Rockline Rot
By the time the plane touched down, the sky had gone that flat Pilbara grey before sunrise. Heat waited on the tarmac like a held breath.
Dean shuffled down the stairs with the rest of the crew. Steelcaps knocking on metal, hi-vis shirts glowing under the floodlights. Someone cracked a joke about another two weeks of ‘golden handcuffs.’ Laughter shot up, thin and hard.
Dean smiled because everyone else did.
The air hit him. Dry. Tasted of dust and aviation fuel. Red grit slid under his boot as he stepped off the last stair. He looked toward the black outline of the hills. Low, blunt, watching.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He knew who it wouldn’t be.
On the bus out to camp, he scrolled anyway. Group chats, footy tips, a power bill reminder. A spam text about a competition he’d never entered. No message from Mel. No photo of the kids with breakfast bowls and bed hair, faces tilted toward the camera.
He opened the last photo he’d saved instead. Two figures at Scarborough beach, backs to him, knee-deep in white water. His son with floaties halfway up his arms. His daughter’s plaits crooked, shoulders pink. The sky behind them blue enough to hurt.
He zoomed in until the pixels broke apart.
‘Oi, Dino,” the bloke across the aisle said. “You on nights this week, or what?’
‘Yeah, mate.’
‘Good. You look like shit.’
Dean snorted. “Cheers, cobber.”
The bus rolled through scrub that went on forever. Tufts of spinifex like barber’s heads splash across the red. Conveyor belts cut the land in straight lines. Piles of ore sitting under harsh lights, huge and still, like someone had poured a new colour onto the earth.
The sun began to haul itself up. Light hit the tin roofs of camp, the fences, the rows of white dongas on stilts. Everything flashed at once, a sudden knife of brightness. No shade yet, only glare.
Back in Perth, Mel would be making school lunches. Peanut butter she once said she hated scraping, because it stuck to the knife and the sink and the kids’ fingers. He pictured her hands. Saw her peel an apple in one long curl. Saw her tap ash from a ciggie out the back when she thought he was still sleeping on his first day of RnR.
He blinked and the dongas were right there, close enough to touch.
Another swing. Another fourteen days in the red hell.
He told himself he wouldn’t think about the last one. Or the one before that. Or the phone call in the cramped quiet of his room, when Mel had said, ‘You’re not seeing them until the lawyer sorts contact. This isn’t safe for us. I’m done.’
He had asked, ‘What do you mean, not safe?’ although he knew.
She had said, ‘Listen to yourself. Listen to how fast you talk. You’re grinding your teeth on the phone. I hear it. You think they don’t? You’re not here, and when you are, you’re not here.’
The line had gone silent after. Only his own breath, hot in his ear.
He’d tried to fix things. Cut down. Sleep more. Eat. Drink less on shift change. Problem was, the camp never slept. Someone was always awake, always under the lights, always ready with a pipe or a baggie in a lunchbox, folded into dirty socks or an used Milo tin.
‘Rock keeps the roster turning,’ Baz had told him, the first time. ‘Management loves it. Twelve-hour shifts feel like six. You smash through the hours. Bonus for them.’
They’d been out the back of A-block, between the laundry and the skip bin. The air stunk of detergent and rotting food. The sky had been sprayed with stars. Baz held a homemade glass pipe with a burnt metal stem. The shard in the bowl caught the light. Clear, then cloudy.
Dean had laughed. ‘Since when are you an economist, mate?
‘Since they started payin’ me to break my own brain.’
Rock had hit like a drill bit through his chest. White light behind the eyes. Teeth grinding until his jaw ached. Thoughts racing, clean and sharp. Talk came out in long runs. Jokes. Plans. Stories that went nowhere.
The world narrowed to a corridor of purpose. Drive truck. Load ore. Follow procedures. Hit targets. Who needed sleep with this under the skin. Who needed anything.
