The Dance of Separation and Return

Sal's brother had told us to cross the Batman Bridge if we ever got the chance, so on the way to Launceston we took the long way round and did.

It is a cable-stayed bridge over the Tamar, the first of its kind built in this country, and it looks like nothing else in Tasmania: a single A-frame tower leaning out over the water with the deck slung off it. It has been there since the 1960s. You come round a bend on a quiet road through farmland and there it is, an unexpectedly serious piece of engineering in the middle of nowhere, and we stopped and looked at it for longer than the crossing took.

Then Launceston for the resupply. Food, water, the whole list, done before the flight so that when Anth got back we could leave immediately and not lose a day of Christmas to a supermarket.

The airport goodbye was the shortest one we have done. Twenty-four hours. He was flying to Melbourne for the screening in the morning and coming back the following afternoon, which barely qualifies as a separation and still involved standing in a drop-off zone not wanting to be the first to move.

Sal drove out to Honeysuckle Banks. Fifth time at that camp, and she has still never slept properly there.

She had a night to herself and used it well: podcasts on, working on her book, nobody to consult about anything. And she made the bed. Properly made it, hospital corners and cushions arranged, the way you can when there is only one person's mess to manage, and then looked at it and did not want to get into it. She sent a photograph. It was, admittedly, a very good bed.

In Melbourne the screening went well. Bloods, questions, the usual battery of tests, and everything pointing the right way, with the actual decision to come in the new year. That is how these things go: you give them a morning and then wait a month.

He flew back on Christmas Eve and Sal collected him from arrivals, and the interruption was over.

Then west. Finally, actually west, after being turned back from it by a mechanic, a house move, Japan, shingles, an inspection and two screenings. Nothing left on the calendar and nobody waiting on us.

We drove out of Launceston on Christmas Eve heading for a coast we had not seen since March, with no plan for the twenty-fifth beyond being somewhere good when it arrived.Read more