Free The Feel of Steel by Helen Garner Page B

skin cream, ukelele – and camp in the empty house till my stuff arrived.
    The day before the move, the packer came. He worked like lightning. By evening the apartment was stacked head-high with cartons. The curtains had been taken down, and when night fell I stood breathless for the last time before the broad valley of lights that sparkled opulently below my bare windows.
    Next morning three huge Samoans arrived and fanned out through the rooms to get the measure of their job. In their presence I became obsessed by a need to keep a grip on my backpack. I crouched in the corner of the stripped living room, squeezing the bag in my arms and scourging myself for my paranoia, racism, prejudice. The silent, courteous men, with their pigtails and biblical names, trudged in and out, carrying everything I owned past me and along the hall to the truck. Hours passed before I let up on myself and realised that I was clinging to my bag not because I thought the removalists would steal it, but because it was the only stable, untouched object left in a life that was once more being dismembered all around me.
    I slept badly on my foam rubber in the denuded flat, and woke to a humid morning. The sky was pearly, with a streak of amber cloud above the large, quiet old apartment blocks on the downward slope of Birriga Road, north-facing among their trees. Kookaburras set up their jovial clamour. Way down on the golf course, sprinklers gushed in fountains all along the fairways. Sweating, looking neither left nor right, I loaded the hire car and headed for the highway.
    At six that evening I stepped stiffly out of the airconditionedcar in Albury, and breathed in a lungful of such scorching heat that my head floated off my shoulders. Dry! Pure! Forty degrees! If I kept going I could be home by midnight. But I knew I was half crazy, so I checked into a motel and sat on the bed. The air cooler roared more loudly than my ears. I unpacked the ukelele. It was not even out of tune. I played a couple of chords, put it back in its case, and went out to the movies.
    Next morning I dawdled: not the first time in my life I had hesitated on that border. I read the paper in the sun. I walked around the Botanic Gardens on gravel paths. When I could delay the moment no longer, I got back into the car and crossed the Murray into Victoria.
    Until Wangaratta the sky was covered in cloud the colour and texture of a water biscuit; then it cleared. The day became a scorcher. The freeway was so wide and smooth, and the landscape so flat and uneventful, that I kept blanking out. I had to eat lollies to stay alert. Near Benalla I almost nodded off. I was frightened. I had slept well: I was not tired: I knew I must be resisting something. But I want to go home, don’t I? I took the exit into Seymour and walked round the streets for half an hour, ate a Boston bun, drank a terrible coffee. Then I got back in the car, which I was beginning to hate, and pushed on. The only way I could keep myself awake was by singing songs out loud, taking big breaths, trying to remember the words and get them perfect.
    How drab the northern outskirts of Melbourne were. There was a whole new road system. I got lost in its flyovers and coloured shards and incomprehensiblesignage. What had they done to my city? And had it really always been so . . . flat?
    My new house, a single-fronted, single-storey terrace rented on a flying visit a month earlier, had bulged and shrunk in my memory. The whole building, like my spirits, seemed sunken, unnaturally low. It had more rooms than I remembered but they were smaller. The backyard was tiny and closed off by a khaki rollerdoor that I had failed in my haste to notice. The kitchen was longer and narrower, the curtains stiffer and shabbier, the picture hooks higher, almost out of reach. One of the bedroom walls was bubbly low down with damp. But how could it be damp today? It was February. There was a drought. The mercury was touching