‘Will we be seeing you again?’ Merle asked Alice as they waited for her bankcard to clear. She tore the receipt from the machine and handed it and Alice’s card across the counter. Alice took them with a nod of thanks and tucked them into her pocket. She’d never imagined she’d eventually spend the money she’d saved to see the world with Oggi on creating a new life alone in the desert.
‘You never know,’ Alice said as she walked out to the car park, not looking back.
She put her things into her truck, whistled for Pip to leap in, and followed. From her pocket she took the last coral tree leaf and stuck it to the edge of her rearview mirror. Cure for heartache. As she drove off, Pip sat to attention, barking, causing a thought to nag at Alice. At the next set of lights she turned down the street the vet clinic was on. But when his van came into view, Alice lost her nerve and put her foot down.
The highway shimmered in the morning heat. Behind her Agnes Bluff disappeared in the distance. When the road intersected, Alice drove west, further into the desert. She wound her window down, rested her elbow on the sill, and leant her head back against her seat. Imagined the heat might blanch her memories, much like the central Australian sun had done to cattle carcasses littering the barren land. Leaving nothing but white bones and dust behind.
Alice drove for three hours through empty desert before she came to a roadhouse. She pulled in to fill up and gave Pip a long drink. A menagerie of camper vans, four-wheel drives and tourist buses trundled by. Alice thought back to her conversation with Moss. Whitefellas went into the desert either to outrun the law, or themselves. Alice ushered Pip back into the truck. She’d committed no crime, but was no exception.
Glancing around, she wondered what someone looking in her direction saw. A girl in her truck with her dog, who knew where she was going? She hoped it wasn’t obvious that she didn’t have a clue what she was doing. She hoped no one could tell how hard she was trying to believe she could outrun anything if her desire to leave it behind was strong enough.
As she idled through the families and backpackers and tourist groups, Alice felt a surge of hope for where she was headed. If she could make a life for herself in a place where a grieving heart once hit the earth and grew into flowers, maybe everything she’d left behind could be transformed into something meaningful too.
The rocky red landscape rolled slowly into clean sand dune country. Less than a hundred kilometres to go until she reached Kililpitjara. To distract herself Alice studied the pristine patterns on the dunes. The nearest loomed, an untouched pyramid of fiery red sand, rippled by wind. She wiped the sweat from her face with her T-shirt. Her legs stuck to the vinyl seat. The sun was high, the glare was white-hot. Pip jumped onto the floor and curled in the shade. Alice pressed her foot down on the accelerator.
‘Nearly there, Pip.’
Finally, after she drove over a slight rise in the highway, a purple shadow appeared ahead of her, far away on the horizon. Alice blinked a few times to be sure it wasn’t a mirage. As she got closer, she leaned forward, her thighs peeling from the seat. Behind undulating sand dunes, the tops of buildings appeared. A few white sails. Tour buses. A road that turned off the highway, with matching signs either side: Welcome to Earnshaw Crater Resort. Alice kept driving until the Kililpitjara National Park Entry Station came into view. She pulled up at the gate by the window of a brick and corrugated-iron building, where a woman greeted her in a park uniform like the one Sarah had been wearing.
‘Hi.’ She leant towards the intercom grille below the window. ‘My name’s Alice Hart.’
The woman ran her finger down a clipboard before looking up, smiling.
‘Go right ahead, Alice. Sarah’s waiting for you at HQ.’ Her voice crackled through the intercom as she pressed a button to raise the boom gate.
Alice drove through, mesmerised by the sight of the crater ahead. It was as elaborate as a dream, changing shape and form with every bend the road took. Its beauty was strange and mystifying, rising like a textured ochre and red painting against the blue sky. The sand dunes, dotted with spinifex and clusters of mulga and desert oaks, were seemingly endless, and all-consuming. After weeks in the desert, there was something about feeling small, unfamiliar and out of place that Alice enjoyed. It was as if she could, at any moment, recreate herself entirely, and no one would notice. She could be whomever she chose.
Twenty minutes later, Alice pulled up outside a timber-framed building that blended in with the surrounding trees and bushes, under the towering presence of the crater. She turned the engine off. Listened to it tick and cool. Wiped her face on her T-shirt again. After spotting a tap on the side of the building, Alice clipped Pip’s collar onto her lead and got out of the truck. She knotted Pip’s lead loosely to the tap, turned it on to a drip and left her to slurp, tail wagging. Behind Alice a screen door opened. She turned to see Sarah walk out, smiling.
‘Alice Hart. Welcome.’
‘Thanks,’ she exhaled. Having a dog in a national park suddenly struck her as problematic. ‘Sarah, I didn’t mention this, but I have a dog …’
‘Other rangers have dogs here too. Your yard has a fence.’ Sarah nodded. ‘Come in. Contracts to sign and uniform fittings and so on, then I’ll show you to your house.’
Alice’s step lightened as she followed Sarah inside. Maybe sometimes it really could be as easy as leaving everything behind to begin again.
With a pile of green ranger uniforms beside her, Alice followed Sarah out of the headquarters car park and onto a ring road that encircled the crater. The enormity of the outer wall was deceiving, as if it were the side of a mountain range; a line of peaks rather than a circular rock formation. Something about it made Alice shiver: its size, its age, what the impact must have been when the meteor hit the earth. How long ago that was. Pip yawned on the seat beside Alice.
‘Quite right, Pip,’ Alice mumbled. Her mind was too tired. The day was too hot. She was in no shape to be contemplating celestial geology.
Sarah turned off the ring road and onto a smaller, unmarked track that curved between mulga trees. Alice peered through them, spotting a few buildings and a dusty oval. They came to a roundabout that forked in three directions, and took the first turn, driving slowly past a fenced work yard, inside which was a large aluminium shed, petrol bowsers, and lockable cage garages full of machinery and vehicles that bore the park logo. As Alice drove by she caught sight of two rangers inside. One was wearing a slouchy hat and sunglasses, talking over the roof of his ute to another. Though she couldn’t see his eyes, his head turned to follow her truck as she drove past.
They went over a dune and around a bend to the edge of the cluster of staff houses, where they stopped in front of a squat, brick house painted white, with a cage garage and padlocked fence. Alice wondered what all the security and fencing was for, what or who there could be to lock out. Sarah got out of her ute and gestured for Alice to pull into the empty garage.
‘Is this all you’ve got?’ she asked, carrying Alice’s backpack and box of notebooks. Pip leapt out to explore.
‘My new bedding and kitchen stuff is in the back. I went shopping before I left the Bluff.’
Sarah took a key off the ring clipped to her work belt and unlocked the front door. Pip ran in ahead of them.
The house smelled freshly disinfected and was full of light. Alice set her belongings on the dining table, distracted by the view through the rear sliding glass door. The backyard was full of wild acacia, spinifex and thryptomene bushes.