A 'writing on the road' Australian Outback short story 'GIRL SOLO On the Road"

‘GIRL SOLO ON THE ROAD’ A Lost-Love in the Australian Outback. (Short Story)

It sat in the morning mist of a lakeside forest. His lost home on wheels, dreaming in the mist. Memories were still hazy, like the mist. Jane. Was she there inside that silvery metal shell? And Griffin, their white bichon-poodle, a memory as fuzzy as the mist? They’d probably be curled up, snuggling upstairs in the double bed that wound down from the ceiling. The warmth of that memory wrapped itself around him like a hug in spite of the chill as he walked towards it and he ached to crawl in with them, hugging them both, leaving space for Griffin like a fluffy warm pillow between them. His heart leapt ahead to the moment when he would hear Jane’s cry and Griffin’s yelp and clattering bark of joy when they slid open the rumbling steel door to find him standing there. After so long. After the nightmare train-wreck train of events that had led him hundreds of kilometres away that night in a storm long ago when he had hitched a ride to find a service station to get a can of diesel fuel after running out and pulling onto the verge on the highway. A car had stopped for him, but before he could climb out at the next service station, an injured car hijacker with a gun had jumped into the back seat and ordered them on, forcing greater and greater speed on the rain-scoured highway until the accident when all were killed, but only part of him, his mind, and he staggered across bush country towards a light that he took to be a farmhouse to begin slow time of searching recovery. Now finally, after following the trail of a girl and a little white dog on journeying in a silver Winnebago RV, he had tracked them down. Then he saw a pair of work boots sitting outside the van. Large men’s work boots, left out overnight The sight kicked him in the guts. Stopped him dead in his tracks. He’d dreamt of this moment of re-uniting, but never for an instant that she might have joined with another. Jane had found somebody else. Already. Griffin, the little dog inside, started a clatter of barking in the enclosed space of the van. The clattering felt like his heart’s beating. He felt panic and grief strike him like a fireball. “Oh, Jane...” He turned away. By the time her tousled face came to a window to check on the rumpus and she blinked sleepily at the misty dawn, he’d already melted into the trees. Griffin kept barking and howling, the sound following him as he went through the trees. To Robbie’s burning ears, the barking hounded him, like the sound of mockery. He had been stupid to think she would wait. And yet... ... what they had together was special, he thought. Now she had lost him a second time. He had walked away from Jane once more, but this time not into forgetfulness, but into a journey of daily, growing memories and heartache, traversing the country as he once planned to do with Jane, trying to forget on purpose this time. ‘Swallow me up,’ he thought, disappearing into nothingness. You’d never imagine in a vast continent like Australia that you would ever run into someone twice on the road, she thought. Yet it happened, and it had just happened to her now. She found herself making camp near a familiar yellow and white caravan on a bend of the river. It belonged to Joyce, a cheery fellow traveller and her retiree husband Keith and here they were again, parked nearby. They’d struck up a friendship only a few weeks ago, but Jane had moved at dawn one morning and she hadn’t wanted to wake them up to say goodbye. Now Joyce was at her door with a friendly grin, while Griffin squealed, barked and pranced in eagerness to say hello. “I see you’ve got ghostly company again,” Joyce said, looking down at the men’s work boots dropped beside the slide-out step of my RV, one boot leaning against the other. Jane had been advised before setting out that for solo female travellers it was a wise precaution to place a pair of large men’s work boots outside the RV at night in order to deter any men with ideas. “I suppose they’re some measure of protection,” Jane said. “Probably better than a sign saying ‘beware of the fluffy dog’. But I’ll probably never know if they’ve succeeded in turning a man away.” “They have, I can tell you,” Joyce said. “Do you remember when we were camping not far from each other at that misty lake in the forest?” “Yes.” Joyce held up a mobile phone. “I’ve got evidence that your trick really does give snooping men the boot. Watch.” Puzzled, Jane stepped outside and joined her in the shadow of the RV. The friend in the road tapped the screen of her phone and brought up moving images. She handed the phone to Jane. Jane recognized a glimpse of a familiar