He liked the way sounds slowed. The way small details popped. Dust swirls in the headlights. Sweat beads on a supervisor’s neck. The slight tremor in another bloke’s hand when he held his coffee cup.
For a while the rock fixed the ache where his kids should have been. The empty house back in Balga. The silent phone. The way Mel’s face had hardened over the years, from soft annoyance to flat rage.
On days off he would hit Bayswater bottle-o, then sit in his dark loungeroom with the curtains pulled, TV on low, jaw clenched, heart racing. Messages came in from boys at site. Photos of pokies, pub toilets, girls in club bathrooms. He answered with laughing emojis. Threw his phone aside. Walked laps of the kitchen until his legs burned.
He tried to ring his kids. Went straight to voicemail.
‘Hey, it’s Dad,’ he said, voice high and brittle. ‘I’m at work. Saw a big lizard. Bigger than you, Maxy. Don’t tell Mum I said that.’ He laughed alone. ‘Love you. Miss you. I’ll see you soon, yeah.’
He listened to the message back after. Hated how he sounded. Strung out, breathy. Like someone else.
When they brought in a contractor crew from a town two hours down the highway, things shifted.
Warraku sat in a hollow between rusted hills. A few streets, a pub, a servo, a cop shop, a clinic with barred windows. People said the gear there came in with the rail. Cheap. Flooded every corner. Kids sitting on crates outside the deli with glassy eyes. Old men with arms like dry sticks, sleeves rolled down no matter the heat.
First time Dean went down, he sat in the back of Baz’s ute with two other blokes. Dust billowed up behind them, thick enough to eat. Wind slapped their faces, dry and bitter.
‘What’s wrong with the usual?’ Dean shouted over the rattle.
Baz flicked his ciggie out the window. ‘Too many eyes in camp. This is better. You’ll see.’
They checked into the pub. Twenty bucks for a sheet that smelled of mould and stale piss. The aircon wheezed in the window, fought and lost against the heat.
A skinny man with faded tattoos and a mining logo cap waited near the ice freezer outside. Baz hugged him like family. Money swapped hands in a casual grip. Rock for some. Bags of fine brown powder for others.
Dean watched one of the older fitters, Taz, touch the powder with the tip of his finger, rub it on his gums, eyes half closed.
‘Good gear,’ Taz said. ‘City stuff’s rubbish compared to this.’
Dean took his usual, the shard wrapped in foil. Baz nodded toward the powder.
‘When the glass stops giving you that first kick, this is next level,’ he said. ‘Floats you. Smooth. No jitters. No jaw. You drift. You know all your pain? Goes dead quiet.’
All your pain.
Dean’s throat tightened.
‘Not my scene,’ he said, swallowing and realising he was hardly even convincing himself.
‘Suit yourself,’ Baz said. ‘Door’s open when you get sick of vibrating out of your skin.’
He tried to believe the rock still worked. Tried to squeeze the last hits of sparkle from it. After a month, then two, the comedowns bit harder. His skin crawled. Nights stretched, thin and cruel. He couldn’t slow his own head. Couldn’t sit still for more than a minute without feeling a wave of grief crash in, heavier each time.
He lay in his donga one afternoon before shift, curtains drawn against the glare. Aircon clunking. The thin mattress sagged under his weight. An empty coffee cup sat on the bench, ring of dried brown stuck to the bottom. His phone rested on his chest. He’d sent three messages to Mel that week. Simple ones. Hope you’re good. How are the kids? Let me know if you need anything.
No reply.
He opened a video from three years back instead. Max at kindy sports day, socks falling down. Ella in a hat too big for her head. Mel filming. Her laugh in the background, lighter then.
Dean pressed the phone to his forehead. His chest hurt.
Rock did nothing for that. Only made the edges sharper.
The next run to Warraku, he went straight to the man near the ice freezer.
‘Want to try the brown this time,’ Dean said.
The bloke looked him over. ‘You FIFO?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thought so. You mob keep this town fed.’
