‘Well then...’
‘Look,’ her voice rose, she gripped Aubin’s arm. ‘It’s very important that this isn’t mentioned to the press. Have you given them a statement?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘We can’t have the offenders thinking we’re onto them, can we? When you do speak to the press, tell them that it was most likely faulty wiring which caused the fire and explosion—it’s what the people in the street seem to think, anyway.’ Her grip on his arm was too tight, she realised. She quickly let him go. Right now she couldn’t have cared less what the offenders thought; it was Monty’s reaction that worried her. She couldn’t hide the fire from him, but she would sure as hell try to prevent him from finding out what had really caused it; for the moment, anyway.
She picked her way to the edge of the crater and stood on the edge, gazing across at the blackness of her back garden. Something was missing, but she couldn’t work out what. She pointed helplessly into the void. And then a thought struck her. ‘It’s gone,’ she said shaking her head and gazing around with wonder. Aubin moved to stand next to her. ‘What is?’
‘The lean-to: the most ugly, jerry built structure you could ever have imagined. We were going to knock it down...’ Stevie laughed. Aubin gaped back at the tears of anger, shock and mirth rolling down her face. (Image 24.1)
Image 24.1
FRIDAY
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
From the bus window Mai watched the spring green of the city slowly merging into the dustier colours of the bush. Then they came upon a swathe of wildflowers, like jewels scattered by a giant’s hand, stretching for kilometres along the roadside. The bus followed the path of flowers as they slowly dried and turned to red dust.
Lin dozed and fretted at Mai’s side, unable to find a comfortable position, her cheek hot and red from resting against the sticky bus window. Mai changed places with her, gently pulled the girl’s head into her shoulder and stroked her hair. When Lin finally settled, her hair tickled Mai’s face like a silken net.
The girls in the front of the bus were singing a song by Pumpuang, ‘Love is Like Bitter Medicine’. Rick yelled at them to shut up, but the sad melody remained in Mai’s head. She found she could recall every word of the song as she sat there, jolting along in the bus.
It was a hit song played frequently on the radio when she still lived with her family. Her mother would bring the battery-powered radio into the rice field and together they would sing the popular songs to distract them from the ache in their stooped backs. She closed her eyes and thought of everything that had happened to her since then. A lot of it was bad, but there was still plenty of good, too. With the Chinaman she’d sampled a world she’d never known to exist outside her father’s movies: French champagne, the rustle of silk against her skin, luxury yachts and expensive cars. This was life as it could be, and to this she aspired with a passion almost as desperate as her need to find her son.
No, she thought as she clenched her jaw, blocking the song from her mind. She didn’t miss her old peasant life; not one little bit. She hated what she had now, but she hated what she’d left behind even more.
Their stops were kept to a minimum, with just enough time to fill up with petrol and use the toilet facilities. The roadhouses became smaller the further north they travelled, and less busy. Theirs had been the only vehicle outside the pumps at the last one. Rick and Jimmy Jack veered from the main road whenever possible. The drive would take longer, Mai had heard the men say, but it meant they would have less chance of the rusty old bus being stopped by the police. The men carried the fake IDs in a hold-all by Jimmy Jack’s feet. Although they were good forgeries, they still didn’t want them scrutinised by over-vigilant cops.
Rick had played the fool for most of the journey, his stupid chatter interspersed with crazy laughter and Mai could see he was getting on Jimmy Jack’s nerves. A while ago the smaller man had unsheathed his knife, now he blew on it, polished and fiddled with it, muttering obscenities and shooting Rick dark looks.
Oblivious to his companion’s sour humour, Rick continued to rehearse what he’d say to the police if they were stopped. He threw a pill into his mouth and snapped his jaws around it like a dog.
He altered his voice, attempting to make it sound less rough.
‘Good day officer,’ he practised, slurring his words, bouncing up and down in his seat as he drove. ‘Yeah, this is a tour bus and these girls are all members of a touring Thai netball team ... You wanna examine their papers? Sure can. Yeah, that’s right, we’re going to Hell-an-Back ... You want your dick sucked, officer?’ He laughed uproariously at his joke.
Jimmy Jack didn’t flicker a smile; seemed absorbed with cleaning his nails with the long knife. He’d told the girls that if they spoke to anyone outside the bus, or tried to escape, he’d slit their throats and leave them in the desert for the dingoes.
They stopped at another roadhouse. Mai, being the most trusted, received permission to take a short walk on her own. She scuffed along the red dusty road until the roadhouse generator became no more than a distant throb. The air seared her lungs; the wind on her face scorched like a hair dryer. She’d never imagined that air could feel so dry, the earth look so red or the sky appear so huge and blue. The baked ground felt like concrete under her tender feet, yet all around her, the clumps of grass looked as soft as cotton wool.
She wondered what it would be like to just keep on walking through this desiccated landscape of stunted shrubs and red dust. Maybe if she walked far enough, she’d come across a farmhouse where kind people would take her in, the woman plump and motherly, the man strong and protective. They would help her get Niran back, help her settle and make this place her home.
She continued to daydream as she walked against the wall of heat, slowing down in the small patches of shade and fantasising about a life that could be. A creature of the night, it was hard to imagine adapting to this country of dry, dazzling brightness.
An eagle soared above her head. It was far bigger than any she had seen at home and big enough to shade her like a parasol as she walked. The grass caught her attention again. She wanted to touch it, see if it was as real and as soft as it looked. She stooped to caress it and pulled her hand away with a sudden shock of pain. Looking down she saw a tattoo of tiny red pricks patterning her palm.
It was a sharp awakening.
In a nearby bush mischievous spirits disguised as small, finch-like birds twittered and laughed at her discomfort. The eagle dropped upon an animal nearby and the unseen victim cried out. No, she realised then, she hated this place as much as any other. Nothing would induce her to run off into it. It was too big, too empty, too dry, and like everything she had encountered since leaving home, that which looked kind invariably wasn’t.
Mai had always lived in close proximity to others. The greatest punishment imaginable to her was to be left alone. Surely, anything was better than this. Turning her back on the phantom birds and the evil pricking grass, she hurried back to the others and the safety of the bus.
The countryside changed again. Every now and then the ground would drop away on either side of the road in gradations of orange and red. The gorges here were so steep it looked as if the ogress Pantoorat had gashed them from the primeval earth with her axe.
They’d been driving almost non-stop for nearly twenty hours and no one had had much sleep. Mai’s eyes were full of grit, as were her clothes, hair and toes, and her palm still stung from the prickly grass. But however bad she felt, she knew Rick fared worse. To counter the effect of the ganja he’d smoked at the last roadhouse, he’d been devouring the small white pills as if they were sweets, rattling them down with water from a plastic bottle. Mai swapped seats with one of the other girls and sat in the single seat near the front of the bus, close behind him. He shook his head to and fro to help wash the pills down. Dandruff speckled the neck of his black T-shirt. If she had Jimmy Jack’s knife, she thought coolly, she was close enough to reach out and cut his throat.