No Vacancy

“You can tell when a town wants you gone. It doesn’t shout—it just forgets to open the door.”

We reached the town just as the sun was crawling behind the trees like something wounded trying to hide. It dragged its light with it, leaving behind a thin wash of bruised purple and grey that stained the sky like a healing wound. The colours drained out of everything as we rolled in—trees, road, sky, even us—until we all looked like ghosts of ourselves, faded versions hanging on in someone else’s dream.

At first, I didn’t realise we’d arrived anywhere. There was no proper welcome, no cluster of houses or neat row of shops. Just a long stretch of empty bitumen, the kind that felt like it had always been there and might keep going long after everything else had disappeared. A war memorial stood crooked on the corner, its peeling paint curling up at the edges like scabs that had been picked one too many times. There were no flowers left, just a sun-cracked plastic wreath and a tiny flag that barely twitched in the evening wind.

The petrol station sat hunched beside the road, one weak fluorescent light buzzing above the bowser, flickering like it couldn’t quite decide whether to stay on or die. It cast shadows that jittered and changed shape, dancing across the gravel like things with minds of their own. I imagined them whispering to each other, warning us not to stop.

I saw the town's name as we passed the rusted sign, but I couldn’t make it out. The letters were scratched and worn, the kind of word that might not mean anything even if you could read it. I sounded it out silently, turning the shape of it over in my head like a pebble in my hand, but nothing familiar came. Mum didn’t say it either. She didn’t say anything. Just slowed the car like we were approaching something dangerous, like the road itself had turned cautious.

The sign had been bent backwards, folded like paper by someone angry or careless or both. A dead gum branch scraped across the metal in the wind, making a dry, dragging sound like bones across a tin roof. Everything felt held in place by the thinnest thread, like the whole town was balancing on something brittle and about to break.

Mum pulled into what counted as the main street. It wasn’t wide—just a pair of dusty lanes edged by buildings that looked like they’d been forgotten by time. A pub slumped on one side, its windows boarded in like it was ashamed of whatever had happened inside. The Coca-Cola sign hanging over the veranda had faded to pale pink and white, barely readable in the strange light. Across from it, the servo squatted low and dull, paint flaking like sunburnt skin.

And then the motel.

Six rooms. All in a row. Like teeth in a tired mouth. Each one with the same drawn curtain, the same peeling door, the same air of resignation.

The engine coughed as we rolled past, a tired sort of noise that made my stomach tighten. Everything in the car seemed to pause with it, even the dust on the dashboard holding still. The pink neon over the office door blinked in and out, casting weird colours on the cracked pavement like someone had spilled jelly and glass and left it to melt.

“They don’t even have a car in the carpark,” Mack said. His voice came out too loud against the hush, like he'd broken some invisible rule. “Not a single one.”

Mum didn’t answer. But I watched her eyes in the mirror. I always watched her eyes now. They flicked sideways—to the mirror, the wing mirrors, the street behind us. Checking. Measuring. I’d seen her do it before, but never so much. Like she thought we were being hunted, or followed. Like something from the road might still be on our tail, just waiting for us to stop.

She pulled in anyway.

The tyres crunched over gravel and glass, slowing to a stop outside the office. The “OFFICE” sign buzzed, casting that sickly pink light onto Mum’s face. It made her look different—harsher around the eyes, more hollow in the cheeks. She didn’t turn off the engine right away. Just sat with her hands on the wheel, staring through the windscreen like she needed a moment to gather herself before stepping out into whatever this place was.

Then she opened the door and went in. The bell over the office door gave a little jangle, soft and uneven, like it had lost some of its pieces. Like it used to know how to ring, but had forgotten.

Mack got out and leaned against the car, arms crossed, trying to look casual, older. But I could see the way he kept shifting his weight from foot to foot, the way his jaw twitched when the wind blew.

I stayed in the back.

No one had told me not to come, but no one had said I should either. The car was warmer, quieter. Safer. And something about the motel made my skin feel too tight, like I didn’t belong out there in the dusk with the boarded-up windows and the flickering sign that couldn’t finish its own word.

I hugged Ribbons and watched the pink light stutter across Mack’s face, across the bonnet of the car, across the edges of the town that had no welcome and maybe no way back out.

Through the grimy glass of the office window, I could see Mum talking to the woman behind the counter. The light inside was yellowish and flickered slightly, the way school hall lights do when no one’s bothered to change the tubes. The woman wore a name badge that caught the light when she turned, but I couldn’t read it. Her hair was tall—backcombed into a helmet that hadn’t been fashionable since before I was born. It looked stiff enough to snap if you poked it, like plastic packaging or a very determined bird's nest.

She was already shaking her head, quick and sharp, before Mum had even finished speaking. Her mouth opened and closed in jerky little bursts, her chin lifting in that way adults do when they’re absolutely certain they don’t owe you an explanation. It was the kind of conversation where the outcome had already been decided before it started.

