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We were passed by huge mining trucks and we passed bullet-riddled signs pointing off right and left down gravel tracks.

‘Ghost towns,' yelled Robin.

Then came big squarish hills near the road, like the ones in John Wayne westerns. ‘Slag heaps,' yelled Robin. ‘From big mine digs.'

The road was smooth and wide and well sealed, but even so, fine red dust settled on the windscreen and back seat.

‘Stop,' Robin yelled as we came up to another turn-off.

I pulled off the road.

Robin peered at the withered strip of bitumen leading all the way to the horizon.

‘Yep. That's it.'

The sign was unreadable because of all the bullet holes.

‘Go down there,' she said.

‘Where's it go?'

‘Drive down it and find out.' She smiled, easy.

I smiled back, but then couldn't help asking, in the open moment, ‘Did you work things out?'

‘What?'

‘With your sister. Liz. The invoice.'

‘Not really,' she said, looking away. But she didn't close it down. ‘Families. Can't live with 'em, can't...'

I should have just nodded. But I wanted more. I always wanted more from her. More of her. ‘You realise, in all the time we've been together, I've never met them before?'

‘I've never met yours.'

‘Ah, but I've invited you to meet mine. So many lunches you could have had.'

‘You said there were about a million of them, so I've probably met half already, without even knowing it.'

Ha, see. She was too smart for me. She can weave words and win an argument, even when she's wrong. And have me laughing at another thing that wasn't what we were talking about.

‘Turn down the road, Zac.' She said it slowly, like a hypnotist's voice. ‘Turn down the road.'

I drove slowly, the big holes in the bitumen road making the Valiant shudder brutally. The red dirt edges kept biting in on each side like the road was a drying creek. Dust collected on the windscreen making it hard to see. It was hot and dry and my eyes were filling with grit. Then the car shuddered again, but not like hitting a pothole. It kind of clenched and died.

‘Shit.'

‘What?'

‘Radiator, I think.'

The car stopped rolling. We were in sight of where the bitumen
gave out altogether and turned into a gravel track. The mounds were all around us like miniature dirt igloos, with empty fishing holes in front.

Steam clouded up from under the front. ‘Radiator for sure.'

We got out and I lifted the bonnet, but had to jump back as boiling water spurted.

Robin looked at the sizzling engine. ‘Have we got any water?'

‘It must be with the jack.'

She went and sat in the car.

I pretended to stagger around with my hands held out. ‘Water. Water.' But then I stopped and looked at the washed-out un-greenness of everything around us. ‘We could actually die, I guess.'

Robin said, ‘Wanna smoke?'

‘Good plan.'

She shuffled the glove box. ‘Did you bring any other CDs?'

‘Nope.'

‘Your iPod?'

‘Nope.'

She hit play in the car stereo.

Bo Diddley sang ‘Somebody Beat Me'. It is bouncier than most of the other songs on the album and more pared back too. Just Bo and his guitar, banging it out, you imagine. He was stranded in Nevada. Someone was about to beat him up and steal his money. One line was all you needed for a song to fit your life.

I went to the boot thinking I might shoot a creature so we could drink its blood to slake our thirst, like Bear Grylls or that guy who sawed his own arm off with a teaspoon. Robin was rolling the joint when I went past with the flagon of white wines. I took a gulp. It was mostly chardonnays and very warm and possibly not life-sustaining.

Robin got out of the car lighting the joint and came to watch.

‘Big drink now.' I poured most of the flagon into the radiator. ‘You'll feel wonderful. Might I suggest the fish with the chef's orange and beetroot salad?' I explained to the car, ‘Valiant means brave right. So, I need you to be brave car ... and work. We've all got jobs to do here, and yours is – to be a car that goes.'

‘Emotionally tenacious.'

‘Huh?'

Robin looked surprised. ‘Did I say that?'

‘Emotionally what? What?'

She smiled. Said, ‘I think you're emotionally tenacious.'

The way Robin says things, you can never tell whether she means it or she means the opposite. And when you don't know what a word means either, you've got very little to go on. ‘Is that good or bad?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘Sounds like one of your dental conditions.' I turned back to the Valiant's engine. ‘Oh, oh. Looks like you've got emotional tenaciousness to the ... um.'

