The Windy Season (4 page)

Crash? the customer asked, bending his knees as he lowered his bounty onto the counter.

Head on, the older man said.

That's the diesel too, the customer said.

The girl glared at Paul. She had a pink, shining stain around her lips and on her cheeks and he could smell the cloying scent of sugar and saliva.

Had some people stop in here a moment ago, the man at the till said. They came from the other way, seen the thing not long after it happened. Was a mess, they reckon.

Fatal? the customer wanted to know, plucking two straws from a container on the counter.

The man serving him nodded.

Jesus, he replied.

Paul followed the older man's eyes to the bend where the road disappeared, hidden behind eucalypts and peppermint trees.

Might as well get a bite, Ruth huffed from behind him. She squinted into the hot light of the food cabinet. Be a bloody age till I'm getting home, she said.

They sat in the old LandCruiser with the windows down, the car stationary, listening to the single station Paul could find on the radio. The late-afternoon sun was hot on his legs. Ruth let out a sigh, pushing back into her seat, straightening her fleshy arms on the steering wheel. She smelt of chicken salt and cheese sausage.

Be good for you, this, Ruth said. Get you out of the house, give your parents some space. You'll do some real work, too. Might harden you up a bit.

Paul didn't say anything. Up the road a man emerged from
the rear door of a van, rested his beer bottle on the bitumen and hurried, barefoot, into the low grass by the roadside. He squared his hips towards a tree, arching his back and looking skywards in the typical reverie. Paul watched him grin and lift a middle finger back towards the van.

You know, you're damn lucky Jake took you on, Ruth continued. It's been a shocker season. Stormy as shit and he's bringing back fuck-all. If it wasn't for this business with your brother he'd only take one deckhand out with him. Ruth turned to face Paul as if to ensure he was listening. Better pull your fucking weight, she said.

His aunt had talked a lot on the drive but she wasn't one for conversing. She spoke at him and answered her own questions. There was a persistent anger in her talk that had sustained the five hundred kilometres they had driven. Paul had learnt it was better to keep quiet. There wasn't much to say, anyway. He had never liked her and he knew she cared little for him. It was obvious that she figured she was doing him and his parents some kind of grand favour. Easing the burden on them all. Going out of her way. He found it hard to even look at her.

Paul searched for another station but only found static. Ruth knocked his hand aside and clicked the radio off. Outside the bush murmured. Ruth tapped out an agitated beat on the steering wheel with her thumb, and briefly lifted herself in her seat, trying to lengthen her torso to see beyond the cars ahead. She was desperate to see it, whatever it was that waited for them up the road.

I mean, the stress of it all, she continued, the monologue into its second hour. It is making me ill. You do understand this? Thyroid's had it. I'm expanding like a force-fed duck. Shingles on my fucking arse.

Paul sighed.

Think that's a real laugh, do you? she said.

Paul shook his head, turned towards the window.

You do, she said. You think it's funny that I've got these shingles.

No.

I'd crack you one. I swear I would knock you back in time.

I don't think it's funny.

Well it isn't. Hurts like nothing else. It's making me depressed. That's how bad the pain is. Ruth breathed out. God's way of telling you you've got too much on your plate. That's what the doc said. Take it easy, Ruth, he said. If he only knew the half of it. The shit I've got to deal with.

A police car howled by them in the opposite lane, rushing towards where the highway swept left, hidden behind thicker, darker bush. It was followed seconds later by another. The traffic was now at a complete stop. Music pumped from the P-plated hatchback in front of them. There was the low throb of a bass drum and the sharp, repetitive refrain of a synthesiser.

It's weird for a boy to not have his licence. And at your age. What are you? Eighteen?

Seventeen.

It's queer. People will think there's something not right with you.

I wanted to take the bus.

Even queerer, she said. Who takes the fucking bus? Junkies and paedophiles. And you don't look like a junkie. You've got that going for you. Do you want people to think you're a paedophile? They do come as young as you. That is a fact.

The hatchback in front creaked and shuddered with each beat. Paul could just make out a girl in the back seat with straightened hair and large black sunglasses. She was laughing at someone or something out of view.

Ruth shifted in her seat again. God, it's a circus out here, she muttered. The boys are right. A fucking dam has broken.

Paul didn't say it but he too thought it was strange. The dense procession of overloaded cars and trailers had been with them the entire trip north from Perth. It was a Friday afternoon but it wasn't a public holiday or long weekend. Christmas was still nearly two months away. He guessed it might be the university crowd, clearing out of the city post-exams.

I told your mother I didn't have room. I used to have room but I have Jake there now and I told your mother that I don't have room anymore. She said it was good enough of me to drive down to get you. That you didn't need a room.

I called the hostel, Paul said.

The hostel will be closed by the time we get there.

They said they'd leave the door unlocked.

Jake doesn't need any more trouble, Ruth said.

Paul was looking out the window but he felt the look she gave him.

In the side mirror he had noticed a white four-wheel drive that looked a lot like his brother's. There were the same yellowed circles of rust on the bonnet, and the roof was laden with gear, perched high enough that you'd think a strong wind might blow the whole lot over. Elliot would have driven this stretch of the Brand Highway countless times, the Pajero packed heavy like a gypsy caravan. Paul had never gone with him. There had been school or his shifts at the supermarket. Even if he could have gone with his brother, he would have found reasons not to.

Wonder if anyone survived it, Ruth said. She pinched at a pale, freckly patch of skin high up on her arm, clamping the flesh between her thumbnail and forefinger. Could just be cleaning it all up, Ruth said. Wish someone would tell us what the fuck is going on.

