Girl + ute

The damn ute starts swaying at the back. I haven't driven in three months, haven't owned a car for three years and it's windy.
The brakes are weak, but I pull over, freeing a queue of pristine 4WDs. Kids peer down at my hat. The steering wheel tugs left, more than I told it to.
Three buckets of sand, 17 large rocks bunched up at the cabin end of the tray. Hello side of the road, I'm Sam and I carry rocks, here's five on the house. I kick the tyres and drive on. For no reason, my tooth hurts.
Yesterday it was the speedo cable. A cartoon 'TWANG!' and the odometer thinks I'm still halfway down Buckster's Hill looking for the cows. At a steady 0 km/h I reach the freeway.
The inside lane will be my home for the next three hours. Even when you floor it, this thing only does 80 km/h on the flat. Worse, the left front wheel suddenly feels like someone tied a brick to it. Steering his faithful green Ford behind me, Ted is already remarking to Mavis that the young fella in the ute seems to have kangaroo petrol.
Only 200 metres and I'm kicking the tyres again, checking the load. There's nothing visibly wrong. Even the telephone company guy eating a sandwich at the side of the road shrugs his approval. All I can do is limp on, until the clunking suddenly smooths itself. Yes, the steering pulls sharply to the left every five minutes, but the wheels go round and I can fight it.
Past a million trees, past rural botanic gardens and a lonely shipyard, over a bridge. I stop once to fill the tank, scoff a pie and hit the three-lane zone. Nothing between me and Sydney.

You wouldn't think reviewing computer monitors could be romantic, but for me that's where it started. The laboratory was cold and we were side by side, rating them out of five. Both fit and twenty-something, edging closer, perhaps imagined. I was the boss and she was blonde with beautiful eyes and that would be stupid.
The weeks go by and you learn about people. She had a small house and a small dog and a big boyfriend with tattoos who wrote for Playboy. I had a share-house at the beach and a new bicycle, he had a place in Cuba and a red sportster. Sometimes you just don't rate.
Then again, there were the work functions. Beery, all-night sleazefests, colleagues and industry people and no partners. Regularly seen together were me, her and a bloke called Rob. We were her entourage and her friends, confidantes away from her real man.
Sometimes Rob wasn't there and I had to do twice the talking. It would get deep and I would drink too much, which probably helped me imagine she brushed my hand deliberately as we stood in a crowd of other journalists farewelling a chauvinist called Mick. Some of them worked with her boyfriend, who was out of town.
There was a lull and Mick swayed, looked me up and down and asked, "Are you two a couple?".
"Er... no," we chimed, laughing at his mistake. Her boyfriend's colleagues laughed, too.
"Well," said Mick, looking me up and down, "I was going to say congratulations."
She had asked me to stay close, because this was a man who had made unwelcome advances in the past. The conversation returned to normal, but her eyes glazed.
"I'm hungry. I want to get something to eat," she told me. "Where can we go?"
The truth is, at 11pm on a Wednesday in the Sydney CBD, there are only so many places you can get food. Next-door was a burger restaurant, five blocks away was Chinatown, but there was nothing in between. My place was an hour away. A beautiful girl was brushing my hand, inviting me to buy her a meal, and I was struck dumb. So I turned around and asked a drunken friend.
On his spurious advice, we headed for burgers. But halfway along the pavement, she saw our boss hailing a cab, said good night and jumped in with him. Standing cold and alone, I turned homeward towards the Quay, wondering about my imagination.
A few days later, one of the biggest companies in our industry held its end-of-year bash. Free jugs of beer, loosened ties and streamers. Happy conversations with people you were happy to see only once a year. I stood with her, in animated conversation with a former colleague. Rob was on the other side of the room.
There was a moment that nobody else saw. My left hand rested on a chair as I gestured with the right, and she pressed her rear against it. Oops, move hand along chair, continue talking. She followed.
OK.
We were expected to stay with the crowd, so after some time in this position that's what happened. We moved together, chatting in platitudes, to the bar next door. We bought expensive drinks, different varieties she'd never tried before. Don't get me wrong, it was just part of the conversation -- people were discussing gourmet beers.
We talked and laughed for two hours, together and in groups. We avoided Rob. She began to hiccup and demonstrated how to cure it by lying on a chair and pretending to swim. We were having fun. We could leave soon.

There is one small problem. In my mouth, for which I have taken pain-killers and should not be consuming alcohol, is a secret, half-finished, dental operation. A root canal, a dead nerve, the result of travelling across Eastern Europe for three months with poor hygeine. Tomorrow morning at 8:30 am, two hours' journey from my home, is the second half of the procedure. Miss it and I lose the tooth. And it's 2 am. And I will see her again.

