The Lost Man(23)

‘They’re going in the wash.’

She didn’t say anything, just turned back to the sheets.

‘Listen, Ilse, sorry about that stupid stockman story at dinner. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

She pushed a sheet aside to look at him. ‘I’m not upset because of the story, Nathan.’

‘No. I suppose not.’

She stretched up to grab a pillowcase. They belonged to the girls, judging by the pattern.

‘Leave them,’ Nathan said. ‘You don’t have to do that now.’

‘I do. They’re Lo’s. They’ve been out since yesterday.’

‘It’s already too late then.’ The bed linen would have been dry five minutes after it was put out. The cotton was now covered in two days’ worth of grit. ‘They’ll have to get washed again anyway. Leave it for now.’

‘No.’

‘Then let me give you a hand.’

Ilse opened her mouth as though to protest, then gave a defeated shrug. ‘Thanks.’ She twisted a peg in her fingers. ‘Nathan, what do you think happened to Cam?’

He pulled a sheet off the line and didn’t reply straight away.

‘Did he get separated from his car by accident?’ She stared hard at the peg in her hands. ‘Or did it look like he meant it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you were out there. What did you see?’

‘There was a cop from St Helens, he could talk through everything –’

‘I know that.’ She stopped him. ‘I’m asking you. Please.’

He sighed. The sheets rustled around them as he told her what he could, seeing the small crease deepen between her eyes. She listened mostly without speaking, her eyes damp and her mouth tight. She interrupted only twice, first when he told her about the shallow hole at the base of the headstone and again when he mentioned the water and supplies abandoned in the back of Cameron’s four-wheel drive. She made him explain that again. It made no more sense the second time.

He watched Ilse as he spoke. It had been ten years but sometimes, in the right light, she still looked like the girl he had met behind the bar that first night. He’d been different too then, back when he was a semi-regular at the town’s lone pub. Making the long drive a bit too often, if he was honest, when the sting of his divorce had still been pretty raw.

His wife – ex-wife, the paperwork had finally come through – had driven away down the Balamara Track a year earlier with five-year-old Xander in tow and without a backwards glance. Without much intention of sticking to the child access arrangement they’d managed to agree on either, as it had turned out.

Nathan had promised Xander that he would phone him in Brisbane every day, but the line rang out too many times to be a coincidence. When he did get through, Xander was called away before they’d had a proper chance to talk, leaving Nathan listening to the dial tone. Jacqui had been impossible to pin down on the dates of a promised visit. Nathan had made himself give her long enough to settle into her new life, and then even a bit longer, but he had walked into the Balamara pub that particular night having transferred an eye-watering sum to retain a family lawyer.

The distance from his son made him feel sad and the lawyer’s fee had made him feel poor, and Nathan had turned up that night not expecting that to change. There was only so much benefit a man could realistically get from nursing a beer in an empty pub.

Ilse had been there.

She was the only one behind the bar and he was the only one in front of it, so she’d served him with a smile and he had introduced himself. She sat across from him as they chatted. She had been working in the pub for exactly three weeks and one day, she told him, having arrived in town with her backpack exactly three weeks and two days earlier. She was Dutch, originally, but had been studying environmental science in Canada, and she leaned across the bar as she taught him how to pronounce her name in a soft melodic accent.

‘Eel-sa,’ he’d tried, and she’d smiled.

‘Close enough.’

He’d kept trying until he got it right.

Her parents were divorced and her mum had died a year earlier from breast cancer – she had stopped talking and looked down at the bar for a very long time, and eventually Nathan had tentatively reached out and put a hand on her arm. She had smiled then, and he felt something dislodge inside him. Anyway, she had said, still smiling, that had given her the motivation to finally go travelling. Have an adventure and see the world a bit.

‘What do you think of the outback?’ he had asked, and she’d laughed.

‘It’s cool. It’s like the edge of the earth.’

He bought them both a drink and they’d sat together in the empty bar as he’d filled her in on the local gossip. He’d had his acoustic guitar in his car and – he cringed at this later – he’d fetched it and played for her. But they had laughed as he played Australian songs she’d never come across and she called out requests for Dutch songs he’d never heard of.

‘So what else do people do for fun around here?’ she’d asked eventually, in a way that reminded him a bit of how Jacqui had used to speak to him. Back in the early days, when things were still good.

‘Apart from come here?’ Nathan had said. ‘Let me think. Sometimes people enjoy punching on.’ She’d rolled her eyes. ‘It’s true, don’t underestimate it. A couple of cousins from Atherton brawled in the street for four hours last year. People brought chairs out and watched.’