Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [85]
‘What?’ she screamed back at me.
‘The radio. Can you turn it off? And the air?’
She eventually punched the ‘off’ button on the radio, but wouldn’t touch the air-conditioning.
I started telling her about a science article I’d read in a magazine when we were back in Adelaide, in the laundromat at the caravan park. It was all about passive smoking and how it killed more people every year than the road toll and most known diseases combined.
‘That’s not true,’ she interrupted, as she defiantly lit up another cigarette, turned around and blew smoke in my face.
‘You always think you’re a wealth of information, Jesse, but that story can’t be true. What about cancer? Those numbers couldn’t include cancer. They wouldn’t have counted all them deaths, I bet. It’s killed almost everyone I know over the age of fifty. It took your grandfather. He didn’t even see his fortieth. Cancer’s like a fucking plague.’
‘The story is true. I read it in a magazine.’
‘Makes no difference where you read it—it’s bullshit.’ She took another drag on the cigarette. ‘Why you reading science magazines, anyway? Since when have you been interested in science? What did you get for the subject at that last school you were at? What was it? An F?’
‘I wasn’t there long enough to get a school report. Don’t you remember?’
She wouldn’t answer me, and only wound down her window and threw the lit cigarette from the car into the dry scrub when Nez started calling out from the back seat that we were all going to die of ‘pastel smoking’.
‘You’ll start a bushfire doing that,’ I complained, as I turned and looked out of the back window to the spot where she had just thrown the cigarette butt.
‘Thank you, Fireman fucking Sam,’ she screamed as she held the empty cigarette packet in her hand, crushed it into a ball and threw it out of the window as well.
‘That should make the both of you happy. I’m all out of cigarettes now, and I’ve no money for another packet. So, it looks like we’ll all have to live a bit longer.’
I tapped her on the shoulder again. ‘You shouldn’t litter. You can get a fine for that. I think it’s thousands of dollars or something.’
It was dark before Gwen realised we had not much more than a drop of petrol in the tank. Her solution was to tap the petrol gauge in the hope that it might shift the needle. It didn’t budge, of course. She pulled over to the side of the road, turned the engine off and rested her head on the steering wheel as she muttered and swore to herself.
When she finally lifted her head she told us we would have to stop when we got to the next town or the car might die on us on the side of the highway.
We drove back onto the road, took the next exit and headed for the lights of a small town not far off the highway. I wound down my window and looked out into the night. As far as I could see we’d arrived in the middle of nowhere anyway.
After doing a lap of the town Gwen pulled into a yard beside a wheat silo and railway siding. She got out of the car, went to the boot and grabbed the blankets and pillows that we’d nicked from the motel. She handed one of the blankets across the seat for Nez and me to share along with two packets of the sweet biscuits and a bottle of water each.
As soon as Gwen lay down across the front seat of the car, manoeuvring her arse around the floor shift, Nez started to cough and splutter. She had never got used to sleeping on the road and was afraid of the dark. It wouldn’t take much for Nez to convince herself that a madman might come along in the night and kidnap her. Or cut our throats as we slept.
Nez pulled more than her share of our blanket over her head as she continued snivelling. Gwen tried to ignore her, pulling her own blanket over her head. Nez responded by crying a little louder, so Gwen told her to shut up. Nez didn’t stop. Gwen eventually sat up, threw her blanket to the floor and climbed across into the back