Catherine Jinks TheRoad (84 page)

You’re right there, thought Peter, though he had to acknowl
edge that Rosie had been whining a bit. Not that he blamed her. She was well and truly sick of driving by now; she was tired and sticky and bored and irritable. They all were. The only difference between Peter and Rosie was that Rosie didn’t know enough to be scared.

Peter was scared. The crow on the windshield – that had scared him more than anything else. It had come out of nowhere and forced Col into a ditch. Why? How? None of the cars had been going very fast, yet the bird looked as if it had been sucked into a jet engine and spat out the other end.

How long would it be before Del’s car hit something?

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Georgie spluttered. ‘Will someone shut that bloody dog
up
? It’s driving me
mad!
’

‘Mongrel!’
Del shouted, fruitlessly.
‘Stop it!’

‘Maybe we should give him a dog biscuit,’ Louise suggested. ‘Do you have any dog biscuits?’

‘I
will
give him dog biscuits, if he’s not careful,’ Del growled. ‘Dog biscuits up the arsehole.’

It had been some time since Peter had even noticed Mongrel’s steady barking. The noise had ceased to bother him much; it was like living next to a railway line. After a while, the squeal of freight trains just fades into the background.

‘These ant hills,’ said Del. ‘I’ve never seen ant hills like this around here before. Yiz ever seen ’em so big? In this parta the world?’

She was addressing Col, who shook his head. The back of his neck was seamed and rough, like elephant hide. He kept clearing his throat.

‘Usually get ’em small, out this way,’ Del continued. ‘These ones are the sorta thing yiz find over the border. Up round Mount Isa and that.’ She sounded faintly uneasy. ‘Bloody enormous, up there.’

Peter, his interest piqued, studied the curious formations outside the car. He could see about five or six mounds, all of them at least as tall as Rosie. They made him think of prehistoric standing stones, except that they were red. Some of them almost looked like big clay statues. In fact the one they were passing (a tall one, nearly as tall as Peter) had a distinct head, with a sort of crown or mitre on it, and a dent for the eyes, and a knob for the nose, and a yawning mouth . . .

His heart skipped a beat, because as the station wagon passed it, the yawning mouth seemed to close. Then his viewpoint changed, and he relaxed. Of course the ant hill hadn’t moved. The change had been in his perspective; from a different angle, in fact, the ant hill didn’t look like a statue at all. Not what Peter would call a statue, anyway. And it was still – perfectly still. They all were. While they might have been teeming with life inside, they had the appearance of dead, ancient, weathered things, like the Easter Island heads or a desert ruin. They were placed, not in clusters, but at carefully measured intervals from each other. Peter wondered if the ants had worked that out. He wondered why the strange, fretted monuments seemed to be trying to tell him something. It wasn’t as if they
were
standing stones. It wasn’t as if they had any religious or astronomical significance.

They were just ant hills.

‘Look,’ said Noel, glancing over his shoulder. ‘See, kids? We’re getting close to the river.’

‘Creek,’ Del corrected. ‘It’s a creek.’

‘Creek, I mean. We’ll be there soon, everyone. We’re actually getting somewhere now.’

Peter offered up a grudging smile, but Louise seemed unimpressed. She had folded herself into a little ball, knees under her chin, arms wrapped around her chest, shoulders hunched. No reassuring words from Noel were going to ease the nameless fears of Louise and her brother. They had seen the blood on the highway. They knew something was wrong.

Peter couldn’t believe that his father was trying to preserve a façade of normality.They had strayed into an episode of
The Twi
light Zone
, and Noel was talking about
getting some
where
? Why on earth did he assume that this ‘somewhere’ was actually worth getting to? Noel might have been an intelligent person, but at present he was almost as deluded as Georgie, who had made it quite clear that she couldn’t understand why they all didn’t just drive to Broken Hill at once, and stop fussing about like little old women.

She obviously didn’t acknowledge her gut instincts at all – not like Peter. Peter had a bad feeling. He had a feeling that they were being driven towards exactly what they should be struggling to avoid.

