by John Clanchy
‘They couldn’t stop you,’ a boy behind me says. ‘Even if they wanted to.’
‘It’s a free country,’ another boy says.
‘So, maybe while you climb,’ Jason, the ranger, says, ‘they just ask you to do it with that in mind. With that attitude. That’s all.’
The girls, I see, are all nodding and smiling back to show him they understand and are mature, and it’s not just cos he’s so gorgeous. I can almost see them climbing the Rock with their heads bowed and their hands joined in front of them. But he is such a spunk, and I look around again at Toni, imagining her rolling her eyes and running her tongue round her lips because she couldn’t not have noticed by now – but she’s not where she was and I can’t see her anywhere, and I feel a moment of panic then, and stand up.
‘Sit down, Lorrrah,’ the kids – the girls especially – are shouting. ‘Sit down, you’re blocking the view.’
‘Where did you get to?’ I ask Toni.
‘When?’
‘At the end of the thing, the performance.’
It’s after nine, and we’re back at our tent. Toni’s putting on jeans and a sweater because it’s started to cool and she’s on duty till eleven tonight, making sure the kids settle, are zipped in, their lights out.
‘I was there,’ she says, not saying where was there.
‘Wasn’t Jason a spunk?’ I say, longing to make contact.
‘Jason?’
‘The ranger. The Aboriginal ranger.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she says, picking up her torch and lifting the flap of the tent. Fully dressed, half-in and half-out of the tent, the moon scarcely touching the shadows in her face, she seems so competent, and grown-up. And so far away. ‘Why don’t you go to bed? Get a good night’s sleep?’
As if I was sick, or a child. A sick child, or something.
‘Laura?’ Mum says when I ring. ‘I was expecting you to call last night, darling. I was just starting to worry.’
‘I would’ve, but the phones at Coober Pedy weren’t working properly, so I thought I’d do it tonight.’
‘And you’re there, at Ayers Rock?’
‘Yes. Only it’s called Uluru.’
We talk, and I ask her about Thomas and Katie, and she doesn’t ask me about me, or about me and Philip, and how I’m getting over it, or if I’m adjusting or depressed, or that. She just talks about herself and the Rock and what a good time I must be having, seeing it and everything. When for all she knows I might have grown suicidal or had a spazz attack and thrown myself off it an hour ago.
‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘I’m thirty-eight, I’ve been to places all over Europe, and I’ve never been to Ayers Rock.’
‘Uluru.’
‘To Uluru. And is it as beautiful as all the pictures?’
‘It’s hard to breathe sometimes.’
‘Breathe? ’ she says, as though she’s suddenly having trouble herself. ‘In all that space? But it’s desert, isn’t it? I thought the desert air was supposed to be dry and clear.’
‘It is. It’s just sometimes.’
‘Darling?’ she says then. ‘There’s nothing wrong … ?’
‘No. It’s nothing physical.’
‘Oh, no!’ the whole bus goes as one. ‘No!’
There’s a notice in the window of the ranger’s office at the entrance to the Park: Climb closed, it says, untilfurther notice. Wind conditions make climbing unsafe.
‘It’s not fair,’ someone says.
‘What wind anyway?’ a boy asks. ‘There’s no wind.’
‘Not here,’ Dave says, as he climbs back into the bus. He’s been into the ranger’s office, fixing all the tickets for entry to the Park. ‘Here it’s as calm as a millpond. But you wait till you get to the Rock. Then you’ll see.’
And he’s right, as usual. It’s fourteen kilometres from the Park gate to the Rock, and as we get close and drive along the base of the Rock, which is looming over us now, even the bus is rocked and buffeted by the wind.
‘But where did it come from?’ a girl near the front of the bus asks Miss Temple.
‘I don’t know, Marcia,’ Miss Temple says. ‘It must just happen here.’
‘The Rock,’ Mr Jasmyne says, and he stands so that everyone in the bus can hear, ‘creates its own micro-climate.’
‘Oh, nooo,’ the kids groan again, and even Mr Jasmyne must hear this over the engine and the rush of the wind, because he goes bright red, instantly, and sits down, and it’s funny then to hear Mr Jasmyne’s deep voice grumbling away and Miss Temple’s softer one saying, ‘Yes, but not now, Gerald,’ and then all the kids whispering and snickering and going, ‘Not now, Gerald. Not now.’
