Twenty Steps From the Front Door

The bus came up over the kerb and stood the whole way on the footpath, five and a half tonnes of Toyota Coaster parked clear of the road in a street of Canberra houses. Grammy brought her van in ahead of it and popped the roof. Two vehicles built for riverbanks and forestry dirt, drawn up on suburban concrete, and neither of them looking sorry about it.

We had come for Sophie. Two and a half weeks of unclaimed road had been handed back the week before at Mannus Lake, when she rang to say she would be in Canberra to see Jess. The road would still be there in a fortnight. Sophie would not still be in Canberra. It had been almost two months since the Gympie driveway, since Torrin and Mack and Soph stood in the gravel and watched the convoy pull out, and she looked well, and she talked the way she always did when there was a great deal to say and not much time to say it in.

The plan was narrow and practical. Drop Sal at the house, say hello properly, then Grammy and Anth would carry on out of the city and find a camp before dark. It lasted about an hour. Grammy had not slept at Blowering, not for a minute of it, lying awake in her van over whether the thing would climb back out of the reservoir in the morning. It had climbed out easily enough, Anth at her wheel and Sal leading in the bus, but the night was spent all the same and it was still on her face. Nobody made a case for pushing on. We stayed where we were and slept on the footpath.

Jan cooked. It had been a long time since a meal arrived at a table nobody had lit a fire for, or balanced on a knee, longer still since the walls around one had stayed where they were put in the wind. Jan and Jess, Sophie, Sal, Grammy, plates going round and three conversations running over the top of one another. Then goodnight, and out into the cold to our own beds, twenty steps from the front door, asleep early like people who had been driving for weeks.

In the morning Anth went back through WikiCamps and reconsidered. What he found was a recreation reserve half an hour out, closer than anything he had been looking at the night before, and half an hour bought the entire day. There was suddenly no reason to be anywhere.

So he washed the bikes. They had ridden on the back of the bus since Gympie and they carried the proof of it, two months of country laid on and dried on and laid over again, red dust and black soil and pale farm grit and the last of the Bago forestry road. The hose took it off in a few minutes. It went down the gutter in a thin brown stream and into a Canberra stormwater drain. Two months of road, gone in a few minutes of tap water.

Before the bus moved, Anth and Sal and Sophie sat down at the table and played a board game. It took as long as it took. Nobody was waiting on anybody.

Then the farewells, indoors, in the house, not out at the kerb with the engine running. Anth said goodbye to Soph without a date attached to it. She had her own van now and her own road, and the two roads had stopped running parallel some time ago. He did not know when he would see her next and did not pretend otherwise. Then out the front door and up into the bus.

Sal stayed. Her bag went inside and the week ahead of her had a shape it had not had in two years: nothing to submit, nothing outstanding, only Monday morning and the placement itself, the last thing standing between her and the end of the whole thing. Anth would come back on Sunday to collect her.

The bus came down off the footpath with Grammy's van behind it, and the drive out took thirty minutes, which barely counted as leaving. A recreation reserve, free, unremarkable except for the distance. Six days, then Sunday.

None of it had been the plan. By the plan, Anth would have said goodbye to his daughter in the street with the engine running and driven out of the city in the last of the light. Instead there had been a dinner, a night on the footpath, a slow morning, a board game, and a farewell said properly indoors with nothing waiting on it. All of it bought by a night Grammy spent awake in her van above a reservoir, worrying about a hill her van climbed without any trouble at all. Anth thought about that for most of the thirty minutes, and did not say so.Read more