Parallel Journeys: Love, Science & Home

The oval at Tunnack emptied out easily, because there had been nothing on it but the bus.

Anth drove south to Sorell with a list. The bus needed washing, and it needed it badly: seven months of Tasmanian gravel, forestry mud, salt off the east coast and whatever had come off that road above Griffith, all of it layered on until the original colour was more of a rumour than a fact. Twelve minutes at the coin wash and it came back looking like a vehicle rather than a geological sample.

Then laundry, then the post office for parcels, and then out to Forcett.

Michael had said in June to stay as long as we liked, and had meant it, and this was the version of that offer that actually mattered: somewhere safe to leave seven metres of house for a month while both of us were on the other side of the country. He took it entirely in his stride. There is a kind of person who offers you something and then is not put out when you take them up on it, and he is one.

The flight went out of Hobart the next morning.

Adelaide was CMAX and a Phase I trial, which means healthy volunteers, controlled doses, and a great deal of sitting still while people take your blood on a schedule. Three weeks of it. The days are structured to the minute and the food arrives when it arrives and there is nothing to decide about anything, which after seven months of choosing where to sleep every single night is either restful or maddening depending on the hour. It paid what it paid. That money was going to Japan in November, and that was the entire point of being there.

Sal was in Brisbane.

Grandad and Mack met her at the airport, which after seven months of video calls is a different thing entirely to a good conversation on a screen.

Three and a half weeks, and no agenda beyond being there. Her father practising the organ in the next room, the way he had for as long as she could remember. Coffee with her mother, sitting still, the kind of conversation that only happens when there is no plane to catch that day. Sophie and Mack within reach and able to be hugged rather than phoned, still at the house at Aroona, which was still an address the family had.

That is the part nobody warns you about. It is not the cold or the water running out or the batteries. It is that everybody you love carries on being somewhere you are not, and what you actually gave up was the ordinary access to them: dropping in, staying for dinner, being in the same room without it costing a flight and a month.

The two returns lined up almost by accident. Anth's trial finished, Sal's weeks in Brisbane finished, and the flight routing put them both through Melbourne on the same day. So they met at a domestic terminal, which is not a location either of them would have chosen for it, and got on the same aircraft to Hobart.

The plane came in over the Derwent with the whole thing laid out below: the mountain, the bridge, the channel running south toward Bruny and Gordon, the east coast somewhere off to the left. All of it now recognisable from the air, which it had not been in January.

The bus was at Forcett where they had left it, clean, waiting, with everything they owned still in it.Read more