February 18th
A few hours later, I get back into the car. In the inky dawn light, I turn off the track and spot the shadowy Separates in the distance. I aim for them, taking narrower and narrower tracks, animal trails now. The sun falls on these rocks before anything else in the land, igniting them into giant, golden marbles. They could be something from a fairytale, strange and otherworldly. I didn’t think they looked real the first time I saw them; it was easy to believe a powerful spirit of the Dreamtime created them into being. They must have an Indigenous name; it’s odd you never told me. Now, it seems wrong.
As we get closer, it all looks more familiar, but with more vegetation, dominated by stringy paperbacks and various acacia trees. Ahead, I see the sand dunes. I thought they were mountains once, my ticket out of here, but now I know that we’d get bogged there almost immediately.
I’m still looking for camels—for the one we left behind when we came out from the desert, the one you trained and who became almost a friend. Although, if she did cross my path, I’m not sure I would know how to recognise her now, and she wouldn’t know me. Besides, she’s probably dead. I watch a couple of huge roos lounging in the shadows of a patch ofspindly trees, and a flock of zebra finches zip and squeak past the open window, overtaking the car.
We’re no longer on any sort of track; we must have reached the unmapped area. There are wings in my chest, fluttering faster than the finches. The car is going more slowly than it’s gone all trip, but we might as well be flying. We’re close. I feel it in my skin. Can you feel it too? We bump and sway, swerve and jolt, until my head’s out the window, panting for the first taste. I feel like singing.
‘Aren’t you excited at all?’ I say.
In the mirror, you glare at me again.
Soon, I see something different in this red land of rocks and rickety trees. Something man-made. Made by this man. You. Your house.
But it doesn’t look the way I remember. It’s trashed, like you are.
I drive closer, the car revving and struggling in the softer sand. In the back seat, you remain silent. This is the den.Yourden. But it’s more a pile of rubbish than a home.
‘We’ve found it.’
You keep watching me in the mirror. Feigning indifference?
‘Sit up. Look!’ I try to contain my frustration, but really, I want to shake you.
You don’t look, though. You lounge on the back seat, lazy as the roos.
As we edge closer through the soft sand, I see graffiti on the walls: huge, scrawling black letters, spelling hate. Someone has found this place before us. I put my foot flat to the pedal, even though the car is screaming.
Cunt. Fucker. Devil house.
It does look like a devil house now, like a snake pit, a hell hole.
‘Well, shit,’ you say finally.
Your dream house, where we’d live for always: ruined. You must be feeling something.
I try to keep my breath steady. Maybe it won’t be so bad, close up. But I can see that the roof has fallen in at one corner and the solar panels you set up are smashed and lying in pieces on the ground. Branches and debris cover the veranda; nothing is neat or organised the way you left it. The pen you made for animals has been blown down too, fence posts buried in the sand. Bits of the blue plastic water pipe that ran from the spring in the Separates back to the house are scattered across the sand. Ruined too? The fluttering in my chest is no longer from excitement: I want to cry, drive us back, start again.
I stop the car.
Your smile is a wild, desperate baring of your teeth, how a wolf would smile. Or a fox, backed against the wall.
‘Well, shit, Gem,’ you say again.
I don’t know how long we stay staring at your house. Eventually, I turn off the engine, and the car shudders and sinks. An immense quiet settles around us.
‘Shouldn’t do that,’ you say.
It takes me a moment to come back to you. You mean the car. It’s probably going to bog. I don’t tell you I haven’t planned on driving it anywhere else. Looking at the wreck of the house in front of us, maybe that was the wrong decision. There’s nothing here, after all. I feel a well of sadness inside as I run my eyes over the house again. I knew it wouldn’t be perfect, butthis? The worst thing is knowing that it’s not just nature that has eroded your house, but that people have done it too.
‘I don’t understand,’ I murmur. ‘You never told anyone where this place was. I was there in the courtroom—you never said…’
You turn away from me and stare at the upholstery of the car seat, then reach forward and pick out a thread. ‘It’s a free country,’ you say. ‘Anyone could find it.’
This is the most we’ve said to each other in a long while; a conversation of sorts. An olive branch? When it gets too hot to stay in the car, I open the door and lurch out.
‘What about me?’ you say, pointing at your legs, at the tight knots I’ve made around you.