Up ahead a two-lane flared intersection, then a large roundabout for cars to circle in pairs. A yellow Cortina is curving in alongside us. It’s coming in fast, the Cortina – it’s really flying. It reaches us and holds our speed so we swing around the island of the roundabout together. Father man isn’t sure of the exit. He jerks his head about in exasperation. My mother is holding the map of Australia out in front of her. She shakes it as if rattling the paper will soothe father man and prevent, or cover, his anger.
Through my window I can see inside the yellow Cortina. There is just the one person, a young woman, driving and opening her mouth wide and pink to sing along with the car radio. I can see her hands on the steering wheel, which she holds very gently in the way people do when they are balancing a fancy cake on a plate. As the Cortina pulls ahead slightly I can see right across the empty back seat of her car and through the far window to a dusty hedge that borders the traffic island in the middle of the roundabout. The sunlight through the car windows paints an image of the two cars across the hedge. The Cortina is racing ahead of us now and the hedge image stretches then dissolves. I can see the back of the young woman’s head getting smaller and smaller as she drives away, her dark hair swaying as she sings. I am happy for her. Perhaps I love her? Perhaps she can tell me what happens next?
Above us is a cloud that has burst. An aeroplane has pierced the cloud and the white has come out in two lines behind its engines. Sad for the sky, but nobody cares about this.
The best is when you are driving and a plane is flying overhead. Especially if it’s flying low and in the same direction (this can happen near an airport). Even better would be the car and the plane and, on tracks next to the road, a train. (Or the train might be running beneath the road on an underground track but you can feel its rumble.) Imagine it – even if it’s only for a moment, there are three engines making time together. The car, the plane, the train, pulling us away, taking us away to someplace new.
Pain on the side of the road again. Pain with feathers. Pain with fur. Pain with scales.
Piles of timber poles waiting in the railway yard with the bark hanging off them like tattered trousers. Good for an accidental fire. I wonder how much kindling it would take to get it all blazing.
When a boy scout rubs two sticks together to make fire the amount of work (elbow grease) he puts in is directly equivalent to the heat produced in the sticks. The mechanical equivalent of heat: the thermal equivalent of work. So the boy scout isn’t needed, really. A machine could hold the sticks and thrust them against each other to create friction. Except that it’s nice to imagine the boy in his shorts with his badges and his woggle and his hat, the boy with his fishing rod and his slingshot and his thick yellow hair falling over his eyes. There are lots of ways for men and boys to dress up and play their parts. Girls get to play parts too, but their costumes are not for science or the skills of life; they are for men to put their eyes on.
In America you can drive your car into restaurants and burger joints and a girl will come out in a purple skirt on rollerskates and take your order in her cardboard hat. In America big fat grown-ups drive their cars around like babies in prams. A soft burger to tear at with your hard teeth, a bottle of fizz with a straw for suckling. You can drive right into a bank. You can drive through the middle of a pet food store and they’ll put your kitty litter in the boot.
Here’s a drive-in movie theatre – a paddock recomissioned, now a car park forested with speaker poles and empty boxes of Maltesers being kicked around in the wind.
The road is pitted and greasy. The road is held in by kerb now. A sign for a smash repairer on the side of the bus stop. Light farm fencing gets darker and heavier, becomes town fencing, although now there’s only humans and dogs to be kept in. Iron-roofed houses, tile-roofed houses clotted up together behind the tall paling fences. Side streets. A high school with chip bags sprouting from its chain-mesh fence.
The road is a highway now, except that it’s slow and lined on either side with businesses nobody wants to go to. Sheet metal engineers, cheap conveyancing, electrical repairs, Quality Plumbing with Pride, ute specialists, Frank’s Motorcycles and Spares, cabinet-makers, aquarium supplies, blinds and awnings, Peace of Mind Security Professionals, pumps, pool supplies, real estate, car rentals, feminine hygiene systems, water features and outdoor furniture, locksmiths, roofing and guttering, marine supplies, trailers, panelbeaters, tyres and lube, air conditioning specialists. Each of these is in a box lining the road. Some of the boxes with glass fronts and showrooms have reception areas; some have a roller door. Free parking on premises, at rear.
