Everywhere We Look, page 2
And the air thickens, beats—pulse-like. Tree trunks morph and mutate in the gelatinous atmosphere. The stench suffocates and, over there, another flash of light. And over there, another shrub, shaking from its base. And the giggling, crisp and sudden, sheering past her in a gust that makes her duck.
White noise mutes. Air sharpens. And footsteps come slow. One. By. One. Towards her. Controlled and deliberate. The vehicle on the road nears, its engine loud enough to break her concentration, and she runs for it.
•
Out of the ute climbs a young man, a head of thick brown hair, his torso muscular through his shirt, which is lightweight despite the cold. His eyes are dark and they travel over her from across the bonnet. She expects him to speak but he doesn’t, and so she doesn’t either. If this were a movie, it might be the meet-cute, the scene in which the awkward but handsome stranger stops to help the damsel in distress. But outside of movies, conventional good looks don’t necessarily signal a good guy. If anything, this man’s thick neck, his superhero arms . . . they remind her he could bury her out here, if he wanted to. Perhaps in the city this moment might have been different. Perhaps she would have rejoiced at this help, been comforted by the proximity of a fellow human. But out here with no one around, the sight of this ute, of this man, has caused an instant ache down the side of her neck. She stretches her jumper lower over her jeans and watches him round the ute, make for the passenger door.
It opens before he reaches the handle.
‘I got it, I got it. I’m not a bloody invalid.’ An older man swings his legs out from the ute, strikes a crutch onto the clay and pulls himself to stand, shoos the younger man—his son, by the looks—away. His left foot is bandaged and he hovers it above the ground, stumbles across the uneven surface, glaring at the younger man’s attempts to help.
Something about this spectacle makes her shoulders relax slightly.
‘Well,’ the older man says, looking at Melissa. ‘What do we have here?’
Without waiting for an answer, they pick their way down the small embankment to Melissa’s car, take stock of the situation. She watches them from the side of the road, unsure if she wants to follow, not knowing if whatever was in the bush still remains but also not sure how exactly to explain herself.
‘You got someone out here with ya?’ the older man asks, and she descends the small slope after all.
She considers the rustling bush. The thing dashing between trees. The giggling. Something had just happened, but what?
‘Only me,’ she says.
The men share a look, turn back to her.
‘So you did this?’ He points to the wheels, one flat, one spare, laid out on the ground by the hatchback. He rests his spare hand on his side, tilts his groin forwards. ‘You’ve done well.’
The cold occurs to her and she wraps her arms around herself, hunches, nods to the men. The younger man—yet to speak—walks around the far side of the hatchback, suddenly straightens, nose first, as if a scent has caught his attention. He turns to the pine forest, ventures in. She makes to speak, to warn him of the footsteps, the feel of the air, but the older man speaks first.
‘How’d this happen?’ He inspects the flat tyre.
‘I swerved to miss a roo.’
‘Ah.’ The man shakes his head. ‘There’s your first problem, right there. Never swerve for that kind of thing. Something jumps out at you when you’re driving, you head straight for it, got it? But don’t worry, love. We’ll have you on your way soon enough. Get you out of the cold, eh?’
Melissa’s not sure where in this conversation she is supposed to contribute, so she simply stands there nodding, forces a smile.
The older man reaches for the spare tyre with his free hand while balancing on his crutch.
‘Oh here, let me.’ Melissa reaches for the wheel.
‘No, no! What kind of gentleman would I be to let a lady do this? You wait over there. Don’t get yourself dirty. You’ll be back on the road before you know it.’
Melissa processes all of this. She was midway through a successful tyre change before they arrived. She’s not afraid of getting her hands dirty.
It’s just that something strange happened. Something interrupted her.
The young man steps out from the brush, pulls a bramble from his shoulder and tosses it aside, speaks for the first time. ‘Anything happen here—before we came?’ He’s addressing Melissa.
