Chapter 43: Mum

It was time to go and see Tom’s mum.

After a late start, Tom and Nena got finished with the packing of the flat and the reorganising the bus by twelve-thirty Saturday afternoon. While they had a quick lunch, Tom rang Rachelle and told her the flat was clean and vacant for when she was ready to move in.

He promised to come up to Brissy when he had free time to go out with the old team. He knew as well as they did that, he wouldn’t have a lot of free time once he started studying.

He did say he was sorry for leaving her and the team with the mess he had uncovered. Rachelle laughed it off and said that he did like to keep life interesting. She also told him that she got the file and had read his notes. She and the team would follow through with his recommendations.

One phone call that Tom had made during the week, and that he hadn’t said much to Nena about, was to his mum. For some reason, thinking about her lately made him feel uneasy, and she had sounded odd on the phone. As much as he hated Bill, he did feel the need to go and see her.

He had estimated that it was, at the least, a ten-hour road trip without any breaks, so more like eleven to twelve hours if there were roadworks. So, Tom had told his mother he would leave Brissy on Friday afternoon and stop for the night on the way, and he should get to her about lunchtime on Saturday.

He hated telling her the lie. In reality, Bus had said it would take about fifteen minutes. It was one of the reasons he and Nena hadn’t really hurried with the packing and had lingered in bed after their late night.

Nena was going to pose as his girlfriend, and Tom wasn’t sure how that was going to pan out either. He’d had a hard time fighting with himself about what to do about Nena. Knowing that she was infatuated with him wasn’t helping him keep his hands to himself.

He just couldn’t get over the feeling that he shouldn’t cross the line.

“Okay, Nena, let’s go,” Tom said.

He took a seat on the right side of the bus behind the front doors where he liked to sit. Nena had climbed into the bus driver’s seat. She had told Tom it was the better seat to have anyway.

Nena turned and grinned at him, “Hey, Boss, you haven’t swiped in, so we can’t go anywhere.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Tom replied in exasperation.

Nena shook her head, “Nope. Bus says it’s part of the original contract, so you have to do it.”

Tom sighed and pulled out his wallet. He placed the half with the Go-Card in it over the reader and waited until it beeped. “Happy now?” he inquired.

Nena giggled, and Bus chuckled as Tom reclaimed his seat. “Off to Comet, we will go,” Nena sang, making Tom smile as the bus started moving.

It headed out of the parking lot and onto the street. As it picked up speed the view outside blurred and darkened. Tom still wondered why no one saw the bus disappear.

He shrugged it off, pulled the pad off his vambrace and started to read.

Comet was Tom’s place of birth.

It is located between Emerald and Blackwater in the Central Queensland region that is also known as the Bowen Basin. The town plus its immediate area had about five hundred permanent occupants.

If it weren’t for the 60km/hr sign and the fact that you had to slow down for a couple of hundred metres, you truly would miss the place if you yawned. Bus, however, didn’t miss.

After Tom spent the first two years of his life in Comet, his parents had moved around the towns in the Bowen Basin as his father shifted between the different underground coal mines. It was the coal dust and poor mining practices by several of the mines owned by the same conglomerate that got him in the end.

Mary had moved from Emerald to Comet with Bill, about four years earlier. Tom had never been to their current house and had only found out about the move when he rang his mum the Wednesday before. He hadn’t seen her for five years, and he really missed her.

Mary had been excited to hear Tom’s voice, and she had asked him to come and visit her. She told Tom that they had brought a property on Lurline Rd and that Bill occasionally ran some cows on it, but they didn’t have any at the moment.

Tom knew that Bill wasn’t into farming cotton, wheat, or sorghum since he still worked at one of the nearby mines as a Shift Operator for their wash plant. Farming was hard work and not Bill’s thing.

Tom was apprehensive about going for the visit since he and Bill hadn’t parted on such good terms when they had last spoken to each other. As far as Tom was concerned, the man was a lazy bastard and just lived off his mother’s goodwill.

Tom was quite sure Bill would have already planned how to spend his mother’s latest windfall.

The hazy view outside the window’s cleared as Bus slowed.

Tom could now see the landscape as if he were travelling on the road like a normal bus. He even felt the bus bounce once it had wheels on the road. They had put a glamour over the bus, so it looked like an old touring bus that had been made into a mobile home.

He and Nena had decided to stick to the story of meeting up again after two years, and since they were both going to be going to the same Uni, they were planning on living together.

Tom didn’t want Nena to mention that he owned the house at the Gold Coast. Instead, they were going to say that they had permission to park on the property, and that was why it would be their address. Well, that was the plan.

Tom told Bus to turn in at the old, white, milk churn that was being used as a letterbox. It had ‘Arn & White’ painted on the side of it in purple letters. He had to smile as it was his mother’s favourite colour. Bus drove slowly up the rutted, dirt road that pretended to be a long driveway.

The house was set about 200m from the access road, and the trees in the front paddocks hid most of it from view. It was obvious they were regrowth that hadn’t been cleared except along the side of the driveway.

Most of the taller trees stood around 9m tall, suggesting they had been growing for over four years. The driveway ran along a fence line that divided the two front paddocks of the 50ha of land.

Tom peered out through the front windscreen as they entered a central paddock that that had fewer trees. He guessed the square house paddock was about two acres of land between the fences. He directed Bus to park beside a large shed that was sheeted with corrugated galvanised-iron.

Tom even remembered to swipe his Go Card when he stepped out of the bus into the heart of a sunny afternoon in Central Queensland. Tom noted that the place needed mowing badly and bits of old machinery littered the area around the house, three water tanks and the shed.