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"Yeah. It seems a shame to be leaving." Sally replied. "I'd really like to come back and live here."
About half way between Happy Christmas and Goonabah, they sped past a white ute, heading in the opposite direction. Neither of them even registered the ute as being any different to the rest of the cars they were passing all the time. And they certainly didn't notice the driver. If they had, maybe a lot of things would have turned out very differently for both Sally and Anton - who was at the wheel of the ute. He didn't notice them either.
John had begun to get bored with Mainline and wanted to go back to Sydney to "sort out some business." They'd both started using again, but neither of them had much money. And there really wasn't much of an opening for scamming in Goonabah. It was too small, and whatever minor scams there were had been snapped up by other people years ago. New faces didn't have a hope.
Phil got back from Sydney the morning Anton and John left Goonabah. When he saw him, Anton almost decided to hang around for a few more days. But John would probably just have gone straight back to Sydney and all the effort Anton had put into convincing him to go via Happy Christmas would have been wasted. Besides, he really wanted to see Sally by this time. It had been a couple of months now and he was missing her quite badly. He felt he'd done his smack binge for a while, and he'd rather be with Sally and straight,than using without her. The novelty had worn off a bit with his last habit and he'd almost come back to the point he'd been at when he and Sally had first met. Not quite the same - as he didn't feel too bad about himself using any more - but getting that way.
So they left Goonabah finally, and arrived at Happy Christmas late that afternoon, when the sun was just going down over the hills behind Here.
I won't describe, in too much depth, Anton's feelings at finding Sally had left just that day. You can imagine how he felt. Needless to say, he wasn't very happy. He wandered off into the darkening fringes of the forest, a great weight of depression and frustration bearing down on him. At first he thought about going back to Mainline. But he knew there was no way John would go too. He could have hitched, although after seeing how empty the last couple of hundred kilometres of highway had been, he didn't fancy the prospect. And anyway, the thought of going back on his tracks over four or five hundred kilometres was really depressing and crazy.
In the end, he just gave up. He decided the only thing he could do under the circumstances was carry on moving and go back to Sydney with John. Any other option was just too hard at that time for him to get his brain around.
The whole trip so far seemed like it had been a complete waste of time and energy. He'd had quite a good time on the coast, but for half of it he'd wanted to be moving on. Mainline had been ok, but his stay there had been strange and quite strained. He'd felt really unsettled the whole time, wondering what he was doing in the place. Most of it had felt like he was just marking time, waiting for something. For Sally mainly. He hadn't even been able to see Muz, as she'd gone off to the coast to spend a couple of weeks living on the beach.
And now he was here. It seemed totally pointless. The attractiveness and the power of his surroundings were not completely lost on Anton, but his preoccupation with the situation he was in effectively blanked out most of it. Which was a shame, because if he'd just relaxed a bit and accepted what was happening to him, he would have experienced the strength of where he was much more strongly. This would almost certainly have made him feel a lot better about what was going on in his life. And he would have got a lot of benefit from Happy Christmas. It would have helped him in whatever he decided to do - to go back to Mainline, or to go on to Sydney. Whichever way he'd gone, he would have carried with him a renewed strength from the land he was then on. But it didn't happen that way and he and John ended up driving back down the dirt track to the highway the next morning. Heading for Sydney.
That short visit to Happy Christmas marked the beginning of a long, low period in Anton's life. Up to that point, he'd been happier than he'd been for a long time. But the novelty of being so far from home, of meeting new people and of going to completely new and different places abruptly vanished. It was replaced by a deep loneliness, a feeling of being lost and a disturbing doubt about what he was doing on this side of the world in the first place.
When he got back to Sydney, he got caught up in the vicious circle of heroin addiction again. Although he knew it was really best to lay off drugs at a time like this, that it was best to be straight, to sort your head out in times of crisis, he slipped almost uncontrollably back into using every day. While he was stoned, his troubles seemed a lot further away, less worrying, easier to handle. But as soon as he started coming down, they grew to gigantic proportions and conspired with the other effects of withdrawal to take away his power of reason. All he could do was have some more and keep it all under control for another day. He knew what was happening to him, but he couldn't find the strength to do anything about it.
In contrast to this, Sally began to find herself feeling happier and more settled. She'd been quite upset at getting back to Mainline and finding she'd missed Anton - not once, but twice. However, this didn't last more than a couple of days. She half expected Anton to turn up again to follow her back from Happy Christmas, although she knew deep down he wasn't going to. But she'd come to terms with his absence a long time before (whereas he'd only just begun to miss her) and this latest development wasn't really a major setback.
On top of that, she came away from Happy Christmas with an unusual feeling of strength - of being able to handle anything. Life had taken on a new meaning during her stay there and she felt like she'd left with a little bit of that place inside her. Or she'd left a little bit of herself there, which was still channelling some of the powerful energy of that land into her, wherever she might be.
