Fog Line

"It’s funny how you can drive the same road a hundred times and only realise you’re lost when the fog rolls in."

The drive to work was a blur. I don't remember most of it, if I'm honest. My hands were on the wheel, my foot worked the pedals, the Corolla made all its usual rattling sounds—the tick of the engine that started whenever the temperature dropped below ten degrees, the slight vibration in the steering column that I kept meaning to get checked—as I navigated the familiar route from Glenorchy towards the industrial area near the Brooker Highway. I passed the park without seeing it, passed the turn-off to Mum's favourite charity shop without registering it, passed a dozen landmarks I could have named in my sleep. But my brain wasn't there. It was still in that kitchen, still seeing Mum's face under the fluorescent lights, still processing those two words on the birth certificate that had rewritten everything I thought I knew about myself.

Jamie Greyson.

Not dead. Never dead. Just... gone. Vanished like morning fog, like something that had never been solid in the first place. And Mum had known. She'd known the whole time, every time I'd asked about him, every time I'd imagined what he might have been like, every time I'd told myself I couldn't be angry at a dead man for leaving us. She'd sat across from me at the kitchen table and let me believe a fiction she'd crafted with her own hands.

I pulled into the car park at Southern Freight & Logistics twenty minutes late. The building squatted there like it always did—a big corrugated iron box with peeling paint the colour of forgotten things and a roller door that rattled in protest whenever it moved, metal grinding against metal in a way that set your teeth on edge. The kind of place that looks exactly the same whether it's summer or winter, morning or afternoon, whether you're arriving with hope or leaving with resignation. Functional. Depressing. The sort of building that seems to actively resist any attempt at improvement, as though ugliness had become its defining characteristic.

The car park was mostly empty this early, just Garry's ute—an ancient Hilux with rust eating at the wheel arches—and a couple of the other drivers' vehicles scattered across the cracked bitumen. I could see diesel rainbows shimmering in the puddles from yesterday's rain, the water catching the weak morning light in swirls of purple and green that almost made the place look beautiful if you squinted hard enough and ignored everything else. Almost.

I sat there for a moment after I killed the engine, hands still gripping the steering wheel. My knuckles were white, bloodless, the tendons standing out like cords beneath my skin. I made myself let go, flexing my fingers one by one. They felt stiff, cramped, like I'd been holding on too tight for too long—and not just to the steering wheel. Like my whole body had been clenched since five-thirty this morning, braced against an impact that had already happened, still waiting for the aftershocks.

Get it together. Just get through the day. Just... do the job.

But the truth was, I didn't want to be here. I wanted to be anywhere else—anywhere that didn't require me to pretend everything was normal, to smile at strangers, to make small talk about the weather whilst my entire understanding of my own existence crumbled like wet origami paper. I wanted to be sitting at my desk with a fresh sheet of kami, making something clean and precise, something that made sense. A crane with wings that folded exactly where they should, a geometric form where every angle corresponded to a mathematical certainty. Or I wanted to be asleep, dreamless, not thinking about anything at all, floating in that merciful blankness where fathers didn't have names and mothers didn't cry in dark kitchens at dawn.

Instead, I grabbed my phone—dead, of course, because I'd forgotten to charge it last night whilst I lay awake staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling and trying to make sense of something that refused to resolve into comprehensible shape—and shoved it in my pocket. Then I got out of the car and headed for the office door, my breath misting in the cold air, my shoulders hunched against the July chill that seemed to have settled into my bones overnight and showed no signs of leaving.

The warehouse smelled like it always did. Cardboard and dust and diesel fumes, that particular industrial perfume that clings to your clothes and follows you home, that gets into your hair and stays there no matter how many times you shower. The concrete floor was stained with oil in patches, swept clean in others, a map of years of accumulated work and neglect. Strip lights hung from the high ceiling on chains, some of them flickering with that arrhythmic pulse that made you wonder if they were about to die or just tormenting you for entertainment. The light they cast was harsh and white, relentless, making the whole place feel like a waiting room for something you didn't want to arrive at. Pallets were stacked along the walls like cardboard monuments, parcels sorted into wire cages with delivery manifest sheets clipped to them, fluttering slightly in the draught from the gap beneath the roller door. The truck I'd be driving today was already backed up to the loading bay, its roller door up, boxes visible inside like patient cargo awaiting its journey into the world.

