Six Weeks and the Open Gate

The store rang the morning after Anth pulled back into Grammy's place at Gympie: the phone had finally come in. There was a rhythm to these things, the way a part or a parcel always seemed to land the moment you stopped waiting for it. He sorted it out with a few calls. Grannie would collect the phone, and Anth would gather it from her on the same run that brought Sal home, folding two errands into one trip to the airport.

Two days until Sal landed. A handful more until he left for New Zealand. In that narrow gap there were jobs on the bus that wanted finishing, and one in particular had been waiting longer than the rest: the electromagnetic drawer locks. He had planned them for months, sketched them, set them aside, returned to them. Saturday was marked for the work, and Saturday delivered. The iron infusion had left him with a surge of energy he had not felt in a while, and he spent the whole day at it, wiring and fitting until the drawers finally held themselves shut the way he had imagined. A small thing, perhaps, but the kind of small thing that makes a rolling home feel finished.

The loose shape of what came next sat warm in the planning. When Anth returned from the trail, we would point the bus at the horizon again, only this time we would not travel alone. Sophie would fall in beside us in her new van, and Grammy too. Three weeks with us in Tasmania had stirred something in her that had not settled since; the nomad in her, it seemed, had only been resting. There was a particular pleasure in imagining the convoy of us, each in our own home on wheels, choosing the same road.

Soon enough Anth was driving the familiar stretch to the airport, waiting at the gate for Sal to walk back into our days. Melbourne airport had handed her back to him so many times over these two years that the ritual had worn a groove; this reunion was no different in its relief, and no less sweet for being practised.

The last two days went to the pack. Anth laid it out and took it apart and laid it out again, weighing every item against the weeks of walking ahead, the way you do when the country is unfamiliar and the load is yours alone to carry. Our time together was short and we both felt the shortness of it. But Torrin was out there on the track, and the chance for Anth to walk beside our son through that country was not one he was willing to let pass.

Then the final drive to the airport. We had made the run to those sliding doors more times than we could count, learned the ache of the departure lounge and the gladness of the arrivals hall. This parting set a record we had never wanted: six weeks, dialled in now around Sal's university dates, longer than any stretch before it. Sal watched Anth go through to the gate and the gap opened ahead of them both, and he went towards it anyway, because the life they had chosen asked it of him, and because every separation either of them had ever counted had ended, in time, with one of them walking back through a sliding door.Leggi altro