The Road by Catherine Jinks
It wasn’t as if he was getting Alzheimer’s. It was just Moira, Moira and her teasing. Though Elspeth had succumbed to Alzheimer’s, it didn’t mean that Col would get it. When Ted had died – of cancer – his mind had been as clear as a bell, at least when he wasn’t under the influence of morphine. He was the oldest of the three Wallace kids, then Col, then Elspeth.
It was the luck of the draw. Poor old Elspeth. She was only sixty-eight, and she couldn’t even wipe herself.
Poor little Elspeth.
Sometimes she knew Col, and that was why he had to keep visiting her, though it always broke his heart. She looked like nothing on earth. She even smelled bad. It was such a strain, witnessing her disintegration, that Col preferred to sneak into town without alerting his niece. He hated having to make small talk after each visit, when all he wanted to do was sit on a park bench with a cold light beer and recover, like a lizard in the sun. As the years went by, it took him longer and longer to pull himself together after seeing Elspeth. The reality was just too painful.
First Ted, now Elspeth. And Helen had died of breast cancer, which was something that he wouldn’t have wished on anyone – not even Helen. And Kevin was a waster, a terrible disappointment; he was living in Burra now, on welfare payouts, shacked up with some hard-faced bitch who had two children by other men. Col despaired of his son. Forty-one years old, and he’d never done a worthwhile thing in his whole life.
But there was no point dwelling on it. Since there was nothing he could do about any of these people (except Elspeth, of course – he had to visit her), Col didn’t waste his failing energies worrying about them too much. Instead, he counted his blessings. He had a nice house, good health, terrific friends. He had his memories, most of them intact. He had Primmy and the kid from next door, who was a little sweetheart, and drew him pictures, and talked to him over the fence. By keeping on an even keel, by staying fit and cheerful, he was doing society a favour. He was taking responsibility for himself.
As he washed up and prepared to leave the house, Col reminded himself once again that he was, by most standards, a very lucky man.
CHAPTER 11
Alec had never driven a 1959 Ford station wagon before. He had certainly never driven anything that felt as if it was being held together by rubber bands and paper clips. The pedals had an alarmingly loose quality to them; the steering was sluggish, slow to respond and heavy to move; the gears ground in the gearbox like a pestle in a mortar. After five minutes behind the wheel, Alec was beginning to regard Del with more respect.
‘How long you had this thing?’ he asked her.
‘Oh . . . a bloody long time.’
‘Feels like it’s overdue for a service,’ Alec said tactfully, and Del snorted.
‘People say that,’ she replied, ‘and it sounds like I should bring in a stud bull.’
Puzzled, Alec dropped the subject. He wasn’t up to making small talk, anyway. For a while there, eating baked beans with Verlie and the kids, he had begun to feel more like himself; the knot in his stomach had started to unravel, the muscles in his shoulders to relax. Something about the smell of hot coffee – and Rosie’s plaintive demands for cornflakes – had thrust recent events at Thorndale into the background. But now, heading towards the scene of the massacre, Alec was growing tense again. He was sweating, and his mouth was dry. He knew that he was alone in his burgeoning sense of unease, however, because no one else in the car had actually encountered anything horrific during the last twenty-four hours. They had no idea what they had stumbled into – they hadn’t even grasped the fact that the laws of nature had been quietly overturned. Besides, Del was perhaps one can short of a sixpack (eccentric, at the very least), and Ross was a stick.
They didn’t have the nous to be scared.
‘Eight minutes,’ said Ross, who was keeping a close eye on his watch. The bastard had been pressured into coming by the wives of the party, and Alec knew why. It was because no one really trusted Alec. They saw how jumpy he was, and they misread the situation. They didn’t understand what he had been through. And they were probably prejudiced against truckies, in any case.
Alec might have been angry about it, if he hadn’t been so scared.
‘There is something weird goin on,’ Del suddenly remarked. She had been gazing out the window, her Lee Enfield propped between her pudgy knees. ‘I can’t put my finger . . . it’s something to do with the distances . . .’
‘The markers are shot up,’ Ross volunteered.
