Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All by Thompson Christina

Author:Thompson, Christina [Thompson, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

10

Turton’s Land Deeds

When Seven and I had been married two years, I finished my dissertation, and in order to celebrate we decided to move. What followed was a strange peripatetic period, during which we lived in a series of cities, moving from Melbourne to Boston to Honolulu to Brisbane and back to Melbourne again in the space of about four years. I had a series of short-term jobs and fellowships and Seven was content to go where I went, and the only complicating factor was that, as we set out on the first leg of our journey, I found that I was pregnant with our first child.

I made this discovery in California, where we’d stopped en route to Boston to visit my aunt, and after the first flush of excitement the only thing I could think about was how I was going to manage the drive. Our plan had been to buy a car in Los Angeles and set out across the country in the great, time-honored (if, in this case, reversed) American tradition. We had done a lot of driving together in Australia, up to Broken Hill and Port Macquarie, all the way across the Nullarbor to Perth. And Seven was what I thought of as a car guy. He read the automotive section of the paper and never took his car to the garage unless the job required tools he didn’t have.

I was a lot less handy with a wrench but I also liked to drive and had crossed the country several times when I was in college: I-90 from Boston to Buffalo, Chicago, and Sioux Falls; I-70 from Baltimore to Denver via Kansas City; I-40 across the south—Raleigh, Durham, Winston-Salem, Knoxville, Nashville, Little Rock; I-10 from Jacksonville to the City of Angels by way of New Orleans. It seemed like a good way for Seven to see America and, besides, he hated flying and was relieved that we’d now reached a part of the journey that could be conducted on the ground.

The last thing Seven had done before we left Melbourne was to give away our car, a copper-colored, two-door Valiant with a black vinyl top. We had left pretty much everything behind us, apart from my books, his toolbox, and his bike. But the car was our main possession, and as soon as we reached Los Angeles, we started looking for a replacement.

L.A. being what it is, we had to rent a car in order to buy one. And so, while I stood at the counter making coffee and thinking about whether I really wanted to drink it, Seven sat at my aunt’s kitchen table flipping through the Yellow Pages.

“Hires, car hire, motorcar—why can’t I find what I’m looking for?”

“Because that’s not what we call it,” I told him. “Try looking under car rental.”

We figured we had about a week to find a suitable vehicle, and every morning Seven would comb through the paper picking out the possibilities. I was in charge of the map.

“How about Glendale.

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