I pushed through the heavy office door. It always stuck a bit, the frame warped from years of Tasmanian weather—damp in winter until the wood swelled, baking in summer until it cracked, never quite right in any season. The hinges squealed their familiar protest, a sound I'd heard a thousand times but which today grated against my nerves like fingernails on a blackboard.

"You're late again," Garry's deep voice boomed, cutting through the clatter of the warehouse as I pushed my way through the heavy office door leading to the storage area.

There it was. I'd been expecting it, rehearsing responses in my head during the drive, but it still hit me in the gut like a physical blow. I didn't turn around, just kept walking, one foot in front of the other, focusing on the simple mechanics of movement because everything else felt too complicated to process.

"Sorry," I replied quickly, my voice tinged with the familiar strain of making excuses. "Car troubles." It was a half-truth, the kind that had become too frequent lately, the kind that slid off my tongue before I could think of something better.

Car troubles. Right. As if the Corolla's various issues—the ticking engine, the suspect steering, the heater that only worked when it felt like it—were the reason I'd been sitting in the driveway for ten minutes that morning, staring at nothing, trying to make my hands stop shaking enough to put the key in the ignition. As if mechanical failure could explain the way my thoughts kept circling back to those seventeen letters. Jamie Nigel Greyson. A name where there should have been a gravestone.

"Hold up!" Garry's voice thundered again, louder this time, the kind of voice that had been trained by years of shouting over warehouse noise and machinery.

I paused, frozen midway through the doorframe. My back stiffened, every muscle tensing, a wave of apprehension washing over me like cold water. I'd already been on thin ice with two warnings for tardiness, two conversations in Garry's cramped office where he'd looked at me with disappointment rather than anger, which somehow felt worse. Is this the end? The thought sent a jolt of dread through me, sharp and electric. On top of everything else—on top of Mum crying in the dark, on top of the birth certificate, on top of finding out my entire life was built on a lie carefully constructed by the person I trusted most—was I about to lose the job that was keeping us afloat? The job that put food in the fridge, that kept the power connected, that gave me a reason to get up in the morning even when getting up felt like the hardest thing in the world?

Reluctantly, I turned around to face my supervisor, bracing myself for whatever came next. If I'm going to get fired, Garry will at least have to do it to my face.

Garry stood behind his desk in the cramped office that always smelled faintly of instant coffee and old paperwork—that particular mustiness of files that had been sitting in the same place for years, accumulating dust and forgetting their own contents. He was a big bloke, solid, built like someone who'd spent his life lifting things and moving things and never quite getting around to sitting still. Broad shoulders that strained his hi-vis vest, hands that looked like they could crush a tin can without trying. Forty-one now, with the kind of weathered face you get from years of outdoor work and not enough sleep, from early mornings and late nights and the constant pressure of keeping a struggling business running. His hair was going grey at the temples, silver threading through the brown in a way that made him look older than his years. He looked tired. He always looked tired, actually, that bone-deep exhaustion that comes from carrying too much for too long, but today it seemed worse. There were shadows under his eyes that hadn't been there last week, purple bruises of sleeplessness that spoke of his own troubles, his own midnight worries I knew nothing about.

"You've had... uh..." Garry stammered, an unusual hesitation in his usually assertive tone, the words catching like they'd hit something on the way out.

My brow furrowed in surprise. It was unlike Garry to falter, his voice usually so strong and commanding, the kind of voice that expected to be obeyed because it had earned that right through decades of hard work. He was looking at something on his desk, not quite meeting my eyes, his thick fingers fidgeting with a pen in a way I'd never seen before. That wasn't like him either. Garry was the kind of supervisor who looked you in the face when he spoke to you—when he praised you, when he bollocked you, whatever. Direct. Honest. The sort of man who believed in facing things head-on because that was the only way to get through them.

"You forgot to collect the manifest," he finally said, his voice returning to its normal timbre as he picked up a sheet of paper from the cluttered desk, holding it out towards me with something that might have been relief in his expression.

