Catherine Jinks TheRoad (11 page)

‘Where?’ Peter threw himself forward, his seat belt biting into his chest and shoulder. ‘I don’t – oh, right.’ The sign was a distant silhouette. ‘What does it say?’

‘I can’t tell, yet,’ Noel replied. ‘Linda, could you just check . . . can you see? That sign . . . what does it say?’

Linda shifted in her seat. She was blocking Peter’s view. ‘Wait a second,’ she mumbled. ‘It says . . . hang on . . .’

They seemed to approach the sign very slowly, then pass it in the blink of an eye. Even so, Peter did catch a glimpse of it – or what was left of it.

A well-aimed load of shot had obliterated whatever paint had remained on its sandblasted surface.

‘Oh,’said Linda.‘Oh,well.Never mind.We’ll just have a look at the next one. Come on, Louise, it’s your choice – plain cheese, or ham and tomato? Make up your mind, or you won’t get anything.’

Up ahead, the flat horizon shimmered.

Slowly Alec began to realise that something was wrong.

He had been so caught up in thoughts of Janine that it hadn’t dawned on him, until now. He had been driving automatically, half his mind on the road, half on the thorny dilemma awaiting him back in Broken Hill. His stomach had finally alerted him to the fact that the hour was getting late, and he still hadn’t reached his destination. Checking the clock, he had seen – to his astonishment – that it was nearly half past twelve. And then he had glanced again at the speedometer.

Eighty-seven km/h. So he wasn’t exactly dragging his feet. Unless the speedometer was busted? But no, he sensed that it was functioning okay. He could tell. He knew his truck and he knew the road; he could always feel when he was starting to push the limit. Something to do with the vibrations in the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands. Something to do with the way his tyres sounded when he crossed a cattle grid. The speed limiter on his fuel pump very rarely kicked in, because Alec’s own feel for the Diesel Dog was as sensitive as any electronic gadget.

He was alert now as he registered the features of the surrounding landscape. He could recall – quite clearly – crossing the bridge at Pine Creek. And the kangaroo corpse, he could remember that. After ploughing through the kangaroo he had slipped back into one of his daydreams, and that had been at . . . Christ!

That had been at eleven o’clock.

No, he decided. I’ve made a mistake somewhere. I should have been there by now. He plotted the position of the Pinnacles, way up ahead. Only two of the peaks were visible – two thrusting rock formations like tits with erect nipples, hugging the horizon – but even so, it meant that he had crossed the time zone boundary. So he was still... what? Thirty kilometres out?

I can’t have covered just twenty-odd kilometres in ninety minutes, he thought numbly. That’s stupid. That doesn’t make sense. He wondered if the old Dog’s clock was fast, for some reason. But it was showing the same time as his own digital watch, and that watch had been spot-on when he left Mildura; he had checked it against the clock at the depot. So what was going on? Some kind of weird
magnetic
thing?

Alec was very vague when it came to magnetic fields, solar winds, electrical discharges, and all the other natural phenomena that you learned about in school (if you were paying attention) and generally used if you were trying to explain certain strange incidents that sometimes occurred out in the middle of nowhere. Alec hadn’t experienced much to wonder about so far – no one did, on the Mildura–Broken Hill run – but he had heard other blokes talking about hauling road trains across the Channel Country of remote Queensland, and encountering the moving lights they called min min; about misshapen creatures (bunyips? yowies?) crossing the road in front of them at dusk, glaring with luminous eyes; about ghostly figures trying to hitch rides, then suddenly vanishing. Granted, these stories were usually told after a couple of hours spent on the booze, by blokes who often had a reputation for popping pills (or caffeine-enriched substances) to keep them awake for forty hours at a stretch. Still, they made you think. And they made you dredge around in your failing memory for all those snippets of physics that you had somehow picked up from textbooks, or television documentaries, or articles in your dentist’s copy of the
Reader’s Digest
: snippets about radio waves . . . the aurora borealis . . . high pressure systems . . .

Alec seemed to remember hearing or reading something once about magnets stopping clocks. But not
speeding up
clocks. Unless that was possible too? Had he hit some kind of strange magnetic field? There were a lot of ores and heavy metals in the rocks around here, not to mention that big line of electricity pylons marching across the country to his right.That thing
had
to have some effect.

