Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  She presented the meal with perfect timing, everything right, at the right time, no over-cooking, no cold food, no ash or grit in the food. She served it on the disposable plates they’d bought.

  He complimented her.

  ‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ she said.

  They ate their Christmas dinner and drank the wine in the Guzzini goblets he’d bought for camping, and as they did, a white mist filled the gorge and stopped short of where they were so that they were atop of it, as if looking out the window of an aircraft above the clouds.

  It came almost level with the slab where they were camped and were eating.

  ‘Jesus, that’s nice,’ he said, staring down at the mist.

  ‘I thought you didn’t go in for God’s handiwork.’

  ‘Well I don’t go searching for it. When he does it before my very eyes, I can be appreciative.’

  She looked down at the mist while chewing the meat off a rabbit bone, as if assessing the mist, aesthetically? theologically? She ate the meal with her fingers, with their painted nails.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, emphatically.

  It was warm and there were bush flies which worried her and she kept brushing them away with her hand, cursing at them.

  ‘Piss off you bastards,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve made peace with the flies,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later in the Australian bush you have to stop shooing the flies and let them be.’

  ‘I’m not going to let them be,’ she said, ‘I’m going to give them a bad time.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘You did the meal perfectly.’

  ‘Thank you – but you aren’t the only person in Australia who can cook on a camp fire.’ She then laughed, and said, ‘Actually it was the first time I have cooked a meal on a camp fire.’

  ‘It was perfect. You looked very primitive – you could have been out of the First Settlement.’

  ‘I felt very primitive,’ she said, ‘if the truth be known.’

  ‘I meant it in the best sense.’

  ‘I assumed you did.’

  They sat there with food-stained hands, smoky from the fire, food and wine on their breath. Belle exposed her legs to the misty sun.

  She stared expressionlessly at him, her hand methodically waving away the flies, and she then began to remove her clothing. They had sex there on the rock slab surrounded by the mist. They played with the idea of her naked body on the rock slab, the bruising of it, the abrasion. He held her head by the hair and pinned her arms, allowing the flies to crawl over her face. She struggled but could not make enough movement to keep them off her face. She came and he came.

  They drank and became drowsy watching, from a cool distance, the fire burning away.

  During the night he got up because he liked to leave the tent in the dead of the night and prowl about naked. He said to himself that although he did not always feel easy in the bush, in fact, he sometimes felt discordant in it, he’d rather be out in it feeling discordant than not be there.

  ‘What are you doing out there for godsake?’ Belle called from the tent.

  ‘Having a piss.’

  He crawled back into the tent.

  ‘I thought for a moment you were communing,’ she said.

  ‘Just checking the boundaries.’

  In the morning he said, ‘Well, it wasn’t unsleepable on the rock.’

  ‘No, not unsleepable,’ she said, and smiled, ‘not unfuckable either.’

  ‘The rock tells our body things our mind cannot comprehend.’

  ‘Don’t give me that bullshit.’

  It was still misty and the air heavy with moisture but it was not cold.

  Neither of them now wanted to stay longer in the bush although they’d talked initially of staying ‘for a few days’.

  He thought he might have stayed on if he’d been alone.

  They struck camp.

  ‘I liked having if off on the rock,’ she said, ‘I seem to be bruised.’

  ‘But you were bruised enough?’ he ritualistically asked, resolving that he would not make that joke again because of its tiredness, resisting what the tiredness meant about their relationship.

  ‘Ha ha.’

  It was a grey sky. The dampness quietened everything down just a little more than usual and the dull sky dulled everything a little more, including their mood.

  They hoisted on their backpacks and began walking.

  ‘I know all about abjection and self-esteem but for a slut like me it’s all a game now.’

  He gestured to indicate that he wasn’t making judgements about it.

  ‘It’s no longer the whole damned basis of my personality,’ she said.

  ‘You have to be a bit like that to go into the bush anyhow. It’s very easy to make it self-punishing.’

