Roadman Read online

  Isabella removed a picture from the inside pocket of her sleeveless hiking jacket and showed Max and Lorraine. The photograph was of a young backpacker holding a didgeridoo somewhere in the Australian outback. Max suddenly froze. He reckoned if he was attached to one of those cardiac machines on the other side of the curtain it would’ve started alarming wildly as his heart shuddered to a complete and painful halt. He stared at the photo, half aware that he was beginning to drool.

  “Zis is our only son, Gerhard,” Isabella said, dabbing her eyes with her husband’s pristine handkerchief. “He vent missink a few months ago. The police don’t know vat happened to him. So ve haff come all ze vay from Germany to search for him ourself.”

  When he woke up later that night, Lorraine and the Winklers were gone. His headache was somewhat better, but someone was snoring nearby and the cardiac monitor still beeped annoyingly. The sky was pitch black outside through the window, but glimmers of fluorescent light from the corridor meant he could still make out the curtains around his bed. Which was bad, real fuck’n bad, because he could also see he wasn’t alone.

  Gerhard was standing at the end of his bed, ragged and bloodied, staring at him with glazed, expressionless eyes. His skin was deathly pale and luminescent, like moonlight after a storm, and maggots were crawling out from his nostrils. Max could see the large vertical gash in Gerhard’s stomach, the gaping wound his hunting knife had made when he had plunged it into the stupid fucker’s guts and sliced upwards.

  Gerhard, his eyes still vacant and deadpan, opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out, just a mouthful of maggots and worms. He stepped closer, stretching his rotting, bony hands out toward Max like a zombie from a B-grade horror movie.

  Max let out a muffled, choked up scream and pulled the bed covers over his head. “Leave me alone! There’s noth’n! Noth’n. No angels, no God. Fuck you. Fuck God!”

  Gerhard visited him every night of his hospital stay around the same time, when all visitors had been asked to leave and the nursing dayshift had handed over to the skeleton staff on night duty, what he came to know as ghoul time. The encounters followed the same predictable script — Gerhard arriving unannounced, staring at Max with vacant deadpan eyes, reaching out with his rotting, bony hands, trying to say something with a mouthful of maggots and worms, and Max hiding beneath the covers in terror shouting to be left fuck’n alone.

  Max thought he’d get used to the visits, but each night was as terrifying as the first. Worse, the cops paid him a visit one afternoon, which really put the bejesus up him. He almost pissed the bed when the curtains were wrenched aside and two SAPOL officers sidled up and asked him how he was feeling. Like his bum cheeks, his throat went into sudden and spontaneous spasm. His body had shut up shop and nothing was going to come out from either orifice. He couldn’t shit or talk in this state, even if he wanted to, which he didn’t. After a few seconds and the initial shock had passed, a million thoughts buzzed through his skull like a swarm of angry wasps.

  Did they know? How did they know? Have they found the humpy? Did Lorraine blow the whistle on him? Who the fuck told the coppers he was here?

  When he didn’t answer, the coppers looked at one another, then the taller of the two said, “We’re investigating the cause of the explosion that injured you. If it’s okay, we’d like to get a statement from you of what happened.”

  Max felt his throat relax, as well as the rest of his body, including his bum cheeks, and he exhaled the breath he had seemingly been holding onto since the coppers ambushed him.

  So that’s all they want, a statement? They still don’t know a fuck’n thing.

  He smiled and told them everything he could remember about the explosion—seeing the smoke up Sellicks Hill, coming upon the burning vehicle, getting out to investigate, the shockwave of the explosion—everything except the kid. That was once piece of evidence he was going to keep to himself. The coppers could go fuck themselves. He wasn’t going to snitch on a ten or eleven year-old kid.

  “Did you see anyone else at the scene?” the tall copper asked.

  Max shook his head. “Just the German couple that called the ambulance.”

  The coppers seemed satisfied and left it at that, even thanking him for his time as they left.

