Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [3]
You’re right.
I checked the compass again and eased back the throttle. The packed sand of the creek bed rode smoother than the corrugated track, only the occasional rock or dead branch to avoid. I wove the natural highway, content, even a little smug, that others would struggle on the bombed-out road while I took the scenic route.
Though what others? I’d passed a German couple in a 4WD yesterday, sharing pleasantries and a peanut butter sandwich, all three of us disappointed to have converged, to have our hectare of personal space intruded.
But today, no one. The world my own.
After an hour I stopped and again checked the compass and the direction of the creek. Then, for the last time I rode on, cruising my private highway, a happy fool beneath the searing sun, painting pictures of Paris, making love to you in a rented room.
And then suddenly the earth was in my mouth. The sky beneath my feet. After a slow, rocky section, the creek bed had smoothed out again. Yes, I was riding too fast, but this wasn’t why I crashed. I crashed because I’d seen death, a skeleton, a fossil of a human being suspended in the eroded bank. In the split second I glimpsed the corpse, I thought it some desert soul escaping from the underworld. I tensed with shock, clipped a boulder and flew. Bits of metal and broken mirror glittered in the air. I saw myself tumble and roll like a stand-in double, the slow-mo scene as bike and body crumpled.
That machine comes to rest with the ousted rider is the curse of the motorcyclist. No matter what speed or terrain they part upon, the smash and tumble always seems to end in an embrace of engine and body.
I was pinned by my bike in the dried-up creek. When I came round, I thought I was dead. How could I be in my body and staring at my head, set down on the sand?
I was looking at the empty helmet, wrenched from my skull by the force of the impact, a fist-sized gash in the left side. Trapped, no ambulance blaring to the rescue, I was happy.
Happy to be alive.
Until I wrestled the engine from my dislocated shoulder, turned and scrabbled to see the dead wasn’t chasing, I didn’t even feel the break in my shin.
I dropped to my knees in pain. I swore so loud that if the rotten body possessed a soul, it would’ve been shaken from the bones. When I grasped it was nothing but hollow marrow, I cursed the empty sky, stranded and broken. I was sat between the body and bike, gripping fists of dirt. Yes, close to crying.
Before I worked out how to resolve a wreck into rescue, I wanted to know who had ended my adventure, who had delayed my rendezvous with you.
I crawled across the creek bed, the two ends of my tibia grating, scorching pain, my separated shoulder useless. I should’ve been taking stock of the bike, my food and water, painkillers. But I wanted to touch this attempt at resurrection, confirm it was real, no trick of the desert on a lonely mind.
All flesh was gone, polished by the soil and its hungry microbes, the wind and the rain and the flaming sun. Though the earth still claimed the bones, something of a life remained in the angle of resting. The left leg, arm, shoulder and ribs lay wedged in the dirt. The distended fingers of the right hand reached out from the bank, almost a Michelangelo touch of the light, but clutching, and missing, at something or someone.
I almost shook hands, welcomed myself to the dead. But this wasn’t my final resting place, and to greet this corpse would be to make myself too comfortable. Instead I ran my fingertips along the femur, the blade of the pelvis and the knobbly spine. Feeling this relic of a life, all my own pain was suspended. Who was buried here? Why? And for how long? I thought Aborigines burned their dead.
Then I saw it, glinting from inside the ribcage. A silver cross. I reached into the heart space, and delicately pinched the flash of silver between my thumb and forefinger. Then I pulled my hand back, slowly, careful as a man defusing a bomb, conscious I was defiling the dead, robbing a grave.
I