I want to give the whole game away that this trip isn’t exactly what they’ve been told it is, if for no other reason than to reassure them these ‘necessities’ won’t be required, but despite my rising frustration, there wouldn’t be any fun in that.
Finally, the sound of Dad’s shoe-shuffle breaks through the noise of the car engine and air-conditioning. He opens the rear door, hands Mum back the house keys, then reaches over to place the water in the cupholder in the front (because he couldn’t possibly fold his body in quarters whilst simultaneously holding a plastic bottle). Mum’s expression as he leans over her suggests she considers the experience on par with being stuck to a spinning wheel and having a blindfolded magician throw very sharp knives at her.
Dad’s water bottle will remain untouched for the rest of the journey.
Finally, plonked back down in his front seat, Dad blurts out in panic, ‘My sandwich!’
My hand had been hovering excitedly over the gear shift but I let it drop back down to my knee.
‘Darl, did you pack my sandwich?’ He asks desperately.
‘I’ll get it!’ Jeff interjects from the back seat, and he’s out of the car with Mum’s house keys, running as fast as his feet can carry him to their front door.
Jeff’s decision to step in saves my parents, both of whom are out of breath and gasping for air. They have, after all, achieved the stupendous dual feats of getting into their seats and plugging in their seat belts. Poor Dad sounds like he’s had to run a marathon. I suppose he has: he’s achieved the miracle twice in as many hours.
‘The news!’ Dad cries out excitedly between gulps for air.
I turn the radio on and watch Dad struggle with the buttons rather than asking me to tune in to his favourite station for him. He touches the screen a number of times and, by luck, gets to AM, then uncannily uses the manual tuner to find the station he’s looking for. Or nearly finds it. He chooses to stay 0.1 hertz off the station so mostly all we can hear is static. It has the overall effect of a tiny fairy inside your head scraping your ear drums with very coarse sandpaper. Knowing the pre-set stations, I push 3 on the screen and the static immediately disappears.
Dad looks utterly amazed. ‘How did you do that, Skeet?’ he asks, using a nickname I’ve had since I was a baby. Skeet is the shortened version of Amos-Quito. I think Amos is what he wanted to name me but, as usual, Mum won out.
‘Magic, Dad,’ I say as Jeff returns, devon-and-tomato-sauce sandwich in hand.
Dad’s now got his water, his news bulletin and his sandwich (which has hopefully been cut into triangles for him, or there’ll be hell to pay), the gear stick is in reverse and we are moving!
‘Anyone want a mint?’ Mum offers before we’re even out of the driveway. Unlike her husband, she has remembered to bring her safety blankie with her this time: an old plastic beetroot container she’s refilled with mints countless times. Aside from its initial rinse, this container has never been cleaned or changed. It dates back to the 1970s, which I know for a fact because I’ve had it carbon dated.
Mum doesn’t offer the tasty, chewy Minties or Mentos that are universally loved, but rather some form of protomint the size and texture of pool chlorine tablets, of a brand she was loyal to for years until Aldi made exactly the same kind of product . . . only twelve cents cheaper.
Jeff happily accepts one – he’s the only person on the planet who likes Mum’s mints – but given it now feels like a hundred thousand years since I ate breakfast, I’m sorely tempted myself.
As the eleven o’clock news finishes up with a weather forecast, I reach to turn it off.
‘Not yet!’ Dad casually brushes my hand aside.
He lets it go for several minutes past the end of the news, so we get to sit through forty-seven ads for furniture and appliances. In his own car, Dad would prefer even the tinny, static-laced radio over the silence that often accompanies one of our road trips together – which is fine for him, since he adeptly employs selective deafness.
In summer he’ll request a regular check of the scores, usually cricket. I may as well be ten again, trapped in the back of the car in forty-degree heat with both of my brothers’ bare legs sticking to mine like a weird skin Velcro, Mum’s hand wildly slapping over the back at random as she tells us to ‘cut the rot’, her term for any sibling disagreement. Mum’s rogue hand-slaps were feared more than Dad’s empty threats of ‘If I pull over, you’ll know it’ or his insistence that he would ‘Do the chewy’ if we kept it up.
We cruise along the street and, as the car slowly picks up speed, it is filled with a dull thumping sound.
‘Has someone got a window down?’ Dad snaps. ‘That’s killing my ears!’
