This Time It Would Be Years

On the way down from Honeysuckle, Anth made his case. It would probably be years before we were back in Canberra, and there were still flavours at Goodberry's he had not tried. Sal agreed without much of a fight. She had first taken Anth there on the strength of a teenage memory. This was our third visit in nine days, and the second running that had been Anth's idea. He chose something new, and Sal watched him weigh it up as if the decision might have to last him until the next visit, whenever that was.

Then we pulled into Liz and Jeff's driveway for the last time. It had started as a rescue, the evening Liz heard we had spent a night in the Erindale shopping centre car park and was appalled enough to offer us her driveway on the spot. By the fifth stay it was simply where the bus went.

The farewell dinner had been planned for their place. In the end we took it to the local pub instead. Jeff had cooked for us four times in four weeks and had turned down our offer to feed ourselves in the bus, and we had imposed on him enough. The pub was nothing flash. It did not need to be, and the food was beside the point.

What mattered was who sat around the table. Jan, whose kerb in Nicholls had been our first address in the city and very nearly our last, and who had passed us the house sit at Higgins. Jess, who had driven us out for the birthday ice cream. Liz and Jeff, who had turned a passing mention of a car park into a driveway and a hot dinner whenever we needed one. Pete, Jan's old friend, who had sat across a 500 table from us the week before and made it look easy. Jan and Liz had been Sal's closest friends for thirty years. Over the stay they had quietly become Anth's as well. Looking around that table, it was hard to find a single part of the Canberra stay that one of these people had not made easier.

Afterwards we went back to Liz and Jeff's and played cards, the way so many of our Canberra evenings had ended. Then Jan, Jess and Pete headed home. That was the goodbye to Jan and Jess, the one we had been carrying around since the week before, and it came at the end of an ordinary card night. That was probably the right place for it.

The next day we rode. We had organised a ride with Liz, Jeff and Pete on Canberra's bike paths, a network that seemed to run everywhere. Pete is a keen road cyclist who puts in hundreds of kilometres every week and was about to turn seventy one. Liz and Jeff were on electric bikes. We were on our ordinary mountain bikes, the analogue kind, every metre of it our own legs. They were the same bikes Anth had washed two months of road dust off in our first days in Canberra. We kept up with all of them, and were quietly pleased about it. By the end we had covered twenty seven kilometres.

We were a few metres from the driveway, almost home, when Sal's bike made a horrible noise. She stopped. The rear brake rotor had broken away from its mounts. If it had let go out on the ride, it could have been a lot worse. Instead it had held on until the very end, which was more consideration than anyone has a right to expect from a brake rotor. Anth ordered a replacement to be delivered to Bairnsdale, further down the road, where we would pick it up in a couple of weeks.

Canberra had been Sal's city long before it was Anth's. Over the stay it had handed her childhood back to her a piece at a time: the Cotter, Mount Clear, Kingsley's, Goodberry's. On the Saturday we said our goodbyes to Liz and Jeff and pulled out of the driveway one last time. For seven weeks we had left the city and come back to it, Monday after Monday, camp after camp. Then we turned due south and drove out of Canberra, and this time it would be years.Read more