I reached the tar-seal road as the first rays of sun picked out the Swimming Hills, their peaks bobbing above wide lakes of mist like giant fat ladies with flowered swimming caps frolicking, ducking beneath the surface as each car approached.

The last sight of my aunty lingered in my mind: she stood in front of the farm house in her old cream quilted dressing gown, waving good bye as I drove through the morning mist that curtained their driveway. In the dawn light it looked like she was floating, but I knew from experience that her feet were very much on the ground.

I’d tried to stop her leaving the warmth of the kitchen to see me off, but she insisted, bestowing upon me one last hug and pressing an envelope into my hand. We didn’t speak. We’d said everything we needed to the night before, sitting up sharing a pot of tea in the kitchen, listening. He’d had a bad night.

Now I drove the familiar route, taking it easy around the bends. I was in a hurry to be home, but I knew from years of doing this drive what lay beyond the gravel verge: nothing - well, not for a long way down.

I pulled over at one point to allow a small, white hatchback to pass. The car had been sitting on my tail for some time. The bright pink licence plate read ‘SOOZ-83’. The little car shot past me without hesitation and I wondered if SOOZ’s mother knew she drove like that.

Years ago that could have been me driving too fast on a mountain road, but now I had a good reason to drive with care. My daughter was almost eighteen months old and I’d never spent the night away from her before. I’d left her reluctantly, needing to visit my aunt and uncle alone, before it was too late. But now, in the chill of the morning with all the evening’s sadness feeling like a weighty cloak around my body, I wished I had her close.

I reached the northern highway by seven, and switched on the radio for the ABC news. The familiar fanfare streamed through the car, comforting me with its dependability. I let the calm modulation of the announcer’s voice wash me gently away from my own woes.

When the news was over I pushed in a cd, switched on cruise control and settled back to make the most of an empty Sunday highway.

The sun reached through the trees in fingers, illuminating the passing scenery like stage lighting. I sped through the surging light with the music blocking out any engine noise, feeling like a character in a film driving to the soundtrack of the movie of my life. I could be anyone, going anywhere, the tug of the unknown calling me away.

But instead of following, I smiled. About now, she would be waking, crying out for her Daddy to come and lift her from her cot. Or perhaps they had fallen asleep together, bathed in the light of the television. He’d get to watch her as she slept, her face more beautiful than the pink curling interior of a seashell, more perfect than a mathematical formula. I envied him that sight.

As if on cue, my mobile phone rang.

‘Morning darling,’ sounded my husband’s voice, tiny in the earpiece.

‘Morning,’ I replied. ‘How was your night?’

‘Great. Oh,’ he dropped his voice a little, as if conscious of sounding too happy. ‘How was yours?’     

‘Alright. I’m glad you two enjoyed yourselves,’ I replied quickly, not wanting to talk about the night before. ‘The boys say hi – they came by for lunch yesterday.’ It had been good to see my cousins, despite the circumstances. ‘Did she go down okay?’
‘Fine. She missed you – a few tears, but I put on a video. I let her sleep in our bed,’ he said, a little apologetically.

I laughed. ‘That’s nice. Which video?’

‘Um… That one with the mouse and the bear – I forget the name.’

‘Oh yeah; is she awake?’

‘Yep - she’s playing - want to say hello?’

‘No, don’t disturb her.’

‘Did you get away on time?’ he asked.

‘Yeah: I’ll be home just after six.’

‘Good. Take it easy on the road though, won’t you – there’s storms forecast for the coast.’

‘Lucky coast. Any rain up there?’

‘No. Well,’ he said, ‘see you tonight, yeah?’

‘Yep, see you tonight. Give her a big kiss from me. I love you.’

‘Love you too. Bye.’

I pulled the earpiece out and dropped it on to the passenger seat. I felt relieved, although I hadn’t acknowledged feeling anxious before the call, just that constant low-grade separation anxiety that starts the moment the baby leaves your womb and ends…

My friends assured me that the fears became more manageable as the years passed, and I hoped they were right.
My journey was approaching the coastal area where I’d spent many summer holidays in my youth, although these days the highway by-passed the town. I thought of calling in for a nostalgic visit, but decided against it - if I pushed on now, I could take time for lunch at our usual café, over the Queensland border.

Remembering those summer days reminded me of my uncle. My first memory is of my uncle. It’s not much of a memory, more a feeling, poignant, filled with promise, like the first soft notes of a symphony that builds slowly to a crescendo. But it’s the first time I remember being me.

He is carrying me in his arms along the beach, my head resting on his shoulder. I watch the sand whisk past below as he strides along with the power of a jet soaring across the sky. We are alone. Out there is the sea, a shout from the wild. Close, the smell of my uncle, and coconut oil, the sound of him humming as he walks, the heat and strength of him holding me high above the world. I move my head: in, eyes closed, out, eyes wide; in, eyes closed, out, eyes wide, in, out, in, out, until the two merge and my uncle is the ocean and the sky and the waves beat in my heart and a walk along the beach becomes an emotion of its own.

