by Cate Kennedy
‘How’s she now?’ asked the ranger, and Rich raised a wry eyebrow as he came back and said, ‘Doesn’t want to talk to anyone. She’s bundled up in her sleeping bag watching a movie on her iPod, if you can believe it.’ He raised a hand and let it sweep. ‘Here in the middle of the wilderness.’
‘Hopefully she’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep,’ said the ranger confidently, as if anyone could sleep on those bare board beds. ‘She’s just a bit upset about the leeches.’
‘I don’t blame her. That time on the Franklin, I had to burn mine off with a cigarette lighter, and it was right in my ear too.’
She grinned. ‘I looked down one night and found one between my toes, and I just about had a fit too.’
He hesitated. ‘I think she’s finding it a bit tougher than she thought.’
‘Yeah, that stretch today is a hard one; a lot of people feel they’ve maybe overestimated their fitness levels by about this point, especially in bad weather. We get people staggering in here, nearly in tears.’
‘Well, she’d never say anything to me, of course, but I think she’s struggling with it.’
She nodded thoughtfully, and he ploughed on. ‘The problem is that there’s no turning back, is there? Once you’re on the track, you have to keep walking till you get to the end.’
‘Not at all. In fact, if you’re going to call it a day, this is a good place to stop.’
He kept his face calm, his expression somewhere between surprise and resignation. ‘What — you’ve got a vehicle or something here?’
‘Well, no, it’s all on foot, but you can walk out from here without too much backtracking. I’ll show you on the map. You head out along the Arm River track.’ She paused. ‘That is, if you really think she’s reached her limit.’
He blinked. It was like a weight lifting off him, a stay of execution. ‘Really?’ he said.
‘Yeah, it’s a much easier walk than trying to head back over Cradle. You just go east instead of south.’ She indicated a guy across the room. ‘See that bloke over there? That’s Andrew — he’s out here doing some volunteer track work with us. He could probably go with you.’
‘How far is it?’ He could hardly keep the joy out of his voice, the incredulous relief.
‘Oh — a few hours walking, then you reach a sealed road. I can probably organise a lift for you back to Mole Creek if you don’t mind waiting round a bit once you get there. There’ll be someone from Parks heading down to the Outdoor Ed Centre, I reckon, who can come and pick you up.’
He sat still and felt pleasure creep up on him, gave himself over to it. He lifted his palms in a gesture of acquiescence.
‘Well, it seems like a shame, but I reckon that would be for the best.’
‘If you think so.’ Deferring, just like that, to his parental authority. Of course.
‘I really think she’s ready to call it a day,’ he added.
‘No worries. I’ll sort it out and confirm it with you in the morning.’
‘We’ll be ready to go any time Andrew is, then,’ he answered. ‘Thanks for that.’
A graceful abdication, a tactical retreat, dignity intact. It was perfect. He could feel the accumulated stress and dread of the days ahead slide off him like rain off a roof.
When he unrolled his sleeping bag and climbed onto one of the wooden platforms he actually slept, and when he rose to consciousness the next morning, the dragging weight of queasy trepidation that had settled on him each morning till now dissipated smoothly as his mind sharpened to wakefulness.
The dread was gone. It was over. Just a few hours walking, penance for the whole folly, then a road. And a lift in a car that would turn the last three days slogging on foot back into half an hour. And then they’d be dropped somewhere they could catch a bus from — up to Deloraine maybe, or the caves at Mole Creek; somewhere with a B&B, anyway, that took credit cards, and Rich was sure that he and Sophie would laugh about this in the future. That time we went to Tassie, she would say, back when we hardly knew each other, remember that, Dad?
He climbed laboriously out of his sleeping bag, so grateful now that he wouldn’t be walking too much further on his ankle, and limped out onto the verandah. Sophie was already up, her hair pulled back today out of her eyes and under her hat, and she was rolling and repacking her stuff into her backpack, which had dried out overnight in front of the fire.
