We stand in silence for a little while, just appreciating. Like a polar opposite to my waitressing self, I am still. Content. I don’t want to be anywhere else with anyone else in this universe. This, is what’s out there. No more wondering.
Jim breaks the silence eventually. ‘Let’s go, Lou. We might be able to see the whales,’ he whispers.
Once a year, whales from Antarctica return to the Australian Byte to give birth to their babies in the place they were born. It’s only a very narrow window of days when they do this, their instinctual watery bodies gravitating towards the memory of the waters where they emerged from the womb.
Without any research into the phenomenon, or even knowing what dates they appear at the edge, Jim had been filling the car with petrol when he heard from someone at the roadhouse that today is probably the last chance to see them. After swiftly packing our meagre belongings – the torch, our water, our wallets – we get back into the car, bidding adieu to yet another space which has carried our spirits through another night, following a turn-off to the national park.
The view from the edge is an unfathomable expanse of sea, crashing below the kilometre-long cliff face, ancient stone which has seen thousands of years of changes. Massive blobs of black slap up and out of the water, breaching their magnificent forms in the daunting sea. We watch in awe, mesmerised by the power of this other world within our own world, mothers moving with their own water, shifting space, listening to some internal guide we will never ever understand.
‘Pretty unreal, hey?’ Jim looks at me. Yet another never-before-seen-marvel we’ve shared. These moments make me feel like our life together is one endless honeymoon.
Afterwards, Jim calls me into a cave, and I tiptoe down into a cavern sliced into the side of the cliff face, gulping back vertigo to stare at the expanse of sea ahead. ‘I love the fact that there’s no signs about anything,’ says Jim. So do I. Find it all yourself. Find yourself.
This land, in all its harshness and beauty, demands that you mature, fast, learning the language of your earth as a matter of survival. Every sound and drop in temperature, in changes to the landscape, reading the earth for your own life. Far from the spoon-fed culture of television and takeaway food, out here is where you learn truly to fall in love with the source of all things. And to listen, with every breath.
The vastness of the land, and the jarringly extreme sense of life and death dancing in the same air, brings my whole being alive with lucidity and focus. I’m in awe everywhere I look, gasping and silenced. Like a trip to a monastery, the effect of the silence and space is overwhelming clarity.
I reassess my need for the newspaper, and wonder if to read that trivia out here would be to miss the point. It’s a relief there is still a place in Australia so blank and untainted that you have no choice but to switch off your connection to the superficial.
Spirits whisper in the eaves. In a place with no distractions, you hear them so clearly. They tell me that all that matters is love, letting go and following your dreams.
We are as vast and expansive and frightening and beautiful and untameable as the land we walk on.
Nothing else matters.
15
Another country
‘What time is it?’
‘It depends where you stand!’
WE’RE DEEP INTO THE PLAIN. Each hour we spend driving makes me feel we’re deep-sea diving and I’m further and further away from the surface. The signs for the ninety-mile straight were hours ago, and we’ve long since stopped looking at road signs in the triple digits for the next place to stop. The horizon spreads out like an ocean, the same vista any way you turn your neck. It’s dizzying.
The austere sameness of the landscape plays tricks with your mind, and by now Jim and I have entered what feels like a different state of consciousness, leaving each other to daydream as time and space melt into our senses. I put my hand on his leg, silently thanking him for bringing me here. He winks back at me in acknowledgement, and keeps driving, silently.
I’m not even sure what time it is. It could be just getting dark, or it could be the sun is just coming up on the horizon, ready to sear the sand. All I can see is space ahead, and the dust we’ve kicked up by the wheels of the car in the rearvision mirror.
What day is it? I’m tired and cramped from being in the same position in the passenger seat while all we own fills every spare piece of space in the back. Jim can’t see out the back because the swag is up against the window, and our two-dollar hessian ‘refugee’ bags with all we own fill every available bit of space and nudge up against me, encroaching on the front seat.
