The Drive Home

I looked out the car window at the pastels of pink, blue, mauve and yellow painted sky, day was falling away making way for night to emerge. He missed the turn-off and I asked anxiously, “Do you know where you are going?”, “Yes, why?” “That was the turn off, do you want me to drive?” I asked without really meaning it. “No, it’s ok I know where we are.” I looked out at the distant hills that seemed to be covered with a sheath of haze and recalled other hills in my homeland thousands of miles away. He was taking the longer route home, but otherwise showed no signs of his actions just minutes before, the coup de gras performed on an injured kangaroo, he said best not to leave it dying in pain and pulled out his pen knife and slit the animal’s throat. The kangaroo had been hit by a car in front of us and the driver just kept on driving with the now blood splattered bull bar. My husband always seemed to pick up the pieces of someone else's carelessness or misadventure. It had been a long drive home and still it felt surreal. The morning had been spent in hospital watching mother lie in what looked like a shroud, white starched sheets tucked up around her body, her eye rims black from lack of sleep but closed nevertheless, I listened to the short gaspy breaths of someone who had forgotten how to breathe, tubes stuck in her nose, in her hand and around her heart. It was our decision they said whether to pull all the tubes off and let her die, it would be quick they reassured us and painless. Though I had often thought of this moment as the easy part, saying yes was harder than expected. My husband held my hand and whispered, “best not to hang on, she’s already gone.”

We drive on in silence too connected to say anything, too preoccupied with our own thoughts to interrupt them. My anxiety subsides. I watch the various shades of green gently fold around us, the shadows are falling now, it will soon be dark, summer seems to have been so short lived. Is there a reason to go home I wonder, but there is no other destination just now, better an empty house than none at all. Up ahead more road works, and a middle-aged man in a fluorescent green vest weaves in and out of stalled traffic with a large plastic money box, asking drivers for donations to feed the homeless and hungry. I reach for my bag and pull out a few gold coins. The man passes by my window and I wave to him to stop. “Why thank you very much,” he nods and then moves to the next car. I am lucky to have a home and reflect on how tenuous that is. Mother had left her home, the only place she had ever known, jumped on a train from Greece to Germany hoping that my dad would meet her at the other end and that they had a place to live, a home. A leap into the unknown, a foreign land, no ties except for what they would create. I tried to retrace that journey many years later, as a middle-aged educated woman with children of my own. It was not possible to retrace her journey, the train from Athens to Munich was no longer offered. We flew to Germany instead and caught the train to Nuremberg where I once lived as a toddler and I marvelled at the comfortable, efficient German trains as we travelled through the countryside. The scenery flashed past us, large farms carefully maintained, smaller allotments with neatly arranged wooden cabins and sheds, fields divided into perfect rows each with their designated crop, and the sun reflected off the solar-panelled roofs which were installed on any flat surface facing the sun, everything organised and in its place, orderly, and unnaturally restrained like the people that lived there. I could see the forests beyond, on the fringes, with their dark timbers and thick dark green leafage intimating a larger more untamed land and past. The Black Forest is more than just a fairy tale, or place within the imagination. I compare the Australian scrubland we pass with that in Germany and it seems to lack the sinister heaviness, the dark shadows of ghosts of ancestors long forgotten but never at rest. The blood shed here has not caught up, yet. 

“When’s the funeral?” he asked.  “At the end of the week. We’ll have to drive back up for it.” He nodded, “best to drive up, we may have to collect things from her flat.” Although we had downsized mum from house to house then to a small flat when dad died she kept accumulating things, a habit she could not stop, it gave her a sense of having achieved something in coming to this foreign land. Then there were the shoes, hundreds of pairs, her and Imelda Marcos would have understood each other. I outgrew her shoes by the time I was twelve, so I would have to dispose of them, pity, she always bought the best. My mind wandered as I mentally scanned her fully furnished flat packed in every corner with things on shelves or in boxes stacked against each other, anywhere there was a space there were things she had bought over the years and the vision gave me a headache – another emptying, her life and mine. At the same time a weight was being lifted, a heaviness that would take some time to disintegrate. With each death there is an unpacking, physical things are replaced with the less tangible shadows of past experiences as they flood back demanding attention. 

I shake my head as if that would dislodge my thoughts and again focus on the scenery passing by my window. There was a sudden clank and the car dropped slightly on the right on its back wheel. “I’ll have to pull over, we’ve got a flat tyre,” he said resignedly. “I’ll ring the NRMA no point in us trying to change it.” We pulled over and waited watching the traffic stream past, some too close for comfort. The sun was starting to set and the sky was turning a greyish pink with patches of yellow folding towards the horizon. I decide to get out of the car to view the sky more closely and look for wildflowers in the bush beside the road. “Don’t go far, they shouldn’t be long now, Sweetheart.” I nod and walk further in keeping close to the bushland. There on a small mound I hadn’t seen before was a handmade wooden cross tied together with blue ribbon and a bunch of now wilted flowers taped to the middle bar, together with a handwritten note “RIP Danny.”   Strange that we would breakdown at this spot. I recall similar road signs, some more elaborate in wooden and glass boxes with a photograph of the deceased and a lit wick floating in a small bowl of oil and water like an eternal flame for a soul lost too soon. They seemed to be one on every street in Greek villages where the young relied on their faith in God and the icons they hung in their cars or around their necks rather than on careful driving, recklessness was considered a rite of passage and if they made it to old age, they devoted themselves to prayers and attending church. 

