We didn’t leave. I ate the sodden bread roll and then we slept, I on the reclined passenger seat and Ciara in a ball at the back. She looked younger in her sleep.
*
Later that night I awoke and found Ciara in the driver’s seat. The car’s radio emanated calm distortion as she browsed the dial. I studied with interest the frequency display as Ciara turned the thin white column over the orange backlit numbers. Many faint stations could be heard. The radio was receiving many — far too many — signals in the dead of night, all at once, from stations many hundreds of kilometres away, and perhaps even from the city. Drowsy late night announcers spoke amid the hiss of swollen high hats and white noise, while chords of country music were audible in the background. Commercial jingles for the stations themselves poked through at times, but they were shorn of their vibrancy: they sounded sad and remote in that mountainside car park, each one promising the greatest hits of decades past, promises they couldn’t keep. All your memories from some golden era, they enticed. The greatest moments of yesterday. It sounded like a traversable landscape full of shadows and gullies, speckled with towers of commanding voices and ensembles, begging to be heard, each separated by rivers of sonic refuse.
Ciara froze at the far right of the dial. A peculiar, droning melody played, and she grabbed my shoulder. It’s them, she whispered. My muscles seized as the buried melody competed with ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ by Bill Withers. The three notes of the melody sounded like foghorns, oceanic in their vastness, stretched beneath the interference. I think Ciara may have shed a tear, though if she did, she managed to wipe it away before the beat kicked in. That’s when I dared look her in the eyes, because I knew what to expect. It wasn’t her keyboard music at all. It was only the opening notes to ‘Great Southern Land’ by Icehouse, and as the first verse started Ciara turned the radio off and went back to sleep.
*
We left the town at 6am. The man at the BP said we would reach the city by midday.
Ciara said she had seen the city in her town. I sensed she wanted to compare notes before we left her region for good. I agreed she probably had seen the city in her town, though I did so reflexively. I knew she had not seen the city at all.
She said that in her town, if she could find a concrete wall of a certain age beneath a blue sky, with no trees in sight, she could imagine she was in the city. But it had to be a certain type of city. It had to be a city she had once imagined to exist. This city might have been at odds with the reality of a city, but it was how she had imagined cities throughout her life, and it was a vision that predated any of her encounters with truths about how cities actually were. It was her city.
As I accelerated up the first ascent of the mountains, she said she knew her city well. In her mind it was an eternal asphalt highway lined with glistening marble shopfronts, diagonal glass chutes for elevators, impenetrable soot from countless different bus networks and clogged commuter traffic, and people marching to their destinations.
There was no shade at all, in her city. The sun beat down on the cement façades with brutal will. There was strange music: many different songs playing at once, both nostalgic and futuristic, and it was the most beautiful sound she had ever known, except she had never really heard it. It was a sound that never ceased, not even at night. It was always present; there was never silence. If she applied all of her mental power she could hear it whenever she wanted to.
The air in her city was alive. The traffic never paused. It was impossible to imagine her city quiet, or still. Everything about her city implied a lesson not yet learned: what a sunburned man in a Ford sedan, parked in front of a corporate building, was thinking at any particular time. Where was he likely to go, what was he likely to do, what had he seen before, and how did this all culminate in a vision of the world. It was possible to be occupied by this speculation forever, Ciara said. You could harvest these speculations at random, and be occupied for the rest of your life.
In her city she never walked. She lay in the back seat of a car and stared upwards at the passing towers. There was an unfathomable number of people inside the towers and they all went somewhere else at night. They all made their way from there to another location, and that location was buffered by other locations, located between many other highways, among millions of other homes.
These people did not live on any particular street, because how could they? When they left the concrete highway they were lost to the mess of locations. They were nothing in particular to the other people in the city, who were all fed up with imagining the finer details of how other people lived. Everyone was fed up with having to think about these things, because it was too difficult to be correct. Even so, they would occasionally feel urged to do so.
Ciara would feel urged to do so constantly in her city, she said, and would never become fed up.
In Ciara’s city the people had resolved that there were mysteries impossible to solve, factors that were unknowable, and they lived with this. The mystery and unknowability of things was a part of their everyday condition. Their environment was far too complex. It was not an effort to ignore their history. They did not try to remember, nor did it occur to them to do so – remembering was not a priority because it was difficult enough to know how to drive home of an evening. Remembering the route, all the turns, the correct lanes and turnpikes, whether to line up for a filter light, whether the approach to a certain roundabout needed to be planned for a whole kilometre in advance, the locations of important shops… all of this was enough to occupy them. Their lives were occupied completely by logistics. That was the way she imagined her city to be.
I said that her city was probably fairly close to the truth of cities, though I did so reflexively. I couldn’t know what to expect of the coastal city as we moved towards it, as I’d never cared to imagine.
