Dark Horse (6 page)

W
ings and husks and curled-up little spider corpses were the only signs that the swarm of insects had been, and gone. The rain had stopped. Fog lowered like a stage curtain, resting heavy on the ground and screening out the hut, the trees, the mountaintop, the sky, the sun, the world beyond the mountain.

Sarah and Heath were confined to the shed and the camping ground. Tansy, tethered to the tap beside the water tank, was an ethereal shape in the mist. She was grazing on the long grass around the tank. The thick air concentrated each sound, every tear of grass and each chew of Tansy’s were audible, as were Heath’s limping, squelching steps.

He was carrying loads of wood up from the pile beside the hut and stacking it to dry in the shed. He disappeared into the mist, reappeared, no complaints about his knee slowing him down or hurting him. Sarah could see that he’d carted plenty of firewood in his day. He dumped it, tossed it, lifted it with sure hands.

The potbelly was blazing hot. Sarah had woken and stepped down from the van to find Heath stoking the fire. With the same proficiency he was showing now, he’d opened the vent door, emptied the ash, arranged some kindling over the few remaining coals, and had the heater ablaze in no time.

Sarah stirred a saucepan of pumpkin soup. This morning they’d have a bowl each, and a Salada cracker in lieu of bread. Responsibility for rationing their supplies had fallen to her, probably because she’d discovered the van. Her movements gave away that the soup was ready. Heath stopped what he was doing and came across.

He’d put on a dry shirt, teamed with the shorts he’d slept in. He was wearing his boots. The pairs of socks were in rows drying by the fire. A five o’clock shadow was appearing on his top lip and jaw. When slim people dropped even one kilo it showed, and he looked leaner than he had the night before. Perhaps she looked thinner too. Sarah felt hollow.

Heath sat down at the table. Tendrils of mist wound into the shed. The bulk of the fog billowed along the shed opening, bulging inwards.

‘It’s got that all-day feel about it,’ Sarah said. ‘There won’t be any helicopters if it stays like this.’

‘Have you been down to the hut?’

‘I went in there yesterday. Why?’

‘There’s a heap of timber and scaffolding that hasn’t been used. I was thinking,’ he sniffed and jerked his shoulder, ‘I can rig up a rough yard for Tansy if you like?’

Sarah sat down in front of her soup. The table was square, the size of a café table. Rust dotted the foldout metal legs. She’d moved the Christmas hamper goods and put them with the other food inside the van. She’d cleaned away the workmen’s rubbish, wiped away the dust.

‘Oh,’ was all she said in response to his offer.

‘We could use the scaffolding as a fence. I don’t think it would be that hard to do.’ Wet fibres of bark clung to his shirt. He sniffed again – the cold air was making his nose run. He ate a spoonful of soup. ‘With the planks of timber, I can make a fence inside the shed, and cordon off that end bay, then she’ll have a stable and a yard.’ He put down his spoon, and pointed to where he meant, moving his hand to indicate a square out front of the last bay of the shed. ‘She won’t have to be tethered all the time.’

‘How long do you think we’re going to be here?’

‘I don’t know.’ He went back to his soup.

Sarah crumbled her dry biscuit into her bowl. Heath must have liked her method; he copied.

‘If they do come and can’t rescue Tansy, have you thought about what you’re going to do? We’ve probably got to build a yard. No matter what happens.’

‘I was imagining I would stay with her, until the creek recedes enough for her to be led across.’

‘That could be ages.’ He stirred in his biscuits. ‘If she’s got a yard and access to cover, they can chopper in bales of hay and drop people in to feed and check on her, until the river is down. It’s either that or they’re going to airlift her out.’

‘I don’t want her airlifted. And I won’t leave her confined in a yard, not without me here with her. Isn’t your knee hurting you?’ Sarah began her soup.

‘It’s not super sore, but it’s not strong either. I don’t know; it’s annoying, that’s all.’

‘You’re probably damaging it more by using it.’

‘Do you think a yard is a good idea? So she’s more comfortable while we’re here. Should we try it?’

Sarah nodded. ‘Thanks for thinking of her.’

‘It’s my way of winning her over.’ His head was low over his bowl, his spoon skimming the cooler surface soup. ‘She keeps giving me the evil eye.’