I walked a little further, but the stench of death hit my nostrils, some poor animal, now a carcass, lay up ahead, and I decided to return to the car, death seemed to be following me. There were always dead animals on the side of the road when we drove on the road to the coast, especially during school holidays when the traffic to holiday destinations thickened and carelessness and speed collected wildlife casualties. It was on one such return trip from our coastal holiday that we experienced a flat tyre and had to wait, like now for roadside assistance. The car was full of holiday experiences, two young children, two dogs, a trailer load of boogie boards, eskies, and suitcases. Luckily, we were not on the steep mountain but closer to home when the trailer got a flat tyre, with no spare we had no choice but to call for help. We let the dogs out for a run and sniff while we waited, and the children sang songs and played eye spy. The drive home interrupted.

As I returned to the car a van with flashing lights pulled up and a young man in mechanics uniform got out. “Hiya, a flat tyre eh?” My husband called out, “yeah that’s right, there’s a spare in the boot.” The whole operation, pumping up the car, removing and replacing the tyre took only a few minutes, it is always the waiting that chews up time. We have so little time. I got back into the car, and we began our drive home again. The sun was falling now, and the red palette was being swallowed by more sombre tones of purple-grey. The sun sets the same way overseas, falling into a horizon we can barely see, as the earth turns imperceptibly. When visiting the Greek island of Lesbos, on our Greek Odyssey trip, we used to watch the sun set over the city and the villages perched on the hillside while sipping wine on the back veranda and waiting for the coolness evening promised but didn’t quite deliver. The heat was less intense when the sun set, but the noise from local activity and tourists increased to a crescendo as the night drew on. My husband looked out over the distance and counted the lights on each mountain ridge, and we followed the bus with our eyes as it journeyed up the mountain then park outside a large house or small hotel. It was the same every night, a happy routine as we etched the scene, the experience into our memory. Those four weeks on the island of Lesbos we often recalled with fondness.

“Almost home. You must be tired, it’s been a long day,” I say and reach out to hold his hand. He smiled, “yes it has been.” It was another lifetime, or so it seemed when he drove our clapped-out Ford Falcon station wagon right round Victoria, our first long road trip and trip away. “Where would you like to go?” he asked a younger me. “Queensland, Victoria or out west?” I thought about it briefly before I replied, “let’s go south through Victoria.” So we did. We left on Christmas Eve straight after work, packed a mattress, clothes, cooking utensils and food into the back of the car and drove out of the city an adventure beckoning. A week driving four or five hours a day in the morning before the real heat hit and then camping wherever we could find shade and a creek. A lot of ground covered in a week, almost 3,000 kilometres I recollect. We made camp before sunset lit a campfire and cooked whatever we had bought along the way and sipped wine and looked at the stars before crashing on the mattress and covering the window with mosquito netting. I shake my head gently, skipping through each memory. “Are you okay love?” he asks. “Yeah, just remembering another drive.” I look out the window and note we have turned into our street.  It is dark now and the cul-de-sac is quiet, our front porch light comes on as we drive into the carport. We are home for now, yet far from that other home we yearn for but cannot have, the home of our early childhood and of our ancestors. We are like the plants plucked from the land they are native to and transplanted elsewhere far away, we survive but we have a memory of what we have have lost, and long to be reunited with. I wonder whether mother ever found a home, a peace. As I approach the house I hear the sounds of children’s voices, squeals of laughter as they are being hosed down by their dad, dogs barking excitedly, and realise these sounds are in my head of times past, memories that are wrapped around this house and garden. Memories of our transplanted lives overwhelms my senses of a far deeper connection I struggle to understand. I recall the sound of children and dogs in the Greek village I was born in and the freedom that we were allowed as we scampered up hills and searched for adventures in the spaces adults neglected. The past and present mingle in a montage of sounds and pictures, sounds and smells, and I breathe deeply to link it all together within me. I notice a dead bird on the path and its lifetime partner cooing gently by its side. I point it out to my husband who sighs and without words finds a trowel and picks up the dead bird whispering comforting words to its mate. I follow him to the vegetable patch where I know he’ll bury it, under the plum tree where our dogs are buried. We say a small prayer and as we walk back to the house he wearily says, “I’m glad to be home, aren’t you?” I hesitate briefly, “yes.”

Have I Aged?

