Poor Reception
Garry Disher (Joint
winner of the open section, 1985, along with Trevor Wilson,
‘The Vegetable Gardeners’)
It was the third day of my return journey. I had been driving for about
three hundred miles a day since Cairns, conscious that time was running
out and I had to get back for work. It seemed like the whole country
had to get back for work. My holiday had begun three weeks earlier and
now I was heading south again. I was halfway home.
It was late January: sticky, hot days and nights, and always the threat
of the rains and floods that come at that time of the year in that part
of the world. All the perverts who had ever driven a car or a truck or
towed a caravan were out on the roads. I needed company, but not like
that. Every fifty miles a different radio station played the same
songs. I looked out to catch glimpses of sunlight flashing on the sea,
avoided the perverts, got tired and cranky. You’re likely to
get like
that if you’ve been away on a holiday with the person
you’ve been
living with for a year, who quite out of the blue tells you
she’s had
just about all she can stand and packs up and leaves.
I thought I would take an inland route. It would be quieter there. A
few more hours added to the trip wouldn’t matter. Soon I felt
better. I
hummed down the country roads and other drivers raised their hands to
me. Somewhere a country radio station was broadcasting a radio
preacher. He cast his vibrant voice out over the land, his words high
then dropping almost to a whisper. It was passion, but at first I
thought it was poor reception.
And so it was that I had sped past the hitchhiker before I could stop.
She had two bags at her feet, looked dusty and tired, and gave me a
last-chance look. I slowed down, watching her in the rear-view mirror,
and at that moment I saw the two bags get to their feet and shake
themselves. I groaned. A grey dog and a black dog, both large. What a
bummer.
But who would give her a lift if I didn’t? Night was coming.
Out in the
middle of nowhere. Anything could happen to her. But where would the
dogs go? In the back, along with her pack and my tent? Perhaps she was
only going up the road a short distance.
By then her hot red face was at my window, puffing and smiling and
grateful. She gasped and gulped at me while I smiled back at her,
bemused and pleased that the decision had been made.
‘Oh this is great,’ she said.
‘I’m going as far as you’re going.
I’m so
hot and bored.
Really. I can’t hack it any longer.’
‘I’m heading for Melbourne,’ I said.
She pounded her forehead with the palm of her hand and whooped.
‘That’s
just great! That’s terrific. Me too.’
Her voice rose to a squeal as I helped her get the dogs into the back
of the car. ‘I left Townsville, I don’t know, days
ago. I been on the
road one two three four
days, and I’m really buggered. I
thought I’d
see some of the country going this way, but no one wants to give me a
ride, or I get rides with dickheads who hassle me. You
wouldn’t
believe.’
I opened the boot of the car, pulled a cold beer from the esky, wiped
the butter from it and gave it to her. She sipped it daintily.
‘I don’t really drink much,’ she said.
‘No, really. But on a hot day,’
she gestured, ‘and I have to celebrate, don’t
I?’
She waved her arms and pulled faces as she talked. She seemed to fill
the car. I drove, demure behind the steering wheel, she bubbled over,
and in the back her dogs slept and farted.
I had been practicing some questions in the past few days. I cleared my
throat and said: ‘I’ve got an idea to put to you.
It’s a long way to
Melbourne still, nearly a thousand miles. What I intended to do was ask
any hitchhiker if they’d be willing to share the cost of
petrol and
share the driving. How does that sound to you?’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I just want to get
there and sleep for a week. I got
thirty dollars, we can use that.’ She smiled at me.
‘Good, because that will help me out,’ I said.
I looked back at the road. I took one hand from the steering wheel and
made explanatory gestures. ‘Also, I’ve got a tent,
a big one, and you
can share it with me if you like. I’m too tired to drive
straight
through tonight.’
Without looking at her I could tell she was giving me a very steady
look. I gave my shoulders a shrug. ‘I won’t hassle
you or anything.’
‘Sure,’ she said remotely.
She leaned back with the knees of her long legs on the dash and
suddenly
started to tell me about herself. ‘I’m
Lesley,’ she nd. ‘I’ve lived all
over the place because my dad was in the Air Force. I
couldn’t
hack that after a while.’ At fourteen, she said, she left
school. She
ran away a lot. She lived in parks and on the beach, had a string of
casual jobs, started to sleep around, got into dope. I think
she must
have told me everything. Her car and most of her possessions
were
stolen a few days before she left Townsville. ‘An MG. I saved
all year
for that car. Stolen the day after my eighteenth birthday. Shit. No
point in waiting around but. They’ve probably
totalled it by now
or stripped it.’
As she talked I watched her press the cold beer can to her skin. Her
legs and feet were bare and dusty. On her legs and on her restless
hands there were long, bright pink scars. She had strong, square hands,
with short, chipped nails. A green ribbon held her hair
clear of her
face and neck. She pointed to the cuts on her legs. ‘I worked
in this
riding school for a few weeks,’ she said.
