Out of Alice (15 page)

It was early to pen them but they were coming home and she had no desire to seek them out, not with the visibility fading as it was. Where was the harm in yarding them early for once? Casting an uneasy look at the mill, still plainly visible through the flying dust, Sara dropped the feed bucket and jogged towards the sound of the bells. She'd just hurry them all into the yard and shut the gate. It shouldn't take more than ten minutes. She'd worry about separating and penning the kids when the storm ended, by which time Jack should be home anyway to take charge of things.

The bells were further off than Sara had first thought. She dithered, wondering if she was being foolish, but they were in a paddock and the mill head would guide her home, after all. Turning to check on its whereabouts, she felt the scarf lift from her head and swore as it sailed off into the bush. She chased it, grabbing at its folds and missing a half-dozen times before finally snatching it back. Sara was tying it firmly in place when she came suddenly upon the goats. The flock, as startled as she was by their sudden meeting, bolted, bleating wildly, the bells bongling dully as they fled.

Of all the stupid animals! She called to them, trotting in their wake as their scattered parts slowly coalesced back into a whole. They were still wary, snorting warningly, heads high and yellow eyes skittish. ‘Good goats,' she encouraged. ‘It's horrid, I know, but it's just a bit further.' Sara's own head was bent and she pulled the ends of the scarf across her mouth and nose. The dust was so thick she could only see parts of the flock, which, like her, seemed driven forward by the gale. All around her the sky had turned a solid ochre colour and grit and bits of leaves and sticks pelted her back. The mill and homestead had vanished, together with the sun. Her vision was down to the last half-dozen goats, but it was all right, she told herself, because the animals knew where they were going. She only had to follow them and they'd bring her to the yard. She hoped it would be soon. Helen would be wondering what had become of her. Bent against the gale, eyes screwed almost shut, she stumbled on, blundering through the skeletons of bushes stripped bare by the howling storm, and once almost falling when her foot met with a log her eyes had missed.

At long last the goats halted. Sara paused and peered ahead, wondering if the storm had swung the gate shut. The wind howled and now she could actually feel the fine sand settling as it met the resistance of her body, building up in the folds of her shirt and scarf, and sifting inside her clothes. The flock was jammed together, unmoving, rumps to the storm, heads lowered into the protection of their collective bodies. No post or netting was visible, nor was the tramped and darkened ground of the goat yard. And, twist and peer how she liked, she could find neither sign nor sound of the mill. The realisation was slow but inescapable. She was lost, like the woman Helen had told her about, the one who had gone out with her son and was never seen again.

Mouth dry, Sara swallowed as fear clawed at her. She stood rigid, wondering what to do. Surely if they had missed the yard, they would have blundered into the sheds or the stockyards instead? Unless they had slipped somehow between the two? But weren't animals supposed to have a fine-tuned homing instinct? Perhaps not, or perhaps the ferocity of flying sand had addled it. Should she wait out the storm, or try to retrace her steps? But just turning to face the screaming wind was enough to decide her.

Crouching, Sara shuffled closer to the nearest goat and bent her head, fighting the instinct to get up and run before the wind, fleeing the terror pressing upon her. Her throat and mouth were parched and Helen's accusing words rang in her head.
You should know better. You're dehydrated
. How could she have been so stupid as to wander into the cloaking storm and expect the animals to guide her? They would think her a fool, a city ninny without the sense to come in out of the rain. She welcomed the stream of reproach and remorse her brain was manufacturing because behind it all, as she huddled there with her fingers dug into her arms with force enough to mark them, another terror pushed at her.

You can't, you can't!
She was screaming, kicking, tiny fists bruising as she beat and struggled, weeping and raging against the dreadful truth, her small face smeared with snot and tears.
Nooo! Benny!
What was it? What were they doing to him?

Grimly Sara forced her wailing younger self away, shutting her back into the shadows from whence she had come, and with her the unreasoning terror that threatened to engulf her grown self. She would think of that later. For now there was fear enough of a purely visceral kind. She must remain calm. Panic, she knew, would only make a bad situation worse.

Afterwards Sara never knew how long she huddled there among the goats, head and back bowed to the blast. Long enough for the sand to have covered her feet and built little hills against her legs. Her mouth and eyes felt gritty, and the heated, dusty air had dried her nasal passages until it seemed that even through the veiling scarf she had breathed pure sand. She could feel it in her hair and down the back of her neck where the formerly protected skin felt flayed by the wind's force. Her mind had been blank for so long, set to endure the violent pelting and threnody of the storm that it was some while before she registered that the unholy force was abating.

