The Taxi

"There is something uniquely suffocating about being driven, at forty kilometres an hour, directly towards a thing you do not understand, by a perfectly nice man who wants to chat."

The engine of that taxi ticked away underneath us with the weary persistence of something a long way past its prime and far too stubborn to admit it, and we came out of the airport precinct and into the main body of the afternoon traffic, and the city began unrolling itself in front of me one red light at a time.

And it was not Adelaide.

It looked exactly like Adelaide. Every building was where it had always been. But something had gone out of it somewhere back in that terminal, and what was left was a surface—a very good, very convincing surface, laid over the top of something whose shape I could no longer make out.

The driver was in his late fifties, with a face that had been out in this weather for most of it, and he had been watching me in the mirror since we pulled off the kerb. He did not say anything for a while. He simply looked, at intervals, in the way of somebody who has had a very great many peculiar people in the back of his car and has learned not to reach a conclusion about any of them too early.

"Bit of a rush back there at the airport, mate," he said at last.

His tone was pitched somewhere between friendliness and enquiry, which is a note I have heard a thousand times in this country and had never once found sinister until that afternoon.

"You running late for something particularly important, are you?"

"Not really," I said.

I said it to the window, and I leaned into the corner of the back seat and pretended to be interested in a car dealership going past, and the cracked vinyl groaned underneath me.

"Just needed to get moving."

The words came out of my mouth misshapen and I heard them go. But there was no other answer available to me, because the true one was: I have just run out of an airport terminal because a woman who can walk through the side of an aeroplane is chasing me, and she is chasing me because I stole her bag and hid it on another planet.

So I let the silence sit there and hoped that it would settle.

He chuckled. It was a good chuckle—dry, and low, and entirely genuine, and it filled that car like warm smoke.

"That airport's always an absolute bloody zoo. You'd think after all that money they poured into the renovations, someone might've invested in a bit of proper organisation. But nope. Same circus. Different day."

And I sat in the back of his taxi and wondered how many men had sat exactly where I was sitting—evasive, over-polite, too quick with a smile and far too careful with a detail. How many people he had driven out of the neighbourhood of one kind of trouble and towards another, and had said something kind to on the way, and had never thought about again.

I gave him a nod that I hoped would end it.

It did not end it.

"Elizabeth train station, right?" He shifted his hands a little on the wheel. "Bit out of the way, innit?"

And my stomach went.

Because he was right, and I had known he was right when I said it, and I had said it anyway with a woman standing on a kerb forty feet behind me.

Nobody took a taxi from Adelaide Airport to Elizabeth. It was a very long way and it cost a great deal of money, and there was a bus that went most of the distance for the price of a coffee—and a fare like that was a thing a driver would remember, and would remember accurately, and would describe to anybody at all who came and asked him about it.

I had left a trail. I had left it in the first ninety seconds and had not even noticed myself doing it.

"Yeah," I said. "That's right."

Flat. Neutral. And about four degrees too flat and too neutral, which I heard as it left me.

"Bit of a trek, that. Nearly an hour with this kind of traffic." He was entirely comfortable. He was making conversation with a bloke in the back of his car on a Saturday afternoon. "You heading further up the line after that? Train to Gawler, or somewhere past that?"

"No," I said. "Meeting someone."

And that should have been the end of it, and his eyebrows went up very slightly in the mirror.

"Could've arranged to meet 'em somewhere closer to the airport, yeah? Would've saved you a bit of coin. And a bit of time." There was no malice in it anywhere. He simply said a thing that happened to be true. "Elizabeth's not exactly a popular spot for a casual catch-up."

And there was nothing wrong with that. That is what I have never been able to get past.

It was an observation. It was the sort of observation any reasonable person would have made, in that car, on that road, on that afternoon. He had no agenda. He was not testing me. He was a taxi driver making conversation, and the conversation had accidentally arrived at the one question I could not answer.

And I knew all of that. I knew every word of it while it was happening.

And I still heard it as an interrogation. And that frightened me a great deal more than anything he could actually have said.

"It wasn't my idea," I said.

And there was an edge on it. A sharp defensive edge that came out of nowhere and went straight across the middle of the car, and I heard it land, and I sat in the back seat with my ears going hot.

Too much. Far too much. He had asked me why I was going somewhere and I had told him it was not my fault.

He did not answer. He shrugged—a small economical shrug, of the kind that gets learned by anybody who has been lied to in his own back seat several thousand times and has long since stopped taking it personally—and he let it go. He let the whole thing dissolve into the sound of tyres on hot tarmac and the rattle of an old suspension.

And I have been grateful to him for that ever since, and he will never know it.