Her voice grew listless and she stopped talking. When I asked her if
she was in a hurry to get to Melbourne she shrugged as if to say no. I
started saying a few things about myself but she hunched her shoulders
and settled down in her seat. From time to time she turned around to
hug and kiss the dogs and murmur endearments to them. Later she fell
asleep. I had a feeling of temporariness.
In the early evening we stopped in a small town to buy food and ask
directions to the nearest camping ground. I bought some hamburger meat
to fry, at which Lesley said ‘Yuck’ and went back
to get herself some
fruit and dog food.
The camping ground was a stony, treeless national park high tip on the
side of a hill. We pitched the tent and looked down into a valley that
winked and changed as the sun set and lights came on here and there.
One or two tiny whirlwinds lifted papers and tossed grit at our legs.
There were only four other tents. Everyone else was on the coast road.
I turned away to set up the gas cooker among some stubby bushes
alongside a cement table and bench. The shower blocks were just across
the track from us. As I cooked the hamburger meat and
drank a can of beer, Lesley ate apples and bananas and seemed to regain
her spirits.
‘I was living with this guy in Townsville,’ she
said. ‘He’s
thirty-three and got a wife and two children, but he wasn’t
living with
them when I met him.’ She paused as though to make sense of
something.
‘Then a few weeks ago he tells me he wants to go back to
them, he has
to get his head together, et cetera, et cetera. I thought in Melbourne
I would stay at my cousin’s place, she lives near the beach,
and I’d
get a job, and if he wants me again I’ll go back to
Townsville. You
know.’
At this point she became confused and unhappy and her eyes filled with
tears. I reached out and touched my fingers against her arm. I hate it
when people cry.
She jerked away from me crossly. ‘I’m all
right,’ she said. ‘You don’t
have to touch me.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
I leaned back on the hard bench and gazed at her.
There are some lessons I take a while to learn, and it’s hard
to work
out what people want sometimes. I try to do the right thing and I get
my head bitten off.
Lesley was flushed and unsettled, but she gathered herself together and
said, ‘See, I have to work things out by myself, I
can’t rely on anyone
else, I can’t let anyone else invade my space
either.’
Oh, for Christ’s sake. Then I saw her shake off her mood and
she said,
‘What about you? Tell me about yourself. You look like you
haven’t had
anything bad happen. Sorry, that sounds awful, forget I said it, you
know what I mean.’
I shrugged, trying to say of course I’ve got it together, and
this is
an idiotic conversation, and, at the same time, ask her what do you
know about what I’ve been through or haven’t been
through.
What proof do you bloody people need? Are there signs that sufferers
give out by which they recognise one another? Is there a certain look
in the eyes that tells others you’re a person who feels? Am I
supposed
to be emotional all over the place? Getting hassled about this kind of
thing twice in one holiday was a bit much.
But I calmed down after a while. And I have this knack of
elaborating on my past and exaggerating the effects, but just
lately
no one’s been very impressed. Anyhow, I like to keep myself
to mysclf;
and I would pass by Lesley like a ship in the night. But at the back of
my mind was the tent and our two sleeping bags on the ground ready
for us.
When it was time to go to bed Lesley waited while I positioned my
sleeping bag, and then she placed hers in the opposite corner, near the
entrance. She brought the dogs in with her. When she saw my face she
said, ‘Well, they’ll just fret all night if I leave
them outside, and
they could get stolen or something.’
‘Just so long as they keep still.’
‘Oh, they will if they’re not disturbed,’
she said.
I didn’t want to make a big thing of it in case she got the
wrong
impression.
Of course the dogs were restless all night, keeping me awake with
little growls, pacing up and down, stinking the place out. Lesley slept
through it all. At one point I had to go outside and, as I stepped over
her, one of the dogs made a rush at me and she woke up
with a
small cry and pushed me away.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said.
‘I’m only going outside.’
As I stood in the moonlight some distance away, looking up at the stars
while I tried to relax and concentrate, I heard her leave the tent,
pull down her pants, and squirt for several seconds. She made no move
to go inside again but stood at a friendly distance and talked in a
dreamy, philosophical way about the meanings of things.
‘Excuse me,’ I
said. I walked past her, across the stony track, and into the toilet
block.
The next morning I woke up early and showered away my grumpiness. I
woke Lesley gently and said we should get going soon.
‘We’ve got a long
day ahead of us.’
She walked across to the shower block, taking the dogs with her, just
as the warden drove up to ask us for the camping fee. He saw Lesley
disappear into the shower block with the dogs at her heels.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘You’d
better go after the little woman and
tell her to leave the dogs outside. What if another lady goes for a
shower and sees the dogs and dies of a bloody heart attack or
something? Could cause a hell of a stink.’
I paid the man and walked across to the women’s shower block,
thinking
this was an interesting development. I stood outside the door and
yelled several times but couldn’t make Lesley hear me over
the sound of
the water. I opened the door and went in, still yelling.
‘Lesley,’ I
said. ‘The warden says no dogs allowed.’
‘Oh damn,’ she said. ‘Well you better
come in and get them.’