‘Frontal bicuspid,' she offered.

‘If you'd only come sooner. Looks like root canal work.'

She leaned in. ‘And a bridge. There's always a bridge. Dental upselling.'

‘Oh yeah. A bridge for sure. Complete new swimming pool and patio area, I'd say, Dr Mays.'

‘Yes Dr Pavlinovic. And now of course, the consultancy fee.'

‘Yes! A spa. I always wanted a spa.'

‘If you'd only come sooner.'

‘If you'd only come sooner.'

She laughed and her face was like sunshine. I stood warming in it. She saw that and clouded. ‘Shouldn't you keep the motor running?'

‘Huh?'

‘When you pour cold “wine” into a boiling radiator.'

‘Yeah. I forgot.' I took the joint and had a toke.

Robin went away again.

I said, ‘She's going to have a hangover in the morning anyway.' I went around Robin's side saying, ‘Even if our phones worked, I can't see ringing that arsehole from the service station...'

Robin had squatted in the dirt to take a piss. Her panties were around her knees. They were the ones with the tiny pink flowers around the top. Her thighs were open beyond as the stream hit the dirt.

She looked up, catching me and scowled.

I looked away, like I'd been caught perving, which I was, but caught perving on a stranger and not my girlfriend who I had looked at in
ways far more open and sexual than having a wee. I went past and put the flagon back in the boot. But I turned back in time to see her stand with her back to me and watched as she hitched up her skirt and bent to lift her panties and saw her white gorgeous arse wriggling back in.

There was no one around. She could lay on the back seat and I could slide my hands up the outside of her thighs until my thumbs hooked under the thin sides of her tiny pink flowered panties. She would look into my eyes then and I'd look back. The smile. She could give me the special smile and then I'd start to pull down, and she'd raise up her bum to help me.

‘Hey,' she said. Robin was standing in front of me, gesturing for the joint. She took it and went back to her car door and leaned against it, toking and looking out into the desert. It reminded me of a film.

I found one of Robin's scarves amongst her clothes in the boot. ‘Put this on.'

‘What?'

‘Put in on your head, you know, as though you were going to keep the dust out of your hair.'

She looked at me suspiciously but started to tie it.

I went back to the boot and got my rifle. ‘Now, kneel down.'

‘What?'

I looked at the car and then off to an imaginary spot next to us and thought about how we'd look from there. ‘Kneel down, here.'

It wasn't near the damp spot. It was behind her open front passenger door, like in the movie.

‘No way. Not here, Zac. Not now.'

Her voice was sad. It was weak and sad and not even angry.

‘I didn't mean that! Huh, I should be so lucky. Shit Rob! It was a fuckin' game. I meant, if you had kneeled down with that scarf you would have been like Elizabeth Taylor in front of the convertible, and I had stood like this.' I put the rifle across my shoulders, both hands hanging over. And then I moved my right leg so I bent it at the knee and my foot rested on the other, like him. ‘I would have been James Dean like the poster for
East of Eden,
just before he struck oil.'

‘Oh.'

‘But seeing as you were so worried that I'd actually take a gun and
force you to blow me, then let's forget it. Or maybe that's what it takes.'

I turned away from her and threw the rifle into the boot and slammed down the hood and walked out into the desert a couple of steps until I was at one of the mine holes. It was no more than two metres by half a metre wide. Old wood was laid along the sides lengthwise, to keep it from caving in, but the wood had broken in places and parts of the soil had fallen. I tried to see the bottom, but it was too dark to see far down. ‘It was
Giant,'
she called from the road. ‘The film about the oil was
Giant.
Rock Hudson.'

Oh fuck. Yeah. Damn.

She kept on, being right.
‘East of Eden
was, um Cain and Abel and ice. There was an ice storage thing. If you're going to quote movies all the time at least get them right.'

I went back to the front of the car and screwed on the radiator cap. She might be smarter and always right, but where did it get her? So what if I made a little mistake like that? It doesn't mean I wasn't right on the bigger thing about how it looked from that photo I'd seen. I put down the hood, leaving eight fingerprints in the dust.

