Red Centre (2)

 

Rain pasted her hair to her scalp. Wet season. She stumbled in the darkness. She cut past sheds, the worker's accommodation, machinery rendered through the torrential curtain as hulking metallic dinosaurs.

Three a.m. They hadn't returned from the hut. She was fresh out in the homestead. Empty bottles everywhere. And she worried for Oliver. She worried for him in the company of this man, an ever-present needle despite the years. Oliver was lost in the world but he was reliable in his own way. He did his work. He paid the staff. He capped his hut-sessions and returned home before midnight. Eighteen years; he knew how things could get with Murphy.

She crossed the road. A dripping fox scoped her and tore off. She hit the dirt track, wobbling through vegetation. Mulga hemmed her in. The hut was visible through a framework of interlocking boughs. A window of yellow light. She heard music. Laughter.

Wind rattled the branches and she felt briefly as if she had stepped outside of time, as if she were some seraphic witness or spirit milked from the gloom. She brushed past the outhouse. 

Muffled whimpers inside. 

She stopped. Something awful festered beneath her skin. Some kind of immediate doom, clear and shocking and magnetic. She wiped slicks of hair from her forehead and caught Oliver's large silhouette in the window. More laughter. She opened the outhouse door.

*

The 4x4 in the petrol station. The woman sitting at the laptop, doused in screen light. They lived with her. They orbited as little moons; as escape, delusion, the great something more that eludes us all.

She looked up specialists when she was drunk. Sent emails. She followed up on a meeting, once. The room had cream walls, polished wood, plastic plants, and it was clean. It felt nice to be in a clean room. It made her cry. The man had a severe side-parting and a strange tie. There were trees and a deer embroidered on it.

Memory is unreliable, she was told. Each time we remember something, we are reconstructing the event, reassembling it from traces throughout the brain. Look at eyewitnesses. Prompting a witness to remember more can generate details that are outright false. But they feel just as correct to the witness as actual memories.

The man had set his clipboard aside and leaned forward. She felt herself focusing on the deer living inside his tie.

You must take your lifestyle into account, too, he said.

*

She watched Murphy out of the corner of her eye as she drove. His head bouncing against the dashboard. His glassy eyes. The red slick spreading at his feet. It was fascinating.

'Air.' Oliver said. She watched him in the mirror. He coughed and spat up blood. His head dipped. The red plains were like lakes of fire in the rising sun. They hit a dip in the road.

'Air ambulance,' he slurred. 'You're too cut. Too cut to be driving.'

They passed the petrol station. Sarah bit her lip and pulled into the courtyard. Stones rattled under the wheels. Oliver groaned. She looked past Murphy's lolling head to the girl leaving the station shop. Her fingers tingled. Her breath came in hisses. The span of her life contracted and shrivelled into a single image.

'You're not. You're not taking us... to any hospital,' Oliver breathed. 'Are you?'

The girl drank from a bottle. She saw the car. Sarah's fingers worried the wheel. She felt an absurd relief, a vindication, and also a dread of everything; everything being circular, unspooling in the same waves and patterns, every one of us a limp marionette guided through a series of familiar stages.

Oliver hacked blood. The girl moved closer. A truck roared by. Sarah floored it.

*

She dried herself off with a towel. Her hands were shaking violently. The front door clattered open. Five a.m.

Feet stamping. Bottles clinking. Curses. She moved to the edge of the doorway. She gripped the frame. Her nails scraped at wood.

Oliver was backed-up against the wall. Space was tight in the hallway. He was half-obscured in a clutter of hanging jackets. Murphy was inches from his face. He spat.

'Why'd you do that? Why'd you run back? Why you running? She's into that shit. She likes it. You comin' over all judgemental? It's her thing. She likes it.'

Sarah saw a glint in his hand as it moved towards Oliver's face. She felt frozen.

Oliver stammered. His hands pawed at the wall behind him.

'Maybe she got... maybe she left of her own... accord. She might have... '

Sarah remembered the outhouse. Struggling with the knots. The girl's tear-stained face. Murphy's nose wrinkled. He coughed. His hand traced down Oliver's side.

'I. Don't. Think. So.'

Oliver exhaled. His eyes widened. Murphy's hand pulled away. She saw dark spurts near Oliver's waist. 

She moved forward. Murphy stepped back. He glanced at her. He seemed uncertain, thrown. They maintained that terrible triangle for a beat, collectively locked, waiting for the next move.

Oliver pushed himself off the wall. He lurched into Murphy. They fell in a twisted pile. Oliver scrabbled for Murphy's hand. He dug his nails in. Prised fingers. He pulled the knife free and buried it in Murphy's gut.

*

She pulled off the road. They came to a standstill in a sea of red dust. Strips of dawn light brushed the plain. A crow, observing the car from a distant mulga branch, trip-hopped to rise into a spiral arc, black wings coasting over the feverish sweep.

Sarah watched the landscape. It looked alive. Like layers of stripped, dessicated flesh. A dormant entity. Murphy was long gone. She smelled shit. She necked draughts from the whisky bottle. 

'Sorry,' Oliver whispered.

She watched the rearview mirror. He was pale and clammy. He gurgled.

'Sorry.'

She closed her eyes. She brought the bottle to her lips and chugged. She drank until everything drained away. 

*

Her feet touched downy fluff. Gossamer threads looped around her.

She walked through the cloud. It was packed. Thousands of translucent people wandered aimlessly under the coal-black sky. Cloud-banks stretched as far as the eye could see, brimming with strange figures. 

She ran her hand through fleecy trails. There were moist drops all over her palm. She could see the bones inside her fingers.

She struggled past crowds to the edge of the cloud. Dense white rolls fell away beneath her. Torrential rain whipped through the atmosphere.

The rain people are unhappy people.

She knelt. She tried to focus on the tiny clusters of light swimming far below. They were so far away.

They feel better, her Auntie said. They can go and live at home again.

 

END