By Gabrielle Blondell
He ignores it there on the seat beside him. Instead, he sits high looking over the cars strung out before him. And beyond them is the sea. On this hot, fine day, it’s an impossible blue; it’s Le Mans Blue Metallic. Stephen breathes it in, goes so far as to crack the window and point his nose toward the gap, but all he can smell is Rex’s leash on the seat. It’s musky, a mix of cow leather and dog.
The car ahead crawls even when there is a space to fill. Stephen knows the game. Try not to use the brakes. Use them and you lose. Loser, he thinks. Too much time on his hands. The next traffic light blinks red and Stephen knows the loser has lost even before his brake lights flare.
A woman winds her way through the cars. She’s taking advantage of the heavy traffic, curving this way and that with a bucket and a squeegee. She pauses by the car in front, smiles broadly like she’s the best part of his day. The loser is leaning out to get a better look. He gives her the nod and she starts on his windscreen, the hem of her short t-shirt riding up. Stephen looks away.
The cars on his left are moving, some of them taking the slipway toward town. He spots a gap and takes it. His tyre is millimetres away from the woman’s bucket. He makes it less, hears the clatter and splash of the water and a cry of alarm, but drives on without looking back. No need to thank me mate, he thinks, knowing the loser has opened his driver’s door and gone to her aid. It’s all a damn game, Stephen thinks. It’s just not much fun.
His hand snakes out toward the dog leash and he rubs the soft leather between fingers and thumb. The traffic light changes and the cars ahead slow to a stop. Some are left stranded across the intersection. Stephen takes his hand from the leash, grips the wheel and brakes. His body rocks forward in the seat and then settles. A gap forms and he moves off again, his back pressing against the upholstery. Nina comes to him then. It’s as if she is standing right in front of him, nose to nose, and she’s yelling like he’s the one who has done wrong.
He brakes again with the shifting swaying traffic. His chin points forward toward the impossible blue. A wave is left behind by a passing speedboat. It’s long and white, frothing at one end. It reminds him of a van with a busted wheel arch he fixed in the shop once. One of those surfy vans, good for boards, good for shagging. It had a bit of artwork, just like that. He watches it draw long and flatten over time and then disappear. The ocean blue and unmarked once more. Inscrutable.
His hand is on the dog leash again, since when, he doesn’t know. He curls it around his wrist as if Rex is still attached and bounding off. The blue sea is closer, taking up more of his horizon.
Suddenly, Nina is back. He sees her as she was countless times, walking ahead of him along the sand with her hands in her hair protecting it from the wind. He would, at times like this, run to her, drawing her hands away, wishing her the freedom from this one vanity. That was before he knew there were as many vanities as there were stars in the night sky; that she lived her life with an eye on how others saw her and so she could not see the world. She could not see him. She watched others watching her. That was all.
The traffic slows and bunches before him. The leash is tight about his wrist as he brings both hands to the steering wheel to steady his ute for braking. The metal clasp dangles about his knees. He gulps and sniffs and the noise which follows is involuntary. It erupts out of him like a bleat, the plaintive cry of a lamb. He wants so badly to reach out toward the passenger seat and feel the sleek black fur and the warmth and love beneath it. But Rex is gone, lost to bone cancer. He, the most faithful of creatures.
Nina is gone too, her betrayals, a long line of them, white and frothing at one end. The gym trainer, the local government councillor with a brood of kids, even the bloke who ran the corner store, damn it! And then, the ageing hipster with the biblical beard, she had actually left him for.
The sea is a palette before him now. A deepening blue of a gutter and a string of paler kicked-up sand where a rip takes everything with it into the arms of the Pacific. He can no longer look at it. Stephen sobs aloud and a great clot of pain breaks free and begins to circulate. He takes the next left and then turns left again. He misses Rex, and Nina too. Oh, how he misses her vanities.
He heads west, his wrist still wrapped in Rex’s leash. He will continue on until the green of the grass turns brown, dries and disappears altogether and all that is before him is emptiness, an inferno-orange-pearl-metallic desert.