lake on the screen and then the image of her RV sitting among trees. And a moving figure. A hooded man, walking towards her van. A man with a familiar stride. She went cold. The man kept going until just before reaching the doorway. She heard the bottled sound of Griffin’s barking coming from inside the van and she remembered the peculiar, insistent sound of it. The man stopped, bent his head to look at the RV’s slide-out doorstep. He was looking at the pair of boots on the ground beside it. She saw it stop him, swaying him as if he’d been caught in a breeze, then he shrugged his shoulders. He turned around revealing a glimpse of a face in the shadow of the hood, a fair man with a rather melancholy eyes. Jane almost dropped the phone. She quivered. On the screen was a face as shocking as a ghost’s. “Didn’t you hear your little dog going mad that day?” her fellow traveller said. “When the stranger spotted those size 12 men’s work boots sitting outside your RV, he just turned around and vanished, into the trees.” “Robbie!” It was a whisper. “You mean you know him?” Joyce said. Jane choked out a reply. Was it a yes or just a groan? Robbie had found them - and left again. He’d seen the boots. A man’s boots. And he’d thought... Had he really thought that? Could he, seriously? Why hadn’t he yelled, kicked at the door, hammered on the side of the van? But that wasn’t Robbie. Robbie respected her, her wishes and her decisions, like no other man she have ever met. She made a vow in that moment. ‘I’m going to undo this terrible mistake. I’m going to find him.’ In a sense it was a renewed vow. She was already sworn to a hopeless quest for Robbie, at least spiritually. After he’d just vanished from their lives one rainy night and never come back, she had determined, after a year of waiting, to go on with the journey they had once planned together. It was as if she hoped to encounter him on the road, evoke his presence in the sharing of new sights and experiences, travelling around the vast arid island continent of Australia, doing the last thing they had planned to do together. She had been so excited and Robbie, though more reluctant at first to leave everything behind, had caught her excitement and thrown himself into it. She had taken Robbie’s memory, and the shared dream, with her on the journey, with only fluffy Griffin for company. But the ghost quest had suddenly turned into a real one. She gave the woman back her phone, felt an urge to bend, pick up the work boots and hurl them into the bush. Empty boots. Upon that thought, something had stopped her. No, she would hang on to them. For now. They would be a potent reminded of the emptiness she desperately needed to fill again, not on a dream quest, but a real one, as real as the creased and scraped leather of those boots. Jane scoured a map of Australia, going over the terrain like a camera in a space satellite. He had found them here. She tapped the map on her iPad screen. A small lake on the way to South Australia. It was their big dream to cross the driest continent on earth, beginning in Sydney and spanning the Nullarbor plain to Perth - with one diversion, a trip half way up the middle of Australia’s to the red centre, taking in a visit to Uluru, the great red monolith once known as Ayers Rock. Was it possible that he would be on the same journey as she was, without her, fulfilling a long held dream? Would he still pursue it after what had happened? “Come on, Griff. Let’s go fetch Robbie!” That spoken name was like pressing a trigger in the dog. Griffin yelped and twisted his head this way and that as if struggling to extract sense from what he had just heard. He hadn’t forgotten Robbie’s name, or Robbie. He loved him as much as she did, maybe too much she used to sometimes think a little jealously. Robbie won people, and animals. Jane sat the dog on the floor next to her driver’s seat, ruffled his head and made him comfortable on a mat, tethering him on a clip for safety. He kept looking up at her sideways, showing a questioning white of an eye, a sliver of moon like an emerging hope. Could he dare hope that what he had heard could happen? Griffin was an excellent traveller and he had known nothing but a life in the van since a pup. He was also a great listener, which made her soliloquies over long driving stretches seem a little less crazy. “You’re got to help me sniff him out, Griff,” she said as they drove through the stubbly dryness of South Australia towards Port Augusta on the way to the Nullarbor Plain and the great trek across the continent. “We’ve got a choice to make soon at Port Augusta though, a crossroads of Australia. Do we head north to the red centre and the Big Rock or keep going clear across the map?” It had been a few weeks