Ricochet

by Robyn Neilson

  The next day the wind had swung around. This time a vicious hot northerly, hitting us head-on and slowing Loup to a snails pace. I waited for him at each desolate rest stop, hoping to find water in the water tanks. To begin with we did. But then as the day wore on, it was clear we were going to run out, and that Loup was in strife.

  ‘Don’t wait for me Frey, just get going and find water!’

  I picture returning to find him covered in ants.

  I myself almost pass out, deciding to rest and wait for the midday sun and infernal wind to move on. Retreating like a dog under a tree. Not a tree with generous leaves, rather a spindly needle arrangement, favoured by city florists bored with flowers… its qualities striking and architectural. Not shady. But if I pushed my head back up against its charred trunk, so that the bark burrowed into my scalp: a calloused hand cupping my crown, that part of me at least was in its shadow. As my brain cooled I semi-dozed, until I was invaded by lines of ants in pursuit of the sweat in the creases of my mouth, eyes, armpits, pubic reservoir.

  Bloody itchy ants saved me from drying up, there and then.

  Pushing on, I turned at the top of a rise and could see Loup diminished in the distance, his gait no longer that of an ice-skater. I kept going, knowing that Coober Pedy must be close. But I was afraid. As the sun began to sink, Loup still hadn’t caught up. A Britz van pulled up opposite me, and a young bleached-hair couple crossed the highway with a coke, snickers and fruit in hand. Right on cue.

  ‘Thanks so much guys, but my boyfriend is back there on roller-blades…he’s really struggling. Maybe you could give him the goodies…but I’d gladly take some water!’

  They gave me water and an orange, and told me I only had 12 kilometres to go. Then they drove on to find Loup, lavishing sustenance upon him.

  We had never felt so blessed.

  Later that night as we lay cramped in my two-man tent on the iron-red dirt of the campground, unable to sleep because of a raucous group of too-merry Germans, Loup bellows in his father’s native tongue “halt mall die schnauzer!”

  Across the unyielding air, there is a sudden low snickering.

  The next day, I rode out with Loup a few hours further along the highway. The red land is carbuncled, punctured by clawing cranes and deep gashes.

  ‘À bientôt’ we bravely said, and I bluffed confidence that we would indeed see each other again. I then rode back and caught the overnight bus home.

  Loup has still not recounted all of his big adventure to me. Apart from when he was forced to recuperate in Alice Springs with a room full of female Swedish backpackers. He stayed there a week as he could hardly walk.

  ‘What else could I do, except wait for my new wheels, rest my aching ankles, and check out my roommates bare arses?’ teased Loup, leaving me wondering on the other end of the phone.

  Our Wedding, December 2008, Descartes Bay.

  “A fantastic figure he always was, half of fun and half of diabolism; with a very slight alteration, he might have sat and stared down, on the top of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.”

  Karen Blixen, ‘Out of Africa’

  Our Wedding is the third thing, which happened a decade later, in a remote Lighthouse in far southwest Victoria. Every minute of those years of separation, I never doubted that Loup was the man. His conviction turned out to be equally tenacious. But it was not until the morning of my 51st Birthday, nine years since we last saw each other, as we awoke in our tent on the side of a French mountain, that Loup finally proposed. Five months later, we had appeased the quaint French legalities; ‘publishing the bans’ of our intended marriage in the local town hall where Loup resided. It was my job to organize the rest, as Loup was tied up with work in France. The week before the big day, I picked Loup and his older brother Pascal up from Melbourne Airport at 2.30am. It was Christmas Eve.

  We drove in the dark up the hills of the Dandenong Ranges, where we would rest for two days. And that is where I first got to know my brother-in-law. Along with Maya, my husky who formed a quick attachment to Pascal, we stayed up talking until 4.30 a.m. When Loup and I awoke late, Pascal was sitting out in the sun, shirt off to feel the full impact of the Australian summer, Maya curved into his side. Pascal appeared modest in character, but not in body. His body was his temple, his vanity, which he worked into a sculpted muscle machine. Unlike his little brother, who took for granted his slender boyish bones and their inherent athleticism.