"You're going?"
"I have to."
The phrase 'I have a dental appointment' does not cut it. 'Sorry' is a poor substitute for 'I have to face up to something, then I will come back for you'. A smile from a man is no match for a woman's crestfallen look. And it's a strange man who chooses surgery over the possibility of sex.
But I did it. I caught a taxi home, woke up alone with a searing headache and shivered on the train. I barely felt the dentist's drill. I went back to work and there she was, opposite me.
It was the week before Christmas. Away from her desk, everywhere she went, she took Rob. And her boyfriend was back in town. He joined us at the bar after work and sat opposite me.
As his colleagues glanced across the room, she sat on his knee and they kissed. They became publicly absorbed in each other for half an hour. Conversations were a blur and I looked at my beer. He talked about their travel plans for Cuba and South America. I gave some backpacking tips, but they were booking hotels. Sometimes you just don't rate.
Finally, at the office Christmas party, she walked over and sat beside me. I'd spent the afternoon with two other girls from work, trying half-heartedly to impress them. We started talking, but Mick turned up. Crashing his former workplace's Christmas party, he breathed smoke in her face and told her she was beautiful. As I stepped forward, some people who lived near her decided to leave and she went with them.
On the ferry home, I wrote her a comic poem. It was never really going to work, but I had to apologise for the whole dentistry thing. It would double as a Christmas present. I bought a couple of cards with small dogs that looked like hers. I felt my apology had to include flowers, so one card went with a bouquet and the other with a bonsai tree. When they arrived at the office everyone gathered to watch, but the cards were blank and I hadn't even enclosed the poem. Nobody owned up.
I almost told her at the pub after work that night, but as her shoulder brushed mine over and over I felt she already knew. She looked into my eyes and smiled, but I just wished her a merry Christmas. The 25th of December was a planned day and she would be spending it with boyfriend and family.
Though it wasn't quite that simple. On Christmas Eve, she worked and I was on holiday. In the middle of my last-minute gift shopping, blinded by need, I walked right across town to the office, strode through the door and prepared to ask her out. But she had gone to lunch. The boss looked at me.
I returned at two o'clock, pressed the elevator button and turned to face the foyer. As the doors closed, she walked out of the neighbouring elevator, past my nose. At the first floor I hit Emergency Stop and ran down the stairs. I ran into the street, past the security guard and into the mass of shoppers. I thought I could see her hair through the crowd and ran towards it, but couldn't find her. I searched three city blocks, then sat at the Quay.
The day after Boxing Day I rang her family home six times. Nobody answered, which was fortunate as I found her mobile phone number.
"Hi, it's Sam."
"Hey there, how are you? I'm just helping my new flatmate unpack her stuff."
"I wanted to tell you the flowers were from me."
"From you? I couldn't work it out. They were beautiful, thank you."
"Is it OK that I sent you flowers? I wanted to apologise for walking out on you in pubs, that sort of thing."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I think you're great. I hope it's OK that I sent you flowers."
"Thank you for them. I hope you know I just think of you as a friend, a good friend."
"Sorry this conversation isn't going exactly as I planned. I'm sorry if I did the wrong thing and I hope this won't change things between us at work..."
And so it deteriorated into cliches. We worked together for two more months until she went to Cuba. And from the way he began to stand between us at every opportunity, it was clear she asked Rob to give me the Mick treatment. Rob laughed behind my back, but neither of them ever spoke a word of it.
One night at the bar I was chatting with Pete, another colleague, when some bastard spiked our beers with vodka. I remember telling Pete the whole story as we sank into toxicity. I remember pouring double whiskies down my throat, throwing up in a burger joint. I woke at dawn, slumped against a pillar in Pitt Street.
A year later she visited the office, tanned and thin. Playboy moved their headquarters upstairs from us and I often saw her boyfriend. He always smiled and remembered my name. They'd had a great time.
She invited me to walk her to the bus stop, looking into my eyes again as we talked about all the things you can see in the world.
"See you. Take care," we said.

Hurtling towards the Mooney Mooney bridge in a ute with no speedometer and a tendency to veer left, I realise the roadside barrier is rather low and flimsy considering it masks a 500 metre drop.
Giant trucks push past and the ute shudders in their wake, but Mooney Mooney is behind and I'm climbing its southern hill.
I enter the peace of a four-lane zone. This time I think of my grandmother, dead at 91, my favourite person. The one soul-mate in my family, a traveller like me. I think about myself, stooped, unemployed and wondering what comes next. I try to work through the sadness, four months of paralysing depression for which there is no explanation. My tooth throbs, though it cannot.
The hills pass, the freeway ends, the cars stop racing each other and slow to the ute's pace. Suburbia envelopes all. At the top of the driveway I pull the handbrake and turn off the engine, clamber out of the seat, stretch in the sunlight and start unloading rocks.
I stop, look up at the bluegums rippling. Lorikeets whistle overhead. I walk over to the vegetable patch, pick a floret of broccoli and chew. I'm back.