Amber and Alice

Amber cracked an eyelid and sunlight hit her optic nerve like a tetanus shot. Why was blind used to describe drunk but not hungover?

Squeezing her eyes tight, she tried to force some synapse activity into the achy sludge in her head and figure out where she was. That single brief glimpse had told her she was in the front seat of a car – not her own. A steady, nauseating vibration said she was going somewhere at speed. The upholstery she was slumped on smelt new. Her dress had ridden up her thighs, she was wearing stockings but not shoes, hairpins were sticking into the back of her head. Her mouth tasted of red wine and felt like she’d been licking gravel.

Okay, enough with the mystery. She covered her eyes with spread fingers and peered through the gaps at the driver, blinking a couple of times at the mane of long, straight golden hair, the one purple-clad arm she could see, the crocheted vest. A bittersweet warmth trickled down Amber’s spine. It looked like…

‘Mum?’ It made no sense but the word fell out anyway.

The voice that answered was painfully cheery. ‘You must have killed a whole bunch of brain cells.’

Amber groaned. Not her mother, but close.

‘You want me to pull over so you can throw up?’ Sage said.

‘No.’ Amber rubbed her face and sat a little higher, dragging at the hem of her dress. What did she do to end up in a car with her sister? ‘Where are we?’

‘On the M1.’

Amber squinted out the windscreen. Three lanes of traffic; trees, valleys and hills. ‘Where’ve we been?’

‘Not been. Going.’ Sage’s grin was wide with excitement. ‘North.’ She pointed at the road ahead and traced a line in the air to the view on the left. ‘Then west.’

‘West?’

‘Yes. West!’

Amber clenched her teeth. It was Sage-speak: peppy, cryptic, annoying. ‘What’s west? No, don’t answer that.’ Amber held up a hand and took a second to think. If she didn’t ask the right questions, they could be ten k’s north or west before Sage got to the point. The one that would explain what the hell Amber was doing on the M1 with her daft sister in someone else’s car. ‘Okay, try this. Why am I here?’

‘Because of the timing. It was perfect. Fate. Rhonda’s smashed arm and you going off like a cork – not that you were drinking champagne last night, at least not by the time I got to you – and now being free as a lark.’

‘Free as a … Last night?’ Amber glanced down at the black dress she was wearing, the sheer black stockings with holes in both knees, the black shoes with the red patent-leather heels lolling in the footwell like they were hungover too. Last night? She closed her eyes and thought back: end-of-financial-year work party, whole firm in a swanky ballroom. The directors, the cliques of lawyers, the new guy from litigation chatting with the lowly human resources team because he didn’t know any better. Tables for ten, fancy food … the extravagant flower arrangements that had could have paid off a student’s uni debt. That had riled her more than all the cajoling and memos and marketing decisions that had come before it. That had … ‘Oh god.’ She clapped a hand across her mouth. ‘Pull over.’

‘You do need to throw up?’

‘No, I need to kill myself.’ Idiot. Stupid, self-righteous, reckless idiot. She grabbed the door handle – why bother waiting for the car to stop? Life as she’d finally managed to carve it out was over. Gone. Blasted away in an explosion of nuclear proportions, now floating about under a mushroom bloody cloud. And she’d detonated herself by waving her flag on moral high ground. She doubled over and groaned.

‘Hold it down, Amber. Nearly there.’

Then they were stopped and Amber was falling out the door, hobbling across sharp stones in her stockings. She wanted to scream, but the shock of cold air and sudden movement, too much red wine and the damage she’d done – and her stomach had other ideas. She made it to the roadside barrier just as last night heaved its way out of her.

When she turned around again, Sage was waving a water bottle out of the open passenger door for her. Amber took it, sluiced her mouth and spat in the dirt. So classy now she was unemployed.

‘Feeling better now?’ Sage called.

Hot tears pooled in her eyes. She wanted to sit in the dirt and cry, but not here and not with Sage, so she blinked hard and gave a casual wave. ‘Sure, great. Just give me a second.’ Wind and dust from passing vehicles swirled around her, goosebumps hardened on her skin. Escaped strands from a French roll snapped at her cheeks and new ladders in her stockings crept up from the soles of her feet as though they were building a path to the holes at her knees. She crossed her arms, as much for warmth as to hold herself together.

‘There’s a coat in the back of the car,’ Sage said.

Amber glanced at the rear end of the vehicle, then took a wider view and looked at the whole thing for the first time. It was a four-wheel drive: big and boxy, dark blue and shiny. ‘Whose car is this?’

