Bart realised he was quite good at reversing. He hadn’t been going particularly fast, which helped, but now he was beginning to wonder how the hell he was moving at all.

‘It’s got a flat,’ he said to himself, remembering why they had stopped in the first place.

It’s got four “flats”, actually. That’s what you call those rubber things with no air in them under this “fourby” isn’t it?

‘Oh, you’re still here.’

The man with the big brown eyes and the blue suit beside him smiled. I never left. You just started ignoring me when you were congratulating yourself on what a good job you were doing. He leant back in the passenger seat, part of his back seeming to disappear into it. Not that I mind. Most people ignore me when they come out here. You just seemed to notice me when I woke you up. Have you ever thought about why?

‘I haven’t had much time to think about anything except going backwards,’ Bart replied testily.

And the fact you’ve got four flats, the man reminded him.

‘Why do I have four flat tyres?’ Bart stopped the four-wheel-drive.

It’s better on soft sand, that’s why.

‘How do you know that?’

You read it somewhere, I think.

‘I read it somewhere?’

Yep. That’s how it works. I’m still getting the hang on your brain but the more you think, the more I learn, which is kind of awesomeness.

Bart couldn’t help grinning. ‘Some of that was a little bit wrong.’

I’m not fucking genuses.

The wheezing cackle that escaped Bart’s mouth surprised him. ‘No. I suppose not.’ He looked out through the windshield. The rain was pelting down now, but there didn’t seem to be any immediate danger.

Pelting down? Like fox pelts? I do not see any of those around here. Feral. That’s right. Rabbits. Oh so this is right, cool and death defying.

A vision of red and grey furs softly thumping the exterior of the four-wheel-drive popped into Bart’s brain. ‘This is possibly the oddest situation I’ve ever found myself in,’ he mumbled under his breath.

No kidding. Oh hey, she’s coming again. Not too far away now. You might feel a bit of a shudder. 

‘What?’ Bart knew what the man meant. He was referring to the legless lizard thing he’d been talking about earlier. ‘I thought we left her behind?’

Left her behind? Not likely. You know, I think this isn’t the one I’m used to. The man frowned, and for the first time Bart noticed his magnificent eyebrows. I think this is the old one.’

‘There’s a new one?’

Well, there’s the one I know, and the one that’s a lot older than me. Haven’t seen her for… Well… I haven’t seen her. She went into the ground long before I came along.

‘I’m afraid to ask.’ Bart looked at the man carefully. ‘It’s kind of dangerous for me to ask this anyway, seeing as I’m supposed to have no idea, but…’ He took a deep breath. ‘When did you come along?’

When the land was still all joined up, that’s when. Might have done a bit of island hopping. Not too sure. It was a long time ago. Came down from the top to here. Took a while but you know, it happened. The man looked down at himself. Obviously.  I’m here.

‘So when did the “old one”, as you put it, come along?’

She didn’t “come along”. She was here the whole time. She kindly made this for us/you/me/ them. I’m getting misty. Mateship. Lingering. Obviously.

‘Are you alright?’

The man did indeed seem to be getting “misty” as he put it. Bart couldn’t find quite the correct term for exactly “what” the man was trying to explain, but he appeared to be sliding down through the vehicle’s floor.

Oops, the man said quietly, then disappeared. It was about that time the wind hit.

Windy

6/ Windy

The vehicle shuddered on its flat tyres then seemed to dig itself into the ground as the wind struck. It was almost like a physical thing had run up and surrounded him on all sides without Bart being able to see it.

He should feel trapped, but he didn’t. The funny thing was, if anything could be funny in this particular moment in time, the wind seemed to have come to a sudden halt. It wasn’t not moving, it just wasn’t going anywhere.

It was almost like a huge dog had run up, knocked him over and now bounced around and licked his face – or would be licking his face if it could get inside the cab, which it couldn’t.

Maybe it was more like one of the lions or tigers in one of those African safari parks that jumped on the roof and everyone sat inside and stared at it, titillated but reasonably safe until one idiot rolled the window down.

Bart contemplated if today, he would be that idiot.

He decided against it. It just didn’t seem like the right time for idiocy. Not at this point. Maybe later. He stared through the windscreen. The shrubbery on the side of the road, and he used the word shrubbery loosely when explaining wattle trees to himself, was waving around madly, the light branches bending steeply in the direction of the hill behind him, but the trees in front, where the wind did not appear to be, stood still, like nothing was touching them, not even a breeze.

He was finding it difficult to control his thoughts. They seemed to be racing wildly around inside his head, just like this wind seemed to be doing outside.

‘Just go with it,’ he said to himself politely, which was odd, but it also seemed easier if he spoke out loud to think what he really meant, because now if he kept his mouth closed the mental words were just leaping about with gay abandon and depositing themselves on his thoughts and making everything look, (well everything that was inside his head anyway) …everything look like someone had come inside and thrown around a pile of laundry without a care in the world, despite the open drawers waiting for them.

‘Smart move,’ he called to the wind. ‘I like you too.’

The wind sighed and hushed, then picked up into a gale, then screamed and lost its way and failed to be exactly what he wanted it to be, and then fainted, only to get up and try it all over again.

‘You’ve got some cool moves there,’ Bart said, although he didn’t know why.