‘Hi,’ he said, magnanimous and calm now, feeling — yes — almost fatherly.
‘Hi,’ she answered. ‘I made tea, the water’s still hot.’
Remember that final straw, Dad? she would say, grinning. When that headwind blew me straight into the mud?
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I was talking to the ranger last night, and she said that considering what a shit day you had yesterday, there’s no need to keep going. Nothing to prove, and I agree with her. You’ve been amazing, getting to this point. We can walk out today along a special track and the Parks Service will give us a lift back to the nearest town and we’ll go somewhere good for our last few days, OK?’
He kept his voice gentle, admiring. She lifted a hand suddenly and swept a stray lock of hair out of her face, and gave him a searching look. His heart knocked at his ribs like a dull desperate fist under her scrutiny because, Jesus Christ, he needed her to smile and concede, needed to see her eyes fill with grateful childish tears of relief, because God knows he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t face another day of it.
Then she lifted her chin and gave one decisive shake of her head, and his heart stopped, then sank.
‘No way am I quitting now,’ she said.
He stared at her, watching her mouth, wondering if he’d possibly misinterpreted what she’d just said. He almost repeated it after her, so stunning was his dumbstruck anger, his shiver of resentful admiration. The cloud of it seethed and shifted inside him, settling into a grim mist of consternation, into a dull joyless acknowledgement that they were going on. There would be no escape east with the likes of Andrew, no reprieve, even if he admitted his own defeat. He was tied to her, bound to her. He stood there swaying slightly with incredulity, sick with rage, and sick with envy; both reactions, he could see, as pure and impulsive as a child’s.
Twelve
No way was she going to be anybody’s excuse. Rich had wanted to give up, she could tell. She’d seen the pissed-off, floored look in his eyes when she’d shaken her head. He’d been quick to hide it, but she’d been watching.
She was OK now. She’d hit rock bottom there for a minute but, like her PE teacher said, once you’d hit the wall you just had to come back harder next time and the inner reserves would be there.
That was the lesson. Not leaning on anybody. Let go of that childish shit.
She didn’t get why he had to be so unfriendly to Russell and Libby, though. Some of the other people on the track were kind of silly, sure, and it was easy to make fun of them, but Russell and Libby had been so nice to him, lending him all that stuff he’d forgotten to bring, and they knew tons about Tasmania too, and had been bushwalking for years. But Rich got that look on his face whenever Russell started to talk to him, as if he couldn’t wait to get away.
This morning when she’d got up to do her stretches and repack, Libby had said to her, ‘So we’re losing you, Sophie?’, and she’d shaken her head, puzzled, then heard about the idea to just give in and walk out on some shortcut. Rich’s idea.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she’d answered, and Libby had just smiled and said, ‘Good.’ She’d asked her to come and have breakfast with them, and she’d gone, even though she told Libby she’d already eaten.
Then of course she couldn’t stop looking at them spooning up that porridge Russell had made with powdered coconut milk and sultanas. Her stomach growling.
Libby saying, ‘Just have a spoonful, you’ll feel much better’, which was a weird thing to say when you thought about it, like she was sick.
Weird, and it should have put her on guard, but she’d had a
few spoonfuls that she’d eaten as slowly as she could, listening to them chatting away about how they were planning to go to Spain to walk the pilgrim trail once their youngest son had finished his final exams for school, and then Libby had looked at her and said, ‘Our daughter Ellie, Sophie, she’d love to meet you, she was just like you when she was fifteen, she went through the same kind of thing’, and Sophie had shrugged, still chewing slowly. Thinking she meant a goth phase, or rebelliousness, or some dumb thing that adults always thought you did as an affectation they were confident you’d grow out of.
A bit preoccupied, in any case, wondering whether the coconut powder Russell had used for the porridge was full-fat or low-fat. Could you even buy low-fat coconut powder?
