by Cate Kennedy
He had nothing else to say. Praying fervently it wouldn’t start lashing with rain again, not now, when they were almost at the end. Imagining people packed into the hut that night, damp rising off them in a fug, the repertoire of snores he’d have to endure, the smell of socks ripening like cheese, the dawn chorus of plastic bag crunches and whispers and backpack zippers, as some poor gang of fools from Stuttgart or Toronto set out for the next leg in driving rain, freezing their knackers off down that rain-lashed track. Or even worse, if that were possible — the tents sodden with water, bowing sideways in the gale, straining at the pegs, with him and Sophie inside trying to sleep on those mats as wet plastic stuck to them like a freezing shower curtain.
‘Once that comes in,’ Russell was saying now, with a kind of sombre enjoyment, ‘it’ll be here to stay. So fingers crossed it blows over us tonight and gives us a bit more clear weather.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘We’ve been real lucky on this walk, with the weather. But if that comes in there won’t be any views to speak of.’
‘You’re right there.’
‘Nothing worth taking a picture of then!’
‘True enough.’
If he comments on the tripod, thought Rich grimly, watching the clouds roiling low to the horizon like a Steven Spielberg special effect, I’ll shove the thing up his nose.
He pointed over at the peaks on the horizon.
‘Is that still Cradle Mountain National Park there?’ he said, for something to say.
‘Nope. They’re the Mountains of Jupiter; we’re really close here to the adjacent park, the Walls of Jerusalem. They’re all the Orion Lakes there. Libby and I did a walk through there a few years ago, higher up. We wanted to go to Lake Adelaide but Parks and Wildlife was detouring all walkers around that track, so we missed out. They were working on a dog-eradication program and had all these baits laid apparently.’
‘On a what?’
‘Trapping feral dogs. There was a pack of them they were trying to catch. We had a chat to a team of rangers while we were there and they were going to bring in a bitch on heat to trap the males.’
Gosh, he thought sarcastically, you’re a fount of information, aren’t you, mate?
‘Libby reckons she heard barking the other night, really faint,’ Russell went on.
‘I would have thought feral dogs would stick to farming country where they can attack something easy, like a sheep,’ he said.
‘They get disoriented,’ Russell answered.
What was he getting out of his pocket now? A bloody Chapstick.
‘How’s that blister?’ Russell added conversationally, unscrewing the lid.
Rich raised the camera to his face, pointed it to the south where Lake St Clair lay waiting for him like a shining blue reward. ‘Never better,’ he answered.
Fifteen
He waited for Sophie to catch up so they could begin the descent together down to Windy Ridge Hut. Kept his tone determinedly pleasant and neutral, letting her know he was prepared to put that little spat behind them.
‘Who have you been chatting with?’
‘That couple from Israel.’
‘The ones with the dreadlocks?’
‘Yep.’
‘They’re actually friends, are they? I thought they might have been on some kind of military exercise together. They hardly seem to speak to each other.’
She laughed. ‘You know what? They’re on their honeymoon.’
‘You’re shitting me.’
‘Nope.’
They were trudging through myrtle forest now, towering and fragrant.
‘Their honeymoon. I can’t believe it. Christ, people are peculiar.’
‘After this they’re going to Vietnam and Laos.’
‘Would it kill them to look like they were enjoying themselves?’
Sophie grinned, tipping her head to catch a glimpse of the forbidding sheer rock faces of Mount Geryon and the Acropolis rising fissured and grey on the western horizon as they walked.
‘That looks scary, doesn’t it? Like the walls of a fortress. Do you reckon people climb it?’ She was making an effort, he could tell. She was sorry.
‘They’re probably not allowed to,’ he answered. ‘It’s as if we’re walking through a sort of museum, isn’t it? Can’t touch this, can’t do that. No lighting fires, no stepping off the track. And those Dutch guys last night insisting you were supposed to strain out your dishwashing water and scatter the dregs around so that it doesn’t hit the ground too hard!’
