Love and Other U-Turns Page 11

  The light in Brisbane is different, with glossy streets flanking the river and giving the sense of new starts, new money, the pristine sheen of a town without the drive and tension of Sydney and Melbourne, not to mention better weather. Jim starts telling me about Tina and Scott, old friends from Sydney we are going to visit. ‘It’s okay Lou, I worked with Tina just before I quit the advertising agency. She quit too. She’s just as random as us!’

  No intellectual or aspirational pretensions of worthiness here. Brisbane seems to value the glitzy show of a clean, shiny place to live. So what if Melbourne considers it showing off, and Sydney only values you if you roll with the high-flyers?

  After a quick stop for some wine we pull up at a timber Queenslander set back from the street. Tina waves to me from the balcony as I stretch my legs and Jim parks the car. She’s smiling like she can’t wait to meet me.

  Tina and Scott are Jim’s friends from his previous life, the incarnation after he’d gone to uni, lived in a share-house in Coogee and worked at an advertising office, knocking his head against a desk to stay sane. Tina, who was the receptionist for a little while, let him intermittently bang it against hers. They are warm, busy, friendly and funny. Pictures line the kitchen wall of the couple riding camels at sunset, swimming with dolphins, surrounded by butterflies in the Amazon. I ask how long they travelled together, before buying this house it appears they are renovating.

  ‘About fifteen years,’ replies Tina.

  Despite both coming from Sydney, they decided to move to Brisbane because it’s cheaper and sunnier. I get the feeling they don’t struggle to make friends, or make new starts. It’s so relaxing being around people who don’t fear the unexpected, embracing it wholeheartedly, instead.

  ‘Do you miss your family?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah but we can drive or fly back – it’s not far. And it’s heaps sunnier here,’ she says, matter-of-fact. And it is.

  Tina and Jim catch up on old times hilariously, sharing stories of share-houses gone wrong and Jim’s running away to clown camp. Scott, outside lugging timber and building a wall for the bathroom, pops his head in every once in a while to pipe in with some news.

  Their home feels like a grown-up version of a tree house, and unlike many of the people we’ve been visiting, they don’t seem to have any ruts. When I ask to go to the bathroom I step outside on a precarious plank of wood, walking the high beam until I get to a toilet with a door but no roof, gazing up at the sky.

  ‘Yeah, Lou, just watch the floor for nails,’ Scott yells over to me. I look down at the rickety wood I’m perched on. Below is a steep drop to the earth. But man the view is exciting.

  Scott comes in at dusk as the crickets start to sing outside and fixes us dinner in a flash like a cheerful army general on speed. So cutely in love, he gives Tina a peck on the cheek every time he passes her, even if it is just to get a condiment from the pantry. Tina, still so distracted by catch-ups that she’s forgotten to prepare anything. She all but looks forlornly at her glass for a second before he tops it up.

  We eat on the couch in the living room. Tina sits on the floor because the chair is on the front balcony or something (furniture is so trivial), and we end up playing Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit in between reminiscent tales of their Coogee share-house.

  Tina screams with excitement any time a song comes on the radio that she likes and when we finish our meals, Scott scoops up the plates but she’s still eating so he leaves hers. ‘DARLS!’ she shouts at him, metres away in the kitchen doorway, ‘Comin’ at you!’ and rolls her plate across the wooden floor to the kitchen because she’s cosy where she is. He washes the dishes and cleans the kitchen at lightning speed, and comes in to top up our wine, pecking Tina’s cheek, for the hundredth time.

  At about midnight, Jim asks Scott what time he has to be up for work.

  ‘Oh, about five.’

  ‘Really? Do you ever get sick? You know, renovating, working, not sleeping much.’

  ‘Never. If I get a niggle I just set the inside army to work. So I don’t. Anyway, I like doing stuff.’ And that’s that. He doesn’t get sick. We drink and talk and laugh into the night, sleeping under a mosquito net in a double bed in the spare room in absolute luxury.

  Late the next morning, with Scott long gone to work, Tina pushes the door open. ‘I bought bacon and eggs so we can have a fry-up breakfast!’ she says cheerfully, like there’s no such thing as a normal weekday, plopping on the bed.

