[Read] Ernest Price - Complicit

The sticky clutch. The rattle of the driver’s window. Bass-heavy speakers. Scratches, dents, cracks: a catalogue of near-misses. Faded paint, from all of the summers without a carport. Three chips in the windscreen, none of them big enough to bother fixing. A gaggle of long-useless air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror.

Andrew had owned two cars, a conservative number for a man of nearly fifty. The first was a gift from his father on his eighteenth birthday, a surprise that brought unwelcome tears to Andrew’s eyes. This was the same father who believed sentiment was the enemy of masculinity. That car was a benefaction, an endowment, an investment, an acknowledgement of Andrew’s unspoken desires. It was a ticket beyond the claustrophobic perimeter of the farm, a way out of his father’s fiefdom, a permission so unlikely that Andrew had never thought to ask.

The car was a newer model of the beast that David drove on the farm. That unwieldy and unforgiving monster could manage any terrain. Andrew had been driving the farm car for as long as he could remember, his mother’s eyes wide as she watched him stall and stutter his way around the paddocks. David didn’t offer much in the way of instruction, but he provided correction in the form of ear-splitting diatribes and the occasional whalloping. It worked well enough.

Having a car of his own opened the world to Andrew, and opened Andrew to the world. Trips into town with his friends to eat burgers and watch movies. Full back seats touring the region for sporting matches and parties. Desperate dashes to make first period at school, after milking the cows. Shopping for his mother, errands for his father. A short-lived, terribly-paid job delivering pizza.
His first date with the city girl, in town to call on cousins. Long drives to meet her parents, and then to visit her at university. Weekends and holidays, driving drunk and restless around the state.

The trip to the beach for his proposal, and the trip home after her acceptance. The pit stop for sex, uncomfortable and urgent. Collecting furniture from the road side as they made a home, milk crates and flea-ridden couches hanging out of open windows. The hungover race to the wedding, air-conditioner blasting, trying desperately to avoid vomiting.

The dash to the hospital while she was in labour, both of them convinced that they were prepared for what their life was to become. The crawl home from the hospital, braking anxiously and often. Car seat facing backwards and then forwards. A pram stuffed into the boot next to nappy bags and a portable crib. Wipes, snacks, games. Enrichment and then distraction. An effort to create the perfect environment for their son, and the creeping realisation that they would never succeed.

The bottom falling out of that car, figuratively but almost literally. The desperate rush to finance something new, the adult realities of house-car-kids pushing at the limits of their credit rating. A new model of his father’s car, but this time the hybrid, a concession to the changing climate. A bridge between his two worlds.

Gridlocked traffic as he went to and from jobs that he hated a lot, and some that he hated slightly less. Hours spent wrestling control of the stereo from Kim, and then Ant. Emergency stops for the bathroom (Ant) and to throw up (Kim). The ephemera of a family life, constantly littering the back seat: water bottles, clothing, paperwork. Laughter, and silence. Arguments. A life lived in motion.

Andrew’s parents were hard, but they didn’t harden him. When Ant was young, Andrew was unguarded, easy with his affections. He wanted the boy to know a life of abundance, even if on a budget. He was determined to build his own family traditions.

And so they took a long summer road trip on a shoestring budget, before Ant started school. They fled the heat that strangled their first apartment, following a trail of rivers and lakes around the state. It was a time without tethers.
Andrew enchanted Ant and Kim, unearthing the skills amassed during a childhood spent on the land. He caught fish with a rig consisting of little more than worms and string, and he cooked the haul on a fire conjured from a paltry collection of sticks and stones. He followed his nose to find fruit trees, and ate the produce despite Kim’s howls of disapproval.

He had been on a thousand (less-joyful) iterations of the Family Road Trip. His frugal father didn’t believe in vacations, but nonetheless was forced to travel on occasion, subject to the same cycle of births, deaths and marriages to which the whole world is beholden. When they attended weddings and funerals, they camped wherever they found themselves at night’s end, crowding into a battered tent. They ate the food his mother packed from home, subsisting on silverside or corned beef sandwiches and small, bitter apples that his father grew but couldn’t sell. There were no concessions made to a boy beguiled by the advertising at gas stations.

Andrew, Kim and Ant spent the summer sleeping in the car, opening its back to the night. They were still young enough for the intimacy of the moment to be intoxicating. The boy's hands reaching for an unknowable night sky, Kim’s hands reaching for Andrew. The moment expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting.