(no subject)
Last week seemed to pass in a blur of insomnia, Hannah getting up before four every morning for early shifts, and me lying there unable to go back to sleep, but unable, also, to be properly awake. Random thought processes and memories would go through my mind, sometimes steered by mental effort and other times by random, mysterious subconscious forces. It was like an extended exercise in the "automatic writing" so beloved of the dadaists.
For some reason the real-life memory that kept recurring was of an evening several years ago driving through Queensland in a rented car, this huge dark country stretching out on every side. We'd driven all day long and barely moved the steering-wheel once, and that only to overtake these vast lorries known in Oz as "road-trains", so enormous that they seem to lie across two or three time zones, and you can still be passing them ten minutes after you pulled out. Now it was evening and I was numbed by staring at the map and realising that we'd barely moved an inch on that scale - totally bewildered, like all Brits, by the sheer size of the place. . .and I was down to about fifteen miles an hour because of all the kangaroos on the road, which would scatter heavily as I approached but then gather again behind me so that I could see them all in the rear-view mirror, lit red by my back lights, huddled and dusk-coloured and weird, like some huge but inefficient alien invasion.
We were coming into Charleville and by complete coincidence the stereo was playing Slim Dusty's song of the same name:
I've seen girls in Paris, to humble any man!
And I've seen earls embarrassed, by models in Milan!
But I've seen enough to know the only girl I wanna see-
and she's waiting back in Charleville for me!
And I had all these pictures of it in my head, of a single dusty main street, painted wooden shop signs, staying in a motel and drinking schooners of Toohey's Old at the bar of the Town & Country hotel, water super-heated in the storage towers so that the cold tap scalded you - all of which, to my amazement and delight, Charleville in fact lived up to admirably.
It was an awesome few days. . .and for some reason, going over it again in my head several times at dawn has now given it all some new significance that I am still trying to work out.