  We took two days to reach my cottage by the sea. Two days and nights of consolidating a friendship. I did not realize then, just how little time Loup and Pascal had spent together in their homeland as young men or adults. This was a rare time of reconnection for the brothers. However things turned sour when we reached my house. Whilst I had been absent, the rampant garden had pleased itself, and then fallen prey to a windstorm. As had the flies and ants and spiders, sprawled on every surface of the house. I swept and chided. Then got the mower out. Of his own accord, Pascal strode into the shed, found saws and rakes and started attacking the wayward shrubs and fallen branches. Working flat out to get everything in order before my family descended for their one and only visit, I mowed and raked, pruned and raked. Pascal sawed and chopped, hauled and piled. Loup on the other hand sat inside. Dusting off and cleaning all my photos with slow precision. But I could not understand his timing. Went wild with frustration. Not knowing yet how much Loup detested gardening.

  ‘Please honey, can’t you see the mess out here? Dad will be horrified; can’t you come out and help us? Leave the photos, we can all do that tonight when it’s dark!’

  Loup quietly got up, put the photos back on the bookshelf, looked at me with disgust, and if I’d looked more closely, hurt, and left.

  He did not return for hours. A promising prelude to our marriage in two days.

  Managing the next day to somehow put that behind us, we went to see our minister, a childhood friend happy to offer us a ceremony unfettered by my childhood zeal. She was curious to know if we had discussed or written our vows.

  ‘What are they?’ asked Loup, ‘Oh, you mean where the woman has to obey the husband and stay, for better or for worse?’

  We were not sure whether to laugh at the anachronism, or the fact that Loup was serious. Seven years later, one of his standard lines is ‘for what did I marry you, if not to fetch my glass and serve me?’ The French in him plays with the assumption; the cynic in him applauds the joke. And the angelic part off him inspires the will in me to do it. I look back and the laugh is on me; that day before our marriage, because I do serve and sweep and wash for Loup, for better or for worse. And therein lies the rub chaffing away the gift of my emancipation. Unless of course there is the invitation to do a deal: ‘une bonne pipe’ in exchange for a job done.

  Participating in a social event is not Loup’s forté, let alone his own wedding. Although he had been spared many of the arrangements; even choosing our rings together. Over the phone between France and Australia, we had both agreed on simple and inexpensive. So Loup suggested plumbers O-rings would be perfect. He was not joking. When I found myself in front of a Melbourne jeweller who was talking French on the phone to his cousin in Strasbourg, Loup’s hometown, I thought this must be a sign. I put on hold a matching pair of bands. However, they did not appeal to Loup. Now with only twenty-four hours to go, we raced off to a local jeweller, so that I could avoid an O-ring, and help purchase something more meaningful. Or at least more beautiful. We found an antique style ring, and for Loup, his simple band.

  Loup had volunteered for one task; to design and print our invitations. One of his ideas proved offensive to my Australian friends… the facetiousness of his French humour, too much. A favourite game of mine is ‘Hang the Butcher’. I badger Loup to play it in his language, as a way of improving my vocabulary. He does not enjoy it as much as I. Hence, Loup used the stick figure image of himself hanging in a noose, and me looking on with a smug smile, as our wedding invite. Even friends whom I thought had a caustic wit d
idn’t laugh.

  One might conclude, along with Zena and my mother when they suggested that ‘perhaps I had persuaded Loup into marriage’, that in fact they and the sceptics were right. My own insecurities needed no further encouragement, so when I put this to Loup, he sighs, bored by the doubting,

  ‘Freya, have you ever known me to do something I haven’t wanted to do? I have thought about this for a very long time…je suis sûr et certain. Je crois dur comme fer. Firm as iron. By the way, chérie…?’

  This is true, that Loup is immovable; truer than any other discovery I have since made about him. Once, out of the blue years later, when I was chopping up timber palettes to feed our pot belly in the hut, Loup looked up from his calculator and said,

  ‘I have only one regret Freya, that I didn’t marry you sooner.’

