Now Showing by Ron Elliott Page B

here. In this house. We’re sitting in the garage.’ She stood and looked in through the glassless window where I’d been hammering the can. ‘The kitchen was in here. Then our room. All three of us used to sleep there. Mum and Dad had the other bedroom. Us and nobody else. In 1899 there were six thousand people here. In 1907 there were fifteen. And then just us in the only viable house left. That’s the history of this town.Boom and bust. Mum wanted us to move out here to be closer to where – Dad was always out here. But we moved back into Coolgardie after a couple of years anyway. There wasn’t any work here – for Mum.’
    Then she turned her back on the house and walked to the other side of the fire and turned to face me, standing up straight, as though doing a speech at school assembly. ‘My belief is this. History starts with us. The only history I care about is what happens between us. That’s when it starts. That’s why I’ve never talked about other things, because they don’t matter.’
    â€˜Us?’
    â€˜Listen to me crap on. Yabber yabber.’ She looked down at the fire with a scared smile.
    I fell in love with her again. I couldn’t not. I stepped out from the wall. I was going to hug her.
    But she looked up at me as though I’d only just arrived. ‘I’ll get a flagon.’
    â€˜Rob.’
    â€˜I’ll get the flagon of reds. Then we can talk. Okay?’
    I nodded. I didn’t want to frighten her off. She’d told me more in the last minute than she’d said in the last couple of months. Maybe more personal stuff than in all the time I’d known her. We had gone to a lot of parties and pubs and bands. We’d seen a lot of movies. We’d made a lot of love. But we had never talked that much about ourselves. It hadn’t seemed necessary.
    She was making the car light flash. I’d saved the interior light when I took the roof off. It was coiled on the back floor of the car and it still worked. Robin had found the point where the button in the door pops out enough to make the light come on. She was opening and closing the passenger door so the light winked on and off, showing her at the car and then gone. The shopfront behind would glow too and be gone. Town, no town; Robin, then no.
    I heard a whine and turned to see a dusty blue heeler coming out of the desert behind the house. It stopped short of the fire and looked back. It was old with lots of nicks out of its grey coat.
    â€˜Here boy,’ I called, but it didn’t move. ‘Yo, Rinnie? Lassie? Here Spot. Fang. Inspector Rex. Heel, Rex. Wolf?’
    The dog wouldn’t budge.
    Robin said, ‘Dog.’ She had brought the flagon back.
    The dog went to her, sniffing and then started to wag its tail.
    â€˜It likes you.’
    Robin sat on a big rock by the fire, looking out at the desert, letting the dog lick her fingers.
    â€˜Here, boy, here.’
    â€˜Dog,’ said Robin.
    â€˜Dog?’
    â€˜That’s his name.’
    The dog still wouldn’t come to me. Robin took a big gulp of red wine as she kept looking into the darkness. She said, ‘Did you hear about the insomniac, agnostic dyslexic?’
    â€˜The what?’
    â€˜He kept waking up worried about whether there was such a thing as a dog.’
    I understood the word dog.
    The dog suddenly turned and ran off.
    A man appeared and walked towards us out of the dark with the dog by his side. His clothes were dusty, as dusty as the dog. He had a beard and a weathered brown face that made it hard to tell his age or his fearsomeness.
    â€˜Gidday. Saw your fire.’
    He stepped into the light, looking at the fire and then the car and back to the rifle on the ground near Robin. He looked up at Robin and he smiled. ‘Hello.’
    â€˜Hello,’ she said.
    The guy said, ‘What you doing all the way out here?’
    â€˜Camping.’
    He nodded and