by John Clanchy
‘You never get away from it out here,’ Dave says. ‘That’s why I don’t drive at dusk or dawn if I can help it. The roos are as thick as grasshoppers then, and you keep thinking they’ll be leaping through the glass and into your lap next.’
And now I look properly, it’s not just dead roos but foxes and birds – galahs and emus and hawks – and they’re everywhere, every twenty yards, sometimes not even that, and on the road itself there are great red patches where the animals have been hit and their blood smeared and spread by the wheels. And some of the patches, I see, are still wet and swish under the bus’s tyres.
‘Semis, roadtrains, buses, four-wheels …’ Dave says. ‘That’s mostly what you get out here. And they’ve all got the big roo bars on the front. Travelling like this, a hundred, hundred and ten k an hour, they just blow the animals apart. The fellow without the noggin back there, he must’ve just been clipped.’
‘It’s awful,’ I say.
‘It’s life, luvvy.’
‘This road –’
‘Amazing, isn’t it? It’s one of the straightest bits of road in the whole country. Apart from the Nullarbor. Forty-eight kilometres flat before we hit the first sign of a bend.’
‘So, why don’t they see them?’
‘Who?’
‘The kangaroos and foxes. Why don’t they see the buses and four-wheel drives coming?’
‘I don’t know, luv. At night they must see the lights from miles away and run straight towards them.’
‘And into them once they get there.’
‘You make it sound like suicide.’
‘And all that blood on the road. Yu-k!’
‘Later,’ he says, ‘you’ll see some actual red roads.’
‘You mean dust?’
‘No, no, it’s proper tarmac, it’s just red, that’s all. It’s probably the sands, or something they mix in with the gravel. It comes up through the tar, and you’d swear the road was painted. I like it myself, it’s easy on the eyes, and the white lines stand out so clear.’
‘They’re so clear here,’ I say. ‘They make you giddy.’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Dave says again. ‘It’s just sitting up front.’
‘They’re like cords, don’t you think? Or strings.’
‘Strings?’ he says, puzzled. ‘I don’t know. They’re just lines to me, luv. Just things to stay inside.’ He glances into the long side mirror outside his window. Then waves as a black and silver four-wheel-drive goes by. It must be doing a hundred and forty, or more. ‘They keep you tight, you know, so you don’t wander all over the shop. And you need that. Especially out here.’
‘Everything’s so –’
‘Yair.’
We both look out at it. At nothing. The red earth, a few trees, some scrubby bushes. And nothing as far as your eye can see on every side. And above it, like some huge curved lid on a cauldron, is the sky. And I’ve never seen anything like this before. I’ve always lived in a town or a city – or, in Greece, a village – and it takes my breath for a minute, just the space and the emptiness of all this, the redness of the earth, the cloudless blue bowl of the sky.
‘You can look forever at country like this,’ Dave says, and I nod but don’t ask him what he means. I sort of understand. And then I look at the road again and the way it just goes on and on till the sides of it meet in a point at the horizon, before it disappears, and I think of something and get out the pen Mum gave me at Christmas and a small notebook. Because there are things you can think and write about but you could never say to anyone, they’d sound so stupid.
‘You’re not writing home already?’ Dave says.
‘No.’
‘Your Mum’s probably still celebrating she’s got rid of you.’
‘I’ve got to do an assignment.’
‘Hard to write in a bus.’
‘It’s only notes.’
‘Oh.’
‘I copy it out neatly,’ I explain, ‘and put it in proper sentences in my journal later. For my assignment.’
‘And what are proper sentences when they’re at home?’
‘Well, for a start, they’ve got to have a subject and a verb.’
‘We used to have those when I went to school.’
‘Well, you’ve still got to have them, for proper sentences. And you can’t begin a sentence with And or But, or that.’
‘You can’t?’
‘No, because they’re conjunctions.’
‘And what’s a conjunction when it’s at home?’
