Friday Brown (23 page)

She glanced at Silence, still perched on his pile. He hadn’t moved. He was looking at the distant trail of dust
with a tiny smile on lips, as if he was expecting company.

Arden wrestled with her decision. She stared at Silence. Swung her gaze to me. Judged the distance between us and the oncoming car. Flicked back to Silence. An expression of pure hatred passed across her face like the shadow of a cloud—then it was gone. She must have made up her mind—she handed over the keys.

‘Take the others. Drive out that way,’ she pointed to the river. ‘Not too far, just out of sight. Park the car somewhere hidden in the scrub and wait for my signal. And keep quiet. Do
not
come back until I let you all know it’s clear.’

‘A cooee?’ I smirked. ‘Hey, you could send us a smoke signal.’
Get in, Silence,
I thought.
Get in.

‘Shut up and get going.’

I climbed up into the cab and started the engine. Bree slid in next to me and the others got in the back. I could barely reach the clutch, even with the seat fully forwards.

Get in, Silence.

He had his eyes locked onto Arden. Still guarding his post.

‘Silence, get in!’ I called.

He started to move towards the car.

Arden said something to Malik in a low voice. Then she leaned in the window. ‘Not him,’ she said. ‘Insurance.’

At the same time Malik snaked an arm around Silence’s throat and held him there. It was as effective as a collar—Silence gasped and wheezed and scraped divots in the dust with his heels.

‘Go,’ Arden said. ‘He’ll be fine. I want to make sure you come back.’

I hesitated, riding the clutch until the rear wheels spun.

Malik whipped Silence around and pinned him on the ground with one arm. He gave me a signal that I figured meant ‘floor it’.

‘Let him go,’ Arden said.

Malik let go of Silence’s throat.

Silence waved.

‘Do what I say and he’ll be okay.’

I put the car in first and eased off the clutch. It jerked forwards, dragging the trailer along behind. I looked back to see if Silence was okay but the car was spraying a cloud of dust. The town disappeared.

Third, fourth. I followed the road away from the town in the opposite direction to the approaching car. About a kilometre out, the gravel ended. Deep ruts scarred what was left of the track and the trailer bounced all over the place, dragging the rear of the car sideways.

In the back, AiAi made a bleating sound in time with the jolts.

‘Jesus, shut him up!’ Bree yelled.

I geared down. The car skidded to a stop.

AiAi whooped.

‘Oi, redneck!’ Bree leaned over the seat and slapped him. ‘It’s not funny!’

Darcy gave me a sly look. ‘Arden thought you were going to drive by yourself, didn’t she?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I answered, still shaking. My heart was squirting blood around my body faster than my brain needed it. I felt dizzy.

‘Would you have? Are you crazy?’ Carrie said.

Joe warned, ‘You’re not doing us any favours, you know, getting her all riled up. She’ll make us stay even longer just to prove her point.’

‘This is stupid,’ I said. ‘Any normal person would have taken one look at that town and turned the car around.’ I put the troopie back in gear and took off more slowly. Some of the holes in the track were half-filled with water. I was worried I might bog the car, then we’d all have been stuck. ‘All we wanted to do was leave. She has no right to keep us here when we want to go.’

‘She said she’d take you on the next run,’ Darcy said.

‘I don’t believe that,’ I said, under my breath.

Bree heard, but she didn’t answer.

‘There,’ Joe said. He pointed to an open gate that led into an overgrown paddock. At the far end, the land rose gently into bushland. ‘They won’t see us in there.’

The troopie navigated itself through the ruts and several times the steering wheel yanked so hard my thumbs were almost ripped off.

‘Where’d you learn to drive a truck like this?’ Joe asked.

‘My mother,’ I said. ‘After driving her car, I can drive just about anything.’

Vivienne taught me to drive in her old EH Holden, when I was twelve. It had no rear seat, a column-shift
gearstick that needed three hands to change, and a hole in the passenger-side floor so big you had to dodge roadkill or you could end up with a kangaroo carcass in your lap. Sometimes she would let me drive at night because the reflective lines gave her double vision. We torched it somewhere near Coonabarabran after the gearbox blew up. Vivienne said you had to honour your dead. We camped there that night around the smoking wreck. In the morning, Vivienne woke and realised she’d left her handbag under the front seat.

