AVERIL ROBERTSON

‘A flannel shirt?’ Emily says through a tight smile. 

It’s her first birthday present, one of several her husband Juzzy has laid out in front of him. He’s been agitated with excitement for days, willing her birthday to come quickly so he can parade his gifting prowess in front of her like a cat with a dead mouse. 

‘Isn’t it great? And see, I got one with red in it. Your favourite colour?’ 

‘Yes, I see! It’s lovely, thank you.’ 

He touches the packages in front of him, a desert of metallic ochre-coloured paper with sticky-tape snakes roiling on its surface. ‘No, not that one next. Um, let me think. Okay, here.’ 

He passes the next present to her. 

‘Oh!’ Emily exclaims. ‘A belt! With a … look how shiny that buckle is, kids!’ 

She holds the belt and buckle up to Simon and Sally. 

‘Ooh, look Mum! It’s got your initials on it!’ Sally says, her fingers sliding over the engraved letters. 

Juzzy’s smile is wide now and he claps his hands together, his eyebrows high with the expectation of her unfettered joy. 

‘This is great, thank you!’ she says. 

‘It gets better!’ he crows. ‘Just you wait.’ 

‘You didn’t need to go to so much trouble,’ she says. ‘It’s just a birthday.’ 

Justin doesn’t answer. He passes her another gift. She tears off the paper, revealing a large shoebox. She flips open the lid. 

‘Cowboy boots!’ she says, pulling out the chunky brown footwear from the box. ‘Oh my!’ 

‘The lady in the shop assured me they’re a wide fit, so they should be okay.’ 

‘Thanks, Juzzy. This is … too much.’ Emily pats her husband’s knee. 

‘I’m not done yet! Here.’ 

‘Looks like this one was a bit hard to wrap,’ Emily says, taking what is clearly going to be a hat from him. ‘Did you put sticky-tape on the shopping list, now that you’ve used every last bit of it?’ 

Juzzy’s eyebrows twitch in towards the bridge of his nose, the smile tightening towards a wince. ‘Sally did that one.’ 

Shit. Emily unwraps it. An Akubra. 

‘Have I perhaps been cast in a reboot of McLeod’s Daughters?’ she asks. 

Juzzy’s eyes shine. ‘Nearly as exciting as that!’ He pulls an envelope from his back pocket and passes it to her. 

She flips open the flap and pulls out the folded papers. 

‘A flight to Alice Springs? And’ – she looks at the next page – ‘an outback cooking retreat?’ 

‘You’ve always wanted the chance to get away and do a proper course. So I thought you should look the part when you go there.’ 

It’s sweet of him. Thoughtful. Perfect for her, in theory. 

‘It’s a long way to go. Are you sure you’ll be okay with the kids for a whole week?’ 

‘Of course! And anyway, Mum’s going to come stay. Help me out. She’ll know all the Mum things that I don’t know how to do.’ 

He’s so smiley, so unrelentingly pleased with himself, that she has to smile back. She looks at the print-out again. ‘I haven’t heard of this Lucky Tucker school before.’ 

‘It’s super hard to get into, they say. Great reviews on their website, though. He had a cancellation. That’s why it’s discounted.’ 

‘Well, then.’ Emily smiles, her molars clenched. ‘I guess I’m going to … the outback.’ 

After Emily’s birthday dinner and the generic but pleasant enough birthday sex, Juz snores gently next to her. She lies on her back, trying not to tremble. 

She’s lived in Melbourne for sixteen years. Came over from Wellington for the work opportunities, stayed for the husband. That’s what she says when people ask, at any rate. The truth is, she doesn’t fit in either place anymore. One shoe too small, the other too big. The landscape, the people – she can’t quite see this ever becoming home, even though it is where she lives. 

In those sixteen years, she’s carefully stuck to the edges of Australia, like crêpe mixture burnt onto the edge of the frypan. Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart. Sydney, Cairns, Brisbane. Cairns was the closest she’d come to living her childhood nightmares of what Australia was like, with the looming threats of surprise snakes and crocs randomly nicking off with small children. 

