The Rule We Had Never Broken

Two days a week created a problem that one day a week never had. A Monday on its own is a drive in and a drive out. A Monday with a Tuesday behind it means a night in the middle, and the night has to happen somewhere, and somewhere was going to be in town rather than out of it. We knew that on the way in and decided to deal with it later.

Grammy stayed behind at the Higgins house. Her plan was to run straight out to the next campsite from there under her own steam, which she was well capable of doing, so the convoy came apart for the day without ceremony. The commute south to Trinity took what it takes. Sal went in.

Anth's day was Bunnings. Not the shop so much as the car park, which is one of the great neutral spaces of Australian life, and he spent a good part of the day there working through the small jobs a bus accumulates and never quite gets around to. Nothing worth describing individually. All of it worth doing, and this was exactly the sort of day to do it on, with hours to fill and a flat surface underneath.

Sal came out in the afternoon and the bus collected her and took the five minutes down the road to Erindale, where there was coffee and somewhere to sit and the light starting to go. Afterwards we had a wander around the area to see what might work for the night, and the wander did not turn up anything better than what we were already standing in. So we stayed. The bus spent the night in a shopping centre car park.

There was more to the reasoning than convenience. Rain was coming, and rain changes what a campsite is. A dirt camp in the wet turns soft, and five and half tonnes of bus on soft ground is a problem you create for yourself in the evening and solve badly in the morning. Bitumen does not do that. Beyond the surface, the tavern across the road was open late, which meant vehicles coming and going and a car park that was not going to look strange with something parked in it. A bus is conspicuous in an empty lot and almost invisible in a busy one.

Anth slept fine. Sal did not. The rain came through in the night and came down hard, and rain on a roof is one of the better things about living in a vehicle, ordinarily enough to put the pair of us under within minutes. It was not enough here. It laid itself over the town without covering it, and everything underneath kept coming through: engines, doors, voices, the general low churn of a place that does not properly stop. Sal is a light sleeper at the best of times and a town at night is not the best of times. She lay awake through a good deal of it and came out the other side with a firm position, which was that next time there would either be earplugs involved or there would not be a next time.

In two and a half years on the road we had never done this. Not once. The rule, unspoken but consistent, had always been to make the extra drive and get clear of the town before stopping, and we had kept to it from Queensland to Tasmania and back up again without ever really examining why. Now we had broken it for a shopping centre car park in Canberra, and the only thing that could be said in its favour was the thing that had made us do it.

Five minutes to the school gate in the morning. That was the entire argument, and the rain had made it a better one than it deserved to be. Whether it was worth the night underneath was Sal's to decide, and she had a week to think it over before the question came round again.Read more