Blink. Move. Breathe.
After that short dose of I can, I’m ready to tackle the feature. I head back to my dirty little room and spread my library books and laptop across the bed.
After three hours, and a draft, I fix myself a sandwich using a pair of scissors as there are no knives in the kitchen, then chomp it down on my bed. Then I start again, and when it’s finished, I celebrate by driving to my sister’s for dinner.
It’s so nice to be around family. And to sit on an actual chair while I eat.
Mum comes to visit my new ‘digs’, and I glance at her face as she enters the room, spying the bottle of Worcestershire sauce and all my belongings in the three hessian sacks. She seems both curious and philosophical, after getting over her initial horror at what I’d chosen to do.
I truly don’t think Mum has ever visited anyone staying at an inner-city pub. Neither have my girlfriends – so I invite them all over for a look, too. Their mutual fascination inspires me to think that it would make a good feature for the daily newspaper, so I quickly send a pitch in the morning to the only editor whose details are listed on the inside of that section. After clicking ‘send’, a reply pops up almost immediately, a ‘thanks but no thanks’, and a promise to keep my details on file.
I go downstairs to help Jim to repack the car, as we only have two more sleeps until we leave. On my way down the stairs my phone rings, and the caller announces she’s an editor from the newspaper I just pitched to.
I barely catch what she is asking because it seems so ludicrous that I just say ‘Yes’, jot notes on a scrap of paper I scramble to find, promise to file the first three columns by Monday … yes, yes … and – she’s gone. She wants me to write three columns a week for two weeks, maybe longer. The person who I’d pitched the pub story to had moved sections and somehow passed on my details as a fashion writer.
‘Oh and Louisa, you’ve been writing fashion for a while haven’t you? You’ll have plenty of contacts for photos, too?’
I’ve never written about fashion before in my life.
I jumble out the news to Jim, race back inside to our room, googling fashion public relations companies, jotting ideas for ‘looks’, racing to the shop to buy a new copy of Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, researching designers to feature and madly emailing friends who might have contacts and suggestions for people who may have photos of their work.
I don’t even have time to ponder the thought that these columns will be read by half a million people and that I’m filling in for a writer who has more than ten years of fashion experience and a staunch following of fans. To ponder the challenges would waste valuable time – I need to start sending emails now, because I’m not going to be in mobile phone or internet range for much longer, and I need the first series of columns ready and written in four days.
So I start this amazing new coup as a fashion columnist for the daily newspaper in a room above a pub in Fitzroy when all the clothes I own in the world fit in one plastic sack, and my writing files are squeezed into the same box as a jar of Worcestershire sauce and an iceberg lettuce that Jim has just bought for lunch.
After working steadily for a couple of hours, I head to the library for more research, transcribing words from a fashion dictionary to keep close, implanting visual memories to refer to when I need to intersperse the columns with a reference which makes it appear like I’ve been doing this longer than a day.
Afterwards, Mum is waiting for me at a café with a batch of forwarded mail and I’m excited to tell her the news. The waiter sees the yellow mail forwarding stickers and asks me where I’ve moved to.
‘Um, a car?’
It’s a warm spring day, one of those Melbourne days when you could cry with the opening of life again after the seemingly never-ending deathly dark of winter. Everybody seems to be out on the street, sunning their freshly revealed skin from Fitzroy’s al-fresco tables. My best girlfriends join me for coffee after Mum leaves, and just like magic, others appear, friends we didn’t know were in the area, an impromptu celebration on a Thursday night.
A balmy breeze curls up the street and reminds me I’m free, my life is changing, rapidly, rapidly now. What lies ahead are new roads, new stories, a future so bright it’s blinding, a love with whom I’ve already shared a million adventures and we’re about to embark on more – and career coups like this magical fashion column.
I have that bittersweet feeling of appreciation for a moment I know will be over before I know it, but keep chanting to myself, over and over, just enjoy, now.
The sun eventually sets and Jim calls me from the kitchen at the Royal Derby. ‘Lou, I’m using that Worcestershire sauce for a pasta dish, invite your friends!’
