Dead Man's Footsteps
most of it.
They were ambling along. With six points on his licence, he was being careful to drive well within the speed limits. Besides, he wasn’t in any hurry. He was happy – intensely happy – just being here with the girl he loved, enjoying the drive, the scenery, the Saturday morning feeling of the whole weekend stretching out ahead of him.
Something he had once read was going around inside his head: Happiness is not getting what you want. It is wanting what you have .
He said it out aloud to Lisa, and she said they were beautiful words, and she agreed with them. Totally. She kissed him. ‘You say so many beautiful things, MJ.’ He blushed.
She pressed a button and music from the Whitlams thumped out of the madly expensive sound system he’d had installed. And their camping gear and the slab of VB beer thumped under the battened-down tarp behind the cab. And his heart thumped too. It was good to be here, good to feel so alive, to feel the warm air blowing on his face through the open window, to smell Lisa’s perfume, to feel her tangle of blonde curls batting against his wrist.
‘Where are we?’ she said, not that she cared. She was enjoying this too. Enjoying the break from her weekly routine of visiting doctors’ practices as a haemophilia drugs sales rep for the pharmaceutical giant Wyeth. Enjoying wearing just a loose white top and pink shorts, instead of the business suits she had to wear during the week. But most of all, enjoying precious time together with MJ.
‘Nearly there,’ he said.
They passed a yellow hexagonal road sign depicting ablack bicycle and stopped at a T-intersection, beside the skeletal trunk of a Radiata pine that was topped by a thick clump of needles, like a badly fitting toupee. Immediately ahead of them rose a steep, bald hill with isolated clusters of bushes looking as if they’d been stuck to it by Velcro.
Lisa, who was English, had only been in Australia for two years. She had moved to Melbourne from Perth a few months ago and the terrain was all new to her. ‘When were you last here?’ she asked.
‘Not for some years – ten maybe. Used to come here camping with my parents, when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘It was our favourite place. You’re going to love it. Yee-hah!’
With a sudden burst of exuberance, he tramped the accelerator. The ute shot forward, making a sharp left on to the highway with a squeal of its tyres and a roar of thunder from its exhausts.
After a few minutes they passed a sign on a pole that read BARWON RIVER , then MJ slowed down and started looking to his right as they passed another saying STONE-HAVEN AND POLLOCKS FORD.
After a while he braked sharply and turned right on to a sandy track. ‘I’m pretty sure this is it!’ he said.
They bounced along for five hundred yards or so. Wide open country to their right, bushes to their left and an embankment down to a river they couldn’t see. They passed a steel-girder bridge sitting on old brick buttresses to their left, then thick brush obscured the view. The track suddenly dipped sharply, then rose again on the far side. After a few minutes it widened out for some yards and ended, turning into scrub grass beyond which was dense brush.
MJ brought the ute to a halt and put on the handbrake.A cloud of dust swirled over them. ‘Welcome to paradise,’ he said.
They kissed.
Then, after some moments, they climbed out. Into total warm silence. The engine pinged. There was the scent of dried grasses in the air. A bowerbird made a sound like someone whistling yoo hoo! , then was silent. Down below them, snaking into the distance, was shimmering water and further away, beneath the fierce late-morning sun, there were bald brown hills sporting just the occasional acacia or eucalyptus tree. The silence was so intense, for a moment they felt they could be the only people on the planet.
‘God,’ Lisa said, ‘this is so beautiful.’
A fly buzzed around her face and she batted it away. Another one came and she batted that away too.
‘Good old flies,’ MJ said. ‘This is the right spot!’
‘Obviously they remember you!’ she said, as a third one landed on her forehead.
He gave her a playful punch, before arcing his hand several times in rapid succession in front of his face, giving an Aussie salute to flap away more flies that were pestering him. Then, with his arm around her, MJ steered Lisa to a gap in the brush.
‘This is where we used to launch our canoe,’ he
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