In the morning, my mother slept.
Sliding down from our beds, Joshua and I slipped, in sleeping bag feet, to open the metal door of the van. Wet dew soaked through the down as we hopped across the grass towards the playground. Taking a swing each, we stayed in our sleeping bags, going higher and higher, while the sun rose, already warm, into the cloudless sky.
I knew nothing about South Australia, but when my mother had told us we were going to live there, I wanted to go. We were moving because, like my father, she too had met someone new, and he lived in Adelaide. She wanted to see if the relationship could work, she said. Although I was apprehensive about this new person (a man I had met briefly a couple of times), I was keen for change, eager to believe that this new life she was suggesting would be a better one. And in the freshness of the morning, swinging high above the park, I was excited.
On that second day, we travelled slowly. First, there was the puncture, only three hours from the caravan park. One hour after changing the tyre, my mother needed to stop for a rest. Sometimes she simply pulled over to the side of the highway, shutting her eyes for a few minutes, while Joshua and I waited, quiet as we could be. If we reached a town, we turned off. We ate ice-creams under whatever shade we could find, and then she would recline the driver’s seat – to doze, just for a moment – while we walked the dog up and down the main street. ‘Liza,’ I would call, and she would trot behind us, pink tongue hanging out, glad of an escape from the car.
This town was the smallest we had seen. A pub and a shop, and a scrappy tree that gave us no relief from the heat. We came back to wake my mother, who stretched, jerking the seat back into the upright position. It was still early afternoon, the sun at its hottest. She was hoping to make a few hundred kilometres before night.
‘But I’m so tired,’ she told us. ‘I don’t think any of us slept well.’
‘Will we go to a hotel tonight?’ I asked, hoping we would.
We pulled out from the gravel and onto the road, the dust clouding behind us.
‘Next town we will see if there’s a swimming pool,’ my mother promised, and we looked at each other, Joshua and I, crossing our fingers that there would be one. I could see it already. Bright blue under the shade of desert oaks, the water clear and cold. It would be empty, and I would float in the cool, lying on my back, looking up at the branches overhead.
Outside the window, the highway stretched, a long grey line across the flatness of that country, and as we picked up speed, I checked the back tyre one more time, the rush of air deafening as I leant out the window.
‘I spy,’ my mother tried, but there was so little to see.
I was tired of being on the road and wanted only to get there. ‘Where will we live?’ I had asked that question before, and so had my brother, but we wanted to know again, to make sure there was no detail we were going to miss. What would our new house be like? What school would we go to? We asked her the same questions over and over again as we drove through the long hard heat, the miles between us and the place we had known as home reaching into the hundreds, as the sun burnt high in the sky.
‘I don’t know what it’s like,’ she said. My mother’s boyfriend (a term I used awkwardly, but I didn’t know what else to call him) had rented us a house. ‘It’s on the same street he lives on.’
‘Which is where?’ we wanted to know, although we had no knowledge of the suburbs of Adelaide, let alone the streets.
‘Will our school be close?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We will pick the school when we get there.’
Would we have our own bedrooms?
We would, she assured us.
Would they be as large as the ones we had left?
Of course, she said.
As I sat in the car, the vinyl sticky against my skin, I tried to imagine our new home, my new school, and the friends I would make. I closed my eyes, enjoying refining this vision of my future. I didn’t yet know that after that long drive from Sydney, all of us excited at the prospect of this new life, we would arrive to find a city as hot as the plains we had crossed, and as desolate. With my cheek pressed against the car window, I would look out at the main street of the suburb in which we were going to live and wish we could turn the car around and go back. The few shops would be closed. Only Le Cornu’s, a furniture store built in the seventies, would have its doors open to the public. It boasted the longest piece of curved non-reflecting glass in the world, and even at that young age, the ugliness of that glass and the fact that the owners felt it deserved any form of accolade seemed pitifully tragic to me.
But then, on that second day of driving, I still had only hope, and with nothing but the road to distract me, I had hours in which to indulge in my fantasies.
‘Still holding up?’ My mother saw me crane my head out the window to check once more whether the tyre she had managed to change was still secure. She put a new tape in the player, and then turned the volume down as soon as the song began. ‘Damn it.’ Her hand slapped against the steering wheel, and she pulled over to the side of the road. Had she forgotten something? We were used to that. I automatically checked to see if the dog was still in the back. She was, curled into the small amount of space next to Joshua, her face resting in his lap.
‘What?’
It was the punctured tyre. She shouldn’t have just thrown it away.
When we had pulled over to fix it, we had seen the great shred of rubber flapping off the side. ‘Stuffed,’ Joshua had pronounced and we had all agreed. After struggling with the wheel brace, and finally managing to remove the bolts, she had heaved it off. Once the spare was fitted she had tried to put the old tyre back into the boot, into the spot where the spare had been. The flies thick around her face, and the heat harsh on her shoulders, she had given up in frustration.
‘There’s no point in keeping it,’ she had said.
Rolling it off the edge of the highway and to the barbed-wire fence, she had dragged it across the scrub and out to the middle of the field, where she had left it, somewhere along those miles of highway.
