Catherine Jinks TheRoad (9 page)

He had just stopped to straighten a leaning fence post when he heard the shot. He knew instantly what it was, of course; it frightened him so much that he nearly dropped his rifle. Then there was another shot. He thought he heard a scream too – a faint, distant sound – but he couldn’t be sure, because by that time he’d started to run. The second shot had given him a fix on his destination. It had come from down the road. He cursed his bad knee, the way it buckled under pressure applied suddenly from a certain angle. It slowed him up; it distracted him. And his heart was no good either, jerking around in his chest as if it wanted to jump out of his ribcage, pounding in his ears until he couldn’t hear anything else. He was panting by the time he reached the gate. It was a bugger, trying to release the catch without dropping his gun. Christ, oh Christ! Another shot.

Cyrene hauled the gate open and staggered through it. Bullets clinked in his pocket – they sounded like loose change. He couldn’t believe the bastard had a gun. Not a shotgun – not by the sound of it – but even if it was spring loaded, Cyrene was stuffed. His only advantage would be surprise.

He didn’t know what the bugger was shooting at. Surely not Grace? Grace had driven off long ago. She ought to have been on the highway, at least. But the scream had been human ...he didn’t know what to think . . .

He was heading down the road when he heard Nathan’s voice, high-pitched and desperate. The kid was calling his name.
‘Nathan?’
he yelled. Ahead of him, the road looped around, forming a lazy S-bend before dropping into a shallow depression that rolled away down to the creek. Cyrene’s eyes weren’t too good at the best of times; what with the dip, and the low screens of saltbush and boxthorn, it was impossible to see Nathan until the kid was almost on top of him, stumbling around the corner with his mouth wide open and his chest heaving. There was blood on Nathan’s knee. His face was wet, and his eyes were wild.

‘Nathan?’ Cyrene croaked.

‘Mum!’The poor kid could hardly speak.Puffing and blowing, tears spilling from his eyes, he flung himself at Cyrene. ‘He got Mum!’

‘What?’

‘Mum’s there!’
Nathan shrilled, pounding on Cyrene’s chest. He was practically incoherent – half-formed words gushed from a distorted mouth – but Cyrene got the message. Gracie was back there, and someone was shooting at her.

‘Okay, you go,’ Cyrene ordered. ‘Go on.’ The bloodshot eyes stared at him, uncomprehending. ‘Go and hide!’ he continued sharply, pointing at the house. ‘Keep goin! When it’s safe, I’ll tell ya, right? Quick, now!’

Nathan blinked. ‘Mum . . .’ he gurgled.

‘Gorn!’

That got rid of Nathan. He released Cyrene’s shirt and ran off unsteadily, tripping once or twice, gulping down air and whining like a frightened dog.

Cyrene didn’t watch him go. Lifting his gun to shoulder height, he continued to advance, trying not to make too much noise. He would have one clear shot before the need to reload put him at a disadvantage. And he didn’t even have a telescopic sight to help him – just this bloody old Lithgow, heavy as lead, which had been lying around for years in his wardrobe and would probably jam at the crucial moment because he hadn’t fired it since Bill Ricketts took over the family farm next door. Cyrene didn’t trust Bill Ricketts. Bill was the sort of fella who’d report you for keeping an unregistered firearm. Bill’s dad had understood that if you lived out the back of beyond you
had
to keep an old rifle squirrelled away somewhere for safety’s sake, whether or not you were a primary producer. It was the way things had always been. But Bill was different.

At least the bullets are soft-nosed, Cyrene thought. At least if I hit the bastard, I’ll do a bit of damage.

And he pressed on cautiously, blinking the sweat out of his eyes.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You eat something, please.’

‘But I’m not hungry!’

‘Rose,’ said Linda, ‘if you don’t eat something now, you’re not getting anything in the car. All right? Don’t think you’re going to fill up on snacks, because I’m sick of it. You eat that toast. One piece of toast won’t kill you. Peter? Have you finished?
Peter!
’

Peter was reading
The Stones of A
mrach
, for perhaps the eighth time. He jerked to attention, reluctantly extricating himself from the lair of the dreaded Molloon. Although he knew that the Fourth Eye would be found in the Molloon’s steaming stomach when Presprill clove its guts in twain, he was still eager to reach that transcendental moment before they had to leave the motel.

