For two hours in our freezing-cold room I channel Prada’s Autumn 2007 collection and interweave the Little Red Riding Hood story. When I’m really immersed in the writing, I forget where I am and scramble beside me, looking for a reference book. Oh. I remember. That went months ago. I miss my dictionary.
When at last I’m happy with the column I send it to my editor, who has also asked me to cover three dance extravaganzas on in Melbourne next week. I call the publicists to arrange photos and they offer me free tickets. Gulp. ‘Oh, thank you, but I won’t be able to make it.’ Why is my freedom beginning to feel like entrapment?
Jim arrives back grinning like a happy fool, inspired from his walk, where he’s seen sea-lions and walked all the way to a whistling cave. ‘Do you have to eat in the bed?’ He’s slurping away under the doona, cold baked beans straight from the can. For some reason this really depresses me.
I pull on some clothes and head up the road for a look for myself, but the day has grown dark while I have been typing. The sea-lions have all gone, now there’s just a violent sea and a dark, ominous sky which looks like it’s sinking. I walk further up the hill to the supermarket, and settle on a can of baked beans for my own dinner. After righteously warming them up and eating them in a huge, silent hall, I pad to the outside bathroom to brush my teeth and whack my arm so hard on the hand dryer I bleed. I stumble back to the dark room and close my eyes, falling into a nightmarish sleep.
I dream that I am in jail by the side of the sea, and Jim is my captor. Then he is sinking into one of my bubble baths, which becomes quicksand, and he can’t breathe.
At 6 am, my phone is ringing. Loudly.
‘HELLO IS THAT LOUISA? LOUISA DEASEY?’
‘Um … yes – OWW!’ I bash my head on the headboard of the bed as I try to sit up.
‘Yeah look it’s Stuart from Toll Couriers – we’ve got a delivery of Krispy Kreme donuts but no-one’s home … is there going to be someone home later?’
Is this some kind of a sick joke?
‘I don’t live in North Fitzroy anymore …’
‘Shall I redirect them somewhere? There’s no return address …’
Jim, who has heard the whole thing because ‘Stuart’ is yelling like a fiend, rolls over. ‘Ask them if they can deliver them to the Esperance backpackers.’
‘Um, Stewart? Have them on me.’
It takes a few emails to get to the bottom of the Krispy Kreme mystery, but I discover it was a Valentine’s Day promotion, something to do with a column I did on romance ideas. They even had cherries on top.
After the days we’ve just had, a few Krispy Kremes would have gone down a treat.
When Jim wakes again, he hits his head so hard on the head of the bed he has a bump the size of a tennis ball. Nightmares, lost gigs, missing donuts, nasty winds, bruised heads and dead birds are an obvious enough oracle.
It’s time to move on.
‘Babe? I don’t think we should stay here much longer.’ He’s revving the accelerator on the car before I’ve even had a shower.
I find myself on the phone to my brother, whingeing.
‘I feel like I spend every day just – packing and unpacking. I dream I do my laundry in one place and have to catch a three-hour train to a place to dry it.’
‘Lou, that’s just the reality of travelling. It’s hard work sometimes …’
Everything we have is dirty, even though we’ve only been on the move since Saturday. At least I’m up to date with my columns, phone calls, emails. But for how long? What if I get another commission with a lead time of twenty minutes? And more importantly, how much longer will I be able to bear missing out on Krispy Kremes?
‘Lou, I don’t have any gigs lined up for a few days so where would you like to go? You’ve never seen the south coast of Western Australia. Let’s just have a look, hey?’
Sounds good to me. Just as long as we get out of this wind.
Onwards we go in our travelling home, like snails carrying all our lives in our dusty shell. The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac are back on replay, and my moods dip and dive for better and for worse depending on the landscape. After a couple of hours we get to Albany, but all I see are kit homes and Red Rooster. Not here. Please, not here.
‘Let’s just … keep going … until the landscape is … better.’
