The Last Girl (35 page)

‘Wow, just wow,’ I remembered Mum saying when she climbed behind the wheel.

Driving away from Beautopia Point she made a Pac-Man motion with one hand. ‘Man, could you be more superficial?’

I was giddy with anticipation. Robyn finally ripping on Stephanie!

But she didn’t go there.

‘Reach, engagement, demographic, sales indicators!’ Mum laughed. ‘He’s talking about junk mail stuck to a toilet wall that people read when they’re taking a poo!’

I guffawed. Mum hadn’t always made me laugh. When I was really little she was just warm and cuddly. Sometimes silly or sad. So sleepy once, she went to the hospital to wake up. Then Dad said she had to go away to get better. When I was nine, just after Stephanie arrived on the scene, he told me Mum was feeling good again—and she wanted to see me . . . if I wanted to see her . . . but that I didn’t have to . . . if I didn’t want to. Dad looked worried that I would. Of course I did.

Mum and I first got together in a park with Dad waiting in a cafe across the road. I was nervous at first but soon it was like being with my fun new school friend Jacinta. Mum didn’t try too hard. She pushed me on the swing and roundabout and when she asked about my friends, my classes, my favourite music and movies and books, I could tell she was genuinely interested. Mum used a tripod and timer so she could get shots of us making funny faces with her old film camera. While we ate the picnic lunch she’d made, she told me she was painting again and wanted to move to the Blue Mountains and start a small business selling old stuff. Sounded like fun to me. As for what had happened to her, and between her and Dad, there never was that awkward moment when she cleared her throat, put on the serious face and voice, declared it was time to listen up. We were just all of a sudden talking about drugs and depression and divorce. She accepted blame for bad choices but also said some stuff had been beyond her control.

‘Sometimes, Dan, shit happens,’ she said.

I giggled not because she used a rude word but because I understood she was telling the truth. Grown-ups like Dad and Stephanie always pretended everything went to plan. But sometimes shit did happen.

‘What you do with the shit that happens is what matters,’ Mum said. It wouldn’t win her Parent of the Year but it made sense to me.

When our hour was up, Mum told me I could call her Robyn if I liked and that she hoped we could be friends. It was only later, after I hugged her tight and said, ‘See you next week, Mum,’ that I realised not once in our hour had Robyn checked a phone. By the time I was ten we got whole afternoons together without Dad supervising from a distance. After another year, Robyn had gotten her place in Shadow Valley and hadn’t relapsed, and it was agreed we could have the occasional weekend together.

We were looking forward to that first sleepover. Beautopia Point was in the rearview mirror. Shadow Valley was ahead. Before we got there, I wanted Robyn to let loose about Stephanie.

‘Dad’s so daggy,’ I agreed. ‘But what about her?’

Mum changed lanes abruptly to a clamour of honking horns. ‘What?’

‘Stephanie?’ I rolled my eyes theatrically and sighed dramatically. ‘God, she’s such a—’

I let it hang there for Mum to finish.

‘Bitch?’

‘Right!’

‘No, sorry, kiddo,’ Mum said. ‘I know you
so-so-so-so
want me to hate her but she . . .’

I looked at her.

‘She seemed nice,’ she said. ‘Poor thing was so nervous. Today must’ve been hard for her.’

Mum shrugged off my scowl. ‘I’ll try to find something wrong with her next time.’

I pouted. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘But your dad,’ Mum said, pulling onto the highway. ‘He wanted to write great lit-ra-char. He said he wasn’t going to write something people read on the toilet! Now look what he’s doing!’

I looked at her. ‘At least he’s kinda making shit happen,’ I said.

We dissolved into laughter.

Mum coaxed her antique car stereo into playing a grunge mix-tape. I couldn’t really hear the angsty anthems above the sputtering of the Jeep’s engine but I enjoyed Robyn’s spirited singalongs. We were chugging happily up the highway when Mum punched the pause button and stopped raging about ‘Killing in the Name’ to stab a finger at McDonald’s yellow arches gleaming above the tree line ahead.

