Dark Horse (5 page)

Although she felt like stepping backwards, creating sudden distance between them, she made herself stand and step forward. She put herself at the van door, one foot on the step, smiling softly with her hand out when he reappeared, the blankets a heavy bundle in his arms.

‘Thanks, Heath.’

‘Goodnight, Sarah.’

A
heavy bout of rain woke her. Sarah sat up on her bedroll. The fire had burned low. Water was sheeting down from the overflowing gutters. In her dream Heath had wiped off the mud after the bog and turned out to be her husband.

Sarah’s grasp on the dream faded as she got her bearings. Her heart had been racing, now it slowed. The roar of the flash flood was background noise in her mind. Wide-awake but bone-tired, Sarah sat thinking. She scratched her scalp, reached around to rub a knuckle up and down her spine. Her skin was itchy. Looking down at her lap, she noticed in the dim firelight that her bed somehow wasn’t right. It was . . . moving.

It took a couple of seconds for Sarah to work out that the blankets were covered with crawling insects. She didn’t scream but made a hissing, rattlesnake sound between her teeth, the skin tightened on her face, and her teeth were suddenly cold with the suck of air. She leapt to her feet, brushing herself down, hitting her own body, stumbling back, too alarmed to scream, her throat closed tight, her muscles taut and cramping in her neck. The itch she’d been feeling on her neck, arms and legs, what she’d believed to be the normal itch of damp, unwashed skin, wasn’t that – it had been the tiny legs of beetles and the bigger legs of spiders, it had been the sticky legs of moths and the many legs of centipedes.

‘Oh hell,’ she managed to issue once clear of the bed and as she rubbed her hands over her limbs, checking every piece of her skin was clear of creeping bodies, and over all her clothing, in the folds and pockets of her shirt and shorts, and behind her ears. Sarah combed her fingers through her hair. She shuddered every five seconds, the same amount of time it took for her to tell herself she was okay, that there weren’t any more insects on her, before the panic that there
had
been returned to grip her once again. Compulsively, she kept running her hands over her body. Her torch was in her bed. Sarah stamped her feet and shuddered and twitched on the other side of the table. She worked up the courage to return to her bed and feel for the torch.

Sarah shook her blankets out. The torch rolled onto the dirt floor. Soft thuds of insects dropping off her bedding and landing on the dirt were repulsive. Sarah turned on the torch and shone it around.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’

Dry parts of the shed floor had been overrun with insects as they sought shelter and dry ground, just like she had. The damp areas remained bug free. Sarah kept to the wet sanctuaries. Island hopping, she went to Tansy and shone the beam around her horse’s feet. The more it rained, the wetter the shed floor was becoming. A damp patch by the end wall had seeped across to Tansy. The horse was standing in a thin layer of mud. At least there were no insects on her. Some had made it to the shed walls though, a few climbing as high as the roof and clambering along the metal beams, threatening to drop from the ceiling.

Tansy was aware of how gross the situation was. She was unimpressed, head down and occasionally kicking her hind leg, revulsion rippling down her flank and spasming along her neck and shoulders. Tansy’s hearing was more acute than Sarah’s, and if Sarah could hear the slimy, masticating sound of the teeming insects, it would be surround-sound stereo to Tansy. The mare’s ears were pitched down and off to either side, the best position to block the noise.

Heath had left the van door open. Sarah figured she should knock anyway. She did. It remained quiet inside. Sarah stood on the step and leaned in through the doorway.

‘Heath . . . I have to come in, I’m sorry, but we have visitors.’

Sarah knocked a little firmer. He didn’t stir. She kept the flashlight pointed down and entered the van. The light reflected back up off the pale lino and illuminated the interior enough for Sarah to get an outline of the bed and the blankets. Heath wasn’t in the bed. Sarah shone the torch over the mattress. His absence levelled Sarah’s thoughts a moment, it drained her head and she was an empty vessel standing there, a zombie with a long face and vacant gaze. She snapped out of it. His wet clothes were on the seat. His boots were missing. She couldn’t see the headlamp anywhere. He must have gone out to the toilet.