The goats knew it first. They were lying down by then, still huddled one against the other, and it was the soft bleat of the nearest nanny that roused Sara from her trance-like state. A kid's voice answered as the goat rose to her feet, shaking sand from her coat, then the youngster was on its knees, under its dam's belly, tugging at her udder. Sara watched bemused, aware that the sky was lightening around her, pulling nearer objects into view. The sun was still hidden but she saw they were in the corner of a paddock where an old yard must once have stood, for the rusty barbed wire was netted on two sides. Jolted by her alien surroundings she swung her head, searching for the mill, but the fog of dust hid all save the closest trees. The sight was disorienting and a bolt of pure panic shot through her as she tried to reconcile the perceived geography of her whereabouts with the facts.

The goats must not have been making for their yard after all. Sara tried to reconstruct her movements and was shaken to realise that she couldn't. She had been so certain. Now all she positively knew was that she must still be within the home paddock so if she followed the fence it would, eventually, take her back. But which way? One must be shorter than the other, but if she chose wrong, how far must she walk? Would it be one kilometre or ten? Had she veered so far off course? She was seriously thirsty but she would walk ten if she had to, she told herself. From somewhere else within her a little voice whispered,
And if it's twenty? Can you do that?
Sara swallowed, afraid. Because it might twenty. The distances to anywhere out here were enormous – at least to her city mind.

Well, she had best start before the absent sun sank somewhere beyond the dust cloud and left her in the dark. Sara glanced at her watch, amazed it still worked, and saw that it was a quarter to five. Jack would be home soon. Her frightened heart lifted. If she couldn't get back herself, he would surely find her. Chiming with that thought, Sara heard the faint surge of a motor somewhere in the distance and a minute later saw the battered motorbike burst from the screening dust to come to a halt before her, scattering the goats as it did so.

‘There you are,' Jack said, as if they had met in the street. He propped the bike and dismounted, the brim of his hat flattened back against the crown, his face and shoulders powdered with dust. ‘All right?' The concern in his glance belied his casual tone.

‘I – yes.' Sara fought the desire to burst into tears. She swallowed to ease her dry throat. ‘I was about to follow the fence back, only I couldn't decide which way.'

‘Either would've done,' he said. ‘Here, I brought you some water.' He pulled a plastic bottle from the leather bag buckled to the carrier and handed it to her. ‘Some blow, eh? Half Munaroo's topsoil is decorating Len's paddocks, which'd be good except half of his has shifted onto the National Park.'

Sara strove to match his tone. ‘It certainly felt like it.' Behind Jack a dim glow showed, the sun coming back through the thinning dust as she drank deeply, the water like nectar to her parched tissues. ‘I was trying to get the goats in,' she explained, looking away. ‘Only they weren't headed for the yard after all.' She damped the end of her scarf and wiped her face, scrubbing at her eyes to remove the threat of tears.

‘No,' he said gently. ‘Goats, any stock, they turn their rumps to the storm. You couldn't have driven them into it and that's what you'd have to have done to get them back. You're fine, that's the main thing. Hop on the back and I'll run you home.'

Seated behind him, her hands clutching his body, Sara let the silent tears course down her cheeks. The sweet relief of his presence and the comfort of being close to his sturdy frame after the ordeal of the storm was overwhelming. She tucked her head into the shelter of his shoulders and clung to him as to a lifeline, knowing that her tears would dry before the ride ended and no one would ever know just how frightened she had really been.

Later, standing in the shower shampooing her hair, Sara could feel the sand washing away beneath her feet. There had been a layer of it on the soap, she had been forced to shake the towels before entering the shower stall, and a small pile of soil lay beneath her discarded clothing. Turning her face up, she let the cool flow spill over her, resolutely shutting her mind to everything but the blessedness of water. The rest she would think of later – both her foolishness, and the screaming child struggling back there in the darkness of her shuttered mind. It was a good thing her memories had hidden from her for so long. Imagine bearing that terror through adolescence!

Helen had been kind, uttering no word of reproach for the worry Sara had caused her.

‘Thank heavens you're safe,' she had said briskly, her thoughts on the havoc the sandstorm had created. ‘My lord, even the fan's covered with dirt and I'll have to turn out every cupboard . . . You'll want a nice long shower. Take your time, Sara. Nobody's getting fed until I get this mess cleared away. Will you look at the stove for heaven's sake! Ten to one the jets are clogged solid.'

Talk over the evening meal was of the dust storm. It had been widespread, according to Frank, forcing them to turn back before they even reached the Munaroo boundary.

‘Really?' Sara pretended interest. ‘Will it have done much damage?'

‘If there had been feed to lose, yeah,' Jack said. ‘It'd all be buried. Take a squiz at the lawn tomorrow and you'll see what I mean. The mulga will have had a pounding too.'

‘The horses didn't come in.' Sara remembered suddenly. ‘I suppose I shouldn't have put their feed out?' She looked questioningly at Jack.

