At half-past eleven Grey watched a lime-green Datsun Bluebird pull in and sit spluttering on the concrete before it was thrown into gear and jerked forward, cutting the motor. Two boys got out rubbing their necks and laughing. Grey knew them. They were a pair of contract fencers. A thirty-year-old simpleton called Jack Harry and a raw-boned kid called Skillington, both from Haigslea. “Only way you can stop it is stall it,” said Jack Harry. He slapped the Datsun’s roof.
“Where are you headed?”
“We’re at a party at Lockyer. We’re the supplies bus. No one on this whole bloody highway’s open except you.”
“What about the Sundowner?”
“Nope. You got any ice?”
“In the freezer by the door.”
“Cheers. What kind of booze you have here?”
“A couple of bottles of port and boxes of goon. That’s all.”
Jack Harry sent the Skillington boy for the wine and cigarettes. He went himself for ice. He took three bags and put them behind the driver’s seat and leant on the car while Grey cleaned off the windscreen.
“How much for those?”
“Twelve dollars.”
“Bloody hell!”
“I don’t set the prices.”
The Skillington boy came out with a bottle of port and a box of cheap Riesling, a litre of ginger ale and a pouch of tobacco.
“All that’s thirty-three fifty. Plus the ice makes forty-five.”
Jack Harry handed Grey two twenty-dollar notes and looked apologetic.
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“That’s all I’ve got.”
“It’ll get taken out of my pay when it comes up wrong tomorrow.”
Skillington went to the car and scratched up a dollar twenty. He handed it to Grey and Grey sighed.
“All right.”
“Thanks, Grey. You’re a mate.”
He took the money and walked back toward the kiosk. What did he care about the money? He laughed at himself.
Jack Harry called out to him.
“Hey, Grey! Vanessa Humphries is back in town. She asked about you tonight. I’ll tell her we saw you.”
“Thanks.”
Grey was surprised she had even thought of him. He had not seen or heard from her for months.
He put the money on the counter, and Jack Harry stuck his cowboy-hatted head around the door.
“Grey, you couldn’t give us a hand startin the car, could you?”
“ What’s wrong with it?”
“Don’t know. Just won’t go.”
The Skillington boy stood beside it on the concrete looking helpless.
Grey sat down in the driver’s seat.
“It’s a moody old bitch,” said Jack Harry.
“Is it yours?”
“No.”
Grey turned the key and the motor only wheezed. He shut the door.
“You boys push me,” he said through the window. “Push me onto the road.”
He held down the clutch and the two boys pelted onto the roadside with the car that ran away from them and stuttered and fired and Grey pumped the accelerator and shifted into third gear.
The highway to the east and the city lay before him, the road to the long-threatening, long-overdue future. In the rear-view mirror he saw the two hopeless boys, silhouetted against a roadhouse that had forty-odd dollars lying on the counter and another four or five hundred in the till, and he thought about leaving them with it and keeping going.
But he turned the car around.
AFTER AN HOUR a police car stopped and two officers stepped up to the kiosk. One fiddled with his holster and leant sideways on the counter.
“There’s been a report of a stolen vehicle, most likely headed in this direction.”
“Which direction is that?”
“East out of the Downs. A green Datsun Bluebird. I don’t suppose you’ve seen it?”
Grey smiled. Likely as not the police had driven past it on their way to here.
“Sorry.”
“Something funny?”
“No.”
The officers walked back to their car with no more said.
The stolen car probably belonged to some kid’s parents, and when the kid saw it gone from the same party Jack Harry and Skillington were at he must have panicked. Jack Harry would have gone looking for any vehicle with the key inside and taken it for fun, for boredom. Grey laughed. He would not have gotten far tonight. They were chasing him before he even ran.
He stared out the window. A west wind blew leaves across the lit concrete and into the dark.
