Exploded View

by Carrie Tiffany

  The television is on in the corner of the roadhouse cafe. We sit four in a line and eat our toasted sandwiches. It’s a quiz show. The host grimaces and lifts his lips from his teeth. I know three answers but I don’t say. Then it’s the news. There’s a report on Australian pedestrian injuries and deaths. The parts of the car causing injury were the front bumper bar, the leading edge of the bonnet, the front edge of the front mudguard and the upper surface of the bonnet. Some pedestrians that were hit did not look, or misjudged a gap in the traffic. Some claimed they looked. Some pedestrians that were hit stood in the centre of the road or deliberately ran into a vehicle. Some pedestrians that were hit were children that, for some reason, hesitated when crossing the road.

  A big lady kangaroo tipped on one side. Her palomino fur full of evening sun, her black gloved paws clasped in greeting.

  These are my inventions: a false floor that fits behind the front seats of a car so one person can sleep on the back seat and one person can sleep on the floor without the hump in the middle cutting them in half. Tools for the kitchen to prevent boring tasks. A walk-in hot air drying cupboard next to the shower so there’s no need for effort with towels. A death sound built into the road and triggered by a car travelling over it to keep innocent animals away.

  The last bit of driving, when the sun is down, is the saddest. The arms of the trees reaching out across the road. Animals line up behind the roadside fences to watch the darkening cars. There is no instrument that tells the driver when the headlights are required. One car flips its light switch and everyone follows. The road is a black strap under the beam of the headlights, then the softness of the gravel as we pull into the roadside stop. There are thousands of vehicles in circulation on the highway and many vehicles are stopped here. All night the sound of the car doors unsticking and punching shut again as people go off to the grass. Each sleeping car keeps its safe travelling distance. For a few seconds when a door is opened or a match is struck to light a cigarette you can see inside a car, but then the darkness takes it back again.

  On my first night in the car I startled each time father man moved in his seat, but I’m used to it now. I could laugh at how safe I am down here with my brother spread out above me on the back seat like a shield. Twelve days ahead.

  The cars wake and get on the road early the next morning. Toilet paper streamers wave us off from the roadside grass.

  A herd of raggy emus run through some bushes on the side of the road. They don’t look at us. Their necks can only look front-ways.

  A dog on a box, a sheep on a stone, the black stump, the long paddock of the road. It isn’t dishonourable if a town doesn’t have an avenue of honour. Perhaps the trees were planted but didn’t grow, or a fire burnt them down.

  There are no trees on the plain. Families live here without trees. The government should buy them some. Here is a flattened bird with its beak cracked against the bitumen. It was licking the road and got stuck by the tongue. This dead kangaroo has her legs open. Her pale underside feels shameful to look at, like the blank groin of a doll.

  People say there is nothing out here, in the outback. You won’t find a shop, you won’t find a house, you won’t find a hairdresser, you won’t find any cities, you won’t find a hall that has a dancing class except it’s cancelled as the teacher has gone away. You won’t find comics, you won’t find books, you won’t find a painting in a frame, you won’t find curtains, you won’t find flowers, you won’t find a lunch box and you won’t find a hairbrush. Nowhere will you find a man with his trousers undone and a screwdriver in his hand. The nothing in the outback is thick and rich. If we stopped the car now and I opened my door and walked off the road and into the outback, I think the outback would kill me. Or maybe I would kill the outback. I think only one of us would survive.

  We pass a truck with a roll of road on its tray. I can’t see what sort of road it is because the surface is on the inside in the same way jam is curled inside a Swiss roll. These are the different types of road that you can buy:

  Blue road.

  Purple road with black stains where potholes have been fixed. It’s the same with silver fillings in teeth – dentists like their repairs to be noticed.

  Light grey road with rough stones that are proud of the bitumen because the mixture was mixed wrong. This road is sticky and tiring for cars.

  Pink road, but only in small sections so it’s a surprise.

  Black road that always looks dry.

  Grey road with cat’s eyes and white shoulder lines and white centre lines, sporty like a tennis court, and white posts every few breaths to announce to the land around, this is the road, see, here is the road.

  Black road that darkens when wet.

  Flecked grey road.

  Smooth white road. This road is used just before a bridge to introduce the idea of water.

  Orange gravel road. Gravel road doesn’t come in a roll – it’s poured onto the road through a sieve.

  Roads stained by paints and acids.

  Skid-marked roads where tyres have gripped and screamed, then fled.

  Roads where one surface is in conflict with the others.

  Roads with corroded edges like old ladies’ lips.

  Roads worried by junctions and intersections, where one road becomes another.

  Roads that the land is taking back.

  Roads scarred by procedures and operations.

  Roads that are unsure of their form.

  Roads over rivers and creeks and streams that cry out with the sound of what is flowing beneath them.

  Today, hardly anyone has spoken. Other families’ cars can be full of words for the holidays. Pink sky at night, and fifty cents for the first person to see the sea, and are we there yet? which is a happy joke because they have somewhere good to go. Some families hold their breath over bridges so they’ll never drown.