  Despite all of these seeming contradictions, our day dawned: a brush of bold blue after a week of grey. A brisk south-easterly ruffled the white caps way out to the horizon. Friends and family worked together to create a feast at the foot of the Lighthouse…. fabulous in every way. We had a guide who might have swaggered off a galleon centuries ago, to take us all up to the big light. Thirty of us in heels, bow ties and hats, champagne flutes teetering, silken scarves, and me dressed up in my grandmother’s cotton lace petticoat. Our excitement floated, our best fabrics furling up the steep spiral stairs. We burst out as if from a chimney, the daylight on top blinding. Clutching the iron railing outside as the wind blew each hair-do asunder, we huddled against the curve of the white stone, small children clinging to the legs of our fathers, our gaze steeled by the sea pounding below. We put our fingers to our faces, wiping away the wet spume as it buffeted high in white puffs. In unison, we gasp as someone yells,

  ‘Look there, Blue Whales!’

  Mesmerised by their plumes of spray… by the magnitude beneath that we figured to be a mother and two calves, surprisingly close in.

  ‘That is a real sign, the best wedding gift’, says our whale biologist friend. ‘Our team has been searching for a month; we knew they’d arrived from Antarctica, but we couldn’t sight any! And here they are… for you.’

  Little did I know, that around the other side of the narrow balustrade, another gasp ensued. Our guests watched in disbelief as Pascal leapt, agile as a monkey, up onto the railing, camera in hand. He was not holding on to any support. Nothing. Nothing at all to prevent him from plummeting the sixty feet below onto the rocks, down through those flimsy white puffs of spray, his corporeal temple to be dragged away in shards by the unknowing waves. Preserved in an Antarctic iceberg. Or carried under a container ship that Loup and I have since watched leaving our sister cities, Melbourne and Marseille. To end as un grain de sable in a La Ciotat sandcastle.

  Loup and I learn of Pascal’s tightrope act later.

  ‘Pascal has always shown off like that….’ says Loup, matter-of-fact. ‘He’s always taken risks, walked out beyond where there was no scaffolding…. Tempting fate.’

  But those who saw Pascal balance on that Lighthouse railing on the day of his little brother’s wedding, did not see this as an act of bravado. They saw it as an act of a man for whom the idea of death was ho-hum. We did not know then how intimate death and Pascal had become.

  The Hut, Chemin de Verdeleau, Provençe. Spring 2015.

  “And what a congress of stinks!

  Roots ripe as old bait,

  Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,

  Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.

  Nothing would give up life:

  Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.”

  Theodore Roethke.

  The Hut is where memories took hold. Where I surrendered to their nagging to be written down, to be re-lived. Because let’s face it, living a vivid life wasn’t fucking happening. Visitors were not coming. Visiting was for the brave. Insistent memories, tired trees, scarified ground and birds retreating from the scalding light or the lashing rain; these are my sole and alien companions.

  When, three years ago I first saw the photo of the hut on ‘Le Bon Coin’ (an equivalent trading post to the Australian ‘Gum Tree’) I was both repelled and intrigued. The vague violet contour of hills behind, the vagrant bush and the vast space surrounding the ugly box called to me. To Loup, it was the low rent which called. For a month we had been frequenting caravan parks, searching for mobile homes to rent. They were either wedged between the concrete ramps of freeways, or imprisoned under a giant web of power pylons. Loup needed to be within commuting distance to work, so a prettier rural location was out of the question. Moreover, the rental of these mobile homes was far dearer than even the payments on our little apartment in La Ciotat. But time was running out, the settlement date on the flat was soon. Loup’s anxiety was at tipping point. The precariousness of his business had ambushed our lives. We would do anything to save it.

  ‘Charmante mobile-maison à louer. Vue impregnable sur Les Alpilles. Un très bon affair!’

  Charming was French irony at it’s best. As was the brazen claim a very good deal! Yes, I was charmed by our drive past the autumn-tinted olive groves, vineyards cloaked in white nets and rambling stone ruins. By the sheep and their shepherd in the fields by the canal, by the bridge which led us to a lumpy limestone track, by the old lantern hanging in the dwarf oak tree at the turn off to our new home.

  But.

  ‘Putain,what the hell?’ hissed Loup, on sighting the derelict pile.

  ‘Sshh,’ I pleaded, ‘look at the setting!’

