Exactly as Good as She Remembered

We came back to Liz's on the Sunday this time, a day ahead of the pattern the last few weeks had set. Sophie's coach left the city early on the Monday morning, and a driveway in south Canberra was a far better place to set an alarm from than a frost valley at the bottom of Namadgi.

Jeff cooked again, for the three of us. By now it no longer felt like a favour we were imposing on him; it simply felt like Jeff. We ate in the house and did not linger. Nobody said why the night was ending early, and nobody needed to. Sophie had been with us since just before Sal's birthday: the cards, the Monday runs, a week in our mended tent at Mount Clear with her Merlin list growing by the day. Tomorrow she would be gone again. Little more than a week earlier the bus had sat at the centre of a small crowd, Grammy and Jan and Jess and Soph all under one roof. It was about to be down to the two of us.

We left early on the Monday, early enough that Canberra had not yet gone to work. The roads into the city were ours. The coach went from the Jolimont Centre, right in the heart of town, and we reached it without meeting a single queue of brake lights, which on a weekday morning in any city feels like getting away with something.

We said our farewells to Soph again. It was the second time in six weeks. The first had been indoors at Jan's in August, no next date set, her road and ours running apart; and then her road had simply turned around and found us for Sal's birthday. Now she was bound for Melbourne to screen for another trial, the same road Anth and Torrin had travelled before her. We kept it short. Then she was on the coach, and the two of us were walking back to the bus with the morning barely begun.

The run out of the city was as quiet as the run in. Neither of us said much. Sal watched the empty lanes slide past and counted, without meaning to, the people who had left this month: Grammy north to beat the Queensland heat home, now Soph to Melbourne, each departure on its own sensible schedule, and somewhere a few more weeks ahead, the two of us.

Then it was simply Monday. Another day for Sal at Trinity, the forty hours creeping closer. Another day for Anth in the Bunnings car park, working down the list of small jobs that stood between the bus and the open road. The jobs had changed character without anyone announcing it. For weeks they had been about living in Canberra. Now they were about leaving it.

On the Tuesday, when Anth collected her, Sal had a suggestion. Goodberry's was just around the corner from the school: frozen custard, one of only a few such stores anywhere in the world, she said, and she remembered it from her teenage years as something close to perfect. While we were at it we picked up Kingsley's Chicken as well, another fixed point from her childhood, and took the lot back to the bus under a clear sky and twenty degrees of spring sunshine.

The chicken was fine. The custard was not a contest.

Canberra had been handing Sal back pieces of her own past all winter. The Cotter in the rain, untouched since she was a girl. Mount Clear and its frost. And now this: a taste she had carried for decades without testing it, which is always a risk, because memory is generous and custard is only custard. It held. It was every bit as good as she had promised, and for a moment in the Tuesday afternoon the woman just over a week past her birthday, placement nearly done, her Masters nearly behind her, was also a teenager in this same city, and neither of them was in any hurry at all.

That evening we drove north to Jan's, for one last stay out the front of her place. It was where Canberra had begun for us, back in August: the bus pulled up at her kerb, Grammy's van ahead of it with its roof popped, and Sophie on her way. Now there was no van ahead of us and no Sophie in the house. There was only the bus, the same street, and the two of us, who had arrived here as a convoy and would leave as we had started out.

We parked where we had parked that first night. Six weeks folded up small behind us, and just a few more nights, this time, was all we asked of it.Read more