‘It’s like Burning Man, like our own little version of Burning Man. My idea, of course, and also Ethan’s.’ She gestured towards goth boy. ‘It’s to, you know, get things going around here again, attract some customers. You know Burning Man? Oh no, wait.’ She’s off to the bar and then back again before I can start eating my chips. She hands me a dusty tourist brochure of Nevada in America. It was about this festival where thousands of people go out to a desert in the middle of nowhere and they dance and make art and everyone is all into ‘radical inclusion and kindness’ and all those strangers make each other gifts and then they set a giant wooden man on fire.
I looked out towards the back again where goth boy seemed to be making some kind of giant man out of hubcaps and spare car parts and I wondered how they were going to do all that out here, but I know now that the most unlikely things happen in the smallest of places.
More people came, none of them looked like tourists, and they weren’t. It was lunchtime near Gospers Mountain in Australia but everyone had come to play at being at a festival in some other sunburnt place. There were two kids dressed like trees with bits of bark taped to the front of their shirts, and another woman, who looked like she was going to some hippy version of the Sunday races, had peacock feathers jutting out of her head.
Goth guy sat in the corner with a guitar and surprised us (at least me) with a sweet voice and an Eric Clapton cover. Denise put a giant snow globe with a kangaroo inside it on top of the bar and tied a red scarf around her head.
‘You a pirate?’ Asheeka asked.
‘A fortune teller,’ she replied. ‘It’s my gift. You know, I can tell the future.’
‘What’s my future?’ I asked her, and she turned her snow globe upside down so that snow fell on top of this kangaroo and its joey standing startled in the middle of the desert.
‘Travel,’ she said. ‘Driving. Endless movement.’
‘Thanks.’ I didn’t think she seemed so bad. Just bored and up in everyone’s face. Someone else came in with a giant easel and ushered Asheeka over so that she could paint her portrait.
‘What’s the gift you’ve brought us to share?’
And I thought about it for a little while as I watched a small girl do a little ballet performance near the bar. ‘Stories,’ I told her, but she was sitting with someone else who needed the kangaroo to tell them their future.
The good and bad about being in a small place was that everyone wanted to get to know you. In some ways that was the fun part, mostly because we just made it up. That was our gift. Stories. That’s what we brought to the party. This guy sat down next to Asheeka and asked what we were doing here and she told him we were travelling all over the outback, looking at horses for our stud farm back home on the outskirts of Sydney. I don’t think Asheeka had ever even heard of a stud farm until Ben had explained what a ‘stud’ was for back in Jindabyne. That’s nasty, was all Asheeka had had to say, but now, apparently, she was in charge of one.
There were so many other stories too: all spun into the small spaces of this kitschy bar. We were finding some long-lost great aunt, we were backstage workers in a travelling circus, we were on our way to reclaim an inheritance the rest of the family was about to steal, we were so many things both that day and along the way. And now, looking back at it, I realise it wasn’t entirely all a lie. It’s not that we were actually any of those things, but we weren’t not those things either. Like, in the time between when we left and when we returned there was just this infinite space where we were anyone.
Later in the afternoon when we were about to take off, Denise handed us both a blank sheet of paper. ‘You write down whatever you want,’ she said, pointing to the old beer keg and the man made of spare car parts that hovered above it. ‘You know, like a letter to a loved one, something you need to let go of.’
Despite first impressions, Denise was actually pretty cool. I held it in my hand, wondering what to write. ‘And then you set it on fire?’
‘God, no! Total fire ban. I thought of pouring water in the keg but, you know, water restrictions, so I think we’ll all just maybe tear up the paper around the shrine and throw it into the sky.’
When we were finished writing, Asheeka and I went out into the back courtyard and Denise turned up the music while everyone tore up pieces of paper. I watched Asheeka tear hers in half and throw her hands up in the air, dancing, floating. At her feet I could see what she had written lying there in two pieces on the ground:
Rosa, I set you free.
