by Cate Kennedy
They squinted up the track that rose hard and steep above them, and spotted another couple of walkers in the distance, already toiling up the incline, polar-fleece hats bobbing above their daypacks.
‘More of them!’ Rich said, rolling his eyes. ‘The place is swarming, isn’t it? Not an inch of untouched space anywhere. All of it trampled by the jostling hordes.’
Like he was already planning one of those travel articles he wrote, in his head.
‘Well, there’s no hut there, I read that last night,’ she responded. ‘It’s really exposed. That’s why it’s so crowded back there, people just come up here for day walks, and stay at Pine Valley Hut.’
‘Ah yes,’ he said sourly. ‘Tucked up safe in the hut. With all the other youth hostellers.’ He turned back to her. ‘You know what — we could camp up here the night instead of staying at the hut. Then just walk down straight to Narcissus Bay in the morning, get there in time to catch the afternoon ferry. Hour and a half, say, from the Labyrinth back to Pine Valley, then back down to the Overland Track, and straight on down to Narcissus. One real night in the wilderness before we hop on the ferry and back to civilisation.’
She chewed her lip, doubtful. ‘So carry our packs and all our gear up there for the night?’
‘Sure. It’s only six kilometres. Give those tents a proper workout. The real walkers camp up there, obviously. There’s lots of lakes and grassy spots on the map. What do you say?’
‘It looked nice on that map in the hut.’
He gazed up the track. ‘It’s up to you,’ he said. ‘But that’s where I’d love to get some shots. And it would be worth it, just to get away from all the other trekkers for twenty-four hours. Off the Overland Superhighway.’
‘I guess.’ She wasn’t even sure what a labyrinth was, apart from a lyric on the Nosferatu album.
And Libby and Russell were back at the hut, saving her a spot. She glanced down the track, reluctantly.
‘Unless you think you can’t carry your pack up that mountain,’ he said.
She felt indignant. Who’d been holding them up so far? Not her. ‘No, I’m fine with it.’
‘It’s a high plateau, above the rainforest here in the valley. Big boulders and lakes and rocks; imagine all those views,’ he said. He was looking at her, speculatively, wondering if she was up to it.
‘Let’s do it then.’
‘Find somewhere where there’s nobody else but us, just for one night.’
‘OK. Yeah.’ She smiled briefly at him and pulled her beanie down, tucking her fringe up and under it. Six k’s was nothing. She could probably run that now, given the chance. She’d never felt so fit in her life.
They trekked back to the hut and retrieved their packs.
‘Changed your mind?’ said Russell in surprise when he saw them, and Rich answered, ‘We thought we’d give an overnight camp a go’, filling a cup with water and surreptitiously pushing a couple of capsules into his hand, gulping them down as Sophie filled in the logbook.
Back out tomorrow to catch the boat, she wrote. It would be good, she told herself as she signed in the time. Not a test. Just something apart from everyone else, like Rich was telling Russell now. ‘We don’t want to join up with anyone else who’s going,’ he insisted, when Russell suggested it. ‘That’s the whole point.’
‘What is a labyrinth, anyway?’ she said as they walked back towards the turn-off.
‘A Jim Henson film,’ he said, ‘starring David Bowie.’
‘I’ve seen that!’ she exclaimed, remembering. ‘With the Bog of Eternal Stench!’
‘They must have filmed that bit on Mount Pelion,’ he said dryly, and she couldn’t help laughing as they started climbing.
‘Don’t you reckon,’ he went on, grinning, ‘that all those tufts of buttongrass look like one of David Bowie’s wigs?’
She laughed again. He was OK, really.
They went through a swampy forest track in the valley but then the track climbed sharply and she concentrated on her footing as they walked, feeling for the first time enough heat in the sun to warm the back of her neck. She had on just her short-sleeved thermal top and her pack felt so much better now, lighter somehow. Less food, probably.
They went clambering up, panting with exertion, the landscape’s vegetation thinning out into dramatic alpine gums, raising limbs skywards like arms, and huge lichen-encrusted rocks, and the air smelling like cold mossy water. It felt as though they were going back in time.
