I nod. ‘I like the way the whole thing is stories within stories within stories. Like you said, infinite, there’s never any conclusion.’
‘Never is,’ she says as we are ushered out of the room and into the harsh fluorescent light of the hallway.
In my dreams that night I’m in counselling again. Scheherazade shows up next to me, points to Maree and says, ‘I had her job once you know, 1001 nights of being a therapist to that psychotic, misogynist of a king. Had to teach him how to be a human being by telling him all those stories. One after the other after the other. I was trying to explain to him how there’s all these different women in the world, some are awful, some are great, but mostly everyone falls somewhere in the in-between spaces.’
In my dream Tracey is smacking her lips. She bites her lower lip and sucks in through her teeth. Maree rubs her temple. ‘Let’s start again,’ she says. ‘Let’s think. Close your eyes. First two words that come to mind when you’re trying to describe yourself.’
Scheherazade flicks her long brown hair to one side and pulls a stick of gum from somewhere in the folds of her brightly beaded dress. I don’t know how she managed to get that in here, since gum is banned, but then again I don’t know how she managed to get herself in here or into this century. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘everyone talks about how I was telling stories so I could survive another night but it’s more than that. I wasn’t just trying to keep him wanting more stories, I was trying to keep him wanting to learn more about what it means to be a woman, you know, what it’s like to be us.’ She looks at me and points her finger, cocks her head to the side with a knowing smile and says, ‘You’ve got to tell a story until it becomes a solid thing, until it becomes human.’
I lean in close to her as the others shift in their chairs, trying to find those magic two words for Maree. In this dream, everyone has the bestest nails you’ve ever seen. Kristina taps her diamond-studded neon-orange nails. Scheherazade’s got alternating pink and matt glitter on each nail and I have miniature reproductions of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings.
‘So,’ I say, ‘in this book I’m writing, I’m trying to make people learn what it’s like to be a girl like me.’
‘Nah,’ she says. ‘That’s where you show people that you and everyone else here are probably too complicated to be contained by any story. That’s the lesson. We’re complicated and undefinable.’
‘That’s my two words to define myself,’ I say. ‘Complicated. Undefinable.’
‘What’s that saying?’ Scheherazade says. ‘You can recognise yourself in a book and know who you are for the first time.’
‘So,’ I say, ‘this book is the place where you and I meet?’
She blows a giant bubble with her chewing gum, pops it with her finger. ‘Me and you and these women, and maybe you meet yourself as well.’
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘Hello,’ she responds as she walks over to the table with the orange cordial and arrowroot biscuits. She picks up a biscuit, places it in her mouth and swallows it whole.
HOW I GOT THAT SECOND CHARGE OF RESISTING ARREST
It was later on, towards evening, after the woman with the clipboard bearing bad news had shown up again and everyone moved towards her side of the room, that Asheeka and I realised that two police officers had arrived and were looking at us and looking at their phones. Looking at us. Looking at their phones. Whispering with some of the volunteers.
Actually, that wasn’t exactly how it happened.
I was talking to the two Elvises, John and Mark, about their favourite Elvis films. I was sitting between them on the other side of the room while they argued about Love Me Tender versus Girls! Girls! Girls! (which both sounded like they were the exact same film, if you asked me) when Asheeka ran up and grabbed my arm.
‘Come on,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Just come.’ Her grip on my arm was so tight I was thinking that it might leave a bruise.
We were both out the front door and into that smoky night before Asheeka said anything to me besides ‘move’, and ‘faster’. By the time she explained it to me we were lying in the middle of a bunch of thorny bushes, watching the bits of red and blue lights that were able to break through the bushes from the police car sirens that were whizzing by. It was in that space that she began to explain, ‘They were looking at us.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh my God, Rosa! The police. You don’t notice anything.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘They were definitely noticing. They were looking at us and looking at their phones and then they were looking at us and talking. One of them even pointed.’
With the fire and everything I’d forgotten about how we were wanted criminals and all.
‘Oh,’ I said.
We picked our way out of the bushes and the rough bits of sticks bit holes in my hands. In the distance, helicopters dropped their large heavy loads onto a mountain that was lit up as though the stars had dropped down to the earth. In front of us there were patches of brown and black on the ground. It was night but with the moon and the fire and the lights from the helicopters it didn’t quite feel like night-time.
‘I guess I just forgot. I mean, heaps has happened since Canberra and I don’t really think of us, as . . . as criminals.’
‘So you think we’re just, like, only a little bit criminal?’ She cracked a smile. ‘Maybe they’ve got wanted posters of us up all over Parra and Harris Park.’
‘What do they do with you when they arrest you?’
‘I don’t know, put handcuffs on you or something?’
‘But what happens after that?’
‘I don’t know!’ She sounded exasperated with me by this point. ‘Let’s just not let it happen.’
‘What did you do with that phone?’
‘Still got it,’ Asheeka replied. She wasn’t going to tell me what she had done or would do with those photos. ‘I phoned my mum,’ she said.
‘What did she say?’
‘Not much. Just that she wasn’t sure that she knew me anymore. I told her I wasn’t sure that I knew me anymore either. I told her I needed to maybe find some new version of myself.’