The flies, even in the cities, are worse than she ever imagined. Growing up in New Zealand, there would sometimes be an Australian news story on TV. A farmer guy in a cork hat, ockering away as flies crawled in and out of every facial orifice. It had seemed so staged, like if you asked a kid to imagine the worst thing about Australia and then make it happen during an interview, and that’s what they’d come up with. Now, living here, she understands both that it is real, and that it is far from the worst thing. 

The outback. She can’t imagine actually being in it. Can’t picture herself walking around on the clichéd burnt earth, casually sidestepping a lizard as sweat trickles down her legs and into her boots. Actually being in the landscape portrayed on travel guidebook covers. The dust. The heat. The slowed-down life. 

These are the fears – the creatures, the heat – she has always articulated to people who ask her about where she’s been in Australia. Pathetic stuff, really. Juz suggested once that they take a family trip ‘somewhere in the middle’ and she’d brushed it off with a joke about needing Melbourne-quality coffee in the mornings. Such a Melburnian, she is. 

But the real fear, the truth, is far more embarrassing. What scares her, more than any of the clichés of nature-based danger about the outback, is the idea that she might run into Mick Taylor. Or John Jarratt. They are the same person to her. She heard the actor interviewed once about Wolf Creek and his voice hit her brain so hard she had to turn it off. That drawl. She hears it in the depths of night, at the time normal people worry they forgot to send an email or think of the smart comeback they should have delivered in response to a snide comment. 

Not Emily. She watched the film with Justin when they first started dating, and he still thinks she enjoyed it. Instead, it stayed with her for weeks. Every night when she closed her eyes, she could hear Mick-slash-John. These days, it’s dulled to random flashes when something has reminded her of it. When it gets in her head again, its viral timbre lingers in her system for weeks. 

She tries to sleep, but Mick’s there, lurking under her eyelids, grinning leerily at her. The panic shimmers just below her skin, searing an ice-hot prickle of fear around her body. She kicks the covers off, turns on her side. Counts in for four, out for four. One sheep, two sheep. What a Kiwi, counting sheep. She spitefully switches to alpacas. Mick’s still there. 

Being rational is something Emily prides herself on. A well-reasoned argument for any situation. The most logical progression through any problem to a successful conclusion. How can she refuse Justin’s gift? Explain it in a way that doesn’t make her seem utterly batshit crazy? 

Even worse, if he asks where the fear comes from, when it started, she’ll have to lie. Pretend it started with Wolf Creek. The actual onset is so much more embarrassing, and the correlations her brain drew between two disconnected films is confusing, even to her.  

Her brother had a birthday party, when the height of a fantastic birthday party at home was to rent a video from Blockbuster and watch it with the lights off. A lounge of eleven-year-old boys when she was just seven was unnerving enough. Then the film came on. The snake pit Indiana Jones found himself in lived in her for years, preying on her at night any time she was worried, and most especially the nights their parents left them with a babysitter. Snakes writhing, pouring into houses, pubs, bathtubs. Piled in the streets. Then, when Wolf Creek entered her subconsciousness, the two films merged into a drawling, snaky hellhole. And now she’s meant to go stay in that hellhole for a week and keep her shit together. 

She gets out of bed, deciding to sit in the cool of the backyard while she gets herself under control. The frigid air when she opens the back door streams over her body. 

‘Better,’ she says. ‘Better.’ 

She steps out onto the deck, then screams. 

Slimy. Squelchy. Soul-destroying. A slug. Under the toes of her left foot. She scrambles inside and drops to the floor, her hand over her mouth. Half of her is terrified that the children and Justin have heard her and will come to investigate; the other half is horrified that a slug – a wandering, misplaced slug – has brought her to her knees. 

‘Stop. You must stop,’ she says out loud. 

