It's Still Life

Wheels

It was that bleached summer colour of blue, our wagon. Solid rubber tyres. I’d steer and she sat in the front, a passenger along for the thrill of it, and because Mum said, “Take care of your little sister.”

That summer we rode the wheels off its axle, rattling down a drought-hardened footpath to the bottom of the gully where a sulphurous creek seeped through the earth, the ground wet-tongued after rain and the slope landslip-steep with six sharp pinched turns, and the first was easily negotiated, the second one too, although when hit at the right angle a sizeable tree root sent us airborne, and by the fifth my sister was holding on white-knuckled and tight-jawed, by the sixth she was screaming and I was scratching open a lifelong love of wheels and speed. By August Dad wondered how his two sweet little girls could wear solid black tyres all the way down to the rims. “What have you kids been up to?” he asked. “Nothing Daddy, just playing in the park!” That was the same park where a few years later a sinkhole appeared and I stood looking down into that yawning gap, seeing a rushing creek far below and wondering where the water went to — but that’s a story for a different time.