Where Torrin Had Slept

Nothing gets sheets as clean as a commercial machine. We had kept up with the washing as we travelled, but three people living in one bus for weeks adds up, and some things only come right in a laundromat’s big drum. So Wangaratta began with the lot: every sheet, every towel, and the clothes that had been through high country, river and creek.

Sophie’s birthday had come and gone while we were down on the Buckland, and Torrin’s was a few days off. Tomorrow we would all be in the one city for the two of them, and not long after that Torrin would be on his way to Canada. Everything about this town day pointed at a train.

The rest of it went the way town days go. Rubbish out, water in, the cupboards and fridge filled again. While the machines turned we found a coffee and something to eat, then drove past the station to look at where the bus would wait for us in the morning. It didn’t look too bad. That was all we needed it to be.

The washing came out hot and folded flat, and we headed back out the way we had come, to a free camp at Brown Brothers winery. A few caravans were already settled in. We took the far end, as far from everyone as the ground allowed, the way we always do.

That night Torrin rolled the camping mat out on the floor of the bus instead of pitching the tent, so there would be nothing to pack in the morning. The bus is not big. With him stretched across the floor there was hardly a step to take that wasn’t near him. Sal, the light sleeper, lay awake a while listening to the two of them breathe, one beside her and one below. The bus had held three of us for weeks now. It would not hold three again for a long time.

It was only twenty minutes back to the station, but the bikes had to come inside first. They live locked to the rack on the back, and that had always been enough, but a whole night alone in a station car park was asking too much of a lock. We had done the same at Bairnsdale on the way to collect Torrin, a month earlier, and here we were doing it again on the way to take him somewhere. In they came, wheel by wheel, into the narrow space down the middle of the bus.

We parked under the car park lights, in full view of the station’s security cameras, and locked the doors behind us. Inside, the bikes lay along the floor where Torrin had slept. The train came in, and the three of us went to find Sophie.Read more