THE DO-OVER

By Eleanor Robertson

The year is 2006. I’m 16 years old. I’m in the driver’s seat of my dad’s enormous Ford Falcon station wagon. He’s trying to teach me how to drive in the car park of the local university. But there’s a problem: the Falcon is at least as old as I am, and it’s made of metal alloys that have been in use continuously since the early Iron Age. The whole thing weighs about the same as the Apollo 11 space shuttle. This is fine, as long as I’m driving the car in a perfectly straight line.

Unfortunately, when the time comes for me to turn a corner, I am simply unable to do it. Instead of power steering, in which the driver’s gestures are translated electronically to the movement of the front wheels, the Falcon’s manual mechanism requires me to muster the raw strength of Arnold Schwarzenegger, or a water buffalo, to steer the car. As I use all my upper-body power to try and wrench the wheel to the left, before crashing at low speed into a wooden bollard, I think to myself, “I hope the school office will let me apply for a new bus pass this late in the year.” This incident was actually the high-water mark of my attempts at learning to drive. Mercifully, I’ve managed to erase most of the memories from my 2010 attempt. Those that remain feature my then-partner’s mother insisting in the strongest possible terms that she teach me. Then there’s a big blank. Then there’s me mailing her an