Roadside Sisters (32 page)

Staring through the pelting rain, Annie drove slowly and found the signs she was looking for. She congratulated herself that she was doing well in handling the big machine. And why not? After all, she’d been driving the tractor on the farm since she was ten. The roads were flat, shining panes of water; in the rear-vision mirror she saw the van was leaving a fair wake in its path. She could, she reflected, be steering an old-time paddle-steamer up a river in the Congo.

‘Where in God’s name are we?’ Meredith climbed into the front seat, rubbing her eyes and pulling at her rumpled clothes. She wiped a patch of moisture from her window and squinted through it. ‘I can’t see a damned thing, and it’s absolutely bucketing down.’

‘There was a truck crash back a bit, so I’m negotiating my way around it.’ Annie threw the map to Meredith and pointed. ‘It’s that bit there.’

Meredith found her reading glasses and stared at the damp square in front of her, turning it this way and then that, as if she was trying to decipher the runic symbols on an ancient scroll.

‘Annie, we’re in the middle of nowhere! The Pacific Highway’s miles away. How did we get here?’

‘Just help me, alright?’ Annie was in no mood for one of Meredith’s lectures. The van’s air-conditioning was still at full bore and Annie, in her damp shirt, was now feeling chilled to the bone. ‘We’re on the Lawrence–Tullymorgan Road, and so I’m thinking this left here is the Tullymorgan–Jacky Bulbin Road.’

Annie slowed and swung the van into the track on the left and headed north again.

‘Hang on!’ Meredith shouted, her face pressed against the foggy window. ‘That sign said Mangrove Creek Road.’

‘Shit! Did it?’

‘You’ve missed the turn-off. The map says it was back a bit.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, just let me get a handle on this.’ Meredith peered at the map again. ‘Yes. I’m right. We’re headed the wrong way. You’ll have to stop and turn back.’

‘I’ll find a place to pull over.’

The rain intensified. The wipers were slashing at the water triple-time, but it was making no difference. Annie could barely see the road in front of her. What she could see was that either side was hemmed in by dense vegetation. ‘Jesus! We’re in the mangroves!’

‘That would explain why it’s called Mangrove Creek Road.’

Annie drove another few kilometres. ‘There’s nowhere to turn!’ She was feeling panicky and claustrophobic. The impenetrable dark green walls were as high as the roof. From her perch in the driver’s seat she couldn’t see through them or over them although sometimes, through the driving rain, she could make out tortured black tangled roots emerging from brackish water.

‘The sides of the road are just swamp. I don’t want to put this thing into a ditch. Maybe if I just keep going a bit further, there’ll be a right turn so we can get back onto the other road.’

Meredith bent over the map again. ‘There’re no turn-offs on this road. It looks like it’s a dead end.’

‘What?! Give me that!’ Annie turned to grab at the map.

‘LOOK OUT!’ Meredith yelled as a flash of white skittered past the windscreen.

Annie turned back and wrenched the steering wheel hard right. The RoadMaster did as it was bid and swerved off the road. It faithfully and purposefully dropped its front wheels into the fast-running water channel. The beast tipped, and planted its snub nose deep into the mud.

Annie and Meredith lurched towards the windscreen, saved from smashing through it by their seatbelts. In the rear of the cabin, the toilet door was flung open and Nina fell out onto the floor with her knickers around her ankles. She slid right down the length of the cabin on a slippery slide of raw sewage.

The motor hissed and died. Again, it was hardly what you’d call a
Thelma and Louise
moment.

It was difficult to know who was most startled by this turn of events. Annie and Meredith up front, with their feet jammed against the windscreen? Nina, in a crumpled heap by the table? Or the bald-headed white ibis, now winging its way back to its nest in the Everlasting Swamp? It was, for all of them, a close call—although, as Meredith, Annie and Nina considered their plight, they couldn’t see how it could have been much worse.

The van was tipped at a thirty-five-degree angle, its back wheels barely on the edge of the road. Black, viscous water was already seeping through the cabin doors and pooling on the rubber matting in the foot wells under the dashboard.

