Silky nodded thoughtfully, dumped the rest of the cone on her plate and wiped her hands.
‘Bush can live his dream.’ I looked back at the sea. A line of surfers rode a perfect wave. ‘I’ll have mine.’
And I did. Bumming round Australia in a camper van, freefall rig in the back, a backpacker along for the ride. The only bit of pressure each day was deciding whether to risk looking like a dickhead on a surfboard, or to do something I was pretty good at, jumping out of aeroplanes. Only dress code, T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops — and the collection of friendship bracelets I’d accumulated over the last few months around my wrist. Money wasn’t a problem. When I ran short, I just drove to another boogie [freefall parachute meet] and packed rigs. I didn’t regret for a moment dumping Plan A, to buy a bike and tour the States. One look at the CNN weather forecast for November back in Washington had been enough.
Silky checked her watch. ‘Better hit the road if we’re going to make it by tonight.’
‘You still want to come?’
‘Of course. I want to meet your friends.’ She stood up and adjusted her cut-off Levis. ‘And we hippies never turn down a free bed.’
It felt pretty good to see all the men turn as she brushed her hand across her long, tanned thighs as we walked to the car park. She’d taken my lectures about sand discipline to heart. I liked to keep the stuff on the beach, where it belonged, and not in vehicles and tents.
The sun was fierce on my shoulders and head, and I knew what was coming. It was hot as an oven inside the 1980s, box-shaped, mustard-coloured VW combi. The guy who’d sold it to me in Sydney had thrown in the corrugated tinfoil window screen for free, but I never remembered to put it up.
Silky made a final check that she wasn’t bringing any sand in with her and threw a beach towel over the burningly hot PVC.
‘It’ll feel cooler once we get moving,’ I said.
‘What will?’ She pouted. ‘The van, or us?’
The air-cooled wagon chugged slowly out of the car park and through the busy streets of the little resort. It looked as if it had been around the planet a couple of times, let alone a continent. I hoped it wasn’t going to finally throw in the towel before I got back to Sydney, cleaned the thick layers of bug kill off the windscreen, and sold it to some other sucker.
We hit the highway south to Brisbane and I was soon on autopilot, elbows on the steering wheel as I stared at the long straight ribbon of tarmac and through the shimmering heat haze. Silky sorted out a cassette from the shoebox between us. There weren’t many still intact; she’d left the box on the seat one afternoon and most of them had melted so badly they looked as if they belonged on a Salvador Dali canvas.
The Libertines sparked up through the crackly door speakers and were soon competing with the rush of wind through the side windows.
Silky settled back in her seat, her sandalled feet resting on the dashboard. A few songs in, she turned to me and said, ‘We’re a good fit, no?’
I didn’t know where that had come from, but she was right. Coming to this place and meeting her had been one of the best things I’d ever done.
It hadn’t been a tough decision, binning George. I never got to find out which department of the CIA or the Pentagon he worked for, and really didn’t give a shit any more.
I just got up one morning, packed everything I owned into two cheap holdalls and a day sack, and went to the office. I told George the truth. I’d had enough; I was mentally fucked. I sat across the desk from him, waiting for one of his habitually scathing replies. ‘I need you until you’re killed or I find somebody better, and you aren’t dead yet.’ But it didn’t happen. Instead I got, ‘Be gone by tomorrow, son.’ The war would go on without me.
As I walked out of the building for the last time, en route to pick up my bags from an apartment I was never going back to, I felt nothing but relief. Then I thought, fuck it; George could have tried a little harder to keep me.
There was a noise like a drunken hod carrier tap-dancing on the roof and I slowed down; I knew exactly what it was. Silky jumped out and stood on the running board. Her surfboard was coming unstrapped again; the wind was getting hold of it. It didn’t matter how many extra bungees I bought her, she always insisted two were enough. She didn’t think the fact we had to stop and do this three or four times a day undermined her argument.
She jumped back in, slammed the door and smiled at me, then started slapping her thighs to the music again as we drove on. The hippie thing was just a piss-take. We’d met at a boogie just outside Sydney. She was in her late twenties and had been travelling for the last six or seven years, working the bars, fruit-picking, hitching rides. It had started as a gap year, then she’d forgotten to go home. ‘The beaches are better here than in Berlin.’ She’d laughed. ‘I bet the same happens to you.’
She’d hitched a ride north with me. Why not? It was only a couple of extra thousand miles in the magical mystery tour that she called her life. I was hoping for a little bit of that myself now.
Silky stopped slapping her thighs and went and dug around on the back seat for some water. She clambered back beside me, sorted out her towel, and passed me the bottle. ‘So, who exactly is Charlie?’ With the Libertines and the wind rush in full swing, she had to shout.
‘Tindall? Known him for years. We worked together.’
She held back her hair with her free hand as she took a swig. ‘Doing what? I thought you worked in a garage, not on a farm.’
‘That’s just what he does now. We used to do loads of stuff — a little bit of freefall, that sort of thing.’
‘Is he still jumping? Is that what we’re going to do?’ She jerked her thumb at the five-cell Raider rig on the back seat.
‘No idea, I just wanted to catch up with him while I’m here. You know how it is. You’re really close to someone for a while, then you don’t see or hear from him for years. Doesn’t make you any less of a mate.’ I picked up the map that lay between us and threw it at her. ‘Except we have to find him first.’
Four hours of long straight roads and one petrol stop later, and we were approaching a small town that sounded more like a tongue-twister than a place on the map. The instructions Charlie had emailed me took us past a store with a tin roof and three saddled horses tied to a rail. We took the track left immediately after a blue letter box at the roadside, made out of a milk churn nailed sideways to a post.
We turned a corner or two and a haphazard collection of red tin roofs and a water tower started to take shape in the distance through the heat haze. We had arrived at Charlie’s farm. Well, his son-in-law’s, but all the family had chipped in. They’d sold their houses and moved to Australia lock, stock and barrel. Once Charlie had reached the magical age of fifty-five, God’s own country had welcomed him with open arms — as long as he took out private health insurance and didn’t expect an Australian pension. His own had kicked in when he’d left the army, though it was hardly enough to keep him in caviar and champagne. Charlie had been offered a commission and taken it. As an officer, he could stay in an extra fifteen years, instead of getting binned at forty.
We drove down half a mile of track, post-and-rail fencing either side of us. About a hundred metres from the house, a woman on a horse, waving like a lunatic, overtook us. I couldn’t see much of her face under her baseball cap, just this huge smile. I slowed, but she waved us on. She stopped at a gate and we carried on along the track.
‘Who was that?’ Silky didn’t sound jealous. A perpetual traveller couldn’t be.
‘Probably Julie, the daughter. The last time I saw her she was about seventeen with a face full of zits. That would have been a good fifteen years ago.’
We pulled up by the house, alongside a weather-beaten Land Cruiser and a pick-up truck that had seen better days.
Charlie stood on the veranda to welcome us, a big man in a green T-shirt. With his cropped, dark red hair, he was on his way to doing a pretty good impression of a traffic light. I could see Silky trying not to stare too obviously at the grey socks he insisted on wearing under his sandals. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s a Brit thing.’
Hazel came out and slipped an arm through her husband’s. She was dressed more or less the same as him, except her feet were bare. They both walked down the steps and out into the sun to greet us.
Charlie was heading for sixty but still looked as fit as a butcher’s dog; there wasn’t an ounce of lard on him, and that ginger hair somehow added to the healthy outdoor look. The sun hadn’t been kind to him though; his skin was more burned than tanned. He thrust out a hand, small and out of proportion to the rest of him. He certainly