  Seven days after being admitted, Max was discharged, a little sore and still nursing a bad shoulder. But the lingering pain and the unexpected visit by the coppers wasn’t what was worrying him. The German fucker had followed him from the hospital all the way back home to North Plympton.

  Not that he told Lorraine, even when she inquired about his nightmares. What the fuck was he going to say? “Oh, it’s noth’n really, just the ghost of the loser German backpacker I sliced up in a fit of rage. He’s come back to haunt me, just like my fuck’n old man, who, by the way, shares the same fuck’n grave at the humpy.”

  In the end he told her he was having nightmares and flashbacks from the explosion.

  “Oh, like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?” she said, to which Max shrugged. “I think they used to call it shellshock. I’ve read about it in women’s magazines. Apparently soldiers get it a lot.”

  And kids who’ve been beaten shitless by their old man for years on end, Max wanted to add.

  “Yeah, someth’n like that.”

  For the next week or so, Lorraine helped with things that needed doing around the house—grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning and ironing, changing the bandages on his wounds—as well as looking after her old man who, like Max, was now almost totally bedbound across the road, getting worse by the day, according to Lorraine.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” he told her. “Looking after two blokes as well as going to work. You’re a good woman. You deserve better than me.”

  Lorraine pecked him on the forehead, and said, “You’re my Sonny, remember. When you’re in love, it makes things easy. I don’t deserve anything. I’m just happy I’ve got you.” Her eyes filmed over and started to well with tears. “I thought you weren’t going to make it. I thought all our dreams…”

  Max reached up and put his finger to her lips to quieten her. She drew into his arms, and even though his shoulder still smarted at the movement, he kept her embrace, allowing her to cry and release the pent up emotions she’d been carrying for so long. He felt himself going hard, and when she felt it too she lifted her dress and climbed on top. She gasped with longing and rode him to a quick and desperate climax.

  Max was glad it was over in a hurry. Not that he didn’t want to make love to Lorraine—hell, he’d been champing at the bit since he left hospital a week ago—but what was playing on his mind was Gerhard. Although he didn’t know the precise time, it was dark outside, approaching ghoul time, and the last thing he wanted was for Gerhard to show up at the end of the bed, bloodied and drooling live maggots onto the sheets, while Lorraine was riding the horse.

  Maybe it was Lorraine’s presence, but thankfully the German backpacker didn’t make a show that night. Nor did he for the next night, nor the days and weeks after that, not for quite some time after. But when he did show again, Max knew that this was it: he wasn’t going to leave again.

  Ever.

  Saturday, 8th November 2008

  Dear Diary,

  It’s extremely late and I should be in bed asleep, but that’s the last thing on my mind at the moment.

  I’ve just got back from Max’s place and I don’t know what to do. I’m in such a state. In fact, I’ve been in a state of shellshock for the past two weeks. Firstly, not knowing what had happened to Max (thinking the worst, actually, that something really, really bad had happened to him), then frantically discovering he was in Noarlunga Hospital (whew, relief), then seeing him for the first time in the hospital bed after the explosion, banged up, bruised, broken and bloodied (OMG, is he going to live?), then watching him gradually improve and regain his strength and finally return home (thank God), and then this…

  Where do I begin? Well, today we made l
ove for the first time in what seems ages, which was great, but he seemed distant and kept looking over my shoulder at the door as if expecting somebody to walk in and catch us in the act. My dad, maybe? But that’s just silly. Dad hasn’t even left the house in months. Heavens, lately he’s barely got the strength to go to the bathroom let alone cross the street and barge in on his daughter having sex with her boyfriend. As if he’d even think about it. It’s not as if I’m sixteen anymore and he feels he needs to ‘protect’ me from horny teenagers that come sniffing around the front door. Good grief, not that he’s said anything, but he probably wants me to get pregnant! Especially before I get too old to have kids!

  I think this near-death experience has affected Max and me more than we realise. Max seems moodier and I, well, I feel more desperate (LOL, Georgina would probably say that I couldn’t actually get more desperate). But that’s the truth. After we made love I figured he’d be in a good mood, so I decided to show him what I’d seen in the real estate section of the Adelaide Sun—our cottage in the hills, coming up for auction next Saturday!

