29
And on the sixth day Frank noticed a dark stump that sat on the periphery of the cane. In the yellow light, the sun shining each way to get in his eyes, he mistook it for the stove. But the stove was on the other side of the track, still resting on its side, and this dark smudge moved. Not much, but it did move, like a ripple of water over the bottom of a still pool. A wallaby, its ears pricked, listening. It wasn’t a wallaby, he could see that much through the sun. He held up a hand to shield his eyes, wary of making a sudden move. Something carrying a club, it seemed to be, yowie, bunyip, Stig of the Dump. He opened his mouth to say something, something to let it know he was a big man here in his house, something to say he was unafraid of whatever looked at him from inside the thinnest part of the cane. His voice would have made the word ‘Hey!’ but when he recognised the creature with the club and his breath was taken away and his lungs closed for business, he ran towards the cane, his heart thick in his chest.
On his knees in front of the pale small face, he panted through his open mouth, shallow little breaths, creeping forward with his hands out, not touching, just reaching. Sal’s face was only visible where blood and dirt had dried and flaked off. Her hair stuck up like fox ears and down over one eye like a hawk’s beak. The other eye shone wetly, a bottom lip sucked red against black mud. What clothes she had on looked the same as her blood- and mud-caked skin. She stared beyond him, her iris overtaken almost completely by a large black pupil. She did not move and for a moment he couldn’t make himself touch her in case she was a ghost. In her hand, what he’d taken for a club was an animal, dead, dried and wet, flattened like roadkill. He saw the eyes of a march hare, the snubbed snout of a dingo. Slowly he rose so that he was stooped over her and quietly, trying to steady his breath, he touched her shoulder. She did not flinch or disappear as he’d been scared she might, but she did not move either. So he gave her the tiniest of prods in the small of her back and she began to walk. She walked like her bones were sticking to each other. He tried to brush the thing she clutched out of her hand, but she shook her head and hung on, and he did not dare force it.
If there was one moment that he regretted not having a phone this was it. Feeling unable to drive, wanting a mug of whisky and a lie-down, he lifted her into the passenger seat of his truck and climbed in himself. He strapped her in, then himself, and started the motor. Before he drove he turned to her. ‘Sal?’ She looked at him, a good start. ‘Are you all right?’
Sal looked at him a deal longer before she nodded. ‘I’m okay, thank you very much,’ she said.
‘Where’ve you been, kiddo?’
‘Had to get this.’ She nodded to the mess of fur and bone that she clutched to her chest. He looked down at it again and really could not tell what kind of animal it had been. ‘What is that?’
‘Bunyip. Just a little one, but.’
He started the engine and drove slowly to Bob and Vicky’s, feeling every stone under the tyres, certain all the time that he would crash the truck and kill them both.