We come to a narrow road,
narrow and serpentine, as if it were the trail of an actual snake that’s shot
off, in fear of us, through the woodlands. The air blustering through my open
window is cool and smells of rich, untainted earth.
Read me something, she
says out of nowhere. Read me something in one of your accents. I tell her I
have to watch the road; the feeling of my voice in my throat, like an engine
idling weakly, catches me by surprise. Guarded by columns of snow gums and
their fern and tussock understory, palled in the dust whipped up by the last
car to have passed this way – probably also headed to the big New Years Party
that Jangers and the others have organised – the road seems to be offering an
optical illusion of some sort, only I can’t be certain what sort, can’t be
certain whether the illusion is one of bringing things forwards or sending them
away, because I’m concentrating on other things.
Then stop the car, she insists.
Watch the road until the next straight, pull over where it’s safe for people to
get by us in both directions, and read to me for a little while, a few minutes,
a minute even, just put the things I’m thinking about out of my head. But the next
straight, I say, is probably Sheepyard Flat. There’ll be people everywhere.
They’ll think things, say things. Would you settle for a joke as we drive?
You
couldn’t save my life with a joke, not even if somebody had taken me hostage
and all they wanted for me was a funny joke, you still couldn’t save me.
I don’t
really know what you mean by that, I say, but how about you tell one?
Okay, she says after a
time. She’s rubbing the seat upholstery between her legs, close to the crotch
of her denim shorts that’s stretched so tightly over her own crotch, like Mylar
over the head of a drum. She’s thumbing the dust off the dashboard as though it
were a smear of dirt on her daughter’s face.
Which weighs less –
Out of what?
Just wait, I’m
remembering this as I go.
Okay.
Okay – which weighs less,
a long blade of grass that’s got ants all over it, so many that it’s black, or
–
The road dips very
sharply; I make first eye contact with the river. I see children swimming in a
beautiful stony river, and some fluorescent kayaks on its banks. There’s a
parking lot, a campground, almost full, and a sign that confirms my estimates:
Sheepyard Flat. But the narrow road darts upwards again, even harder into the
mountain, and that idyll is quickly left behind. It smells of farts in the car
– cherry and rice cracker farts – that I don’t think I did. And the lack of first
gear torque and the fish-tailing backside of this borrowed Nissan Navara are
making work of the ascent.
She’s making hard work of
the joke and that’s all right. I have her, in a way, right where she wants to
be, and that is where I want her too.
A blade of grass with
ants, she repeats, apprising herself of what she’s already said, or a
Norwegian?
I don’t know. The
question’s funny enough on its own. Which weighs less?
A Norwegian, she answers,
chuckling. Then she forgets the punch line irretrievably, and I pull over
beside a big cheese wedge of granite, on the flat of which we both sit, our
arses warmed by the latent heat in it, sunning ourselves like snakes in an
unmanned wilderness, and I read to her out of the only book I’ve brought with
me, Peter Camenzind, in a voice I feel could actually have been Hesse’s, until
I crack up laughing and have to finish the chapter in my normal accent, that of
a public school-educated Melbournian, and a huge coffee stain blotting out the
start of the next chapter has us down and into the car again, which doesn’t
smell like anything anymore, only the staleness of an old car that’s been kept
well, and I tell her we’ll be around everybody soon, and there’ll be all the
music and drugs and goodwill you can imagine, will you like that? She says yes
and no, but then repeats the word no and simply says yes.
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