ernest ragman chapter 2 (2004)

Alive &
Well &
Hitching in Queensland


The hunter dropped me outside Bundaberg. The lift had lasted through the night. His left arm was bandaged, partly covering a swathe of tattoos, and to change gear he had to hold the wheel with his knees and reach across with his right hand. He'd injured himself hunting pig, he said.
Next to my rucksack on the back seat lay two rifles and a copy of Bacon Busters.
By the end of the journey he was asking me what he should do about his wife. Did the Lord really mean him to live this way?
"I wouldn't say I'm miserable but I ain't known 'appiness for a long time," he said.
I could only offer him the peace found in silence.
He drove a few kilometres out of his way to drop me on the northern edge of town.
"Cheers," I yelled as I grabbed my bag from the back. Bacon Busters was open at the 'Babes n Boars' section.
He waved with his good arm as he started back the way we'd come. I dropped my bag at my feet and stuck my thumb out.
Another dirty stretch of the Bruce Highway as the sodden heat of the day slithered into the air. I looked like a sleep-deprived murderer and I stood there for some time as the cars shot by. All things considered this was the best way to travel, to keep a low profile, but Jesus that flattened Cane Toad was starting to get depressing.
I was almost surprised when I finally got a bite. The dark brown Holden stopped just past my spot and the driver opened the boot while I jogged up the red dirt siding. I stopped below the snarling top lip of the open trunk and looked at him. Thin grey hair above a thin face with a spud for a nose, T-shirt and shorts that didn't appear to have been changed since they were in fashion. Somehow rodent-like.
"You heading north?"
"Yih, far as Rockie."
He meant Rockhampton. This was the land of the abbreviation.
He blinked at me through his specks. Rockhampton was a good few hundred kilometres away. I slung my bag in and pulled the door shut, sending dust ricocheting to the ground.
We strode round to either side of the front of the car. I paused at the passenger door.
"Giddiiin," he said as he ducked beneath the smouldering roof of his mobile lair.
The inside of the car was like an oven, but not the kind used to make anything appealing. A cassette tape looked about to turn into a puddle on the dashboard and my seat felt like it was packed with burning coals beneath the plastic cover. A breeze came through the open windows when we got going, but it just turned the vehicle into a fan oven.
We also weren't moving fast enough to even have any impact on the guy's sweat-heavy strands of hair, let alone introduce some air conditioning to the car. I looked at the speedometer. We were tearing along at sixty. As we rounded a corner on to a long stretch of straight a car sped up behind us and overtook without a second thought.
"I'll get there same time as you," said the guy.
The other car shrunk into the bleached distance.
"I used to drive trucks," he explained, fiddling with the fan controls so more hot air pumped into the car.
"These cunts are all in such an 'urry, but everyone gits there the same time."
The car descended into what felt like an expectant silence as, outside, the tall leaves of sugar cane fields waved on either side of the road. I felt I had to say something supportive, although I would've loved him to break the seventy mark.
"Plus you get to see more of the countryside this way," I managed.
"I don't give a shit," he replied, the vowels rolling off his tongue like condensation down the side of a cold midi of Tooheys.
That was the problem with hitching. You could never be sure what people wanted out of the in-car conversation. This guy seemed to speak more out of boredom than manners or any pretence of actually giving a shit.
Yet again I found myself wrapped up in issues that should not have troubled a man just trying to mind his own affairs. People were passing prisons and this was a jerry wagon.
Another car flew past us.
The guy flicked two bony fingers. "Fack orfff."
We carried on, the car droning through the folds of heat and silence smothering the highway.
The guy piped up again some time later, scratching the side of his pointed face as he turned slightly in my direction.
"So where y'headed?"
"Airlie Beach."
He laughed grimly. "Yeh I know about yooze bloakes and Airlie Beach."
Then he seemed to catch himself. "I only laughed because I work with you bloakes on the fruit picking and they all go up that way, that's why. I ain't laughing at you or anything."