‘Nah, I mean the . . .’ Without finishing her sentence, Del waved a hand. ‘We’re gettin close to the Pine Creek crossing. I can tell from where the trees are, on the right. We’ve only been drivin eight minutes and –’
‘Ten minutes,’ Ross interrupted.
‘All right, ten minutes. It still doesn’t make sense. I crossed Pine Creek yesterday afternoon –’
‘Look!’ cried Alec.
It was Diesel Dog. It had to be, though the vague, white shape on the horizon was impossible to identify as yet. Alec found himself speeding up, and had to force his foot off the spongy accelerator.
‘Is that it?’ Del frowned.
‘It can’t be.’ Ross sounded definite.
Alec said nothing. He knew, with a ferocious sense of satisfaction, that the others were heading for the shock of their lives. Gradually, the Dog’s familiar features became visible: the scaffolding of the roo bar, the black number emblazoned above the roof, the insignia on the mudflaps, the scattering of blunt declarations – ‘MACK’, ‘ROAD TRAIN’, ‘DIESEL DOG’. Alec slowed, and pulled over when he was level with the Dog’s mighty bank of headlights.
‘There he is. That’s my dog,’ he said.
Ross swallowed; the sound was audible. ‘This can’t be the same one we passed yesterday,’ he protested hoarsely. ‘It can’t be the same one!’
‘It is,’ said Del. ‘At least, it’s Alec’s truck.’ She glanced over at him. ‘It is, isn’t it? Gary Radford & Sons. I reckanise the way it’s parked.’
Alec nodded. He cut the Ford’s engine. They sat staring at the Dog’s hubcaps for a while as silence engulfed them. Even Mongrel wasn’t making a sound.
‘So,’ Del finally remarked. ‘The Good Lord’s up to something.’
‘This doesn’t make sense,’ Ross complained, in a high-pitched voice.
‘You’re right there.’ Del gave Alec a nudge. ‘Dja think it’s the same goin south?’
‘Probably. The Fergusons got stranded.’
‘So we could drive for another two hours, turn around, and we’d be back here in ten minutes?’
‘I dunno.’ Alec shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Now listen,’ Ross began, in a hectoring tone. But he never finished the sentence. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, Alec saw that he was rubbing his forehead as he stared at the road train, his eyes haunted.
Deal with it, mate, Alec thought. It was a relief to share some of the worry around.
Ahead of them, the road stretched like a long, grey finger pointing at the sky. It was still barred with the elongated shadows of posts and bushes, but they were shortening as the sun rose higher. Alec saw a crow sitting on a white post some ten metres away. There was another one parked across the road, like a mirror image; they could have been a couple of heraldic statues flanking a gateway.
‘That place where it happened,’ Del suddenly asked, ‘was it far from here?’
‘Eh?’ Alec blinked. ‘You mean –’
‘The property. Y’know. Where your friends got –’ ‘Thorndale. Yeah. Right.’
‘Is it far?’
‘No.’
‘And yiz never went there? To the house, I mean.’
‘No. At least . . .’ Alec paused, and took a deep breath. ‘At least I never did.’
Del grunted. Alec closed his eyes. He knew exactly what she was going to say next. He could feel it coming.
‘Didja see any phone lines?’
‘There weren’t any, or yiz didn’t notice?’
‘I didn’t notice.’
‘Right. Okay.’
‘I’m not goin back there.’ Alec spoke with the curtness of desperation. He couldn’t wait any longer for Del to get to the point; he wanted to make his position clear. She, in turn, fixed him with her strangely detached regard, which put him in mind of an animal’s. It was blue and blank and guileless, but with a cheerfully ruthless quality as well.
‘Whassa matter?’ she asked. ‘Scared?’
‘I’d be a fuckin idiot not to be.’
‘We’ve got a gun here, mate.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘We gotta do something.’
But Alec shook his head.
‘Not down there, we don’t,’ he replied.
‘You think he’s still waitin around, this bastard?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Yiz heard someone leave, didn’t ya?’
Alec was silent.