24
The peace of cucumbers
‘People with a connection to nature … just seem to be happier.’
THERE’S A FUNNY PATTERN IN my life, and in this trip. Every time I find myself standing on the edge of hopelessness, just about to give up, a place or an event will startle me so suddenly with its beauty that I do a complete about-face, ready to start again.
After another half hour, Jim slows down as we round into a logging town called Denmark, crossing a little river at the foot of the main street. We look at each other and nod. Yes.
Denmark is a town so picture-book pretty, so lushly green and fertile, I wonder if I dreamed it up. Even the snippets of conversation we catch all centre around crops and growing, fruit and ripening, abundance and gratitude. After glimpsing the word ‘accommodation’ up on a hill we find ourselves at the Denmark Backpackers, but should really be called the Denmark Four Seasons. Inside, it contains everything that we need, to restore body, mind and spirit.
As we pull up, we meet Cheryl, the receptionist, a thin wiry version of Georgie from the Royal Derby so long ago, a drifter who looks like she’s been expecting us. She even smells like sandalwood incense, just like Georgie did.
‘You guys need a room, hey?’ She’s drinking coffee on the steps outside, smiling. She shows us the rooms, double ensuite bedrooms set up by the owner who had backpacked around the world and decided to build a place to stay with the one thing they were all missing: bathrooms in an annex of the dorm. I peer in to the double room she’s offering us, furnished with art, picture-book shutter windows looking out to the hills, and fragrant with the smell of bergamot. ‘And coffee is complimentary …’ she says. God can we please stay here forever?
The crushed peanuts and red dust on my passenger seat have been making clean clothes before driving a futile exercise. So when Cheryl shows us that the laundromat is just a few metres downstairs, I sing a little song of joy in my head. I – gulp – miss Sprinklerville. For so long I’ve underestimated the strain of constantly connecting with tough, white, Australian men. To be left alone to do something as simple as laundry is like being given room to breathe.
I can’t believe our luck, finding Denmark. By morning the steam of frost rises on the mountains, with cool air blowing from the south. We walk a few streets from the hostel to find lush, rolling hills topped with chalets, breathing air so dewy you could drink it.
Our bedroom looks out to a storybook vista of green, rolling hills, a river, and the song of native birds flanked by the occasional logging truck. Cheryl doesn’t seem to sleep, but hums and sings her way to the kettle in the kitchen twelve times a day. She drinks coffee like a fish, constantly tidies, chatters to everyone, the ageless sister or grandmother anyone would want.
We wake early, going for walks up hills and along the river and see horses, kookaburras, alpacas, huge pelicans and all sorts of birds in the treetops. Gumnuts litter the ground, like Snugglepot and Cuddlepie were invented here. We drive to the Valley of the Giants in Walpole, getting sick with dizziness in ancient gums and walking along the shaky path up the top.
On Sunday, market day, I walk up the road to see old gypsy-looking men singing Chris Isaak songs and playing the guitar. A fragrant café on the corner sells wattle-seed cake and emu paste and witchetty grubs, as well as environmental shops and signs up in the street inviting people down to certain trees to do yoga, wish for things or just ‘come and make friends’.
Jim is in our room, laying out his mine maps and getting organised, pitching gigs, now that we are back in phone and internet range. Cheryl lives here, in her own ‘quarters’, which is like a walk-in apartment, just across from r
eception. I start to think of her like my sister, as she always greets me with a smile, tells me where I can find waitressing work if I’d like it, and one night, after cleaning out her closet, brings me a bag full of clothes.
‘We’re about the same size. Take a look. If there’s anything you don’t want just put it back in the bag and I’ll take it to the op shop in the morning.’ She treats me like I’ve come to Denmark for good. Like she wants both of us to stay. It amazes me how many places we could just … settle down in Australia. How easy it is to make friends.
I fix the printer at the reception desk one morning and they give us our night’s accommodation on the house.