I'd been considering doing some fruit picking to harvest some readies. Apparently the farms feeding Bundie's belching rum and ginger ale plants were sure sources of income for backpackers and every other itinerant around. They were also rough places to toil for too long, judging by this man's sun-furrowed features and hasty explanation of his mirth at my expense.
But I was forgetting myself. Time to throw another gambit to the hungry conversation beast.
"So have you been to Airlie?" I asked hopefully.
"I been once but I was pissed."
It seemed the beast was easily satiated for now. It would develop an eating disorder at this rate.
We passed a sign: Rockhampton, 350. The speedo hovered around 65.
After a time we stopped at a garage, a forlorn place with a single pump being worked by a two-headed attendant. The small forecourt was riddled with sharp-smelling stains left by spilt oil and petrol that had fast evaporated into the humid air. A toilet sign pointed round the back of the building, where you just knew there'd be a rickety cubicle inhabited by a spider subsisting on Cane Toads and tourists.
"I've got to fill 'er with piss," said the guy, climbing out of our hot metal box.
I got out and watched him approach the baseball cap-clad attendant, wondering if he'd taken his gruffness out on me and would suddenly come over like a Piccadilly dandy.
"Fill 'er up mate," he said, thrusting a crumpled $20 note into the pump-jockey's hairy palm.
It was a reassurance.
Less reassuring was the ungodly cacophony of moans and whirrs emitting from beneath the bonnet. Even the attendant's country calm appeared to be ruffled by the performance, as he raised one bushy eyebrow and hesitated before pushing the pump into the side of the car.
"Is that meant to happen?" I asked the decrepit machine's owner.
He peered back at me through his wonky glasses like an owl that's fallen from its nest and smacked every branch of the tree on the way down. "There ain't nothing wrong with 'er. Owned 'er for years," he snapped, tapping the bonnet with proprietary pride.
"Oh," I said doubtfully. "Look, do you want a drink from the shop?"
I was picking up my hitchers' etiquette as I went along here but I thought it might be an appropriate gesture to offer him something.
"Can if you want but it'll cost ya, this is the only station between 'ere and Gladdie… and I've got some piss in the car."
We pulled back onto the road, the pump attendant's face a moment of detail in the two-tone landscape of white sun and brown shadow. I could've sworn his eyes and mouth flashed wily and aware for a second as the car crawled past his post at the pump, but that was probably just my insistence on filling a blank canvas. We headed on into the treacle of the afternoon.
The guy leant across and yanked at the glove compartment, veering into the other lane as he did so, though of course it all happened at 40 and the nearest oncoming car had just left Townsville. The compartment was empty apart from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag, the paper sticking to the glass speaking of the elixir within.
"There's yer piss," he said.
"Are you sure?" I hesitated.
He stared at the road, blinking occasionally at the white glare outside. I pulled the bottle from the paper. It was a large bottle of VB, white trash fuel. Nonetheless my dry gullet welcomed it, and I savoured the last fizzy, sweaty drops in my mouth as I passed the brown bottle to the guy. He took a quick swig and passed it back.
"Never been one for drinkin' at the wheel. Cunts start doin' that when they on a run from Rockie to Sydney and they asleep before they 'it the border."
Ah, the trucking days again. He seemed to be relaxing. Perhaps this lord of the Bruce Highway would soon share his stock of tales from the road.
"That quite a regular run is it then, Rockie to Sydney?" I asked.
"Dunno."
I sighed and looked out my window at the flat landscape, which yielded its stories with the same reluctance. I suppose I should be grateful for this, I thought. It's got to be better than being asked for marital advice. I took a desultory sip of the VB and felt the cool liquid course down my neck. Then another as I examined a passing Gum tree.
"Oi!"
I turned to face the guy, who was staring at me, the car starting to stray towards the wrong lane again. His neck moved in angular spasms and his eyes blinked crazily behind his bottletops.
"Yer a nice cunt yoo are… nickin' all my piss!"
I was busy spluttering, my impending answer already sounding plumby and inadequate, when the engine exploded.
