‘Nup. Start with the other books first. I’m reading this one.’
THE SECOND CAR WE STOLE
The second car we stole was by far my favourite. It was so great in fact that it deserves a little pause in the story. It looked like this: hot pink and shiny all over like a clichéd bridesmaid’s dress. Its convertible roof was made of a soft white leather like its hubcap rims and stiff ribbed seats; even the steering wheel was in that white leather, and the gearstick. On its front and back there were headlights and rear lights as big as dinner plates surrounded by glossy chrome. It was the length of a minivan, most of it bonnet, like a bonnet that stretched forever until it met the car’s windscreen, which was low enough with the top down that your head poked up over it. Even the radio inside was like those giant old-fashioned radios you see whole families huddled around in 1950s movies.
If I’d owned that car, I wouldn’t have left the keys with that dumbarse boy. They had like 40 of those vintage cars parked in rows down at the local oval in Parkes and there were dozens of people walking around taking photos of themselves in front of them. This young guy, dressed up in a velvet suit (of course), was sitting in our beautiful hot-pink car at the end of one of the rows, reeling off all these facts about cars to anyone who came along, such as that Al Capone had a bulletproof Cadillac and every model is named after a French explorer and they all have a such-and-such engine. But, anyway, there he was, this guy and all his facts. Asheeka asked if we could sit in his car. She said it like she wasn’t taking no for an answer and I don’t think he could do anything but let her. On the back seat there was this long pink silk scarf that Asheeka tied around her neck. She pulled down her glasses, and took herself around to the driver’s-side door where she nudged Mr Facts over and held the steering wheel while he giggled and turned red and said, ‘It’s not for test-driving, little lady.’
That’s when I imagine he sealed his fate. A. Line. Like. That. Who could blame us for stealing his car? But. No. We didn’t do it right then and there. It was after he tried to playfully shove Asheeka out of the car and Asheeka pushed his keys into her pocket.
Yes, of course there was security, but there were also the various car owners who showed up one or two at a time, sometimes to give a car a wax down, sometimes to pick up something they might have left in the glovebox, sometimes to take the car out of the lot and take someone for a spin. We watched the car lot from that fair across the road as we ate our free sausage sangas and six kids from the local school performed a little play about Elvis marrying Priscilla and then, just like that, when it was getting dark, Asheeka began to walk across the road and I followed.
The boy with all the facts was somewhere else. People were showing up here and there to take their cars home for the night. Asheeka opened the front door and waved me into the passenger seat. There was no arguing about who would drive. Asheeka just backed out and then we were on the road, floating in the bigness of that grand old car. She drove slowly. We stuck our arms out the windows like we were in our own parade. On the road out of town, through those quiet streets, kids stopped playing soccer and stared at us, smiling, and the retirees on their porch rocking chairs lifted their arms up and waved. As we drove past that last pub and started to climb the hill, a bunch of guys lifted their beer glasses and cheered. It felt like the entire world was telling us to move forward.
But then, in the strange way the world works, it also asked us to stop. As it turned out, we weren’t really on the way out at all, just on our way up and into outer space. We stopped at what looked like a giant spaceship caught on the edge of a lighthouse. It was bigger even than my mother’s apartment building. Enormous. Gigantic. Expansive. I can’t think of any other synonyms or a simile that doesn’t sound too clichéd. There it was. I’d seen it on TV. The sign in front explained how it was that this giant dish had been the reason everyone in the world knew that humanity had made it to the moon.
‘Now we’re on the moon,’ I said to Asheeka. It seemed like a logical thing to say, as strange as it sounded, with our lives being the way they were.
‘You’re always on the moon inside your head,’ Asheeka responded, the side of her lip twitching up into a grin.
‘No, this was how we saw the real, real moon. Not the one inside my head. I remember my nan talking about the Parkes dish and Buzz Aldrin and the first pictures of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon. You know, the cameras they used on that first rocket to the moon, they shot pictures to this satellite dish and they bumped all around the world and landed on the TV sets.’
‘Yeah. Year nine. They made us study that. I remember the pictures in our history book, looking like this.’
‘Nan said they were one of the first families in the neighbourhood to get a TV so everyone came over to their place to watch it. I remember her saying that everyone was sitting in their living room and no one could breathe.’
‘They were probably waiting for pictures of explosions or aliens or maybe just the darkness of a TV screen with no reception . . .’
‘But instead they got this guy dressed up like a giant white bubble and everyone was clapping and screaming. Nan said everyone was so proud, her and Pop and everyone there, even the people like them who came from other countries, they were all so proud, like each one of them had helped that astronaut get there.’
Asheeka got out of the car and walked towards the dish. The lights around the bottom were lit up dazzlingly white against the night time and it hit the grass and the trees so that there was something of a green afterglow everywhere. She touched the bricks on the tower underneath the dish and looked up towards the sky. ‘So we could send messages to space and back?’
‘I suppose,’ I said, walking over and sitting near her on the grass. ‘We could send messages to space. I think they take a long time to get there. Like you’d be sending a message to the future.’