You could feel the difference when they got up to the plateau and the ground flattened out all around them.
‘Top of the world!’ Rich shouted, and she nodded, because he was right.
The exhilaration that pumped through her when she looked around her was like nervousness and joy at the same time, like a shock of pleasure. There wasn’t actually a clear track to walk on, but the ground was hard and worn so you could see where other people had walked, across the cushiony soft patches of grass. All around them were massive stony mountains, pushing grey fingers and pillars of rock up and up. Clusters of broken boulders, bright with green and yellow lichen, ground tipping off into cliffs and ravines. Rich stopping and crouching, exclaiming, snapping photos.
They walked towards the towering crags of mountains, and Sophie saw a couple of wallabies bounding through the rocks into the vegetation, there then gone.
She slowed down, the wind blowing her head clean, dreamily taking it all in, until they reached a mirror-still lake, reflecting sky and upswelling cloud.
She couldn’t tell how long they’d been walking. Their two heads, when they leaned over the water, were silhouetted perfectly, the bowl of sky behind them, the bottom of the lake clear below the shadows of their faces. She could see it there, crystalline under the surface, another world furred with slow, patient algae, dropping away.
‘Can we stop and camp here?’ she said, and he gazed round assessingly and there was a long moment of contented silence. Then as if she’d dropped a rock into the water, it was broken; Rich yelping ‘Shit!’ and staggering awkwardly to a boulder, brushing his jeans maniacally as if he was putting out flames, swearing.
‘Ants everywhere!’ he called. ‘Look out!’
As he spoke she felt a stinging bite, and hit at her own jeans, pulling off her gaiters and swiping at dozens of tiny black ants.
‘God, the place is infested with them!’ he said, stomping furiously. ‘Quick, grab your stuff and come up onto the grass. There must be a massive nest down there.’
She scratched her bites and climbed onto another boulder, watching the ants swarming over the ground, looking for her. Scenting where she’d been.
‘That’s amazing,’ she said, and fished in her pack for a cracker, which she crumbled, fascinated, over the dirt.
‘You’re not feeding the little bastards, are you? Argh, this is impossible — come on, nice as the lake is, we’ll have to find another flat spot where we can set up the tents. Have you got any sting gel?’
She shook her head, hypnotised, still dreamy. She watched the ants grab tiny crumbs of dry biscuit and drag them like cargo off the lake shore, like loot off a shipwreck. Where were they going with it? She imagined a colony underground, a huge warren of tunnels and nests, an ant civilisation, efficient as a fortress. They could just slip through a crack in the earth or down through a fissure in these rocks, she thought, and into that secret hidden world. She could have watched them for hours. Her hand crept to her mouth and her front teeth bit absently at a ridge of fingernail, then she stopped, and let her hand drop. No satisfaction in it. No need for it.
‘Let’s get going, eh?’ he said. ‘We’re going to be overrun here.’
She pulled on her pack and followed him, her mind miles away, picking her way vaguely across the alpine grass until he stopped and uncapped the lens cap of his camera.
‘Look at this,’ he said.
Ahead of them stood a sign, an incongruous intrusion, the hand of departmental officialdom. Do not procee
d further unless at least two people in your party are competent at navigation with a map and compass.
Rich grinned, nodding. ‘This is more like it,’ he said exuberantly. ‘At last.’
He took the photo with a flourish and kept walking, glancing back to check her response, and she saw the challenge on his face, the playful, evasive way he winked at her.
Later she’d remember his face as he turned back to her in that instant, that eye closing in a momentary glitter of anticipation, the sun bathing his face in bright hard light. She’d summon it again and again, trying to divine its intention, but it was still impossible to tell whether it was innocent or not.
‘Wow,’ he heard Sophie saying behind him as they scrambled across a cold stretch of lichen-bright rock. ‘Wow, wow, wow. This really is like Lord of the Rings.’