Because he was trying to remain calm, however, he repressed this sense of foreboding as much as possible, and searched for hopeful signs. The trees were a hopeful sign. They were growing more thickly now – sinuous eucalypts, pale in the sun. They promised shade, water, a creek, a bridge, perhaps a house – civilisation, in other words. They were friendlier than the ant hills. They leaned towards the car, smooth and creamy (though flushed here and there with pink or grey), their leaves rustling, their twisted limbs marred by the odd knot or hard whorl like a boil, like a pimple, from which a sticky red crust showed the path of the sap where it had flowed from an open wound . . .

Peter gasped. He leaned out the window.

‘Peter,’ said Linda. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘I’m just –’

‘Head inside the car, please. It isn’t safe.’

The sap. It was hard to see from a moving vehicle, but Peter could have sworn that the sap was moving too, trickling out of black-lipped slashes in the bark – trickling out like blood, or treacle – unless the play of light was fooling him? Unless the flicker of sunlight through waving branches was lending movement to a frozen cascade?

‘Here we are,’ said Del, and all at once they were crossing a wide stretch of golden sand. It was flat and fine-grained. There were saplings growing out of it.

‘What’s that?’ asked Rosie.

‘It’s the creek,’ Linda replied.

‘Where’s the water?’

‘There is no water.’

‘There’s water,’ Del contradicted. ‘Can’t see it, that’s all. It’s under the sand, if yiz know where to look.’

‘Do
you
know where to look?’ Peter inquired, and Del cleared her throat.

‘Nah . . . not really. I gotta bit of an idea, but not really. Not like an Abo or anything.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Col. ‘This isn’t right, is it?’

They had crossed the creek bed and were climbing a low bank, some of which was eroding away. Looking back, Peter saw the tyre tracks that they had left behind them, as clear as footprints on a beach. There were other tracks too (lizard tracks?), faint and delicate, as if a moth had fluttered across the surface of the ground. Beyond these marks, the Harwoods’ sedan was struggling down the opposite bank, its passengers bobbing about like plastic bottles on a choppy sea.

‘This can’t be right,’ said Col, who was waving a folded map around. ‘This ridge is too close to the creek. Are you sure we’re on the Balaclava turn off?’

‘Pretty sure,’ Del replied.

‘Then what’s this ridge doing here?’

The ridge loomed ahead of them, higher than Peter had anticipated. Its ruddy contours were visible behind the treetops; it looked a bit like a wave, rising as sheer as a wall in front of the track (which divided at its foot, one branch heading south, the other north, both travelling between the base of the ridge and the edge of the creek).

‘Hang on,’ said Del. ‘I’ll just pull over.’ And she turned left.

‘Are you sure we’re not on the road to Oakdale?’ Noel queried. He was poring over the map, his head almost touching Col’s. ‘This ridge right
here
. . .’ (A rattle of paper.) ‘...is closer than it is
there
.’

‘But not
that
close,’ Col protested. ‘And if it
is
the Oakdale turn-off, then where was Ascot Vale station? We should have been able to see that. It should have been off to our right somewhere.’

‘Here,’ Del sighed. Her handbrake screeched as the station wagon rolled to a standstill. The engine coughed and died. ‘Let’s have a look.’

Three heads were now clustered over the map, silhouetted against the windscreen. Mongrel was growling. Peter twisted around to watch the Harwoods’ car come to a halt behind Del’s, and the driver’s door pop open. Ross emerged, a frown on his face.

‘Might as well get out,’ said Linda. ‘Kids? Why don’t you get out and stretch your legs?’

‘I’m thirsty,’ Rose complained.

‘There’s juice in the back. We can all have some.’

Stop, revive, survive, thought Peter. Everyone was spilling out into the sunshine. Georgie shoved past Peter and headed for Ambrose, whose linen jacket looked as bleached and creased as an old dish rag. Verlie moved stiffly to the boot of her car. Alec joined Ross,who had reached Del’s door.They both stepped back when it fell open, and she hauled herself to her feet, the map dangling from her grubby fingers.