It wasn't a huge explosion and the car wasn't consumed by flames or anything, but there was definitely a bang and there were definitely trails of smoke rising from the bonnet. The car's usual burning smell, of its synthetic innards slowly roasting alongside its human occupants, was overwhelmed by a fiery odour straight from its malfunctioning mechanism. The guy shifted his gaze to the source of the explosion and the road beyond, and not before time because we were straying close to the far edge of the right hand lane. He guided the car across the tarmac to the left verge, stomping the accelerator impotently as the vehicle juddered to a halt.
We sat there as the stench dissipated, like two lab rats recovering from having electrodes clamped to our balls. Finally I ruined the moment of temporary calm - I couldn't help a distasteful sniff. The guy shot me a look, flipped the bonnet and jumped out of the car. He stalked round the front and lifted the bonnet.
I joined him. It didn't look pretty in there. He wiped his brow and frowned at the steaming chambers.
"I don' understand it. I filled 'er up with water 'n' oil this morning and I ain't driven over 70."
I was well aware of the last piece of information.
"How old is this car?"
"Got it sicond 'and."
"When was that?"
"When I packed in the trucks… coupla years ago."
Nothing I could say would help a situation in which we had made an enemy of the glaringly obvious. I went and sat in the shade of a Gum tree and watched a gang of ants the size of poodles foraging between the pale rocks. The guy tentatively reached into the engine for a second before staggering backwards yelling, "Shit!" and waving his right hand uselessly in the warm air, looking like a contorting crash test dummy.
I watched the performance from my cross-legged position atop the roots of the peeling tree. Tears wouldn't have helped, but nor would laughter.
Suck at the marrow of life, live among insects the size of household pets, get a lift from a man in serious need of a spanner. And don't even get me started on his car.
The guy came over and stood scuffing his feet, shifting rubble and raising dust. I stared at his wizened toenails protruding from his worn leather sandals, quickly realised there wasn't anything there to distract me, and looked up at him.
"So what are we going to do?"
"Dunnah."
"Well do you have any breakdown assistance?"
"Yer wha?"
That was it. I leapt to my feet.
"Well, thanks for taking me this far, but I'm afraid you've dug your own grave. I'm getting out of here."
I strode purposefully to the car, which had taken on a distinctly deflated air, and took my rucksack from the boot. As I heaved it on to my back I looked yearningly at a bottle of water lying amid old scraps of newspaper and empty VB bottles. It would have come in handy during the long roadside vigil I now faced, but I didn't trust anything to do with that car. I slammed the boot just as the guy stepped up and shoved his gnarled face in front of mine.
"Yer a nice cunt yoo are!"
"Flattery will get you nowhere."
"Yer wha?"
"Never… nothing. I've got to get hitching now. I've got a long way to go."
I started trudging up the road away from the car. The guy glared at me, the hostility in his eyes crudely magnified by his thick specks, then started rummaging around inside the car. I seemed to have shaken him off. The conversation would suffer but at least I'd stand a chance of picking up a ride.
I positioned myself a comfortable distance from the car. While I wanted to send a firm message to the harbinger of disaster who currently had his head buried in the boot, I could also use the breakdown to present myself as a distressed motorist in need of a lift. Cloaking the more truthful impression of an aimless bum littering the side of the road. I was learning this visual shorthand fast now my passage out of the desert depended on it. I'd never much noticed it before. I'd always sat dead-eyed in the back of my parents' car, presuming all the hopeful hitchers we sped past, no matter how spruced up they were, would be German rock climbers who'd spend long hours telling us how the English sense of humour differed to back in Frankfurt.
Within a few minutes a car appeared at the south end of the straight, its shining bumper growing as it approached along the eternal yellow line. I stuck out a thumb, pushed a nervous hand through my hair, and straightened my back. Grinned.
The motorist slowed to examine the Holden, which suddenly became a Punch and Judy stall for the guy's head as he sprung up from his business in the boot and turned his steely short-sightedness on the passing vehicle. Luckily at that moment I caught the motorist's eye and he headed towards me.
