These ones are slippery, each step an inch away from a fall, etched into the cliff face like children’s teeth.
He tests his foot on the first wooden step and it puts up with his weight. He might make it. He jumps up two or more steps at a time, missing the ones disintegrating.
Looking up further there’s only rotting timber. The staircase up to the higher section of rock is no longer a staircase.
He hums a piano ditty and feels like a character in a silent movie, each step on a swinging bridge breaking behind him.
He doesn’t want to think about coming down.
He keeps his weight on the very edges of each step, as his hands grind into the cliff face as if they alone can hold him up.
The metal railings around the edge start to give way, ending just short of the rock, leaving a wide gap like one between front teeth.
His lungs are hopeless. He has to stop every couple of seconds now.
At the top of Orphan Rock he ducks under the railing and plays with the mist on the cliff edge, moving his hands through to the point where he can no longer see them.
He squats to catch his breath and when he stands up the fog starts to lift and he has to take a step back to take in the brazen clarity of it.
The brutal drop.
He holds on to the railing and leans out as far as he can go to look down until he feels dizzy. The Three Sisters stand together with their secrets. The roof of the Scenic Railway glints like a beacon as the carriages disappear into the crack in the cliffs.
He’s missed the last train.
Jimmy’s shoes are wet now and he sits down to take them off, placing them together, their red sheen covered in damp ash and mud.
He shifts a bit to empty his pockets and puts the coins down in the little piles he leaves everywhere around the house. Hansel breadcrumbs, Mona calls them.
He ferrets for the small parcel in his back pocket and tucks it inside one of the shoes where it’s warm and dry. He puts his phone in the other one.
He lies on his stomach and squirms out to the edge, squinting over. There’s nothing to see at the bottom now. The green dissolves into grey into darkness.
He edges back and stands up. He plants his heels firmly into the rock, wet toes worming out the roots and grooves for something to hold onto.
He leans forward again, to where earth meets sky. His eyes track the sudden shallow sun and this time avoid the hold of the dark drop below.
Jimmy thinks about getting a photo of the disappearing horizon for Mona but there’s not enough light.
As the fog bears down again, he stands up on the railing and balances for a moment, the steel muggy, slippery, beneath his feet.
As the fog gets thicker, he starts to dance like he danced last night, losing her for a moment in the sweet-smelling smoke, losing himself, before she returned, with her arms raised, smiling, as if she was there all along.
As he sways he feels the air shift beneath him, a pressure rush forcing him upwards.
The rain is hard now and it washes flecks of grey onto the sandstone below.
His T-shirt is stuck to his skin and it’s that sudden kind of cold where he thinks he will never get warm.
He slips and as he falls, Jimmy’s feet point in the direction where he comes from.
And the last thought he thinks is that he wants to get back.
But as he thinks it his body hits the canopy of the rainforest without a sound and without a sound the trees open up to swallow him along with the rain.
THE UNGUARDED MOMENT
Melbourne, 2018
You’re here. I can feel it.
I get lost up and down the escalators, walking through rooms of Japanese ceramics and contemporary Australian design.
I could ask for directions.
I see a sea of grey hair in a dim room and imagine you there. Your work is hidden as if the gallery is afraid of people seeing it.
It’s like a cemetery here, the paintings and photos tombstones for artists mostly dead. And others.
I take a seat near the back in case I need to make a quick exit.
You’re sitting in the front row.
The black suit, the way you stay straight, the ungiving back.
You never move your head, don’t bother looking around.
There’s a point where you’ve seen it all before.
You take your hat off and suddenly the room is resurrected. Filled with young people. It’s packed and they’re noisy and they have to stand up because there are no seats left.
Your hair is still the same length but you’ve struggled to put it into a ponytail.
I stand up and take a polaroid of the back of your head.
I wish I could show it to Jimmy. It would have made him laugh.
The curator does an introduction and asks one question and you are off, standing at the lectern.
You talk about your subjects and the way they move you.
The girl next to me records you on her phone. Furtive.
You move your hand like a wave, caressing the curves of a body.
You talk about love and intimacy.
As you talk, your eyes roam.
I keep my face up, look straight, don’t smile.
But your eyes move on to another person in the room. There’s nothing.
Not a glimmer.
You talk about empowerment and composition.
The sound of your voice, the same measured and rehearsed calm of a lecture you’ve delivered many times before.
Your words just one long stream that take me to languid afternoons in the studio. To the dirty junkyard of a ballroom.
You talk about where we begin and where we end.
But when you start to talk about beauty, I get up and walk.
Past your latest boys and girls, with their lost faces and thin porcelain skin. So transparent I can see the veins blue, like cracks about to break them open.
I move to a room even darker, but one that wakes me up. A collection of redundant things.
