Dark Horse (9 page)

I
nside the van, the phone in her hand felt different. It
was
lighter. Heath was outside by the open door. ‘I’m not coming in,’ he said. ‘I’m not touching it.’

Sarah struck the phone against the side of the bench, and struck it again.

Heath leaned in. ‘Are you serious?’

Sarah shone the torch on the bench edge and hit the side of her phone against it repeatedly until the device cracked apart.

‘For God’s sake, Sarah . . .’

The phone had not broken fully open. She got out a butter knife and prised the phone into two halves.

There was the sound of Heath muttering and walking over to the table by the fire. It sounded like he moved a chair and sat down.

‘I think we need to take a breath and think about what really matters,’ he said when she came out. He lounged the top half of his body on the table, pushing the plates aside, chest pressed to the tabletop, hands open and imploring, expression pleading in the lamplight.

Was this pose a lie too? Did he do it to confuse her, one minute closed off and the next open and approachable?

‘We’re here and we have to stay safe. That’s our main priority. If your gun was moved, that’s a problem, but it’s no reason to spin off out of control.’

Sarah laid the two halves of the phone on the table and shone the torch on them. ‘You took the battery out,’ she said without emotion. ‘It’s gone.’

He lifted his head and looked.

‘Don’t say you didn’t take it.’

‘I didn’t take it.’

‘It’s missing.’ Sarah pointed the torchlight closer. ‘Where is it?’

‘I didn’t open your phone.’

‘Would you stop lying for one second?’

‘Did it drop out when you were hitting it?’

‘No,’ she said with as much mildness as she could manage.

‘Well . . .’ he sat back, ‘it must have dropped out.’

‘So here is how I’m seeing it.’ Sat down opposite him. ‘You either didn’t want to risk the phone starting to work, or you saw that the phone had started working, and you took the battery and put the phone back together so I wouldn’t know any different.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Sarah, listen, I didn’t bring up my brother to patronise you. I felt like I could talk about it with you. And I think I might have hurt your feelings when you looked at me and I wouldn’t look back at you before.’ His adult gaze, he levelled it at Sarah, and his pick-up skills weren’t dusty, they were expertly polished, sharpened to a point, designed to enter the body, pierce the mind, excite the heart, electrify the blood and warm the skin. ‘I wanted to,’ he said, his voice smoothly dropping an octave, ‘but I didn’t because I’d realised how much you were hurting and I knew it wouldn’t be right.’

Sarah was stunned, not by his appeal, but by his methods.

‘Was it to save the battery?’ she said after a pause.

‘I didn’t touch your phone.’

Sarah breathed slowly to calm herself. She was gripping the torch against her breast; she placed it down with deliberation.

‘If you really believed I’m the kind of person who would do something like that, you wouldn’t be like this,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t have looked at me like that before. You wouldn’t have come down into the shower while I was there, or slept in the same bed as me last night. You know I’m okay.’

‘How am I meant to feel?’ Her voice betrayed her, unsteady and high, affected by her emotions. ‘My gun has been taken, my battery has been taken, no one is coming for us, and you won’t tell me who you are. What am I meant to do?’

‘You’re meant to wait to be rescued.’

‘My phone was the last chance we had of telling anyone we’re here. That doesn’t bother you?’

‘It bothers me, especially now you’ve smashed it to pieces.’

‘What about my gun? It’s gone.’

‘I’m hoping there’s an explanation.’

‘Any thoughts on what that explanation might be?’

‘I told you what I thought.’ He said carefully, ‘You’ve put the gun somewhere, and you are choosing not to remember where.’

‘Did I do that to the battery too?’

‘The battery dropped out when you were hitting the phone.’

Sarah pushed up from the table. ‘Okay then, let’s look.’

As Heath reluctantly stood he knocked over the bottle of whiskey beneath the table. He leaned down and eyed the depleted drink. Less than a quarter of the bottle was left. It was clear what he was thinking.

‘I didn’t drink all that,’ Sarah said.

‘Well I didn’t.’

‘I didn’t,’ she repeated firmly. ‘I put it under there so I . . . wouldn’t . . . drink any more . . .’ That sentence hadn’t really helped her argument.

To reach the bottle, to save bending his knee, Heath perched on the seat and reached under the table. He had to pull himself up awkwardly. He put the bottle on the tabletop and leaned forward, recovering for a moment, hands on lap.

Sarah quickly ducked her head and looked under the table, suspicious of the way he was sitting with his hands out of view. Heath unfurled his fingers showing her his empty palms. His face, when she looked up, was filled with disbelief.

‘I think you need to calm down.’

