by Jane Rawson
This wasn’t what she’d imagined, gripping the fence at Flagstaff station. This was much better.
She scrabbled her way down to the edge of the water, sliding part of the way on her arse, jumped up on to a boulder and scuffed her thongs from her feet. The crispy lichen scratched her soles. One hour; she had one hour. She pulled off her T-shirt and jeans, looked around, and took off her undies and bra too. And then she dived.
Oh, the water. Bubbles tickled over her skin and she wriggled through them. She’d forgotten the feeling of water. How had she forgotten this? How? She broke the surface and shrieked with happiness. She dived to the bottom again and felt her fingers brush the whispering mud of the billabong floor. She shimmied through the water like a seal, filled her mouth with water and blew a brown fountain into the air. She lay on her back, floated.
There would be more of this where she was going, wouldn’t there? She’d imagined about a third of a country − Simon and Sarah had travelled all through the southwest of the US, to Los Angeles, to the Rio Grande. There were rivers, weren’t there? The Rio Grande was a river, right? Dammit, even if there were no rivers, there were a hell of a lot of swimming pools. Sparkling blue, so bright they hurt your eyes, shining tiles and super model look-a-likes on poolside lounges. Bikinis with metal trim.
She floated on her back, stared at the achingly blue sky through the grey-green leaves. There would never be this again, or anything quite like it.
She dived under.
Nothing in her life would ever be real again.
Ah, fuck it. She pushed herself up to the surface and hauled herself out onto the rock. She lay naked and cool on the warm rock and wished she had a bucket of hot chips, and knew that where she was going, she could have all the hot chips in the world. She could lie dripping wet on hot concrete by a swimming pool, eating chips from a bucket. If she got too thirsty, she could have a drink from the tap. And a bit later, she could lie on her towel on the grass under a tree and read a book until she fell asleep.
This was going to be great. No, seriously, she thought, and pulled on her T-shirt: this was going to be great.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In 2003, Ben Rawson took me on a three-month tour of Phnom Penh: it was inspirational. The first draft of this book was written during National Novel Writing Month: cheers to Chris Baty for coming up with such a sterling idea, and to Rose Mulready and Jane Ormond, without whom writing doesn’t get done. Let’s remember it was Matt Eckhaus who first had the idea for a mockumentary about a man really seeing America (and thanks to Lisa Dempster at Vignette Press for publishing an early version of Simon and Sarah’s story as ‘A Dynasty of Square Standers’). And thank you to those who have encouraged me when I’ve felt like chucking it all in - in particular, Christine and John Hirst and Laurel Savino; but of course, also Anne and Howard Rawson, and Sharon Gallagher.
Jane Rawson grew up in Canberra. During years as a travel editor and writer, mostly for Lonely Planet, she dawdled around the streets of San Francisco, Prague and Phnom Penh and left smitten. These days she lives in Melbourne’s west and edits the environment and energy section of The Conversation, an independent news website. She likes cats, quiet, minimal capitalisation, and finding out that everything is going to be OK.
