by E. M. Reapy
You check your foot, the bruise has coloured it a dark purple-green. The swelling has gone down or at least doesn’t feel as painful. A fat caterpillar crosses over your toes.
You’ve seen it before on TV, you know the Aboriginal people used to get protein from insects. Bushtucker. You take a deep breath, pick it up and chew it.
Done.
Fuck off squeamish, helpless Fiona. Those days are gone.
The birds hoot as you follow the river. A tree with low branches blocks you and you duck to get under it. Loads of lumps of larvae are stuck on the bark and you pick one off, close your eyes and crunch down on it. Your teeth crush it making juice squirt and leak from your mouth. But you wipe your chin and keep chewing. It tastes nutty. You take another one. And another.
The rays hit the leaves on the trees, everything is neon. The contrast turned up. Bright greens and blues. Yellows.
Australia could be so beautiful.
Your mam would love this forest. She liked bringing you and your sister for cycles in the woods outside town on a Sunday, her only day off in the week. She worked every morning, going to the hotel early to wash pots and peel spuds and carrots and onions for the lunchtime carvery. She left there to clean big houses and offices. In the evenings, she tried to have dinner ready and everything in order for when you got back from school and your father finished on site. She never wanted ye to be poor. She kept you in the same clothes and shoes as the girls from the houses she cleaned.
A lump comes to your throat. Your mam, always trying to give you the best life, and look at you here and what you’ve done with yours.
Her raw hands and fingers. Her modest smiles when she was in town and met people you knew. She was always aware when you were embarrassed of her. What reason did you ever have to feel like that? To be embarrassed that your mother worked hard? None except trying to look cool for people you didn’t even like. You want your mam to hug you now. To take your hand and help you out of here.
The sun goes behind a cloud. A big black turkey with a red head, wiggly yellow throat and black beak struts by you. You consider chasing it to break its neck. But how will you eat it? You’re too weak to even think about how much effort that would take and how bloody and feathery it’d be if you didn’t cook it.
You walk closer to the forest and look out for fruit or berries. Grapes. Anything. You munch on different leaves, on yellow and orange flowers, hoping they won’t leave you sick in your stomach again.
You eat unripe things that you’ve never seen before. Some have the texture of kiwi fruit, or taste sweet like cherries or sharp like gooseberry. You’re constantly sick from but you’re kind of getting used to that.
★
The next while, you trek underneath the tall, guardian-like trees. You don’t disturb the giant webs that lay over paths, you go around them, or if they’re spun across the tress, you go under them.
Sometimes you stop to watch the birds, to listen to them, to call out to them, make up conversations. ‘Grand day, isn’t it,’ ‘Any craic?’ ‘None, now, yourself?’ You can shout as loud as you want.
You get into the river and let it take you downstream for a while, just floating. But your skin flares and you get out, dry up and hit the shade again. Mostly, you’re under eucalyptus trees and other trees you don’t know the names of. You don’t know the names of anything. It’s like this whole new world has been unlocked for you, a world you’d always been in but never aware of.
You make camp to nap at the base of trees or even by the river if it isn’t too cold. The insects feed on you. They bite and hover and taunt you.
‘I’ll eat ye if ye don’t fuck off,’ you say but they never take heed. You lay and watch the sunset. The purple, gold, pink, red changing into blues; royal, navy, violet, midnight. Once tiredness comes, you sleep soundly.
You wake with the sun.
★
Your eyes snap open and you watch it from where you slept on a flat patch near a bare gum tree. It’s at least four foot, slim, brownish-skinned, marble-dark eyes. Its movements, quick and deliberate, aware of everything around. Vibrations tremor through it. It looks smooth, assured. You couldn’t move if you tried.
It coils and uncoils and dips in and out of the drier cracks in the ground. Its body is lithe, its scales have flecks of a lighter brown, dark green and black. The pattern curves around it to a soft whitish underside. Its head is rectangular. It doesn’t hiss.
