Both of Them Running Hot

There were three of us in the Bus for the Monday run, Sophie having stayed on, and the shape of the day was familiar enough by now that nobody discussed it. Sal went in at Trinity. The bus went to Bunnings. Soph took herself off to the shopping centre nearby and spent the day in it.

Anth spent his running the printer.

It had been aboard less than a fortnight and it was already the largest single object in the bus that was not part of the bus. There was no room for it, not really. There is no room for anything in a converted Coaster that has not been designed in, and a 3D printer is not a small machine. So it lived where it could and got moved when it was in the way, which was often.

The plan had been settled before it arrived. Print everything on the list, every bracket and mount and fitting that had been sitting on that list for months, and then sell it. The printer was not joining the household. It was a visitor with a job of work to do and a departure date attached to it, and the job was to make enough parts to justify having bought the thing at all. So it ran, most of the day, in a car park at Bunnings, while Anth fed it and watched it and waited.

Monday evening went to Liz and Jeff's again.

A fortnight earlier that driveway had been an intervention. Liz had found out where we had slept and been appalled about it, and the offer had come with some force behind it. This time it was simply where Monday went. Nobody made anything of the arrangement. Sophie took a bed inside the house, we took the bus in the driveway, and the whole thing had the ease of something done twice rather than once.

Jeff cooked. We offered to do our own in the bus, which was the honest offer of people who did not want to be a standing imposition, and he would not hear of it. He was not being polite about it either. There are people who feed others because it is expected and people who feed others because it is what they enjoy doing, and Jeff was plainly the second kind.

Afterwards Sophie taught Liz and Jeff the card game she had brought back from her trial and taught the rest of us on Sal's birthday. It went around the table for a good while. Then we said goodnight and went out to the bus.

Somewhere in that week the arithmetic quietly finished itself. Two days at the school every week had been producing eight hours of one-on-one contact, and with the weeks already behind her the forty required hours were within reach of just a few weeks more. One more Monday and Tuesday and Sal would be done, and the timing put the finish just before the school holidays started.

So there were two things aboard with end dates on them by then. The printer had a list to get through before it was sold, and we had just a few weeks to get through before Canberra was finished. Both of them were running hot.Read more