Catherine Jinks TheRoad (42 page)

‘That’s an old car,’ said Ross, waving his arms. ‘You can tell by the shape of the headlights.
Ahoy!
’

Wiping her hands on a tea-towel, Verlie descended the stairs very carefully (her knees weren’t what they had been) and joined Ross at the roadside. The moving vehicle was almost upon them, and suddenly its headlights swerved sideways, bouncing and weaving. With a puff of dust and a crunch of pebbles, it eased to a halt behind the caravan.

‘Hello,’ someone said, over the noisy rattle of an ancient engine. ‘What happened to you?’

The voice sounded vaguely familiar. But there were so many people crammed into the idling station wagon, and the light was so poor, that for several seconds Verlie was confused. She didn’t recognise the car at all, and the passenger nearest to her seemed to be carrying – was it a
gun
, that thing pointed towards the sky? She was stepping backwards, her hand on her heart, when she spotted a pale face at the rear window. A child’s face.

‘Is that the Fergusons?’ said Ross, in disbelief.

‘That’s right.’ Noel Ferguson leaned across the man with the gun. ‘I don’t think we ever got your name, though.’

‘R-Ross. Harwood.’

‘And Verlie,’ said Verlie.

‘Do you blokes know each other?’ the driver of the station wagon demanded, in tones as harsh and unlovely as the screech of a rusty gate.

‘They stopped to help us earlier,’ Noel explained. ‘They were going to put a call through to the NRMA –’

‘The map’s wrong,’ Ross interrupted. He was now more collected, after the initial shock of encountering the Fergusons again. Verlie knew that he could not admit to the shameful truth without first laying the blame on someone else. ‘According to the map, it should have been no more than three and a half hours from Mildura to Broken Hill, and we were driving for – oh, five hours? Something like that?’

‘Then you musta been drivin bloody slowly,’ the driver interjected. ‘I could practically
walk
from Mildura to Broken Hill in five hours.’

There was a sudden surge of raised voices: Ross’s, Noel’s, Linda’s. Verlie noticed that the scruffy man with the gun said nothing, and she was disturbed by this. He was sitting there like Death at the Feast, being utterly ignored, when his presence demanded an explanation.

‘So you ran out of petrol too?’ Noel was saying. ‘Well that’s odd. So did Alec, here. This is Alec. You may have noticed his truck.’

‘Yes, the truck. We saw that,’ Ross replied. ‘But where have
you
come from?’ he demanded of the female driver. ‘Have you come from Mildura?’

‘Yeah, and it’s taken me just under three hours.’

‘It can’t have.’

‘It bloody well did, mate.’

‘But it
can’
t
have!’ Ross’s voice was pitched high. ‘There’s nothing wrong with our car, it’s just been serviced, and we were driving close to eighty the whole way!’

‘You know, it’s odd,’ Noel said, ‘because we had exactly the same experience going in the opposite direction, and it didn’t make sense because we did the whole thing in less than four when we were driving
to
Broken Hill –’

‘Look,’ the driver interjected, ‘you blokes aren’t locals, you mighta done a detour somewhere, on some side road, but I’m tellin ya, I done this drive a million times, it’s no more than three, three and a half hours door-to-door –’