It Changed on a Number

Monday had a shape to it now. Down to the south of the city first, Tuggeranong end, to drop Sal at Trinity, and then the day belonged to the list: groceries, water, the small parts and bits and pieces that a bus quietly accumulates a need for. Town day. There is a particular satisfaction in a day made entirely of errands when the errands are the price of living the way we live, and Anth worked through them without hurrying.

Then the day changed, and it changed on a number. Sal was offered a second placement day. Tuesdays, starting the following week, on top of the Mondays already running. The offer was worth more than a second day of work, because the requirement was forty hours of one-on-one and forty hours accumulates twice as fast at two days a week as it does at one. In a single conversation the length of the Canberra stint had been cut in half. Not shortened, halved, and the difference between those two words is the difference between waiting out a season and seeing the end of one.

Next week it would start. For now there was still the house sit at Higgins waiting on the other side of the city, and the evening had its own commitment.

North, then, back up to Nicholls and Jan's, because it was Jess's birthday. Vietnamese had been decided on some time earlier and Vietnamese it was, the whole table of us out for the night, the sort of evening that has nothing to do with the road and is better for it. It ran long in the way birthday dinners do.

By the time it finished and we came back to the bus, parked out the front of Jan's where it had been parked before, nobody had much appetite for crossing the city again in the dark to reach a house we had not yet seen. Higgins would keep until morning. So the bus stayed where it was for the night, and we slept on the same stretch of Nicholls footpath we had slept on two weeks earlier at the start of all this.

Two weeks earlier there had been two vehicles on it, and Grammy's roof had been up, and the whole thing had happened by accident because she had lost a night's sleep worrying about a hill. This time there was one vehicle, parked deliberately, and Grammy was at the far southern end of Canberra waiting on a Thursday appointment to find out what her rear wheel had to say for itself.Read more