A story part 2 - Road to Nowhere

I was rooted.

Feet frozen to the spot; numbed with cold, and reality. Blackness spreading across the day. Heart a stone, like ice. Hurt screaming soundless, somewhere inside; engulfed.

Swallowed up.

The long-feared-come-true-at-last.

At my feet, a jagged chunk of quartz shone starkly, seamed with fool's gold. Nearby, a discarded bottle top, blue...

Let's not pick it up. Let's leave it as a gift to the Queen of The Magpies.

...mocked. The faint outline of a sandal in the dust, dug deeper where it had changed direction.

After an eternity, I turned; slowly, weighted down with leaden loss and dread.

Ruth was a long way up the long climb to the cross-roads, becoming smaller and smaller with each step, determined-seeming, thrusting forward.

At the top of the ridge the day was bright and clear, like steel; she stopped, a tiny figure like a rose-pink doll, the wind picking up and tossing her raven black hair wildly. I willed her to turn. Sending my thoughts like broken birds.

Please turn, please, please....

And she was gone.

I began to walk slowly, each step an effort of struggle hard against the dead weight of despair. The sharp gravel bit through my thin soles. I grasped the hurt.

At the top, exposed, the wind was fierce, cutting through threadbare cheesecloth, whipping tangled hair across my face. Ruth was nowhere in sight. Down in the empty hollow the white signpost on the Twenty Mile was stark; like a gibbet.

I sat for a long, long time, letting the wind hurt; the pain gave form to whatever was left of me; edged a black hole that went down forever. The wind shushed through the dry pale paper grass; saying nothing of any sense. High up in the empty sky a crow cried, solitary, mournful. A long way off a dog barked then stopped abruptly.

The world had emptied out; of anything of sense, of anything of substance, of anything that I would want.

A faint far off sound of gravel crushing grew louder. An old faded Commer ute trailing dust: Old Fred, Goin' up the Top Forty. He stared blankly through the wound-down window as he passed, saying nothing, never acknowledging my presence. Once he would have waved, gruffly. But that was then, when I was with Ruth. Now, already, I was with no one, was no one. Rexie barked wildly from the back, scrabbling to stay upright on the shifting bales of hay.

The silence returned; and the sighing of the wind. It was too cold now up there, even for despair.

I began the long, dragging haul back down the way I'd come. Off the ridge, it was deathly still and silent; was a different world; all the magic drained out, like water down a plughole, dried up, left a corpse, withered, dull, flat.

I saw the Winding Forest Road for what it was: an empty, desolate, back road to nowhere. The bush silent and dry, straggling along a deserted strip of rutted dust and rusted fence wire.

I stood at the entrance to the camp on the edge of the trees. Once, months ago, it had been a Ranger's Lookout; I'd sweated its dream into being on a bright morning to the ring of an axe and the warbling of magpies.

Now it was tawdry, grubby, pathetic. A rumpled, greasy sleeping bag; sagging pine boughs yellowing. The campfire cold and unraked. On a bush rock, the pale blue star flowers Ruth had arranged in an old ink bottle, eons ago, were wilted, withered.

I felt sickened, ashamed, stupid.

Suddenly I grabbed my shoulder bag and ran. Ran hard, heart-bursting, throat-burning hard, down to the road and halfway up to the ridge until I could run no further.

Sobbing, I stumbled on. Pushing hard till it hurt, running whenever I could, tears streaming down an unwashed face, stiff with dust. Down past the Twenty Mile turn off, down away from an empty valley, down away from an empty life.