The white Ford stopped and the driver smiled amicably up at me. An honest Aussie type, hair parted from the side, scrubbed features, loved his mother, supported the Brisbane Broncos. "Put your foot down and don't look back you fool," I felt like screaming.
Instead I smiled at his rhetorical question: "Had a spot of bother with the motor?"
"Yes, it would appear so," I laughed.
"Well I can take you up the ro…"
Then he glanced in his wing mirror and Lady Luck was suddenly eloping with my best friend and taking the kids.
"Oh, how about your mate? He wanna lift?"
I looked down the road at the guy, who was now locking up the car.
"Nuh, he wants to stay with the car," I replied.
The man shook his head resignedly. "Right 'o. Well, jump in. That'll teach you to drive an 'olden, but I s'pose a Pom wouldn't know any better…"
A cry suddenly pierced the easy rapport I'd created with Broncos boy and his laid back, mildly racist humour. It was the guy, bearing down on us clutching the last of the VB in one bony hand, and in the other a bulging sports bag with a bottle of Bundie sticking out the top.
"Yer a nice cunt yoo are!"
The driver heard the hoarse oath, his eyes grew as they took in the jagged stick man in his mirror, and he threw the car into gear. The Ford revved away from the kerb and kept going, accelerating fast. Probably not an excessive reaction.
"Yer a nice cunt yoo are, tryin' ta ditch me," said the guy, all pointing fingers and jutting bottlenecks.
"Is that all you can say? Jesus, you're like a stuck record," I shouted back.
"Call yourself an 'itcher," he ploughed on. "When the going gets tough yoo piss orff."
"Look, two of us are never going to get a lift together, especially when one of us looks like a walking mini-bar. I suggest you stay here with that relic of a car and rope some fool into towing you to Rockhampton. I've got my own troubles, and I need to get out of here as fast as I can."
The guy seemed downcast at this. He blinked even more than usual as he glared at me from beneath his bristling eyebrows. His knuckles clasping his worldly goods were white bone with hot red streaks.
"Cunts like you…" he began.
"Look…" I began.
"See, thing is, I got tah see my daughter. It's 'er birthday."
I stared at him.
"She lives in Rockie with 'er mum. Why else do you think I've got a Wednesday orff?"
"I thought you were going there to get pissed."
"Yih, course, but I'll see mah daughter first."
"Well… fine, very noble of you. But we can't hitch together. If you stay here by the car I'll head a couple of hundred metres back down the road.
I figured I could beat him to a lift that way. But it was all academic.
"Nah, I ain't 'itchin' by myself. Not with the nutters on these roads."
"But we could be stood here all day."
"We'll git somethin'. They'll see the 'olden."
I shifted my gaze to the sky above his head, which bobbed like a pea in boiling water. It was a remorseless cobalt blue. The guy lit a cigarette and I think I may even have pouted as I realised I was lumbered with him and his bright orange clipper.
We stood in stony silence, our bags at our feet as we waited for the next sign of human life. Shimmering walls of heat rose from the baking tarmac and a single bird circled overhead. My trusty guidebook told me there were no Vultures in Australia, but I wasn't convinced. The guy slumped on to his hold-all and started polishing off the VB. He offered me the bottle and I declined, with the same sureness that I imagined the next passing stranger would.
A few cars swished by going south. Their occupants tried not to pass judgement but always blew it at the last moment with the same look in their glassy eyes. Afternoon began condensing into evening, streaks of pink materialising in the blue canopy. Cigarette followed cigarette and car followed car out of the north.
Just as I was considering hanging my hammock from that Ghost Gum the horizon blipped and sent a 4X4 up the road. To my surprise the vehicle stopped, though it was travelling at least twice as fast as the guy had. The back tyres spurted dirt at our bags and legs as the 4X4, a charcoal grey Landcruiser with smoked windows, skidded to a halt.
A man jumped out, leaving his door yawning into the highway, and held the boot open for us. He was stocky, with a bare torso covered in tattoos and a black Akubra teetering on his thick head.
"G'day. Chuck yer stuff in," he barked.
