* * *
A considerable time has passed since these interviews were recorded, and it is interesting to note that despite a good deal of effort no further sightings have been discovered. The available evidence – if it can be graced with the term – is insufficient in itself to indicate as to whether or not this individual and her car really did exist.
The last person I intended interviewing in relation to the matter was a genteel elderly lady named Daphne Little, of Meagan Court, Witta. Where this project is concerned, however (or by any other criteria), the meeting can in no way be regarded as successful. Yet an informal account of it should not be omitted from this summary, for reasons that will become clear.
On reflection the problem began when I first went to her home and introduced myself. The warmth of her greeting and her gentle manner somehow deflected me from my purpose and, as time went by, I found myself becoming more and more deeply engaged in conversation. The subjects touched on were broad-ranging, and included everything from frosty mornings in Orange to life, the universe and everything – Papua New Guinea, gardening, the Central Australian outback, road trains, the Rum Jungle Mine in the early days, Melbourne in the sixties and divers other things.
After a time she made a brief excursion to the kitchen, following which she returned with tea and an elegant collation. I’d glanced at my watch while she was away and couldn’t believe I had been talking there with her for more than two and a half hours, despite my time being carefully budgeted and the fact that by now I had missed completely two unrelated but critical appointments. Even so, I felt it would be exceedingly boorish of me to refuse her hospitality. As a result what little urgency of resolve still remaining simply evaporated in the afternoon sunshine, as we sat outside in her garden and continued our tranquil communion.
And it was not until late afternoon, on extending my thanks and making ready to depart, did I recall the actual purpose of my visit, so in parting I asked whether she or any of her acquaintances might have seen or heard of the red car and its driver.
“My son has a car like that,” Daphne replied, her eyes twinkling in the most disarming manner, “but he lives in Indonesia.”
And I have to admit that my departure from Meagan Court was made in a state of mild intoxication, the result of having enjoyed lunch and a good many hours conversation with perhaps the most engaging and captivating woman I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. In fact it only occurred to me a couple of days later, on finding myself staring at an empty page in my notebook under the heading: “Meagan Court – a Mrs Daphne Little. May have seen or know something about the red car,” that I came to appreciate what had happened.
Not only had she not answered my question, but she had done so in the most beguiling fashion. And how easily and uncritically had I been seduced into accepting her response.
A couple of months were to pass before I had another opportunity to revisit the scene of this comprehensive enchantment, and by that time I was sure I knew the answer. This was the person herself: The Granny in the Red GTS. And she must have deduced somehow the purpose of that earlier visit. Certainly she was ready for my question, with my almost forgetting to ask on that first occasion being in itself simple testament to the nature of this captivating individual.
Doubtless her son does have a car resembling the one described. But it is patent that his residing in Indonesia in no way guarantees its similar whereabouts.
And so I ventured forth once more to Meagan Court, all flinty eye and gritty resolve. Take a chance, I thought. Arrive unannounced; her welcoming voice alone may well be enough to unravel my determination should I telephone beforehand.
Once there I parked by the gate, as before, but on walking up the driveway I sensed a difference, somehow. The garden seemed… Well, almost as if it had been abandoned. And even from outside the house felt hollow and cold.
I stood by the door for a minute, hesitating to knock, my mind a blank. Then a neighbour appeared. Would I be looking for Daphne Little, she asked. And I was just about to say how it wasn’t important and I could come back later, when a profound sadness came over her.
“Daphne died last week,” she said quietly, “in the Nambour Hospital. Her poor heart simply gave up trying to keep pace with her.”
I stood there, unable to move, feeling cheated somehow and utterly robbed. Not of my prize, though, for in that moment it was revealed as the trivial thing it was. No, not that.
And then it came to me: what I had lost so irrevocably was the opportunity of seeing her again, of finding excuses to return here, to wander with her through the garden or have cups of tea and home-made cakes under the pergola while talking again of New Guinean masks and cork clutch-plates in nineteen twenty-nine Essex cars; the taming by guile and love of a great feral tomcat in the bush of Central Australia; how she was found by her lost sons fifty years after having to adopt a false name and give them up for adoption, of flying flooded creeks in an FJ Holden and, how she showed a stubborn old desert Aboriginal man that being a white woman didn’t mean she was soft and worthless.
And, too, about specialty shops in Singapore and op-shops in Caloundra; about living and loving and laughing through all of the adversities and triumphs that life can deliver; of sitting on a rock in a high and windy place watching falcons soaring and diving; of seeing the sun going down through the orange haze of a Top End grass-fire – the smell of the smoke and the crackle of the flames.
All of this and more, so terribly much more.
After a while I found myself wandering back to the car, wondering how many times would I have come here with my question, knowing deep inside that I would have deferred its asking that I might always have a reason to return. And, one day, after numerous visits and many more years, the neighbour would come to me and tell, not of pain and the Nambour Hospital, but of finding Daphne under her big bauhinia tree, beneath a blanket of its lavender flowers – exactly as it should have been.
During this sad introspection my legs had carried me – unbidden – back to the gate and down the steep little driveway. In heart and spirit I was numb, yet I was seeing – with great clarity somehow and magnified out of all proportion – the detail and texture of the gravel at my feet.
And it was here, at the sharp change of angle where the driveway adjoins the sealed road, that I found the answer. On the bitumen it was, near the edge of the seal, on a stone standing fractionally higher than the others – a tiny flake: a scraping of red enamel.
Bright, fire-engine red, enamel.
It must have been difficult to manoeuvre out of the drive without running it aground, with its fairings and air-ducts and low clearance. But then, in her younger days, she’d driven one of my Dad’s three trailer road trains along a narrow Territory bush track without running that aground.
Just as I was about to kneel down to recover the flake I heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. There’s not a lot of traffic at the end of Meagan Court, so instead I stepped back to give the driver plenty of room to turn. When he’d passed I looked down to the roadway again but the coloured flake was gone.
I could ask the neighbours, I suppose. But, like I said, it no longer seems important.
There won’t be any more sightings of a sweet little grey-haired lady driving a red GTS. She’s sitting on the grass somewhere in the afternoon sunshine, talking to a bandicoot and watching the flowers grow and the clouds change colour.
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