Relief hit me so hard I almost sagged. Not fired. Not today. The tension drained from my shoulders like water from a cracked vessel, leaving me feeling hollow and light-headed. I approached the desk and took the manifest from Garry, my fingers brushing the cheap paper. It was flimsy, insubstantial, just a list of addresses and package numbers that would dictate my entire day, but it felt like a temporary reprieve, a small mercy in a morning that had started off on the wrong foot and shown no signs of finding its balance.

"Truck is loaded, ready to go. I've already mapped out the route. You better get going, the first one is down Huonville way," Garry instructed, his tone businesslike as he released his grip on the paper, already turning back to whatever problems awaited him on his desk.

I nodded, a quick, efficient movement as I turned to leave, my eyes scanning the list briefly. Huonville. That was south, down past Kingston, out into the Huon Valley where the orchards spread across hillsides and the roads narrowed to single lanes that wound through forest and farmland. Rural deliveries always took longer—lots of driveways, properties set back from the road behind gates and cattle grids, people who wanted to chat because they hadn't seen another human face in days. The kind of run that could eat up half your day if you let it, but which also offered something the city routes didn't: silence, space, time to think. "And then up to Berriedale?" I queried, pausing once again in the doorway, the manifest rustling slightly in my grip. The route seemed unusually convoluted, zigzagging across the map in a way that made no geographical sense. "That's a completely different direction."

Berriedale was north. Back through Hobart, past the turn-off to Glenorchy, up into the northern suburbs where the houses got bigger and the driveways got longer. It didn't make sense to go south then double back north. Total waste of petrol and time, the kind of routing that would have made my Year 10 maths teacher wince.

"I know," Garry's voice grew tense, a hint of frustration creeping in, his jaw tightening in that way it did when he was dealing with problems he hadn't created but was expected to solve. "Another fucking priority delivery. And since Liam quit last week... Well..." he trailed off, the unsaid words hanging heavily in the air between us like cigarette smoke, like the memory of arguments that hadn't ended well.

Right. Liam. Who'd walked out after an argument with Garry about overtime and never came back, just left his hi-vis hanging in the break room and his name on the whiteboard schedule like a ghost that wouldn't take the hint and disappear. Which left us even more short-staffed than usual, stretched thin across a customer base that kept growing whilst the workforce shrank. Which meant everyone else was picking up the slack, covering routes they didn't know, working hours they hadn't planned for, pretending their bodies and their patience were infinite resources that could be drawn upon without consequence.

"I'll get it done," I declared, a newfound determination infusing my voice despite everything. I knew the importance of these deliveries, the unspoken trust that came with them, the fragile economics of a company barely keeping its head above water. The fact that we were operating on margins so thin you could see through them, that every delivery mattered, that losing a client could mean losing more jobs—including mine.

With a final glance back at Garry, who was already frowning at something on his computer screen, I walked out of the poky office, letting the door close with a definitive thud behind me. It was more than just a physical exit; it was a commitment, a silent vow to rise above the challenges of the day, to prove that I was still reliable even when my whole world felt like it was sliding sideways into chaos.

Or at least that's what I told myself. Really, I just wanted to get out on the road where I didn't have to look anyone in the eye, where I could be alone with my thoughts even if those thoughts were the last thing I wanted to be alone with.

As I made my way towards the small truck, my steps were methodical, almost automatic, muscle memory taking over where conscious thought had failed. I'd done this hundreds of times. Thousands, maybe. The routine of it was almost comforting—the familiar sequence of actions that required no decisions, no thinking, just movement. I reached out and pressed the green button on the wall without breaking stride, my palm finding it from pure instinct. The large roller door groaned to life, rattling in its ascent and revealing the early morning light that filtered into the dim warehouse. The sound reverberated through the space, metal on metal, a familiar symphony of machinery that needed oiling and never got it, that complained every time it was asked to perform its only function.

The morning air that rushed in was cold. Properly cold. July cold, that Tasmanian winter chill that gets into your bones and doesn't leave, that makes you wonder if summer ever really existed or if it was just something you dreamed during the long dark nights. I could see my breath for a second before it disappeared, a brief ghost that formed and dissolved in the space between me and the world. The sky outside was that flat grey colour that meant more rain was coming, clouds sitting low and heavy over the hills like a weighted blanket pressing down on the valley.

