BILL WAS sitting on a sofa in the day room, singing a country song and twanging a guitar. You could do a lot of damage with guitar strings. Why weren’t any staff watching over him? A shaft of sunlight through the window caught the side of his face, and Sidney realised who he reminded her of: herself.
‘Bill, I think you’re my dad.’
He stopped playing and stared at her as she sat next to him, his tongue moving, always moving.
It was obvious — Bill/Billy, he was a truck driver, and he had the same alien-coloured eyes as Sidney. ‘Do you remember a girl called Faye?’
‘Nah.’
‘At a truck stop on the highway a long, long time ago. Don’t you remember?’ Do you remember? and Don’t you remember? volleyed from one side of her brain to the other, as if in a tennis match.
Bill shook his head. Perhaps he was trying to shake words out too. ‘If they ever make me go out there again,’ he said, ‘I’m gonna drive my truck through the city and kill myself and everybody else too.’
‘I want to stay here forever too, Dad.’ Don’t you remember? Do you remember? ‘Do you know a song called “Mama Hated Diesels”?’
‘By Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen?’
‘No. Some Australian guy. Ringo somebody. Or Lucky.’
‘Nah. Definitely Commander Cody.’
‘I don’t think so.’
He plucked his guitar and crooned, ‘Mama hated diesels so bad. Mmm, mmm, it had somethin’ to do with Dad …’
Sidney felt drowsy; she curled into the fetal position, and closed her eyes, her head resting on the cushion next to Dad’s leg.
‘One day the local sheriff told me they had found, her body by the road, she’d been flaggin’ diesels down …’ Singing relaxed his tongue, and brought tone to his voice, somehow, and the song was a lullaby, like the hum of the highway.
‘Dad,’ she said once he’d finished. ‘If a song is playing when you die, do you think it plays forever in that place?’
He didn’t answer.
‘What would your song be, Dad?’
She must have fallen asleep. She woke alone on the sofa to sounds in her head like a needle stuck on an old record, spinning, spinning, crackling.