She stares at me without embarrassment, I look at her wrinkled face, a light makeup dusted on her cheeks, a line of blue on her eyelid and glance away. Does she know me, or I her, it is hard to say. I walk on by and there are many faces that pass by, none look my way and I see no-one I know, or so I think. The years have played on by on some instrument, the song long repeated, each song a chapter in our book, an event we recall when its music plays and we are who we’ve always been a young person with hopes and dreams, but body betrays us, starts to deteriorate in ways we we cannot see, the mirror lies we say that face is of another much aged. I complain that everyone has gone, that those I befriended in my youth have long departed for places we overlooked, distant shores or cities we cannot afford to visit, the meandering youth turn into grey nomadic tribes looking to live their final days on shores that revive and let them forget their age. It is when I look upon my progeny, I see myself reflected back, a young face, a brightness of eye, a sharp wit, a healthy stride and realise then that this is them not me and I must have aged if not within them externally. She stops me walking on and says “Do you not remember me, we were friends back then, stayed up all night at parties, smoked the weed as it was passed on from hip lip to lip, drank far too much and were sick. Do you not remember them, the friends we met back then?”

If she remembers me then why not I her in the creases of her brow, the scrunched up corners of her mouth, the voice that waivers as if it struggles to maintain the rhythm of the sound a word makes. Surely I cannot have aged if she recognises me for the youth I once was, had been. I search my memories, the pages of my book, yellowed now from dusty nooks, and sunlight streams too many leaks in closed corridors forgotten by the years of rearing kids and caring for parents now in their final hours. There was a time when before the labour of each day I had no plan, no rope to tie me down, no barriers to a future unseen, the endlessness of possibilities, when time did not pass or so I believed and time was in plentiful supply, there is time I said for everything and then there is time for me to be set free from days bound to the desk where light was filtered in, measured in the hours of the working day till night fell and released we went and played. Was she one of them? The one we met at the bar, smoked cigarettes and raged against the barbarity of mankind, holding onto our beloved’s arm, or seeking out a lover for the night, was she that friend that I relied upon to help me find my way to something else? There was that friend with dark brown eyes, and dark brown hair, with golden voice and full of rage who smiled and laughed and didn’t care if she was liked or loved or not, or she pretended this fearlessness but with the years bitterness swept her up before she died much too young, wrinkles never quite surfaced, her firm white flesh and bright eyes instead were buried in the afterlife. This memory of the one that died a reprimand for my longing of my youth that hides beneath this skin this look of aging in motion. 

I swim among the crowd that seems to surge in ebbs and flows around the fringes of my life and it all seems so foreign and apart, so different to the merriment of those friends I had, the fun we made, the laughter that sang within our eyes, the trepidations of our heart, “You’ll have laughter lines he said” I took umbrage and he replied, “it only shows that you have loved life, no criticism meant, no insult intended, enjoy it now.” Again I laughed and he filled my glass with more red wine. 

I seemed to have lost those apparitions of the past, they have faded into memories like sepia photos over time, I can’t see their faces in the passing crowd, no common smile, or wink that says, I know you and you me, lets have a drink. They have all aged beyond recognition, their skin a pale yellow, their hands blotched in aging spots, their gait a slow weighted step aided by the cane they now hold in their hand to direct their tread. Where is the sprite that leapt ahead, or with confidence placed each step without a thought or weariness? The body sheds with every year its bold luminescent sheen turning softer losing tightness, as if it has a leak through which life’s breath and substance disappears. 

“I was once your age,” another said, and I did not believe her then for her skin much changed, her figure lost form, how could she have been beautiful at all? Now I repeat that line to others that are disinclined to listen but through politeness nod their heads, “I’m sure you were I’ve seen pictures of you when you were young.” The words bite into my consciousness and I shake the tremor from my thoughts, “But I’m still young inside my head.” They smile and turn away to speak to their peers who know the lingo of the current trend. I sigh and look around the room, hoping to catch the eye of someone who can speak the language of the mind. The faces I compare to those of old, the partying types that we often met when out and about painting the town red, that’s what it was called back then, now they look at you and laugh when you tell them that, “why red?”. 

I ring my friends, a closer much smaller group, to catch their voice, their passing years, to reminisce about our times and brood about the fearful times ahead. “Do you remember Monica?” I confess I haven’t seen her for quite a while, “Well you won’t, she’s dead. Died from cancer just last week.” I take a breath, and reflect how many faces now turned old I should not regret to be told that I am one of them, those who have survived middle-age. 

The woman with the persistent stare has followed me through the crowd touches my arm gently to stop and turn around, “It is you, I recognise your face, surely you remember me, from ’82 the year you moved interstate?” I flip through the pages of my book and settle on a look of a youngish single mum with a voice I loathed but who had back then a kindness of touch. “Oh yes, now I remember, you were once a friend.” We tarry awhile and exchange the niceties of the day, a quick summary of where we’ve been, but who we are now does not meld and I remark, “well we will have to catch up some time, I have to go now.” She nods and shakes my hand then we both go our way. The path I walk is my alone, shared with those who chose to stay and those I lose along the way, are fallen leaves that have had their part in forming who I am right now.