I didn’t see it at first. The intersection was staggered so the two arms, north-south and east-west, didn’t quite align. Not that I was thinking in symbols back then. That came later. It came with an awareness that crossroads are meeting places, drawing in forces from all four directions, for better, for worse. Although, that particular intersection didn’t seem to want to be a crossroads. Then again, maybe it did. Best not to overthink things. I do know crossroads are places where decisions are made for you and crossroads are not places to get stuck in. My stay in Cann River taught me that.
My car rolled into town about six. At that time of year—it was autumn—the light of the day had begun to give way to the darkness. I’d been driving all afternoon, and I was on a downhill stretch of road coming in from the west. Didn’t notice the lack of power until I’d reached the bridge and saw the scattered buildings of the town up ahead. It was then, as the road flattened out, that I realised something was wrong. I depressed the clutch and changed down, touched the accelerator and nothing happened.
I felt that rippling in my belly, a sensation I refused to give in to. I had to be practical, rational, calm. Things worked out better when people stayed calm.
It felt like good luck when I saw the roadhouse coming into view on my right, lit up in anticipation of the night. I depressed the clutch again and coasted towards it. Hoping to park out of the way, I jerked the steering wheel as the tyres hit the concrete driveway, coming to a full stop on the forecourt a bit shy of the bowsers.
I pulled the keys from the ignition, thinking with relief I’d been saved. As if some guardian angel up there in the heavens was looking down on me, kindly. In the moment, it was a reasonable thing to think. Had my car packed up a mile back, I’d have been forced to spend the night at the roadside on one of the loneliest stretches of uninhabited forest that corner of the world had to offer. Not a nice place for a single woman to find herself. People have been murdered out there. Bushwhacked, disappearing without a trace. Besides, my belly was empty, and I had no food in the car. My mouth was dry, and I nursed one mother of a headache too, after my send off the night before.
All the way from Cockatoo, that send-off had felt like punishment. I convinced myself my workmates had bought the cheapest grog known to woman or beast, and that it just about summed up their view of me. A sort of alcoholic good riddance.
Or maybe they were jealous.
After all, I was relocating up the coast. Set to take possession of a neat cottage in open country after taking early retirement from a position in local government. I’d had enough of the office lifestyle and thought to try my hand at something else. Besides, my house had burned down in the catastrophic wild fires of February 1983—Ash Wednesday, as they were calling the conflagration and, unlike some, I wasn’t going to rebuild.
That was all behind me and I was looking ahead to the east in anticipation of a fresh start. Sun rising over sapphire waters. Rolling green country and cows. The village fair. I thought maybe I’d join the historical society. They were bound to have one. I was brimming with speculation and optimism. I couldn’t get there soon enough.
Cann River was halfway from where I’d come to where I was heading. Halfway to paradise. The horror firmly behind me.
Even as I entered the roadhouse, taking in at a glance the young man seated by a window to my left, his multicoloured beanie failing to obscure his scarred brow, I had a sinking sense that my optimism was premature. On the jukebox, Joan Baez was busy lamenting poor old Dixie. Misgivings reared, and it was as though the c*****e back in Cockatoo had followed me all the way along the highway, trailing behind me like a wraith.
I shook away my thoughts and approached the counter. The woman cleaning the pie warmer looked personable enough. Although she had her back to me, I thought she might have been a kindred soul. She seemed about my age and same in height and build. I thought it funny how women over fifty all ended up looking the same. Well, maybe on the surface. She wore her hair scooped up high on her head and as she turned, I saw the fingers of grey pinned back from her face. She’d painted her eyebrows—they were overly arched—and caked on the makeup, yet her cheeks still creased when she offered me a smile, waiting, hands on hips.
‘What you want?’
‘My car has died on me,’ I said by way of explanation.
She eyed me with cool hostility. Any hope I had of conviviality withered. ‘My car has died on me,’ I repeated, deciding, despite my rumbling belly, that if she expected me to order, she had another think coming.
‘That it, there.’ She indicated with a tilt of her head and I followed her gaze back to my steel-grey hatchback, angled awkwardly, its rear jutting out, obstructing the exit.
‘It isn’t in the way, I hope.’
‘I get Con to shift it.’
Her accent was thick. I couldn’t place it. Italian? I detected a twang. Eastern Europe, maybe. Somewhere like Romania.
She held out her hand. I gave her my keys and she disappeared.
I shifted round a fraction and surveyed the roadhouse interior, avoiding looking in the direction of the scar-faced man. Set alongside the long run of casement windows were tables of lurid orange Formica with matching chairs. The sort of colour that showed every blemish. The floor was covered in cheap grey patterned linoleum, worn and chipped about the entrance.
