Love and Other U-Turns

by Louisa Deasey

  I guess the same things that draw people into the conventional ones. A need to belong. A need for someone to fix. A need to set yourself – with someone else – against the world. Against whatever represents the ‘authority’ that has slighted you. In this case, the ‘pigs’. Thankfully, neither Jim nor I are representative of anything that has slighted either of them. My generic tracksuit has come in handy.

  Beef holds fort behind the bar like a preacher with all of us banked up as he gives his sermon, the bar his pulpit, his place, his power. He tells story after story, and I tune in again to hear about some ‘city poofter’ who was lost, coming in and asking for a glass of champagne for his ‘missus’.

  ‘Told him to fuck off,’ says Beef.

  I’ve never been in a dynamic like this before – the bikies, the wife, a closed bar. If I think about it on an intellectual level I get freaked out. So I gulp down more Bundy and go with the flow.

  Jim is asking Beef more questions about his convictions, which sets off another rambling story. Monique gets excited and nods emphatically at the right spots. She’s on his side. He’s hers, now. Somehow, a mention of an Aboriginal makes it into one of the stories, and I hear that word again, fired like a shot from Monique’s lips. The way I now let this word coast past my ears without defence shows me how much I’ve already changed. I’m not even shocked to hear it anymore.

  Jim has been locked in conversation with Beef for some time, but sensing the conversation with Monique is heading into dark territory, he snaps off his bar stool and announces that he wants to update his website with some pictures of them.

  ‘What? You want to take pictures of us?’ Beef looks humbled all of a sudden. Monique stares at him, quiet, too. She even looks nervous and shy.

  ‘We’ve not got any pictures of the two of us.’ They’ve been together for seven years.

  Jim just laughs and gets the camera out of the car, while the two disappear and put on their ‘colours’ – their decorated leather jackets. They re-emerge on a roaring Harley into the bar. Monique is freshly made up, with gothically black lipstick.

  Jim takes about twenty photos of the two of them revving the engine, cracking jokes like a professional, getting them to ham it up. They hug, kiss and laugh like lovesick teenagers, and for the first time all night Beef isn’t talking about a custody battle or the cops. He’s patting Monique’s hair and they kiss, thinking I’m not looking. She nervously re-touches her lipstick in between shots.

  When Jim reappears from the car he has two of his goat t-shirts, one for both Beef and one for Monique. I snap the camera at Beef’s radiant smile as Jim presents him with his new work wear.

  ‘I’m makin’ you an Honorary Rebel!’ yells Beef, through teary eyes.

  Before they take the Harley away, Jim snaps a quick picture of me in my green singlet and tracksuit pants, riding it.

  Beef laughs behind me. ‘Love, hold this.’

  He hands me a crossbow, and Jim takes another picture.

  ‘You’ll email them pics to us, won’t you?’ says Monique, blushing, before Beef shows us to a room for the night.

  I can barely keep my eyes open as Beef talks away in the room. It’s a shack right at the bottom of the mine with fibro walls and a mosquito net. There’s even a sink next to the bed.

  ‘Don’t disturb the dragon …’ Beef says on his way out, but it melds into my dream and I’m not sure if I imagined it. We pass out, holding hands like schoolchildren. The mosquito net flaps against our faces and the dry heat catches in my throat.

  In the morning I wake to see a giant lizard wandering across the floor. I find a kettle, next to the sink, and get some instant coffee out of the car. There’s a toilet, but no shower, so I brush my teeth in the sink. The lizard saunters back across the floor and I realise Beef wasn’t joking. It even has gills, which must be the ‘bearded’ element of the dragon. I open the door and let it out.

  Not knowing how much car time will be on the agenda today, I pull my tracksuit back on and go out for a look at the town.

  Iron Knob is an arid town once home to a BHP iron mine long since closed, about fifty kilometres from Port Augusta. Everything about the place is dishevelled, abandoned, rough. Cactus plants litter the footpath which is dusty with red ochre. I pad past tin shacks with Rottweilers standing guard and don’t see one female.

  Everything looks like it was knocked up quickly, cheaply, to serve a purpose. The whole feel is coarse, tough, parched and masculine.