I walk along a corridor of photos where I can see the photographer’s shadow. Shadows like a stain on a dress, an angel on a child’s chest, a monster lurking down the bottom, the man in the hat. A couple’s tryst in the park, lying entwined on a rug, picnic basket empty, serene, except for the shadow looming.
I lean into images of things hard to see. People listening to music. Reading. The air. Lamps. Stills from movies I haven’t seen alongside snaps that would never make the family album. Maybe go at the back for a laugh.
The photos en masse have a collective force.
What do people look like when they read? When they’re asleep?
The same. Their faces anyway, despite their bodies being in odd positions, unaware of the camera.
The posing becomes clear, like Ro when he’s pretending to be asleep.
Something about tension.
Messages on the back of photos.
this is the Jew
should never have trusted him!
the wind was really howling
Absent mothers hide under black cloths and drapery, becoming part of the furniture to hold their babies still. Disappearing from the frame.
I look closely to make them out.
In the end, every collection is, after all, a reflecting pool.
It’s the damaged ones that hold me most. The faces cut from photos. The jilted lovers scraped out. The careful erasure. The cigarette burns. The savage psycho attack on a woman in a fur coat whose face has been stabbed with scissors. Red paint over faces, Xs mark the spot.
It’s not just faces.
The whole shape of a man is gone.
These collections of people. The sleeping, the reclining, those who look dead but probably aren’t, the shapes on a cutting room floor.
Left in attic boxes, sold on eBay, found in op shops.
They don’t feel archived here. They don’t feel traced.
They don’t feel frozen the way that your photographs do.
&nbs
p; They suddenly feel bright as family, like they’ve been brought back to life.
I return to the retrospective and stand in the gallery.
The crowds flutter around me and the photographs drawn to slivers of light.
My eyes are black. My lips are black.
I’ve done a couple of loops, but keep returning to the same images, lingering, with longing.
Your bones poke out, your collarbone. Your beautiful mouth. The most luscious thing.
I don’t stand too close but I’d like to.
In this public space I’m suddenly aware of what others will think of me. That they may be watching me watching us watching you. Making connections.
You take the cord in your mouth, in your teeth.
It’s not that the girl is naked, so much, but that she appears asleep. Her body surrendered to the dark.
This time it’s me perched above, intruding on the girl’s dreams as she lies with abandon, knees apart.
The fall. Falling in love. Falling leaves. Falling asleep. All the things we loved.
I can feel the heat rising off the girl’s body as she throws off the covers and moves on top of them. Turning her head backwards and forwards, to find the coolness, the sweet spot.
Waiting for the cool change. Letting the dark air touch our skin. The awkwardness, thrill, of learning about our new bodies.
As I watch this girl in the art gallery, my body responds to the girl’s, and I’m reluctant to leave her.
That lusciousness of complete letting go. Ankle bracelets bought at markets. Dry summer nights in the bungalow. Too lazy, too tired, too hot, to put on the doona cover before falling into bed.
When I stand in front of the photo, I don’t want to look at the girl, I want to be the girl, caught up in the process of becoming.
Running away to Melbourne and dangling our legs over the overpass. Trolling for gruff billy goats and enjoying the danger of watching cars below. Lying on the banks of the Yarra, kissing you in the cold, jeans ripped and New Romantic in every sense.
But coming of age doesn’t stop, it just keeps coming.
I move on to the Ballroom. The blood and mud.
I look for you but you’re still missing. Just your dirty feet pointing to the sky.
I search in my bag for the cool slime of polaroid.
I talk back.
To the man wearing a hat in the shadows.
To the man hurting a soft boy in his arms.
I sticky-tape my polaroid from the party over the top of Dodge’s photograph.
I find the playlist on my phone and set up the speaker. The opening synth beat of ‘Change in Mood’ fills the gallery.
I return to the image of the girl sleeping.
I take my boots off and my dress and the rest of my layers.
I sit naked beneath the portrait and lie back against the cool floor.
I spread my legs and lift my head so it’s at just the right angle.
I am me and I am not me.
My body is pale and clear and is what it is.
I look out at the gathering crowd.
I am almost a mirror.
That was now, this is then.
I make my own phantasy.
I count to ten.
SPRING RAIN
Blue Mountains, 2018
Ro runs ahead, following the railing with his fingertips. He points out towards Mount Solitary and squints.
Is that them? The Three Sisters?
Mona turns him around to the left.
Maybe we could go down the Giant Stairway and catch the Scenic Railway back up. Do you feel like a big walk? she says.
What’s the Scenic Railway?
It’s a really steep train track – says here the steepest railway in the world.
I wanna do that!
Along the pathway to the Honeymoon Bridge, Ro becomes a stream of words.
What’s that plant called?
I’m not sure but that’s definitely a tree fern.
We need Google.
We don’t need Google. You’re a walking encyclopedia.
But I want to know the names.
He runs ahead to touch the sculptures placed along the path, calling to her as he goes. Metal animals. Echidna. Frill-neck.
