Persons Present

North of Port Augusta the Stuart Highway stops pretending it is going anywhere in particular. It simply goes. I had driven it once before, at nineteen, in the back of my father's Kingswood with Ray asleep against my shoulder and a bag of oranges sweating between us, and I remembered it as a single long note held for too long. Thirty-nine years later it was the same note. The salt lakes came up on the left like sheets left out on a line, and after that there was nothing to measure distance by except the white posts and the road trains that came at me out of the shimmer with their three trailers and their wind.

The Corolla, a white 2014 hatch, lifted on its springs every time one went past, like someone startled by a large man in a corridor. I counted them. Between Port Augusta and the Glendambo turn-off there were fourteen, roughly one every sixteen kilometres, which tells you something about the economy of the north and nothing at all about why I was on that road.

In the glovebox, under the logbook and the tyre-pressure gauge, were eleven birthday cards in a rubber band. They had come every September from 2014 to 2024, kookaburras and galahs and once, inexplicably, a giraffe, and inside, in my brother's square left-handed capitals, a sentence or two. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAGS. STILL HERE. R. Or: FOUND A NICE BIT OF CRYSTAL THIS YEAR, THOUGHT OF YOU, NO IDEA WHY. R. Paper-clipped to each card was my reply. I had written every one of them, usually around Christmas, when guilt has a seasonal discount, and I had never sent any. Eleven envelopes, his address, no stamps. The arithmetic was not difficult.

The 2025 card had not come. I had noticed in the third week of September, standing at my letterbox in Norwood, and had thought, well, he has finally stopped, and had felt something I filed under relief. In December a constable from Calder's Find rang me on a Sunday afternoon while I was deadheading the roses, and I learned that my brother had been dead in his dugout for four days before anyone knew, and that he was fifty-four, and that I was his next of kin, and that there was a will.