The slick of sewage that had slopped over the rim of the shallow toilet bowl had stopped running, and was now soaking into various squares of carpeting and floor mats. Every loose item on every bench—cameras, sunglasses, books, the chopping board, binoculars, shoes, sunhats and plastic baskets of sunscreen, pens, lip balm and moisturiser—had been dashed to the floor.
To add to the carnage, when Annie had last raided the fridge she hadn’t secured its top latch, so that the appliance had spewed its insides through an open, lolling door. Eggs, milk and fruit, split plastic containers of leftover bolognaise sauce, olives and camembert cheese, had all been vomited up and were marinating in a stinking stew. Outside, the rain was steadily drumming on untold millions of mangrove leaves. A biblical multitude of mosquitoes had been disturbed and now smelled an opportunity.

Nina cried first. That was understandable. She had been sitting on the loo, doubled over and clutching her writhing gut; she’d had no warning they were driving pell-mell into disaster. She had been violently upended from her plastic perch, bashed her head on the sink and then been unceremoniously ejected into the cabin, landing on her bare arse. She was wailing with pain and indignity in equal measure.

Meredith was the next one to crack, although it wasn’t outright weeping. Nina thought it sounded more like the whimpering of one of Anton’s guinea pigs.

Annie willed herself not to cry. Couldn’t. Shouldn’t. Wouldn’t. Instead she unbuckled her seatbelt and fell forward and the gear stick jammed into her ribs. ‘Fuck!’ Annie knew that she’d never been so precise in her employment of the expletive in her whole life. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’

‘For God’s sake, do you think swearing’s going to help?’ Meredith sniffed. Her reading glasses might have been smashed, but her sense of outrage was still intact.

‘I think I might have broken something,’ moaned Nina. She suddenly had an image of herself as Shelley Winters in the
Poseidon Adventure—
everyone thinking that she was too fat to make it—but her heart would go on . . . and on. Or was that
Titanic
? Amazing, she thought, how leading ladies had become younger and slimmer, but more buoyant during the past quarter of a century.

Meredith also unbuckled her seatbelt and extended her palm to brace herself for the drop against the hard dashboard. Nina might be seriously injured. She had to assess the situation.

She clambered between the front seats to the cabin behind. ‘Where does it hurt?’ She gently placed her palm on Nina’s shin, which looked to be bruising already.

‘Everywhere. But I think my ankle copped the worst of it. Ow!’

‘Can you move it?’ Nina obediently wriggled her toes and turned her foot. ‘Well then, I guess that means it’s not broken,’ Meredith diagnosed, drawing on some rudimentary medical knowledge from Girl Guides. ‘Let’s hope it’s just a sprain. My God, it reeks in here!’

‘The first thing we’d better do is try to ring roadside assist.’ Annie reached into the glovebox. ‘I’ll get the number. It’s in the folder. Let’s hope there’s reception out here.’

Annie found her BlackBerry and mumbled a silent prayer to the God of Telecommunications but there was, predictably, no coverage. They were, as Meredith had already helpfully mentioned, precisely in the middle of nowhere and way out of mobile range.

‘My God, what are we going to do now?’ gasped Nina. It was a very good question and no-one had any good answer for it. There was a long silence between them as the rain steadily beat down—and then, instantly, ceased.

Annie located a road map, opened the driver’s door and jumped down to the roadway. The low cloud was clearing fast, and the heat of the afternoon sun was already evaporating the moisture and raising a plume of steam from every broad, thick leaf. The light was refracting through dripping water, creating a shifting mosaic of silver and gold. Annie immediately thought of Lizzie, and the old familiar feeling of loss, on top of everything else, had her blinking back tears. She shielded her eyes from the bright shards of reflection to peer at the map.

The estuary was a jigsaw of channels, lagoons, sand bars and alluvial islands—Oyster Channel, Rabbit Island, Shark Creek, Crystal Waters. Fish, prawns and oysters spawned here. Waterbirds nested. Insects swarmed in the silvery grey, oily mud. It was the sounds Annie was most amazed by. Water was running fast in the channel by the roadway; beyond that, in the thick density of mangrove leaf and root, frogs chorused, birds called and the air hummed with buzzing creatures—every living thing had been invigorated by the fierce tropical storm. Along the road in both directions there was nothing to see but more mangrove trees.

