Thirty Voices on the Silverton Road

The Broken Hill Trades Hall occupied its corner of the town centre with the utilitarian solidity of a building constructed to serve functions rather than impress observers. Its yard, normally empty or hosting the overflow of community meetings, had been transformed this morning into a staging ground — thirty-odd girls in khaki uniforms and their accompanying parents filling the gravel space with the particular energy that departure generated in communities too small to take any collective event for granted.

The morning sun was already asserting itself, washing the scene in a brightness that made water bottles glint and hair ribbons catch the light. Dust rose from the restless shuffling of boots and the dragging of packs across gravel. The scent of eucalyptus from the nearby gums mingled with the dust in the combination that constituted Broken Hill's atmospheric signature — present in every outdoor gathering, every school assembly, every moment the town's population occupied open ground.

Parents occupied the periphery with the mixed expressions of adults managing competing impulses. Mothers conducted final inspections of straps and collars with the thorough anxiety of people who had already inspected these items twice and who understood that the third inspection served their own nervous systems rather than any practical purpose. Fathers carried heavy packs to the bus steps, their eyes moving from their daughters to the road that led west toward Silverton and back to their daughters, the visual circuit tracing the path between what they were releasing and what they were releasing it toward.

These parents had heard about Sally Harlow. Not the full details — Barry Glasson's management of the information had ensured that the word murder remained absent from official communications — but enough. A woman found in Silverton. The circumstances under investigation. The vague assurances from police that the public was not at risk. The parents who had signed permission slips weeks ago, before Sally's body was discovered, now stood in the Trades Hall yard with their signatures committed and their children's excitement too far advanced to retract without explanations that the available information did not support.

They let them go. One by one, in the particular acts of release that parenting required and that each parent performed according to their own calculus of risk and trust and the inability to keep children safe indefinitely without also keeping them confined.

Violet stood at the centre of her group with the rucksack on her shoulder and the weight of twelve days pressing against her from the inside. The journal was not in the rucksack — it remained hidden at the Dallow Residence, in the drawer that someone had opened and that she had not been able to regard as secure since. What she carried was the knowledge the journal had provided, and the anonymous letter's warnings, and the contents of Barry Glasson's notebook, and the word Ironsand, and Clarke's face in the classroom, and the locket's absence from her neck where Jasmine's presence now occupied it.

Her friends flanked her in the configuration their friendship had established over four years — Mandy at her left, quick-witted and irrepressible, her hair catching the sun; Michelle at her right, performing cheer with the skill of someone whose domestic circumstances had made performance a survival mechanism; Rebecca slightly apart but firmly within the circle, adjusting her sash with the nervous precision of someone who sought order as a defence against uncertainty.

To anyone observing from outside the group, they were four girls at the start of an ordinary camp. The observation would have been accurate in every respect except the ones that mattered.

Mandy offered reassurance with the confidence of a detective's daughter whose intelligence about the investigation came from overheard phone calls and whose faith in her father's competence remained intact despite everything Violet had found in his study. Her father said things were contained. The camp was proceeding. If it were dangerous, they would not be going. The logic was circular but comforting, and Mandy delivered it with the authority of someone who needed it to be true.

Michelle's response carried the fracture that her parents' disintegrating marriage had introduced into all her interactions — the brightness that flickered, the mischief that served as deflection, the underlying awareness that the structures she had relied upon were proving less permanent than she had assumed. She spoke of pranks and midnight feasts and the liberation of a week without homework, and the enthusiasm was real even as the effort required to sustain it was visible to anyone who knew where to look.

Rebecca offered something different. Her expression of wanting to get away, to breathe, to simply exist without the weight of whatever she was carrying — the sentiment was delivered with a quietness that communicated volumes. Violet caught her eye, and the exchange that passed between them operated in the register that their friendship maintained for communications too sensitive for language: acknowledgement. Recognition. The silent confirmation that neither of them was entirely alright and that both of them knew it.

