Exploded View

by Carrie Tiffany

  Between Eucla and Yalata the blue Volvo comes past again. The mother is in the back now with her yellow hair squashed against the door strut. The small one is in the front but its mouth is closed. The father man is driving under a hat. He’s had enough. Their three mouths are closed, just like ours.

  Further on there’s a man with a broken-down motorbike on the side of the road. The dirt is red here and the motorcyclist’s white t-shirt is pink from where he’s been lying in the dirt. He’s given up trying to fix the motorbike. He’s sitting on his leather jacket with his black helmet between his legs and his thumb pointed out at us as we drive past. There are a few tools scattered in the dirt around the back wheel of the motorbike that he hasn’t bothered to pack away. When it is clear that we are not going to stop he flips his hand over and sticks his middle finger up angrily.

  You can have a motorbike or you can have a family. You can’t have both. The thing you need to do about the motorbike man stuck on the side of the road is to never think about him and his broken-down motorbike again.

  I brought an old golf trolley home from the tip once and gave it to my brother. Things with wheels are prized at the tip. A father will take the wheels from an old pram and build a go-kart for his boy. He’ll tell the boy to be careful and take a photograph as the boy rides the go-kart in front of the house. The mother might come out too and watch for a bit in her apron, or call them in for tea. Who knows what they eat, but they drink white milk out of tall glasses.

  My brother dragged the rusty golf trolley to the top of Struttle Road hill and strapped himself to it. He wove the vinyl strap that’s meant to go around the bag of clubs through the belt loops of his Lee jeans. My brother was the cab and the chassis of his golf trolley car, but the weight of him was not enough to fasten the wheels to the road.

  The snapped bone inside my brother’s leg was hidden by the flesh around it. What to do first – unthread him from the broken trolley or wipe his wet cheeks with my sleeve?

  When the cast came off my brother’s leg all the muscles had gone. His leg was wasted and unreliable. An unused machine becomes brittle and is subject to rust, but its parts never waste.

  Thinking about my brother’s wasted leg made me worried for my face. Could not speaking make my face sink like with old people who have lost their teeth? I began some exercises in front of the mirror, whispering a song – either a nursery rhyme or Kate Bush. Then I expressed surprise and pretended to greet someone fondly, my lips puckered for a kiss. Lastly, I thought of something good that a smile could feed on. When the smile didn’t come I lifted my lips and bared my teeth instead. It’s what dogs do in warning. It’s a simple way of saying: I’m dangerous, don’t come near.

  A road sign tells us a bridge is up ahead so we’ll pay attention, so we don’t get surprised. You could live under a bridge. Under a bridge could be a sort of house. If it was a wide bridge you’d sleep right under the middle so the rain didn’t get in at the sides. There aren’t any cupboards but you could take bricks out of the pillars and store things behind them. Then you could go off in the daytime and you and your things would always be safe.

  The inside of a burnt tree could be a house, except it is full of charcoal. A shed is the best house, or a mechanic’s workshop or an outside laundry. It makes sense to sleep in the pit in the workshop and climb up and down the ladder to your bed. If you had a cat or a dog you’d have to lift them up or down, or maybe, with time and practice, they could learn the ladder. My brother put me in the fridge once. It’s not that I was especially small. It was a big fridge and I got in the salad crisper at the bottom and scraps of lettuce that were wet and see-through stuck to my legs.

  My mother is reading The Silken Trap. When it is finished she wraps it in a plastic bag and puts it in the boot of the Holden. Then she is reading With This Ring.

  When you see a knife-beaked bird, like a kookaburra, think of it inside an egg. It will sweeten you to imagine the bird as a chick, cramped and scruffy-feathered in its tight white egg. When you see a man, think of a baby in its snug blue blanket. When you see a snake, think of a pink worm in wet soil.

  The gravy is hot so I’m not fast enough to eat my pie. It doesn’t take long before it’s too long off the road. Nobody waits for a girl. If you don’t do something fast enough you have to run or you have to pretend you have done the thing so you don’t hold everyone up.

