HE STANDS STOOPED before the brick wall which stretches over two hundred metres either side of him, and stares at the graffiti. An exuberant splash of colour and meaningless symbols, it is messy and pointless, he thinks, like his life. Sniffing to prevent a flood of mucus from his nostril, he removes a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, extracts one and lights it. He continues to stare at the wall, oblivious of the world and more importantly to his uncle who walks up beside him, and assumes an identical stance.
‘Whatcha lookin’ at?’
Peter gestures half-heartedly towards the wall and says, ‘What’s it mean?’
Ron smiles and turns to study his nephew. ‘Nothin’. Kids with nothing betta to do.’
Following a strange silence during which Ron probably wonders what is wrong with his nephew, and Peter wonders what is wrong with himself, the two men walk the length of the wall to the right, turn the corner, and enter the yard through a wrought-iron gate.
The sign says, Outback Wreckers and Peter snorts at the irony. It’s a five-hectare automotive graveyard located on Llandilo Rd, Londonderry, in the outer western suburbs of Sydney. When he was younger, Peter used to laugh at the idea that the western suburbs of Sydney qualified as the outback in his uncle’s opinion. Nowadays, he doesn’t find anything funny.
Ron leads him into the office and motions for him to take a seat as the fly-screen door smacks shut behind them. Choosing the first available chair, Peter slowly lowers himself onto it as though he is dipping his body into a hot bath. He winces and shifts his bodyweight until he is more comfortable. Aware of Ron fiddling around at the sink with a kettle and some coffee mugs, Peter simply sits quietly and waits. The surface of the small dining table is stained and scuffed.
‘How ya been, Pete?’
‘Alright,’ he lies. Pain is his ever-present companion. Heavy doses of codeine keep the physical pain in check, but nothing can dull the blade of emotional torture.
Ron grunts dismissively as he places a steaming mug of coffee on the table in front of Peter.
‘Ya mum says otherwise.’
Watching his uncle take a seat opposite him and thoughtfully sip his coffee, Peter wonders what his mum hopes to achieve by this arrangement. He has to hand it to her, though, because since the accident she has never stopped trying to help him. She loves him and he knows it, but her love is desperate and suffocating. That’s what mothers do, he supposes, they love with sometimes frightening passion, as though their love is the ultimate force for good in the universe; as though it was omnipotent. He’s grateful, but she’s wearing herself out for nothing because he is beyond help. No one else wants to accept this truth.
‘She reckons,’ continues Ron, ‘that by spending some time down here with me and working here at the yard…’
Although he doesn’t finish the sentence, it doesn’t matter. Peter hears the scepticism in his uncle’s tone but does not blame him for that. Without a better plan, or any plan at all for that matter, Peter has agreed to his mum’s latest tactic. That she has chosen a wrecking yard as the location for his redemption seems like sending an alcoholic to a pub to get sober. Sick irony. Perhaps there is madness to her method, perhaps she is just mad. He sighs. Somewhere deep inside him, where an innocent seventeen-year-old used to live and laugh boldly in the face of life’s challenges, there are good memories. Peter can’t often reach them though, as they are like deep wells scattered around a vast desert, and his doesn’t even have the energy to search for them, let alone draw water up and drink it. He’s dying of thirst.
Ron nods with the wise understanding his sixty-two years has given him.
‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘You’re always welcome here.’
‘Thanks,’ replies Peter without looking up from the table.
A finger of sunlight pokes through the dirty Venetian blinds and points at a particularly rough spot on the table. Peter sees a glint of twisted metal and hears the angry snap of breaking glass. He flinches automatically.
His uncle notices but doesn’t say anything.
‘Come on, finish yer coffee and we’ll put you to work, eh?’
For the first time, Peter raises his eyes off the table and looks at Ron, who shudders involuntarily in response. He’s momentarily lost for words, but Peter has seen that look before. The awkward way people stare when they know they shouldn’t, but cannot stop themselves. They see something dark and disturbing in Peter’s blue eyes. The scar which begins high on his right cheek and explodes across his eye socket into the expanses of his forehead is ugly, and his blue eyes are steely cold. Empty.