‘They make it strict so people don’t wreck it, though. Because it’s pristine.’
‘Pristine! This isn’t pristine. It’s heaving with people. And I read in the hut last night you get fined if you build a cairn. Wow, one of the most picturesque things about walking in Tibet is all these stone and wooden cairns people have built around the place, on hilltops and mountainsides mostly. They decorate them with all this stuff.’
She considered this, frowning into the distance. ‘Do they have those prayer flags hanging on them?’
‘Those multicoloured ones? Yeah. Sending all those prayers to heaven.’
‘Mum’s got them all around the verandah. She reckons they have to stay up until they tatter away naturally, or something. Sometimes I wonder what they actually have written on them.’ Sophie paused at the grin sliding across his face. ‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. That’s just so like the Sandy I remember. Decorates the house with Tibetan prayer flags but hasn’t ever actually been to Tibet.’
He was expecting her to agree, to smile conspiratorially with him. He felt a sharp ache for it, that easy camaraderie. But her voice was subdued when she finally answered.
‘Well, she was busy.’
‘Yeah, she was always rushing round, getting caught up in the latest craze.’
She shook her head. ‘Busy looking after me, I meant.’
There was no accusation there. No hidden reproach for him. It just made his sudden hot shame worse. God, the way she looked up at you, raising those downcast lids to give you the full high-beam of everything she was thinking. Nowhere to hide, in that glare. You just wanted to put your hands up to your own face, like a shield.
‘I wanted to ask you something else, yesterday,’ Sophie said.
A pinch of trepidation. He felt bruised, as though he was coming back in off the ropes, dazed, wavering arms up. Some internal tear somewhere, something to blindside you again later.
‘Fire away.’
‘I don’t know ...’ Eyes away from him again now, a hand creeping up to her mouth to anxiously chew a nail.
‘You may as well. Now’s the time.’
‘Did you love me when I was born?’
Ligaments tearing. A rib poking, surely, into his lung; stabbing, sharp-edged. What else could suck the air from you like that? From every part of him, he felt himself gathering breath, drawing in remnants and shreds of everything he needed to answer her. And he couldn’t hesitate, couldn’t let her see a second of doubt.
‘Are you kidding? You were ... awesome. Totally beautiful. You even melted Janet’s heart in five seconds.’
‘But you, though.’
He couldn’t trust himself to look at her now, how she hunched around the fingers in her mouth, teeth tearing, her eyes averted from him with mortification. Him. It was him putting her through this.
‘You have to believe that I did.’ He hesitated. ‘Your mother and me splitting up was ... that had been brewing for a very long while. It wasn’t you.’
‘Right.’
‘I mean, I don’t know what Sandy’s said, but ...’
‘OK. Don’t worry about it.’
It hadn’t been him. Absolutely not his doing. The certainty of that fact savage in him, familiar as a witness statement pared down to its essentials, recited over and over.
I’m promising you now that if you leave you’ll never see Sophie again.
He could remember it, the instant fury as it tu
rned in him sudden as an undertow, grasping in that moment that Sandy saw the baby like leverage, like a piece of ammunition against him. He’d looked back at her, wondering how twenty-four hours could turn someone you thought you knew into such a cold and calculating stranger, standing there on the new deck clutching their baby like a hostage, glaring at him with such utter icy capability; he knew she would do it, given the chance. He just couldn’t bring himself to even answer.
He’d turned around instead, and kept walking. It wasn’t like he’d weighed it up, just that something in him suddenly snapped. Now, he thought, she could be like all those others she seemed so enamoured of — all the loud and domineering women who propped themselves in his kitchen drinking wine out of the cask and complaining about how hard done by they were, when as far as he could tell all they did was sit around on their supporting mother’s benefits and do as little as possible. Those women! The town was jammed with them — women who looked at you askance, with instant dislike, the moment you dared to disagree with them, women who waved off your contribution to the conversation with smirking, impatient contempt, because if you weren’t talking about them, they weren’t listening. Sandy’s new club.