‘What did she say to that?’
‘She said not to put any more photographs on the internet. That everyone was looking and that she was glad my father was dead so that he couldn’t see the kind of shame I was bringing on the family and then she said something that I actually wasn’t expecting. She said she kind of understood. That she’d been a young woman once and things didn’t go the way she wanted them to go but, you know, you have to accept that that’s just how life is. She’s never said anything like that before; you know, given some ground.’
‘Maybe people change.’
‘Maybe.’
I watched her do that thing she did where she braided her own hair behind her back without looking. ‘She also said to call your mother,’ Asheeka added. A heavy vehicle with a long trailer behind it rattled alongside the road. ‘Your dad’s missing and your mum’s gone bonkers.’
‘What?’
‘Mum said your dad’s around here somewhere, with his walkie-talkie thing, tapping in on all the police and truck drivers and emergency service people and their broadcasts trying to find us, and your mum has just lost it. Isn’t leaving the apartment. Isn’t even going to work. Just sitting in her pyjamas all day or something. My mum’s sending Ronny around with food. Apparently she lets him in and he puts the food in the fridge and takes out the food he brought over the time before and throws it in the bin.’
I was thinking of that spot in the sunlight on the balcony that Mum used to like sitting in on Sunday mornings. ‘Why doesn’t your mum go over to my mum’s?’
‘I don’t know. Probably doesn’t want to embarrass your mum by looking at her like that.’
And I feel something knot up in my stomach because I know that the shame is mine to face and not Asheeka’s mum’s to look away from. This
is what we do to each other, all us girls, all us women. Doing things that make us feel ashamed: putting naked photos on the internet, turning away when we know we should listen, telling each other that we don’t look good enough, don’t say the right things. Running. Running. Running when people need us to stay.
HITCH
In the morning we hitched. I had no idea why anyone would want to pick up two girls with mud and sticks and stones attached to every part of their bodies. We had gone from jumping into scrub to sleeping in the rough on the side of the road.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I just don’t know about this.’ I stared at the matted clump of hair pushed up against the side of Asheeka’s cheek.
‘Someone’ll pick us up,’ Asheeka stated, sticking her thumb out towards the road.
‘That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.’ I looked down the endless road. There were hardly any cars. We began to walk north, because all the talk of the fires in the evacuation centre was about them being down south. Sometimes, Asheeka turned around and walked backwards, her thumb held out, looking like she had no fear of anything behind her.
Once, half an hour into the walking, I heard a car behind us. We turned as it slowed on approach and the driver, a woman with grey hair and too much of a perm, came close enough that we could see her lip turn up slightly when she inspected us before driving off again.
It was the truck drivers who saved us on that road going north. When Asheeka saw a truck she stood almost in the middle of the road so that it slowed as it came towards her. Emboldened she walked further into the centre of the street and held her arms straight out on either side as if she were Jesus Christ about to be crucified.
The first guy, Gus, who had a giant pot belly, didn’t look like he could get out of that seat to do us any harm. He took us through Canberra – wouldn’t stop there on account of the air. Someone had died there this morning, he told us, getting out of a plane; her lungs gave out with the shock of all that smoke coming in from the surrounding bushfires and getting trapped in a place that was like the bottom of a bowl between all the hills around it. Imagine that, I thought, dying because you breathed. That’s all. Just tried to breathe the air. There was something about it that made me feel as though I was already choking.
Gus drove us up towards Yass. Further north there was blue sky in places but the same bone-dryness on the ground. And slowly smells came back again, like the smells of things other than fire: wild lavender and eucalyptus and the mandarins that Gus was transporting in his truck, all scratching at your nose like a Lush cosmetics shop.
Asheeka wound her window down and stuck her hand out and let it bob gently this way and that in the wind. There were cows just standing there looking like cows. Gus’s radio crackled. Somewhere in the not-too-distant distance, other truck drivers were talking about road blockages and places where fires might jump across the road.
‘How does that work?’ I asked. ‘The radio? Can you talk to anyone?’
Gus took the toothpick he’d had sticking out the side of his mouth and held it in one hand while he drove the truck with the other, as though the question I had asked him was a really, really serious one that required total and complete concentration.
‘Not, like, anyone. They’ve got to be listening on the right channel and they’ve got to be within 50 k or so, depending on what they’ve got at their end and what you’ve got at yours. Can’t listen to the cops or anything like that, but lots of people do. Depends who can hear you over the chatter too. Mostly it’s for telling people about what’s going on. The condition of the roads and stuff but sometimes you just shoot the shit. People get lonely out here, just being by themselves driving all the time.’
‘Can I try it?’
‘Who you wanting to speak to?’
‘My dad.’
‘Haven’t got a phone?’
‘Lost it.’ Even if I’d had a phone, I’m not sure how I’d call him anyway. I was too used to pressing ‘Dad’ on a screen. Couldn’t remember what his number was. Asheeka was looking at me like what are you up to now? If Dad was somewhere around here he’d be listening to that thing, like always. Gus pulled out the small speaker on its cord and showed me the button you press to speak. He pushed the buttons on his dashboard one after the other. ‘Channel one, channel two, channel three. Hope you find your dad,’ he said before pulling his hat down lower on his forehead.
