Girls in Boys' Cars Page 12

  ‘That’s it. You broke the moment.’

  ‘We can’t keep going, though, can we?’ We hadn’t talked about going back (or even going forward) in ages, and now that we’d been here for a few days it felt like the question was hanging over us like that grey smoke.

  A flock of birds came up through the sky in the distance and flew in a circle around us before taking off over our heads.

  ‘We could always find out,’ Asheeka said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If we can just keep going and going. We could find out what happens if we don’t stop.’

  I was trying to get my head around what Asheeka was saying when Paula came and joined us. She was all messy hair up in a bun and bright blue eyes and she had a tourist map and a red pen. She sat down in front of us. ‘Trying to work out where we should go, with all that’s going on,’ she told us.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘The fires.’ Paula looked at me like I’d just fallen from the sky.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I began to say, ‘but what does it mean for us? Do we stay here or do we go somewhere else?’

  Paula looked down at this giant map of New South Wales she’d unfolded on her lap. She traced the road with a finger and then looked at a list of alerts on her phone where different numbers of fireballs flashed like emojis next to each place name. ‘I suppose – I don’t really know, no one does – I suppose you just need to keep looking at all the alerts . . .’ She looked up at both of us and grinned. ‘Now, look at me here from the damp and rain and cold of Ireland trying to explain fire season to Australians.’

  ‘But we’re not from that kind of Australia,’ I started to explain.

  ‘Aren’t ya now?’

  Asheeka tried to provide a little more explanation but it sounded even worse than mine. ‘We’re from the city. Like, we didn’t know that you can’t just keep driving where you want to. That there might be things out there that would stop you.’

  ‘Can’t imagine there’s anything that would stop you girls,’ Paula said. ‘But you need to be safe now.’

  I left the two of them together in the courtyard where Paula was trying to explain to Asheeka what roads she thought she could take. There were too many lines and circles and dots and it was making me dizzy. I went back into the communal room where the computers were. I logged onto Facebook and Insta. I wanted to be part of the world again, but it was still mostly filled with Asheeka – they were everywhere, those pictures. You couldn’t really tell where they’d come from in the first place, they’d been shared so many times over. I tried not to look, but I couldn’t help it. In my Messenger there were long messages from my father. The last one said: I’m coming to find you.

  I’m okay, I typed, and logged out.

  The first place Asheeka wanted to drive to when we got back in that car was a drowned town. Like, no joke, she actually wanted to be a tourist. Paula told her about this town that was drowned out when they built the Snowy Hydro Dam and now, because the weather had been so hot and dry most of the summer, the water had almost completely evaporated and that old town that had ceased to exist all those years ago had re-emerged out of the water.

  I rolled my window up to stop the ash that was floating through the gap in vertical sheets. The whole world was on fire that day but we couldn’t see where the burning was coming from. I looked at the long dry grass by the roadside and pictured it in flames beside our car. Asheeka rolled down her window as soon as mine was up. Specks of ash floated in and landed on her lap as she drove. She held them in her open palms until they flew off elsewhere.

  When we got to the river the earth was cracked and broken everywhere, like something ancient. When we got out of the car, Asheeka took off her shoes and waded out to the edge of the mud and I followed. The earth was wet and sticky underneath my feet. Asheeka stopped near the roof of an old sandstone house that peeked out above the muddy water. She sat down right there, right in the muck, and shoved her hand into the muddy hole that had probably once been a window.

  ‘I wonder where the people are who once lived here. Probably they’re not even alive anymore. All that history gone,’ Asheeka said.

  In the distance, clouds of smoke were tumbling down the mountains. In front of us were deranged and muddy objects: part of a wall, the metal of a gate. We were standing in the middle of the apocalypse. It made something feel bent and broken inside of me.