  A travelling sales rep with no bookings that day, she cooks in her tracksuit like we’re all on a camp together and we brush our teeth in the kitchen sink, because there’s no bathroom. The instant ease I feel with Tina is so refreshing it gives me energy. We are as far from mortgage hell as you can get. This couple is like a case for spirited selfishness – doing what they love, being who they are, without compromise or boredom-induced jealousies – inspires me to think that Jim and I can make it. That we have more than valium-bland Sprinklerville to look forward to.

  Outside I stretch in the sun up high in the trees, overlooking someone else’s backyard with kids bouncing on a trampoline. Tina and Scott remind me that life is just a game and we make up the rules, ruts don’t really exist except in our heads, and new friends are just a drive away.

  Later in the car, Jim tells me why he loves them so much, ‘They treat me like a new friend, every time I see them.’

  I think about it. It’s what anyone wants, in any relationship. To be treated like a new, unpredictable, limitless human being every time you interact with someone, unshackled by the past. To be acknowledged, for the possibilities that you are. It’s how Jim treats everyone, but it’s so rarely reciprocated to him.

  We drive off, eggs in our belly, ready for a new layer of sunscreen to protect against the Queensland sun, as Tina waves goodbye. Ready to pack our fifteen years of adventure into the relationship. And maybe, one day, have a dinner party of our own.

  ‘Will you let me roll my dirty plate across the floor?’

  ‘Only if you yell “Comin’ at you darls!”’

  It’s amazing how other people’s positive energy can restore your equilibrium. Travelling in the hardcore manner we’re doing heightens the effects of every place we visit. We’re never there for long, so we sponge it up, spit it out, leaving as if we’ve spent a day in someone else’s outfit – misery, happiness, ruts and all.

  I haven’t worn make-up, shaved my armpits or even washed my hair for days. But staring back at me from the mirror in the car is a happy, if a little ruddy, face. My oily hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and I’m wearing a blue singlet I put on five hundred encounters back in Woodenbong, after what I think was my last shower. My eyes are slightly bloodshot, and parts of me are sore from sitting, sleeping and travelling on unfamiliar grounds. The slight feeling of flu permeates my body, but it’s hard to know if it’s because we don’t sleep or eat regularly, are having too much fun, talking too much or are just too damn in love.

  Jim catches me checking out my reflection in the mirror, and sniffing my armpits, before I hunt for some deodorant in the car.

  ‘You look great Lou, don’t worry. Promise me you won’t put any make-up on until we get back to Sydney!’

  The sky softens from a purity of white sun to a cooler blue as we drop further south, car wheels carrying us back over the same highways which look oh so different from this side of the road, and this stage of the journey.

  Reversing over roads we crossed ten days ago I remember the exact conversation we were having at certain landmarks. Because of our surplus in the sleep bank thanks to the glorious double bed at Tina and Scott’s, we drive for ten hours straight, only stopping to refuel or stretch our legs and relieve ourselves against gum trees, the cleaner option in fresh, open air to stained murder-scene ask-for-the-key toilets offered by petrol stations.

  Our phones cut in and out of range, and when we go for a few hours with no coverage, Jim, as usual, has about five messages when he turns it back on. O
ne is from Sammy, an ex-girlfriend who is a country-and-western singer. She sounds like a gypsy soul too. ‘Not a sprinkler, Lou. Promise.’

  Sammy’s in love with a fellow road-hungry musician, and I know I’m going to like her. Jim tells me it was Sammy who once suggested, as they were driving past a prison in Derby, Western Australia, that they stop and do a ‘gig’. He made some jokes and she sang some songs with her guitar. The prisoners said it was the best day of their lives. When he tells me this story my ears prick up, longing to see Derby, wishing I at least knew what the sky looked like up there. People who have seen that part of Western Australia, up close to the Territory, get a look in their eyes when they describe it. It’s my country, too. So what if I’m a girl?

  Sammy’s at her parents’ farm in Taree for the night, and has invited us to drop by. Looking on the map, Taree is a fair way away, and after telling her we probably won’t get there until 11 pm, I’m all booked in to meet yet another soul, another reminder that there is more than one way to travel through this earth.

