Fear Is the Rider (2 page)

He'd first seen the girl two days before. He was driving along the dust road west of the Darling River. The low scrub-covered plains around him stretched from horizon to horizon, grey-blue under the December sun that seemed to spread all over the sky. The cloud of red dust raised by the wheels of the tiny silver Honda Civic swirled and pulsated behind him like a burst of flame. Redness, whirling redness centred by the white sun. The heat was lethal, a tangible, killing thing that dried the life out of everything but the indestructible saltbush. Except for the saltbush the earth was naked, hard, unliving, red.

But in the car it was cool. The roaring air-conditioning unit numbed the brain but kept the body cool. The world outside the silver capsule was like a moving picture, slightly unreal, conveying its menace to the brain rather than the emotions. If you got out of the car the heat fell on you as though someone had thrown a bucket of dry hot water at you. So you didn't get out of the car if you could help it.

Ahead, far far ahead where the dead straight flat road dwindled to nothing, was another cloud of dust. Another vehicle, travelling slowly it seemed, some fifteen, twenty kilometres away. He glanced at the speedometer. One hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. The little car rolled steadily and smoothly over the shallow dust on the road. It took half an hour to catch up with the car ahead and then he had to slow down because the billowing cloud of dust thrown up by the other vehicle made it impossible for him to pass.

He tried several times, pulling to the far right-hand side of the road and accelerating into the shifting redness of the dust. But he couldn't even see beyond the bonnet of the Honda and had to fall back.

It was a hundred kilometres to the next town and he would have to crawl along at—he looked at the speedometer again—a little more than seventy kilometres an hour. It would take almost two hours to get there. The driver ahead wouldn't even know he was behind. He looked back through his own rear window. Nothing but the moving haze of dust.

From the dust it was putting up, whatever was ahead of him was a fairly heavy vehicle, probably a truck. He thought about sounding his horn in the hope that the other driver would pull to one side and let him past. But he was diffident. In any case, few truck drivers out west liked to let anybody pass. They'd sooner have somebody breathe their dust than breathe somebody else's.

The dust ahead died down slightly and he accelerated sharply. He caught a glimpse of some sort of square vehicle, then the dust swelled up again and he had to fall back. He'd better keep well away, he thought, or the dust would clog up the air-conditioning. He slowed down, took up station a couple of hundred metres behind the dust cloud in front and resigned himself to a couple of hours of slow boredom.

Suddenly the dust ahead disappeared and he could see quite clearly a brown Land Cruiser, heavily equipped with roll bars, roof rack, water tanks. It had encountered a floodway, a strip of concrete set down to protect the road against the rush of water that came across it once in every five or ten years when rain fell and briefly turned the desert into a vast inland sea.

He sent the Honda darting forward, trying to get past the Land Cruiser before it left the concrete strip. But the strip was only a couple of hundred metres long and he saw he had no hope. He tried a tentative tap on the horn; immediately the Land Cruiser pulled to one side and almost stopped.

Gratefully he drove past it, slowing down to wave his gratitude to the other driver.

It was a girl, a pretty girl he thought from the little he saw, with fair hair almost to her shoulders. Twenty, perhaps, a little younger than he was anyway. He smiled as he recognised in himself the automatic assessment a man makes looking at any woman. She raised her hand to her forehead in acknowledgment of his salute and then he was driving on dust again, behind him nothing but the opaque cloud. The Land Cruiser might never have been. He drove fast to relieve the girl of his dust cloud and well within the hour was pulling into the town of Rylock.

The word ‘town' has many connotations in Australia. Out here, deep in the Centre country, it meant three derelict houses, one fairly smart small wooden post office, two burnt-out buildings, a couple of ramshackle cottages, a general store cum petrol station and a large, well-built, but very shabby old hotel. The only life in the wide, dusty main street was an improbable goat forlornly chewing at some litter. On the veranda of the hotel a group of Aborigines, ragged old men, fat women, grubby children, sat in a torpor beside their dogs, turning their lightless eyes incuriously towards the silver Honda as it pulled up.

Inside the hotel two Aborigines were playing pool, two more, obviously stockmen, were at the bar. Three white men were at a table drinking beer with considerable concentration. Bush flies, a dartboard on the wall, a Pickering cartoon showing a prime minister with attenuated genitalia; a small oasis offering momentary, illusory relief from the heat.

All the men in the bar turned to look at the newcomer, not amiably, not with hostility, not even with interest.

A remarkably neat, well-scrubbed barman served him with beer and he leaned against the bar drinking slowly, wondering whether to drive on to the next town two hundred kilometres away or inquire about a room here.

He'd been there for almost half an hour and was finishing his second beer when the girl came in. She was wearing shorts and a yellow blouse and sandals, and she was indeed a pretty girl.

She hesitated in the doorway for a moment choosing at which point to approach the bar. Then she came and stood a couple of paces from him, conscious of but undisturbed by the gaze of the men in the bar.

‘Shandy, please,' she said to the barman. Confident and well-spoken, she was at ease in this environment, or at any rate appeared to be.

He waited until she had taken a sip of her drink before speaking.

‘Thanks for letting me past back there.'

She looked at him inquiringly, not understanding at first, but obviously realising from his clothing and his voice that he too was a stranger here.

‘I was in the Honda that passed you about a hundred Ks back.'

‘Oh yes. Nothing worse than eating someone's dust for miles. Doesn't matter to me. I never travel fast enough.'

‘Travel a lot?'

‘All the time really.'

So, as people do in a pub in the bush, they talked and learned a little about each other.

He learned that she was Katie Alton, a freelance photographer-journalist from Sydney, travelling the outback doing articles on anything that caught her interest.

