He gets into the car and tyres spin round like he’s at a drag race. Then Evelyn asks if I could say something in my native tongue so in French I say: ‘Your boobs are falling down.’ I shouldn’t have said that even though it is true. When you are old everything starts to head south like a runny egg cut with the wrong knife and there is very little you can do about it. Margie says everyone’s tits and bits end up dropping, dragging or drooping. ‘Surrender now!’ she used to say when she drank sherry with Mum. But it doesn’t seem to matter in this case because the ladies just look at each other like I’ve told them a little secret and aren’t they lucky to have heard it.
Then we all hear loud beeping and look out the back window. There is Pat holding his hand on the horn with wide eyes goggling at me. He pulls up alongside the driver and points. Everyone is on one side of the bus and I wonder if we might topple over. Bob up the front says to Walter, ‘Hey, maybe it’s one of them Mad Max fellas!’
The bus pulls over, Pat storms on and pulls me out. All the ladies get really worked up and say, ‘Where are you taking her?’ Pat says, ‘She doesn’t belong here.’ Doris gets all huffy: ‘Well, where does she belong? This is all her land, we are the visitors!’ I tell Doris it is okay, that my land used to be 44 Carroll Street, Beyen. Not this highway in the middle of nowhere.
And then I see the woman I came to find, two rows down and over. Much smaller than me, drawn back into herself, she was. I feel her bruised heart so I whisper in her ear: ‘She can still run in her sleep.’ Other people’s stories thunder through me like a bolting horse but before I can pull the reins in and get a good look, the pictures in my head have galloped off for good. So when Walter asks how I know her granddaughter was hit and run over by that drugged-up Latino fella so high he might’ve been on Mount Everest, I can’t answer. But I do know that in that girl’s dreams her back is not broken and at the farmhouse she runs all the way down to the lake, along the jetty and takes flight. Long limbs dangling, lungs screaming with delight, and nothing can ever be as perfect as that moment before she hits the cold, crisp water below. Carrying her shadow across as far as it will go.
Half a smile creeps onto the lady’s face as she watches Pat drag me out of the bus. I feel heavy in my chest like that poor lady does. That’s what grief is, knowledge and pain all squashed up together. As me and Pat walk back to the car the grannies open their windows and shout at Pat: ‘We know all about your Mabo!’ and I asked Pat what his Mabo is but he doesn’t say anything. It wasn’t my fault getting swept away with everyone. That is a real life defence in court. ‘She just got caught up with the wrong crowd, your honour.’ Pat didn’t have just cause to get angry. But he’s not one for following the rules.
‘Geezus. For the love of…you can’t just…take off!’ ‘Yeah, I can. I’m a bird.’
‘You’re not a bird, you’re a bloody idiot.’
I look outside and see a peregrine falcon hovering in the sky, like she’s posing for a still-life painting. I know it’s a she because they are bigger then the males. They mate for life and both look after their eggs, which take thirty-three days to hatch. They are the fastest animals in the world except for when they’re floating in the sky above you. She’s not like the purple-faced eagle that William Freeman drew for my dad. But I wonder if birds can talk to each other, even if one is real and the other is only a picture, drawn a long time ago on a page that’s crinkled and torn. Is that falcon up above telling the purple-faced eagle where we are really going?
Pat said he’d lost time, that we were on a schedule and I can’t just do what I like. Then the phone rang and his boss Warren got angry with him because he’d sent an order through for some beer, but Pat didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he realises I’ve been pressing buttons on all his technologies.
‘You can’t keep your bloody hands to yourself, can ya!’
‘If God calls, then you should pick up the phone!’
‘Stop with all the bullshit! If you’d just be normal none of this would have happened! None of it!’
Subtext is like a truth submarine lying underneath the surface of what people say. Pat knows I understand. It’s my fault we’ve lost Mum. Trouble ends up sticking to me like superglue any which way the wind blows, but am I smart enough to run when the tidal wave reaches shore? Or would I close my eyes and listen to the ocean as it sang me all the way into its dark belly?
9 Why you always park in the middle
What am I afraid of? There’s no x + y equation to figure that question out so I get a different answer every time. Pat hasn’t said a word for ages. My eyelids close up shop for a while. When I wake up the sun is looking for the other side of the world, taking its bright glare with it. A herd of cattle crosses ahead and Pat slows to a stop. The last cow, she’s almost to the other side but then she stops and looks straight at me. Cows never look afraid. They don’t care who you are or what you look like. They’ll always just stare at you the same and that’s why I like them. Vegetarian egalitarians.
And now we’ve made it to Newridge, a town of 147 people that you can actually find on an outback map (of nowhere places no one really cares about). The road in is the road out, a couple of handspans down the track. We pull into car space number three out the front of Midge’s Creek Hotel. Halfway between one and five, this third business always leads to trouble, especially when there are ten spaces, but Pat doesn’t understand. Pat only sees what numbers look like, not what they mean. Mum used to say I could make something feel better if I changed its value. I tried to change the value of huntsman spiders from terrifying to just God-awful until one crawled onto my arm once and I flung it across the room, screaming my head off. Then Mum had to throw magazines at it because that spider kept rearing its front legs up like a shocked horse. The New Idea finally got him but he was squashed all over Olivia Newton-John’s face and she did not look ‘sublime’ like the magazine cover said. Just sick.
Spiders are always scary and parking in the third car space is always wrong. You know what Pat says? That someone did a survey in Paris recently and found out that people’s favourite number was three. He was trying to trick me into changing its value, but I knew only bad things would happen. Pat looks at a scribbled note on the palm of his hand: ‘12/3/96, 10.07 am–11.46 am No. 2.’ His eyes are five steps ahead. Inside the hotel Pat sees me jiggling and tells me not to cause any trouble, but it’s uncomfortable having two needs at opposite ends of your body. I decide to relieve my overextended bladder before I get a lemonade. When I come back from the loo the lemonade’s waiting for me with a pink umbrella and a plastic monkey hanging from the side. I hop onto the bar stool and listen to the horserace on TV. There’s a few men watching in the corner, one with a brown cap pulled so far down I can’t tell if he’s asleep or not.
‘Yeah, that O-ring was a bit loose, mate. Anything else?’
Pat’s fixing a tap at the bar. Bob the publican shakes his head and looks back at the horses. His mouth’s a very thin slit like God had run out of pencil and had to scratch a skinny line with his fingernail so Bob could at least breathe.