‘To the future,’ she said, without a lot of enthusiasm, and started walking slowly around that building, her hand trailing along the brick surface.
‘What would you want to say?’ I asked.
She tilted her head and spoke up towards those huge curves of metal above us. ‘The future. I don’t think I’ve got one. You know, people like you and Catherine, you’ll go off to university and I’ll just be nowhere, working in a shop or something, helping my mum. Marrying some loser.’
‘That’s not true. You’re #Illstealcarswithyou Asheeka,’ I said.
‘You’re smart, you know. You used to be smart anyway, like get good grades and stuff. I don’t know why you’re messing it all up.’
‘Because . . .’
‘Because you’ve got no reason.’ She moved back away from the dish and pointed up. ‘Look at those stars.’
She was right. All those stars. Sometimes at night, lying here inside this place, I look out the window and I see them there. Bright and burning and aching. All those stars.
THE TURNING
There was a certain kind of satisfaction in one thing leading to the next and then to the next. I drove the car away from that observatory. We rolled down the windows and you could tell that the wet was about to come – the kind of rain that you feel in the air before it hits because it’s been so long since you’ve seen rain that even the hint of it coming makes you feel like you can breathe deeper and slower for a moment. Asheeka had her arm out the window, her fingers stretched wide open like she was catching every hint of the breeze that was starting to roll in. I slowed down briefly near a field of some sort of plant that was so yellow you could see it, even in this darkness.
And then there were the lights of a police car flashing towards us, a kilometre or so behind us on that long flat road, and then I wasn’t sure anymore that I wanted whatever it was that the next thing was going to lead to. I put my foot straight down on the accelerator and we jerked quickly forward until the needle on the speedometer hovered at 75 miles per hour and the car began to shake and I had to slow down to 65.
This was not the way that
cop chases went in the movies.
‘What are we doing?’ Asheeka put her hand on the doorhandle, like my dad did every time I turned a corner when he was teaching me how to drive. It was like she’d been asleep for hours and had suddenly woken up.
‘I don’t know.’ I was looking everywhere for a cross street to turn into but there wasn’t one. That road was a long straight line that cut through different squares of wheat and dust and brown grass. I could see another police car with flashing lights now, approaching from behind. ‘They’re coming for us.’
Asheeka looked into the rear-view mirror. I could see her face in the corner of my vision, the red drained out of her cheeks, looking so not like Asheeka at all. And they were there, those two cop cars were right behind us for a brief moment before they pulled around to our right and overtook us and kept on speeding down that road and into the sky. I thought my heart, at that moment, was going to leap out of my mouth and land on the windscreen.
And then, if I’m being honest about it, I did one of the many, many inexplicable things that I’ve done. I turned a hard left into the field beside us and I pushed my foot down on the accelerator as hard as I could so that the car would spin out. That field of the driest, driest brown turned smooth and slippery below the tyres. The trees stood there silently, leaning their branches out to stop us. We spun again and again and I was up there in those stars. I was sliding down the Milky Way.
And then I was out of the car in the middle of the field where Asheeka had dragged me. I was outside in the dark and then I was inside myself again. I watched a bolt of lightning break the sky open, then rain fell on my face and in my hair and on my clothes. I opened my mouth and for the first time in a long time the air didn’t taste like dust.
Asheeka stood over me, her hair matted and sticking to her cheeks, she looked at me for a moment like she was staring at some sort of wounded animal, and then she leaned down and slapped me, her hand like concrete against my cheek.
JAILBIRDS
In the morning we woke up in that car on the side of the road across from Lithgow Correctional Centre. The car was far too pink, the jail was far too grey, and the white leather seats hurt against the dark sky. I tried to count the number of days we had been away now: 11, maybe 12.
I was looking at the messages my dad had sent me on Facebook Messenger. He was home now. Safe. He’d had to go home because my mother wasn’t doing so well and she didn’t really have anyone else.
I could hear Asheeka peeing as she leaned against the door of the passenger seat I was sitting in. She turned around and looked at me and said, ‘You know, you are not in fact invisible. Even when you’re so up in your head you don’t know what’s going on here in the real world, there are always people here looking at you. Like when you decide to purposely make a car go spinning out of control in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, I’m there with you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t do that to me again.’
She backed away from the car and walked further up to where that fence was and I watched her kick at the dirt with her thongs and I thought of those red leather–soled shoes she always insisted on wearing down Church Street on a Saturday night. She turned around and ran her finger along the bonnet of the car.
‘I’m tired of being a girl in boys’ cars,’ she said. ‘I like this one. It’s pink. I’m going to take it home and drive right over Arnold with it in that McDonald’s car park.’ She took the phone from my hand and showed me a message that Arnold had sent her. It said he was going to make sure she spent the rest of her life in jail for what she’d done. ‘I’m not ending up there,’ she said, pointing to the jail in front of us.
‘I think we have to go home,’ I said. I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror. My hair was still full of mud from last night and it sat up on the top of my head in a messy bun held together with a small twig.