since Robbie had come upon their van in the mist. If he’d chosen to go on a diversion to the Rock, he might have finished that leg of the journey by now, then possibly continued the big dream of crossing the Nullarbor Plain on the Eyre Highway between Adelaide and Perth. “What do we do, Griff? The heart, I suppose. We can’t resist a call from the heart. But we might be doing it all for nothing and we may have to double back on ourselves to do the Nullarbor crossing we planned to do together.” They turned inland. A destination sign spelt out remote names like Woomera and Coober Pedy - and Alice Springs more than a thousand miles away. Travel was a sensual pleasure punctuated by endless stretches of boredom, she thought like the endless stretches of scrub passing by as she progressed into the growing dryness of central Australia, but the most interesting parts and the parts she accumulated over the miles were less about events and more about the journey across the landscape of her emotions, the impact of boredom itself and the reflection it brought. She recalled first meeting Robbie on a cruise in Egypt on the Nile. The sacred spaces of temples and the pharaohs’ tombs had unnerved him. “Eerie,” he said. “Not really. They truly believed.” She pointed to a wall painting of a pharaoh meeting the gods. “These scenes are from the greatest travel book ever written, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, are all about the soul’s journey through eternity where the king is met by ministering beings, jackal-guardians and the pantheon of gods and goddesses who help him on the road and guide him through the dangers of the crossing.” “Crossing?” he said. “To an afterlife. They didn’t want to go of course, but they accepted that they must move on to another existence and they brought their beliefs to life in these vivid images.” Usually, on the road, she did not dwell on the past. Somehow the past did not exist in the freedom of travel. Travel was about today and the future. The road ahead. But the past today was like the unsteadying weight of a caravan that she saw being towed by a car ahead, she thought. She moved out and overtook. She saw a pair of wedge-tail eagles ripping and clawing at the body of a kangaroo, and wondered at the scale of the carnage in remote Australia. Like milestones, dead animals marked the route, furry, feathered and scarlet mounds of sadness. Wildlife shockingly stilled by collision with flying metal. She tried wherever possible to look away, but the cumulative assault gathered like mud around a tyre, wearying her, dulling and slowing her thoughts down to pessimistic introspection. Would it have been better if he had died in that crash and his body had been found? It was a renegade thought that she quickly put away. ‘Robbie, don’t be too far away,’ she said in a murmur. Griff twitched one fluffy white flap-ear at the sound of the name. He was getting used to hearing the name again as it cropped up frequently in her murmurings. The town of Woomera would be a good place to check for Robbie. A fan of early space pioneering he was attracted to the history of the place, including its role as a cold war testing ground for weapons. It was the heart if a rocket testing range the size of the Great Britain and was still used from tine to time for international projects, a sort of mysterious X-Files town where things went on behind hangar doors. A space town in a whole continent of space. She turned off the highway. There was a campsite at Woomera, but first she’d take a spun round the town. A closed, shuttered place, brightened by a field display of rockets and missiles in all shapes and sizes, piercing the sky above the town. A few visitors around taking snaps. But no Robbie. She drove to the camp where she checked in and showed the manager a photo of Robbie on her phone. A head shake. ”Sorry, Luv.” A walk a round the park, checking RVs, caravans and campers, failed to produce any results, although she did come across a campsite pub, Cudgee Bar, an iron shed where she heard a cheery halloo emerge from inside. Joyce - and her silent husband Keith. Again. “What are the chances of running into you again?” Joyce said, drawing her inside where she found travellers sitting round a well-stocked bar. “You sit here and wash away the road dust with a cold beer or two and bring us up to date on your search.” “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pored over that video you sent me,” Jane said. “It’s been my lifeline. I even put in up on my blog and on YouTube. You’ve gone viral, Joyce.” “But still no Robbie.” “No Robbie.” “You poor dear,” the older woman said a powdery voice. “And how’s your little white dog? I hope he chewed up those boots that caused all the trouble...” It