The counter, with its display cabinets and vintage till, protruded into the space. In one cabinet were the remains after the day’s trade: two sandwiches—egg mayo, and ham and salad—and an otherwise lonely Kitchener bun. I hadn’t seen one of those since the weekend I spent in Adelaide several years back. It looked odd and out of place and homemade.
On a menu board, propped on a high shelf behind the counter, were listed hamburgers with the lot and chips, written in neat lettering. Beneath, written in large, clumsy letters by someone who couldn’t spell, was a small range of gourmet pies: Venisen, Hunta and Stake. I thought maybe there was a good cook in residence, for those pies were obviously not bought in. Besides, almost no one deviated from the traditional meat pie, not even in the city. Meat slurry they were normally, with tomato sauce squirted in the crust vent.
The woman reappeared behind the counter.
‘He’s moving it into the garage.’
I looked around to see a burly-looking man heading past the bowsers to my car. He had on the navy-blue overalls of a mechanic. I noticed a slight limp in his gait. He opened the driver’s side door and reached in to release the handbrake and disengage the gears. Then he went around and leaned back against the rear bumper. Once the car was moving, he hurried back and took hold of the steering wheel. There was a brief pause in which I admired his strength.
‘You want to order something?’
‘I’ll have a steak pie, please.’
‘With chips?’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Fresh out of steak,’ the woman said without turning. ‘Only got the hunter.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘This and that. Could be chicken.’ She didn’t sound that sure. ‘He changes it,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘The baker?’
‘Con.’
She gestured behind me. She didn’t mean scar face. She was referring to the mechanic. It was a confronting revelation, that the man who fixes cars also bakes the pies. I chose not to make too much of it.
‘Sauce?’ she said, raising her eyebrows to her hairline.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Better with sauce,’ she mumbled grumpily.
‘If you say so.’
The woman flounced away, her piled-high coiffure bobbing behind her. I leaned against the counter and waited. My sense that I’d offended her was confirmed when she reappeared, grabbed the tongs from the bench and extracted the only pie in the warmer, plonking it on a plate and squirting on the side the sauce I expressly didn’t want, and setting the whole affair down on the counter in front of me along with some cutlery.
‘You have it here,’ she said, nudging the plate in my direction.
‘My chips?’
‘Sit. I bring them across.’
‘Can I get a drink?’
‘Help yourself.’ She pointed to the fridge beside the door to the kitchen. I went over and grabbed an orange squash.
Loaded up with my dinner, I made my way to a table far from the guy with the scar who sat there motionless, staring into space, ignoring his surroundings or oblivious to them.
I leaned back in my seat and waited for the chips. A few minutes later the sour woman came and plonked down a bowl. The chips were heavily salted.
Avoiding the sauce on my plate, which had taken on the colour of congealed blood, I proceeded to cut into my pie. Flakes of pale meat smothered in gravy oozed out. Looked like chicken. He must have used the thigh. I detected the flavour of fresh thyme beneath a liberal dousing of pepper and a hint of something unfamiliar. Aniseed perhaps.
Midway through my repast the mechanic, Con, wandered in, trailing a smell of diesel behind him which spread and infused the room. He put my keys on the counter, turned and scanned around as though observing a crowd, taking in each of the two of us in turn. I reciprocated, taking him in, and not with a sympathetic eye. He was broad shouldered, long in the body and he had a bit of a belly on him. His left foot kicked out sideways. He had fuzzy, brown hair, a cleft chin and his eyes were set too close together. His brow was arranged in a permanent frown, and his lips were the same as his mother’s, thin and tight, curved down at the edges. I placed him around thirty.
Our eyes met and he didn’t look away.
‘Not like the sauce, then?’ he said. I thought he was addressing me, but there was a loud clang behind the counter and the woman cleared her throat.
‘She said, no sauce.’
‘Is that right?’
How could two people get so caught up on whether I wanted the sauce? What difference could it make to either of them? To anything?
I polished off the chips and bit into the last segment of my pie and washed it all down with the orange squash. Outside, long shadows leached into the gloaming. The neon sign centred on the wide verge at the corner flickered as though trembling in the cooling air. Across the highway, stood a hotel. Two storeys, the upper level fronted by a deep veranda, its balcony sheltering the pavement below, the whole affair painted a pale shade of aqua. Two of the downstairs windows were lighted. Another came on as I watched. Upstairs this time.
A woman exited the front door and took in a sandwich board advertising the nightly accommodation rate. For a while no cars passed through the town.
‘You’ll be wanting to stop the night then,’ Con said to me from his station by the counter.
I got up, collected my plate, and made my approach.
Aksara