Heartstrings | Page 6

the bedroll, laid the groundsheet on the sand next to his
campfire, set his swag upon it, and sat down.
He put on his sheepskin jacket with the wool inside, but left it open at the front, which was
warmed by his fire. One last joint, a big one, from the tin in the pocket he took the makings -
tobacco and the last of his home grown pure grass, to make a nice thick one, to take his time
on before he would lay down.
The night was very dark, and the air very cold. Wrapped in his warm swag, he lay, facing the
fire. After while, he got up, shivering, to push the log onto the coals, and to kick a hole in the
sand for his hip to settle in. He put on a sweater and a woolen cap and socks, wrapped himself
again in the swag, and lay unmoving for the rest of the dark time.
Occasionally his eyes would close for a while, and he would doze in snatches. He woke from
a doze, remembering his dream of a dancer, the wonderful swirling of the body and the
flowing dress and veil and the unfamiliar, caterwauling music with it's hip-hop rhythms, and
the flow of her hair and the flow of her limbs, and the delicious resilient texture of her skin
and flesh, and the smell and taste of her. He was aroused, gave himself the nice spasm of
relief, remembering.
Another time, he was in the sea, under the ocean, looking up through the surface to the sky,
and the dream was the color of water, and he woke to the firelight, to the red and black and
the stillness of the night, and his campfire.
Not a dingo howled. The bush around was still.
His eyes caught the firelight, and dark sparks in them were like sapphire's set in his golden
haired face.
In the morning he decided, he would set the rising sun to his back again, still heading West,
and South across the desert edge.
When he got up, the air was icy cold, in the first dawn light, with the shadows long on the
ground, his gully damp and chilly and all shadowed.
He enlivened his fire, and set the billy to boil. This morning he would cook oats, and make
porridge, he decided, a good start to the day, which should be a long one, if he was to make

Heartstrings

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up some kilometers. Time was running out a bit, if he was to meet up with his brother in time
for this wedding that he had agreed to attend, in Perth.
It had been a long journey, and most of it had flashed by un-noticed as his inner demons
devoured his mind, as the wheels chewed up the road, hour by hour. The desert road across
the Nullarbor Plains was all new to him - he had not driven across before, but only flown over
the continent, the dry eternal plain far below him, below the clouds, a dull tawny brown with
the fain streaks of roads, fences, and a smattering of the shadows of thin trees.
He had avoided road-houses, caravan parks, towns, and all other humans. Stopping only to
pick up fuel and fresh food, and on the first night, to sleep, he had pressed on Westwards,
leaving the great cities of the eastern seaboard behind him.
Leaving it all behind him.
After the first few hours of elation, the wild sense of freedom had vaporised, leaving a still
cold hollow inside him, an empty, draughty space that the beauty of the country through
which he drove could not warm or fill.
He had stopped for a dingo's lunch of a piss and a look around, on the banks of the mighty
Darling River, and indifferently surveyed its wide muddy waters. It was added to his list of
‘spend some time here, another time.’ Ceduna, Eucla, the barren Stirling ranges to the North,
and the empty, frightening deserts that went on and on and on, into the center and then out
again, he turned his back upon. At this time, on the Nullarbor track, he had been glad to have
a destination, a goal to draw him on, for the feeling of driving on the edge of such an enormity
of distance made him vertiginous.
The road went on, and on, straight as a line ruled across the vast continent.
It was not until he passed Eucla on the remote Southern coast, the border between South
Australia and The great Western third, and turned North by West into the desert to head for
Kalgoorlie via Norseman, that a sense of arrival overcame