Love and Other U-Turns

by Louisa Deasey

  In the morning, after jogs and sunscreen, corn thins and apples in the main street, we buy water from the supermarket and hop back in. Jim’s brown legs look so happy behind the wheel, and as he drives, he keeps a big bottle of water between them, for sips.

  Eventually, like a slow sunrise, Jim’s mood picks up a little, as he eases back into his spot behind the wheel. He always does the majority of the driving. Since this car has been his home for longer than I’ve known him, it’s only natural that I get the visitor’s chair. Besides, I find the Mazda pretty hard work to drive. Even though he bought it near-new when he fled Sydney three years ago, the heavy load of carrying his life in the back and high-speed country driving has taken the grunt from the engine. It’s a full-on thigh workout trying to accelerate with any speed. No wonder he does Tibetan yoga stretches every time we stop for petrol.

  Moving in with someone has a way of shining a torch on your oft-ignored habits and how they reflect your values. Jim doesn’t value material possessions, to put it mildly. Eyes always half-misty with the bigger picture (a gag in his head, a philosophy about the world), the simple matter of even packing the car with any sense of structure or detail eludes him. And it’s even worse when he’s about to go on stage, or running late for a gig, which is pretty often.

  His clown shoes get thrown on top of a whipper-snipper on top of his jeans and socks. Historical non-fiction novels flap in the back window alongside his tax return box. If I hadn’t insisted on a complete re-pack I’m sure the Worcestershire sauce would have been thrown in the same bag as my towels.

  It’s for this very reason that I love him. Here, in my two-day-old tracksuit, stinky singlet and five-dollar sunglasses, he still gives me that look. Misty-eyed, kind and caring, hand out to open my door, like he can’t believe I’ve chosen him. Yes, I have. And you get this stinky tracksuit too.

  He doesn’t know I went through my bags with a fine-toothed comb and left behind anything that I would have been heartbroken to see ripped, stained, covered in dust or fallen in the gravel when he was going through one of his pre-gig frenzies, searching for lost keys, phone, wallet or props. Constantly wondering if he’s going to accidentally drop, smash or break any of my possessions is like a daily reminder not to get too attached to ‘stuff’. It’s a good way to be. Yet an art I still haven’t quite mastered.

  Although it doesn’t sound very romantic, I feel as I think a prisoner would feel. Stripped of all the accoutrements of my outer ‘personality’, dressed in a generic uniform, planted in a landscape so wide, gaping and unenthusiastic, I’m forced inward, to question who I am and what makes me who I am, if it’s not possessions or place.

  I question twenty-nine years worth of habits and values. The fact that up until now, I’ve always needed daily stimulation – coffee and words, reading, talking, action, writing. Newspapers, radio, television, connection to the wider universe. It’s a city thing, but also because I hate to switch off. I might miss – something. Here, I have no such input – just a flat, barren landscape, reflecting the unchanging nature of time. Confronting me with its yawning revelation that nothing material I could ever say or do will change the nature of life.

  By absorbing the landscape I understand Jim so much more, and even, perhaps, become like him. Out here you know survival, or even the cycle of life, has nothing to do with superficial wants or needs. It’s a series of rhythms, and we follow, as much as we like to delude ourselves that we lead. Life, death, growth, change. Designer boots would give me no advantage out here. Neither would a man who valued such things.

  I wonder why I’ve always done this kind of thing – pulled the rug out from under my feet so I have absolutely no back-up option. Like throwing away all my belongings and moving into a man’s car. Yes, I trust him, but what? What if something happens – worse or more dramatically than it did last night? What if he snaps or I snap and we both end up in the middle of nowhere with no way out?

  I put my hand on his warm leg, flopped like it always is, relaxed on my side of the car. He puts his left hand on top of mine, in a movement so natural and comfortable it’s like it’s my own hand. Immediately, my doubts dissolve like a small pool of water does in the scorching sun.

  As we cross the border to South Australia, we come back into range and my phone beeps with messages. It’s a designer, calling about photos for one of the fashion stories.

  ‘Hi Louisa, I just got your message! I’d love to be featured in The Age!’ she breathes excitedly.