Outside, the city changed. Suburbia came in like a tide—tired brick houses with patchy lawns, a mechanic's with a hand-painted sign, a takeaway shop, wide bleached footpaths with the shadows of gum trees lying long across them.

We came onto Main North Road, which runs up through the top of that city like a spine, and I watched the landmarks go past and felt something in my chest that I had not been braced for.

Because I have been up that road a hundred times. Dealerships with plastic bunting going in the hot wind. A factory that has been derelict since I was at school, wearing the same graffiti it was wearing then.

And I had been up it with Josh. That was the thing. Trips north in the university breaks. Family barbecues at Carisbrooke Park with our mother apologising for the salad. Weekends out at Para Wirra with a tent that had never once gone up on the first attempt.

All of it came at me through the window of a taxi and none of it would come into focus, and it hung out there over the bitumen shimmering in the heat like something I had made up.

Because it was not the same road any more.

It had become a countdown. Every light we stopped at was a light we were going to move off from. Every kilometre put me closer to a concrete carpark that I did not want to be standing in, and to whatever it was that was going to be waiting for me in it.

We went past a bottle shop with the VB signage bleached down to nothing and posters in the window so sun-warped that they had begun to look like fossils. Past a fast-food place with its fluorescent sign already burning in daylight, and half a dozen utes and lowered hatchbacks in the car park with their exhausts still ticking.

The road ahead of us shimmered and lifted and turned into water and then was not water, over and over, all the way to the horizon.

I wiped the sweat off my forehead with a sleeve that was already wet, and put my head back against the rest—not to relax, because I could not have relaxed if somebody had paid me for it, but simply to look, for a minute, like a man going somewhere unremarkable.

To anybody outside that car, that is all I was.

To one person, I was not.

"Just visiting Adelaide, then?" he said, after a long while. "Or are you a local, coming home?"

And his eyes came up in that cracked mirror again—dark, and shrewd, and perfectly polite. There was nothing unkind in it anywhere. There was simply a man who had spent thirty years reading people from behind a wheel, watching the posture and the pauses and the small tells, and who was extremely good at it and did not know that he was.

"Local," I said.

And then, before I could stop it: "Well. I used to be properly local, anyway. Haven't been back in a while."

It was not the answer I had planned. I had not planned any answer; that was the trouble with it. He had asked it so gently and so simply that it went straight in under everything, and something came up out of me that I had not authorised.

And it left a question sitting in my lap that I did not want.

When did this city stop being home?

"Ah," he said, warmly. "A born-and-bred Adelaide boy, then." The lines round his eyes deepened. "Not much changes in this city, you know. People say it's small like that's a bad thing. But there's comfort in it. Same streets. Same sun. Feels good to come home again, doesn't it?"

And there was a rough sort of tenderness in the way he said it—something almost paternal—and it caught me entirely undefended.

I had been braced for transactional politeness. I had been braced for the traffic, or the Crows, or the weather. And instead a stranger had said something decent to me out of a long life of driving people about, and I sat in the back of his taxi with everything I had done that day sitting in my lap, and I could not answer him.

I made a noise. It was not agreement and it was not denial. It was cowardice, and it was all I had.

We went past one of those enormous suburban retail complexes—the acres of car park, the big grey boxes, the trolleys abandoned in the bays—and something came up in me without any warning at all.

Josh and I in a place exactly like that one, years ago, when he moved out of home. Standing in an aisle arguing about bar stools. Him wanting a futon, of all the objects in creation, and me telling him that it was the single worst piece of furniture ever conceived by man, and him buying it anyway out of pure obstinacy, and the two of us getting it into the back of the Commodore and it not fitting and neither of us admitting that it did not fit for forty minutes.

He had been so pleased with himself. He had been so pleased with that flat.

"You seem a bit… unusually distracted, if you don't mind my saying," the driver said.

And that pulled me straight back into the car.

His voice was still gentle. It was still perfectly casual. And there was a thread of something extremely sharp running right through the middle of it, and he had laid it out in the open the way people do in this state, without any confrontation in it at all.

"Something rather like that," I said.

And I shifted in my seat, and the vinyl complained, and the air conditioning was fighting a losing battle with the afternoon, and I could not have told anybody whether the sweat on the back of my neck was the heat or not.

"Well. I hope it all goes smooth for you." He swung us into another lane and round a semitrailer with the unhurried ease of somebody who has spent half a lifetime doing it and finds it restful. "Not every day I get sent halfway to bloody Gawler, I'll tell you that. Keeps me awake behind the wheel."

I got my mouth to do something that was almost a smile.

And I had my phone out again, in my fist, gripped hard enough to hurt, as though a message might materialise on it if I only held it tightly enough.

