My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

  The clock on the cafe wall ticks loudly. It’s still another couple of hours ’til I have to meet Terri. I trawl the streets, making up stories about the lives of the people I pass: the teenage pram pushers, the shop assistants on lunchtime errands, the wrinkled women in shapeless floral dresses and orthopedic shoes gossiping outside the bakery. Few acknowledge me. I fantasise about being taken home by one of them, wrapped in their patchwork quilt and fed chicken soup. I would tell them my plan, and they would laugh and tell me not to be silly, to stay with them instead.

  Schoolkids overtake me, bags thumping against their backs as they race to be the first home. Mum waits by the gate, chatting to the mum next door. They all look so goddamn smug in their safe routines – the afternoon raid on the fridge, the TV cartoons, dinner at six, Dad home soon. Isn’t that kind of complacency why I left? I left to find a simple life in the bush, but maybe what I need is the simplicity of a sun-filled verandah with a couch and a dog and a good book, a toy on the shelf for my nieces and nephew, a trellis of climbing beans, a candle on the windowsill for me to light at dusk.

  Why do I seem to want such conflicting things in life? It’s all so confusing.

  I run into the library and pound out an email.

  What are the most effective practices for change? For connection with the mystery, for cultivating wisdom and clarity? Does transformation necessitate sacrifice? Is harder better? How do we know when we need to push through resistance, and when to allow ourselves to just be? How do we follow our hearts?

  I type in the names of six of my wisest women friends.

  Tomorrow morning at first light, I walk out into the wilderness for four days and nights seeking answers to these questions, seeking a way to be most awake and alive in this world. I am scared and confused. Please hold me in your hearts.

  PS Reply by post.

  With a sigh I click send, knowing their replies will come too late to help me on my quest.

  I trudge back up the street. An unusual woman walks towards me. Her hair is pulled back in a low bun, tight ringlets escaping to frame her round face. She looks at me intently with dark eyes, hesitates, and then gently touches my arm. I stop.

  “This is going to sound strange, but I’m a clairvoyant, and I just had a flash of you sitting in a cave, like one of those Indian sadhus. I’m not sure why, but I felt like I needed to tell you.”

  “Oh, okay. That’s … thanks,” I stumble.

  I’m silent on the way back to The Block.

  Terri drops me off at the bridge.

  “Good luck,” she says, “I’ll be thinking of you.”

  I feel sick as I squeeze out a goodbye, knowing she is the last person I will see for another five days. I’ve already left a note at the kitchen, telling everyone not to expect me for a few days. My steps up the path are leaden, my belly a tight ball of tension. A willy-willy gusts around my ankles. I swallow back the sense that I’m an abandoned child, lost in the woods.

  Ryan swings out of his shelter path and onto the trail. His walk is measured and smooth, still floating on quest cloud nine. Damn. There’s no point hiding, he’s seen me.

  “Hey, heard you’re heading out,” he says, walking towards me.

  “Yep, sparrow’s fart tomorrow. My turn for the sledgehammer,” I say, attempting lightness.

  “How ya feeling?” he asks, his face calmly inquisitive.

  “A bit scared, you know, the usual resistance, I guess,” I say, the word “resistance” slamming into my chest like a demolition ball.

  “Do you really want to do it?”

  Don’t go there, Ryan, I plead silently, as the lump in my throat threatens to choke me. I look down and roll loose stones under my boot.

  “’Cause you don’t have to, you know. There’s nothing to prove here.”

  I double over, exploding with a loud sob.

  Ryan pulls me up, my head collapsing onto his chest. “Shh,” he says, smoothing down my hair.

  “I … just can’t do it, Ryan. I don’t know … what I need to do …” I stammer out between sobs. “You did … you did it.”

  “Yeah, but I had to quit first.”

  I collapse in a fresh bout of tears. “I thought I wanted to … I just don’t know … who I am anymore.”

  Ryan cups my face in his hands so that I’m forced to look at him.

  “Claire, listen to me,” he says, more serious than I have ever seen him. “Your presence is stunning. If you could only see how beautiful you are when you’re just being yourself. You change people just by being you.”