I dread to think what the hell pasta with Worcestershire sauce will taste like but the gesture of him cooking in that dingy kitchen, which only has one saucepan and a filthy electric stove, is so beautiful that I can’t hold back from inviting them. We stop to buy wine and Parmesan cheese, and sit outside on the rooftop balcony filled with rusty ashtrays with the background city song of the sound of the engines of passing cars.
Jim is visible through the kitchen window, flipping things across the frying pan, eager to serve my friends.
He dishes up plates of steaming pasta for everyone and brings them outside, when it promptly starts to rain. ‘No worries’ is our new reaction to everything, and we turn our bedroom floor into a table, spreading out newspaper like a cloth while Georgie serenades us with her acoustics up and down the hall.
After dinner, Jim plays his self-created comedy DVD on his laptop and we laugh into the night. Having my friends in this space, when we’ve only ever had dinner parties in houses and apartments, makes it all the more like a crazy movie we’ve just written or something. It just feels so unreal.
When they leave we brush our teeth together like kids on camp in the shared bathroom, and the rain falls quietly outside. I fall asleep smiling, gratefully, thinking how mysterious life is and how little you really need to be happy.
It’s our last night in Melbourne, and we spend it at my sister’s. I sit in the lounge room, attempting the first two fashion columns on my laptop as she clicks her knitting needles while their new kitten plays with a ball of string by my feet. The rain splashes the windows first gently, then harder and harder.
It takes me two hours to write the first column, and most of that effort is the fight to silence the taunts that I’m not capable, that I’m silly for thinking that I can, that I don’t know what I’m doing. When I’ve finally finished writing, I’m sure it will be sent back. I’m sure they’ll figure out I’m just bluffing. Still, I gulp after re-reading it for the twentieth time, and press ‘send’.
‘So that’s pretty great about the columns,’ says Ayala with a proud twinkle in her eye, clicking her needles. Everything about her is cosy.
Did I ever notice so much as now, that I’m leaving?
‘Someone at work saw your byline in Sunday Life last week. I said you were my sister. She wants to be a freelance writer, too.’
She gives me a look, like it’s not going to happen.
‘Why do you look like that?’
‘She said she didn’t hand in the last review because her neighbours played some music too loud or something.’
‘Couldn’t she have taken her computer to another room in the house? Worn headphones?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Yeah, well, next time she uses that excuse tell her I wrote that piece in the Albury Red Rooster. They were cleaning up to Britney Spears, and it was turned up really loud.’
The news reports: Steve Irwin has died of a stingray attack. Jim comes in, after a ten-minute set at a comedy room in the city.
‘There’s already stingray gags making the rounds, Lou.’
Life moves forward, so quickly it bites.
Ayala adds enough oats to her morning porridge for both of us and wakes us up to eat with the kids at the back table. I’m wearing an old tracksuit because it�
��s so cold and Jim just pulls on his one pair of jeans and the one woollen jumper he owns. Ayala, in her pyjamas, would usually be embarrassed by someone seeing her like this. As I’m helping her with the bowls, she says to me, ‘It’s easy to relax around someone like Jim. He doesn’t care about things like clothes, does he?’ The kids pull faces as jokes and even though his eyes are still barely open, Jim blows up a snake from his ever-ready supply of balloons in his pocket. He hands it over and lets go of the end before Finn gets it.
‘Oh, OH! There you go. Now it’s a dead snake.’
Finn laughs. Jim quickly makes Phoebe a pink poodle so they both have an animal, and Ayala scoops them off to pre-school. She tells me later that as soon as she handed Phoebe over to her teacher, she proclaimed loudly, ‘We had a real live clown in our house last night!’ and showed her the poodle to prove it.
Mum takes us to the corner café for one final latte before we leave. She gives us a road map of Australia, not realising it will become our mutual diary.
Goodbye, Melbourne. Goodbye roads I know and corners and history and cafés and safety and knowing that there will always be someone I know somewhere at some hour and all the pieces that make up a tribe, a place, a life that is home.