‘You could never have fixed it,’ I told her. ‘At least that’s what you said.’
She knew that. But it was the wheel we needed. ‘Or at least I think we do.’ With her elbow resting on the edge of the window, the flies already coating her arm, she stared out across the field, and then turned back to me. ‘Do we?’
I didn’t know.
Under the merciless glare of the sun, she walked around the car, examining each of the tyres.
‘You’ll never find it,’ I said, not wanting to turn back, not now when there was a promise of a swimming pool at the next town.
‘It wasn’t that far,’ she answered, the wheels spinning on the gravel as she pulled out onto the road, turning across the lanes in one great swoop.
‘It’s at least an hour,’ I groaned, slumping down in my seat.
She had made up her mind, and we drove back, bypassing the town where we had stopped so that she could rest, continuing out along that highway, not sure what landmarks we should be looking for. ‘Was there anything?’ my mother asked. ‘A sign?’ I shook my head, my gaze fixed out the window. It all looked the same; the long road, the barbed-wire fence, the flat dry country and the stretch of cloudless sky, taut across the landscape, each continuing indefinitely.
‘Stop,’ Joshua called from the back, and my mother veered off the road.
‘Is it here?’ she asked.
He shook his head.
The dog had been sick. She had eaten something, tiny bones and vomit marked his knee. It wasn’t much. ‘Just wipe it off,’ my mother told him, and she searched in her bag for a tissue, which she then spat on before he had a chance to stop her.
Looking out at the road, she shook her head. ‘It could be anywhere,’ she finally admitted.
‘Can we turn around?’ I asked.
I could see she was wavering. We could be asked to get out and start looking, to walk out into that
scrub, and it would scratch like steel wool against our legs, while we flicked at the flies with a piece of long grass and searched among those dry bushes for something we might not even need. I was willing her to turn the key in the ignition and keep driving forward, on to that town with a swimming pool, and then, when we were cool and refreshed, to go further, to that hotel where we would spend the night, and then finally to that new place, our new life in a new city, waiting for us, untouched and ready to begin.
A crow cawed as it alighted on a fence post. Cocking its head to one side, it watched us. My mother took her sunglasses from the top of her head, and put them back on again. She checked the rear-vision mirror one last time, and we pulled out onto that highway, leaving that wheel behind us, the metal slowly rusting, the tyre rotting, lost from sight in grass that swayed like flax under the relentless scorch of the sun.
SIXTEEN
I HAD JUST TURNED SIXTEEN WHEN I FIRST HAD SEX. His name was Michael Brown, and he was the same age as me. At the time, my friends and I referred to me having lost my virginity, a strange phrase that seemed to imply I’d misplaced a part of myself. I certainly didn’t feel as though having sex had resulted in a loss of my innocence, or of anything else for that matter. The only absence that felt marked was the absence of my own self-confidence, but this didn’t have anything to do with Michael. I’d been shy and anxious about fitting in from a young age, and this meant the decisions I made were not always good ones.
This shyness was something I had hoped magically to shed when I commenced my new life in Adelaide. Of all the changes I had wanted, the greatest was probably a change in myself. I had envisaged someone who was bolder and more interesting than the girl who had grown up in Sydney. I had imagined her in her new home, at her new school, with her new friends. But it didn’t take long before the fantasies dissolved into dust.
Now, when my daughter asks me about the worst place I ever lived in, I often tell her it was that first house in Adelaide. In the middle of a street that was known for its tall gracious bluestones, our place was built in the sixties by an Eastern European architect. It would be the height of fashion these days, but then, with its metal sculptures, pear-shaped beds and paintings that moved when you turned on a switch, it was alarming. How could anyone build such a place? How could anyone live there? As we pulled into the driveway, I was speechless.
We knew no one. In those first few weeks before school started, we were bored. It was hot and still. I either lay on my bed, swatting at flies and reading, or I squabbled with Joshua. We were asked to a couple of places; people who knew people who had kids in the same year at the school we had chosen. We answered the adults’ questions politely as we sipped on icy lemonade, the condensation making the glasses slippery in our hands. Yes, we liked it here. Certainly a much easier city to live in, my mother would add, a welcome change from the hectic pace of Sydney. She would compliment the markets, or the parklands, or the hills, picking some feature that she had liked, the conversation opening a little further. We would be sent off to play with the children. Sitting in their bedrooms, curtains drawn to keep out the fierceness of the sun, we would attempt a few games – cards or Monopoly – and try to talk, never quite able to explain why we had moved whenever the question came up. Even if it had been because my mother had a new job (which she didn’t) the explanation would have been inadequate. In the wealthier suburbs of Adelaide, women didn’t really work, and if they did, they certainly didn’t pack up their entire families and move for their careers. As for moving for love – that was an explanation we were even less likely to give. This was a city in which people of my mother’s age were usually married. They did not live in de facto relationships.