The scent of sandalwood incense drifts up from the shop downstairs, and we buy our breakfast fruit at the store from the most shiny, happy soul I’ve ever encountered. He radiates health, and when he touches my fruit it’s like he’s pulsing with light, infusing it with healing powers. Back at the kitchen, where Cheryl is fixing coffee number twelve for the day, she asks how long we’re staying. I look out over the horizon for a moment, at the giant gums up the winding path to Albany.
‘I don’t know, but we really like it here. Why do you think people are so happy here, Cheryl?’ I ask, referring to every stranger I’ve come across since we got here – they have all been smiling.
‘There’s a strong connection to the earth in this town. People with a connection to nature just seem … happier.’
A cheerful English couple appear covered in bloodied bandages on our second night, clutching some squashed goats cheese and a bottle of wine, yet smiling and looking like they’ve just had the adventure of their lives. On their campervan tour of Australia, they’d been heading up the hills to a winery and rolled it on a particularly windy part, during the misty rain. The campervan was written off, everything smashed except, remarkably, this bottle of wine and their bodies.
They show us the photos in the kitchen while we are preparing dinner, a cross between proud and still in shock, wanting to debrief. The pictures are like printouts from a horror Transport Accident Commission commercial.
The wife had had to be dragged out by her feet, so bad was the state of the van. But the chirpy husband sustained one small scratch to his knee. The police chatted to them for an hour and they had a cheese and wine picnic afterwards with the scent of eucalypts behind them.
They’ve rolled up the police printouts of the campervan carcass like certificates and leave them on the kitchen bench in case anyone else wants to see them. Even car crashes seem to have a happy ending here.
In less than a week, despite only one small story commission, I’m regaining my equilibrium. I’m feeling stronger, and more connected. Like I’m almost ready to make a decision about where to go next. But still, so many questions.
After an email from one of my regular editors saying she has resigned from the magazine, and the Krispy Kreme incident, my urges to go back to Melbourne and closer to new sources of writing work have been getting stronger and stronger. I still have to rise three hours early for the time difference with liaising over the fashion columns. And I can’t seem to get any stories commissioned on any of the experiences I’m having that are decidedly un-tourist-like, or unappealing to an advertising-obsessed market of the eastern side of Australia. So I do what anyone would do.
I pick cucumbers.
The organic farm is an eight-kilometre drive up a rolling hill from our accommodation. I buy a two-dollar shirt to wear at the op shop the day before after seeing a sign for ‘help wanted’ in the kitchen of the hostel, and Jim drops me off at daybreak, when the picking shift begins.
I don’t want to think anymore. No more analysing, words, interior work. I even need a break from pitching articles, which, for the past week, have been met with an awfully silent inbox. Nobody wants to know about Western Australia, about Aussie outback culture. They want fashion. Dance. Beauty. Stylish, happy people who appear to have their lives together. Money, success, endless possibilities and vistas for what you can accomplish here on earth. And somewhere deep inside me, I guess that’s what I want, too.
At the organic farm, I meet my two workmates, a girl and a guy who both have steady, grounded energy emanating from their pores, and who are both blissfully removed and unrelated to any of my troubles.
The smell of dirt, the abundance of the earth and the repetitive, physical labour help me escape my dilemmas for a while. The sky is shining, and I wonder why I’ve never had an outdoors job before. It’s physically gruelling, but satisfying in a way which brings you back to all that is nature-like in your own body. Growth. Strength. Natural beauty. Seasons, light and dark …
When we break for lunch, Jenny gives me half her sandwich under a tree while we sit, cross-legged, on our jumpers. My nails are black, I’m scratched and sweaty, and my god I feel physically alive. We spend eight hours crouching over the cucumber plants a few metres away from each other in happy silence, breaking the peace to check which cucumbers make the A grade.
It’s Valentine’s Day, so Jenny, who is twenty-three, takes a moment to stop picking and describes her plans with her boyfriend.