Goodbye to all the interiors I’ve inhabited and all the jobs and floors I’ve tramped carrying plates, glasses and plans, houses I’ve lived in, streets I’ve walked in the dead of night never worrying where I am because I know the place, I know the space, I’m in it as much as it’s in me.
I feel scared, casting aside a place which has given me my education, my family, my dearest friends and even led me to Jim, and now, a column in the daily newspaper. But it’s time to go, that’s all I know. I don’t so much know it as feel it. If I don’t go now, when I have a laughing knight in a shining Mazda to lead me, when will I go?
Goodbye security. I’m leaping, now, not even looking at the roads I’m leaving, just flicking madly through the map Mum has given us. Some people show houses where they’ve lived, restaurant locales of their first dates. We get maps to form our sacred history. Crinkled by the sun on the dashboard, open to number 33, waiting for dots to mark our stops on this sunburnt country.
On we drive leaving the past behind like a bucket of ashes, scooped up, gathered together, placed in the dust bin marked ‘then’.
And here I am – now.
I pray out loud to Hermes, the God of travel, to keep us safe on the long road ahead. Jim chimes in, smiling at me and yelling out the window, ‘Bring it on!’ then he sees my lips moving and my eyes shut in prayer.
‘What did you ask for?’
I was adding a clause for decent coffee in the outback roadhouses.
12
Living history
‘It’s good to look them in the eye, Lou. They’re just searching for a connection.’
IT’S ALMOST NIGHT – DID we really only leave Melbourne this morning? – and I don’t know how much longer until we stop. Or even where we’re going, exactly.
I feel like I’m in exile. But I chose this. I wanted this. I remind myself I have nothing to fear. I’m still me – just in a different place. Where am I going? Why, again?
Jim’s gentle spirit, guiding the car forward like a ship, brings me back, as I catch his now familiar look of peace.
‘Just wait’ll you see the Nullarbor, Lou … all these hours of “nothing” will be worth it.’
Oh, yeah. That’s why.
Numerous layers of sunscreen, kilometres in the hundreds and snacks eaten in a moving car disconnect me from the earthly centre of my body. No six-o’clock meals at the table for me, or even a bath to book-end the day. You’re on your own now kiddo. It’s real.
Waves of sadness at what I’ve left behind compete with a soft sort of anticipation of a future I’ll not know until I experience it. The mystery is beautiful, but fear hovers just below the surface of my consciousness.
We stop in Horsham, where the winds blow wild and instead of walking around the lake to stretch my legs I just want to cower in the car. A few more hours of roads again and we’re in Nhill, or ‘the abode of spirits’, according to the sign. We walk in opposite directions around the lake, rejoining to prepare sandwiches with our crockery box unloaded on a picnic bench like the vagabonds we are.
Excitement has faded to mellow apathy, the kind you can only get when you have been driving for hours and you know there are countless more until you get to your destination. You give in to it, like rocking in a boat travelling across the world. Wheels turning over bitumen, carrying us somewhere I’ve never seen. Surrender, the rocking motion whispers.
The murky sky we left in Melbourne has transformed into the wind-whipped warmth of the Western District, and by nightfall I can already feel the oily layers of sunscreen that I’ll need to remove at the next shower. And I have no idea where or when that will be.
Because our phones lost coverage somewhere outside Ararat and radio options have lessened to zilch, a self-imposed silence rules supreme.
At a petrol station in Horsham, Jim emerges and hands me a huge pair of sunglasses. ‘Nothing’s too fine for my little lady,’ he says, jokingly, and I pull off the price tag: $4.99. He chuckles softly, saying I look like a giant ant.
The rest of my travelling outfit is a ten-dollar green singlet and a pair of tracksuit pants. Jim, too, wears a cotton pair of tracksuit pants and an old orange t-shirt. We put them on after our showers in Melbourne, having no idea these decidedly inelegant outfits would see us across the desert.
Runners, socks and sandals sit on the floor of the car for random exercise when we stop. Jim drives barefoot. Clothes are such an afterthought for him.
