The Road Read online

  THE ROAD

  ALSO BY CATHERINE JINKS

  An Evening with the Messiah

  Little White Secrets

  The Inquisitor

  The Notary

  Bella Vista

  The Gentleman’s Garden

  Spinning Around

  CATHERINE

  JINKS

  THE ROAD

  Acknowledgements:

  The author would like to thank Peter Jinks, Timothy Jinks and Steve Radford for their assistance.

  Author note:

  The prologue is derived from a story retold by AW Reed in Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables, first published by Reed in 1982 and originally published by Reed as three separate volumes: Aboriginal fables and legendary tales, Aboriginal legends and Aboriginal myths, 1977 and 1978. These books were hugely influential on Australian culture and the perception of Dreaming stories in the 1970s and 1980s, although the authenticity of some of the stories was later questioned.

  First published in 2004

  Copyright © Catherine Jinks, 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Jinks, Catherine, 1963– .

  The Road.

  ISBN 1 74114 356 X.

  1. Australian fiction. 2. Horror tales, Australian. I.Title.

  A823. 3

  Designed by Ellie Exarchos

  Set in 12/17 Adobe Caslon by Midland Typesetters

  Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my grandmother,

  Phyllis Jinks

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ‘After the night of the storm even the whites must have learned that Jambuwal is stronger than any of us, that to harm him or his people is to risk his anger. The white man may have guns, and dynamite to blast the rocks, but Jambuwal is the mightiest of all.’

  Anonymous Aboriginal Writer: ‘Jambuwal the Thunder Man’,

  Aboriginal and Islander Identity, Vol. 1–2, No.6, October 1975

  PROLOGUE

  Ngurunderi killed a wombat. Its spilled blood took the form of a man, who attacked Ngurunderi with his own spear. But Ngurunderi killed the Evil One, and left his body where it had fallen.

  Upon resuming his journey, Ngurunderi soon realised that he was making no progress. He recognised the same sand hills and the same trees. No matter how far he walked, he could not escape the body, which was absorbing every creature that approached it. He realised that, unless he utterly destroyed it, the Evil One’s body would continue to be a threat to every living thing . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  There were two dogs, Bit and Harry. They lived in a small shed made of four upright logs, grey and weathered and sheathed in chicken wire. Attached to the chicken wire were some faded shreds of green tarpaulin. The shed had a tin roof.

  Bit was an old dog – a stiff-legged, flat-backed, twelve-year-old cattle dog – but Harry was young. Harry would play with Nathan while Bit dozed under the peppercorn tree, his ears twitching the flies away as he slept. Harry was a godsend. He kept Nathan occupied. Nathan’s cousins were far away, and Grace hadn’t brought his trike or his football with her. She had brought almost nothing – just a suitcase full of clothes. There had been no time to plan. She had even left her hairbrush behind.

  So Nathan played with Harry. He also dug holes in the red dirt of Thorndale with a dessert spoon, and built a nest for himself out of junk strewn around the yard: an old sewing-machine table, an age-pitted bicycle wheel, a rusty paint tin, a length of plastic pipe, a sheet of corrugated iron. There was nothing much in Cyrene’s garden except the piles of broken machinery and discarded containers dotted around like animal droppings. Saltbush had sprouted in a failed rockery near the front door, and there was the peppercorn tree, of course, which had a piece of frayed black tyre dangling from one limb. This tortured fragment would turn and turn, revolving every time the air shifted.

  Cyrene had promised to hang a swing in its place, just as soon as he found enough rope.

  Sometimes Grace took Nathan for a walk, and Harry would come with them. They might walk down to the disintegrating shell of a Holden ute that sat beside the back gate, and Grace would bang on its chassis with a broom handle, to chase away any snakes that might be hiding inside, so that Nathan could pretend to be a racing car driver. Or they might wander down to the creek (which was always dry) to look for emus. Or they might climb over the back gate and crunch through the parched, grey-green scrub until they reached the low ridge behind Thorndale, where there was a deep hole in the ground. Cyrene knew nothing about this hole. It had been there a long time, and it wasn’t a well, a bore or a mineshaft. Someone had really put their back into it, he said. ‘So they’d have somewhere cool to keep their beer, maybe.’

  ‘Y’reckon?’ Grace never knew when Cyrene was joking.

  ‘Nah,’ the old man replied. ‘Too far to walk.’

  ‘I reckon it’s a wombat hole,’ said Nathan.

  Cyrene grunted.

  ‘I’m a wombat, aren’t I, Mum?’ Nathan continued.

  ‘Yeah.’ Grace didn’t want to talk about that. ‘Eat your dinner, Nathan, will ya?’

  ‘Mum’s a wombat, too. It’s our totem.’

  ‘Uncle Frank’s been on at him about it,’ Grace explained. ‘Yalata dreamtime – that kinda stuff.’ Cyrene said nothing. Whatever he thought about his sister Gladys’s marriage to Grace’s grandfather – whose own mother had been a Nullarbor Aborigine – he had kept it to himself for fifty years. Grace sensed that what he didn’t like (or didn’t understand) he preferred to ignore.

