by Cate Kennedy
Eleven
She was up early, restlessly wakeful in the hut with all that strange unfamiliar breathing going on around her. She’d dreamed she was organising a music festival, feverishly responsible for everything, every single detail; showing cars where to park and doing sound checks and finding clothes racks for the performers and hanging all the lights, and just as she was about to meet some stars she heard her mum calling her from the ticket booth where she was supposedly trying to help, just one tiny simple responsibility, calling her to say, giggling, that she’d forgotten to bring any change, did Sophie have change so she could sell some tickets? And in front of her, a huge queue of Sophie’s friends waiting, staring at her accusingly.
She had woken up with her jaw clenched in rage, and gone outside. Smelt the forest, inhaling the rich scent of so many woody fragrances — soil and leaves and cinnamony dampness. She’d sleep outside in her tent from now on. She liked it much better, waking up hearing birds calling to each other instead of humans snoring.
She should have told Rich she was on a special diet.
Or in training.
For what, though? Something at school. Some inter-school athletics event. She could invent something. She had found that the trick of lying to her mother was inserting a couple of specifics to distract her with. That, and knowing that Sandy wanted things easy and frictionless and made a point of not seeing anything she didn’t want to see.
With Rich, maybe she could let her guard down. She’d eaten nearly half of it, anyway, making herself chew each mouthful twenty times, but even despite the walking, she’d had no appetite for the rest, and scraped her plate clean quickly. She was fine. Just hated people watching her while she ate. And the protein bars were really filling.
He’d ask her about herself soon, she was sure. He’d say Boy, you’re ten times fitter than I am, that’s for sure. And I guess you’ve got a lot of questions about why Sandy and I split up, so go ahead.
She thought about what he’d said in the bus, about doing that trust game, relying on strangers to catch you as you fell. All her life, she felt, she’d been relied upon, the stable counterpoint as her mother muddled through, her unwilling confidante and vigilant, uneasy sidekick. What would I do without you? Sandy would say, only half jokingly, as Sophie remembered to bring in the washing and prioritised the overdue bills and showed Sandy again how to program the video and use the printer and record a message on the answering machine. What would I do without you? in a voice that could turn clingy in an instant, in that holding pattern of perpetual needy hopelessness.
Well, she wanted a turn letting go. She didn’t want to fall, just to see how it felt to lean, rather than be the one leaned on. To be able to step into the circle, and stop having to brace herself, automatically, for someone else’s weight.
It was worse. He was conscious of that the moment he woke up.
He unzipped his sleeping bag, peeled back his sock and had a look at his ankle, wincing involuntarily at the weeping redness of it. It looked a bit like the start of a tropical ulcer he’d got one time when he was in Bali. He’d gone out stoned on someone’s kayak and scraped his leg on some coral, and by the time his holiday was over it was an angry festering mess, the centre like a tiny angry volcano on a shiny crimson plateau. It had taken a course of antibiotics that time, which had really done his stomach in after all those magic mushrooms.
He got up stiffly, ducking to avoid the wooden bunk above him, and went outside onto the verandah, where two parties of walkers were already ensconced with bowls of muesli and unfolded maps, talking routes and side-trips. They wished him good morning and he smiled distractedly, trying not to limp as he found a spot to sit on a fallen tree nearby. He soaked a handkerchief with cold water from his drinking bottle and applied it to the heel. The relief was instantaneous and he sat there for a few minutes, immersed in it, only opening his eyes when he sensed someone standing over him. It was that guy Russell again. Jesus, was nowhere far enough away?
‘Just out watching those brown scrub wrens,’ Russell said. ‘Did you see them?’
‘Nope.’ The only birds he had really noticed on the walk were the crows, hanging around as though they were waiting for you to fall in your tracks so they could peck your eyes out. They’d cluster on bare branches, making that cawing, croaking sound like they were catching their breath after a bout of helpless laughter.
‘I saw a dusky robin yesterday too. And a couple of flycatchers.’
Fabulous, Rich thought darkly.
‘Got a few blisters there?’ Russell went on. ‘Couldn’t help noticing you were limping a bit.’