‘Stop whingeing, you kids,’ Dave shouts over his shoulder as he pulls into the carpark. ‘The Climb’ll only be shut for an hour or so. The wind always drops after that, and they’ll let you go up as soon as it does.’
‘Hurrah!’
‘Good on you, Dimbo!’
‘By that time,’ Dave says, ‘the sun’ll be up properly anyway, and you’ll get a much better view.’
It’s still only half-light as we scramble out of the bus at the foot of the Climb. And the first thing that hits you is the cold, the ice on your cheeks, and you can’t believe that last night you were lying out on the grass under the stars in a T-shirt and shorts, and sweating, and thinking about sex.
‘Did it hurt for you?’ Toni had said at one point. Out of nowhere. She’d come back to the tent just after eleven, and had lain on top of her sleeping bag, reading one of her magazines. I was scribbling and re-writing, and crossing things out in my journal, and then rescuing them and putting them back in again, and being indecisive – as usual. Mum says I’m not indecisive at all, I’m too hard on myself, I’ve lost confidence for the moment, that’s all.
‘Hurt?’ I said. ‘Did what hurt?’
‘With Philip,’ she said, turning a page without looking at me.
‘You mean breaking up? Of course it did, you know that.’ Toni might have looked especially bright and alive last night, but she was also being especially dumb.
‘No, I didn’t mean that.’ She stopped. ‘I meant the first time,’ she said eventually, turning another page.
I tried to see what it was she was reading, what’d provoked this, but her eyes didn’t seem to be moving at all, only her hand turning the page.
‘You mean,’ I said, ‘when we –’
‘Yes.’ She still sounded bored. ‘Did it hurt? For you.’
‘A bit. But not after, and anyway, it was so quick. I told you.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and slammed the magazine shut and yawned, and didn’t want to listen – when she’d been the one who’d asked in the first place. She was, I realized then, not actually interested in whether it had hurt for me or not. She was just feeling restless and bored with herself. ‘How much longer are you going to be? What are you writing for Godsake, your mem-wahs?’
The Rock’s not red this morning, more black and brown and with patches of dull orange – just a huge massed shadow, full of cold openings, though even as we stretch back our necks and gaze up at it, a shower of sparks hits the top and sets the whole spine of the Rock on fire.
‘Wow! Did you see that?’
‘Look, that’s where you go up.’ Billy Whitecross, as usual, is loudest of all. ‘There’s the chain,’ he shouts. ‘I’m not going to hang onto that.’
‘People have to,’ one of the girls says.
‘No, they don’t. It’s a free country.’
‘You could fall.’
‘As if.’
Light is breaking all over the Rock now, but it’s too cold and windy just to stand and look.
‘We’ve got an hour at least,’ Miss Temple announces when everyone’s off the buses and lined up. ‘So I can’t see any point just waiting round here. Why don’t we do one of the walks along the bottom, the one Jason told us about last night – the Mala walk, do you remember? That way you can see some of
the artwork and the waterholes and caves first.’
‘Caves, yeahh!’
‘A lot of them you can’t go into, don’t forget.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re sacred places. You’ll find there are signs that tell you where you can go and where you can’t. And where you can take photos, and where it’s not allowed.’
There’s some grumbling about this, but everyone’s just happy at this moment to have something to do, and get their limbs moving. It’s lucky we’ve got Dave with us, too, otherwise we’d have been here in our shorts and thongs instead of the beanies and gloves and ski jackets everyone’s got on. But it’s still freezing.
Groups of tourists, Europeans and Japanese, are huddled, separately, by the locked gates leading to the Climb. They’re smoking or blowing in their hands or stamping their feet and reading the signs as they wait. More and more buses are pulling into the carpark all the time. I look back down along the road in the direction of the Resort, and a whole of chain of buses, the sunlight glinting on their metal sides, is snaking its way through the Park towards the Rock.
‘So, we go this way.’ Miss Temple waves towards the left of the Climb. ‘It’s called the Mala walk,’ she reads from a brochure, ‘because the Mala’s the hare wallaby, and all this part along here, out to that big bulge over there at least, is one big ceremonial area.’
