Darwin gets rolled out into the sun on a squeaking gurney. They’ve taken him off the oxygen. Leonie in her skirt and the brindle dog follow. I set up the mattress in the back of her utility truck. It smells like a mattress that others have died on.
The matron says he only needs the breathing mask if no one’s around. He can’t attach it himself. “If he needs it,” she says, “he’ll be wheezing or panicked.”
We slide him from the gurney. The hospital people aren’t much help. They don’t like it when relatives appear from nowhere and make their own arrangements. I take a hold under his arms, my thumbs fit deep into the grooves between his shoulder bones. Leonie takes his legs. We push and pull him, careful as we can.
“You’re heavy,” I tell him. The ties in the front of his hospital smock pull open. I cover him up with a sheet. The dog jumps up and carefully steps around him, puts its head out the side. Leonie ropes the suitcases onto the tailboard. I stay in the back to travel with him and the cylinders of oxygen. Darwin looks pale outside.
“Are you alright?” I ask him.
I pull the sheet up to shade his face, but he shakes his head slightly. He doesn’t want to be covered.
The road to Maude is straight as a die. I sit on the spare wheel in the back, Darwin dozes on the mattress. I move so my shadow covers his face, put my hand close to his nostrils, feel his breath on my fingers.
He sleeps despite the noise of the motor and the hiss of the tyres on the thin strip of tar. Loose bits of straw fly up around us from the tray of the ute. The wind sweeps the face of his black and white dog so it looks like it’s smiling.
The others all sit in the front: Leonie and Callie and Dickie Del Mar. I can’t see their faces, just the backs of their heads through the dirty glass. I never imagined the three of them together. Callie is in the middle, straddling the hump on the floor. Her hair is cut irregular and short across the back; she trims it herself so it ends up at angles. Leonie drives. I can already tell she doesn’t like Callie by the way she leans against the door away from her. Dickie puts his narrow brown arm along the back of the seat behind her. I slap the roof of the cab and Callie turns to see me. I wipe the dust from the window. She twists her mouth as she forces the sliding part of the glass.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“Do you have enough room? You can sit back here if you like.”
Dickie’s leathery arm rests like a reptile between us, his slender fingers clasp the width of the seat top. He looks out his side, off into the spinifex.
“I’m fine,” she says. She calls to the dog but the dog ignores her. Now that the window’s open the others don’t speak. No one wants Darwin to know about Dickie. I pick up a rusted wrench from beside me and play with the adjustment, watch Dickie’s loose khaki pant leg and wonder if he wants to press his leg against Callie’s jeans. I remember how he brushed against my mother’s leg, their feet as tight as magnets.
I throw the wrench out the back of the ute, watch it spin up through the air then clang on the road behind us. A semitrailer sounds its horn as it comes from the other direction, its iron crates rattling. Jammed-up sheep bulge through the slats on the side, dust storms up as its wheels leave the bitumen. Dickie rolls his window up. I put the oxygen fitting over Darwin’s nose and mouth, paste down the tape that’s come loose from the patch on his eye.
Callie turns and kneels back around on the seat, puts her head through the open bit of the window. “How’s Darwin doing?” she asks.
“He’s keeping to himself,” I say.
She calls to the dog again. “He must be deaf,” she says. It bares its teeth to the wind. I wave the flies from around Darwin’s mouth. “Border collies are my favourites,” she says, “except they run around in circles.”
As we turn into Muddy Gates Lane the dust rises behind us like billowing linen. Leonie slows down to a crawl as we loll in and out of the ruts. I steady the oxygen barrel. Callie looks down the track.
“Is this it?” she asks.
“We still have a mile to go.”
“There aren’t any signs,” she says.
“Signs of what?” I ask.
She looks at me squarely. “Life,” she says. She scans the salt grass flats, squints as if she must be missing something.
I shade my eyes as though I can see what she doesn’t, but there’s nothing in particular, save anthills, some of them higher than horses, rising up from the plain. We pass the occasional boxgum growing this way or that to avoid the harshness. Rangy cattle seek shade. Outbreaks of horehound are the only traces of green.
“If you have to cross a distance there should be something on the other side,” says Callie.
“What were you expecting?” I ask.
“I just came to be with you,” she says.
“Then why aren’t you sitting back here?”