And then she realised what had to be done.
‘I have to go back,’ she told him, shocked at herself as she heard her own words.
Alex turned his face away from her, towards the door, saying nothing. For some reason his silence only strengthened her resolve. ‘I have to, Al. I need to. Confronting this could be a way for me to get a grip on my life again,’ she told him fiercely. ‘It might be the only way.’
Still Alex was silent. Still he kept his face turned away.
She paused, bit her lip, then murmured, ‘I don’t know if I can do it alone.’
She kept watching the back of his head, and saw it beginning to shake. ‘This is crazy,’ he murmured, and then swung around towards her, so she could clearly see his pain and confusion. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t just -’
‘Okay.’ She got up quickly. ‘I understand.’ She shoved the water back at him and he grabbed it as it sloshed over onto his hand. ‘You’ve done enough.’
She ran into the passageway and pulled open his front door, then moved as fast as she could away from him. But she could hear him behind her, keeping pace, and he was saying her name – her real name – again and again, until it was a chant keeping time with her footsteps. Each time she heard ‘Amy’ it was as though another piece of her re-emerged, twisting and writhing.
Eventually, she couldn’t run any more. She sank down onto the road, spent.
A second later, Alex crouched down in front of her. He took a deep breath.
‘Amy, this is important to me too. So if you
‘… I will find a way to come with you,’ he said eventually, looking back down at her.
And he put his hand over hers.
It was as though she had been drowning for ten years, and at last there was a hand outstretched within sight.
PART TWO
MILLENNIUM
31
Australia
December 1999
Despite the dusk’s warmth, the day’s sun was almost spent. It flooded the sky with fiery colour in a last blaze of defiance as it sank towards the horizon. Except for the small motel, every turn revealed bushland, stretching on and on until it ran beyond sight.
Amy had thought such vast emptiness would make her nervous, and yet she was entranced by the fullness of this unspoiled land. They were going from east to west, taking the highway that had riven a harsh grey line in the red-brown sand, like a rogue thread within the great cloth of scrubby grass and bush that cloaked the southern reaches of Australia.
As she stood on a patch of dirt watching the sky change colour, she felt Alex’s arms envelop her, and leaned into him. He rested his chin on her head and his breath was warm in her hair. She reached her hand up to stroke his stubbled cheek, and he lightly kissed her palm. Then his arm shot out, and he held a camera in front of them, and pressed the button as she laughed.
‘You’ve just taken a photo of my tonsils,’ she said, swinging around to see that there was a carrier bag by his feet. She peered inside and groaned. ‘Not again.’ It was the third night running that their evening meal had consisted of pre-packaged pies and soggy chips. But she guessed it was harder to come by fruit and veg in these isolated, barren parts.
They sat down on the veranda step in front of their small room, and took unenthusiastic bites of their dinner.
‘Are you sad?’ Alex asked between mouthfuls, his shaggy sun-bleached hair quivering as he turned to look at her.
She smiled, knowing what he meant. Their time away had gone so fast, in a couple of weeks they would be back home – in bustling, dark, frosty England, neon-lit with Christmas cheer – the complete antithesis to the hushed, sparse place they were part of right now.
‘Not really,’ she murmured. ‘I mean, we’re coming back, aren’t we – well, at least away again.’ They had spent most of the past five months discussing where else they would like to travel, having fallen in love with being on the road, and would have been tempted to stay if they hadn’t promised families and friends that they’d be back for Christmas and the frenetic Millennium celebrations.
‘Of course,’ he said, running a hand down her bare thigh, leaving a few crumbs on her skin that he then lightly swept off. ‘Although I don’t think I’ll be around when you tell your dad, if you don’t mind.’
Amy smiled, but he was right. Her dad had become a complete nightmare when they’d announced they were going away, first trying to dissuade them, and then, when he couldn’t, attempting to organise them to within an inch of their life. He’d spent a fortnight buying them all sorts of gadgets and gismos that they’d hardly ever used, and made them both get complete medical records from the doctor, just in case they happened to need a blood transfusion or three. Then, at the airport, he had given Alex a lecture about his responsibilities in front of Amy and her mother, while Alex looked petrified. Her father had ended the talk by shaking Alex’s hand and saying, ‘Take good care of her for me,’ to which Alex had replied, ‘Yes, sir,’ as though they were in some midday melodrama. Amy and her mother had laughed, but neither man had seemed to find it amusing.
Now, she shook her head despite her smile. ‘Poor Dad, he finds it hard letting me be grown up. He’s got no one to be a kid with any more.’
They sat in silence for a moment. In the time it had taken them to eat their meagre meal, the sun had vanished, the bold colours thrown out in its descent now fading to pastels as the sky darkened.
Amy was remembering everything they had packed into the past few months. Riding tuk-tuks in Thailand and visiting temples teeming with people in Bangkok; then the rickety, laborious train ride to the north, to find themselves on the backs of elephants or sitting skimming the water on bamboo rafts as they floated through small rapids. Their skin had become bronzed, making their teeth glow whiter. They had lost weight on a diet of rice, fish and chicken, and their hair and nails had seemed to grow faster than they did at home.
Then Sydney. Alex had found a few weeks’ casual work in a pub, while Amy waitressed in a cafe nearby, on the strip at Manly where tourists ventured through night after night, traces of sand and salt lingering around their hairlines.
And then had come this whistle-stop road trip – first to Melbourne and then along the Great Ocean Road towards Adelaide, before this final journey over the deserted, treeless plains of the Nullarbor, the hire car churning steadily through the endless kilometres.
‘Come on.’ Alex jumped up and held out his hand, and they headed into their room. He went over to the esky and dug around in it, pulling out a couple of stubbies of beer. ‘Here you go.’ The ice they had poured in there that morning had done its job of cooling them, although the rest of the grocery stores were now floating in melted water.
Amy set about pulling things out and drying them as Alex spread a map on the bed. He studied it for a while and then said, ‘I reckon we can make Perth in two or three days. What do you think?’
‘Let’s take our time,’ she replied. ‘It’s bound to cost more when we get into the city. And we’ll still have a week there.’
‘It’s such a shame we didn’t plan this better.’ Alex shook his head in frustration. ‘There’s so much cool stuff on this side when you start looking – we’d need at least a month to explore the coastline, for a start.’
