‘Mum, can I get one of these, I’ll get one for Essie too?’ Sam holds up a flip box of chewy mints.
‘Hang on, Sam. Let me do this.’
She selects the account, holds her breath while the machine thinks.
‘Muuuum! LISTEN!’
The attendant raises an eyebrow, scowls at Sam. He is starting to scrunch up his face and she can see the telltale pink creeping across his collarbone. She feels exhausted already at the prospect of a meltdown.
The machine pings approval. Her hands unclench.
‘Yes, whatever you want.’ She takes the boxes from Sam and slides them across the counter, relief coursing through her.
She makes the call outside the car, knowing Essie will be all over it if she hears. ‘GeoTech, how may I help you?’
‘It’s Miriam Elliot here, I need to speak with someone in management.’
‘Sorry, Mrs Elliot, no one’s available.’
‘It’s urgent.’
A pause, Mim prepares to go hard.
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
She waits, steadies her breathing.
‘Mim, it’s Di Benton here. I’m so sorry we haven’t spoken yet, I’ve just been flat chat trying to work out what’s happening.’
She’s met Di before. Knows she’s only second in charge. Can’t be that bad, then, surely. Or maybe they think a woman will do a better job of smoothing things over with Mim.
‘Have you heard anything about Ben?’
‘Not as yet, but we have everyone here working on it. Is there anything I can do?’
‘I’m sorry –’ She feels like she is sixteen, asking the bar manager at the footy club for her pay. ‘I’m just having trouble with our accounts. Have you stopped paying him?’
‘Stopped paying him? God no, why would we do that? Hang on, let me just check with Chelsea, you poor thing, are you stuck somewhere, I can send a car over?’
Mim almost shrivels with embarrassment. The ridiculousness of big business. She imagines one of their former university departments offering to send a car and almost laughs out loud. ‘No, no, it’s fine, I just couldn’t work out – I mean, I suppose if he’s not working, if you don’t know where he is…’
‘Give me a second, Mim.’
The line clicks and Mim paces beside the car, smiling briefly at Sam when he taps on the window and eyebrows a question.
‘You there, Mim?’
‘Yes?’ Mim stops pacing.
‘It’s not a problem at our end. I’ve checked.’
‘So?’ The anger fails in her throat. ‘So what does that mean?’
‘I don’t know, a bank thing maybe? Leave it with me, huh? In the meantime, are you sure I can’t send someone –’
She cuts her off. ‘No, no, all fine. Really, it’s okay. I just want to know where he is, Di. I just want him home.’ Her voice cracks. Shit. She didn’t want that to happen.
‘Of course, of course you do, we all do. I’ll be in touch, you look after you, yeah, and the kids.’
‘Who was that?’ Sam asks as she starts the car. ‘Was that about Dad?’
‘All good,’ she says, turning out on to the highway and avoiding Essie’s eyes in the rear-vision mirror.
4
Before the border they begin to see the ravages of the latest fires. Unprecedented, again. The word has lost its meaning. The hills on both sides are still black. But it’s what’s underneath that’s the biggest problem. The fires burn so hard and hot now that they crucify the seedbed beneath the soil. All that grows back is scrubby acacia, ready to burn again. Flora extinction rates rocketing. Thank Christ for the seed vaults. Mim flips her glasses down. Up. Disaster makes her tired. She opens the window a little.
‘Mum, that’s too windy.’
‘Sorry, Sammy, just need to wake up a bit.’
Essie’s serious voice, the one she uses to chastise, to educate. ‘You should pull over if you’re tired, Mum.’
‘I’m okay, just want to get there now, only a couple of hours to go.’ She eyes her daughter in the rear-vision mirror, staring out the window at the squares of yellow suddenly appearing in the black.
‘Do they grow canola in Japan?’ Essie says.
‘Not sure.’
‘Why?’ asks Sam.
‘For the Friendship Project, with our sister school.’ She holds up her screen and clicks. ‘No one else from my class will have fields of canola.’
‘Have you got any pictures yet? From the sister school?’
‘Nup.’ Essie shakes her head.
‘Maybe they’ll send a pic of an earthquake drill? Do you think?’
Essie is non-committal. ‘Maybe. It’s meant to be intimate pictures. A real slice of life. Not something we can ask Google.’
‘But you can ask Google anything,’ Sam says and Essie whacks him on the arm.
‘Mum! Oww!’
‘Stop it, you two,’ she says and changes tack. ‘It’ll be good to take some pictures of the farm.’
‘Yeah, and then Dad, he hasn’t been in it at all yet.’
‘Of course,’ Mim says, flipping her sunnies down again as the sun sinks lower on her left and the glare shoots across the dashboard. She opens the window a little lower so that the wind gushes in, and makes it difficult for the conversation to continue.
* * *
When they hit the turn-off, she tells the kids to put the screens away. Even in the dark, she wants them to be paying attention, to mark the significance of this homecoming with her.
In front, an orange streak in the headlights, green flash of eyes.
‘What’s that, Mum?’
‘Fox,’ says Essie.
‘I thought the foxes were all gone?’
There is a part of Mim that is glad the eradication programs were never one hundred per cent effective. ‘Too smart for that, foxes,’ she says.
‘They are the greatest contributing factor to the extinction of small marsupials such as the eastern quoll,’ Essie says.
Mim nods seriously. Essie doesn’t react well when she feels like Mim is patronising her. ‘You sound just like your grandpa.’
‘Was he a fox-hater too?’ says Sam.
‘He didn’t like them much. I remember when he shot one once, your uncle Michael went searching for the babies –’
‘Cubs,’ says Sam.
‘Yeah, cubs, and he found them, and one was still alive, and he kept it for ages, secretly. But when Dad found out he was so mad.’
She remembers the sound the cub had made, curled up against Michael’s t-shirt in the makeshift nest he had made from old rags and cushions, while the two of them hid out behind the decommissioned digger in the big shed. It was like all those movies where ducklings think a human is their mother – the cub adored him, stuck out its hard little tongue to lick him, nuzzled at his armpits and groin.
‘It’s growing pretty quick,’ she’d said, because sometimes Michael needed reminding of the world outside himself, the notion of cause and effect.
He’d ignored her, strummed his forefinger over the russet neck of the cub’s fur, smiling indulgently. ‘A survivor,’ he’d said.