A car in front of us, a car behind. New and used cash registers. Blinds and canopies. Mobil fuel with car wash. Dave’s Windscreens. A stream of cars flow in the other direction. Traffic lights now. Parked cars nose to tail. Streetlights. Commercial cookery supplies. Parking meters. Rubbish bins.
‘It’s a fucking nightmare,’ father man says, as if it wasn’t his idea, as if we have forced him here.
A fish and chip shop, a Chinese restaurant, a chemist with sunhats on a stand outside. Cars flow and glide down the channel in front of the banked shops. Everyone is on their way.
An incline. Many of the brown pavers that make up the footpath have lifted and dirty yellow sand is coming through. Father man’s window is down and the smell of petrol and sunscreen and exhaust fans from the takeaway shops and the salt-saturated filmy air is streaming in.
And here, oh, the road is ending. We can’t go any further. This is the other side of the country. What we’ve been driving through is human life thickening up before it runs out of land.
There’s a car park. In front of the car park is a strip of pale sand and in front of that the large, loose sea.
HOME AGAIN
While we have been away, the fat lady has bought a car. There’s something wrong with it already so she has parked it in front of the workshop for father man to notice once he gets home. The fat lady’s car is just a run-around. It’s a forest green Mini. As soon as I see it I know that I’m going to drive it on the highway at night and I know that I am going to hurt it.
My mother walks around the house calling for Babette and then she searches under the beds and looks in all of the cupboards. My brother and I don’t help. Babette won’t be coming home – if there was somewhere else to go why would you come back here?
It rains on the first night that we are home and the rain is kind. I don’t want to go out in it. I would like to stay in my bed – the mattress is long and flat with no transmission hump pushing up against me. My mother goes to her room early. How eager we are to close our doors on each other.
My door, I know, will be opened. Because of the trip there’s a gap and time must be made up for. Because of the trip father man experienced losses and now it’s time to pay. It is urgent like I’ve seen a dog is, or a horse or a bull.
Afterwards I climb out of the window and walk to the tip in the rain. I like how the raindrops hold on to my hair before they drip away. The early settlers thought that rain would follow the plough, but rain takes no notice of people. It’s just a coincidence that I like to go out walking in the rain and that the drumming of the rain on the roof covered the sounds that father man made.
The feathers that came out of the rip in my pillow are not real feathers. They are man-made sanitised fibre. They are made in China. When I cleaned myself up, when I got dressed for my walk, I put a handful of the white feathers in the pocket of my jeans. The rain held back to let me into the night. Father man, my mother and my brother were asleep in their beds. The yawn of a bonnet didn’t wake them. I patted the radiator of the Holden, with some affection, I think. I could have taken a spanner and removed a part – perhaps the starter motor? I could have taken the part behind the workshop or onto the lawn and buried it with the others, but instead I took the feathers from my pocket, unstuck them with my fingers and placed them on the hard surface of the rocker cover, one by one. Most will scatter as so
on as father man opens the bonnet. A few might remain. A demonstration of soft.
It’s good that I don’t go to school the next day because the Avon lady comes. Cicadas are doing their practice in the damp air. Leaves are dead on the ground. A brown Torana drives up. A lady sits in the car filling in a form and then she drags the handbrake on and gets out. She has her pink lipstick around her mouth and she has her white plastic court shoes and a gold chain tight around her ankle. She looks at the house and then at the workshop. She must have heard the cricket on the radio because she picks her basket up off the back seat of the Torana and walks through the gravel and the pine needles towards the workshop. She doesn’t lift her feet high enough to account for the slope of the ramp so her high heels scrape on the concrete. If the Avon lady knew the first thing about cars she would have known that the workshop was built high up because there is a pit shaped like a coffin in the middle of it, but dug into the ground at the same height as a man so he can stand underneath the cars and work on them with his tools scattered around the opening and with a light.
