Merle wasn’t at the pub when Alice arrived. A young girl with a thick accent checked her in, explaining the dinner menu with relentless enthusiasm while Alice pretended to listen. The girl had a map of the world tattooed on the underside of her forearm. Tiny stars dotted the map. What must that feel like, to be somewhere so far flung from all you knew, somewhere you’d willingly chosen to go, to explore? What was that like, to have no other purpose than to travel and collect experiences so vivid and meaningful that you permanently marked them on your skin? Each star taunted Alice. I haven’t been there. I haven’t been there. I haven’t been there.
‘Miss?’ The girl waved a menu in Alice’s face, smiling brightly.
‘Sorry.’ She shook her head. ‘Can I order up to my room?’
‘For a good tip.’
After ordering, Alice went upstairs with her backpack, unlocked the door to her room and locked it behind her.
She sat on the bed, unlaced her boots, and dropped sideways onto the pillow, letting go of the sob that had been pressing against her ribs for days.
18. Orange Immortelle
Meaning: Written in the stars
Waitzia acuminata | Western Australia
Perennial with long, narrow leaves, and papery orange, yellow and white flowers. Spring blooming after winter rain. En masse these flowers are spectacular. Have been found in their millions across much of the scrub and desert in the west, with people often travelling long distances to see them.
Alice was woken by the sunrise. She kicked the sweaty sheet off her legs and sat up, rubbing the salt crust from her eyes. Her room was bathed in an orange glow. She went to the window and pushed back the curtains. Unfettered light flooded in, reflected off the Bluff towering over the dusty town. Alice looked beyond the buildings and streets to the undulating red sand dunes and gullies of spinifex and desert oaks, stretching as far as she could see. She remembered soldier crabs, sea breezes, green sugar cane, silver river water, and fields of bright, blooming flowers. The desert air was so dry and thin that the perspiration on her body evaporated before it could bead. She was further than she’d ever been from anyone, anything and anywhere she knew.
‘I’m here,’ she whispered.
After a coffee and a fruit scone at the bar, Alice walked out of the pub to her truck. She checked the turquoise paint on her doors was dry, and went to the glove box for the decals. She covered both doors with them, then stepped back, folding her arms. She’d never have thought anonymity could come as easily as a coat of paint and some monarch butterfly stickers.
Later she went to the grocery store, and filled the freezer of her bar fridge with lemonade ice blocks. She ate three in a row lying on her bed, watching through the window as the midday sun blanched the trees. In the afternoon, when it started to cool, she went out to wander the strange red landscape.
She walked along the base of the bluff, studying the squat emu bushes, clumps of spinifex, and spindly desert oak trees. She stopped to notice the wildflowers that grew among the rocks, and picked a couple for her pockets. A charm of finches flew overhead, singing into the vivid afternoon sky. Alice swallowed roughly; the otherworldly feeling of the desert landscape saturated her senses.
Days and nights passed. The split on her nose healed. Occasionally a memory would rise, and Alice would let it. But if she found herself drawn back to the night she left Thornfield, she did whatever it took to distract herself from thinking through the depths of June’s betrayal, or what had happened to Oggi and Boryana. Were they arrested? Were they scared? Did they know it was June who had reported them? She knew how to push the unanswered questions down.
To give structure to her days, Alice developed a routine around the sun; she was insatiable for the desert light. Every morning, she sat on her windowsill, above the corrugated-iron roof of the hotel. As the sun came up, it painted the rocky outcrops and ranges in varying hues: rich wine-coloured burgundy, bright ochre, shimmering bronze and butterscotch. Beholding the seemingly endless expanse of the sky, Alice tried to breathe more deeply, as if she might inhale the space, as if she might create a similar kind of vastness inside herself.
After sunrise, she would take a walk. The town was set in an ancient, dry riverbed, filled with pebbly sand from which tall and thick ghost gums grew. She strolled among their cream to white and pink-tinged trunks, stopping to inspect a pale grey stone or a fallen gum nut. It was hard to believe water had ever flowed there, as if the river was no more than folklore, something that long ago took to the sky on the wings of black cockatoos.
Through the middle of the day, when it was hottest, Alice stayed in her room with the air conditioning on high, flicking through the cable channels. As the afternoons cooled, she went back out to wander again. At night, after dinner, she found refuge in shadows and watched the stars.
Two weeks passed. She didn’t go back to see the vet. She didn’t check her emails. She took the SIM card out of her mobile phone and threw it away.
To her surprise, there were things in the desert that brought her such comfort, they felt almost medicinal. The fiery colour of the dirt, and the feel of it cupped in her hands, soft as powder. The melodic songs of the birds. The light at the beginning and end of each day. The warm wind, the silver-green-blue of the gum leaves, the endless, cloud-tufted sky, and, most of all, the wildflowers growing in the riverbed, among roots and stones. She had started to pick and press them, without fully admitting to herself that it was the familiarity of the flowers that brought her the most solace.
One morning, Alice discovered she’d filled a whole notebook with pressed wildflowers. After she finished breakfast at the bar, she headed into town to buy a new one.
Walking along a quiet street by the dry riverbed, Alice found the town library. She smiled at a faded mural on the library wall, evidently an attempt to make the small boxy building look like a stack of books. Inside was cool respite from the searing heat.
Alice wandered between the shelves contentedly. She remembered the library from her childhood, filled with pastel light and stained-glass windows that told stories.
‘Sally,’ she mumbled.
‘Can I help you?’ the librarian asked from the next shelf over.
‘Where are your fairytales?’ Alice asked.
‘By the back wall.’
Alice ran her fingers along the spines of the stories she remembered reading as a girl. Her writing desk, her library bag, her mother’s ferns. She searched for one book in particular and when she found it she let out a small cry.
Later, after she’d joined and tucked her library card into her pocket, Alice borrowed the maximum number of books allowed and lugged them back to her hotel room. She spent the afternoon flicking through their pages, running her fingertips over stray sentences, intermittently stopping to rest an open book on her chest while she watched the lacy patterns of gum tree shadows dancing across her wall. That night she bought pad thai takeaway with extra chilli, and a six-pack of cold beer, then lay on her bed under the air conditioner while she read the book she’d treasured as a girl, full of stories about women who shed their seal skins and left them and the sea behind for the love of a man.