Came into town on a load run, flatbed with a giant bullbar on it, built for roos and cattle and now wasted on a town full of roundabouts. Drove the roundabouts the way I drive everything, which is to assume the town will get out of my way. No blinker. Didn't look. Second one in, straight across the nose of a little yellow HiAce with doilies in the window.
Bullbar went in like a battering ram. Took the front quarter out, headlight glass across the gutter, kept going down the flank — metal on metal, paint off the door in one long screaming stripe. The van spun a quarter turn and stopped and the bloke sat there with both hands on the wheel, white as a rag.
I got out. Didn't kill the engine. Stood there looking at the damage like it was the van's fault. "Reckon you're in the wrong lane, mate."
Yellow HiAce. Lace doily under a ceramic pot on the dash. Little solar panel on the roof that had nothing to do with anything. And him climbing out all shaky in a soft grey hoodie, hair in his eyes, saying "oh — yeah. Yeah, no. Sorry. Sorry."
vanNEET. That was the name on the rego, and it stuck, because it was exactly what he was. Forty-odd. Pretty in a way that had clearly never been told about itself. Fine wrists. Soft mouth. Folded up small.
Walked the side of it, ran a flat hand down the scratches to the back door, hunkered, looked at the tie rod. "She'll drive. Pulls left, don't fight it." Straightened up. "Get the details done. I'm ringing a tow."
"Um." His hands were going. "I don't reckon I can afford —"
"Not coming out of your pocket."
Got the form out of the glovebox, put it on the tray. He wrote, shaky, and his face went all at once, the way it does when the adrenalin turns around. "It's my house, though."
"I know." Hand on the back of his neck, weight, the way I do everything. "It's a quarter panel and a door. It's metal. Nothing that matters is fucked."
Then I opened the slider. "Go on. Show us."
"Show you what?"
"Your house. Give us the tour."
And he did it, because I'd told him to. Forty-odd years old and he stood in his own doorway and pointed at the bed and the milk crate of water bottles, the little gas cooker, the drawer with the cutlery in it, and he got his phone out to show me the app that tracks the battery off the solar panel and his hand was shaking that bad he kept missing. Proud of it. All of it. A life rationed down to two litres a day in a car park.
"Righto," I said, and put him on the bed.
Not rough enough to hurt. Just heavy enough that there was no question, a knee between his own, and he worked out quick that the only thing to do was lie still and take it and let his head shut up.
That was the thing, though. The doily, the solar panel, the app. A life spent managing himself. Now there was a bloke on top of him who'd decided where he was going to be and it wasn't up for discussion, in his own house, and something in him went quiet that hadn't in years.
Came with his face in his own pillow and both hands in the blanket, and I didn't stop for it. Straight through it, steady as a machine, till I was done. Pen still out on the tray.
Tow truck got there about then. Bloke hooked on, didn't say a word about the two of us climbing out of the back. "Where we taking her?"
"My yard. Off the tip road."
vanNEET got up in the cab with his backpack and said thanks out the window, twice. I took the doily and the pot off the dash and put them in my ute.
Towie wound the dolly down and looked at the stripe down the door. "Bit of a mess, that."
"Quarter panel and a door."
"Quarter panel and a door," the towie agreed. "You can claim the lot on the business though, can't you. Being a panel beater."
The truck pulled out and took him with it.
"Yeah," I said. "I know."