Red Centre (1)

 

How often can you say: that is something I will never forget? Something burned into my brain?

It was the oddest memory, and it was one that Sarah had told very few people about. There were too many factors, anyway. The long drive through the Red Centre. Endless sand plains. Salt pans. Wheat belts. Cattle stations. Massed, skeletal bushes, crouching on the dry red sprawl like the dessicated husks of some long-extinct race. 

The grinding headache. Dints on the road. Ridges. The constant rattling in the bones. The peculiar sense of loss and detachment that, at twenty-two, she was told would leave in time, in time, and yet eighteen years later would linger with an added and ever-increasing ominous edge, a slow-burning fuse.

She swallowed the paracetamol and slugged back water as she left the petrol station. Red dust flanked the dirt track. Stars were slung up in the night sky like flecks of white paint on blacktop.

The 4x4 pulled in amongst a cloud of dust, dead locusts glued to the steel bumpers. It drew up beside her. She made to walk past it and saw the man slumped on the dashboard. She remembered the sudden spike, the needles inside her. 

She moved towards the window. Gravel crunched under her feet. A woman was clutching the wheel. She was staring straight ahead. Her eyes had a strange misty shine. Her body seemed seized by some kind of stutter. Her head turned towards Sarah and snapped back as if stuck in a loop.

Sarah breathed. Her stomach felt tight. The woman looked so familiar. She looked at the man in the seat beside her. His face was wedged against the dashboard. She saw the red puddle by his shoes. She was backing away when she saw the man in the back seat. He was looking straight at her. There was blood on his lips.

Two yellow eyes split the red sweep. A truck tore past within a dusty shroud. Stones clanked and skipped. When Sarah looked back the 4x4 was gone. The dirt track coiled away from her own lonely car.

In years to come she would attribute it - by degrees - to stress, exhaustion, false memories, false interpretation, the intermingling of dreams and reality, the things we tell ourselves, the situations and delusions we project and graft onto our own hollow existences as we fumble and scrape for some kind of alternative or escape from the everyday. And yet they remained crisp and clear, stubbornly separate from reveries amidst the passage of time. The woman clutching the wheel. The red puddle. The man looking at her.

*

Auntie Lynette told her about the rain people when her mother was ill. Her mother was ill for almost as long as she could remember. Most of her memories revolved around the muggy bedroom. Thin shafts escaping through the drawn curtains. The pasty face. Drawn eyelids. Wrinkles like doughy rivets. The empty bottles. Too loud, Sarah, she would say. Don't touch the wallpaper. Lynn, take Sarah away, please, I'll see her later, it's too loud, there's too many people.

Other times she would cry and pull her close, paw at her face with clammy hands. Hiss we have to stick together with horrible breath, or it's just us now you stay away from him if he come round here he ain't no father to you despite the fact Sarah knew of no such figure, or do you know how much I love you. She would fall asleep with webs of drool on her lips.

Sarah sat on Auntie Lynette's lap in the rocking chair on the porch. Cattle were bedding down under the silvery ceiling of a mulga tree. The moon was a sharp knife cut. Further into the field beyond, the rotting remains of feral dogs killed by ranchers hung from another disinterested mulga.

The rain people are unhappy people, her Auntie said. They go and live in the clouds when they feel sad. They walk around the clouds, all soggy and miserable. When there's too many unhappy people blocking up the clouds it rains, and all the sadness falls away in little drops, and they feel better. They can go and live at home again.

How do they get back down from the clouds? Sarah said.

Don't be a smart alec, her Auntie would say.

*

Oliver drained his beer, set it amongst the clutter on the kitchen worksurface, and slung a backpack over his shoulders. He nudged a stack of dirty plates turning. Sarah sat cross-legged on the sofa in the living room, waiting for him. She sipped a mug of warm white wine. Brown coffee smears lined the rim. 

Oliver slouched against the doorway, backpack clunking. The single lamp cast a muzzy sphere upon the ceiling. The routine was well established by now. Monday to Friday was mustering sheep and cattle, maintenance, harvesting crops, looking after horses. In the evenings they drank. Weekends they delegated more to the ranch workers - kids mostly, working holiday visas, locals, Murphy - and they drank properly.

Sarah wrung her hands. Oliver smiled - his gums glistened. He was lit already.

'Going to the hut,' he croaked. 'Whip that fucker at cards. Debt's racking up. Need to turn on the style.'

He picked at his teeth. Sarah looked up and smiled wanly. He lurched into the room and kissed her forehead. She felt bubbles of saliva. He whistled as he left. 

Rain thrummed the windows. She sunk the dregs in the mug. She dipped her head onto the sofa and scrabbled at the floor. It took a minute to find a bottle with something in it. The kitchen was too far away. 

*

They'd met working in a hotel restaurant in Ayers Rock. She was twenty-two and he was twenty-five. She worked the bar and he worked the floor. She remembered him doing silver service, terribly. Potatoes and vegetables rolling onto people's laps. He'd kicked an errant broccoli stem in her direction as he ferried plates back to the kitchen once. He laughed and called it a love token, later.