Tears welled at the memory. My uncle carried an entire family on his broad shoulders - last night he could barely lift his hand to touch my face.

I blinked rapidly and reached for the plastic container that sat on the passenger seat beside my mobile and a bunch of full pink roses.

Even as her world fell apart, my aunty continued with the practicalities, as she had always done. The container was full of jam drop biscuits, my favourites, which she’d baked especially for my visit. In quick succession I stuffed one, two, three biscuits into my mouth, as if trying to staunch my tears with the sweetness.

Then my hand went automatically to my stomach and smoothed the skin, an habitual movement during pregnancy, when I was proud of my expanding belly, but now used to chastise myself for over-eating.

I took hold of the roll of fat that bulged over my jeans and kneaded it like the raw bread dough it resembled. Losing those last few kilos was proving harder than I had imagined it would be.

I’d enjoyed the burgeoning of pregnancy. Before the baby, catching a glimpse of myself in a shop window had triggered the automatic response of stand-up-straight-tummy-in that most women know. But whilst pregnant I’d push my belly out, taking pride in its increasing size. I tried to recall that pride now, but failed, and noted that the strongest emotion I was feeling was shame. I knew that was irrational – I should be proud of what my body had done, but still I felt shame.

I just wanted to be flatter – flatter stomach, flatter chest, flatter thighs - like the women I saw in magazines, on television and in the movies.

I wondered why society loved flat women so much. I wondered how they managed to fit all their vital organs into such tiny spaces. Not a lump or a bulge anywhere, as if they were empty. Or was it that the rest of us were too full?

I sighed and dropped the biscuit container on to the floor, out of arms reach.

My musings had carried me through several of the smaller towns. Now the highway diminished to one lane either way, as I approached one of the country’s motoring black spots. White crosses on the tree trunks marked each fatality - I drove through a forest of white crosses.

Automatically I slowed down, my hands gripping the wheel a little tighter. The trees grew close to the road, seeming to shroud the sky. The cd I’d been playing finished, so I drove in silence, thinking of the lives that had ended in this place, the devastation caused to those who’d loved them. It was a relief to pass through safely.

I stopped at the next town to stretch my legs. It was a major tourist spot, but I’d travelled through it so often on my journeys to and from school that I no longer noticed the busloads of holidaymakers queuing for photographs in front of landmarks.
My uncle had always driven me to school at the beginning of term, and picked me up at the end for school holidays. He’d do the round trip in one day, not liking to be away from the farm for too long. I now know that the coast road is not the fastest route to the boarding schools my cousins and I attended in the New England area, but I think that he enjoyed the trip via the coast, even if the ocean was just a vista from the car window. When the boys had left school and it was just him and me, we’d detour fifteen minutes from the highway and stop for fish and chips at a beachside café. I was headed there now.
I remember the second last time we took this drive, when I returned to school for the final term before graduation, before exams, before I embarked upon my adult life. I was nervous, unsure if I could do well enough and had been lost in my own thoughts for most of the drive. We ate our fish and chips in silence. My uncle finished his and then started to sneak chips from my bag, a game we used to play when I was a child, but hadn’t played for years. I was supposed to object and fight him off - instead I simply handed him the bag.

‘You know,’ he said quietly, putting it down and wiping his hands on a paper towel. ‘I miss your mother, still, most days. Funny, after all these years.’

He paused and glanced at me briefly.

‘But I think of it like an oyster: losing her was the piece of grit that gave me a pearl – you.’

He reached over and squeezed my knee. His expression started to glow with humour, precursor to one of his jokes. ‘And I am as happy as a clam.’

And then he smiled his wide, close-lipped smile.

My uncle was a happy man. Not jovial, not boisterous, just happy. I’d often catch him standing staring at apparently nothing and he’d invariably tell me he was admiring the view, even if he was in the shed, staring at a blank wall. Or he’d be in the middle of a paddock, taking deep gulps of air, his arms outstretched as if trying to embrace the atmosphere and he’d say he was just taking a tonic.

His sons always teased him about that. Whenever any of us were recovering from an illness, he’d insist we lie outside on the old cane lounge to ‘take a tonic’. The boys used to say he’d do the same for a dying man and expect him to recover; I wish it were true. 

*

For once the weatherman was right. Vast black storm clouds, heavy with rain, had gathered and were pressing down on the air around me as I took the exit to the beach. Here was another town that had grown rapidly in recent years. But the fish and chip shop was still there and the ocean looked the same, no matter what mankind did on its shores.

There was one important stop before lunch, a stop that we never discussed, but always made.

