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Sport 24: Summer 2000
Only touch me with your eyes!
Only touch me with your eyes!
We began driving along a gravel road and through the rear-view mirror I watched the dust roll into a neat ploughed row behind us. It was a large car and there was no point in trying to move the driver's seat forward. It wouldn't budge and your fingers would just wind up touching something awful, something soft and damp, like a paper bag containing half a meat pie, if you groped down below the seat to find the release lever. So, whenever I drove I had to sit on the edge of the seat, my toes extended, ballet pointe, my arms straight, fixed ten to two on the steering wheel. When Jeff drove it was different. He was able to drive like anyone driving a Holden station wagon should: his elbow resting on the edge of the open window, his right hand loosely fingering the steering wheel as his left hand spidered across the shelf above the dashboard searching for a plastic animal, a small length of curved wire, or whatever else it was he wanted to show me. Jeff had a very particular way of driving. He would start at the left of the road, gaze through the windscreen at the view around him until the front wheels of the car were just over the white centre line, at which point he would jerk the car back to the left of the road before letting it drift once more to the right. I would keep my eyes fixed on the road straight page 4 ahead, not so much because I was scared we'd have a crash but because Jeff's driving made me carsick. So, I drove. The dust rising behind us, seeping into the car like poison gas in a scary film. When we arrived at where we were going and climbed out of the car there would be two perfectly formed circles on the bench seat, the only dust-free patches in the entire car. On the outside the dust would settle into the corrugations on the roof and bonnet, the same colour as the car itself.