Loop Tracks by Sue Orr

Author:Sue Orr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.

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Her mother would like her to get her feet off the car dashboard. She has said so once, twice, possibly even more times than that, who would know? Not the girl, who has switched off the nagging voice as revenge for her mother failing to listen to what she had to say. About going to the doctor and the total lack of need for this trip now she’s no longer feeling sick and throwing up.

Ol’ Blue Eyes is the name of the nail varnish and did it not say, on the tiny label, that it would not chip, peel or flake? Did it not also promise an elusive, absolute allure? None of these claims stands up to scrutiny; this is clear to the girl right now. Yes, the polish is clinging to the nails of her two big toes, but it has already reduced itself to untidy scrapings on the others. It has disappeared completely from the two smallest. The allure has been compromised and the question now is whether to pick the remaining polish off or hold back and apply more of the lacquer when she gets home.

The doctor’s rooms are four blocks from the crossroads, where they now wait for traffic passing through town to clear. The risk, if she starts trying to lift the varnish with her fingernails, is that she won’t finish the job in time. Picking the flakes off and dropping them to the floor will also further annoy her mother. Annoying her mother is not generally something the girl aspires to, but honestly, this morning. The drama of it all. Her father, silent and brooding on his way out the door to work. Her mother, popping pills at the kitchen bench like the women in Valley of the Dolls (a book forbidden and therefore carefully hidden between the girl’s mattress and bed base). Swallowing the pills down with gulps of water and turning on her as though the girl is some kind of feral cat and spitting out the words, You’re going to the doctor at nine, and now, here they are, not talking to each other in the car going to the doctor to tell him she was sick last week and now she’s better.

As they turn onto the main road, she scrapes away the first furrow of deep blue. It comes away cleanly. I can’t imagine, now, how the girl fails to notice as her mother shifts the gear stick one, two, three, four, picks up speed and does not turn into McLeod Street with its row of bungalow medical rooms but instead passes through the town’s limits and drives that Holden Kingswood out into the countryside. As distracted as she is by her pedicure dilemma, the girl must feel the surge of the engine? Look up and wonder where they’re going? You fly over these parts today and the little country towns merge into each other, reach out to hold hands and be something bigger. But in 1978 each of them

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