Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [84]
Nez and me came back to the motel one afternoon after a swim in the sea to find Gwen curled up on her bed, sobbing like a baby. She was wearing only her underwear, she had bruises all over her arms and legs, and her make-up was ruined, with mascara stains running down her cheeks.
I looked around the room, at the empty bottles, the overflowing ashtrays and coke foils, and the clothes and underwear lying on the floor. It was a mess. Nez was standing behind me, breathing heavily. I could tell by the rattling noise in her chest that her asthma was playing up, like it did whenever she was nervous.
I told Nez to leave the room and go next door and watch some TV, but she wouldn’t. She ran past me, jumped onto the bed, lay down alongside Gwen and held onto her as tightly as she could.
It turned out that Cowboy Tommy had vanished just as quickly as he’d arrived. He left Gwen with a black eye and an unpaid bill for the rooms, as well as a bar tab fit for a football team on an end-of-season trip.
Tommy left us with no choice but to do a runner from the motel.
Later that night, after Gwen had put Nez to bed, I helped her load the boot of the car with two garbage bags stuffed with our clothes, her make-up case, and Nez’s few toys. We then raided the housemaid’s trolley, stealing packets of sweet biscuits, a cardboard box full of bottled water, blankets and pillows, some soap, and a toilet roll and towel.
The next morning we ate breakfast, took a final swim in the pool and ordered a lunch of roast chicken, baked potatoes and chocolate ice-cream. Gwen added the meal to our tab, along with a tip for the young waiter she’d flirted with over lunch. We then snuck away from the motel by the rear car park.
Our getaway car was a shit-coloured Commodore without a straight panel and tyres worn smooth as racing slicks. It was a bomb, for sure, but it had never broken down on us in the two years we’d had it, and kept us dry and more or less warm when it was the only place we had to sleep for the night.
After leaving Adelaide we drove to the border and crossed into the far west of Victoria. I sat in the back with Nez, who kicked me as she lay on the other side of the car, sulking over something she wouldn’t talk about. I was pretty sure it would be over Tommy having abandoned us. He’d paid Nez a lot of attention that week and she’d lapped it up like a spoiled kitten.
The sky was big, blue and empty except for a ball of sun tracking us, while the land we drove through was as flat as an iron, and bone dry and brown.
I got thirsty just looking out of the car window at it.
There wasn’t much we saw along the way that wasn’t stone dead. We drove through one small town totally deserted and another just as empty except for an old man sitting in a rocker on the verandah of a rundown weatherboard house. He was wrapped in an old blanket and had shoulder-length white hair and grey skin. While he looked more like a ghost than a man and frightened me, I couldn’t take my eyes off him as we drove by.
We also saw sheep and cows dotted here and there in the dry paddocks, and some farm machinery, most of which was rusted and looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time.
It was a hot day on the highway. The air-conditioning in the car, which had never worked properly anyway, hummed and grunted so loudly I couldn’t make out a single song on the radio, even though it was turned up full blast. Gwen made things worse by chain-smoking all the way with the car windows wound up.
I could hardly spot Nez through the smoke so I coughed a couple of times in the hope that Gwen would get the