The whistle blew. Leaders in crisp uniforms began the process of converting thirty excited girls into a group capable of boarding a bus in some approximation of order. The bus doors opened with a hiss of compressed air. Rucksacks were heaved aboard. Seats were claimed with the competitive urgency that the allocation of limited resources always produced in groups of teenagers.

The bus lurched from the kerb. Gears ground, then settled into the steady rumble that would accompany the journey's duration. Through the windows, Broken Hill performed its farewell — the corrugated roofs, the verandahs, the corner shops with their faded signage, the front gardens conducting their ongoing negotiation with heat and dust. Each landmark passed with the particular quality of things observed through moving glass, familiar objects rendered slightly foreign by the fact of departure.

The town fell away. The road opened.

The Outback received the bus with the vast indifference of a landscape that had been receiving travellers since before the road existed and that regarded the passage of a single vehicle across its surface with the same attention it gave to the movement of clouds or the migration of birds — which was to say, none. Ochre earth stretched to the horizon. Spinifex tufted the ground in scattered clumps. Gum trees stood in their ghostly bark, skeletal and graceful, their shadows shortening as the morning advanced.

The heat was already producing its signature shimmer above the road's surface, the mirage effect transforming the distant bitumen into the appearance of water that retreated as the bus approached — the landscape's oldest deception, offered to every traveller without malice or apology.

Inside the bus, thirty voices maintained the cocoon of sound that moving groups of teenagers generated. The chatter was layered and continuous — conversations starting and merging and splitting and reforming with the fluid dynamics of social interaction conducted at volume in an enclosed space. Michelle had claimed the aisle as a performance venue, her stories and gestures drawing laughter from girls who occupied seats well beyond the immediate circle of her friendship. Mandy produced contraband with the theatrical flourish of a magician — Minties, biscuits, toffees — each revelation greeted with the particular delight that forbidden food produced when consumed outside parental jurisdiction.

Rebecca observed from her seat with the half-smile of someone whose participation in the group's enthusiasm was genuine but calibrated — present without being consumed, engaged without being carried away. Her comment about the night sky — stars upon stars, the smallness of their lives — landed with the particular weight that philosophical observations acquired when delivered by someone whose composure suggested they were drawing from experience rather than abstraction.

Violet sat beside the window. The vinyl seat was warm against her back. The glass vibrated faintly with the engine's rhythm, transmitting the road's texture through a medium she could feel against her temple when she leaned her head against it. The landscape passing beyond the glass was the same landscape she had walked with Jasmine, the same country she had ridden through on her bicycle, the same terrain that had surrounded her for every one of her sixteen years. It looked different from the bus. Not unfamiliar — the red earth and the gum trees and the sky were exactly as they had always been — but reframed by the direction of travel. She was not walking through it. She was being carried toward something.

She allowed herself, for intervals that lasted minutes before the weight reasserted itself, to participate in the laughter. The sound that emerged from her when Michelle's stories landed or Mandy's revelations exceeded expectation was genuine — the particular quality of mirth that friendship produced in people who had been sharing it for long enough that the triggers were established and the responses were reflexive. She laughed, and the laughing loosened something that the past twelve days had tightened, and the loosening felt like relief even though she understood that relief was not the same as safety.

The bus carried them forward. The kilometres accumulated beneath the tyres with the steady progress of a vehicle travelling a route it had been travelling since the road was sealed. The landscape offered no landmarks beyond the repetition of its own elements — earth, scrub, sky, the occasional fence marking a boundary that the terrain ignored. The road was a line drawn across a surface that had not consented to being divided, and the bus followed it with the particular trust that vehicles placed in infrastructure.

Silverton was thirty kilometres from Broken Hill. The distance was short by Outback standards — a measurement that the landscape absorbed without registering. But the distance between where the bus had departed and where it was heading was measured in more than kilometres. It was measured in everything that Broken Hill contained and that Silverton concealed, in the investigation that had begun with a torn newspaper page and that was now travelling on a bus full of girls in khaki who did not know what the girl by the window was carrying.

The Outback stretched. The bus hummed. Thirty voices filled the air with the sound of people who were young and together and heading somewhere, and the sound was bright and real and belonged to a morning that would not last.