One Very Hot Day (2007)

Recently I drove from Adelaide to the Murray River. Lots of people do it. Personally, I detest spending more than an hour in the car and will just about do anything to get out of it. With the radio it’s almost bearable, but after you pass through the Mount Lofty Ranges the kinds of stations I prefer to listen to fade out and you’re left with a lot of static. The alternative is the sort of generic pop stations which long ago dispensed with announcing the time in preference of the same songs played at the same time everyday – exactly the same time. ‘Oh,’ you’re supposed to think, if you’re a regular listener, ‘The Police singing Roxanne. That means it must be twenty past one.’ And sure enough, you check your watch and it is! As for me, I grip the steering wheel in something akin to apoplexy and curse all things “Classic Rock”. Because how many times can you listen to Roxanne without going mad? Add it up. There are three-hundred-and-sixty-five days in a year, so if you’re consistently tuning in it means in the next twelve months you’ll hear the song almost four-hundred times. It’s my opinion that most commercial stations own approximately six compact discs which they keep on permanent rotation. And regrettably most people are too dumb to notice.

It was a very hot day – nudging forty degrees, the sweat was pooling in the middle of my back, my shirt was sticking to the car seat. I drove with just my fingertips touching the steering wheel, gingerly like it was a casserole dish taken straight out of the oven, which is exactly what it felt like. Another thing I despise is air-conditioning in cars. Whenever I drive, even in the middle of winter when it’s cold and the rain is coming at you parallel to the ground, I need the window open, to feel fresh air on my face. Cooped up in a tiny car I feel claustrophobic and soon grow irritable.

You might be asking yourself about now: Why bother driving all that way if you hate it so much? Well, it had to do with my work. I simply couldn’t get out of it. So I swallowed my annoyance, packed a small suitcase, and drove out of the city.

Going through the Ranges wasn’t so bad. There were still patches of green and plenty of shade thrown from the trees by the side of the road. But once you emerge onto the plains the landscape is flat and dusty and brown. There’s absolutely nothing to look at. The radio’s gone. You discover, as I did, that your cassette player no longer works. In short, after about an hour you’re ready – you think about this quite seriously – to lift your foot and put it through the windscreen.

So after a dismal few hours in the car it was with some relief that, just as I reached the river and was about to descend towards the ferry, I noticed a general store. I checked my watch, realised I was running early, and decided to buy lunch. The store, which was part of a small town servicing the ferry and the few surrounding farms, was just a box with two petrol pumps out front and an LPG tank to one side. There was no-one else in sight. The air was still and scorching, the sun grated my bare arms and pinched my face. I tilted my head this way and that but there was nothing to be heard. It was like one of those Mexican towns in the movies where everyone goes to sleep in the afternoon, or perhaps a place where aliens have taken everyone and replaced them with remarkable look-alikes and the first thing you know about it is when you’re ordering a sandwich and a thirty centimetre grey reptilian beast bursts out of the store proprietor’s face.

Inside the store smelled of cooking grease, that low caustic aroma that catches at the back of your throat and makes you wonder whether there’s a dead body lying behind the counter. A hand-written menu pinned to the wall rapidly diminished my prospects of a wholesome lunch. Basically my choices were limited to fast food – the deathly kind: pasties, sausage rolls, custard tarts, several varieties of meat pies – and still more fast food. But then on top of the counter I noticed a selection of lovingly-made rolls inside neatly-presented clear plastic containers. Except all the rolls were white, even the ones with stick-on labels that said things like “egg and mayonnaise on a wheat roll”. Looking closer I could see that not only didn’t the style of roll correspond to the label, but the contents of the roll didn’t either. You might order a ham and cheese wholemeal roll only to find yourself biting into a turkey and cranberry sauce on white. Except the turkey would be the kind you cut off a roll and which looks like it’s been run over by a passing road train.

In a corner of the optimistically-named dining room a man and two women were sitting at a table drinking coffee and eating cake. With crumbs scattered about their mouths and down their shirt fronts, they looked quite smug and content with their lot. The man lifted his head in acknowledgement. They were, it seemed to me, the centre of things hereabouts, kings and queens of all they survey. Gazing out the window I guessed that wasn’t far from the truth.

