I slept badly that night. I felt that I was letting down everyone and everything that had a woman’s name. I was pushing Ros faster than she wanted to go. I wasn’t planning to do justice to Katherine. And I hadn’t made the slightest effort to order Jocasta’s Jest from a single bookshop.

3 Bungle Bungle

Three
 
Bungle Bungle

Our drivers were called Wayne and Clay. Wayne was large and dark and affable, looked to be of Maori descent, and lived in Perth. Clay was brittle and moody, irascibly Anglo-Saxon, and lived in Darwin. It was Clay who did the first stretch of driving and delivered the introductory spiel, a low and often psychopathic routine – misogynistic and homophobic – which turned out to be more or less standard on this particular bus line, and which eventually forced us into finding some other means of transport.

I cannot hope to render the sinewy distaste of this performance, but roughly it went:

‘G’day. The name’s Clay. The ugly one to my left is Wayne. For those of you who haven’t travelled with us before, a few words of caution about the bus. At the very rear you will see a door marked rest room. You’ll get no rest there. It is in fact a mobile toilet. Just how mobile you will discover when you sit down in it. You will notice that the door to the mobile toilet opens outwards. Please remember to lock it. This serves two purposes: it activates a light on my dashboard, telling me that you’re in there, and it saves you the embarrassment, if I am forced to brake suddenly, of being sent sliding down the aisle with your knickers round your ankles and a rubber rash on each cheek. Rest assured, it happens. The record so far, for your information, is Row 5.

‘The curtained partition at the back of the bus is for the relief driver and admission is by invitation only. Yes, I did say invitation. . . . So don’t hold your breath, fellers.’

As it fell out, Clay ended up spending most of the journey in this curtained partition himself, in a massive pet occasioned by something Ros said to him. He’d dropped us off at a roadhouse remarkable, even by Australian roadhouse standards, for its lack of anything you might reasonably have called an amenity. Since he was a bloke who clearly enjoyed a joke, Ros congratulated him on his choice as she climbed back into the bus. ‘Nice place you found for us, Clay,’ she observed. That was sufficient to put him to bed for the day.