The man left us to stow our bags, which we did with nervous glances at each other. Inside, I was forced to sit up front by my kind hitching partner, who jumped in the back and glared at me from above crossed arms.
The driver started accelerating without further ceremony until the speed limit was a distant memory. He lit a Peter Jackson and turned up the stereo. On the CD a group of young African American gentleman expressed doubts about their girlfriends' fidelity and detailed how they planned to extract revenge. It was a celebration of sexual violence.
"Fucking great CD. Friend of mine made it. Really knows his music that cunt," said the driver.
We continued in a silence broken only by the sound of five guys telling each other how they were going to punish their partners for perceived betrayals.
I had to know how long this was going to last.
"So where are you headed?" I asked.
"Townsville."
Looked like I was in for the long haul. I sunk back into my seat and looked around at the aspects of the interior that weren't wearing an Akubra or surreptitiously glugging a bottle of Bundie. The Landcruiser's interior had the worn feel of a vehicle that had already travelled a long way. Crumpled chocolate bar wrappers, empty energy drink cans and crushed cigarette packets littered the floor, suggesting our chauffeur was also feeling a touch ragged on the inside.
"Where have you come from today?" I asked.
The driver lit another cigarette. "Gold Coast."
I did some quick calculations. He'd been driving for 12 hours and had another 12 to go. He squinted and coughed as a fungus of smoke filled the air between us.
"Had an injury at work and been visiting the relies," he explained.
He'd obviously been convalescing a long time and had resorted to desperate measures to fill the listless hours in the Gold Coast's bland landscape of billboards, casinos and, yawn, great beaches. Every patch of flesh you could see on his sweat-dunked torso was covered in fresh tattoos. Most of the tat's seemed to draw on Viking mythology, such as the picture covering his stomach of a ship sailing into a storm with a whiskered fleet staunchly manning the bows.
I wanted to ask him what was with the Viking obsession but I pictured myself taking a trip to Valhalla and my voice limped out with: "Back to work then is it?"
"Yeah."
He watched the uneventful road with the same blank expression as the guy behind him stared at the back of the driver's seat. These two were a match distilled in Bundie.
"What do you do?" I tried again, my voice still wavering.
"I'm a stockman."
The stockman and the fruit picker and me. Jesus.
I turned to my window and gazed at the flat horizon turning red above the baking earth. My eyes felt sore and I began to do a passable impression of the fruit picker. The heat really drained your energy, even if all you were doing was sitting in cars finding endless ways to make conversation.
Suddenly, a few miles up the road, the stockman swerved into the edge of a dark field of towering sugar cane.
I turned to face him. He held a bowie knife, which glinted cruelly above his tight fist.
Before I could offer him my Swiss Army if he wanted to prepare some cheese and biscuits he spat, "I'll give you a five minute 'ead start. Then the 'unt begins."
His voice was even and his jaw clenched. I looked into the back. The fruit picker was wearing a Bundie Rum T-shirt and giving me the thumbs up. I began screaming.
"I ain't even crashed yet," said the stockman.
I opened my bleary eyes and looked around. We were coming into the outskirts of Rockhampton. Roadside posters for motels and the town's one-DJ radio station began replacing the Gum trees. I wiped my hot brow and tried to gulp but my mouth was so dry it was more of a gag. The only bottle I could see was clutched by two greedy talons in the back seat. Liberating the Bundie, I raised it to my scaly lips but stopped short of pouring the fluid.
"Oh… you don't mind do you," I checked.
"Nah. Yooze cunts drink as much piss as you like."
It was an achievement really, making a generous remark sound so much like a threat.
We entered the stretch of roundabouts and streetlights that heralded the next oasis of civilisation. London, Paris and Rockie.
A petrol station appeared ahead. It was a more ambitious structure than the one the fruit picker and I had stopped at, with a huge green sign jutting out the top like the ten-gallon hat on a Texan oil baron. We rolled on to the tarmac forecourt, stopping between a station wagon packed with a farmer's weekly shopping and a ute with a window sticker saying "Brute Ute".
