Ice cream ran between Sam’s fingers and down his wrist. He licked the back of his thumb clean and watched the closest seagull squawking angrily, ruffling its feathers as it charged another bird. Katie’s paddle-pop was sliding off its stick and she had to duck to scoop it into her mouth. Her chin was wet with chocolate ice cream and her shirt was stained. Almost breathless, she was slurping up as much as she could before it all melted.
Travelling through Port Augusta, having crossed one dried-up lake that had cracked into large mud plates, Dettie had decided to stop at the next shoreline. After crossing a narrow bridge, they’d pulled over near a small dock where people were using a concrete ramp to load their boats into the water, and where a pink Mr Whippy van had parked. Dettie had let Jon buy them all ice creams, and was nibbling her own lime-flavoured icy pole, holding it at a distance, one hand poised to catch the runoff. The car was parked behind them, near a pair of bins, and they were standing beside a long wooden jetty that reached out into the rippling water.
For the first time in days Sam felt a crisp breeze creeping beneath his singlet and up his back. His teeth were numb as he bit into the last of the paddle pop, letting it melt away in his mouth. Jon had finished his in four lazy bites and was chewing on the stick. No one had spoken since they’d parked. Katie’s attention had been on her ice cream; Dettie, who clutched her handbag tightly to her side whenever Jon was close by, had tested each of the car’s wheels with her foot; and Jon strolled with his arms stretched out, tilting his head back in the sunlight to let the wind whip through his clothes, pinning them to his body.
In the sky two birds caught an updraft and were lifted higher, their wings trembling. Two long brown bridges, one newer than the other, both uplifted on crisscrossing pylons, snaked off into the distance, uniting both sides of the town. People as small as ants were fishing from the smaller of the pair, riding bikes and walking its length with dogs. Several white sailboats bobbed on the surface of the water.
‘Is everyone done?’ Dettie asked, winding the wrapper around her stick.
‘Just a second, love.’ Jon yawned. ‘You might want to take a bit of a breather while you can. Look around. It’s a hell of a view.’
Dettie cleared her throat, jerking her head towards Katie and Sam.
‘What’s that, love?’
‘The language.’ Dettie raised her eyebrows.
‘Right.’ Jon nodded. ‘Sorry, love. Heck of a view, kids.’
‘Just say “nice view”.’
‘Right.’
Dettie had stayed back from the water’s edge, trying not to look out over the expanse. She hadn’t even crossed the boundary of the dirt car park. They had been driving together for a few hours now, and gradually she and Jon had stopped talking so cautiously to one another. She’d even stopped flinching when he called her love.
The seagulls had given up on Sam and were crowding around Katie, cawing and twitching their open beaks.
Jon tugged a map from his back pocket and sat down, spreading it out over a patch of grass. Sam knelt beside him as he was pinning it down with his shoe and a couple of pieces of bark, and watched him hunt out a strip of road that followed the coastline. Sam leant over to read the name of the closest town.
‘Wondering where we are, me mate?’ Jon shielded his eyes. The sun had just swung out from behind a cloud.
Sam nodded.
‘Well,’ Jon bit his bottom lip as he turned the map towards Sam, ‘it looks like we’re smack in the middle of Port Augusta here.’ He jabbed at the name.
Jon’s map was a little smaller than the one in the diner, and had been folded and refolded until it was breaking apart at the creases. In the area of ocean he had written comments and drawn arrows that led to the towns he must have visited. Under Melbourne it said Twisted ankle off tram, and pointing to a town called Millicent he had scrawled One eyed Geezer—story about shark hunt.
Jon began tracing his finger along a highway leading west. There was nothing written yet under the arch of the Great Australian Bight.
Sam tapped the paper, and then pointed at the road and his watch.
‘How long to go?’ Jon asked, and went back to measuring out the distance with his thumb. ‘I should say a good couple of days.’
Sam tugged at the grass, nodding.
Beside the car, seagulls had started pecking around the bins, snapping at one another. Sam watched them leaping into the air and gliding in small circles, but he became slowly distracted by his view of the car. Something about it didn’t look right, he realised. It seemed to be exactly the same, the same make and colour, and there were no new scratches or dents—but something had changed, he could tell. Nothing seemed to be missing. The aerial was still there, and the mirrors, but he felt as though he should have been noticing something; he just wasn’t sure what it was.
‘So, do you know any sign language, me mate?’ Jon said.
Sam blinked. He let the grass blades in his fingers tumble back to the ground. He remembered Tracey clasping his hands. The pamphlet she’d given him on sign language, with its cartoon people, stiff and grey and dead-eyed. He shook his head and stared again at the map.
‘Never mind,’ Jon said. ‘A brother of an ex-girlfriend of mine—way back in the day—he was deaf. We all grew up together talking to him in sign. I know you’re not deaf, but I was thinking I might get a chance to dust off some of that. See what I remember. It’d be nice.’ He took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. ‘Although, that’s British sign,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if it’s different here.’
Jon kept staring up at the clouds drifting above them. He sniffed and scratched his nose. Slowly, his eyes eased down until they focused on the stick still clenched between his teeth. ‘You want to see a dumb trick?’ he asked, and grinned. ‘Here, give us your garbage.’
Nodding, Sam wiped the spit off his paddle-pop stick and held it out.
‘Oh, and I’ll need…Could you ask Katie for hers? And see if your aunt has still got one too? Could you do that?’ Jon wiped off his own stick and pinched the two together at a right angle.
Dettie and Katie followed Sam back over. Dettie had insisted on rinsing hers off and was wiping it dry with her blouse.
Taking the four sticks, Jon wound them into one another, their edges touching, the two inside sticks crossed. He had to strain to lock them in place, but when the four of them were knotted together they held, making the small frame of a boomerang. He lifted it up, hanging it on his finger.
Katie laughed and Sam raised his thumbs.
When Jon laid it down on the map, the tips of the boomerang stretched from the road they were on off into the midst of the Nullarbor.