Even John was stretching his legs.

‘Don’t let the dog out!’ Del warned Linda. ‘He’s in a funny mood.’

‘What’s the
matter
with him?’ Louise sounded shaken, for Mongrel was now barking frantically, showing his yellow teeth and drooling gums. ‘He’s going mad.’

‘Too many people,’ Del replied shortly. ‘Too many people hangin round me car. Now. What’s all this about Ascot Vale station?’

While the rest of the adults discussed map references, Linda distributed cups of apple juice. Peter drank his quickly. The breeze had died, and the eucalyptus leaves hung straight and limp. Everything was very still. Across the road, where the ground began to rise, there were patches of dense shade; Peter strolled over to the closest, which was formed by a hollow weathered into the side of the ridge. A desperate-looking mulga clutched at sliding soil with its roots, tenaciously holding the slope together. Beside it, the earth
had
fallen away, leaving the hollow, which was lined with harder, less friable material – slabs of rock, clay subsoil. Peter reached out to touch this shaded surface, wondering if it might be cool. Then he recoiled suddenly.

‘Mum!’ he cried.

‘What?’

‘Come and look!’

‘What?’

‘Aborigines!’

One or two heads lifted. Linda said, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘There!’ Peter pointed, retreating from the shadowy hollow. ‘I mean – they’ve been here! Aborigines!’

Hand prints. They were dark red, shading into brown, and they were as clear as stars in the night sky.

Bloody
hand prints, Peter had originally assumed. But then he’d remembered his art teacher, and her pictures of Aboriginal rock paintings: attenuated figures, uncoiling serpents, ochre hand prints. Lots and lots of hand prints.

‘Look!’ he exclaimed. ‘Rock paintings!’

‘Can’t be,’ said Del.

‘They are! Look!’

But Del didn’t respond – she was locked in an intense discussion about the map. John was standing stock still, as if frozen to the spot. Only Linda wandered over, and Ambrose, and Georgie.

And Rose, of course. Rose went straight up to the nearest hand print, placing her own hand on it.

‘Don’t!’ Peter exclaimed. The sight of his sister’s pale, plump starfish of a hand on that big, red stain unnerved him for some reason.

‘Don’t,’ said Linda. ‘Don’t, sweetie, you might hurt the painting.’

‘Do you remember these?’ Ambrose wanted to know, and Georgie shrugged, pressing against him.

‘Don’t remember any of it,’ she said.

‘But you’ve been down here, haven’t you?’

Another shrug. ‘If I have,’ Georgie muttered, ‘I must have been stoned at the time.’

‘Perhaps you put these here yourself,’ Ambrose suggested, with a half-smile.

‘Probably. They’re probably not real.’

‘How many are there, Rosie?’ Linda inquired, and Peter sensed that she was trying to distract her youngest daughter’s attention from all this talk of drugs and forgery. Rosie began to count the hand prints. Peter studied them from a greater distance, noting that while some were dark, and dry, and old, some were redder. Clearer. Almost . . .

Almost
fresher
.

He turned abruptly. His cup had to be rinsed and returned to the boot of Verlie’s car. On the way there, he saw to his surprise that John had climbed back inside again. The man in the funny trousers seemed even more frightened than Peter was. He had slid right down in his seat.

Peter heard Ross say, ‘But how long
for
? There’s hardly any petrol left in our tank.’

‘Whaddaya mean?’ Del frowned. ‘You got all Col’s, didn’t ya?’

‘I didn’t have much,’ Col admitted, and Ross said, ‘We’re not going to get far. That’s all I’m saying. So what happens if my car conks out? We have to make
plans
.
Decisions.
’

Peter sidled closer.

‘We can’t make any decisions unless we work out where we are,’ Noel remarked patiently. ‘Otherwise we won’t know which way to turn. Left or right? It depends whether we’re
here
or
here
.’ He stabbed at the map with his forefinger.

Then Alec muttered something. When asked to speak up, he folded his arms and said, ‘How do you know we’re anywhere?’