  Here’s a town. The local football ground has red dirt instead of grass. Two tall white goalposts in the middle, a shorter one on either side. The Australian family. It must be training because a clump of men chase a ball, but nobody is wearing a uniform. The ball flies up in the air and a black man climbs on the back of a white man like a lizard up a tree. It’s to take a mark, so nobody minds.

  The roadside stop isn’t in the right place tonight so we park on the hard shoulder and get ready to sleep. Father man locks the car doors. My mother pushes her bra straps off her shoulders. She puts a cardigan over her face and says goodnight. Father man has a last cigarette. I can hear the dry skin of his lips sticking and unsticking to the damp white paper.

  I might have too much spit for kissing. What’s better for kissing – a dry tongue or a wet tongue? When I was small and I had a cold my brother said his spit was medicine. I opened my mouth and he spat a warm ball of it into me. I can’t remember if it worked.

  I don’t know how to shut myself off in the car tonight. I’d like to go for a walk on the road. I’d like a torch to read the manual. I shut my eyes and make the pages come up behind them. If I concentrate hard I can read it in my mind.

  Modelling the parts has tuned my man’s hands to weight and tension. He can feel how the fabric of my jeans tightens where my thighs are fullest. There are empty belt loops for him to finger. There’s the ridge that marks the elastic of my underpants where it grips the top of each leg. Undoing Waist Stud has several stages. It starts with grasping and squeezing – the thumb against the pubic bone, the fingers between the legs, the unzipping of the zip. Before the waist stud is undone the fingers trace the edge of the waistband, opening up a space between the fabric and the skin. The undoing of the stud is quick, simply done. My man’s hands have good weight and warmth; they cause no upset to my skin. I don’t know if other females have a trail of fine hairs down their belly, or such a brushy thickness of it between their legs. Because of this what happens next happens through the cotton of my underpants, although the hair is always snaking out and the fabric can easily be pushed aside. With his thumbs, with the very tips of his fingers, my man’s hands separate the folds to stroke the collar of the hooded pin at the centre join of me. Then he pumps its tip. In an engine this mechanism is a primer, a way of establishing a necessary flow.

  I turn over and rearrange my t-shirt-pushed-inside-my-yellow-bathing-suit pillow. Fifteen days ahead.

  One sheep in a paddock of dull grey sheep has its head in a hollowed-out tree stump. Is it a smart sheep, or a dumb sheep?

  I have a big appetite for toast but there’s only one piece in the paper envelope. The girl doing till in the roadhouse has gold chains in her ears. Chain links fold back on themselves under force. How did the girl push the thin chains through the flesh of her earlobe? A safety pin, a compass, a needle? She mustn’t feel the gritty bit of chain dragging at the inside meat of her ear anymore, but she must have felt it the first time. Each road train trailer has safety chains to connect it to the trailer in front. It’s only in case the coupling fails. Sometimes, when a trailer has been unhitched, you’ll see the chains resting slackly on the ground. Each fat link looks like a piece of dog shit – part of a chain of shit that’s been laid down as the dog got bored and walked away while the shit kept coming.

  The road is just the road now. There are no historic monuments or animal sanctuaries or adventure parks. There is no minigolf, no viewing platforms or waterfalls. When there are, you never stop at them. There is the name of the town you left and the name of the town you will arrive at. You might as well be driving
across the face of a map.

  Sad trees along the roadside dripping wet. The rain chips, pins, wobbles, breaks and smatters across the windscreen. Again. Again. Again. Only the broken rain hits the passenger’s window, then it drips away for the road and grass to have. A clump of brown sheep, tired, despised. The railway line beside the road pulls us towards it and then away. The rusty tracks, always twinned, always high and proud of the grey stone bed beneath them. What a fine road they make to scrape along.

  A road sign shows a mother duck looking back over her shoulder at a line of ducklings as she crosses the road. You never actually see that and nobody would stop if they did.