I close my eyes for a minute and drift off into a regretful memory about the new mattress I gave away when I got rid of my bed and all the rest of my furniture … I’m woken from my listless fantasy by a gut churn from a sudden slam on the brakes.
‘Lou! Look!’ It’s the loudest Jim’s been all day.
A camel has walked in front of the car.
Yes, a camel. We pull over by the side of the road and manage to catch a glimpse of it trotting into the distance, its gold and mocha humps eventually blending in with the horizon.
It’s then that I realise we’ve made it to Western Australia. The driving has been so long, so flat, so severe, disorienting my perception so that I’d almost given up hoping. Camels, red dust and searing heat are the first taste I get of this new country. But it’s not just any summer heat, the kind you get for two weeks in January every year in Melbourne. No, this kind of heat would disintegrate an animal carcass in a day, char your skin in an hour and leave you dry and delirious, slow and stunned, easily forgetting your past, present and future.
Jim pulls over, and I find a tree to squat behind, cleaner than any truck stop we’ve been in, with a few bull-ants for company, too. ‘Are we really in Western Australia?’
‘Sure are, baby!’ He’s smiling and aflame with passion, like he’s just brought me home to our renovated love nest. ‘Check out the colour of the ground!’ I stand up and look down at the red earth, almost tripping over a bull carcass. A smile spreads across my face. I’m really here.
After we hop back in, Jim starts telling me stories about where we’re going, who he knows, gigs he’s done. He’s waking up. Already, his energy is shifting. The same way I noticed how much he relaxed when we drove out of Sydney or Melbourne, he is in an entirely different zone, over here. Like it’s the land of his birth, even though he was born and raised in Sydney.
A question appears, faintly, walking in front of my sun-seared eyes. How will you change, from here on in?
At Border Village, like we’ve crossed the finish line in a wacky race, three giant clocks with three time zones at the fork in the road symbolise the crossing of a threshold.
‘What time is it, Jim?’
‘It depends where you stand!’
Technically, you’re supposed to change your watch back two hours when you cross the border, but really, how can a few metres dictate the time? This is one of my favourite parts of travelling. That realisation that time is but a construct, just like the rest of your life.
I fix a coffee from brown powder in polystyrene at the truck stop while Jim helps the quarantine inspectors go through our car. They retrieve markers of our relationship, cleaning out the boot, forcing the unpacking again, this time, to be repacked with a cake of red dust. Our territorial marker, our glorious achievement that dust. This time, my clothes will have it too. No more red dust jealousy, like I had in Melbourne when he’d unpack yet another item caked in his passport stamp from a foreign part of my own country.
Out go the nuts we bought back in Queensland, honey from Adelaide, some rice snacks from Sydney, and all the fresh fruit we’d hoped would last until Perth. Although we’re on the border we’re also in no-man’s land. No paper, no phone connection … and now, no fruit.
Jim munches on two apples at once and chats to the men as they search.
‘When did you guys leave Melbourne?’
I hear one drawl, as he removes another bag, this one with the Worcestershire sauce from Fitzroy.
‘Ah … day before yesterday,’ Jim slows to their pace, talking the same way, instantly making them comfortable.
The old guy looks up. ‘What? You did that – in two days?’ Jim, standing with two empty apple cores, has on a green t-shirt which says, ‘Pike – Just do Nothing’. And he looks like the most simple, ruddy fool in the world.
‘Did you say you’ve got a missus?’ the old man asks. Jim waves over, signalling to the man where I’m standing, and he laughs, shaking his head.
The pace of shopkeepers, even the quarantine agents – is all a slow saunter. I gaze up at the shop TV, its unknown newsreader reporting on unknown people and places reminding me that I might as well be in a new country. The clock we adjust our watches to says four o’clock, and we’ve miles to go before we sleep. Six hundred kilometres, to be precise, from Border Village to Kalgoorlie.
In Norseman, closer, closer to the finish line which just keeps moving, I buy a can of dolmades, three more bottles of water and a packet of snakes, to cheer Jim on with the driving. Walking out of the little supermarket, I notice a sign in the window, advertising a metal detector. Below the photo is a hand-scrawled encouragement: ‘There’s gold in them there hills!’
