A Few Stops Too Soon

Torrin had another outpatient visit to keep in Melbourne, his second, with two more still to come before he could leave for Canada. Beyond them sat a ski season and a flight now only weeks away. Every day he spent travelling with us carried that knowledge quietly inside it, and none of us mentioned it much.

Anth and Torrin caught the morning train out of Traralgon. Sal stayed in town with the bus and gave herself a town day: the small errands that never quite run out, a coffee drunk while it was still hot, and a little work at her own pace with nobody waiting on her. After a week of three people sharing one bus, the quiet felt like something she had been given.

At Richmond, Anth stepped off and walked a kilometre past the MCG to catch a connecting train out to Lachie’s. Lachie was a friend from the trials, one of the people that strange, shut-in world had given Anth over the years, and it was to his place that two parcels had been sent. One was the new tripod, the replacement Sal had been doing without, filming her videos on the little GorillaPod and making do. The other held parts for the bus from Japan, to be fitted by a mechanic some other day. Anth carried them back toward the city with the satisfaction of a man ticking off a list.

Torrin rode on alone to his appointment. Anth had sat through enough of those follow-ups himself to picture it exactly: the forms, the needle, the wait. Now it was his son in the chair, turning weeks of confinement into a season in the snow. It was the same trade Anth had been making for years.

The two of them found each other again at Flinders Street with minutes to spare, and were on the train home before either had properly caught his breath.

Then Bleach came out on the laptop. Anth and Torrin had started the anime together many years ago, and on this ride home they were into the very last season. The city thinned behind the window, then the suburbs, then the paddocks, and neither of them looked up. Somewhere in the middle of an episode Anth caught himself doing a sum he hadn’t meant to start: how many episodes were left, and how many weeks. Neither number was large. He kept it to himself and turned back to the screen.

A station name came up, near enough, and they were out on the platform with the parcels before the sign had properly landed. Trafalgar. Not Traralgon. A few stops short, and the train already pulling away. That left two grown men, one new tripod and a box of Japanese bus parts with half an hour on a country platform to consider how alike two names can be when you are not really listening.

When the right station finally came and the three of us were together again, we set our sights on CRB campsite, up in the high country. A few hours on, the light was going and we were nowhere near it. We could have pushed through. But in nearly three years on the road the two of us had never hit an animal, and that record is kept by refusing exactly this: the dusk drive, the last hour when everything with legs is on the move. We checked WikiCamps instead and found a place to do us in between, right on the bank of the Tambo River.

There was no one else there. We slid the bus in beside the water, the day’s warmth still rising out of the ground, and Torrin pitched a tent behind it. After dark, Anth and Torrin took torches down to the river’s edge. They came back later than they’d meant to, pleased with themselves, telling Sal about the frogs they had found along the bank, interesting enough to keep them crouched there longer than either intended.

We fell asleep to those same frogs, calling from the water’s edge while the river slid past in the dark on its way down to the lakes. A few metres behind us, through the bus wall and the thin skin of a tent, Torrin was hearing them too. In a few weeks there would be an ocean between us. Tonight there was a stretch of riverbank, some frogs, and the three of us within the sound of them.

In the morning Torrin had the tent down and rolled before Sal had finished her coffee. The bus was packed and ready. We pulled away from the Tambo and started climbing into the high country again, toward the camp we hadn’t reached.Read more