  ‘Sammy lives in Newcastle, but she regularly tours the Northern Territory … and she’s studying teaching …’ and now she’s in Taree. Another person joyfully taking advantage of cut-price domestic fares, she regularly touches down across all states of Australia, rendezvousing with her muso man in Newcastle when they aren’t both gigging around. Just the kind of teacher I’d want. Wild, fulfilled and free.

  By Taree, we have lost all the heat of the Brisbane sun, and the chill in the air is cutting. Jim pulls into McDonald’s and we chomp down oily fillets of fish, scruffing in the back seat for our jumpers, unworn for days. We make it to Sammy’s farm just before midnight, a dirt road off a dirt road with the air getting blacker as we move. So cold by now that a thick fog envelops the car, we pull to a stop next to an abandoned farmhouse under a pitch-black sky with nothing but the faint sound of cows as a sign of life. When we get out of the car the air is so cold it’s like we’ve dived into a pool. We gulp. After ten spooky minutes standing on a house porch in the middle of a paddock, the darkness is playing tricks with my mind. I feel like I’m walking in on someone else’s stories. Someone else’s long-held business.

  Eventually Sammy appears out of the darkness. She has a sprightly, no-nonsense, can-do energy, like someone who has grown up close to the earth. She shakes my hand eagerly, despite the hour and despite the fact that, as we discover, we’ve woken her from sleep. I like her immediately. Unpretentious, full of life and stories, and curious about ours, she laughs easily and her eyes sparkle when she speaks.

  ‘Mum’s cookin’ you both a fry-up brekkie in the morning. Better be up by seven!’

  Alas – we have to be back in Sydney by 8 am. My interview is booked for three hundred kilometres away – which means we have to get up at – three!

  ‘Better be a bloody good interview!’ she says good-naturedly, considering we are essentially crashing on her floor for a few hours then leaving.

  ‘Who’s it for?’ she asks. When I explain, she offers herself and her partner as potential candidates. ‘We’ve just put out a CD. Could be good publicity?’

  I give her my business card so she can email me when she gets back to Newcastle. It feels particularly strange to take a professional action when I’m unshowered and sleeping on her floor.

  I’d better get used to it, I think, planning how to wash and clean up my appearance so that I’m at least acceptable enough to walk into a well-to-do Sydney couple’s Bronte home. Jim may love me looking like this, but most other people, especially those who work in media, have certain … standards. I find soap in the ice-cold shower, and settle for a Clayton’s wash, my skin hurting from the freezing water. I get as far as a splash on my chest and decide to skip it.

  The century-old farmhouse, with faded photos of relatives from the 1800s, has a permanent whistling under the doors. There is a bedroom but neither of us feels right about sleeping in there. We sort of mutually decide on a doorway, where we roll out the swag. It’s about three degrees, and I didn’t pack thermals. We roll into each other and Jim says, ‘Don’t forget, Lou, you add your light energy to the dark.’

  I always got mocked for my ‘vibes’ until Jim. He doesn’t even need me to verbalise them, noticing immediately and giving me hopeful little sermons about light and love, while the wind is howling and it feels as though there’s a whole family going through the motions in the darkness around us.

  ‘Jim, did Sammy mention graves under the floor?’

  ‘Lou, they’re just resting.’

  I once read that doing scary things is the quickest way to reprogram your brain to see how many self-imposed boundaries can really be melded with a bit of daring. This first road trip with Jim has become my own Anthony Robbins course – but with ice-cold showers instead of hot-coal walks. And sermons about light in haunted houses rather than NLP. It’s a lot cheaper.

  My mind dips and weaves with thoughts of ghouls and ghosts as Jim tries to blow warm air on my nose, the only part of my body not covered by the swag. I breathe shallowly, trying to listen for anything unexpected. The house creaks, howls and sighs. It’s hard to know if I’m dreaming or imagining, and at one point Jim says he is seeing a woman leaning over us in a white dress, just as I’m picturing the same thing too.