  I thought he’d be happy. I thought he’d feel a second lease of life after surviving such a horrible accident and want to start afresh, like we’ve talked about, but all he did was say there’s nothing we can do about it and kept staring at the TV with a blank look in his eyes. I felt totally deflated. I felt like screaming at him that we’re going to waste our big chance to escape this rat race. But I didn’t. Instead I just stormed out of the house and came home. Bad move.

  Dad heard me crying in the lounge room and came to see what the problem was. I heard his laboured breathing and bare feet shuffling down the hallway and shouted for him not to worry, that everything’s okay and he should go back to bed. But dad being dad didn’t listen. I guess, though I might never know, that a parent just knows when his child is in pain and suffering emotionally. What parent would turn away from helping?

  He asked me what was wrong and I told him about Max and my plans to buy a house in the hills, and that we’d already seen the cottage we wanted. He said that was wonderful and how happy he was to hear we were going to set up house together. I said, “How can you say that?” and he said he’d be all right by himself. I laughed, maybe a little too cynically, because I could see the hurt in his eyes. Nonetheless, he said, “’Course I’ll be fine. I just want you to be happy.”

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I rushed to my bedroom, blubbering that I couldn’t go, I couldn’t leave him in the state he was in, final, and I wasn’t going to talk about it again.

  But worse was to follow. I heard him shuffle back to his bedroom, coughing and spluttering, his chest rattling like a smoker’s last dying breath. I thought I heard him stumble and cry out in pain, so I went to investigate and make sure he was okay. What I saw made my blood curdle and my mind shriek.

  Dad was sitting on the edge of his bed contemplating something so horrible I could barely contain myself. He had emptied his entire vial of sleeping pills into his hand and was about to shove them all into his mouth. My mind screamed out, “DAD, DON’T!” but in an amazing bout of self-control I didn’t say a word. A sudden calmness came over me, like I imagine a nurse or doctor must feel when they see death on the face of their patient and they know only instant action will save them. I calmly walked over to him, grabbed his wrist and pried open his hand, emptying the pills back into the medicine bottle. My hands were shaking, but I still felt calm and composed. “You’ll only need one to sleep,” I said, handing it to him, which he took with a swig of water.

  I then tucked him into bed and left him to fall asleep peacefully. Then I went to my bedroom and cried and cried and cried, planting my face into my pillow to muffle the sound of my sobs. But it wasn’t my dad I was crying for.

  I cried because at that very moment I happened upon him on the edge of his bed with the handful of pills, about to take them all, when the sudden feeling of calmness overcame me, my first instinct wasn’t to go and help him.

  It had been to turn and walk away.

  CHAPTER 13

  Mr. Jack Daniels became Max’s BFF—Best Fuck’n Friend—in the days that followed what he considered his self-imposed house arrest. His boss, Bill O’Driscoll, would’ve called it his “comeuppance”, just like he said about that dipshit Jonesy the day he sent him packing. “Don’t like to say things behind people’s back, Max, but the lad got his comeuppance, to be sure.” His old man wouldn’t have been so contrite; he would’ve said Max had got what he fuck’n deserved, and then given him a clip around the ears for good fuck’n measure.

  The fact of the matter was that Max was a prisoner in his own goddamn house. Not only that, he was his own judge, jury and prison guard.

  And fuck’n parole officer.

  Lorraine was his house bitch. In fact, she now spent so much time in his house she was more like his cell mate. Only difference was, she got to come and go as she wanted. Her stuff was everywhere. Shoes left on the lounge room floor. Hairbrush and panties in the bedroom. Make-up and toothbrush in the bathroom. Even dresses and tops hanging in the closet. Then, to cap it all off, of all bloody things, a bunch of daffodils on the kitchen table.

