b) telling Gill about it was the right idea.
What we hadn’t decided, was who was going to tell her. Or how; or when.
We’d talked about it of course; the discussion had gone something like this:
“You tell her.”
“Hell no! You tell her.”
“You’re her brother. You should tell her.”
“You’re her best friend! It should come from you.”
“You know her better. You should tell her.”
“No way! You guys are much closer. You tell her.”
“Look, she can’t hate you completely. You’re her brother – she can’t get rid of you. If she’s pissed off with me, it could ruin our friendship. You tell her.”
“You’ve seen the way we fight! If I tell her, it could be the biggest self-destruct of all. She won’t go mad at you, because she values your friendship. You tell her.”
“I’m sleeping with her brother. I can’t possibly tell her that!”
“Well I’ve stolen her best friend! And… despoiled her. I am so not telling her that.”
We thought about playing scissors, paper, rock for it – but secretly, we were both too afraid to lose. Even me, and I’m awesome at that game.
With little resolved before work, we counted ourselves lucky just to still be there. Whatever personal issues we were having could be ignored for now, while we concentrated on being the best employees it was possible to be. Or so I thought.
“You’ve got to tell her today,” Roo whispered as we climbed out of the Land Rover.
And then, I was being singled out – and I was more than a little worried, until one of the supervisors explained that they wanted me to join the weed-spraying team for the day.
“Fair enough,” I said.
So as I was led away, I gave Roo the ‘looks like you’ll have to tell her after all’ shrug.
(In case you’re wondering, this was a particularly expressive shrug, involving extensive mobility of both hands and eyebrows. I felt sure it would do the job.)
As far as I was concerned, it was now out of my hands.
But I trusted Roo. She could always get the job done.
Unlike someone I could mention, who was currently struggling with the concept that weeds are plants too. And that they look remarkably similar to the plants that aren’t weeds…
Well, they’re green. Mostly.
It was a long, hot, and for me very confusing, day.
I didn’t see the girls again until after the minibus dropped me off outside the campsite. I walked in and found Roo and Gill taking it in turns to dig through Rusty in search of clean clothes.
Roo spotted me on approach. “Hey! How was it?” she asked.
“Oh God, it was bloody awful! Well, the job itself was fine, but right at the start they showed us which plants to spray and which ones not to. And I still couldn’t tell the damn things apart!”
“Oh hell! So what did you do?”
“I just sort of sprayed shit at random. I mean, it’s weed-killer, right? So surely it only kills weeds, not proper plants.”
“I don’t think it works exactly like that,” she said.
“I’m awful at this job.”
“Yes darling, I’m afraid you are.”
It took a few seconds for the implications of that to sink in.
Not the confirmation that I was failing miserably at the easiest job in the world – that much was painfully obvious.
It was that first part.
Darling.
I looked from Roo to Gill and back.
“So… you know?”
Gill rolled her eyes skyward by way of an answer.
“You told her?” I asked Roo.
“I did.”
“And…?”
“She knew.”
“She knew?”
“She knew.”
“Gill, you knew?”
“I knew.”
“What? How did you know?”
“Oh, I could tell this was going to happen. I probably knew about it before you did.”
“But… when did you find out?”
She gave me a disgusted look. “Duh! I knew from the beginning! From the time you guys went for a shower, and didn’t come back for, like two hours!”
“Ah.”
“Yes! Did you really think I’d been asleep all that time? I figured it out about ten minutes after I came back and both of you didn’t. I tried really hard not to need the toilet, but you were in there for two frigging hours! So I had to sneak in – being really quiet – and of course, there were two sets of feet in the shower cubicle.”
“Ah! So you knew, all this time…”
“I knew.”
“And we were working ourselves up so much about telling you!”
She chuckled. “I knew that, too.”
“You could have said something!”
“Ha! I wasn’t going to make it that easy for you. And now that you know I know, there will begin a period of me teasing you mercilessly. Because you stole my best friend,” she turned to Roo, “and you stole my brother! So you both deserve to suffer. For example, I know you’ve been sneaking out here at night, to do it in the back of Rusty!”
“No,” I denied, “not at all! As if we’d do that!”
“Dude, I’ve driven thousands of miles in Rusty. You think I don’t know the sound of his suspension creaking?”
“That could be the wind, or the trees… other camper vans… a thousand things.”
Gill made a show of looking all around us, at the otherwise-empty camping ground.
“It could be the wind,” I repeated, weakly.
“I can hear it when you open the sliding door. I’m never that asleep.”
It was true that Rusty’s sliding door had a very distinctive noise to it. An oil-deprived shriek, not unlike the death-squeal of a medium-sized pig.
“Why else would you keep suggesting that we leave the seats flat?” Gill continued.
“Um… it’s good to hide our stuff? So it’s not all in plain site…”
“Pah. Gonna have to try harder than that.”
I had nothing more to add in my defence, as Gill rummaged around in the footwell in search of clean socks.