‘Know what I really love about that view?’

I’d spent enough time with Mum to know she abhorred the fast-food franchise for all the usual reasons (fatty, salty, sugary, lazy, stupid, corporate greed) and for an unusual and unreasonable one (coulrophobia) so I was ready for sarcastic anti-capitalist, anti-consumer and anti-clown commentary.

‘What I love is that it’s the last McDonald’s for fifty kilometres,’ she said, taking her riff in a different direction. ‘There’s not another one up here. Once we pass this we’re in the real Blue Mountains, served without fries, supersized by nature.’

I laughed. ‘ “Supersized by nature”? Really? Maybe you should work for Dad after all.’

Now I passed that last McDonald’s. Garish plastic Ronald stood sentinel by the door. Inside, a few people were slumped over dinky little tables and in the cushioned booths. The happy meals would outlast the customers by years. That’s what I’d heard: the place’s burgers didn’t decompose.

I rode on. Greenglen’s main drag looked like it’d been hit by a tornado. The pizza shop, liquor store, delicatessen, bank, post office, thrift store, carpet retailer, Chinese takeaway: they’d all been smashed by cars veering off the highway. The pharmacy had a four-wheel drive garaged in its shattered storefront. When I returned I’d have to pick my way through rubble in there to find Lorazepam.

But it wasn’t the property damage that sent a shiver through me. Amid the stiff corpses and the Goners was a bushy-looking guy, machete clutched in one hand, throat torn open, three dead dogs around him—all of them in a pool of blood. When I stopped, ready to carry the bike around the bodies, I heard a squealing noise, like the echo of my brakes, back down the highway. Before I could work out how that was possible, the dusk erupted with angry snarls and barks. More rabid dogs. In the shadows. They might rip me to pieces before I got the gun from my pannier. I leaped over the Machete Guy and the dead dogs and jumped back on the bike. My legs pistoned and I bumped between car panels, bunny-hopped over a Goner, got the bike onto a clear stretch of road and rode for the horizon. My panting, my heart in my ears: they were too loud for me to hear how close the slavering jaws were behind me. Had the dogs been feral already, living in the surrounding bushland, or were they domestic pets driven insane by hunger and hatred for what humans had become? It didn’t matter.

‘Faster, don’t fall,’ I told myself.

If they ran me to ground I was dead.

It wasn’t until I was well out of town that I risked a look back. Behind me, the highway was dark and empty and quiet.

I slowed and stopped. My blood was hot and hard in my head and my vision swam a little. I had a horrible thought: that I’d imagined the whole thing. I was nearly dead from exhaustion. I was at the end of my tether at the end of the world. It’d be surprising if my mind didn’t snap, if it didn’t start conjuring waking nightmares. Then I heard it, terrible and wonderful: barking, howling, yelping, silence. I wasn’t crazy. At least not yet. There were dogs down there that wanted to savage me. As long as they were there and I was here.

Night came quickly. Blackness welled out of the ground. Pressed down from the clouds. The only illumination was my bike’s headlight and I shone it on Jake’s Stop ’n’ Fill. This was the family-run petrol-station-cum-general-store that marked the turn-off to Shadow Valley. It hadn’t been smashed or burned. The doors were closed and locked. I hoped that wherever Jake and family were, they were as peaceful and unperturbed as their property.

‘Last chance to check your Facetics and Intermails on the World Wide Pond.’

Mum always made some variation on that joke when we stopped here to pick up her snail mail. She used an old lady voice, simultaneously making fun of her offline ways and my online addiction. But it was true. Once we started the descent into the valley, the bars on my phone dwindled. By the time we hit dirt road, with mountains rising all around us, there was no reception. Other people who lived down this way had satellite dishes for their phone, internet and TV. They all enjoyed the same connectivity as the rest of the world. Just not Mum.

