“No,” she said.
“Poor boy, his wife left him. Lives out Dugan way with two little kiddies. It can't be much fun.”
“Why?” she asked, examining the photo. “Why did she leave?”
“Who knows? Just packed up one day and when he got home she was gone. People say she ran off with a fellow she was engaged to before Brad. You know, she got pregnant to Brad, and—” Her mother consulted the photograph. “Maybe he isn't as nice as he looks,” she said. “Sometime these happy-go-lucky fellers—”
She didn't finish. She was thinking, Sally knew, of their father, who had been nice-looking and charming enough but grew sullen when there were no more hearts to win, and more and more disappointed with himself, and angry with them, and beat their mother, and at last, when they were still quite small, took off.
Sally, with her new understanding of these things, threw her arms around her mother, who was too surprised by this burst of affection to resist.
“Lordy, Lordy,” Sally said to herself in the old black mammy's voice she used for one set of exchanges with herself, "life is saaad.”
In the afternoons she had taken to going for long walks over the low, rather treeless hills. It pleased her, after so many months in the city, to be in the open again, alone and with no one to consider but herself.
The air in these late-spring days had a particular softness. There were birds about, there was the scent of blossom. She felt a lightening of her spirits that was more, she thought, than just a response to the soft weather. She was beginning to recover some of her old good humour in the face of what life presented, its sly indignities. The errors she had made need not, after all, be fatal. “Things will turn out all right, I'll survive. I'm young, I'm tougher than I look.”
This was the way she argued with herself as she strode out under the high clouds, with the rolling landscape before her of low hills and willow-fringed creeks and their many bridges.
One day, when she was out later than usual and had turned back because the sky far to the west had darkened and was growling, she was overtaken on the white-dust road by a Ford Falcon that tooted its horn, went past, then came to a halt and stood waiting for her to catch up. A dirty-blond head appeared at the window. “Want a lift?”
“No thanks,” she called, still twenty yards off. “I'm walking.”
“You'll get drenched,” the voice told her. “Gunna be a storm.”
When she came level she saw who it was. She might not have recognised him without the blue suit and groomsman's bow tie, but it was him all right. Same unruly head of hair, same look of broad-faced amusement.
“That's all right,” she told him. “I'll risk it.”
He looked at her, his eyes laughing. “Okay,” he said, "suit yourself. We don't mind, do we, Lou?”
She saw then that there was a child in the back, a boy about four years old, and a baby strapped in beside him and slumped sideways, sleeping.
“No,” the boy shouted, "we don't mind. We got ourselves, eh?” He laughed and repeated it. It was a formula.
“That's right,” the man said.
“Hi,” said Sally, ducking her head to be on a level with the boy.
“Hi,” the boy said, suddenly shy.
They looked at one another for a moment, then he said, shouting: "Hey, why don't you ride with us? We're not goin’ far.”
“Where?” she asked, "where are you going?”
“Anywhere! We're ridin’ the baby. She likes it, it stops ‘er screamin'. We just ride ‘er and she stops. Anywhere we like. All over. We like havin’ people ride with us, don't we, Brad?”
“Sometimes,” the man said. “It depends.”
“We like girls,” the boy shouted.
The first drops of rain began to fall. They bounced in big splashes off the roof of the car.
“All right,” Sally said, "I'll ride with you for a bit,” and she ran round the back of the car and got in.
“Well,” he said to the boy, "we got lucky, eh?”
“We did,” the boy crowed, "this time we got lucky.”
“Brad Jenkins,” the man told her, starting the car up. “And that's Lou and Mandy”
“I'm four,” the boy announced, "an’ Mandy's one. Nearly. Our mum ran off an’ left us. He's our dad.”
She looked at the man. Oh Delilah, that mouth! she thought. He lifted an eyebrow and gave a slow grin. “Reuters,” he said, "all the news as soon as it happens. That's enough, eh, Lou? We don't want to give away all our secrets.”
“What secrets?” the boy shouted. “What secrets, Daddy? Have we got secrets?”
“It's true,” he told her, still grinning. “No secrets.”
The boy looked puzzled. Something was going on here that he didn't get. “Hey,” he said, "you didn't tell us your name.”
“Sally,” she told him. And added for the man's benefit, "Prentiss.”
“I know,” he said. “Jumbo's wedding.”
Almost immediately the heavens opened up and water began pouring into her lap. Not just a few drops, but a torrent.
“Sorry,” he said.
She shook her head. There was not much use complaining. The car swooped up and down the low hills.
“Hey, Brad,” the boy shouted over the sound of the storm, "are we gunna take Sally to our house? Like the last one?”
“Steady on,” the man told him. “She'll think we're kidnappers.”
“We are. We're kidnappers.”
“Don't worry,” he told her seriously. But she wasn't worried. It amused her to think of him riding round the countryside letting Lou do the talking for him, using the kids as bait. She didn't expect to find herself tied up at the back of a barn.
“He goes on like that all the time. Non-stop.”
“What?” The boy shouted. “Was that about me?”
“Yes it was,” the man told him. “I said you talk too much.”
“I do, don't I?” the boy said. He was very pleased with himself. “I'm a chatterbox.”
“Okay, now, a bit of silence, eh? While we work out what we're doin'. You're soaked,” he told Sally. “We could get you some dry clothes if you like. I could take you back after we've eaten. We'd be goin’ out anyway t’ get the baby to sleep — No, Lou,” he told the boy, who was trying to interrupt, "I'll handle it. It's true, we would like it. I'm a pretty good cook.”
She wasn't taken in by any of this and he didn't expect her to be. Part of his charm, she saw, was that he expected you to see through him and become complicit in what all this playfulness, with its hidden urgencies, might lead to. But nothing else had happened to her in the last week.
“Okay,” she said. “But you're looking after me, eh, Lou?”
“Am I? Am I, Brad? What for?”
“It's all right, mate,” he told him, "she's jokin',” and he gave her a bold, shy look that was meant to disguise with boyish diffidence his easy assurance that she was not.
When they got there it proved to be a house on wheels, a portable barrack-block for workers on the line. Long and narrow, like a stranded railway carriage, it consisted of a dozen rooms all of the same size along a single corridor, with a kitchen unit at one end and a shower and a couple of toilets at the other. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the land, all washed and dripping, glowed under a golden sky.
“Well,” he said, "this is it — nice, eh? We aren't cramped. Lots of room for expansion, if you'd like to move in. We can put up any number. We could open a hotel.”
Only four of the rooms were in use. The others, when she looked in, were thick with dust, the little square windows grimed with months, maybe years, of muck. One or two of them had old pin-ups on the walls. Another was piled with dusty cartons and magazines, and there were tools, several shovels, and a pick or two in a pile in one corner.