THE ’RITH
Moving in any direction felt like progress, but now that we had entered the outskirts of Sydney’s western suburbs, every movement forward felt like going backwards. On the footpath ahead of us, two girls with the same knock-off Converse flats, jean skirts and tube tops whispered and laughed like the world was an easy casual space. The houses in Penrith were the colours of chocolate blocks: milk chocolate crackle, dark chocolate with flecks of raspberry, white chocolate tiles for the McMansions in between the 1960s chocolate brick homes squashed flat to one storey.
‘What day is it?’ Asheeka asked.
‘Thursday.’
‘Arnold’ll be at Macca’s after practice.’
‘How long have we been gone?’
‘Two weeks.’ Enough for everything to change.
The day flatlined. Took the air out of us. There was nothing that resembled a breeze in this hot valley, nothing that signalled we were back here, where girls’ bodies were different from those you see in the postcards of Bondi Beach and everyone was overdressed and underdressed all at the same time. Girls, everywhere, their hands touching their own bellies awkwardly, hiding the belly buttons that poked out from their low-waisted jeans for everyone to see.
Asheeka drove this time. It was slow, precise. Deliberate. We drove past the Westfield and I watched our car’s reflection pass across its windows, so pink it looked imagined. A group of boys pulled up next to us at a traffic light in a lowered Honda. They beeped and laughed: two women in a car they’d never get to touch.
We got on the M4 and Asheeka took her time in the left-hand lane. The roof of the car was down. We both knew this was the first time and the last time we would ever be this free. Asheeka, not too far off from disappearing for the last time, held both arms into the air like she was trying to catch this one last moment of breath, until we turned off the highway and drove through the car yards. That mannequin was there in the low-cut sequinned dress, same as she had always been, tied to a pole and advertising used cars for quick sale. We drove under the overpass and through the side streets behind it to where a different story began at another time in the back of Parramatta, where the river ended and no one went and the buildings were drowning in overgrown plants and grass and cracked footpaths. We drove past that and down Church Street. Asheeka pulled her lip gloss out of her bag and drew it slowly across her lips in the rear-vision mirror.
When we arrived at the North Parramatta McDonald’s parking lot, Arnold and Tom and Jake were there in that gym gear they were wearing yesterday, the day before, would be wearing every day in the future like nothing was ever going to change them.
‘Here we are,’ Asheeka said, turning to me after she’d parked and turned off the engine. ‘Let’s tell them no.’
I sat there, watched her get slowly out of the car and walk towards where Arnold was. One of his mates smashed his fist into Arnold’s shoulder and Arnold looked up, saw her there, and crossed his arms over his chest. His face was cold and hard. Every bit of his body was an accusation. And Asheeka, she just kept on walking, like he was nothing. For a second, she turned briefly and looked at him with no feeling, just so he knew she hadn’t missed him. Then she kept walking past him and further up the road, that blue cotton hem of her dress lifting up slightly in the breeze. That’s when everyone’s phones came out and Arnold yelled, ‘You come back here!’ in this really unconvincing way, like he’d never had to insist on anything ever in his life.
Phone
s lit up. Someone talked about calling triple zero ‘quick, so they can catch her’. ‘It’s pink!’ someone else yelled. A couple of the girls I recognised from school came out from the guts of the restaurant: Catherine stood there by the door twisting her hair nervously around her finger. I watched Asheeka walk away. I thought about fistfuls of chips in my mouth. I thought about all the stories and all the boys and all the nice legs, nice hair and all their talking all the time. I thought about the endless grids of suburban streets and my mother’s work heels stranded silently in the hallway. I thought about my father trembling against his own skin.
I knew that Asheeka had left me. And I knew that it was my time to say, I’m here, so what, and I’m going to try to be here on my own terms, and I shifted into the driver’s seat, started the engine and reversed the car. The giant McDonald’s M on its pole stood there in the middle of the parking lot, the centre of the universe, the biggest moon in the sky and I wanted it gone. I drove forward. Straight into that pole. It wasn’t much of a hit, not for me at least. The immense stretch of car bonnet absorbed all the shock, bending it back into the shape of an inverted triangle, which looked like it was grinning, egging me on. I backed away again, then drove forward right into that pole a second time.
