Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose 2024 – Long List
Mick drove, his right arm leaning out the window, tanned to the colour of teak below the rolled sleeve of his shirt. Paul lay across the back seat, floppy hair hiding his eyes. His T-shirt was dark and slick with sweat. I sat in the front passenger seat bent over an ancient road map. Plotting our adventure through the Little Sandy Desert of Western Australia. Three university friends escaping Perth in our car, Daisy. Looking for the real Australia.
“The map definitely had a service station around here,” Mick said, more to himself than us. I could hear the hope in his voice. Daisy kept going, her temperature gauge hovering around the red mark. The highway simmered into the distance.
“Hey look.” Mick pointed at the windscreen as we crest the next undulation in the road. “Is that a service station?”
I squinted through the heat haze. “Na, it’s just a mirage, the desert’s got to you.”
“No look, it’s getting bigger.”
Even Daisy seemed to take a deep breath and run faster, smoother towards a big shady forecourt. We all perked up, excited at the prospect of talking to someone else, eating snack food and topping up the petrol and water.
A woman stood in the shade of the forecourt. Her thin hair hung limp and bottle blond down her back, a child hid behind her faded blue jeans. To one side sat a mangy dog, one ear up and one ear down.
“Hullo, strangers,” she said, smiling. Her eyes were the same washed-out blue as her jeans. A black gap instead of her front teeth. “I’m Sheila, this is Maddy. Come in, I don’t get many callers here since the local strip mine closed.”
We went into the shop, a low-ceilinged room with a long counter. The goods on display were sparse: a couple of boxes of cornflakes, a pile of assorted grease guns and bundles of sandpaper. No snacks.
“Is there a motor camp around?” Paul asked, looking out the window at the continuous flatness.
“Not within two hundred miles. I could put you up here. You could sleep on the floor,” Sheila said.
“No, we couldn’t do that,” Paul replied.
Sheila shrugged. “There’s a dust storm coming. It won’t be safe to drive in a couple of hours.” She waved us through the back into a long narrow room with a desk at one end and a TV at the other. Maddy was curled up on a faded brown corduroy couch facing the TV, sucking her thumb. In the middle of the room was a green Formica table surrounded by an assortment of decrepit chairs including a wooden spindle-back and a child’s chair with a sagging frayed wicker seat. I sat on an elderly Formica chair. The sharp tack-points poked through the worn plastic seat and prickle me through my shorts. Maddy clambered up onto the broken chair.
“It’s not much but we make do,” Sheila said, shrugging her shoulders.
She grabbed the jug and boiled the water for tea, then waved a packet of biscuits. “I’ll put it on the tab,” she said, smiling her toothless smile.
The crunch of biscuits lured the dog over. His long nails clicked on the concrete. Sheila smiled. “This is Bruce, he keeps the rodents under control.” Bruce settled by the table, looking up at Sheila while she stroked his ears.
It’s difficult to make casual conversation with someone who is missing their front teeth. I concentrated on her pale blue eyes and asked, “Do you run the station alone?”
“I have a husband. He is away working at the mines. He’ll be back next week. I met him when I drove the trucks. I still have my licence. But I don’t work away as much now because we have Maddy.”
I looked at the two of them, one so pale, the other tanned a dark nugget brown. So different yet here, together.
“So, what do you need?” Sheila asked.
Mick ticked the items off on his fingers. “Petrol and water. Oh, do you have any sunblock and maybe some burn salve?” He rubbed his sunburned arm. No longer a dark teak, it was a deep hot red.
“I will have a look,” Sheila said, rising from the table.
We heard her in the next room moving things around. The bang and thump of heavy items hitting the floor – the noise made a lie of empty shelves. Maddy sat at the end of the table and observed us. She sucked the ends of her hair, her eyes never blinking.
“I draw. I draw stuff that happens round here, I’ll draw you when you go, the hot arm.” Maddy pointed to Mick. “And the little car,” she said, pointing through the open door towards Daisy parked on the forecourt.
“Could I see some of your pictures?” I asked, the school teacher coming out in me.
She took me by the hand to the small table by the TV. There were hundreds of drawings stacked in neat piles. Some small, some large, some skinny. The drawings were all simple stick figures. On top of one pile a crumpled receipt portraying Maddy with a man. They were standing on the forecourt. Sun rays blasted out from a wobbly circle on the top of the page. There were drawings of Sheila and Bruce sitting in a big truck. Sheila was smiling, her teeth slightly protruding through her lips. Another showed the man standing by a truck, bowser nozzle in his hand; beside him Maddy was eating an ice cream.
“Wow, you have ice cream,” I said, my mouth suddenly watering at the thought.