He took out his wallet and palmed the photograph he kept of his mother standing in the yellow grass in front of their house. He smiled at her hair in pigtails and the big pink coat that made her look so young. He was already nine years older than she was in the photograph, in a year he would be older than she would ever become. Tonight he could not remember her voice or even a single word she had spoken, yet she seemed close to him. She belonged to him much more than she did to the young man standing beside her, looking much like himself, who would right now be drinking away these hours before morning in the solitude of some outback hotel room. Yet without the photograph Grey could not recall her. There was a spirit who inhabited his dreams; it felt like his mother, but he could not be sure. After a time of staring, the photograph recalled his sister. The sad mouth paired with exuberant eyes. He put the photograph away and walked out into the night.
The three o’clock highway ran silently through the grassland and through grey fields that were mostly fallow now. At the eastern entry to the roadhouse was an eternally empty noticeboard to advertise goings-on in nearby towns and Grey leant against it. The Milky Way stretched farther and brighter than he had ever seen it and the sky was washed out with dirty twinkling.
He switched off the inside lights and the neon criers at
the main and sat down on the gravel by the road, and then he and the roadhouse were lost to an oblivion of stars and plain. He thought that the dark that enveloped the land was the same that God divided on the first day, and it had not grown a moment older or changed, no matter how many lights men shone into it, and in that eternal dark nothing was certain. Grey wondered where she was tonight, if she was with he who he had loved since boyhood–or was it some other after all? It was better to have no idea. It was better like this, out here away from it. He tried not to think of her and instead he thought of Vanessa. He wondered how long she would be in town. She had asked about him tonight. Perhaps he had been unkind to her, been foolish. Again tonight, far out in the west, the land was burning. The fire nipped at the southwestern stars and held him. Then he thought of her without being able to help it. He spoke her name to the dark, to the empty distance between himself and the heavens. At times God seemed on the verge of speaking across that distance, but the word was always withheld, or was whispered and not understood, and he wondered was the universe holy and meaningful, as the ancient saints had it in his mother’s books, or was it all just a tawdry, banal and violent nothing, like this highway, where the pretty glare of lamps made the earth a depthless plane.
It was six o’clock. A red front stretched the length of the eastern horizon to counter the front in the west. The western front retreated and failed in a haze of smoke. He sat before the roadhouse with his eyes closed and his head between his knees below the ever-fading remnants of last night’s universe.
ECCLESTON SAT ALONE IN HIS HOUSE. HE HAD TALKED with Possum through the afternoon and marked the place with pen on a road map. Now a candle sat on the windowsill and he watched the jumping flame. He looked for the hundredth time in the night across the way to the North house. He saw her in one of the lit windows. Then the lights went out. It was very early morning. He watched the candle twisting and the wax burn
down and the flame glow and glow and then go out with a ribbon of black smoke. He got in Possum’s bodytruck and drove out to the big highway and drove west.
VIII
THE NEXT NIGHT GREY ATTENDED THE SHOWGIRL’S crowning dance with a vague hope of seeing Vanessa. He scanned the hall for the boys but they were nowhere amidst the small crowd. With a fifteen-dollar cover charge and no beer at the bar, he reckoned they would not be coming. He had asked Matt Thiebaud who had given him a doubtful “maybe’. He could not see Vanessa either. She had attended this party in years gone. But why should she be here tonight? He took a glass of red wine and laughed at himself. He nodded to Jack Harry, who would not be here but for his plain young cousin who was one of the showgirl entrants. Grey decided to finish the glass and leave when the voice he recognized spoke close to his ear and her hand fell on his shoulder.
“So they’ve let you out, have they?”
He smiled at the meaningless quip. She was smiling too, that credulous, indiscriminating smile that lit her face like a ray of warming light. He realized what a long time had passed since he had seen her. She gave him such physical relief that he sighed and breathed deeply, as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. She had lightened her hair and it hung loose over her ears and touched her neck, and the kerosene lamplight showed her skin to its fullest golden hue. She was beautiful. Grey remembered her birthday had passed since he had last seen her. Even in those months she seemed to have grown up.
“You must be twenty-two now.”