I look up at the sky, a different, wider-seeming sky than the one I’m used to, with a heat that tastes like liquid gold, drying on my tongue in a crust coloured amber, like honey. I can see why people head west for new beginnings, a new life, or just to forget the old one. It’s easy to start over again when the sky drips liquid gold all over your tongue in a heat so strong you can’t remember where you’ve come from.
And any step you take could be on a gold mine.
16
A touch of Paris in
the goldfields
‘I’ve always wanted to go to Paris, Jim.’
JIM’S SHINING FACE, WET WITH new jokes for a brand-new day, wakes me from a dreamless sleep. He has his hands behind his head, looking up at the whirring fan.
‘Lou, do you think there’s a skimpy in Paris called Boulder?’
‘Umph?’ I’m groggy with the relief that only a bed can give after thirteen hours on the road.
We rolled in to Boulder, Kalgoorlie’s twin town, late last night, lost in two time zones after eleven hundred kilometres of road.
I couldn’t talk. So beyond hungry, angry, lonely and tired – otherwise known as the HALT principle – it was all I could do not to give voice to the feelings of blame that he had made me this way, when yes, I had agreed that we keep driving, mercilessly, from Border Village. To Grand Final Weekend in Kalgoorlie. And nowhere to sleep.
Like a Survivor challenge we’d given ourselves, we really had left ourselves in the most ludicrous situation. But, like everything about how we go about meeting our basic needs together, impulse always seems to take precedence over foresight and planning. Or even logic. Sometimes that was great. Sometimes it was – not.
I just had to trust that Jim’s good karmic vibe would see us in a bed by the time the clock struck midnight. If nothing else, I needed to check my email, and shower about a kilo of dirt, fatigue and random thoughts of fear from my skin and hair.
One sweaty pub after another in Kalgoorlie turned us away. Men spilling out the doors sporting mullets and wife-beater singlets cast eager eyes up and down at me, spitting on the street, downing pints of beer. Jim and I took it in turns to ask. I didn’t want to show him I was a bit scared.
‘Hi, my boyfriend and I were wondering if you had any accommodation upstairs?’
The owner shakes his head. Nope. ‘Won’t have much luck on Grand Final Weekend I’m afraid, love.’
My emotions have always had an element of the Big Dipper about them, swinging from ecstatic highs to miserable lows – and that’s just before I’ve had a coffee in the morning. Fronting up to the main bars of packed pubs on Hannan Street after a day spent in the car, ignoring the werewolf-type glances of sweaty cashed-up drunks, I felt a little angry. And bereft. With a side dish of hopelessness.
‘We’ll try Boulder, Lou. Come on.’
In Boulder, just five kilometres up the road from Kalgoorlie, there is still a little noise in the few open corner pubs, but nowhere near the element of desperate aggression we just escaped.
The sandwich board out the front of the Golden Eagle Hotel announces, ‘Skimpy of the Week: Paris’.
‘I’ve always wanted to go to Paris, Jim.’
When we walk in together, numb, exhausted, bug-eyed, the middle-aged couple behind the bar just smile at us sweetly, then hand over the key to a room before we’ve even registered how great it is that we will have a bed tonight. And a shower.
Homeless and unwashed at 11 pm on a Friday night, still in my exquisite sunscreen-and-sweat-soaked singlet and navy tracksuit pants, bloodshot and mincing words, with the scent of our just-eaten dinner from McDonald’s emanating from our pores, I worked really hard to smile at the lady as she talked us through the facilities. Finally, she left, and we lugged our bags up the stairs. After a few moments, footsteps again, and a tap at the door.
It’s the lady, in heels, I notice, teamed with her own tracksuit pants, standing proudly as if posing for a brochure, bearing three fresh towels for us. There were also three on the bed when we got there. ‘Youse need any more towels you just let me know.’
We must have looked dirty, I guess.