was a comfort to share an evening with a friend on the road. She didn’t have many, except for the silent ones who followed her blog yet rarely posted a comment. Tomorrow she would move on to the opal mining town of Coober Pedy, where people lived underground in homes cut out of the rock to escape the heat of summer. Underground houses to last for eternity. Like Egyptian tombs. Maybe Robbie would go there for the Opals, though he wouldn’t like the reminder of tombs. Jane’s Blog We stopped at the side of the road at the opal mining town of Coober Pedy and stared at the sight of hillocks, little hills left by the digging of opals that crammed the landscape like tiny pyramids. In their hundreds, maybe thousands as far as the eye could see. “You like to dig, Griff,” I said to the dog. “Do you reckon you could dig that many holes?” Signs said it was a dangerous place to take a walk. Hidden shafts were everywhere. Take one careless step backwards and you could disappear down a disused shaft and nobody would ever know. Sadly the expanse of Australia has a grim history of hiding away the remains of the dead and the murdered. Robbie had been walking around the road kill in gibbous moonlight until a truck on the highway caught him in its lights and stopped for him. Nobody travelled the Nullarbor at night except truckies in their big rigs lined with fairy lights, weary men fighting boredom, overweight from too much truck-stop food as they chased after killer deadlines. The dead bodies at the side of the road told the story. Road kill. Kangaroos, wombats, emus, dingoes, even the odd hulk of a wild camel carcass. Robbie clambered up into the high cab, into a cloister, lit by dashboard lights and a driver in a uniform blue singlet, enveloped by an unction of warm diesel fumes and some kind of scent, insect repellent perhaps. “Where ya goin, Mate?” “Your way.” “Across the ‘Bor.” “All the way.” “On foot at night? You could have been just another bump in the night on my bull-bars, wearing that camo coat and hood. You were as invisible as a ghost out there. Wouldn’t even have known I’d hit you.” “Thanks. For stopping.” The driver ground the gears and they pulled away, the big engine rumbling and straining to suck the rig out of its inertia. “Why on your own?” “I got dumped,” Robbie said. “Woman trouble?” “You could say.” “Tell me about it.” “Yeah, I suppose it happens to plenty.’ ‘No, I mean tell me about it. We’ve got time to pass.” He meant it. He wanted to know. So Robbie shrugged inside his coat and told him about the plans he and Jane had of crossing the Nullarbor together how they put all their savings together to buy the Winnebago RV, then about the rainy night and the accident. His story was punctuated by a thud of a soft, heavy body hitting the steel wall front of their truck as they hammered through the night. The driver did not even wince. “Dumb roos never learn.” Then Robbie went on to tell about the joy of finding them again in the mist and about the shock of seeing the boots on the ground outside and about walking away a second time. Was that a groan of the rig, or from the driver beside him? “Mate, mate, mate. You’ve fucked up bad. Made two big mistakes right there.” “What do you mean?” “Mistake number one. You should have got her out of bed whoever the poor lonely girl was with. Kicked the door down if you had to.” “I respect Jane too much for that.” “Respect?” He almost spat it out. “You’ve got to grab what’s yours.” “I give Jane her space.” “You don’t get hitched to give each other space, Mate. You get hitched to jump into each other’s skins, in every kind of way. Maybe you never had hold of her and that’s why she’s slipped away.” Was he right? “Well, she didn’t take long finding someone else.” “Mistake number two, mate. The work boots. How can you be sure there was even a bloke inside the van?” “They weren’t her boots.” “Hers, all right.” “Not that size.” “You don’t get it. She probably bought them from a charity Op Shop. Did it ever occur to you that she put them outside for protection? It’s an old dodge single ladies use when they’re on the road solo. They sit them outside like a pair of leathery old guard dogs. Keeps pests away. Of the male kind.” Robbie felt a thump to his body as if they had struck an animal in the night. “Oh, God...” “Point is, you’ll never know. You didn’t grab hold of your problem. Or your woman, seems to me.” “I made a terrible mistake?” “Your mistake was loose grip. So where is she now?” “I don’t know,” he said in a despairing tone. “We planned for so long to cross Australia and maybe she’s doing it without me, thinking I’m lost and gone forever.” “Sounds like you’ve both got a long journey ahead of you.” “We met on a journey, you know. On a Nile Cruise holiday. That