She gets herself onto the couch, and somehow, drifts off into a sweaty slumber. 

*

In the post-first-coffee sweet-spot of the morning the next day, Emily retrieves the envelope. Perhaps she can negotiate a refund for the flights and cooking retreat. Go somewhere else. She logs into Justin’s email account and finds the invoices. Discounted, non-refundable. 

She googles ‘fear of the outback’ and instead of finding reassurances that she’ll be okay, she’s drawn to the lists of all the things there that could kill her. ‘Notorious Australian Outback Murders’, one listing says. Oh god, those Brits that went missing. She’s sure the guy that did it was caught and jailed. But what do they say about cockroaches? That if you can see one, there’ll be hundreds more lurking that you can’t see. 

She clicks to shut the browser window, then brings it back up again. ‘Quick treatment for being scared of something’. A listing near the top mentions phobias and realisation slams through her, like Wile E Coyote running at the tunnel painted on the mountainside. A phobia. Is that what she has? In which case, she needs … what? A therapist? A hypnotist?  

She’s typing quickly, clicking through various options, her heart thudding in her chest: one week one week one week. What can she do in one week to fix this? 

*

The next few days are filled with the practical tasks required for her to step out of family life for a week. A meal plan and freezer meals ready to go. After-school activities meticulously listed and double-checked in the family calendar. Books returned to the library; new ones borrowed. A birthday present ready for a party. Costumes designed and hastily sewn for Harmony Day. A whole-house clean, in preparation for the mother-in-law taking up residence. 

When people ask about the exact level of excitement that is inevitably coursing through her, Emily smiles, laughs. 

‘It’s going to be amazing. AH-MAZING,’ she enthuses. 

The closer her flight gets, the more shrill and effusive she is, even as she can’t eat, can’t sleep. 

On the Saturday morning of her flight, Justin gets the kids into the car. She’s dressed in the clothes he got her, and grateful he will drop her close enough to the departure area that not too many people will see that she looks like the forgotten female member of Katter’s Australian Party. She hasn’t looked in the mirror – what if her own appearance triggers her? Justin insists on photos before she walks away from the car so until they become yesterday’s ephemera, she’ll be off social media. 

She checks in for the flight. The check-in desk woman sees her shaking hands. Shame shrinks her shoulders to her neck.  

‘Um, nervous flyer,’ she mutters.  

The gate lounge seems packed with Mick Taylor lookalikes. She escapes to the bathroom, waiting until the final call to board before she runs to the gate and out to the plane. She has an aisle seat, wonderfully close to the front. It’s easy to focus on the overhead bins, the row numbers, the seat letters, and not make eye contact. 

Perhaps a temazepam for a three-hour flight is ill-advised, but once she’s seated and belted in, she takes one anyway. It’s been years since she’s taken them – Justin doesn’t like it. Says it turns her into an empty shop-front. Her body, her face, her eyes, but no one’s home. Now, its vacant comfort wraps around her and she dozes. 

It’s not enough, though. As the plane lands, she scrunches the paper sick-bag into a tight ball. Her temples throb as she works her molars together. She lets her mind go down the rabbit-hole of what would happen should she crack a tooth right now. The retreat, impossible. An immediate flight back, likely. But the only thing cracked is her mind. 

Justin’s had confirmation that the retreat will have someone in arrivals to meet her. She scuttles off the plane as soon as they’re allowed, trying to avoid looking at the other passengers. The airport is full of people dressed just like she is. Which ones are the cockroaches, the bad eggs? Through the arrivals door, she sees her name and a sign. Good. Okay. At least that has worked. 

But then she looks up. Takes him in properly. The checked flannel shirt. The hat. The leery, lazy grin. She freezes. Little huffs of air snuffle in and out of her. Her eyes are starting to stream. She has to go with him. She must. What did that website say – that exposure therapy is the way through? But it’s meant to be controlled. Supervised. Not like this. Not like this. 

