She and Tommy went hard at it day and night for the next week or so. After breakfast each morning he’d give me money to take Nez to see a movie and eat as much takeaway as we could stuff into ourselves. When we weren’t at the movies or hanging around the beach we rode buses across the city, armed with a disposable camera that Tommy had given us to play with. We took pictures of other passengers on the buses or of people in the street when they weren’t watching us. When Tommy handed me the camera he’d said it was a gift for us, and maybe it was, but I knew he hadn’t paid a cent for it because I’d seen him steal the camera just the day before, from the 7-Eleven around the corner from where we were staying.
Nez and me came back to the motel one afternoon after a swim in the sea to find Gwen curled up on her bed, sobbing like a baby. She was wearing only her underwear, she had bruises all over her arms and legs, and her make-up was ruined, with mascara stains running down her cheeks.
I looked around the room, at the empty bottles, the overflowing ashtrays and coke foils, and the clothes and underwear lying on the floor. It was a mess. Nez was standing behind me, breathing heavily. I could tell by the rattling noise in her chest that her asthma was playing up, like it did whenever she was nervous.
I told Nez to leave the room and go next door and watch some TV, but she wouldn’t. She ran past me, jumped onto the bed, lay down alongside Gwen and held onto her as tightly as she could.
It turned out that Cowboy Tommy had vanished just as quickly as he’d arrived. He left Gwen with a black eye and an unpaid bill for the rooms, as well as a bar tab fit for a football team on an end-of-season trip.
Tommy left us with no choice but to do a runner from the motel.
Later that night, after Gwen had put Nez to bed, I helped her load the boot of the car with two garbage bags stuffed with our clothes, her make-up case, and Nez’s few toys. We then raided the housemaid’s trolley, stealing packets of sweet biscuits, a cardboard box full of bottled water, blankets and pillows, some soap, and a toilet roll and towel.
The next morning we ate breakfast, took a final swim in the pool and ordered a lunch of roast chicken, baked potatoes and chocolate ice-cream. Gwen added the meal to our tab, along with a tip for the young waiter she’d flirted with over lunch. We then snuck away from the motel by the rear car park.
Our getaway car was a shit-coloured Commodore without a straight panel and tyres worn smooth as racing slicks. It was a bomb, for sure, but it had never broken down on us in the two years we’d had it, and kept us dry and more or less warm when it was the only place we had to sleep for the night.
After leaving Adelaide we drove to the border and crossed into the far west of Victoria. I sat in the back with Nez, who kicked me as she lay on the other side of the car, sulking over something she wouldn’t talk about. I was pretty sure it would be over Tommy having abandoned us. He’d paid Nez a lot of attention that week and she’d lapped it up like a spoiled kitten.
The sky was big, blue and empty except for a ball of sun tracking us, while the land we drove through was as flat as an iron, and bone dry and brown.
I got thirsty just looking out of the car window at it.
There wasn’t much we saw along the way that wasn’t stone dead. We drove through one small town totally deserted and another just as empty except for an old man sitting in a rocker on the verandah of a rundown weatherboard house. He was wrapped in an old blanket and had shoulder-length white hair and grey skin. While he looked more like a ghost than a man and frightened me, I couldn’t take my eyes off him as we drove by.
We also saw sheep and cows dotted here and there in the dry paddocks, and some farm machinery, most of which was rusted and looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time.
It was a hot day on the highway. The air-conditioning in the car, which had never worked properly anyway, hummed and grunted so loudly I couldn’t make out a single song on the radio, even though it was turned up full blast. Gwen made things worse by chain-smoking all the way with the car windows wound up.
I could hardly spot Nez through the smoke so I coughed a couple of times in the hope that Gwen would get the message and put her cigarette out. But she didn’t, so I leaned over the seat, tapped her on the shoulder and yelled at her to turn the radio down and the air-conditioning off.
‘What?’ she screamed back at me.
‘The radio. Can you turn it off? And the air?’
She eventually punched the ‘off’ button on the radio, but wouldn’t touch the air-conditioning.