was a long journey too.” “It won’t seem as long as this one.” They drove on into the dark void of the Nullarbor night. Robbie saw a road sign, a campsite ahead. He asked the truck driver to pull over. “You’d better let me off here,” he said. “Here is nowhere,” the man said. “Yes, but there’s a campsite. She might be here.” “Hm. I could wait a minute while you take a quick shifty around,” the driver said. “But I’d be pushing it.” “No, you’ve got a deadline.” “And you?” “I’ll just hitch another ride later.” “Suit yourself. Have a happy ending.” There was no sign of the silver home on wheels. No Jane. No Griffin. Just a collection of caravans and motorhomes pulled up for the night. It was like trying to peer into thick mist. Jane’s Blog. A cry from the heart. Robbie, where are you? [Blog 2 of the day] BUT WAIT... My cry from the heart may have found an answer, or at least a tantalizing hint of one. I’ve been pulling into campsites and roadhouses along the way to check for Robbie and this morning we stopped at a roadside diner. I spotted a man at a table, a thin, shaggy haired guy in a day-glow yellow coat. He was just finishing a gargantuan breakfast, his table festooned with empty plates. A long distance bike rider - I’d seen his bike outside. They needed to eat vast amounts of food. They burn it off over the relentless kilometres. I always feel a mixture of sympathy and admiration for these solitary and heroic journeyers, a different breed from the lycrad performers in cities who waft along with a virtuous air as if their pumping legs and spinning wheels - anachronistic windmills - are generating clean energy to save our planet and we ought to be grateful. I grabbed a coffee and raisin toast to go and when I came out of the diner, I spotted the cyclist outside, fiddling with saddlebags on his bike. On an impulse, I spoke to him. “I’m sure I’ve passed you a few times on the road,” I said. He smiled. He took a while answering, as if the solitude of the road, hours spent slowly turning pedals, winding lonely days into lonely nights, had stolen his powers of speech. He had to reach somewhere to find vocabulary after prolonged separation from human contact. “I’m sure I wasn’t passing you,” he said. “A long haul on a bike.” “Five thousand kilometres and counting.” It turned out he was a charity worker who had decided one day to take eight months off and pedal around Australia. “It’s all about participating in life,” he said. He was also a Christian and he shyly revealed a gold cross that he kept on his handlebars. How many cars, vans and trucks had passed him by on the road? How many travellers had he seen but ignored him? On another impulse, I showed him a photo of Robbie on my phone. “Ever happen to come across this guy on the road?” He shook his shaggy head. Yet another impulse made me dig up the video showing the hooded figure moving away from my van in the mist. I held up the phone to his pale, faraway eyes. Now the long distance rider’s shaggy brows drew together in a frown. “Funny enough - there was a guy at the side of the road one day just at dusk. Guy in a hoodie like that. I stopped and we chatted for a while.” “You going all the way across the Nullarbor on a bike?” he said to me. “You going all the way on foot?” I said to him. “I hitch lifts with trucks mostly. Never seem to get anywhere though.” “Sorry I can’t give you a lift, brother,” I told him. “But I pray you have a successful and happy crossing... Funny, I remember the guy in the hood, because I started pumping up a tyre and when I turned around he’d just vanished.” “He does that.” The Nullarbor. It means we may have come more than a thousand kilometres in the wrong direction. Could it have been Robbie the long distance cyclist met? Is Robbie already making the great crossing? I feel a surge of panic. I’ve lost days I have to turn around and head south - as fast as I can. I have to race down to the Nullarbor and that means steeling myself for a series of along drives. The hours, and the destination road signs placed at intervals along the highway, will be measuring out the interminable distance back and I will be wishing the RV could be a retractable measuring tape and I could push a button on the dashboard and reel in a thousand kilometres of road in a moment. She had lost time and found emptiness. Beautiful red emptiness. But emptiness all the same. No Robbie. Sometimes when she replayed the video of to man walking up to the van in the mist, she wondered if it could really be him The face was shadowed by a hood. Maybe it was all wishful thinking. It was a long journey doubling back to begin the crossing of Australia. Jane pushed on past Port Augusta towards Ceduna, passing through small towns with dusty Australian names like