  Jim turns down the radio and I act like I’m in an office, hoping she can’t hear the sounds of a car honking nearby. I chant off the specifications by rote: my email address, how many pixels I need the photos to be, the size of the file, when it will be published … ‘Yes, by tomorrow will be just fine.’

  By tomorrow I might be out of internet range but hopefully I can forward files from a service station on the Nullarbor.

  I call back other contacts, organising the next week’s columns and information as we drive through the streets of Adelaide, searching for the exit. I point through the map for Jim as he searches for the street which leads back onto the highway. The car is packed to the brim, and when he brakes suddenly, a book of Henry Lawson poems hits me on the head.

  ‘Owww!’ Now it’s my turn to be grumpy.

  I have my folder of notes in my backpack like a schoolkid. I never would have thought it was possible to conduct an entire business from a moving car until I saw Jim in action. His weathered Collins diary holds the details of his gigs, his Tibetan breathing exercises (‘when I started balancing chairs on my chin the doctor said I needed to do daily stretches to protect my back’), his contacts across Australia – and the world – with a few plastic inserts filled with weathered set-lists. Once, after a gig in Queensland, he’d nonchalantly stuffed his three-hundred-dollar cash fee in a sock in his glove box. Then he pencilled in the payment and added it to his list of venues at the back of his diary.

  His version of MYOB. I like it.

  I love learning, with Jim by my side spurring me on, that I need so much less than I’ve been told I do. Not just that, but with someone who cares more about the way I treat people – and life – as I go about what I do, rather than the end result, I focus more on getting the process right. ‘It’s not about to-do lists, Lou. It’s about intention,’ is what he believes. The products don’t matter – my only reliable tool, he teaches me, is my head and my heart and soul. Passion, excitement and the drive to make it work are so much more important than the right pen, the right office, the right pair of shoes. These are all you need to be literally earning a living from what you love as you skate across the road map of Australia. This feeling of seeing the same view for days on end is blurring the lines between us. We impose new boundaries and little escapes, little spots of breathing space.

  In Adelaide we buy some groceries from Coles and set up a picnic in the park, splitting up afterwards to go for long walks alone and meet up back at the car. Space apart, in these long days of driving, is crucial.

  But always, inevitably, by the end of the walk I’m missing him, like a limb I’ve left back at the car. This partnership stuff is such a paradox.

  We are in constant motion, in transit. Neither here nor there. Without much else to rest on, achievement-wise, we begin to push each other to cover greater and greater expanses. The day’s accomplishments are ticking off dots. Three hundred and ninety-eight kilometres between two dots, one day, and we treat it like stops on a bus. This is a road trip to rival all our previous road trips. It’s addictive.

  ‘Lou, how many kilometres until Iron Knob?’ Jim prods, and I kiss goodbye to the vague thought of stopping at every little town between Adelaide and Ceduna. Jim never did like to travel like a tourist.

  ‘Ummm, 597 …’

  ‘Cool …’ he drawls. I love the peace of looking out the window while he drives. It’s so damn relaxing. We never make boring chitchat to fill in the gaps. It’s either love-talk, creative-talk, travel-t
alk or nothing.

  We pass through towns famous for the biggest this and the smallest that or only known because someone was murdered there. A coffee and a splash of water at one place will make me love it, and if the sun has been stinging me for hours and I have a headache from driving, I hate it. It has nothing to do with the town.

  Travel narratives written by people who’ve lived in Melbourne and Sydney often complain about the lack of amenities in the outback, the stupidity or slowness of the locals, comparing everything to the ‘better’ big city equivalent. But the one question they don’t seem to answer is: What drives the people to disappear out here? Is it humility or hopelessness? And why does so much of the media produced in Australia ignore the ninety per cent of landmass, west of Sydney and Melbourne? Why does loving one idea mean you have to reject its opposite?

  It’s easy to put down what you don’t understand, but I want to make up my own mind, to see if it really is hard for a girl to be out here, not just a girl, placing us all in that one lump of cliché, but me. Can I do it?