‘There’s not much of a track,’ Carrie said. ‘And it’s pretty sandy up here.’

She was right. I stopped the car again and got out. I locked the hubs on the wheels and changed into 4WD. The car crept up a shallow incline, the engine screaming in low gear. We left obvious tyre tracks right through the centre of the grassy paddock. I drove fifty or so metres into scrub, taking out small trees and bushes with the bull-bar, then I parked and we all climbed out.

‘I’ll go out and have a look from the paddock. See if we’re visible,’ Joe said.

‘Joe, wait,’ I stopped him. ‘Before you do that.’

‘What?’

‘You’re wearing a red T-shirt.’

‘You’re right,’ He looked down at himself, then at my bare feet. ‘You go, then. But you haven’t got any shoes on.’

‘It’s okay, I can’t feel anything.’

It was true. Days in the dirt had made them tough
again. The sand underneath was as soft as cottonwool. I picked up a stick and bashed the weeds before I ventured into the tall grass. From the clearing, the car was well hidden, though I could see Joe and AiAi moving around.

When I got back Darcy and Carrie were rummaging in the back of the car.

‘We haven’t got anything to drink,’ Bree said. ‘There’s plenty of food, but no water.’

‘Yeah, Arden poured the whole container onto the fire,’ I muttered.

A queasy rolling started in my stomach. Prickly numbness started in my fingertips, like the early signs of an insidious disease.

‘There’s warm beer,’ said AiAi.

‘Bored, bored, bored,’ whined Darcy.

‘Hopefully we won’t be here for too long,’ I said. I had to do something. Anything but think.

I sat up on top of the roof-racks and looked back towards the road. A faint smudge of smoke still hung in the air in the direction of the town. I thought of Silence and the seesaw feeling grew stronger.

Afternoon passed and the scrub fell into shadow. We sat there, waiting, for hours. The inside of my mouth tasted like crumbled chalk. Flies swarmed the interior of the car, crawling over everything, and my arms were tired from swatting them away. The air was humid and heavy.

‘Let’s go back,’ Carrie said. Her hair had started to grow out into a short afro. It was damp with sweat.
‘I am not spending the night out here.’

‘Well, you can explain that to Arden,’ Darcy said, ‘I didn’t see a signal yet.’

Joe said to me, ‘What do you want to do?’

I wanted to go back for Silence. But I also wanted to stay, just a little longer, even with all the flies and the dust and sweat. Out there in the bush, there was nothing more threatening than the darkening sky.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

If I had known, would I have gone back sooner? If there was an audible reshuffle and click every time my path was altered, some
Jumanji
-like close-up of a gamepiece slotting into place, would it have changed our fate? It could have been that moment or a million before it; I’ll never know.

So we waited.

Back at the ghost town, there was something malevolent. I could feel it. And I wasn’t ready.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I was lying flat on the roof of the car. In my delirium, pieces of the sky seemed to be shuffling, rearranging themselves into shapes like teardrops and ice cubes.

I needed water. I was parched. I wet my lips with my tongue but nothing happened.
Water.
I sent a plea to the rain gods, if they were listening. I’d lie in the middle of that paddock with my mouth open, catching drops, until I burst like a water-balloon.

I laughed. Was it a hallucination? Did I imagine the feel of cool wet drops on my skin?

‘Friday?’ Joe. Flicking dregs from a beer bottle at me.

‘What?’

‘Are you sick? Are you going to be okay to drive?’

‘I’m fine.’ I held out a hand. ‘I give in. I’ll have that beer now. We should wait a little bit longer, I think.’

Joe climbed up and sat next to me.

I drained the warm beer. It had the same effect as swallowing a bucket of salt water but, strangely, my stomach settled down and I had some feeling back in my fingers.

‘Do you think he’s okay?’ Joe asked what I was thinking. Is
he
okay? Not, are
they
okay? ‘Who do you reckon was in that car?’

‘I don’t know. Probably just tourists,’ I said and swung my legs over the side of the car. I jumped down. ‘Carrie’s right—we can’t stay here all night. We should go back.’

Reversing the car with the trailer attached proved too much of a challenge. I drove straight forwards, through the scrub. The car escaped with a few branches stuck in the bull-bar and a fresh dent in the driver’s side door. AiAi jumped up and down like a lunatic until Darcy sat on him to shut him up.

