The Road Read online

  ‘Creek,’ said Peter.

  ‘What?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Creek. That begins with “C”.’

  ‘Where’s a creek?’ Rose struggled to peer out the window. ‘Show me.’

  ‘There. Where the trees are.’

  ‘What trees?’

  ‘There.’ Peter stabbed at the glass with his finger. ‘Over there. A long way away.’

  ‘I can’t see it!’ Rose wailed, and Peter rolled his eyes.

  ‘You can’t see the creek, Rose,’ Linda explained. ‘It’s behind the trees.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be saying “I spy a creek” if you can’t actually see it,’ Louise objected. She was rewinding her tape again and could hear the discussion through the padding of her headphones. Rose’s forehead wrinkled as she pondered this new suggestion.

  ‘Louise!’ Linda’s tone was full of warning.

  ‘Yeah, butt out,’ said Peter. ‘If you want to play the game, gimme the walkman.’

  ‘Was it “creek”, Rosie?’ Linda interrupted. ‘It wasn’t, was it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right. My turn, now. Um . . . “crow”.’

  ‘No. Your turn, Daddy.’

  ‘Um . . .’ Noel put on a great show of thinking hard. ‘Let’s see now . . . something beginning with “C”. Would it be . . . a cloud?’ ‘Yes!’

  Peter wished with all his heart that he could do something in the car without getting sick: read, preferably, or use a play station, or do a crossword . . . anything. Louise didn’t get sick. She could stick decals on her toenails and plait Rosie’s hair and write in her diary without suffering a single pang of nausea. It wasn’t fair. The Stones of Amrach was sitting right beside Peter, tantalising him with its well-thumbed cover (which depicted Presprill with his shield on his back, gazing out over the lake of the Tann towards Amroth), and he couldn’t even open it without risking an immediate descent into wretchedness.

  Sullenly he focused his attention on the endless, boring stretch of outback beyond the road, which the display at the Visitors’ Centre had identified as being of a ‘semi-arid’ nature. Semi-arid. If this is semi-arid, he thought, arid must be sand dunes.

  ‘Peter.’ Rose tapped his shoulder. ‘It’s your turn.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s your turn.’

  ‘Oh.’ He looked around the car. They had already nominated the words seat, mirror, steering wheel, radio, hand, foot, map and bag. There wasn’t much left to suggest that Rose would recognise. Gearstick? No. Fuel gauge? No. Shifting his gaze to the road unrolling before them, he saw a truck approaching in the other lane. It was big and white, and belching black smoke. It was the first vehicle they had seen in ages.

  He said: ‘I spy with my little eyes something beginning with “T”.’

  ‘Truck!’ Rosie crowed, and Peter nodded.

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  ‘Well done, Rosie!’ Linda exclaimed. Noel declared that Rose was a very clever girl. Peter settled back into his seat again, glancing at his watch. It was nearly half past eleven. He was getting thirsty.

  ‘Can I have a drink please, Mum?’

  ‘Yes. Hang on.’ Linda began to rummage around in the overstuffed bag at her feet. ‘Water or juice?’

  ‘Juice, please.’

  ‘Can I have some too?’ Rose piped up.

  ‘What’s the magic word?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘When are we getting to the roadhouse, Dad?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Can we stop there for lunch?’

  Noel glanced at Linda. ‘Well . . . I know Mum’s made some nice sandwiches . . .’

  ‘I wanna ice cream!’ Rose cried. Her memory for treats was tenacious. Though she often forgot to say ‘please’, she remembered very clearly stopping at Coombah roadhouse on the way to Broken Hill, because Noel had bought ice creams there. Linda glared at Rose over the top of her headrest.

  ‘You won’t get anything if you talk like that!’ she snapped, whereupon Rose began to chant her request in a singsong voice.

  ‘May-I-have-ice-cream-please?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Please, Mummy? I said please!’

  ‘If you eat your lunch, you can have an ice cream.’ Linda looked at Noel. ‘Could we eat lunch there, do you think? Would they let us, if we bought ice creams? I seem to remember some tables and things . . .’

  ‘I’m hungry, Mummy.’

  ‘Oh, Rose. You just had all those chips.’