  For a second it is my grandmother and not Ryan standing in front of me. Thank you for being you.

  Like a knife piercing the fog, I suddenly see myself through Ryan’s eyes, through my grandmother’s, the perfection already there, waiting for me to realise it. I don’t need a sledgehammer. All I need to do is blow with the gentlest of breaths.

  “I quit,” I say quietly. “I quit, I quit, I quit, I quit!” I yell, throwing up my arms.

  “I quit.” I laugh this time. Ryan takes my hands and spins me around, spins until we both collapse onto our backs, a pair of silly quitters, wise fools, lying on the gravel, howling with laughter, the kookaburras picking up our refrain and running with it ’til day’s end.

  5.

  I wake at first light with a stabbing fear, forgetting I had quit. The remembrance spreads through me like bush honey, sweet and runny. I spring out of bed to greet the day, looking around to see what I missed during last week’s self-absorption. Like magical beanstalks, the new grasstree flowers have grown at least a foot.

  “Eee-choong!” A rufous whistler flits in to show me it has returned for the summer.

  “I’m back tooooo,” I sing in reply.

  Jumping up on the log, I’m a gymnast on the beam, scissor kicking and toes pointing, chest puffed out and arms lifted in finale. Wattlebirds hiccup in applause. Bowing, I take a running leap from the log up the trunk of the scribbly gum, returning as a barefoot Charlie Chaplin, with a stick cane and bark hat, tapping in the dirt. I’m a pole dancer around a tree, gyrating to the hoot of the kookaburra. I’m a jazz ballerina, hands circling in dramatic twirling waves. The day is mine, all mine, to do whatsoever my heart desires.

  I stop and tip my face to the rising sun. So, then, what do I want to do with this day? My breathing is the slow swell of the sea.

  Turning, I walk back into my shelter and calmly begin to fill a small pack – water bottle, rolled blanket, sandals, fire-kit, bandage, an apple, nuts and a sweet potato. Winking at the Wild Woman, I duck under my doorway, pad down my shelter trail, past the empty Gunyah and out of camp. If my pack is light, my plans are even lighter. All I know is I’m walking. Wandering. Perhaps overnight, perhaps longer. I don’t know, and I don’t want to. Right now, I just want to feel my feet moving across the earth, before the doubts and the plans can catch me, before I try to pin them down with meaning. I would probably have made the same tracks had this been my official Wandering Quest. But it is not that. How glad I am not to be that woman on the trail today. I’m a little nervous, a little excited, but keep my thoughts firmly on the step of one foot in front of the other, in the appreciation of waking birdsong and the open horizon ahead.

  Snake Creek has been flushed clean by spring rains, the water jostling around my shins as I cross. Out on the heath track, my feet veer south-west. I hesitate slightly but continue. The faint tyre tracks peter out at the broken fence, as I knew they would. From here on in there are no tracks, just kilometres of seemingly identical ridges, sandstone clefts and rainforest gullies of the wilderness reserve. I rarely venture here, the land of lost borders on my adventure map. Looking back in the direction I came from, I snap a twig from a shrub as I step into the unfamiliar, as much a farewell as an announcement of my presence on new country. The rising sun is a steady
friend as I walk, notwithstanding the vagaries of weaving between grasstrees and granite boulders, ducking under tea-tree thickets and vines.

  I climb incidentally, sneaking sideways up to the ridge. After many false summits, by mid-afternoon I end up on a wide rock of granite, looking out over a deep valley to a twin cliff in the west. I feel like I’ve been here before. In fact, I’m sure I remember this rock. It can’t be. Oh my God, it is – there’s the ring of stones from our fire. I’ve walked back to the exact place where Nikki, Chloe and I spent autumn equinox.