‘I don’t know. I think you need to go home,’ Asheeka said. ‘No one ever asks me what I want and now I’m saying it. I want this car. This road.’
‘I wanted a lot of things. You know, I wanted to be thinner, I wanted people to like me more. I’m sorry again that I did that to you. The thing with the photos.’
‘I can’t believe I ever let him do that to me.’
‘Not your fault.’
‘Not entirely, but I could have said no. I didn’t know that then but I could have said no.’
‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no,’ I started to sing it like an anthem. ‘No, no, no, girls in boys’ cars. Sometimes you can’t say no, even though you know you should. Like everywhere I look people are like, “Girl Power”, “Me Too”, Beyoncé and Lizzo and all that. Everyone is singing about how girls rule the world and all, but you still can’t say no.’
‘I saw him, you know, I saw what Tom did to you in that parking lot the night we stole the car.’
I’d left that bit out of the story out when I wrote it before. I guess I was still trying to work out what it meant. But I didn’t realise that Asheeka saw it. I was staring up at that big McDonald’s M when Tom came up from behind me and tried to put his hand into the back of my dress. He did it like it was nothing, just stepped up behind me, one arm around my waist pressing me back into his body, the other one right up inside my bra.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t do anything. I just climbed into that car because I couldn’t stand any of the boys anymore.’
‘I couldn’t stand it anymore either. Those boys. That bruise you had on your face one time. Everything that every boy means when they use the word slut. That night. Wanting Jake to want me again. Standing there with Tom against my back, with a scream in my throat that wouldn’t come out.’
She walked slowly around to the front of the car. I watched her flick her thongs off and crawl gently up the bonnet, turning herself slowly around until her bum was in the middle of the windscreen.
‘That wasn’t all. It wasn’t everything that happened. You didn’t see it. I called my dad after that. I told him that I wanted him to come and get me from that parking lot. I told him that I needed him, that I didn’t feel safe. I saw him stand too long there on the pavement across the road and he just stood there and stood there. And I knew that the noise and the concrete and the white heat of that M was burning into his skin. I knew he was going to slip up. He slipped up. He turned around. Never crossed the road.’
‘I want someone who will always cross the road for me.’
‘Me too.’
AUSTRALIANA
The song on the radio said it was Friday night and things were pumping but inside the pub there was just a little old lady eating an egg and lettuce sandwich and a guy drinking a beer while watching the football in overdue-for-a-wash overalls.
The most interesting-looking person in the place was the woman behind the bar, who, as my mother would have said, looked far too old to have fire engine–red streaks in her hair and zigzags shaved into her undercut. She came over close to where Asheeka and I were drinking our lemon, lime and bitters, flipping through the six-week-old newspapers, and waiting for our hair to dry after we’d washed it in the sinks at the petrol station down the road. This woman was wiping down a bunch of already clean tables and chairs and glancing up at us as she did it. You could tell she was taking in every detail.
‘And what are you guys doing?’
‘We’re drinking lemon, lime and bitters because you wouldn’t serve us beers,’ Asheeka replied. Behind the bar there were signs advertising crocodile and emu pizza and a number of statues of Australian icons like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, all made out of small seashells glued together.
‘Ah, smart-arses,’ she responded, and wound her way back to some tables and chairs further away which also didn’t need cleaning before coming back. ‘But why you here? Why you in this pub?’
Asheeka looked up, studied the guy at the bar and the old lady taking small, slow bites of her sandwich. ‘Just, you know, come to see the sights.’
‘Like what?�
�
‘You know, like the trees and the nature.’
‘But it’s all burned down. You know, Gospers Mountain, a lot of the Blue Mountains. Couple of months ago we were packed out with bus-loads of tourists, now we’ve just got Mave from down the road come in to have a sandwich ’cause she feels sorry for us. Nothing to see,’ the bar lady repeated like she wanted us to know that we were 110 per cent full of shit.
She leaned against a bar stool and took a closer look at us. I bit my nails. The whole thing reeked of being put in the naughty corner in primary school because you’d lied about pulling someone’s hair. And then she went in for the kill. ‘You know the trees and the nature are all dead, right?’
The guy in the overalls looked at us and said, ‘Quit it, Denise.’
‘That woman is so nosey,’ Asheeka said to overalls guy as Denise walked away.
‘I can hear you,’ Denise shot back from behind the bar.
I looked up at the ceiling. It had those kind of fancy patterns in the corners and around the light fittings that you find in really old homes. More people started to enter the bar. Another guy in overalls who knew overall guy number one and a twenty-something man who looked like an old-school goth in tight black jeans and a Metallica t-shirt. Old-school goth man went behind the bar and helped Denise carry a big beer keg with no top out to the back garden behind the pub. I was watching him hanging pink paper lanterns across the back fence when Denise suddenly returned with the burgers we’d ordered.
She gestured out towards the back and said, ‘We’re having a party. You guys should join us.’
‘What for?’ Asheeka asked, like she was just going to pretend this woman wasn’t continually using us for her personal entertainment.
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