‘It’s a joining word,’ I say. ‘It’s not a starting word.’
‘But what if you’re joining one sentence to another?’
‘Well, you can’t, that’s all. It’s a rule.’
‘But none of my sentences would be proper then,’ he says. ‘Especially if I’m just thinking.’
‘It’s different if you’re thinking, you can use them then. But in your assignments, you’ve got to write them properly without conjunctions at the beginning. Like in this assignment I’m doing for the trip.’
‘Homework on a bus trip? They take some beating, some of these teachers.’
‘Well, Miss Temple anyway. She’s a bit of a slave-driver.’
‘Temple? Isn’t she the – ?’ Dave jerks a finger towards the back of the bus.
‘Yes, but I like her.’
‘Well, you write your notes, and I’ll listen to some proper music.’ He picks up a cassette from the dashboard in front of him. It’s got a man and a guitar on the front in an outback Aussie bush hat, and I can tell straightaway it’s Slim Dusty. ‘I can’t stand the racket that lot are playing,’ he says. ‘What have you got in there?’ he asks, pointing at my Walkman.
‘It’s classical.’ I try not to sound posh. ‘It’s my Mum’s and she played it at my Gran’s funeral, and I liked it so much she bought me a disc.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘It’s called the Miserere. It’s by Allegri.’
He takes his eyes off the road then and looks at me full in the face for the first time as if he’d thought he knew me and now he’s not so sure. ‘Oh,’ he says.
‘It’s sung by the Tallis Scholars. On this disc anyway.’
‘Is it?’
‘I’m sure you’d like it,’ I say, but he’s watching the road again and putting his cassette tape in the player on the dashboard. He turns the volume to low, so I can hardly hear the words, just the melody of the guitar, and an outback voice. Dave’s lips move with the tape, and his eyes look straight ahead down the road. As I start to write:
The road was making her giddy now …
I haven’t worked out who the her in this story is yet. Whether she’s even got a name.
The road was redder than the soil in places, smeared and crusting like paint. It came up through the glass at her. Pressed on her chest. She looked out at the nothing all around her. At the immensity of nothing. The flat earth, the blue bowl of the sky. Nothing to the horizon, nothing either side but mulga, grey scrub (saltbush?), bodies, dead animals. And through it all, the road, straight and stitched down the middle with a white dotted string.
Inside the bus she followed the string with her eyes, and grew giddy again.
‘Mesmeric, ’ a woman had said to her earlier. ‘Bus trips can be mesmeric. ’
She was panting slightly, and wondered if it was asthma or the aircon in the bus. But it was panting, not choking. It was something to do with the red ground, the sky, the road, the white string which was snaking in through the glass of the bus, and attaching itself to her navel. She could feel it now, winding her in, drawing her away from the edge, in towards the Centre, and the Rock
‘What – finished already?’
‘It’s nothing. Just some thoughts.’ I close the notebook quickly, though Dave could hardly read it from where he is.
‘Homework always took me ages. You seem to do it so quickly.’
‘It’s only first impressions. Just things off the top
of my head. I might make it up into a story later.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘I don’t know yet. Maybe someone on a bus trip.’
‘You?’
‘No, no, it’s someone else. I haven’t thought of a name yet. I’ll write it in the third person.’
‘What’s the third person when it’s at home?’
Everything’s always at home for Dave.
‘You know,’ I say, ‘you use she instead of I and her for me, and that.’
‘But it could still be you, and you just put your feelings into someone else?’
‘It could.’
‘It must be wonderful to write.’ He sounds as if he really means it.
‘That’s what Mum says.’
And I think about Mum then, and how energetic and positive she always is, even about bad things like me and Philip breaking up, and I wonder if she would have liked to be a writer but had me instead, and now she’d like me to be one, and I’m her she. And maybe that’s why she gave me the pen. But my mood’s broken, and I just don’t feel like writing any more at the moment, so I get out my Walkman and the disc Mum gave me.