Meredith’s head emerged from the door, but the brutality of the light and steaming humidity sent her reeling back inside. She stood gripping the corner of the kitchen benchtop as one horrifying thought pushed everything else from her mind.
Crocodiles! There would be crocodiles submerged in the vile, stinking swamp. Meredith had seen enough Hollywood disaster movies to know what came next. At nightfall a huge monster of a thing would emerge and pull them one by one, screaming, to a gruesome death. Nina, with her swollen ankle, might hold them all back, and so would have to be sacrificed first.

‘Annie! Come back inside,’ Meredith called. ‘There could be anything out there.’

‘I know,’ Annie called back. ‘You should come and have a look. It’s like the mud is moving. It’s incredible.’

‘Crocodiles!’ screeched Meredith, stumbling back and tripping over Nina’s prostrate form.

‘Ow! Careful! My ankle!’

‘There are no crocodiles!’ Annie shook her head in disbelief at Meredith’s amateur theatrics. ‘We’re way too far south for crocodiles. I meant crabs! There’re thousands of ’em, everywhere.’

Meredith slammed the van door with annoyance. Here she was, in the worst predicament she could ever recall being in—apart from that time she had dysentery in Bombay—and Annie was narrating a fascinating nature documentary.

Inspecting the vehicle for damage, Annie was surprised to find none. Not from this accident anyway. There were various scrapes in evidence from Nina’s misadventures. The front of the RoadMaster was lodged solidly in the mud up to its bonnet but seemed to have, like Nina, suffered a mighty indignity more than anything else.

Elvis was still singing. The reflective jewels on his jumpsuit were sparkling in the sunset. However, the light was dimming
fast. In another moment it would drop behind the trees and be gone. Annie estimated that in a scarce half-hour all would be pitch-black. There was probably a farm a way back—but how far? It could be ten kilometres. Annie didn’t care to make the walk alone in the dark. Rescue looked to be impossible until morning, but there was not one flat surface inside the van they could sleep on. It was time to accept their fate and set up camp on the road for the night. The first thing they had to do was to get Nina outside and wash the shit off her.

Meredith had been itching to say what was on her mind since she had woken earlier that afternoon and found that Annie was delivering them into a wilderness. As it turned out, the opportunity to savage her pig-headed travelling companion soon presented itself.

Nina had suffered the humiliation of standing out on the roadway nude, on one leg, using Meredith as a crutch. Annie washed her down with cold soapy water from a bucket. She couldn’t remember suffering such mortification since the twins were born and she’d sat in a kiddie playpool in the maternity ward trying to ease her labour pains. Meredith and Annie conducted themselves with quiet professionalism as she moaned and she was grateful for that at least.

They had all worked together by the van’s dim interior lights to throw out the stinking matting and ruined foodstuffs, sluice down the floors of the van with disinfectant and pack away some of the items catapulted in the crash. After that, they’d sat
outside on the road on camp chairs, plastered with insect repellent, and shared a candlelit supper of cheese, salami, dry biscuits and a jar of gourmet jalapeno dip. Annie had made a head start on a bottle of Margaret River merlot.

Another round of Nina’s medication had done the trick and her stomach felt easier. Meredith had gulped down enough Ural to catch her cystitis before it travelled to her kidneys and caused any more discomfort. Now, at the rear of the vehicle, work continued by the light of a torch balanced on Nina’s knee. A decision had been made to erect a makeshift tent over assorted bedding in the event of another storm rolling in during the night. They swatted at an infinite cloud of insects attracted by the torch’s piercing blue glow.

‘What’s Brad going to say?’ Nina moaned as she watched Annie and Meredith work up a sweat dragging mattresses out of the front door in the still-humid evening. To Annie, it seemed that Nina had said this a hundred times and now, enough was enough.