She was standing in an open cubicle facing towards me with her hands
behind her back, turning slightly one way and then the other to let the
hot water stream over her shoulders. She smiled and pointed to where
the dogs sat in a corner. She looked younger and smaller. She had tiny
tattoos of red and blue flowers. I thought about them on my way back to
the tent, a dog collar in each hand.
After packing up some of our gear I sat in the entrance to the tent
eating breakfast and reading yesterday’s paper. Lesley,
looking even
younger with her wet hair dripping onto the shoulders of a clean shirt,
sat down with me and began to roll a joint.
I poured some Raisin Bran into a bowl and poured milk over it.
‘Want
some?’ I asked, offering her the bowl.
She gave a small, delicate shudder. ‘No thanks,’
she said, blowing
smoke from the side of her mouth so that it went out through the tent
flap. Looking happy and renewed, she told me about the beach hideaway
where she and her friends cooked seafood in hot coals in the sand. We
were sitting opposite each other, cross-legged in the early sun,
smiling at each other. I thought about the little red and blue flowers
but something must have passed across my eyes because Lesley started to
pack up. People are always packing up.
For the first hour on the road we sat as though in a trance. The air
was clean; it let us rush through it with hardly a sound, and it
carried to us the smells of the farms. The farmers were going to work;
they seemed to nod and wink hello from their utilities, and their sons
waved as they opened paddock gates. Their kelpies dashed along the
fence lines. Later it got much hotter and, while Lesley drove the car,
I calculated distances, miles per gallon and hours to go, the maps
balanced on my knees and resting against the dash.
‘It will be pretty late by the time we get there,’
I said. ‘Do you want to drive straight through?’
Part of me wanted her to
say she’d
like to camp another night, and part of me wanted to get home.
‘Let’s drive straight through,’ she said.
‘I’m tired of being on the
road, you know? We can make it.’ She was a very good driver;
she
buzzed past cars and trucks, silent and watchful for hours.
We drove through the long day. Lesley talked again when it was my turn
to drive. I understood that the things she loved did not last
for
long, they were taken away from her or they promised too much. The
thing is, this time I listened to her talk about these matters without
wanting to groan or roll my eyes. She didn’t mind when 1
reached out
and touched her arm.
She smiled at me. ‘Maybe you could stay at my
cousin’s place tonight,’
she said. ‘If you’re too tired to drive back to
your place alter you
drop me off.’
‘Mm, thanks,’ I said.
We got to the outskirts of Melbourne at one o’clock that
night. The
roads were still busy, crowded with people returning from their
holidays. I could feel the strain of it. Quite suddenly Lesley
and I
were bickering about the best route to take to get to her
cousin’s
suburb, which lay on the other side of the city. She had never been to
Melbourne before. She looked at the map and then at the names of the
streets I was taking, and said, ‘This is a bit out of the
way, isn’t
it?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘There’s no way
I’m driving through the centre of the
city, all right? The traffic would be murder. It would take us
hours.’
‘I just want to know where you’re taking
me,’ she said offhandedly.
‘You could be taking me somewhere where I can’t
escape or something.’
‘Jesus!’ I said, all elbows and feet like I am
sometimes. ‘ You asked
me if I wanted to stay with you tonight, remember?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘Perhaps I’ve
changed my mind since.’
I grunted. I always bite. I never think.
And we got well and truly lost, of course, trying to find her
cousin’s house in one of the suburbs on the bay. It was two
o’clock by
then. But at least we stopped snapping at each other, and she stopped
teasing me as well. We were friends again. Lesley channelled her energy
into baiting the people from whom we asked directions. There were a lot
of perverts about. It was a place where no-one goes to bed. Cops, taxi
drivers, young guys painting and working on cars in
panel-beaters’
shops, drunks, kids coming back from the beach. The air was damp with
the smells of the sea, the streets were black between the lights.
‘You dickhead,’ said Lesley to a dull-witted taxi
driver. She made me a
bit nervous. We were so close to home and she was abusing civilians and
grunting piggily at cops, turning the noises into a clearing of her
throat. She was hard to keep up with.
‘You trying to get us arrested?’ I said.
‘You should have more fun,’ she said.
‘Turn everything into an
adventure like I do.’
At three o’clock in the morning we found her
cousin’s house. It looked
deserted, and no-one had answered Lesley’s regular phone
calls during
the past few hours.
‘I’ll sleep on the porch,’ she said.
We stood by the car door and she gave me a rueful smile, but I was
thinking about the red and blue flowers again. ‘You
sure?’ I said.
‘Perhaps we could find a motel or something. Get a good
night’s sleep.’
She reached up to pull my face down and kissed me.
‘Loosen up,’ she said. ‘It was really
nice meeting you. It was great
that you came along. You saved me all kinds of hassles.’
I wanted to leave her with some advice as well. The grey dog was
between our legs: it gave a squeaky yawn and thumped me with its tail.
I let Lesley see me give it a scratch behind its ears.
In the end I told her to take care and got into my car. Around the next
corner I parked under a street light to work out from the directory how
to get out of there, and before I could forget them I wrote down the
house number and street name on the back of my hand.