Most of our clothes lived in the furthest-back footwells, so she soon gave up and pulled the seat-reclining lever, causing one of the middle seats to spring violently upright. It also caused another, less expected phenomenon, which we shall call ‘the flight of the previously concealed condom’.
The rubber, which I’d used last night and then been unable to find in the dark, was catapulted forwards, dripping with menace.
It flew past Gill’s face, missing her left ear by inches, and impacted on the windscreen with a splat. All eyes watched as it slowly peeled itself free of the glass and plopped into a pile of dust on the dashboard.
Gill looked back at me and raised one eyebrow.
“We might have done it once in Rusty…” I admitted.
Departure
Legitimizing my relationship with Roo was the missing piece of the puzzle.
It made everything better – and apart from the gruelling necessity of work in the fields, our life in Kununurra was pretty damn good already.
In fact, everything was going about as well as I could possibly imagine.
Which is usually when life decides to stab you in the face with a fork.
It was a deliciously mild evening, and we were relaxing after work with a well-earned glass of wine. We were just discussing whether or not the shiny new laptop we’d bought from eBay would arrive this week, when Roo got the phone call.
It’s the call that no-one wants to get.
And it changed everything for all of us, but most especially for Roo, because it was her Mum that was dying.
Now, this wasn’t completely unexpected. I don’t want to give the impression that a sudden accident had befallen her. Frieda had been battling cancer for several years, and there had been a time when she was
winning. Then, only days before I’d arrived in Australia, the family had gathered together to hear the news. It was back. It had spread. It was out of their hands. It was now just a matter of keeping her comfortable… for as long as she had left.
It was a testament to their strength and amazing generosity as a family that they’d welcomed me into their household at such a time. For most of my stay there I had no idea just how recent, and how devastating, the news was. I didn’t feel close enough to ask, and they didn’t feel the need to have nosey Englishmen speculating on their private pain.
Staying with the family had never felt awkward; they’d all made supreme efforts to maintain a happy home environment, even while privately, all their worlds were collapsing. Frieda herself had insisted that Roo go travelling with us, as originally planned; she was a lifelong traveller herself, and recognised the same growing wanderlust in Roo. She knew how life-changing that could be, and was so keen to encourage it that she did so in spite of her own ticking clock.
She also didn’t want her situation to inconvenience anyone else more than was strictly necessary, something which in itself shows incredible selflessness and generosity of soul.
So we’d set off on our adventures, always seeking out the most fun and excitement, even while Roo kept a weather-eye on events back home. Of all of us, only she knew just how serious the situation was.
That it was only a matter of time…
And that time had just run out.
Roo’s Dad booked her a flight home to Perth the next day.
Gill and I sat in Rusty, after dropping Roo off at Kununurra’s tiny airport. We held each other and sobbed; me, for Roo, and for the loneliness and pain I could only imagine that she was feeling right now; and Gill cried for Frieda, because in the three months she’d spent waiting for me, she’d come to know her very well indeed. Sharing an endless capacity for chatting, a love of traveling, walking, reading and sewing, they’d spent every morning deep in conversation about their projects and adventures, past and present.
I’d hardly known her, so brief was my time in her company. But Gill was going to miss Frieda deeply.
It was hard to get a handle on just how quickly things had changed.
Only a couple of days ago, we’d been sitting around on the grass outside our tent, eating melted ice cream, laughing at the ridiculousness of our lives.
Now we were sitting in the van, crying into each other’s clothing.
I couldn’t stop thinking about a similar day, just a couple of months earlier; we’d been sitting tearfully in Rusty when Frieda joined the rest of the family to wave us off.
Saying goodbye to loved ones before a long trip is always bittersweet; for Roo, never more so. She must have been terrified by the possibility that something could happen while she was hundreds, or even thousands of miles away – but she’d borne that fear alone. She’d never asked us for help, never given any indication of her own battle, going on inside her, hope against despair.
How she must have felt that day, pulling out of her driveway, leaving her mum, I can’t begin to imagine. But I think Frieda was very proud of Roo, as she stood there, waving us off on our voyage of discovery.
She’d wished us all a safe journey.
And we had no idea, back then, but that was the last time we’d see her alive.
When Gill and I pulled ourselves together, and drove back to the campsite, there was only one issue left for us to discuss.
What to do next.
It was impossible to think about work. That normality seemed so remote from where we were now, so tied to a previous life, where the worst things in the world were back-ache and sunburn. But we had to go in and explain the situation at least.
And there were other mundane concerns.
Problems we’d faced as a trio, but now had to face on our own.
As always, finance was the ugliest of them.
We’d worked for a few weeks now, and had finally broken even on our traveling expenses to date. We’d even saved a bit of cash, and in a fit of excitement at our new-found affluence, we’d spent a thousand dollars buying a laptop on eBay.
The damn thing still hadn’t arrived.
All of which put us in a fairly awkward position.