He followed her, limping up into the van, and slid onto the kitchen seat. Sarah began shining the torch around the van floor. The beam illuminated the van interior enough for the cans of food and assorted items on the bench to be dimly visible.

Heath wasn’t looking down at the floor. He was looking across at the hipflasks of alcohol that were beside the cans, the spirits that Sarah had included in her Christmas picnic. ‘How long have you been drinking for?’ he asked her.

She ignored him.

‘Must be a while, because you hold it pretty well. I can’t tell you’re drunk.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Are those hipflasks empty?’

‘I haven’t touched them.’

Staying seated he reached across. He shook each flask. The sound was the hollow rattle of dregs.

A cold kernel of fear lodged in Sarah’s upper chest; it released a fresh wave of concern and sickness through her. Was he so skilful as to set it up this thoroughly? She was sure she hadn’t drunk from the hipflasks . . .

Sarah kept her head down. ‘The battery’s not here.’

‘What’s that?’

He pointed to a dark lump in the shadows by the foot of the bed. Sarah shone the torch. It was just dirt that had been traipsed in.

She began a methodical slow sweep with the torch beam. She was systematic for Heath’s benefit: she knew the battery wasn’t there. Then her beam cast across a flat, small black block of something under the kitchen table. Sarah’s torchlight steadied, stayed shining on it. She shook her head.

Heath leaned to see underneath the table. ‘That looks like it.’

Sarah stood back, leaving the offending item for him to retrieve. He held it out for her to take, but she didn’t want it. He put it down at the far end of the table, beside the rolled-up building specs.

‘It didn’t fall out . . .’

‘Who hit you in the face, Sarah?’

‘Tansy.’

‘Tansy?’

‘You cut the chain on the gate into Hangman’s Track.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Why?’

‘I had to get up the track quickly. To get something.’

‘To get what?’

‘Not what you’d imagine.’

‘Illegal?’

‘No.’

‘So you did lie about that. I bet your name isn’t even “Heath”. You took my gun. Why?’

‘I didn’t take your gun.’

‘You know what I see in
your
eyes? I see that you think this is a game.’

Heath went out and sat at the table while Sarah gathered her things, as she passed by him, he said, ‘You don’t have to do this.’

As she left the shed, with Tansy in tow, he called, ‘This is crazy.’

It did feel crazy, leading Tansy down towards the hut, the torchlight slicing through the dark. Sarah’s bedroll was beneath her arm, a pillow and blankets rolled up inside of it.

Heath came in through the back door of the hut with an armful of kindling and firewood. He brushed aside the dried animal droppings, set and lit the fire for her. Sarah tethered Tansy to the memorial post beside Sid’s grave. She left the front door of the hut open. Night air flowed in and through the hut. In the subdued light of the new fire the room was hostile. The materials they’d shifted and left behind were in their different piles. The order they’d achieved earlier was fine if the room was for storage, not welcoming when it was to be a place for sleep and retreat.

Heath began cleaning away a space for her bed.

‘I can do that.’

‘I shouldn’t have spoken as bluntly as I did,’ he offered. ‘I’m not qualified to talk about depression or anything like that, so I should have kept my mouth shut. I don’t want to leave you down here alone – and not because I think you’re going to harm yourself, Sarah, I know you’re not – but because from the start I’ve made it harder for you, and it’s the last thing I want. Please . . .’ he extended his hand, as though she might take it and they’d head off hand in hand to the van, ‘you don’t have to stay down here.’

‘I’d like it if you left now.’

T
he possum hadn’t been growling from somewhere in the bush, it had been making its after-dark noises from the hut. Possums tend not to talk to themselves. Another possum joined the rasping hacking call. The two conversed and cavorted in the ceiling above Sarah’s head, sounding like massive rats with emphysema. She lay in her bed staring at the plywood ceiling above her.

Sarah thumped the floor beside her, to try and silence the animals. They stopped scampering and wheezing, then started again. When Sarah thumped the floor for a second time, they didn’t stop at all. She sat up in her bed and reached for a nearby piece of wood. She slapped it on the floor – the possums paused and listened, judged that to be incidental too, and recommenced making a racket.

Shooting embers landed on Sarah’s blankets. She moved back from the flames, repositioning her bed up against a pile of steel poles. Draughts came in through both doorways – the front door and the internal door that led into the demolished room – and cooled her. Sarah got up again and shuffled her bed a little closer to the fire. Outside the open door, Tansy kept shifting about too, changing her stance in the wet grass. Scattering and pattering sounds along the edges of the room announced that the actual rats had arrived. They adjusted to Sarah just as the possums had, unfazed by her after the first few startled squeaks and dashes. Soon they behaved as though Sarah was a part of the furniture. Rodents who had nothing better to do with their time than climb all over the poles and wriggle about behind the timber, scamper across the bottom of her bed.

