The Best Australian Essays 2014 (2 page)

The Little Prince, and Other Vehicles

Rozanna Lilley

My first car was an apple-green Ford Escort. At least, that's what I like to say. Certainly, it was the first car I drove without immediately having an accident.

I was almost thirty by the time I actually got my licence. It wasn't for lack of trying. When I finished secondary school I hired an instructor. I can't recall much about him, except that his portly middle luxuriously enfolded the handbrake. Even then, I couldn't entirely blame him for my tendency to crunch the gears. One sultry afternoon in the backstreets of Darling-hurst he asked me, concerned, about my secondary school results. I reluctantly told him I had a score that could get me into any university degree. I could tell that he couldn't reconcile my academic aptitude with my driving ineptitude.

Later, when I'd got a bit older and less steady, I had another stab at driving. I was living in a share house in an inner-city suburb. I liked the terrace because it had a stable door that swung out to a brick courtyard. My room was a separate building to the side of the courtyard. I even had my own bathroom. There was a back gate as well, so it was easy to come and go. Lovers, too, could enter and exit with impunity. Mainly it was the stable door that gave these encounters a triflingly suspended sense of the romantic. On a good day, it provided a kind of quasi-rural framing to all that haystack volatility. Seeing half of something tends to be more palatable than a vista.

I shared the courtyard terrace with two young women and a man I was later to fall in love with. He occupied another room abutting the courtyard thereby gaining a ringside seat to the circus of my early twenties. Anthony watched the passing parade for about a year, giving deft nicknames, like ‘Speedy Sam', to my boyfriends. Eventually he'd seen enough and decided he may as well take me in.

Tiffany had a part-time job as a chef. She worked for the underworld giant Abe Saffron. Mr Big required discreet lunches with other ‘businessmen' in private dining rooms. She never said much about her kitchen preparations but I know for a fact that, at least before his lonely suicide in his ageing mother's spare bedroom, he was partial to home-cooked quiche.

Vixen was a seemingly quiet slip of a girl. She slept in the attic and sometimes had a girlfriend, rippling with muscles and illustrated with tattoos, drop by for boisterous S&M sessions. Anthony swore that Vixen was the dominatrix. Often, though, I would find her in the living room late at night, hunched around my vertical record player, tears spilling over to the maudlin refrains of ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?' Once, when stoned, she climbed into my bed, claiming loneliness. That night I didn't sleep a wink.

Vixen usually drove a motorbike. But sometimes she had brief possession of a car. She wasn't the kind of person to just leave you alone with your inadequacies. So one evening she decided to teach me to drive. It was all going okay and, for a brief moment, I thought, ‘Hey, this isn't so hard.' We turned a quiet corner. The road curved but somehow I needed to keep going straight. Vixen was shouting, ‘Brake! Brake!' I'd never heard her raise her voice before. I'd only heard the low moans of pleasure emanating from above. I hit the accelerator instead and we ploughed through a low brick wall, gently nudging the front of a house.

The owner emerged. She was shaken and angry. We exchanged phone numbers and she noted the numberplate. Vixen and I repaired to the corner pub, for whiskey. Later I rang my dad. Back then I imagined he could fix anything. And sometimes, when I found myself in a tight corner, that was right. He drove an hour down what he called ‘the big hill' from the Blue Mountains to talk to the aggrieved house owner. He offered to repair any damage himself. In these situations, he liked to use the phrase ‘I'm a handyman.' After that, I didn't try driving again for quite a while.

Eventually I found myself married. In the scheme of things, Michael both preceded and followed Anthony. We met in the bar at the Sydney Opera House. I was a tour guide and he was a stagehand. I was especially impressed that he was a divorcee. It seemed so alluringly adult. Michael claimed he couldn't drive. That wasn't really true. He always liked to pretend he was incapable, even to himself. Eventually he told me that he had been for his truck licence in New Zealand. The story was a set piece that involved hulking Maoris in lumberjack shirts, winding mountains and the risky boundary of the wooded wild. That was the good part. Then came a halting with fear sniffing around its edges. And, after that, a refusal to ever get behind the wheel again.