  ‘I was thinking that.’

  They walked a few metres apart. They passed a stand of grey kangaroos some way off which speculatively watched them walk by. Belle and he indicated to each other by a glance that they’d seen the kangaroos.

  ‘More of God’s handiwork,’ she called.

  He realised as they walked out that he had a disquiet about being there with Belle. When he looked at the Christmas they’d just had together – on paper – it was untroubled, memorable, an enriched event – the mist in the gorge, the perfect campfire meal, the good wine. Belle naked on the rock, his standing on the ledge in the dead of night, the melancholy bush.

  The disquiet came because Belle had been moved out of place in his life. The Budawang bush was the place of his childhood testing, his family’s bush experience, touching base, touching primitive base. He had learned his masculinity here.

  She did not belong in that album.

  He looked back at her up the trail, plodding through the swampy part in her Keds, dripping wet from the moisture of the bushes. He saw her again at the camp fire, primitively squatting. He felt a huge fondness for her.

  They’d often said that they were not the sort of person either would really choose to spend Christmas or birthdays with, they were making do with each other.

  By bringing Belle with him on his fortieth birthday and on Christmas he had left an ineradicable and inappropriate memory trace across the countryside.

  She was also somehow an embodiment of his great-grandmother, they’d divined that in Katoomba at his great-grandmother’s grave. But this was not his great-grandmother’s territory.

  He was then struck by a splintering observation – the Budawangs and the Blue Mountains of Katoomba were part of the Great Dividing Range but in his head they were different mountains, different districts. His great-grandmother and Belle belonged at Katoomba, the decayed health resort and spa. It was there that his great-grandmother had used her charms and beauty to make her living, her fortune. The Budawangs were where he’d been the boy scout and the army officer.

  The parts still didn’t quite come together.

  He caught up with Belle and touched her fondly.

  ‘Sorry about the mud,’ he said.

  ‘I can cope. I can take it.’

  This was where he’d learned as a boy how to ‘take it’.

  ‘I’ll get you a new pair of Keds.’

  ‘They come from the States.’

  ‘I’ll get a pair sent across.’

  ‘You probably won’t.’

  In a motel on the coast they showered off the mud, dried off the dampness, turned up the air-conditioner to warm and got slowly drunk, sprawled on the floor. Belle with a towel wrapped around her drying hair, in a silk kimono, was like a cat back in habitat.

  He spread out the map of southern New South Wales.

  These are my heartlands, he showed her, the English damp green tablelands of Bowral and Moss Vale, the old goldfields, the lakes of Jindabyne, the new snow resort, down to Bega where my father introduced me to the man who had a library of a thousand books of mystery and the supernatural, to Kiama where my girlfriend from
school and I went for our miserable honeymoon after we married in the hometown Church of England.

  And Milton, where I found ten years of Champion magazine in an old newsagency.

  He told her how he had been a rebellious but highly proficient scout, had played football up and down the coast, had been a soldier on manoeuvres there, had surfed the whole coast, camped out and hunted in all the bush.

  ‘You’re a very sentimental person,’ she said, as she rubbed cream into a scratch on her leg.

  ‘No, I don’t think I am.’

  ‘I think you are.’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘A sentimental drunk, then.’

  ‘There is another territory.’

  He circled the Katoomba and Jenolan Caves district.

  ‘My great-grandmother’s territory.’

  ‘We’ve done that.’

  ‘And there is my grandfather’s territory.’ He circled the town.

  But neither were ever mentioned in this territory, he told her, pointing at the first heartlands circle.

  Belle was leaning on his shoulder pretending an interest, for an instant she became someone else leaning on his shoulder looking at the map, a high-spirited late arrival at a dying party.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, ‘let’s check out now and go back to the city. I think it’s over.’

  Two weeks later he went back to the Budawangs and camped again in the same place, alone. It was a trip to erase the mistake of having gone there with Belle.