Iron Knob, Kimba and Wirrulla on a path to the coast at Ceduna. Was Robbie on this road with them? Why was he on foot, hiking? A camouflaged hire-van grew in her rearview mirror and sped past, a waving group of young girls inside. Germans, probably. Funny how people standardized themselves. German girls travelled Australia in a T-shirt and a single pair of micro shorts, it appeared. And then there were the Grey Nomads in their beloved caravans, the wives sporting a regulation short-back-and-sides haircut. A memo must go out of the day older people retired. Maybe they were right. She’d be safer on the road with a unisex haircut and wouldn’t have had to resort to men’s work boots outside the van door at night. “Would you do that if we lived on the road?” Robbie once said, looking at her long black locks. “You don’t want me to?” Jane’s Blog. Our silver Winnebago began a trek into the void today - 1200 kilometres that go on without a bend or turn – flatness that extends forever except for the faintly detectable curve of the horizon, a parched and denuded universe of faded grey-blue saltbush and bluebush, with only the odd roadhouse and campsite spread around 200 km to 300 kms apart. We spotted a sign coming up as we entered the main section of the Nullarbor Plain. I slowed. Nullarbor Plain Eastern edge of the treeless plain “Bad news for you, Griffin,” I told my little dog who twisted his head up to listen to me. “The treeless plain. That means no trees to lift your leg on anywhere. You’re going to bust. Want to take a quick walk now?” He barked. We stopped and I got out with Griffin, stretching my legs near the road sign. Griffin promptly used the sign to lift a leg on. I should have taken a photo. But we needed to keep moving. Griffin settled happily at my side between the seats and we pulled back onto the road, climbing back to a cruising speed of 110 kilometres an hour. Crossing the limestone plateau of the world’s driest continent of Australia has to be the nearest thing to the feeling of crossing the emptiness of space, I thought feeling a tingling sense of vulnerability as we hurtled in our silver pod of metal across the emptiness, while my fluffy little companio maker In places the road widened. Emergency landing strips for the Flying Doctor service, a sign informed her. Accidents happened here. You could easily image meeting your maker out here, she thought. The emptiness gave her vertigo, like looking out from the roof of a skyscraper. God did a lot of his stuff in deserts and empty places, she recalled. In wildernesses and lonely mountain tops. There was room to believe in a god in a void like this, while the city crowded him out with traffic jams, traffic lights, newsflashes and bustling people. She had kept a belief, though. Unlike Robbie. He could never quite grab hold of the idea of a god, he said. But he left her plenty of room to believe in hers. Would she ever find Robbie? It was be like trying to find a soul in the void of Egyptian eternity. The next stop would be the Nullarbor Roadhouse and camping area. She would need to check if Robbie was there or had been seen. She had stopped to check other campsites along the way. She’d also needed fuel and a stopover for the night, a chance for a beer and a meal. But first she would make a stop at a landmark sight that may have drawn Robbie, the southern cliffs of Australia known as The Great Australian Bight, the underbelly on the map that looked like a ragged bite had been taken out of the continent. It felt like a religious experience. I heard great chords of music in the air, a reaction from the tedium and silence of the Nullarbor road. The spectacle of that gap was my life at that moment. Emptied, but also filled with an inexplicable joy. I couldn’t help giving out a loud whoop and it sent Griffin barking in shared excitement. At the Nullarbor Roadhouse restaurant, she ordered Pasta of the Day, with a tomato and pesto base. It was a bright place decorated with cheery painted murals of whales splashing about in the waters of the Bight. Robbie would have chosen the Nullarburger, a doorstop of Nullabor Angus Beef with the works, she guessed. Robbie was on her mind. She’d shown his picture to the receptionist when booking in at the camping park and the man had shaken his head. And she’d asked the same question at the restaurant counter where the girl had taken quite an interest. “No, I’d remember him,” a girl with an Irish accent assured her. “Things must be looking up on the Nullarbor. Some cute guys on the road these days.” Befiore coming to dinner, she’d toured the RVs, vans and tents in the camping grounds, finding no sign of Robbie, but attracting a lot of attention and fuss for Griffin. Before her order arrived, a young man turned