by Sally Piper
She still runs.
People ask her why she risks it. Go to a gym, they say.
She tells them gyms are no different. The creeps just have bigger mirrors.
But she’s not an idiot; she runs at the high tide of caution. She runs where it’s well lit. Never near warehouses with their dark-mouthed doors or through parks with their pillars of trees. She faces oncoming traffic so she can see what is coming towards her. She wears a black cap. Never white. White shines like a virtuous beacon begging to be sullied. Under black she can hide.
Nicole can’t stop this activity. She knows if she does, that her fears will have leaked into every aspect of her life and she’ll no longer resemble anything of the girl she used to be.
So she pretends she’s somebody else when she runs. Someone more like Lisa. As she pushes herself out hard and the endorphins build, she sees a strong woman with muscles as tough as granite. This woman has a stony, don’t-mess-with-me stare. She chants fuck off in her head when she hears catcalls or horns trumpeting. She is alert and agile and fast. She can outrun anyone. For a time she is reborn. She’s high on the body’s natural drugs. She’s a junkie. Free of the reality that she’s not invincible.
Nicole had been sure he was out there that first night. Close but out of sight. None of them spoke of it, but neither did they need to. Their silence on the topic was admission enough. A convenient if-we-don’t-talk-about-it mindset, then it can’t be true. Instead, they acted like the independent young women they believed they were when they first set out.
They cleared a site of stones and branches and set up their three-man tent with home-practised skill. They changed into their swimmers then and raced each other into the sea. Nicole remembers how the tightness she’d held in her muscles for most of that day was gradually released by the cool sea water.
Together, they collected fresh water from upstream and cooked a meal of Continental ready-made pasta before it grew too dark. Once the sun had dropped out of sight and a waxing half-moon took its place in the night sky, Lisa rigged up her torch so that it hung from the centre of their tent. It provided weak, but adequate light. They sat up in their sleeping bags, huddled beneath it.
Nicole rummaged through her pack till she found the bottle of Southern Comfort she’d brought along as a surprise. ‘Ta-da!’ she declared, holding it up.
‘Another reason to love you!’ Sam cheered.
Nicole poured a measure into each of their cups.
‘To day one!’ they chorused and chinked plastic.
‘I can’t believe we’re actually here,’ Sam said, taking a sip.
Nicole found it hard to believe too. They’d talked about doing this hike for so long but had never put that talk into action. Now here they were.
‘Yep. A shaky start, but we did it. Close to twenty Ks with a kick-arse pack.’ Lisa pushed Sam playfully, so that she toppled backwards, giggling, her cup held safely aloft.
It was the only reference any one of them made that night about the incident in the car park. And as their cheeks took on a glow from the warming alcohol, Nicole started to believe they could put it behind them. Reduce it to an unpleasant encounter, one they need not allow spoil their fun.
As the alcohol lubricated laughter and jokes about near falls and moments of despair throughout the day – each made as insignificant as the man had become in their minds by then – Nicole had felt like she could conquer anything.
She needed to go to the toilet before she went to sleep that night. She pushed the sleeping bag off her legs and crawled out of the tent. She moved a short way into the scrub, just beyond the perimeter of the tent light. She could still hear the others chatting and giggling,
The hand-held torch she took with her was inadequate. Its dull beam barely lit the ground in front of her. In daylight, the brain and eyes work to interpret simultaneously. During the day, big noises were the ones she noticed: reptiles and mammals scurrying amongst the bracken, birds calling, laughing, taking flight. But in the dark, not even her sharp vision was much use to her. Darkness takes orientation without regret or apology. Interpretation becomes subject to the imagination.
The alcohol might have made her irrational, but she imagined she could hear all manner of industry in the earth beneath her bare arse, only centimetres above the bristly undergrowth. It was as though night held a microphone to sound and amplified it. Small, unseen creatures – wood slaters, beetles and centipedes – suddenly seemed large and forbidding as she imagined them working their way through bark and soil. So when she heard a genuinely loud crack like a twig breaking a few metres behind her, it sounded like a tree had been felled.
Her urine flow stopped of its own accord. She held the squat as though made of stone. She no longer noticed the burn in her tired thighs. She thinks she also held her breath, or slowed it at least to a barely detectable shift of air.
Whatever caused that siren crack must have paused in wary paralysis too, because everything went silent for a time. Nicole imagined the aperture of its pupils opening and closing as they adjusted to her white arse in the dark. She imagined its nose lifted to check the air, catching the acidic scent of her urine. And the sonar cups of its ears twitched as they funnelled the smallest sounds into them. She’d felt ill equipped in comparison. Incapable of determining the location or movement of whatever was out there. She was the intruder, the one without the necessary wiring to navigate a nocturnal terrain.
Then there was another crack. Louder. Closer. Or had her imagination drawn the sound in?
