Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [29]
After the flat monotony of Route 1, the Sandover Highway is a roller coaster. I’m glad to get off the asphalt and feel something more than the occasional roadkill flexing the suspension. The track is rutted but not too rough, occasionally juddering my hands from the steering wheel.
I drive for hours, no thought in my head but the holes in the road. I’m happily numbed by the focus, only pulling over when the sun touches the horizon. I pitch the rented tent, cook a tin of beans on the gas stove and light a fire. The one dead tree I find and break for kindling stands at the edge of light, and the knots and bark shadow like the furrowed brow of an old man come to warm himself before the coals.
I sleep, then wake up cold, the roll mat too thin for the desert night. Stepping outside, I’m stunned by the light of the universe, the stillness of it all. How a galaxy in mid-explosion can seem so calm. Now the dead tree glows with a crown of stars, the furrowed brow smoothed. I stand and take a piss, crouch to the embers of the fire and rub my hands.
And then, as sudden as a switch is flicked, a lone gust of wind. The coals flare, ash races on a gale, the tent swells like a billowed sail.
And then nothing. The wind gone, blown.
I set again off just before dawn, making the creek around midday. I had imagined navigating dunes of drifted sand, but a rough track, no doubt carved by others seeking out the ruin, leads me all the way.
And what should have been a drive focused on direction, oil checks and overheating, was a study of the dream I had last night.
It was a replay of the first time Anna and I went out together, when she picked me up two streets from the station, without asking, because she knew that I wanted her, to be driven out to the coast and forget who I was, who I was chasing. She’d pulled over, leaned across the passenger seat and flicked open the door. I noticed her painted toenails, that she drove barefoot. I asked her if the car was stolen and she laughed. She asked if I had enough money for a stick of rock.
On waking this morning, I’d thought the dream reality and the desert the dream. Driving now, it plays vividly on, as bright as the Australian sun.
We were heading towards the coast, along an empty dual carriageway.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘A kestrel.’
Anna followed my finger to the hovering bird. It dropped like a stone to the verge. I gently gripped the inside of her forearm, felt the heat of her soft skin, a pulse. The car veered across both lanes before she regained control. She wound down the window.
Even in my sleep, cold on the desert floor in central Australia, I’d tasted sea air, perfume.
‘Are we running away?’ she asked.
‘Just like a singer.’
She looked across, knowing. ‘Or a fourteen-year-old in a stolen car.’
I laughed. ‘But with a romantic ending.’ I added. ‘The two of us, sailing on the sun.’
‘Into the sunset,’ she corrected. ‘Not on the sun.’ She laughed. ‘We’d burst into flames.’
A seaside town flickered past like a reel of film. I saw the reflection of the car in a shop window, Anna the driver and I the passenger, the pair of us incognito.
She pulled up in a car park where shifting sand had blown into the corners, halfway up fence posts and signs, dissolving kerbs and footpaths. We felt the fresh wind. Anna locked the doors and we walked across the road on to the beach. She tried to trip me and we wrestled and laughed. The sea boomed against the shore. A rabble of gulls squawked above. I walked with my arm over her shoulder and pulled her close to feel her hair dance about my face. We stood and kissed for a long time. I kissed her neck and hair and cheeks and nose, pressing against her pelvis.
And when we stopped and stared, I could see myself in her eye, as though I occupied her pupil. She turned and pulled me towards the dunes. She walked backwards and tugged me along. And when I ran ahead, Anna chased.