Jeff dutifully closes his window without a word. Dad might be immune to radio static at full volume but the sound of fresh air makes his ears bleed. (Though, I have to concede, it was bothering me too. If there’s anything that gives my noggin a floggin’ more than a solitary open window in an otherwise closed car, I’m yet to come across it.)
‘Where are we going again?’ Dad asks.
I usually make the plans with Mum and then hope they get accurately relayed to Dad. I’m sure we’ve already been through the whole point of this little adventure, but I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.
‘Gloucester,’ I say, hoping to trigger some recently buried memory in his brain.
‘Where did you say?’
Several months previously, we’d had Mum and Dad over to our place to break the news to them that we would be selling up and moving. Ever since then, we’d been informing them of potential properties we’d seen online to include them in the process and alleviate any of their concerns that we were going to move too far away from them.
About nine years back, Jeff and I uprooted ourselves from our inner-city lifestyles and did what could charitably be called a ‘tree change’ – if by ‘tree change’ you mean selling our two-hundred square metre inner-city terrace to buy a hundred acres in the Hunter Valley – and learned, among other things: that electric mowers aren’t really efficient enough to cut a grassy area the size of the Vatican; that 12,500 high-maintenance grapevines make around 30,000 bottles of wine . . . every single year; and that opening tourist accommodation involves a lot of cleaning toilets and changing soiled sheets.
Our tree change did also result in the purchase of my beloved pig Helga and the rescue of several goats and other animals; the creation of our award-winning wines when our original plan had been to simply bulldoze the entire crop; the production of our own olive oil (easily the best tasting oil I’d ever tried); and not to mention our successful accommodation business that had lately been running at around 95 per cent occupancy. But over the past year or so, the challenges of drought, bushfire, failed crops, falling wine prices, near bankruptcy and the devastating impact of Covid on tourism had all conspired to make us feel that, as we’d accomplished our dream well before the ten-year goal, perhaps it was time to start a new, less stressful adventure – particularly as there was apparently an opportunity for financial freedom with the property’s sale in the lava-hot post-Covid rural property market.
‘So . . .’ I said to Mum and Dad over a cup of tea that day, while we looked out over our beautiful vineyard. ‘Cain, our real estate agent, called and advised we could expect almost double what we thought our property was worth!’
After eight years of running Block Eight, Cain’s call had surprised us. Until then, we’d toyed with the idea of selling but financially it just wouldn’t have worked for us. This surge in the property market Cain identified had the potential to set up Jeff and me for the rest of our lives. Besides, we couldn’t deny we were just a little tired of being chambermaids. Well, I certainly was. Jeff has somewhat more patience for menial labour.
I wasn’t expecting Mum and Dad to metaphorically break open the bubbly when I broke the news to them that day. Perhaps it hadn’t been the best idea to tell them while overlooking the vines they’d backbreakingly helped prune.
When you step into your parents’ very settled lives and convince them to sell their home of twenty-five years to move closer to you so you can help ‘look after them’ and then, three years after they make the momentous move, tell them you’re moving . . . well, I can understand why it might have been difficult for them not to take our news personally.
But with the successful sale a few months later, Jeff and I had slowly eased them into the idea while we waited for settlement to happen.
I answer Dad’s question in the car. ‘A town called Gloucester, it’s —’
‘I won’t be moving,’ Mum says firmly, not for the first time. ‘Gloucester is hours away!’ she reiterates, as if to remind Dad of their joint dismay at us leaving to live over eighty kilometres away. ‘I don’t want to live in Gloucester! I definitely won’t be moving.’
In truth, I didn’t believe for a second that Mum couldn’t be convinced to follow us to wherever we ended up. From the moment they joined us in the Hunter Valley, Jeff and I have been a constant in their lives; whereas before, visits from any of their kids were infrequent and often brief. Not only had we helped them choose furniture for their new home, but we’d also done all of the landscaping for them, turning their barren yard into a green oasis they loved. While that would certainly be hard for them to leave, we could recreate it anywhere and, besides, they’d become increasingly reliant on us for a host of other duties.
Just as they had embraced us as irreplaceable in their lives, we too had come to enjoy having them at ours for dinners and cups of tea. They also helped us out with odd jobs when our busy lives demanded too much of our time or the animals needed someone to feed them on the rare occasion we did find an opportunity to go away for a single night.
‘There’s a three-bedroom traditional cottage in Gloucester that you guys should look at.’ Jeff turns to Mum and says. ‘It’s got an established rose garden, Jude.’