  The year before, I’d interviewed a paranormal expert who’d documented the most ‘haunted’ areas of Melbourne. He’d told me ghosts stick to their old homes, and in particular, cold air is often a sign of a haunting. Tick to both, here.

  It’s almost a relief when Jim’s phone alarm goes off at 3 am, even though we are deathly tired. I turn on every light I can find and Jim writes Sammy a note before we bolt to our refuge, the car. I catch Jim doing a little bow at the door, saying thank you to the space, the spirits. I’d just done the same thing silently in my head, before walking out the door.

  After spending two weeks doing things and meeting people in ways and paths I’ve never walked before, defying all conventional wisdom for how a road trip should be done, what’s an interview added to the mix? No sleep, no shower, no preparation at my home study, I’m just glad Jim has years of experience searching for back-to-back kids’ parties on Saturdays. He doesn’t even ask for the address until we get to Bronte.

  After logging a thousand kilometres the day before and with another three hundred to do that morning, the endless road has lost some of its romance. But every time I feel myself drifting back into comfort mode – wanting my bed, my coffee, my flat – I think of how great it is to be somewhere new. Like I’ve been set free.

  ‘What are you going to do while I’m there?’ I ask, visualising him sleeping in the car on the corner of the street. He thinks for a minute then remembers that one of his oldest friends lives nearby.

  ‘I’ll have breakfast with Patty!’ Like turning up at morning toast time is the most normal thing in the world.

  Jim must be really tired, because he asks me to drive for the first time, out of Taree. I gaze in wonder, and more than a bit of fear, as I hear him snore just minutes after swapping sides with me. I love that he’s so portable, though. He can just put his feet on the dashboard in a yoga pose and he’s out.

  We drive for three hours through the night before the sky, like hope, cracks through with light at the same time we have made it back into Sydney radio and phone range. When you’ve been driving for hours in the middle of the night, when the sun starts rising it’s almost a miracle. Everything’s so much easier in the light.

  Exhausted, we pull over for a few minutes’ rest at a shop in Raymond Terrace. Jim rolls out his ever-present swag and we snatch a moment of sleep together with the freeway traffic spinning past us. I lie there, listening to the morning traffic zooming past on the Pacific Highway, stunned that the rhythm of driving has been temporarily stopped, aware that we have pushed it all beyond luck, and even stupidity. I beg the universe, Mercury and Hermes, all to get us safely to Sydney. I look to the sky and promise to be Jim’s extra set of eyes –
to help the gods deliver us from the fate of Transport Accident Commission commercials.

  Jim wakes fifteen minutes later, packs up the swag and buys the strange breakfast selection of fresh prawn rolls from the shop, just metres away. At one dollar a pop, and the freshest prawns in Australia, they’re so cheap! As he hands over the money I laugh to myself that they don’t know we used their tree as a bed. Still, I guess it’s everyone’s tree.

  I walk outside and stretch, dashing back in to get a takeaway coffee for the remainder of the trip so that I can at least string a sentence together. I check my crumpled notes, apply make-up in the passenger seat, and try to mentally rehearse for being around ‘normal’ people again. But what surprises me is that I’m not nervous. The couples I interview for this column, especially the ones suggested to me by my editors, always come from a certain demographic. My socioeconomic ‘tribe’, I guess you’d say. After being around every tribe but my own over the past couple of weeks, this will be a walk in the park.

  We pull up at a little cottage, and a casual couple in jeans greet me at the door. ‘Would you like a coffee?’ asks the man, and I try to hide my drool. Yes, please.

  During the interview, the girl, offhand, makes a quip about how she’d often come over to find nude girls reading in the living room of the bohemian share-house where he once lived. I know this is something that will strike the average newspaper reader as odd.

  ‘Did you get jealous?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head, no. ‘Besides,’ her partner adds, ‘if someone is jealous there’s usually some sort of manipulation going on.’

  It’s these little pearls and offhand remarks during interviews that I live for, usually cast as an afterthought or deviation from the main story. I finish my coffee and the tape clicks that it’s been an hour, texting Jim that I’m ready to be collected. Soon, his Mazda pulls up outside their little cottage.