‘If you’re not a horsey person, she knows it, and won’t give you the time of day.’

‘Who says I’m not a horsey person?’ He arched an eyebrow.

‘What breed is she then?’

Heath rubbed his lips and squinted in her direction, although in the fog there was very little to see. ‘Quarter horse?’

‘Anglo. She’s an endurance horse.’

‘Endurance? Like trail riding?’

‘Not trail riding, faster. Competition. Trail riding on steroids. Distance. Speed. Nonstop.’

‘It’s a sport?’

‘Definitely. You can compete all over the world.’

Heath swayed his head and looked impressed. ‘Sorta like the Dakar for horses?’

‘You could say that. And she’s the best in the country. A couple more years and she will be, anyway. The Arabs, they passed her over. They made a mistake.’

‘Now I really do want to be friends with her. You ride her in competitions?’

‘Yep.’

‘You must be a good rider.’

‘I am.’

‘Mmm.’ Heath’s eyes shone, a darker shade of green this morning, depth and intensity restored. Short black lashes fringing them.

Sarah wondered if knowing his surname would make any difference. She’d
taken
a man’s surname and still been left in the dark. She didn’t need to know his background, his family, his friends, his likes and dislikes – you can know all those things and still not know a man. Love had tricked Sarah into thinking a person could be trusted and understood. It seemed such a naïve thing in retrospect. Why had she so blindly believed that her husband had rolled over and exposed his soft underbelly and bared his soul? He hadn’t. If anything, all those women, the one night stands, the regulars, the hookers who had only known
his
first name, they’d seen deeper into him than Sarah had, they’d experienced his weaknesses and his darkness and those two things were more revealing than a person’s strength and goodness. Or so she thought. Granted she was bitter.

Sarah stared through Heath while this turned in her mind, and saw now that he’d not looked away. While she’d been caught up in her thoughts he’d been studying her face, looking into her eyes while they were unseeing and open, peering right inside her.

Heat crept up Sarah’s neck and warmed her cheeks. She looked down.

‘And here I was thinking you might steal my horse to ride off and check your poppy field. But instead you sit down and tell me you want to build a yard so she’s comfortable. I can’t work you out.’

‘Poppies don’t grow well in this climate.’

‘Of course.’

‘Found out the hard way. Took a real hammering there.’

‘Worth a try I guess.’

She heard him chuckle. Sarah ate her soup.

‘Will we have a coffee after this?’ he said.

‘There’s only a bit left in the jar, and a few tea bags.’

‘I suppose we better be careful with what we’ve got.’

‘To be on the safe side, I reckon.’

It sounded like he resumed eating; Sarah didn’t look up to find out.

The workmen had taken most of their tools with them. Sarah and Heath searched in and around the hut, the van and the shed. Heath used the crowbar to prise some panels from the door of the colonial-style toilet block. After glancing around the toilet’s timber walls and at the concrete floor, peering into the quaint corrugated iron showers, seeing the new fittings designed to look old, the exposed pipes and freestanding basins, they still found nothing. Sarah and Heath remained without the most basic of tools. A hammer would have been useful. A wrench. Wire. A box of nails. A wheelbarrow would have been a godsend. Saws, pliers, all those things they had to make do without. What they did have, and appreciated all the more because of the lack of other tools, were the crowbar and the shovels.

In Hangman’s Hut, Heath separated the scaffolding into different piles, in order of size, and set aside those poles with couplings or with joiners already attached. Sarah moved the planks of timber. To save on floor space she leaned the beams and boards up against the stone walls. It was uncomfortable work. Fog clung to them like cold sweat. It made everything wet. They talked now and then, sometimes it was Sarah who broke the silence, other times it was Heath, incidental conversation, practical exchanges –

‘Do you think we’ll need these smaller pieces of timber?’

‘Probably not, but stack them anyway.’

Finished sorting the materials, and while in front of the shed marking out with stones where they’d dig the post holes, Heath said –

‘Righty-o, favourite album.’

‘Nina Simone. Live at Carnegie Hall.’

‘Jeez,’ he laughed.

‘You know the recording?’

‘Kinda. Not what I was expecting.’