  At the top of an unpaved road, which is the main street, I look down on the town. A place for human cactuses, I think. In need of harshness to thrive. I feel sort of intrusive, or arrogant, for thinking I could just slot into these worlds, across Australia.

  Jim’s lack of opinion or preference had at first struck me as weak, but now I see that it’s the only way he can see the whole of Australia. Imagine if I’d come to a place like this with any of my exes, such as Marco? His aftershave would have warned them a mile away, and we would have been chased out, like the couple Beef mentioned, asking for champagne.

  Opinions. Preferences. Personalities. They can rub people the wrong way. Better to be neutral. Safer. I’m becoming more and more like Jim. A blank slate in each new place. An unwritten page, ready and waiting for a new story in every town.

  I return to the room and make some toast in a toaster I find under the sink. Beef and Monique turn up soon after and we sit with them in the dry, parched heat as Beef cracks open his first tinny for the day. The bearded dragon wanders sinisterly over to his thongs, and Beef pats it absentmindedly.

  We mention where we stayed the night before this.

  ‘Been to Keith once. Best mates were bluin’. Made up now but,’ says Beef, looking up at the sky. I ask if one of them ended up in a hole.

  Beef chuckles, the scent of dust and Bundy coming out of him as he looks at me, shaking his head.

  ‘Never take a woman to that place, Jimbo.’ Monique nods grimly in agreement.

  We drive off, a little later, and when we start to debrief after the turn-off we can’t help but laugh hysterically. Jim looks at me, and says, ‘How many people have said that about Iron Knob?’

  14

  Nullarbord reaming

  ‘Love, by the time it comes here, is old news. So we don’t get the papers.’

  CEDUNA IS WINDY AND RAGGED. But as it’s the last town before we really are deep in the heart of Nullarbor country, Jim wants to see if there’s the chance of a gig. Inside the Foreshore Hotel at Ceduna, perfectly healthy human beings smoke and drink the day away to the sinister song of pokies. Outside the sun shines blue and bright.

  ‘G’day mate,’ Jim cracks a joke to an anxious-looking Aboriginal man, smoking in the corner. A smile spreads across his face, white teeth grinning widely, shining in the light. The rest glance hopelessly from their ticket stubs to the races on the TV while the chime of the pokies competes with the cash register, slamming open and shut.

  The bar is filled with thin, chocolate-skinned Aboriginal people. They look hunted, haunted, hungry. And perhaps worst of all, like they’ve given up. Behind the bar the two owners are white, plump, brisk efficiency, tinkling dollars into the register, seemingly oblivious to how horrific this scene seems, to me.

  I feel ashamed of my skin. Again. Jim gives me a nod. Knows I’m adjusting. You’re okay, babe, his eyes say. Just take it all in.

  After a chat to the owners about the oyster festival, we go back outside through the pokies room. ‘Hey Nelly, how’s things?’ says Jim to an elderly Aboriginal woman. She looks up, and her eyes change.

  ‘Jimbo! Funny man!’ She’s grinning from ear to ear, remembering something from the last time he was here. The others nearby raise their heads from slumped shoulders and cheap, printed dresses, sipping glasses of beer perched on the pokies slots. Their eyes wide like children, a couple catch his words and smile, too. For a second, the energy is changed, even in this den of smoky sadness.

  I feel, again, like I am travel
ling with a priest who heals through laughter.

  On we go, up the road, deep into the heart of Nullarbor country now. Greater and greater expanses between cars and people, life and earth, a blank, barren landscape of what was apparently a sea bed a couple of million years ago.

  ‘Null – Arbor.’ No trees. Nothing but the howling wind and the sounds of a few thousand centuries of earth to keep you warm at night.

  If you hold still long enough, or even – don’t talk – it speaks to you, whispering through the reeves, cracked open to the sky.

  The stark contrast between the silent, almost soothingly barren landscape and the petrol stations we must, by necessity, stop at further highlight the strange confusion of what I’m perceiving and what’s real, what has gone before us and what lies ahead.

