John Marsden - Incurable

I set off again. I knew I was a long way behind but there was nothing I could do about that. I rode into darkness. The daylight failed fast. At least it seemed to get a bit warmer as the wind dropped away. At the first crossroads I went left. I had a feeling this road was called Sutherland’s but I wasn’t certain. It didn’t matter much, as I was pretty sure of my general direction.

I was trying to plan my strategy for when I got to Rawson Road. The whole idea of planning for something so out of my control was dumb but I suppose all planning is dumb in a way. Seeing you can’t predict the future, and seeing you can’t control other people, not to mention vehicles, animals, falling trees, the weather and your own self most of the time, planning has got to be… what? A kind of insurance policy. A way of trying to make yourself feel OK, because you can pretend you do have control of your life and the world around you. This is very reassuring when you’re heading into dangerous and horrible situations.

That’s what I thought about, riding along in the cold damp evening, trying not to use my lights. Generally I used a torch instead of headlights, which was not nearly as good of course. Safer in terms of attracting attention but violently dangerous when it came to road safety. I knew the others would be doing the same though, so at least I wasn’t losing more time.

I’d thought I would find Rawson Road pretty easily, but something basic had changed. I don’t want to sound too cosmic and psychic but because it wasn’t our country any more it seemed almost impossibly different. How weird that was, to be in a foreign country where such a short time ago it had been a part of our everyday world. The dirt road I was going down now for instance: not much more than a year ago I could have driven or ridden or walked down here without much thought. Just another dirt road lined with gum trees, a fence that badly needed fixing, a concrete-lined ford across a dip, and in the distance a farmhouse with lights on and people at home. I should have felt at home myself. But a new spirit had spread across the land and I trembled as I pushed forwards, knowing that although it felt like my land it was not. It smelt different. The energy was not the same. I was in alien territory. Instead of getting onto a plane and flying for a zillion hours to get somewhere else, now we could do it by wandering down a track for four hours.

Soon enough though I had to think about stuff that was more down-to-earth. Like self-preservation. All those days back in Wirrawee, going to school, looking after the farm, managing the cattle, trying to manage Gavin: all of that suddenly slipped off me and once again I was the hunter and the hunted. I felt like I’d turned into an animal, a fox maybe, and without any effort I was focused on finding the prey without being shot. I’d seen foxes do terrible things but I’d also admired their cunning. They could grab a duck in broad daylight, when I was working less than fifty metres away. They could find the only hole in the wire; they could tunnel into a chook yard; they seemed to know when you were holding a rifle and when you were only holding a stick; and on the one night when you’d forgotten to lock the gate into the poultry yard, they somehow knew and came sneaking in and killed everything that moved.

Well, I had to be the fox, and somehow I put on the skin of a fox and became a fox on a four-wheel motorbike. You can make a bike go pretty quietly if you keep the revs down and sneak along. I thought my problem at this stage would be more to do with finding Rawson Road than with aggressive enemies. I was trying to picture a map in my head and I thought Rawson Road ran from north to south, from my right to my left, across the flat monotonous country that I was in now. I forced the pace as fast as I could, but the noise of the bike got too loud when I went above thirty or thirty-five. I wondered how the others had done it. Would they have abandoned their bikes and gone on foot? With two bikes — plus one they didn’t know about — their noise problem would be more severe than mine of course.

Time was passing too fast and I felt under pressure to push on. Headlights travelling from right to left showed me I was coming to an intersection. It looked big and busy. Rawson Road? I waited for the headlights to pass, then had to wait for two more vehicles going the other way. Busy road. Maybe it was Rawson. I rode out onto the bitumen and looked around, feeling kind of bold. There was no way to tell what road it was. I rode cautiously down it, wondering how far I should go. If I’d got the wrong one this could be an expensive side trip. I suddenly remembered too that you’re not meant to ride four-wheelers on made roads. Well, not my four-wheeler anyway. It was something to do with the tyres. They ploughed up the paddocks any time I went off the tracks. Around the front of the machinery shed where I rode in and out, you could see nothing but muddy tracks. The grass was worn away in no time flat. They were heavy-tread tyres and I don’t know why they couldn’t tolerate bitumen but apparently they couldn’t.

Well, tough luck. For tonight they had no choice.

I’d gone about a k and a half when I saw one of those green and white direction signs ahead. Thank goodness. I’d been lucky no more cars had come. If I was really lucky the sign would tell me I was on Rawson Road. If I was really really lucky Homer and Lee and the others would be waiting there with Gavin to say, ‘Hi Ellie, the whole thing turned out to be a false alarm and we can all go home.’

I wasn’t too lucky. The sign was not in English but the numbers were the same as ours, and it looked like they’d kept the road numbering system we’d used. I didn’t know what number Rawson Road was meant to be but I knew it wasn’t Highway 3 and apparently I was on Highway 3.

Swear swear swear. Swearwords can be satisfying sometimes. I wheeled the bike around then had to go straight off the road because there was a car coming. In fact it was a truck with a string of cars behind it so I had to lie low for about four minutes while they all trundled past. As soon as there was a break I revved the bike back to the intersection. I didn’t have to worry about noise now, not out here on the highway.

I turned left and headed off on the dirt again. The landscape looked exactly the same. Sometimes it gets so boring, the way it just goes on and on. Sometimes it’s depressing. On TV ages ago they were talking about the Germans invading Russia during World War II, and how the landscape of Russia sent some of the soldiers crazy. It was to do with the way they woke up each morning and set out again and marched all day but nothing changed. Nothing ever changed! For day after day, month after month, they kept moving through a world where they felt like they weren’t moving at all. Walking and walking and walking and the horizon never moved and it all stayed the same.

No, I remembered, I didn’t see it on TV, I heard it on the car radio, and Mum was driving, because I remember her looking out at the bush and saying, ‘Yes, God, yes!’ when she heard this.

I didn’t agree with her — our landscape never had that effect on me — and I was worried by her saying it. For one thing I thought she was being disloyal. But still, I understood what she meant. At the same time if you knew the bit of bush you were in, or if you stopped and spent some time there, or if you opened your eyes and had a decent look around, you couldn’t see it as monotonous. It was only when we were driving that the endless miles got slightly depressing sometimes.

I sort of knew Rawson Road when I came to it. I’m not sure what it was, but something gave me the vibe of ‘Yes, I think this is it.’ It must have been three years since I’d come along here, and that was in the car, with my parents.