‘If it wasn’t your friends that left, then it musta been the gunman,’ Del continued, with remorseless logic. ‘If it was your friends, then he can’t be such a good shot, or he woulda hit ’em. And even if he did hit ’em, there’s no guarantee they’re dead. For all you know, they might still be alive. Didja thinka that, when ya choofed off? Eh?’
Alec turned his face away. The thought had never occurred to him – it struck him like a boot in the guts. What if Chris and Graham were still alive? What if they were lying there with the life slowly draining out of them, unable to move?
‘Ah, jeez,’ he choked.
‘Come on,’ said Del, patting him on the arm. ‘We’ll go take a look, eh?’
‘I don’t – I don’t –’
‘We oughta do it, Alec. There might be a phone.’
‘But –’
‘What else can we do, eh?’ She was beginning to sound impatient. ‘Hit the road again? What for? Yiz said it yourself – we’re not gunna get anywhere.’
Alec crumpled. His whole body sagged. He could recognise the truth in what she’d said – and he could recognise something else, as well. No matter how far they went, they always seemed to end up at Thorndale.
Was there a reason for that?
‘Wait – wait a minute, now,’ Ross was saying. ‘Wait just a minute. What are you doing? What’s this all about?’ He had been so quiet that Alec had briefly forgotten his existence. Like Chris before him, Ross had probably been struggling against the forces of Unreason, trying to come to terms with the fact that the laws of physics weren’t working any more. ‘We said we’d go straight back,’ he objected. ‘We can’t go anywhere else.’
‘We said we’d be gone about an hour.’ Del gave the nod to Alec, who turned her key in the ignition. ‘It’s been fifteen minutes tops.’
‘But where are you going?’ Ross demanded.
‘To Thorndale. This place – y’know – where it happened.’
‘Where the shooting happened?’
Del turned right around in her seat to face him. The ancient, scuffed leather beneath her ample backside squeaked and cracked.
‘If the coppers aren’t comin, Ross, somebody’s gotta check it out. There might be people still alive.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘We gotta gun and a dog. Anyway, first sign of trouble, we’re outta there.’
‘I don’t think this is wise.’ Ross spoke pompously, but he was sweating bullets. Alec could tell. ‘We don’t know what’s happened. We don’t even know if Mr . . . Mr . . .’
‘Muller,’ Alec supplied, flatly.
‘. . . if Mr Muller here is telling the truth.’
‘Oh, get a grip!’ Alec was well and truly fed up with this blind prejudice against him. ‘If you don’t bloody like it, mate, you can get out here, and we’ll pick you up on the way back!’
‘I’ll thank you, Mr Muller, not to take that tone with me.’
‘Now, now, you blokes.’ Del seemed to be enjoying the exchange; there was a lilt in her voice and a smile on her face. ‘Be good, or we’ll turn around and go straight back home.’
‘It’s not a joking matter, Ms Deegan!’ Ross snapped.
‘You’re right,’ Del agreed. ‘It’s not. And we can’t afford to bugger around, either.’ She became serious, all of a sudden. ‘Look, Ross, I don’t have much petrol. The stations around here – they’ve always got petrol. So at the very least, even if this place doesn’t have a phone, at least it’ll have petrol. Maybe some food. We’ve gotta think ahead, Ross.’
‘That’s right.’ Alec was struck by the sense of Del’s argument. ‘We could actually take stuff, couldn’t we? Borrow it, I mean.’
‘We could.’
‘If we don’t get shot at,’ Ross spluttered.
‘If we get shot at, we turn right around,’ Del assured him. ‘But what’s the point of goin back to the others now, and headin for Thorndale again later? Which we’ll have to, I reckon, when we start to run outta supplies. No question we’ll eat up all our petrol, zippin back and forth like that.’
‘Someone will be along soon –’ Ross began, but Del interrupted him.
‘Yeah, well, maybe,’ she said. ‘But I’ve never been one to expect other people to pull me outta the messes I get meself into.’
She and Ross were almost eye to eye; looking over at them, Alec saw the challenge in her gaze, and the way Ross yielded before it. No one was going to accuse Ross of being feeble.
