I lie in the bed across from hers, feeling the ship rock from side to side—the first bad weather of the voyage. It’s been very convenient: all day I’ve said that I’m too seasick to even consider eating. Even standing up feels like too much of an effort; I’m too tired, and my head starts to spin. Grandma goes back and forth to the dining room looking worried, and I wonder again why she doesn’t just get angry with me. See through me. I’ve forgotten the strength of my own willpower. I’ve stayed in bed all day, sleeping intermittently, not eating a single thing. All I had yesterday was breakfast and the Sprite. I have not stopped thinking of food for a moment, though. I know tonight I will dream of the BLT. But I feel myself shrinking, too, disappearing, and the smaller I become, the smaller my self-loathing. I close my eyes. Grandma keeps talking.

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 22

We met for meals after that—all the meals which were served in the three days it took to cross the country. When we weren’t eating I was in my seat, staring out the window at the ever-changing landscape, or out on the observation deck, my face to the wind. We passed some cities and small towns, but the landscape was mostly rural: trees, grass, rivers and fields, the greens greener than anything I had seen back home. I thought of the grey-green mottle of a eucalypt, the smell of tea tree beside the creek and the flap and screech of sulphur-crested cockatoos. I thought of the dairy farm, remembering the feel of an udder in my fists, the flank against my cheek, I thought of Roy in the hotel—his flushed face, the way he gazed at me, wet-eyed, from above. I’d had no word from him since I’d left Sydney, no guarantee that he would be waiting for me at the station, no idea what world I would enter. But there was no use worrying; barrelling blindly forwards was the only way.

It helped to have Jim to sit with at meals, to speak with. We talked about the war, about farming, about relationships. He told me how his father had died before the war, and how much his mother relied on him, how hard it was to leave her. He told me about a woman he’d fallen for in Brisbane, how on their third date she had told him about her husband, who was over fighting in France. I told him how my parents had lost their farm before the war and that was how we ended up in Sydney, but how they’d gone back to give living off the land another try.