Chapter 6: Outback

Bonnie slept at Don and Shona’s house that night, I found out later, while Don and I slept in the sleeper cab until a little after dawn. Boy, I reckon that Bundy Black we were drinking got up in the night while I was sleeping and kicked hell out of both our heads. That Bundy was still swinging and slugging when we woke up due to the matched timing of someone banging hard on the driver’s door.

“What in the ... who’s that?” I shouted. As soon as I did that my ears and head hurt, and hurt bad. If whoever was knocking replied, I couldn’t hear it.

“Answer that door, would you, Don, mate?” I requested, “I don’t think I could get up.” I had tried and it just made the cab spin wildly.

“It’s your bloody door, Mark, I’ve got this steam jackhammer inside my head that I’m trying to contend with here, mate.”

I managed to sit up. I was disorientated, the curtains were left partially open and it was bright daylight outside, the sun was low and a hot beam of light streamed right into the bed chamber. To my confused eyeballs the front of the cab spun into view and back out again. It took me a moment to extricate my feet from the tangled bedclothes, before I threw my legs one by one over the edge of the bed. I pushed my head out through the half-opened curtains and found it was much too bright to keep my eyes fully open, so I tried to squint. And all the time the banging continued. I wanted to step down, but needed to do it with my eyes open. My mouth tasted like I’d chundered up most of my guts, including me liver, kidneys, prostrate gland and possibly even chewed on the inside of my brown button during the night. My nose told me that possibly one or both of us had spewed inside the cab, and I definitely didn’t want to step in it.

“If that’s you, Bonnie,” I whispered loud enough to register as a full-bodied shout in Hangoverland, “you should have the bloody key I gave you and let yourself in.”

The banging stopped. I thought about lying back down again and pulling the covers over me and not doing anything more until the world stopped spinning. But I knew if I laid down, the world would still spin and I’d still have to get up. I needed water to drink, and I needed a piss. I needed fresh air and I desperately needed peace and quiet. I noticed then that it had gone quite quiet, the only banging was in my head, deep metallic banging, like a hammer on an anvil.

I tried to remember the last time I went off piste and hit the turps as hard as that all the way through to ending up legless. I thought it must’ve been my buck’s night about a week before I hitched up to Maggie, along with all my mates from the newspaper. Fifteen years ago, blimey!

Yeah, would you believe it? Me, off my face over a sheila, and fifteen years later grogged up again over another one, this time an impossible woman trying to get me to climb a mountain with a summit way beyond my reach. Both were special women I had thought, not just sheilas. The first time I was wasted was before I made Maggie the main focus of my life and the second bender was to blank the fabulous Bonnie out of my otherwise uncomplicated life.

Funnily enough, I had remained completely sober for weeks after my marriage to Maggie ended in that Darwin delivery room. Would you reckon? Maybe I couldn’t afford to drink to get over Maggie, I needed to get to Melbourne as quickly as possible and I drove in my reliable old ute, that was older and more faithful than my marriage had turned out to be. That old ute had taken me as a young man to Uni in Perth, carried me to work in the NT and every summer took me down to Aunt Milly’s near Melbourne. Yeah, that faithful old ute outlasted my marriage and never let me down. I had driven straight through a whole day and a half, five years ago, Darwin to Melbourne, with the only heavy load I carried was in my heart.

When I got to my empty Aunt’s place, a neighbour told me she was in the hospital, from where she never emerged. She never even woke up enough for me to give her a proper goodbye. I never touched a drop then, other than sipped a toast at my Aunt’s wake, where I played host to hardly anyone I knew well enough to tell my troubles to. At the time I was too busy to be maudlin, I had my Aunt’s business, which was now my business, to run. Memories, do they never stop their haunting?

It was still quiet outside the cab, so I tentatively reached down with a toe until I felt the floor, it seemed dry, so the other foot followed and I was standing there, swaying unsteadily but at least on my feet.

The world was still spinning, of course it was, I remember from school that the Earth spins at 1600 clicks per hour, so maybe it was me that wasn’t spinning with the rest of the world. Yeah, maybe I had so cut myself off from the world that I was a low-orbiting moon all on my lonesome, orbiting on a different path to everyone else, to Maggie, to Bonnie, and all my ties were irrevocably cut off from anyone who had ever mattered to me.

