Graceful Abaddon

Loveable Creatures (1)

Chapter One: Leaving Home and Boyfriend 

Her mind was messier than her room, and that was saying something. Abbey tried to hide the chaos. Shove this here, stuff that there.

The image of her boyfriend Gavin, hurt, too kind to say it. She should have told him eight months north would never change a thing. She'd think about him all the time. His smell – honeyed sweat and pear shampoo – would follow her, drawn by the wind. Nights she'd press her neck into her pillow. Pretend he was nibbling her earlobe. She knew these things were cheesy. She wished that she had said them though.

Gavin: downcast. Looking at his coffee. Swivelling his spoon. Breaking up the froth like he was poling through a film of pollution. Abbey, stuttering in her haste: "There's this boy who needs home schooling. He lives on this island where the only teachers are at the school, and he was expelled. It'll be twice as much as I'm getting now. And free accommodation". She told him she was thinking about it. In truth that was a lie. She was decided. She wanted Gavin to raise his eyes and say "don't go". Abbey, I can't live without you. He didn't.

That moment you realise your life is not a sitcom. No audience to cheer you on, to sympathise when times are rough. No overpaid hack intent on milking everything your life is worth. She hadn't viewers overseas, on divan rugs and spring-clean sofas, eating macaroni as the main theme played its bored routine. No arguments on Reddit. No tabloid gossip. No one even in her family cared much if they stayed together.

Her and Gavin. She thought him one in a million.

So why take a job over five-hundred kilometres away?

Abbey Watson tended to assume the worst. She knew this. Often though, things did work out. She knew this but she daren't assume. Her father had not been killed by a truck on any of the interstate highways he now so frequented. Her mother showed no obvious signs of cancer. Humphrey, their old poodle, was still rising to his breakfast bowl each morning.

But what if this time she was right?

Was this the end of her and Gavin?

Was this the last time they would be together?

She swept this thought, like the million others troubling her, beneath the rug of her subconscious.

*** *** *** ***

When the day finally, inexorably came, Abbey's father picked her up from the apartment she and her mother were renting.

Hitting the highway; clear roads under Friday morning sunrise. Abbey squirmed in the passenger seat, reaching the limits of her foot-space. Her dad sat stiff behind the wheel. Awkward. The wispy mists of winter dawn devoured by the sun. Brooding hours on the road. Intermittent conversation. The tea thermos between her knees made slopping sounds. On the roadside now and then, a stranded car, its dual lights blinking. Random emergency phone boxes. Splattered hunks of meat. Grizzled, flyblown fur. Murky woodland. Beaten shells of clapboard buildings, abandoned fuel-stops left to rot.

Gutters of the past.

They pulled off into Hyssup Plains. A forlorn little settlement, two hundred kilometers north-west of the Sunshine Coast. The street was empty save a woman holding a toddler's hand down the road. The child had no pants on. At midday, the few shops – a grocer-cum-pharmacy, two hardware stores (one gardening, one pool supplies) and a café named Friendly Coffee - sat silently, openly, staring each other off like suspicious neighbours. Abbey followed her dad into the café. The air was balmy and burnt. An aged transistor spluttered conversation on the counter. A tanned and skinny woman, somewhere between forty and dead, chewed gum. A cord phone pressed against her ear. On a chalkboard near the counter, pancakes just $2.50. The special of the day was cheese on toast.