That's why I was, yet again, learning to drive. We'd moved from Sydney to Canberra. I was doing a PhD in anthropology. Mike got a job at the local theatre centre. My father, Merv, bought the Ford Escort for me. He liked, perhaps I should say loved, reading the ads in the
Weekly Trading Post.
Dad didn't really consult me about the car. Consultation wasn't part of his repertoire. One weekend he just delivered it, telling me I owed him the purchase price.

A decade was sandwiched somewhere between these two sets of driving lessons, peppered with part-time work, university degrees and failed relationships. My new instructor, Paul, was a Vietnam vet with a gammy leg. He was riddled with patience. He used to pick me up from the university and we would drive, for about thirty minutes once or twice a week, around the tranquil campus. Every time I saw a corner I accelerated. I just couldn't help it. We started on a manual. About thirty lessons in, and numerous near accidents later, he reluctantly told me I was only fit for an automatic. Even then, my parking was perfidious.

By this time I had a daughter. Paul advised me to try using her trike to figure out what happened to the wheels when reverse parking. I picked it up from the pathway at the side of our rented cottage. I tried manoeuvring it backwards through the irregular scatter of bricks and insolent buttersoft jonquils. I was so permanently tired that it didn't really help.

I failed my licence a couple of times. The first time I was behind a Stop sign. There was a police car crossing the intersection ahead. It seemed like an eternity that we were waiting there and I thought the examiner looked impatient. So I hit the accelerator, lurching forwards. The police car braked just in time. The examiner looked straight ahead, as though his life was one long series of disappointing appointments. In a clipped tone he commanded, ‘Drive straight back to the Motor Registry.'

The second time I went for my test I was relieved to have a different examiner. He told me to turn right. With a flair for the literal, I did. It was just a pity that we weren't actually at a street yet. At least it was a parking lot and not a house.

Finally I had a female examiner. Paul had tried to coach me through my nerves. He even lied and told me I was a good driver. At that moment I felt genuinely fond of him. When I took the test the third time I explained how hard it was to have a little kid in Canberra and a husband who didn't drive and to be trying to study and pick your one-year-old daughter up in the dark from childcare and then take her home on the bus in the dead of a cold winter. She didn't say much. When it came time to reverse park she instructed me to try an opening about the size of three semi-trailers. At last I had passed my driving test.

I was so excited when I got my licence that I celebrated by going to Superbarn and buying a boot-load full of groceries. All the other drivers seemed to be dawdling, as though the toy town air had wound down their clockwork. A couple of days later I realised the speedometer measured miles not kilometres.

I paid my dad back the $800 for the Ford Escort. It wasn't easy on my scholarship with a husband who drank and smoked his way through his weekly pay packet. I gave Paul a slightly flirty thankyou card. It seemed the least I could do, given he'd seen action.

Of course that's not the whole story of my driving. My ambivalent feelings towards cars began, like most things do, in childhood. My mother rarely drove. She had little truck with the practical side of life. Like many spouses, Merv enjoyed small acts of domestic terrorism. If we were heading down a highway he might suddenly speed up. Breaking the limit, he would manoeuvre parallel to other cars, trying to egg their drivers into macho competition. I come from a family of five kids and there were always at least three of us in the back seat, sweat stuck to the vinyl, so many struggling moths. As the Valiant accelerated we would clutch the front seat, enthralled. Mum would begin screaming. Dad would start laughing. Then I'd laugh too, just to show I was on my father's side.

My father's driving was erratic. I was a teenager before I realised that he was colour-blind. Though even now I'm not sure if he was just toying with me. When we approached traffic lights he asked if they were red or green. He had a strong dislike of rules and of authority. He wasn't very interested in parking meters or sticking inside lanes. If he wanted to change direction he would just mount the concrete road divider and head the other way. Merv often remarked that he needed a truck or, at least, a four-wheel drive because most vehicles couldn't accommodate his expectations.

