Gordon's Ebb & Flow: A Solo Chapter

Sal went through at Hobart and Anth drove back down to Gordon on his own.

Same spot. The one on the water facing east, where the sun comes up out of the channel behind Bruny and puts the light straight down onto the bus. He had sat in it in June while she was in Hobart with her friends, and again in September, and now for a third time. It is not a large camp and there is nothing much to it, and by that point it was the closest thing either of us had to an address.

Dion was still there, and on the first morning he asked for a hand. He had a second vehicle that needed shifting to Franklin, up the Huon, which meant two drivers and forty minutes each way through the orchard country south-west of Hobart. On the way back he stopped at a grocery store, which turned out to matter: the food in the bus had been bought on the assumption that both of us would be away, and the plan had changed, and Anth was now staying put for two and a half weeks with the wrong shopping.

The plan had changed because of the trials. There was another one coming after Japan and there was news to wait on, which meant staying reachable and staying in Tasmania rather than flying anywhere.

Then Dion and Girl Dog left, and it was just the bus.

Seventeen days. The weather did everything in that time: days of hard wind that had the bus moving on its springs from dark to dawn, days of flat brilliant sun off the water, days of low grey cloud sitting on Bruny and not shifting, and rain that came in and drummed on a metal roof for hours at a stretch. There is nothing to do about any of it except be there while it happens.

Anth worked through the maintenance list, which behaves the way maintenance lists always behave: you finish one job and the finishing of it exposes two more. Nothing dramatic, all of it necessary, the accumulated small attention that a seven-metre vehicle carrying everything you own requires if it is going to keep doing that.

And he watched the camp turn over.

That is the thing about sitting still in a place where nobody else does. Gordon emptied and refilled around him for two and a half weeks. Grey nomads would come in for a few nights and put their chairs in a ring and talk. Families arrived at weekends with kids who went straight to the water. Full-timers came through, recognisable immediately by how quickly they set up and how little they carried, stayed a night, went on. He was the fixed point. Everybody else was moving.

Somewhere in the middle of that he booked the ferry home.

The earliest crossing available on the Spirit of Tasmania was June. Not this year. Next.

We had come to Tasmania in February intending to see it properly and had never put an end date on that. Now there was one, and it was eight months away, and it had been chosen by a booking system rather than by us. Which means we are not visiting this island. We are living here, and will have been for well over a year by the time we drive onto that boat.

Two ways to take that. It is a constraint, arrived at without discussion, that fixes where we will be for the whole of a year we had left open. It is also eight more months of a place we have not come close to exhausting, in seasons we have not seen it in yet.

Both are true. Anth sat with it for a while and then got on with the list.

Sal, in Queensland, had two days of workshops and a great deal else.

The house at Aroona was being given up. Sophie and Mack had stayed on in it after we drove the bus out of that driveway in January, and so it had gone on being an address the family had, a fixed point somewhere behind us that we did not have to think about. Now the lease was ending and the two of them were moving into places of their own, which meant the last of it had to be boxed and sorted and carried, and somebody had to be there for the part where you decide what is worth keeping.

That was the real reason for the seventeen days. The workshops accounted for two.

It was the last place all of them lived together. It was emptied by the people who had lived in it, with Sal in the middle of that for the better part of a fortnight, and at the end of it the keys went back.

She flew into Hobart at the end of the week. Anth packed up the camp, drove north, and collected her.Read more