‘What are you saying – that I look like —?’

‘A country music girl.’

She gagged.

‘Hey,
I’m
into country.’

‘Sorry.’

Sarah reappraised him. Perhaps that was what the shine was, the almost evangelistic zeal for life some country people had. Glass half-full folk. She supposed with a hat on and long pants he might start to look a bit rural. It was hard to judge when they were both dressed like a couple of
Deliverance
rejects. They were in their matching baggy shorts, bare legs and boots. They’d rugged up as best they could, pulled on socks, Sarah had her raincoat over her shirt and Heath had on a second shirt.

‘What sort of car do you drive?’

All she had wanted to know was whether or not his car completed the country boy picture: a ute with the R. M. Williams horns sticker in the back window. But the question caused him to turn his back to her in the fog.

‘Nothing fancy.’

‘It’s a four-wheel-drive though?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Whereabouts on the plateau is it?’

‘I’d actually crossed over the plateau.’ He still had his back to her. ‘And got a bit lost on the tracks the other side of it.’

‘If it’s on a track it’s going to be harder to see from the air, right?’

‘Like you said, they’re going to fly over the camping site and see us up here anyway. Finding my car isn’t going to make much difference, I don’t reckon.’

The mist was so dense that when Sarah was on one end of a bundled length of scaffolding poles and Heath was on the other end she lost sight of him. It was as though a ghost were holding up the other end of the load. They carried the poles and the timber boards out the back door of the hut, up the incline, past Tansy’s new tethering point – a star picket sunk deep into the earth – and to the shed. Sarah could feel Heath during these trips, hear his footsteps, his breathing, when he spoke his voice came clear out of the mist, but he was invisible. They talked about the weather, the storm, recalling the cloud colour and way the thunder hadn’t stopped rumbling, and the strength of the rain, the volume. Their conversation flowed easily. Sarah told him about the bridge. He came close and listened. She could see him now and saw that he reacted to her tale in the way she’d expected him to react the night before: lips parted, eyes tightened with disbelief – she wasn’t exaggerating, was she?

‘The tree hit only metres behind you?’

‘Yep.’

‘And it was how big?’

‘As big as any I’ve seen in the ranges. Like the ones in Lauriston Park.’

‘Christ.’ His head tipped to one side and his hand rested gentle on his hip. ‘Did you . . . what did you do after that?’

She explained how Tansy had run. For some reason she didn’t mention the stag. It wasn’t that she deliberately kept the animal out of the story, it was only towards the end that she thought to include him, and then it seemed strange –
oh yeah, and there was this huge stag deer
. Was the animal her secret? Did she want that special moment to remain between the stag and her alone? No one could understand what had passed between them.

Heath talked freely about his walk up to the hut. It sounded to her as though he’d known precisely where he’d been at the time of the flood and exactly how to get to where he was going.

‘I walked up an old trappers track. There were creeks forming as I climbed, out of nowhere
rivers
were appearing. I hardly got across some sections. And since then we’ve had more rain. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re not only cut off from the bottom, from Lauriston, but if we’re cut off now from Spinners Creek as well. That’s what I reckon. We can check the road, but I know the way I came would be impossible to get down now. I don’t think we can even get back to the plateau and that area.’

‘There were washouts in the road. I thought, though, on foot there’d be a way through the bush.’

‘I’m telling you – there are whole new ravines that weren’t there a couple of days ago. The mountaintop is carved up. I’ve been trying not to frighten you, but, as far as I can see, the only way we’re getting down is to be helicoptered out. That’s why we’ve gotta build the yard. We shouldn’t panic – like you said, we’ve got food, we’ve got shelter, they
will
come, but it’s going to be a while before anyone can walk in and out.’

Sarah set about digging the post holes they had marked. Heath, unable to dig due to his weak knee, left her side and set to work building the dividing wall inside the shed. They were isolated in their jobs, cut off visually from one another because of the fog, aurally in touch, but that was all.

After a while Sarah noticed that the noises of Heath working had stopped. She paused and listened. She heard movement down at the other end of the shed, not where he was meant to be.

She called into the fog, in jest to hide her suspicion – ‘That you, Sid?’

‘Aye indeed,’ Heath answered from somewhere near the van.