Ricochet

by Robyn Neilson

  So again to the mountains I flee, complete with tent, hiking stove, backpack, boots, and my trusted beech baton. This time I take a folding chair, pillows, two solar lamps, and an esky. Luxuries I can afford now that I am not lugging everything on my back. A bottle of Talisker is wedged between my sleeping bag and thermarest mattress. I return for a second attempt on the peak where Loup and I had failed. And this time I make it.

  Wonderland is again exhilarating. Stupidly I run out of water. And daylight. Clambering over the lunarscape in the dark. Pitching my tent by head torch and starlight under the shelter of a pinkish monolith, an uncanny heart-shaped rock leans in a corner as if purposefully placed there. Once again at altitude, I do not sleep, unable to get warm. The next day, finding a residual bank of snow, scraping off the dusting of dirt beside the chamois footprints, I dig down and retrieve fistfuls of transparent white, shoving the slightly salty coldness into my parched mouth. I heat the snow on my stove, desperate for my first cup of tea in 24 hours. Hoping like hell I don’t run out of gas. Snow takes time to boil.

  On the way up, I passed by the yellow stripy man and his sunny refuge, and thought for one macabre minute of one of my favourite fiction characters, Gretje Reyniers who rued the fact she could never make her husband jealous. I cast back to Loup’s and my explosive fight on the mountainside. And realise it was the closest my husband has ever come to showing jealousy. A dark cloud of thought: does Loup not introduce me to his friends because he too fears his own inner monster? But I have no desire to play Gretje.

  In fact, the beaming girl who serves iced drinks straight out of the cascade, a chatty group of older hikers and a charming younger couple, are more appealing to me than vapid flirting with the mountain-man. Although I do suppress a motherly urge to remove a flake of snot from his nose, and then feel completely exonerated, when he tells me in his sunny, surprising way that ‘C’est incroyable, my wife lives near to you, à Lancon en Provençe!’ Again I am shamed by the obvious fact that there are so many like-minded French people at hand, potential friends: which I have not made.

  Wonderland sets the stage for revolt. Two weeks have passed, and I have not gone back to our hut. Scant French conversation with fellow hikers is the food I have craved. Better than pain au chocolat, better than our mechanical sex. So, I stay in the cool of my tent, and Loup comes to visit me on the weekends. And our sex takes on its old intensity; we actually have conversations, discover new things about each other. Laugh. Breathe.

  We both know that things had broken down too far. More than the water in our canal, I am calmed by the mystery and camaraderie in the mountains. Despite being alone each day and night, I find it enough to exchange smiles and bonjours and map-sharing along the track. Almost. Homesickness is still a sickness. But up here in these mountains, the air is something to gulp. Sometimes the air is too pure, and I want to throw up. Sometimes the edge up high is too close. Sometimes I fear the vertical drop will not arrest my fall. But it is a fear of being alive, of knowing at last what it is about this place called France that I would miss if it were whisked away.

  ‘You would have loved it here Pascal’, I call, projecting my small voice out into Wonderland.

  ‘You should never have left.’

  Final Return to the hut, Autumn 2015.

  “Didn’t I tell you

  What I believe

  Did somebody say that

  A love like that won’t last

  Didn’t I give you

  All that I’ve got to give baby.”

  Sade No Ordinary Love.

  After my ‘treatment’ in the mountains, I return for one final week in the hut. Cure thermale is what the French government generously treat their elderly to once a year. A treatment of thermal baths and daily walks under the cool of a forest canopy; and a restricted but nutritional buffet. Thank Christ I’m not there yet, I’d have to smuggle in the scotch, as old Madame Gardon did… whenever I cleaned for her, I found cognac stashed in the corners of every room.

  I choose to leave Wonderland on dusk, stretching the return drive to five hours, wanting it to never end. I hug the old tar, the minor roads, and they snail me up and down, sidling la rive of a turquoise lake big as a sea, now ink-black under the night sky. Farther along, approaching the hamlet of Le Vernet, I slow to second gear to silence the engine, my thoughts silenced by the giant massifs, custodians of one hundred and forty-nine passengers.

