Dedication
For Caitlin and Claire.
And for Bob and Luc.
Prologue
A lone woman sits at a scratched table in a bleak hut. Alone, but in rapture with all that is good and bad about love and solitude. She has attended to all the morning's chores, listened to La Bande Originale, and now is silent and uncertain of what to do next. The shutters are closed against the assault of the mistral. Being inside and still leads her to a kind of contemplation, an interrogation of loss: a haunting of her new husband and his family. Wondering dogs her. Not that at times she does not despise this her only friend, but she learns to be led.
Thus her memory meanders, like her wayward sewing threads: the weft of time weaving it into line, not as chronological time, but as sensory time. She imagines the donkey trails of old France, their meaning revived and rewritten each time she attempts that same route from one place to another. The woman wants to keep a record because she has little else to do. She imagines the writing will bring to her daily life a purpose; a semicolon against the unravelling. Nothing grand will be achieved, rather a steering away from the spectre of loneliness, the shadow of a spell, causing her to pause and draw deep breath in the place in which she stood.
That place is France; and three distinct places within, which she summons as if they are something she has swallowed. Where she begins the remembering is a derelict mobile home rented from gypsies. A hut with three views: the first being the outdoor latrine which she and her husband dug in turns, grimacing at the limestone, and over which she cobbled together a shelter; their second view being the cyclone fence of a rifle range which could not conceal the beauty of trees beyond it; and their third view, which she ingested without being close enough to savour or inhale, being the distant hills of Les Alpilles in their soft violet blue rise and fall, reminding her of home in Australia.
But Freya had had two previous homes in France. The first was Auriol, the second La Ciotat. She writes out of necessity: to explain to herself her alteration. To tell of how each place grew into her, grafting her. Finally she realizes that being untethered from home puts her on the path between all of her homes. It is along that path where Loup and she found each other, deserted each other, and where she later returned, believing that she might retrieve what they had lost. The woman alone. Her ego resisting the idea that she is no longer young, clings to the idea that memory is the salve to prepare her for what is to come.
Freya suddenly finds her beginning. She shoves her chair back on the faux-timber plastic floor, pleased with the result of her morning’s sweep and scrub, and strides a couple of metres to their bed, squeezing sideways between the bowing wall and her side of the bed to retrieve her secreted ‘emergency’ two litre bottle of water, and her laptop which she hides under the mattress. She boils water on the camping stove, inhales deeply the aroma of her Orange Pekoe Broken Tea Leaves, (the intriguing and exact title of the leaf tea she has triumphantly found in the distant Carrefour supermarché), and arranges her laptop on a pile of books on top of her bike box.
Freya decides she will write whilst standing.
Terra Australis, The Nullarbor Highway.
“Go west young man, and grow up with the country.” John B Lane Soule, the Terre Haute Indiana Express,1851.
“The sea is where the sun goes at the end of the day, where it lives while you sleep. I have a fix on things when I know where west is.” Tim Winton, Land’s Edge.
It is October 1998. The afternoon sun sears my eyes; sweat drips into them, adding insult to injury. The flesh between my legs feels permanently damaged. This is why you came here, I remind myself, for the western sun and the pain.
Push pedal pump push pedal pump push pedal pump.
I welcome the physical pain; its straightforwardness is refreshing, obliterating every sordid panic that I had previously endured. I am in love with the stark simplicity of my ride. Every morning I crawl out from my tent, light my little stove for my first majestic cuppa, hoe into fruitcake or dates and nuts, and then pack up my city, my roving planet. Everything that is important to me must be carried by me. I remember when I was younger, returning from my inaugural solo backpacking tour, declaring piously, ‘From now on, I am getting rid of all unnecessary stuff. From this day forward, I am acquiring only what I can carry on my back.’ Such fabulous idealism lasted a week in the real world.
Now, eight days into my ride from Adelaide to Perth, via as many coastal and desert detours as possible, I have already posted excess things home. First to go was my helmet. Second was my bulky K-Mart sleeping bag. How is a puny plastic bike helmet going to save me from a monster road train that needs a whole kilometre in which to brake?
I am haunted by the tragedy of a Japanese cyclist freshly killed by one such goliath. Not the driver’s fault. Nor the cyclist’s. How can one assign blame in this devastation? As it was told to me, the cyclist was turning in from a side road, just before sunrise, with no headlamp on. It appears he was sucked into the slipstream between two road trains travelling in tandem. The first driver radioed his colleague behind to say watch out for the crazy cyclist, but the response, ‘What cyclist?’ spelled the horror of what had just happened. Gone in a split second, pulverised under the 50-metres long, 200-ton leviathan. The woman behind the counter in the roadhouse recounts this to me as a cautionary tale; scalding and adding rhetorically ‘Don’t you have family?’
I could understand her disapproval, given that she and her husband and neighbouring farmers were the small group that had to meet and greet the disconsolate Japanese family. Friends of hers were down on their knees upon the tar; scraping up bits and pieces of flesh, cradling what might have been a hand, a heart, a smile. ‘And the driver,’ she admonishes, ‘spare a thought for the road train driver whose life has been scarred forever’. As I pedal slowly past the memorial site…. flowers still fresh… a mute Japanese flag fluttering…. the wound in the road still blood stained…. I momentarily doubt the rightness of what I am attempting. If I never see my daughters again, that would be the most wrong thing I had ever done.
Still, I posted the helmet home. Its absence may even teach me to ride with more caution. Although, riding until 11 o’clock at night just to get to Iron Knob, a forgotten mining town as gritty as its name suggests, was close to the most wrong thing. I refused to stay put in Port Augusta, a big town. But too late, it became evident that the highway was under reconstruction. All along its tacky-tar edge, I careened into dark ditches to avoid forcing a road train to swerve. Experience taught me that these drivers, although they thought me hare-brained, were kind and respectful. It was important to keep them on my side.
Arriving in Iron Knob, shaking with exhaustion, cold and fear…what was this god-forsaken place, where ghosts linger behind boarded-up windows, dogs growl, and the smouldering end of a lone cigarette glowers through a cyclone fence? The only place to stay is the desolate motel beside the highway, but its bell is unresponsive. I push my bike up a dim lane, looking for a likely door to knock upon. Thinking this itself might outweigh the stupidity of riding at night or posting home those things that were supposed to save me.
Instead, I am greeted by a man with radial-tyre skin wearing short pyjamas, who willingly sends his wife back down the lane with me to open up the motel. My room for the night is a shipping container; cast aside in orbit from the main hangar. This separation pleases me.
‘I am sorry, I can’t offer you any food, do you have enough to eat tonight?’ says the tanned, Scandinavian-boned woman.
‘Oh yes thank you, I’ll