  He realised, as he sat there in the bush at Mitchell Lookout, that it was a misguided effort. Coming back to erase it had only more deeply inscribed it.

  Now whenever he passed the place he would think of having gone there with the wrong person, of having taken his great-grandmother into the hard country where she didn’t belong. He would laugh about Belle, squatting there cooking, about the flies on her face, and Belle saying, ‘I feel quite happy about it, Hemingway.’

  From a Bush Log Book 2

  He said on the telephone that he would be using a German solid-fuel stove in the bush.

  ‘I’ll put your father on,’ his seventy-year-old mother said, and he pictured them passing the telephone between them, and he heard her say to his father in a very audible conspiratorial whisper, ‘He says he is going to use a German solid-fuel stove.’ His father came on and said the German solid-fuel stove or any-nationality-fuel stoves were banned.

  What he didn’t say to his father and mother was that he intended to have camp fires regardless of the fire bans. He was now forty and could damn well light a fire, legal or illegal, if he damn well wanted to. And they were disappointing him too with this fire panic. They were bush people who’d brought him up on bush codes of perseverance and on all the bush drills. Why else as a little boy had he crouched shivering and sodden at damp, smoking camp fires blowing his very soul into the fire to get it to flame. Or suffered fly-pestered pink-eye and heat headaches in the dust of summer scout camps, his ears ringing with the madness of cicadas in the hot eucalyptus air, doggedly going about his camp routines. He’d paid. And his family always lit correct fires that caught with the first match. His family knew that the bigger the fire the bigger the fool. He and his family had a pretty good relationship with fire.

  On the way through to the bush he paid them a postponed Christmas visit. It was in fact his second trip to the Budawangs in two weeks. For Christmas he’d gone to the Budawangs with Belle but now felt he needed to go there alone. He wanted now to apologise to the bush for having taken Belle there. Belle had been wrong. Belle belonged in the Intercontinental. No, that wasn’t really it, he wasn’t sure why he wanted to go back into the bush again alone. He’d apologised to Belle for having taken her into the bush where she didn’t belong.

  As he stopped in the driveway of the family home they came out from the sunroom where they’d been waiting for him. His father leaned in the car window and said, ‘It’s a ticking bomb out there.’

  His mother wanted to organise another Christmas dinner, to repeat Christmas for him.

  He begged off, ‘I’ve done a lot of moving about this year – I had my report to do – I have to go back to Canberra to present it to a standing committee – I just need to for a few days – no people. It’s for the good of my soul.’

  His mother understood soul.

  ‘We expected you for Christmas,’ his father said, ‘I can’t see what could be more important than family Christmas.’

  What had been more important than family Christmas had been trying to forget his work on the nuclear fuel cycle, and turning forty. He’d tried with Belle and it had worked except for the bush part. He was going to try the bush part again, alone.

  ‘It’s a very silly move from a number of points of view,’ his father went on as they moved into the house, ‘the ban is total.’

  He said he could smell rain about.

  They didn’t comment. His family didn’t believe that you could ‘smell’ rain. He wasn’t sure that he believed you could smell rain.

  His mother wanted to freeze his steak he’d bought for the bush but he told her not to freeze it.

  He asked her though to mend his jeans – as a way of giving her some part to play.

  ‘You’re old enough to know better,’ his father said, punishing the newspaper with slaps of his hand.

  His mother came back with her sewing basket. ‘I’ll mend it with especially strong cotton,’ she said. ‘My mother used this cotton.’

  ‘Your mother used it – that same reel?’

  ‘You don’t use much of it,’ she said to block his incredulity, ‘so it never runs out.’

  She mended his jeans by hand.

  ‘You shouldn’t go into the bush in old clothes,’ she said, ‘you don’t want clothes falling apart in the bush.’

  He’d not forgotten that dictum.

  ‘I’ve put your steak in the freezer,’ she said, biting the thread through with her teeth.

  Later he excused himself from the room and removed the meat from the freezer.

  After years of opposing frozen food his mother now preferred it. From pre-refrigeration days of her youth, his mother now obsessively feared ‘things going bad’ and in her old age froze everything.

  Regardless of his wishes she put together a repeat of a family Christmas.

  ‘What are you going to eat out there?’ his nephew asked at the meal.

  All questions from nephews and nieces were trick questions.

  ‘Mainly tinned food,’ he said, knowing this would lose him marks.

  ‘You’re not walking far then,’ his nephew said with the smile of the experienced.

  ‘No, I’m not walking far,’ he said, an apology to the whole family for having included any tinned food for a camp. ‘It’s a lazy camp.’

  They didn’t know of such a thing.

  ‘I’ve never carried a can of tinned food into the bush in my life,’ his brother declared, ‘freeze-dried is the go.’

  ‘If he can carry it he can take it,’ his sister said, quoting an infrequently used family dictum; used only to excuse foolishness, eccentricity. It was like an appeal to the High Court on some nearly forgotten constitutional ground. He smiled thankfully at her.

  ‘You won’t be able to heat them,’ his father said, seizing on this as a way of stopping him. ‘How do you think you’re going to heat them with a fire ban on?’

  ‘With this heat they’ll be hot enough to eat straight out of the can.’

  His father grunted.

  ‘You’ll need a hot meal in the evening,’ his mother said, ‘for strength.’

  ‘I think, Mother, he’s old enough to feed himself,’ his sister said, again acting as his advocate.

  ‘Run to the fire and out the other side,’ his nephew said to his father, talking across him, ‘isn’t that the way you handle bush fire?’ His nephew smirked. He now had him trapped in a bush fire.

  ‘If it isn’t burning on the other side,’ his brother said, ‘and if i
t doesn’t have a second front.’

  ‘And that’s if you get through the first wave of fire,’ his nephew said, with an estimating glance at him which indicated that he didn’t think he was the sort of person who would make it through the fire.

  ‘Wet the sleeping bag, unzip it, and pull it over your head,’ he said to the nephew and brother. ‘Isn’t that how it’s done?’

  His brother said yes, if there was enough water around to wet a sleeping bag and if the sleeping bag wasn’t synthetic.

  ‘Don’t try to beat the fire uphill – you won’t,’ his nephew said.

  ‘I wouldn’t try,’ he said to his nephew.

  His nephew obviously thought he was the sort of person who would try. His nephew tossed a nut into the air and caught it in his mouth.

  ‘I know the fastest way to be found if you’re lost in the bush.’

  ‘What’s that?’ His nephew was sceptical.

  ‘You stay where you are, mix a dry martini and within minutes someone will turn up and tell you that you’re mixing it wrong.’

  The table looked at him unsatisfied, and he knew they hadn’t got the joke, they weren’t a martini family and they blamed him, he could tell, for making a joke outside the comfortable boundaries of their shared lore. He’d blundered again. He didn’t handle being a member of a family very well.

  ‘Why are you going?’ his brother asked.

  ‘Foolhardiness,’ his father said.

  He told them he was going to the upper reaches of the Clyde River which he hadn’t done yet in his walking. He wanted to look at Webb’s Crown, a remaining block of plateau around which the river had cut itself on both sides, leaving Webb’s Crown like a giant cake in the middle of the river.

  ‘It’s nothing to look at,’ his nephew said.

  He couldn’t very well say he was going into the bush to apologise to the bush for having taken the wrong person to that part of his metaphorical self. Or that he’d taken his great-grandmother replica into the bush when he should’ve taken her to Las Vegas.

  And when would he be able to go aimlessly into the bush, without plan?

  His family always worked the plan.

  As a kid he’d just ‘gone into the bush’ and one thing suggested another, invitations were issued by caves, clearings, high points, creeks – they all called you to them.