Li said, If you’re going to Port Howard, the makecamp got cleared out two weeks ago.
The woman stared at her. Are you sure? There’s a lot of people heading down that way.
Li shrugged. There’s Source in Kutha. Check for yourself.
The woman looked stunned. She nodded again and turned back, tugging the boy with her. Li couldn’t work out how they hadn’t heard yet, the way people talked on the road.
Mum, she heard the boy saying, what’s wrong with her face?
She went and got out the ghost map from the four-wheel drive. Lawrence was about eighty k north-east. It had been a decent-sized town when the map was made and the highway went right through it. There was no way the family would have missed the kids unless the kids were further ahead than she’d figured. Then she remembered the bikes. Travelling like that they would have covered the distance in less than half the time, probably only camped one night. Matti could have been well past Lawrence before they even left.
Not long after sunset, Li banked up the firepit and bedded down beside it. She lurched awake in the dark to snarling and birds screaming. Reached for her knife. A child cried out in fear and there were shouts from the beach, then gunshots. She got into the four-wheel drive, ripped the Saint Anthony medallion from its rusted chain and held it in her fist but the child cried on and on, a thin, jarring sound. Matti had cried like that all through the first year of her life, cried until Li was drowning, until she wanted only to be lifted clear of this devastating error. Threw the chair across the room, smashed the bowl. Ange found her shaking Matti, shouting at her to stop. Said she wouldn’t tell Frank if Li swore never to do it again.
She didn’t have the thing you had to have to do this, didn’t even know what it was. Wanted to walk away from it to somewhere quiet, but she couldn’t because they existed – both of them. And she couldn’t give them up.
In the morning, the beach was a killing field of blood and feathers. Streams of birds flew in to replace the dead.
The family left while Li was still cooling the last of her smoked fish. The older boy stared as they passed and the adults nodded soberly. She understood that he must have relayed her question from the way the woman caught him by the hand in some kind of demonstration of how not to lose your child. As if it might be contagious.
One of the men dropped back and laid something on the sand ten metres from her. Thanks for the water and the fish, he said.
Li waited till he’d almost caught up with the others before she went to look. It was a dust mask. She brushed off the salt and held it, dangling by its elastic. Wondered where they would go when they found out she was right. Not back where they’d come from. Anyway, with all the unsheltered heading south, there would be another makecamp soon enough.
Three days east, Li came to what was left of Lawrence. The town was shuttered and shrouded in dust and people walking through picked over the buildings for anything they could use. The general store was locked up tight – either Nalanjin’s family had planned to come back, or they didn’t want to give away what they couldn’t carry – but the boards had already been pulled off one of the windows, and the glass salvaged. The shelves were bare but she found a can of peas that had rolled under the counter.
There had been four road camps between the lake and Lawrence, some just a couple of families, some big enough that she had to walk in and ask. Every kid she’d seen was accounted for.
She slept in the shop and walked out on the nineteenth day into a low-level duster that cleared to make way for other dusters. A dim and bloody sun. The daytime warmth was gone, days behind her. The dust deadened sound so that people loomed out of it dreamlike. Even engines were muffled, the trucks sounding distant until they were almost on top of her.
Between dusters, she saw spinifex and buffel grassland, mulga scrub. Behind the fence, to the south, were low tussocky hills and the XB came and went. Here and there were derelict houses and what remained of fencelines. Sometimes smoke rising from a chimney. Once, someone came out of a shed, their face hidden under a beekeeping helmet and veil, and stood watching till she passed.
The highway was sealed again now but dust lay so thick on it that it could have been a dirt track. Dust blew in eddies, lifted with every step, particles filling the air, coating her clothes and skin and eyelashes. The dust mask made it almost bearable. She experimented with wrapping a strip of clear plastic around her eyes and tying it behind her head. It helped for a little while but the plastic sweated against her skin and the dust worked its way in until her eyes were raw and weeping again. In the end she made a bandana out of her thermal leggings and pulled it down most of the way.
These dusters weren’t fierce like the one north of Kutha, but they were persistent enough to make her feel a bit like she was choking all the time. And when a truck went past it boiled up an explosion so intense that she had to crouch down at the roadside and bury her head in her arms until the dust subsided. The highway would be quieter at night,