I turned left at the water and headed north. The curb and gutter stopped about five blocks along and the road became narrower, with thick scrub on either side as it wound up to a headland that overlooked the sweep of the beach. I pulled into the small car park at the top, just as the first drops of rain broke onto my windscreen, like big fat grapes, bursting with juice.
I was alone. I took a deep breath and got out of the car, carrying the roses. They were still damp with dew – my aunt must have picked them whilst I was sleeping. The rain was falling harder now. I could feel the impact of each drop on my head and shoulders, like quick fingers trying to attract my attention. I unwrapped the roses as I walked to the white painted wooden railing guarding the cliff top. The storm had darkened the world around me and the railing shone with a strange luminance in the gloom.

This was where they had found her car. They never found her body, so for us, this was her grave. My mother, my uncle’s baby sister, star student, world traveller, single mother, missing person.

She’d been coming home to the farm, to me. She’d only been away one night. Maybe she’d gone to help someone in distress – she was a strong swimmer. Maybe it was an accident and she’d fallen. Maybe it was worse.

I looked way out to sea, then flung the roses over the edge as hard as I could, watching them fly through the air, a bright spot tumbling against a grey backdrop. The rain streaked down my face, but I wasn’t crying. I was only two when we lost her and my uncle did the crying for both of us.

Roses weren’t her favourite flower, but these roses came with love from my aunt, from a rose garden my mother had known. She and my aunty had been best friends at school - that’s how my aunt and uncle met. When I arrived, unplanned, it was natural that Mum and I went to live at the farm, and so my family was born.

Then my uncle lost his beloved sister, his best mate, the last of his childhood. My grandparents had already passed on, so now he was an orphan and an only child. But he had gained a pearl.

I’d often daydream that she wasn’t dead, that she’d just had enough and walked away. Being a single mother was not easy – in the late sixties it was even harder. So I’d fantasise about her return, on some auspicious day: my twenty-first, my wedding, the birth of my daughter. But when she didn’t reappear during my uncle’s illness, I had to let that dream go: if she’d come back for anything, she would have come back to say good-bye to him.

The sky rumbled and groaned and sent the rain down like a landslide. I turned away from the sea and hurried back to the car.
I drove slowly down the hill, with the wipers on full, peering through a wash of rain like a heavy fringe across my windscreen. Inside the car was hot and clammy. I was glad to reach the cafe and leave the stuffiness behind.

The only other occupant of the waterfront car park was a motorbike rider, trying to gear up in the rain. I watched him as I turned off the car and reached for the folding umbrella I kept in the side pocket of my door. He was getting soaked. He caught me watching him and smiled ruefully, shrugging. He was about twenty-two, I guessed, and had messy blonde hair and a thickish beard with a sculpted look to it. But his eyes and face had such youthful freshness to them that somehow he looked clean-cut, despite all the hair and the biker gear. I imagined he was a student, who would graduate and get a job in a laboratory or a high school or an office and shed the hair, find a partner and settle down. Just like I did.

I scrambled out of the car, then leant back in, clumsily trying to retrieve my handbag and stay dry beneath the umbrella. To my surprise, I felt a hand upon the umbrella handle and looked around. The young biker was beside me. He took the umbrella and held it above me, smiling.

‘No point in everyone getting wet,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’

He handed me the umbrella as I straightened up.

‘Not good weather for bikes,’ I commented.

He shrugged again, as he walked backwards to his bike, grinning at me.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Ah well – got a schedule to keep. Enjoy your day. See-ya.’

He raised a hand in farewell and put on his helmet, a be-stickered work of art. I watched him as he revved up and wheeled out of the car park, disappearing down the road in a sound wave of white that lingered long after he was gone.

I ate my fish and chips outside under the awning, and watched the rain over the sea, grey on grey. I felt part of the landscape, as if the wet brush painting the seascape had painted me too, with blurry edges melding into the wash of the ocean.

The visit to the headland had left my emotions open, but the boy’s simple kindness made me feel happy in a situation where my mood could have gone either way.

I caught myself humming a tangled tune, as I licked the salt from my fingers. The sharp smell of the sea and the fish caught in my nostrils. I held my hand to my face and sniffed at the lemon tang that lingered there. I wanted to run out into the rain and swoop along the beach like a gull, calling up into the clouds. As I sat motionless at the concrete council bench, I was really flying over the sand in my uncle’s arms, singing.

The rain had eased a little by the time I rejoined the highway. It gave the motorway a glossy slick that pitched the light into odd places. I was on the homeward run, as the road widened to four lanes either way and the traffic sped up to 110km per hour. There were more vehicles now, some travelling too fast.

A siren wailed behind me. I could see the red light of an ambulance flashing in the rear view mirror, about half a kilometre away, coming up fast. I pulled over to the left lane to make room for it to pass.