  Emerging into the broad river valley, I switch the radio channel from France Inter, too hip with an emission on the London psychedelic scene, to the intimacy of France Culture. Favouring going slow, I glide between the narrow-gutted villages of Haute-Provence and a replayed interview with Jacques Tati makes me laugh and cry and feel something else overwhelming: a wave of sobriety and sadness. And enchantment. Enchantment for my foreign home; for the whirl of unknown words, the sensation of being lost each day, not just in the mystery-mountains, but also in the most familiar of places. The village boulangerie or pharmacie for example, where an unexpected question will suddenly flounder me. For so long I confused this floundering with being lost, but now I realise it has been a gift to feel lost, to forage in this undergrowth of unknown words, endlessly roaming for clues. The irony is that as soon as I exit my solitary roam, I will regret the ordinariness of knowing all the words. Being held captive by doubt for six years is, in fact more rewarding.

  Déception, Autumn 2017, Australia.

  My ricocheting between Australia and France retracts, landing me abruptly back home: the knot looks different from the inside. The mystery of a ‘homeland’ deepens. Now I have nostalgia for the land of France, which is another kind of homesickness. A mal de pays for a budding green; fungal smells that I cannot find here, a certain tone of speech that is more like song, these nuances, which secrete themselves in accidental meaning, is the essence I feared losing. Along with the voices of France Inter. This is a new sadness.

  But I’ve escaped the particular madness of homesickness, which I reflect was of course a madness of choice: I chose to follow my husband to another country, chose to uproot myself. I have no concept of the horror of being stolen, or chased by war out of my homeland. Therefore I wonder if my descent into dislocation was disproportionately dark. Lured by Pascal. And now, the fusty room Pascal inhabited is instead replete with the life of the living. Rather than the tinnitus of his presence, I hear a gentle percussion like the wafting of my neighbour’s wind chimes outside our Melbourne terrace. The simple joy I feel at walking the seven minutes past trams and pubs and op shops and sourdough bakeries to my daughter’s house, a happy place where I inhale the baby scalp of my new grandson; this is life itself.

  Of Loup, I am less certain. For he is now living the drama of proving himself in a foreign land. Of course he had already done that in his audacious dare to dissect Australia from south to north on roller-blades. But such heroism, even if for the audience of himself alone, is irreconcilable with the drabness of daily life. We are tested. That brave couple I imagined us to be, whose more than ordinary love could withstand six or seven months apart over a period of nine years and the merest of contact, (Loup did not believe in Skype, or seeing each other on a screen); that couple it turns out, are running out of time.

  A foolish conceit: this is no no ordinary love.

  Strangely hotter than summer. I am driving down from those blue-violet hills where Pascal Loup and I first trespassed, nine Christmases ago. Their rise and fall not unlike the Provence hills, my distant twilight companions. Now, winding down through a forest of Mountain Ash, I am dizzy from looking up. I can barely see the sky between. Up close, these hills are alive in a different way from Les Alpilles. Here, is a rainforest of ferns taller than trees with chameleon Lyrebirds hiding in the dense understory; there, was an arid rocky spine where nothing could hide and all things were illuminated. Reluctant, the car and I leave the canopy, landing in a flat bitumen-bound city where rage sizzles along the road. This Monday, any excuse will do. Déjà vu strikes, and
for a panicking moment, I am back on the Autoroute in France, incapable of matching the mad race. But I am fuelled by duty and desire. As I now have four grandsons. The first, Oliver, who was in my heart at the conception of this writing, and whose absence broke me as I ricocheted between two worlds, is now visiting from across another vast space between our Australian cities.