With a flick of my wrist, I sent the manifest—a single, flimsy sheet of paper that dictated my day, that reduced my existence to a series of addresses and package numbers—sailing across the cab. It landed haphazardly on the passenger seat, one corner folding over. I should have smoothed it out. Should have cared about keeping things neat, about maintaining the precision that I brought to my origami, the attention to detail that usually defined me. But I didn't. Couldn't summon the energy for it, couldn't make myself care about something so small when everything large had just collapsed.

Pulling myself up into the driver's seat, I settled in and closed the door with a satisfying thud. The sound was solid. Final. Like shutting out the world for a bit, like creating a small metal sanctuary where nobody could reach me, where nobody could see the way my hands were still trembling slightly on the steering wheel.

A deep sigh escaped my lips, one of relief mixed with a tinge of resignation. The news of Liam's resignation last week had initially been a disappointment, a shake-up in our small team that had meant extra work for everyone else, extra hours, extra tiredness in a job that already asked too much. Another driver gone, another person who'd decided that the pay and conditions weren't worth the hassle of dealing with Garry's demands and the company's chronic understaffing. But now, in a twist of fate, it seemed like my saving grace. Being a driver down was probably the only thing keeping me on the payroll. My recent string of late arrivals should have got me sacked by now—would have got me sacked, if the company handbook meant anything, if Garry wasn't desperate for anyone who could drive a truck and read a manifest. Would have got me sacked, if Garry had literally anyone else he could put in this truck today.

I turned the key in the ignition. The engine turned over once, twice, caught on the third try with a splutter and a cough that spoke of cold mornings and neglected maintenance. The whole cab shook slightly as it settled into its usual rumble, that low vibration that worked its way through the seat and into my spine. The fuel gauge showed just over half a tank. The temperature gauge slowly started to creep up from C towards the middle, the needle moving with glacial patience. Everything was normal. Everything was exactly the same as yesterday and the day before and the day before that.

Except nothing was the same. Nothing would ever be the same again.

A sour taste lingered in my mouth, an unpleasant reminder of the unfulfilled aspirations that often haunted my thoughts, of the life I'd been promised by well-meaning teachers who didn't understand that some promises can't survive contact with reality. I knew I should be grateful for this job, and I was. I really was, in the way you're grateful for a life raft even when you're sick of floating and tired of the endless grey sea. Mum needed the money. We needed the money. This job kept the power on, kept food in the fridge—such as it was, that sad collection of half-empty containers and nearly-expired condiments. Without it, we'd be properly fucked, sliding from precarious to catastrophic, from managing to drowning.

But deep down, in the part of me that still remembered what it felt like to hope for things, I couldn't help but wonder—would this be a career my father would be proud of?

The question hit different now. Before this morning, it had been theoretical, almost philosophical, the kind of thing you wonder about in the abstract. My father was dead, and dead people don't judge you for your career choices. You can imagine them being proud of anything, can't you? Make up whatever version of them you need, craft them into the supportive presence you wished you'd had. A dead father could have been anything: a scholar, a tradesman, a dreamer, a pragmatist. You could paint him in whatever colours suited your current needs.

But Jamie Greyson wasn't dead. Jamie Greyson was out there somewhere, alive, breathing, living his life, eating breakfast and going to work and doing all the ordinary things that living people do. Completely unaware that I existed, that somewhere in Tasmania there was a nineteen-year-old with his genetics and his mother's eyes wondering what kind of man he was. And somehow that made the question worse. If he knew about me—if he'd known I was born, if he'd been around to watch me grow up—would he look at me driving a delivery truck at nineteen and think I'd done well? That I'd made the best of difficult circumstances? Or would he be disappointed? Would he see a dropout, a failure, a young man who'd surrendered his potential to the demands of survival?