‘Yeah. Just the one, really.’ He glanced at Russell. ‘Actually I’m not sure it’s a blister — I’m wondering if I’ve got a bite from somewhere.’
Russell squatted down. Rack off, he wanted to say. Rack off and go and read your fucking bird book.
‘Let’s have a look,’ said Russell.
Rich removed the wet fabric reluctantly. He bet Russell never got blisters — no, he’d have skin like a bloody elephant’s. His heel would wear a hole in a boot, not the other way round.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it reminds me of a tropical ulcer I got once when I was sailing. In Flores. Took a catamaran through the archipelagos there.’
‘This might help,’ said Russell. He held out a little jar. ‘You can have this.’
Rich worked hard to control his voice, keep himself friendly and reasonable. ‘What is it?’
‘Golden Seal ointment.’ Russell rose and stretched. ‘And try two pairs of socks. If you need some sterile dressing to cover it with first, let me know.’
‘Right. Thanks very much.’ No, this guy wouldn’t have antiseptic cream, would he? He’d have this stuff, like something out of a medieval apothecary. He sniffed it. Christ, it was like axle grease.
‘Sure this goes on the inside of the boots, not the outside?’ he said jokingly, but Russell had gone back to the hut, no doubt to prepare some gourmet breakfast out of freeze-dried lichen.
‘Golden Seal,’ he muttered, smearing some on. ‘Made with real seals.’
He looked around for Sophie to share the joke, but she wasn’t around either. Probably still asleep, he thought. But then he spotted her, up and dressed and sitting on another tree stump, staring into her mobile phone like it was a bloody oracle. She obviously still couldn’t believe what the ranger at the centre had told her, and the evidence in front of her own eyes. See, they were addicted to the things, they couldn’t live without them.
‘Ready for some breakfast?’ he called to her. She glanced up from behind that screen of lank, black hair, blinking, dropping her hand from her mouth where she’d been distractedly gnawing a fingernail.
‘I’ve already had breakfast.’
‘Eh?’
‘I had two GoBreakfast bars.’
‘Hey, you need more than that to do today’s walk. It’s almost seven hours today.’ As he spoke, determinedly cheerful, he felt a shudder of horror at the thought. His heel, inside that boot, for seven hours, rubbing over and over and over on that broken skin as he trudged fourteen kilometres straight. ‘I thought I might cook up some porridge,’ he went on, sounding to his own ears as relentlessly, inanely upbeat as one of the phoneys at the TV station, adding a bonus temptation of an added attachment to the slicer-dicer deal.
‘I had some protein bars.’ Steel in her voice.
He had to get back to his pack, dry his heel, put on this ointment, then two pairs of socks, then somehow ease his foot into his boot. Then get up and walk, and walk, and walk. He let the smile slide off his face — she was looking back at her phone, anyway.
‘You’re telling me you’re going to walk till lunchtime on nothing but two muesli bars? That’s bullshit.’
She flashed him a quick look. No smiles now, from either of them.
‘Just watch me,’ she replied mutinously, digging for her earphones.
Muttered it, really — like she didn’t care if he h
eard or not. The day stretched ahead of him, bleak as certain pain, an image of pushing himself forward with every step along a desolate cold moor that went on as far as the eye could see, not even a place to stop and shelter for seven more hours. No way out of this now but ahead.
He was composing the rough sketch of an article in his head as they wound across Pine Forest Moor. It took his mind off the inescapable reality that with each kilometre they covered he was walking more deeply into a landscape he’d then have to walk out of, because they weren’t even halfway. It felt, when you stepped back from it, like the height of stupidity, to be voluntarily ploughing pointlessly onwards only to plough out the other side again. It felt like an elaborate practical joke someone was playing on you, that you hadn’t got yet.
The track was stony and crisscrossed with roots, and although the day was clear they still had to traverse deep, squelching bogs, and this deteriorated into a veritable marsh once they’d crossed the base of Mount Pelion West. Composing the article (a landscape scattered with massive boulders left by receding glaciers and gnarled old trees, war veterans of the weather’s dramatic battles) helped him not think about the thing, whatever it was — a golem, a gremlin, a succubus — that hung onto his foot inside his boot and hit his Achilles tendon with a tiny red-hot hammer every time he took a step. A few thousand steps, he thought through gritted teeth. Then a few thousand more. It had to toughen up soon.
