Twenty-Five Kilometres

“Sometimes you don’t realise how far you’ve come until someone points out you’ve almost made it—then you watch the road twist away anyway.”

We had been on the road for two more days, though it didn’t feel like days—more like a smear of heat and silence and roadside servo sandwiches. Nothing important had happened, not really. Just kilometre after kilometre of cracked tarmac, wiry scrub, and the occasional stretch of bitumen so straight and flat it looked like it might fall off the edge of the world. It was the kind of travel that made your thoughts feel heavy and slow, like your brain had been dulled by the drone of tyres and the sameness of the horizon.

We didn’t talk much. Not because there was nothing to say, but because the weight of saying it felt too hard. Mum drove like someone on autopilot, hands locked on the wheel, her eyes never lingering too long on anything. Mack stared out the window, jaw tight, arms crossed, as if holding himself in place by sheer will. And I just sat there, pressing Ribbons to my chest, watching the landscape blur and wondering if it was possible to feel homesick for somewhere you hadn’t even left yet.

By the time the edges of Brisbane started to appear, the inside of the car felt stretched thin, like a bubble about to pop. The city didn’t arrive all at once. It crept up on us, quietly at first, like a bad decision you only realise you’ve made once it’s far too late to turn around.

It looked like it had grown too fast and without permission, the way weeds take over a forgotten garden—too much, too soon, with no one really in charge. Like someone had started out with a blueprint and optimism, then halfway through decided they were too tired to care how it turned out. So it kept expanding, outwards and upwards and sideways, a mess of glass and concrete and advertising hoardings, sprawling wherever there was room—or even when there wasn’t.

The first signs of it were cautious. A lone servo with flickering fluorescent lights, the kind that made your skin look sickly and grey even in daylight. Then clusters of low buildings—shops, warehouses, garages with their roller doors half open and tired men inside smoking with one hand while the other turned greasy tools. I saw a billboard advertising a skin clinic, a woman’s face airbrushed into a version of perfection that made her look more like a statue than a person. Her eyes followed us as we passed, unblinking and indifferent.

And then, like a switch had been thrown, it was everywhere.

Houses appeared in unnatural symmetry, one after the other after the other, so uniform they looked like they'd been printed rather than built. Fences that offered no privacy but demarcated ownership like invisible lines drawn in the sand. Street names tried to pretend they were poetic—Wattlebird Close, Serenity Drive, Jacaranda Court—but they only made me feel more lost, like we were being lied to about where we were.

Mum didn’t speak. Her hands were locked at ten and two on the steering wheel, knuckles pale, shoulders high. She was breathing through her nose in that tight, clipped way that said she was trying very hard not to feel anything. The lines around her mouth were back—the ones that deepened whenever she was concentrating too hard on pretending everything was fine.

Mack tapped his foot silently against the floor of the car, staring out at the rows of houses with narrowed eyes. He didn’t say anything either, but his whole body felt stiff beside me, like he was holding something in.

The traffic grew thicker, the calm of open road traded for the start-stop rhythm of brake lights and indicators and cars that crowded too close. We passed shopping centres with gleaming car parks and identical fonts, all promising bargains and freshness and happiness in bulk. People moved across pedestrian crossings without urgency, eyes down at their phones, oblivious to the restless chaos of vehicles around them.

It all looked so normal, so utterly everyday, and yet I felt like an outsider watching a world I’d once belonged to but no longer understood.

The air changed, too. The country air had always smelled dry—cracked earth and eucalyptus, the ghost of campfire smoke—but now it reeked of people. Of car exhaust and melted bitumen and hot grease trapped in chip wrappers. It smelled like bins and vending machines and fake air fresheners trying to cover up everything underneath. Even with the windows up, it seeped in.

I leaned my forehead against the glass, watching the city slide past us. Part of me longed for it—the noise, the movement, the life. Shops and people and traffic lights meant rules, and rules meant safety, or at least the possibility of it.

