Not a Day Had Passed

Of everything Sal's placement at Trinity had given her, the one thing she had not seen coming was Erinn. Somewhere among the forty hours and the school corridors, a face from another life had turned up working there. The little girl Sal had known since she was small was suddenly a grown woman with a family, and an open invitation came with her.

We had spent the best part of a week saying goodbye. Jan and Jess at the pub, then Liz and Jeff in their driveway that same morning, seven weeks of Canberra closing behind us one hug at a time. It felt strange that the road out should lead, in well under an hour, to a hello. Forty kilometres due south of Liz's, over the line out of the ACT and into New South Wales, the suburbs gave way to paddocks. Then came the turn-off to Michelago and a rural gate, and the bus climbed a farm track with Sal sitting forward in her seat.

She had known John and Karen since she was a teenager in Canberra. Church on Sundays, horse-riding camps, Easter after Easter spent camping with their family until it stopped feeling like their family and became something closer to hers. Karen had been her best friend back then, before Jan and Liz, before almost everything. When Sal married, little Erinn walked ahead of her as flower girl. A few years later Sal came back to another of those Easters with a baby on her hip, and the baby was Sophie. Later still the roles turned around, and Sal stood beside Erinn as matron of honour when she married Terry.

Then distance had done what distance does. Nobody chose it. There had been no falling out, only life carrying each family off in its own direction until the years were simply there between them. Sal had wondered, privately, whether those years would show.

They didn't. Within minutes of pulling up it was as though no time had passed at all. Karen and Sal talked the way people do who learned each other's rhythms young: half-sentences, old names, laughter arriving before the end of the story. Erinn, Terry, John, Karen, four children and a Dalmatian all came out to meet the bus. The Dalmatian was Nala, and she decided on Sal at once. Sal, who had gone a long while without a dog to put her hands on, took every chance she got to crouch and rub the soft heads of those spotted ears.

It was spring on the property and everything was beginning. Out in the paddock were lambs a day old, all knees, bleating at nothing. Inside the house an incubator held a clutch of eggs mid-hatch, and we stood over it while one chick worked its way out, wet and furious. The barbecue smoke drifted across the yard and we ate well. John and Karen wanted the road from us, where we had been and how a person lives in a bus, and we told it gladly.

Not everything was new growth. John was moving carefully, recovering from a hip replacement, and said so without any complaint. He was grateful, he told us, because he knew plenty of people who were worse off than him. Karen talked about the hundred acres next door that had been theirs, and the decision a few years back to give it up and retire into town. She did not dress it up. She missed it. She could see the land from here and it was no longer hers to walk.

The afternoon belonged to the children. Erinn and Terry had four: two boys first, Lachy and Harley, then two girls, Bella and Sasha. It was the same order John and Karen's own four had come in, which seemed funnier the longer we thought about it. We played backyard cricket on the grass, and our bowling was honest with us about how long it had been. Then we moved inside for cards, game after game, until Sal offered to teach them Shithead.

She shuffled the deck the way Sophie had shown her on her birthday, three weeks before. Sal thought of Sophie at that table: the game Sophie had brought back from her trial in Sydney, learned in Jan's lounge room and now being dealt out to Erinn's children. And here was the same family who had once held Sophie as a baby at an Easter campsite. For a moment the years ran together in her hands, and she had to look down at the cards and count them again.

We parked the bus on the hill behind the house for the night. From the door the land fell away west across the valley, and beyond it rose the ranges of Namadgi, blue going grey as the sun went down behind them. Somewhere back there, as the crow flies not far at all, was Mount Clear. A fortnight earlier Sophie had pitched our tent there beside the bus, under the same peaks we were looking at now from the far side. Below us a lamb called and its mother answered. A light came on in the house. The ridgeline held the last of the colour for a long time, then let it go all at once, and the cold came up the hill to meet us.

Sal stayed in that remembering state the whole visit, quiet in the way she gets when something old has been handed back to her. In the morning she took her coffee out to the step and drank it while it was hot, looking at the paddock where the lambs were already steadier on their legs.

The goodbye, when it came, was harder than either of us had expected. These were people Sal loved, and she had only just found them again. There was real sadness in her, and real gratitude, and she did not try to choose between them. Karen held on to her a long time. Nala followed the bus as far as the gate.

Halfway down the track Sal turned in her seat and watched the hill until the gums took it.Read more