  ‘But I’m still hungry.’

  Peter propped his elbow on the armrest, cradling his chin in his hand. Whiz, whiz, whiz – the white posts flew by. So did another sign advertising ‘Mario’s’, which was sitting forlornly out in the middle of nowhere. (Peter didn’t know what ‘Mario’s’ was, exactly, because they were always going too fast for him to read the small print.) There hadn’t been any fences for a little while, and he wondered why. He saw a crow strutting about, looking for road kill. He spotted a bare, stony ridge rising up behind a distant thread of green.

  ‘All right,’ said Linda, ‘we’re almost there, so we’ll eat lunch now, and then stop at the roadhouse for an ice cream. What kind of sandwich would you like, Rosie? Vegemite, peanut butter, ham or cheese? I won’t ask if you want tomato.’

  ‘Vegemite.’

  ‘How did I guess. Peter? What do you want? We’ve got ham and tomato as well.’

  ‘Ham, please. With mustard.’ Peter leaned towards his mother in anticipation, and found himself looking out the left-hand windows of the car. What he saw made him frown, and check his watch again. Eleven thirty-five. It was an hour and twenty minutes since they had left Broken Hill.

  ‘Dad?’ he said.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Coombah roadhouse is about halfway, isn’t it?’

  ‘About that, yes.’

  ‘And it takes, like, three hours to get to Wentworth?’

  ‘Approximately.’

  Plastic bags rustled as Linda rooted among the sandwiches. Peter studied the country to his left, which was similar to that on his right – saltbush downs under an intense blue sky, scattered here and there with spindly trees, salt pans, dirt tracks.

  ‘So we should be at Coombah in a few minutes?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then where’s the lake? Remember after Coombah we were driving along, and you said we were driving through a dry lake? Remember? Shouldn’t we have reached that by now?’

  There was a short silence. Linda passed a Vegemite sandwich to Rose. Louise had her eyes shut, caught up in the spell of Britney Spears. Noel flexed his fingers on the steering wheel.

  ‘We’ll get to the lake in a minute,’ he said at last. Linda stuck her head between her knees again, searching for a ham sandwich. Her voice sounded muffled as she observed: ‘What do the sign-posts say? The distance markers? They should be able to tell us how long before we reach Coombah.’

  Good point, thought Peter. He hadn’t been studying the little green signs that gave you your distance, in kilometres, to the next significant locality. There had been too many other things going on, and besides, he wasn’t sitting on the left hand side of the car.

  But after accepting a sandwich and checking if it contained mustard (it did), he once more turned his attention to Louise’s window. Louise had taken her headphones off. She was asking for a cheese and tomato sandwich. Before Linda could explain that there weren’t any cheese and tomato sandwiches, Noel said: ‘There’s a sign. Up ahead.’

  ‘Where?’ Peter threw himself forward, his seat belt biting into his chest and shoulder. ‘I don’t – oh, right.’ The sign was a distant silhouette. ‘What does it say?’

  ‘I can’t tell, yet,’ Noel replied. ‘Linda, could you just check . . . can you see? That sign . . . what does it say?’

  Linda shifted in her seat. She was blocking Peter’s view. ‘Wait a second,’ she mumbled. ‘It says . . . hang on . . .’

  They seem
ed to approach the sign very slowly, then pass it in the blink of an eye. Even so, Peter did catch a glimpse of it – or what was left of it.

  A well-aimed load of shot had obliterated whatever paint had remained on its sandblasted surface.

  ‘Oh,’ said Linda. ‘Oh, well. Never mind. We’ll just have a look at the next one. Come on, Louise, it’s your choice – plain cheese, or ham and tomato? Make up your mind, or you won’t get anything.’

  Up ahead, the flat horizon shimmered.

  Slowly Alec began to realise that something was wrong.

  He had been so caught up in thoughts of Janine that it hadn’t dawned on him, until now. He had been driving automatically, half his mind on the road, half on the thorny dilemma awaiting him back in Broken Hill. His stomach had finally alerted him to the fact that the hour was getting late, and he still hadn’t reached his destination. Checking the clock, he had seen – to his astonishment – that it was nearly half past twelve. And then he had glanced again at the speedometer.