But another part of me—something smaller and sharper and more honest—missed the reassuring silence of the outback. Missed the way the sky went on forever. Missed the feeling that we were the only ones left in the world, and that no one could find us if they didn’t know where to look.

Because here, in the city, it felt like eyes could be everywhere.

And I wasn’t sure we were ready to be seen.

Mum rolled her window halfway down, and the noise of the city slipped inside in disjointed bursts—snatches of conversation from passing pedestrians, the low thrum of a bassline from a nearby car, the screech of brakes somewhere behind us. The air was thick with heat and petrol fumes, and the stale atmosphere of our car—the smell of old wrappers, crumpled clothes, and that faint lingering tang of anxiety—shifted slightly but didn’t disappear.

Her fingers began tapping on the steering wheel. It wasn’t a beat I recognised, not exactly, but something about it scratched at the edge of memory. Like a nursery rhyme played out of tune, or a lullaby remembered in pieces. Tap-tap. Pause. Tap. Tap-tap. A broken rhythm, searching for itself. I watched her knuckles twitch with each motion, the way her pinky hovered slightly off the wheel like it didn’t know if it was supposed to join in or stay out of it.

It was the kind of tapping that meant she was somewhere else in her head. Not with us. Not in the car. Solving a puzzle only she could see, one with too many pieces missing and the box long since thrown away.

Mack didn’t notice. Or if he did, he didn’t show it. He was pressed up against the passenger window, eyes darting between road signs and exit numbers. His lips moved a little, like he was mouthing names to himself—Milton, Taringa, Indooroopilly—as if the act of speaking them silently might make the geography more real, more navigable. Like maybe, if he learned enough of the map quickly enough, he could anchor us somewhere. Keep us from floating too far off course.

I let my gaze drift out the windscreen, and that’s when I saw it. A green sign, tall and square and gleaming in the harsh sunlight, the white text standing out like a promise: Brisbane — 25km.

My heart jumped.

I sat forward in my seat, Ribbons tumbling off my lap in a quiet heap as I straightened with something I hadn’t felt in days—hope. Actual hope, sharp and sudden and electric, like someone had struck a match in the middle of a long, dark tunnel.

“We’re nearly there,” I said, the words bubbling out before I could temper them. “We’re almost at Aunty Amelia’s house.”

The name felt safe. Solid. Like it could hold weight. A real grown-up. The kind who paid bills on time and didn’t fall apart in petrol station car parks or talk to ghosts on the phone at midnight. Aunty Amelia meant walls that didn’t creak in the wind and dinners served on actual plates and clean sheets that smelled like fabric softener.

For a second—just one—I imagined it: us pulling into a driveway, getting out of the car, Mum hugging Aunty Amelia tightly while Mack and I stood on a neat lawn with our overnight bags. I imagined going inside. A real bathroom. A light switch that didn’t flicker. Doors that locked. Silence that wasn’t frightening.

But Mum didn’t respond.

She didn’t nod. Didn’t smile. Didn’t even glance in the rear-view mirror to catch my eye.

Instead, her hand shot out suddenly—so fast it startled me—and slapped the radio off with one sharp twist. The soft static that had been murmuring in the background cut out instantly, replaced by a silence that felt too heavy, too deliberate.

It was the kind of silence that says don’t speak. The kind that swells to fill every inch of available space, growing larger with each passing second.

She gripped the wheel again with both hands, tighter now. Her knuckles stood out like small white stones, and the tendons in her neck pulled taut.

My earlier excitement curdled a little, turning to something colder, something wary. The silence didn’t feel like calm. It felt like a pause before something fell.

Mack leaned forward from his seat, arm stretched out like a compass needle finding true north, his finger pointing toward a break in the traffic up ahead where a side road branched off to the right. “Turn here,” he said. Not a suggestion. A statement. His voice carried a new kind of weight—still a child’s, but firmer, like he’d rehearsed this moment in his head and decided it was time to try.

