Instead I drive faster. I take the turn inland and push the car as fast as it will go. The shrubs and the water move backwards in a blur, and I imagine that time is rewinding, back to when the world was some other place. I keep my eyes on the road ahead and wait for the relief of concrete, and the absence of sea.
It’s getting dark by the time I arrive and I miss the first turn-off to Gracetown on the freeway, so I have to get off at the next exit. This means I have to drive back through Charlotte Hill along High Street, past Howling Books.
I haven’t been back to the city since we moved. I crawl with the traffic and have the strangest feeling – like I’m driving through a dream of my past. Small things have changed: Beat Clothing is now Gracetown Organics. The DVD store is now a café. Other than that it’s the same.
When I pull level with Howling Books, Henry’s sitting behind the counter on a stool: heels hooked on the rung at the bottom of it, elbows on knees, book in hands, completely focused. The only sign that three years have passed is that I don’t want to kiss him. There’s a mild urge to kick him, but that’s about it.
Amy’s not there, but she’ll be around, somewhere close by. I might not have replied to Henry’s letters, but I read every one. I held them together with a fat rubber band, shoved far at the back of my sock drawer. I know he and Amy kissed on that last night of the world. I know they started then.
Before the traffic moves, Henry comes outside to take in the books that are on shelves in the street. The breeze shifts his hair around. It’s got that same blue-black shine. I watch him and test myself, but no matter how I stare, there’s no haze in my chest, no flicker in the skies.
I think back to those first few months in Sea Ridge, when every time I thought about him I burned with anger and embarrassment. When the only thing that took the blush off my skin was the sea.
I’m relieved when the traffic moves.
Rose lives a block back from High Street, which is crammed with shops selling coffee and clothes and records. The north of the city always felt like the second-hand side of town to Cal and me, and we liked it. Over the river, in the south, there are wide streets and new clothes, but if I have to live in the city, I prefer it here. The cinema shows old and new films, walls are covered in graffiti, crooked powerlines cross the sky.
Rose’s last flat, over the road from the hospital, only had one bedroom. When Cal and I stayed there she put a mattress on the lounge room floor for us. Her new place is an orange-brick warehouse with CAR REPAIRS written in faded letters across the outside. There’s a wooden door on the left, and double wooden doors on the right, which must be where they drove the cars in.
Rose is my favourite aunt – she was Cal’s, too – but she has always been the most elusive. She appears and disappears. When she appeared in Sea Ridge she was always mowing the lawn or cleaning out the garage or smoking in the dunes. When she disappeared, it was always to somewhere exotic – travelling through Africa, working in London, volunteering in Chile.
Once I asked her why she didn’t have kids.
‘I never wanted them,’ she said. ‘I’m too busy. Plus, I swear too fucking much.’
But I know she didn’t mind Cal and me being around. I’m told that after I was born, I cried all the time; Rose would stop by after her shift at the hospital and hold me, so Mum and Dad could get some sleep. Mum would wake in the night and hear Rose reciting the periodic table. ‘It’s the only story I know,’ she’d said.
Before I get out of the car I send Mum and Gran a quick text to say I’ve arrived, then I put my phone on silent and take my suitcases out of the boot. I leave Cal’s box where it is, locked inside.
‘I heard she gave you the car,’ Rose says when she opens the door. ‘How’d it feel to drive here?’
‘Pretty good.’
‘You were scared the whole way, right?’
‘Half the way,’ I tell her, looking around. It’s messy because she’s renovating, but that’s not the problem. ‘There are no walls,’ I say, and she taps on the outside one.
‘There are no indoor walls.’
It’s one huge room with polished concrete floors, the front all windows. There’s a kitchen in the back right corner and two spaces at the front set up as bedrooms.
I can see straight into Rose’s life now. Her bed is unmade, a blue mess with a chest of drawers next to it and a shelf full of her medical books. Her clothes, mostly jeans and t-shirts, are lying on the floor or half out of drawers. There’s a clothes rack with some little black dresses, some long boots underneath.
My corner of the warehouse is near the front windows. There’s a bed with a pile of sheets on it, a chest of drawers and an empty clothes rack.
‘Obviously the long-term plan is to have walls, but until then we’ll just have to respect each other’s space. The bathroom has walls.’ Rose points to a metal door near the kitchen.
I look at where she’s pointing and try to be comforted by that fact.
‘You don’t like it?’ she asks.
‘I do. It’s just not what I expected.’
But what I’m really thinking is, there’s nowhere to hide.
I don’t have much to unpack, and there’s no food in the house, so Rose and I leave for the supermarket. I’m thinking about the warehouse on the way and wondering what I’ve let myself into. I’ve gotten used to being alone and doing my own thing – walking to the beach, skipping school to sleep, crying if I want to, in my room where no one sees.
‘I’m talking to you,’ Rose says.
‘And?’
She points through the windshield. ‘We’re here. You get the trolley. I’ll meet you inside.’
Rose isn’t much of a cook so we buy things that I can make or things we can heat. It feels good to shop in the city, and not in Sea Ridge, where everyone knows everyone, and everyone still gives us looks. This supermarket is new. Cal and I never stood in the chocolate aisle deliberating between peanut or plain M&M’s. Rose doesn’t deliberate at all as it turns out. She puts both bags in the trolley.
‘Your gran says you’re not eating enough,’ she says, and we keep moving. ‘She also says you’ve turned into a zombie who hides in her room, sleeps all day and spends her nights at the beach with her mother, who has always turned into a zombie.’
Rose throws cans of tuna in the trolley while I’m trying to get a look at myself in the cake tins to see if I do actually look like the undead. The news isn’t entirely good.
‘She has no idea what a zombie actually is,’ Rose says. ‘So I wouldn’t worry.’
‘Cal introduced her to zombies. Shaun of the Dead is her top movie of all time.’
‘Jesus,’ Rose says. ‘We didn’t even get to watch TV when we were growing up. Now she’s watching Simon Pegg films and telling me my niece needs to have sex. But don’t worry,’ she says, looking at my horrified face. ‘I set her straight about that. I told her to leave you alone.’
‘Good.’
‘I told her zombies don’t have sex.’
I put down the cake tin and we keep walking. Rose moves along the aisle complaining about the volume of Gran calls she’s had lately and how every one of them has been about me. ‘Late at night, early in the morning,’ she says, throwing crackers into the trolley.