‘That your Misery thing?’
‘Yes.’ I put my earplugs in, and Dave gives me a grin in his mirror and turns up his Slim Dusty and we drift apart then, and I pick up my book and try to read. But something’s wrong and ten minutes later I find I’m reading the same sentence over and over and still can’t understand it, and my breathing’s still funny, and it is this panting, as if I’ve been running or something, and it’s all weird, I think, sitting here in this glass cage, swooping over the road at such speed and listening to the Miserere, which is Latin and from centuries ago in Europe, and reading Tolkien about hobbits and tiny English shires and villages, and outside all the time there’s just … this that you’re floating through, and it’s like a moon or desert landscape and, if you look long enough, it’s not you but the landscape that’s floating and that’s where the panting and giddiness comes from, and I think it must be like this if you’re drunk or on heroin, and I don’t know whether it makes me feel good or bad, but it’s like moving out of yourself, being detached from yourself, and you don’t quite know any longer who you are. But you can’t think about that for long because it’s a bit frightening, and that’s what makes you pant and you put down the book and switch off the disc and nearly rip the earphones off your head in your rush to get back to reality.
‘Atta girl,’ says Dave. ‘I knew Slim Dusty would get you in the end.’
And I know I should feel upset about this – about being called luvvy and girl and Miss Gorgeous – and, if Miss Temple knew, she’d be saying that I should find ways (‘You can be firm and polite but still unambiguous, Laura’) of telling Dave that it’s patronizing and demeaning and sexist and it could disempower me for life and that, but actually I don’t mind it and even like it, and I wonder what that means, about me, and the only thing that makes me upset and anxious is the thought that Miss Temple might overhear him, and he’d get in trouble. Which sounds really weird – me wanting to protect him – because if anyone else said it – a real sleaze, say, like Mr Kovacs – then I would be upset and maybe even say something. But the real sleazy types don’t call you luv or girl or luvvy at all, they call you young lady or young woman or pretty young woman like you so you can’t object when they perve at your legs and tits.
Someone like Dave is just a different generation. When Dave says girl or even girlie, he’s just saying he’s feeling good himself this morning and he’s happy to see you and be talking to you instead of gazing at headless kangaroos all day, and he probably even says it to his own daughter, who may not even be a feminist, and he means nothing but goodwill by it, whereas Mr Kovacs calls you young woman and that, but only to try and deceive you. And this is what Mum’s always saying – because she teaches people who can’t speak English at all, especially migrants and refugees and that – it’s the intention of the speech act that counts, not the form. People will understand mistakes in form, as long as they can see your intention isn’t bad.
And I agree with all that, but just now I’m hoping Dave’s form is as good as his intention because Miss Temple’s come up to the front of the bus and is telling Dave we should stop for twenty minutes at Wilcannia because some of the children will want to take photographs and seeing country towns is part of the enlargement of their general social perspective, and all Dave says is:
‘It will be.’
‘I don’t see what the problem is,’ Miss Temple says. ‘You must need a break, and it gives the children a toilet stop as well.’
‘You’re the boss, Miss T,’ Dave says, and I just know he’s not going to get away with that, and I’m already cringing for him, but Miss Temple must be in a really good mood after a whole morning under Mr Jasmyne’s overcoat and only the backs of heads in front of her, because she just makes a slight click with her tongue and smiles at me and all I hear, as she moves back down the aisle, is the sharp echo of ‘Miss T, indeed.’ But it’s so sunny, and she’s so happy – I can tell because she hasn’t even asked me about my journal – and I think even she doesn’t really care. And all this time Dave’s whistling Slim Dusty and winking at me, and I don’t think he understands just how close – any other day – he came to being reduced to a tiny pile of nuclear ash.
And when we get to Wilcannia and stop in the main street which, as far as you can see, is also the only street, it’s not Miss Temple who’s talking about perspective any more, it’s Dave.