Hit the road instead. Turn your back on it. Get back a bit of the spontaneity that had almost died in you, hanging round in Ayresville, sleeping through your life.
He had recalled, as he’d driven away, a recurring dream he’d had for years — one of those stress dreams about being inexplicably at some airport, with somewhere vital he had to get to and suddenly without luggage or a ticket. But then he’d find himself calming down, realising that he had all he needed, despite it all, just his passport and keycard. The rest he could manage without. Passport and keycard — the bare fundamentals you’d need to escape with.
‘All I want to take is the Kombi,’ he’d said to Sandy that day. The new, ice-cold hatchet-faced Sandy, who stood staring at him as he stuffed some clothes into a bag.
‘Take everything that’s yours ...’ she answered grimly.
‘You can have everything else — the books, all the household stuff ...’
‘... everything that’s yours. Take it and go.’
‘And my share of the house. You take it all.’
She’d sneered at him. ‘Gee, thanks. That’s big of you, leaving me the mortgage.’
He stopped, feeling his face contort. There was no reasoning with her. That was the trouble.
‘Will you just shut up and listen? I’ll ring you, OK? When we’ve both calmed down and we can discuss this ...’
She raised an arm and pointed down the road, a dramatic, imperious gesture that made him want to burst out laughing.
‘There’s nothing to discuss. You walk out on us and I never want to hear from you again. No contact, no custody, no nothing. So you’d better pack everything you want now, Rich, because once you go, that’s it. That’s the ultimate betrayal.’
‘You don’t have to be such a drama queen. Now’s not the time to ...’
But once she’d cast herself in the role, he could see, she had to keep upping the ante. Asked him how his parents would feel, told him how Sophie would grow up now thinking that all men were like him; absconders, never to be trusted or relied upon.
‘Sophie can ...’ he began again.
‘What do you care about Sophie? You’d rather go and sit on a beach in Goa than stay here and be a father to Sophie.’
‘I want all of us to go. Jesus, that’s what we’ve always talked about. How a baby shouldn’t be a reason to stop travelling and experiencing the world —’
‘Rich, just get your stuff and get out of our lives.’
And then that final sentence, I’m promising you now that if you leave you’ll never see Sophie again, and her face like something carved out of marble.
The driver’s seat of the Kombi, the smell of the van as familiar as his own clothes; heat cracks on the dash from thousands of kilometres of happy adventuring together, the gull feathers and shells strung with fishing line hanging from the rear-vision mirror seeming suddenly like a childish craft project.
They hadn’t driven that van for months because there wasn’t really room for the baby seat, but he’d held his breath and turned the key and the Kombivan, that triumph of German engineering, coughed in Teutonic amazement and started. The ragged sound of the engine turning over flooded him with relief.
He pushed the column shift into reverse, not looking at her there on the deck, telling himself he’d call that night and they’d be able to rationally discuss what to do. She was the one who had burned the bridges, not him.
The few cartons he’d taken he boxed up in a friend’s garage in the city, already feeling the restorative powers of ridding himself of all the stuff he knew he could do without. He wrote an ambiguously open-ended note to his parents and drove to Sydney, where he sold the Kombi to a couple of Dutch backpackers who wanted to see Uluru, wished them luck without telling them about the crack in the radiator.
Walked away without a pang. He couldn’t believe how light and clear things felt, how unencumbered and exhilarating and vast the world suddenly seemed, full of its old potential. Some people, he thought, were just made to be always moving, always exploring. That was what the desire to travel was about — movement towards an emptier, less cluttered life. Now he was himself again, substance flowing back into him, vital flesh and blood.
He made his way to the airport carrying almost nothing, and thought how the dream had probably been signalling to him all this time, preparing him for just this kind of detachment. Then he was on a plane to Borneo, divested of all of it, shuddering with relief as he leaned back in his seat, the ID photo on his new passport looking at him with the steely eyes of a man who’s made a narrow escape but now has got places to go.