  My pace quickens with my need to hold babies Theo and Jacob and read stories to cousins Flynn and Ollie. It may be a trope, but there is no greater joy than the wet mouths of your grandchildren on your parched face. No greater gift than their perfect hands seeking out your own flawed. My second chance to be a better mother. My old friend Zena and my mother judged it right: I did near fuck it up the first time. As I walk the leafy glittering streets of Melbourne’s inner north, pushing Flynn and Ollie along in a double pram, I re-discover parks and playgrounds and bike paths and revel in the enduring ‘Monkey Grip’ sensation of my hometown. The intoxicating blend of old hippies, new hipsters and their offspring; of elderly Italians growing Roma tomatoes on their nature strip, of the charming mix of Edwardian and Victorian row houses, some quirky with the random collections of student households, of tattooed girls on bikes with flower pots in the front pannier, of the smell of good coffee served by bearded baristas, and what feels like laid-back acceptance, everywhere. A kind of suspension of judgement that I rarely felt in the cities of France, although Marseille always seemed a little different. There, it seemed possible to avoid the expectations of being à la mode.

  My grandsons and I find ourselves passing a bar where I would frequently meet my inebriated boyfriend. Seeing my sixty year old face reflected in the glass, pushing the innocents in their stroller, I am shocked to see I am the same woman who had sex in that bar.

  ‘G-g, it’s like the outback!’

  Exclaims Ollie as we wheel from Park Street alongside Merri creek. The bushy trails are a crackled lemon-scented summer-brown; that unique perfume which protects us from our city. And then in the opposite direction, we roll along the bike path toward Royal Park, an elevated oval of tinder dry grass, of ghost gums and gallahs nesting in fallen logs and ants foraging under creamy paper-bark; the soaring glass towers of commerce so close and yet so far. We are on aboriginal land; strolling their sacred skin. Ollie and Flynn are surprised to see a couple of homeless men, encamped under bowering silver branches. But that is the best place to make a home, I tell them.

  ‘You are a wonderful mother,’ I say to my other visiting daughter later that evening, as I pick up random pieces of Lego and squashed spaghetti, in an attempt to diffuse an old argument, which taunts us. The part of my ego still afloat presumes this naturally implies that in part, I was a good mother to her.

  And what of Loup? He who sails through life, untethered; un-mothered, un-fathered, without having fathered a child himself? He is free from all judgement. Free of ugly comparisons with his genetic determinants. He is all of his own nature, no nurture. Or so he believes. And I have placed Loup high on the pedestal I made for him. At my lowest point, he saved me from further stupidity with men and years later, when I sat alone in my car on a dismal rainy afternoon, overlooking the ships in the harbour, working far from home, I struggled to compose a Birthday letter for the Frenchman I had met, loved and lost, and carefully bubble-wrapped two small Aboriginal paintings of a yabby and a goanna.

  Speak to him, I intoned.

  I counted the days… an express-post delivery and return…. at the best, nine or ten days. On the eighth night setting off for work, I drove the four kilometres along my limestone track before the tar. A storm was brewing, and the Cape, sea and sky were a stew of steel. I rounded the corner where half a dozen DIY letterboxes sat precariously on posts, their metallic numbers and decorative touches dislodged by the wind. If I stopped I would be late. I hesitated then the car lurched and stalled, the wind almost ripping the door off its hinges. My letterbox was a red enamel retro-rubbish bin, with a slit cut into its side. I had wired the lid onto one handle, so that it could be easily levered open. Salt air had rusted every edge. But it was still the cutest box. Once, I lifted the lid and a huge huntsman dropped down onto the mail. Please God, no huntsman tonight. Please God, let it be Loup.

  And it was. His childlike printed hand, the familiar French stamps of our long ago correspondence. I was late for work, but I did not care. My world was now transformed. Six months later at Loup’s invitation, I was sitting on the TGV from Paris to Marseille. I had landed from Melbourne without so much as a follow-up phone-call. Not even a text to confirm that the man I had not seen in nine years would indeed be at the Gare Saint Charles waiting for me. I just had to have faith. And there he was, older and more tired than I remember, not from naturally ageing, but from the kind of fatigue you get from relentless work; from mental exhaustion. But when, like two nervous teenagers he drove me back to his blue-door stable and shyly we made love, the boy I remember reappeared.