‘There hasn’t been a signal,’ Darcy warned. ‘What if it’s not safe?’

I drove with only the parking lights on, creeping along at a jogger’s pace. As we got closer to the town, shapes emerged in the dying light: the silhouette of the church, its spire and cross, two figures huddled over the campfire.

‘Do you see that?’ Bree said, pressing her nose to the windscreen. ‘Are they…?’

‘They’ve got the fire going again,’ Joe said in a flat voice.

‘Why the hell didn’t they send a signal if everything was okay?’

‘Well, maybe they tried and we didn’t see it,’ Darcy said.

Arden and Malik stood as we pulled up. Hunched shoulders, hands in pockets.

That cheery, orange glow filled me with rage. We were hiding, like fugitives, out in the bush, while Arden and Malik sat warming themselves by the fire.

And where was Silence?

I hopped out. I unlocked the hubs.

‘Where have you been? I’ve been so worried,’ Arden accused. Her eyes were black holes, her back rigid. ‘We’ve been flashing the torches for hours. We thought you’d left us here.’ She threw a look at Malik and he nodded.

‘Told you,’ Darcy said. ‘God, how can it be so hot during the day and so cold at night?’ She warmed her hands over the fire.

‘Where’s Silence?’ Carrie and I said together.

My pulse had an unsteady rhythm that left me breathless.

‘Where’s Silence?’ AiAi echoed, his voice edged with fear.

Arden pulled herself up to her full height.

Malik stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.

‘We couldn’t stop him.’ She stared at her feet and when she looked up again, her eyes were filled with tears. ‘There was a car. A family. They’d taken a wrong turn.
We told them we were camping. Silence was hiding, like I told him, but we gave them directions and when they went to drive off he came running out after them. He begged them to take him with them.’ She sniffled and wiped her nose. ‘They put his stuff in the back and drove off. I said, what about you?’ She pointed at me. ‘But he was upset and he said he had to go. He was missing Amy.’

She sank into a deckchair.

‘You know all about Amy, don’t you?’ Arden peeked at me from beneath wet eyelashes. ‘I mean, he told you
everything
.’

Was. She said Silence
was
missing.
Told
you everything. Past tense. It’s the way she said it—not like it was something that happened a few hours ago, but like it was a footnote on an obituary.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said dully. There was an ache the size of a fist where my heart should be. I felt like I was surrounded by strangers. ‘He wouldn’t.’

Carrie and Bree exchanged a look.

‘He got in?’ Bree asked. She chewed her nail.

‘He got in,’ Malik confirmed. ‘And they drove off.’

‘Look,’ Arden sighed. ‘I’ve been thinking. Maybe we should get out of here and go someplace else. It’s not exactly working out the way I imagined, is it?’ She gave a rueful smile. ‘I’m willing to admit defeat.’

Joe held up his hand for a high five but I ignored it.

‘No.’

‘What do you mean, no?’ Arden frowned. ‘You’re the one who wanted to leave.’

‘Not without Silence.’

‘He’s gone!’ she screamed. ‘How many times do I have to tell you!’

‘Leave her alone,’ Bree said quietly. She stood between us. ‘Let her get used to the idea.’

Arden muttered something under her breath. ‘Go to sleep. We’ll stock up tomorrow, plan our route and drop off our excess baggage.’ She glared at me. ‘Then we’ll come back, pick you all up and head back the other way.’

My body felt electrified, like I was picking up current through my feet. Volts of frustrated energy and no way to release it.

I grabbed a torch and headed off in the direction of the river.

Bree and Carrie followed.

‘He wouldn’t have left without me,’ I said, when we were out of earshot.

‘Well, what do you think happened to him? I doubt very much he’s lying in a shallow grave,’ Carrie joked.

I played the torch over the trees. Their pale, naked trunks were scarred with initials. In the trickster light I imagined they were arms and legs, torsos, twisted in agony. The beam hit the water and diffused.

I was suddenly freezing. Iced water for blood. The river was higher, lapping at the edges of the bank. It looked like I felt: a few ripples on the surface but rolling and churning underneath. My dread was real even if Vivienne’s stories weren’t—this was the curse, staring me in the face.

‘I know you don’t believe me,’ I said. I looked back at the distant circle of fire. ‘And tomorrow I’ll be gone.’