Out the driver-side window, looking east and inland, the horizon was a sad, purplish mirage, the ridgeline rendered two-dimensional by distance like the painted horizon of a movie set. Leading to nothingness. Dead-ended. Paul glanced again into his mirror and caught the silhouette of the driver of the Pajero, and for a moment he saw Elliot at the wheel, staring out at those same paddocks. He felt a grim tightness in his stomach.

There was the shuddering drone of a helicopter above them. His aunty fell back again into her seat and exhaled, long and loud.

Elliot had been happy to travel alone. It was probably the thing Paul least understood about his brother, the way that they were most different, that Elliot could withstand that kind of isolation, be all alone in truly remote places. And he did it often, too.

When his brother was away, Paul often found himself entering the bedroom at the end of the hallway with a kind of tourist's nosiness. Ringo had sometimes followed him, becoming more interested in Paul's comings and goings than usual, as if the dog could sense that he was up to no good.

The room had the dank smell of sea things, long dead, and the bubblegum scent of surfboard wax. Paul had more than once rummaged through Elliot's bottom drawer. Amid the thicket of expired cards and broken watches and empty aftershave bottles, there were odd treasures, the stuff of a life that he knew was far more exotic than his own. A shark tooth on a chain that had been given to Elliot by their grandmother. Maps of islands below India called the Sentinels, fingers of land engulfed in the blue of the Indian Ocean. Paul would return to an envelope he had found. In it was a photograph of a short, thin girl: Tess. She was naked, her dark hair falling forward over her angular shoulders and only partially covering her breasts, wearing the halo of a
camera flash reflected in the mirror behind her. The collection of things in Elliot's room had always tantalised him, and with each search he had grown more reckless. He'd lit cigarettes and sipped at a miniature bottle of Jack Daniel's. He'd once found a packet of condoms and put one on, felt the starchy powder between his fingers. He knew there was a kind of madness to it. He would often catch his reflection in the long mirror on the cupboard door, see the embarrassment and disappointment on the face staring back at him, and he would wonder who was accusing whom. Ringo gave him that look too, the old dog studying him between naps on the carpeted floor.

Almost an hour passed before they were moving again. A policeman sat against the bonnet of his car, parked across the highway lanes. He waved the traffic towards a fire break that ran parallel to the road. They drove down the narrow overgrown track. Grass brushed underneath the LandCruiser. On one side of them eucalypts lined the road like a curtain. Paul could still see bitumen between the trees, the broad highway eerie in its emptiness. Further up there were lights and the grim cordon of emergency vehicles. Ruth leant so far forward in her seat she was almost up against the windscreen, eyes narrowed, peering through the leaves. Paul caught a glimpse of an ambulance officer on her knees beside a twist of metal and he looked away, stared out his window and into the white light of a field. The paddock was barren apart from a few strange trees. Dwarf trees, bent and bowed, their gnarled grey branches leaning north. Some had grown completely twisted to the ground. The wind, Paul guessed.

Beside him with her eyes still on the highway, a spectator enthralled, Ruth gasped.

We set up camp in flat country near Cobar. Dead arse tingling from the day's riding. Hard to sleep in the winter desert. The rocky ground like a freezer block. Feeling like a corpse in your swag. Harder to sleep with what lies ahead. It is impossible this. What the President is wanting us to do. Go from coast to coast, east to west. Six thousand kilometres across the country. So many who would shoot us on sight.

But it feels inevitable too. The President has that way about him. Like there is no stopping what we started.

At sea

PAUL HAD BEEN IN STARK NO MORE
than four hours.

Ruth had dropped him at the hostel near midnight, the front of the building unlit when he arrived. There were signs of backpackers, the beach towels and t-shirts on the wooden rail of the veranda twisting and thrashing in the gale, but there was no movement from inside. The reception area was closed when he entered and most of the lights were off. There was no one about except for a girl leaning against the bench in the small kitchen, eating cereal and reading. Paul made a sandwich using bread from a loaf on the bench and a crusted jar of honey he found in the pantry. He then went to the dorm, sat down on the bottom bunk that was left free, tried to eat as quietly as he could by the small light above his bed. Listening to the breaths and snores of strangers behind the curtains that hung across each bunk. For the few hours until his alarm went off he lay on top
of the stiff sheets, his bum numb from the seven-hour drive, his mind alive with thoughts, kept awake by the frenzied song of the wind and rain against the window.

Now, standing at the kerb in the predawn, the town was black around him. He barely recognised it. In the dark the place seemed almost shrunken, the inlet smaller, the town flatter. It just wasn't like he remembered it from when he was younger. A terrible, howling wind blew from the inlet, smelling of rotting seaweed. The rain fell in jagged panes. Paul held his damp backpack to his chest, under his jacket.

A ute rounded the corner, headlights tunnelling through the sea mist. It pulled a skiff on a trailer. Paul raised his arm in a wave. The vehicle stopped. Paul had started to walk around the bonnet to the passenger door when there was a whistle from inside. He looked through the windscreen into the gloom of the cabin. Jake peered out at him from under the hood of a jumper.

In the boat, he yelled through the open window. And keep your head down. Don't need a fucking fine.

Paul stepped on the hub of the trailer, dropped his bag in first then clambered over the lip of the dinghy. The walls of the boat were low and he tried to lie as flat as he could but there were things in the hull, lumpy objects with hard edges, and he couldn't make them out. He touched one with his hand and felt its icy damp. He felt around for his backpack and pulled it to him, but found it was soaked, creamy and slick under his fingers. He put his hand to his nose, smelt the stink of fish blood and almost heaved. The ute set off and the boat jolted and bucked on the trailer. Another sheet of rain slapped over him. He leant back into the frozen bed of bait boxes. The sky above was a dense, shapeless dark.