PART FOUR

The phone rang and rang.

‘Yeah?’ a man finally said.

It might have been her dad, but there was no video, and she’d barely spoken to her dad in the last couple of years, so it might not have been him. He didn’t believe in normal phones. Also, he’d installed some thing so the government couldn’t monitor him, and which made his voice sound weird. Sylvie thought about hanging up.

‘Dad?’ she said.

Immediately, his voice softened.

She told him she’d be driving down to see her mum in Melbourne. Maybe she could come past on the way through? Not that it wasn’t out of the way. It was. It was a long way out of the way, in the bush somewhere, or the desert, or whatever.

‘Of course, mate,’ he said. ‘No worries.’

He didn’t ask why she wanted to come. Which was good, because she couldn’t have told him.

‘Anyway, I’ll come out the day after tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Thursday, if you’re going to be there.’ Blankly, she turned her mind from the implications of this statement.

She could always cancel.

Her dad was saying something to someone else that she couldn’t understand. There was a woman’s voice in the background. Short, harsh sentences. Then he said: ‘Just happens I got a fresh vacancy. Number seven.’

‘You mean someone died?’

There was a pause. ‘I’ll fix her up for you, Vee. You can stay as long as you want. You know that.’

It wasn’t much of an offer — she knew that.

‘But you’ll call me again if you really are coming?’ he said.

‘I’m coming on Thursday,’ she told him. ‘Really. I just said that. I’m calling you now.’

That was the plan, anyway, but by Thursday afternoon, Sylvie realised she couldn’t do it. She was still three hours away, and the map said there was a place called Esperance up ahead, which was still going. She clicked on it. It had a service station and a motel. She clicked on the motel, skipped through a short promotional video. The place looked okay. Or not nightmarish, anyway, and the reviews weren’t terrible. She zoomed out again. There was an Italian restaurant in the main street — La Strada Affamata — and a pub with no obvious fascist paraphernalia. She took the car off autopilot, unzipped the Vista — a view of lush Asian jungle — and pulled onto the exit, which was lined on either side, she saw now, by long rows of blackened trunks, from which luminous green foliage had begun to sprout. A fire had come through not so long ago, but Esperance had survived, apparently. So she would sleep in Esperance and give herself another night to think about it. Maybe she’d feel stronger in the morning. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d drive straight through and forget all about it. Two years, three years. What difference would it make?