Road Rage

Marguerite Bunce

Word Count 1883

When it arrived – new in a box all the way from Japan – it was my mother's first car. I can't remember why she had to have a car. Dad had our 'family' car. The known world was filled with dads in family cars driving these big cars fast, quite often while drunk. This was a great era for a lot of men. Nearly everything was boxed up for them. Women and kids lived in boxes, climate change didn't exist and driving big cars came guilt free. My mother's Honda N600 with its modest nose, toy tyres and automatic transmission was then, to most men, a shopping trolley with an engine. But in the outer Sydney suburbs, where we lived, it was a clown car, something only a woman would drive. 

My mother did not care. She read books like 'Small is Beautiful' and 'Diet for a Small Planet' – and our small family became vegetarians eating small pellets of 'TVP' (textured vegetable protein) and dad was forced into pacifist Quakerism – which involved a long drive to the nearest Meeting House. By the time she could no longer stomach vegetarianism, and was fed up with Quakers (taken over by gay men) and had up-graded us to fake English countryside, ten years had passed with the Honda. In those ten years, quite a few women had unlocked the door to their box. My mother, however, was an exception. Feminism didn't register with her. She simply called herself the silverback of the family. 

Even Australia's box had briefly burst then resealed. We'd had a Prime Minister who made University free. For me. Not only that, Australia was to be its own person in the world. Like me. Not just toddling along behind our Mother country and Uncle Sam. I learnt to drive, went to uni, and in the meantime, our Prime Minister was sacked. We weren't sure why. 

When my mother drove, she clenched and unclenched the wheel. It was a big deal, driving. I didn't get to drive often, but I knew it was a powerful thing to be alone, behind the wheel. I was back at home and unable to sit down due to an operation on the 'base’ of my spine. The car's passenger seat had been removed, so that I could recline. It felt as if I was lying inches from the road, being dragged about. Whenever the car needed petrol, the door would open, and there I was, face down in the rear footwell. Independence stubbed out. Recently, news has confirmed that Australia's radical new vision of itself was covertly crushed by our friends, the British Crown and the CIA.

A woman was now Great Britain's Prime Minister and a former actor was President of the United States. It was also the year Princess Grace of Monaco died when she accidentally drove off a cliff. I was taking my mother's car back to the inner city. It would blend in - being easy to park, and great for navigating crowded roads. The reality was Hunger Games for spoilt men. I had to know exactly where I was going, no slowing down to look for street names, no unsure lane changes, no pulling over to check the map without screaming brakes, horns and death threats. The idea of having to cross the Harbour Bridge to enter North Sydney required days of mental and physical preparation. 

I recovered from driving in Sydney by discovering a greater fear – acting. Abject loneliness meant that I took the advice of the only old friend I'd run into. He urged me, 'You should do it'. Ross didn't want me hanging around. (He was always aloof – even some years later after his ex-wife's doberman tore up my washing while I was living in the flat above his parents' house.) 

The month of evening drama workshops was an intense convulsion of people, pretty much unsuited to acting, who bonded the way soldiers do under fire. I got an instant social life, serial boyfriends, a shared flat and, shortly after, a new qualification as an English/Drama teacher. It was while driving from my new flat into the city with my new boyfriend one Sunday that I had my first big accident. 


There were multiple lanes on William Street, clearly marked, and you indicated to change lanes – and yet, I was not warned when the huge car in the lane beside me moved into and across the front of my car. The impact of his instant blame for me being in his way was something I could never have withstood on my own. He was a doctor and he was running late. His car was untouched. But this time I was not alone. My boyfriend, who had the devil in him, as well as an acute sense of social justice, said the police would have to be rung as there was more than $50 damage to my car. These were the days when, in order to ring the police, you had to find a working public telephone. The whole business was protracted and it took an extraordinary amount of 'fuck you' to stick it out, but we did. We waited. And as I watched him seethe, without fully realising it, I saw I was not supposed to be loose in his version of the world. I also knew that I would have embarrassed my father, doing this dreadful thing to an important angry man. There was no situation, really, that my father would have felt warranted my behaviour. 

The moment the police car appeared, the Doctor was ready. He immediately addressed the male policeman and explained why it was my fault and that he needed to get going. The male policeman nodded politely and told him to address the female policeman beside him, who was in charge. The police looked at the damage to my car. I didn't need to say much in my defence, because the damage told them whose fault it must have been. The doctor was charged with negligent driving and then sent on his way. After that, my father decided the car could no longer stay dull green. After panel beating, it was painted daffodil yellow, as if that would change things.

