by Sally Piper
Within a few hundred metres, she had to weave her way round ever-larger boulders. They rose up tall to form walls either side of her. Lisa’s and Samantha’s voices disappeared altogether as the gorge narrowed. The mad whirring of cicadas took over instead.
She stopped and waited. One of those rare times she’d been able to still her tautness to move. Small, black flies heckled her face and tickled the backs of her bare legs, and the larger docile March flies tried to sting her. Being slow and lazy feeders, she slapped and killed several while she waited. They released a honey scent into the air.
A slash of blue sky separated the opposing grey cliffs. The sun was directly overhead. It drilled down mercilessly through the space. The rocks ticked with heat and her body dripped with perspiration. But it was the absolute stillness that unsettled her the most. Tomblike, she remembers thinking. She imagined her father calling her to task for her melodrama.
Then the stillness was shattered.
A single stone the size of a teacup dropped from above. It hit the rocky ground with an amplified crash in the narrow gorge. It landed not far behind her. She startled badly. Lost her balance on the rocky terrain, almost rolled her ankle.
A heart doesn’t go gently into fright. It stampedes. The cicadas were silenced by the whoosh of blood that raced up her neck and into her head.
More rocks followed. A cascade of various sized stones. All had the potential to do serious harm. She was paralysed to act for a few seconds. By fear. Confusion. It was time enough for her to wonder what it was disturbing the cliff top. A kangaroo? Echidna? Goanna?
But then she had another thought. What if it’s him? What if he’s causing this dangerous avalanche of rocks?
This thought finally set her in motion. All she could think about then was getting back to the others. Returning to safety in numbers. But it meant going back the way she’d just come. Past where a rock the size of a football had just crashed down.
She scrambled towards the rock face from where the rocks were … what? Falling? Being thrown? She took shelter beneath the cantilever, hoped she was out of sight from who or what was above her.
She got down on all fours, like an animal. She no longer cared about the safe placement of hands or feet. She only cared about getting out of there. She stayed close to the cliff face, moving quickly over the rocky ground. She didn’t look back. She didn’t look up. She concentrated only on moving forward as quickly as she could. And her pack – a burden of weight all of that day – had felt light and inconsequential as she scurried beneath its load.
She was breathing hard by the time she felt able to fully stand again and the gorge widened once more. The rocks underfoot became smaller, more manageable. It was only then that she noticed the bloodied scratches on her palms and shins.
In stark contrast to the terror she felt as she escaped the gorge, was the easy stance of Lisa and Samantha when they came into view.
‘There she is,’ Samantha called on seeing her.
‘You ever heard of waiting?’ Lisa scolded. ‘We’ve been standing here for ages wondering which way you went.’
Then the two of them must have seen her wide-eyed fear and heard her heaving breath, because they closed in round her. They made her feel safe while she explained what happened.
In the retelling though, she wondered whether or not she’d spectacularly panicked at what was a normal shift in the topography, something Lisa must have thought as well. ‘Rocks probably fall round here all the time,’ Lisa said, pointing to the cliff tops. There was little vegetation along their upper reaches to hold them firm.
Nicole laughed then in a way she hoped conveyed that she was nothing more than a silly, irrational girl. ‘I guess we’re just not normally standing underneath them,’ she said. ‘I must have looked like Wile E. Coyote trying to get away from the Road Runner.’
‘Beep. Beep,’ Samantha said, and they all laughed.
They studied the bifurcation in the track after that. Noticed what looked like a collapsed cairn of stones. Buried beneath this rubble was a piece of rotting timber with a black arrow carved into it that indicated left. The tufty grass under the stones looked newly flattened.
Nicole still doesn’t know if it was the landscape against her that day or humanity.
Nicole regrets now not going for a swim with the others before she set up camp. Because when she gets back from the beach after Lisa and Samantha, they have squeezed their tents alongside hers on the site she thought small enough to avoid this.
She pauses when she sees them pushing their tent pegs into the sandy soil with the heels of their boots, and thinks about how she can tactfully pack up and move elsewhere. But then Samantha turns and waves at her with that needy look she still has, and she can’t bring herself to do it. She’d feel like a bitch.
‘How was the swim?’ Lisa calls brightly.
Still too jolly. Still trying too hard. Why can’t she be the two-fingers-to-the-world girl she used to be? At least she knew where she stood with her. This new Lisa, the one who gives a shit, creeps her out.
‘Cold,’ Nicole replies and crawls into her tent to change out of her wet swimming costume.
She stays in her tent for a while after she’s changed. Lays on her back on her sleeping mat and wonders if she can reasonably stay there till morning, wile away the next twelve hours cocooned inside.
