Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

Trevor gave him a little push and so he went ahead and found a rough shed covered with the exact same net that guarded Trevor’s house except here it was threaded with dead vines and saplings like a trash pile.

The boy thought, She should not have left me alone.

Go on, said Trevor. Nothing’s going to bite you.

Inside this shell the boy found a very pretty pale blue car, its axles set on wooden blocks. There was three or four feet between the car and the netting so there was room to admire it properly.

You know what sort of car this is?

No, said the boy, generally relieved.

You like it.

It’s cool, Trevor.

It was dark and strange inside the net, not scary, not at all-the car was so silvery, shiny blue, like ice, or a fall sky. You could also smell the cleaning products and see the little starbursts of sunlight-headlight rims inside the wild stick nest.

It’s got huge fucking petrol tanks, said Trevor. It used to be a rally car. You can drive seven hundred miles in this without stopping. Trevor made a pistol with his finger. Bang, he said. You want to fire it up?

What?

Start the engine.

Thank you, Trevor.

The door wasn’t even locked. The boy climbed up first and slid across behind the wheel.

See the key? Just turn it.

That’s all he did and the engine came to life and Trevor showed him how to get down on the floor and push the pedal to make the engine go real loud. It was clean down there, no dust, nothing but a silver coin which he took and put in the pocket with the paper money. After a while he got sick of being on the floor so they took a brick from the backseat and rested it on the pedal.

Got to keep the battery charged. Trevor explained how that worked. He might as well remember this if he was going to be responsible for Adam’s shitty Peugeot.

The boy did not say he was going home. He learned about the generator and they both squatted in the bush some distance off watching the exhaust smoke drift out into the sunlight and disappear. Trevor produced tobacco from the waist of his sarong and began to roll a cigarette.

Everyone thinks that the road stops up at my place, Trevor said. You look at a map, that’s what it shows. You ask the police, that’s what they’ll tell you, but none of that is true.

The boy paid attention to the police.

There’s an old survey road all the way through here. This is my back door, you understand? I can drive the way we’ve walked. It’s all passable now. There’s nothing to stop me coming out on the Bruce Highway just before Eumundi. So when they come for me, Trevor said, I’m out of here. I’m an orphan, dig it. This is why you need to know me. We learn how to look after ourselves.

I’m not an orphan, said the boy. I’m not!

Hey, take it easy. Trevor ruffled his hair.

The boy pulled away. He felt the man’s upset, his eyes traveling angrily across his scalp, although maybe this was just his imagination.

I’m not going to hurt you, said the man.

My dad would kill you, said the boy.

He’s your dad, said the man. What choice would he have?

The boy’s skin got dark as tree bark. He walked up the hill barefoot. Dial was left below, not knowing what to do. She was waiting, for what, for nothing. Outside the open windows the world was green, fecund, everything rotting and being born, but she did not know how to garden and she got herself trapped in the hut with its miserable yellow moisture barrier between the rustic clapboard and the inside frame. Inside the hut was worse than the place she had been born in-rickety, cobwebbed, no straight line or corner and everything made poisonous looking by the yellow shiny paper. This was the alternative architecture, its most reliable component manufactured by Dow Chemical, Monsanto, 3M.

She made herself drive the car. She had to go somewhere, but she set off along Remus Creek Road not knowing where that might be.

In Nambour she drove past the police station twice. She parked half a block away, still uncertain. Her mouth was dry; she felt sick with the smell of automotive plastics. She locked the car with the windows up, her hands trembling as she did so.

She planned to take one step, then another. She had brought her passport with her. She did not know which way led back to Brisbane.

She came upon a newsagent with a crouching dark veranda and a low doorway. She had planned to ask which way was south but instead she saw the walls were stacked with pulp fiction. She asked if they might have The Sea-Wolf, and having politely considered Sea of Troubles and Sea Babes, she was directed to a dusty lending library in the School of Arts. The library was useless but the librarian had heard there was a wonderful bookstore at Noosa Junction although she had never been there personally.

What an awful place to spend your life.

Heading back to Yandina, she began to drive more slowly as if tempting something to happen to her, slowing in front of bullying gravel trucks, daring them to destroy her. Approaching the turnoff to Remus Creek Road she found she could not do it. She headed another mile, then three. Somewhere near Eumundi she pulled off the road and sat there with the engine running.

She was parked across a rough sort of track leading into the scraggy bush. Through the smeary windshield she could make out piles of sawdust, some stacks of fresh-cut timber held in racks. There were two abandoned cars, an open-walled shed that might have been the mill and a wiry little man, maybe sixty years of age, who now came out to look at her. He wore shorts and an apron which stopped just above his leathery knees.

He stepped back then, to one side, so she might enter.

She waved that she was leaving. He stood back farther.

She thought, Is this it then? Another throw of the dice.

In a moment she was rolling down a bumpy track, splashing and slipping sideways, into the deep wheel ruts. The miller waited, between two mounds of dead gray sawdust, the gateposts of his foreign world. Behind him was a stack of sappy bright yellow planks, a gorgeous slash of yellow.

He had a mouth like a sock puppet and a short stubby clay pipe. He cocked his head at her.

This is a sawmill?

Last time I looked.

It was the yellow that drew her from the car.

That’s blackbut, he said, seeing what she was looking at.

She was close enough to smell its rich sappy odor.

You doing fencing? That’s fencing.

I want to line a wall, she decided.

Oh no, love, not suitable. It’s for fencing, cheap old fencing. It’ll shrink like billy-oh.

She was thinking the walls would be golden in the lamplight.

If I nailed it flat, she said, it couldn’t shrink.

It’ll curl up like bacon.

Well, I could pin it flat.

You’re what they call alternative ?

I guess so.

He cocked a flirty eyebrow. You could use a nail and bend it over, he said, so as it shrinks it might stay flat. You’d make a kind of L with it. You could do that. You’ll be up all night with those nails.

That’s OK.

He nodded. His mouth was small and the smile was thin. Hoy! he cried.

From the shadows of the big open-sided shed there emerged a middle-aged giant with a belly and naked legs.

Urge, said the sawmiller, get your beautiful body over here.

And then the two men roped the fence palings onto the Peugeot and she paid them twenty dollars and drove home with her purchase slapping and whipping on the roof. She thought of Camus’s asthma patient moving peas from one saucepan into another. Beckett, too. More fun to build a wall.

She did not untie the ropes correctly which was why the boy would later see the yellow bruise and blood-black graze which covered her ankle and the upper part of her foot. When the pain abated she loaded up about six splintery planks in her unprotected arms, carrying them directly into the big hut and dropping them untidily onto the clearest patch of floor. Can’t go on. Must go on.