She could still feel the press of urine in her bladder. She willed the flow to start again, but it wouldn’t come. Briefly she wished she could urinate standing up, like a man. So little of them exposed. So little of them vulnerable. They could still run if they had to. But not women. Not her. She was brought to the ground, ankles hobbled by clothes, forced to expose the most private parts of her body just to excrete its wastes.
Another crack fired off. This time to her left.
Was it circling her?
Nicole had a strong sense of being watched. That whatever was out there knew her location. Sensed her vulnerability. She cast the limited torch beam round but it fell short.
She tensed the muscles round her bladder and finally the flow began again. She pushed the urine out in a hard, steaming gush. It sprayed back against her ankles as it hit the ground. She didn’t care. Finishing, she pulled up her pants and shorts too soon. The last dribble of urine wet the crotch of each.
She turned back towards the tent but stumbled on the rough terrain in her haste. As she righted herself, she thought she heard a soft laugh coming from somewhere in the bush behind her.
Get a grip, she scolded.
But she lost hold of her courage after that, rushing back towards the tent light and leaving the darkness to what or who occupied it.
That’s why yesterday, after she’d set up her tent – still annoyed at Lisa for pretending she could be someone else – she’d set off to give tangible evidence to her imagination from that night. She needed to know where he’d been. The same way people need to know the details of a death or an accident. And it had felt good to be the hunter.
She had followed the creek, working on the assumption that he, like them, would have needed water, and would have made camp not far from it. It was easy going initially, but as the terrain became steeper and the scrub more dense, she struggled to cut a path alongside the creek. Trees had fallen in places. She had to climb over or around them.
Twenty minutes in, about when she was thinking the terrain had got the better of her, the rise suddenly plateaued and the creek widened again into a sizeable pool fed by a small waterfall upstream. Behind it, the contour of the land rose sharply again. There was a patch of flattish land to one side of the pool, large enough for a tent. She set her mind to work, tried to see his tent erected there. The image came easily.
&nbs
p; She had stayed there for a while. Sat on the ground with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped round them; an innocent and childlike pose to strike while she tried to imagine the thoughts of a man determined to terrorise them.
Nicole has placed a filter over many of her memories of having been here previously. They are more pixelated monochrome than sharp colour – the edges of them are ill-defined; their brightness dulled; their form incomplete. But the deeply embedded feeling of the things that happened here, they still weigh heavily, still try to pull her under.
She had left the area gasping for air.
There have been moments since they started out yesterday, when she’s wondered if all that they experienced wasn’t the fanciful thinking of young minds determined to insert drama into their lives. She feels nothing of the isolation and wilderness that she’d felt back then. They pass other hikers on the track now. And there were four other tents set up beyond theirs by nightfall last night. Last time, their yellow three-man tent was the only one on the barely cleared space. The dark sandy soil of the campsite is now so well trodden that it is packed down hard and the roots of the remaining tea-tree are exposed like the blood vessels on the back of a hand. The bracken that she’d once had to push through to go to the toilet previously is all but gone and excretion now occurs in the privacy of an elevated wooden structure.
She recognises it as the same promontory of land. But it is also nothing like it was. It’s had to give in many ways to satisfy the demands of walkers. The bridge she’s on now is such an example. Previously, they had to leave the cove early on the second morning because they needed to cross a tidal creek. Their departure time was dictated by low tide. They left their socks and boots off, tied the laces of them together and hung them round their necks to wade through the water. She is shorter than the other two, so the cold, brown water had come above her knees, soaked the hem of her hiking shorts. The rocks were slippery underfoot. She remembers the care she took to keep her balance. She didn’t want to risk falling and wetting her gear. Once across, they sat on a large, flat rock to dry their feet and put their socks and boots on. The rock is still there, just as she remembers it, but the timber bridge constructed over the waterway, like the long-drop toilet, is a new addition to the landscape.
The bridge annoys her. It’s a cheat. It takes away the need to think or plan. It also takes away the challenge. But worst of all, the slick convenience of it dumbs down the extremes of their previous experience. She recalls with ease the fear she’d felt back then. The nagging sense that their activities were being secretly observed. Trivialising anything about that offends her. She stamps across the bridge now and makes its boards rattle.
They walk in the same order as yesterday, in the same order that they crossed the waterway years before: Nicole in the lead, then Lisa, and Samantha several paces behind.
It’s a shorter day today, but more difficult as she remembers it. She hopes Samantha copes.
She has decided to walk slower today, so Samantha doesn’t feel she has to rush. But equally, Nicole wants to hold the ground beneath her feet for longer. Maybe then she’ll find the courage to hold her thoughts for longer too. Try and make sense of them. Make sense of why she’s here.
They have to climb up a steep and rocky headland to get out of the cove. But first they have to pass the spot that confirmed for her all those years before that it wasn’t the paranoid imagination of a young woman that made her believe they were being watched that first night.
They start what is initially a gentle climb, but the track soon becomes steeper and they have to step up onto increasingly larger rocks. Even though they walk closely together, they mostly walk in silence.