*
Ciara became more reckless as we approached the city. She wanted to steal our McDonald’s value meals. She wanted to steal petrol. She blankly stared down men while she stood at the bowsers pumping, and she crushed her cigarettes near fuel-puddled lanes. She wanted to drive every stretch of the journey, and she wanted to push the accelerator as hard as it would go, like we could catch air as we wound our way down each mountain slope, like we could sail or plummet the rest of the way to the city.
She still planted her cassette tapes along the way. She bundled up an armload at one mountainside car park and then spun around, sending tapes unspooling across the bitumen. She left them inside the straw and napkin dispensers at McDonald’s, and in the windscreen-cleaning tubs at the petrol stations, and occasionally she’d toss them from the window of the moving car into the mountain forests, and down into the canyons. She left them at truck stops, where at least one man stopped to pick one up.
It turned out the route we had taken was not the conventional one. A man at a BP said that this route was preferable for tourists, since it wound more elegantly around the illogical declines. The other route tore straight through the mountains on four-lane highways. He said it was often impossible to even know you were in the mountains on that road. Though you’d probably be in the city by now if you’d taken it, he added, as we purchased a bag of chips.
When I went to the toilet at the back of the station, I saw, where the trees parted for an electrical tower, the city sprawled many kilometres below. I called to Ciara and we stared at it for a while. From that vantage point it was difficult to distinguish roads, and it was impossible to tell whether the city had an edge. It was impossible to imagine how the winding mountain roads could eventually lead into it. She said that maybe they wouldn’t. It didn’t look like a city at all. It looked more like a spread of mould.
I told her that it was likely the city was so big that its edge couldn’t be seen from where we stood. That the good parts were much further away. But I didn’t believe what I said. It seemed impossible that the city could keep pressing past the grey shimmer that shrouded the farthest horizon.
*
<
br /> Ciara kept playing with the dials on the car radio. The frequencies were weak in the mountains, but as we descended into the basin the dial filled with stations. There were at least a dozen to choose from, with varying degrees of clarity, and all were much busier and more assertive than the station in Ciara’s town. There were many references to traffic jams in various regions of the city we knew we would never find. We passed through what must have been a satellite town, different to any we had seen before. This particular town — or maybe it was a suburb of the city, or even its own city — seemed made up of all the edges of other towns. Lining the road were large bottle shops and car yards, factory-sized clothing outlets, petrol stations, and a green, featureless park with dozens of sprinklers. Everything was impossibly new, like the tentacle roads in Ciara’s town, except here there was life: families buzzed in paddock-sized asphalt car yards in the shadows of monstrous homewares outlets. Further in the distance, visible only with effort, the green fences of large brick homes stood gleaming. Even the roads were perfectly black and smooth, as if glazed with oil. Ciara was unimpressed. It’s nothing like a city or a town, she said.
Once we’d passed through this town of edges it seemed we’d be in the city at any moment. Neither of us knew how it would happen – whether the threshold of the city would be marked in any way. The road felt resistant to the nearby sprawl, and it wasn’t long before we were descending steeply again, surrounded by mountain forest.
Ciara was getting impatient. I didn’t tell her that once we found and crossed the city threshold it might be many hours before we reached a part that resembled what she had imagined. And I dared not admit that the city she’d imagined might not exist at all. Though how couldn’t it? Surely the city was vast enough to hold any vision that might occur to someone who had never set foot within.
*
It was late afternoon when we turned onto a narrow circular road, and then onto a six-lane highway running endlessly towards a grey horizon of factories and plains. This was the road into the city, I told Ciara. It must be the one that leads into it proper.
She was excited then. Said she was looking forward to drinking a beer when we got to where we were going. So I asked where in the city she wanted to go, but she didn’t know. And I didn’t either.
The drivers were all aggressive. I stuck to the left lane where no one could pressure me to drive too fast, but vehicles still weaved impatiently around us. It was as if they knew Ciara and I didn’t need to be anywhere, especially not there.
Ciara said that we’d need to find jobs once we got to the city. That we’d need to find a house too. I told her that I supposed that was true. That there was not really any other logical thing to do. She said I would most likely work at a Woolworths again, and maybe she would too. But before that we’d need to take it slow. For a while we’d live in the car at the edge of the ocean. We’d print out copies of our CVs at a library and look for jobs during the day, and then we’d drink some beers on the beach during the night. When one of us found a job we would rent a house or apartment right in the centre of the city, maybe even somewhere with a view of the water. Then, after we’d worked for years and saved some money to each buy houses, I could do whatever I wanted — she flicked her cigarette onto the highway — and she’d do whatever she wanted.
I supposed she was only being careful, not factoring me into her long-term plans.