It bent towards Arnold and Jake and Tom and hovered over them – one side of the M broke away and swung down swiftly cutting the air above their heads. I felt as satisfied as if I’d bent that metal back myself with my own bare hands. That’s when the fire started. First there was smoke. Then there were flames. I opened the car door and stepped out as the yellow arms of fire crept out towards the tyres.
And I stood there watching it, all lit up and burning.
LEARNING EMPATHY
Maree says that empathy, like writing, is an act of imagination. You have to put yourself into someone else’s place and really think about what it would be like to be them. I’m getting ready for a visit from my mum by trying to put myself into her head but I can’t. It’s like trying to shove my whole body into a closed book.
And then there she is, all that soft quiet clicking of herself walking slowly past the plastic chairs. Security has stripped her of all her jewellery and her jacket and her scarves and she kind of looks like she’s been sanded down. She doesn’t look like she’s had her signature blonde streaks put in her hair anytime recently. It is pulled back simply, the grey hairs showing around her temple.
We stand there looking at each other at first. She is so close I catch her buttered-toast smell but that small space between us is also so large, so densely filled with so many words, so many stories we don’t know how to talk about, that I don’t know how I can sift through all that and make my way to her, so I sit and she sits. The wintry light comes in thick through the windows and I realise how long it’s been since I noticed those flecks of green in her eyes.
She opens up a packet of M&Ms and pushes it gently towards me. ‘My mother told me this would happen,’ she says. ‘When I acted up. She said to me one day you’ll get a daughter and you’ll know how it feels.’ She starts to look more relaxed, like she’s settling into the fact that this is her life now. ‘I ran away once, with a girlfriend, Sue. Me and Sue, we wanted to go to this concert in Kings Cross, but my mum didn’t want us to. We went anyway, disappeared for the whole weekend.’
She rolls the M&Ms around on her tongue for a while and I listen to them click against her teeth. ‘But you know, we came back eventually.’
‘I came back for you.’ I reach out and put my hand over hers and she puts her other hand over mine and we sit here, all our hands layered one over the other.
‘Was it worth it?’
‘Leaving or coming back?’
‘Both.’
I look out that window, where I can see the trees stripped of all their leaves. When I get out of here, it’ll be almost summer again.
‘I’ve been looking through pictures of you from when you were younger. Trying to work out how you got here, who you were, who you are.’
Something clicks in my brain. ‘Did you upload those to my Instagram feed?’
She doesn’t hesitate. ‘Yes. I wanted everyone else to know who you are too.’
‘What? A loser?’
‘I don’t see that in those photos. I see someone who thinks a lot, someone who is thoughtful and kind and funny.’ She leans forward and pushes a few stray hairs gently behind my ear. ‘Someone sent me something the other day. Anonymously.’
‘A book?’
‘A photograph.’
‘Oh.’ I am thinking of Asheeka and me in that toilet stall at the evacuation centre, me with most of my clothes off, when my mother adds, ‘I’ve never seen you look so much like you were completely at home with yourself.’
‘What was I doing?’
‘Sitting by a lake somewhere staring up at the sky.’ She pushes her chair up close to me and I put my head on her shoulder like I did when I was a kid, and she rubs her hand up and down my shoulder until one of the guards yells, ‘Time’s up,’ and all those mothers in the room rise slowly from their chairs and make their way towards the door.
*
Back in my cell, I take out the books I’ve been sent and place them in the order in which I received them. I take out my pencil and open to the first page of On the Road, and I write down all the letters in the order that someone has underlined them. And like Tracey said, those letters turn into words and the words turn into sentences and the sentences turn into a letter.
