The Country – An Outsider

Those memories are red now. The rust-coloured dust of my childhood has managed to penetrate every deep recess of my mind and body. Some mornings when I put my shoes on, I swear I see red on them.

The red dust belonged to nowhere. It stuck to everything. It was like a fly in summer. It covered your shoes. It covered your clothes. It stuck under your nails. The world out there was trying to bury you, to make you the same as everything around you.

Of course, I never let it consume me. Every night after I scrubbed my body clean of the cursed dust, I would take a toothbrush to my shoes, soak my clothes in the bathtub and scrape under my fingernails. Every Saturday I would mop the floors and wipe down the windowsills. All of it to remove any trace of that dust.

I was naïve to think that countryside life would be easy. I ate the lies my own father had fed me. “Every day is an adventure out there,” he’d exclaim as we packed our lives into brown boxes that would soon take on the reddish hue of the inhospitable world we were moving to.

The first night there was one of the worst. I felt like I had been chewed up and spat out in a new alien world. The aircon had been broken for weeks; the house was at a temperature hotter than anything I’d felt before. The morning after wasn’t much better. I woke up covered in sweat and saw how the dust now covered everything I owned. Long gone was dinner with friends, midnight runs to McDonalds, Sundays in the city. Dinner became a can of baked beans; midnight runs were now to the phone to check fire notices and Sundays were spent on the cold bathroom tiles because the air conditioner still didn’t work.

I quickly learnt how lonely it was out there. That amount of loneliness, knowing that the nearest town is an hour’s drive away, does something to you. If ever I looked up towards the horizon, I was greeted with nothing. Red dirt and scraggly patches of grass stretched on forever. And all of it glimmering with the heat of a hostile sun burning down. Those mirages were like a gate, some otherworldly barrier separating me from the world.

On the days when I would walk aimlessly through the property the mirages would loom over me. But they were still out of reach. No matter how far I’d walk, shifting red walls surrounded me, taunting me. Reminding me that I was trapped.

Sunday was the rare day where those mirages would fade away as I got driven to town. But even there – things were different. My last connection to the outside world, the people of the town, became another barrier. The red dust was replaced with scathing glares. Everyone knew everyone. Which meant everyone knew me. But I didn’t know them.

If this world was an alien plain to me then I was an alien to them, an oddity, some strange creature. I wasn’t covered in the same red dust that they had come to terms with. Their gazes would follow me as they whispered questions under their breath.

I knew that I would never fit in. I was more than aware of that fact, but the way I was pushed away shocked me. It was like they were one breathing creature hunting me, trying to push me out and poison me. It felt like the dust they lived in had corrupted them – made them hate the outside world.

They didn’t want to know me; they didn’t want me in their town. I was an outsider. But I guess that’s what life in the country is like for people like me.

By Riley Landau (Year 11)