  ‘No wombats around here, son,’ he remarked. ‘Too dry for wombats. Snakes, roos and emus – that’s what you get here.’

  ‘And lizards,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘And flies,’ said Grace. You couldn’t keep the flies out of Cyrene’s house. It was too old – too ramshackle. It had been tacked together over the years out of fibro, galvanised iron and pressed tin; there was a caravan jammed up against it, and an enclosed veranda made up of twelve mismatched doors, most of them with glass inserts. The flyscreens were full of holes. There was a missing pane in the bathroom window.

  And there were the dogs, of course. Flies love dogs.

  ‘We saw roo poo today, eh, Mum?’ said Nathan. ‘Didn�
��t we?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m gunna put food out for ’em, aren’t I?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Grace wasn’t sure whether the droppings they’d seen had come from kangaroos, goats, rabbits or even sheep. Old Nugget could have told her, but Nugget was dead. His wife, Gladys, was dead too. The only one left of that generation was Cyrene.

  Grace hadn’t had much to do with him over the years. Her mother had sent him Christmas cards, and had kept track of him through Gladys. There had been visits – one or two – when Grace was a kid. But the connection was a remote one, as remote as Thorndale itself. For a long time, Cyrene had been little more to Grace than a photo at the back of a drawer.

  Thank God, she thought. Thank God for that, or I’d be well and truly stuffed.

  ‘Can Harry sleep in our room?’ Nathan asked later, when Grace was scraping the dishes and darkness was pressing in on all sides, pushing against windows and filling up corners. Grace only regretted her decision to come to Thorndale at night. Its isolation worried her then. She would peer into the void around the little house, searching for a glimmer of yellow light in the distance. She would strain to catch the sound of a truck on the highway.

  ‘Ask Cyrene,’ she replied.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said ask your mum. Can I, Mum?’

  Grace hesitated. Harry didn’t smell too good. He wasn’t a clean dog. But at least he was a big one – a big dog with big teeth. ‘Yeah, all right,’ she said.

  ‘Yay!’

  ‘He’s not comin in the bed, but. He stays on the floor.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And if he plays up, he’s out. I mean it.’

  ‘He won’t.’

  He didn’t either. One whack on the nose from Grace’s Who Weekly magazine was enough to settle him down. He curled up by the door like a storybook dog, and for three hours after that he hardly made a noise. Just a couple of sneezes and one ‘thump’ when his feathery tail hit the skirting board. Grace would never have known that he was in the room, if she hadn’t left the lamp on.

  She could no longer sleep in the dark. She might doze, but only for a short time, waking with a gasp and a start, sitting up and listening, listening. A light in her room always made her feel safer. Ever since the business in the car park, she had slept with a knife beside her bed.

  Nathan hadn’t asked about the knife. He had learned not to ask about a lot of things lately.

  Gazing at him as he lay sleeping next to her, his arms flung wide, his silky hair tousled, his lips bunched and his lashes quivering slightly with every beat of his pulse, Grace wondered how he had remained so untouched. His skin was still perfect. His eyes were still clear. He still smiled and talked without flinching or stammering, eager to find out more about the world. It was a bloody miracle.

  Or was it? Grace worried about Nathan. She was afraid that he might be like a piece of wood gutted by ants, which would show no trace of damage on the outside until it suddenly caved in under pressure.

  She hoped not, but she had a bad feeling.

  It was one more thing to keep her awake at night.

  The next day, Harry and Bit disappeared.

  They went out with Grace and Nathan, who walked to the ridge and back after lunch. Bit never made it; he got tired and turned tail for home before they had even crossed the first salt pan. Harry stuck it out though. Sometimes bounding ahead, sometimes trailing behind, sometimes swerving off to follow a scent into a thicket of mulga, he stayed with Grace and Nathan until they reached the ‘wombat’ hole. Then, while Nathan was collecting pebbles, Harry wandered away. He often did that. Grace whistled once or twice, but wasn’t surprised when he failed to respond. He was barely more than a puppy, and wayward in his habits. ‘Useless,’ Cyrene called him. Bit had been a working dog, and would always come to heel, but Cyrene had taken no trouble with Harry’s manners. He was too old, he said, to start training up young dogs.

  Nathan liked the quartz pebbles, which were pink and white. He liked pebbles with traces of mica in them, because they glittered in the sun. He put fifteen pebbles in a plastic bag to take home with him, and also found a skull, very small, which Cyrene later identified as a sheep’s skull. Grace agreed that the skull could come home too; it was picked clean and bleached white. Nathan put it in the plastic bag with his pebbles.