Nicole imagines all three of them are having the same memory. The cube-shaped clusters of wombat scat they pass must be a reminder for each of them. And just as she recognised the rock they sat on to dry their feet, Nicole recognises the rock where they discovered another kind of scat. This one wasn’t cube-shaped. It was long and brown and fell in the shape of a child’s back-to-front six. It was unmistakably human.
She remembers how she stopped so abruptly when she saw it that Lisa ran into the back of her.
‘What’s the matter?’ Lisa asked and peered round her. ‘Bloody hell. What animal did that?’
‘No animal,’ Nicole said. ‘Not a furry one anyway.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Animals don’t use toilet paper.’ She pointed to a few squares of brown-smeared tissue paper discarded in a bush.
‘It’s his, isn’t it?’ Samantha said once she reached them.
‘It might be someone else’s?’ Lisa offered.
‘Then that means there’s two sickos out here,’ Nicole said.
Lisa’s eyes shone bright with anger as she looked around. ‘Bastard.’ She drew the word out softly.
Samantha brought her hands up to cover her mouth.
Nicole expects the others remember something of her expression too. Maybe she paled. Maybe her shoulders dropped, defeated. Because that’s how she felt when they found that talisman, that filthy thing that confirmed his presence.
‘It’s not worth it,’ Nicole said. ‘I think we should call the whole thing off. Turn around and go back.’
‘Go back?’ Lisa snapped. ‘Because of that creep? No way.’
There was a new and dangerous edge to Lisa’s anger. Nicole felt weak in the face of it.
‘You know why he’s left his fucking shit on a rock, don’t you?’ Lisa stabbed her finger towards the brown, tapered stool. ‘Because he’s gutless, that’s why. BECAUSE HE DOESN’T HAVE ANY FUCKING BALLS!’ She shouted this, hands cupped round her mouth. Her words echoed round the cove.
‘Shh,’ Samantha hissed. ‘He’ll hear you.’
‘Good.’
‘It’s not good,’ Nicole said. ‘Nothing about this is good.’
‘He’s playing games with us. Childish games he thinks make him look like a tough guy. But it makes him look STUPID!’
Samantha looked around, fearful. ‘You’ll only make things worse.’
‘It’s a turd, Sam,’ Lisa snapped. ‘He probably still lights his farts as well. Seriously … three of us against that? Where’s the challenge?’
Nicole remembers how fierce Lisa looked. Her face dared them to do just that, to challenge her.
Nicole tried to, but her effort seems lame now. ‘But we don’t know what else he’s capable of.’
‘I know what I’m capable of.’ Lisa had stood tall despite the weight of her pack. ‘And that’s not to let him fuck with my head the way you’re letting him fuck with yours.’
They were harsh words. Hurtful. And they shamed Nicole, because Lisa was right, she had let him fuck with her head.
‘We could come back another time,’ Samantha offered. But there was no conviction in her statement.
Lisa pounced on it. ‘Oh sure we will. Just like we’ll do that trip to Bali we’re always talking about … or we’ll learn how to ski … or scuba dive. We’re always going to do something, but we never do anything other than the same old safe shit we’ve always done. And now here we are, actually doing something different and you two want to quit.’ Lisa barged past Nicole then, disturbed the flies that had settled on the shit as she stepped over it, and pushed on up the rise. ‘I’m going to finish what we started,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘You two can do what you like.’
Which of course was for Nicole and Samantha to follow her.
Today, none of them mentions this episode from years before. No one admits that this was the point at which they could have altered the course of things by turning back.
Nicole steps over the bare space on the rock and walks on, just as she did previously.
Chapter 4
Samantha has to clamber up and over great blocks of stone as they head out of the cove. Several are taller than her and
she struggles to find a foothold. And when she does she doesn’t then always have the strength to lift her weight, along with the weight of her pack. A couple of times she has to take her backpack off and push it up onto the boulder ahead of her. It’s a slow and demoralising activity. One neither Nicole nor Lisa need do. So each time she has to she feels another chip knocked from her confidence. Another reminder that she’s not fit enough. Not agile enough. The others say nothing of the fact that she has to do this, not even a critical side-glance. It’s a reminder that they were close once. And it’s this thought that helps Samantha face this next boulder now without groaning.
Lisa waits at the top to help take her pack.
‘Sorry,’ Samantha says as she clambers onto the rocky plateau, breathing hard.
‘Enough with the sorry. I don’t mind.’
Intrinsically Samantha knows that she doesn’t. They had that kind of friendship once. They were tight. Inseparable. Individual slights led to collective umbrage. Heart scars were shared. It’s hard, even after all this time, to unlearn the quality of it.
Samantha thinks friendship and love have much in common. In the early days each is ferociously intense but in the dying ones, achingly painful. She still feels the loss of what they had. She registers it as an irretrievable absence inside her. Some days this void takes up more space than others, hollows her out, but never so much that she can’t go on. She just lives with sadness for a time. She imagines this is how people feel when they grieve. They live in emotional flux. Some days, life just feels less kind.