Alec flicked a glance at the Pinnacles again, but they didn’t appear to be any closer. Then he put his foot down, and the country rolled past at a slightly faster rate, looking the same as usual. Something was wrong, though. Alec knew this road very well, and he knew that one stretch of it wasn’t necessarily indistinguishable from another stretch. There were always small differences that eventually combined to make a big difference. Scattered acacias would eventually merge to form a copse; dry dents in the earth would eventually run into a wide, sandy creek lined with river gums. But as his gaze skipped from the road to its surroundings and back again, he saw no gradually emerging changes. The bushes flitted past, the stony roadside ditches endlessly unfurled, but the streak of green to his left stayed at a fixed distance. So did the Pinnacles. So did the Barrier Ranges – they remained a faint, bluish brush stroke on the far horizon, barely clearing the tops of the stunted mulga trees.

Okay, he thought. Okay. Now, I’m not drunk, and I’m not on drugs. So either I’m going mad, or the clocks are fucked. Or was I dreaming away, back there, so that I slowed down to a crawl without noticing? It was possible.

His stomach growled, and Alec became even more uneasy. He could practically set his watch by his gut – it started to complain at precisely noon each day if it hadn’t been fed within the past two hours. According to the clock in his stomach, it was way, way past twelve p.m. And all he had on him were a couple of chocolate bars, plus a thermos half full of cold tea, from yesterday’s trip. Not exactly a satisfying lunch.

He reached for his phone, which was lying on the seat beside him. It wasn’t just an ordinary mobile, because there was no access to the CDMA network out on the Silver City Highway. Instead, employees of Gary Radford and Sons Pty Ltd used satellite phones – in Alec’s case, an Iridium low earth orbit satellite phone, which had the ability to pierce even the blanket of silence that engulfed the remote area outside of Broken Hill.

But when he punched in the encoded base number, nothing happened. The little black slab of technology lay in his hand, silent and dead, like a miniature coffin. He tried again, tearing his eyes from the road just long enough to note that the phone’s display screen was blank.

He might as well have used a shoe to call home, for all the good it did him.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he breathed. Was it a flat battery? Could something have drained it? Those weird magnetic fields again? The boss was going to go ballistic if Alec didn’t show up soon. He was way behind schedule already, unless his watch was wrong. Unless his eyes were playing tricks on him.

Unless he’d gone mad.

He tried the radio. Even at the best of times there wasn’t much you could pick up out here – just the local ABC station, and the odd, static-laden piece of country music, or snatch of cricket commentary, which sounded as if it was coming through from Mars. But there was always something. Something to assure you that you weren’t a mere dot on an empty plain, heading into infinity.

Until now.

Grimacing, Alec fiddled more and more frantically with the dial on the radio as he guided his gigantic truck with one hand. All he could find was static, static and more static, with here and there a slight clearing in the fuzz, accompanied by strange, scratchy noises that sounded almost, but not quite, like an electronic voice or growl. Like the groan of a didgeridoo pushed through a grid of satellite interference. Like someone spluttering into a microphone.

Suddenly experiencing a surge of unreasonable panic, he snapped off the radio and peered at the Pinnacles again. They hadn’t fucking moved. He was sure of it. They
hadn’t fucking moved
in the last – what was it? (He checked his watch: twelve thirty-seven.) In the last
eleven minutes
. That wasn’t right. That couldn’t be right. Unless the clocks were wrong, and the speedometer was playing up, and his guts were making a fool of him – unless he had experienced a blackout or an epileptic fit while continuing to keep his Dog on the road – he had got exactly nowhere over the last hour and three quarters.

Alec tried to reassure himself with thoughts of Janine, and her enamelled hair clips, and her lacy bras hanging on the clothes line.
That
was reality. That was safety. This was just another job, same as all the other jobs, and it would be over soon. He was being a bloody fool. Of course he would get there, he
had
to get there. He was on the road, wasn’t he? The road to Broken Hill? All roads have a beginning and an end, and the Silver City Highway was no different. It had been built to take people from point A to point B, in a bit over three hours – four if you were being careful.