I pressed number one. ‘Dad, Dad. Aldo. It’s Rosa. It’s Rosa. I’m here with Asheeka and we’re all right. I don’t know where you are, Dad, but we’re okay and we’re heading away from the fires. Dad. Dad. Aldo. Are you near the fires? Dad . . . Dad . . . It’s not safe right now to be driving around in all of this.’ I pressed another button and said it again.
In retrospect (you understand a lot of things better in retrospect), it occurs to me that Dad probably thought we were unsafe driving around in those fires too, but you can’t always see the way things are for other people when you’re right up in your own face all the time.
We pulled into a main street not too far from a sign that said it was 50 kilometres to Yass. When I say a main street, it was more like four shops in a row that suddenly appeared on the road and then disappeared again into vast strips of red dirt and the occasional house that broke up the landscape. This was, I guess, what passed for ‘pumping’ out here. Gus was excited, anyway. He’d been talking about the bakery here on and off for the past couple of hours. Turned out Gus was an expert on things that Asheeka and I didn’t find nearly as exciting, like, for example, finger buns and vanilla slices and how moist a lamington should be on the inside.
He insisted on buying us lunch at the bakery, which, as it turns out, was the only shop open anyway. Behind the counter they had all the things that Gus’s dreams were made of: neenish tarts and custard tarts and sausage rolls and four kinds of meat pies. Gus had obviously been here before and he and the guy behind the counter yammered on and on about the weather, the fires and the ever-so-slight alterations that had been made to the shop’s vanilla slices over the years.
Gus turned around. ‘Ya ready to order?’ and we walked up to the counter with these fat grins on our mouths. The guy was young, maybe thirty, with the warmest smile I’ve ever seen. He said, ‘G’day’ and we both giggled while ordering our sausages and custard tarts, or at least I did, because I thought the only people who said G’day were clichéd Australian characters from some story written in the 1950s. We followed Gus out to the tables on the footpath where we ate our goods under all that blue sky and Gus finished his meal off with a rollie like people do after sex in the movies.
As we moved down the road the voices on the radio crackled and buzzed. The information kept changing and rearranging itself as it passed from one person to the other. These voices of people I’ll never meet, they were calling out across the wires, Girl named Rosa, looking for her dad. Wants him to know she’s safe. Rosa. Rosa, you in the fires? Rosa’s dad, go to the evacuation centre. Rosa’s fine. They are all still there Aldo, Aldo, Rosa’s dad. Was he that guy they found lost, the one with the burnt arm wandering down the road? Aldo. Rosa.
Lost people everywhere.
YASS
Gus told us he couldn’t take us any further and dropped us in Yass not long after midday. It looked like a postcard of regional Australia. Things felt safe because it was like we had fallen into the pages of The Wind in the Willows: there was the old rusted bridge over the river that stood there all lonely and romantic and the main street with the brick and cream buildings that had things like ‘General Store 1810’ carved above their doorways. I used the spare change I had in my pocket to buy us ice blocks and we found a bench under the great big metal awning of a shop where we could sit, almost comfortably, under the sharp-edged sun, and watch the road.
I don’t know. It was the fire and the heat, I guess, but everywhere we were passing through was a ghost town. Yass had exactly no one on its main street but you could see through the window of the pub across the road
that there was a TV on and someone behind the bar, and the post office door occasionally swung open as someone scurried back to the safety of an air-conditioned car.
‘I want to go to Parkes,’ I said to Asheeka. ‘There’s something there I want to show you. A surprise I think you’d like.’
‘I think you’ve given me enough surprises,’ she said, and I couldn’t work out exactly how angry or sad her tone was. Sweat dripped down her neck. Clouds sat low in the sky and I wasn’t sure if they were clouds or smoke, but things did feel better here.
‘It’s north,’ I said, ‘Parkes. We should head north.’ I kept sitting on that bench and Asheeka kept walking up to the occasional car that pulled up near the post office and she kept getting rejected for a lift. A breeze picked up leaves and blew them into the gutters. It didn’t seem to make anything cooler, though. It just made the hot wind slap across your face like it was commanding your attention.
Across the road a truck pulled up in front of the Chinese restaurant and I watched a Punjabi guy get out and stack a number of boxes on a small trolley. Asheeka walked across the road and opened the truck door. She climbed inside and sat in the passenger’s seat as if she’d simply been sitting there waiting for this lift to come all along. I watched her pull her hair back into a braid and fix herself up in the rear-view mirror. The guy came out of the restaurant not long after that and they sat in the car for a while, having a conversation I had no way of hearing before the engine started up and they drove off down the road. And I thought to myself, This is it. This is where she leaves me again. But shortly afterwards, the guy turned his truck around and they were there in front of me and this guy, he winds down his window and says, ‘G’day, Rosa. I hear you need a lift north?’
‘We’re going to Parkes!’ Asheeka shouted in the cabin beside him and he added, ‘Via Dubbo. Your friend threatened to hijack my truck if I didn’t take you guys along with me.’
Girls in Boys' Cars Page 15