  Eighty-seven km/h. So he wasn’t exactly dragging his feet. Unless the speedometer was busted? But no, he sensed that it was functioning okay. He could tell. He knew his truck and he knew the road; he could always feel when he was starting to push the limit. Something to do with the vibrations in the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands. Something to do with the way his tyres sounded when he crossed a cattle grid. The speed limiter on his fuel pump very rarely kicked in, because Alec’s own feel for the Diesel Dog was as sensitive as any electronic gadget.

  He was alert now as he registered the features of the surrounding landscape. He could recall – quite clearly – crossing the bridge at Pine Creek. And the kangaroo corpse, he could remember that. After ploughing through the kangaroo he had slipped back into one of his daydreams, and that had been at . . . Christ!

  That had been at eleven o’clock.

  No, he decided. I’ve made a mistake somewhere. I should have been there by now. He plotted the position of the Pinnacles, way up ahead. Only two of the peaks were visible – two thrusting rock formations like tits with erect nipples, hugging the horizon – but even so, it meant that he had crossed the time zone boundary. So he was still . . . what? Thirty kilometres out?

  I can’t have covered just twenty-odd kilometres in ninety minutes, he thought numbly. That’s stupid. That doesn’t make sense. He wondered if the old Dog’s clock was fast, for some reason. But it was showing the same time as his own digital watch, and that watch had been spot-on when he left Mildura; he had checked it against the clock at the depot. So what was going on? Some kind of weird magnetic thing?

  Alec was very vague when it came to magnetic fields, solar winds, electrical discharges, and all the other natural phenomena that you learned about in school (if you were paying attention) and generally used if you were trying to explain certain strange incidents that sometimes occurred out in the middle of nowhere. Alec hadn’t experienced much to wonder about so far – no one did, on the Mildura–Broken Hill run – but he had heard other blokes talking about hauling road trains across the Channel Country of remote Queensland, and encountering the moving lights they called min min; about misshapen creatures (bunyips? yowies?) crossing the road in front of them at dusk, glaring with luminous eyes; about ghostly figures trying to hitch rides, then suddenly vanishing. Granted, these stories were usually told after a couple of hours spent on the booze, by blokes who often had a reputation for popping pills (or caffeine-enriched substances) to keep them awake for forty hours at a stretch. Still, they made you think. And they made you dredge around in your failing memory for all those snippets of physics that you had somehow picked up from textbooks, or television documentaries, or articles in your dentist’s copy of the Reader’s Digest: snippets about radio waves . . . the aurora borealis . . . high pressure systems . . .

  Alec seemed to remember hearing or reading something once about magnets stopping clocks. But not speeding up clocks. Unless that was possible too? Had he hit some kind of strange magnetic field? There were a lot of ores and heavy metals in the rocks around here, not to mention that big line of electricity pylons marching across the country to his right. That thing had to have some effect.

  Alec flicked a glance at the Pinnacles again, but they didn’t appear to be any closer. Then he put his foot down, and the country rolled past at a slightly faster rate, looking the same as usual. Something was wrong, though. Alec knew this road very well, and he knew that one stretch of it wasn’t necessarily indistinguishable from another stretch. There were always small differences that eventually combined to make a big difference. Scattered acacias would eventually merge to form a copse; dry dents in the earth would eventually run into a wide, sandy creek lined with river gums. But as his gaze skipped from the road to its surroundings and back again, he saw no gradually emerging changes. The bushes flitted past, the stony roadside ditches endlessly unfurled, but the streak of green to his left stayed at a fixed distance. So did the Pinnacles. So did the Barrier Ranges – they remained a faint, bluish brush stroke on the far horizon, barely clearing the tops of the stunted mulga trees.

  Okay, he thought. Okay. Now, I’m not drunk, and I’m not on drugs. So either I’m going mad, or the clocks are fucked. Or was I dreaming away, back there, so that I slowed down to a crawl without noticing? It was possible.

  His stomach growled, and Alec became even more uneasy. He could practically set his watch by his gut – it started to complain at precisely noon each day if it hadn’t been fed within the past two hours. According to the clock in his stomach, it was way, way past twelve p.m. And all he had on him were a couple of chocolate bars, plus a thermos half full of cold tea, from yesterday’s trip. Not exactly a satisfying lunch.