We drive relentlessly, silently, trying to place some distance between then and now, not really talking, strangely tense. It’s just ‘us’ now, a travelling entity bonded together, all our belongings mixed up in boxes, stacked atop each other, moving across the map of Australia with no particular to-do list or purpose, except adventure and a different perspective of this country I’ve always lived in but never really seen.
By eight o’clock I’m tired and I miss my mum. I just want to call her and let her know we are – well, where are we? I’d better not call her.
I snap out of it and flick into organisational mode, remembering that if we want to eat anything other than a bag of chips or cold tuna from our box in the boot, we’ll have to stop driving soon. Things like meals and accommodation aren’t really Jim’s forte.
‘Babe, do you think there’s a town coming up?’
My dreams of a hot meal and something else to look at other than a moving road are fading fast. Ahead, behind and around us is blank darkness and a line in the middle of the road, illuminated by our headlights.
‘Um … are you hungry?’
Well no, not really, since all I’ve done today is sit. But I want to stop before it gets to the desperate stage. The gaps between towns are getting wider and wider.
Logic has a funny way of ruining things. Knowing how late it is, how we should eat or plan a bed or stop driving, I prod Jim until he responds by slowing down, and drives around the two streets of the next town we happen across until we find the local motel.
‘Shall we keep going?’ says Jim intuitively, when I come back from the investigation process.
‘Babe, it’s late. How are we going to find anything else and still get dinner?’ I say, feeling a little like a whingeing wife. We’ve been driving for eleven hours.
Part of me wants to keep driving. But the other part knows how deranged we both become without a proper night’s sleep. And we’ve got a long drive tomorrow.
Begrudgingly paying eighty dollars for a double room with no heating and a musty bed that sinks in the middle with a lime green coverlet, we dump our bags, wander into the dining room, share the wilted and oily salad buffet with strangers, then go to our room to shower and sleep.
Jim seems grumpy. Perhaps because the last time he crossed the Nullarbor he slept in his car.
He probably thinks I’m high maintenance.
I regret that I made us stop at this expensive, soulless motel, feeling guilty that I’ve somehow added a champagne lifestyle to his carry-on luggage. Was it that strange of me to want a bed?
Our room looks like something furnished in the 1950s for a family on a beachside holiday. There is no bath, no TV, and the radios seem to just be for decoration – they don’t work. More eerie silence. It feels like we are two aliens from outer space landed in the most inappropriate facilities to recover from our journey.
It’s freezing and there is only one blanket. But, there are six towels. That’s handy.
I head into the shower, with a little exclamation at the nice soaps in the bathroom, trying to find something positive. ‘Well that’s worth the eighty dollars then.’
I’m not imagining it, am I? I know he loves me, but my mind starts playing obsessive tricks in the shower. He’s going to drop me off at the next petrol station. He’s wishing he never invited me to move into his car.
When I come out, he has that furrowed look, still, and he’s on his own computer. I don’t interrupt. I’m tense. He’s tense. Being together 24/7 is exhausting. Again, the thought: Oh God, what have I done?
I’m too tired to bring my big bag in from the car, but after my shower I need something clean to wear. Jim’s t-shirts, which he has curiously lugged in, are lying in a pile next to the bed. ‘Just wear one of those, Lou,’ he says, not looking up from the email he’s writing.
I gulp, but I need an extra layer so I put one on over my singlet and climb into bed, pulling the blanket over me so I can’t even see what I’m wearing. Underneath the blanket, the t-shirt reads: I FUCKED A GOAT.
I pull open my own laptop, eager to replace the dull tension from driving with some sort of intellectual stimulation. The internet delivers. I find emails from editors, some fact checking for a story, my horoscopes, and a response to my first fashion column, inviting me to a cupcake and champagne party in South Yarra to launch a new label.
‘I have to be at another function … thanks for thinking of me …’ I write in response. I don’t mention that I’m in a town called Keith and I’ll probably be eating bain-marie specials on the Nullarbor the night they toast the designer. Jim and I both eventually pack up our computers at the same time, and switch off the light. We lie, unmoving, in the strange motel.
Love and Other U-Turns Page 15