Four Hours Facing Strangers

The Jindera Recreation Reserve was chosen for none of the usual reasons. It sat around a country sports oval with only a couple of other campers scattered about, and its single virtue was that it lay twenty minutes from the railway station at Albury. We picked our spot with Grammy in mind, room enough for the bus and her van to sit side by side while we were gone. For four days that was all the place had to do: hold everything still.

One night there, and in the morning Grammy drove us in, with a detour to the post office for a Prime Day order that had been waiting on us. A new pair of Crocs for Anth. He had succumbed to them not long after we first hit the road and had never been talked out of them since, wearing them through every taunt that came his way and refusing to consider any other camp shoe. Sal had spent two years declining to share the enthusiasm. Then someone made them fleece lined and white, and there they were at the counter, a pair each. She joined the dark side without much of a fight, and her feet, cold since Nangar, stopped complaining.

We said our temporary goodbyes at the station and boarded with every intention of working through the four hours south.

The seats faced each other, which is how we came to be looking at Mat and Clouds. They were strangers to us and, as it turned out, to each other as well, introduced a moment earlier by the seating plan. Clouds was short for Claudia. She told us to use the short one. Mat had lived in Japan, which was the door in, and once it opened the conversation ran without a pause for the rest of the journey, from Tokyo out through work and family and, by the end, mental health, the sort of ground people usually take months to reach. No laptops came out. When Southern Cross was called it felt less like arriving than being interrupted. Four hours, and we stepped onto the platform with two new friends.

A tram carried us to Laneways, a hotel booked on price alone and better than its price by a distance, the room well appointed, the welcome real.

Torrin came to us that evening. He had moved down to Melbourne a few weeks earlier to improve his odds of landing a trial, running the same arithmetic Anth had run for years: money earned lying still so that something else could be paid for. In Torrin's case the something else was Canada, and snow, and Shea. We had farewelled him at Grammy's not many weeks before and had not expected him again so soon. We ate at an Indonesian place around the corner, too much of it, and walked back slow.

In the morning Sal walked to her workshop, a few minutes down the footpath.

Anth and Torrin spent the day out in the grid of the city, picking up geocaches Anth had missed on earlier trial visits, when Melbourne had been somewhere he passed through on his own. Later they played video games. Anth had come round to something over the past year, not gladly at first: that a good share of his son's life now happened in there, and if he wanted more hours with him, he would have to go in and meet him where he was. So he went. He was not much good at it. That was never the point.

Dinner came in a bag that night rather than a restaurant. Afterwards Torrin caught his train back to the temporary place he was staying.

Sal's last day of workshops came and went like any other. She walked back up the same footpath and that was the end of it. No more flights to Brisbane. No more trains to Melbourne. No more of the two-year rhythm that had decided where the bus could be and when, that had set our departures and shortened our stays and put a date on every stretch of road we had planned since Tasmania. Two years of arranging a life around a calendar somebody else kept, finished on a Saturday afternoon in a rented room with nobody watching. She said it felt surreal. Nothing had marked it. There had been no reason to expect anything would.

Torrin met us early on the Sunday for breakfast and walked us back to Southern Cross. He waited on the concourse until our train came in, which he did not have to do. Goodbyes to him have not got easier for the practice.

The ride north was quieter. We had the work we had meant to do on the way down and now no excuse left, so some of it got done, and the country went past the other way. Whatever fills an outbound journey was not in this one.

Grammy was at Albury, in the same place she had dropped us, and drove us back out.

We took one more night at the reserve rather than travel in the dark. The bus stood where we had left it, her van alongside, the oval black and empty past them, everything as still as we had asked the place to keep it. Sal's white Crocs went by the door with the rest of the shoes. Whatever came next, nobody was expecting her anywhere.Read more