The Drive

Em loved the way the road slowly unwound. As she drove east, it was like the road was a dancer woken from slumber, stretching the kinks out of her back. The towns got smaller and further apart. The hills got flatter. Soon, she was driving alone on a long, grey ribbon that stretched to eternity.

It was freeing to be alone, just her in her new car, released into the big, wide world. When she had been younger, she had been afraid of the space on the wide plains beyond the Adelaide hills, but on a school trip a teacher had explained that the further out you went, the bigger everything got. The tractors, the farms, the paddocks, the loans. It was all relative, like drawing a map on a balloon and then blowing air into it. At the time, that made her feel a lot less scared of the space, and it was still a comfort now. The sound system in her little red Audi was amazing, and she gave a concert to herself at the top of her voice.

After a few hours, a few towns and a petrol stop, she passed a sign. “Welcome to Victoria.” Nothing else changed. The dry paddocks were the same brown colour. The heat haze still shimmered on the horizon, but Em grinned to herself and took a sip on her slushie. She had also bought a few snacks and a pair of cheap sunnies at the petrol station and kept checking her reflection in the rear view mirror. Did they make her look older? More confident? Maybe even a bit pretty? She had never been a sunglasses girl, but she liked them.

She went through another town and crossed a long bridge. “Welcome to New South Wales,” another sign announced. Then she was out in the middle of Australia, driving on a straight, straight road that occasionally found itself on the high bank of a snaking, brown river.

A short time after noon, Em pulled into a small town decorated with frogs. She parked on the main street, turned off the engine and pulled the handbrake. Her ears rang in the silence and her legs needed a stretch. She found some lunch in a takeaway shop, and ordered expertly from the chalkboard. When her burger came, she was pleased to see that the burger was burned and the sauce had dripped out the side. If it was she who made the burger, this would not have happened. But she had told herself that she wouldn’t work in a takeaway shop ever again, so it didn’t really matter. The burger was delicious, so she ate it outside, strolling slowly up the wide street. The weather wasn’t too hot, because they were in a lull between heatwaves. Apart from the frogs that adorned every power pole, there was not much to see.

After lunch and a refuel, she drove in silence, letting her thoughts tumble through her head. What would Sydney be like? Would she find friends? She had spent some time on Google Maps looking up her university. It was right in the middle of the city, within walking distance, she thought, to Darling Harbour, The Rocks, and everything she had heard about Sydney.

Neither of her parents had been to university. Dad had spent some time in a chemical factory before they bought the shop. Mum had always worked at takeaways and she was the driving force of the family business. The shop should have gone okay, but the whole operation of take-away downstairs and dwelling upstairs lurched from one crisis to the next. A missed delivery, the rate bill, the health inspector, the employee going on holiday, car registration, birthdays, Christmas, Mondays, laundry—Everything came as a surprise. Unpaid bills were stacked on the fridge, the dishwasher was always full and dirty, there was never milk upstairs and they were forever writing IOUs and raiding the walk-in fridge out the back of the shop. Piles of paper were everywhere and there was never enough money. Em hated it. She always had. She wanted order. She wanted simple. She wanted comfort. An easy run at life, with nothing crowding her elbows.

And in the middle of the rat mess was the hulking form of Em’s mum, with her clenched fists and hunched stance, and the way she used words and shame like barbed hooks that tore and cut at anything they bit into.

This is why the only way was to get out, to get far, far away.

Dinner was nothing special, and when Em got tired near midnight, she found a park on a  quiet side street in a tiny town, cut the engine, pulled out her doona and a sleeping bag and lay down on the edge of the grass right beneath the driver’s door. The dry grass smelled sweet and the stars above, unhampered by the moon, were very bright and very awake.

Em slept comfortably and deeply. When she woke, a slim crescent moon was low in the pale eastern sky and there was a light dew on her pillow. A magpie in a nearby tree broke into song. She packed quickly, quite awake, and resumed her trip.

The inside of the car was littered with fast food wrappers and crumbs. When she found a petrol station, she fuelled up and used the vacuum cleaner for a dollar. After using the restroom and changing into a fresh set of clothes, she was off. “I’ll be in Sydney tonight,” she told herself.

A few hours later, the Sturt Highway tipped her into the dual carriageway of the Hume. The number of cars increased and the distance to Sydney whittled down. Em shifted in her chair and sat up straight when a truck nearly sideswiped her. She was so focussed on the heavy traffic and on trying to find the right lane and route that the first glimpse of the Sydney skyline took her by surprise.

She used a map she had printed out from the computer at home to make her way to her university. She was unsure which buildings belonged to her university and which didn’t. They were all large and imposing, and there weren’t any obvious signs that she could see. There were no parks and she felt overwhelmed by the whole experience, so after doing a few laps of the area she thought was the university, she struck out, away from the area in search of a hotel.

She saw a few places that looked like hotels, and her foot hovered over the brake each time, but they all looked so big and daunting, and the traffic behind her moved so quickly that she couldn’t bring herself to commit. “Come on, Manessa, you’re being silly,” an inner voice scolded. Then, when she saw a three storey brick building up ahead, with a pub downstairs and two layers of timber windows in brick above, she knew it felt right. 

Em pulled into a narrow lane and followed signs to a temporary car park. She went through the frameless glass sliding doors into Reception and knew she had lucked in. The place had hidden lighting and dark paint and beautiful furniture. The guy behind the desk was in his twenties, hot, with barber-cut hair and a white shirt.

“I’d like a room please,” Em said, and for the next minute or two he showed her some room photos from a display book and talked about prices, but his eyes were beautiful, so she could barely concentrate. In the end she chose a room with its very own freestanding bath. As she paid with her debit card, her mum’s scolding voice went off in her mind: “Come on, Manessa. It’s just a big fat waste of money. How many milkshakes did ya have to sell for that bath? I bet you’re not even going to use it.”

Em rolled her eyes at her imaginary mother and did not invite her into the elevator.

The room, it turned out, was not quite as big as the picture had led her to believe, but it did have its own freestanding bath and a large window. A porter delivered Em’s bags to the door and she thanked him, wondered if she should tip him like they did in the movies, and was relieved when he left without expecting anything. The guy with the nice eyes said that there was a pool on the roof. Em’s swimmers were in her clothes bag and she thought that she might as well try it out.

It turned out the hotel was long and skinny, and much taller than the three stories at the front. The pool was on the roof and except for a guy in a white polo shirt who squatted down to check the quality of the water, Em had the place to herself. The sun was bright. It was mid afternoon now. The air in Sydney felt thicker than in Adelaide. Harder to breathe. Em waited until the water tester was gone and then she dived in.

I’m purposely NOT saying things in this chapter, purposely holding back the storm. Do I need a sense of menace here, a wrong note?