“No, not now. I ate them all. The truck hasn’t come back,” Maddy said matter-of-factly. “I have other pictures in my head. I am not allowed to draw them on paper, just keep them inside.”
Sheila suddenly burst from the storeroom looking distracted. “Sorry I forget what was it you wanted,” she said, looking at Mick.
“Some salve for my sunburn if you have any,” came his soft reply.
“Of course.”
She soon reappeared with a dusty bottle, then turned to me, “I don’t know if you want a wash-up – there is water in the tank. But the canvas downpipe pipe has disintegrated. I usually bucket the water down to the garden but unless you want to fill the old outside bath by hand it’s just as easy to climb the ladder and sit in the tank. There aren’t any poisonous creatures up there.”
I was pretty excited to get rid of two days of sweat. “Yes, please.” The thought of hiding in a cool place was dizzying.
I took my clothes off at the bottom of the ladder and hung them over the rungs, saying a little prayer to ward off the poisonous spiders. Opening the lid, I slid into the cool dark water and wondered how long it had been since Sheila had had a visitor. What would it be like to have a strange child and a moth-eaten dog called Bruce for company? How do you deal with the loneliness? After a good soak I backed down the ladder glimpsing a small vegetable garden shaded by a large canvas awning. The sand was piled up the sides of the canvas, stretching it tight.
I dressed, shaking each item to get rid of any unwelcome visitors and went inside. We listened to the once beautiful Sheila reminisce about the mines, how she had made good money driving and had fallen in love with the man who owned the petrol station. She was laughing as she remembered how she had become addicted to ice creams. How she would go out of her way to drive here.
“You ate them all, now there is none left,” said an angry voice from the corner. Maddy was hunched over her small desk. “You ate them all, and I couldn’t have any!” Her skinny body was tight with anger.
“Well, times are tougher now,” Sheila said gently, “We don’t get the traffic like we used to.”
“Dad would make it OK,” spat Maddy as she angrily stabbed her pencil on the paper. “Dad would always make it OK.”
Sheila shrugged and changed the subject. “The forecast said the dust storm will be here just before sunset. You shouldn’t drive anywhere. Please stay, you could leave in the morning.”
Mick, Paul and I nodded without looking at each other. None of us had the energy to travel any further today.
After a dinner of beans and vegetables from Sheila’s garden, we sat outside to watch the sunset. The impending dust storm gave the sky a golden glow streaked with purple. The horizon was a wall of red. First sign of the wind was the tiny flicks of sand rushing across our shoes as we hurried inside. Suddenly the building moaned as the desert sand scraped across every surface.
Bruce whimpered and curled into a tight ball. Maddy sat at her desk, furiously drawing in the sudden darkness. We sat silently around the table. Within ten minutes the storm had passed. Maddy flicked the light switches but the power was out. We sat in the dark and told stories.
Paul talked about our trip north, the tall, fossilised trees at Cervantes and wondered about the ancient forests of Western Australia.
Maddy laughed. “There’s no forests in Western Australia silly. It’s a desert.” “Look,” she said to me, “See what I drew about you.”
We went over to her desk. She handed over a drawing of me. Naked. Climbing up the ladder to the water tank.
“Why did you draw that?” I asked.
Maddy smiled a sly smile. “Do you want to be bigger?” she said.
I grabbed the picture and screwed it up. Maddy wailed and hit me, “Go away I don’t like you,” she said, pushing me.
Sheila came out of her bedroom, shouting, “Don’t up upset our visitors. What have you been drawing?”
“It’s OK,” I said, stuffing the screwed-up drawing into my shorts back pocket. “Nothing to worry about.”
Sheila dragged Maddy into the bedroom and closed the door. We could hear them talking. ”Don’t draw those things” – Sheila’s voice. And Maddy whimpering: “I won’t, it’s all still in my head. I promised you.”
The next morning the power was back. Finishing our breakfast and cups of tea, we tidied our things and paid the bill. Mick pointed Daisy north into the barren red landscape. We were already thinking of the hundreds of kilometres we had to travel before we hit a town.
Behind us Sheila and Maddy stood waving. Bruce was nowhere to be seen. A plume of sand obscured our wave of return. Above, the sun burned hot. Mick drove with his sleeve rolled down, the windows closed against the dust.
As I settled into the hard car seat, I remembered the screwed-up drawing in my pocket. I pulled it out, ready to throw it out the window. Then I noticed the picture on the other side. The pencil marks were pressed hard into the paper. I flattened it against my knee and saw a stick woman holding a gun, pointing it at a stickman. Her face was covered with blood. A child was holding onto a dog. Out of the gun’s barrel were five hard straight pencil lines.
Mazz Scannell lives in Wellington. She has written creatively in between a varied corporate life of business writing. She enjoys writing in any form from flash fiction, nonfiction and fiction.