*

It must have been a Saturday - they'd been on it all day. A Saturday maybe seven, eight years ago. Afternoon store run. It should have been a morning run - in the early days they set off at four a.m. She'd not peeled her face from the pillow until ten. Spent half an hour with her hands down her throat getting that yellow gunk out. Few glasses to siphon off the shakes. It was hell stocking up on groceries when you lived five hours from town.

The red dunefields were still a transportive rush, an alien landscape, a blood-red cleansing amid the delirium tremens. They passed plains pockmarked with craters, garnished with bloodwood and camel poison bush, squatting shrubs like strange insects with their gray bark and jagged leaves. Abandoned cars littering an Opal Mining site. The sad, scrawny frames of dead kangaroos hanging from the livestock rack of a truck outside a pastoral station.

There was still something freeing here, something separate. Even if the chips had not fallen as she perhaps expected, even if they had transformed into something different in the process. 

It was night by the time they neared the farm. The cider bottle frothed at her mouth as they lurched over a mound, and she hawked a noose of spittle between her legs. A membranous mist coated the red sprawl and the stark treelines beyond as if a great, malevolent entity cast from a thousand lost souls moved to reclaim the land as the world slept.

Holiday workers - two skinny girls, a guy with long, greasy hair and bright green shorts -  unloaded the pallets and lugged them into the store shed. Murphy hovered round - he was always hovering round - all wisecracks and seedy glances at the bent figures.

Oliver jiggled the door. He'd staggered slightly as it opened. The living room was bathed in the blue glow of the laptop screen. She'd seen herself sitting there, watching the monitor. Eyes scored red. Hand shaking over the mouse. Oliver saw it too. She knew he did. She saw him start. It was just for a beat. The room was empty again as they moved in.

'Left the laptop on,' he'd slurred.

She watched the empty chair by the laptop. We have transformed into something different, she thought.

*

Murphy was always around. He'd been there at the hotel restaurant, smoking joints by the bins outside, cornering teenage daughters; head down on the bar, surrounded by shot glasses on nights Oliver closed up. He'd managed to linger another eighteen years. He was a leech. Sarah knew him for what he was. 

He stuck close to Oliver in the early days; he crowed, slapped his back, letched and, remarkably, somehow fulfilled an indispensable role. Some kind of depraved, inferior sidekick or base projection of self that Oliver came to rely on as he negotiated his own stiff, quietly-accepted spiral.

Present-day Murphy was pasty, moustached and heavily-lined, his face a scrunched-up prune when it ventured to express more than his pebble-eyed stare; all rakish, angry juts encased in oversized dungarees and baseball caps. Sarah despised him. It was as if she saw in him a physical manifestation of their cumulative decline, as if they had somehow birthed this rotten lump through their miserable ways.

On Saturday nights Oliver and Murphy went to the hut for cards, beer and whisky. Whatever else was going. During these hours Sarah drank alone. Inside these solitary binges she found the vestiges of self-reflection, a paper-thin partition of awareness beneath the meat, the bones, the discoloured liver, the rind of soul. She would ask herself why they had allowed this to happen. It felt like it had always been happening; it should be happening. It was insidious in its claiming of years, character, spark and sovereignty; it was a part of them; it was a part of nature.

*

One lost Saturday night she fell asleep on the sofa. A dark patch spread over the crotch of her jeans.

In her dreams she saw low hanging clouds. In another moment she was walking on them. They rolled before her like high banks of snow. She stepped forward. The ground was pillowy and soft. Wisps trailed from the milky masses. Hazy curlicues formed around her feet as they sunk into the whiteness.

The sky around was black and starless. She left a row of indentations in the fluff behind her. In the distance she could see people wandering aimlessly over a downy stretch. There were perhaps five or six men and women. When she closed in she could see several more, sitting or slumped amongst white folds. 

She peered. The sharp white of the clouds and the ink-black sky were a curious marriage and within this she found it hard to focus. It seemed to her as if the people in the clouds were soaking, but soaked through to their core - their skin was dewy in substance, and had a strange diaphanous glaze.

She saw one man fall to his knees. Drops leeched from his eyes; thick silvery nodules. He shook, and his mouth opened in a silent scream. The flow increased. Water streamed from his eyes, ears and nose. His mouth gaped. He convulsed. Sarah watched his body shimmer and collapse, dissolving piecemeal into the cloudy floor.

The remaining people rose and ambled to the cloud's edge. Sarah rushed to join them, tugging her feet from tufts of sinking softness. A swollen bank gave way to endless night below, and through the blackness rain moved in sparkling sheets. She thought she could see tiny lights, far, far below.

The rain people are unhappy people, her Auntie said. 

When she woke she saw Murphy asleep in the armchair opposite her. His trousers were around his ankles and his hand was wrapped around his limp member.

*

https://www.abctales.com/story/stephen-thom/red-centre-2