Mum didn’t respond straight away. Her eyes flicked toward the road sign, then to the indicator light she didn’t touch, and finally to the rear-view mirror, where she might have caught my expression. I don’t know what she saw—hope, maybe. Or expectation. Or the quiet, pleading kind of trust that only ever gets built in moments when you really need something to be true.

“What?” she said, but we all knew she’d heard him the first time.

“This is the road to Aunty Amelia’s house,” Mack replied. Calm. Careful. “The GPS says her street’s just down this way. We’re really close now.”

He even tilted the phone slightly in her direction, as if offering evidence. I could see the map from the back seat—the glowing blue line curving gently to the right, a finish line so close we could almost hear the chorus of relief waiting for us on the other side.

But Mum blinked. A quick flutter of lashes like dust had gotten in her eyes. Then another. Then she shook her head, too fast and too final, like she was swatting away a thought that had grown dangerous.

“We’ll get something to eat first,” she said. Her voice had that too-smooth quality, like she was trying to walk a tightrope of plausibility, trying to keep us from noticing the net had disappeared.

Mack didn’t argue straight away. He just sat back, processing. “That’s not what you said yesterday,” he said eventually, his voice quiet, almost mild. But I knew that tone—he was probing, measuring. Trying to see if today’s version of Mum would hold under gentle pressure or if she’d crack like the others had.

“We’ll see her tomorrow,” she said, dismissively now. “When we’re more settled. When things are… clearer.”

“You said that yesterday too,” he said, and this time there was no disguising the steel in it.

Her hands clamped down on the steering wheel so tightly I could see the strain in her forearms. Her knuckles stood out like chalk against her skin. The car was too quiet. Even the road seemed to quiet down for a second, as if it was waiting to hear what would happen next.

“Mack, don’t start,” she snapped, using that sharp, parental cadence meant to end discussions without further examination. “Not now. Not when we’re so close.”

He didn’t raise his voice. That was the thing. He just kept looking at her—not defiant, not even angry, just terribly, terribly calm. “I’m not starting anything,” he said. “I’m just watching. I’m paying attention to what’s actually happening instead of what you’re saying is happening.”

The car filled with silence again, but it wasn’t empty. It was loaded, like a drawer you couldn’t quite close, too full of sharp things pressing against the wood.

Then the turn came.

And we missed it.

Deliberately.

Her jaw was tight, her eyes locked on the road ahead, and I knew—knew with the kind of certainty that doesn’t need explanation—that she’d made the choice before Mack even opened his mouth. The blinker stayed off. The tyres kept rolling forward. And the GPS on her phone tried to recover, the little blue line redrawing itself again and again like it was as confused as we were.

Outside the window, Brisbane unfurled in the wrong direction. Not toward family or safe beds or doors that would open to let us in. But elsewhere—into streets with graffiti curling up the sides of bus shelters, shopfronts with metal shutters half-lowered like they couldn’t decide whether they were open for business or bracing for impact.

“We’ll stop somewhere quiet,” Mum muttered. It wasn’t an answer. It wasn’t even directed at us. She sounded like someone narrating her thoughts just loud enough to believe they were her own idea. “Somewhere we can think properly.”

‘Somewhere quiet’ had never meant what it should. It didn’t mean peace. It meant hiding. It meant no witnesses. It meant isolation disguised as planning.

Mack said nothing now. He didn’t even look at her. Just watched the phone screen silently, his thumb brushing the edge of the device as the route tried, yet again, to adjust to our mother’s refusal to follow it.

I curled Ribbons tighter into my chest and leaned my head against the car door. The buildings outside were moving faster now, a blur of brick and signage and lives we weren’t part of. The city felt close and far all at once—like a destination you could enter physically but never quite reach emotionally.

We weren’t being taken to Aunty Amelia’s.

We were being taken away from something else.

And Mum—our fierce, unravelled Mum—wasn’t guiding us anymore. She was fleeing.