Sara Blake settled back in to her bus seat with a thankful sigh as the big vehicle slid smoothly through the streets of Alice Springs. Her muscles, which seemed to have been tensed ever since she had fled Mildura, relaxed, along with the nagging impulse to look behind her.
Safe at last.
But she wouldn’t think of that now. It would be better to concentrate instead on her new job. To work out how she was going to justify her lack of teaching experience to the mother of her young charges. Governessing and some housework, the ad had read. Surely any reasonably intelligent person could manage that? It was just a matter of working out the right approach to her new employer – show that she was willing and adaptable, and hope it would be enough.
Sara found herself watching the passing scenery, which had the glamour of difference. She had spent her life in the city of Adelaide and this was her first visit to the Alice, as the locals called it, the isolated little town set in the bowl of the Macdonnell Ranges. It was only early September but she still found herself unused to the heat, and the vivid light. The pace was slower too, in everything, as she had learned on Monday. Arriving from the airport, she had taken the taxi driver’s advice on a budget hotel on the riverbank, and had then tried to book her onward journey.
‘Not till Wednesdee, love,’ the snaggle-toothed owner advised her, a practised hand reaching for the stack of sun-faded brochures on the desk. ‘On’y three buses a week – on Mondees, Wednesdees and Fridees. Not to worry, but. Plenty to see in the Alice.’
‘But I was told there was a bus every day.’ Sara suspected he simply wanted an extra night’s booking.
‘So there is. The dog runs up three days an’ back two.’
‘Dog?’ she repeated, wondering about his sanity.
‘Greyhound,’ he said patiently. ‘Like I said, she runs to Darwin Mondee, Wednesdee, Fridee, an’ comes back Tuesdee and Thursdee. So you can book your seat tomorrow and be off at the crack of dawn Wednesdee. Which gives you a full day to see the sights.’ He beamed and waggled the leaflets at her.
He had spoken the truth – except about the early start. A mechanical fault had delayed them for several hours, during which Sara’s anxiety levels had steadily risen. It did no good to tell herself she was being absurd, and that nobody but her new employer knew where she was. It wasn’t until the diesel motor turned over and the door sighed shut that she finally relaxed and could gaze out upon the scenery that so exactly resembled the paintings of Albert Namatjira – copies or prints of which could seemingly be found in every shop in Alice Springs.
Perched high above the bitumen, cocooned within the shaded windows and air-conditioned comfort, Sara watched the scenery pass: low, rugged ranges tinted purple and ochre, red soil, white gums, an untidy scribble of olive-green scrub and the odd taller tree whose dusty grey leaves gave off glints of silver in the vivid light. The sky was cloudless, a pale enervating blue with edgings of pink that may, she decided, have something to do with the window colouring. There was nothing to see – the occasional car roof passing below her, dark clouds of birds that periodically took wing from the road’s verge, and endless vistas of scrub and rocky ridge, and red desert. The other passengers were mostly silent, wrapped in their own thoughts, only the infrequent murmur, too indistinct to decipher, breaking through the hum of the diesel motor.
Sara wondered where the stations were. She couldn’t even see any cattle and yet she understood that the land north of Alice Springs was all divided up into properties. Sometimes a windmill showed on the skyline to support this theory but her eye wasn’t quick enough to discern the dark shapes of cattle standing among the thin scattering of scrub. The visible landscape was dreary beyond belief and as the first couple of hours passed without change to the view from her window she started to wonder if she hadn’t made a hideous mistake.
Then the bus began to slow, the passengers all stirring in their seats to crane ahead. Sara saw that they were entering a town – well, scarcely that. A collection of shabby buildings scattered across an open flat, a dusty racecourse with a crooked stand, a black tank and mill set beside a shallow creek, and up ahead a roadhouse with a further scatter of buildings at its back. There were no shops, no paved streets, just dirt tracks between the houses. A sign, pockmarked with bullet holes, announced that this was Charlotte Creek. Sara had reached her destination.