I'd never blamed him for leaving us. After all, you have no control over when you die. I'd repeated that to myself for years, a mantra I'd crafted to explain the inexplicable, to make peace with an absence that had shaped my entire life. Especially when life felt particularly unfair, when the weight of circumstance pressed down on me until I could barely breathe. When I'd left school early, walking away from education because the alternative was watching Mum work herself into an early grave. When I'd watched my friends go off to college whilst I sorted parcels in a tin shed that baked in summer and froze in winter. When I'd come home to find Mum crying over the bills she couldn't pay, those thin envelopes with their red-printed warnings that might as well have been death sentences for the anxiety they caused. You have no control over when you die. It was a kind of comfort, that mantra. It meant I couldn't be angry at him. It meant the situation was just bad luck, just the universe being cruel in the random, impartial way that universes are cruel.

But now? Now that I knew he hadn't died, that he'd just... what? Left? Not known about me? Been kept away by distance or circumstance or choices I didn't understand?

I didn't have that comfort anymore. Now the anger had somewhere to go, had a target, had a name—and that name was Jamie Nigel Greyson, and it sat in my chest like a hot coal that wouldn't stop burning.

With a gentle press on the accelerator, I guided the truck out of the complex and onto the main road. The engine hummed steadily beneath me, a comforting and familiar presence, the only constant in a morning that had upended everything else. I cast a final glance at the address on the manifest, confirming my route before steering the vehicle towards Huonville. The road stretched out in front of me, grey tarmac disappearing into grey sky, a path that was both literal and metaphorical, leading me not just to my destination but perhaps, in some small way, towards understanding my own journey.

Or maybe it was just a road. Just tarmac and white lines and me driving a truck full of other people's parcels, trying not to think about the fact that my entire life had been a lie. Trying not to think about how many times Mum had looked me in the eye and told me stories about a dead man who had never actually died. Trying not to think about what that meant about everything else she'd ever told me.

As the truck rolled forward, the suburbs giving way to open road, my thoughts drifted to the time when my mother fell ill at the start of my college years. Year 11, that was, when everything changed, when the future I'd imagined for myself began to dissolve like sugar in rain. I remembered her coming home from work one day, looking grey. Not just tired—Mum was always tired, had been tired for as long as I could remember—but grey in a way that spoke of something deeper, something wrong at the fundamental level of her being. Her skin had that translucent quality, like paper held up to light, and she'd moved slowly, carefully, as if every step cost her something she couldn't afford to spend.

She'd waved it off, said it was nothing, just a cold coming on, but I'd seen the way she moved, like everything hurt, like the simple act of existing had become an ordeal. And it got worse over the next few weeks, the greyness deepening, the movements becoming more laboured, until I'd wake up in the middle of the night and hear her coughing in her room, trying to muffle the sound so she wouldn't worry me.

I remembered the school counsellors, their well-meaning attempts to persuade me to stay in school. Mrs Colley, who'd called me into her office with its motivational posters and dying pot plants and talked about my potential, about how dropping out would limit my options, about the importance of qualifications in today's competitive job market. Mr Woods, who'd tried to work out a payment plan for my fees, as if that was the main issue, as if the problem was just money and not the slow-motion collapse of everything that held my life together. They knew, as well as I did, that the state offered no real alternatives, no safety net that could catch us before we hit the ground. If I stayed, my mother would suffer, working extra shifts to cover my school expenses whilst her health deteriorated, and that in turn would affect my grades, and eventually I'd fail anyway. The decision, it seemed, had already been made for me. We were on our own, navigating a world that often felt indifferent to our struggles, that treated poverty like a personal failing rather than a systemic trap.

The Corolla had barely made it up the hill that day, the day I officially withdrew from school. I remembered that specifically, the way the engine had whined and complained, straining against the gradient, and I'd thought, Great, if the car dies we're properly fucked, if we can't even get from A to B we're done. But it hadn't died. It had kept going, same as me, same as Mum. Just... kept going, because that's what you do when stopping isn't an option, when the alternative to movement is collapse.

My grip on the steering wheel tightened slightly as I thought about my friends, particularly Beth. Time and circumstances had gradually pulled us in different directions, the gap between our lives widening with each passing month, especially over the last six months when I'd stopped accepting invitations to things I couldn't afford and she'd stopped asking. We'd been close in school—properly close, the kind of close where you share lunch and secrets and plans for futures that seem infinite with possibility. We'd studied together in the library, complained about teachers in whispered conversations, made plans for the future together that seemed as solid as the desks we sat at.