There was a moment's silence while the engine cooled, sounding less panicked than the fruit picker's had.
"Well, this is me: Rockie," announced the fruit picker.
"Righto mate. 'Ave a good night," the stockman said into the driver's mirror.
"I will when I get down the pub."
The laughter that followed was natural and easy. It galled me slightly that these two had bonded after a dozen words, while my continued attempts at conversation ended with me nervously muttering into silence.
I walked the fruit picker to the edge of the forecourt while the stockman filled the Landcruiser. We looked up the footpath that led along the edge of the highway to town, past ramshackle houses with dogs barking and chickens pecking in the yard.
We looked at each other.
"Cheers for annoying the shit outta me," he snapped, and gave me one last flash of his seething eyes before he scurried up the path like a rat that's been at the beer barrel.
Now a new chapter. I looked back at the stockman holding the nozzle into the side of the 4X4. He was going as far north as I needed to go. Surely it was a golden lift. Surely?
The stockman wouldn't accept any petrol money so I bought him a coffee. He took it black with three sugars. We screeched back on to the road and Rockie was soon a distant memory. He sipped on the steaming liquid.
"So what's with walking across Australia?" he said suddenly, in as close to a conversational tone as I'd heard from him.
"Um… oh it's a cheap way to get about."
He looked unconvinced.
"So what's yer name?"
"Ernest."
"Ernest eh? Some a you Pommie cunts got funny names! What's yer surname?"
"Ragman."
"Rag man! Heh, one a the blokes at the station's called that - the Aboriginal 'o clears out the stables."
Rag man. I thought of the way my father pronounced it, Rugmun, like he'd just had a sharp object surgically implanted in his rectum. That land of Pot Noodles and roundabouts seemed a long way away. As far away as the womb, which had been about the most eventful part of my life before I boarded the flight to this oversized floater in the South Pacific. And now my life was exciting… what? Maybe it was time for a cup of tea. And remember how I like my toast buttered Mother.
I spent much of the journey engrossed in such thoughts, spiralling into my inner world as surely as the car was sucked in by the somehow sentient darkness. Every now and then the stockman would disturb me with a grunt, or I'd suddenly remember the situation I was in and jolt into uneasy awareness of my brooding surroundings.
The broken digits on the car clock said 10 o'clock, midnight, one o'clock. The speedo hovered between 140 and 150. The trees and undergrowth looming out of the night started to remind me of the opening scene of a Scooby Doo cartoon.
"Things are beginning to look pretty tropical," I commented.
"Yep, this is where it starts to get real interesting," came the reply from the darkness. "Real troppo."
"Troppo," I laughed at this latest abbreviation.
"Yeah, troppo. That's what we used to call it in the Territory. One day, 'bout this time of year, this cunt on the station, nice enough bloake, fuckin' lost it and did 'imself in. Gone troppo 'e 'ad."
Just then catalogue of domestic violence on the radio came to an end.
Even its owner had heard enough after six listens. "There's some good road music in there," he said, pointing at the glove box.
I opened the compartment and reached into grab the CD. Next to it lay a bowie knife, unsheathed and glinting as cruelly as was possible in the low light coming from the dashboard.
My hand froze for a second and the hesitation didn't go unnoticed.
"Ah you found my guilty secret."
"What?"
"I like a bit of 'unting."
"What do you… what do you hunt?"
"Pig - keep your eyes sharp and you'll see some. The pests need to be wiped out - imported they are, like yooze Poms!"
He laughed jovially and I joined in, while estimating how long it would take me to unfasten my seat belt and roll out the door.
"Wanna play the CD then?"
I wiped the sweat from my palm off its shiny surface and pushed it into the stereo. It was Australian country. At the first this was a welcome relief from the rap, but it soon transpired that the guitar twanger was about as White Supremacist as the rappers had been Black Power. The crackly songs spoke fondly of a simple, honest place where men where men, animals were animals, and women, homosexuals and blackfellas were also animals. This place was probably somewhere near the cattle station my travelling companion had worked on in the Northern Territory.
