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.

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