It approaches. Swift. Deliberate. Its face is right in front of yours. You look it in the eye. Its mouth opens and a black pronged tongue flashes out and in. You don’t know if it’s poisonous. You try to breathe.
It moves closer, flicks its tongue again. You don’t know if you should strike or jump or scream.
It lifts its neck. Shit. Its body starts rising. You can’t look away from it.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Your senses are all alerted.
Danger.
Now.
‘Please don’t bite me. Please don’t bite me.’
You need to get away. Your pulse drums in your ears.
Its tongue flickers. Its body makes a slight S shape in the air.
You need to get the hell away. You push yourself up on your arms as quick as you can but it springs. It’s like a hard punch into your face. It latches onto your cheek. Its teeth pierce your skin. You grasp its body. With two hands you pull it off and fling it as far as you can, towards the river. You look back and can’t see it. You touch your cheek. Clear sap and blood on your fingers.
You slap a long legged insect away from your face. Then another. Fucking bloodsuckers. You massage the back of your left shoulder, your muscle is pulled. You get up properly and limp on, holding the wound.
★
If there’s lethal venom, how would you know? Would you just drop walking? Would you convulse and puke and turn a different colour with the poison? Would it be metallic, spreading all across your face? But when you touch the bite, it feels like a scratch, it isn’t swelling much. Your face is tender when you move your mouth. That’s grand. You’ve nothing to smile about anyway.
All you can do is keep going and wonder what the fuck will get you next.
The sky changes in the middle of the day and with it, everything changes. The air becomes charged, tense. The clouds rush to dark grey and the winds pick up. It’s the quickest swing in weather you’ve seen. Within an hour, a storm begins and torrential rain spits down though it’s a warm rain. You keep your mouth open, it moistens your tongue and throat.
The river gets wild under the storm, the trees buckle in the forest. You crouch down in a gap and feel dragged by the winds. Your hair smacks your face. Thunder rumbles and lightning flashes up the whole sky, making it pink. The lightning is forked and bolts of it smash into itself while other bolts hit the ground.
You start to pray even though God probably forgot about you a long time ago.
The river rises quickly. It’s not safe. You need to get higher. You wanted water so badly, now it’s going to kill you. The ground goes soft and your bad foot keeps letting you down. You fall on your face into the mud.
Is there a point to any of this? Should you stay down and let nature take you? Call this whole thing off? This joke of a woman you are, this joke of a girl.
You sigh and push yourself up and stumble forward.
Not after all this.
Not yet.
The wind bashes you and the river gets higher. You try to get to the forest. Rainwater seeps down, making it hard to get a grip on anything. But you struggle on, clinging and heaving. Finally, you’re at the forest’s edge. The leaves are pelted with rain.
The river is wider now and alive. Even the marsh land is disappearing. Rainwater stings your eyes and fills your mouth and ears and nose. It drowns them in hisses and glugs. You can barely breathe as you face the storm. But you’re refreshed.
You laugh and raise your arms and a feeling washes through you. The storm cleaves the air.
&nb
sp; It’s terrifying here.
It’s fucking glorious.
★
Late in the evening, the storm dies and the forest is glistening with raindrops. You shiver in your wet clothes and try to figure out what to do to dry off. You hobble further through the forest to find a dry patch, or somewhere exposed to hang your clothes and let the air take the damp from them. You keep a watch to the left to see how far away you are from the edge, from the river, in case you get disorientated and lost amongst the trees.
From the corner of your eye, you see the swish of long, dark hair move behind a tree.
Fuck.
‘Who’s there?’ you shout. ‘Hey, who are you?’
You’ve become so accustomed to being on your own that it makes your heart speed to think that someone else is here.
You walk over slowly to where you’d seen it. You tremble from fear as well as from your soggy clothes.
A middle aged lady is bent down, picking mushrooms and putting them in a food bag. She doesn’t turn to greet you or explain herself or anything. Her hands have big blue veins bulging as she picks.
You cough. She stays where she is, working away.