  Father man is in charge of the five primary controls – the throttle, the footbrake, the handbrake, the gear lever, the steering wheel – and the nine secondary controls – the choke, the ignition, the starter, the indicators, the lights, the dip switch, the horn, the windscreen wiper and windscreen washer. He has two hands and two feet to operate fourteen controls. No large forces are needed. Most of the action is in the head. Father man assesses the road, the environment, the conditions and the car, making constant, minute adjustments. He knows how to keep the car away from other cars on the safe side of the road. He knows how to manoeuvre through small spaces and park without incident. From this it can be seen that he has the best interests of the family at heart.

  When father man gets behind the wheel the car becomes included in his body, so that the outer edge of the car becomes his outer edge, even with us inside.

  A sign with the South Australian road toll on it. They updated it every year from 1970 to 1975. I doubt it means there haven’t been any deaths since 1975. It’s a small sign with an advertisement for Wing Chin Chinese restaurant in the corner. I think they just ran out of room.

  The manual again. In Checking Oil Pump Impeller Radial Clearance, the oil pump is high in the picture. It is almost life-sized. The hand grasps the pump in a relaxed grip. The fingers are curled, almost touching, resting expectantly next to each other. There is a black line between each finger. Just near the knuckle joint, in the split between the first and second finger, the flesh bulges a little, like a stomach, or a cheek. The knuckle skin is smooth and glassy like nipple skin, but I’ve only ever touched my own. What you are looking for when you insert the feeler gauge is a free fit with minimum clearance. The spindle must be flush with the propeller at all times.

  My mother is cleaning her teeth at the handbasin in the petrol station toilet. We know we are in the ladies because there’s a smiling Spanish dancing girl on the door. The sun has gone down even further when we come out. Just a few hours of driving in the dark, then I will be on the floor of the car again. My brother falls asleep first, then my mother, then father man. The car smells of bananas but there’s enough air down here to get a girl through the night.

  There is a place for a girl, but it is not in a room, is not in a house, is not in a bed, is not in a garden, it is not in water, it is not in sunlight or under the branches of trees. The place for a girl is in a car. The girl in the car is on a road. The surface of the road is glittering. Nobody, not even the girl, knows if the car is travelling through the speckled stars of the black sky or across the chipped stones of the black road.

  My brother burps. An owl hoots from a roadside tree. Fourteen days ahead.

  Scaly-footed young magpies own the Rotary park and picnic stop. They show us their beaks and make their demands.

  Here’s a road train, an eleven-wheeler. It says long vehicle on the mudguards. The road train is in front of us. It kinks its hips around the bend, the skirt of its trailer following on behind.

  When we leave the car to eat or piss or to stretch our legs we are drawn straight back to it. At the roadside stop we fan out from our car but we always keep it in sight. You never approach the empty waiting car of another. You never touch the empty waiting car of another, even though the car itself can’t feel. Doors opening. Doors closing. Everyone has their corner. Our legs must be starting to wither, but why walk when you can drive?

  You can tell from behind, from the way that they drive, when a driver is wearing a hat inside the car. They are never a good driver. Wearing a hat inside the car means they do not understand the meaning of the car. It’s usually someone on their own. A family in the same car shares the shelter of the roof. The car becomes the family hat.

  My mother asks me if I am having some trouble talking. She asks me if I have a sore throat.

  I miss the night driving. I miss pushing a car through the dark with my foot on the petrol, my hands on the wheel. I might cry today. I don’t know why, but I have to be careful so the tears don’t get out. I should be happy. Here I am, a girl on the road with her family. A girl on the road who is safe.

  It must be the afternoon because here are some children coming home from school. They are waiting to cross the highway opposite the petrol station. The girls hold their schoolbags in front of them so the wind from the road doesn’t blow up their checked dresses. There’s an automotive repair workshop next to the petrol station. A mechanic sits drinking a can of Coke on a kerosene drum underneath the rolled-up roller door. Father man is cleaning our windows with the window-cleaning stick. For a second my view of the mechanic is sudsy, and then it is clear. The mechanic must have been a schoolchild once. Now he sits sucking on his can and you can see straight up the leg of his shorts where there are two eggs squashed in a red bag and the white stalk of his dick.