I started telling her about a science article I’d read in a magazine when we were back in Adelaide, in the laundromat at the caravan park. It was all about passive smoking and how it killed more people every year than the road toll and most known diseases combined.
‘That’s not true,’ she interrupted, as she defiantly lit up another cigarette, turned around and blew smoke in my face.
‘You always think you’re a wealth of information, Jesse, but that story can’t be true. What about cancer? Those numbers couldn’t include cancer. They wouldn’t have counted all them deaths, I bet. It’s killed almost everyone I know over the age of fifty. It took your grandfather. He didn’t even see his fortieth. Cancer’s like a fucking plague.’
‘The story is true. I read it in a magazine.’
‘Makes no difference where you read it—it’s bullshit.’ She took another drag on the cigarette. ‘Why you reading science magazines, anyway? Since when have you been interested in science? What did you get for the subject at that last school you were at? What was it? An F?’
‘I wasn’t there long enough to get a school report. Don’t you remember?’
She wouldn’t answer me, and only wound down her window and threw the lit cigarette from the car into the dry scrub when Nez started calling out from the back seat that we were all going to die of ‘pastel smoking’.
‘You’ll start a bushfire doing that,’ I complained, as I turned and looked out of the back window to the spot where she had just thrown the cigarette butt.
‘Thank you, Fireman fucking Sam,’ she screamed as she held the empty cigarette packet in her hand, crushed it into a ball and threw it out of the window as well.
‘That should make the both of you happy. I’m all out of cigarettes now, and I’ve no money for another packet. So, it looks like we’ll all have to live a bit longer.’
I tapped her on the shoulder again. ‘You shouldn’t litter. You can get a fine for that. I think it’s thousands of dollars or something.’
It was dark before Gwen realised we had not much more than a drop of petrol in the tank. Her solution was to tap the petrol gauge in the hope that it might shift the needle. It didn’t budge, of course. She pulled over to the side of the road, turned the engine off and rested her head on the steering wheel as she muttered and swore to herself.
When she finally lifted her head she told us we would have to stop when we got to the next town or the car might die on us on the side of the highway.
We drove back onto the road, took the next exit and headed for the lights of a small town not far off the highway. I wound down my window and looked out into the night. As far as I could see we’d arrived in the middle of nowhere anyway.
After doing a lap of the town Gwen pulled into a yard beside a wheat silo and railway siding. She got out of the car, went to the boot and grabbed the blankets and pillows that we’d nicked from the motel. She handed one of the blankets across the seat for Nez and me to share along with two packets of the sweet biscuits and a bottle of water each.
As soon as Gwen lay down across the front seat of the car, manoeuvring her arse around the floor shift, Nez started to cough and splutter. She had never got used to sleeping on the road and was afraid of the dark. It wouldn’t take much for Nez to convince herself that a madman might come along in the night and kidnap her. Or cut our throats as we slept.
Nez pulled more than her share of our blanket over her head as she continued snivelling. Gwen tried to ignore her, pulling her own blanket over her head. Nez responded by crying a little louder, so Gwen told her to shut up. Nez didn’t stop. Gwen eventually sat up, threw her blanket to the floor and climbed across into the back seat with us. She looked angry, like maybe she was about to slap Nez in the face. But she didn’t. She squeezed in between us, put her arm around Nez and told her we were going to be okay.
We weren’t going to be stuck here for too long, she explained. Although we hadn’t seen one when we drove through the town, she was sure there’d be a pub around, and she’d get some work behind the bar for a couple of days. Then we’d be back out on the highway and heading for
home
, wherever that might be.
She was still going on about how things were going to pick up for us when I fell asleep.
Early the next morning the hackling grate of a bird and a dull tapping sound woke me. I sat up and looked out through the windscreen at a large blackbird perched on the end of the car bonnet, pecking at the duco. The bird tilted its head to one side to get a better look at me before lifting its wings and vanishing into the sky.
I looked over at Nez. She was still asleep.
I got out of the car, hobbled across the gravel yard in my bare feet and took a piss behind a tree. When I came back Gwen was sitting in the driver’s seat with the car window wound down, puffing on a butt that she must have retrieved from the ashtray.