Mum leaned forward, both hands flat on the counter—her “please just listen” position. I knew it well. It meant she was trying to sound reasonable, calm, like someone who had options but was choosing politeness. Her shoulders were up tight, like she was trying to stop her heart from falling out.

The woman didn’t care. She gave a little flick of her hand, like batting away a mosquito, and turned slightly to the side—like she'd already decided Mum didn’t exist anymore. Mum straightened up slow, her face doing that thing where everything goes still and hard at once, like a mask lowering into place. Then she turned and strode out fast, her heels tapping the lino like bullets hitting concrete.

“No rooms,” she muttered, yanking open the car door like it had personally insulted her.

“What do you mean no rooms?” Mack asked, eyebrows knitting together as he clambered back into the passenger seat. He twisted around to look out at the building again. “The whole place is dark. There’s nobody here.”

“They’re full,” Mum said, biting the words off like they tasted wrong.

“They’re not,” he shot back, flat and certain, like someone pointing out two plus two didn’t equal five. “We can literally see they’re not.”

“She said they’re being held for contractors,” Mum replied, gripping the steering wheel like it might fly away if she let go. “Some mining crew. Booked out for the whole month.”

Mack's mouth hung open for a second, caught mid-thought, then closed with a click. I could see the gears turning behind his eyes, trying to bend the information into something that made sense. His face did that thing it did when he was doing fractions in his head—puzzled, frustrated, suspicious.

“That’s not a thing,” he said at last, with all the gravity of someone calling out a lie.

“It’s what she said,” Mum replied, sharper now, as if saying it aloud made it true.

“Did you ask if we could just have one room? Just for tonight? Did you tell her we’ve got a kid?”

“I asked, Mack.” Her voice cracked a little, then steeled again. “I asked everything I could ask.”

She sat down hard and slammed her door with the kind of force that made the whole car flinch. The noise echoed along the empty street, bouncing off hollow buildings like a warning. Or a dare.

Without another word, mum pulled out of the carpark slowly, tyres crunching over gravel, and turned back onto the street. The engine gave a tired groan as if it was as done as we were.

We drove past the boarded pub, past the cracked memorial, past the dying gum tree scratching the air with spindly fingers. No one waved. No curtains twitched. No lights came on in the buildings we passed. It felt like we were the only ones left, like we were driving through the after-image of a place that had once mattered but had been forgotten by the world.

And it felt like we weren’t leaving it behind so much as being swallowed up by it.

We tried two more places after that, though I don’t know why we bothered. Hope felt like a thread pulled too thin, already fraying. The first was a bed and breakfast tucked behind a white picket fence, the kind you see on postcards of happier towns. It should’ve looked welcoming, but it didn’t—it looked like it was pretending. The paint was too clean in places and peeling in others, the gate creaked as if it hadn’t opened for years, and the garden was just wild enough to feel deliberate, like it had been arranged to appear forgotten.

A hand-painted sign swung gently on a rusting chain near the front gate. CLOSED FOR PRIVATE FUNCTION. The words were faded and crooked, the paint cracked like old skin. It didn’t look temporary. It looked permanent, like someone had decided a long time ago that the door was closed, and no one had dared challenge it.

Mum knocked anyway. Three times. Firm, polite, hopeful. The kind of knock she used for people she needed something from. But there was no answer. No footsteps. No voices. Not even a dog barked. The windows remained dark, curtains pulled tight like eyelids over sleeping eyes. Or hiding ones.

We stood there for a while, just long enough for the silence to settle into something uncomfortable. Then Mum turned away, her face unreadable, and we got back in the car.

The last place was a caravan park on the far edge of town—though “town” felt generous. It was more like a collection of buildings that had agreed to share a postcode. The caravan park looked like it had been abandoned mid-sentence. A swing set sagged near the entrance, its chains tangled and one seat missing entirely. The office door was locked, the sign in the window bleached almost white by the sun, and the only clue to its purpose was a yellowing corkboard with a sheet of paper pinned to it.

A mobile number, written in biro that had run in the rain. The digits blurred, like they were trying to disappear into the page.

Mum stood there for a long moment, holding her phone but not dialling. Her other hand trembled slightly at her side, the kind of shake you only noticed if you were looking closely—and I was always looking closely now. She scanned the rows of caravans with drawn curtains and crooked aerials, all of them slumped in place like relics from another time. There was a stillness to the park that didn’t feel like sleep. It felt like abandonment. Like whoever had lived there had left in a hurry, and the air hadn’t quite figured out what to do without them.

And then I saw it. That look on her face. Not just worry—something deeper. Something colder. Recognition, maybe. Like she'd seen a place just like this before, and whatever memory it summoned wasn’t good.

She turned back to the car without a word. Not frustrated. Not defeated. Just… finished.