  Asheeka wrapped her hand around a long, rusty steel pole that looked like it had been thrust from the sky and into the ground like a spear. ‘Imagine that. Just starting again. Flooding everything and starting again.’ I watched her pick up a small sandstone brick. She turned it over. Wiped off some of the dirt. She was wearing those Minnie Mouse socks from the lost and found at the backpackers. Minnie’s head was distorted, her face a giant brown lump with two black ears.

  Overhead birds screeched and flew in circles. And then it happened, at least two-dozen kangaroos jumping together across the mud, the dried-out earth. Asheeka and I were dumbstruck. Mostly we’d only seen kangaroos in zoos but here they were in the wild like a flock of grounded birds. And that’s when we saw the fire trucks screech down the road behind us and we understood that all those kangaroos, they were running for their lives.

  And at that point I realised we should be running for our lives too and that made my feet stick to the ground. The smoke moved in more thickly than we’d seen it in the last couple of days. If panic made me immovable, it stuck a rocket up Asheeka’s arse.

  ‘Quick.’ She grabbed me, hand around my waist. My legs didn’t move. ‘Quick,’ she said again, and then kicked my leg hard.

  ‘I can’t move . . .’ I began to say, but she wasn’t having any of it. She pulled me towards the car where she shoved me into the passenger’s seat.

  But Asheeka mustn’t have been much more calm than I was because she backed the car hard into the giant sign on concrete poles that said, Welcome to Lake Eucumbene! The sign was obviously built to last: our car not so much. Sparks flew off the left side of the car as we drove forward, as though we were getting our own private fireworks show, and then came a thump, which I realised only later came from the bumper bar falling off. It continued like that as we drove down some random street, thumps from bits falling, until Asheeka pulled over at the gate of a farm and declared she couldn’t drive anymore. We watched the fire trucks whizz by.

  We were headed towards Cooma, I hoped, coming from somewhere around Adaminaby, but I didn’t know exactly where we were. Asheeka plucked her hairbrush from the glove compartment and started combing her hair like she used to before exams. Her brushing started at that thin, exposed strip of flesh in the centre of her head and then down on each side, ending at the tips she had tinted a slightly paler shade of brown. There was a way it had to be done to calm her down. The tips used to curl in because she wore curlers to bed at night. Not these days; these days it just hung straight.

  ‘I think,’ Asheeka said, ‘that we have lost the bumper bar and a hubcap and maybe the left back tyre is wonky because it feels like the car is being pulled in that direction. Something else fell out of the underneath of the car as well but I don’t know what it was.’ She said it all too quickly, like if she got all the words out fast enough we’d be out of the situation we were in.

  An image of my dad pointing out all the parts that cars are made of in his garage popped into my mind and faded into the panic. I got out of the passenger’s seat and walked around to the driver’s side of the car. ‘I think I should drive for a little while.’ She looked up at me and I could tell that she’d taken her head to some other place to escape all this. ‘Come on.’ I gave her a little push on the shoulder. I didn’t think either of us was really capable of driving but at least I wouldn’t be brushing my hair at the same time. The sound of clicking and thudding carried me along. That long country road came unzipped – it melted into all that smoke. I drove through the bit lined with squiggly gums, followed by the bit that was made of burnt and
blackened things, followed by a bit made out of sky all the way down to the ground. I turned right at an intersection with the grand old pub and kept going down the street with the park and its lonely seesaw. Smoke appeared from somewhere and rolled itself through the intersection. I panicked. Turned right. Turned right again. I wasn’t sure if I was going forward or backwards, into the fire or away from it.

  ‘I’ve never seen . . .’ Asheeka put her hairbrush in her lap. She seemed to be trying to find the words.

  ‘Fire?’ A burning stick skipped across the road and then disintegrated.

  ‘It’s on fire,’ Asheeka repeated. ‘It’s all on fire.’

  Through the windscreen the world was a sci-fi novel. We were at the part where the characters thought they were in their own world and suddenly they realised that they had actually landed in an alternate universe – the smoke, the absence of people. We’d fallen into a wormhole.

