The Road Trip

‘Have you got your GPS with you?’ my father’s tone rang sternly in my ears.

‘Yes, yes’. ‘I’ve taken it with me’.

Not true, I thought to myself. But I didn’t need another pre-emptory lecture and he didn’t need to know I’d already looked it up online the night before. I’d already thought of the routes, planned which exit to take, given myself every opportunity to be emotionally available to my mother for the duration of the journey. She jumped into the passenger seat of my fading blue Hybrid vehicle, and I automatically glanced to the rear to see the child’s car seat notably empty.

She was silent but her eyes seemed dead, and every pore of her being weeped with a sense of desiccated despair.

The past 9 months had taken years off her life. Her once full skin seemed like a Dali clock on the bones of her face, and her eyebrows had let go of all of their occupants like leaves in the fall.

The car was heavy again with the weight of her grief and I wondered if she would ever know what it would feel like to be around me, and to be happy.

‘How is he?’ I asked as the ignition started and I prepared myself again for the litany of her tiny tragedies.

‘He’s useless. He blames me for everything. Always has, always will. I can’t stand living in there with him’ she blurted.

‘No, I meant him’

‘Oh, your brother!’ Well, we’ll see. I spoke to him yesterday, he complained about the meat not being very nice. You know. they give just three or four options for the food. Friday: it’s fish and chips. Monday is apparently some sort of casserole and the meat is far too overcooked! It’s just killing him. You know how he is about his meat.’

‘Yes, well. He is in prison, Mum.’

‘YES, yes’ she said irritated with me for stating the obvious ‘but it’s like they are deliberately trying to break him. They should think about how it makes them feel’ she said, referring to the prisoners.

‘Well, I guess they don’t want it to be like some sort of resort, you know.’ I countered ‘It would hardly seem fair to the public, and other victims’.

‘In your brother’s case, there was no victim’.

She always jumped heroically to my brother’s defence, and even in the midst of truth or opinion she found it easy to suspect that I was there to lay blame. But historically, I’d been accused of a number of crimes against him. Too loud you are for a younger sister. Talking too much, you could see why he hit you almost. Maybe you should just consider that he is always going to be better than you at Science and Maths and you will always be better at him at reading and writing.

Yes, edicts of truth had been declared over our respective destinies since childhood. Now, again I could not chance to speak out because it was clear my role was to destabilise and disrupt, the oracle of antipathy. I muttered something to the odometer ahead and steadied my hands on the wheel.

Roads lay vast outstretched before us, and within minutes I felt the nature strips retreat as real nature stood on parade, shuffling to greet us on the silent charcoal highway.

Barely any cars were our neighbours, and once again my thoughts turned naturally to my brother.

‘Would he have any sunlight?’

‘How much sunlight would he see?’

‘Did he have a chance to gaze upon the clouds and notice how each day was like new Monet or Degas in the skies? How some days the clouds seemed to be whispering to each other in smooth long brush strokes, and other days huddled like flocks across the great blue beyond. How every day we could stare at new art in our midst and be joyful. I wondered what he would think of clouds if I asked him.

‘What do you think he will do when he comes out?’

‘I don’t know, get a job I guess, if anyone will employ him. It’s hard with his record you know, they put them on some sort of list.

I sat there, thinking about the lists I had. My to-do list, the groceries list, the list of new clothes I needed to buy for the boys: a new sunhat for kindy, triple-zero singlets for the baby.

What of other lists? Most wanted, most- dangerous. I couldn’t imagine my brother on any other kinds of list, a predator even. Not him, he didn’t fit the bill. Completely intoxicated anyway when all the proverbial hit the fan.

And despite it all, his life seemed so stuck and yet so fluid. There was a heaviness about his existence that lacked any form of constancy or stability and made him fragile and breakable but there was a newness there and a sense of potential I thought would be liberating for him. He had completely shattered everything we every expected for him, and now, and maybe only now, he could be free. I wanted him to see himself through our eyes, that he was a man marred but redeemable. That he had done this great, immense and terrifying thing but that we were still there, rallying to meet him on that interminable weighted highway.

Thinking out loud I asked her ‘Have you ever seen a prison emoji?’ They have a church one, a hospital, a home.

‘Maybe we could design a prison emoji together’ I wondered out loud.

‘He won’t do it!’ she declared definitively, ‘he doesn’t know how to use emojis’.

I glanced backwards looking at my journal I had taken with me, to share with him.

Moments of glory from our childhood, moments of hope and optimism penned in the little leather bound slimline book.

It’s smooth features. It’s perfection. The money too had been wedged in there, from his accomplice.

It hardly seemed like enough. $20,000 for three months in prison. He might have made more money taking his ideas on the black market. And for now, she was a good little sister.