What predated on rats and possums?

Sarah covered her ears in an attempt to block out the sounds. She decided, as every tick of her watch resounded in her ear, that the Australian bush was unbalanced without thylacines. Big cats, pack carnivores, were missing from the mountain. Those Tassie tigers would have caught rats all right, and they would have climbed up into roofs and hunted possums. Had the apex predator survived extinction Sarah might not have brazenly moved down to the hut. The same if dingos left the flats and coastal regions and made a home of Australia’s densely timbered temperate climates, Sarah wouldn’t be so fast to exit the caravan then. With or without dangerous predators to sort out the rats and possums, Heath would be resting easier than Sarah was. She began to appreciate how important sleep was in surviving. How could she combat Heath if she was delirious with tiredness? He’d shown her that being mentally on the ball was as important as being physically strong. Sarah needed to be smarter. Mosquitoes droned around her. Their bites stung her knuckles and fingers. She pulled the blanket up over her head, arranging it so that she could still see. She was a pair of eyes peering out from a pile of blankets.

Sid had probably hung himself in despair over the cold, the possum racket, the rat scratching and the mozzie attack – not the cops.

Sarah realised that sleep would be a matter of waiting for her exhaustion to become too great. Her eyes would then close on their own, her hearing would dim, her stiff muscles would grow tired of being tense, and her mind would give in. Until then there was nothing she could do but wait. It was two a.m., she was growing tired of waiting. Possum and rat noises had become hard to differentiate – no more abrasive growling, just heavy thuds and scurrying, squeaks and small grunts, the sounds came from every side, above her and around her on the floor. Every now and then there was the weight of a rat on the end of her bed. Sarah’s chin puckered when this happened. Her breathing became shallow. It would be silly to scream. Hours ago she had pulled her knees into her chest and curled into a ball. She decided that if the rats came near her face, she would whimper, give in, and return to the van with her tail between her legs. It proved that when given the option between sleeping with predictable, benign wild creatures (the scampering and sniffing was to be expected, the most the rats were going to do would be nip her out of curiosity) or sleeping with a totally unpredictable man, she was compelled to pick the latter. Her brain told her that the animals weren’t a threat and that Heath might very well be, and still her gut overrode the complex wiring and told her to stick with her own species, for better or for worse. The hut back door creaked open.

Heath’s voice whispered across the room, ‘It’s only me. Are you awake?’

The rats shot off in every direction and the possums galloped like flat-footed Shetland ponies across the ceiling. He knew she wasn’t asleep. Sarah listened as he picked his way over to where she was. He came into view. He’d brought down more firewood and the flyscreen from the back window of the van. He was rugged up, dressed in his long cargo pants. He looked older and more handsome with stubble on his cheeks.

‘How you going?’

‘Yeah, great,’ she mumbled from beneath the blankets.

Heath stood by the fire looking at her, po-faced at first – miserable to see her so miserable, but then it looked as though it became hard for him to keep the sullen expression. ‘You don’t look like you’re having much fun.’

‘I’m fine. Really cosy.’

He fought his grin. Good-looking people should be banned from grinning. It was a weapon – a scrambler of brainwaves.

‘I’ve come to swap shifts. I’ll do the second half of the night. No arguing.’

He put the wood on the fire. Sarah climbed out of bed. While lying down the room had gotten larger and creepier, the shadows had been blacker, but getting to her feet the dimensions changed back to normal and the room was no longer scary.

Sarah sat down on the raised hearth, her back to the fire.

Heath sat down beside her.

She closed her eyes.

‘It’s pretty cool how stubborn you are,’ he said.

Sarah sought solitude and rest behind the familiarity of her palms a moment, she leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands over her face, breathing within the little cave her palms and fingers made. Weak flesh-tinted light shone through the gaps. She lowered her hands. Heath was brushing a hot ember from off the toe of his boot. A sooty mark was left behind. He looked across at her, and then reached out and took her hand in his. The back of her hand and her fingers were covered with red dots.

‘Look how badly you’ve been bitten.’

‘One big itch; I’m not sure where to start.’

‘I won’t touch,’ he said letting go. ‘Or I’ll start them off.’

They sat in silence, watching the moving shadows the firelight caused.

‘I don’t know if I came up here to kill myself,’ Sarah told him. There were rat droppings on the floor. She looked at them and then glanced around for more droppings, without intent, focusing anywhere and on anything because she didn’t want to look at Heath as she confessed. Eye contact would only create intensity, there was already enough of that. ‘I’m not sure what I was thinking. On the bridge . . . I guess it crossed my mind that getting swept up in the water was an option.’ She wriggled her nose and rubbed it.

