- Gangly on the brake pedal, trouble with boots
The trip ends like a spoof. She goes gangly on the brake pedal and I go too short in the leg to reach the button that will release my bag from the boot. We know the coach has left the station but we work the farce for the fun of it and, hell, when you’ve faked that many hook turns you have to at least go through the motions of trying.
It’s peak hour for three hours in the Melbourne CBD each evening and we have swum into this show of lights and glinting metal like unwitting minnows against a seasonal salmon migration. Yesterday she nearly mounted the median strip swerving down sunlit lanes in mild midday suburban traffic. Tonight, she has a dangerously entertaining reputation to maintain.
We cross two lanes, perform an illegal hook turn across an intersection hosting eight different directional options, cut off a police car, swing around 180 degrees to face due east again, sidle across two more lanes and wait patiently for the light to turn green. This last manoeuvre is a token courtesy rather than a genuine concession recognising the primacy of traffic regulations.
“You’re not gonna make it. We’ll drive you to Avalon,” she tells me.
“It might be running late,” I offer meekly.
I’m the dummy who booked for the wrong airport, basing the decision on aesthetic preferences rather than proximity.
Say it out loud and you’ll understand: “I’m leaving on a night flight from Avalon”.
Okay, now this: “I’m leaving on a night flight from Tullamarine”.
Got it? So, now you can see how all this started and how legs went gangly and I turned into an exasperated Kevin in an episode of the Wonder Years, trying to get into his older brother’s stop-starting car. (Or in my case, weak with giggling as I try to salvage my bag from the boot of my friend’s car as she decides where and whether to park.) Now you’ve got the picture, throw in the large glass of Verdelho I had with pizza only fifteen minutes ago.
Suddenly, you’ve got yourself a lady with her coarse dyed-black hair escaping its half-hearted chignon, dragging a suitcase, juggling hand luggage, and scrambling cash, coins and ticket back into a purse, as she is asking the wrong driver if this is the coach to Avalon and he is telling her “No” and pointing to the right enormous white block with wheels just departing.
Then the lady is running to another driver, with wild questioning eyes and her skirt blooming and he is asking her, “Avalon?” although he already knows and her entire audience of passengers waiting for the quick coach trip to Tullamarine know too. And the second driver is walking briskly, purposefully out of the coach parking bay and signaling to the departing coach. And now, there is a moment filled with every kind of waiting (wrapped around the lady’s huge swell of rising dread at the possibility of such public disappointment) where the Tullamarine audience falls respectfully silent as it watches for what hearkens from behind the blackened windows of the departing coach. But the coach slows, turns and pulls into the bay in front of the lady.
(Had a man emerged from that coach and kissed her, she knows there would have been applause but this is a simple, singular and everyday romance painted only slightly larger by the complexities and diversity of the fuels involved.)
A couple of the passengers smile sheepishly at me as I make my way, shaking with the rush, down to one of the darker seats at the back. I have made a panoptical spectacle of myself and now it is time to slink into my seat, repress the excessive heartbeats and pen my Verdelhoed impression of the trip.
Within seconds it seems, the sky has turned a deep velvet blue and Melbourne has become a smattering of sequins pressed upon it. From the back seat, a man’s telephone conversation narrates in baritone the unexpected joys of an extra 24 hours of holidaying that he has somehow been gifted. Soon, this conversation will turn into a soliloquy on the benefits of defining the middle-aged parameters of a romantic interlude from the outset, but we have not reached that point yet. I have also not yet become slightly nauseous with motion, nor noticed that the black fineline pen has leaked all over my fingers. What is actually happening, is that I have started writing this:
As you hand over the fifteen dollars that was ten asked for but should have been twenty (for pizza for three), you flick quickly forward to the knowledge that notes spent now could disrupt the subtle fluctuations of cashflow in a future unspent.
On the bus that will take you to Avalon, a distant airport mistakenly booked and perfectly named, you chance (through palings paced at 10 centimetres walking) upon a dazzling jingle of moonlit coins shining your homeward path, like the coins shining and unspent that sit in your purse and that your throat is already waiting to be grateful for. Four dollars in a vending machine at Avalon will almost quench this begging, desperate new thirst.
I flick the book shut with sudden disgust. It could be the tortured prose. Could just be the coach. More likely, it’s the ugly marriage of both.
- Please do not touch the statue
Avalon airport is a disappointing oasis of white-pebbled gardens, figurative statues that would seem better placed in a Russian space museum and a large neon sign introducing the arrivals as if to the set of a reality TV show. Without the evening spotlights to profile its minor attractions, Avalon would be a tin shed too far away from the distant mountains to even invoke the mystical loneliness of the word ‘remote’.
At check-in, a plain pony-tailed flight clerk too bored with her environment to bother with the airline’s mandatory lip gloss informs me that the plane will be an hour late. Beside her, another ponytailed drone is arguing with the leader of a large Chinese contingency about a stack of maroon passports dismembered from the hands that should be holding each individual one. From within the fuzz of drink, pizza and motion-sick circumspection, I find that none of this bothers me. In a moment, I am past the bag inspection spending my coins on the water, taking several large swigs, pushing into an even-more stubborn smudge the black ink I have suddenly noticed like an unfortunate birthmark across my middle fingers.
The babble of Chinese grows around me. The plastic seat that is to be my new home for the next two hours embraces me warmly. The water acts as coolant on an overheated engine. Tired but content, I settle into the last pages of a good book and I consider this: there are always worse things than a late plane almost missed from a disappointing airport. In fact, everything is probably worse than that particularly wonderful thing. You can be leaving a dear friend behind in another city to go home and face things you’ve spent three days avoiding and that’s okay.
A spoof ending is the best one can probably hope for.
Tags: Avalon, back to reality, coach, erratic driving, Melbourne, night flight
