Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Depicted: Marital infidelity, Car crash
Discussed: Animal death
Love Locks
Belle was only half an hour from home when she decided her bladder wasn’t going to make it. She pulled off the highway, held on over the cattle grid that protected the long-distance traffic from the actual countryside, and wound down into the bypassed town.
The sun was low, picking up gold on the turning trees. Sheep unspooled into a single file along a well-worn track terracing the slope. Off home too, an alpaca minding the end of the line. A banner across the road at the top of town announced the annual Celtic Festival. Two churches, three pubs, a competition of op-shops, this town had been Belle’s watering hole before she left for university, and now, whenever she came home.
Her dad’s Range Rover was outside O’Reilly’s. Belle pulled her hand-me-down ute alongside, got out and nosed against the glass briefly, spying her dad’s dirty boots in the back foot-well and a roll of horse blankets on the seat. The smell of damp straw leaked out. Familiarity, return, love, all washed over her.
Her mobile pinged. A text from Jay back in the city: ‘Traffic okay?’ Belle texted back as she walked: ‘Almost home.’ A second message arrived as she sent hers off. ‘Miss you already.’ Belle smiled, typed ‘miss you more.’ She added a heart and shoved her phone back in her pocket.
The toilets were out back, through the pub’s dining room. The place would be busy later with festival tourists and locals enjoying the long Easter weekend. For now, the sound system pumped Elton John into the slow hour before the change to the evening menu. Belle glanced over to see if she could spot her father at the bar. And there he was, framed in the hatch that joined the two rooms. Belle raised her hand. Froze mid-wave. Was it her dad? The man’s features were animated, his lips smiling, his cheeks smooth – when her father’s wrinkles could seem as deep as the gullies on their property. Belle looked down, uncertain, and could see her own reflection in the polished lid of an empty bain-marie at the centre of the carvery. She looked like her dad. People were always commenting on the resemblance.
In seconds, the oscillating shifts of recognition and reservation resolved themselves. Idiot. Of course it was him. It was undoubtedly his shirt, collar popped. He’d been wearing the same one on his wedding anniversary trip to Paris. Her mother had sent photos, posed on the Pont des Arts beside a cringingly romantic padlock they’d fastened amongst the thousands of others on the bridge to symbolise undying love.
Belle picked up speed, ready to call out to her father on her way to the toilets. As she crossed the ghost restaurant of blank tables – except the one in the corner piled with salt and pepper shakers and collapsed serviette origami – the angle of her view through the hatch changed. She could see now, at this angle, that her father was not alone.
The pair were framed by the hatch with the lucky horseshoe nailed above it. The woman was nothing like Belle’s mother. No half-recognition to juggle, no reservations. The woman reminded her of Stephanie Curtis from high school.
It might have been the lightest of kisses, or a full DNA fluid swap. Belle looked away the moment the woman’s lips connected with her father’s smile.
Belle didn’t get back on the highway. She stayed to the south of the cattle grid and took the backroads home, following the route she’d learnt when she’d wanted to avoid the trap of random breath testing. She’d taken a similarly furtive route out of O’Reilly’s, using the labyrinth behind the toilets, the old hallways stacked with wine cartons and collapsed trestles and smeared highchairs. Because she hadn’t trusted herself to talk to her father.
The recycling hopper spilled cardboard at the top of the back laneway. This was the backstage to all the invitingly decorated glory of the shop windows advertising clichés for the Celtic Festival. She had to force herself out of the wings. Run from there to her car.
The car park was filling up so she got away unnoticed in the crowd. She drove as recklessly as she had on the intoxicated nights during her last year at school. Alcohol and rage blistered the brain in the same way. She counted roadkill to anchor herself. Lost count at six wallabies. A desiccated wombat signposted their private road. A dark lump in the dusk light.
Her tyres sent gunshots of gravel across the front of the house. Her words were unexploded ordinance in her mouth.
‘Mum,’ she called as she pushed through the front door.
Her childhood home was already dark, having fallen into night before the outside world. She should have turned her headlights on at some stage, but how to pinpoint the exact moment of dusk? Her mother had missed it too. She must have gone into the garden straight after her shift. Belle could see her through the French doors, still in her hospital uniform, a shirt made pretty only by the last flush of light coming over the lawn.
Belle’s headlong rush was halted by the reality of her. The serenity of the scene her mother created. What was she doing? One of those unseen things never noticed until they’d not been done. Pruning, deadheading, tidying. Her trousers were rolled high so they didn’t drag in the mulch. She was like a figure from an Old Master: farmer in the fields in the last of the light. A trio of magpies dogged her every movement, stalking her with milling steps and tiny leaps. One chortled. Belle heard it through the open doors. Her mother heard it of course and turned to acknowledge the bird with a word.
Belle was suddenly unsure about whether she could tell her. One word from her would destroy this moment and every moment going forward.
Her mother stooped to gather up the cut branches and flowers, a bouquet of dying leaf matter. She paused only to scratch her right ankle. Mosquito hour. She’d be coming in soon. She led the pied piper trail of magpies in the direction of the compost bins. Out of sight.
