Five Hours of Darkness and Bitumen

The Barrier Highway between Broken Hill and Adelaide stretched ahead like a ribbon of ink, the darkness so complete it felt solid — punctured only by the twin cones of headlights carving through scrub that existed more as suggestion than substance. Out here, civilisation was a concept rather than a fact. A service station every hundred kilometres if fortune allowed. Scattered homesteads set so far back from the road they might as well have been rumours. The land was spinifex and saltbush clinging to red earth, the occasional ghost gum standing white-barked and luminous in the dark like something that had forgotten to leave when everything else did.

Paul had been driving for nearly an hour. The thorn scratches on his arms stung each time he adjusted his grip on the wheel — small, sharp reminders of the rose bushes that had received his fall from the bedroom window, and of the wife whose garden he had destroyed on his way out. The absurdity of his departure had not diminished with distance. A thirty-five-year-old man, climbing out his own bedroom window to avoid a conversation, landing in rose bushes, scrambling for his car whilst his wife shouted from above. It was farcical. It was also, he suspected, the most honest thing he had done in years.

His phone sat in the centre console, switched to silent. Claire's name had appeared thirteen times since he left Broken Hill, each call accompanied by the same photograph — her smiling, hair caught in wind, taken during a weekend in Adelaide three years ago when they had both still been capable of happiness in each other's presence. He had not answered. Could not answer. Whatever Claire needed to say would still exist tomorrow, and the distance between Broken Hill and Adelaide was the first space Paul had occupied in months that did not feel like it was shrinking around him.

The highway's monotony was almost meditative. Kilometre markers slid past in the headlights. Reflective posts winked green from the roadside. The engine held its steady note beneath thoughts that circled and returned and circled again, the way thoughts do when there is nothing to interrupt them but darkness and bitumen and the vast indifference of the Australian interior.

Luke's phone call occupied the centre of that circling. Something had been wrong — genuinely wrong, not the performative crisis Luke occasionally manufactured when he wanted company or attention. Paul had known his brother for thirty-five years. He had shared a bedroom with him in Adelaide and Broken Hill, had whispered with him through the thin walls of a household held together by silence and religious obligation, had watched him navigate a childhood that should have crushed him and emerge still somehow himself. Paul knew every register of Luke's voice — the dreamy abstraction, the theatrical urgency, the genuine warmth — and what he had heard on the phone that evening belonged to none of them. There had been an edge beneath the familiar patterns. A rawness when Luke said he needed him. A quality that suggested not merely domestic trouble with Jamie but something larger, something that had shaken Luke at a depth Paul had never heard accessed before.

Luke had bought plane tickets. That alone was diagnostic. Luke, who would argue over a restaurant bill split to the last dollar, had spent money he did not have on last-minute airfares without being asked. The generosity was not out of character — Luke could be extraordinarily generous — but the spontaneity of the expenditure pointed to desperation rather than largesse. Whatever was happening in Berriedale was not something that could wait for budgets or planning.

The near-miss happened without preamble.

A kangaroo — large, dazed, panicked by the sudden wash of light — exploded from the scrub and bounded directly across Paul's path. His foot found the brake before his mind had fully registered what his eyes were seeing. The ABS pulsed beneath his sole. The steering wheel wrenched. Time compressed into something elastic and then snapped back, and the animal was gone — veering into darkness at the last possible instant, vanishing as completely as if it had never existed.

Paul sat at an angle across the empty highway, engine running, hands locked on the wheel, heart slamming against his ribs. The silence after the squeal of brakes was enormous. He pulled to the shoulder and waited for the shaking to stop, for his breathing to remember its rhythm, for the adrenaline to drain from a body that had just confronted the particular mathematics of outback driving — that a hundred and ten kilometres per hour and a startled marsupial could end everything between one heartbeat and the next.

It was while he sat there, hands still trembling, that Claire's fourteenth call lit the screen and rang through to voicemail. He watched the notification appear and recede. Switched the phone to do not disturb. Tucked it back into the console.

He pulled onto the highway again — slower now, more cautious — and the remaining hours unspooled ahead of him in darkness and reflection. Three hours to Adelaide. A few hours' sleep if he was lucky. A morning flight across Bass Strait to Hobart, where his brother waited with a crisis he could not or would not explain over the phone. Paul did not know what he was driving toward. Did not know whether his presence would help or merely complicate whatever Luke was facing. Did not know if the brother who had always seemed to navigate chaos with inexplicable grace had finally encountered something that grace alone could not carry him through.