Dean tried to joke. ‘Glad I can do my bit.’
The man shrugged. ‘No one else gives a shit.’
He handed over a small bag. Powder fine as dust, the colour of dirty sugar.
First time, Taz fixed him up in the motel bathroom. Taz’s hands were steady, movements practiced. No fuss. No talk. Dean watched water swirl, watched the cotton ball sink, watched the barrel fill, cloudy and warm.
He felt the prick, then the surge. A wave rolled through his body, heavy and slow. Heat bloomed in his chest. Limbs turned to sandbags. Noise outside the thin bathroom door faded, then warped. The guilt, the clawing grief, the endless replay of Mel’s last words, all sank somewhere beneath the floorboards.
He sat on the toilet lid, head against the tank, eyes half open. The tiles blurred. His heartbeat slowed.
‘I get it now,’ he murmured.
Taz rinsed the spoon. ‘Yeah bruh,’ he said. ‘That’s the trap, man.’
Heroin did what rock stopped doing. Took away the engine that never shut off. Rested his bones in glue. Gave him a pocket of nothing where the hurt lived.
He told himself it would be a once-off. Then something for bad nights. Then something for bad swings. He drew lines in his head, then crossed each one.
The town around them sank further. More boarded windows. More kids with slow eyes. Police cars crawled the streets, then stopped bothering. The clinic put up posters about bloodborne viruses and overdose response. No one read them.
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At camp the safety talks continued. Slips, trips, falls. Mental health blurbs read off cards. Posters on the mess wall with hotlines no one rang.
Dean’s eyes grew darker, even when he slept. Weight dropped off his frame. He pulled his belt two notches tighter. His hard hat sat loose on his head.
‘Everything all right, Dino?’ his shift boss asked on a pre-start one morning. ‘You look… tired.’
‘Kids woke up at three,’ Dean said. ‘FaceTime. Couldn’t tell them no.’
The lie slid out smooth. People nodded, sympathetic. No one asked why his kids never featured on his socials anymore.
Three swings later, he found himself in a shack outside Warraku, not even bothering with the donga. Some bloke Baz knew had a place out near the old dog track. Transportable, half sunk, fibro walls stained with smoke and handprints. Couch cushions gutted, yellow stuffing spilling out. A fridge that clicked but rarely cooled. Piles of take-away containers, sour with old sauce.
The yard held three wrecked cars, a washing machine, two dead fridges, and a couch with no legs. Red dust coated everything, as if the earth had slowly climbed up for a better look.
A brown dog lay under a rusted Hilux, too hot to move. Flies crawled over its eyes. It twitched once, slow, then went still again.
Inside, the air had weight. Smoke. Sweat. Vinegar from old cleaning fluid. The sweet-sour tang of bin juice. An orange curtain hung limply over the single window, blocked most of the light. What light slipped through turned the room the colour of piss.
Music drifted from a small radio on the counter. Thin, tinny. There was laughter from the kitchen, then a cough that went on too long.
Dean sat on a sunken couch, needle still hanging from his arm. Third night into his swing. Twelve hours on, twelve “off,” although there was no off now, only a different kind of grind.
His hi-vis shirt stuck to his skin. Dark patches under the arms. Red dust in the fabric, permanent now. Work boots untied, tongues hanging like dead tongues.
His head lolled to one side. His vision traced the brown water stain on the ceiling, followed the shape of it until it looked like a map of a country he didn’t know. A lizard skittered across the wall above the TV, freeze-framed for a second beside a warped poster of a band he recognised from the ‘90s, then vanished behind a crack.
Someone in the far corner giggled. A thin woman with track marks up both arms lay curled on a mattress, hair stuck to her cheek. A man next to her scratched at his neck until he broke skin and carried on.
Dean’s hand dangled off the side of the couch. Red dirt gritted under his fingertips. His knuckles were grazed. He couldn’t remember why.