Ron is already outside by the time Peter rises to his feet. The stiffness in his knee is only a minor contributor to his reluctance, though. He can see through the window of the office, out into the yard where his uncle strides purposefully towards a white XY GT Falcon. It looks out of place among the bent and busted vehicles which are strewn around in some roughshod semblance of order. The bonnet of the old Ford is raised and Peter sees that a cloth has been draped over the fender and into the engine bay which he knows contains a 5.8 litre V8. Standing at the window, Peter wistfully watches his uncle set to work and he feels torn. Yesterday’s boy wants to bolt through the door and into the yard and get his hands dirty and ask a million questions, but today’s broken man is rooted to the floor. He’s afraid. His guts are churning.
Apparently unconcerned by Peter’s no-show, Ron works away methodically with only an occasional pause to utter an expletive and shake his hand from some injury or other. Peter feels dizzy, so he sits down. The room begins to darken as though someone has closed the blinds, and he can hear voices. Faint whispers that are too soft to be understood. Glass shatters, then tinkles on the floor. Plastic snaps and pops. Metal grinds and screeches. The door opens suddenly, and a familiar voice slices into Peter’s waking nightmare.
‘You comin’ or what?’ queries Ron. ‘I could use a hand out here.’
Too stunned to speak, Peter sits there until the question is repeated and then finally, with considerable effort he tells his uncle that he is on his way. The screen door slams shut again and Peter jumps to his feet: a surprising show of agility.
Out in the yard, Peter shields his eyes with one hand and fumbles in his pocket for his sunglasses with the other. Lighting another cigarette, he surveys the yard, which leaves him dazed as his thinks of all the crashes that resulted in these cars ending up here. He can’t help but wonder about the drivers and the passengers, the lucky ones, the not-so-fortunate and…the dead. Running his hand over the scar on his face, Peter can’t decide whether he is lucky or not. Everyone said so. Look at the car, they said, it’s a miracle you survived. He snorts and spits on the ground.
Walking over towards the XY which is the subject of intense attention from his uncle, Peter tries desperately to change the tape playing in his mind; a highlights package of the night of his crash except that it’s mostly lowlights. He remembers the thrill of approaching the car, with his mate Miles telling him all about how the keys were in the ignition and no one was watching it. How they could roll it down the street for fifty metres or so and then kick her over. Miles had said he would drive to start off with, then Peter could have a go. He recalls Miles’ exact words as he released the handbrake on the Datsun 120Y, and they began to push it down the street.
‘We’ll just drive her till she runs out of juice and then nick off and leave. Sweet, eh?’
It had been sweet at the start. They got away with no trouble, then jumped in and Miles fired the engine. Exhilaration blocked out everything Peter should have been feeling and thinking, but it faded quickly like a delicate flower under the hot sun. Miles was driving like a maniac. Several times Peter told him to take it easy, but the other laughed it off by saying the car wasn’t theirs so it didn’t matter if they trashed it and that Peter should chill out and enjoy the ride. Peter was anything but chilled out, and after just five minutes in the car with Miles, he began to fear for his safety.
‘This yours?’ asks Peter of his uncle, as he leans on the opposite fender to the one where the cloth is laid out.
Ron stands and wipes his forehead with what he thinks is a clean cloth. A greasy streak replaces the lake of sweat. ‘Yeah.’
Ron doesn’t seem to say much, and Peter thinks he’s changed since his run-in with cancer eighteen months ago. That had knocked everyone around, but most of all the man himself. Of course, he fought like the tough old tiger he is but the Big C strikes fear into the hearts of the bravest of men. From the first indicators that something was wrong through the full diagnosis and onto the treatment, he talked about beating it, but he knew, as did the whole family, that realistically he was only a fifty-fifty chance. Even now, long past the operation to remove the tumour from his stomach and with the nightmare of chemotherapy treatment beginning to fade in his memory, the shadow of death plagued him. That’s what he jokingly called his remission: the shadow of death. Since then he had slowed down, slowed his speech, slowed his thinking, and slowed the pace of life. Cancer had aged him. Peter remembers family get-togethers with his aunt and uncle, and their rapid-fire verbal exchanges: combative yet somehow complementary and strangely sweet. Every now and then that sharp tongue of his would return to the fray and his family glimpsed the former Ron, but suffering wounds the soul and rips the fabric of personality. It alters perception: changes everything, and Peter knew it.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘No problem,’ says Ron, without removing his head from deep in the engine bay. ‘Just replacing the oil filter.’