He remembered the plane banking over the airport and out across the ocean. It had been raining on the ground, but above the cloud cover the sky was a dazzling blue. He’d closed his eyes against the glare, and shed his nagging doubts like an old skin.
And here she was, that same baby, back to bring it all up again. He’d invited this, he’d plotted it, argued for it, wanted it.
She’d pulled ahead of him by now, her hands appearing from around her backpack to grope in a back pocket for the earpieces to her iPod as she walked. That fumbling defensiveness, the thin delicacy of her wrists, sent a terrible sharpening sorrow through him.
That’s not what she wanted to ask him, he knew. Not really. She didn’t mean did you love me when I was born? She meant why did you leave me?
Rich couldn’t answer either question, anyway. He wondered if he had loved her. He wondered if he’d ever really loved anybody.
Sandy was perspiring even before she climbed into the sweat lodge. She’d always hated confined spaces, especially dark ones. Once she was inside, settled on the cedar benches with the others around the brazier, she wondered what the minimum time was you could stay in there and still fulfil the requirements. Not that it was a test, she reminded herself, blinking the stinging perspiration out of her eyes. Nobody was making her stay in there — if you had any doubts or health concerns you could opt for an aromatherapy spa instead — but it made sense that the closer you got to the edge of your tolerance, the longer you could endure the purifying heat, the sharper your vision would be.
She was a bit hazy on what kind of vision to expect. She was getting her shamanic animal totems mixed up with her medicine tarot animals, and the Goddesses were all blurring into a composite perfected being with a willowy figure, flowing hair, a jug and a sheaf of wheat. The sweat was pouring from her, though. That had to be having a good detoxifying effect. But with all the steam being generated from the brazier (just garden variety heat beads, a small part of her brain registered; there was nothing stopping her trying this at home) you’d think the air would be moist, but it was scorchingly arid as she drew it into her lungs. Dry enough to shrivel your eyeballs. No wonder they had advised everyone about ‘intaking’ enough wa
ter this afternoon before the session.
‘Focus now,’ said the instructor, whose name was something even Ayresville residents would have hidden a smile at — Passionflower Windfeather, or Butterfly Eaglemountain, or somesuch — ‘focus now, and look down into that sacred tunnel, and invite your totemic animal guide to appear. We invoke you now, O Mighty Ones, we call across the forest and the prairie for you to approach.’
OK, Sandy thought, but prairie? She closed her eyes. Should have opted for the spa, she was thinking, when a wave of inspiration hit her. It just blossomed in her head out of nowhere. What someone should invent, it was suddenly clear to her, was a medicine tarot pack using native Australian animals, and Aboriginal mythology instead of Native American. Rejig the whole idea — dingos instead of coyotes, echidnas instead of porcupines, majestic red kangaroos instead of wolves. She could see how the whole thing could be marketed — you could even throw in a dreamcatcher. She’d talk to Gail at the Sunday market about it when she got home. The idea seemed so perfect, so foolproof, she wondered if she was a bit delirious with the heat. The instructor was talking to them now about their breathing, only she was calling it ‘breathwork’. Even respiring, she thought fleetingly, was called work around here.
Focus now, on the swimming reddish space before her closed lids. Another minute and she’d climb out, before she fainted, because she remembered this sensation now from kneeling in Mass at school on hot days, when everything went distant and prickly as though she was losing reception on a TV, then she’d keel over. Something small and black wavered tentatively before her closed eyes.
Not a bat, please God, she thought despairingly. Anything but that. But the shape alighted and tucked its wings neatly into place, bustling with merry energy.
For a few astonished seconds, inside her head, she saw what she was supposed to. It hopped right up to her and cocked its coal-black head, tapping its beak with businesslike energy onto the ground between them, like it was calling her to attention. She could see its mischievous eye shining. She held her breath. Surely to God the thing wasn’t going to open its mouth and speak to her. She saw that shrewd intent eye, the beak briskly tapping again, here here, on the earth. Sandy, behind scrunched lids, dropped her eyes to tumbling blackness, the blank ground splitting open. Then she toppled sideways off the bench.