He’s looking at her. He steps forward. 

‘Emily Matthewson?’ 

She nods. 

‘You okay?’ 

She nods. 

‘No worries. Let’s go.’ 

She trails him to his vehicle. Every pore of her skin is screaming at her. Pulsing with dread. 

‘Breathe,’ she says in her head. ‘Breathe.’ 

The silver Subaru Outback is blessedly cool as soon as the aircon kicks in. The sweat on Emily’s face helps to cool her as the chilled air blasts over her. She focuses on the road out the front of the car. Tries to ignore the strange man next to her. His gum-chewing is gunshot loud in the quiet car. 

They drive out of Alice, she’s not sure in what direction. Low scrub nestled in reddish dirt. Flatness in every direction. Maybe it’s not so different from northwest Victoria, after all. 

After forty-three minutes – she’s tracked it on her old-school analogue watch – the driver slows and peels off onto a track. There’s a faded sign: ‘Lucky Tucker Outback Cooking Retreat’. Just like in the printouts. It looked nicer on the website, though. How long ago were the photos even taken? But the booking form showed most dates were sold out, so they must be doing something right. 

‘Nearly there, love,’ the man says. ‘Then you can relax. Meet the others.’ 

She nods, not trusting her voice to come out normally. And yet, he seems okay. Quiet, but nice. She gets out her phone to look at the staff profiles on the website so she can see how he fits in at the cooking school.  

‘Not much use out here, that thing,’ he says. ‘No reception.’ 

‘Oh,’ she squeaks. 

What might have once been decorative wine barrels are stacked haphazardly at the gate they zip through. There are squat buildings up ahead. As they get closer, she sees worn weatherboards, the memory of paint in the natural undulations of the wood. The requisite windmill stands to the rear of the property. It’s … she can’t think of a polite way to put it. Understated, perhaps. Rustic, if she’s being generous.  

He drives them around the curving driveway to the back of the largest building. 

‘The others are in the dorm,’ he says. 

‘Dorm?’ 

‘Part of the experience, love. Like, uh, like the MasterChef house.’ 

He carries her case. Her hands flip around in front of her face, trying to keep the flies away. She fleetingly wonders why Juzzy didn’t get her a hat with corks on it. Perhaps he considered it, then backed away from the idea, knowing she would have laughed derisively at such a cliché. 

‘In here,’ he says, opening a door into the building. 

She sees external locks on the door. Lets a frisson of fear flutter through her. But of course he needs to secure the property when he doesn’t have students. She’s being ridiculous. Letting her imagination run riot over any rationality she might usually be able to muster. 

She can’t see anything in the dark. Her nose wrinkles as she takes in the smell. Distinctly human. Like a mismanaged old folks’ home. Flight fires in her. She breathes in sharply. 

‘I … I just need to …’ 

And she pushes past him, out the door. The cowboy boots thunk hard against the dirt as she pounds away from the dorm. Retreats through the gate. She hears shouting from behind her. Thinks of that scene in Wolf Creek near the end. She instinctively ducks her head and hunkers down, trying to stay close to the ground. 

The guy catches up to her quickly in the SUV. 

‘Come on, love. Don’t be like that,’ he calls through the wound-down window. 

When she doesn’t stop, he swears then brakes hard, hopping out and following her on foot. She pushes harder. The heels on her boots don’t cope with the acceleration. She stumbles. 

He tackles her from behind then straddles her, the weight of his backside pushing her hip bones into the red earth. He leans down so his hot mouth is on her ear. His finger trails along her jawline. Chewing-gum breath eases over her face. The collar of his flannel shirt flops forwards, darting against her cheekbone. 

‘You’ve got to come back,’ he says, deep and quiet. ‘You’re my lucky tucker.’ 

– © Averil Robertson, 2024 . First published The Outback Volume 9, Outback Writers Festival Inc and Spur N Eight Publishing, 2024