I got behind the wheel and turned the key. The engine spluttered but didn't catch. I tried again and it caught, the engine throaty and good to go.

I said, ‘Ha, the Phantom never dies.' Water spatters were on the windscreen from when the radiator had boiled and I put on the wipers making the damp dust into a mud smear on the glass.

She got in her side.

I said, ‘I'm pretty sure it was the Phantom.'

The gravel narrowed quickly and the dust got thicker on the windscreen. When I travelled at the right speed, most of it trailed behind us without coming into the car. Robin squatted up on her side of the seat, her legs under her skirt to keep them out of the sun. She squinted over the top of the windscreen as if she were searching for landfall.

After ten or so Ks, I said, ‘This does lead somewhere, doesn't it? I mean there is a place somewhere that this is leading to?'

‘Used to be.'

‘Is there water?'

‘Maybe. There used to be a river, I think. Or maybe a river every twenty years when it floods and nothing the rest of the time.'

She kept looking, trying to find the place on the horizon.

I said, ‘Does it piss you off, me talking about films all the time?'

‘No.'

‘It never used to.'

‘No, it's good.' She was yessing me.

‘I wouldn't bring it up. I'm being emotionally tenuous again.'

‘Tenacious.'

‘That's it.'

‘Well, actually, it can be fun. But then, sometimes, when you do it, it throws me out of the moment. Not every single thing we do or think has to be held up against the validating measure of a film from the 1960s.'

‘It does piss you off.'

‘That's probably too strong a word.'

‘What else about me pisses you off?'

‘How long have you got?' She didn't even turn around when she said it. It was casual and it was mean and it was empty of feeling. ‘Here. This is it.'

We came in amongst the broken roofless ruins of an old town. I pulled off the track near a fallen veranda and the back wheel slid right and down. I gunned the motor and the back wheel spun itself deeper and deeper into the soft sand. ‘Fuck.' I hit the steering wheel. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.' I turned off the engine and got out to take a look. I'd bogged it up to the axle.

Robin was out of the car walking away.

‘Robin.'

She kept walking towards a roofless, windowless wrecked house over the other side of the track.

‘Robin, wait!'

She stopped and turned slowly. ‘What?'

I started to walk to her.

She said, ‘What do you want?'

The way she said it stopped me. ‘What's going on?'

‘We're camping. Like you wanted.'

‘What's going on with us?'

‘Can we talk about this later?'

‘When?'

‘Not now.'

‘That's what I've been doing for the last couple of months, “not nowing”. When is now?'

Robin closed her eyes and bowed her head. When she spoke it was like she was dead. ‘I don't know.' She gave up on me then. It was clear. She didn't love me anymore. And still she stood with her head bowed like a nurse from the Second World War waiting for the Japanese to yell or execute or do whatever.

It was over.

I went back to the car and then, for something to do, I went and looked at the bogged wheel. When I turned back to Robin, she was gone.

Next to the car were the remains of what was once a row of shops. Front wooden posts still supported most of the sagging bullnose veranda roof. A piece had come all the way loose and lay on the ground like a metal person hugging their knees.

I saw Robin moving around in the house on the other side of the track. Some of the outer wall had collapsed into small hills of bricks. Robin was in a window frame, then wasn't.

I popped the boot and grabbed the rifle and a box of cartridges and I set off, away from her. The back of the shops was missing. A big roofless brick wall still stood. You could make out the faded white letters above the doorway,
Imperial Hotel.
There was a water tank on its side. Abandoned cactus had spread. A rusted Dodge truck, half buried and shot up. Bits of glass. A quarter of a plate. The handle of a cup. Then I was out of the remains of the town. Over on the left was another poppet head in the distance, its top barely visible against the sky, like a headless skeleton. I stood at the top of a one-person mine shaft, a metre by two, long and narrow like a grave. I kicked gravel at the edge of the mine and it spilled in and hit the bottom of the hole, clattering on tin and tinkling on glass deep in the darkness.