  Racism is an arbitrary term out here. There are no newspapers, no intellectual commentary or egos vying for the perfect words with which to describe something that has happened.

  As we drive I romanticise that I will finally be able to learn, in each town, through its museums and statues, about the original inhabitants of our land. But nothing prepares me for the uncomfortable gap in information about Aboriginal history, replaced by bronze statues paying homage to European explorers who ‘found’ something which was already found. So much wisdom, so much knowledge, lies hidden in their Indigenous wandering souls, both about the land, their own history, and how to live in a way connected with a sense of spirit. But I learn that partially because of their own cultural attitude towards recording information and the shameful, violent history of white colonisation, not much of it will be laid out and ready for us to pick up and touch, in a museum or library. The things I learn won’t come from books, they’ll come from one-on-one experiences, entirely subjective, but all the more beautiful because it’s living history. All the more incredible, because it’s been here all along, waiting for me.

  A still, silent separation starts to sink into my skin and I feel myself becoming like the voluntary lone wolves out here. Drifters, wanderers, loners. This isn’t the sort of space which attracts those who need constant attention. Or even – acknowledgement.

  Signs start to appear signalling turn-offs to Aboriginal camps, and I wonder how far you have to walk before you are deep in a place where white culture has never gone before.

  Later, in Perth, I read of a nomadic Aboriginal tribe which has managed to stay so removed from what we call ‘society’ they have never even seen a car. The reporter, a white man sent to deliver money for a painting by one of the elders of the tribe, drove deep into the heart of the country to find them, after the uber cool ‘art’ world got ‘word’ of this artist. They ran for cover when his car arrived. Still speaking in dialect, through a translator, they thought the car was a monster sent as punishment for something they’d done to the land. He offered them money for the painting and the woman who headed the tribe went and buried it.

  What use is money, really, when you know how to live abundantly without it?

  The further we drive the more of this country seeps into my skin. The wind picks up as we go further west, the stacked Mazda chopped and buffeted with no protection from the gusts blowing in from the ocean, nature’s constant reminder that we are but a fleck in the landscape, surrounded by flat, ancient plains, dropping down into thousands of miles of sea. Frightening carved cliff-edges with no sign or warning drop into the same ocean, far from gentrified explanations, civilisation.

  Your sense of time and place has nothing on this, it whispers to me.

  The jaw-dropping landscape of the southern byte scooping suddenly down into the southern ocean is such a dramatic vista, with deep, echoing silence, that I’m awed like someone who has met their guru when they least expected it.

  Jim and I have stopped talking, silenced from this strange, flat plain, rocking us forward like a dream, processing our thoughts and revelling in the peace after our night sleeping with Dragons and Rebels, absorbing other people’s demons. Jim has crossed the Nullarbor a few times, now, and just accepts the silence that it breeds.

  Something peculiar has also been taking me over, but it’s been there since I met him. Now that we share every second and millimetre of car space, dreams and every waking thought, it is growing more imperceptible. I feel like I’m becoming Jim, merging into his body when it’s all I look at, forgetting what I was or thought before I knew him. We share everything – habits and hours, water bottles and dreamscapes, music, jokes, brainstorming, silent time, the car, sleep, laughter. I should be alarmed, but I’m not. Friends, family, even observers who knew us separately, don’t exist in this place we have planted ourselves, so we are free to merge completely. He picks up my mannerisms as I do his.

  Though our speed picks up as the landscape gets flatter and more desolate, kangaroo signs warn of driving at night. Jim, from experience, knows dusk is the most dangerous time for roo run-ins. After saving on lodgings and food the night before, we embrace the idea of paying for a night’s anonymity, nothing but sleep, no-one to impress, no-one to explain ourselves to.

  ‘Here?’ Jim nods, pulls over at the Nullarbor Roadhouse. When he turns to me I see his eyes are bloodshot, wide open like peeled onions, eight hours of driving making him batty.

  I hand over eighty dollars for a ‘donga’, to yet another stranger in yet another place I’ve never dreamed of, getting that familiar feeling of romance at unlocking the door to a paper-thin shack which promises us a night of rest, if we can stay warm enough in the whisper-thin walls.

