Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

‘At John O’Groats I made a circle out of stones and sprinkled him all over them. Like decorating a cake. That was nice. I sat down next to him and drank champagne. And then I threw him off a cliff edge in Cornwall. It was all good. But here — I can’t get this last one right.’ He looked at me, crestfallen. ‘I’m bored of it, sick of it.’ He looked at the envelope in his hands. ‘I could just pass by a bin outside a chip shop and drop him in.’

‘Who was he?’ My throat was burning.

‘He was mine,’ Lloyd said, and smiled widely. ‘He was mine and he was hit by a truck on his way to work. BAM!’ he shouted, and giggled and then was quiet.

‘Your son?’

‘No — not my son.’

My insides listed and turned like a shoal of fish.

‘Sorry,’ I said. I stood and brushed my trousers down. Lloyd conducted the air around him with his hands.

‘Shall we go now?’ I asked. I didn’t want to go back to the house without him.

Working at the Hedland is different from Darwin. In Darwin someone told me it was safer at the Hedland where there were fewer tourists who came and went, and that the sex was more average because they were the people who lived and worked there. At the Hedland, they weren’t off their tits on excitement because they were on holiday. It made sense, and I did some reading up on the place, which is a mining town, and so I expected it to look like a Western film, but when I got off the Greyhound it looked just like a shitty little town. And as it goes, the sex is just the same for bored men as it is for over-excited men. I guess they’ve had the chance to really think about the things they’d like to do to a person. But not all of them are like that. Some are kind, but even kind people use other people for sex. You come to see that.

I share a room and a bed above a rotisserie chicken shop with Karen. She’s been in Port Hedland two years by the time I get there, but she doesn’t tell me why, and I don’t tell her why I’m there either. We just rub along together, and she makes me laugh. She’s the beautiful type, straight out of a magazine, with long hair and a small waist, and I try not to think too hard about how she, looking like she does, could have come to be in the same place as me.

We try and make the place look decent, even if it smells bad from all the cooked chickens, and Karen refers to a thing she calls ‘ombionce’ which is brought about by scented candles and a red and orange rag rug over the only window. She also talks about ‘fung shuay’ and throws a fit when I move things around while she’s out, so that the foot of the bed faces the door. ‘That’s how you get carried out when you die!’ she wails, yanking the bed across the room to where it had been before, so it gets in the way every time you walk by it, and you smash your shin on it.

‘So what?’ I say. ‘You’d rather go head first out the window?’ She doesn’t laugh.

We try not to bring work back to the room, both of us prefer to work in a bloke’s truck or their place, but sometimes if it’s cold out you get more done if you can take them somewhere yourself, so we figure out a rota so that she gets the odd hours, I get the even. She works harder than I do, she says she has a hunger to get out of the Hedland. One afternoon we’re sipping Cokes and ice outside the Four Square on the main street, and Karen points to an Aboriginal girl down an alleyway, leant up against the fence, her eyes closed with the sun in them.

‘See her,’ says Karen, ‘that’s what we got below us. That’s the level down. Those girls haven’t got the drive to get to a better place than this.’ I look at the girl she’s nodding at, a girl about my age, or maybe younger, wearing a soft blue T-shirt and a skirt that doesn’t look comfortable to wear. ‘That one there, I’ve seen her go for a can of beer.’ She turns to me and says in a softer voice, one that I’m not used to hearing come out of her, ‘Don’t ever think that we’re stuck here like her, we’re not, we got a way out if we want it.’

Karen gets picked up pretty soon after that, and I stay there looking at the girl who screws for beer money and I wonder what the difference is. She sees me looking and faces me with her two feet planted apart, and stares back in a way that lets me know there is something different there, but not something I know anything about. I move along, because she scares me.

For a couple of months the Hedland feels safe. I can walk around and I don’t feel eyes on me. I sleep, I don’t wake up and have that feeling someone’s crouched in the corner, that they’ve slunk in the window and they’ve been waiting for me to see them. But on my way to work one night I’m aware of the sound of footsteps close behind me. When I hurry, they speed up. The main thing is not to look, and I push into an all-night café. No one follows me in and I sit on a Coke for an hour and then the waitress starts staring at me and it could be because I’ve only bought a Coke and I’ve stayed too long. She starts walking towards me with a sour look on her face, and an older bloke with a thick middle comes up and sits with me.

‘She’s all right, Marg,’ he says, ‘she’s with me.’ He smiles at me in a way I haven’t seen in a long time, and the waitress rolls her eyes and goes back behind the counter. ‘Beer for your thoughts?’ he asks and gets the waitress to bring two. He’s lonely, and you can tell that he’s not just worried about getting his leg over, he’s worried about talking to someone.

‘Was reading here,’ he says, showing me his newspaper, ‘about how they found a six-foot carpet snake under this old lady’s bed — she’d been dropping food down for her cat when her nurse brought it in. Snake ate the cat and then ate the leftovers too probably!’ He laughs and I laugh too. The waitress looks over.

‘I always wanted a pet at home,’ I say but I shut up about that because the word makes me feel hot and sad. ‘You live far from here?’ I ask the man, wondering if he will try to pick me up later.

‘Yeah. Fair way,’ he says. ‘Come into town now and again for some decent food and stave off the boredom. Was in town tonight to see a film as it goes.’

‘What are you going to see?’

‘Missed it now. They were doing Lady and the Tramp — loved that film.’

I smile. He’s a soft old git. ‘Sorry if I made you miss it.’

‘Nah,’ he blushes a little, ‘don’t be sorry. It’s a treat to talk to someone.’

When we finish our drinks he doesn’t ask for anything, or try to make me stay with another drink. He just tells me to keep safe. ‘I’m in here every few weeks,’ he says, ‘if you ever want a talk and a beer — a night off.’ He shakes me by the hand. ‘It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Name’s Otto, hope we’ll meet again.’ He slips me $20 and leaves $10 on the counter for our drinks, then leaves the café without even a squeeze at my boobs. When he walks he goes from side to side as well as forward.

‘The way I see it,’ says Karen, lighting the second half of her last cigarette, ‘is that you just go straight down. You just dig to China.’

I frown. ‘China’s to the side.’

‘It’s a figure of speech.’ Karen frowns back and inhales the stale cigarette, passes it to me and I know we are friends. ‘England, then. If you want to be specific about it. The main point is, we’re not supposed to be here, us whiteys. The place is trying to spit us out all the time.’ I pass the cigarette back, careful not to take more than is polite. Karen puts it in her mouth and leans forward at me, pointing to her lip, almost burning me with the tip of the cigarette.

‘See this?’ There’s a small white scar there. ‘I’m twenty-three, I had a cancer burnt off there last year.’ She sits back, holds the smoke in her lungs and lets it out in waves. She folds her arms in front of her. ‘Who knows what else is going on with my face right now.’ She feels her cheeks like she’s looking for bits that will fall off. ‘Did you know our mum never gave us anything to cover over our faces? And that was the era of Slip Slop Slap — we did a whole fuckin’ school assembly on it.’ She stands up and does a little performance. ‘“Slip! Slop! Slap!”’ she sings. ‘“Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen and slap on a hat.”’ She does a turn and some jazz hands, then stands on one hip with her arms folded. ‘I was the bloody bird — even then, even then she couldn’t be bothered to zinc us up.’