Catherine Jinks TheRoad (16 page)

‘Do you have a goldfish?’ Rose asked, and Louise nodded.

‘Yes,’ she replied, drawing a card from the collection dealt to her.

‘Yay! Do you have a crab?’

They retraced their route, heading north again, as the sun travelled across the sky.

Chris and Graham McKenzie were following in the steps of
Burke and Wills. For three long years they had planned their trip,

which would take them north from Melbourne, across the New South Wales border to Menindee, past White Cliffs, through Tibooburra and into the Sturt Stony Desert. They didn’t necessarily expect to get as far as Normanton during the two weeks available to them, but they were hoping that they might see Birdsville, and even Boulia. At the very least, they would be visiting a portion of Queensland’s far west.

Chris had researched the area thoroughly. He had purchased the requisite maps and guidebooks, and had read almost every available text dealing with the ill-fated journey. He found it a strangely compelling story. In 1861, Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills had set off at the vanguard of a great expedition into Australia’s heart, with the purpose of discovering a route from Australia’s south coast to the Gulf of Carpentaria. The expedition had ended in tragedy; Burke and Wills had both died, without actually reaching the waters of the gulf. Yet their failed attempt had worked its way into the Australian psyche, and the McKenzie brothers were not alone in their fascination with this tale of doomed hopes and fatal mistakes.

Chris, perhaps, was the more obsessed of the two. Graham simply liked camping and trekking; together, he and Chris had explored the wilderness of south-west Tasmania, Kakadu National Park and the Abel Tasman coastal track in New Zealand. Graham was willing to give anything a go, and had no problem with Chris’s desire to visit ‘Burke and Wills country’. Chris was especially keen to see the Dig Tree, an old coolibah still growing beside Cooper Creek. One member of the 1861 expedition, William Brahe, had waited three months for Burke and Wills at the Dig Tree before packing up and leaving just nine hours before the wayward expedition leaders actually did return.

A brand new Land Rover Freelander had been acquired especially for the journey. It belonged to Chris, who could afford it; he was a veterinarian with a practice in Orbost. Graham worked in a plant nursery on the outskirts of Melbourne (though he was training to be a landscape designer) and earned barely enough to support himself, now that his ex-wife and son were living in a separate house. His contribution to the trek had been in the preparation, which he had undertaken with his customary patience and attention to detail. On his advice, Chris had bought a hand pump, a pressure gauge, a set of radiator hoses, a pair of tyre levers, an adjustable spanner, four jerry cans, nine litres of engine oil, and an extra fan belt. After their hikes through various national parks, they already possessed the requisite tent, compass, sleeping bags, first aid kit, camp oven, Swiss army knife, aluminium water bottles and satellite phone.

Graham wasn’t about to make the same mistakes as Burke and Wills.

They had stayed a night in Mildura, visiting an old school friend, and had left a little late after enjoying a big fried brunch; it would have been uncivil to refuse their friend’s hospitality. But as they drove along the Silver City Highway, adjusting their original plans, Graham reminded Chris that the whole idea of this trip had been to take it in easy stages. They had plenty of time. They weren’t chasing a short-lived natural phenomenon or a seasonal migration or an agricultural show. The land was timeless, and they were looking to slow their pace. Graham, in particular, needed to slow his pace. The big city vibe had infected him; he had been rushing about trying to finish jobs, finish his training, keep an eye on his son, wrestle with the Tax Office and his wife’s lawyer . . .

‘I need to soak up the silence,’ he remarked. ‘I need to get out of there.’

Chris grunted.

‘I’m not breathing right,’ Graham continued. ‘My energy levels are fucked. I’m all disconnected.’

Chris said nothing. He was by far the less talkative of the two brothers, though Graham tended to quieten down if he spent any time in Chris’s company. Graham’s trouble, in Chris’s opinion, was that his ex-wife happened to be a neurotic hippy who spouted off about discovering emotional equilibriums and releasing tension and ingesting pure substances while simultaneously dumping on everyone close to her, knocking back huge quantities of prescription drugs and causing endless blow-ups at work (when she wasn’t taking sick days off to visit tarot readers and naturopaths).

Chris disliked her intensely, because she was always screwing with Graham’s head. Graham was an easygoing sort of bloke who, if he had married someone stable, would have been quite content with his life. He was a McKenzie, after all. McKenzies were quiet achievers, every one of them; they were thorough, patient and capable, and they didn’t indulge in the sort of histrionics that Graham’s wife had made her specialty. It could be argued, in fact, that the McKenzies were a little
too
quiet. Certainly Graham’s wife had been of that opinion; she had constantly complained that they didn’t
communicate
with each other, that they were
repressed
and
closed off
and impossible to talk to. She herself never seemed to shut up, so it wasn’t surprising that she found the McKenzies dull. Perhaps they were, a little. They had a way of choosing their words carefully, and absorbing ideas without comment. Their long, companionable silences were as expressive of comfort as cheerful noise might be in another family. But it never seemed to occur to Graham’s wife that when the McKenzies failed to respond in a spirited manner to her observations about the Life beyond Life, and healing crystals, and her own psychic intuition, it was because they found such observations ludicrous, and were too polite to say so.

Why Graham had married her was a mystery to them all. Perhaps he had found her alluringly exotic. Even Chris had to concede that she was stunning to look at and that Graham might have been a little bored with the inexpressive good sense of women like his sister – the kind of women with whom the McKenzies tended to socialise. They were country people, after all, and Graham’s wife wasn’t. She was a suburban refugee. A private school dropout whose own family was in a permanent state of surreptitious warfare.

No wonder Graham kept escaping into the bush. It was the only way he could survive.

‘I wish I could have brought Tian along,’ Graham suddenly observed, when they were close to the Eastern Time Zone boundary. He was referring to his son. ‘Tian would have loved this. He would have been right into it.’

Again, Chris made no reply. He knew why Tian hadn’t come. The boy’s mother wouldn’t have allowed it, and Tian, after all, was only four years old. Chris himself didn’t know if Tian was quite ready to undertake such a trip. Apart from anything else, the kid had problems. Of course he had problems. With a mother like that, and a divorce under way – it was inevitable.

Chris offered up a silent prayer of thanks that Tian wasn’t sitting in the back seat, screaming that high-pitched scream which sounded like a steam train whistle. One day, he knew, Tian would have to become involved. A trip into the wilderness would become his rite of passage. But until that day, Chris wasn’t going to be wishing him any closer than he was.