Those glossy, wrinkled snowgums, bent and twisted by weather, the peaty smell of the ground, tarns and clear little lakes. And to the west, as he fumbled for his camera again, range after range peaked into a vanishing point.
The day cold but as clear as gin, that blue air that made every exposure perfect, every reflection a mirror image. He was getting some great shots; shots that pissed all over the murals he’d seen in the wilderness-gear shop that day. He’d send them these, for sure. See what happened. They climbed, scrambling from tarn to hill to see more peaks, down into glaciated folds and valleys, touching the great fissures that ice had split in boulders, and at last it was possible to walk on ground untrampled by other people’s boots.
He could tell they both felt it, the jubilant relief of empty wilderness, a place as beautiful as a postcard every way you looked. And maybe that was just a transitory lucky illusion, maybe in a few minutes they’d come across a couple of German backpackers munching cheese and Ryvitas and looking up something in their field guide, but for this minute, at least, he was happy.
His head seemed to clear. Everything, finally, was going the way he’d meant it to.
‘See?’ he called triumphantly to Sophie, as they came across a pyramid of heaped stones, guiding the way. ‘Cairns!’ He lifted his eyes from the faint impression of a trail they’d been following on the ground, letting it resolve itself into open ground again, searching for the next heap of stones somewhere ahead.
Patches of sunlight and shadow sifted down and rolled across this vista through breaking clouds. They thinned and tore like gauze, revealing patches of palest blue, like a glimpse of something promised.
Sandy tried to do as she was instructed: empty her mind of all preconceptions and allow a single image of her positive force in the world to rise undistorted by any negative patterns.
Her positive force in the world. Just thinking about it gave her a peculiar shiver of something like grief. She’d lost focus, that was the trouble, from her political activism, her conviction. She’d got tired and burned out.
She thought about Sophie, and the night years ago when they’d gone to a friend’s birthday. There’d been a band, and all the kids had been dancing along with the adults. She saw Sophie as she’d been that night, eyes closed with blissful abandon, dancing in that big happy tribe of kids, grinning the big, unselfconscious smile of a five-year-old, radiating nothing but joy and delight. How beautiful to be five, she thought, so free and uninhibited, and so cherished. The image of that child pirouetted and twirled in her mind’s eye, jumping and holding hands with the other kids. That’s positive force, she thought. Once you’ve danced like that, once you’ve felt that collective joy, it lodges in you forever somewhere. Whatever happens, it never leaves you.
She sat, her eyes closed, hugging herself as she watched that small precious child whirl like a laughing dervish. Somewhere in her daughter now, she prayed, was the memory of a childhood in a town where maybe people were disorganised or ineffectual or lax or infuriating, but when the music started, at least everyone got up to dance. She might have got lots of things wrong learning to be a parent, but she’d got that bit right, at least.
Stone-littered hillsides, rocks scabbed with scaly lichen, the afternoon ticking on. He walked calmly, covertly trying to establish his bearings. No panic. The whole basin was only eight kilometres long.
They stopped for a break and took off their packs, Sophie reaching up to pull off her hat, scratch her scalp and untangle hanks of hair with her fingers. Exertion had given her cheeks a high colour against the paleness of the rest of her face.
‘I have to ask you,’ he said to her, ‘what’s with the hair?’
‘What do you mean?’ Tilting that defensive look at him which instantly stirred some memory, something silted and covered over.
‘Hey, I’m sure it’s the hippest of the hip, but it just looks kind of ... I don’t know ... snarled up about halfway down there.’
‘They’re hair extensions.’
‘Eh?’
‘They’re extensions. They plait them in to give you longer hair. Everyone’s got them. Don’t you ever wonder how some celebrity turns up one week with short hair and then the next week has got hair down to her waist?’
He looked at her hair again, fascinated. ‘Is it ... fake hair?’
‘You can get real hair too, but these — I don’t know what they’re made of.’
‘I mention it because it’s turning into a big clump of dreadlocks.’
She grimaced. ‘Yeah, I know. It’s been rubbing against the backpack.’
‘They look like they’re going to knot up and split off, or something.’