up at her table. A waiter? No, empty handed. But his face was filled with a grin of friendliness. “You’re looking for a man?” he said. “Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing.” Hope leapt up like a light of hope in her eyes. “You know something?” she said. “Well, yes, I think. I’m a man, you see.” He grinned even wider. Her shoulders slumped while her anger rose. “A pretty forward man.” “Not really. I’ve seen you at three different campsites and I’ve had to work up to this. It’s just that I’m a solo journeyer like you and I wondered if you’d like to break the boredom of the Nullarbor with a little company for an hour. I swear the road engineers have drawn a straight line on the map between two points - boredom and coma. Though... I kind of like the trip.” She thought of the work boots she used to leave outside her van at night. They were meant to keep away men like this one. Well, maybe not men like this one. In fact, as a quite charming sheepishness spread over his cheeks, she thought he was probably the sort of guy who ought to be leaving ladies high heels outside his van to keep the women away. But he was vulnerable, not predatory. And she could do with someone else to talk to beside her fluffy dog. “So bring your meal over,” she said. “Great.” Her food arrived just as he returned to join her, also revealing a pasta meal. “There, you see,” he said. “We’re already on the same page. Of the menu at least. I’m Abe.” “Jane. And what quest brings you on this journey?” “Inspiration. I’m on a spiritual quest for meaning that I don’t find in IT, social media and web development. And you, Jane? I was only partly kidding earlier. I did actually overheard you asking after somebody and showing a picture around.” She had a twinge of dread. Robbie. Could it happen again? Could Robbie would walk in on them, or worse, glimpse them together through a window and walk away a third time? A quick check reassured her they were not in view. Don’t get jumpy. This isn’t a date. Just a roadside chat that meant nothing. But the boots had meant nothing too and look what grief that had brought her, she thought. “Okay, I can see by your look that I’m pressing you,” he said. “But maybe you need somebody to risk doing that. Even at the risk of being booted from your table, which I’d hate.” They ate in silence for a while. “Well?” He was pressing, so unlike Robbie. Maybe some men were less concerned about boundaries. Maybe, sometimes, you need a bit of a push. “It’ a lost-love story about boots. Men’s work boots.” She told him the story of upside-down Cinderella quest. He listened and nodded with half a smile, as if he knew what was coming. Maybe it was just encouragement. “A sad, but great story,” he said, “and I’m mightily interested in how it’s going to end.” “Well, for us, it must end in a few minutes,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I’ve got a small, fretting dog locked in a van in the middle of the Nullarbor. Maybe, we’ll spot each other on the road somewhere. What are you driving?” “A pale metallic blue Jeep with a rooftop sleeper that I put up at night. I’ll be taking my time and stopping on the road. There’s a golf course across the Nullarbor, you may have heard. The world’s longest golf course. Called The Nullarbor Links, an eighteen hole, par seventy-two golf course spanning your journey. You play a hole then drive two hundred kilometres and there’s the next hole at the side of the road, usually close to a roadhouse or a little town. The golf course is rough as guts, with saltbush, bluebush and stones on the fairways and the balls you don’t lose, the crows steal, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun and they have pretty good astro-turf greens at the end of each hole. I think of it as a golf drive that’s 1,365 kilometres long...” Abe’s enthusiasm for life gave her mood a lift that she hadn’t felt for a while. “Thanks, Jane,” he said, “for breaking the solitude of the Nullarbor.” “I didn’t mind the break either. You were good company, Abe.” Robbie was back on the road again at night, this time hitching a ride aboard a different kind of truck. It was a road train filled with stamping lowing livestock and their stench wafted over him on the roadside like a fog as the truck braked and its length of horror stopped. God, they stank. But a ride was a ride. The smell, an amalgam of animal stress and befoulment, thinned as they pulled off again, leaving a slipstream of hell behind them. Were they on the road to their doom? He had a small glimpse into the reasons for Jane’s vegetarian tastes. Some things were best to distance yourself from and you didn’t ever want to get this close to them. Life and death was one of them. And abattoirs. He thought of Griffin and felt