The trouble was, Alec took time out. He was a dreamer, always had been. That’s why they called him Dozy. That’s why they tapped on his skull sometimes, and waved their hands in front of his eyes. ‘Oi! Mate! Earth to Alec, ya dozy bugger!’ they would say. And Alec would realise that he had missed something – something important.

Clearly, it was the same in this case. Clearly, he had missed something. But what? How? You couldn’t exactly close your eyes and chill out when you were driving a Mack super liner. If you did, you’d end up in hospital with your nose up your arse. Alec might have been dozy, but he wasn’t in a bloody coma. He had to keep at least one eye open, or risk the inevitable consequences.

So what had he missed?

At that point he remembered the fuel gauge, and stopped watching the road for half a second to assess the levels. His normal fuel load for the Mildura trip was seven hundred litres: some two hundred and twenty for the trip there, two hundred and twenty for the trip back, and another two hundred and fifty-odd for emergencies. After making a laboured mental calculation, Alec worked out that he now had approximately one hundred litres left in the tank.

Which proved, if nothing else did, that something was seriously wrong.

The man had a dog with him – a scruffy bull terrier called Mullet. Mullet’s face had been savagely scarred by kicks and bites, but his nose was still good. It could still do the job. Mullet smelled the dead thing before he had even reached the gate, and bounded ahead eagerly. But the man’s voice jerked him back like a short lead.

‘Mullet! Cummeer!’

The siren scent of the dead thing made the dog skittish as he approached the house; he kept veering away and coming to heel again. His toenails clicked on the front steps. His tail was almost caught in the screen door as it slammed shut. An overwhelming potpourri of smells immediately struck him, all of them associated with food, water, sweat, grease, smoke. The man’s heavy boots made the floor creak. He said: ‘Nathan?’

There was no reply. A refrigerator gurgled and a clock ticked; the only other sound was the man’s ragged breathing. He went into the kitchen and Mullet followed him, bustling about, snuffling at kickboards. One by one, the cupboard doors banged open

– bang, bang, bang. Mullet was assailed by hot and spicy smells, wheaten smells, the musty smell of old potatoes. But he had to tear himself away, because the man was moving on.

‘Mullet!’ he said. ‘Cummeer. Nathan! Where are ya? Come out, come out, wherever you are.’

They crossed the living room and entered the first bedroom. It contained a double bed, an old wardrobe, a cabinet, an unpacked suitcase. There were clothes strewn everywhere – a woman’s clothes, a child’s clothes. A ghostly sheep’s skull sat on a bedside table.

The man opened the wardrobe, grunted, and closed it again. He looked under the bed. He was carrying a rifle.

Mullet preceded him into the next bedroom, which was small and cluttered, and smelled strongly of tobacco. The walls and ceiling were brown with old smoke. The bed was a single, draped in a drab chenille cover. There were two chests of drawers which supported piles of mismatched objects: an antique sewing machine, a transistor radio, a lamp, an alarm clock, a tin money box, a shoe horn, a spectacle-case, a china dog, a crystal inkwell. The wardrobe was stuffed with clothes, and nothing else. More objects had collected in the corners of the room, among them an ancient bag of golf clubs, a broken gramophone, a box of magazines, a bakelite ashtray on a stand. No one was hiding under the bed, because there was no room to hide. That space, too, was packed with dusty possessions.

The man led Mullet into the bathroom, where they checked behind the door and inside the wickerwork laundry hamper. A tap was dripping. From the bathroom they retraced their steps up the hall, stopping briefly in the first bedroom to collect a soiled pair of shorts (size six). From there they made their way to the enclosed verandah, which was full of old newspapers and collapsed chairs; Mullet sniffed out no one in that long, narrow room, nor in the caravan wedged against it. The door of the caravan had to be forced, and this was done by means of a hammer retrieved from the garage. The garage, too, was searched very thoroughly, with Mullet inserting himself into every pocket of empty space.

No one was hiding behind the blistered meat safe, beneath the old bedspread, or inside the empty oil drum.

‘Fuck ’im,’ the man said. He emerged into the yard again looking angry, and narrowed his eyes against the sun. Mullet began to poke around some of the piles of rubbish, then veered off again towards the dead thing. He could smell other dogs. The smell was very strong – as was the reek of rotting flesh.