by Cate Kennedy
Anyway. Years ago now, and everyone was over it. He’d eventually sent a copy of the photo of the eight-year-old Sophie on to his parents anyway, as a sort of appeasing extra in a card when he hadn’t been in touch with them for a while.
Ludicrous to be even thinking about it now, really. He should be focusing on the seminar he was attending; it’d be over by lunchtime and his boss would want to know what they’d covered.
He stretched his shoulders. In front of him, the Workplace Motivator presenter seemed to be winding up his introductory spiel. Rich could glance through the notes later. He rolled his eyes at a colleague as the consultant launched a PowerPoint presentation, pointed a red laser at the screen and clicked. Nothing. Nobody dared snicker as he aimed it instead at his laptop and data projector on the desk. The screen flashed its familiar rich royal blue and Rich waited as the first message came cartwheeling in across the screen accompanied by an energetic soft-rock soundtrack.
CORE COMPETENCY it read. That vanished to be replaced by the next slide, where the text raced in from the left so fast it leaned forward, only to jerk upright as it arrived, like the Road Runner. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU?
He waited to see whether they were going to use every option on the ‘slide transition’ list. Yes, they were. The slides flashed in from above, appeared out of a stippled chequerboard, arrived in a slow fade then a pinwheel, marched in from diagonal ends of the screen. Figures and statements accosted him, challenging him with the questions senior management liked to think it asked. He yawned a big jaw-cracking yawn, and checked his watch. WHO ARE THE KEY STAKEHOLDERS? flashed the screen. Rich had a sudden mental image of a bunch of besuited zombies, staggering towards him raising stakes in their clammy hands, the walking dead.
K.P.I.s proclaimed the next slide, then dissolved — the lazy editor’s tool — into an image of a high, snowcapped mountain that spun disconcertingly offscreen to be replaced by a page which demanded to know: WHAT GETS YOU TO THE TOP?
He was sure they had this same theme music in their royalty-free CD archive at work. He’d used it himself, he was almost certain, on an ad about doing your degree by correspondence. They all sounded the same, anyway. It’d be called something like: ‘Starburst Success’ (‘driving uptempo beats, Mozart strings and groovy bass with a euphoric vibe’). Just modified Led Zeppelin riffs, really. Mountaintops, thought Rich tiredly. Give me a break.
He wondered if they’d catch some good weather on Cradle Mountain; that rich, transitory kind of saturated sunlight that made every photo something special. Magic hour. One thing, the deciduous beech they had down there would be changing colour — he’d make sure he caught plenty of that in his shots.
On the screen, letters began to skid in from the left, flipping as they fell into place like mahjong tiles. A. T. T. I ... and he thought lethargically: let me guess.
At last it was over and the facilitator stepped in front of the screen holding textas and a roll of white paper. ‘We might take this opportunity to break into small groups ...’ Rich whispered to the guy next to him, and the two of them had to stifle a bout of gasping schoolboy hysteria when that’s exactly what the poor sap said.
He’d go and visit his mother. Before the Tassie trip. Definitely.
It was all a matter of posture, Sandy thought as she explained her story to the mechanic. Your posture was different in the bank, say, than it was in the health-food shop, different when a customer was unconvinced compared to the one who nodded along with you, fishing for their wallet.
‘So I came out and someone had just smashed into me and driven off,’ she finished.
‘Yeah, that’s happening more and more.’
‘Town’s really changing,’ she added, and he nodded.
‘So I was wondering if you had another one that would fit. One for a Datsun 180Y.’ You needed to get the tilt of the head right — apologetic but kind of flirtatious. Appealing.
‘Probably got something out the back.’ He jerked his own head towards the yard behind the workshop where rusted cars sat mired in waving weeds.
Appealing, yet a little helpless.
‘OK, thanks — I’ll go back there and see if I can find something.’
‘I’m in the middle of a job here.’
‘Of course you are. I’ve got a set of screwdrivers in the car — I’ll be right.’
