Road Story

By Julienne van Loon

This remarkable novel reveals the strong bond of love between friends and the dark pervasiveness of addiction. As Diana Kooper runs from a car crash, scarcely looking back, she leaves her best friend, Nicole, slumped and bloody in the damaged vehicle. After hitching a ride to a remote community, Diana takes a job as a kitchen hand at Bob's, an isolated truck stop. At first she thinks she can predict the sort of rhythm her life will follow in this dusty, diesel-driven, lonely stop, but soon a series of unsettling events disturb her seemingly ordered existence—a dog is brutally stabbed to death and left as a warning beside one of the gas pumps, and when Bob disappears under suspicious circumstances, Diana is left to look after the roadhouse kitchen on her own. As everyday life becomes increasingly challenging, Diana is forced to confront her haunting past in order to deal with her present predicament.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Unwin
• Release date: Sep 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781741159127

Book preview

ROAD

STORY

JULIENNE VAN LOON grew up in country New South Wales. She studied creative writing at the University of Wollongong and later at the University of Queensland. Julienne now lives in Perth, where she teaches in the Faculty of Media, Society and Culture at Curtin University of Technology. Road Story is her first book.

ROAD

STORY

JULIENNE VAN LOON

First published in 2005

Copyright © Julienne van Loon 2005

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Van Loon, Julienne, 1970–.

Road story.

ISBN 1 74114 621 6.

I. Title.

A823.3

Set in 11.5/15pt Adobe Garamond by Asset Typesetting Pty Ltd Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Nothing is worth clinging to.

(Sabbe dhamma nalam abhinivesaya.)

     from the Majjhima-Nikaya

CONTENTS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1

Diana Kooper is running. She is looking straight ahead through the warm night rain, all silvery in the fluorescent streetlight. The footpath beneath her is so shiny and black it could be liquid.

God, how she can run.

A siren starts up somewhere behind her.

Diana is cutting through the old park near City Road, cool parcels of darkness enveloping her briefly between splashes of milky light. She passes the pool where they sometimes used to lie beneath the shadecloth eating Drumsticks. The four a.m. rain is falling heavy on her face and her shoes squelch, once as the foot hits the ground and again as the heel is lifted. Squelch-squalch, squelch-squalch.

Diana is running for the intersection of Broadway and City Road. She can feel blisters forming on her heels, and glass shards from the car windscreen sliding about in her left boot. But she doesn’t stop, can’t. Her line of flight curves gently around the edges of an empty pond.

‘Hey!’ calls a drunkard, ‘Hey carn, where ya goin’ darlin’?’

A vehicle’s brakes squeal to a halt at the traffic lights. Diana dodges a taxi. She moves diagonally across Broadway, passing the gas cookware shop and then the homeless guys standing around a lit gallon drum on Abercrombie Street. She passes a nightclub they went to once, where the entrance is a large red double door opening onto a steep flight of stairs. The place is all quiet now, the big doors closed. She takes in the sharp scent of urine as she goes by.

It’s a mid-week morning and an hour before dawn. A street sweeper, its reverse warning blaring, comes out of an alleyway near the University of Technology. Diana’s crossing the street again and she can almost see the clock tower now. Squelch-squalch, squelch-squalch. Her breath is regular now, her step firm.

Of course, in running, there are things Diana Kooper is intending to leave behind her. Some are everyday things: the soapy white heads on the morning beers she serves for breakfast punters at the bar in Botany Road; the sound of the drag queens arguing in the room adjoining her King Street bedsit; the glossy pictures of expensive destinations — Spain, Zaire, Chicago — in the travel shop window below. And then there are things that go beyond the everyday: the theft of all her valuables; the eviction notice owing to rental arrears; the letter from East Sydney TAFE documenting the extent of her failure in core units in the Certificate III of Photography. But worst of all, there is this latest incident. Back on the corner of City Road and Cleveland Street she has left a white Suzuki hatchback wedged against a power pole, doors open. And there’s a girl on the passenger side, no pulse.

If that girl is dead, Diana reasons, it is not necessarily because of the accident. If she is dead, it is not entirely my fault. ‘I love you, Nic,’ she had whispered in the girl’s direction. The car engine was humming, the shattered windscreen glistening in the night rain as she turned away. But before she could start to run, Diana was forced to vomit. She bent over the swirling roadside gutter and watched the stormwater carry the clotted mess of soupy mucus away.

Nicole Clarke is wedged halfway through a broken windscreen and is bleeding as her closest friend crosses up onto the footpath outside Central Station. The old clock says twenty past nine. That’s not the correct time.

Diana slows her pace.

Central Station is full of people with nowhere to go. There are the homeless, the mentally ill and those too drunk or drug-fucked to find their way to any place else. Figures drape themselves across the orange plastic seats, many of them sleeping. Those that are awake gaze into the middle distance, avoiding eye contact with the wet girl as she makes her way toward the monitors announcing arrivals and departures. There are lumpy bodies sleeping on the cold hard floor, heads on bags, faces covered. An obese woman, her small orchestra of bulging plastic bags gathered around her, sits reciting the words to a Duran Duran song without much sense of rhythm or key. At the Eddy Avenue end of the large open station, charity workers hand out sandwiches and tea.