  The only bastion he had left to himself was the backyard shed, the place he now spent most of the day and evening mulling the time away with his BFF, Jack Daniels, like now. This dusty and grimy hole was the only place she hadn’t left her scent, which was just as well, because if she ever discovered what was in here, he didn’t know what he’d do. There’d be questions, for sure, and even more questions. Questions he wouldn’t be able to answer to her satisfaction. Like a pit bull with its teeth locked around somebody’s neck, she wouldn’t let go until she got her answers. There’d be yelling and screaming. Things would get messy, real messy. She’d get mad. He’d get even madder. Hell, he might not be able to control himself. He might even…

  The handle to the shed door wiggled and rattled, giving him a start. It didn’t open, of course, he’d locked it for good reason, for just this kind of unwanted surprise. Like the lock up metal cabinet he’d had delivered from the Pawn Queens when Lorraine was at work last week. He might’ve been tipping back the bourbon every day, but he’d been sober enough to make sure the didgeridoo and other trinkets he’d accumulated over the past year were safely out of sight.

  The door handle wiggled and rattled again. “It’s me, Max,” Lorraine said through the door. “Dinner’s ready.”

  Max eyed the half empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the bench top, then said, “I’m not hungry. Maybe later.”

  Although he couldn’t see her, he knew she was still standing on the other side of the door, her hand still resting on the handle, holding her breath and exhaling a silent sigh of despair. He waited until he heard her soft footsteps crossing the lawn to the house before reaching for the bottle of Jack Daniels and taking another swig, thinking it was for her own good he kept his distance.

  That night he headed to bed after he watched the lights go out inside the house. To his surprise, Lorraine was in his bed asleep, or at least pretending to be asleep. He’d have thought she’d go back to her house for the night, considering he wasn’t much company at the moment. He didn’t say a word, just quietly put on his pyjamas, crept under the covers and promptly fell into a long, deep asleep.

  He awoke suddenly in the early morning. It was still dark and the alarm clock said it was 2:14 a.m. He had been startled awake by what he thought was a sound from the kitchen. He felt for Lorraine to check she was safe before he investigated the cause of the sound, but all he felt was an empty, warm indent in the sheet where she had been sleeping.

  Probably gone to the toilet, he figured, now confident that it was Lorraine who had made the noise that had woken him and not some intruder.

  But when the alarm clock ticked over to 2:18 a.m. and he had heard no further sound, either the toilet flushing or her returning footsteps down the corridor, he began to suspect something wasn’t right. She wouldn’t have returned to her ho
use at this hour, nor had she turned on the kitchen light if what she had wanted was a glass of water or milk, or even a cup of tea. What the hell could she be doing?

  He called out her name, cautiously at first. Then, when she didn’t reply, he called again, louder, “Lorraine?”

  When again there was no reply, he got out of bed and went to the kitchen. It was extremely dark and he banged his shin on the leg of one of the kitchen chairs. Lorraine wasn’t there. He called again, still with no answer. Nothing.

  Where the hell could she be?

  Just as he was about to turn around and head to the bathroom to check to see if she was there, he felt a faint draft on the back of his neck. His skin immediately pricked into goose bumps: the sliding door was open.

  Careful not to shin one of the chairs again, he edged through the darkness to the glass doors. He glanced outside and to his dread saw the ghostly beam of a torchlight through the window sweeping back and forth inside his shed. He desperately hoped it was an intruder and not Lorraine. The Remy or the hunting knife could deal with an intruder. Easy. But what the fuck would he do if it was Lorraine in there?

  He decided he’d make that decision once he knew exactly who he was dealing with. He crept toward the shed, the long grass cushioning his bare feet and silencing his footsteps. He ducked beneath the shed window as one of the beams swung in his direction. After a minute he stood higher, slowly, peeking over the window frame into the shed. The torch was pointed at the second-hand cabinet, but it was too dark to make out if the intruder was a man or woman. The torchlight shifted to the pile of empty Jack Daniels’ bottles stacked against the shed wall, then suddenly switched and moved to the bench. Max ducked down again to avoid being seen. Then he heard the sound of one of the bench drawers being pulled open.