5
We came to a halt and the driver wound down his window. He rattled off a series of short, sharp instructions to someone in Paperclip, then I heard the creak of a barrier being raised and the car rolled forward once more.
We rumbled over the kilometre or so of hardcore towards the main and took the left. No surprises there. The Georgians weren’t any fonder of their old mates from the Russian Federation than the Americans were.
We moved smoothly along the metalled road, with only the occasional shake and rattle as we encountered a good old-fashioned pothole.
I tried to time this stretch by counting off the seconds, and got to twenty minutes without a pause.
The two in the front were still enjoying themselves. They switched the radio on and listened to some Georgian songs that seemed to involve a lot of wailing. Maybe it was the same station that played in embassy security huts?
At no stage did they acknowledge I was there. Maybe they’d forgotten me. That would have been nice.
There’d been no steep climbs up or down, so we were still following the valley. Why weren’t we going over the high ground, stopping at the VCP then heading back to the city? And if we weren’t, was that a good or a bad thing? I had a nasty feeling I knew the answer.
Ten minutes more and this definitely wasn’t normal police stuff. We still hadn’t got anywhere near the high ground; if we’d been going back to the city we would have done so by now.
I shuffled around, trying to get more blanket over me. My goosebumps were on the retreat and I wanted to make the most of it while I could.
Something about being warm and cocooned set me thinking about Silky again. I was confused. I knew I’d done the right thing coming here with Charlie, but at the same time, all I wanted now was to be back with her in Australia. Not just as an alternative to lying in the back of a car on my way to what was probably going to be the beasting of a lifetime, but simply because I wanted to be with her. She smelled a whole lot better than these blankets, for starters.
I thought about her lying next to me on the beach, and sitting beside me in the passenger seat of the VW. My mind rambled. I couldn’t think of a single moment with her that hadn’t been good. I thought about the time she said, ‘We’re a good fit, no?’ She was right, we were. I missed her.
So what were we going to do when I got back? There was still the trip to the red centre; to what I called Ayers Rock and Silky and everybody else seemed to think was now Uluru.
Before meeting Silky, I’d have cut away from any fearful thoughts in a situation like this – even cut away from good stuff at the same time. I probably would just have lain here. But f*ck it, I liked it this way. There was still sailing in the Whitsundays, and Kakadu National Park, and New Zealand. All the places we’d spoken about when we were travelling together. I wanted to go to them all, and I wanted to go to them with her.
The gearbox made a muffled complaint and the car slowed. We turned onto much rougher ground. I curled up tight.
The engine cut out.
Both front doors opened and there was the crunch of shoes on stones.
The tailgate was lifted and the blanket pulled away. The cold air hit me like a slap in the bollocks.