Free Draw the Brisbane Line by P.A. Fenton Page A

system.  Rosencrantz .  God, she hoped that wasn’t some kind of omen.  She couldn’t remember the role of the character in the play exactly, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t good.
    She drove through the roundabout, backed by a chorus of honking and cheers.

Chapter 10
     
     
    Tait’s phone was going to overheat and explode, the way he was stabbing and swiping and clicking and swearing at it.
    ‘Fucking come on,’ he muttered every ten seconds or so, always followed by an apology.  ‘Sorry Miss Lucas.’
    ‘Just call me Jenny, please,’ she said after about the eighth time.  She was starting to feel like his teacher, being called Miss Lucas.
    ‘OK, Jenny.  Sorry about the language, it’s just this bloody mobile reception —’
    ‘And don’t apologise for fucking swearing.  You’re likely to hear much worse from me over the next couple of hours.’
    ‘I think it’s going to take more than a couple of hours to get to Brisbane in the traffic we’re about to hit.  We’ll be lucky to get there before dark.  Take a left here.’
    They’d taken a few turns against the flow of traffic and headed back into the low sprawl of suburban Noosa.  It felt wrong to Jenny, not like the road out of town but the road to nowhere.  The houses soon began to thin the further they drove, before abruptly blossoming again as they turned into an entrance to a small golf course.  It was the kind of course created just to sell the property around it for a few hundred thousand more per plot.  Tait often played there, he said, and sometimes caddied.  He directed them to a small ring road which encircled the estate, separating it from the looming bushland like an optimistic firebreak.   They stopped at a metal gate.  The gate guarded a narrow road just barely wide enough to accommodate a car.   The road disappeared into dense bush, eucalyptus and paper bark and all manner of spiky scrub crowding around the thin ribbon of bitumen.  Tait hopped out of the car and swung the gate open and gestured for Jenny to drive through.
    ‘Access road,’ he said.  ‘Not too many people know about it.  Bit of a detour, but it’ll drop us right onto McKinnon Drive, and from there it’s a more or less straight run across to Cooroy.  We can hook up with the highway there.’
    ‘You realise if I hit a big enough pothole on this road, we’ll be utterly fucked.  This car might be pretty, but it possesses absolutely zero off-road handling.  I couldn’t even take it into the underground garage at the apartment because the angles on the ramp were too sharp.’
    ‘We’ll be fine, I drive these roads all the time.’
    She gave him a quick glance.  ‘So where’s your car?’
    ‘Sammo took it.  Said he didn’t want me skipping town.’
    ‘Well, that sounds retarded.’
    ‘Yeah, he’s not the sharpest tool, but he’s a violent bastard.  Into some nasty shit, drugs and stuff.’
    ‘Taking them or selling them?’
    ‘Both.  Shit!  This fucking phone.’
    ‘I don’t think it’s your phone, it’s most likely the network.’
    ‘Have you tried your phone?’
    ‘Um.’ 
    It was a good question.  Where was her phone?  It wasn’t in the front, and she usually kept close at all times like a diabetic with insulin.  In all the chaos of riot and departure, she had committed the modern sin of phone neglect.  ‘Must be in my bag,’ she said, though she couldn’t remember putting it in there.  She last had it when she was helping Kirsty load her car and trying to get through to Dave.  There had still been reception then, but he wasn’t picking up.
    ‘I need to call my uncle in Brisbane,’ Tait said.  ‘Let him know I’m on my way.’
    ‘I’m sure it’s just the network, overloaded.’
    They rounded a bend and she almost stood on the brakes.  Tait lurched forward into his seatbelt with a strangled wheeze and spilled his phone on the floor.  A white Holden Ute was parked across the road, blocking the way