As Kevin gazed at the road ahead, his blue eyes narrowed. Furrows of wrinkles splayed out from his eyes; he’d cultivated a few new rows since I’d seen him last.
I turned to the window. We’d left behind the smattering of houses perched along Constant Creek and drove along the road through the cane fields toward the mountains where Grandma’s little farm was hidden away in the rainforest.
‘It’s been a dry spring,’ Kevin said. ‘Been having to water the new citrus trees your mum put in.’
‘So much for the wettest part of Queensland then.’
‘Yeah.’
This is what we were reduced to. Weather talk.
We passed the servo on the opposite side of the road and I twisted around to look at the rusted sign. A loose panel flapped in the wake of the ute. Someone had painted (in the sixties, I was pretty sure) a picture of a Brahman bull, some sugar cane and a tractor ploughing a field.
Welcome to Kelly’s Crossing – Population 750
Lock up your daughters, folks.
‘Seven hundred and fifty people. Bloody hell, this place is such a dump,’ I said to no-one in particular.
Kevin shook his head. ‘More like six-fifty now. Since they closed the mill.’
‘Or six-forty-nine,’ I said, thinking of Mum.
Kevin glanced sideways. ‘Your mum said you used to love coming here when you were little. Kelly’s Crossing too small for you these days?’
It had always been small, and even though I’d spent school holidays here, it was always hard to get used to the smallness all over again.
Not far from the petrol station we passed a guy wearing long hippy-style pants and a singlet walking with bare feet along the bitumen. Kevin didn’t slow down as the boy stepped off the road to let us pass. Through my dusty window I caught a glimpse of dark, straggly hair falling around serious black eyes.
‘Who’s that?’ I said.
‘Matthew Bright.’
‘Bright?’
‘His mum’s renting the Harrisons’ farm next door to us.’
‘Why didn’t you give him a lift then?’
‘It’s only half a kilometre.’ Kevin glanced into the rear-vision mirror.
‘Not very neighbourly of you,’ I said, twisting and looking through the back window as the guy shrank away. I knew the code of outback Queensland roads. You always offered people lifts, especially if you knew them.
‘Do you want me to stop?’
‘No, it’s too late now.’
I rested my head, cradled by my hand, against the window. An overwhelming feeling of homesickness ached in my chest. But I had no home to be sick about. Grandma’s farm didn’t belong to me and I didn’t belong to it. Despite that, the longing remained there in my chest, a hollow yearning for something that didn’t exist. If home is where the heart is, my heart was definitely a vagrant.
We didn’t speak as we drove through the top gate of the farm. When I saw the same carved wooden sign from my childhood, Kingfisher Farm, excitement whispered through me, my five-year-old anticipation of seeing my grandma or of riding Rocket, the old racehorse she kept in the home paddock. Then, just as quickly, the feeling was gone. I couldn’t hold on to it. It seeped away like water through sand, like the residue of a pleasant dream that slips from your waking mind no matter how hard you grasp at the fleeting fragments.
The ute rolled and rattled down across the small gully and then up along the winding dirt driveway until the arching forest opened up to reveal the farmhouse, set in a clearing with the mountains looming up behind it. As we drove through the house gate I saw our two cows grazing in a small dry paddock to the right of the house. Mum’s small orchard and vegetable patches flanked the other side.
Mum and Kevin were supposed to be renovating Grandma’s house, but the old Queenslander’s roof was still rusty, the white paint still flaking from the walls in sheets like tissue paper, and the veranda still wonky with its missing railings. Kevin had mowed the square of browning buffalo grass in front of the house, but apart from that, the leggy shrubs and unweeded garden under the giant flame tree told me he wasn’t keeping up with all the work.
‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ I said.
Kevin glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘It’s getting there.’
Over near the shed and garage I noticed various vehicle corpses nestled in their own little garden of weeds. But there was no sign of Mum’s old FJ ute. A crucial part of the Swiss Cheese Effect, apart from Kevin not going with Mum the day of the show, was that if she had been driving the FJ instead of the Datsun she wouldn’t have died. It was such a solid hunk of metal, she would have made better time in it and she would not have fallen asleep at the second she passed that big tree. But the FJ was gone now. Kevin must have sold it.
Another ute, like Mum’s but rusted out and missing the doors, had appeared since I was last home, along with the body of a white Commodore, its windscreen a spider web of silver cracks.
‘What’s with all the wrecks?’ I said.
‘Parts,’ he said, pulling on the handbrake. ‘I’m working from home a bit.’
‘They still got you on at the mechanic’s in town?’
‘Yep, part-time, but I do some repairs and things here.’
The sight of the car wrecks made my skin crawl. I didn’t know how Kevin could stand having these horrible reminders in the yard. I tried not to think about what the Datsun would look like now, but the image of a twisted hunk of metal came to mind unbidden. It didn’t matter. I was used to that image. I could handle
