From a moving car
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 9: Up North
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Meera Atkinson
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It's 1979 and I'm 15, fucked up and restless. My mother and I are living alone after years of domestic violence with her deranged or drunken boyfriends. Finally, everything is quiet. Too quiet. I've long left school, having refused to continue on the grounds that I have no need of a conventional education because I'm going to be an artist. I've killed time learning to be a secretary and a beautician, but am hopeless at both. I'm not going to fit into a job or mainstream society anytime soon. I pass aimless hours roaming the streets of Glebe, daydreaming in Jubilee Park, pondering my prospects and the problem of life, planning my escape, searching for a man with whom to lose my virginity. I'm itching to be an adult. It seems to me far better to be one than to be at the mercy of one. During the day, I visit grown-up friends, like the elderly gentleman around the corner who lets me smoke his cigarettes and drink his beer while we play cards, or the household of prostitute lesbians where I eat Vegemite toast and grill the girls about blow-job technique. I have few friends my own age.
Michelle Rutherford is one of the few and she's my closest friend. The youngest of a large Catholic brood, she goes to St Scholastica's. I've also befriended her brother Pete who lives and works in the district the family has left. He makes trips to the city from time to time. The oldest brothers, James and Jeremy, are legendary, larger than life, and absent. James is a journalist whose career keeps him busy and leaves little time for loitering around home, and Jeremy is travelling somewhere with someone.
One day I went looking for Michelle. The Rutherfords' door is always open; no need to knock and wait for a reply. I walk through the empty house searching for signs of life but find none. I reach Michelle's bedroom where I'm startled to see a tall, sandy-haired guy lying on her bed reading. It's Jeremy. He's just got back from his latest adventure. We talk. We start to spend time together. It feels like destiny. He's not the handsome surfer I've imagined as my chosen one, but to my 15-year-old eyes he is exotic and sophisticated. Most importantly he's available, and for a girl in a hurry that's everything.
Jeremy's not like anyone I've ever known. He's only 21, but he's one of those guys who has the air of an old man. He is bookish and aspires to write, a combination that leads him to imagine he is Humbert Humbert to my Lolita. He smokes roll-your-owns, mumbles and shuffles around barefoot in second-hand suits. His hair is a wiry mess and he drinks vast amounts of wine. I don't know if I'm awed by him or embarrassed by him.
I already understand the currency of sex appeal. I've spent years testing the ways that being cute or sexy or childlike or knowing or suggestive or playful can get me my way, learning the sly art of manipulation. But in my mind, I won't be a woman till I've done it. Overnight we are an item. Jeremy is charmed by my precociousness and promises to take me away.
WHEN JEREMY SPOKE OF HIS TRAVEL, two places stood out as special: Spain and Darwin. When he talked about Darwin it was not the place he waxed lyrical about, it was its mind-set, its experiential essence. He described a magical world populated by a loose-knit network of nomads who crisscrossed each other's lives and days in a cosmic ballet of interdependence and bonhomie. He favoured neither hippies nor punks. The people he liked were too unhealthy, dry and cynical to be the former, and too non-urban, relaxed and anti-fashion to qualify as the latter, although they all shared a contempt for wealth and materialism. The cardinal sin in Jeremy's eyes was pretension. For his generation, who grew up on The Catcher in the Rye, phoney was the worst thing you could be. Somehow Darwin became the symbol of this doctrine, the spiritual home of a tribe of outcasts. It was not a tropical paradise in which to find or lose yourself. It was simply a place to be.
I'm not sure why I latched onto Jeremy's idealisation of Darwin, why going there became an all-consuming mission. Probably it was because it was a vision, and I needed a vision. It was the furthest, most unimaginable site within reach, an irresistible destination.
OUR DEPARTURE IS PRESENTED TO MY FAMILY AS a fait accompli. I tell my mother she has two choices: she can let me go, in which case I'll stay in contact, or else I'll run away. My grandfather drives us up Parramatta Road to look at bombs in second-hand car yards. We buy a puce-pink EK Holden station wagon with orange nylon curtains for a few hundred dollars, throw a mattress in the back, pack it with boxes of books and hit the highway on a crisp autumn day.
The road trip begins sedately enough. Our relationship is new, we're still getting to know one another, or what little of ourselves we'll allow the other to know. I sit in the passenger seat with my feet up on the dashboard watching the world go by, probing Jeremy for his fascinating thoughts and feelings about me, helping make the practical decisions: where we'll stop, for how long and for what purpose. We amble through hippie country: Bellingen, Nimbin, Mullumbimby, stopping for a night of live music in a pub here or there, sleeping in the wagon parked in secluded spots where I practise my fledgling sexual skills and sleep with my underpants drying over the elastic curtain cords.
The car breaks down on a winding road deep in the hinterland of far northern NSW. The local mechanic takes pity on us and tows us to his garage where we live in the wagon for days on end waiting for a new engine. His wife kindly delivers food on a tray every now and then, and we sit in the front seat with a view of her Hills Hoist. I dip into the boxes of books and begin, for the first time in my life, to read. Jeremy has varied taste but he tends toward blowhard writers like J.P. Donlevy, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. I discover the modernist classics: Dorothy Parker and T S Eliot, and later the Beat poets. I learn Eliot's ode to ageing, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
I know I'm pretty and I have a nice body, but that's not good enough. I want to be painfully beautiful, impossibly smart, exceptionally talented, worldly, charismatic, famous and dazzlingly special. I soak everything up; forging and re-imagining my identity with the books my hand is drawn to, with the people I encounter, with the miles we clock up. I gaze out the window fantasising about my future. I know this journey is only the start, and that Jeremy is only the first. I like Jeremy, but even more I like the effect I have on him. I have to admit I'm disappointed in sex. It's not the earth-shattering experience I've been led to expect. I feel cheated. At first, Jeremy's lust for me was fun, but now it's tedious. I try to work out how much I can withhold and how much I must concede to keep the balance of power exactly how I like it. What I do love about sex, what I'm drunk on, is the way that once you hook a man with it, or with the suggestion of it, you can make him do just about anything.
IT WOULD BE ANOTHER FOUR YEARS BEFORE I'd fall in love with a man and sex. In the meantime, I focused on pleasing Jeremy because there was some satisfaction in that. Besides it was strategic: I needed him. The further north we headed, the more profoundly I felt myself in uncharted territory. Each mile pushed the familiarity of my childhood farther behind. The fact that I was utterly lost didn't bother me at all. My only fear was going back, back to childhood, to entrapment, to powerlessness. Anything else, any hardship, deprivation, misgiving or humiliation was tolerable, even desirable, so long as it did not send me back.
I didn't realise how unusual it was for a girl my age to be on the road. If I missed home and my family I did not allow myself to acknowledge it. I was bewildered most of the time but I willed myself to appear at ease. I played the part to convince myself. Always on the move, I couldn't anchor myself or weigh myself down to steadiness, and this was the attraction of the transient life I'd chosen. It was as if I believed I could outrun myself if I moved fast enough, could outwit the terror and grief if I kept one step ahead of it. I amused myself by playing mind games with Jeremy, who flattered me and stroked my endlessly needy ego while providing a small sense of security in contrast to our ever-changing landscape.