We drove back through the quiet streets, the tyres crunching gravel in the kind of silence that made every sound feel too loud. When we pulled into the servo, the fluorescent lights above the bowsers buzzed like insects trapped in glass, and the whole place smelled faintly of burnt rubber and fried oil.

Mum got out without a word and disappeared inside. Mack and I stayed in the car, watching her through the window. She stood at the counter talking to a man with a grey beard that looked like wiry metal. His flannelette shirt was too big, and his skin had the pale, indoor look of someone who didn’t go outside unless he had to. He kept glancing toward the car, his eyes small and quick, like a rat testing the air for danger.

I didn’t like the way he looked at us. Not openly suspicious, but not kind either. Curious in a way that made me want to pull Ribbons over my face like a blanket. I slid down in my seat until my head barely cleared the window line.

When Mum came back, her face was pinched and pale in the servo’s pinkish light. She held a folded map in one hand and a white plastic bag in the other. The bag rustled, and I could see the shapes inside—some bread, maybe biscuits, a packet of something crinkly. Emergency food.

“North-east again,” she said, sliding into the driver’s seat and starting the car before she’d even shut the door properly. Her voice was flat. “There’s a campground by the river. Twenty minutes, if the roads are okay.”

Mack was watching her, quiet at first. Then he said, very carefully, “We could’ve stayed here. At the motel. You could’ve pushed harder.”

His voice wasn’t angry, not exactly. It was… disappointed. That was worse.

“They don’t want strangers here,” Mum said, eyes locked on the windscreen. Her hands gripped the wheel so tightly I could see the tendons stand out like cables. “Nice people talk too much. Remember faces. Ask questions.”

She said it like a warning. Like a spell meant to keep something dangerous at bay.

The words hung in the air like smoke after a match is struck. I looked at Mack. He looked at her. Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then I asked the question. The one I probably shouldn’t have.

“What kind of questions?”

Mum met my eyes in the rearview mirror. Just for a second. Just long enough for something raw to flicker there. Then she blinked it away.

“Just questions, Rose,” she said softly. “The kind we don’t want to answer right now.”

And then she put the car in gear, and we were moving again—back onto the road, into the dark, toward a river and a campground none of us had ever seen. Away from the town that didn’t want us. Or maybe knew us all too well.

We left the town as quietly as we’d come in, like ghosts passing through a place that was already haunted. Mum didn’t say a word as she guided the car back onto the road, the tyres crunching softly over loose gravel, a sound that felt smaller than it should have, like the earth didn’t quite believe we were really there.

I twisted around in my seat to watch it disappear behind us—the rows of shuttered windows, the broken neon sign, the servo’s pale light still flickering like a tired eye. The further we drove, the smaller everything became, until the last glimmer blinked out behind a bend in the road and it was like the town had folded itself shut, closing the page on us.

The windows fogged with our breath again. I didn’t realise how warm it had become inside the car until I drew my finger through the mist and felt the sudden coolness of the glass beneath. I made a little house first—four crooked lines and a wonky triangle roof—then a tree with too many branches. Then a family: three stick figures holding hands. Mum in the middle, Mack tall beside her, me smaller with Ribbons tucked under one arm like a fourth person.

But the fog crept back quickly, curling in around my pictures and swallowing them whole. I tried to draw them again. A better tree this time, a straighter house. But it was no good. The warmth inside the car was stronger than my drawings, and they vanished one by one as if they’d never been there to begin with. Like the town.

The road ahead was darker than before—an older sort of dark, the kind that didn’t make room for headlights. The bitumen ended not long after we passed the last house, and from then on it was dirt again, coarser now, with the occasional pothole that made the car jump and creak like it was protesting. The track twisted away into open scrubland, empty of everything except shadows and the brittle shapes of dead trees, bleached and skeletal in the headlights like bones someone had forgotten to bury.

Even the stars seemed uncertain tonight. A few blinked on—half-hearted and faint—but the rest were still hiding behind thin cloud, like they were waiting to see what we’d do next. Waiting to see if we deserved their company.

I leaned my head against the window. The glass was cool, damp with the mist from my breath, and the thrum of the engine buzzed gently through the side of my skull. I could feel every vibration, every tick and rattle and wheeze from the car’s tired frame. It felt like it might come apart at any moment, scattering us like dust into the dark.

I held Ribbons closer, her body warm and a little damp from being squashed against me for so long. The cotton fur was starting to smell faintly of sweat and old air. Her button eyes were scratched from years of love, but they still looked steady somehow—still calm in a way I couldn’t manage on my own.

“We’re not lost,” I whispered to her, my lips barely moving. “We’re just not… found yet.”

I said it again, louder this time, like saying it properly might make it more true.

“We’re just not found yet.”

She didn’t answer, of course. Stuffed rabbits never do. But I felt her shift against me slightly, the fabric crinkling with the movement, and I chose to believe it was her nodding. That she understood what I meant. That sometimes being lost was safer than being found by the wrong people.