Water That Owed Nothing

We drove down off the hilltop that had been ours alone these last nights, the bus tilting as it always did on rougher roads, and pointed south again, still running against the winter tide of rigs headed north for the warmth. Wagga Wagga was the next town day, and town days had their own rhythm by now: a list, a division of labour, the small machinery of keeping a bus and a van on the road. This one belonged mostly to Grammy. She needed a new phone, which meant two different stores and the patience to match, so while Sal took the food list and topped up what the last week had emptied, Anth stayed with his mum and worked through it with her.

He was the one who sorted these things now. The signing in, the transferring across, the shop assistant explaining what a woman of seventy-odd already half knew. Anth stood beside her and got it done, no fuss, and when the phone was finally working in her hand we found coffee and a steak lunch and sat in the ordinary sunshine of a Wagga afternoon with the errand behind us.

Then Bunnings, for a few bits to improve the electrical system in Grammy's van. Anth had built the bus's own set-up over the long months of the conversion, every wire and fuse of it, and he could not look at her van now without seeing where it fell short: a little more capacity here, a neater run there. It was not sentiment. A thing could be made to work better, and he was the one who knew how, and she had the good sense to let him at it. That was how the two of them had always got on. Practical people, both.

Town done, the list spent, it was only twenty minutes on to the night's stop. Not a wild camp, not the kind of place we would have chosen if choosing were the only thing that mattered, but a recreation reserve on the edge of the small town of The Rock, just south of Wagga, the great hill that gives the town its name standing over it all, dark against the last of the light. We pulled in, the bus and Grammy's van, and levelled up on the grass.

What the reserve had, and what the wild places never did, was free hot showers. There is a shower in the bus, a recirculating one, the same water pumped warm and round again, and we had leaned on it a couple of times through the dry country behind us: careful, adequate, never quite enough. This was a different thing altogether. This was hot water that kept coming and asked nothing back, and after weeks of counting every litre it was a small extravagance to stand under it and simply let it run, the drum of it loud in the little block, steam fogging the mirror, no part of us doing sums. We walked back across the grass pink and warm and faintly amazed at ourselves.

It was short and sweet, that stop. In the morning we woke refreshed, the hill still there through the windscreen, and set off south toward the last camp before Melbourne, where the road would soon narrow to trains and workshops and another parting. But that was tomorrow's weight. This morning there was only the bus and Grammy's van nosing back onto the highway, her new phone working in her hand, and the clean, uncomplicated feeling of a night's real water still on the skin.Read more