Water, I needed water to drink, followed by coffee, lots of coffee. I needed to get behind that wheel, get going to Darwin. I was on a mission to deliver my paper on time as scheduled. Then lock up the cab in the truck park near the airport for the new owners to collect as agreed. I wanted to catch my flight to Lima, 26 hours in the air, via Melbourne and Santiago. I would leave Oz in the dying hours of the old year and arrive to start my new life afresh in the new year.

Yeah. That was a goal worth the effort. A new beginning, leaving everything that had hurt me behind. Of course, there can never really be a new start. I still had all the baggage of my old life to carry around with me, keep me awake at night, along with the shame of being such a dope throughout my marriage.

There was nothing to stop me. All my decent furniture was in storage, my refurnished house was let out to strangers on a two-year contract, so all my crap with Maggie, and now this business with Bonnie, weighing me down was only to last for a few more days. Still, a promise is a promise, and ... then I thought, why was it so bloody quiet?

“Where’s the nearest coffee shop, Don?” I asked my new cobber.

“Bugger, my mouth tastes like pickled arse,” Don groaned. “Tell me it’s not yours, mate.”

“No, I’ve still got me Grundies on, and these are as snug as any budgie smugglers. I know my mouth tastes like I’ve been chewing chunder but it doesn’t smell that bad in here, I must’ve yawned out the window, or before I got here. Either that or I’ve got used to the smell.”

“No, you’d have to be dead to get used to the smell of ripe chunder. You had your liquid laugh behind the barbie area before we staggered back here. I think it was the last couple of Lamington cakes that turned your guts. Mate, we saw that party out to the bitter end. Where the bleedin’ Bundy appeared from is a mystery beyond my detection skills. About that time Shona stormed off with all the rest of the sheilas, including yours—”

“She’s not mine!” I insisted, “She’s just lending me for a couple of days.”

“Maybe, but there’s no denying that there’s something between you that needs sorting before you kill each other. Anyway, I told Shona that I couldn’t leave a mate in that state. Either that or you wouldn’t let me go home to the missus in my condition, not sure if I can remember.”

“Either way, it sounds like we were both lifesavers.”

“Yeah, ridgie didge.”

“Anyway, as for that Bonnie sheila, my promise to her was to drop her off in Darwin, that’s the only commitment for me to fulfil. I owe her that. She owes me nothing. She’s a temp hitchhiker on her way back to her glamorous lifestyle, to be forever surrounded by beautiful luxury, the sweetness and light that she’s used to. Meanwhile I’m off bumming around the world with a backpack, an old camera and periodic access to the cloud. If she’s not here by the time I sober up and am ready to drive off from here, I’ll shoot through and she’s history. Now, find and get your daks on, Don, we need to find a cafe or a hotel open, I’m dying for a coffee.”

I found the trackies that I wore at the start of yesterday, still hanging over the driver’s seat, which reminded me that we, or rather I, still hadn’t found a laundromat to wash every bloody stitch of my clothes that I’d used up, all but one tee that we had managed to get through in one day. Originally I had planned eking those out over the whole trip. It now looked like to keep to my planned schedule, of delivery at dawn on Friday, I’ll be sitting in stinkies all the way, while she’ll have a fresh donated wardrobe at her disposal. Further more, I thought, she’ll wear her lended perfume, that’ll make her smell nice, which means she’ll be getting up my nose all the bloody way. Driving on my own, I hadn’t bothered to bring any deo, knowing that for the next two years on walkabout I was just going to keep cool sweating naturally and freshen up where I could. So for this trip I would change at truck stop showers here in Oz and hotels and hostels along my journey to find myself. Buckley’s chance of that happening now with so many conflicting thoughts in my head.

Don stirred himself and he had a lot less trouble than I had getting to the point where his long, bare, hairy legs dangled over the sleeping box.

“Bloody hell, do I look anywhere near as bad as you do, you ugly bastard?” he asked, his voice barely above a dry croak. I vaguely recalled someone finding a karaoke machine from somewhere during the drinking session and Don and me singing Bee Gees and ABBA duets, which I assume Don’ll never live down and I know that I can never return to these parts and hold my head up as a serious human being, ever.