  I’m determined not to judge anything by previous standards, on this trip, not to classify anything as intelligent or non-intelligent, ugly or beautiful. I want to watch it all like an observer watching a film, even my own actions, in these places. The landscape is merely me, reflected. A blank page for me to understand the nuances and motivation of my character, my culture and Australia. An Australia I’ve previously only seen from the telescope of people in my socioeconomic group, in a city whose streets and dialects I knew.

  Adelaide marks the end of a certain kind of civilisation, and not just because we’re losing mass-market shopping, footpaths and kit homes. It’s more the sense that we are going into exile now. Passing through the gate into a long period of blankness. The people we see from here on in are their own tribes, following the rules of a different Australia, not the intellectual arty Australia I know, nor the bland uniformity of suburbia.

  This feels more wild and undefined, characters seemingly passing time to get through another day, uncaring whether they leave any mark on this world, grateful just to be left alone. Noise and ego doesn’t apply out here. No-one’s going to save you if you’re silly enough to run out of sanity on a long and lonely road because you’re wearing the right clothes or you’ve been on TV. Pretensions got left at the edge of ‘civilisation’. Out here we’re all the same, flattened by the landscape.

  We all need water, petrol, food, everyone is ‘mate’ and you can make friends or enemies in a split second depending on whether you embrace this or not.

  We pull in to Port Augusta late, hungry and tired, heading to the supermarket to refill on water and fruit for the next day’s food. Jim stops, momentarily, before he opens the door.

  ‘You might get a shock, Lou. There’s a lot of Aboriginals here.’ He gives me a look, like he’s happy that he could be the one to bring me here.

  ‘Okay.’ I don’t realise how the bland landscape has seeped into my skin until I find myself visually entranced by rows and rows of colourfully packaged groceries in the Safeway. We reconnect at the check-out, water, celery, chocolate, tuna, chips, in hand.

  In approximately two minutes at the Port Augusta Safeway, I see more Aboriginal people, of vastly different tribes and colours, than I have ever come across before in my life. I feel like I’m in another country. And I’m the odd one out, being white.

  Across the road are two hotels, and Jim explains that one is for the ‘whitefellas’, one for ‘blackfellas’, and the line is rarely crossed. Signs are scattered around with ‘No Humbugging’, and Jim clarifies what it means. ‘Begging for money,’ he says, and he politely says no to a few people gently asking for money. Their body language is downtrodden, passive. But it’s the resolution to the white and black power dynamic, that this is the way it is, which really jars me. I feel fat, privileged, disgusting. ‘No mate, sorry mate,’ I find myself saying also. I look at them and feel the tug of history and all that my ‘people’ have done.

  There’s so much I want to know and tell them, but instead I just send a silent thank you and I’m sorry, as I pass, looking them in the eye, facing my own shame and acknowledging theirs.

  Jim takes my hand as we walk back to the car. ‘It’s good to look at them, Lou. They’re just like us. They’re just searching for a connection.’ Then he looks at me with a cheeky grin. ‘It’s kinda cool being the one with the different-coloured skin. Shows you how they must feel!’

  God I love him. He gets it.

  13

  Bundy, bikies and

  bearded dragons

  ‘Youse need a room for the night?’

  STILL DIGESTING MY ENCOUNTER FROM the Port Augusta Safeway, we drive down a dirt road to a pub.

  At least, that’s what Jim claims it is, but it just looks like an abandoned tin shack, with a black Rottweiler standing guard at the door. It looks a bit like you might picture the head office of the Klu Klux Klan, but I keep this to myself.

  A warm, dry heat touches my skin and my stomach rumbles in the dark. Jim is beginning to doubt anyone’s home. I wonder briefly if I can go into a hotel – however tin-shacky – in my tracksuit.

  ‘You might be the best-dressed girl in Iron Knob,’ says Jim, pointing to my painted red toe-nails peeping out from my sandals. ‘Beef’ll offer us a room if he’s in,’ he says, referring to a guy who gave him a gig once. That’s all I know. I don’t like to ask Jim too many questions. If you narrow stuff down by overanalysing things, you narrow the possibilities, is our motto.