  A tool is an expression of its user. It looks raw, what the mechanic has between his legs. Like it has only just been born. An afterbirth, or an afterthought.

  The schoolchildren go into the petrol station. I think they’ll buy Cheezels and then they’ll go home.

  When we pull back out onto the road it’s still the wheat belt so I close my eyes and think about Sharon’s tyre boy. I imagine that he’s mine. I imagine that I meet him at lunchtime. We cross the highway. I have a fifty-cent coin in the hip pocket of my jeans; I buy the boy a pie. The boy peels back the plastic top of the sauce with his black fingers. When he bites into the pie, mince drips out and he swoops down on it and gulps at the hot meat. A smear of it is on his face now. I want to wipe it away like a mother does, but you have to be wary of that. It’s best that they don’t ever think you are the boss of them. The brown meat on the boy’s face is drying to a dark crust. I don’t know what we might do next so I imagine it is evening. We’ve driven past so many motels now, but I’ve never been inside one.

  Here we are then, just as the night turns grey. I decide to give the tyre boy a ute because he only has a bicycle. I give the boy a white HR ute with three on the tree. When the boy changes gear he does something funny with his elbow – like a cat boxing with its paw. I’m sitting next to the boy on the bench seat with my elbow out the window. My arm is brown, the brown you can only get from going to the beach. The boy drives onto the concrete apron in front of the Best Western motel with hair dryers and colour television and a hatch next to the door for breakfast to be slid through. Six steps between the ute and the room, the engine of the mini fridge taking over with a hum, hum, hum, now that the ute is resting quietly outside. There’s a double bed with a bedspread in seat-cover chenille. There are glove boxes on both sides of the bed and twin hinged silver ashtrays that flip out to crush your smokes into. There’s a mirror with headlights on each side of the bedhead to see by. The television is on a wheeled tray in front of us. The boy presses the ignition on the wooden dash and selects the channel. With television we don’t have to go through all the dead places to get somewhere. The picture on the television screen assembles and we are behind the wheel in San Francisco looking out at tall wooden houses crowded together on a steep hill, the water of the bay ahead, a glimpse of the shouldered bridge, the pale, patched road falling away in front of us. The tyres screech as the car hurtles across an intersection, is airborne for a second, then slams back down against the road. It can’t be good for the suspension. Our car chases the car ahead in the way do
gs chase cats. It’s only for entertainment – everyone knows they will never catch each other.

  The boy lies next to me on the double bed. He’s making revving noises behind his teeth.

  ‘I’ll take you for a spin,’ the boy says and he rolls over and pops the press-studs on my denim shirt.

  I need some time here to imagine more stuff that he might do to me, so I take the roof off the Best Western motel. When you look down from above there is a line of bedroom boxes side by side for couples and a line of car parks for cars to rest from the road. You can be safe from the lounge room and the kitchen when you are on the road – there’s no need for rooms to be a family in.

  Here’s a crane-view of a boy and a girl on the bed in every room, just like me and the boy from the automotive, except that this me I’m looking down on has brown skin all over and long yellow hair and good jeans that aren’t handed down from my brother.

  Back in the motel room now. I’m lying down on the bed and the door is open – there’s just the flyscreen between us and the white ute. If I turn my head on the pillow I can see past the boy’s shoulder and out the door. The ute is beautiful through the hazy veil of the flyscreen. In a motel you can be gone first thing in the morning; you can be gone as soon as you put the key in the ignition and turn it home.

  A pink nightdress of dirt gets up off the flat and swirls towards us – up down, up down, and then it peters out. You might think a family in a car would see the same things, but that’s only if they look through the same window. Four people, four individual winding panes of glass, and the family screen in front. Nobody mentions the pink wind but I know I’m not the only one that saw.