‘Hey,’ you call. ‘Hey, lady.’
You tiptoe over and tap her back. She gasps and drops the food bag as she turns, holding her hand to her chest.
‘Oh, my, I didn’t expect to see someone out here. Girl, you gave me a fright,’ she says. She removes two earphones from her ears and turns off her iPod.
‘What were you listening to?’ you ask. Your voice is high pitched. You sway as you stand.
‘Joy Division.’
‘I know them. I like them. I do. Transmission.’
‘What are you doing out here?’
You lose your balance and clutch onto a tree. ‘Yeah. I don’t have an answer. Isolation, wasn’t that one of their songs? I don’t know. What are you doing out here?’
‘Calm down,’ she says and puts a hand up. ‘It’s okay.’
‘I – the storm – I—’
‘Okay, relax. Calm down. Take some deep breaths with me. Yes?’ She looks older than your mother but her skin is unblemished and pale. She wears a long navy smock over jeans and her feet are in construction worker boots.
You sigh a yes and copy the way she’s breathing. After five deep inhalations and releases, you feel your heartbeat slow down.
The woman gathers her dark hair and twirls it around. ‘What you doing out here, girl?’ she asks.
You shrug. ‘I’m lost, I guess.’
Your mind goes empty for a moment and you have to search it. Find memories for how you got here. Antonio’s bitty nails on his fat hand holding the gear stick, the curdled milk in Fletchers’ fridge, Jett’s stained white singlet falling on the ground. His tongue in your mouth. Your chest gets tighter. Your eyes squint.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Scottish?’
‘Irish.’
‘Where did you come from?’
‘I followed the river. I don’t know where I was. Or where I am now.’
Tears brim against your bottom lids.
‘Oh, girl,’ she says and opens her arms out.
‘I’m all wet,’ you say.
‘Come here.’
She embraces you. You begin to cry into her shoulder. She’s warm and you can smell lemon shampoo and sweat off her hair.
‘I’m sorry,’ you say after a minute or so. You straighten yourself, rub your eyes and face, take a deep breath up your nose clearing and sucking the snot back.
‘Don’t be sorry,’ she says. She looks around. ‘I’m just waiting on my partner Geoff. Don’t be afraid. We’re not hippies either. These mushrooms aren’t magic. They just taste good. And they’re easy to find after a storm.’
Geoff comes bounding through the trees a couple of minutes later. He has white hair that fuzzes out under his baseball cap. He wears cream slacks and a rugby top. He looks fit but he has a slight limp and when he stands still, he massages his elbows and the bottom of his back.
‘Who’s this, Dorothy?’ he asks the woman cheerfully.
‘This is – I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You never told me your name, doll.’
‘I’m Fiona,’ you say and offer your hand. He gives it a firm handshake.
‘Fiona, are you hungry?’ he asks.
‘Have you anywhere to go?’ Dorothy asks.
‘I – I don’t, not really. No.’
‘Look at your foot, love,’ Geoff says and points.
‘I know, yeah. It’s getting a bit better, I think.’ You forgot that you’re only wearing one shoe. The other washed away somewhere in the storm.
‘Your face?’ he says.
‘Oh yeah, a snake got me,’ you say and imagine its lunge again. ‘I don’t know if it was poisonous. Would I be dead if it was?’
Geoff comes closer and closes one eye to examine the bite with his other. Stray white hairs whisker on his cheeks and his skin is clear and waxy.
‘Doesn’t seem infected. What did the bugger look like?’
You tell Geoff the details you can remember. He presses around the bite to see if anything comes out. It pinches and you try to stay still.
‘You’re safe, I reckon. Lucky.’
Dorothy rubs her throat. She exchanges glances with Geoff and nods at you.
‘Well, you’ll come to the cottage for some dinner?’ Geoff invites.
You check both their faces. You haven’t seen a human face since…
Geoff and Dorothy are real. They aren’t birds or fish or grubs. They seem kind. You don’t know what you should do.
‘Ye won’t give me back to the Fletchers’? Or Antonio?’