  They walked back to Thorndale calling out Harry’s name and were surprised to find that Bit hadn’t returned to the house. At first they didn’t worry. Nathan busied himself arranging his skull and pebbles on a sandy stretch of ground beside the biggest water tank. Grace went inside to phone her mum. She had phoned her mum every day since arriving, always reversing the charges. Her mum said that everything was fine. She had been to the doctor, who had given her antibiotics for her chest infection. As for the rest of the family, things were okay with them, too. Gary was working a new job down at The Lord Nelson. Sylvia and the kids were visiting Sylvia’s mother-in-law for a week. Grace’s cousin Angela had got engaged. ‘They’ll be throwin a big party,’ Grace’s mum pointed out. ‘It’s in three weeks time. I said I didn’t know if yiz could make it.’ A pause. ‘Whaddaya reckon, Gracie? Will yiz be back by then?’

  Grace fiddled with the phone cord. ‘I dunno,’ she said.

  ‘No one’s seen ’im. He’s cleared out, did I tell ya?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Hasn’t come back, either. Gary went around and checked. House is still empty. Car’s gone.’

  ‘What about the window?’

  ‘Oh, we fixed that. Gotta bit of plywood. Haven’t told the agent, Gracie – not yet. It’s a shockin mess in there, love, did y’know? That mirror cabinet in the bathroom, it’s been pulled off the wall.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Grace.

  ‘And the holes in the bedroom door, they’re gunna set ya back a bit.’

  ‘Well I didn’t put ’em there. Why should I pay? He can.’

  ‘If we can find ’im.’

  ‘Before he finds me.’ Grace hunched her shoulders. ‘What did Mark say?’

  ‘He said the coppers are on the lookout, but y’know what they’re like, the bastards. Poor Gary can’t drop a ciggie butt without them jumpin on top of ’im, but I get me bloody door kicked in and they don’t wanna know. A domestic, they called it. I said, “Dja think I did it meself, for God’s sake? Me own bloody door?”’

  ‘But he’s breached an AVO, Mum!’

  ‘So? Coppers couldn’t give a stuff. Sean was blockin the bloody Gabriels’ driveway, the other day, and the coppers came down on us like a tunna bricks, but when your bloody ex trashes me house with a golf club, they’re so bloody slow that he’s gone before they get here. And then they try to make out like Mark did it. Just because of that one time. Even though I told ’em Mark doesn’t drink any more. Bastards.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  ‘They don’t really think Mark did it? Not when they know what happened ta me?’

  ‘Who can tell what they think? I said to ’em, “Check for fuckin fingerprints” but they didn’t. I haven’t heard a thing. Not one thing.’

  ‘But ya pressed charges?’

  ‘I told ’em who did it.’

  ‘But isn’t there a warrant out, or something?’

  ‘He tried to clobber ya, didn’t he? Course there’s a warrant out. Mark says if he doesn’t show up in court next week, he’s stuffed.’ Another pause. ‘Yiz oughta show up yourself, Gracie. It won’t go down, otherwise.’

  ‘But I can’t,’ Grace whispered. Glancing out the window, she saw Nathan drawing in the dirt with a stick. ‘I can’t, Mum, he’ll kill me.’

  ‘He won’t.’

  ‘He will.’

  ‘He won’t. Mark’s here. Gary’s here. They’re bigger’n he is.’

  But they’re not as mean, Grace thought. They’re not as smart. And they’re not obsessed. After five years of marriage, Grace knew
her husband better than anyone. She had the scars to prove it. What her mum didn’t understand – what Mark and Gary and Sean and Sylvia and Frank didn’t understand – was that the man who had promised to kill her was insane. Actually insane. It had taken her years to work that out. She hadn’t really believed it herself, until she had tried to leave him.

  Mark had hit Mum a few times before giving up the booze. Gary had once driven a car over his ex-girlfriend’s mailbox, and Sean and Sylvia were always fighting about money. But Gary had been drunk at the time, and had been ashamed of himself afterwards. Sean and Sylvia never threw anything or hit anyone; they just screamed. They were normal, hardworking people trying to sort out their problems as best they could.

  They didn’t understand how crazy some people could get – perhaps because Grace had never told them the whole story. At first she had been protecting her husband. He had been laid off and was very stressed, and she was sure that, once he had found another job, he would stop tying her to towel rails and hiding all her clothes and punching her in the ribs. Then, when things failed to improve, she had hidden the bruises from her family because he had threatened to gouge her eyes out and slit her stomach open if she didn’t. She was frightened of him, and ashamed of herself. Ashamed of what she had got herself into, against her mother’s advice. Her mum had warned her several times: ‘Thinks the sun shines out of his own arse, doesn’t he?’ But Grace had chosen to go her own way.

  Only when the blows had started to fall on Nathan had she finally sought help. And the result? Her house trashed. Her family attacked. Endless phone calls, with heavy breathing on the other end of the line. Slashed tyres and graffiti: ‘Cunt’, ‘Slag’, ‘Black bitch’. Then the unlucky confrontation in a car park. The Apprehended Violence Order. The letter, typed: Your dead.

  She had thrown that away, like an idiot. She should have kept it – maybe had it checked for fingerprints. But she had panicked and flushed it down the toilet, so that Gary and Sean wouldn’t see it. If they had, she knew, they would have gone to beat the crap out of their brother-in-law. And he would have killed them. Somehow, he would have. She was sure of it.