Then Libby was looking at her again, with a sad kind of smile, nodding, saying, ‘I never knew how to address it with her, to my eternal regret, but she’s just great now’, and Sophie realised she wasn’t talking about dyed hair and piercings.
It took such a huge effort to swallow, suddenly. Down with the mouthful of porridge went what threatened to be a sob. God, no way. No way in the world could she lose it and start crying again now.
Because they’d ask was she OK, they’d need to know why. And how could you ever explain it, that what you were crying for was yourself, for having to worry about a spoonful of powder, having to give something like that so much of your devoted attention? Crying for the sight of Russell’s hand giving Libby’s forearm a quick squeeze in the silence that followed, a terrible silence full of the potential to crack open?
She’d swallowed, finally, and looked down at her plastic plate, holding it together, the porridge sitting in her stomach like clag, and they didn’t ask.
‘Anyway, I’ve got something for you,’ Libby said after a few moments, in a brighter voice.
‘I don’t need anything. That was heaps, really.’ The words jerking out of her mechanically.
‘Well, I hope you’ll think about just rolling these up in the corner of your pack, just in case.’ Libby rose and went to her pack and returned with two folded-up tops.
‘Couldn’t help noticing yesterday your windcheaters cut out a bit early round the bottom,’ she said with an apologetic grin, gesturing to her own hips with a wave of her hand.
‘You’ll have to excuse Libby,’ Russell said. ‘She thinks every illness begins with a chill in the kidneys.’
‘Don’t take it the wrong way,’ Libby went on, ‘and of course don’t wear them if you don’t want to, but they’re thermal tops, specially designed for hiking — they look a bit daggy but they come right down over your jeans.’
Sophie tried to make her face looked pleased and interested.
‘You can give them back to me at Narcissus if you like, or keep them, I don’t mind, but I’d feel a lot better if I knew that freezing wind wasn’t hitting your bare skin. OK, now I’m totally embarrassed, so take them, please, and stuff them in your bag.’
‘Well, thanks,’ she said.
‘Good in an emergency,’ said Russell. They both smiled at her, and she smiled back. It was as awkward as Christmas, when her grandmother gave her butt-ugly unwanted clothes as well, a similar strained and sickly silence. There was no way she could wear them. It wasn’t as if anybody on this walk could care less about appearances — not one single person had even noticed she hadn’t been wearing make-up after the first day, she’d been stressing for nothing — but really, as if she’d ever wear a coral pink polo-necked top. Even to bed. And the beige stripy one was almost as bad. Still, as her mum often said after she’d opened one of Janet’s fashion-disaster gifts, it was the thought that counted. She’d keep them, and give them back to Libby later. She’d thank her and say they’d been great.
She still felt shaken. Just three days, and she’d been more or less eating dinner every night, but Libby had noticed. Her mum had never noticed.
Nothing to prove, he’d said unwisely; he might have guessed that would be the exact wrong thing to say. He couldn’t believe her renewed stamina. He didn’t know where she got it from, because God knows she was built like a bloody racehorse, but whatever it was let her progress up the track now, on the fourth day, in the rain, like a grimly determined clockwork toy. Here she came, her long legs striking out in their black leggings, thin as a couple of licorice straps, eating up the miles. Like a fury.
He’d pulled himself together this morning. Gone back into the hut and averted his eyes from his pack, lying there in the corner like a gloating Rotweiller, waiting for him. After desperately rummaging through for anything that would let him keep walking on his ankle — Panadol, anti-inflammatories, anything — he almost wept with relief when he found the blister pack of prescription painkillers in the bottom of his toilet bag. At last, at last, a lucky break. Someone at work had given them to him, he recalled, after the guy had had a knee reconstruction. He’d taken two and managed to haul that hated, overstuffed weight up onto his aching shoulders, managed to walk without having to think about pain every second. OK, so he was slow, pacing himself carefully to make the distance, but did everybody really have to catch up with him and try to hold some inane conversation with him? Couldn’t they just leave him alone with his own sodden thoughts, let him focus, teeth gritted, on one foot in front of the other? Out here in the desolate middle of nowhere, and he still couldn’t be left in peace.