Sarah dodged the insects, climbed the tow bar and went around to the far side of the van. Down this end of the shed the floor was completely wet, puddles forming in places. With the ground offbounds to critters, the pallet of mortar and cement had become an insect metropolis, a mound of squirming black and brown. She frowned. Glossy brochures of the ranges never contained pictures like this. ‘Beautiful wilderness’ never came with this kind of slant. Rain began teeming down even harder. It was a downpour like the one she’d ridden through on her way up there. Sarah shone the torch along the open shed bay. Heath wasn’t standing on the edge of the wet taking a leak, he was somewhere out in the weather. Sarah couldn’t think why he would do that, some reasons came to mind and she pushed them aside. Her mind went to the gun.

Sarah had stopped well back from the pallet, and she didn’t want to get any closer. From where she was she used the torch to see if the gun was where she’d left it.

‘Oh God . . .’

There was a snake sheltering under there and now being swallowed, wriggling, struggling and dying under the carpet of crawling life. Sarah squatted and pulled a face of disbelief. She shone the torch to see if she could see beyond the gruesome scene. She couldn’t. If the gun was gone, she couldn’t tell. If it was there, it was, ironically enough, extremely well hidden and safe. There was no way Sarah was going to be retrieving it any time soon. A noise behind Sarah had her straightening and turning.

Headlamp shining, Heath had walked in out of the rain. He stood, dripping and pale, within the shed perimeter. There was a pained and apologetic look in his eye, it was clear he hadn’t ducked out to go to the toilet – he’d walked somewhere. He’d been away and he hadn’t necessarily planned on coming back.

Sarah’s brow wrinkled with confusion, and, much to her frustration, it tightened with hurt. She rubbed it away with her fingertips. She had no right to be hurt, or confused. They were two strangers under one shed roof. So what if he left? She should be pleased he wanted to bugger off. She was probably safer on her own; she was definitely safer on her own going by the way he was carrying on.

But despite all this it twanged something inside Sarah to have been deserted.

She thought about that moment on the bridge, the stag, and feeling a connection; surviving should be the only thing on Sarah’s mind.

‘Nice night for a walk,’ she said.

Heath angled his face down and pulled off the headlamp. In the pocket of his shorts Sarah could see the top of a ziplock plastic bag. Whatever was in it was stretching the shorts pocket wide. She hadn’t seen any ziplock bags in her search of the caravan and all its drawers and cupboards, so she guessed he’d come with his personal items waterproofed.

‘Is your phone working, Heath?’

He was silent.

‘Is that what you were doing? Making a call? Because the best spot is out the front of the hut, near the grave – as luck would have it.’ Her smile was strained. ‘You know, you can say you don’t want to waste your battery. I get it. You don’t have to help me.’

‘It’s out of battery.’ He took the bag from his pocket. His wallet and phone were together in the ziplock plastic. He took the phone out and limped towards her. The sore knee was back. Maybe it was an injury that came and went? Soft tissue injuries were sometimes like that.

He tried to pass her his phone. She wouldn’t take it.

‘I want to show you that it’s out of battery.’ He displayed it to her. It was a touch-screen smartphone in a moulded all-weather, shockproof case, the sort of protective case tradies used. He pressed the bottom button a couple of times, with the screen turned to her, and then pressed the top power button. ‘Nothing.’

‘I don’t care. It’s your phone.’

‘When I got here it was as good as flat. And . . . I thought you might be a park ranger.’

‘I see.’

‘I panicked. But I should have told you my phone worked. You’re not a ranger are you?’

‘No.’

‘That’s handy.’

‘You don’t have to tell me.’

‘It’s probably better if I don’t.’ He wiped away a droplet running down the bridge of his nose. ‘I haven’t been able to get reception. I’ve flattened it trying to send texts and make calls. Nothing’s gone through.’

‘You haven’t made an emergency call?’

‘I haven’t been able to.’

He was saturated, beginning to shiver again, standing with his weight on his good leg. They were close to one another and speaking in clear, raised voices to get above the sound of the water. The noise wasn’t that of rain on the tin roof, it was the sound of splashing and gushing, a waterfall pouring from the guttering and onto the ground all around the shed. It curved around them like a mini Niagara Falls. Water was beginning to run beneath the shed walls and was pooling in the floor’s low spots.

The guilty look Heath had when emerging from the rain hadn’t shifted from his eyes, so even though Sarah looked for evidence of him lying, it was concealed within his general culpability. Experience told her anyway that truth came in scraps, chunks of honesty, coughed up like fur balls.

‘I should have been more up front, I’m really sorry.’