Helpless, and yet a tiny bit brave. ‘Because I need to look for some brakelight covers as well — he smashed them up too.’
She was rummaging in the boot before he called her back.
‘Look — probably best if I go and have a dig around. OHS, you know; the boss would kill me.’
He flashed her a quick tired grin; he had a nice smile.
‘I don’t want to take up too much of your time.’
‘Nah, that’s OK. Quicker if I check.’
‘Really? That’s so nice of you.’ Now she should stay out of his way until he brought back a bumper bar, and then, when he saw her trying to heft it into the car, he’d offer to put it on for her with the hydraulic drill thing he had in the workshop. She could almost see him now, waving her money away when she brought out her wallet. If she visualised that clearly enough, it might happen. Then she’d say with surprised gratitude, I’ll have to buy you a drink sometime, getting the posture just right, and who knew? Nothing wrong with a mechanic. They made good money.
Sophie fitted everything into her pack, unpacked it again, repositioned things. Took out the drink bottle and slid it into a side pocket instead, then took all the clothes out and laid them on her bed, debating with herself. Carrying unnecessary or inappropriate gear, said the bushwalking guide she’d downloaded, is one of the major mistakes inexperienced walkers make.
Well, that wouldn’t be her. Tent, poles, sleeping mat, all wrapped inside the two waterproofing green plastic bags Mr Boyd had said would be bound to come in handy. Her online guide agreed with this. Put all your gear into plastic bags to keep everything dry. Some camping shops sell waterproof plastic pack liners. Modify your plans as necessary depending on weather conditions. If you do become lost, stop, stay calm and set up camp. Signal for help — three blasts on a whistle, three lines stamped in the snow, three yells. Any pattern of three is a standard distress signal in Tasmania.
She would be totally self-contained, self-sustaining. She’d be carrying everything she would need. Preparing physically and psychologically for the walk is of utmost importance, said the guide. Many beginners overestimate their fitness and stamina levels, and end up exhausted and overwhelmed by the rigorous demands of a six-hour walk carrying a heavy pack.
Yeah, but how many beginner walkers setting out on the Overland Track, thought Sophie, could do two hundred sit-ups and twenty chin-lifts? She patted down the plastic boxes stacked with PowerBars, packaged tightly with sachets of electrolyte drinks and ziplock bags of isotonic rehydration powder. She’d found the energy gel bars on the net. Orange flavoured. This would be like doing one of those endurance courses, where you paced yourself, tested your real stamina.
The language of it, it was great. Protein carbo complex. Predigested hydrolysated protein. Whey protein isolates. Bonded glutamine. Creatine.
Like a mantra, really. A mantra for a marathon.
Six-thirty, speaking of sit-ups.
Her heart hammering solidly away in her chest as she counted, her breath pulling in and out like a bellows, hot in her throat and chest. Forty minutes of it, until she could smell the sharp scent of her own sweat. A chemical smell. Like her mum and her friends, always on about releasing the toxins.
She bet Rich wouldn’t be sucked in by that stuff. She could tell it from his voice, even, over the phone, despite how nervously stilted both their phone conversations so far had been, full of the awkward pauses of strangers. She was relieved when they’d slipped into texting instead. And really, she only had those two old photos of him to go by, the ones in the envelope at the back of one of her mum’s photo albums. She’d looked at those blurry pictures
thousands of times, at odd moments. One was an old round-cornered snapshot from an instamatic camera, of people standing in front of a big arching tree-fern, the light gloomy and green. Her mum really pretty and slim in her Indian shirt, and Rich a bearded, tanned face in the background, smiling behind sunglasses so that it was impossible to tell whether he was looking at the camera or looking away, thinking his own private, hidden thoughts. The other snapshot was square and shiny with a thin white border, the glaze on its surface, when you turned it into the light, reduced to a maze of tiny cracks. A polaroid, her mother had called it once, and Sophie when she was little had heard the word and thought polar. Seen the faded bluish skin tones on the smiling people in the shot, gathered in someone’s garden at night, and imagined coldness, numb fingers, frost. Imagined Rich in a cold place, a white world.
