‘Huh!’ Asheeka laughed. ‘I’m just very convincing.’ She held out her arm and pulled me up into the big cabin of that truck so that we were all squished together and heading north. Amrit, Amreet, he corrected Asheeka when she mispronounced it, asked us the where have you come from, where have been questions as we drove into the biggest, driest stretch of nothing and dirt and road and sky and we spun some bullshit stories about travelling around Australia.
Asheeka and I looked at each other and grinned every time he spoke, and I knew exactly what she was thinking even before she opened her mouth and asked in that unsubtle way of hers, ‘Hey, how come you speak like you’re Crocodile Dundee or something?’
‘What do you mean?’ He grinned and looked at the road. He had these fat sun-kissed cheeks and big rough hands. He knew exactly what she meant and I wondered if the accent was a joke, like he was putting it on.
‘Like, you know,’ Asheeka said, ‘everyone who looks like you where I live speaks like they’ve just come off a boat, but you speak like you’re impersonating Steve Irwin.’
‘Well, that’s because my family got off the boat a long, long time ago, like a couple of generations ago. You know the Sikhs were the first hawkers in rural New South Wales? They used to walk around the countryside selling stuff to farmers out of a cart, just like they did in Punjab. And now I’m like a hawker too, but like, modern style, with a truck.’ He slowed down as a dog crossed the road and there was a loud squealing from the air compression brakes. ‘You guys are really racist,’ he added casually. ‘My family has probably been here longer than either of yours.’
‘Yeah, but,’ Asheeka eyed him suspiciously and batted her eyelashes, ‘you still don’t look like Steve Irwin even if you speak like him. And we can’t be racist because I’m Fijian-Indian and her family is from everywhere.’
‘I still think you’re being racist but you’re cute, so I’m going to forgive you because you’re cuter than most of the other racists around here. Neither of you gets out of the city much, do you?’
‘Nup,’ I said.
‘You been to India?’ Asheeka wanted to push the point.
‘No. You?’
‘Nup.’
‘What’s in the truck?’ I asked. I wanted to move the conversation anywhere but where it was.
‘Spices and stuff. I drive down to Blacktown once every couple of months and pick up spices and vegetables and packed food from India and Asia and even Fiji, actually, and I deliver it to all the restaurants and shops who use that stuff or sell it. I know, like, every ethnic that speaks like Steve Irwin in the central west of New South Wales.’
Asheeka smiled, then put her feet up on the dashboard.
‘Do you listen to the short-wave radio in your truck much?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, mostly just to talk about the cricket, but lately with the weather and all I’ve been listening lots because, you know, you gotta know what direction to drive in. Or not to drive in. There’s so much going on out there and there are all these people looking for help or trying to connect. I grabbed a couple of boxes of face masks outside Sydney, dropped them off at a fire station further north. People are looking for help transporting things.’
I leaned forward, turned his short-wave on. I knew how to use it now and I’d learned how much further you can get in life without asking for permission.
‘You drive trucks?’ Amrit asked, sounding surprised.
‘Nah, I’m just checking for my dad out there. He likes listening in on these things. It’s how he listens to the world.’ I pressed channel one and then two and then three. This is Rosa. Rosa looking for Aldo. I described him – dark hair, olive skin, stubble. There was back chatter again, across the channels. Someone met a guy named Aldo in a fire somewhere, says that Aldo pulled him through a window. Another said he met him in a line helping the Salvos hand out food. And I wanted to believe in them all, all these versions of my dad, the ones that sounded like the him from his army days that his friends had told me about, not the version I knew now, who would sometimes meet me on my mum’s roof-top swimming pool and sometimes couldn’t cross the road when I really needed him to.
Outside the wind was whipping the dust up into small clouds that reached up to the doors of the truck.
‘There’s not much reception on the phones at the moment. Everyone’s looking for people over the short-wave,’ Amrit comments. ‘Where’s your dad?’
‘Not sure.’
