Coffee, Cockatoos & Coming Home

Anth spent the afternoon on the list. Water, groceries, diesel, all of it around Hobart, all of it the same circuit we have done a dozen times now, and all of it done alone for the last time in a fortnight.

Then out to the airport in the evening to collect her.

Sal got into the bus and it hit her harder than either of us expected. She had spent two weeks taking a house apart. Boxing it, sorting it, deciding what was worth keeping and what was not, and handing back the keys to the last place all of them had lived together. Then a flight, and a car park at Hobart, and up the step into seven metres of vehicle that smelled the way it always smells.

Coming home. That was the phrase she used, and she meant it precisely, and neither of us had quite realised until that moment that the word had moved.

There were assignments waiting and Japan coming, so we did not go far. Seven Mile Beach again, the day use area we had used the night before she left, ten minutes from the airport and good enough.

We walked the beach before bed. There was a moon on it and the tide was doing what it does and neither of us said very much, which after a fortnight of phone calls was the point. You cannot catch up on two weeks in an hour. What you can do is walk next to somebody again.

The cockatoos woke us.

Yellow-tailed blacks, a proper mob of them, in the trees right beside the bus, working through the cones and making the noise they make, which is somewhere between a wail and a complaint and carries about a kilometre. They drop what they do not want and it lands on whatever is underneath, which that morning was us. There is no sleeping through it and no reason to be annoyed about it.

So we got up and made coffee, both of us, in the same small space, which is the thing that had been missing for a fortnight. Not the beaches or the mountains or any of the rest of it. Two cups on a bench in a vehicle and somebody to hand one to.Read more