The Avon lady walks in through the roller door. I don’t follow. I’m behind the kerosene drum under the trees. I don’t know what happens next. The concrete apron of the workshop is white in the sun and you can’t see past the frame of the roller door into the darkness inside.
The Avon lady would have blinked a few times to adjust her eyes to the darkness. She would have taken her catalogue out of her plastic basket and perhaps put it down on the workbench, or perhaps even put it into his hand. It goes to show that not everyone can see what he has. If she got close to him she would have felt what he has pressing against her stomach where her blouse was tucked into her pleated skirt – blue nylon – knife pleats or ray pleats? I’m never sure, but every bit of it was pleated, except at the back where she’d been sitting on it, so around her bum it was flattened like the lid of a cardboard box.
She isn’t in the workshop for long. When she comes out she doesn’t look different. Nothing is my fault. She walks back down the ramp and gets into her car.
I want her to see me, to smile at me. I want to ask her about the terry towelling seat covers in the Torana. Are they the ones that tie on underneath or are they fitted with elastic? I want the chain on her ankle and her root perm and everything in the Avon autumn catalogue except the wooden toys and the butterdish shaped like a cow. I want the Avon lady to stay here and live with us, or better still to open the passenger door of her car and move the boxes of catalogues out of the way so we can all get into the back together – so the Avon lady can rescue us, the three of us, my mother, my brother, myself, and take us far away.
Sunday. The garden string is sad. It is coiled around itself green and hard. My mother is driving; my brother is tossing the string up and down in his hand as we drive back up the highway from the nursery. The three of us can go on an outing together now that we are home. My brother’s window is open and when I look across I can see the ball of string held in the frame of the window for a second like it is a painting. The green string is in the foreground of the painting; the scene outside the window, the dirty roadside bush, is the background. The string could easily go out the window if my brother fumbles, but nobody says this. My mother’s plants died while we were away so we went on an outing to the nursery. She didn’t buy more plants but she bought the string.
My mother parks the Holden under the shade of the pine trees, facing the house. She pulls on the handbrake and takes the key from the ignition. My brother’s hand is still opening and closing around the string. We watch the brown house in front of us. The paint is called mission brown. If we forget the house is made of wood the paint will remind us. The lawn around the house is yellow but it is still quite nice at night, high and mattressy on its runners. My brother has stopped throwing the string now. His hand is on the doorhandle, but he doesn’t open it. He is waiting for our mother to open her door and get out of the car. She could always change her mind. Maybe there is someplace else for us to go?
Our mother is looking through the windscreen at the house in the same bored way as if she is still driving. It is how she looks at the television. I watch the petrol gauge as it sinks its spider’s leg below the horizon. Our mother has a red spotted headscarf over her hair. She has her gold-framed glasses on. She isn’t bothering with her contact lenses today – she’s giving her eyes a rest. The three of us sit in the car together, watching the house.
I close my eyes and lift the bonnet. I remove the timing case and chain tensioner. I remove the bolt, lock washer and plain washer securing the camshaft timing wheel. When you put your mind in the engine some of what your body is saying – about being too hot, wanting a drink, needing to cry – can be turned down for a while. The manual can be relied upon. It is the same each time you open it. The same parts, the same hands. One exploded view sits next to another. No breath. No noise. No lies. How is it that paper can be separate from time? How is it that outside the world of paper something is always happening next?
My mother opens her door and gets out of the car and we go inside. Not the string though – the string sits bunched up in its green ball on top of the beer fridge by the back door. When father man opens the fridge after dinner the ball of string bounces down in front of his face and he swears at it. Because he is a man he must catch it, even though there is a risk he might spill his beer.
