No one knows I drive a Rolls-Royce Phantom. I only drive it after midnight on weeknights, when the city sleeps.
That is the arrangement I have made with myself.
By day, I belong to the ordinary world of fluorescent lights, practical shoes, forms, emails, half-finished ambitions, institutional language, and the dull ache of being misunderstood. By day, I am legible. I can be placed. Filed. Explained away. Another man in Melbourne carrying too much history in his shoulders and too many futures in his head. But after midnight, when the offices are dark and the cafés have stacked their chairs like little acts of surrender, I become harder to classify.
The Phantom waits in silence.
It does not call out to me like a sports car would. It does not beg to be seen. That would be vulgar. The Rolls-Royce understands something fundamental about power, about grief, about reserve. It understands that the deepest luxuries are not noise but insulation. Not spectacle but control. Not attention, but distance.
I slip behind the wheel and close the door with that heavy, muted finality that makes the outside world seem instantly fictional. The city remains there, of course, but dimmed, like a problem placed behind glass. Inside is another climate. Another moral order. Leather, timber, hush. The sort of hush that makes a man believe his thoughts may finally line up and march in single file.
I drive without music at first.
You hear more without music. The low sermon of the engine. The faint brushing of tyres over asphalt. The small mechanical assurances that something in this life was built properly, by people who still believed workmanship mattered. Sometimes I head towards East Melbourne, where the terraces look asleep but faintly judgmental, as though they have seen generations of secrets come home late. Sometimes I drift through Carlton, past buildings that remind me of old ambitions, old humiliations, old versions of myself. Sometimes I go north, where the streets widen and the traffic lights cycle obediently for nobody, turning green for ghosts.
There is something almost ecclesiastical about driving a Phantom through an empty city.
You do not drive it so much as proceed in it.
The car does not encourage haste. It makes speed feel undignified. In that sense it is the opposite of modern life, which is always urging urgency, efficiency, response, optimization, movement for its own sake. The Phantom says: no. Sit properly. Breathe. Regard things. Accept that some people were meant to arrive slowly.
I pass tram stops deserted except for one person every now and then, usually smoking, usually looking like the end of a conversation they did not deserve. I pass kebab shops in their final hour, convenience stores lit like aquariums, police cars parked under indifferent street lamps, apartment towers with a single illuminated window on the nineteenth floor. I always wonder about that one window. Someone awake. Someone pacing. Someone unable to surrender to sleep because the mind has once again opened its courtroom.
Perhaps that is why I drive.
Not for status. Not really. Status is mostly for other people, and other people are rarely worth the administrative burden. I drive because the car creates a chamber in which my mind can move differently. It gives my thoughts the dignity of a setting. Some men go to monasteries. Some disappear into affairs, drink, religion, or self-help. I take the Phantom down St Kilda Road at 12:47 a.m. on a Wednesday and let the bonnet ornament point me toward whatever part of myself is making the most noise.
In those hours I think about all the lives I might have lived.
The disciplined life. The brave life. The life of service. The life of scholarship. The life of moral seriousness that does not become self-punishment. The life in which I chose one road cleanly instead of standing at the intersection studying all of them until the light changed without me.
Sometimes I think about the institutions I have loved from afar. The ones with sandstone entrances and coded language and hidden rooms. The sort of places that promise meaning, gravity, consequence. Places where one imagines one’s vigilance might be put to noble use. Places where, if admitted, one might finally stop feeling like a person wandering around with surplus perception and nowhere sanctioned to put it.
Other times I think about simpler things.
My mother’s tired hands. My father’s endurance. The strange guilt of surviving your own life in fragments. Friends who became disappointing. Colleagues who were coarser than they first appeared. The many humiliations that do not sound dramatic enough when spoken aloud, but which nevertheless accumulate inside a person until he begins to feel inhabited by sediment.
The Phantom is very good with sediment.
It carries it without complaint.
There are nights when I drive to the edge of the bay and pull over where the palms stand in a row like sentries who have seen empires come and go. The city behind me glows with that peculiar Melbourne mixture of grandeur and anticlimax. Not quite old world, not quite new money, not quite honest about itself. I leave the engine running for a moment, then switch it off and sit in the after-silence.
And in that silence I sometimes feel the strangest thing.
Happiness is too flimsy a word for what I mean, too bright and silly and daytime. What I feel is something closer to private sovereignty. A recovered centre. The sense that perhaps my life, despite all its false starts and self-doubt and overthinking and painful loyalties, still belongs to me.
Because the world is always trying to tell you who you are. Your résumé tells one story. Your failures tell another. Your body tells one. Your longing tells another. Family has its version. Institutions have theirs. Psychoanalysts have theirs. Enemies, if you are lucky enough to have earned any, create the most cartoonish version of all. Before long you can become a parliament of hostile interpretations, every internal faction talking over the next.
But at 1:13 a.m. in a Phantom, turning through the city with no destination urgent enough to announce itself, I am not a problem to be solved. I am not a case study. I am not an almost. I am not the person who left or the person who hesitated or the person who should have done more by now.
I am simply a man in command of a very serious motor car, moving through darkness with dignity.
There is healing in that.
Even the absurdity of it heals me a little. Because let us admit it plainly: it is absurd. There is something faintly comic about a solitary man gliding around Melbourne after midnight in one of the most opulent cars ever made, unseen by the very audience such a car is supposed to impress. All that craftsmanship, all that expense, all that imperial theatre, and for what? For empty intersections, shuttered shopfronts, and a driver who does not even tell anyone.
But maybe that is precisely why it matters.
It is mine in the purest sense because it exists outside applause.
No one is there to envy it. No one is there to congratulate me, resent me, decode me, reduce me. There is no performance because there is no witness. It is a luxury removed from the market of personalities. A secret ritual. A moving chapel for one.
Sometimes, on the way home, I take the long route through streets lined with trees and sleeping houses. I look at the windows, the balconies, the façades, and think how strange it is that everyone is living inside a private mythology. Behind one wall, a marriage is ending politely. Behind another, a student is still awake under a desk lamp trying to become someone. Behind another, an old migrant couple are sleeping in separate rooms, bound by history more than tenderness. Behind another, someone has just received terrible news. Behind another, a person is dreaming of escape.
And outside, passing quietly beneath the branches, I go by in the Phantom like a rumour.
By the time I reach home the sky is sometimes beginning to thin at the edges. Not dawn, not yet, but the suggestion that dawn has appointed a junior representative. I park carefully. I sit for a moment longer with both hands on the wheel. The cabin still holds the faint scent of wood polish and leather and night air carried in on my coat.
Then I step out, close the door softly, and the spell breaks.
By morning I will once again look like a man of ordinary means and ordinary concerns. I will answer questions, perform roles, carry the visible version of myself through the day. Nobody will know that a few hours earlier I was gliding through the city in near-perfect silence, thinking enormous thoughts beneath the streetlights. Nobody will know that while they slept I briefly became the custodian of another life, one built not on permission but on taste, solitude, and secret grandeur.
And perhaps that is for the best.
Some things become vulgar the moment they are explained.
The Phantom is one of them.
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