Ben held his arm out straight and stuck his thumb up the way he had seen it done in old movies. He had a feeling that people didn’t use the thumb any more. Where Ben came from people did not hitchhike.

Olive lay at his feet in the sandstone gravel of the roadside, her head on his bare, blistered foot, eyes closed, saying nothing. That was the thing that worried him most: Olive not speaking.

He listened for the creek. As they had walked up the steep dirt road from the cabin he had listened for it till the last. Then the umbilical cord had been cut and the sound was gone. Just Ben and Olive. Now he thought he heard it again, like the distant sound of the ocean in a shell. But the sound was a car. It appeared around the big bend a couple of hundred metres up the road. A small yellow hatchback filled with passengers. It had ‘P’ plates on the front and, as it passed, someone screamed at them from the window.

‘Have some water,’ Ben said, bending down to offer Olive the dregs of the bottle he had found in the cabin.

She did not respond.

They waited a long time, maybe twenty-five minutes, for the sound of another engine. But what turned the bend was a motorbike, not a car, and it sped past them down the hill and away.

A week earlier Ben would have been beaten by this, would have been angry and frustrated and scared. He would have thought that the world was out to get him, but now he did not expect so much. Things could not rattle him so easily. Maybe not even death. He would not get carried away with things, good or bad.

After ten minutes another engine, louder, lower. A truck, Ben was sure. In his clouded, tired mind he calculated that there might only be two seats in a truck and some part of him gave up hope but he looked down at Olive and he knew that he had to stop the truck.

It rounded the bend, a semitrailer with a green cab and dozens of long logs on the back. Ben waved his arms wildly.

‘Help!’ Ben called. ‘Stop!’

Olive was startled by the shouting and tried to stand but she faltered and dropped to her knees. Ben wanted to comfort her but he knew that his job was to get them home, to get them to Nan’s. The truck moved past them and there was no way the driver could not have seen them. Ben watched the back of the truck recede, but still anger did not rise up in him.

He coughed heavily. His lungs ached.

Red lights and a deep groan a hundred metres further on, before the steep hill that led to the faraway bend. The truck’s red brake lights. Maybe just slowing for the hill, Ben figured, but then it pulled to the side, rocks kicking up, indicator on.

‘This is us.’ Even as he said the words, Ben did not believe them.

Olive didn’t seem to hear him. She was lying down again so he scooped her off the ground, balancing her across his arms as he walk-ran toward the truck, which was still slowing, half-on, half-off the road. Every molecule of energy left in his starving, exhausted, bleeding body went into that run.

He reached the truck as it finally pulled up with a sssss and a crunch of tyres on gravel. He ran alongside the truck and the driver watched him in the dirty passenger-side mirror. The door popped open and swung over Ben’s head. The driver – neatly shaven, brown shirt, sunglasses, kind of old-fashioned-looking – met them with a smile. He had good teeth, Ben noticed. He would have thought that truck drivers didn’t brush their teeth very often, but this one did. 

‘Thank you,’ Ben said.

The driver looked down at them, at their dirty, ragged clothes. ‘You lost?’

‘Sort of,’ Ben said.