My spirits dropped as the traffic started to slow down. There was an accident ahead. I got that feeling of dread, that it-could-have-been-me type of feeling.

I tried not to look as I crawled past, but I couldn’t help it - it was a motorbike, mangled in the centre lane and a rider, sprawled out on the wet tar. It was him, the boy from the beach. I saw his helmet, discarded by the side of the ambulance.

My heart thumped and my throat muscles contracted; I gasped for breath. The world moved into slow motion, all except the emergency services people, who seemed sped up, moving frantically around his body. Two ambulance officers were on their knees over his chest. A policewoman was putting up a screen around him.

I drove, barely seeing the road in front of me. My hands, clinging to the wheel like a crutch, started to shake. I pulled over to the verge and rested my head on the window. In my closed eyes I saw him, in the flashing light, red, spread across the road, ragged, as if the rain was taking him to pieces with each pelting drop.

Then the ambulance sped past me, the siren calling out its urgency to the cars that scattered before it.

I took a few deep breaths, breathing in the silence after the siren like a calming draught. If the ambulance was rushing to a hospital then there was still hope.

I pulled back out onto the motorway and resumed my journey, seeking comfort in action. The light was starting to fade, but the rain had stopped. I was only an hour and a half from home.

Ten minutes on I passed the ambulance, pulled over on the verge, with the back doors open. I saw both officers bent over the figure on the stretcher, working quickly. I kept driving, trying not to think about what I had just seen.

Five minutes on, the ambulance passed me again and I relaxed a little – hope. I reached for the tupperware container for a snack, then remembered that I’d pushed it to the floor. Instead, my hand found the envelope my aunt had given me, which I’d forgotten about. I put it in my lap.

Then I passed the ambulance again, but this time the doors were closed and the two officers were leaning against the side, one talking on the two-way. I knew what had happened. Suddenly I felt very weary.

At the next rest stop I pulled over and turned off the engine. In the encroaching darkness the lights of the cars passing beat like a metronome, as I stared blankly ahead.

The envelope lay in my lap.

Numbly, my hands opened it and put it before my eyes: it was a photograph, a photograph of my uncle and my mother, arm in arm, standing in front of the farmhouse. It was taken the year before she disappeared. My mother, with a hand to her face, pushing back her wild mop of blonde hair, my uncle, looking straight into the camera, smiling his big, close-mouthed smile.

They looked happy.

Suddenly, my heart tore like velvet and all the sad feelings poured out. Tears rushed me like a tidal wave. I fell back in my seat, struggling to keep my head above the pain, as I banged my clenched fist against the steering wheel and wailed in the darkness of the roadside rest stop.

On drives through the country at night, I’ve seen dobs of light scattered about, windows of houses, each marking the lives of people unknown to me. But to them, their home is the centre of the universe and their universe revolves around them. Thousands, millions of tiny whirlpools. Who knows what dramas unfold behind each of those anonymous markers?

The cars rushed past me on the motorway, intent on their own journeys. A lone car, parked beside a motorway at night gives no hint of its occupant’s distress, like the torturer’s horse in the poem, tethered quietly outside the house where the torturer is at work.

When my car started up again without pause I felt surprise, as if it was wrong for the simple mechanics of life to continue like nothing had changed.

I was close to home but the familiar landmarks seemed strange to me until I realised that it was me who was strange. I shivered and turned on the heating. The last hour of a journey is always the longest.

*

The cool mountain air smelt of autumn fires in carpeted rooms, as I wound up the range towards the lights of home.
Serious gums lined our driveway, like Beefeaters at Buckingham Palace, their bushy tops lost in the thick, black night sky - no moon, no stars. I paused for a moment by the car, bag in hand and took in the quiet, like a tonic. The verandah light came on and I stepped towards soft voices, a smile starting to crack the mask of my tired face.

My husband and my daughter waiting at the top of the steps.

Then I was in their arms; then I was home.

‘Your aunt called about half an hour ago,’ my husband said, after we’d moved inside to sit in front of a welcome-home fire. I looked at him over the head of my child; she sat on my lap in her pyjamas, burbling complicated tales of adventure to me. I knew what he was about to tell me.

‘He’s gone,’ he said quietly.

I nodded and stroked my daughter’s head, breathing in the perfume of her hair and skin. I didn’t cry. She looked up at me and smiled, my pearl.

***

About the Author

Zacharey Jane’s first novel The Lifeboat was published in 2008 by UQP and shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award in 2009. It will also be released in Spain and Turkey in 2009. She is currently working on her next novel, about religion, body parts and love. In 2010 UQP will be publishing her children’s story Tobias Blow.

When not writing, Zacharey is fulltime mother to two children, sings with the Sixpenny Jazztet and is actively working to become the subversive element in Toowoomba.

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