Mechanics came and went with the years. The trick was to find one who could cope with the compacted engine. There was always a gasp as they lifted the bonnet and looked down. They had to be special, almost sensitive, to cope with contorting their hands to get at all the twisted tubing. My friends all drove old cars, and we wore out our mechanics quicker than our cars. Eventually I splashed out on an all stainless steel exhaust both for the manifold and rear, expecting that I could keep my car indefinitely. So I was due my next accident. A hit and run so bad my car left its body and was converted to red.

But before that, there was a brush with the Milperra Bikie Massacre. It was a father's day Sunday afternoon and I was taking the freeway down to my parents' place, passing through our old western suburbs. My car had enough speed, but drivers were so ashamed to find themselves behind it so I was always being overtaken. I'd overtake them again, because they'd inevitably slow down once they were in front. Sometimes I'd just block them so they had to drop back behind. It was my standard practice to drag cars off at the lights – my car was light and fast - for short distances – and I was furious. 

So, there I was on the freeway when a bikie came up behind. Traffic was light, birds somewhere were singing I guess, but any enjoyment of the surrounding world was being chewed to a pulp by his pneumatic engine. I sped up, blocking the standard attempt to overtake. I admit, I am catnip for road rage – an agent provocateur, but like something was wrong inside me, like I'd been drip fed anger and now it was leaking back out – constantly. The bikie pulled up beside my open window and snarled. There was a whole string of them coming up behind me like hairy hornets. I gave the bikie a side eye as he reached out and grabbed my window, as if he thought he could pull my door off – who knows. I was supposed to be scared. What the fuck. He was nothing compared to my mother. Nothing. A pantomime in badly painted leather who disappeared into puffs of cartoon CO₁. Off they all went. Hell's bot flies.

And on the news that night I found out that lots of people had been caught up in a gunfight nearby in Milperra between the Bandidos and the Commancheros in a pub car park. It started just before 2pm and went on for some hours before the police got full control. Seven people were dead, thirty arrested and 500 witnesses. The police didn't have enough vans for all the weapons confiscated. 

The final accident happened as I was driving to the school where I was a casual teacher. It was a main road. From a side road came a white 4 wheel drive, crossing through me, to get to the opposite side. It was a knock-out blow, from a former boxer, who had once been a contender, no less, for a world title. He was keen to leave the scene. He told me that his big new car was uninsured. My tough luck. So he was just another dick on the road. I got his phone number on a scrap of paper. Neighbouring people had heard the crash, and helped me push the car off to the side. I didn't want to leave it alone, but a fellow teacher had pulled up on a motorbike, and offered me a lift.

Great guffs of innuendo spread as we arrived through the school gates.– populated predominantly by Lebanese from the south of Lebanon. There was nowhere else better to be. The school was full of tough, funny kids and their families, Shia migrants from some time earlier in the eighties who lived in the suburb which was and still is, the constituency of the current Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese - our leader who continues the great tradition of subservience which makes Australia the door-mat of the English speaking world. Are the Lebanese invisible to him now, as I was then, in my car, to the men who don't see other lives as equal to theirs? 

My car died the same year that the Iraq war lit up evening TV for my mother. She hadn't been so excited in ages. Watching the tracer lights arcing over the night-time skies of Bagdad and knowing it was real thrilled her. Being a narcissist she had a thing for lying, self-righteous thugs. Heaven knows how she would contain herself now, but just as well, she's dead and I’m not opening her box.

The former boxer was never home when I rang. His wife gave me stories about how he was in Queensland demolishing asbestos laden houses (so hard up he was). And he never did pay up. My car wasn't even a glitch in his downhill trajectory. 

It was just a small car and so very long ago.

Marguerite grew up in Sydney, Australia, where she published poetry in some anthologies and won a couple of prizes. When her poems became too long for traditional publication, she wrote a libretto for an opera based on a Bocaccio story from the Decameron. “The Remedy” was performed by the Sydney Metropolitan Opera company. Short films she wrote were shown at the National Film Institute in London and elsewhere. She currently lives in the south of France where she is experimenting in new forms of writing, such as the essay published here.

Previous
Previous

How Not to Sell a Car

Next
Next

Shift Work