Miles of stiff yellow buttongrass, tufty and strawberry blonde, like a glam-rocker’s hairdo. Duran Duran grass. And the pandani, those big clusters of grass trees like something Dr Seuss would draw. A solid headwind hit them as they toiled around the low boggy ground, a whole line of walkers now bent into the wind, trudging forward like a party of sherpas trekking across Everest, Rich thought, hunched against the elements, setting their jaws and staggering on. And when he looked ahead he couldn’t quite believe it but they were actually going to slog back in the direction they’d already been in a big, depressing loop, they were going to double back, so they’d get to experience this wind from every possible angle. Sophie was up ahead, he saw, making heavy work of the mud and roots, like everyone, and he looked back down at where he was putting his feet again when suddenly the wind seemed to gather itself and expel a whistling blast that almost tore his hat off his head. He glanced up again, staggering, eyes streaming, and saw it had actually blown one of the walkers off the track; they were on their back in the mud. Sophie! He jogged awkwardly, stumbling, to the spot, the tiny hammer going crash crash crash, pounding rivets into his ankle. She was trying to scramble to her feet, hampered by her pack which kept her, turtle-like and helpless, in the bog. He couldn’t see, for a few seconds, whether she needed help getting up or not.
He hesitated. She’d been so pig-headed that morning, snapping at him about breakfast, maybe she’d swear at him now if he reached out a hand. Maybe she was humiliated that she’d fallen over and he should just pretend ... By the time he’d moved forward, torn by indecision, somebody else was already there, one of the group from New Zealand. The woman braced a foot against a tree root and held out a hand to Sophie.
‘I’m alright,’ he heard her say. ‘I can get myself up.’ Her legs kicked again, straining for purchase against the tussocky grass, and she raised herself onto her elbows, her pack coming free and sucking out of the mud like a mired tree stump. He caught her eye as she paused there, panting, and she looked straight through him as if he wasn’t even there. He stood frozen as she hauled herself up onto her knees.
‘Good on you,’ said the Kiwi woman, taking Sophie’s outstretched hand and hoisting her back upright again, dripping mud and water. Just as she did, another gust of wind made them both stagger and clutch each other and Rich winced, expecting tears. Or a scene — sitting down on the track and refusing to go any further, maybe, or screaming at him for dragging her through this, making it his fault. He waited, cringing, for the outburst, but instead Sophie and the other woman laughed. They sat on the cross-laid logs of the track and wiped their faces and tried to brush themselves off as the wind whipped and belted around them, and laughed, speechless with helpless hilarity. As he watched, still rooted to the spot, the other walkers who’d stopped smiled too, exchanging a few words, stepping over them. All laughing, now, at the weather, making light of it, making a little Kodak moment of instant glowing camaraderie. She was incorrigible. Sitting there giggling with the Kiwi woman, covered in mud.
He crouched down. ‘Are you really OK?’
‘Yes, yes. My fault — I wasn’t watching where I was going — I was looking at the light changing on the mountain there.’
‘Mount Oakleigh,’ said the New Zealander. ‘I was looking at it too. You can’t go through this beautiful scenery watching your feet every step of the way, can you? Good thing you were wearing your raincoat.’
‘Yeah, it’s just my pack really that copped it, and everything inside’s in plastic bags, anyway.’
She was turned away from him; there was nowhere he could put a reassuring hand on her now without seeming clumsy and awkward. He’d missed his moment. He glanced up at the mountain she’d pointed to — just a big grey outcrop that looked like a burned, badly risen soufflé. And he still had kilometres of agony to go, with nothing but dead trees and bogs, and across this track made of these slippery split logs that were killing his feet. Russell had told him there was more than likely going to be a Parks and Wildlife ranger or warden at the next hut, so he’d make sure he’d ask them whose brilliant idea it had been making a track out of rounded logs, and did they realise how much more arduous it made the walk. How it had nearly caused a serious accident with his daughter. And he’d have something to say about it in his article too. He let the indignation mount and seethe in him.
‘Are you sure you’re alright?’ he said again.
‘Yes. I’m good.’