I was glad to start school after the loneliness of the summer. But I was also nervous and it took some time before I made friends. At the end of the first year, I was one of the well-behaved girls, part of a group who got good marks, participated in a few activities and largely went unnoticed. The only boys I talked to were the misfits; the pimply, bespectacled ones who did debating, or the theatrical ones who liked hanging out with the girls and would probably come out as gay eventually.
Michael was very different from me. He sat at the back of the class, slouched in his chair, long legs in grey school pants stretched out in front of him, making smart-arse remarks in response to comments from other students, or instructions from the teacher. He was good at sport. He was popular. And he also managed to get high marks in most subjects. I didn’t talk to him, and if he had spoken to me, I would only have blushed, secretly longing for attention but acutely uncomfortable with receiving it.
But, towards the end of the final school year, I ended up kissing him at a party, on a balcony that looked out across the lights of Adelaide, and it was all quite without warning, without any schoolgirl whispers of ‘I think Michael Brown likes you’ preceding it. As I wondered how on earth this had happened to me, his hands ran up and down my dress, and he told me I was beautiful, while the city sparkled, vast and distant, below us.
Did he want to be my boyfriend? I barely dared ask myself the question, but when I went home that night, I lay awake in my room and imagined. I felt as though I were holding a new life in my hands, fragile and extraordinary, to be gazed at in wonder. Would I be popular? What would it be like? I could not believe it. But the eggshell delicacy was far too easily crushed: it must be a mistake. He had been drunk. In all likelihood he had thought I was someone else.
The following week I saw him at school, and everything I had tentatively hoped for failed to eventuate. I wished he would fling his bag down next to me and engage in some joking light-hearted conversation, while I, exuding desirability and a suitable lack of availability, tossed witty responses back at him. I wanted him to claim publicly what had happened between us, but I was also terrified that if he did, I would be too tongue-tied to know how to respond. I could not think what I would say to him. And so I avoided him and he, too, seemed to avoid me.
At that time of the year there were parties most weekends. I was on the periphery, invited to some and not to others. I didn’t drink all that much, but I was trying to smoke in an attempt to be less of a good girl. Not that being bad was necessarily a prerequisite for popularity. The school I attended was a private one in the wealthier Adelaide suburbs, and although the fact that it was co-educational meant that it had a reputation for being slightly progressive, it was in fact a solidly middle-class institution. Most of the students lived in brick veneer homes surrounded by landscaped native gardens, the smell of eucalypt sap and melting bitumen tart in the heat of summer, and the cold gully winds harsh in winter. Few came from divorced or extended families and I was one of only a small number who had a working mother. We were too young for drugs, and alcohol was not yet regularly abused. Still, I thought that I could only improve my standing by learning to smoke, and I practised at home, setting fire to my rubbish bin as I threw what I thought were dead matches on top of the piles of old papers. I would run to the bathroom to douse the flames in water, making lame excuses for why there was a fire whenever I happened to cross paths with my mother.
The weekend after I first kissed Michael Brown, my friends and I went to another party. I knew he would be there and I hoped he’d notice me again, but for most of the evening we neither talked nor acknowledged each other’s presence. He was on one side of the long darkened rumpus room, surrounded by the boys. I was on the other, surrounded by the girls. After he’d drunk enough, he weaved his way through the beanbags in the middle, briefly clutching the edge of the table and spilling sticky Coke onto a plate of Jatz and cubed cheese. When he suggested we go out to my car I knew he wanted me. And that was all I needed.
Groping at each other in the back of my Datsun 1200, the smell of Brandivino sweetly stale on his breath, he told me that he wanted to have sex. I was surprised, unsure as to how we had progressed this far this fast. I almost said yes, and I know that this was largely due to the fact that I was flattered by the propositi
on. He liked me, so much so that he actually wanted to have sex with me. As for how I felt about him, I didn’t really know. I liked him, but I think I liked him liking me more.
Eventually I said no. I was worried that this would result in him no longer being interested in me, but the flip side was also daunting. If I said yes to having sex in the back of a car, would I be too easy and lose him anyway? My own desires played an almost negligible role in my thought process. The decisions I was making were completely ruled by how I would be viewed, both by him and by my peers. Now, if I try to remember what it was that I actually wanted, I know that there was a part of me that was curious, and that found him attractive. I also wanted him to like me, to know me a little, and for us to be able to talk to each other before we went any further.
‘How about next week?’ he urged. ‘How about I come down to your house?’
My mother was away, a fact I had let slip at some stage in the evening, and I agreed, relieved that I hadn’t lost him and glad to be able to slip back into the fantasy of thinking that perhaps we were, after all, working towards being boyfriend and girlfriend.
The following Saturday night, he was there, waiting for me at the bus stop, jiggling one leg up and down as he leant forward, looking out for me. We lived at the end of the line, on the other side of the city from the school, in a beachside suburb that had not yet been discovered by the rich. Sprawling bungalows with flaking paint were interspersed with more modest mock Tudor houses, the homes of grandparents who looked after the kids in the holidays, taking them down to the beach where they could swim safely in an ocean that was always flat.
Births Deaths Marriages Page 7