a pang. “Out here on your lonesome?” the driver said. “I’m looking for someone.” “Let me guess.” “Yes, okay, it’s a woman.” “Nullarbour, null amour my friend. You’re looking for love in the wrong place. Try the bright city lights of Perth for a woman.” “I’m not jut looking for just any woman.” “Oh? Okay, this is going to be the price of your ride. Tell us your story. My audio book ran out at Ceduna, you see. So speak up. I’m a bit hard of hearing on this side.” Robbie related his story. But he did not interpret the possible significance of the boots left outside the van. He wanted another opinion. The new driver mulled over the tale as the miles sped by in the cab. Finally he shook head head. “You might as well have been dead and visited her as a ghost for all she knew about it,” the cattle truck man said. “She didn’t even know you came. It’s as if you were never there.” “Our dog knew I was there.” “Animals know. Take it from me. They know about mortality too. So maybe your lady’s found someone else now. Are you going to keep on haunting her?” “You think there was someone else in there?” “It’s what she was telling the world, whatever the truth of it.” “Maybe she just put out the boots because she was just afraid.” “Not as afraid as you, maybe. You afraid of lots of things, my friend? I saw the way you were screwing up your face when you first climbed in. The animals. That’s the whiff of mortality. You have a horror of it.” “It’s not something I want to grab hold of, if that’s what you mean.” “Maybe you need to accept it. Death I mean.” Did he? Was that it? A blog follower’s comment The young man lying in the rooftop sleeper above the Jeep smiled. His finger quivered over the ‘comments’ box at the end of he blog. He’d been a follower ever since her blog began. It was a favourite in social blogging circles and he had fallen under the spell of the girl and the dog in their search through the wilderness of Australia. What could he write? She needed encouragement. Maybe you needed that feeling of emptying yourself so that the new could come in. He clicked ‘return’. He added another silent message before closing the laptop. ‘”Sleep well, Winnebago Woman...” The longest straight. The sign said. 90 MILE STRAIGHT AUSTRALIA’S LONGEST STRAIGHT ROAD 146.6 km Only one straight road on earth could rival it – one across the desert of Saudi Arabia, the travel guides said. The longest straight stretch of road in Australia, the Ninety Mile straight had not a kink in it. There were stories of people propping up their your steering wheels with sticks and taking out a fat novel to read... She had journeyed though Eucla, an old settlement drowned in sand dunes and crossed a border into Western Australia, where briefly, three different time zones operated. Them on to Caiguna and Norseman and into the Ninety Mile straight. What had her dinner companion said that night back at the Nullarbor Roadhouse? “I swear the road engineers have drawn a straight line on the map between two points - boredom and coma. Though... I kind of like the trip.” ‘Like’ wasn’t the right word for it now. It was a straight line leading to infinity. She drove and drove, eyelids growing heavy, before shaking off the thrall. And at the point of convergence she blinked at the vision of a tiny figure of a man in the haze. He glowed in the low light of the sun. Was it someone she almost welcomed seeing at the end of it all? Or was it her lost one? Or was it a young man with sheepish smile who said he’d be making lots of stops on the way and who stood apart from his pale metallic blue Jeep in the blue bush and saltbush - someone she and Griffin could begin a new journey with after this... What was her heart open to? She knew she had to choose before she got there. Jane’s Blog - Postscript I have thrown away the boots. In a sense they are filled now, and I have accepted that Robbie is gone, lost to us forever. A new friend, Abe, has tagged along with us to Western Australia and has also made a warm friend of Griffin. I think Abe may be tagging along with us a lot longer. It seems he’s been following me for quite a while. On my blog. And on the road. Griffin has made another friend too. There’s a story of a red dog in the rusty-iron ore industrial port of Dampier – a faithful animal that roamed the Pilbera region on a quest in search of a lost master who had gone missing, even taking lifts with truck drivers to travel the highways, searching endlessly, just as I searched. There’s a bronze monument to ‘Red Dog’ in Dampier standing on a rock and I took a photo of Griff standing beside him. Abe says every dog in Western Australia is a red dog because of all the dust around, but not Griffin who’s still a little white dog. He manages to shake off everything.