Still not looking at him. Later he wished he’d made more of a deal of it, wished he’d trusted that shred of instinct, because he was sure he saw a tear glittering in her eye, despite her tone of dismissive nonchalance as she re-shouldered her pack and wiped mud from her forehead. He realised in that moment what was different about her face — she wasn’t wearing all that eyeliner and pale foundation anymore, and her features looked undefended somehow, strained with a new rawness.
By the time they’d slogged through the last gruelling kilometres of wet forest and dripping tree ferns, and emerged exhausted and sweating at the other side, it was clear she must have been at the end of her tether. He should have seen that, but he was too preoccupied with his own exhaustion, too cut off. So that after they’d dumped their packs on the big wrap-around verandah of the hut and all gone down to a creek Russell had told them about, where she could wash the mud off or even have a swim if she wanted to, Sophie had stood there unbuttoning her raincoat with weary fingers and Libby, with a startled grimace of distaste, had cried, ‘Ugh, Soph, you’ve got wait ...’
And all of them, Sophie included, had looked down at the pale, mud-smeared skin on her chest to see a necklace of leeches, seven or eight of them, blackly shining and fat with blood, just where the collar of her raincoat had been, and Sophie had sucked in a breath and screamed and screamed.
And it had been Libby she’d turned to, her arms outstretched like a child’s. Libby who’d taken her hand and let her scream her revulsion out till she was spent, leaving him to stand there, drained and jangled, redundant. Whatever her tether had been, it was clearly snapped now, he thought, seeing her ashen and hiccupping, still clinging to Libby’s hand. Secret relief rushed through him like a bitter anaesthetic. OK, he’d thought with flat finality, all over bar the shouting, the whole idea. Now let’s find the ranger and get the fuck out of here.
My God, she’d never seen a real bloodsucking leech in her life till now, and they were totally disgusting. But there was a Parks ranger at the hut called Jen and as soon as she saw Sophie arrive back on the verandah with Rich and the others, she knew just what to do.
/> ‘Welcome to Pelion Palace,’ she said, ‘just let me get some salt for your visitors there.’ As she sprinkled it onto the leeches she muttered, ‘Take that, you little pricks’, so that Sophie had to smile, and within a minute the leeches were writhing in satisfying death throes on the ground and Sophie was inside holding tissues to the uniform little trickles of blood on her neck.
The whole vampire thing — totally freaking horrible. She kept thinking of how they’d wriggled in there, their gaping little mouths sucking her blood out, and she hadn’t felt a thing. A circle of them. She sat there shuddering, waiting for the bleeding to stop.
Then Jen made her a hot chocolate and heard about how she’d come a cropper off the track in the wind, and she found Sophie her clean dry clothes in her pack and brushed off her jeans and hung them up to dry in front of the stove.
‘Have you got other pants?’ she asked.
‘One pair, yeah.’
‘That’s alright then. Are your feet cold?’
‘They sure are,’ she answered. She could hear the tiredness in her own voice, the shake in it, embarrassing tears hovering somewhere threatening to spill. Jen lent her some great bedsocks and she couldn’t work out why she felt like crying when she handed them to her. It was her mum, she finally realised with a start. That was just the kind of thing she’d do. Russell and Libby pooled their food with Rich and her and they made dinner, and Libby somehow put together an apricot crumble that Sophie ate without even admonishing herself, without even thinking about it. She felt brittle and weak, shivery with fatigue. Lactic acid, she thought vaguely. Should have an isotonic electrolyte replacement drink to buffer it, one with calcium and magnesium she could quickly absorb, but her eyes watched Libby spoon out another helping of apricot crumble and pass it to her and she ate it gratefully, mechanically. Carbohydrate and fruit, some sugars. Not so bad. She’d earned them; it was fuel. Even though the hut was huge there were too many people here to deal with; she wanted to be back in her quiet house, lying on her bed, doing normal things, not sitting here listening to Rich tell Jen about the time he’d got a leech on the Franklin River. She found an empty bunk space up the end of the hut and crawled into her sleeping bag and watched an episode of CSI she had downloaded on her iPod, her eyes focused on the tiny screen and blotting out everything around her, and as long as she didn’t think too hard about the leeches she felt OK.