Someone started to talk about a dust storm approaching and I switched the channel. Then I heard him. Rosa, Rosa, is that you?
Amrit switched the channel back to the one where they were talking about the dust storm and I switched back to the other channel and someone was saying, He’s gone. Gone back out again, Aldo. Amrit switched the channel back again. ‘Hold on, this is really important,’ he said. But he didn’t realise what I’d lost. He’d come for me. Finally.
The man on the radio was talking about an epic cloud of dust headed over Dubbo. Amrit looked up at what we’d thought was another hazy, smoky sky in the distance. The sky was beginning to turn dark again at an hour in the afternoon when you were meant to be able to look up and see the sun hanging brightly there, like a beacon urging you forward.
LIMBO LAND
I’m in the waiting room before the waiting room waiting for Dad’s visit. Waiting. Waiting. That’s how it goes in this place. Tracey won’t look at me because she’d been searched and ready and looking forward to a visitor who hasn’t shown up, and now she’s stuck here in limbo land until all the afternoon visits are over. It’s humiliating, you know. It’s like having a giant spotlight over your head and a neon sign that says I’m a loser. It happens to the girls here all the time. I don’t even need to talk to her to know what’s happened. There is always one girl and they are always angry and they stay angry until next time or sometimes they punch someone’s head against the tiles in the bathroom and that makes them angry for a slightly shorter time. That’s how it goes.
Outside the window lightning flashes across the sky. It goes dark and lights up again. No rain. Not yet. I’m beginning to think my whole life is governed by pathetic fallacy. You know, as I’m trying to write the story of what happened it’s beginning to sound ridiculous – all those fires and floods and dust storms that enter the narrative right at that time when the characters are about to hit some moment of bone-deep change they can’t quite put into words. At this moment I think the lightning is coming from Tracey. Like, inside her head it’s a dark and stormy night and she’s trying to work out how to deal with all those people in her life who keep her endless dark and stormy night going.
I looked it up the other day – pathetic fallacy – in the encyclopedia in the centre library. This is what research is reduced to when you are not allowed to have access to a computer. You literally have to go to an encyclopedia instead of Wikipedia, like it’s 1952 or something. No internet for us. We can’t be trusted with modern technology.
When I finally get through to the official waiting room, there he is. He’s got a shaved head. He’s going backwards in years now that he’s using his army skills and all that heroism he learned over that summer to train a new batch of people to work in the SES.
He’s chatting with one of the other dads he’s met. They’re all like BFFs, the parents and friends and everyone else who line up for so long outside the centre, waiting to fill out the forms, waiting to go through the metal detectors, waiting while they put their phones and their handbags in lockers and check their kids’ pockets for the toys they’re trying to illegally smuggle in.
It takes him a few minutes to notice that I’ve sat down and opened up a packet of Doritos. He’s busy trading stories with the other dad about trying to book an appointment to come. An hour and a half, he says. Two hours, the other guy replies. Once we got disconnected on the phone and it took Dad a couple of days of calling for someone to tell him I was fine, that nothing happened. There was just some kind of problem with the phone. I pr
obably hadn’t hung up on him or been punched out by someone in line who didn’t want to wait for the phone anymore.
By the time he turns around I am all the way through one packet of Doritos and most of the way through another. He looks at me and smiles, kind of awkwardly. ‘They don’t feed you enough in here?’
‘Not really. Not anything good anyway,’ I reply.
‘I went to visit your mum,’ he says. He’s getting better at jumping straight into the guts of what he wants to say when he visits me. We’re over it now, that initial strangeness of visiting, and he knows, like everyone knows, that the five-minute warning seems to come up more quickly every time so if you’ve got something to say you need to get it out quick.
‘She’s getting better, you know. She was writing you a letter. She was writing you lots of letters, actually. Just starting a letter to you over and over again.’
‘She hasn’t wanted to visit me.’
‘You don’t understand. It was such a shock when you went missing. But I think it hit her even harder when you came back. Everything that had happened. We’ve basically lost you twice now.’