Two days of rain. Water pooled on the road. I am going to the dentist with my mother. The car lunges through old spray. We don’t put our eyes on each other – there’s no need. Each morning you get back up on your legs and you don’t think about anything at all, except breakfast.
My mother has lipstick on and a red t-shirt with flowers on the chest. She reads Family Circle in the waiting room as the dentist puts the tools in my mouth. No chance to speak. When the dentist drills the top off my infected tooth his nostrils flare. I am not the only one in the world that is rotten; he must have smelled it before.
Later, the fat lady has gone shopping so I watch Get Smart on the television in her living room. The best bit is the beginning with Maxwell Smart in his little red car and then all of the doors opening and closing behind him as he goes down underground into the secret vault where the good spies work. The Get Smart music is my favourite music in the world.
During the ads I play with Babette and look at the fat lady’s things. She has a new set of steak knives in a box – wooden handles, copper screws, jagged edges. They won’t match her forks but it doesn’t matter with meat.
The next show is about an American family. The father with the beard, the mother with the perm, the son with a crew cut because he’s in the cadets, the daughter with a golden ponytail pulled high and tight. They eat pancakes together at a shiny table. The boy wants to borrow the family car to take a girl out on a date, but he doesn’t want to say that so he makes up an unbelievable story. Each member of the family takes a turn saying a line. After they say their line they wait for the laughing-in-a-can to come up around them and then to die down again. This is normal for an American family – not just that they are happy, but that all the invisible laughers around them are happy too.
Tonight for dinner it’s fish fingers, red jelly and ice cream. My mother has a lot of trouble cooking the fish fingers and keeping the crumbs on them. Father man doesn’t have dessert, he has another green can, and then he deadlocks the doors.
My mother’s preparations for the night take a long time. She puts on the radio. She has a hot shower. She shaves her legs. She dries herself with a pink towel and applies powders to her body. Then she sits at her dressing table on a spindly chair with curved metal legs, to tweeze her eyebrows and lotion her face and neck. When you are getting a vehicle ready for storage it’s advisable to top off the petrol and the battery and lubricate the doors. My mother must concentrate on her female procedures; she is in her own world now, not reachable, not to be disturbed.
Two bites on my jaw that I scratch into one. Blood on my pillowcase sticks
the nylon to my face in the night. When I sit up in the morning the pillow comes with me. The more I rear back from it, the more it comes.
Out of the window I can see two planes in the sky – they know how to keep their distance. The sky clicks with heat, clear turquoise brought to the front, and every morning swarms of insects rising from the lawn. Father man must have seen the blood on my face. He might have closed his eyes, but he didn’t turn his head away.
Back to work in the workshop, in the afternoon. Father man tells me to hold the spanner firm. His head is close to mine. Wax is fruiting around the hair stalks in his ear. The spanner slips. The head of it chimes against the clutch plate. I shut my eyes so my fingers can work faster, finding the bolt, tickling it free. It is a habit, a skill, I have learnt from working in the dark. I don’t know I’ve done it until I open my eyes again and father man is looking at my face. His mouth hangs slack for a second and then he shuts it. Does he know something? Do I care if he knows something?
This is where television is good for learning how to hold the pieces of your face in one expression that could be happy or could be sad, but has nothing real behind it. It’s a Thursday. I don’t know what other families are doing, but I know they aren’t doing this.
Later, on Hogan’s Heroes, the prisoners decide to sabotage a convoy of German supply trucks on their way to the front line. Schultz is guarding the trucks while the drivers have dinner at Stalag 13. Schultz is an oaf and it doesn’t take much for the prisoners to get him into conversation and offer him their home-brewed liquor and get him drunk. The prisoners load the drunken Schultz onto the back of one of the trucks where he snores happily, then they use hacksaws to cut part way through the engine hoses in the German supply trucks. The plan is for the trucks to be some distance away from Stalag 13 before they break down. This is so the sabotage can’t be linked to them.
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