Echoes of Absence, Promise of Return

The airport at Launceston is a small one, and Sal was through the doors and gone inside about four minutes.

Anth drove out south with the passenger seat empty. Second time in seven months. The first had been the four nights at Gordon in June, and that had felt like a small holiday from each other; this felt different, because she was flying to Brisbane to be in the same room as her family for the first time in seven months, and he was heading for Hobart, and he was heading for Hobart and then Adelaide and a cannula in his arm for the Japan money.

Ten minutes down the road, Evandale.

He had not planned to stop that soon. But there was a sign for a free camp at Honeysuckle Banks, on the South Esk, and nobody was waiting for him anywhere, and there is no reason to drive for four hours when the day has already done its important thing. He turned in.

The site sits along the river with a handful of vehicles in it, spread out enough that nobody bothers anybody. He parked, and the sun went down over the water, and that was the day.

Then the noise started.

Honeysuckle Banks is close enough to the Launceston airport that aircraft come over on approach, and close enough to the line that freight trains work through in the night. Neither of these is a secret; the reviews mention both. Anth lay there listening to a train go through somewhere in the dark and thought it was one of the better sounds available, and went to sleep.

Sal would have hated it. She sleeps lightly and she notices everything, and a camp with trains and planes would have been a camp with no sleep in it, and they would have moved in the morning if not sooner. He knew this with complete certainty, lying in the dark, from the other side of a country.

That is the thing about being alone in a shared space. It is not the absence that gets you, exactly. It is knowing precisely what the other person would have said about each thing as it happened, and having nobody to say it to.

He thought about Torrin, too, before he slept. Nine months in Japan now, and the whole reason for the trial in Adelaide was to get all of them into the same country in November. There was a symmetry in it that would have seemed neat if he had been in the mood for it: everybody scattering in different directions in order to eventually converge.

In the morning there would be another short drive south, and then Hobart, and then a flight. For now there was a river, a bus with too much room in it, and a train going through at some hour with nobody there to complain about it.Read more