Catherine Jinks TheRoad (2 page)

‘Uncle Frank’s been on at him about it,’ Grace explained.

‘Yalata dreamtime – that kinda stuff.’ Cyrene said nothing. Whatever he thought about his sister Gladys’s marriage to Grace’s grandfather – whose own mother had been a Nullarbor Aborigine

– he had kept it to himself for fifty years. Grace sensed that what he didn’t like (or didn’t understand) he preferred to ignore. ‘No wombats around here, son,’ he remarked. ‘Too dry for

wombats. Snakes, roos and emus – that’s what you get here.’

‘And lizards,’ said Nathan.

‘Yup.’

‘And flies,’ said Grace. You couldn’t keep the flies out of Cyrene’s house. It was too old – too ramshackle. It had been tacked together over the years out of fibro, galvanised iron and pressed tin; there was a caravan jammed up against it, and an enclosed veranda made up of twelve mismatched doors, most of them with glass inserts. The flyscreens were full of holes. There was a missing pane in the bathroom window.

And there were the dogs, of course. Flies love dogs.

‘We saw roo poo today, eh, Mum?’ said Nathan. ‘Didn’t we?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m gunna put food out for ’em, aren’t I?’

‘Maybe.’ Grace wasn’t sure whether the droppings they’d seen had come from kangaroos, goats, rabbits or even sheep. Old Nugget could have told her, but Nugget was dead. His wife, Gladys, was dead too. The only one left of that generation was Cyrene.

Grace hadn’t had much to do with him over the years. Her mother had sent him Christmas cards, and had kept track of him through Gladys. There had been visits – one or two – when Grace was a kid. But the connection was a remote one, as remote as Thorndale itself. For a long time, Cyrene had been little more to Grace than a photo at the back of a drawer.

Thank God, she thought. Thank God for that, or I’d be well and truly stuffed.

‘Can Harry sleep in our room?’ Nathan asked later, when Grace was scraping the dishes and darkness was pressing in on all sides, pushing against windows and filling up corners. Grace only regretted her decision to come to Thorndale at night. Its isolation worried her then. She would peer into the void around the little house, searching for a glimmer of yellow light in the distance. She would strain to catch the sound of a truck on the highway.

‘Ask Cyrene,’ she replied.

‘I did.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said ask your mum. Can I, Mum?’

Grace hesitated. Harry didn’t smell too good. He wasn’t a clean dog. But at least he was a big one – a big dog with big teeth.

‘Yeah, all right,’ she said.

‘Yay!’

‘He’s not comin in the bed, but. He stays on the floor.’

‘Okay.’

‘And if he plays up, he’s out. I mean it.’

‘He won’t.’

He didn’t either. One whack on the nose from Grace’s
Who
Weekly
magazine was enough to settle him down. He curled up by the door like a storybook dog, and for three hours after that he hardly made a noise. Just a couple of sneezes and one ‘thump’ when his feathery tail hit the skirting board. Grace would never have known that he was in the room, if she hadn’t left the lamp on.

She could no longer sleep in the dark. She might doze, but only for a short time, waking with a gasp and a start, sitting up and listening, listening. A light in her room always made her feel safer. Ever since the business in the car park, she had slept with a knife beside her bed.

Nathan hadn’t asked about the knife. He had learned not to ask about a lot of things lately.

Gazing at him as he lay sleeping next to her, his arms flung wide, his silky hair tousled, his lips bunched and his lashes quivering slightly with every beat of his pulse, Grace wondered how he had remained so untouched. His skin was still perfect. His eyes were still clear. He still smiled and talked without flinching or stammering, eager to find out more about the world. It was a bloody miracle.

Or was it? Grace worried about Nathan. She was afraid that he might be like a piece of wood gutted by ants, which would show no trace of damage on the outside until it suddenly caved in under pressure.

She hoped not, but she had a bad feeling.

It was one more thing to keep her awake at night.

The next day, Harry and Bit disappeared.

They went out with Grace and Nathan, who walked to the ridge and back after lunch. Bit never made it; he got tired and turned tail for home before they had even crossed the first salt pan. Harry stuck it out though. Sometimes bounding ahead, sometimes trailing behind, sometimes swerving off to follow a scent into a thicket of mulga, he stayed with Grace and Nathan until they reached the ‘wombat’ hole. Then, while Nathan was collecting pebbles, Harry wandered away. He often did that. Grace whistled once or twice, but wasn’t surprised when he failed to respond. He was barely more than a puppy, and wayward in his habits. ‘Useless,’ Cyrene called him. Bit had been a working dog, and would always come to heel, but Cyrene had taken no trouble with Harry’s manners. He was too old, he said, to start training up young dogs.

Nathan liked the quartz pebbles, which were pink and white. He liked pebbles with traces of mica in them, because they glittered in the sun. He put fifteen pebbles in a plastic bag to take home with him, and also found a skull, very small, which Cyrene later identified as a sheep’s skull. Grace agreed that the skull could come home too; it was picked clean and bleached white. Nathan put it in the plastic bag with his pebbles.

They walked back to Thorndale calling out Harry’s name and were surprised to find that Bit hadn’t returned to the house. At first they didn’t worry. Nathan busied himself arranging his skull and pebbles on a sandy stretch of ground beside the biggest water tank. Grace went inside to phone her mum. She had phoned her mum every day since arriving, always reversing the charges. Her mum said that everything was fine. She had been to the doctor, who had given her antibiotics for her chest infection. As for the rest of the family, things were okay with them, too. Gary was working a new job down at The Lord Nelson. Sylvia and the kids were visiting Sylvia’s mother-in-law for a week. Grace’s cousin Angela had got engaged. ‘They’ll be throwin a big party,’ Grace’s mum pointed out. ‘It’s in three weeks time. I said I didn’t know if yiz could make it.’ A pause. ‘Whaddaya reckon, Gracie? Will yiz be back by then?’

Grace fiddled with the phone cord. ‘I dunno,’ she said.

‘No one’s seen ’im. He’s cleared out, did I tell ya?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hasn’t come back, either. Gary went around and checked. House is still empty. Car’s gone.’

‘What about the window?’

‘Oh, we fixed that. Gotta bit of plywood. Haven’t told the agent, Gracie – not yet. It’s a shockin mess in there, love, did y’know? That mirror cabinet in the bathroom, it’s been pulled off the wall.’

‘Shit,’ said Grace.

‘And the holes in the bedroom door, they’re gunna set ya back a bit.’

‘Well
I
didn’t put ’em there. Why should I pay?
He
can.’

‘If we can find ’im.’

‘Before he finds me.’ Grace hunched her shoulders. ‘What did Mark say?’

‘He said the coppers are on the lookout, but y’know what they’re like, the bastards. Poor Gary can’t drop a ciggie butt without them jumpin on top of ’im, but I get me bloody door kicked in and they don’t wanna know. A domestic, they called it. I said, “Dja think I did it meself,for God’s sake? Me own bloody door?”’

‘But he’s breached an AVO, Mum!’