‘What?’ Dorothy asks.
‘Ye won’t give me back to the men?’
Dorothy’s eyes grow wide at Geoff but they soften when she looks at you. She moves closer and puts her arm around you. You fold into her side.
‘Fiona, you’ll come with us and we’ll get you some dry clothes and food. We won’t give you to anyone. I promise you, love.’
★
Their car is a half-mile walk away and Geoff offers you a piggyback but you decline and shuffle beside them. It’s an hour’s drive to their house. It’s like you’ve never noticed what a car looked or felt like before. You touch the seat and window. Smell the exhaust. You are amazed by the road, by signs, by the civilisation of the sporadic houses and cars you pass on the way.
Geoff explains that you’re on the Victorian side of the border with New South Wales. When he gives you a map, you look at the outback village where the hostel had been and where you are now. There’s no distance between them. Are you far enough away?
You get to their cottage. It’s on top of a small mountain. You gaze around. Farmland, vineyards, hills and forest everywhere. You can see a river in the distance. You wonder if it’s your river.
The cottage is a four-bed and wooden. Bright and mismatched flowers grow around it. The door sign says, ‘Beware of the Dog’ and ‘Sorry about the Mess but We Live Here’ in crazy fonts and patterns. The house isn’t locked and when Geoff opens the door, a little white furry dog jumps up and down off his leg, yelping.
They bring you in and make you a cup of strong coffee. It’s nice and strange to be in someone’s house. You’d forgotten your own family home back in Ireland, a bungalow near the church. Your dad on his chair by the fire watching Reeling in the Years and tutting, ‘It feels like only yesterday,’ regardless of whether the show was looking back on 2004 or 1978.
Dorothy’s house is different but it has that feel of a good place. The feel of a home. The faint smell of cooking, of fruit, of dog. The clutter of being lived in. She shows you pictures of her sons. They are handsome, ruddy men with strong jawlines. Even her youngest, who’s twenty-two, is married with kids. She shows you pictures of her grandchildren and bits and pieces of the artwork they’d made for her – a lollipop-stick-framed painting with scribb
ly people in a garden, a poem about her typed neat and autographed.
You smile but feel inadequate, twenty-four years old and unable to look after yourself, never mind anyone else.
Geoff busies himself in the kitchen. You hear him open the fridge and the oven, clatter pots and pans. He whistles and clicks his fingers as he prepares the food.
Dorothy puts the pictures back and offers you more cushions. When you’ve finished your coffee, she sits beside you and takes your hand.
‘So, what’s going on, girl? Are you a runaway?’
You take a deep breath. Could you tell her?
‘Yes, kind of.’ You sigh one of those shaky sighs before you might cry. ‘I did something really stupid, Dorothy. Really stupid.’
‘I ain’t a judge or juror, doll,’ she says.
You clamp your teeth. Struggle with how to tell her without it sounding awful. She waits.
‘I ended up in a house way out in the bush. Just men and me. You know what I mean?’
She nods. Her mouth is downturned.
‘I escaped, I didn’t stay for long. Before they could…’
She squeezes your hand.
‘And they chased me, but I hid, waited for them to go and I walked. Followed the river. I have nothing, I just have myself.’ You look down at your clothes, which are threadbare in parts from being wet and dried by the sun.
‘How long you been walkabout?’ Dorothy asks.
‘Don’t know. Maybe three days? I’m not sure. It felt like a really long day with scary nights in between. Thought I’d end up in a town, or something. But there was nothing. Just the river, the bank and the trees beside it. I only met ye because the storm forced me deeper into the forest.’
She keeps a hold of your hand. ‘Don’t worry about anything. My girlfriend Meryl will call later. She’s a doc and she’ll check your foot. We’ll set up the internet after dinner and you can apply for a new passport. You can also contact the police.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you need to report the hostel man and those farmers.’
‘But Dorothy, it was my own fault, like. I asked for help. I agreed to the offer.’ Your breathing narrows.