  ‘Where’s it going?’ I wanted to know. There was smoke and embers and heat and patches of fire in the distance but I couldn’t get my head around where the actual centre of the fire was. ‘I don’t know which way is forward,’ I said. Asheeka picked up that map Paula had given her off the floor and traced a trembling finger down a road as though it might give us some answers.

  The heat inside that car was beginning to melt my brain. I pushed at the air conditioning button. I turned up the fan but it only blew hot smoke into the car.

  I thought about how in all those sci-fi books the characters hit a point where they have to go backwards in order to go forward: like they realised they had to return to their home planet in order to find out who they really were. I turned another corner and then found the main road again. Outside I saw that same lonely seesaw that we had already recently passed. ‘I don’t think we are going forward,’ I said. ‘I think we’re just driving in circles.’

  ‘Maybe we should go home,’ Asheeka said for the first and only time on this trip. She took a deep breath and I imagined she was sucking the words back into her mouth. ‘My dad is coming for us,’ I said and I wanted to believe it, I wanted to believe he could save me this time. We continued to drive into our new universe, driving in circles, trying to drive forward.

  THE TELLING BITS

  The thing about books is they leave out all that quiet space where nothing happens, but it’s hard to explain how life is if you don’t try to explain how not much and everything happens all at the same time.

  I’m in that nowhere space right now, lying on a mattress that’s too thin, feeling the metal wire of the bed frame underneath cut up into my back. I’m like the princess in The Princess and the Pea. Now that I think about it, that’s kind of a quiet story too, about someone trying to go to sleep but Hans Christian Anderson concentrates on all the dramatic bits, the piling of mattresses one on top of the other. A pea that turns a princess into an insomniac.

  This correctional centre is filled with quiet bits even when there’s too much noise going on in the background. They lock you in your room at 7.30 pm and there’s no getting out until 6.00 am the next day. No TV. No nothing. Just quiet. Tracey pulls out photographs of her kid and I think of my mum and I wonder if she does the same.

  That time after I was arrested and they let me out on bail before the sentencing hearing, that was the quietest time ever of my life. I knew where I was going, everyone did. I’d pleaded guilty on everything but there were still a lot of questions, like how much punishment would I get? How long would I be put away for and where? The how and the what and the why of everything sat everywhere like a heavy fog in my mum’s apartment.

  Dad came back to Sydney for a while but he’d found a new life for himself out there on the road. He’d found his purpose again helping fight those fires. He left again for a couple of weeks before my hearing, when the floods came in February and it rained so hard that the fires raging everywhere finally went out and suddenly the burnt-out carcasses of trees were sitting underneath flood water. He sent me a picture of him and his new mates in a dingy next to a half-submerged sign that said Know Your Fire Plan! They were smiling and pointing at it: a small moment of comic relief.

  I showed the picture to my mum. ‘I think you saved him,’ she said. ‘It’s great he’s back out there working now. I guess he was stronger after all than everyone gave him credit for.’ And it was true in a way. But I couldn’t save Mum. ‘I guess I’m not as strong as that,’ she said, and it broke my heart. For Mum I was the straw that broke the camel’s back. No, that’s not true. I was a bulldozer, a steamroller, a dump truck that pushed her into a deep dark hole. She’d almost lost her daughter to the road and now she was about to lose me again because of everything I’d done. Something in her had broken. The kind of broken where you walk out of life for a little while and when you come back you’re a smaller version of yourself. That apartment was filled with quiet and sky and rain, the two of us just trying to work out this new world that we were in.

  In the mornings I pulled out all those old family scrapbooks Mum used to love putting together with Nan when we all lived together. We didn’t talk much, or I guess we kind of did, but we talked through the pages and photographs that slipped through our hands. I guess I never noticed how much Dad was at the centre of all of those pictures: he was always there spinning me around in the park or holding me up to the sky. We always seemed to be laughing, Mum always seemed to be sitting on a bench somewhere in the background looking worried. I wondered what Nan was trying to say when she took all those photographs.