The older man pauses, glances over his shoulder at the younger man and they swing their heads towards her in unison.
‘Ah, um, no. What do you mean?’
‘Here.’ The older man rolls the wheel to the younger one, who lifts it onto the hub, begins fastening nuts to the wheel.
‘Thank you for stopping,’ she says, thumbing her phone, suddenly urgent to perform connection, to show these strangers that someone’s waiting for her, that someone knows where she is.
The older man glances at her phone. ‘Useless as tits on a bull out here.’ He leans on his crutch. ‘No reception.’
Melissa’s cheeks warm. She sends a silent thanks to the dark for hiding the rush of blood to her face.
‘But don’t worry. Irregardless of how I look, I am not the killer from Wolf Creek.’ He laughs at this, splays his hands wide as if showing off a costume.
Melissa takes in his flannelette shirt and jeans, coupled with the grey stubbled beard of the sadistic roadside killer in the movie. She takes a step away from him.
‘I reckon my addition here’—he taps his crutch—‘would make me a pretty good bad guy in one of them flicks. Imagine me comin’: tap, tap, tap, and then . . . BAM.’
Melissa jumps at this, the man having lurched towards her.
He retreats, laughing.
Melissa glances at the younger man, who looks quickly back to the wheel. Acquitted of all charges, she thinks.
This will be over soon.
‘Nah, just kidding around,’ the older man continues, still laughing. ‘You’re alright. We’re the good guys, don’t you worry. You’re right.’
Melissa feigns a smile. By her thigh, she rearranges the keys in her hand so that the largest one protrudes between her forefinger and the next, the way her mother had shown her as a girl.
‘So what are you doin’ out here all by yourself?’
‘Just passing through,’ she says, surprising herself with a lie (again). ‘On my way to Thomastown.’
The younger man pushes himself to stand, hauls the damaged wheel into the boot, arranges the jack, the tools neatly into their slots. Replaces the compartment cover.
‘Well, I’m just glad it was us that found you,’ the older man says. ‘You never know who you might come across out here.’ He’s too close now. She smells rum on his breath. ‘It’s a bit silly of you, really, being out here alone at night.’
‘Yes, well, I’d better get going.’ She smiles, edges closer to the driver’s door.
The younger man slams the boot and strides over, stopping when he’s hip to hip with the other man. Melissa edges further still, feels for the doorhandle behind her.
‘Thank you so much for this. It’s very kind of you.’ She smiles even harder, locating the handle and fumbling it open.
‘Like I said, we’re happy to help, aren’t we, son?’
The younger man nods, face unreadable.
‘I really appreciate it, but I must get going.’ She opens the door. ‘Thank you again.’
She forces herself to climb calmly into the car, casually hits the door-lock button. Almost cries at the comfort of the starting engine. She accelerates up and out of the clearing, takes long, shaky breaths. On the road, she flicks on her high beams and speeds into the night, leaving the men and their vehicle shrinking in her rear-view mirror.
2.
BRIDIE
Bridie closes the door behind her, careful to conserve the warmth inside for her return. She zips her jacket over her chin so her lips press lightly against fleece, edges her hands into her pockets to trap warmth there too. She looks to the black sky, inhales, holds clear country air in her lungs for a moment before watching her breath escape into the night. She treads down four steps and onto the road, her boots a dry crunch on gravel.
She’d performed these same actions earlier today, closing warmth inside the walls of her own home and keeping the baby safe within. When the latch had closed then, it snipped an invisible cord, cutting her off from the tiny human she’d grown in her body and kept near ever since. Walking down the steps then had been like pushing through water, each tread an effort against an incoming tide; Robert’s words—We’ll be fine—urging her onwards.