‘At least we’re on the same page now. I wanted to tell you that I don’t mind what you were doing in the bush. I didn’t know how to say it though without sounding like I really did. I don’t.’

‘It’s nothing bad,’ he assured her. His gaze moved to the pallet, to beneath it, where Sarah had been shining the torch. A flicker of disturbance passed over his features. His eyes began to roam, only now seeing the insect life. ‘Holy shit . . .’

‘It gets even better around the other side of the van.’

‘This is like . . .’

‘I know. I’m waiting for Harry, Ron and Hermione to turn up any moment.’

A touch of the playful shine returned to Heath’s eyes. He suppressed a smile.

There was the wet crack of a tree branch out in the bush, and the thud of it landing on the sodden earth. ‘There’s Hagrid now.’

He smiled. ‘Thank you for not being upset. I should have explained. I promise I won’t leave like that again.’

Sarah could only guess how lost and weak she must look to him – ill-fitting clothes, socks bunched around her ankles, soggy soles from standing in a puddle, bloodshot eyes, white complexion, lank hair and a bruised face.

‘We’ll hang tough together,’ he said. ‘You think?’

‘I’m not sure we’ve got much say in it. Looks like we’ll have to share the caravan until the bugs move their house of horrors elsewhere.’

‘We’ll share it anyway. I didn’t mean to start us off on the wrong foot. I’ll make up for it, you’ll see. We’ll be a team, hey?’

This time her dreams were underwater. It was a dream that had no people in it and no images and no thread or theme, she simply knew she was at the bottom of a sea. She woke. It was dark. It was still raining. Heath was beside her in the bed. She could tell he hadn’t slept yet. He was shivering under the blankets. His teeth knocked and chattered.

The longer Sarah lay there the more she realised that her time spent sleeping had been short – a ten-minute nap at most. The type of rest animals have; quick bouts of slumber, and then alert again, one ear to the weather, the other ear tuned to all other sounds.

‘I wonder how bad it is downstream?’ she said.

‘Be bad I reckon.’

‘The rain will have to stop soon.’

‘Doesn’t it keep up for seven days and seven nights?’

‘It feels like that.’

She was lying on her back. She edged her hand up and touched her jaw where it was tender, she probed the inside of her mouth with her tongue, tested the sore spots by sucking lightly on them.

Heath must have guessed, or sensed, what she was doing. ‘Your face hurting?’

Sarah snaked her hand under the blanket and closed her eyes against the damp air. ‘It’s okay.’

He continued shivering intensely, chattering his teeth. He had his back to her. They had used up all the dry shirts, and his top half was bare. She had given him her shorts so he didn’t have to sleep naked. Sarah was warm enough beneath the one remaining flannelette shirt, hot compared to him. The rifle ammunition was now buttoned into the top pocket of her shirt, digging into her breast.

‘How old are you?’ she asked.

‘Twenty-eight.’

Sarah spooned her lower body in behind him. He moaned with her warmth.

‘Shh, no moaning.’

‘Ohh,’ he said breathing deeper and relaxing back into her, ‘Thank you.’

‘No
ohh-ing
either.’

As a tease he muttered a lusty ‘Oh God, yesss . . .’

She was silent. She could tell he smiled.

When he next spoke his tone was solemn. ‘I am sorry about leaving.’

There was a vulnerable crack in his voice as he said this. Sarah pretended not to have noticed it, not noticing that, or how unexpectedly familiar his body felt against hers, or how the rain had cleaned his hair and made it soft, how it had washed the mud away and left him smelling like the bush, wet eucalyptus leaves and damp bark, a cold steel smell of wet rock and the fresh scent of water-laden fern fronds. He was stripped of his own oils and scrubbed clean, no Heath scent present, or maybe a hint of it. If she cancelled out the bush aromas, in her nostrils was a trace of something warmer. All the socks were wet now too. Both their feet were bare. The tops of her toes rested against his insteps. Sarah sensed his awareness of her breathing in his scent. ‘You smell like the bush, how far did you go looking for reception?’

‘Past that log. I’ve been up here before with mates and seemed to remember reception being pretty good over there.’

‘Is it drugs?’

Her words hung in the dark air.

He answered after a pause. ‘Nothing hardcore – I swear.’ Said in a voice loud enough to get above the sound of the rain spilling in long sheets from the gutters, while the insects swarmed and as the water ran in ever-widening channels across the shed floor.