But when I pad up the hall to scrub away three states and two days worth of dirt, I’m standing next to a urinal, and there’s no lock on the door. I shut my eyes and watch the water run down the plug-hole, washing off yet another insane journey.
It always startles me how a full night’s rest wipes your aura clean and you’re ready to do it all again. Just when you think this is it, I can’t go on like this anymore, one big dose of unconscious oblivion and you’re ready to do it all over again.
‘Youse wanna come down for a sausage when the game starts?’
As much as I hate football, I do love that it is such a unifying force this woman is already inviting us to a barbecue. The husband adds, almost as an aside, as I pay for another night, realising we’ve slept past check-out time, ‘Youse might wanna move ya car, seen it got a bit of a swipe last night.’ I walk out the back and look at the Mazda, parked haywire – almost on its side – like Jim had been a second away from falling asleep at the wheel. The entire back left light has been smashed, and there’s a huge dent in the rear chassis.
Jim, back in the room, is eager to try out a new joke, but I interrupt him. ‘Babe, um the car is a bit damaged.’
‘Oh. Right-o.’ He doesn’t seem too fussed. He rubs his eyes, pulls on his shorts, and pads down the fire escape to have a look.
His face is contemplative. ‘I can just tape it up I reckon.’
It hasn’t affected his mood at all. He fishes out some masking tape from the glove box and gets to work.
‘Did she say something about sausages?’ He winks at me, dusting off his knees.
‘I love you.’
Jim, despite his strange material circumstances, is easy to love. He doesn’t blame, get angry, snap or criticise me, even when he hasn’t slept for days or has had his only possession smashed. When cornered, he burrows into his own private oasis, which can be just as hard to penetrate. But unlike some of my less-appealing traits, he never erupts or has a ‘mood’ depending on circumstance. A quiet acceptance that he has created every cause and effect in his life frees me from bearing the brunt of less evolved projections. It’s liberating, and forces me to step up to the plate and lift my game, lose any remnant of projections from relationships past. We don’t play games. Jealousy is a non-issue.
‘If I wasn’t into you, why would you even want to be with me?’ he said once, on the subject. I feel the same way. And I know that if I talk to other men or establish relationships with anyone – man or woman – Jim will just want to hear about it out of curiosity about me, n
ot some lower ego jealousy wanting to know if the other person poses a threat. There is no threat. We love each other, and we both expect each other to love the world. It happened straight away and the connection is so invisible and so deep that to worry about it being severed just doesn’t cross either of our minds. When we talk about other relationships we’ve been in, it’s a curious conversation, not an anxious one.
But at the same time, we see that these issues are pretty much prevalent in every gender exchange we have with others. When we get home, or back into the car, after each exchange, it’s like a huge sigh of relief. Life is so much simpler when you don’t get jealous.
After we spend some time in Kalgoorlie, I realise that I would have been in real trouble had I come here without him. Kalgoorlie is a peculiar place, dramatic in its exposure of the worst of white Australian male behaviour.
By midday the sun is beating down on the tin roof of the pub and sweat pours down my décolletage after just a few moments standing on the balcony outside our room, surveying this new landscape. Downstairs, the pub is filling up fast. Sweaty white men with shaved heads clad in Bulldogs colours line the bar, shouting and jeering.
I take the chance for another leisurely shower while Jim settles in with a lemonade and his mobile phone to ‘watch’ the game with his best mate back in a different space and time (it’s three o’clock there), in Sydney.
The mirror and sink is just a step away from the urinal, but Paris, the skimpy, has left some make-up and hairspray on the counter. Jim says she was touching up her lipstick when he walked in.
‘It was a little awkward Lou,’ he said with a chuckle, when he returned to the room. Although she nodded that he could go right ahead, he used the cubicle out of respect, emerging when she had got to the eyeliner part of her make-up routine. I giggle, picturing the exchange.
After my shower I put on my favourite cotton red dress, in celebration of being able to cast off my Nullarbor tracksuit, and also because it’s the only thing in my bag fitting for such heat. I walk down to the bar to join Jim and watch the scene.
Love and Other U-Turns Page 18