‘The signs,’ Dave says, ‘will tell you the story.’
‘This is the women’s area,’ Miss Temple explains. ‘It’s especially sacred, so make sure you do what the signs say.’
Her voice is torn away by the wind and drowned in the shouts of children racing off down the path towards the waterhole and the first caves.
‘I hope –’ she cries, but it’s already too late. Kirk Joliffe, one of Billy’s mates, has found a cleft in the Rock that echoes. ‘Coo-ee,’ he shouts into it, but the cold blast that comes back is a hundred times louder than his own tiny voice: ‘Coo-ee,’ it bellows back, rocking him on his feet. ‘Coo-ee-ee!’
The Rock, she knows at once, is alive. 'Stay off,’a voice warns her as soon as she comes near it, ‘stay off.’ The wind flows down over the Rock, ruffling the folds in its skin: ‘Stay off,’ it moans, ‘stay off.’ Butcher birds fly in and out of the hollows ofits ribs. Wrens andfinches flicker in its shadows: ‘Stay off,’ they pipe, ‘stay off.’ And all this while the Rock crouches, as the ants pour over it, cling to its mane.
Once she feels it shudder, in revulsion, and the steel chains bite and rattle on its neck. It lies chained to the earth, brooding and distrustful, the bronze plaques nailed into its side aching in the cold morning air. But then the sun comes out, and she feels it stretch in response, then settle, its warm breath pouring westwards out across the plain to where its mother and its sisters are still being born …
‘Look, there’s people climbing already,’ Billy Whitecross shouts. ‘The Japanese, they’ll beat us. I told you we shouldn’t have waited so long.’
‘It’s not a race, Billy,’ Miss Temple says. ‘Now remember,’ she cries, as the boys race off towards the gate at the bottom of the Climb, ‘nobody’s to go in – Billy, do you hear me? – nobody’s to start until we all get there.’
‘But we’ll be last –’ is all we hear back.
The wind has dropped almost to nothing now, and as we come out of the shadow of the Rock, the sun’s suddenly hot, and in minutes we’re sweating in our gloves and ski jackets. Which have begun to look stupid as we peel them off. The carpark by the Climb is nearly full, hundreds of tourists, Japanese, Germans, Italians, flocking off the buses and chattering loudly as they head for the Climb. Some Japanese women sit on the wooden benches by the carpark, holding white paper fans between their faces and the sun. But it’s the Japanese girls who make the most noise, laughing and shrieking and bending double and clinging to one another’s arms when they look up and see what’s ahead of them. They look the happiest of all. And are all made up, even at this hour, and look and sound like mynahs or lorikeets themselves. They’re the ones I’d love to talk to. I look to see if there are any Greek buses, but can’t find a single one.
When we get to the entrance to the Climb, the other teachers are there, and all our kids are lined up on one side of the gate.
‘Come on, come on,’ they’re yelling. ‘Everyone’s going in front of us.’
‘Now,’ Mrs Harvey says, when she has everyone’s attention, ‘we’re going to do this as one group. I don’t want people running all over the place by themselves – do you hear me, you over there?’
‘Yes, Mrs Harvey.’
‘This is a climb, remember, it’s not easy, it can even be dangerous. You see the warning sign over there?’
‘What does it say?’ someone at the back calls out.
‘It says the Anangu – that’s the local Aboriginal people – Jason told us about them last night, remember?’
‘He said we could go up.’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Harvey says over the top of them, ‘but he also said the local people wished we didn’t. And they’ve put this warning –’
‘What does it say?’
‘Well, if you’d just be quiet enough for one minute, I’d tell you. It says the Anangu are distressed by the number of people who are injured attempting the Climb. That, by the way, is what all those plaques are for.’
‘What plaques?’
‘Over there. Don’t you see, in the side of the Rock?’
‘What are they for?’
‘They’re for the dead.’
‘The Dead?’
