Whylight

My mother would not be driving me anywhere because she didn’t know how to, and furthermore, we did not own a car. The desert was hot; the sun, some five kilometres away, a furious, unrelenting ball of wrath. I was tucked safely away within the confines of my NASA spacesuit to avoid the subatomic conversion from human being to liquidised sausage sizzle.

Somewhere on the other side of the globe, the sad little village of QT Spoons lives alone and, scientifically speaking, isolated from any form of sunlight three hundred and fifty or so days a year.

It was to Spoons that I now ventured forth, answering my true calling as an underappreciated young detective destined for greatness.

“Belle,” my mum began, before warbling something unintelligible. The spacesuit made it difficult to follow day-to-day conversation. I had to wear it because my skin was extremely sensitive and charred very easily when exposed to sunlight. It was one of the reasons why leaving Alice Springs behind was a good decision on my part. I sign-languaged my mother, indicating that she needed to speak up.

“FUZZWICK’S READY!” she shouted, thrusting into my thickly gloved hands the reins tethered to a tall, woolly creature with a serape draped over its back. As I struggled to clamber onto it, Mum exchanged a slightly edgy look with Dad. No doubt they were wondering their foolproof plan to get me to the airport via llama was going to hold up. Fuzzwick snorted loudly and kicked me in the shin. I stumbled over, and my father helped me up, and pulled me into an awkward can’t-quite-wrap-my-arms-round-your-spacesuit hug.

“I love you Belle,” I think he said, “don’t forget the cover story.” And then he lovingly patted me on the head for about a minute, though the thick spacesuit helmet made it difficult to tell. I suppose it could have been an endangered flying desert bilby relieving itself on top of my head for all I knew.

I clambered onto the llama’s back, successfully this time, and took one last look around the sweeping orange death trap of a sunny desert before waving goodbye to my parents and bolting off into the horizon.

Somehow I made it onto the plane. Liberated from my spacesuit prison, I fully reclined my seat, blissfully ignorant of the disgruntled passenger behind me, and reviewed my so-far case notes. Earlier this week I had received an SOS letter from my estranged grandfather, Chad, asking for my assistance in investigating illegal enchilada smuggling in Spoons. Chad was a police officer. He didn’t get along well with the rest of the family who thought he was completely nuts, but I still felt inclined to accept. This was my first official case, having only ever dealt with petty crime (lollipop snatching, textbook counterfeiting, irresponsible rabbit breeding); often interrupted by my mother’s irritating, bordering on criminal tendency to remove critical evidence from my secret stash under the dishwasher.

I used to visit Chad on the summer holidays, before my mother had a monstrous fistfight with him and defected to Australia. But though we hadn’t seen each other in years, Chad was strangely perky about the whole thing. I sincerely hoped this had more to do with his enthusiasm for scientific investigations rather than a typical-Chad spontaneous desire to hunt mushrooms in the wilderness with me because no one else would.

When I landed in Spoons, it was dark, freezing and bitterly, indisputably, absolutely, unconditionally, irrevocably miserable. Rain spat down violently as I squinted around, finally spotting Chad casually waiting for me under a bright orange umbrella, next to a drenched and half collapsed hotdog stand.

“Yo Bellie!” he called out, saluting me fanatically. Chad has called me ‘Bellie’ ever since I can remember. He has a thing for stomach humour. I approached and he gave me an asphyxiating bear hug. “How’s little Renny doing?” His breath smelled strongly of bad breath. I recoiled slightly, and recited the cover story my parents had devised especially for him. Mum and Dad were brilliant scientists searching for a breakthrough in human photosynthesis, which was why they had to remain in Alice Springs despite the fact that the harsh sun regularly lavished death rays upon me, their only daughter. They were paranoid that Chad might try to steal their idea, so the plan was to tell him that they fared well, and were living in the desert in order to worship the ancient Egyptian sun god, Ra.