  A man whose burnished skin blended with the tree trunks, a young woman and two girls waited by the fence. The adults incongruously dressed in white pants, and white shoes… the woman hobbling over the stone in her high heels. They both wear heavy gold chains. His hangs across his white t-shirt which said “Droit au But”, also in gold, across the familiar Marseille soccer insignia.

  ‘Bonjour’, he smiled and in a nasal accent, ‘Monsieur Renard, but call me Léon.’

  We followed him to the mobile home. Which was no longer mobile, and had not been a home for twenty-five years.

  The walls were vomit-yellow stucco, and seemed to be dripping with a residue of the same. There were large cracks and kicked-in holes and the chassis on which the whole putrid thing hunkered was rusty and riddled with weeds. The windows were broken and their shutters hung skewed, green paint peeling off like sorry scabs. Brown stains leached out from the roof, giving the appearance of the inside of an old toilet bowl.

  Definitely not bloody charming.

  ‘Jesus I can’t even reach the door’ I said to Loup under my breath.

  Léon hurried to my aid, ‘Allez-y, go ahead Madame,’ as he grabbed one arm and Loup the other, hoisting me up the 70 cm from the ground. Through the front door is too kind. For a start, only one half of the glass door had actual glass in it. As I kneeled then stood, my hands and feet dislodged whole tribes of insects. Spiders and ants and scorpions and wasps perfectly at home here.

  Loup and I looked askance at each other. We could not see the floor or the walls because everything was coated in grime. Black and sticky as bitumen. Ripped bags of cement and piles of rotting timber and broken furniture and fermenting garbage. The once granny-smith- green of the bathtub was now coal-tarred, and where the pipes carrying water had once been, cockroaches and bad odours reigned freely. We jumped back out through the door, to the rush of sweet autumn decay in the air outside. I knelt on a mound of pinecones; pressing bunches of thyme and rosemary to my nose.

  ‘Yes, we’ll take it’, we said unequivocally to Léon Renard. Our friendly part-gypsy landlord gave us a month of access, rent free, to get the place inhabitable.

  ‘I love it’ I said unflinching, as a small spider crawled up my leg. Knowing that back home, any spider crawling up my leg was cause for phobic alarm. We drove back through fields of receding colours, traversing one side of Marseille to the other, to pack up our tiny bricks and mortar apartment. In the steps of the three little pigs, ch
oosing to build our house instead on rust and sand.

  Quatre saisons in one room.

  Summer has by now arrived in the stark hills, merciless and mercurial. Each season imposes a new character on our hut. Like litmus paper, we lie and absorb the onslaught of each new personality. I have learnt that our first season, Automne, was the gentlest. Printemps is always welcome, but there is a price to pay for her crazy youth. Hiver and Été are by turns equally severe.

  The south of France is a cauldron, and soon the sky will shatter and fork down, followed by an unprecedented three-day torrent of rain. My first weeks of relentless scrubbing and painting, Loup’s leftover plastic flooring and orange laminex, a miniature pot belly from Strasbourg, colourful cane baskets, the photographed faces of family and a large charcoal drawing of a wolf, have elevated the hut from putrid to homely. In our eyes, at least.

  We still have no power or plumbing or water. But we have Nature. To my horror, I will discover a déception: my fidelity to Mother Nature will be tested, as her inescapable presence verges on oppressive.

  Looking out at the rain, old memories swell with the wood left out in the wet too long. Lightning memories. When I was a child a neighbouring school playground was struck, and a boy died. Working my first summer job in a fire tower, an electric storm singled out my perch in the sky and as I dropped to the floor, an obscenity leapt from deep in my throat into the communications radio. ‘Death by lightning’ therefore seems an imaginative way to lose one’s life. Either that, or mercenary and simple. Now, Loup tells me of four men killed on the one day in neighbouring Drome whilst out whipper-snippering. And then I hear on the radio of a birthday party of eight-year olds, terrorised and gravely injured by lightning in a Paris park. As if to confirm the alarming fact that children are not exempt from the treachery of nature. Once, exploring in the ranges behind my new home in Auriol, I cowered for hours under thorns, my haunches braking into the sticky clay. The track turned traitor. Lightning stalked. Travelled all the way from that distant day on the red-Outback highway to this slippery slope of European-green, just to remind me of how small I am.