or, alternatively, an aggressively cheerful energy. She muttered in passing about aged drivers and overdue registration checks; she referred, more than once, to the difficulty of helping people who won’t help themselves. Frida stirred the house with these perceptible struggles and satisfactions, and Ruth found it easier to stay out of her way. She withdrew to her chair. She counted ships and pretended to read the newspaper. Jeffrey called with the idea of inviting a friend from Sydney to stay for the weekend; he suggested an unmarried woman who, Ruth knew, was a discreet and grateful guest and a diligent spy for the worried children of her elderly friends. Ruth nodded and smiled into the phone. Frida mopped, and the car waited.
The following week, Ruth sat in the driver’s seat facing the sea, which was level and green except in the path of the morning sun; there, it was ribbed with silver. She felt the familiar dread as she turned the ignition key, but today there was an additional terror: the car seemed to press in on her, as if it were being compacted with her inside it; the car felt so small and so heavy that it might at any moment sink into the dune, leaving her buried in a sandy hole.
“You hate this car,” Ruth said aloud, and lifted her hands to those places on the steering wheel that Harry had smoothed by touching so often. He believed in buying expensive European cars that would last a long time; this car vindicated him. It was sheathed in indestructibility.
“You hate this car,” said Ruth again, because she did hate it and was afraid, not just of driving it but of the expensive machinery of its European heart. Frida was right, as usual. She was probably right about everything.
But it annoyed Ruth that Frida was right, so she put the car in reverse and backed it down the long driveway with the surety that comes only from bravado. Frida came to the lounge-room window; Ruth could see hands shifting the lace of the curtains. But it was too late—Ruth was heading down the drive. Out on the road, she turned right, away from town. To her left were the hills; to her right was the sea. A low wing of cloud rolled away as she drove. It was July—the middle of the mild winter. The road was bright and grey, and the car so fast under her heated hands; the word she thought of was quicksilver , and that was an important word, a word for a pirate or a tomcat; her own cats had silly athletes’ names, human names she disapproved of and declined to use; how focused her mind felt, she thought, even with all of this in it, pirates and tomcats; she was moving towards a definite point and would be delighted to discover what it was. She would find it, and go home again. But her return would have to be perfect: a gesture of both surrender and magnificence. It would have to indicate that Ruth, although willing to sell the car, was not entirely ruled by Frida’s will.
Ruth followed the broad leftward curve of a hillside until she was a little dizzy, and there as the road straightened stood a roadside fruit stand with space for a few cars to park beside it. She had often wondered who stopped at fruit stands like this. Harry always refused. Now she turned off the road, bumped up the grassy verge, and sat for a moment in the stilled car. When she stepped out, the air felt newly polished. It both buoyed and stung.
A teenage boy, dark-skinned and light-haired from too much sun, manned the stall. His blinking face was scrubbed clean by boredom, and the surfboard propped beside him explained his look of marine longing. His stock was almost entirely made up of avocados, but a glorious pineapple caught Ruth’s eye. It shouldn’t have been there: a pineapple, this far south, in July! She approached and laid one hand on its corrugated hide.
“Busy today?” Ruth asked. She had emptied the car’s ashtray of coins, and now they weighed down her pockets.
“Nope,” said the boy, and he shrugged and sighed and looked towards the
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