Australia

They would go for exactly one month, having husbanded their leave with rare efficiency. The flights were long-booked, internet cheap. For the first three days they knew where they were staying, and after that, they’d go where adventure took them. They had a book, and a good map, bought second hand at the local car booter. It was the map that had started it, in fact. They’d bought the map, and the map had fed the dream. They looked at the shape of the place, the size of it, and knew they had to go there.

They would travel light, be nimble. They would allow themselves five pairs of underwear each, and use laundry, or discard and replace by buying from cheap shops. (They relished the friend of a friend story of an old hippy who’d gone to the states with only one set of clothes. Each city he reached, he went to the discount store, bought new ones, binned the old ones. This, they felt, was something to aspire to.)

They were ready for this. They’d been together four years. They were both twenty-eight years old.

They had done their advanced reading, of uneven treasures truffled from second hand bookshops: Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Patrick White. Not all of these did they like. They listened to the Go-Betweens. What they looked forward to was the thought of being lost, of dusty days of driving without seeing a soul before fetching up in some hick village to drink tasteless chilled beer and amuse the locals with their accents. To be in a place at the same time parochial and continent-vast: this was what they wanted. They would occasionally seek out internet cafes, update their social network spaces, email friends with only slightly exaggerated tales from places with unlikely names. Perhaps they’d finally blog.

They wanted this to change them, to give them definition. They imagined themselves coming back sharper, surer of themselves, tanned and lean. Their outlines would be clearer; they’d leave a stronger shadow. Looking back, they’d see this as the start of being adults, they thought.

Of course it didn’t work out that way. Things rarely do. A week before, they had a nuclear level row which saw bags being packed for a different reason. He’d always had a problem with faithfulness at more than the theoretical level, and had wanted a memory to take with him on the trip. She found out, and her anger combined with his lack of contrition to take them somewhere irretrievable.

They didn’t get much back on the tickets. She boxed the books and took them down the local charity shop. She kept the map. They moved on, as people do. The years turned.

At thirty-two she got a job that took her travelling. India, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey: she liked it. She kept a list of the countries she’d visited and saw it rise towards fifty. One day, finally, Australia. She took the map with her, although she didn’t need it. Her itinerary kept her to the main cities. Work had her busy, but in the evenings she’d walk around, try to get the measure of places. Sydney she found swish, but vacuous. In Melbourne she liked the coffee and the presence of bookshops. Brisbane was a redneck city, a county town really. She drank a little too much wine, having developed a taste for fizzy shiraz, and on her second to last night in Melbourne had an unsatisfactory one-night stand with someone originally from Auckland she got talking to in a bar. They exchanged phone numbers afterwards, but only imaginary ones.

On her last day in Sydney, doing the tourist thing of looking at the opera house, she thought of him, for the first time in a couple of years. They’d have had their picture taken here, accosting a passing stranger, him pulling an ironic pose for the camera. She didn’t miss him, more her young self, or the possibilities there’d seemed to be for the two of them. They should have had that month in Australia. If the break-up hadn’t happened before, it would only have happened after. But they should have done the trip first.

So work done she headed home, feeing she still hadn’t seen Australia, and sensing she never would. The idea of it, that was the thing to hold on to.