We were currently parked at the furthest possible point from Perth.
The only way to get further away would be to drive Rusty into the ocean. It had taken us weeks of shared driving, and weeks of shared petrol-buying, to get this far. Now we were faced with a stark reality; of the two of us, only Gill could legally drive Rusty.
We were three-thousand, two-hundred and five kilometres away from home.
And with only two of us to contribute, we couldn’t afford the petrol to get there.
Not to mention the food and accommodation costs we’d face en route.
So.
We had exactly two choices.
One; stay here. Carry on working. Ignore what was going on back in Perth. Save money, plan the route home, and, when we were ready, drive it. Estimated time: a month at least.
Or two; fly home immediately. And when I say home, I mean Perth, of course. At this point we didn’t know how long Frieda still had; if there was to be any chance of Gill seeing her again, before the end, this was it.
Of course, we would also have to keep our distance; the last thing a family in grief needs, is a pair of houseguests.
Gill and I chased these possibilities around and around. Neither of us were keen to go back to work in Kununurra’s blazing heat, but we couldn’t base a decision such as this on pure laziness.
“But what if we break down on the way back?” Gill asked. Rusty had been temperamental, to put it mildly, on our trip up here. One big bill would wipe us out, even if we worked and saved before we left, potentially leaving us stranded, penniless, in the middle of some Hall’s Creek-style shit-hole.
Just the thought of that made me feel queasy.
And then, as often happens in these kinds of situations, Fate gave us a helping hand. Disguised, inevitably, as a kick in the bollocks.
We went to pay our campsite fees, and we couldn’t find the wallet.
The shared wallet was how we’d been managing our funds – using it to pay for all our joint expenses, like camping and petrol, and each drawing equal amounts of cash to put into it when it became empty.
The last known sighting of the shared wallet had been on Rusty’s dashboard – presumably by the person who took it. We’d been a bit lax with security in Kununurra, due to the emptiness of the campsite, but leaving the wallet out in plain sight was a rookie mistake.
Which means it was most likely mine.
But I’m a big believer in not bothering to assign blame in these cases… What possible good can come of that kind of arguing? Regardless, it made our tricky decision all too easy. We’d lost all our cash – well over a hundred dollars. We’d lost the ability to access any of my money, as my bank card had been in the wallet too. There was no way Gill’s finances would get us home on their own, and my bank didn’t even have a branch in Kununurra. Any replacement card would go to Perth…
So I dug deep down into the bottom of my rucksack, and there I discovered a folded, sealed envelope. ‘DO NOT USE – EVER’ was written on the front in felt-tip pen. Inside was the English credit card I’d maxed out to fly to Australia in the first place – and there was just enough room left on its balance for two one-way domestic flights to Perth.
Sold.
The laptop arrived the day before our flight. We got to sample the long-anticipated delights of the local DVD rental shop. Then, we packed everything we could carry into our backpacks, parked Rusty in the campsite’s storage field – so close to the one shady tree that he was nearly part of it. We left our bright orange high-viz jackets draped around the front seats, and made the back look as flat and empty as possible – difficult, given that it was still rammed with almost everything the three of us owned.
We caught a lift to the airport with the cam
psite owner, and promised her faithfully that we’d be back to collect our bedraggled van – one day. Hopefully before Grandfather Time turned Rusty into plain old rust.
Roo picked us up from Perth airport, and filled us in on what was happening.
She’d arrived back in time to spend a last few days at her Mum’s bedside, and for now, Frieda was holding on. Just about.
So Gill and I moved into a youth hostel while we figured out our next move.
One morning, at 4am, the beep of my phone woke us both up.
I knew then, without even reaching for it, that this was the message.
I checked it anyway, because what else can you do, really?
It was from Roo, and simply said, “It’s over. She’s at peace.”
I felt hollow, that spreading numbness of disbelief that comes with an event so massive, and so dreadful, that I couldn’t even begin to figure out my reaction to it.
I’ve no idea what I replied to that message with. Some carefully phrased platitude, no doubt, that struggled to convey in a few short words something which couldn’t adequately be explained by all the flowery language in creation.
Love. Sympathy.
Support. Belief.
Peace.
All of which, to Roo and her family, were completely and utterly useless.
There was nothing Gill and I could do for them; nothing except keep our distance, and still be available, and try to understand how this delicate balance worked.
And comfort each other, because, well, that was all we had.
Each other.
And once again, time, great destroyer and greatest of healers, was our master.
Only this time, we had way too much of it.
Under Pressure
Waiting, in a city like Perth, isn’t cheap.
Both Gill and I knew that sooner or later we’d be flying back to Kununurra to rescue Rusty, because nothing else made sense.
Time would pass.
Eventually, Roo would feel strong enough to venture out again – and the adventure would continue.
But until then, we needed jobs.
So following an advert on our hostel noticeboard, we scored jobs as labourers, working for a brick-paving firm called Buildcraft.
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 12