‘Don't worry about it,' he said. ‘Animals shift for 'emselves. They'll come back soon enough.' He yawned, setting his mug aside. ‘Dunno about you, Dad, but I'm for an early night. We're gonna have to check all those damn mills again tomorrow or they'll be seizing up on us. I dare say there's a few will have lost vanes as well. There's no end to it.'

‘Not till the rain comes,' his father agreed placidly. ‘Some things just are, boy. That's the way of it, and we don't get much say in the matter.'

Sara helped Helen clean up and agreed that there was no point in making a start on the house that night.

‘Frankly I'm too tired.' Helen hung up her apron. ‘It's years since I've seen a blow like that. God!' She scratched her head. ‘My hair's filthy, I must shower. Everything else can wait till the morning.' Abruptly she said, ‘You showed good sense sticking with the goats, but I was worried about you when you disappeared. You're a bit too precious to lose, you know.'

Tears pricked Sara's eyes at the words. If Stella had only ever told her that, just once.

‘I was stupid, but it's a lesson well learned, I assure you. As for the house, the pair of us will have it to rights in no time. Just think of it as a late spring clean. Now, I'm off to bed. I feel as if I could sleep for a week.'

First, however, her bed had to be remade. The white counterpane was red. Sara folded in the edges of it and lifted the whole thing carefully, but the sand from the pillowcase had slipped down into the sheets, so she stripped the lot, carried the linen onto the verandah and shook it all out. The night air was cooler and the stars shone brightly. The last of the dust must have cleared – well, either that or it was all underfoot, she thought, feeling the crunch beneath her sandals. Every ledge and shelf and louvre would be coated with the stuff. It would have infiltrated the wardrobes and drawers, and the books and papers in the schoolroom. She sighed. She and Helen had busy days ahead of them.

Once in bed with the French doors set wide and the fan whirling, Sara could no longer suppress the memory that had come to her in the storm. Her skin prickled and she shivered, drawing the sheet closer. What could it mean? Children made and received wild threats all the time, didn't they?
Touch that and you'll die!
How many kids said that to siblings? How many teenage girls husked breathlessly to friends' extravagant statements?
If he looks at me I'll just die!
But there had been nothing of threat or delighted anticipation in that memory. The awful terror behind the words went deeper than that: she had been frantic for her brother's safety, hysterical over the danger she had perceived him to be in. Had she been mistaken then? Could a six-year-old actually judge such things? And if so, could this explain the mystery of Ben's apparent disappearance? Had the young Sara witnessed what had happened? Might it have been something so dreadful it had caused her to forget everything about it?

It was no good. There were too many questions and no answers she could trust. Sara wondered if she would ever know the truth. She smoothed her hand over her face where the skin felt dry and abraded; she should have creamed it, the back of her neck too – every­where the flying grit had stung – but she had been too tired to bother. Who could have imagined the country could turn on one so suddenly? It was the impersonal nature of the storm that had made it so frightening. Now that she was safe, she could admit to the terror of being lost in that howling cacophony, of the unspeakable relief of seeing Jack coming for her on the bike. Sara had been afraid to let herself realise the full extent of her fear, afraid that she would snap and run heedlessly, as her feet had wanted to, until reason itself was lost.

Staying in control had saved her. If she had left the goats or climbed through the fence, she might still be wandering out there. Sara shuddered at the thought. Next time she would know better, would remember for instance that the storm had come from what Sam had identified all that time ago as the south.
How can you tell?
Sara had asked and he'd looked at her as if her wits were lacking.
From where the sun is, of course.
If she had only remembered that it would have helped her get her position in the paddock.

Jack had said the flock turned their rumps to the storm so that must mean she had followed them north. So if the goat yard was south of the homestead, it meant that the road to it came in from the west. If she had walked to the left, she would have reached, and perhaps recognised, the corner of the fence paralleled by the track to Kileys bore. From there it was just a matter of following it home.

So simple, once you thought about it. Sara yawned. Most puzzles were, in the end, save for all the bewildering questions she had around her own beginnings, such as the fact that her name wasn't on the registry. In the press of other events she had almost forgotten the letter. She would write again, then, to the Victorian registry and the one in New South Wales and, if need be, to Queensland.

Her thoughts drifted and she found sleep, dreaming of a garden with a bright flowering bush near a broad stone wall upon which she and her brother sprawled. They hung face down across the sun-warmed stones, flicking a carefully gathered hoard of gumnuts at a big goanna that was gorging himself on a nest of eggs in the grass below. The sight of the long-clawed lizard entertained but didn't alarm them. High on the wall, rendered safe by each other's presence, they laughed and shot their puny ammunition at the monster, as untouchable as a knight in some magic fairytale.