‘A few cold beers on the balcony, and a nice meal of spaghetti bolognaise.’
Jim and I will unfortunately be apart on our first Valentine’s Day together – he’d driven back to Perth just this morning for a gig at The Brass Monkey which got arranged yesterday. I don’t even know where to begin when she asks me if I have a boyfriend.
I keep the questions up, to divert her from asking me anything. ‘How long have you been with him?’
‘A couple of years. But no way am I having kids. I don’t want to become another country town statistic.’
I smile at her choice of words.
Then I frown: Am I going to become a weather-beaten statistic if I stay in the Mazda?
When we finish for the day, I hike down the hill, waving off their offers of a lift. It’s almost six kilometres, but I want to be so exhausted that I fall into bed. I want to scratch the dirt out from under my layers of skin until I’m numb to the empty shock of sleeping without Jim for the first time in months – on Valentine’s Day, of all days.
After walking down the hill for two hours as the sun sets slowly above me, my legs are quivering with fatigue. I make it up the steps to our room, hop in our blissfully private ensuite shower and the water doesn’t run clear for a good ten minutes.
Afterwards, I crawl into bed, and find a note Jim had slipped under my pillow: ‘Don’t worry about it all so much, Lou. I’ll love you whatever you decide, and wherever you are. I just want you to do what makes you happy.’
That night, I watch a bit of TV then listen to the trees blowing just down the hill overlooking the river. I call Sally and hear all about her new floors, the familiar tune of Melbourne life reassuring me that as much as I’ve changed, it will be there waiting when I want to return. And how long would I stay happy there, really? Would it really provide enough of a challenge? When Sally asks me where we are and what we’ve seen this past week I don’t know where to start. I give her just a morsel, the hills of Denmark, the cucumber farm. I know to tell her more would overwhelm her. And besides, she probably wouldn’t understand why I keep going.
I fall asleep quickly, and when I wake I remember my dream. I was flying above Australia, looking down on every state. Like all flying dreams, it depended on me getting the balance just right – half focus, half let go – and you can make it to the sky. In the dream I was the news reporter, the only one with the bird’s eye view in all of Australia. I was the only one who could see things clearly, because I was far enough away.
I wake, intent on my decision. Keep going.
But first, I go to the retreat on the hill for a massage, to gear me up for the next stage of this journey. The woman kneads away in a scented room overlooking the water while flute music plays and she asks what sort of mattress I’ve been sleeping on for my spine to be so knotted. I don’t mention the Mazda.
But when I lea
ve I feel there’s new petrol in my tank, ready for another long haul.
I remember an interview I did, before we left Sydney, with a couple who had moved here from England. The wife had relocated twice, for the husband’s work. She’d said, ‘You have to find your own purpose for being somewhere, other than just the relationship. Otherwise, you become a mess.’
I write one word – scope – on a piece of paper and stuff it in my wallet. It came to me from the dream, and it’s the reason I’m doing this. Yes, the frustrations keep coming and the way we travel is hard, but it’s giving me a better scope on life than any other thing I’ve ever done so far. And no matter how tired and frustrated one place will make me, the endless cycle of regeneration in a new town is addictive. Without the Kalgoorlies and the Corrigins, I would never ever appreciate the Denmarks so dearly.
When Jim comes back, we stay up late talking in the night.
‘The highs and lows of the road are much more extreme than in everyday life, Lou. But that’s what’s so special about being on tour.’
Coping with the lows does tend to make these places like Denmark so much more special. And it’s another reason I want to keep travelling, at least for a little longer. I want to see all of my life as a tour, as a road. I want the sense of urgency, of alertness, of excitement, of being alive, that all of this has woken in me.
‘I’m ready to go again Jim.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah. But can we base ourselves in Fremantle again for a bit? I liked it there.’
It’s funny that I was thinking of that. Because Roo has just invited him back for a weekly gig. And offered to pay him double.
Love and Other U-Turns Page 27