  ‘You heard of the Rebels bikie gang, Lou?’

  ‘No … oh … maybe … ?’

  ‘… doesn’t matter.’

  We walk up the dark path to the shack and I bump a plastic chair, causing the dog to bark, as we open the door to the shed.

  ‘FUCK ME DEAD IT’S JIMBO!’ A stocky man is perched behind the counter with long mutton chops. He’s clad in a wife beater, slams a beer on the bar, takes a look at me and firmly plants down a Bundy ‘for the lady’.

  ‘Youse need a room for the night?’

  Soon, his wife trots out, nodding her approval. I get the feeling she’s the real one we need to impress in this relationship. Like a lost soul joining the Rebels as a dysfunctional replacement for the safe haven of a family, Beef secedes to the matriarchal Monique.

  Gypsy, the Rottweiler, runs in and sniffs my leg while Jim ‘catches up’ with Beef. They reminisce over the gig Jim did and why the cops came (shots were fired), how happy Jim was not to be shot at (very), and how Beef reckoned it was the best night ever but the f’ing cops should have f’ed off or he wouldn’t have had to use his crossbow.

  For the next few hours, Beef and Monique keep up a steady stream of stories about battles with the cops, how they keep out the rival bikie gang with their crossbow, and which guy had heckled Jim and who buried someone down a hole in some other town after a bad ‘blue’. Jim laughs and looks at me, ‘It was a tough gig that night, Lou.’

  I’ll say.

  ‘Beef must like you,’ Jim whispers, nodding to the third Bundy and coke I’ve been given since we got there, and Monique even makes me a ham and cheese sandwich when I ask Jim for the keys to the car to get some tuna. I hate Bundy and coke, but it would be like scorning someone’s prize offering to turn it away, so I flinch and pour it down my gullet.

  ‘Eight bucks them usually cost,’ says Beef, unexpectedly, and I remember to keep hiding the fact that it sort of hurts to drink them.

  Their warmth for Jim spreads to me, in a she’s Jimbo’s missus, so she must be okay way. And also, because they’re laughing. I get the feeling they don’t laugh much. Jim’s visitation is like a medicine which will carry them through another chapter of their lives. You just can’t discount how important it is to laugh.

  After a while, I go to the ‘ladies’ toilet, a big cold empty row of cubicles with a window out to the flat, red earth of Iron Knob, an old mining town. There’s a TV on behind me and, aside from the bar stools, th
e tables and chairs are all plastic, like you’d find at a cheap garden furniture shop. An old man sits on the corner bar stool, drinking his beer out of a stubby holder with a naked woman on it. He only moves his head once, to laugh at Jim, indicating that he can hear everything.

  Unusually for me, I’m not scared. I never am, with Jim, no matter how jagged the men, how scarred their histories. He seems to have a Fool’s touch, coming in with no judgements, just an ear for the humour in even the most tragic story, a way to make anyone smile, and no ego at all so there is no threat or sense that he is doing it for any selfish reason of his own. Every place we visit the men practically beg him to stay and listen to their stories. It’s as if he’s become the modern version of the nomadic medicine man, but he heals psychic pain more than the physical version, simply by listening and joking and providing an unopinionated presence.

  Through snatches of stories about brawls and bar-fights – relating to who has been excluded from the Rebels and why he’d ‘kill’ for ’em – I gather Beef came from a broken home. He doesn’t realise it, but he talks about his dog and it sounds like he’s describing himself. ‘That’s why I called her Gypsy, love,’ Beef tells me, referring to the dog who stands guard at the door wearing a little silver-studded collar. ‘Had no home, nobody owned her. Bloody beaten up good when I found her.’

  Monique is kind to me, but in a forceful, don’t mess with me or any of my kind way. Her hair is red, straight, sleek, and she has thick eyeliner which serves to shrink her already piercing green eyes. Her nails are blood red and she wears black, like she’s a widow.

  Beef speaks of his daughter, from another marriage, the custody battle, all the complicated madness that makes up a messy life. I wonder how Monique found him, and what draws people in to these unconventional tribes which you only usually hear about on the news, when there has been a bloody brawl.