Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
The leather seat burned into her bare legs. She put her hands under her thighs and lifted one leg, then the other. The sensation of peeling the scorched skin from the cream surface decreased in ferocity after a few lifts. She opens the electric window, gingerly pressing the metal button and turns the fancy, multi-directional air-con to face her. Soon the wind is blowing her hair into a brown, tangled mess and she had forgotten the suffocating heat and thoughts of the beach skipped through her mind.
The starts of these trips were always full of anticipation. Two weeks stretched out like a most marvellous prize. Unbelievably lucky that she could go again. Never knowing until the day before but now come to be expected and hoped for. They always were filled with plans of postcards and letter to pen pals. It didn’t matter that she could never coordinate finding a stamp and managing to remember to post them before the two week respite was up. It didn’t matter that they screamed past at a giddy pace, faster than the freight trucks rattled by in the opposite direction. It didn’t matter. Today was first day, the best day of the trip. The day that gave the longest space between home and holiday. There was always a ritualistic element to the trips that she craved. An order, a predictability, an emptiness and quiet, yet with more connection and warmth than any other place or time.
A concerned-looking man steps from a station-wagon at the ghost-town quiet petrol station. Persistent flies come black and thick to claim his face as fresh territory. He is swatting them away as he walks over to the out-of-place car with its fancy hood ornament and electric windows. When the window is wound down he asks if the fancy car has brake trouble. The brake lights are blinking on and off. The kind woman with the tousled hair girl next to her nods apologetically. No. No problem. He says nothing more and wipes the corner of his eye with the back of his hand with a gesture only understood by those who live through summers heavy with flies. The girl looks at him walking away, giving a ride to the swarms clinging to his shirt. And wonders at why her grandmother drove up open highways with her foot touching on and off the brake.
Few words are spoken but time is always given. Time to stop, time to look at wildflowers and weeds. Time that could never be given by those who could not see the purple haze stretched out over paddocks as anything but a weed. She picks the Patterson’s Curse, filling the back seats with blooms and ants and thinks their name so unfortunate and ill fitting.
She settles into the monotony of the trip, takes in the emptiness of the horizon that circles the car and the roads disappear into nothingness. She counts down the country towns, tapping her feet to the endless white posts with reflector strips as they race past.
This trip, like so many before, included a stop in a dreary mining town. Where the sidewalks were wide and the verandas were deep. Where boards across nailed-up windows were thick with ingrained red dust. Where men with felt hats pulled down across their crumpled brows walked in past tired-looking girls in their tiny costumes. Booth-lined streets lit up by neon lights and sequins imprint the scene confusingly. A lesson in lust and loathing given to a girl not yet in high school but feeling very close in age to those shiny, sad girls
A bakery on the hill is a welcome sight after many signposts and pit stops. The smooth concrete floors packed high with bags of flour. The smell of bread and roar of mixers and ovens transports her to another time. A time where she was a fresh baby, watching her teenage mother packing bread into plastic crates from her car seat cradle. Her mother’s lithe frame heaves the full crates into the back of the panel van at 2am, her body still healing from birth. She longs to know her mother then, young with only one child. Young and fierce and willing to climb out windows to escape and race between towns to get her new baby back. Two-week trips full of deserts and dunes let her escape her mother now, aged beyond her years with a turbulent marriage and a houseful of small people, but let her find her mother, discover her by piecing together scraps of stories.
Men sleep whilst kind women prepare the meal. A table laden with food and the girl is delirious with hunger. Always so much food. So much food never tasted at home. Butter and meat dripping with fat. Potatoes so crispy they were too tasty to be vegetables. Two types of forks. So proper and bountiful but tempered with crass jokes and boisterous banter intermittently and unsuccessfully hushed by otherwise quiet women
The girl delights at sitting with adults. At being seen and spoken to. At choosing her own food and deciding her own portions. A freedom so rich. They joke about the girl almost being old enough to leave an oppressive home. Thinly veiled scorn of a mother, far away. She retreats, wishes for bed. Sitting at the table seems to require too high a price.
Soon the red dust melts into flat scrub and scrappy dunes. She inhales the salty air and breathes in space. The ocean is loud and the wind cuts through her melancholy. She watches the kind woman walking on the shore and adores that she waits until every last seashell has been picked.
The house is cold and empty. She unpacks her suitcase and is left to wander the museum of memories not hers but of hers. She opens the wardrobe and taffeta and rayon ball gowns leap out, begging to be touched and twirled around. She pulls glass stoppers of long-abandoned glass whiskey decanters, and skims ceramic balls across faded green velvet tables. The clicks echos throughout the house and she remembers the lonely sounds down here. The sun glints from the crystal light-catchers and reflects onto the carpeted staircase that sweeps off the ground and curves across the foyer. The gold jumps out from the velvet blue and dances in repeating patterns. The girl traces the regal patterns with her fingers as she sits on the bottom step and settles into being lady of a sad, forgotten manor. So close to her history, her stories, but so cut off from them, like a child who can only read the pictures.