He wouldn’t be able to read in the car, because he got sick. So unless he finished the chapter now, he wouldn’t do it before lunchtime.

‘I don’t want any more,’ he assured his mother, preparing to plunge back into the pages of his novel. But Linda wouldn’t let him.

‘Have you cleaned your teeth?’ she asked. ‘Peter? Have you?’

‘Uh – no.’

‘Then go and do it.
Now
.’

Sighing, Peter rose from the bed to which he had been assigned. It was always chaos when the Fergusons travelled. There were five of them – two adults and three children, crammed into one car, one motel room, one restaurant booth. Linda and Noel generally shared a double bed wherever they stopped to sleep. If there were three singles in the room as well, everything was straightforward. But if there were two doubles and a single – or a double, two singles and a trundle or a foldaway

– then the arguments would start. Louise resented sharing a double with Rosie. Rosie complained that she always had to sleep in the foldaway. Why couldn’t Peter, for once? Peter would point out that going to bed at half past eight was stupid. If he read his book in the bathroom, it wouldn’t bother Rosie, would it? It wouldn’t keep her awake. Whereupon Mum would reply that if she and Noel could go to bed at eight thirty, then so could Peter. Besides, they all had to get up early in the morning. Big day, tomorrow. An extra hour of sleep wouldn’t hurt.

Peter had to squirm past his mum to reach the bathroom. When he got there, he found his father wedged between the sink and the toilet bowl. Peter said: ‘I can’t clean my teeth, Mum, Dad’s shaving.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Noel. ‘Plenty of room.’ He shifted slightly, smiling through his shaving soap. ‘You can squeeze in, can’t you?’ ‘I’ll wait,’ Peter replied. But his mother’s voice barred his exit. ‘Do it now,’ she insisted. ‘There’s a queue.’

‘Mum?’ It was Louise. ‘I can’t find my other red sock.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Louise.’

‘I can’t find it!’

‘Have you looked?’

‘Yes, I’ve looked!’

‘You say you’ve looked, but I know I’ll come over there, and it’ll be sitting on top of everything, staring at me . . .’

‘It’s
not
, Mum!’

Peter sidled up to the vanity sink, plucked his toothbrush from the communal cup, and squeezed a gob of toothpaste onto its bristles – which already looked as if a dog had been chewing on them. He didn’t like travelling. Holidays could be fun, in some ways, but they could also be hell. At home, he slept in his own room. Louise and Rosie shared a big bedroom, but he had a little one all to himself, and he loved it. He loved to get away from everyone, retreating into his private domain, shutting the door on the endless yakking, the whirring appliances, the chattering television. Sometimes his family wore him out. They were so
noisy
, especially Rose. His mum maintained that he had never stopped talking either, when he was five, but Peter didn’t believe it. Rosie was a motormouth. Even Louise didn’t talk as much as Rose. Peter, who had quite clear memories of Louise when she was five (he had been eight at the time), knew for a fact that she had never burbled on like Rose. And if
she
hadn’t, then
he
certainly hadn’t. Because he was the quietest person in the family.

Peter spat out a mouthful of toothpaste. He mistimed it, and it hit his father’s wrist, but Noel – who had been rinsing off his razor – didn’t get mad. He rarely got mad about anything. Linda, on the other hand, got mad all the time. She was mad now, in fact, mad at Rosie, who had dropped a slice of Vegemite toast, face down, onto a pile of folded T-shirts.

‘Just
sit
!’ Linda snapped, addressing Rosie, as Peter and Noel emerged from the bathroom. ‘I
told
you not to wander around – now I’m going to have to wash that all over again!’

‘Sorry, Mum,’ Rosie muttered

‘Yes, well, it’s a bit late now, isn’t it?’

‘Lin,’ said Noel, in a gently reproachful voice, ‘it was an accident.’

Linda stiffened. ‘There wouldn’t have
been
an accident if she’d done what I told her to do!’ Bustling past her husband, she paused briefly, and added in a low voice (which Peter heard, nonetheless): ‘I’m the one who does the laundry around here, so I’m the injured party, all right?’