‘Well – it’s your call,’ he finally growled. ‘But there has to be some explanation –’
‘Yeah, yeah. I know.’ Del swung back around to face the windscreen. ‘Come on, Alec, whaddaya doin? We’re chewin up fuel, sittin here!’
Obediently, Alec yanked at the gearstick. With his foot on the doughy accelerator, he guided Del’s car back onto the road.
As he did so, he silently recited a little prayer.
They were late getting away, because Georgie had taken a sleeping pill the night before. She usually needed chemical assistance to get to sleep, and even then she would twitch and moan and mutter. Ambrose hadn’t been sleeping well himself since taking up with Georgie, but there was nothing he could do about it. He was in her thrall, bound to her despite all his misgivings, titillated even when he was horrified. Perhaps the old adage was true – perhaps opposites really did attract, in some irresistible, physics-based way – because Georgie and Ambrose couldn’t have been more different. She even smoked in bed, scattering her ash carelessly over the twisted sheets. Her skin, her hair, her mouth – they all smelled of smoke, all the time. She didn’t seem to care that Ambrose was asthmatic. She would leave windows open and expect the cross-draught to take care of everything. She made perfunctory efforts to blow smoke away from him, through doors or into air conditioning vents, but was fundamentally unwilling to let his health problems interfere with her enjoyment.
She was a monster – a magnificent monster – with whom Ambrose was utterly infatuated.
Not that she possessed no redeeming features; on the contrary, she was a very attractive girl beneath all her efforts to disguise the fact. Her skin was beautiful, pale and fine; she had slender, delicate bones, long-toed feet, elegant hands. Her full lips had a sullenly provocative pout to them, and her eyes slanted a little at the corners. Despite the shaggy hair, dyed a rough black, and the poisonous lipstick colours, and the nose stud, and the nicotine stains, and the aggressive style of garb she favoured, Georgie was still a ‘babe’. That was the classification given to her by Ambrose’s brother Tom, at their last family get-together, when the Scales clan had turned out in force to celebrate Tom’s birthday. Georgie, Ambrose remembered, had arrived at that particular celebration in a pair of leotards and a leather corset. She had been asked repeatedly not to smoke inside his parents’ house, had scoffed loudly at the artwork displayed on the Zoffany wallpaper, and had taken a bottle of almond bath salts with her when she left. Her excuse for this blatant theft had be
The truth was, he had enjoyed his parents’ dismay. They had had their own way too bloody often, in his opinion, and needed a good kick in the teeth. Ambrose himself had done everything required of him: the stultifying high school subjects, the endless hours of study, the outstanding exam results, the law degree, the holiday jobs at his father’s office. He kept himself well-groomed and clean-shaven. He never forgot a birthday, or omitted an inquiry about his grandmother’s health. He was now toiling away in a junior position on the staff of a large city law firm, working long hours – sometimes on the weekend – and spending his hard-earned cash on expensive suits and sessions at the gym. He was in every way dutiful, sensible, irreproachable – save in one respect.
Having picked Georgie up at the house of a film-student friend, he was now able to wreak havoc vicariously, enjoying his parents’ alarm while dodging all responsibility for the trouble she caused. No one blamed Ambrose for anything. How could they? Georgie was uncontrollable. She was like a force of nature. Ambrose was simply carried along in her wake, quite obviously in sexual bondage to her, an intelligent, well-behaved private-school graduate who was no match for the careless and voracious Georgie.
It was a match made in heaven, as far as Ambrose was concerned. While Georgie dragged him to all kinds of dubious functions – while she went out of her way to shock and madden by removing articles of clothing in public, and employing language that would have made a bikie blush, and engaging in screeching, knock-down arguments outside shops and pubs – she was delightfully compliant in bed. Ambrose knew what people thought about his and Georgie’s sex life, but they were dead wrong. It was Ambrose who had the upper hand in their most private moments, even though he took the back seat at parties. He had to laugh, sometimes, at the way his friends looked at them both. He had to smile when he thought about the engraved handcuffs she had given him for his birthday.