fragment 3

I wasn't driving this time. I was sitting in the back, behind my father, and Craig was at the wheel. We had made so many trips down to the Gold Coast, our little red car was gradually (or not so gradually) giving up.

Bits of rubber were peeling off, windows jammed, doors wouldn't open from the inside, the air conditioning stopped working. It had been a good small car, one that my parents had bought us ten years previously, because they were concerned about me without one.

My parents had loved cars. I have dozens of photographs of them posing with their automobiles. The big brown Valiant (that my mother blamed Malcolm Fraser for them having to sell, supposedly because he said petrol prices were to escalate), the pert petrol-blue Hillman, the black sporty-looking one from the 1940s, the Morris Minor.

But Craig and I had no car in the early 1990s, and so my parents convinced me to let them buy me one. I wasn't comfortable about it. My father could be generous, but he made sure you felt obligated. But I gave in, and was grateful for the small red second-hand Ford Laser.

And after my mother died, we wore it out completely travelling up and down the highway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, helping my father, taking him to doctors and hospitals, and keeping him company.

But this time, when I was sitting in the back seat, as Craig motored the three of us down to Currumbin to eat fish and chips by the water, we were talking about something I no longer remember (but wish I did) and my father casually said, 'Oh that Shakespeare, he's over-rated you know.'

There was a pause. Craig threaded his arm between the front seats and squeezed my knee, as I bit my lip.

'Really, Dad,' I said, as I looked at the back of his head, wispy strands of white-grey hair heartbreakingly clinging to his ancient scalp.