Now, the night is wide and cold, and the house behind her a temporary home for the weekend. From the trees beside her, night-birds cajole and confer, their calls a steady, revving engine that pauses, shifts up a gear, persists a moment, changes back. Above, a frogmouth watches over the cottage from its perch, continues its siren call. The low repeated note reminds Bridie of the evacuate tone at Freya’s school. Evacuate now. Evacuate now. Mostly, the night is still but every now and then a breeze lifts, delivering a clatter of cutlery or the muted hum of people from the restaurant over the hill.
Bridie crunches down the path and nods to a horse standing still by the fence.
‘Evening,’ she says, tipping an imaginary hat.
It whinnies at her and she jumps, lunges away, imagines it laughing at her behind her back.
She looks to Wisemans Crossing, bordering the property across the field, pictures Melissa’s blue hatchback winding along it, slowing to turn through the gates, traversing the cattle grids there.
A second later, as if she’d wished them into existence, the headlights appear. If that’s all it took, I would have done it earlier.
The car slows, makes the turn as prophesied, and Bridie confirms it as Melissa’s hatchback when it passes under the single streetlight. Her relief at Melissa’s arrival tinges with resentment. She’s glad Melissa is finally here, and pleased she can abandon her trek through the cold to the restaurant to use the phone again, but she’s also a little peeved. Bridie’s been here with Cassandra since four, as arranged. She glances at her watch, switches on its light; it’s now almost eight o’clock.
The tread of her boots gathers more gravel as she swivels, turns back to the house where she left Cassandra tending the fire. It’ll take a few minutes for Melissa to navigate the property, winding through vineyards and past the restaurant. She’ll no doubt stop there to ask for directions, which will bring her here to this orange-dirt road and Bridie with her hands in her pockets.
Bridie wouldn’t say the afternoon’s been bad—it’s been nice, really, spending time with Cassandra. They’d had a good laugh over dinner, enjoyed their meal, Cassandra’s executive role providing endless anecdotes to gossip about. But at times the conversation was stilted and Bridie had longed for Melissa’s presence to smooth over Cassandra’s brashness.
But awkward moments with Cassandra aren’t the cause of Bridie’s resentment. Every time Bridie’s little Oliver has popped into her mind’s eye, the landscape has greyed. She’s never been away from him like this: not for this long, and certainly not so far away. While Melissa and Cassandra had lobbied for this weekend for months, Bridie had stalled, worried her baby was still too little to leave, that she’d fret for him the whole time and he for her. But she’d felt obliged to come and so had agreed, had then spent the last few weeks anxious about it. So now that Melissa is turning up hours late, Bridie can’t help but feel cheated out of time she could have spent at home with Oliver, enjoying his sweet scent and savouring his impossible softness against her chest.
She skids on a loose rock, finds her balance and pauses, hands on hips, considers the house on the hill. It’s imposing from here, silhouetted against the dull night behind. On the far side, the land drops to a steep outcrop, which plunges to a valley beyond, making the house appear almost like a cardboard cut-out from here, flat against a blank background. Aside from the Milky Way, pressing insistently through patchy clouds, yellow light emanating from the house provides the only light in the landscape; she avoids looking directly at it to preserve her night vision.
Bridie pulls her beanie lower over her brow and runs her gaze along the house’s rooftop, sectioned into three uneven gables. She had thought the roofline charming this afternoon when they’d driven up this private road under a blue sky. Her window had been down and the air was warm and bright with birdsong, and this weekend away had seemed like a good idea after all. We’ll be fine. But now, in the shadows, the complicated roofline makes her think of Shirley Jackson’s novel and that terrifying house.
Bridie had been obsessed with The Haunting of Hill House for a while, had read it several times, sought out reviews and analyses, watched the screen adaptations. She’d read about the uncanniness of the home, how it sheltered but also threatened, menaced, concealed. Now that she thinks about it, she’d read it just after she’d agreed to marry Justin. Maybe she’d been anxious about the prospect of settling down with him. Maybe her obsession was a way of processing the anxiety. But it didn’t matter in the end. Who knows what Justin’s up to these days?