Outside, a road train bellowed, gears grinding on a distant slope. The sound vibrated through the thinly clad shack, setting the walls shivering. The entire structure trembled, then settled back on its stumps. Dust drifted down through a crack in the ceiling and landed on his face, mixed with sweat, turned to mud trails near his eyes.
His phone waited in his pocket. He felt the shape of it against his leg. A brick. A stone. A last connection to a life that felt like it belonged to someone else.
He thought about pulling it out. Calling Mel. Saying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sick. I need help.’ Saying, ‘Tell them I love them.’ Saying, ‘I saw a goanna bigger than the ute. Maxy would have loved it.’ Saying any kinda bullshit just to go back to what was.
His hand didn’t move.
He saw Ella’s school drawing on the old fridge door in his mind. Four stick figures under a blue sky. One tall. One slightly shorter with long hair like hers. Two tiny ones, arms out wide. A sun in the corner, with a smiling face and straight lines for rays. She had written ‘My famly’ under it in shaky letters.
That fridge now stood in a rental house in a suburb he no longer entered. The drawing might still be there, or some new bloke’s footy schedule might cover it. He didn’t know.
Sweat rolled into his ear. He heard each drip as if the room had gone silent. In truth, noise still thrummed around him. Breaths. Sniffs. The flick of lighters. A groan. The radio now mushy with ads. Voices trying to sell life insurance and fast food to people whose teeth had gone and whose hearts rattled like loose cans.
Heat pressed in from every side, even with the sun going down. Metal outside stored the day, radiated it back into the shack. The floorboards seemed to hum with it. His boots baked his feet. His skin felt too small.
The land outside lay open and merciless. No trees high enough for shade. No river with real water. Only creeks that ran once in a decade and left stories behind.
Flies crawled in under the door. Found his face. Found the glossy rim of his nostrils. He twitched, but slow.
‘Dino,’ Baz said from somewhere behind him. ‘You still with us, mate?’
Dean tried to answer. His tongue felt thick. Mouth cotton dry. The needle in his arm wobbled when he shifted, tore a little. A bead of blood gathered around the metal, fat and bright.
He could smell his own sweat. Sour. Rancid. Under that, the faint detergent left from camp laundry. A ghost of machine-clean over human rot.
‘I’m good,’ Dean slurred.
Baz laughed. ‘No you’re not. But join the club.’
Dean’s eyelids drooped. He let them. Behind them, colours bled. Red of dirt. Orange of hi-vis. The pale blue of Mel’s eyes when she used to look at him in the morning before the kids woke up.
Her last look had been different. No blue. Grey, like sky over freeway concrete.
‘You said you’d stop,’ she’d told him, voice low so the kids wouldn’t hear. ‘You said you’d talk to someone.’
He’d rubbed his face with both hands. ‘I’m working on it, babe.’
‘You’ve been saying that for a year.’
He’d snapped then. Raised his voice. Thrown blame at rosters, bosses, money. Told her she had no idea what the desert does to a person. How the heat stripped skin from bone. How the red dust got into lungs and hair and bed sheets and never washed out.
‘You think you’re the only one hurting?’ she’d said, shaking. ‘They wait for you at the window. Every plane noise, they think it’s you. Then you walk through the door and you’re wired out of your skull. You clean the shed at midnight. You talk to the TV like it’s more important to you than we are. You don’t hear them. You think you’re here, but you’re not here.’
He’d laughed then, bitter. ‘So what, you want me to quit and work at Bunnings? Push trolleys at Coles?’
‘I want you alive,’ she whispered.
The shack walls creaked again. Out in the yard, wind caught an empty drum and rolled it against a fence. The sound went on, hollow and dull, like a slow heartbeat.
Dean’s chest tightened. For a second he thought he might stop breathing. Part of him welcomed it. Part of him screamed.
He opened his eyes. The room smeared. He saw his own hand, palm up, veins blue under the skin. The syringe still perched, angled, absurd.
