As he was on the opposite roster, Alice didn’t have any reason to see Dylan. If they passed each other on the road or in the work yard, she ducked her head. To keep herself busy, whenever she wasn’t on sunset patrol, Alice started walking Pip around the crater in the afternoons. They walked to Kututu Puli to watch the sun set on the lichen-covered red boulders. With enough determination, she could work and walk the raw burn of love out of her system. Maybe her feeling for him really was a fever. Maybe she could break it.
On her next day off Alice roamed her house restlessly. Lulu and Aiden were busy. Ruby wasn’t home. Alice had been for her morning and afternoon walks, cleaned, and driven into town to buy Pip a new chew toy. By six o’clock the sky was dark enough to flick her fairy lights on and finally surrender to the thoughts of Dylan she’d been resisting all day.
Alice went outside into the smoky purple dusk. Ever since the first night she’d turned her fairy lights on, they’d been tiny secret beacons of her heart. When she lay in bed watching them shine, she was consumed by hope that the fragile little lights she’d strung in the darkness somehow reached him across the dunes, somehow spoke to him all the things she could not say.
A loud rapping knock on the front door made her jump. Pip sniffed the air, barking.
‘Coming,’ Alice called, rushing through the house. Could it be? She flung the door open.
‘Happy housewarming!’ Lulu and Aiden sang in unison.
‘Oh!’ Alice startled. ‘You guys!’ She smiled widely enough to hide her crushing disappointment.
In one arm Lulu held an oven dish of tacos oozing melted cheese and heaped with guacamole. In the other she cradled the colourful Mexican vase that Alice often commented on, filled with freshly cut desert roses. Alice remembered the handwritten entry in the Thornfield Dictionary. Peace. Beside Lulu, Aiden carried the Frida Kahlo print Alice always ogled most at their house, and a six-pack of Coronas.
‘For you, chica,’ Lulu said, grinning as she and Aiden offered their gifts. ‘We know you’ve been working so hard to make your house a home, and wanted to celebrate with you.’
‘Speechless,’ Alice croaked, choking up. ‘Come in, come in, you wonderful, cheeky buggers.’ She sniffled, stepping aside to let them in. As she was closing the door, Pip yapped. ‘What?’ Alice asked her. She yapped again at the door. For a moment Alice was giddy with hope. But when she swung the door open, it was Ruby who stepped into the light.
‘You need to get your outdoor light fixed, Pinta-Pinta,’ Ruby said, walking inside with a fresh loaf of bread that smelled warm and garlicky. ‘I baked.’ She handed the loaf to Alice with a nod and went to sit with Lulu and Aiden at the table. Alice took the bread and Lulu’s tacos into the kitchen, willing herself to keep smiling. Willing herself not to cry because her beautiful, kind friends weren’t Dylan turning up at her door. She busied herself pouring drinks and finding plates, overwhelmed by deep gratitude, and deeper foolishness.
After the impromptu housewarming, Alice’s resolve began to crumble. She wouldn’t admit that she went out of her way to at least see his ute, or hear his voice on the park radio. It was a hunger unlike any she’d known. She started breaking afternoon plans with Ruby, and lying to Lulu about needing time alone. Something’s going on with you, chica. I can feel it, Lulu said to her. Alice brushed her off.
For a long time, she’d told herself her afternoon walks had nothing to do with him. Every time Alice walked the dusty red dirt track around the crater, she inwardly denied she was driven by one thing: the moment she would come around the bend by the scraggly gums and rest her eyes on his face. She ignored that she deliberately timed her walk so she’d ‘coincidentally’ bump into him at sunset at Kututu Puli. He held the full attention of the afternoon tourist group while he told them the story of Kililpitjara. But he always looked up just as she passed; she thrilled at his eyes drifting over her body.
And so their charade went, day by day. She would walk on, timing her pace to her best guess of how long it would take him to finish, and make his last patrol lap of the ring road. If she thought she needed to slow down, she’d amble under her favourite archway of mulga trees, which reached over the track, the fingers of their branches entwined. Or she’d gather a fistful of desert wildflowers to press in her notebook. But if she thought she needed to quicken her pace, Alice broke into a jog. She didn’t stop to take in the light or the birdsong, or notice the baked scent of the earth as the day cooled. She didn’t pause to wonder at the mulga archway or give a thought to wildflowers. There was only ever one thing on her mind. It was only ever him.
At Kututu Puli she stopped to fill her empty-on-purpose water bottle. She always sat on the side of the water tank, facing the full light of the setting sun. She knew her legs and feet were visible from the road. It was his call whether he pulled up and stopped to see her. She stared at the red sky while she waited.
He’ll be here.
No matter how many times she heard the sound, the thrill of his tyres crunching on the dirt did not wane.
His engine would cut silent. His car door would open.
He was there.
And, if anyone was watching, all they’d see was two friends bumping into each other, meeting by accident. Every day of the week.
‘G’day,’ he’d say with a smile.
‘G’day,’ she’d reply, always expressing just enough surprise to see him, never having to force her warmest grin.
As the sun set the two of them sat talking, taking their time to carefully reveal pieces of themselves to each other: they never talked about who she was before she’d arrived at Kililpitjara, or who else was in his life. Instead they talked around those things, showing each other their best half-truths.
‘Have you ever been to the west coast?’ he asked one day, without looking at her.
Had he heard her thoughts and daydreams? She didn’t look at him. ‘Not yet,’ she said breezily, swatting flies away, fixing her gaze in the same direction as his, on tussocks of spinifex backlit by the sun. ‘Love to though. To see where red dirt meets white sand and aqua sea.’
He laughed. ‘What the hell are we doing hanging around here?’
She grinned at him. Yellow butterflies swooped over the grass, drunk on the orange light. The lichen turned black in the shadows, and the crater wall reflected the blaze of sunset colours.
Though his presence soothed painful memories she wanted to forget, every time they met, the life Alice had left behind began to creep like a vine into her heart, tendril by tendril and leaf by leaf, until she realised one day while they were talking that she was always mentally gathering him bouquets, silently telling him her deepest longings the only way she knew how: through the unspoken language of Australian native flowers.
23. Desert heath-myrtle
Meaning: Flame, I burn
Thryptomene maisonneuvii | Northern Territory
Traditionally, Anangu women beat pukara (Pit.) with a wooden bowl to collect dew containing nectar from the flowers. Thryptomene, derived from Greek, means coy or prudish; this bush appears modest but in winter through to spring produces a cloak of tiny white flowers with red centres, blooming as if revealing a secret.
Alice’s twenty-seventh birthday fell in the middle of her four days off. She hadn’t told anyone about it. Not even Lulu.