he appeared, striding down the road with his head down, sucking on the cigarette he seemed to be hiding in his palm. When he saw the boys he jerked his thumb.
‘Hop in,’ he said.
They clambered up into the cab as Artie started the truck and they were soon roaring down the valley road. Artie reeked of beer and smoke. He shouted a few things over the noise of the engine but didn’t say much after a while. Tom noticed that he was looking at his watch more and more often, scratching his pointy nose each time. Flynn was leaning forward to work the old indicator hand. Tom grabbed a handful of his shirt so he wouldn’t topple forward. Artie became more and more distracted, pressing the accelerator pedal further and further to the floor, the engine wailing its way up and down the hills. After a while they pulled up in a cloud of dust down by the turn-off to Angel Rock. Tom looked over at Artie.
‘I’m sorry, fellers, I’ll have to drop you here. I’m real late for something.’
‘Is it far?’
‘Nope. You can see the rock from here,’ he said, pointing out his window. ‘You just go down this road, take the first right; that goes straight into town. Shouldn’t take you twenty minutes.’
‘All right.’
‘Thanks, son. Really appreciate it.’
Tom was more than glad to get out of the truck. He clambered down after Flynn and shut the door behind them. Artie wasted no more time and took off up the road, sounding the truck’s wheezy horn and waving his arm out the window. They watched him go and then waited for the dust to settle.
‘Well, come on then,’ said Tom, setting off, when it had.
‘Wrong way, Tom.’
‘Right way, Flynn. We’re not going into town, are we. We’re going home. Home’s this way, towards the river. This road meets up with ours.’
Flynn didn’t argue and he followed Tom as he set off along the eastern branch of the crossroads. The afternoon was still and very quiet. The road followed a ridge for a little while and then dropped down into a gully. As Tom thought they might, Flynn’s shoes soon began to pinch him and he sat, put the harmonica down, and pulled them off. He would have left all three items behind if Tom hadn’t picked them up. When they walked on the sun seemed much lower in the sky than it had been just five minutes before and in under the trees the light was growing dimmer. Tom wasn’t worried. He thought the shale road would be easy enough to follow, even after dark, and Artie had said it wasn’t far.
They came to where the road split into two and, after thinking about it for a moment, Tom decided on the right fork. The road wound down through a stand of gnarled old swamp gum where the darkness was thickening, great drifts of it piling up in the undergrowth. They could hear rustling, whispering sounds coming from in behind the roadside trees.
‘Is this the right way?’ Flynn asked, his voice hesitant.
‘Yep. It must be.’
Flynn looked doubtful. Tom slipped the watch off his wrist and gave it to him to play with. He’d started to teach Flynn how to tell the time but he seemed happy enough just watching the second hand go round and the luminous dots marking the hours.
‘What time is it?’
‘I can’t tell.’
‘Try.’
Flynn looked at the watch, his lips moving as he laboured with the concepts of big and little, numbers, circles, hands. Tom squeezed at the splinters starting to itch under the skin of his palm. Surely by now they’d be able to see the town, he thought, as what felt like another fifteen minutes passed. He hadn’t seen or heard a car for a long while now and the road was becoming less even and more and more potholed and corrugated. He felt a moment of panic but fought it down. He stopped in the middle of the road and turned round. Flynn stopped too.
‘I think we’ve come the wrong way,’ he said at last. Flynn looked up at him but, thankfully, didn’t start to cry.
Back along the road, maybe half an hour before, he had seen the last roadside mailbox, the last gate, the last track leading up to a farmhouse. It would be simple enough to go and ask someone the right way – they might even get a lift. Henry need never know, Tom thought. He wouldn’t get back home until much later, maybe even tomorrow morning. He turned round, happy with the plan, but as he did he noticed a long, dark shape by the edge of the road. It was just behind a white road marker with a red reflector nailed to it. They must have walked straight past it before and not noticed. He stared until he was sure it was not a shadow and then he moved closer. It was a kangaroo, stretched out, with its smaller front legs above its head, its head between them, its massive hind legs and tail half-obscured by the roadside grass. Tom had seen kangaroos before in the valley, but never one as large. He’d heard stories from the timbermen of the kangaroos of the outback and how they could leap over high fences and how to shoot one and skin it and cut it up and which parts to eat. He thought this one must have been hit by a car. He’d seen many things killed this way and had even been in the truck when Henry had cursed and hit something, but they’d never stopped to see what. One time Tom had turned and peered out into the blackness and seen a strange shape in the red glow of the truck’s tail-lights, something stumbling and broken, an outlandish shape spilling its blood and its life out onto the road, and he’d never forgotten the sight.
He approached the roo cautiously, not really a thought in his head about why, but drawn to it all the same. Flynn was dillydallying around behind and hadn’t noticed what had caught his eye. He was holding his watch arm up to his ear, a self-contained system with himself at the centre, a whole world within the stretch of his arms. Tom turned back to the kangaroo and immediately caught the stench coming off it. The smell was about the same as a rotten cat or dog. Tom screwed up his nose and was about to call to Flynn and continue walking when he felt the kangaroo stiffen and sense him. Not dead after all. He stopped and held his breath. They were only a foot or two away from each other. He heard the animal’s chest suck in air and then its entire body quivered, sprang upright, and reared to its full height before him. Tom stepped back and fell over but didn’t take his eye off the kangaroo for a moment. The roo’s head turned to and fro, its eyes as wide and white as a spooked horse’s. There were black and white markings on its face and it had black paws. The fur around one heavily muscled shoulder was much darker and Tom could just see the glistening edges of a putrid wound. Maybe it had been shot, he thought, but before he could think anything else the animal turned clumsily and bounded off into the bush. Tom watched it go – sat and stared into the twilight after it like a sea captain after a mermaid or white whale.
After a moment or two he stood, his and Flynn’s predicament forgotten, thinking only of how the kangaroo had come to be injured and how it had come to be by the side of this road.
‘Wow,’ he said to Flynn. ‘Did you see that? Did you see how big it was?’
He looked around for his brother but the piece of road where he had been was empty; there was no Flynn standing there, no Flynn singing, no Flynn on the grass verge, no Flynn playing a harmonica. Nothing at all and nothing to be heard either. He looked up and around, as if he might be up a tree, or hanging in the air, glowing, like a small moon, but he was gone, and there were only so many times you could look in the same places.
‘Flynn!’ he yelled. ‘Come back or you’ll get a bloody belting!’
His shouts were swallowed up by the trees and seemed to make no impression. He stopped, listened, and thought he heard the kangaroo – or maybe Flynn –