She settled back into Mainline quite quickly and almost straight away began to try and get her life into some kind of usable state. She began working on the pirate radio station, just doing small bits at first. But she rapidly got to the point where she was knocking up hour long programs about this and that. She learnt a few techniques from the others and developed a few of her own. It came as a surprise to her when she realized she was actually really good at radio despite the primitive equipment she had to work with. People would come up to her in the Starlight and say: "I heard your program on the radio the other day..." They were always complimentary and one or two of them gave her ideas for new things to do, or new angles to approach old topics.
During this period, she started sleeping with Phil. She thought about it for a while before it happened. It was obvious he was interested in her. And she found him really attractive. But she hesitated for a while, feeling that a relationship with him would really complicate things if Anton came back. One day, though, Muz left Goonabah again to go to Sydney and Sally realized she was going there mainly to see Anton. Although she didn't mind this, it triggered something inside her and she thought "why not?" That night she slept with Phil for the first-time.
There was just one more job to do, before they could turn round, step on the gas and prepare for the year-long sleep that would take them back to the pleasant and orderly planet they came from. But what a scummy hole to have to go to first - a dirty overgrown dump that would one day in the far distant future be called "Earth" by it's inhabitants. They felt sorry for the poor bastards they had to drop off there. Well, sort of sorry, anyway. Fancy being stuck for ever on that place!
But they knew the risks when they broke the law. They should have just conformed like everyone else and then they wouldn't be here now. They were all guilty of scratching up bits of concrete and trying to grow things. Growing plants had been illegal for centuries Once, their planet had been wild and overgrown like this one they were heading for now, but years of hard work had cured that. Now they could proudly say that not a single living thing existed on that world. Except for humans, of course!
Using all the ingenuity of their extremely intelligent race they'd replaced trees with solar-powered oxygen-producing machines and all their food came from vast antiseptic factories. None of that dirty plant muck their ancestors used to eat. And the entire surface of that wonderful paradise was paved in beautifully landscaped, coloured concrete. The hideous mess called "nature" was once and for all done away with.
But somehow seeds had survived, passed on from generation to generation of social misfits, reactionaries whose emotional inadequacy made them crave the old ways. And these fools had been caught trying to plant them. A pathetic attempt, of course - the concrete was so thick that not even an atom bomb could crack it. But they'd tried anyway and been caught. And now they were on their way to face their punishment. A just punishment, and one which fitted the crime perfectly. They would be condemned for ever to the nightmarish jungles of earth.
"We've hidden your means of escape somewhere on the planet." the captain told the convicts, just before they took off and left them there. "You'll have plenty of time to look for it!"
The crew laughed as they shot up into the black depths of space again, leaving the group of convicts standing there watching, frightened and bewildered. That was a clever twist to their sentence: a means of escape!
The convicts survived somehow in that disturbing and alien environment. It's amazing that they did, really, as it was so opposite to what they were used to. No concrete. And trees everywhere. Naturally, they developed a two-edged relationship with their new environment. They loved it, because it was like something they had always dreamed of: green, damp, natural. But at the same time they had to fight it, because they didn't understand how to live with it - they'd never had the opportunity to learn before. Now it was a question of survival and they had to make a few decisions fast.
Sadly, in their ignorance, they made the wrong decisions. Instead of relaxing and flowing with their new surroundings, they pushed and fought against it, not realizing, of course that it was just this approach that had left their planet the way it was. And of course as they survived and bred and spread out, so it became ingrained in their culture and they moved around the planet ripping it apart in all sorts of small ways as they went.
The combination of their light skin and the unfriendliness of the darker people who already lived on the planet, forced them into the colder regions. The natives weren't naturally unfriendly, but they didn't like the way this new mob did so much damage wherever they went. So they pushed them back, out of the bits where they lived.
Thousands of generations later, the descendents of the castaways were still at it and, partly as a result of having all but destroyed their bit of the planet, and partly because of a hereditary feeling of being lost and searching for something, they began to spread out over the rest of the planet. Unfortunately, after a while, bits of it started to look like the place where their ancestors had been thrown out of for fighting against that very same thing. (That civilization, by the way, had long since destroyed itself with some nightmarish chemical death. And now the plants, buried centuries before, had finally found a few flaws in the concrete and weakened it enough to break through again.)
But what about the means of escape that the space travellers hid on the planet all those centuries ago? you might ask. Did they ever find it?
Well, yes ... and no ... That is, they found it, but by then they'd forgotten they were looking for it, so they didn't recognize it as having any special extra-terrestrial significance. But that didn't stop them using it. And they're still using it today, to free themselves from life in the penal colony they don't even know they live in.
Whoever added the means of escape to that sentence had a cruel and ironical sense of humour. The crew had planted seeds before they left. And these seeds had quickly sprouted and grown into ... white poppies.
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