Head Check

In twenty-six years I failed four thousand one hundred and eighteen people, and not one of them has died on my account.

I kept that number in pencil inside the cover of my diary. Under it was the number of passes, which was smaller and which I did not keep for pride. People think an examiner wants to fail them. That is like thinking a lifeguard wants you to drown. I wanted them to come back in a month with their mirrors adjusted.

On a Thursday in June, fourteen working days before I finished, I walked to work. Forty-one minutes from my flat on Kerr Street to the Service NSW centre, past the Caltex, the dead video shop with the faded Shrek poster still in the window, and the roundabout at Moore and Hennessy that I have called the Saucepan since 1999, because it is round and at ten past three, when the high school lets out, it boils over.

I had walked every day since February. I told the girls at the counter it was for my heart. My heart was fine. It was my eyes.

For four months there had been a grey thumbprint in the middle of everything I looked at. Not black. Grey, as if someone had pressed a dirty thumb on the lens of the world and then politely stepped back. If I looked straight at a face, the face went. If I looked a little to the left of it, there it was again, nose and all. The optometrist in Dubbo showed me a grid of straight lines and asked if any of them were bent. They were all bent. She said the word wet, as if she were talking about the weather, and gave me the form you fill in to tell Transport about a medical condition, which in New South Wales is your own job. I put it in the cutlery drawer under the good knives.

I sold the Mazda in March to a man from Gilgandra who drove it away with the handbrake on. I heard it the whole length of Kerr Street. I said nothing. It was not my car any more and he was not my candidate.

My retirement was the thirtieth of June. If I told Rhonda, my manager, now, there would be a different form, with a box on it that said Medical, and twenty-six years would end in that box. I wanted the other form, the one that comes with a cake from Woolworths and Darren making a speech he has written on his phone.

So I had a system. Tallis Creek has three test routes, A, B and C, and I knew them the way some women know the rosary. Every sign, every give-way, every pothole outside the Lutheran church that the council has been promising to fix since Keating. I did not need to read the sign at Byrne Street. I knew it was a stop sign because it had been a stop sign for thirty years, and the shire does not spend money on change.

And you do not need the middle of your eyes to examine a driver. People do not believe this, but it is true. The edges of my vision were perfect, and the edges are where the information is. I could see a head turn for a blind-spot check without looking at it. I could feel a late brake in my lower back. A car tells you everything if you shut up and let it. Most of what I knew about a candidate I knew in the first forty metres out of the car park, from how they let off the handbrake.

Darren was at the kettle when I came in. He is thirty-four, from Orange, and he passes people because, as he puts it, they've got jobs to get to. He was eating a sausage roll at eight-fifteen in the morning, which tells you most of what you need to know.

"Morning, Vesna. Your eleven-thirty's here again."

"It is eight-fifteen."

"She's early. She's in the car park. She's been in the car park since seven-thirty." He pointed with the sausage roll. "Fourth go. Mutch."

"I know who she is."

I did know. Leanne Mutch, forty-three, driving her sister's white Corolla with dog hair on the passenger seat and a pine-tree air freshener so old it smelled of nothing. First attempt, October: rolled through the stop sign at Byrne Street at walking pace, looking at me instead of the road. Immediate fail. Second attempt, January: sixty-eight down the hill past the showground in a sixty, and when I asked her afterwards what the limit was, she said, "Sixty," and then, "Oh." Third attempt, April: she entered the Saucepan at five past three, a school bus came round from her right, and she stopped dead in the roundabout with her hands over her face. Not a fail on the sheet, technically. A fail in life. I had taken the wheel from the passenger side and steered us to the kerb while the bus driver leaned on his horn.

"Let me take her," Darren said. "Give the poor woman a fresh pair of eyes."

He did not mean anything by it. Darren never means anything by anything. I put my bag in my locker and found the right key by feel.

"If she can pass me," I said, "she can drive in Sydney."

"Nobody wants to drive in Sydney."

"That is not the point."

I had two tests before her: a seventeen-year-old called Kai who did everything right and was going to be a menace as soon as I was out of the car, and a farmer's wife from out on the Collie road who reversed into the bay like she was parking a header and passed with a single error. I wrote both sheets with my face close to the clipboard and my head turned a little to the side, so that the words came in from the edge. I sharpen my pencils with a vegetable knife. Darren says it's the most threatening thing he has ever seen anyone do in a staff room. A pencil sharpener makes a fat point. You cannot write in the little boxes with a fat point.

At eleven-twenty-nine I was standing by the white Corolla. I am never late, and I am never early, because early is a kind of late that thinks well of itself.

She had her hands at ten and two before I had my seatbelt on.

"I've been practising," she said. "Every night. My nephew does the clipboard."

"Good." I pushed the passenger seat all the way back, the way I always do, so I am behind the driver's shoulder and can see their head without turning mine. "Mirrors."

"Done them."

"Do them again. I want to see."

She did them again. Her nephew, whoever he was, had taught her to touch each mirror and say its name out loud, like a pilot. Left. Rear. Right. It was ridiculous. It was not wrong.

