The policeman had stopped talking and his head just lolled to one side. Peter remembered bringing ice-cream to the little girl who had sat with her father, recalled her face rippling with pleasure. He had not wanted to orphan her. Tears began to muster in his eyes but were they for the girl or himself? For so long he’d had to be strong, at school, managing to avoid the subject of his father with the deftness of a bomb technician disengaging the trigger mechanism. Later as he grew older the questions about his oma, the implicit query of what had happened to his parents, the delicious anticipation of young women wanting to mother him, their red lips circling the straw of a shared milkshake, the way he’d had to bite his tongue when they slagged off their own ‘helicopter’ parents, a cheap pejorative lingo coined by those who would farm out their children to friends or other relatives while they doused themselves in suntan lotion on a Spanish terrace scanning magazines rather than cramped over a Monopoly board with their children, telling themselves it was really for the kids’ benefit, it was making them independent. Well he was independent now. With his bow and axe he had slain the three-headed monster that had devoured his childhood. So what did it matter if he cried? Who was there to witness it?
The car had a quarter tank of fuel. He would drive till it ran out or something presented itself. He had no qualms abandoning his plans for Asia. In fact, he felt he belonged here. There were remote communities, indigenous people he could hang out with, learning their ways. They would have no reason to hand him in.
He drove north through bush cutting over rough ground. The two-way radio buzzed, another cop.
‘Clem, where are you?’
He kept on. The bush gave way onto a cleared track, wet and muddy. He decided to take it, hoping it would circumnavigate any roadblocks they had out for him, confident nobody else would be out in these conditions. It had been a long, long journey and he was all of a sudden unbelievably tired but there would be time to rest soon enough. The storm was lightening finally and with it, his mood. He had traversed darkness and had emerged washed by the waters, baptised anew, woken, healed.