The Lost Man

by Jane Harper

The pilots worked the land from the air, using noise and movement to herd cattle over distances the size of small European countries.

The man had tried, though. He had chased the shade until he couldn’t anymore.

They lived in a land of extremes in more ways than one. People were either completely fine, or very not.

Nathan could see Xander’s city softness exposed like a layer of new skin. His edges had been gently rounded by nuanced debate and foreign coffee and morning news. They had not been chipped away and sanded down to a hard callus.

Nothing was wrong, and that in itself felt very wrong indeed.

He was holding them back as hard as only teenage boys can—pale and tight-faced with the effort of shoring up the dam—but the grief was lapping at the edges.

A place where rivers flooded without rain and seashells fossilized a thousand miles from water and men who left their cars found themselves walking to their deaths.

She’d made the right sympathetic noises as he’d pulled on his shirt and shoes, while also managing to convey on some level that she was a little pissed off he was leaving her in the middle of the night for a drama involving his own family. It was funny how high and bright the red flags flew in hindsight, Nathan often thought.

The rules of the outback might seem brutal, but they were written in blood.

If it were his car found abandoned, and he in trouble or missing. Would the local passerby call it in? Or would all those people who still turned their backs on him discover that, actually, when push came to shove, they were no better than he was? He honestly didn’t know.

Leaving someone stranded out there was not a matter of manners, it was life and death in the most literal sense. Nathan had single-handedly managed to do the unthinkable and unite the entire town—white, Indigenous, old, young, long-standing rivals, firm friends. Thirty-year grudges were set aside for as long as it took to discuss Nathan’s transgression.

Not a single white baby born in the town had survived until the 1920s.

She meant School of the Air, Nathan knew. He had gone through all that himself, mucking around while he was supposed to be listening in to some faraway teacher crackling on the radio.

He’d learned a long time ago to think first and talk second, because Carl did not like getting the wrong answer. I was scared, Cam. I was scared of Dad. I’m sorry. I know you didn’t do anything wrong. Nathan wanted to say all that and more to Cameron, and he did, later, several times. It made no difference. It took a long time for Cameron to look Nathan in the eye again. When he did, it was through a shadow of betrayal that never, in twenty years, fully went away.

The cattle were so free range, they were almost feral.

Antivenin was expensive and had a short shelf life, so the medical center in town did not keep supplies.

His early desperation for human contact had changed too. Other people’s company should have been a relief, but now just stirred up complicated emotions that he later had to deal with all on his own, long after they were gone.

Her grief was the raw and messy kind, and Nathan could see people glancing away, uncomfortable.

They know that could’ve easily been you we buried out there. Still could be, one day soon, if they’re not careful. And that’d be something they’d all have to live with. This kind of thing brings things into perspective, puts people in a forgiving mood.”

It had taken Nathan a long time—years—to get used to his life as it was. The swift cut of rejection had hurt enough at the time when it was sharp and fresh, but it was the way the wound had festered that had been the killer. He had got through it once, barely. He knew with wholehearted certainty that he could not do it again.

After Kelly died, he had felt his fingertips starting to slip. He had been holding on for so long, and it was too hard, and he was just tired. He had felt himself, for the first time, simply giving up. Not all at once, and not entirely willingly, but a little at a time, slipping away, day after day. And while this was going on, his bloody brothers had known all along what had happened.

A long way from home, Nathan thought. Few local connections, if any. Backpackers might enjoy the flexibility of casual postings, but it left them vulnerable in other ways. Everyone knew that. Cameron knew that. And Nathan found himself thinking again of that other backpacker, more than twenty years ago, with her messy braid glowing orange by the flickering light of the campfire. The blunted edges of the memory had suddenly become cutthroat sharp, threatening to slip and slice him if not handled with care.

Either way, she was out there on her own in the dark with this big, insistent bloke.” He looked at Nathan. “Someone can decide it’s in their best interests to agree to something, but a choice is only really a choice if there’s a genuine alternative. Otherwise it’s manipulation and it’s taking advantage.” He shrugged. “It’s rape.”

“Life out here is hard. We all try to get through the best way we can. But trust me, there’s not a single person here who isn’t lying to themselves about something.

He knew how to do it too, so I’d get a few kilometers before it would drop out. Like last year, I was stuck for nearly five hours, waiting for him to come and drag me home like an animal. I couldn’t trust the car, and if I couldn’t trust it, he knew I couldn’t drive it. And I couldn’t take the girls away in it.”

“How is he going to protect me from my husband in the next room? He’s three hours away in the police station on a good day. Do you know what an angry person can do in three hours?”

With Cam safely in the ground, it seemed everyone felt more able to say what they couldn’t when he was walking around.

And not least because sometimes, quite a lot of the time, he felt connected to the outback in a way that he loved. There was something about the brutal heat, when the sun was high in the sky and he was watching the slow meandering movement of the herds. Looking out over the wide-open plains and seeing the changing colors in the dust. It was the only time when he felt something close to happiness. If Xander couldn’t feel it himself, and Nathan knew not everyone could, then he couldn’t explain it. It was harsh and unforgiving, but it felt like home.

“I’d started to wonder if Cam was more like your dad than he let on. Maybe worse, even, because he was clever. He could hide it better.”