He sounded fine on the phone. He really did. Nothing creepy. And she had all the gear she needed, in any case; she wouldn’t be relying on him for anything.
She touched her forehead to her knees, panting, resisting the urge to go to the bookcase and find that photo album right now and pull those two pictures out, stare into them as if they could offer her anything more than a shadowed face in a forest somewhere, a person living in a blank, polar world of missing detail.
She could hear her mother’s car pull up as she paused to catch her breath, then she heard Sandy call down the hall.
‘Sophie? Guess what? The mechanic replaced the bumper for nothing! What did I tell you?’
She dropped her dizzy, thumping head back to her knees, wondering if her mother expected her to answer. Yes, she wanted a response — she could hear footsteps tracking up the hall towards her room. Sophie tucked her legs under her and smoothed her hair back and tried to regulate her breathing.
Here came her mother’s standard customary glance as she put her head round the door; buoyant and preoccupied, the cursory absent-minded smile as she waved at Sophie cross-legged and shiny-faced on the floor.
‘What have you been doing?’ she said, and Sophie rested her palms on her knees, still panting.
‘Yoga,’ she answered.
Feeling a droplet of sweat break from the back of her neck and run like a raindrop down her demurely straight spine.
Sandy was humming, kicking off her shoes. A good week, some new stock ready for the market, party at Margot’s tomorrow. And a car fixed through thinking positively, refusing to let negative thoughts cloud her judgements. She put on her Annie Lennox compilation CD and sang along.
You’re pleased with yourself, Janet’s voice observed inside her head, not encouragingly. A dampener on her good humour, the usual rain on her parade, but tonight, she wasn’t going to pay any attention. There’s nothing stopping you getting a new car, a more reliable one, her mother’s voice scolded in the same old undertone as Sandy stepped into the kitchen and picked a couple of sweet potatoes out of the vegetable box, singing that sisters were doing it for themselves.
Not tonight, she thought sunnily, and my car is perfectly reliable, I’m just refusing to buy into the whole culture of conspicuous consumption. And in three days I’m going on a retreat to nurture that powerful core of myself whether you like it or not and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
There now. Why couldn’t she be as articulate as that when her mother was actually on the phone? Nothing bitter or hysterical, just calm assertiveness, just centredness. She should get out her yoga mat, come to think of it, and do some yoga with Sophie in the living room. Together. Where was that mat? The phone rang, and she put down her knife and answered it.
Rich’s voice on the other end drained her goodwill in one cold swallow. She’d reconciled herself to Sophie going to Tasmania, but her mind kept skittering around the solid fact that it was Rich she’d be going with.
I still have some issues, she’d say sombrely to her friends when they enquired about the trip. And she’d sneak into Sophie’s room when she was at school, and look at her pack and equipment laid out in neat piles on her floor, and feel better. Sophie, she could tell, was organised and prepared, determined to get through it. She wouldn’t need him as much more than a chaperone. A walking companion, like a teacher on a school trip — you didn’t have to be friends with them, you just had to be more or less supervised by them. She’d come home at the end, tired and dirty and aching in every joint and complaining about sleeping in a tent or on a bunk bed, and maybe then, finally, she’d look at the cosy and welcoming home she had here with a whole new appreciation.
Of course Sandy had issues — who wouldn’t? — with him muscling in like this, as if everything could be just swept under the carpet. Issues that would have to be expressed, she knew, in order to be transcended.
‘Sandy?’ she heard him say now. ‘Is that you?’
He always sounded quieter than she remembered, less dogmatic. He laid out the planned schedule to her and she stood stiffly, listening, taking notes on flight times. There was a chair there, next to the table, but for some reason she didn’t want to sit down. Standing made her feel more empowered. The anger is justified, she said to herself. Go into the anger, and own it.