Something catches Peter’s eye: a sliver of reflected light or rapid movement beyond the row of wrecks behind the XY. He stares for a moment, but nothing moves. Curious still, he wanders over toward the area. Ron’s voice follows him, but it fades, and he ignores it. The remnants of a red HJ Monaro crouch on the dusty ground, sandwiched between an early 80s Bluebird and a Nissan Urvan. With its passenger’s side completely caved in from what must have been a high-speed impact, the Monaro looks sad. Peter feels for it. He used to own one. In the unbroken driver’s headlight, Peter sees a light: weak, as though about to die from lack of power. Of course, it has no power. He lowers himself gently to the ground, then lower still so his eye is level with the headlight. Weirdly, his heart races, and he forces himself to swallow and revive his dry mouth. Shielding the headlight from the sun with his hand, he continues to stare into it, fascinated by the dim light. Surely it is his imagination. It’s impossible.
Raising his head from the headlight to the bonnet, he sees a figure behind the wheel of the car and springs backward in alarm. When he looks again, it is gone. Peter feels like he has seen a ghost. It looked like him. The cloud of dust he created lingers in the air around him momentarily before casually drifting down but Peter doesn’t move. He can’t. There is no trick of light here because the windscreen of the Monaro is non-existent. No optical illusion can be blamed for the apparition in the driver’s seat. It grips the steering wheel with two bony hands and smiles the twisted smirk of a maniac. Is that the sound of an engine?
Finally, and with considerable effort, Peter shakes off the horrified torpor and carefully pushes himself to his feet. When he looks again into the cabin of the Monaro, the spectre is gone. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them slowly. Nothing.
As his uncle has not given him any work, he wanders around the yard to kill some time. Maybe he’ll find a rare treasure among the bones of yesterday’s automobiles. He comes to realise that the wrecks are actually laid out in rows albeit haphazardly, and despite the obstruction of an occasional crumpled bonnet or concertinaed boot, he can see all the way down this row to the Colourbond steel fence at the bottom of the property.
He passes several compact Mazdas, a seventies model Mercedes, two Falcons, and a Kingswood before he stops dead in his tracks: mid-stride in front of a Datsun 120Y. Its headlights are on. That’s what he notices first, seconds before the death driver from the Monaro appears behind the wheel. It laughs, but Peter doesn’t know at what. It turns the steering wheel to the left, then to the right and back again quickly, simulating the action of negotiating a tight corner, then snickers as though the action should mean something to Peter. He stares in terrified fascination. Sounds of violent destruction assault his ears: crunching, smashing, tearing, crying, screaming. Peter swallows hard and forces himself to take a breath. The sounds get louder.
Behind the wheel of the Camry next to the 120Y, another ghostly vision chuckles as its bony hands slap the dashboard. Music plays from somewhere: the sounds of AC/DC hard rocking in to join the cacophony. Peter doesn’t move because he can’t, but he turns his head slowly to see that the whole row of wrecks is now inhabited by ugly wraiths. They hoot and holler as though revving themselves, together with their imaginary engines, while crouching at a make-believe starting grid waiting for the checkered flag to fall and the race to begin. With a bizarre and unexpected sense of relief, Peter realises that they are not interested in him. They do not seem to even be aware of him, except for the driver of the Datsun 120Y who has ceased laughing and is now staring at Peter. The evil fire of its eyes scorches Peter’s relief and turns his legs to jelly. He collapses.
Falling only to his knees, Peter can still see the spectre which is now beckoning to him. He shakes his head and opens his mouth to speak, but his mouth is so dry the hot air stings his tongue. The ghost driver patiently continues to motion for Peter to come, and finally he moves, almost automatically, towards the car. He feels disconnected, as though he has been removed from reality, as though his body has been severed from his mind. Dread feelings have lost the struggle to avoid danger. He inches forward despite his fear.
As Peter approaches the driver’s door, the death driver gestures for him to enter via the front passenger door, which springs open suddenly. Still moving, his head spinning, his heart hammering in his chest, Peter feels inexorably drawn to the car now. It’s too late to change his mind. Too late to flee.