He opens up a pack of Skittles, throws a handful to the back of his mouth. I open up another packet of chips. ‘I was thinking about it the other day. How strong she was, after you guys broke up. And then we moved out of the house with Nan and Pop. It was like she lost her whole family. She was a strong woman.’
‘Your nan still asks for her.’
‘Nan doesn’t know where she is half the time.’
‘She still knows who she loves.’ He eats a Mars Bar slowly, runs his hand over his shaved head. ‘Things catch up with you.’
‘But you weren’t that strong, were you?’ He looks at me and I can see all that new strength he has fading from his body and pouring out from his hands as they start to tremble.
‘Things were hard, you know. Like most of the time I could be fine but I had my bad days and then I had too many bad days and I lost my job. Sometimes the things that happen to you happen again in your head later, and all of a sudden it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning.’
I don’t know what to say. I put my arm around his shoulder. ‘I’m glad you left us. I’m glad you stopped looking for us and went back for her.’
‘She needed me. She deserved someone to take care of her. But I knew that you needed me too and I’m sorry, I’m even more sorry that I didn’t come when you asked me to, that night you left. It’s what kept me going, even with all that noise and brightness and loss that I saw along the way, which would usually send me crawling back to some dark corner of that past, I told my head “no” a thousand times and kept moving forward.’
Then the five-minute warning comes, and he’s out the door again and I’m back in my cell with my book and all my thoughts. I wonder if I inherited my invisibility from my mum. I wonder if my dad and his issues took up so much space that she had to retreat. I wonder if he ever told her sorry, for everything.
I take the rubber band off the stack of letters from him that I save underneath my mattress. In one of those letters he’s included a photo of Asheeka and me from when we first started hanging out in year nine. I lie there studying it from the left-hand-side corner, across and down, reading it like a page, making sure that I take in every detail. I’ve still got my braces but I’m not trying to hide my teeth, like usual, because I’m happy I’ve got a friend. Asheeka has the kind of floral headband that would make her cringe now. She looks exactly like she should look as a fourteen-year-old, for the last time in a long time, not like someone who is trying to look ten years older. Behind her I can see traces of the school tuckshop where we used the lunch money my mother gave me to buy Diet Coke and then spent the rest on lipliners and eyebrow pencils at the two-dollar shop on the way home. In her image I can see this other young girl emerging. The one who hits with a closed fist and only wears heels with red leather soles. Her eyes stare straight at the camera. Then there’s me squinting like I’ve just woken up into a disturbing light, like I’ve just woken up and come out into the world and I’m trying to work out the rules for living here, but we’re together and that’s it.
That’s who we were. But, like my dad said, the past always catches up with you.
DUST
We drove on. What else do you do in this sunburnt country of floods and fires and droughts? Dorothea Mackellar had it right in that poem. Its terror and its beauty and all that stuff in its ragged mountain ranges and wide-open plains. It was all there on the road to Dubbo but no one knew exactly when it was going to punch us in the face.
Amrit pressed that button over and over again, the one that made the windshield solution pour down until it didn’t help that much anymore, the windscreen wipers and the solution just turning all that dust into mud and wiping it across the glass. In the distance there were giant clouds of red dust, reaching hundreds of kilometres into the sky, rolling forward, wiping out the sun.
We made it, though, to that little corner store in Dubbo. Amrit climbed down in a hurry and we followed, watched him pound on the fly-screened back door of the shop before a woman with a dishcloth held over her face pulled us in by the arms and shut the door behind us. Inside, the dust spiralled around in the fluorescent light from above and we saw a man and two young boys sitting on pillows in the middle of one of the aisles surrounded by packets of spices and giant cans of ghee that rattled and shook as though a train was continually driving over the shop roof.
Asheeka and I tucked our legs under our chins and sat there adjusting to the strange unearthly glow of the place. From where we were I could see the light of the sun trying to cut through the cloud of dust that whipped itself across the front glass windows of her shop.