“Well, looking at you and knowing how bad I feel on the inside, then yeah, prob’ly.”

“Bung us me strides, Mark, will you? They’re on the floor by the door, I s’pect me shirt’s underneath ‘em.”

Without thinking, I bent down too quickly. All right it was normal speed but it was more than my few undamaged brain cells could cope with and I almost didn’t get back up again. Not only was my own planet spinning faster, it had acquired multicoloured orbital rings and crazy pockmarked moons which kept crashing into each other in eyeball-searing explosions. “Strewth!” I muttered and, with one hand gripping the sleeping box board, I grabbed the strides and tee with the other hand and threw them up onto the bed. As I picked them up somewhere in the middle of the pile, odd coins rolled out of the pockets, hitting the metal floor of the cab, sounding like the nine bells of St Patrick Cathedral going off under the control of a lunatic campanologist trying to yank such a crescendo that even the blokes roasting in Hellfire would bang on the ceiling to complain about. Don groaned and fell back on the bed, trying his utmost to stuff the bedsheets and pillows in his ears.

Then the door was unlocked and opened. Shona climbed up into the cab. “Crikey, it smells like a pair of possums died in here while they were eating and shittin’ out each other. Get your bloody clothes on and come outside, you mangy bastards. You’ve got sixty seconds or I’ll be back with a big stick, no, make that a whittled stick with a sharp point for stabbing on the end.” She disappeared as quickly as she arrived.

Clobbered up, we mustered in what must’ve taken about twice the allotted time allowed, and stood side by side by the front wheels of the truck. At least I’d mercifully grabbed my sunnies, but Don must have lost his along the way, so he kept his eyes tight shut in the blinding low sunlight.

Shona looked down on me like I was a crippled Bunyip just crawled out from the stinkiest swamp beyond the Black Stump imaginable, then she looked up her hubby like he was a poky that had stopped flashing but still hadn’t paid out the promised bloody jackpot.

“Right you two drongoes, it appears you haven’t the sense to boil a billy between you.” She poked Don in the chest. “I’m disappointed in you that you stayed all night getting a gutful with the doppy dill here, although at least you stopped the bastard driving off in the night—”

“Hey,” I protested, “I would—”

“I haven’t got to you yet, you wingeing whacker,” she spat at me, then turned back to Don and opened her mouth to continue her invective but nothing came out. “I’ve lost me bloody thread now, you soppy drongo, you’re about as useless as a legless emu. Right, now listen clear, you bastard, my cousin Junie’ll drive you home. There’s a full jug of coffee waiting for you when you get there. Drink it, all of it, even if it makes you chunder again. Have a shower, get your head down for a few hours and this arvo you will treat me and the girls as if we’re princesses for what’s left of our rootin’ Chrissie holiday, that dopy bollocks here has done nothing but bugger up since he entered the State of South Australia. In the meantime, our girls and me are going therapy shopping in the Boxing Day sales, using your beer money for the rest of the bloody summer. Right?”

“Yeah, Hon. Righto, I’ll be off then.” Don shook my hand, “Good luck, matey, looks like you’re gonna need it.”

“Yeah, likewise, you right?”

“Yeah, she’ll be right.” He shuffled off, being led by a broad islander sheila in a vest, her wrestlers’ arms covered in tats. She was twice as wide and a third of a metre shorter than Don, even though he was bent head down at the shoulders, round the corner to the car park.

Shona turned her attention to me. “As for you, silly bollocks, you’ve gone and pissed me off twice and nobody still living has ever done that before. You may have saved that girl from a fate worse than, but you also broke her bloody heart—”

“Shona, I gave Bonnie absolutely no encouragement, no expectations of any thanks required of a one-off nature. I made it clear from the beginning that I was not only a full-on loner here, but I was leaving Oz solo for at least a few months. She knew that I wanted nothing to do with any relationship, and certainly not what would count as a mercy root by way of a thank you. I even overheard her saying something to herself, as she had already guessed that I had been rooted by a sheila that had put me off sheilas for good.”