He stared at it. The thing looked like a small flagpole sunk in a dying country.
The environment had always worked against him. The site. The roster. The heat. The airport lounge with its news screens full of other people’s lives. The demountables at camp. The single-lane highway home with its roos and road trains and crosses at the verge where people had fallen asleep and gone into the scrub.
Now even this room played its part. Every stain. Every buzzing fly. Every breath from the bodies around him. The land outside, silent and red, waiting to bleach whatever bones it received.
He thought of his son’s face when he’d last carried him to bed. Heavy head on his shoulder, breath warm on his neck. Tiny hand clutching his hi-vis shirt front. The boy had murmured, half asleep, ‘You smell like work.’ There’d been pride in that, once.
Now he smelled like heroin sweat and stale dust.
A sound tore out of him. A small one. Nothing heroic. A soft grunt, almost a sob, almost a laugh. He wasn’t sure which.
His hand twitched. Fingers closed around the barrel. He pulled the needle out. A thin line of blood dragged behind it, smeared over his skin. He pressed his thumb to the puncture. The world tilted.
Baz swore. ‘Careful, mate. You’re gonna bruise.’
Too late for that, Dean wanted to say. Whole life was one big bruise now. Purple. Swollen. Waiting for the next hit to land.
He slid off the couch. Knees hit the floor. Dust puffed up, filling his nose. He coughed hard, stomach clenching. Someone shouted from the kitchen. Someone else laughed.
He crawled toward the doorway, palms scraping on splintered wood. The door frame felt cool against his shoulder, even in the heat.
Outside, the sky had gone dirty pink. The horizon shimmered. The ground still held the day, radiating waves of warmth that made the air above it wobble.
He staggered to his feet. Legs shaking. His boots sank a little in the loose dust, fine as talc. The dog under the Hilux watched him without lifting its head, eyes milky.
He leaned on the bonnet of a dead car. The metal burned his palm. He didn’t move it. The pain anchored him to the moment.
In the distance, the lights of the mine flickered on. Tall poles topped with white glare. Conveyor belts glowed. Trucks crawled along haul roads, tiny from here, each one a giant metal beetle carrying another load of shit from the hole in the earth.
He reached for his phone with shaking fingers.
Screen lit his face, cold and blue in the dusk. His blurred reflection in the glass. Hollow eyes. Cheeks sunk. Grey stubble. A stranger in a high-vis shirt, collar dark with salt.
Contacts list: Mel. His thumb hovered.
His heart hammered against his ribs. Sweat slid down his back.
He imagined her seeing his number. Seeing his name. The pause before she answered. Or the way she might let it ring out and send it to voicemail.
He pictured the kids at the kitchen table. Homework spread out. TV on. A new voice from the hallway. A man he didn’t know saying, ‘Phone’s ringing, babe.’
Dean’s thumb trembled. He lowered the phone.
For a moment he thought about dialing a number on one of those EAP posters from the mess. Some anonymous voice line with a cheery slogan. Talk to someone. You are not alone.
But he knew he was alone. The desert had a way of proving that. No matter how many bodies you crammed into a donga, no matter how loud the wet mess got on seafood night, the land around all of it stayed silent and deep and old. Watching.
The cough came back, harsh. He doubled over, spat red mud and spit into the dust. It soaked in at once, disappeared.
Behind him, the shack door creaked. Laughter spilled out, then cut off. Someone shouted for a lighter. The radio pinged into another song.
He stood there, caught between the lit windows of the mine and the dim orange square behind him. Between two places that chewed people up in different ways.
His pulse thudded in his ears. Each beat a small reminder.
For now, he was still here.
The phone weighed heavy in his hand. The land pressed against his skin from every side. The swing had barely started. Twelve nights to go.
The desert waited, patient as time.
Antony Broad writes about Australian crime and corruption, where fact and fiction share the same dirt.