‘Are we in outer space?’ the youngest of the kids asked, and everyone burst into the kind of laughter that comes when things are too strange for words.
‘Kind of,’ Amrit responded.
‘You drove through this?’ the woman asked, throwing the dishtowel over her shoulder and wiping at the corners of her eyes with the loose folds of her sari.
‘We didn’t know quite when the storm would hit, so I just kept going, but it wasn’t so bad until I got near here.’ He stopped speaking, was out of breath.
The woman got up and pulled a few cans of juice and soft drink from the fridge behind us, and just as she sat down again, the lights went out. She pressed the drinks into everyone’s hands and then headed towards the cash register before returning with a couple of large torches. She sat down again and, turning on the torches, she placed them in the middle of the circle so that all our faces were half lit up. One of the boys went to move and she pulled him down again into her lap. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ she cautioned. ‘We don’t know if the windows might break. It’s safer here.’ She squeezed her arms around her son and added, ‘Who are your friends, Amrit?’ She let out a deep breath and took us in from our feet to our heads.
‘I’m Asheeka and this is Rosa,’ Asheeka replied for him. ‘We were just travelling. Our car broke down and Amrit was kind enough to pick us up.’
One of the boys began to cry and the woman comforted him. ‘This is Arun, my baby. He’s three, and this is Joseph, who’s five. I’m Deepa, and this is my husband, John.’ John waved his hand from where he was sitting a metre or so behind us, as though he was ready to jump up at any minute.
‘Deepa and her family moved here from Kerala about a decade ago,’ Amrit explained. ‘This shop is like the centre of town for everyone in the community from South East Asia. They’re like celebs. Everyone knows them.’
‘Ah, shush,’ Deepa said and clucked her tongue, but you could tell she was pleased.
The power went on again for a minute and then back off. After a while, the two boys grabbed cans from a shelf and rolled them around on the floor, making the sounds of cars crashing. Deepa looked at them and sighed. ‘Boys,’ she said. ‘A bad time for you two to be travelling.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘How long do these l
ast?’
‘Depends. We need to wait until it passes over. What’s the story, then? Where are you from?’
Amrit leaned back against the shelf. ‘Just you wait,’ he said. ‘Deepa will get your whole life story out of you, arrange your marriage, get you a job and set you up in a house.’
‘Oh, shush,’ said Deepa again. ‘I’m just being friendly.’ She flicked her hair back over her shoulder, tilted her head and looked at both of us like she was really, really ready to listen.
I didn’t say anything but Asheeka surprised me by laying it all out on the table then and there. ‘I had this dickhead boyfriend. We stole his car then we got into a bunch of trouble and then there were fires everywhere and we smashed the car and now Rosa is desperate to get to Parkes for some reason.’
‘That’s a lot. That’s a lot of stuff to have happened.’ Deepa picked up the cans that the boys had taken off the shelf and Amrit looked at us like we had just sucked the breath out of his body. ‘It’s pretty brave. Or maybe really stupid. Brave or stupid. Most things are a bit of both, I guess. That’s what everyone thought when we left Kerala. Where to from here?’
It’s that last question, or maybe it was just Asheeka finally telling someone the truth, that made me cry before I even realised I was crying. I got up to leave but I ended up in a dead end in the back of the shop where I sat on top of a giant keg of canola oil unable to stop crying and unable to explain why.
‘Let’s just give her a little space,’ I heard Asheeka say from around the corner. Asheeka always knew me like that, knew that sometimes I just tipped over the edge and couldn’t get back without the quiet space. I tried to say to myself over and over again: Flat line. Flat line. I thought of a road that kept going and going. Be a flat line. Calm. Breathe.
I read all the labels on the cans: peas, mushy peas, carrots, baby carrots, corn, creamed corn, asparagus, whole baby potatoes, mushrooms, and a bunch of other stuff in a language I couldn’t read. I was inside a square field of vegetables. I cut a line through the air with my hand, like a knife. A flat line.
Girls in Boys' Cars Page 16