The first train out is at 4.52 a.m. It’s going to Lithgow. Diana’s pulse races as she leans forward to catch her breath, hands on hips. Her face is hot and red. She paces to cool down. She is thinking. She has nothing with her but the ATM card in the back pocket of her jeans. Her keys are still in the Suzuki’s ignition and her bag is on the back seat. It’s twenty minutes until the train goes. She can’t go back. She waits.

Before long, Diana is sitting on the westbound country train, just as any normal person would. There is nothing unusual about the way she looks vacantly out the window, or listens to the routine beat of the tracks passing beneath. She dozes for a while. At Lithgow she exits the damp station building and turns right, passing the old railway workers’ cottages on one side, the railway tracks on the other. She walks on.

The Suzuki will have been towed away by now, leaving a soft smudge of white paint around the metal pole and a sea of glass shrapnel along the gutter’s edge. And Nicole? She’ll be gone too, picked up by the ambos, laid out on a stretcher, taken somewhere else. The traffic on City Road will be racing by, regardless, brakes squealing, drivers cursing, the daily pattern of the city carrying on.

As Diana reaches the Great Western Highway the midmorning light shines gently, but after a few kilometres of walking, it starts to get hot. It’s early December and the cicadas are deafening in the tall eucalypts along the roadside. Her mind is numb now, the heat distilling everything. She listens to the sound of her own breath in harmony with the drone of the insects, and notices small things: flies; a discarded cigarette lighter; ants. She walks with her thumb out to one side and after six or seven Ks — an hour, maybe two — a roaring black semi stops for her.

Diana climbs up into the high cabin of a brand-new Volvo. It’s thoroughly flash, boasting lamb’s wool seat covers, refrigerated air, a mini fridge. The dash is alight with digitation. Everything is gleaming.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Out west.’

‘Going home then?’

‘Guess so.’

The driver’s name is Zac. He is big and black, a Maori, pronouncing his ‘i’s and ‘e’s like a true Kiwi. There is something comforting about him, a kind of contentment coming out through a glint in his eyes.

‘This machine’s got everything a man could want,’ he announces after a few minutes. ‘The good Lord Jesus knew just what he was doing when he let this little baby off the production line.’

Apparently Jesus found Zac in the middle of a bender five years ago. Jesus rescued him from Satan. Jesus is the saviour. He is the only way. He also invented the Harley Davidson.

Diana nods a lot, looking forward at the road then drifting into short fits of sleep, but the shadow of Nicole presses into her mind so that she can almost sense the other girl’s body right there in the cabin of the Volvo. Nicole might as well be sitting there, between Diana and the driver, taking comfort in the soft seat cover. Diana places a hand, palm down, on the blank seat between her and Zac.

The truck moves west, away, away.

‘Let’s see who can piss like a man!’

Four years ago, Diana walked into the girls’ toilets at Nyngan High, aged fourteen and a half. She crossed out of the sunlight and into the cool cement damp, pungent with urine, white with cigarette smoke. There was the bare arse of Nicole Clarke. She was standing on a toilet seat, one foot either side of the bowl, the cubicle door wide open.

In the next cubicle, Artemis Takos was doing the same and further along Lee-anne Black too, green and white checked tunics held up above hips, undies scrunched in hand.

Diana smirked as the others pissed sporadically onto the toilet seats, but mostly onto their own shoes and socks, and onto the floor, shrieking with laughter.

‘Oh, fuck me!’

‘Oh, shit!’

‘Oh, bad idea, Lee-anne!’

Nicole was first to jump down off the seat, avoiding the puddles, flinging off her netball shoes and ankle socks, trying to hoist her legs up into the long narrow handbasin and turning on a row of taps full bore.

‘Oh, shame!’

Diana hadn’t known whether to back out quietly or laugh out loud.

‘So, youse are the tough chicks, hey?’ She was daring herself to keep talking, Winfield Blue in hand, the first few lines crucial. ‘And youse can’t even piss straight!’

Nicole Clarke flashed her a look, all fierce

Reviews for Road Story

[edgeworth_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Meh. This novella was on my reading list for Creative Writing, since all my tutors have a habit of assigning the class their own books (not that I wouldn't, in their position). Road Story follows the tale of Diana Kooper, who flees from the scene of a car accident in Sydney, starting a new life at a truck stop in rural New South Wales.It's not a bad book. It's just really not my kind of fiction. It also plunges one headfirst into the ocker culture of Australia; what one might call the "true" culture of Australia, the beer-swilling "yair mate" stereotype most foreigners picture call to mind after Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee. While van Loon captures that environment very well, it's a culture that I utterly loathe, and don't particularly want to read about.