She said she’d go for a walk every day, each time in a different direction. If seeing the city spread out like that — she gestured back up the mountains — had told her anything, it was that you could spend a lifetime walking the city’s roads — especially if what I said was true, that our view earlier had not even been the full extent of it.
She wound her window up and turned the radio down. She was pretty sure she hadn’t seen this six-lane highway from up there. It was big enough that she would have. She supposed we’d breached the city’s shimmer already. She lit another cigarette and wound the window down again. The fumes from the city were so potent that I couldn’t smell her smoke.
*
The highway went on for hours. Giant road signs frequently indicated destinations, but none were for the city itself. It was difficult to tell which region of the city was the centre proper.
Night fell, and we were hungry. We deemed it sensible to park in a McDonald’s car park for the night, because city centres after hours are dangerous places, so we would need at least several hours of daylight in the centre in order to prepare for it at night.
Ciara was excited to stop. Sitting there, the spectacle of headlights rushing through the highway artery could sustain us for the night. We ate our Value Meals in the blue-lit outdoor area, Ciara smoking between mouthfuls of her Big Mac. We watched as tired families ate their Value Meals and Happy Meals in ominously lit sedans.
It rained, and we felt lucky that we hadn’t reached the city proper on a rainy night. Sitting in the front of the car, we watched the highway headlights illuminate the mist. Approaching midnight, the highway traffic hadn’t slowed. Surely with the pressure of so many vehicles flowing inwards the city might one day burst at the seams. Ciara laughed when I said this. She said the city could hold everyone in the country if it needed to. The size of her town was a speck among this spread, she said, pointing back up the invisible mountains again. She seemed like she couldn’t believe we were in the middle of it. She seemed to believe the city was impenetrable, that we’d done something special.
At nine the following morning, after shaking off our unspoken reluctance, we turned back onto the six-lane highway. It was a crisp, blue, sunny day. Though we hadn’t been able to find any beer the night before, there was a hungover mood between Ciara and me. It was a feeling possibly born of the realisation that the journey was drawing to a close, that soon we would need to face whatever new reality awaited us in the city proper.
Several times Ciara counted our money. We didn’t have much, but we had the car. On the radio, a man and woman exchanged banter on popular news topics of the day. Certain celebrities were up to no good, cheating on their husbands and wives. There was some discussion about sharks and whether or not it was safe to swim at the beaches, and whether or not sharks should be killed. The jovial announcers invited listeners to call up and offer their opinion on the matter, then the news bulletins discussed the unaffordable prices of houses in the city, then discussed an impending heatwave, and then discussed several violent conflicts happening in countries that weren’t ours. Then came the sports report, and then an announcement about the traffic throughout the city. There was nothing of particular note about the traffic that Sunday. Clear highways, and a chokepoint on some specific road, but nothing that would cause us or anyone a delayed journey.
At that point on the highway the road signs above started specifying that we were nearing the city itself. The signs indicated that it was always straight ahead. For most of the drive our view had been blocked on both sides by tall cement walls debossed with wattle designs and the occasional Southern Cross. Billboards appeared more regularly, promoting brands that never bothered advertising in regions outside the city. The advertisements were louder, more lurid and suggestive, designed for people who spent their money more aggressively. Neither of us spoke.
The hours wore on. Eventually Ciara said that we were meant to be in the city by now. I had been waiting for her to say so. I’d become increasingly worried that we’d missed a turn off.
I looked at the road signs and told her that we could turn left or right onto special roads bound for Liverpool, Strathfield, Campbelltown, Auburn, Blacktown, Ryde, Newcastle, Wollongong or Hornsby – but that the city proper was still straight ahead. The signs couldn’t be wrong. She said that the signs had been wrong the whole time.
*
When we did turn off the highway onto a four-lane road, Ciara became animated again. We could see shops and apartment buildings on either side, although it still didn’t look like a city.
She said that once we wer
e there we’d need to take a day or two to get ourselves acquainted. We’d spend those days walking and exploring, occasionally stopping in a park to drink a beer. At night we would explore the concert halls and see the kind of music popular among unusual people in the city.
She lit a cigarette. She’d acquired a habit of doing so emphatically, like it punctuated the arrival of a new epiphany. She pointed forward into the hazy brown horizon and told me that she believed there would be so many people there that the odds of finding someone interesting would certainly be in our favour. We’d passed so many faces already, and they were just the people who had cars. There will be many people who don’t have cars, she said. There was no way the city could be united by anything in particular.
She tossed a handful of cassettes out the window. A car beeped, and then overtook us, and a man waved his fist as he sped into the distance. Ciara laughed.
It won’t be easy, she said, lowering her tone. I think she was mocking me.
We’ll need to find a place to stay, she continued, but not immediately. We’ll need to figure out exactly where we want to stay, because the city is vast. Maybe we’ve already passed the best place.
The Town Page 19
