Lost Girls by Graham Wilson Page B

after six the next morning. That was good; she could sleep
on the bus at no cost and her funds were limited.
    Next morning,
in the early dawn, she collected her backpack from the bus and
walked up town in Coober Pedy. She was ravenous and decided to
treat herself to a big plate of cooked breakfast before she checked
out the town. Walking along the main street she found an early
opening cafe.
    It had one
other guest who was starting a big plate of bacon, eggs and
sausages, with a couple tomatoes and mushrooms on the side. The
food smelt and looked delicious.
    She sat down at
the table next to his. When the waiter came she pointed to this
man’s plate and said, in her best and politest Swedish English, “I
would like one meal just like that plate, if you please. I am not
sure what you call it.”
    The man eating
looked up and fixed her with a weather beaten smile. “Oh you just
call it ‘The Works’. Bacon, Egg and Sausage with the works, but
most locals just call it ‘The Works’. I promise it is as good as it
looks.”
    He talked to
her with a distant smile, his eyes crinkled up around the edges. He
was looking both at her and way past her, but with a burning
intensity for both her and the other place. She felt something grab
in the pit of her stomach that she had never felt before.
    It was not
mainly sexual through there was that mixed in, it was a primal
attraction, an almost mindless fatal attraction, as in the movie.
It spoke of danger.
    She had lost
count of the number of men she had shared her body with over the
years. If she felt in the mood and they felt in the mood it was
something she did when the moment was there. She liked the feeling
of a man thrusting with abandon, body out of control, as she clawed
at his back, and sometime bit him, as she thrust back. No doubt she
would do it with this man. She knew already this part would happen
between them. It would be good and wild, the way she liked it.
    But it was
more, something much sharper; it was the element of buried danger
that excited her. Taking up with this man would be going past
life’s safe places. She gone past life’s safe places in her travels
and the physical ordeals she had put herself through. But she had
never done it with a man.
    It was almost
predatory, both of them as looking at the other like two predators
eying off the other to feast on, the female spider and her mate,
except in this case the mate was her equal or more in threat. Her
sixth sense told her this man was dangerous, seriously dangerous,
though not in a callous way. But he was disregardful of danger to
him and to others and of the consequences which may follow his
actions. She had heard of bored sailors playing Russian roulette
with a loaded pistol. It was somehow akin to that. They would take
the shot; some would survive and some not. She now grasped that in
doing this death dance with others lay the supreme thrill; a place
she had eternally searched for in a tame world.
    All this passed
through Elin’s mind in a fraction of a second as she appraised her
co-diner.
    Breaking from
his intense gaze she held out her hand, cool and polite. “I am
Elin, how are you?”
    He responded
with a firm and callused hand. “Name is Mark, Mark B for short. I
am what folks round here call a local to the Outback, that is
anywhere out the back of Australia.”
    “I am from
Sweden, though I think of myself as more of a Norse Viking warrior
from an earlier time, as my father was always telling me stories of
our Viking ancestor heroes,” she said.
    Mark gestured,
“Why don’t you join me, be my Viking Goddess?”
    She moved her
chair to his table.
    They ate with
muted conversation. It was what came after that mattered for them
both. He shared his food with her as she waited for hers. In return
she shared her food with him. Their hands and knees brushed in
passing. She felt a thrill and she knew he felt it too.
    When they had
both finished he said. “My truck is out the back. I have