"Does he make the noises?" I asked.

"What noises?"

"Your nephew."

"You make noises," she said. "You go tch. When I brake late. Like that." She did it, a small wet click on the back of her teeth. It was a very good impression.

"I do not make noises."

"You did it four times in April. Before the bus."

I did not answer, because the answer was yes and the test had not started. "When you are ready," I said, "please drive out of the car park and turn left onto Mitchell Street."

The handbrake came off clean. No jerk, no roll. Forty metres, and I already knew more than I had known in three tests. She had stopped driving like a woman sitting an exam and started driving like a woman going somewhere.

Route B goes left onto Mitchell, right at the lights by the Commercial Hotel, along Byrne to the stop sign, down the showground hill, around the hospital loop, and back through the Saucepan from the north. Nineteen minutes if nobody does anything stupid. I had the whole thing in my head like a song. At the Commercial lights she checked her right mirror and turned her head for the cyclist that is always there, a man in his seventies with a milk crate on the back. I did not look at him. I saw him come forward out of the grey, past my left cheek, and then he was gone behind us.

At Byrne Street she stopped. A full stop: the car sank on its springs and came back up. She counted under her breath, one, two, and looked both ways twice.

"You don't have to count," I said.

"I know I don't have to."

On the showground hill she sat on fifty-eight, and I could hear the engine holding against the slope, so she was braking with the gears the way somebody had taught her. Not the nephew. Someone older. I wrote nothing. Writing nothing is the best thing I ever do for a candidate, and almost none of them know it.

Then we came round the hospital loop to Hennessy Street and the council was there.

There had been no roadworks on Hennessy on Tuesday. Now there were orange barriers along the left lane, a truck with a flashing arrow, three men in high-vis looking into a hole, and signs. New signs. Temporary ones on little A-frames, put there that morning by people who did not know about my system.

I turned my head left to bring the first sign in from the side. Too late. It went past as an orange blur with a black shape on it that might have been a number. Forty, probably. Roadworks are usually forty. Usually is not a word I put on a sheet.

"What is the speed limit here?" I said.

Examiners do not ask that. We watch, and if the candidate gets it wrong, we know. In twenty-six years I had never asked anyone to read me a sign.

"Forty," said Leanne. She was already on thirty-eight. Then she glanced at me. I felt it more than saw it: a small change in the side of the cabin where her face was.

At the end of the barriers stood a man with a lollipop sign on a pole. Stop on one side, Slow on the other. Red on one side, orange on the other, and at that distance, through the thumbprint, both colours were the same colour. I looked left of him, at a bin. I got his hi-vis vest, his arm, the pole, and a disc that could have been either.

Leanne stopped. Smoothly, well short of the line of cones, handbrake on because it was a slope. I let my breath out through my nose.

The lollipop man turned the pole and waved her on, and the side I could not read became, presumably, the other side.

"Proceed when it is safe," I said, which was unnecessary, because she was proceeding.

The detour took us down Clancy Street, which is not on any of my routes, and then, because the shire hates me personally, back up to Moore, which meant we would come at the Saucepan from the east instead of the north. It was ten to twelve. No school buses. Just a ute with a kelpie in the tray and an old Volvo that had been going around that roundabout, as far as I knew, since 1985.

Leanne slowed for it. I waited for the moment in April when her hands came off the wheel.

She looked right. She looked right again. The Volvo passed. She went, signalled left for her exit, did her head check over her left shoulder, and came out onto Moore Street at exactly the speed she should have, and the kelpie in the ute ahead barked at us, and I did not go tch.

"Pull over when it is safe," I said, "in the parking bay by the showground gate."

She parked. She put the handbrake on and the car in park and turned the engine off, all without being asked. Then she put both hands in her lap.

"Have I failed?"

"I did not say that."

"You only make people pull over when they've failed. Or when they cry." She looked straight ahead through the windscreen at the showground fence, the empty pavilion, a sign for a rodeo that had been and gone. "I'm not crying."

"No."

"You couldn't read the stop-slow," she said. "Could you."

I said nothing. My hands were on the clipboard. The pencil was in the clip and I wanted to take it out, so I would have something to do with my fingers.

"You look at things sideways," she said. "You've been doing it the whole time. You did it in April as well, I just didn't know what it was then. My mum had it. Macular. She used to watch the telly like it was a bloke at the pub she didn't trust." She turned her head and did it, a little sideways tilt, chin down, eyes off to the left. It was a very good impression. It was me.

"Your mother," I said, and then I could not think how the sentence went on.

"Seven years she had it. She was all right. She did her crosswords with a magnifying glass the size of a dinner plate." Leanne picked at a dog hair on her knee. "I've seen you walking. Every morning on Kerr Street. I come off the night bus from Coonaby at seven and you're always on the corner by the Caltex in that green coat. I thought you just liked walking."

"I do like walking."

"Yeah, but."

A magpie landed on the bonnet, looked in at us, and left.