“Twenty-three, Grey. You don’t remember anything, do you?”
He remembered their first kiss. They were sixteen and thirteen and she had just taken her first drink of blackberry wine. He had stolen the bottle from his father’s cupboard. It was the sweetest-smelling thing he could find and she said it was blissful and felt a little like cheating, drinking alcohol that tasted so good. He remembered the excitement of having a girl, of her already swollen body that made his loins sing with a strange pain, and the way she spoke and held his hand that seemed so wonderful and grown up. That was the night he decided to marry Vanessa Humphries. He knew he was only one of a number of boys she had played at love with. Even so, he always felt he had the edge on the others, that when she had exhausted them she would return to him, or somewhere within arm’s reach of him, and they would pick up where they had left off, and he had long been justified in this feeling.
“So how are things?’ she said. “I haven’t seen you for so long.” She spoke without any of the awkwardness or spite he had been prepared for, that he thought his inexplicable disappearance from her life deserved.
“I’ve been around. What about you? How’s school?”
“Only half a year to go. It’s very exciting.”
He nodded. He imagined kissing her tonight, sneaking away laughing into the dark, climbing into one of the rooms of the schoolhouse beside the hall.
“No big news then?’ he said.
“Well–I’ve gotten engaged.”
“Oh.” He felt cheated. “When?”
“A couple of weeks ago. It happened quite suddenly.”
He stumbled over his words that he saw made no sense: “I’d been meaning to call you.”
They looked at each other with embarrassment until, unable to hold her gaze, he glanced away across the room at the blurred faces of the crowd.
“Now don’t pretend you were ever serious about us, Grey.”
He sighed.
“ Why not? Who is he?”
“You don’t know him. His name’s Michael Reed. He works on a newspaper in the city. He’s just over there. He and his family wanted to see where I grew up.”
Grey looked across the room and found the tall man she pointed at. He was talking with a smartly dressed woman who bore sufficient resemblance to him to be his sister and who was cradling a child.
“Your mother must be happy.”
“She is. Though she’d be happier if it was going to be at the Presbyterian. Michael doesn’t want a church wedding.”
Grey nodded. He saw the chain around Vanessa’s neck now bore a heart-shaped locket.
“Come and I’ll introduce you!”
“In a minute,” Grey said.
And all at once he was not talking to her anymore. She had said goodbye and walked across the hall. He lost her in the crowd. He saw her next standing at the edge of the dance floor with her fiancé’s sister, having relieved that woman of her child. Vanessa rocked back and forth and side to side, lulling the child in her arms to sleep, her figure hinting at itself as if by accident through her pretty beige dress. The child was not hers, but to see her cradling an infant on her hip, where her own would be after a few short years had passed him by, hurt him.
Later he spotted her alone in a corner of the hall. He went to her and caught her hand and held it. He could see the discomfort it caused her, but he did not let go. This–Vanessa and all that went with her–was real and good. If he could hold onto it he might make something real of himself also. So he kept hold of her hand despite her protests.
“No, Grey,” she whispered, her eyes darting around the room, “I can’t.”
“Is he giving you trouble?’ said a red-faced young man in a sports coat who was even drunker than Grey.
“No, Tommy. I’m fine.”
Vanessa pulled on Grey’s arm. She scowled at him and pulled free. He walked out to the car park and stood alone next to his truck without getting in. He sucked the cold air in long draughts until he was almost sober. Then he stood shivering in the blue light at the top of the hall’s stairs for everyone to see. She went out to him.
“ Why don’t you go home, Grey? You’re tired,” she took his hand, “and look, you’re cold.”
Her fiancé came out to them.
“Who’s this?”
Grey ignored him.
“That’s the one I told you about,” said the sports-coated drunk who joined the miserable party on the veranda. “The one who was giving her trouble before.”
“Get out of here.” the fiancé said. But Grey did not move or stop staring at Vanessa. “I mean it. Get the hell out of here, you dumb hick!”
Grey ran his hand over his face and laughed.