‘Well, I’ve spent five years getting my rose garden perfect,’ Mum says triumphantly. ‘So if you think I’m leaving all that work behind you can go to blazes.’
‘Look Jude, we never promised you a rose garden,’ Jeff says with a smirk. Mum nods knowingly at the song reference and lets the argument drop, for now.
* * *
It just took 412 days to get them out of their driveway . . . imagine what another full-blown move of house would do to my nerves.
Meanwhile, Bing Lee, Harvey Norman, Domayne and The Good Guys have all now consecutively told us we can get the cheapest TV from them and some cricketing has-been has spent several minutes telling us the cricket hasn’t started yet, but that there are no clouds in the sky, and the pitch is perfect, so I think it’s safe enough to turn off the radio. If he’s disappointed, Dad doesn’t let on.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind driving, Skeet?’ he says instead.
‘I’m good, thanks Dad.’
‘I said are you sure you don’t mind doing the driving?’ He appears to have misheard me.
‘Yep, I’m all good, thanks, Dad,’ I repeat for his benefit.
I volunteer to do all the driving as a way to save my own life. I mean, I’m a lover of amusement park rides but, generally, when Dad drives I’m never more in fear of dying. Bile sits at the back of my throat and my knuckles are white against the seatbelt as Dad races over the speed limit, drifts into other people’s lanes and drives along those dots on the side of the road, sending vibrations through his passengers. While that comes in handy for Belinda Carlisle impressions, it’s not exactly soothing.
Apparently men of his generation – with sixty-five years’ driving experience, they eagerly tell you – no longer have to obey road rules or follow safety advice. They drive with an air of ‘Do you know how long I’ve been at this game?’ and expect all other drivers to give them the courtesy of getting out of their way. Gone are the hands on the wheel at ten and two. They drive with only their right hand on the wheel, way down at five.
In Dad’s case, I use the term ‘hand’ loosely, because just his thumb and forefinger connect with the wheel. Even when he’s barrelling along the motorway at over 120 kilometres an hour, it’s just two fingers on the wheel, thanks very much. Sometimes there’s a hot cup of coffee in his left hand. On the occasions he bothers to indicate, he lifts his right hand off the wheel entirely to flick the indicator . . . leaving not a hell of a lot in control of the speeding vehicle. Don’t worry though, if both your hands are otherwise engaged, a kneecap is all you need to steer.
Sadly, I too have developed this dirty little driving habit, often finding myself with just one hand on the wheel and my other resting comfortably on my knee. But whenever Dad’s a passenger of mine I force myself to put both hands at ten and two because I want my father doing as the safety experts say . . . not as I do. Besides, I’m much younger, you see: I can safely get away with it.
Miraculously, Dad has never had a serious accident. I suppose he’s resting on those laurels. I think it’s pure chance nothing serious has happened in the last couple of years. It takes him six and a half minutes to catch up on the conversation we had three topics ago. How on earth are his reflexes going to react in an emergency?
What has occurred, however, is an increasing number of ‘dings’. Dad either fails to look around the car for obstacles (I can’t recall the last time he checked over his shoulder before turning, changing lanes or reversing) or he misjudges the width of the car and simply scrapes it against another car, tree or pole – any stationary object will do.
Being able to control a speeding vehicle with just his thumbs naturally makes Dad a very critical passenger. Thoughtfully, he is quick to point out the slightest driving infringement anyone else makes. My dad has a particular fondness for ‘objectively’ assessing Mum’s parking abilities, going so far as to actually get out of the car and review her ‘performance’ from a distance like an Olympic judge about to score her attempts. He went to the East German school of scoring.
‘A bit too close to the line this time, darl,’ he delivers his verdict. ‘Just a few inches but you were nearly there.’
Yet increasingly, it’s Mum who takes control of the wheel when it’s just the two of them. I suppose this is her way, like me, of ensuring her own survival. Overall, she’s a more considerate driver: ultra-careful of obeying the rules and conscious of other drivers. Perhaps too much so. The fallout from Dad’s criticism is that Mum has become a very nervous driver. She grips the wheel so tightly she must lose most of the feeling in her hands. Which does beg the question: how many of her fingers actually have control of the car?