Nothing. No calls. No messages. Nothing at all from Josh since eleven words and a place name.

We were well up into the north by then. Salisbury went past without ceremony—industrial sheds, chain-link, a service station squatting under its own sun-blasted signage—and then the long retail spine of Elizabeth began to come up. Concrete. Car yards. Shopping complexes lying low and wide along the road.

A place built for transactions. Not for meeting anybody.

And then the phone went off in my hand.

I came straight up out of the seat, and my heart went into my throat, and I had the thing turned over and lit before I had finished moving.

It was not Josh.

It was a low-battery warning. Twenty per cent. That was all it was.

And I sat there and looked at it and something in me came apart very quietly.

Because that was the last thing I had. A telephone with nothing on it, in a suburb I did not want to be in, with a charger sitting in a bag I had never packed properly. And it was going to go flat. And when it went flat there would be no message from Josh even in theory, and I would be standing in a carpark in the north of Adelaide with a doorway to another world in my trousers and no means whatever of contacting one single human being on this planet.

"Bloody brilliant," I said.

The driver chuckled again, and the lines came up round his eyes.

"Technology, eh? Always there—right up until you actually need it. Then it disappears faster than your wallet at the pokies."

And I laughed. I actually laughed, once, and it came out of me flat and mechanical and with nothing at all behind it, and he took it kindly, because he was a kind man, and because he had no possible way of knowing that he had just described my entire week.

The shadows were getting long across the bitumen. We went past Ryans Road, and the great low bulk of the shopping centre with its car parks swarming, and every landmark that came up and went past felt like another item being ticked off a list that I had not written and could not see the end of.

"We're almost there now," he said. "Elizabeth train station. Just up ahead on the left."

And my stomach turned over.

I nodded. I could not get anything else out. And my hand went to my pocket and touched the shape of the phone through the fabric, exactly as it had been doing all day, as though this time it might be different.

It was not different.

Meet me at the Elizabeth train station instead of the airport.

Why?

The station came up ahead of us on the left, grey and squat and entirely unwelcoming—concrete and steel, put up by people who had been asked for utility and had delivered it and had not been asked for anything else. It sat there in the sun throwing hard angular shadows out across the asphalt, and it did not look like a place where anybody had ever been pleased to see anybody.

"Thanks," I said.

And there was a great deal more than gratitude in it, and none of the rest of it was anything I could have explained to him.

He looked at me one last time in the mirror. And something went between us—some flicker of understanding, and of all the questions he had decided not to ask—and his face softened by about a millimetre behind the professional indifference that a man learns after thirty years of not getting involved in other people's afternoons.

"Well, mate," he said. "I hope your complicated afternoon gets a lot easier from here on out."

"Me too," I said. And I barely got it out.

The taxi came into the carpark and slowed, and the suspension dipped, and I looked out at the place where I was about to be standing.

It was enormous. It was an ocean of bleached, cracked, sun-scoured asphalt going away in every direction, with the heat coming up off it in long liquid waves that made the far side of it shimmer and move—and the whole surface of it looked as though it might soften and take me down into itself if I stood still on it long enough.

And beyond it, the station: a slab of grey concrete sitting there under that sky with an air of enormous indifference, its metal roof radiating heat like the door of a kiln.

The light in that carpark was vicious. It came off everything at once—windscreens, chrome, the white shoulder of a leaning street sign—and every glance cost me something, and the backs of my eyes had begun to ache in a way that made each blink feel as though somebody had got sand in behind the lids.

He pulled up short of the pedestrian access and looked back at me over his shoulder, and this time there was no curiosity in his face. It was something quieter than that.

I already had my wallet out. I put the money into his hand with an efficiency that was very close to rudeness, and he hesitated for a moment as though there were one more thing he had wanted to say to me—and I did not leave him the room to say it, and I have wondered ever since what it was.

My eyes were already out on that carpark, going car by car, doing the only thing I have ever known how to do.

Blue sedan. No. White hatchback. No. A late-model four-wheel drive with the windows dark. No.

My heart, which had been slowly coming back down over the course of that drive, started straight back up again with every vehicle I eliminated.

"Cheers, mate," he said, folding the notes without ceremony, and the warmth had gone out of his voice and had been replaced by something entirely professional.

And I did not answer him. I did not thank him. I opened the door and got out.

And January hit me like a wall.

The door clicked shut behind me with a sound I did not care for at all, and the air out there was thick and heavy and standing perfectly still, and it smelled of petrol and hot metal and that dry mineral smell that comes off sunbaked railway concrete and off nothing else on earth.

I stood there with one hand on the strap of my bag, and the soles of my shoes very slightly sinking into the asphalt.