Suddenly there’s a hush, but I’m not looking at the plaques because I’ve read about them before we even came. Instead, for the first time I’m looking up at the Climb itself, and I see how easy the lower bit is, and how people are just strolling up it and taking pictures and talking into their video-cameras, but then I see how the Rock suddenly curves out like the ruff on a dog’s or a lion’s neck, and how the sides fall away and all you’ve got is this narrow path, and it’s only a tiny silver necklace that’s holding you there, and some of the people now going up it almost look to be going up on their hands and knees, and if you slipped or were thrown off or snatched up by the wind, you wouldn’t just fall or tumble or hit the Rock or anything, you’d fly out into space until you hit the ground. Some of the other kids, the boys especially, are looking too now, and I wonder if they’re feeling the same sudden doubt I’m feeling, and wondering, for the first time, whether they’ll even be able to do it.
‘And,’ Mrs Harvey is saying, ‘there’s at least one schoolboy amongst them.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘They fell – you can read the plaques for yourselves. Some had heart attacks.’
‘But look at all these people,’ Billy calls out. ‘Japanese and everything, they’re just walking up. Look, there’s one even coming back.’
‘We don’t know that. He may even have thought better of it.’
‘He’s been to the top,’ another boy says resentfully. ‘He’s the first back. It’s easy, I bet we could have beaten him easy.’
‘Yeahh!’
‘I’m merely reading you the notice,’ Mrs Harvey says. ‘It’s perfectly safe, of course it is, but only if you’re sensible and careful.’
‘What else does it say, Mrs Harvey?’
‘It says it prefers you did the walks rather than the Climb. The Mala walk, for instance.’
‘We’ve done that. You can’t even go into half the caves.’
‘But that if you do do the Climb …’ Mrs Harvey, I can tell from her voice, is giving up, ‘you have their permission. Now, Mr Prescott will go first, and nobody is to go ahead of him, at least until we’re at the top. So, Dwayne, if you’ll stand there by the gate …’
Mr Prescott smiles and raises his fist in victory, and the boys all cheer. Toni moves with him, in his shadow.
‘Antonia, you remain here with me,’ Mrs Harvey says. ‘You can help with the last group of girls.’
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br /> Toni’s lip goes down, but she moves back from the gate, pulling a sour face at me behind Mrs Harvey’s back.
All right now, we’ll move off in twos.’
There’s a surge of at least threes and fours. Billy and Kirk and their friends elbow and push their way towards the gate. Some of the girls, I notice, have taken one another by the hand.
‘Wait!’ Mrs Harvey screams, and that’s all that holds them. ‘I nearly forgot,’ she says. ‘Is there anyone who doesn’t want to climb? Don’t be afraid to say if you don’t want to. No one will think badly of you if you don’t. No one? You’re all sure? Okay.’
‘Luisa’s got her hand up,’ someone says.
‘What?’
‘Luisa, Mrs Harvey. She’s had her hand up all the time, she doesn’t want to go.’
‘I can’t see anyone – Oh, there you are, Luisa. Is that right? You don’t want to go?’
‘Come on, come on,’ the boys at the front are urging. Mr Prescott has his hands and arms spread on their chests, pushing them back. A Japanese man smiles, squeezes past.
‘Is that right?’ Mrs Harvey is bending over Luisa now, trying to hear. ‘You don’t want to go?’
Luisa doesn’t speak, just shakes her head. She’s still holding Sarah’s hand.
‘Very well, you don’t have to go. We all respect –’
‘Chicken,’ a boy yells.
‘Shut up, you lot,’ Mrs Harvey says. ‘Now,’ she says to Miss Temple, ‘what do we do about this? I suppose we should have anticipated something like this.’
‘She mightn’t have known,’ Miss Temple says, ‘till she saw it. She’ll just have to wait here till we come down, I suppose.’
‘She can’t be by herself. The guidebook says it’s two hours up and back, three if you want to explore everything. We can’t just leave her by herself, with all these strangers around. Which bus is she in?’
‘She can’t stay in the bus,’ Dave says.
Listening to them, and knowing how this will finish, I feel my stomach already unclenching.
‘Whyever not?’ Miss Temple says to Dave.
‘Put her in the bus, Dimbo,’ Billy says, and everyone laughs. So he says it again. ‘Put her in the bus.’ Only his nearest mates laugh the second time.