  ‘Dongas’ are an accommodation option favoured by truckers. A step up from a campsite, but only just, they offer walls, but no heating. An ancient creaky bed, sparsely furnished and occasionally, electricity. This one has no lights, and Jim sets about with his phone, feeling his way in the dark.

  ‘I’ll search for that torch Mum gave us,’ I say. Bless Mum and her torches and maps.

  Inside, we peel back the flimsy pink cotton spread and lie down for a little while, listening to the howling wind coming in off the plains, and a distant dog from a caravan, barking. Within moments his breath is husky in a dream beside me, his heart rate slowed, asleep. Lying and listening, and a little bit lonely in my waking state, I’m also curious about this strange, neither-here-nor-there place, so I think I’ll go and explore. The bed is more than a bit sunken in the middle, so I can’t slip out easily. It has to be a heave.

  I trek to the showers under the stars, which are coin-in-the-slot, one dollar for ten minutes. A sign on the door asks me not to take too long: ‘Water comes by truck. Not by mother nature!’ It smells like a urinal, even though it’s definitely for females. I weigh the pros and cons of going in for a wash. In Keith, it was a toss-up between the jog and the shower. The jog won. In Iron Knob, there was no shower. I don’t think I’ve ever layered so much sunscreen and sweat in my life.

  I know it’s only a dollar, but this shower is really filthy. And kind of – creepy. Jim is asleep in our murder-mystery shack on the edge of the dongas. I take my towel back to the car. This place would be a great setting for an episode of Medium.

  Searching for a connection to what day it is, or what’s happening in the rest of the universe, I ask in the shop for a newspaper.

  ‘Love, by the time it comes here, is old news. So we don’t get the papers. Last chance was Ceduna. Next probably Norseman.’ I look at our map. That’s a one-thousand-kilometre gap.

  The shop owner talks slowly, but not with any ill-will. It’s just a different pace out here. The TV blares in the background, and I see her point.

  ‘Do you miss the paper?’ I ask her vaguely, still absorbing this strange fact.

  ‘Nope. Never read it.’

  I order the least unhealthy of the meal options from the bain-marie: a hamburger.

  ‘Seventeen dollars, thanks love.’

  The patty is so dry when I bite into it the entire thing falls apart.

  So I walk outside, sit on the gravel road, and listen to the silence again, bef
ore heading back to our room. I fall asleep with my arms around Jim, my one and only anchor. He stirs, still sleeping, and hugs me back.

  I wake from a cold sleep, thinking of cliffs. By now, Jim can read my breathing patterns even when I think he’s still asleep.

  ‘Don’t go for a run, babe. You just don’t know.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll just stretch my legs in the field.’

  Outside our room, a lizard waddles lazily across my toes like it couldn’t care less, and I gaze out to the distance, far from signs and traffic and police and all those city safety-nets which are placed to protect us from our own stupidity. Here, you could walk and walk and get lost in a thousand kilometres of space, freeze to death in a night’s winds, or worse, fall off the byte if you walk too fast. The earth demands reverence and respect, and I feel my spirit finally understand just a fraction of the sacred awe which kept Aboriginal people living in harmony with this frightening, mystical land for centuries.

  Mystery and gaping anonymity hit you here, too. There’s a quiet apathy to the things that make up an identity, in a space like this. If you wanted to disappear, this would be the place to do it.

  But be careful where you step. The twenty-seven hundred kilometres of cliff dropping down into three hundred feet of granite which make up the Great Australian Byte looks out to Antarctica, dropping stiff and sharp, like God has sawn it off in a violent decision, dropping into the deep blue sea. There are no fences out here, nobody else to protect you from the elements. Whether you live or die is all up to you.

  Jim comes up behind me to gaze at it too. ‘You like the Nullarbor, don’t you?’ He looks proud, like someone who is showing me their backyard. Like? This is more than like – it’s intense fascination. All this time I’ve lived in Melbourne, and I never came to see this. I like Jim’s way of acting like Australia is his to show me, just as it’s all of ours, but not that many people want to see it.