‘I’m not judging you, you know that?’

After a pause she continued, ‘For a while, a month or so ago, I’d wake up every morning and lie there dreaming up ways to kill myself, I suppose I did plan it back then. I thought of heading up into the bush and making a call to the police before I did the deed. I figured, it would take a while for them to find me, and I’d be well and truly dead. Also some poor neighbour wouldn’t have to find me. And everyone in town wouldn’t be able to point to the place I did it, and say,
that’s where Sarah Barnard killed herself
. I thought about how I’d do it in a secluded bush spot. As a double measure I thought I’d take tablets
and
shoot myself. That combination seemed the most effective and foolproof way. But I didn’t want a bushwalker to find me either. I’d always thought I’d call the police myself.’ She snuck a peek at Heath. He was angled toward her, his posture open, his gaze respectful and tentative. ‘Text them my GPS location, with the message
Sarah has suicided here
. I thought it’d be kinda cute.’ She swallowed. ‘Strangely enough, I don’t think I was serious about it when I was making all those elaborate plans. It feels like the idea went to ground so it could really gain some traction.’

‘From what I can see, you didn’t have your earphones with you for your ride, so you couldn’t have had the wailing of Nina Simone in your ears, so you probably weren’t at risk anyway.’

‘Excuse me, Nina Simone does not wail.’ His irreverent comment meant she could hold his gaze. ‘Bloody . . .’ Sarah searched her mind for a country and western singer, ‘Waylon Jennings
wails
.’

‘But that’s the good thing about country music, you’ve never got as many problems as the singer does. You end up feeling more sorry for him, than you do for yourself.’

‘More likely to want to shoot the singer.’

‘Hey, that’s taking it too far. You’re talkin’ ’bout my boys,’ he said with an exaggerated country twang.

‘Or there could be the risk of putting a bullet in your head to stop the agony of listening.’

They fell silent. Sarah went back to staring at the rat droppings.

‘Pretty weak isn’t it,’ she said.

‘Sadness screws up your thinking.’

‘I don’t have anywhere to go. My husband lied about our finances as well as everything else. The business was set up in my name, he said for tax purposes, but who would know if that’s the real reason. I’ve had to declare bankruptcy. I have no idea what I’m going to do. No real estate agent will touch me; I can’t lease a place. The banks won’t come near me. Our trail riding business was my job, so I haven’t got one of those anymore. In the coming weeks, when the bankruptcy kicks in, my name is going to be mud throughout the equine world. All the friends I thought I had, they all helped him. They’ve looked after his horses – which, by the way, are
my
horses. I was stupid enough to let him sign the cheques for those. He told everyone that the split was worse for him financially than what it was for me – no way.’

‘And he was having an affair?’

‘Times twenty. Yeah.’

The fire had grown bigger and her back was getting hot. Sarah shifted down onto the floor. She sat cross-legged looking at the open flames, at the wide fireplace, up at the chimney. She imagined the hut in its heyday, deeply coloured stones, pale timber beams, a shingled roof. A young, hard and basic hut, as opposed to this old crumbling one. A bushranger’s life where problems piled on top of other problems: money, shelter, horses, weather, food. Things hadn’t changed much.

‘I’m down to agisting Tansy somewhere and moving into my parents’ place, and asking them for money. Rock bottom,’ she confirmed. ‘Going to my parents for help is kinda like swallowing razorblades.’

Heath moved too. He sat beside her.

‘What’s your verdict?’ Sarah asked. ‘Any country and western song cover that?’

‘It’s crying out to be made into a song.’ He moved closer, near enough so that they were touching. His shoulder was against her shoulder. ‘Do you wanna hear something good?’

‘Yes please.’

‘I’ve got seven hundred acres Tansy can run around on.’

‘Is that before or after I’m allowed to know who you are? Will it be a secret location? I’ll have to be blindfolded to go there?’

‘The co-ordinates will be delivered to you in invisible ink on dissolving paper. You’ll be bundled into a black van down a dark alleyway and made to recite the co-ordinates to a blind driver.’

‘A blind driver?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wouldn’t invisible ink be fairly hard for me to read anyway?’

‘Impossible.’

‘And then?’

‘You find out the driver is also deaf.’

‘Interesting.’ She laughed.

Heath said softly to her, ‘If I get down off this mountain without a fuss, I promise you’ll get to try my mum’s plum pudding.’

‘So it’s blackmail now?’

‘My word it is.’