Catherine Jinks TheRoad (15 page)

It seemed unlikely.

‘Okay. Here,’ said Louise. They stopped behind the nearest tree, which wasn’t much taller than Noel, and Rose pulled her pants down. Peter looked away. He surveyed the area around him and saw a crow sitting on one of the other trees in the stunted little thicket. It sat quite still, head cocked, looking at Peter with one eye. He said ‘Shoo’, but it didn’t move. It didn’t even blink.

‘Finished?’ said Louise. ‘Okay, here.’

‘Can you wipe my bottom?’ Rose pleaded.

‘No, I can’t. You’re five years old. You can wipe your own bottom.’

Suddenly Peter spotted another crow. Like the first, it had fixed him with its bright, blank gaze – though unlike the first it was standing on the ground, near an ants’ nest. Its feathers were glossy, its legs gnarled. For some reason it made him nervous.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

‘I can’t!’ Rose protested. She was having trouble with her shorts, which had somehow become entwined in her underpants. With a sigh, Louise corrected the problem. Then they went back to the car, Louise chivvying Rose along whenever the little girl stopped to pick up a feather or study a pellet of dung. Several times along the way Peter glanced over his shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of the two crows. But they had disappeared from sight.

In the car, Noel and Linda had come to a decision.

‘We’re going back to that mailbox,’ Linda informed her offspring. ‘We don’t have much petrol left in the tank, so we’re going back to borrow some from the people who live in the house with the mailbox.’

Peter and Louise exchanged glances. Louise said: ‘What about the roadhouse? Can’t we buy petrol there?’

‘We can’t be sure we’ll get to it,’ Linda replied. ‘Not with what we’ve got in the tank right now.’

‘But you said we were really close,’ Louise objected.

‘I thought we were.’ Noel was muttering again. ‘It’s probably best to be on the safe side, though.’

‘When are we going to have ice cream?’ Rose queried, and Peter gave her a nudge. ‘What?’ she said, as he pulled faces at her.

‘We’ll get ice cream, sweetie.’ Linda sounded very tired. ‘As soon as we reach an ice cream shop, we’ll have ice cream.’

‘But I wa-a-ant one!’

‘Rose!’

‘It’s okay, Rose,’ Louise said quickly. ‘We can play “Fish”. Do you want to play “Fish”?’

‘Yeah!’ Rose’s face brightened. ‘Now?’

‘Right now.’

Peter heaved a sigh of relief, knowing that he was excused all card games while travelling, in case he threw up. (Rose, like Louise, had guts of iron.) While Linda reached into her bag for playing cards, Noel turned his key in the ignition and hauled at the steering wheel. The car swung around in a wide U-turn before starting off down the road.

Peter found himself looking towards the electricity pylons rather than the creek, and it occurred to him that on their trip up to Broken Hill a week before he must have viewed the same scene from the same angle. If only he could remember more about it!

‘We should have bought one of those topographic maps from that army disposal store in Oxide Street,’ he remarked. ‘Those maps had
everything
on them – all the creeks and ridges and tracks and everything. I bet if we had one of those we could tell where we are.’

There was no reply. Recollecting that his parents had scoffed at his suggestion that they purchase a set of such maps, at eight dollars each (when they had already spent eighty, in the same shop, on an Akubra for Noel) Peter wasn’t surprised that they refused to comment. Peter had always liked maps. He liked drawing his own maps of imaginary kingdoms, and he liked studying the family atlas. His request for a set of topographic maps had therefore been regarded as just another attempt to pursue one of his hobbies, and had been greeted no more favourably than Louise’s request for a new pair of polarised sunglasses.

Peter thought: So I was right all along, wasn’t I? You
should
have bought those maps.

‘Okay. Let’s see. Have you got . . . an octopus?’ Louise inquired of her sister, and, upon receiving a negative reply, picked up a card from the centre stack. ‘Oh! Two seahorses.’

‘Yell if you spot that mailbox, Peter,’ Linda said. ‘It’ll be on your side, and we don’t want to miss it.’

‘Those maps had all the stations marked on them too,’ Peter continued. ‘With their names.’

‘Yes, well, that’s very interesting, I’m sure. But since we don’t have any topographic maps, it’s not very useful, is it?’