  My daughter observes plaintively that I don’t have a home. She has a point. I do have a tiny house, but someone else lives there. Someone else wakes up to the sun bucking on the white of the waves as they gallop the sweep of the Bay. Someone else falls asleep up in the attic as it creaks like a timber Galleon, listening to the rain on the tin roof, just inches from their head. However, I had learnt in France that my home was born of the chemins upon which I walked. I re-learn here in my country that home is a temporal thing. And that ‘my country’ has never been mine: that as the old Aunties say, we belong to the land, it does not belong to us.

  And what of Pascal? I imagine my Father and he in silent collusion somewhere; a sacred, scorching, ordinary place, where in times of wretched self-doubt I can retreat. Too late, I realize that the hut in France was one such place. And that all the plans we attempt but fail to make since, all the struggles Loup faces in this new land, are in need of that familiar entrapment, that modest pared-back comfort.

  For now that Loup and I are here, finally, we are hounded by a lack of forgiveness and from the debt that sucks him dry. We dream desperate dreams to build our own little hut, far from anywhere, upon a limestone cliff, battered by winds from Antarctica, isolated in a field of tall grass and twisted trees beside a broken shore, where kangaroos throng and snakes slither and birds sing, all night long, as they did in France.

  But in fact what happens is far less poetic. History repeats its pattern: Loup packs his things and walks out. Just like his father had, thirty-five years ago. Gone, erasing all that faith bestowed upon him, the pedestal in ruins. The déception we risked, a foregone conclusion.

  Epilogue, Winter 2017.

  “I will show you a field of zebra finch

  Dreaming in the shadow of the puli puli ochre

  When the soft blanket of language hums

  Kinship and campfires flavour windswept hair”

  Ali Cobby Eckermann, Yankunytjatjara Love Poems

  Six days after Loup disappeared, I returned from one job and home to another, to find in the winter dark a bundle of his clothes out on the lawn. But it was not his clothes; it was Loup himself inside his clothes, spread-eagled face down, the grass wet with dew around his ears. Dropping to my knees beside him, I had visions of Pascal and held my breath in trepidation as I turned him over. Please please God no damage. Sweet Jesus, no!

  Loup was unmarked. But he was slow to awake, as if he were a very long way away. When he did open his eyes, it was as if he’d been asleep for a long time. He could only mutter broken things in French. It was so bitterly cold I was shaking and he was hypothermic, a dead weight. I hauled him clumsily up the grassy slope and with much effort, up the steps. Turning the heater on high, I wrapped him in a doona and rubbed and hugged and chided him, weeping all the time. He kept asking ‘qu-est ce que se passé?’ as if he had absolutely no idea of what had happened, or how long he had been lying on the ground in the dark. Apparently he had no recollection of leaving, of packing up all his possessions here in the hills, and then doing the same down in Melbourne. Taki
ng every care to avoid being in each place when he knew I would be for work: playing cat and mouse. Apparently Loup had no memory of removing his wedding ring and leaving it beside my earrings in the Carlton bedroom. No memory of how he got from the hills to the City and back again. No memory of his four-page letter I find here on this frost-bound winter night. But only have the courage to flip from the first words of recriminations to the last lines:

  ‘Freya, I have always loved you and always will’.

  ‘We must get you to a hospital,’ I keep urging, but Loup refuses to move. As I peel off his sodden shoes socks and trousers, all the while rubbing the circulation back into his limp legs feet arms and hands, I feel like the Pietà. Loup had mislaid six days of his life, or else he refused to remember. Either way, I was in shock as he then makes love with such urgency it rattles me. The entire episode remains a mystery, but I am grateful that we are granted another chance: I do not wish to unravel what appears a simple gift of grace.

  A few weeks later, we return full circle to the desert as a way of mending; pedalling our bikes, lumping our camping gear and enormous amounts of water. This is the thing we are made for; the thing we are made to do together. And we are challenged in every way possible: the endless red sand, spinifex sun and stars become our solitary habitat as we tackle corrugations, river rock, bull-dust, gravel, head-wind and deep sand for miles; placing our hands on ancient yellow-ochre hands, sleeping wild under an infinite black sky, bringing us back to our beginning. Making love with red in our hair and the scratching of the earth down our spine.