I followed the freeway, first east and then south and then south-west; just over half a clockface around Port Phillip Bay. Free of roadworks again the road gets you to the peninsula in ninety minutes; at least from where we are in the inner north. The elevated southbound bridge circles the city passing a million lights, which drift behind like some passing galaxy.
City behind, the car slid south, engine a sleepy purl, while the radio burbled notes out into space, a slipstream of sound that will never die but reverberate out into the universe and infinity. The program: Passing Notes on PBS; track, Whisper of Fall by Respira. Night driving music, as long as you don’t drift off.
Alex in the big comfortable velour seat (the car is a lounge room on wheels) behind me talks, falls silent, finally snoozing; past where the lights from the houses on the cliff-face of Mount Martha shine like trinkets on a Christmas tree.
Then west again and through Capel Sound and Rye, and up the long curving road around the back of Blairgowrie towards the house on the hill, the weekend cabin; from where sometimes at night you can hear Bass Strait’s angry roil.
We stood on the front porch and looked out before opening the house. The northern horizon was a thin pale luminous strip under night cloud, a lit stage behind a heavy curtain: that galaxy of city light, far behind now.
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