Maybe you can play with me, and see where we go, and we can get up and fall down down and run around naked and freak out, and freak in and laugh our way to the top of the world and fall back down, and vertically hover like a moonbeam on a hot day and frequently decide we aren’t going to do this anyway

‘No problem,’ said Bart. ‘I have a feeling I should be slightly afraid right now. I can’t see anyone talking to me.’

Despite your efforts to be totally cool, your mother always sees you as a greasy haired vertical twig with a pot belly You should make sure to brush to the left and not to the right and send loving messages to bestial freaks from afar and western breathtaking breweries make good beer Maybe we should go to the pub

The words floated and shimmered around him as the wind blew, and Bart, being Bart, thought this was the possibly the most exciting moment in his life, aside from that time about nine months ago when he’d met Solway in the newsagency. He also wondered, and not so briefly, whether he should start the fourby up again and keep reversing until he at least got to the bottom of the hill, because he thought, if he stayed here, there might be a high possibility the creek, which was likely no longer a creek but a very fast moving river, would come up past the line of wattle trees and be on the track where he currently was, and it might be a bit hard to get out of there.

He turned the key in the ignition. Like a heartbeat in motion, which was a very odd way to describe a okay I’m just going with it then, the vehicle started up, put itself in reverse, and Bart looked over his shoulder simply for the fact it seemed like a good idea to look like he was actually controlling the very fast reversing of said vehicle, because if anyone was watching, not that anyone was, and saw he didn’t even have his hands on the steering wheel and perhaps was merely a passenger and not even a guide, they might think now was a good time to call the cops because Bartholomew Branson had probably lost his marbles.

He fervently agreed.

Then he decided he should probably place his hands gently on the steering wheel, like his driving instructor had told him to many years before, because if anyone happened to be reading this in their heads later in the day, not that it was likely as he hadn’t written it down, keeping hands on the steering wheel was a very safe thing to do, and the last thing he wanted, when he started up his vlogging business, was have anyone say that Bart Brand was an unsafe influencer.

Not that he’d ever been an influencer of any description, but if he became one, ever, he’d rather be one for good rather than bad, and this seemed like the best possible moment to think that.

~~~~~~,~’~~~~~.~’~~80>

Solway had just come to the conclusion she did not like rain. The rain had stopped some time ago. It had just become really windy, and not in a particularly good way, because her clothing had been soaked through and now she would have to take all her wet gear off in the middle of a track on the side of this very long slope, and try not to let any of her clothes blow away while she was attempting to put them on. She unslung her backpack and let it drop to the ground.

She did not stop to wonder why she was thinking in very long sentences. It was too bloody cold for that. She thought, in fact, that she should probably be thinking in very short, vertically challenged, sentences, because the shivering she currently experienced made her brain think in static, up and down, stop start, beeping machine-like thoughts, rather than long flowing thoughts, and now she had just repeated the same idea in one thought, which would be highly unlikely under any other circumstance because the training she had done before becoming a weather presenter did not allow for that sort of thing and…

‘Fuck. Where the hell is my jumper?’

She stomped a foot down on a dainty pair of knickers someone had thoughtfully placed in her backpack for no reason at all. Letting her underwear fly off into the sunset didn’t seem like a very good idea.

Ah, there it was, under the…

‘Goddammit.’ Bart had also put what looked like a very cheap, but extremely practical, plastic poncho in a side pocket, and if Solway had noticed it earlier, perhaps she would not have found herself in this current predicament.

The predicament being; half-naked standing on a slope covered in short prickly bushes in the middle of the afternoon.

She’d put her jumper on first and then perhaps get out of her jeans and attire herself in those very comfortable warm, fluffy looking tracksuit pants that were not going to fly off into the sunset at all.

*stomp*

Solway sighed. Well. Hopefully someone would get some use out of that sparkly, frilly, lace covered and not in the least bit practical, pair of underwear one day. They certainly seemed to be enjoying the weather, floating around in the breeze like a large demented butterfly. She pulled the jumper over her head.

‘Ooh-hoo-hooo, lovely.’ The warmth was immediate and indeed rather lovely. She unzipped her jeans. A large, black range rover appeared over the rise in front of her. The driver began to grin. Solway, literally, had just been caught with her pants around her ankles. 

‘Oh great. Just great.’ She waved. 

It seemed appropriate and if she thought about it (which at this point she didn’t really want to do) it was probably better they’d appeared in front of her. If they had come up behind her they would have got a full display. As it was though, and she could count her lucky stars for this one, she was semi-squatting and the rather large jumper she had, extremely fortunately, just put on, disguised the fact Solway Endersans was currently wearing no underwear. The vehicle stopped.

‘Need a hand?’ The man grinned, then winced as the passenger Solway had only just noticed, smacked him in the arm.

‘Don’t be such a wanker, Ronald.’ The woman got out of the vehicle and strode towards Solway, a thermos in her grip. ‘I’ll stand in front of you, if you like, while you put your trackies on, then we’ll discuss whether you have sugar or not, and why the hell you are out here in the middle of nowhere.’

Solway smiled. It felt like the first genuine smile she’d made at another human being aside from Bart for quite some time. The sudden tears in her eyes were probably from the wind rushing down this slope and she wiped them away quickly with the hand not holding onto her forgotten jeans.

‘Thankyou,’ she said.

‘You’re welcome.’