The Week We Started to Come Apart

Sophie came down from Sydney, three hours on the bus, her clinical trial finished and paid out. She was funding her travels the way her brother funded his and the way her father had funded most of the journey, by lying still in a facility for a set number of days and letting somebody take blood. There was a second reason for the timing. Sal's birthday fell on the Sunday.

Before that, there was pool. Jan and a few of her regulars had a standing thing at the local pub and asked whether we wanted to come along, so we did. Neither of us played often, for the straightforward reason that a pool table was not among the things that would fit in a bus, and the gap between games tended to be measured in months rather than days. We held our own regardless. Whatever the game had left in us had stayed put.

On the way home we picked up Chinese, and it turned into an early birthday dinner on a weeknight, which was the sort of celebration that happened when the people were in one place and the date was still a few days off. Sophie arrived just in time for it, which was either good planning or good luck and did not much matter which.

It was at the house that Grammy said she was going home.

Not because she wanted to. She was clear about that. She would have kept going, and said so, and there was no sense of a woman who had run out of appetite for the road. It was the heat. Queensland was warming up and the forecast had storms in it, and the idea of being out in the van through the worst of that, on her own, did not appeal. Better to make the run north while the weather still allowed it than to be caught partway through later on. So she started getting ready to leave, and the convoy that had rolled out of Gympie in June, two vehicles keeping pace with each other for three months, quietly acquired an end date.

There was work to do before she could go. Both water pumps in her van had failed, one of them recently and the other almost the day we all left. She had ordered replacements, and Anth spent a while in the van fitting them, which was a good few hours of lying awkwardly in a confined space with a torch. He had time to think about what the job amounted to while he was doing it. He was getting a vehicle ready for a long drive that we would not be on.

In the same stretch of days a 3D printer arrived from Amazon. It was not standard equipment for a mobile home and Anth knew it, but there was a running list of small things that would improve the bus, brackets and mounts and fittings that either did not exist or cost more to have made than to make at home, and the printer would pay for itself somewhere down that list. So it came aboard.

Two jobs, then, in the one week. New pumps into a van that was leaving, and a printer into a bus that was staying.

The house sit came to its end, second week and last, and we crossed the city to Jan's. By Sunday everyone would be in the one place: Sophie down from Sydney, Jan and Jess, Grammy with her van part packed for the run north. It was a well-timed birthday. The whole lot of us in one room, in the week the lot of us had started to come apart.Read more