Sage spread her arms wide, grinning like it was a magic trick. ‘Rhonda’s.’

The same Rhonda with the smashed arm, Amber assumed. ‘Does she know you have it?’

‘She insisted I take it. She knows fate when she sees it. Or, in her case, a wonky step on a short flight of stairs.’

Amber rolled the cool water bottle across her forehead, trying to think what to ask. ‘Why are we in Rhonda’s four-wheel drive on the M1?’

‘This is the way to the start. North then west before we go west-west. I explained all this last night.’

‘I was drunk last night.’

‘Smashed.’

‘So explain it again.’

Sage let out a sigh. ‘Rhonda bought the four-wheel drive because she was going to trade in her old Holden anyway.’ The words were fast and flat, like she’d been through it fifteen times already, like maybe it’d been a whole lot chattier the first few times and now it was just the information without the enthusiasm. ‘We split the cost on the rest, did the introductory, met the others. Our leader – superhero with the hammer – told us to do a trial run on the packing, which was just as well because it took three goes to fit it all in. It’s a jigsaw back there.’ She hitched a thumb over her shoulder, kept talking. ‘We loaded up Wednesday, Rhonda fell down the stairs Thursday, you cracked the shits on Friday – by the way, about bloody time – now it’s nine-thirty Saturday, it starts at ten in Denman and we’re late.’

Amber waited for her brain to process the words, an uneasy churning in her gut – and it wasn’t anything to do with alcohol. ‘What starts at ten in Denman?’

This time Sage spoke slow and loud, as though Amber had a hearing problem. ‘The tag-along tour. Lead car, five tag-alongs, Uluru, Alice Springs, back.’

‘Alice Springs?’

‘Yes! She’s got it.’

No, she hadn’t. ‘That’s, what, two days’ drive?’

‘Four just to get there. But we’re doing the return trip in two weeks because obviously we’re not going to be driving the whole time. There’s gorges and hikes and historic stuff and lovely, lovely sunsets. It’s going to be great.’ Sage was smiling now, excited, waiting for it to reach Amber.

‘You actually think I’m going to Alice Springs with you?’ Two weeks in a car with her sister: Never. Going. To. Happen.

‘You wanted to last night.’

‘I was drunk last night.’

‘Smashed.’

‘So not responsible for any actual or assumed alcohol-induced enthusiasm.’

‘I did try to tell you that but you insisted.’

‘Oh, yeah, and how did that work? I slurred, “Two-week family road trip, wouldn’t that be a fucking joke?” And you interpreted it as I’d love to and helped me into the car after I’d passed out.’

‘Actually, we were already in the car outside your place. I said, “It was just a wild idea.” And you said, “Fuck wild idea. It’s a fucking brilliant idea. Doable, totally doable. Darling girls, it’s a plan. No, it’s a done deal.”’

‘I did not say darling girls.’

‘Yes, you did. And you refused to get out. Remember this?’ Sage clamped her knees on the steering wheel, her arms around the back of her seat and raised her voice in a wail. ‘“If I’m going on this damn trip, I’m not getting out until I see Uluru in the windscreen.”’

Amber opened her mouth to protest but a hazy, drunken memory crept into her mind: dark street, the shadowy glow from the light above the rear-view mirror, and her stockinged feet braced on the dashboard. ‘Oh.’

‘You do remember,’ Sage said.

‘Yeah, I remember that bit.’ Stupid, reckless idiot.

‘Good. Can you get back in the car now?’

It was cold and exposed on the verge of the motorway, isolated and probably not too safe so close to oncoming traffic, but Amber looked one way then the other, turned and glanced around at the bush and hills that stretched out behind her.

‘You’re letting all the warm air out,’ Sage called.

Amber didn’t want to get in the car. Didn’t want to drive pointlessly cross-country. She never wanted to do that again.

‘Come on, Amber.’

‘I’m not going to Alice Springs.’

‘You’ve just chucked in your job. What else have you got to do?’

The tears again, making Sage swim in Amber’s vision. She couldn’t explain it to her anti-regular-work, perennially-starting-something-new sister, she didn’t get it. ‘I’m not going to Alice Sp–’

‘For god’s sake, Amber, you’re not fifteen. Get in the car before we get hit by a truck.’

Amber took another look, one way then the other, got in and buckled up, feeling exactly like her fifteen-year-old self: sullen, resentful and with no other choice.