  We stretch and yawn. We mill around the car at the roadside stop. My mother says, ‘oh, look at that stick, that’s an unusual-looking stick.’

  It’s a trail of dog shit. There are fat sections and thin sections like the carriages of a toy train linked together with strands of grass. She bends down to pick it up.

  My mother’s scalp is greasy beneath her hair. Here’s a fence creeping away between two hills. The road in evening gloom. Somebody planned all of this. Somebody wanted all of this to happen out here.

  A flower farm with a white delivery truck parked in the driveway. The sign on the side of the truck says, Everything’s Coming Up Roses.

  When I have money I will send myself flowers with love words on a white card.

  Lunch at the roadhouse cafe. Father man is using the toilet to shave so we can sit and read car and fishing magazines as we drink our apple juice.

  What people want is transport with all the trimmings. What people want is a bench seat in mint green vinyl and four on the floor. What people want is a shelf under the glove box for maps and handbags and a mirror behind the shade visor for the female to redden her lips so the male who drives will be reminded of her sexual parts. What people want is for their father to be dead so the road is all for them and they can go wherever they want. But then, surprisingly, what people want is not the latest model car. What they want is the car their father wanted but wasn’t smart enough and didn’t have a good enough job to get. They want this car but with all the up-to-date features – a tape deck, automatic blinkers, a cigarette lighter. The car is sleek and fast and low. The car has potential. If only they could get around that one slow driver who’s always in front, that slow driver in the heap-of-crap car, then everything in the world would belong to them.

  That’s according to an article about the car in modern times by a car psychologist from America.

  There’s a lot to worry about out in the world. One thing that’s certain is that prices are rising and everything will soon be too expensive to buy.

  A small trailer is a happy sight. When you tow a trailer you are always being followed; there’s the l
ive weight of it behind you, like a dog pulling on its lead. You can use it to measure things: a trailer load of sand, a trailer load of wood or chicken shit. There’s no engine, no moving parts that need tending. And the look of it – small and square, sometimes covered, sometimes open, and the happy ball joint connected to the car with its stumpy tail.

  Gaining, gaining, gaining – there’s always someone coming up behind. But first a milk tanker to be overtaken – a silver cannon loaded with white.

  It’s nice to travel next to the powerlines, their pole shoulders straight across the sky, and to think about the tree each pole could have been. I saw a power pole lying down on the back of a very long truck with a rag tied around its end – a wooden hot dog. The road is happy to have the company of the poles and wires. The surface of the road dips and rises, dips and rises, to keep time with the slack black strings. One burnt power pole has been left standing high up the hill, all ready for the crucifixion.

  Father man controls the engine’s breathing with the throttle and the choke. Father man controls the steering and the placement of the vehicle on the road.

  The car kills insects with wings (moths, dragonflies, lacewings, mosquitos, butterflies, flies) and the other insects that come with them – bugs and spiders. The car kills most sorts of birds although the emu we drove over was already dead. The car kills rabbits, bandicoots, hopping mice, numbats, skinks, rats, lizards, wombats, snakes, echidnas, goannas, wallabies and kangaroos. The car kills a bat and an eagle. The eagle had a choice between picking at the innards of a rabbit, and life. It chose the innards of the rabbit, and death. Each kill is a road accident – and just like when we saw the red car and the green car, we don’t stop. We kill a fox and on the outskirts of the town of Cobar we kill a ginger cat with a low-hanging stomach and half a tail.

  The insects and small birds get sucked into the orbit of the Holden as it cuts its car-hole out of the wind, but surely anything larger has a choice?

  Driving into a dark sky. Soon rain will fall.

  What is best to fall on you – a tonne of feathers or a tonne of hammers? Have you seen a hammer fly? The wood, the head, the wood, the head, the shiny rabbit ears rotating through the air… But it’s a trick. Feathers have more volume than hammers so they displace more air. I’d still choose the hammers. The slam, the bruise, the blood. Family life. The press of the feathers would be too soft to bear.

  A country town can have a guard of trees announcing it – English-shaped trees in a polite queue to trick you into thinking that you could be arriving somewhere good. At the petrol station at Cunnamulla I’m bleeding. Well, I’m not quite bleeding yet. First the brown smear, then the red fall. Mornings are tricky at the roadside stop. The first time I stand up I have to hope the pad hasn’t moved and there isn’t a leak.

  Father man hates the caravans that beetle along in front of us. The women that belong to caravan men are heavy about the shoulders, reinforced for towing.

  A hawk polices overhead. Out the side window: strips of torn tyre rubber from where it has escaped its wheel and gotten free. A black stain where the rubber has burnt the road.

  Speed and sway. A shock absorber can check rapid movement. The only thing that could stop us now is a collision with a road train, or a wall.

  Our circling tyres are a joke to the road. It has already been rolled. Ordinary cars, not road trains, are only the slightest rub on its surface, a mere tickle.

  Driving over a bridge. The dead road hard beneath us, then a rise, a buoyancy, as the tyres sense another family of air beneath them. They tighten, harden, bounce. Where would we go if we could get free of the road?