He eases himself down onto the passenger seat, aware of the driver carefully observing his every movement. Once seated, the door slams shut, and there is sudden, dramatic silence, as though all the noise had been coming from a single source and someone had yanked the power cord from the socket. In that cold, suffocating silence, Peter sits with his eyes fixed on a comforting point of blue sky through the distant gum trees.
‘Whose fault was it?’
His brain muffled by inertia and shock, Peter does not realise that the question is for him, and that the speaker is the death driver.
‘Whose fault was it?’
Peter’s throat is tight, constricted with fear, and his words nearly choke him.
‘It was my fault. I-’ He doesn’t get to finish his sentence.
‘Whose fault was it?’
Before he speaks again Peter slowly turns his head to look at the interviewer from Hell. It seems that only the correct answer, the one it is seeking, will stop it repeating the question, or perhaps, he reasons, it has no ability to communicate, no life in fact outside of what animation is injected by Peter’s rabid imagination.
‘Whose fault was it?’ Its voice is persistent, taunting Peter.
Inside the Datsun 120Y the air is cold as though air-conditioned and it is dark. Straining his ears, Peter vaguely catches a distant melody, and he recognises it.
He remembers the song, I See Red by Split Enz because it was playing on the radio of the stolen 120Y just before it jumped the kerb and skipped across someone’s front lawn and ploughed into the side of their house. Sweat breaks out on Peter’s forehead, and, after he wipes it with the back of his hand, he notices that the liquid oozing from his skin is not sweat. A crooked talon of evil grips his heart and squeezes. He gasps, then begins to cough as his heart restarts.
‘Whose fault was it?’
Peter feels the desperate need to escape but senses the debilitating powerlessness of raw fear. He thinks he is dying as I See Red continues to bounce around the inside of the old Datsun; in and out of his head as though weaving insanity into his mind. His head spins as darkness encroaches the borders of his peripheral vision. If only he could think clearly. If only he could answer the question and satisfy the maniacal curiosity of the death driver.
‘It,’ begins Peter hesitantly, ‘was an accident. It was no one’s fault.’
The music stops. Peter has never experienced a deeper, more frightening silence, but he knows he has answered correctly. Without really wanting to, he turns again to look at the driver and finds it staring at him. Its hollow eyes thrust into his like long knives. He feels pain in his head, an intense throbbing which threatens to explode and splash his brains all over the inside of the 120Y, but he can’t look away.
It speaks. ‘What do all these wrecks have in common?’
‘They’ve been written off.’
Peter feels an unexpected elation. The pain and the fear remain, but something has changed, or more accurately, something is changing. The iceberg of his heart is thawing. The dust of his desolation is being blown away. What is it? Peter is mystified by the rampant swirl of emotion he is experiencing. An inexplicable calmness descends on him like soft rain.
‘You have a choice, Peter,’ it says. ‘You can stay with me and we can roam the never-ending highway to Hell forever, with all the other write-offs. Lost and hopeless.’
Peter wishes he could break the gaze of the spectral orator because he doesn’t think he can stand any more pain. Tears explode from his eyes, and a weeping howl from deep in his heart fills the air. He gets it. Understanding has risen like the light of dawn.
The death driver nods and attempts a smile, which looks hideous.
‘Leave the junkyard. You don’t belong here. Forgive yourself.’
As Peter continues to look at the driver, its face transforms, and he recognises the final visage.
‘Miles?’ He knows it is not his dead friend, but he wants it to be. He craves the opportunity to see him and speak with him again. The image of his friend nods.
‘Leave the wrecking yard. You don’t belong. The only person who has written you off is you.’
Peter can hardly see now through the blur of hot tears, but in the blink of an eye there is no longer anything to see. He is alone. Heat and light invade the interior of the Datsun, and Peter feels different. Clean. Alive. Born again.
When he attempts to leave the car, he finds his knee does not protest; no stiffness and no pain. Peter takes a deep breath and sprints back down between the lonely forgotten car wrecks back to where his uncle is still tinkering under the bonnet of the XY. He has no idea how long he has been gone but presumes from Ron’s disinterested greeting that it has not been long.
‘I have to go, Uncle Ron,’ he says breathlessly as he reaches the side of Falcon. Then, before the other man can respond, Peter races away into the office and out onto Llandilo Rd. Out into his second-chance life.