‘I’d heard about the damage to these tracks,’ the walker next to him was saying conversationally. ‘I knew it was caused by erosion. All these walkers, one after the other, going around the muddy boggy spots instead of through them. But I had no idea it was getting so pounded.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Was talking to that guy Andrew last night, at the hut. Out here on his annual holidays, helping them do repair work. Makes me want to sign up to come and do some voluntary work myself next summer.’
Rich snuck a quick glance at the guy to see if he was joking. No, deadly serious. ‘They’re going to have to cap the numbers soon,’ he answered. ‘Almost ten thousand people a year, queuing up to do the walk. They’re going to have to draw the line.’
The guy nodded eagerly. ‘That’s what I mean. That’s why you get braiding damage like that. Too many walkers, just loving the place to death.’ He pointed to the wide marshy mess up ahead, a bog of footprints around a black hole of marshy mud. ‘Look at that. Disaster.’
What can you expect? Rich thought irritably to himself. Six-day walk, pisses with rain most of the year, everybody in big boots? It’s a walking track, for godsakes. People create it by walking on it.
‘Wet-boot walking,’ said the guy firmly. ‘That’s the only thing for it.’ He approached the puddle with clumping, square-shouldered determination and strode straight through it. There was nothing for it but to follow him. Rich felt his new boots hit the mud with a squelch. They sank up to his ankles. He thought of the diggers in World War I, toes rotting off with trench foot. The mud around here, he wouldn’t be surprised if someone went in up to their waists. There’d be plenty of hikers coming up behind to haul them out, like they were all on some kind of gruelling spiritual test.
Wet-boot walking, he thought contemptuously, tramping along. Even slogging through mud’s got to have its own bloody terminology.
Like the way they insisted, now, that you do the walk from north to south, to protect the track. Just to make sure you were all herded along in the same direction, stopping at the same huts and cooking up the same freeze-dried meals and swapping the same stories of how intrepid you were, pitting yourself against nature. And if you ever got a chance to look up to appreciate the scenery around you it was either covered in cloud or driving rain, so you went back to just watching your own feet, right and left, interminably, one after the other, forever unto infinity over the wire-covered duckboards and rutted puddles, on and on and on. You could save yourself the money, thought Rich bitterly, and stick a Fatbuster Pro exercise treadmill into a shower, turn the cold tap on, walk underneath it all day with twenty kilos of
weights strapped to your back, and get just the same effect.
Russell was up ahead, springing through the muddy patches in — he couldn’t believe it — what looked like a pair of old sneakers. ‘Stunning, isn’t it?’ Russell called back, indicating a rain-washed vista with a wave of his arm.
‘Fantastic!’ he replied, jerking his head up, away from his feet. They slogged through another Somme trench, Russell on calf muscles that seemed hydraulically powered.
‘Mate,’ Rich said as he caught up, ‘why aren’t you wearing proper hiking boots?’
Russell grinned. ‘I come from the other school of thought, the one which prefers Dunlop Volleys.’
‘Are you shitting me? For bushwalking?’
‘Well, they’re light, they’re comfortable, they’ve got great grip in the wet, and they’re much more low-impact, especially in delicate alpine environments like this. I’d always bring extra boots in winter, of course.’
‘Of course.’ Sarcasm, though, was no match for Russell’s eager enthusiasm.
‘I read some research,’ he said, ‘that showed that carrying a kilogram on the feet is equivalent to carrying seven kilograms in a backpack.’
What sort of person, Rich thought, would come across research like that? Russell strode along the track as though his feet weighed nothing, as though he didn’t have a care in the world. Any minute, thought Rich sourly, he’s going to start yodelling ‘The Happy Wanderer’.
Russell glanced back at him, still grinning. ‘Makes you glad you brought other shoes to change into at night, doesn’t it?