She looked out through the cracked windscreen at me as I walked by the car. Smoke hissed between a gap in her front teeth as she spoke. ‘I’ve stuffed up this time, haven’t I, Jesse?’ She tried laughing.
I said nothing as I shrugged my shoulders. There’d been so many other times she’d got us into trouble there didn’t seem to be a lot of difference
this time
.
Nez was awake. She rolled around inside her blanket a couple of times, sat up and looked around the car as she rubbed sleep from her eyes. She didn’t have much of an idea about where she was. She complained that she had to go to the toilet. When Gwen told her she would have to do it behind the tree like I had, Nez looked at her in horror, which surprised me. Both Nez and me had been forced to take a piss in plenty of places worse than this one.
‘The tree? I’m not going over there.’
‘Yes you are, Nez. You’ll go where I tell you to go.’
Nez screwed her face up. ‘Well, I’m only going to pee then. That’s all I’m going to do.’
Gwen held up her miserly butt and stared at it. ‘Piss or don’t piss then. See if I care.’
Nez got out of the car and slammed the door in protest. After she’d finished squatting behind the tree she ran back just as Gwen got out of the car herself and went to the boot. It sounded like she was rustling around in the garbage bags. After a couple of minutes she closed the boot and walked around to the side of the car.
Gwen had changed into what she liked to call her ‘lucky dress’. It was sleeveless and a deep red colour with a low neckline. She smiled at us as she smoothed the creases of the dress with the palms of her hands. ‘How do I look?’
Neither of us said a word. Me because I didn’t care how she looked, and Nez because I could see that she was already worrying herself with the thought that Gwen might be about to shoot through on us. Gwen had done it before, and more than once—left us behind when things got so tight for her that all she could think to do was run away.
I looked along the stretch of highway leading away from the car. It would not have surprised me at all if Gwen walked away from the car and didn’t come back. I also knew that if I didn’t have Nez to look after I’d go too, as far away from Gwen as I could get.
Gwen told us we weren’t to stray from the car, and if anyone came snooping around asking questions I was to tell them we’d broken down and that
our father
would be back soon with a mechanic from the town.
‘What about the toilet?’ Nez asked. ‘What if I need to go? If I have to . . .’
Gwen ignored her. She was busy doing her lipstick in the side mirror. She then stood up, pointed the lipstick at Nez and jabbed the air with it as she spoke.
‘Use your brains, Nez. Go where you have to. There’s a toilet roll in the boot.’
As Nez got out to search through the boot Gwen took a final look at herself in the mirror, stood up and grabbed her bag from the floor of the car. She was about to walk off when Nez called out to her.
‘Wait. I want to take your photo.’
Nez was holding the disposable camera in her hand. She walked towards Gwen, stopped about a metre in front of her, lifted the camera to her eye and looked through the lens.
‘Smile.’
Gwen could never resist a photo opportunity. She draped the bag over her shoulder with one hand, rested the other on her hip and pouted her lips. She held her pose until Nez had taken the picture.
Before I knew what she was doing Gwen had grabbed hold of me and wrapped an arm tightly around my waist. ‘Take this one, Nezzie, with my toy boy.’
Nez took the picture before I had wriggled free by elbowing Gwen in the ribs.
‘Take it easy, Jesse, take it easy,’ she yelled at me before posing again. ‘Come on, love, another one of me.’
Nez examined the camera. ‘No. There’s only two pictures left—I’m saving them.’
Gwen appeared a little insulted. ‘Suit yourself then. See you two later.’ She dropped the bag to her side, turned around and walked off.
I strolled onto the road and watched as the red triangle of Gwen’s dress grew smaller and smaller. It stopped for a moment and drifted in a haze coming off the hot tar on the road. While I could not make out her face I imagined that Gwen might be looking back at us and thinking about what she might do next.
The dress then moved forward and vanished.
I told Nez to stay with the car while I took a look around the yard, but I’d taken only a few steps when I heard the car door creak open, followed by Nez’s footsteps scraping behind me in the gravel.
After circling the yard a couple of times I headed for a tin shed on one side of the wheat silo. When I opened the shed door I could hardly believe my luck: there was a toilet in one corner.