Wendy had been collecting places around her home town. Specific sites where events had occurred. Significant events. These sites were now always to be approached with caution.
Curfew Street undulates down toward Wendy’s home, the opposing lanes separated by wide shrubby gardens which break at intersections for cars to access the cross streets. At one such intersection, Curfew Street crests and oncoming cars are not as apparent as on a straightforward road. Here an oncoming car, failing to notice Wendy's apparentness, once suddenly turned across her path giving her only enough time to slam on the brakes and skid to a stop two millimetres from the car which itself had frozen in panic realising what it had just done. Time stood still as Wendy’s heart tried to escape through her throat, and her motorbike and the little red car sat t-shaped, almost touching in the middle of the road.
Wendy now rode towards this crest each day with extra vigilance, watching for cars suddenly turning in front of her.
It was on Myopia Road, just after the roundabout, that a car ignored the stop sign and drove out of a side street, into the bike lane and into Wendy, knocking her sideways off her bicycle. She was grazed and bruised and had needed to lie down on the nature strip while passing witnesses with takeaway coffees yelled abuse at the flustered driver. Wendy, whose husband was out of town, had had to phone a friend for a for a lift home, where, after the shock had passed, she finally remembered how to cry, felt sorry for the driver and his beaten up old car and his shrunken elderly mother who had sat wrapped in a blanket in the back seat, head barely visible above the window line. She had no bike for over a week while they replaced the mangled back wheel.
Wendy added this t-intersection to her growing mental list of accident black spots, and now always slowed down on approach, alert for incoming cars, for drivers blind to cyclists, expecting the unexpected.
The cafe at Middlemarch Five Ways is unassuming. Plastic pot plants. Laminex tables. Hard chairs. This is where Wendy’s husband told her he “needed some time alone” and the world drained out through Wendy’s feet. She later learned that “need to be alone” meant “need to be with that woman” he’d met at the "incredible" interstate conference he’d not stopped talking about ever since.
Wendy did not subsequently approach that cafe with caution. She actively avoided it, and Middlemarch Five Ways, and her husband and that woman, and even her home town for a while when she fled to Alaska to see the midnight sun and taste reindeer.