  Dabs of insect blood on the windscreen. The speed of impact milks them dead.

  Hours and hours of the plains. Thick white sky presses against the road. No fences, no edges, just flatness. A darker moustache where the sky meets the scrub. If you could drive over to that place, to the horizon, you’d drive right off the world. The grey road turns to ice in front of us but always dries as we race to meet it. Trucks in the distance elongate, skate, then firm. Night falling to meet the last of the day. The dusk trembles – is it sexy? As it gets darker our headlights joust with oncoming vehicles; their high beams cross and drill us, find the white plates of our faces.

  You can’t force an engine seal. You have to check that each edge is seated snugly against the other. Sometimes father man has to leave the car at night because of the congestion. He’ll moan and adjust his trousers and open the car door and walk off, gingerly, into the night. No one will stir. My mother breathes her night breaths. My brother breathes his night breaths. I pretend I don’t know that father man is gone. Time is grainy for a while. I can pretend there is nothing that I know.

  On the side of the road tiny bullet flies dart at our wetnesses: eyes, nostrils, lips, first of the day’s sweat. A string could be a snake. A tear could be a lake. Out here we are the beginning and the end of everything.

  Skittery tumbleweeds rush across the road in front of us. All afternoon low grey bushes wave at us as we pass. It’s not because of us; it’s just the weather of the road.

  A petal-eared rabbit asleep on the edge of the hard shoulder, the white line for its pillow.

  The news is on television in the roadhouse. Somewhere in this country there’s a bushfire in the hills. Houses are burning and a shed is collapsing and a helicopter has taken some blurry footage of the sweet white smoke from the air. It’s interesting to see. It isn’t made up. The four of us sit in front of our lunch and watch it together. The chief fireman is interviewed. He is bald with silver badges on his shirt and a fat wedding ring and a heavy identity bracelet that slops around on his wrist as he points and gestures. The bushfire is serious but he’s enjoying himself and we are too. When the bushfire story is finished it’s back to the cricket. My mother pats her mouth with her serviette and sighs the proper sigh for a natural disaster and we look down at our smeared plates again. A cyclone would be good now, or an earthquake – any catastrophe brought on by mother nature to take us out of ourselves.

  The uncoupled trailer of a road train abandoned at our roadside stop. Its cab has gone on ahead to hunt. Every so often a spaghetti-legged man riding a bicycle with pain around his mouth.

  At Barcaldine my mother gives me money to buy more pads. I don’t know how much blood is the right amount. The woman at the check-out in the supermarket takes the pads over to the service counter where she wraps them up in a sheet of newspaper and sticky-tapes the end down before she puts them in the bag.

  A road dream. A tyre stain on the road like the brackets around a sentence starts to writhe because it is a snake. The snake bites its tail to make a wheel and races the car. I put my hand out of the window to touch the snake-wheel as it passes but its skin is burning hot from the friction of the road. Faster, faster we go, the car and the snake.

  The river trees are rusting from the river water. The river stain creeps up their trunks in the same way that rust creeps up the car’s panels behind the paint. Sometimes a rusted car will be lying on its roof in a paddock and father man will say, ‘look at that Jap crap.’

  There’s a galah for sale on the edge of this town and puppies in the next. A sign for ferrets going cheap in faded red paint on corrugated iron. You won’t find an animal for sale in a town or right out in the bush. It’s only on the edge of town where they have too many and would rather have the money. If it’s your birthday your mother might tell the father man to take the rutted driveway next to the sign and then she’ll get her purse from her bag and walk into one of the sheds near the house and come out with a box with a squirmy kitten in it and stab marks in the cardboard made with scissors so the kitten has air. The people who owned the kitten won’t come out to wave goodbye because they are so sad to see it go.

  The road is in our teeth, in the fat of our buttocks, the skin on the backs of our legs, our spines, the soles of our feet. When we stop the land is there, sideways, fanning out, opening up along each side of the road
, but it isn’t where we’re going. We walk the white line behind the car to stretch our legs. Over a week of driving now. We don’t leave the road. The press of the car against our flesh. That’s all we need.

  The yellow paddocks are beautiful when the cubes of hay have been left sitting in their regular pattern on the land. They could be houses on a new estate or items in a supermarket for the sheep to browse and buy. Just browsing is what you say when you don’t have any money but you want to touch things and see their colours as if you do. Nobody knows what you have in your pocket. Most children are poor, but not everyone has nothing.

  My mother doesn’t get to drive much, not that I care about that. Father man looks stupid sitting in the passenger’s seat, his hands slack in his lap. When it’s time for them to swap places my mother walks around the back of the car, past the boot, to take her new seat. Father man walks around the front, past the engine. It’s a changing of the guard, but there’s never any danger that they might meet.

  As we drive I can see where the air sits on top of the hills. There’s a slice of air that isn’t as blue. It’s a place you could live up there – in a hut maybe or a cave – and the sky would let you in. There would be air enough to go around.