  It looks like no-one has been up here since. I take off my pack and stretch. Pardalotes contact-call in the forest canopy. Clouds throw moving shadows across the granite. The winter coats of blackbutt are strewn messily over the rocks, as if shed in a moment of passion. It’s more beautiful than I remember, quieter and older. The Block seems a universe away. A single raven launches itself across the valley, its cawing slow and mournful. The rustle of leaves above invites rather than interrupts the stillness. I realise I’m holding my breath. If I was wearing a watch, I’d check that the second hand was still ticking. I can imagine time losing its way up here, slipping between cracks in the rocks, in the spaces between birdsong, minutes turning into days and years into minutes. What’s six years to this mountain, or 60,000 years, for that matter? Barely more than a rippling and crumbling of stone. In some ways it feels like yesterday that I was up here; in others, it feels much longer than the six months, the image I have of myself then as someone years younger. I had just finished my shelter and was itching to be alone. And here I am, solo, just as I wanted. Maybe just as the land wanted too.

  Come on, every mystic needs a roof.

  I haul my sore feet up and look around for a site. The sun quickly slips as I stack rib-bone sticks along the sides of a long pole, which I snap between the fork of a tree and wedge against a rock. I hum as I work, orioles rolling their rs through the valley. It’s already starting to feel homely – it’s amazing what a few sticks thrown together can do. The shelter looks a bit like the skeleton of a beached whale. It’s going to be more psychological protection than anything. I would need at least half a metre of leaf litter to keep me dry, let alone warm, and that’s clearly not going to happen on this ridge. Still, better some than none. Propping up a latticework of wattle against the ribs, I collect what leaves I can find and tip them on, topping it off with a patchwork quilt of bark. Stuffing a mattress of leaves inside, two scorpions scuttle out. Not my perfect idea of bed mates.

  The sun is still a couple of handspans away from the cliffs. The fireplace has held one sacred fire and tonight will hold another.

  Despite the waning light, I take my time, choosing each stick carefully, turning it over in my hands as I summon the qualities of each direction. I don’t have to imagine or make them up now. I know them as scents and sounds, as friends with personalities – the sly southerly creeping in on cirrus clouds and huddling me close to the hearth, the north-east sunrise warming my cold face in winter, the burnt-out smell of summer’s westerly. I bed them down like compass bearings on the rock, the foundation upon which all else stands. Circling the fireplace I set the kindling, not so much holding a question as extending a prayer down through my arms and into each stick.

  The sun flings out its last net for the day, catching the bent backs of the tussock grass and staining them gold, like the webs of the golden-orb spider above. I cast my own net, an upturned hat catching the fine powder of stringybark crushed between my palms, the stamens of spent banksia flowers. I mix the ingredients like a cake batter, holding them to my cheek to check for moisture, before sprinkling them into the bracken-fern bowl. I pull the icing on the cake from my pocket – the head of a bulrush flower that I collected on the way – and pluck the fluff to line the heart of the bundle.

  The hand-drill stalk held upright between my palms is another directional marker, pointing up where the four directions dissolve into the limitless, into the endless circular turnings of the stars and seasons and all other mysteries. A coal slips out like the fifth child.

  With my face centimetres from the tiny glow, I feel as if I could be looking into the eye of the big bang moments before the explosion, swirling with the same creative potential, aroused by the same evolutionary drive for life, for being. Perhaps it was this very force that brought me out to the forest, the same one that wills me now to transfer the smoking coal into the bundle, to hold it above my head as if in offering, and give it three long, steady breaths of life. It flickers for a moment, then roars into flame. Shadows skip and sway through the forest. The fire is unusually bright, lighting up the white backs of the trees, the rocks. A burning stick arches itself in ecstasy, moments before collapse.

  Prying out some early coals, I place them in the nook of a small hollow branch, cover them with green gum leaves and stick the branch inside the shelter. Smoke fissures the bark. Panicked scuttles and scratches reveal themselves as lines of bugs in mass exodus. I hope the scorpions are amongst them. Squeezing myself inside, the crackle of the fire lulls me to sleep.

  In my dream, the fire has gone out. I’m desperately trying to restart it, but the coals are too small. Wild dogs inch closer as they see my futile struggle. I want to run away but instead run towards the pack. To my surprise they scatter. I realise they are much smaller than I thought, no threat at all. One dog morphs into a young man, tall and steady. We find a dead chicken and eat it together, my hunger finally sated.