She learned that he was John Shaw, a landscape architect, recently graduated, travelling from Sydney to Adelaide to be interviewed for a government job, taking the long way round because he had time and wanted to look at some of the desert vegetation.

Each of them knew instinctively that the other depended more on family money than their own earnings, at present, and because he was driving a new car and she was driving a very well-equipped four-wheel-drive vehicle, that their respective family money was not meagre. They were people from the same environment sending out signals to each other in this alien territory.

He saw a rather short, slender girl with wide eyes and mouth, fair skin and hair, nose slightly and attractively turned a little to one side, well-kept hands, expensive casual blouse and shorts, legs a trifle sturdier than perfection required, wearing no brassiere and not needing to. She, without looking, saw a tall, slim, athletic but studious man a little older than herself with black hair and a thin intelligent face.

They were willing to talk to each other and they drank very slowly to prolong the gentle skirmish.

‘Where to from here?' asked Shaw.

‘I'm going out along the Obiri Track.'

‘That's a bit rugged isn't it?'

‘Six hundred kilometres of hell and heat,' she said flippantly, ‘at least that's probably how I'll describe it. In fact my gallant Land Cruiser will glide over it without noticing it, but I'm not going to admit that.'

‘What's out there?'

‘There are some Aboriginal carvings at Pattersons Creek, and further along as well. I'll try to sell an article with photographs of them, and then I thought I'd try something along the lines of “lone woman's journey over the worst track in Australia”.'

She had a deep voice with a strange attractive accent, which, young as she was, he thought might have been accumulated through travel in many countries.

‘Isn't that all a bit chancy by yourself?'

‘I don't think so. All that can happen is that I break down. I've enough water and food to last me a month. Someone should come through eventually.'

‘Where is the Obiri Track anyway?'

‘About two hundred kilometres west of here. It runs due west from Yogabilla to Obiri, north of Lake Eyre.'

‘And where do you go after that?'

‘On up to Darwin, I think.'

‘Interesting life.'

‘I like it.'

Shaw tried hard to think of something else to say to prolong the conversation.

‘How long will you be on the Obiri Track?'

‘About a week. I'll probably spend two or three days at Pattersons Creek, then drift on slowly.'

‘Will you have another drink?'

‘No, thanks. I'd better be getting on. I want to make camp before sunset.'

Regretfully Shaw watched her leave the bar, then saw the Land Cruiser pull away along the dusty street. He sighed, mourning briefly, as every man does, the moving on of a lovely girl; decided he would spend the night in this pub and ordered another beer.

Yogabilla was a railway town with wide dirt streets, fifty or so timber and iron boxes that passed for houses, the inevitable huge old hotel, two general stores, a pleasant white-painted bungalow that was the police station, and a small brick post office and telephone exchange attended by one woman, sometimes.

Shaw could see the town for half an hour before he arrived, far across the morning sun-washed plain of sparse saltbush. From a distance, resting in the shimmering heat haze it looked exotic and interesting, but as he drove in it became the usual dull, dirty, despairing outback township.

He thought about seeking a cup of coffee, abandoned the idea as ridiculous and drove on down the dust road towards Adelaide, two days away.

He wasn't actually seeing much of the desert vegetation, he thought, mainly because it was too damned hot to get out of the car and look at it. He had another week before his appointment in Adelaide, but had already decided to go straight through and spend his waiting time by the coast where at least he could swim.

Ten kilometres south of Yogabilla a track broke away from the road and ran west. By the side of the road was a large sign. Shaw stopped to read it.

DANGER. OBIRI TRACK. FROM HERE TO OBIRI HEAT, SHIFTING SANDS, SOAKS AND VARIOUS OTHER HAZARDS MAKE TRAVELLING EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. IN THE EVENT OF BREAKDOWN DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CAR. BEFORE DEPARTURE REPORT TO THE POLICE STATION AT YOGABILLA. THERE IS NO DRINKING WATER OR PETROL FOR THE NEXT 600 KILOMETRES.

To Shaw in his air-conditioned capsule the sign seemed theatrical. He looked out along the track as it disappeared into the great Stony Desert. It did not appear a great deal worse than the main road. A ribbon of dust running due west, not very different from the face of the desert itself except that there was no saltbush growing on the track.

The girl had said she was going to spend a couple of days at Pattersons Creek. How far out was Pattersons Creek? He had the feeling that it wasn't all that far. Surely the Honda could travel some distance along the track. It certainly could if it were no worse than what he could see. It would be pleasant to see that girl again. He had five days to spare.

He could just run out to Pattersons Creek, if it were close enough, for the day and come back to spend the night in the pub at Yogabilla. It was worth talking to the police about it anyway. He might even see some interesting vegetation at Pattersons Creek. He smiled at his own self-deception, turned the car around and drove back to the police station at Yogabilla.

Only that black-and-white sign POLICE at the front gate of the bungalow indicated its function. On the veranda a middle-aged man wearing shorts held up by braces and a khaki shirt was sprinkling a couple of desiccated plants from a watering can.

Not quite sure how to address a policeman, Shaw walked up the path towards him. The man turned his heavy, weather-reddened face towards Shaw.

‘G'day.'

‘G'day,' said Shaw.

‘S'right. C'n I do for you.'

Shaw moved on to the veranda out of the sun.

‘I was thinking of poking my nose out along the Obiri Track, and I saw the sign that says report to the police station.'

The sergeant stood upright and looked at the small silver Honda parked outside the gate. Further up the street outside the pub were trucks, four-wheel-drives, huge utilities. The Honda looked like a spaniel puppy among wolfhounds.