  I pulled out some of the photographs and showed them to Mum. There were a few of them, from different angles, where I was pointing at Dad’s legs. I must have been something like ten. ‘Why am I always pointing at his legs?’

  Mum takes a deep breath and doesn’t speak for a while. ‘That’s when he was going through that phase, you know where sometimes he’d wake up in the morning, numb from the waist down and say, “Are those my legs, are those legs mine?” We made a game of it, pointing at his legs. I didn’t want you to be scared.’

  And I don’t know what to say, so I put them back into the book and close it and I put my head against her arm.

  In the afternoons I walked to the retirement home to see Nan. She always had someone visiting, even if it was just someone from the neighbouring room.

  ‘Salam,’ she’d say as I walked into her room and climbed up on her bed, or ‘yassou’ or ‘ciao’ or sometimes, ‘Mi amore, we are having a tree,’ as she lifted a cup of tea to her lips.

  She hadn’t even realised that I’d gone, come back, become someone new. Time was irrelevant when you were lost in an endless conversation outside of time and space. I tried to tell her where I’d been and she drank tea and nodded her head and said, ‘I like the driving too.’ Inside her room it always smelled like cinnamon biscuits. I would crawl into her bed, get underneath the blankets, pull them up over my body and fall asleep listening to her talking.

  THE QUIET BITS

  Sometimes the story collapses because you don’t have any more petrol to keep going and your car probably isn’t roadworthy anymore anyway. After the car gave up, night came quickly. I was so tired. Asheeka got out of the car and stood there. The wind was fierce and her hair was flying wildly around her, whipping her own face.

  ‘What is happening now?’ Asheeka said softly as she pulled the hair out of her mouth and pushed it back behind her ear.

  ‘It’s the end of the world.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Behind Asheeka I could see eucalyptus trees with the bark stripping itself off, unfolding like hands reaching outwards. I guess this was the point at which we should have turned around, handed ourselves in, gone back to heartbroken mothers and our ordinary lives but you know how to fix everything when you’re looking backwards. Maybe there wouldn’t have been so many consequences if we had. Like, yes, we’d have been in trouble, but probably not as much trouble as we were in right then, when we went out to see the world and it was on fire.

/>   That was how we ended up in the church. I couldn’t help but think of Nan and all those services she dragged me to in every sandstone church left in the greater western suburbs. I’ve never been that religious but that night it really felt like an act of God that that building was there, a short way down the road from where we’d broken down, with all its sandstone-solid feeling even if when we opened the big heavy wooden doors at the back we realised that part of the roof was missing.

  ‘I think this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen standing beside a road,’ I said to Asheeka. I sat on one of the few church pews that hadn’t collapsed in the middle and studied a vine that had crept in between two bricks and was now populating the wall inside the church with small bright yellow flowers and leaves of the sharpest, deepest green.

  Asheeka sat on a pew not so far from me. ‘Do you believe in God?’ The redness of the moon shining down on her gave her hair a slightly purple colour.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t not believe in God. I think it brings people a lot of comfort, to believe that you’re going somewhere better, less confusing, in the afterlife.’

  ‘My mum was always, Your father is with God now, your father is with God now, in the weeks after he died. It was her way of saying that’s it, no more questions, it’s out of our hands. He’s with God. He’s with God. I used to picture God as Elvis and imagine they were spending a lot of time doing duets together,’ said Asheeka.

  ‘My dad and I always had this idea that we’d like to live in a church like this. He loved the idea of the high ceilings and stained glass and living in a place that had marked out the important bits of people’s lives: births, deaths, marriages, but the churches around Parramatta kept getting turned into pubs and I don’t think my dad would ever have the money anyhow, so all we could do to get closer to God was to get all the way up in the sky on that pool deck at Mum’s place.’