  *

  I wake and can only guess at the hour. The kingdom of night insects gives me clues. There is a point at which its symphony changes, seesawing back and forth like a DJ merging tracks, signalling the liminal time, when it is no longer night but not yet morning. I catch it now as the insects pause, as if recalibrating, soon settling into a new syncopated rhythm, like fingers thrumming on a table. I shift my sore hips and poke my head out of the shelter. A yellow crescent moon has risen. My heart stirs and thumps awake. It has its own rhythm too, its own language, which I have been learning when sleep abandons me to the forest’s twitching hour.

  I shiver under the blanket. I get up and feed the coals into flames, rubbing my legs together like a cricket’s and curling them around the fire. When the hair on my arms stands to attention, I sit up and cast a nervous glance around. I’m being watched; I can feel it. Across the valley, stars rest motionless on the treetops. The insect song quietens. The whole forest is tense, waiting, listening. Time and space roll up tighter and tighter, sucked into a single sizzling point. My ears ring with the building pressure. It releases in a furious flapping of ghost-white wings coming towards me, closer and closer, until they stop, hovering at my eye level with an almost imperceptible beat. I stare into two unblinking marble eyes, barely having time to register their presence before they vanish. I stumble to my feet, scanning the branches for signs of the visitor. Did I imagine it? Seconds later it’s back, just as swift and silent, but closer this time, holding my gaze with the intensity of a lover. And, then again, gone, banking abruptly to one side, it takes off across the valley, a white speck slipping behind the black curtain of the cliffs.

  Holy crap, was that a white-throated nightjar? It must have been. I’ve been hoping to see one all year. But what exactly … was that?

  I sit, gaping, on the granite outcrop. Looking out in the direction of the disappearing bird, I can suddenly see myself from the vantage of the invisible wings – a young woman, poised at the edge of a fire, on the edge of a vast escarpment, on the edge of time.

  In that moment I am neither myself nor the bird, but both. I am the white-winged bird, the woman here now and the one from six months ago. I am the rock I sit on, the valley below and the sky above. I am scorpion and crow and fire and moon. I am as timeless and eternal as the mountain range itself, the molten fires that pushed them upwards, and the Dreaming that created them.

  In that second I understand that, rather than sharing an intera
ction, the bird and I are part of one coordinated action, one continuous dance happening not between us, but through us. We are expressions of a planet that is alive and responsive, a sentient universe dreaming itself into being moment by moment, every movement both spontaneous and perfectly choreographed.

  *

  I wake in time to see the sun rise burgundy, like a plum ready for picking. It washes me in shades of pink. My sweet potato lies forgotten in the coals. Chipping off the charred skin, I munch on the pulp as I descend. The valley is hot and heavy, as if gravity grasps more firmly as I move nearer to sea level. I swing into camp just long enough to restock my bag with apples, water and sweet potatoes.

  As my walkabout continues, so too does the dance of the land. I am the black cockatoo calling at dusk, the frogs in full symphony in the reeds. I am the tallest of trees swaying in unison and the kangaroos at rest. I am the brown falcon who plucks a koel from its nest and thrashes it to death on the ground, and the one who watches wide-eyed, who moves in to snap the koel’s collarbone and sever the wings, fanning them out to marvel at the kaleidoscope of spotted dots and wrapping them in paperbark for safe-keeping.

  As I walk, I collect stones in my hands, carry them for so long and leave them some place else. I imagine them as stitches that I sew across the country. My needle runs up and over the spine of the ridge, zigzags back and forth between valley, swamp and gully; between tussock grass and forest. Stone by stone I am sewing the land together, embedding myself deeper in its fabric. The land wills me to walk it as much as I want to walk it, my steps not a burden but a balm, each footstep another thread knitting the broken pieces together, fastening the patches into a whole.

  I walk that day and most of the next, resting for the night on the edge of a forest clearing.