It was a strange world this stockman came from really, about as alien as the western world got to my homeland. My curiosity got the better of my abject terror.
"So have you always been a stockman?"
"Yeah, worked on stations all over the Territory and Queensland since I was 15."
"What's it like living somewhere so remote? I mean, what do you… what do you do at night?"
"Dunnah, watch TV, 'it the grog, the usual really. The nearest boozer's a good thirty clicks away."
I pictured the moths at the lightbulb, the cards on the table, the mouths open in laughter. As the night leered outside the windows.
Suddenly, a few musical Mein Kampfs later, we swerved into the side of a field. I clenched so fast I may have left a permanent ridge in his seat.
"Better get some shut-eye. I was fallin' asleep back there."
And… relax.
The sudden silence made the humming night outside seem all the more eerie. I curled up in my seat and tried to copy the snorting, scratching body beside me but it was impossible to get comfortable in this heat. I wound down a window but that just made it worse. First one then a couple of thousand mosquitoes swarmed through the gap. They started biting and the scratching next to me intensified. Suddenly the stockman sprung up and sparked up the ignition in one angry movement.
"Black bastards!" he exclaimed.
I quietly wound the window up as we revved back on to the road. He hit the speed limit within seconds, and kept right on.
Two o'clock came and went. The road was straight for as far as you could see and as long as you could remember. The CD finished and we sat in a silence broken only by his occasional slurp on a bottle of whatever branded sugar solution he was on now. We carried on into the night as surely as the whiskered fleet on his stomach headed into the storm. As I watched his eyes flicker I realised he'd now been driving for over 20 hours. The conversation game had taken on sinister new dimensions.
"So," I said, thinking quickly. "Are those tattoos new? They look quite fresh."
"Yeah, got them on the Goldie. They was a coupla days' work for the bloake that did 'em and a coupla months wages for me."
He went on to talk me through the various designs and their meanings, and his plans to add to them.
"… that's a Demon and that's 'is Demon Sheila…. Gonna put a Viking battle there…"
It was enough to get him through the last part of our journey together. Sometime before three the headlights picked out a sign saying the turn-off for Airlie Beach was ahead, in a town called Prosperpine.
"Yeah, Prossie, that's 'im," confirmed the stockman.
We screeched to a halt in front of a row of darkened bungalows. He leapt out to open the boot, leaving his door yawning into the highway as he had done all those hours ago. His tattoed torso was a ghostly white and blue form in the moonlight.
"Well, good luck with the rest of the drive," I said.
Looking at his face in the red lights I suddenly realised he was younger than he seemed, probably not many years older than me. He gave me a cursory "Cheers" and that was it, the red lights were shrinking into the darkness. I trudged on up the road looking for the centre of town, if such a thing existed.
Not many years older than me, but he'd been a stockman for a lifetime already. Different to everyone I'd ever known, sure, but basically just a guy looking for some chat to help him through the night. Well I failed him there: too terrified; and me with blood on my hands. Still, at least I was still alive. At least we both were.
There was a town centre. It was a petrol station. I found a small public park and pitched my tent in the corner, in a concealed spot behind a bush. I positioned the tent so the door was hard up against a low wall, a precaution against the marauding night terrors this land seemed ready to hurl my way. Any onlookers who saw the tent with my bulging rucksack pinning me against the wall would think I was sharing the space with other people, perhaps a pair of nubile Swedish backpackers I'd charmed into chauffeuring me all the way from Byron Bay. "Ernest, your map-reading skills are aaawesome!" You'd be lucky. Still, as I dug my sleeping bag out and unrolled it, I contemplated that this camping spot had been a lucky find; even if such turns of fortune did seem rather like a man who's fallen into a disused wishing well finding pennies at the bottom. It was like a sauna in here and already I could feel the sleeping bag bringing a heat rash out on my legs. I pushed my hands under my neck and listened to the silence around me. Hopefully there'd be more of that to come, once I'd done what had to be done in Airlie Beach.