Learning to Drive

Carmen had been driving for almost twenty-five years when she moved from Zaragoza to Perth. She had driven through Madrid at rush hour, along mountain roads in the Pyrenees and across half of France with three children arguing in the back seat. So when she found out that she would have to pass the Australian driving test to keep driving after her first few months, she didn't bother worrying about it. "How hard can it be?" she said to her husband, Pablo. "A car is a car."

Her first lesson taught her otherwise. Her instructor, a calm, sunburnt man called Dave, asked her to pull out of the car park and turn right. Carmen checked her mirrors, indicated perfectly and drove straight onto the right-hand side of the road. Dave didn't even raise his voice. "Left, Carmen," he said gently, as a large truck came towards them. "We like keeping to the left here."

The problem, she soon realized, was not knowing the rules. She had read the handbook twice and could answer every question in it. The problem was that her body refused to forget twenty-five years of habits. Whenever she wanted to change gear, her right hand reached for the door. Whenever she wanted to indicate, she switched on the windscreen wipers instead. Dave started counting the wipers. By the end of the second week, the score was forty-one.

Then there were the stop signs. In Spain, Carmen admitted, she had gotten used to slowing down almost to a stop, looking both ways and carrying on. In Western Australia, a stop sign meant stopping completely, with the wheels not moving at all, exactly at the line. "Not near the line," said Dave. "Not somewhere around the line. On it." Carmen tried stopping on it. She stopped before it, after it and, once, so suddenly that Dave's coffee ended up on his shorts.

She considered giving up. Pablo had passed his test on the first attempt, which did not help. Her teenage son offered to give her some tips, which helped even less. One evening she sat in the car outside their house, refusing to go inside, and seriously thought about buying a bicycle instead.

What saved her in the end was a piece of advice from her neighbor, Joy, a retired bus driver who had moved to Australia from Scotland forty years earlier. "Stop trying to forget how you drove in Spain," Joy told her. "You'll never manage to delete it. Try to tell yourself a little story every time you get in. Say it out loud if you have to."

So Carmen began talking to herself. "Driver in the middle of the road," she would whisper as she turned a corner. "Passenger next to the curb." At every stop sign she counted out loud: "Line, stop, one, two, look, go." It felt ridiculous, and Dave pretended not to hear, but it worked. The wipers stayed off. The coffee stayed in Dave's cup. After six weeks, Dave said she was ready to book the test.

On the morning of the test, Carmen remembered to bring her passport, forgot to bring her glasses and had to drive home again to fetch them. The examiner was a serious young woman who wrote things on a clipboard without saying a word. Carmen whispered her little story at every corner. At the first stop sign, she stopped so precisely on the line that she felt like applauding herself.

Near the end, the examiner asked her to reverse into a parking space between two cars. Carmen held her breath, turned the wheel and slid the car into the space as neatly as she had done a thousand times in narrow Spanish streets. For the first time all morning, the examiner smiled.

Back at the test center, she was told she had passed. She didn't remember saying thank you, but she did remember switching on the windscreen wipers as she drove out of the car park. Nobody, she decided, needed to know about that.