Belle remembered having been sent to bed without dinner for lying when she was ten. What had her lie been that night? Nothing compared to this.
For all the punishment of that one missed dinner, she’d been brought up on kindness. She hovered at the French doors where the smell of her father’s ashtray on the top step was strongest. She couldn’t work out whether it would be kinder to tell or not to tell.
Her eyes stung from the effort of keeping them open.
Alcohol and rage and fatigue. No-one should drive under the influence of any of them.
Belle had flown across the cattle grid onto the highway. She’d flown over bridges named for forgotten men, crossing Daisy Bed Creek and Murdering Hut Creek and Beddaluck Creek (Better-luck next time). She drove too fast, her high beam strobing the dark where there was nothing.
She alternated having the air-conditioning on full-pelt with having the windows open wide, the radio blasting all the while. Dark shadows threatened to become cars, could just as easily have been dust specks running across her eyeballs. Until something did come out of her peripheral vision. She swerved, her left-hand tyres losing traction in the stones on the verge, over-correcting back onto the road, praying she wasn’t careening into the other car. She worked on instinct. Heart beating wildly.
There was no other car. There was nothing. She slowed and crawled to a lighted place off the road. Her sleep was like a coma. She couldn’t remember falling. Was startled awake again.
‘Miss,’ called a woman through the window. Her knuckles were white on the glass as she knocked.
Belle pushed the button to open a gap.
‘I thought you might be dead,’ the woman said, her tongue loosened by relief. ‘It’s not unknown. They pull up and the heart gives out.’
Belle’s lips were sewn together with dried spit. She nodded and the woman accepted she was okay and waddled back to her booth in the servo.
While Belle leant on the ute, dusting the side of it and filling the petrol tank from the bowser, she could see the woman in an aquarium of light, surrounded by chips and chocolates, against a backdrop of plain-packaged cancer. The light was so white, it rendered all things stark.
She ignored the warning sign on the bowser and texted her mother an apology for not making it home after all. A reply came immediately as if her mother had been holding her phone and imagining Belle’s mangled body in a fiery crash on the side of the highway. Because this is what she always imagined when Belle was late arriving.
‘Sorry you can’t make it,’ her mum wrote. ‘I’ll save the egg hunt for next time.’ The accompanying emoji could indicate irony, or she could have chosen it simply as something cute, like childish Easter traditions.
Belle threw the phone through the open window onto the front seat. Her mother should be protecting herself. There was no excuse for someone her age to be so naïve and trusting. Belle’s eyes pricked with tears, but she couldn’t waste the moisture.
She paid for a self-serve coffee along with the petrol and sucked the former through the cup’s plastic lid as she walked back to the ute, frustrated by the nozzle’s likeness to a toddler’s sippy cup. She was no longer a child.
She didn’t want to think about it, but she asked herself, had her father been unfaithful other times before this? When she was a child. When she was at school. She didn’t want to recast happy times but there was no avoiding the fact: one glimpse had destroyed not only the present and the future, it undermined the past. Lies were backdating. She could easily reinterpret her dad’s absences, his unexplained good humour and high spirits at different times. And driving back to the city, now sober and at the speed limit, only gave her more time to think.
Too much time. She felt she’d failed a test by running away without speaking to her mother. Her failure proved she lacked courage. Just like her father.
Paddocks and starlight gave way to light industry and warehouses and undistinguished architecture. And in the distance, a glittering skyline.
Home. This was home, not back there on her parents’ property. Because home was a refuge, and Jay was her saviour. When she’d shown Jay the twee photo of her parents on the iconic Paris bridge, Jay had immediately grabbed a bicycle padlock and raced her to the bridge over the storm water drain at the end of the road. Jay had made Belle laugh as they solemnly snapped the small metal lock shut around chicken wire. They’d laughed except when they’d kissed and couldn’t laugh, and then they’d run home.
Jay would be waiting for Belle to come back after the Easter break. In a few days time.
A parallel park two blocks from the share house was just big enough for a country ute. She straightened the chassis and lent her head back and closed her eyes and felt fatigue wash over her. The silence was a balm.
Broken when her phone vibrated in the cup holder. The screen cast an eerie light across the cab. Her dad’s text had no emojis. ‘Your mum not happy. Expect u here in time 4 golden shamrock parade.’
Belle wanted to crawl into Jay’s bed and sob the betrayal into Jay’s arms.
Her phone was still in her hand. She hadn’t used it to tell Jay she was coming back early. Hadn’t sent a warning.
She really hadn’t meant to set Jay a test. But then, why should she have any reason to trust Jay would pass? And what if Jay wasn’t alone? Something had come undone inside Belle. A padlock hung loose.
It was almost midnight. A fox dashed across the inner-city road. At some stage Belle would have to get out. She’d have to talk. To her father, mother, lover. To someone.
Jane Downing’s short stories have been published widely around Australia and overseas. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and in 2023 she won the AAALS (American Association of Australasian Literary Studies) Fiction Award. Her novel, ‘The Sultan’s Daughter,’ was released by Obiter Publishing in 2020. She can be found at janedowning.wordpress.com
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