Behind me the taxi turned over and pulled away, and the sound of it went off across the carpark, and then went out of the carpark, and then was not anywhere at all.

And I had thought, in some stupid corner of myself, that I would feel better once it had gone.

I felt considerably worse.

Because I looked out at that carpark and saw exactly what I was standing in.

There was no cover. Not one thing anywhere in the whole of it—no wall, no corner, no building line, nothing at all between me and anybody who came in off that road. The bays were laid out in a lopsided grid with the paint half gone out of them, and a scatter of dusty cars sat about looking less parked than abandoned, and every single one of them was visible from every other point in the lot.

I could be seen from the road. I could be seen from the station. I could be seen from every approach, and there was nowhere on that entire two acres of asphalt where I could stand and not be seen from three directions at once.

It was the airport again. It was exactly the airport again, without the crowd.

The gum trees at the edges of the lot threw down long broken shadows that never quite reached anything, and their leaves hung dead still in air that was not moving at all, and even the birds had given it up. There was no sound anywhere except a car out on Main North Road.

A few people were drifting about at the edges of the station in that slow, deliberate, minimum-effort way that every person in this state has learned by the age of about ten. In that heat, any movement a man does not absolutely require is a movement he will pay for later.

None of them was my brother.

I went round the cars again, systematically, the way I would go round a list. And his was not there. It had not been there the first time and it was not there now, and going round them a third time was not going to change anything, and I went round them a third time anyway.

And then I looked at my watch.

Twenty-four minutes to four.

And I stood in the middle of that carpark and did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic said exactly what it had been saying for the whole of the last hour, and what I had refused to sit still and listen to.

He is not late.

If he had been at Burra when he sent that message, then even at the speed my brother drives—and my brother drives at a speed that has cost him a licence—he could not possibly be here yet. He had another half an hour in him at the very least. Very probably more.

There was nothing wrong. Nothing had happened. Nobody had failed to arrive anywhere.

I was simply early.

And I stood there in the heat with that in my hands and could not make it do one single thing for me. Because I knew it, and it was true, and it was correct, and it changed absolutely nothing about what was going on in my chest—and that was the moment I understood that something in me had come loose from the evidence, and that I was no longer a man who could be reasoned with, not even by myself.

And that is the one thing I have. That is the whole of what I am for. Put the numbers in front of me and I will tell a room full of frightened people what is actually happening rather than what they are all afraid is happening, and I have done it in front of executives who did not want to hear it, and I have been right.

And I stood in a carpark in Elizabeth with the numbers in my hand, and they told me that everything was fine, and I did not believe them.

What the bloody hell is taking him so long.

The heat came up through the soles of my shoes until it felt as though the asphalt were slowly taking them, and I rocked forward onto the balls of my feet and looked at the same six cars again for the hundredth time.

I got the phone out.

Nothing. Of course nothing. The same eleven words, sitting in the same place, on a screen I could barely read for the glare coming off it, with the battery indicator up in the corner going quietly about its business.

I put it away.

I walked a little way towards the station, although I had no intention whatever of getting on a train, and the building loomed up at me offering neither shade nor sanctuary nor anything else. It was a shape. It was a marker. It was the place in the message.

And people came out of it in a slow trickle and went off across the carpark towards their cars—a young bloke with headphones on and a skateboard under his arm; a woman dragging a suitcase that had lost a wheel; an older couple arm in arm, moving at the pace of people with nowhere in particular to be.

Strangers, all of them. Not one of them my brother.

And every car that came up Main North Road from the south lifted me and dropped me. Every single one. A white ute. A faded hatchback. Somebody's grandmother in a Camry. Each of them was hope arriving and hope leaving inside about four seconds, and it did it to me perhaps thirty times, and by the end of it I could no longer tell whether I was looking at that road or simply flinching at it.

And underneath all of it, something colder came up.

Because it had stopped being irritation. It had stopped being irritation somewhere in the middle of the third pass round the cars, and what was underneath it was a slow crawling certainty that something in this whole arrangement was wrong. Not delayed. Not inconvenient. Wrong—the way a note is wrong, or a chair with one leg shorter than the other three, or a door standing very slightly open in a house where every door was shut.

I should not have come here.

Not like this. Not without knowing why. Not without one single piece of information about what I was walking into, and not without any plan at all for what I would do if the answer turned out to be a bad one.

I have never in eleven years walked into a room without knowing why the meeting had been called.

I stood in the middle of an empty carpark in the northern suburbs of Adelaide in forty degrees of heat with a doorway to another world in my pocket, and I went round the cars again.

And there was still no bloody sign of Josh.