Maybe she’d just liked the book.
Bridie balls her fists, flexes her fingers. Robert says she must stop overthinking everything. And here she is, doing it again, about a novel.
Over the rise, Melissa’s headlights glow. Bridie waves her arms, shields her eyes from the approaching light, notices the beams drop. The hatchback pulls alongside Bridie and she waits while the passenger window lowers. Bridie leans into the cab and her eyes readjust; it could be the lack of light within the car but Melissa looks sickly pale.
Melissa seeks Bridie’s eyes in the dark, sighs in relief. ‘Oh, Bridie, am I glad to see you!’
‘Me too,’ says Bridie. Me too.
She climbs into the passenger seat, fastens her seatbelt. It’s warm in the car, and she cups her fingers around the heating vents, tries not to show that she’s frustrated with Melissa.
‘I can’t believe the trip took you three hours,’ she says, calculating the difference in time between when Melissa says she left and now. Bridie and Cassandra had taken only two hours to drive here, she tells Melissa, ‘and we stopped at no fewer than four roadside stalls for fruit and veg along Wisemans Crossing.’ You won’t get fresher than this, Cassandra had proclaimed each time she slowed the car, pulled off the road.
Bridie points to the house perched above them on the hill. ‘Just continue straight ahead. The road ends at the house.’
The car rolls a little on the start, and Bridie reaches for the grab handle. She unzips her jacket while Melissa apologises for being late, explains that she had car trouble on the way. ‘It’s a long story but I should text Rich; he’ll have expected to hear from me by now.’
‘Oh, there’s no reception here. You have to use the restaurant’s landline. I was headed there just now to call you, in fact. If you drive us back down, I’ll introduce you to Sue, guardian of the landline.’
Bridie has had the pleasure of dealing with Sue twice already. The first time was right after they’d arrived. A note on the cottage kitchen table had warned about unreliable phone reception and said that the phone at the restaurant was available to guests. Bridie had made the trek down the hill and across the vineyard to let Robert know that she and Cassandra were here.
The second time Bridie had asked Sue for the phone was after dinner. During the meal, while Bridie forked sirloin steak coated with mushroom sauce into her mouth, her mind had been at home with mashed pumpkin and grapes sliced longways in half. The thing is Oliver hasn’t long stopped breastfeeding and he isn’t impressed with taking his milk out of a cup.
Over dessert Bridie had asked Cassandra about her boys: Did they take well to cups? But Cassandra had been vague and distracted, couldn’t seem to remember anything about the baby stage with her kids. So, when Cassandra had excused herself to visit the bathroom, Bridie didn’t think it could hurt to make another phone call home, just to check. She’d slipped across to the bar and asked Sue for the phone.
The conversation had started out normally enough. Robert had been chirpy.
‘Another call so soon?’ he’d said. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
The house was surprisingly quiet behind him. At this hour, she’d expected to hear Oliver crying, wondering where his deserter mother had gone. She’d pictured Robert cradling the phone between ear and shoulder, Oliver grizzling and grabbing at the phone from his hip. But apparently Oliver had eaten his dinner and was happily chewing on the spout of his plastic cup, the contents long and contentedly drained. Bridie was pleased to hear this, of course she was, but some small part of her chafed with disappointment. Had she wanted Robert to fail? For Oliver not to cope? Could she really be so readily replaced by a plastic spout?
Bridie had twisted the cord connecting the handset to the phone, moved her hand over her ear to block the restaurant’s noise. ‘I was just near the phone and thought I’d see how dinner went,’ she said, watching Cassandra head back to the table and refill her glass.
‘All good here.’ Robert crunched something while he spoke—probably his beloved cashews.
‘He’s not on the iPad, is he?’
Robert’s silence answered the question.
‘Rob, it’s bad for him to have too much screen—’
‘Honey, everything is under control here. Enjoy your weekend away and stop thinking about us.’
