Eight months earlier
GREAT NORTHERN HIGHWAY
February 23rd, later
I keep driving, even when I hear a rattling sound—something must be hanging from the underside of the car, scraping and bumping against the bitumen. I imagine metal sparking, flames, incinerating me and the car.
Not yet, please.
I turn the radio up, but loud music doesn’t mask the racket. When I skid back onto the access track, the noise is accompanied by a growling.
Can you hear it?
Can you hear me coming?
By late afternoon, the car limps off the track and onto the rougher ground, smoke seeping from the hood. Seems I’m good at destroying things—this car is no exception.
But I’m here. Back.
The car splutters to a stop beneath the spindly trees near the den. Dead. I turn the ignition again, just to check, but the engine whines then goes silent.
‘Sorry,’ I whisper.
I get out, trembling all over.
You may be dead, too. The first dead body I will see in my life will be yours. I swallow bile at the realisation that Iam worse than you. A murderer. I have destroyed something I might have saved. Destroyed you. It feels nothing like what I imagined.
Even after two days, my footprints are still in the sand. Yours too, leading around the side of the den. Before I follow them, movement in the scrub catches my eye. An animal darts away from behind a clump of tea-tree. A dingo? I squint. No, a fox.
Myfox. Sal.
But I am seeing things. And I’m being stupid. It’s the fox I rescued from the road. But how is she still alive? Could it mean you might be too? I squint at the scrub again, but now see only shades of brown, no bright fur of a fox. Fact and fiction are blurring. I start walking, placing my feet inside your flattened footprints, dread settling over me.
I wipe sweat from my face and neck as I get to the spot. The mulga branches are still lying across the dirt. But you are not here, not in the hole where I buried you. I spin around, scan the land, my chest pounding. Has an animal dug you up? That fox? A person? Did I not bury you, after all?
I look at my nails, now clean. I did do it, didn’t I? I try to will the shaking in my hands to stop before it moves across my body. I remember the spade in my palms, the digging. The blood running down the side of your face. I remember making the hole bigger, rolling you in. You weren’t dead then, just unconscious, but after I finished, your exposed face and shoulders were directly under the sun. That’s how I left you; I wanted you to be able to breathe. Which is crazy, really. Perhaps I didn’t really want to kill you—or at least, not be fully responsible. I wanted the land to do it for me. Death by desert.
But you always surprise me, don’t you?
I step backwards and trip over the spade, which is covered in flies, settling on what must be your dried blood. There are tracks in the sand as if a huge snake has wound its way across it. But no snake is this big, even out here. I almost look towards the Separates to check they haven’t moved and somehow made these marks, but no, they are human drag marks. And they lead straight to your den.
It must have taken some strength to crawl out from the holes and pull yourself along the dirt towards shelter. I follow the marks like a thread, until, at the door to your den, I stop, breathing deeply. Could someone have helped you escape? If you’ve been found, I’ll be caught. Then I remind myself why I came back—how none of that matters now—and I step inside. Everything is as I left it, the floors swept, the roof tiles piled in the corner. The Separates stare back through the cracked window pane, watchful, reproachful.He’s in there, they whisper, sending shivers over the land towards me.
I follow a trail of bloodied sand down the corridor, past the dead snake in the doorway, and into the room that used to be mine, the one you said we’d share one day. You are on the double bed, splayed across the sheets, face-down in the cobwebs and dust. You are completely red, from the sand, from your blood, from the sun. Your skin has come away and left bleeding raw muscles. You could be one of your art installations. You do not look entirely human.
Trembling, I step towards you, reach out my hand. You said you never wanted to go back into this house. You said our time here was finished, that this place should burn. And yet here you are, waiting. What have I done, and how have you survived it, survived me?