Then she marched into the bathroom, leaving Noel to exchange a quick glance with his son. The unspoken message from Noel was: be nice to your mother until we hit the road.

Linda was always in a bad mood when they had to pack up. She had said more than once that organising the Ferguson family was like trying to organise a bunch of headless chickens. Whenever they all had to go somewhere in the morning – whether it was to school, to netball, to swimming lessons or to work – Linda’s temper would begin to fray as she chivvied people in and out of the bathroom, hunted down clean shorts, searched for missing keys, wiped up spilled orange juice and made sandwiches. On holidays it was ten times worse, until they actually reached their destination. Then Linda would chill out on a deckchair, reading, while Noel took the children to butterfly farms, railway museums, marine parks and heritage trails.

There was a railway museum in Broken Hill, as it happened, and Noel had taken his kids to see that during their five-day visit. They had also toured a mine, ridden a camel, picnicked at Penrose Park and inspected the Line of Lode miners’ memorial.

Together, Linda and Louise had lingered over displays of silver jewellery and shop windows full of cheap summer sandals. (Louise, as Noel often remarked, had a pink gene as big as a bus.) Together, Peter and Noel had spent several hours at the geocentre, admiring chunks of crystalline rock and multicoloured ore. They had all dined out at the Musicians’ Club, trooped through a large number of art galleries and bought souvenirs at the Royal Flying Doctor Service gift shop.

But the real purpose of the trip had been to visit Noel’s Aunt Glenys. She was seventy-three years old and lived on Wolfram Street, in a little house made of corrugated iron. Noel had spent a lot of his childhood with Auntie Glenys (Peter didn’t know why, exactly), so every two years the Fergusons would pile into their car and drive up from Melbourne to Broken Hill for a family get-together. They would make a point of taking Glenys out to dinner one night. They would crowd into her tiny kitchen, kiss her powdery cheek, listen to her stories about the ladies at the club and insist on washing up all the dirty cups and plates. (At least, Linda would insist; Peter and Louise were less enthusiastic.) Noel would make a point of chatting to Glenys for at least two hours every day, morning and evening. He would sit at the kitchen table with her, sipping a cup of tea, while Linda used Glenys’s washing machine and Rosie followed Louise around the back garden (bickering about a set of coloured pencils perhaps) and Peter sat in the living room poring over Glenys’s set of Reader’s Digest condensed books. Peter enjoyed those books. He had read
The Stepford Wives
during their last visit to Broken Hill, and
The Boys from Brazil
during this visit. But he had been unable to finish
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
. He hadn’t had time.

Peter was like his mother, in that respect; they both liked to wallow in books. He also had his mother’s green eyes and good teeth. But for the most part he resembled Noel. They were both skinny, tall and pale, with bony joints and soft, measured voices. They both had heavy dark hair and an abiding love of factual information. Peter was more passionate about
The Lord of the Rings
than Noel was, and couldn’t drum up much enthusiasm for his father’s chief interest, which was electronic communication. (Noel worked for Telstra after all.) But on the whole, father and son were two of a kind.

That was why they both responded in the same way during the frantic, last-minute preparations that always preceded the family’s departure from any motel. While Linda issued sharp commands, and Rosie whined, and Louise argued, Peter and Noel tiptoed around, trying not to catch anyone’s eye. Noel loaded their suitcases into the boot, returned the room keys and paid the bill. Peter checked under the beds, in the drawers and behind the shower curtain for any forgotten possessions. They did their jobs, in other words. And they both heaved silent sighs of relief when the car doors finally slammed, signalling the start of their journey.

‘Right,’ Linda said. ‘Have we got everything? Rose – have you got your Barbie?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Louise, did you remember to put away all your pens and things?’

‘Yes.’

‘Peter, did –’

‘I checked the drawers, I checked the cupboards and I checked under the beds.’

‘Did anyone check the bathroom?’

‘I did that too.’

‘All right.’ Linda slumped against her seat, as if all the tension was draining out of her. ‘Let’s go then.’