Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

I pass Kelly out on the veranda, on her rag rug, and she lifts her head to smell me as I go by. It’s not a smell of Hello , it’s a smell of What are you up to ?

Back inside Otto looks up from Shortland Street and gives me a smile. He is always happiest at this time of day, with a full belly and a beer in his hand, the show on the TV, which I have to pretend to enjoy. A woman dressed as a nurse orders a lime and soda in a pub and my hands clench. I will go in the morning, that is when his old bones are slowest.

My night is sleepless, and I listen to Kelly snoring outside my window. She cries in her sleep. When the sky starts to lighten, I hear her get up and go and pee a little way from her sleeping ditch, and then I hear her slump herself back down for the final rest before the day. If she is awake, she watches the blue come into the sky, and a single bush curlew from another place cutting across the open spaces of the paddock. The flies start to thicken the air.

By the time Otto unlocks my door I have filled my pockets with everything I can carry without looking suspicious. Before I leave the room, I look at all of the things that need to stay behind and say goodbye to them. I slide the knife from under my bed into the very back of the cupboard, where it might never be found. Even after everything, I wouldn’t want Otto to know I’d ever thought about slitting his throat.

I cook a breakfast of chops and eggs, and he wipes a slice of white bread around his plate and sighs happily. I force down an egg on a heel of bread, to look normal, but it starts to come back up, and I have to run to the loo and Otto rubs my back when I come out.

‘Remember last week? Maybe it’s the morning sicks,’ he says, hopefully. ‘When my mother was preggo with my little brother we had to give her meadowsweet just to keep water down. I’ll pick some up when I’m next in town.’ Not: when we’re next in town . That time has long passed. I wonder how long it would take for him to get me pregnant. Every time we finish, I squat in the shower and try to flush everything out.

‘Roight,’ he says, slapping the meat of his gut, ‘to the day’s business.’

He scrapes back his chair and lays a large dry hand on my shoulder as he passes by. The last time , I think, and it sends a jolt through my belly, and when he thumps down the steps of the veranda, and heads out towards the dunny, throwing Kelly his chop bone as he goes, I feel a prickling on my skin. The key for the ute hangs over the oven and it catches the light. I take the can of money from under the sink, and the key from its hook, and I walk as calmly as I can out of the door. Kelly is chomping her bone, standing with her legs planted far apart, and she looks up at me from hooded eyes as I pass by, considering. I tell myself I am fetching something from the truck, so that if she can read my mind she won’t know. But the second I slot the key into the ute’s door, she drops the bone from her teeth and starts up, jumping on the spot with fury, loud loud loud.

The dunny door opens, and Otto crouches with his trousers around his ankles, a red face, his yellow legs bowed. I’m inside the ute and the door is closed, and the key is in the ignition. Kelly jumps at my window. I have to keep a calmness in me so that the truck doesn’t stall, but Otto has left it in gear which I didn’t notice, and so it does, and he has pulled up his trousers, and the panic is setting in on me, I’m already trying to think of an excuse, that I was practising my parking, or that I thought I’d drive up to the sheep, nothing I know that will wash, and Otto is running at me, shaking the rolled-up comic book he’s been reading, like he’s going to flog me on the nose with it; his face is an open hole of anger, and the truck starts again, and I jerk away from the dog, and Otto reaches me just in time to slam his whole body onto the bonnet and we look each other in the eye for the count of one and I know somehow that this will be it, that if he catches me, my body will end up in the tall dry grasses of the paddock, with Kelly shifting me deeper and deeper in every few days and the flies will blow me as I bloat up and the sun peels the skin from my bones.

I put the truck in reverse and Otto flops forward onto the ground, and there is a squeak from Kelly and I go backwards for a long time, until Otto is standing again, and running for the shed, and I have to hope the things I pulled out of the truck were the right things.

I turn myself around slowly, carefully, see Kelly in my wing mirror, lying on the ground, and despite everything, I feel bad, she is just a dog, and then I go, and I don’t stop for the wooden gate, I smash through it, and it’s so old, it flies off like it’s made of paper. I turn left on the road towards town, and I keep going. I do not look in my rear-view mirror. I drive past the town, in case someone recognises the ute, and then I just drive fast, not seeing more than two cars by the time I have used up a third of a tank of diesel. I can go straight for as long as the truck will take me.

The air is different out here, the sour meat smell is gone, and I keep all the windows down, even though the wind bangs at my ears. The smell is not of old unwashed places or of fat and eggs frying, it is of hot leaves and earth and bitumen. I take as many sharp turns as I can, and wind my way through three or four small towns so that when he comes looking I can throw him off. I wonder in what way Otto will come after me, because I am certain that he will. There’s a possibility that he might call the police, I guess, but the idea of a cell is not so bad. They don’t know me out here.

When it feels like the sun has crisped my eyelids and it has started to edge down over west, I pull into a motel. I park badly across a set of lines, but no one else is in the parking lot so it doesn’t seem to matter. The truck’s engine ticks like a panting dog.

I ask the lady behind the counter if there’s anywhere I can park that won’t be seen by the road.

‘You in some kind of trouble, missy?’ she asks in not a nice way. Her hair is creeping out of the red handkerchief she wears on her head.

‘I’ve left my boyfriend, I don’t want him to find me.’

‘Been roughing you up, has he?’ I nod, and the lady’s face softens. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘pay up-front and I’ll show you round to the back where Eddie keeps the boat.’

I peel off three notes from the roll in Otto’s tin and she’s happy. Once I’ve parked, she gives me a key and also a bar of chocolate. ‘You drown your sorrows with that, missy,’ she says. ‘You get trouble, dial nine and I’ll send Eddie round with a bat.’

Eddie’s boat is a speed boat with a shiny red hull. I am so far from the water, and I think of the smell of it, the winds and the chuck and gulp of water lapping at the fibreglass. I will drive to the coast tomorrow; I won’t stop until I get there and I can float face down in the waves.

‘It’s never touched the bloody sea,’ says the woman, and reknots her hair into the handkerchief as she walks back to reception.

I buy three packets of smokes — they have the kind me and Karen used to smoke, Holidays, like that’s going to trick you — a box of matches and a postcard with a photograph of a dolphin on it from the gas station, and I smoke a whole packet in my non-smoking room. I feel bad after the lady gave me the chocolate and let me park round the back, near Eddie’s boat, but I’m not ready for the outside yet. I prop the postcard up on the pillow and use it as something to look at. It’s hot as hell, and probably the cigarette smoke is not the most refreshing smell, but it feels so good and I push away the memory of Otto’s red little penis.

After the smokes, I have a long hot shower and get into bed still wet so that the ceiling fan will cool me off while I sleep. I dream of the sheep out there alone with Otto and Kelly, and start up in the night with my heart pounding wondering what will happen to them. I sleep again but wake at dawn to throw up over and over into the loo, like I’m turning inside out, getting rid of the chops and the dog hair, Otto’s tongue and Kelly’s mackerel breath. I drink water from the tap in the way Mum used to shout at us for, in case the spider was up there nesting. I drink long hard gulps of it. I watch the day come while I smoke a Holiday and the birds sing and everything smells brand new.