‘I don’t want it just to be at the airport,’ she said coolly. ‘I don’t want to be in the situation of just dropping her off somewhere assuming you’ll be there to meet her, and then you go and catch a plane.’
‘But that’s ... I mean that’s pretty much what ...’
‘Listen, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you now for seven years and I’m her mother and it’s up to me, not you, alright? I need to see you and assess things.’
A silence. ‘OK. Fine. So we meet in the city? Catch up there, before the flight?’
‘Yeah. Then we go out to the airport together. I’ll drive.’
‘Great. OK. That makes it a lot easier, actually. That’s a good idea.’
Her hand went to the bottom of the phone handset, the fingers seeking a cord to twist. Nothing. She toyed with an earring instead.
‘I’m really not happy about this, Rich.’
‘No kidding.’
‘I’ve had to think about this very carefully and work through some very conflicted feelings here.’
‘OK. Fair enough.’
‘You can’t just step back into someone’s life when it suits you, you can’t just cancel out everything that’s happened.’
‘But see, Sandy, that’s just it. What’s “everything”? I haven’t been around for her growing up, I’ve missed the “everything”. To me it’s just a big blank. And that’s why I want to catch up, just make an overture of friendship, now that she’s about to become, well, an adult ...’
She remembered that reasoned tone, the way he was always able to explain himself calmly and make her feel like she was the irrational one.
‘Abandonment,’ she snapped, cutting him off. ‘That’s the everything.’
That shut him up. She heard a sniff, an indrawn breath of someone summoning ... what? Patience? Tolerance? Antagonism?
‘It’s been fifteen years,’ was all he said. Her fingers sought something to twist again, went to the spot between her eyes, and rubbed.
‘I just want you to know I’m doing this for Sophie’s sake,’ she said finally. ‘I see it as her chance to test if you’re a person she can trust to let into her life. That will be her decision, obviously. But I’m doing it under great duress. I’m feeling a lot of pressure and that seems very unfair.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ she heard him mutter. ‘Not everything’s about you.’
How strange, not to have a cord to connect this handset to the phone, tethering you securely to some kind of solid electrical connection you could get your head around. How weird, instead, to imagine their two voices travelling into space, bouncing off a satellite somewhere, bleeping out these little coded messages into the silent, pitiless dark of some black hole.
‘Coming from you, that’s pretty funny,’ she replied, fingers descending for touchdown on the good solid edge of the table, �
��the patron saint of selfishness.’
She waited for the flare of temper that would break the connection, like a symbolic door slam, her thin pleasure at knowing she held the last word and the high moral ground. But he didn’t hang up. She waited, nervously taken aback.
‘What café?’ he said evenly. ‘And what time?’
She made him hold on while she got out her diary and flipped through it. Annie was singing Thorn in my side, you know that’s all you ever were, and Sandy held the receiver into the air, hoping he was listening.
OK, done. It was all going ahead. He could feel it. At work, Rich tilted back in his chair to chat to Martin, one of the young guys working on post-production whose shifts sometimes coincided with his own.
‘MP3 players,’ he said.
‘What about ’em?’ Martin was about twenty-three, he guessed, and went to a lot of those music festivals held in paddocks around the country. Had those new tattoos they all seemed to get, in rings around his biceps and big curlicues down onto his forearms, and that weird hair brushed forward round his face, like he had a wig on backwards. Played in a weekend band too, Rich thought. Perfect. Martin was his zeitgeist broker, his key into the right demographic. He grinned back at Rich now.
‘You finally weakening?’ Martin said.
He smiled back. ‘Maybe. Call it peer-group pressure.’
‘Mate, they’re so cheap on the net they’re practically giving them away. Once you’ve got one, you won’t be able to live without it.’
‘I’m not sure exactly what I should get, though.’
Martin fished something out of his pocket the size of a matchbox. ‘See this? I can hold two thousand songs on this, whole albums, other people’s playlists, the works. Even your standard MP3 can download movies now. You’ll never pay for a CD again.’