  He reached for his phone, which was lying on the seat beside him. It wasn’t just an ordinary mobile, because there was no access to the CDMA network out on the Silver City Highway. Instead, employees of Gary Radford and Sons Pty Ltd used satellite phones – in Alec’s case, an Iridium low earth orbit satellite phone, which had the ability to pierce even the blanket of silence that engulfed the remote area outside of Broken Hill.

  But when he punched in the encoded base number, nothing happened. The little black slab of technology lay in his hand, silent and dead, like a miniature coffin. He tried again, tearing his eyes from the road just long enough to note that the phone’s display screen was blank.

  He might as well have used a shoe to call home, for all the good it did him.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he breathed. Was it a flat battery? Could something have drained it? Those weird magnetic fields again? The boss was going to go ballistic if Alec didn’t show up soon. He was way behind schedule already, unless his watch was wrong. Unless his eyes were playing tricks on him.

  Unless he’d gone mad.

  He tried the radio. Even at the best of times there wasn’t much you could pick up out here – just the local ABC station, and the odd, static-laden piece of country music, or snatch of cricket commentary, which sounded as if it was coming through from Mars. But there was always something. Something to assure you that you weren’t a mere dot on an empty plain, heading into infinity.

  Until now.

  Grimacing, Alec fiddled more and more frantically with the dial on the radio as he guided his gigantic truck with one hand. All he could find was static, static and more static, with here and there a slight clearing in the fuzz, accompanied by strange, scratchy noises that sounded almost, but not quite, like an electronic voice or growl. Like the groan of a didgeridoo pushed through a grid of satellite interference. Like someone spluttering into a microphone.

  Suddenly experiencing a surge of unreasonable panic, he snapped off the radio and peered at the Pinnacles again. They hadn’t fucking moved. He was sure of it. They hadn’t fucking moved in the last – what was it? (He checked his watch: twelve thirty-seven.) In the last eleven minutes. That wasn’t right. That couldn’t be right. Unless the clocks were wrong, and the speedometer was playing up, an
d his guts were making a fool of him – unless he had experienced a blackout or an epileptic fit while continuing to keep his Dog on the road – he had got exactly nowhere over the last hour and three quarters.

  Alec tried to reassure himself with thoughts of Janine, and her enamelled hair clips, and her lacy bras hanging on the clothes line. That was reality. That was safety. This was just another job, same as all the other jobs, and it would be over soon. He was being a bloody fool. Of course he would get there, he had to get there. He was on the road, wasn’t he? The road to Broken Hill? All roads have a beginning and an end, and the Silver City Highway was no different. It had been built to take people from point A to point B, in a bit over three hours – four if you were being careful.

  The trouble was, Alec took time out. He was a dreamer, always had been. That’s why they called him Dozy. That’s why they tapped on his skull sometimes, and waved their hands in front of his eyes. ‘Oi! Mate! Earth to Alec, ya dozy bugger!’ they would say. And Alec would realise that he had missed something – something important.

  Clearly, it was the same in this case. Clearly, he had missed something. But what? How? You couldn’t exactly close your eyes and chill out when you were driving a Mack super liner. If you did, you’d end up in hospital with your nose up your arse. Alec might have been dozy, but he wasn’t in a bloody coma. He had to keep at least one eye open, or risk the inevitable consequences.

  So what had he missed?

  At that point he remembered the fuel gauge, and stopped watching the road for half a second to assess the levels. His normal fuel load for the Mildura trip was seven hundred litres: some two hundred and twenty for the trip there, two hundred and twenty for the trip back, and another two hundred and fifty-odd for emergencies. After making a laboured mental calculation, Alec worked out that he now had approximately one hundred litres left in the tank.

  Which proved, if nothing else did, that something was seriously wrong.

  The man had a dog with him – a scruffy bull terrier called Mullet. Mullet’s face had been savagely scarred by kicks and bites, but his nose was still good. It could still do the job. Mullet smelled the dead thing before he had even reached the gate, and bounded ahead eagerly. But the man’s voice jerked him back like a short lead.