Beth, now in her final year of college, was preparing to pursue a business degree at UTAS. I'd seen her post about it on Facebook a few weeks ago, scrolling through my feed during a lunch break in the cab of this very truck. Photos of her in her formal school uniform at some awards ceremony, holding a certificate with gold embossing, grinning at the camera with that confidence that comes from knowing your path is clear and well-lit. Her parents on either side of her, looking proud in that way parents look when their children fulfil the dreams they'd always held for them. The caption had been something about dreams coming true, about working hard and achieving goals, about the future being bright and full of promise.

I'd liked the post. Left a comment—"Congrats!" or something equally bland, equally inadequate to express the complicated tangle of emotions that had knotted themselves in my chest. What else was I supposed to say? I would have been there too if my mum hadn't got sick and we weren't poor? I'm happy for you even though your success reminds me of everything I gave up? Enjoy the life I'll never have?

I couldn't help but feel a pang of what might have been, a sharp twinge of loss for a future that had never quite materialised. Had things been different, I would have studied economics. I had always had a knack for numbers and finance, even though my own financial situation was modest at best, perhaps because it was modest—when you grow up counting pennies, you develop an intimate understanding of how money works, how it flows and pools and sometimes evaporates entirely. I'd been good at it too. Proper good. My Year 10 maths teacher, Mr Henderson, had pulled me aside once after class and told me I should consider it for university. "You've got a head for this, Joel," he'd said, looking at me with an intensity that made me uncomfortable because it contained something I wasn't used to seeing directed at me: belief. "Don't waste it."

Well. Here we were. Here I was, driving a truck through fog, delivering packages for people who had more than I'd ever have, thinking about waste and potential and all the things that get lost when life doesn't cooperate with your plans.

The truck jostled and swayed as it traversed the rough road, a reminder of the physical journey I was on even as my mind wandered through territories that had no maps. The road quality deteriorated once you got out past Kingston, the tarmac pocked with potholes that the council would fix eventually. Maybe. Someday. When they had the budget and the will and the time, which was to say probably never. The truck's suspension groaned with every bump, protesting the abuse, and I could hear the parcels shifting slightly in the back despite being strapped down properly, cardboard whispering against cardboard in the darkness of the cargo space.

I adjusted the headlights, turning them up to pierce through the thick fog that had descended over the valley like a blanket, like a shroud, like something trying to hide the world from itself. It had come in fast, rolling down from the mountain with that eerie speed that Tasmanian fog has, turning everything grey and indistinct in a matter of minutes. The fog seemed symbolic, though I tried not to think about that, tried not to read metaphors into weather patterns like some kind of literature student. A visual representation of the uncertainties and obscured paths in my life. I could barely see twenty metres ahead, the world reduced to a small bubble of visibility that moved with me, that offered no hint of what lay beyond its boundaries. The white lines on the road appeared and disappeared in the murk like messages I couldn't quite read. Other cars had their lights on, ghostly shapes that emerged from the grey and vanished again, there and gone before I could register more than the impression of movement.

As the lights cut through the mist, carving temporary corridors through the whiteness, I couldn't help but wish for a similar clarity in my own life, a guiding light to illuminate the way forward. But there was no such light. There was just fog, inside and out, obscuring everything that had once seemed clear.

Jamie Greyson.

The name sat in my head like a stone. Heavy. Immovable. Real. Taking up space that had previously belonged to comfortable fictions, to the story of a dead father who couldn't disappoint me because he'd never had the chance to try.

I had a father. He had a name. He was alive somewhere, breathing the same air I breathed, looking at the same sky, existing in the same world that I did.

And I had absolutely no idea what to do with that information. No idea whether to search for him, to confront him, to pretend I'd never learned the truth. No idea whether finding him would heal something or break something further. No idea who I even was anymore, now that the foundation of my identity had proved to be built on sand.

The truck rumbled on through the fog, carrying me south towards Huonville, towards a day of deliveries and forced smiles and pretending everything was normal. Towards strangers' driveways and polite exchanges and the mechanical routine of work that asked nothing of me except my presence and my hands.

But nothing was normal. Not the fog. Not the silence in the cab. Not the weight in my chest where comfortable certainties used to live.

Not anymore.