She flicked her hair back over her shoulder, stared pointedly out at the horizon.
‘They’re gonna get wrecked,’ she muttered.
‘Pardon?’
She favoured him with an eye-rolling sideways glance. ‘They’re going to wreck my hair. Because they use araldite, to put them in.’
‘Wait. They glue these things into your hair?’
‘Yeah.’ She inspected the ends of her hair, considering. ‘Or else they tie them in, or just clip them.’
‘You know what, Sophie? I reckon we should cut them off. I could use the small blade on my pocket knife.’
She turned and glared at him. ‘These cost me seventy-five bucks.’
‘Yeah, but they’re ruining your hair, right? You can’t even brush it.’ He scrabbled in his experience for another approach. ‘You’d look great with short hair. Just up to there, under the chin.’
Before he’d had a chance to think about it, he’d touched her. Just tapping his finger against the side of her neck, under her multi-pierced earlobe, drawing an imaginary line across that tender skin.
And just as suddenly, she reached back and grasped a strand of his ponytail between thumb and forefinger, and gave it a lighthearted yank, and he saw he was wrong about her, of course, and about any lack of fire or spirit in her. She grinned Sandy’s grin at him, one eyebrow up, just the same. Oh, that quizzical look, lips parted, puzzling. He remembered it now.
‘I’ll do you a deal,’ she said.
And he nodded, mute, dry-throated. Anything, he’d do anything if she’d give him that mischievous, conspiratorial grin again. If she’d take charge.
‘What’s the matter?’ he heard her say. ‘Nervous?’
‘Course not.’
‘So why have you got your hand in front of your eyes?’
He needed a second or two.
She’d had that little quirk of the eyebrow when she’d been born. They’d pulled her out like they were hauling a tree root, forget this comforting bullshit about lifting out the baby during a caesarean, and he’d said, ‘It’s a girl, Sandy’; and at the sound of his voice the baby had turned her head and given him this baleful quirk, her newborn squashed face searching out his eyes in one long assessing owl blink, the eyebrows saying well? with barely concealed impatience, a little Winston Churchill look, wondering if he was the one, if he was going to be up to it. Already finding him wanting. Fully cognisant with his weaknessnes, it seemed to him, even then.
‘Here, you’d better do t
he deed,’ he said tightly, passing the knife, blade uppermost, into her open hand.
And that night at Greenie Acres, Sandy retrieved the memory now, with a kind of wonder that she could have thought she’d lost it. Impromptu singing and dancing around the fire, energy fuelled on nothing but adrenaline and joy that she had taken the leap and found herself here, so firmly entire and reinvented.
Seeing the blue and white flashing lights of a police car, sudden subdued disappointment thumping in her. Three police officers had gotten out of the car, and the music had wavered uneasily, the guy on the violin and the girl on the flute faltering, the banjo being lowered uncertainly, and Sandy had thought oh, no, please don’t. Then the police had asked for an assurance — what was this? — that there’d be no photos, and the protesters had agreed eagerly of course not, no photos, and then the police officers had turned off their blue lights and thrown their hats in the back seat and joined in the dancing. Yes. Sandy had felt it then, the overspilling strength of what seems fragile, that unforgettable lesson. For half an hour, as they all hooted and stamped and jumped, anything in the world had seemed possible.
When these facilitators asked her what was making her cry in the meditations, how could she even begin to explain?
‘How long have you been growing it?’ Sophie asked him, as he ran his hand across the exposed back of his neck with a rueful smile.
‘Eh? Oh, I don’t know. Had a few haircuts here and there. Usually going into countries where it’s an issue, you know — where they give you a hard time for looking like a hippie. A hangover from the old days. But that’s my first haircut in about seven years, I’d say.’
She held the sawn-off ponytail like a swatch in her hand, looking at it closely. Her own hair swung at her jawbone now, her lovely neck suddenly exposed.
‘When mine’s not black,’ she said suddenly, ‘it’s just the same colour.’
Rich rubbed hard at his neck. That feeling again, threatening to engulf him.