The man, who turned out to be the owner of the store, peered over his half-eaten Berliner, looked surprised, and said, ‘Back for more?’

More what? I wanted to ask. There was nothing to want more of. And who was this strange person masquerading as me?

‘Did you want something?’

Now call me stupid, but generally when you walk into a store it’s not because you want to enjoy the view.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The proprietor yelled, ‘Marge!’ Then he said in a quieter tone, ‘The wife’ll fix you up.’

And sure enough, wiping her hands on a tea towel, a middle-aged woman emerged from out back, turned her face to me, lifted an eyebrow and just stood there.

‘Don’t mind her,’ the proprietor said. ‘She’s a good sort really.’ If being a good sort meant someone who wants to kill you because they’ve been called away from some essential duty.

I ordered a salad wheat roll then wandered through a doorway into the variety section. It was miserable. A few items fitting into the category of personal hygiene – soap, tampons, toothpaste – and a few paltry bite-sized boxes of cereal. Most of the merchandise looked like it had been there since the 1950s.

I went back into the dining room and because I had been there more than five minutes already the proprietor decided we must be friends. Why do people assume you’re interested in everything they have to say? Some things, sure; but everything? But I guess in those parts customers were few and far between – which would explain the state of the “variety” component of the store.

The proprietor began telling me about the time a football club turned up on its way home to the Riverland. The footballers tumbled out of their tour bus and, like cavemen on a rampage, burst in. While some took bites out of every visible piece of fruit and then replaced them half-eaten into their containers, others snatched biscuits out of their display jars and, holding them in bear-like paws, took giant mouthfuls out of each one before returning them. At the same time as this was going on others, having discovered the variety room, were taking condoms from their wrappers and distributing them amongst the lollies and chewing gum beside the counter.

Astonished, I asked, ‘What did you do?’

The proprietor, leaning back in his chair, adopting a self-satisfied I’ve-seen-it-all-before expression, said, ‘I’ve been in hotels all my life.’

I tried not to look around because if I did he knew what I would be thinking.

‘You tolerate,’ he said, as though the words had been written by Solomon himself and he was merely reciting them, ‘not reciprocate.’

‘So they trashed your store and you said nothing?’

Suddenly the haughtiness fell from his face. I heard it clang as it hit the floor. ‘There were too many of them. They were animals!’

Eventually, the story continued, a naked man entered, his hands covering his genitals.

‘They stripped me so I couldn’t get nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m starving.’

The proprietor had attempted to make light of the situation. ‘It’s a safe bet you don’t have any money,’ he said to the naked man, who didn’t see this as a problem and began helping himself to whatever was at hand.

As they left the footballers took with them a blackboard sign on which the daily petrol prices were chalked.

‘Probably to flash obscene messages to passing motorists,’ the proprietor said to me.

Then we all stood looking at each other: me, the owner, and the two women – who, incidentally, hadn’t uttered a single word.

At last my roll arrived and though I knew Marge must have kneaded the dough and baked the roll fresh while I waited there was no sign of this having happened. And though the roll was quite cold, she charged me as if it was a freshly baked one. At least she charged me for the labour. Smarting at the expense, I took my roll and a Coke out to my car and began reflecting on general stores in general (excuse the pun).

Mostly they’re in the middle of nowhere, their food is crap, but because they’re hundreds of kilometres from the nearest competition – or any other place anyone would want to be – they charge the earth. General store proprietors are criminals. You walk in and, unless they’re drinking coffee and eating cake and entertaining women, they watch you suspiciously. After all, balking at the exorbitant prices, you might decide to snatch an armful of merchandise and leg it to your car, leaving a trail of chewing gum packets and Snickers bars for the bat-wielding owner to follow. But, as well as being a potential thief, you are also an outsider – what they call a Townie. (Though, such is the remoteness of the store, it’s hard to imagine anyone not directly related by blood to the proprietor not being an outsider.) In short, you’re made to feel like they’re doing you a favour just by serving you.

I unwrapped my roll, opened my mouth, bit down. You guessed it. It was egg and mayonnaise on white …