He stretches up to touch huge blowflies climbing up an overhanging cave wall.
Are they really that big?
I hope not.
At the Honeymoon Bridge he stands in the middle and won’t look down, uncertain about moving across to the Three Sisters or back to where he came from.
The drama of the drop stops her too. She keeps moving for him.
The tour groups bank up behind them, screaming to hear their own voices, waiting for echoes. Murdering the silence.
She heads down the Giant Stairway to avoid them.
The steps cut into the rock are uneven and eroded and the handrails are no longer just a guide.
She grips them like the wheels of a wheelchair to manoeuvre around, all the time ready to grab Ro by the hoodie if he slips.
She can’t decide whether to walk in front or behind him.
Things are quiet as they leave the tourists above, concentrating on the way their feet fall on the rock, the views dropping beneath them.
My hands stink, Ro says.
He holds his palms out and they are etched a light russet red.
That’s the smell of rust, she says.
She holds out her own, darker brown.
From the metal railings.
She sniffs her hands. The smell of cold days on Melbourne trains. The Ballroom shoot. Jimmy’s warm lips.
The smell of blood.
I like it. That smell. Ro sniffs his fingers again.
At the bottom of the stairs it’s hard to balance on solid ground, like she has sea legs.
Ro can’t stop laughing, copying her walk as he follows behind, stopping when she turns around.
Hard to believe that was only nine hundred steps! she says.
There is no way she can go back up.
Ro reads out the sign.
The track’s called the Federal Pass.
As they head in the direction of the Scenic Railway, the call is clear, the loudest sound in the valley.
What birds are they, Mama?
I think they’re bellbirds.
They sound like when you play the triangle. Ding! Ding! Ding!
He listens for the echo.
As they walk through the rainforest, the tree ferns brush their faces, a wet kiss.
Mona keeps peering up, looking for signs of it. The rock. But she can’t seem to find the right angle, the right shape. She sees gnarled red limbs and bumps on bark.
What are you looking for?
A place called Orphan Rock.
What’s an orphan? Is that like that girl with red hair, Annie?
It’s someone who’s lost both their parents.
Lost in the bush?
I meant someone who has two parents who have both died.
I have one parent who died.
Don’t worry, Ro, you’re not an orphan.
But if you died, I would be.
Well, not really, because Beñat is your dad and he would look after you then.
I’m glad I’m not an orphan. I wouldn’t want to wear rags and have no porridge to eat and sing all the time.
That’s called a musical.
Hey, what’s that sound? That shhhhh sound, he says.
The falls are coming up.
He runs ahead.
I can’t even see them!
It’s more like trickles than falls at the moment. It’s an underground river. Sometimes it rushes over those rocks.
She points up to the green boulders, big as cars, climbing the mountain, rolling stones to the sky.
Sometimes when you do these walks there’s so much fog you can’t see anything, so we’re lucky today.
Ro runs ahead again to where the track splits.
We can either go one hundred me
tres to the Scenic Railway platform or go up the Furber Steps, he says.
I don’t think my legs can manage more stairs.
Ro sings You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and she joins in by Scotland afore ye.
When they get to the railway platform, Ro yells even though she’s standing right next to him.
Look, I’ve found it!
What?
Orphan Rock!
He points to a sign.
She still can’t see it, the shape of the rock, even where the railway cuts through to the platform above.
Maybe she’s looking for the wrong thing. A free-standing pinnacle.
Maybe they are right beneath it.
Her legs start to shake and then bend and she lets them go until she ends up on the ground sitting on her backpack.
Mama, are you okay?
Just giving my knees a rest.
Hey, the train’s coming. Get up!
Ro yanks her and bolts ahead so he’s alongside the first carriage.
How do we get on?
He shakes the barrier.
Hey, can you calm down? You need to wait until they open the doors and let the other passengers off. You know, this train used to be called the Mountain Devil. They used this line to move coal, she says.
I know. I can read the sign too.
Sitting in the carriage, Ro fiddles with the seats at various angles.
Look, Mama – there’s a choice of Laidback, Original or Cliffhanger. Which one do you want?
I think I might stick to Original.
But I want to be at the front and I want Cliffhanger!
Mona secures the backpack under the seat and puts her boots on top of it as the train starts to shuttle backwards at a steep angle up the mountain. She grips onto the bar above her head.
Ro leans down to grab the bag, unzipping.
You need to hang on! We’re moving! she cries.
I want to take my one photo a day!
You can’t! We need both hands to hold on.
The mountain view zooms into reverse as they rollercoast up the side of the cliff and she shuts her eyes.
She forces herself to open them again and swivels her head, looking for a glimpse of Orphan Rock, before the darkness of the tunnel catches her.
It’s like falling, but backwards.
An uplift of pressure.
She can’t escape the feeling.
She starts to feel the weight lift, hoping to catch up with him, meet him in between.
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