Childhood was punctuated by a litany of cars, each one momentarily cherished. There was the ute and the Valiant and, later, when we moved across the continent from Perth to Sydney, shedding my three stepbrothers along the way, something smaller. In caressing tones, Dad called his Morris Mini ‘the little
dauphin'.
I had never heard my father speak a foreign language before. It was unnerving. He was so large and the car was so small, it was a constant surprise that he could fit inside. But Merv always was full of surprises.

Once he bought a bus. He'd been reading the
Trading Post
again. My parents' houses were littered with the detritus of Merv's sudden passions. There was a darkroom built and never used. There were four toilets, some never properly connected to the main plumbing. There was a fridge in the living room and a fridge in the laundry and a fridge in the kitchen. It is possible to be hungry anywhere. There was a potters wheel and an etching press and new sheds constructed to hold a dazzling array of tools, initially purchased with ardour and then recklessly abandoned.

But the bus stepped things up a notch. For a start, it cost more. Although my mother rarely complained about my father's unchecked impulses, she couldn't help feeling affronted by an unroadworthy vehicle, which ate substantially into their cheque account. She didn't want a bus. She knew they weren't really going anywhere. In fact, as the years passed she had become increasingly stationary. She may have longed for mobility but, as a writer, her travels were determinedly interior.

Eventually the bus was parked in the ample backyard of a friend's wife's father who lived in a fishing village down the South Coast. His name was ‘Pappy' and I used to imagine him as having the insouciant manner and unpredictable charm of Popeye. Vague plans for the renovation of the bus circled through Merv's capacious mind for years. When my parents had a particularly explosive argument he sometimes threatened to live in the now rat-infested shell. But I knew that it was bluff because he could never abandon my mother. She needed him too much.

Usually when Dad tired of cars he would take them to the countryside and set fire to them. Then he would claim the insurance. When investigators phoned from the claims office, Dad spoke to them severely. His manner was poised between murderous threat and utter inscrutability. He had learned the language of intimidation in his younger years, working as a canecutter and a merchant seaman. They always paid up.

When I claimed the Ford Escort as my first car, I skipped a vehicle. Dad bought me another car when I was in my early twenties. But I never actually saw it. It was a time in my life when I didn't like visiting my parents. Partly I was exhausted with their quasi-bohemian eccentricities. Mainly I was busy growing up.

I suspect Dad actually meant to give me the car when he bought it. But I wasn't making any progress towards a licence. So he registered it in my name and then decided to use it himself. I'd forgotten all about the car until I got a call from Kings Cross police station, demanding I front up there. In the 1980s this particular station had a fearsome reputation for lawlessness. I took Anthony along for the ride. As both a rugby player and a law student, he seemed like a good travelling companion. We caught the train there and were ushered into a bare interview room. Inside I was presented with some stark facts. I had thousands of dollars in unpaid parking fines; I never attended court; unless I paid up I would be jailed.

At this point I paused. I had been raised to believe that the worst thing a person could be was ‘a copper's nark'. My parents had both been Communists; they knew what it was like to be under ASIO surveillance. The law, and especially its officers, were held in familial contempt. However I didn't want to go to prison and so my self-preservation got the better of my loyalty. ‘But I don't even drive,' I blurted out. ‘What do you mean?' the incredulous policeman demanded. ‘My father just registered the car in my name; he drives it,' I explained.

The policeman exited, leaving Anthony and me to ponder my fate. When he returned about fifteen minutes later, he looked unexpectedly furious. Taking his accustomed seat behind the grim-grey office desk, he leaned pointedly forwards, resting his weight on his formidable elbows and hissed, ‘You didn't tell me you are Merv Lilley's daughter.'

A silence reverberated. I saw no option but to agree to his account of my lineage. He leaned back and cautioned: ‘How often do you see your father?' ‘Never,' I instantly replied. ‘He's hard to pin down. I haven't seen him for ages.' The policeman sized me up. He exhaled, exhausted with the charade. ‘You tell your father, next time you do see him, that one day soon we will catch him.' I nodded my assent. A few weeks later Merv did time for parking offences. He tried to talk it up but when he came out of jail he was, for a brief period, a quieter man.