As if to compensate, Mum’s cottage provided old-fashioned information overload. Soon after she rented the place, she started her secondhand business. With money saved from selling paintings, she magpied her way through musty op shops, garage sales and flea markets, filling her Jeep and trailer many times over with movies and music, books and magazines, vintage clothes and decor, old toys and weirdo folk art. When Mum had her first stall on a sunny spring Sunday, hipster tourists flocked to her retro-rustic-chic inventory. She turned a healthy profit and the next day was back out trawling for fresh stock. After a few months, she started putting up flyers offering to buy people’s unwanted stuff.

Mum acquired trashy treasures faster than she could sell them. By the first time I visited Shadow Valley, the place was already a junkatorium. In her hallway alone, string art creations and paintings of blue-faced ladies competed for wall space with blaxploitation film posters and framed cigarette advertisements. Books teetered in thigh-high towers along the skirting board. The picture rails were lined with armies of action figures. Tin robots clustered around deco lamps.

‘Wow,’ I said.

On that first visit I helped Mum weed her vegetable garden and collect eggs from her chook house. She told me the names of the trees in her yard and she taught me how to bake chocolate cookies in her warm country kitchen while fog and rain filled Shadow Valley. She enjoyed me poking through her stuff. We laughed at the big hair and bigger shoulder pads in yellowing
Cosmopolitan
magazines and she showed me how to work her old turntable and care for her musty record collection. After dinner, she dragged out her super 8 projector and we watched
Bride of Frankenstein
while she drank red wine and I sipped homemade lemonade. I loved all of it, not least because it was the opposite of my Beautopia Point house, where all the food came from gourmet packets and all the furniture and decorations looked like they’d been bought last week.

But that first weekend I realised how hard-wired I was to expect wi-fi everywhere. On the Friday I reflexively reached for my phone every ten minutes. It wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that my inability to text or update had sunk in enough that I actually pressed the ‘off’ button. But as soon as we were climbing towards Jake’s on Sunday afternoon I was excitedly awaiting the return of connectivity, much to Mum’s amusement.

Thinking about all that gave me renewed hope about what I’d find at the end of Shadow Valley Road. If the telepathy worked like a radio wave—which recent experience with the Revivees indicated it did—then maybe Mum really could have been shielded from the worst of it. There might be thousands of places like hers all around the world, effectively cut off from civilisation and thus saved from its end. I pictured cave-dwelling hermits, pockets of Bedouins, remote Tibetan hamlets, baseloads of Antarctic scientists and space station orbiters all asking themselves what the hell had happened to everyone else.

The only way to find out was to keep moving. I needed to get to Mum’s place as soon as I possibly could but I also needed to ride safely. What lay below me were a few kilometres of narrow sealed road and then many more kays of narrower dirt track, all of it flanked by rugged and completely dark mountain wilderness. I wouldn’t be able to see much farther than a few metres. If I went too fast I might follow the headlight out into thin air and wind up at the bottom of a cliff. I wondered what’d happen if I came off the bike and broke my leg. Whether I’d crawl to Mum’s rather than fire off a flare for Jack to follow. I forced myself to eat a muesli bar, washed it down with a big drink of water and then peed on the road.

‘Here goes nothing,’ I said to the night.

I let the bike roll, crunching gravel, fingers tugging lightly on the handlebar brakes. When I got to the bottom of the dip, I clicked through the gears and pedalled in long slow strokes up the next hill. I rode along a plateau for a while and followed the road as it wound down into Shadow Valley. I rode endlessly into the brilliant tunnel that the headlight carved from the night, everything beyond the tree trunks and canopy as black as deep space. Pedalling slowly, I hit a calming cadence inside that glowing cocoon.

My heart jumped when silver flashed at me from the edge of the darkness ahead. I squeezed the brakes and eased the bike to a stop. My headlight had flared back at me from the chrome and glass of a black Jeep Cherokee parked in the centre of the road.

‘Hello?’ I called.

No response.

I rode up and summoned the courage to cup my hands against the driver’s tinted window.

I jumped back from the face smudged against the glass, hand clamped over my mouth. The window was blurred with condensation.