The sheet on my knee had one mark on it so far, from the detour: a slightly late head check on the merge out of Clancy Street, which on the form is a minor. One minor is a pass. But there is a line on that form for the examiner's judgement, and I had used it before, in my life, on candidates I simply did not believe. I could write that her observation was inadequate in the work zone. That she had failed to respond appropriately to temporary traffic control. No one would argue. She would come back in a month to Darren, who would pass her with a smile. I would be retired. Nobody believes what a failed candidate says about an examiner. They all say we're blind.

I took the pencil out of the clip.

This is the part I have thought about since. Not the eyes. The pencil. Because for four months I had been telling myself that what I was doing was not lying. I had sold the car. I did not drive. Everyone in the car with me was safe, because I knew the routes and I could feel a bad driver through the seat. I had made every bit of it true except the one bit that mattered, which was that I could no longer see what I was signing.

Four thousand one hundred and eighteen times, I had sat in a car park and told a person the truth about themselves. Your mirrors are for decoration. You treated the stop sign as a suggestion. You are not ready. I had watched them go red and go white, and I had watched some of them call me things in the car park that I will not repeat, and I had told myself it was a gift. And now a woman with dog hair on her trousers had told me the truth about myself, very kindly, without a clipboard, and my first thought was to fail her for it.

I put the pencil to the sheet and wrote, in the remarks box, in letters I could not quite see: Good observation at work zone. Correct response to traffic controller. Then I signed the bottom.

"You passed," I said. "One minor. Your head check on the merge out of Clancy Street was late. Do it earlier."

She did not move. Then she put her forehead on the steering wheel and the horn went off, one long note across the showground, and the magpie came back to see what all the fuss was about.

"Sorry," she said into the wheel. "Sorry, sorry."

"That is not on the test."

At the centre I did her paperwork at the counter, my nose almost on the screen, and Darren took her photo because I told him to. Her eyes were shut in it. She did not care. She held the provisional licence the way people hold a newborn they have been handed in a hospital, too far out from the body, afraid of it.

"I can carry passengers," she said. "Can't I. On my reds."

"Your provisional licence permits passengers, subject to the conditions."

"Where do you live? Kerr Street. What number?"

"I am working until four."

"I'll wait," she said. "I've been in that car park since seven-thirty. I'm good at it."

At twelve-ten I ate my boiled egg in the sun by the bins, as I have done for twenty-six years. I did a test at one and a test at two-thirty, both on Route A, both passes, and I wrote both sheets with my head on one side. At ten to four Darren came and stood next to my desk with his hands in his pockets.

"She's still out there," he said. "Mutch. Sitting in the car."

"I know."

"Do you want me to tell her to go home?"

I looked up at him, or at the place just next to him, so that his face came in from the side. He has a kind face. I had not looked at it properly in four months.

"Darren," I said. "On Monday I need to talk to Rhonda. I would like you to come in with me."

He waited. Darren is good at waiting, which I had never counted as a skill.

"Okay," he said.

"It is about my eyes."

"Okay," he said again, and that was all. He did not make a speech. I could have kissed him, and I am not a woman who kisses people at work.

I had not sat in the passenger seat of a car without a clipboard since my brother Tomo taught me to drive, in 1983, in a Valiant with a split bench seat, on the road out past the Coonaby tip. I did not know what to do with my hands. I put them on my knees. Then I put them in my coat pockets. Then on my knees again.

"You can put your seat forward," Leanne said. "You don't have to sit right back there."

"I am comfortable."

"You're behind my shoulder. It's weird."

I put the seat forward. Two notches. Not all the way.

She drove out of the car park and turned left on Mitchell without my asking. At the lights by the Commercial she turned her head for the old man with the milk crate, and he came out of the grey past my cheek and went behind us, and I found that I was not counting. At the Saucepan it was a quarter past four and the last of the school traffic was going round, a mother in a Kluger with her phone on her knee, a boy on a scooter on the footpath. Leanne waited. Right, and right again. I felt the car gather itself under us and go.

On Kerr Street she pulled up outside my building with the passenger side to the kerb, the way you should, and the handbrake went on with a short, clean ratchet.

"Thank you," I said. "Your parking is acceptable."

"Acceptable," she said. "I'll get it on a mug."

I went up the stairs. I had the key in my hand before I got to the door, because I had been finding it by feel for months. I went into the kitchen and pulled out the cutlery drawer, lifted the good knives, and took out the form. Then I found the magnifying glass in the drawer by the stove, the one I had bought at the chemist in Dubbo and never used, and I sat at the table and filled the form in. It took twenty minutes. My handwriting was enormous. Where it asked for the nature of the condition I wrote the word the optometrist had used, and where it asked for the date of onset I wrote February, which was the truth, and not June, which would have been more convenient.

When I stood up to put the kettle on I saw, out of the edge of the window, that the white Corolla was still at the kerb. She had waited to make sure I got inside. A head check, I suppose. Then the indicator went on, right, and she checked her mirror and pulled out, and just before she reached the corner she gave the horn two short taps.

Unnecessary use of the horn.

I let it go.

Author's note: This is AI-assisted fiction. It was drafted and edited with an AI writing assistant (Grok Bot).