Much to Dad’s delight, my mother does not have a faultless driving record – even though the only thing she’s ever done wrong in the car is to accidentally take her foot off the brake at a set of lights one day about forty years ago. Her car rolled into the one in front, causing a minor dent in the guy’s rear bumper. The bump occurred while she was fishing around in her handbag for a breath mint, thus prompting the need for an easy-to-locate beetroot container instead.
There was another time when a kangaroo jumped out at the car she was driving and slammed into the rear passenger door. Mum was so shaken by the experience I was surprised she ever got behind the wheel again, particularly with Dad available to readily recount the incident.
They keep a tally of who’s caused the most dings. Dad thinks they’re neck and neck. I know who my money’s on. While Dad’s dents and scrapes are treated strictly on a need-to-know basis, if Mum even has the slightest mishap, he takes great delight in relaying this to important people in their lives.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ the teller at the local bank branch says.
‘I’d like to deposit these coins in our account,’ Mum says, handing over a jar full of gold and silver.
‘We’ll need it to repair our car,’ Dad tells the wholly uninterested teller. ‘My wife reversed into a street sign.’
The postie will also be told the following day.
Which is why, when Jeff ran over one of his precious pieces of structural pine lying on the ground near his latest renovation project and it sprang up and smashed a massive dent into the side of our ute, we made sure Dad never found out about it. We went so far as to stand in the way, covering the evidence, whenever he walked around that side of the car.
No worries about his own dings though – Dad has a guy drive up two hours from the Central Coast for at-home cash-in-hand jobs to fix any ‘scratches’. The guy even spray paints the patched area in almost the same colour as the actual car. Like a lot of dads, mine has an army of ‘guys’. There’s a guy to fix mowers, a guy to fix car engines, a guy who supplies fresh potatoes and a guy across the road for any heavy lifting. For everything else, he’s got Jeff.
Dad’s always had mates on hand to help out with odd jobs or offer advice and knowledge. More often than not, the task at hand is a minor repair and a thinly veiled excuse for a blokey natter and an occasional roll of the eye at how difficult it is to understand women. Come to think of it, I cannot recall a solitary female friend or acquaintance of my father’s. Similarly, Mum has never had a male friend of her own and more often than not any mixing of genders is done strictly in couples. It’s as if there’s an unspoken law observed among their generation that outside of marriage, they stick to their own gender for company. Men without mates are at risk of closing up altogether, so their role in my father’s life is without question. They also help him see the lighter side of things. But it makes me reflect on how incomplete my life would be without my female friends, and also wonder whether Mum and Dad’s world views would have altered had they each maintained independent relationships with the opposite sex.
* * *
Being the world’s most competent driver, Dad in the front passenger seat may as well be the examiner beside me as I go for my Ps. I feel him silently judging every driving decision I make. And if that doesn’t have me on edge enough, there’s always Mum to add a whole extra layer of stress.
‘He’s coming over to our side!’ Mum shrieks from the back seat as I’m waiting at an intersection.
A car has turned the corner in front of us and comes within about, oh, two metres of the side of our car.
‘Not quite, Mum,’ I say as calmly as I can.
‘Jeez it looked like he was.’
‘Leave the driving to Skeet, darl,’ Dad says authoritatively.
‘Sorry,’ Mum says but only half-heartedly, because her eagle-eyed perception of all other cars on the road is far superior to ours and we just don’t appreciate that.
Sure enough, as soon as I turn onto the highway there is a hold-up of some sort and the cars in front are all stopped, so I’m forced to brake hard. But Mum has beaten me to it and has applied her own special emergency brakes from the back, kicking Dad’s seat in the process while also emitting a little terrified scream.
‘You right, Jude?’ Jeff asks.
‘I just —’
‘I’ve got it, Mum,’ I say. ‘But thanks anyway.’