Rosa,
I’m sorry about you being in there. I really am. One day I might see you again but for now I’m on the road and I’m not coming back until I figure out a lot of things. You wouldn’t believe it, I’m picking fruit in all these places. My nails, you should see them! But it gives me a lot of time to think and at night I meet people from all sorts of places and I listen to everything about where they’ve all been and where they want to go. Maybe I’ll go to those places too one day. A woman I met told me something that made me think of you, she said when you tell a story you are trying to walk with someone else to understand who they are while listening to your own heartbeat. Isn’t that beautiful? Maybe I’ll write the story of you and me one day.
Love Asheeka
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
So, part of the many things that this book is about is the way that sometimes we don’t notice all the things that girls do. And in that spirit I’d love to take a moment to make sure that some of the girls in my life know that I’m noticing them. Even if you’re not a big part of my writing, you’re a big part of my life, and I can’t keep my life out of these books.
GIRLS ON MY ROAD TRIP
Sheila Ngoc Pham, I cannot think of anyone who does more for the writing community (and everyone else) than you and you do it quietly, with such dignity and grace. You are a fierce and critical voice and I am grateful to have you in my life. I am surrounded by inspirational girls who break themselves in order to carry the epic weight of the world – Azadeh Dastyari I’m looking at you. There are so many immensely talented writers in my life right now whose work is exploding onto the literary scene in the most beautiful of ways: Eda Günaydın, Rawah Arja, Chloe Higgins and Hajer thank you for your friendship and for your words. Thank you also to Fiona Wright and Liz Allen who have been a constant on my road trip. And to Frances An, May Ngo, Zarlasht Sarwari, Ailsa Liu, Michele Freeman, Claire Nemorin, Ruth Mooney and all the other inspirational girls making work with The Finishing School Collective.
GIRLS I’D LIKE TO STEAL A CAR WITH
Carmel Lee, I would definitely steal a car with you because you could argue our way out of anything – thank you for your advice on the legal scenes in this book and for many years of unwavering friendship. To my Marist girls, I feel like I might have stolen a car with you at some point and maybe I just can’t remember what happened that night? Rossella Garofano, Marilyn Fitzgerald, Asheeka Nand and Lisa Walker, you are my compassionate, fierce and forever friends. Belinda Kneeshaw, I know we were th
e original Thelma and Louise because I have a picture of us riding down the street butt naked on a giant plastic bike and almost forty years on I can’t think of many other people I’d like to ride into the sunset with. And Louisa Smith, of course, you always have been and always will be in my heart.
GIRLS WHO MAKE THE WORLD GO ROUND
Augusta Supple, you care so hard for this industry and its people, sometimes it makes my heart break. Sophia Kouyoumdjian, I will always think of you as a kind of superwoman flying around Parramatta, holding all the artists up. I am indebted to so many of the girls who have made The Parramatta Artists’ Studios my favourite place in the universe including Hayley Megan French, Tian Zhang and Carla Theunissen. Marian Abboud, Linda Brescia and Emma Saunders, I don’t think I would ever be able to understand what’s possible if I didn’t have the privilege of making art with you. Joanne Kee, damn girl! Look what you’ve done in just a few short years, you’ve built a home where complex and thoughtful stories can grow at The National Theatre. The Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University has a lot of great boys hanging around but it’s run by girls and I am thankful for their wisdom and generosity, particularly to Kate Fagan, Anne Jamison, Rachel Morley, Milissa Deitz and Catriona Menzies-Pike for all their support, and to the non-girl members of the centre, particularly Ivor Indyk and Anthony Uhlmann.
GIRLS WHO READ BOOKS
Thank you to my agent Catherine Drayton for having the faith to take me on and for helping me to reshape this book. To Claire Craig, thank you for your conversations and for helping me to think through how I could make this a much stronger story. Brianne Collins, you have such a keen eye for detail and working through your edits was some of the hardest writing I’ve ever done but I’m thankful for it. Thank you also to Belinda Huang for her assistance.
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