‘No,’ he says, when she asks him if he isn’t getting out to look at the town too. ‘I’ll just stop here and keep a perspective on my bus.’
And when I look around, I can see why Miss Temple asks him and is suddenly looking so nervous and uncertain herself.
‘Besides,’ Dave tells her, ‘I hate driving a bus without mirrors, or wheels.’
The town looks like Port Moresby or Kosovo on the TV. All the shops have wire cages instead of glass, or if they have glass behind the wire, it’s all smashed, and some shops are black and burnt, and the gutters are full of rubbish and old tyres, and at the crossroads where the hotels are, there are large groups of black people – not just men but women and children – and dogs, all just standing about and waiting, though occasionally one crosses the street from one group to the other, and once a man with a maroon and yellow beanie staggers into the middle of the street and he’s yelling and it sounds like Fucken barsterrd but he could be talking to anyone, he’s not looking anywhere in particular, and he could even be yelling at the street or the sky or God or even himself for all you could tell he’s so drunk.
A few of the other men yell back then, and some of the women laugh, and a dog barks and it sounds like the man’s voice, and Fucken barsterrd he yells back and it could even be to the dog this time, and Miss Temple’s looking around and she’s still smiling but her smile’s fixed on her face now like it’s painted there or she’s had a stroke and the corners of her mouth are paralysed, and Mr Jasmyne’s taken her arm and is looking around and even his glasses must be working this morning because as I come up to them, he’s saying, ‘Good God, I had no idea,’ and Miss Temple says she hadn’t either, and all the black people have turned and are watching us now and the kids still getting off the bus are getting off more and more slowly and as they drip off, their mouths fall open one by one because they’ve been watching out the window and they can see the kids from the other buses all collecting round the teachers and not running off and trashing the town like they normally would because this time someone’s already done it for them, and that’s when Mr Jasmyne says:
‘No need to stay long.’
‘No,’ says Miss Temple, and is looking at him as if he’s said something wise.
‘Don’t want to give the impression this is a zoo or anything.’
‘No,’ says Miss Temple, and she’s still smiling and looking first at the children and then up the street towards the Aborigines, and her smi
le must be killing her, and she must know by now, I think, what it’s like to be stretched herself to the point of bursting.
And Mr Jasmyne’s right, I think, in what he says, but the thing about a zoo is, it’s usually much clearer who the animals are because there the animals are all inside the cages and are interesting and you want to see them and that and poke them to make them move and roar at you instead of just lying around in the sun all day, but here the black people and us kids can walk around and the only people inside the cages are the shopkeepers, and you can poke them, I suppose, and get them to roar at you, but you mightn’t get served if you do. And there’s one supermarket that’s clean and bright and some of the kids go in there to buy chocolate and things, but the others just hang around the teachers and some even drift back onto the buses. And I look for Toni but can’t see her and I wonder if she’s even got off in the first place, and I start to look for Mr Prescott then, and catch myself doing it and think I shouldn’t and get confused, but luckily Miss Temple says to me:
‘That’s one of ours, isn’t it? Go and get her, will you, while I get the others on the bus.’
Miss Temple’s pointing to the edge of our group where Luisa has strayed and is standing and gazing at the people on the corner who are gazing back. And I walk slowly towards her because I almost like the town – it’s so grotty – and the sun’s so warm, and I don’t think the Aborigines mean any harm to anyone at all just standing on the corner and waiting for whatever they’re waiting for and they didn’t ask for a hundred white kids to land on them with their mouths open, and a few of them – the girls and women – are smiling and fluttering their hands and looking at our jeans and our shoes, and I smile and wave back, and Luisa, when I come up to her, is standing and gazing, not with her mouth open, but just absorbed, and Sarah’s right behind her and saying, ‘C’mon, Luisa, the bus is going now. We’ll be late,’ but Luisa for once is taking no notice, and she’s almost – till I touch her – in another world.