She puts her hands beneath her head, not bothered by the confined space, the way the nylon mesh is close to her face or the way her elbows push against the tent’s thin walls. She needs to collect her thoughts before she goes out, un-jumble them enough for her to be in a group.
She thinks company is overrated. A condition forced upon people at birth till they don’t know how to be alone anymore. It’s something she unlearned to need a long time ago. And here she is now, forced to relearn it once again.
It makes her think of the few times she’s tried to accommodate men in her life. Mostly she remembers how she felt her apartment contract around her as they took up more and more space, more and more often. She reached a point where her home felt smaller than this tent feels to her now.
Maybe it was about ownership. Not wanting to relinquish any part of what she’d worked hard for. But maybe it was more than this, reasons that only a three-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrink could extract about trust or control.
Still, she feels the lack in her now at not being able to relearn the simple act of companionship with these two once-close friends. But they are separated from her now by much more than thin nylon. There are more than two decades between them as well. And yet, even now, she expects they know her better than anyone else.
She listens to them as they discuss what they’re going to have for their dinner.
‘I think I’ll try the nasi goreng,’ Samantha says.
‘Curried beef for me.’
‘Have you noticed how all the meat in these packets is cut exactly the same size and shape?’
‘I know. They look like dog treats.’
Nicole smiles at this. The two of them seem to have taken up easily from where they left off. She feels a pang of regret at not being able to do the same. The fracture though had to come. The alternative was unbearable. If they’d remained friends their experiences out here would always be magnified threefold. The memory of it kept large between them so that she could never look away and forget. To shrink it, to reduce it to the size of a small bitter pill was only possible if she was on her own. She misses them though. Sometimes.
You filthy cunt, Nicole hears him say again.
She says the word softly now, as she sometimes does. ‘Cunt.’ She tries to reduce the sound of it to something as harmless as the sound of hat or bean. But the single syllable leaves her mouth like a dry and jagged stone.
She says it again. ‘Cunt.’
She still hates that he owned this word, that it was his stone
to spit and not hers.
And because she doesn’t want to think about him anymore, she unzips the opening of her tent and crawls out to join the others.
The moon isn’t the big, bright bauble it was last time. It doesn’t silver the leaves of the surrounding trees or cast shadows as it had back then. It’s not the moon she remembers cupping in her hand and closing one eye to so that it looked to rest as an almost perfect orb in the nest of her palm. She holds her cupped hand up now and briefly cradles tonight’s half empty moon in it. The stars are a vast decoration around it. She picks one – a bright one. Perhaps it’s Jupiter or Venus, and not a star at all. She lines it up with the dark silhouette of a tree branch, stretched out like a finger, and waits.
‘Last time we were here,’ Samantha says, ‘I hoped the moon would stay bright the whole time.’
Each of them has turned off their headlamps and they sit around Nicole’s camp light. It looks like a saucer-sized spaceship with its ring of tiny LED lights positioned like portholes around the perimeter of it. It is efficient though, far better than the hand-held torch she had last time; it had failed to illuminate much of anything at all. The spaceship light hides enough though that she can’t clearly see the expressions on the faces of the others to know how Samantha’s recollection is affecting them.
‘So we could see more?’ Lisa asks.
‘Uh-huh.’
None of them speaks for a while. Nicole looks back to the branch and sees that the bright star has shifted position in relation to it. Only a little, but it’s enough to remind her that they exist on something that’s moving; that they’re mere tenants of something grander.
‘I wished it’d go away.’ Nicole supposes she’s spoken because she thinks they can’t see much of her face either.
‘Did you? Why?’ Samantha asks.
‘So we could see less.’
None of them claimed to have slept well or for long the last time they were here. They’d blamed the discomfort of their cramped, shared tent or aching muscles, the restlessness of one or the other. But Nicole knew for her there was more at play than a too-close sleeping companion. She’d stirred from her sleep after what felt like only ten minutes into it. Her sleeping bag had twisted uncomfortably round her legs and she sat up to untangle it.
Fatigue must have caught up with Samantha as she lay motionless, her breath coming in regular little puffs. Lisa was restless. She kicked her legs about and her breath was uneven, periodically coming in rushed pants. Nicole wondered who or what it was she fought against.
Nicole lay down again, but sleep felt a long way off.
The night sounds took over.
In retrospect, she should have burrowed her head inside her sleeping bag to shut out the noises, to blind her. But it was oppressive with three in the tent. And she was too alert by then to shut much of anything out.
The moon was full and bright. It illuminated the inside of their tent in sepia tones. She could easily make out the features of the other two alongside her, Samantha in the middle, then Lisa. She could also see the shapes of trees that cast their dark shadows across the fabric. A soft breeze had come in sometime through the night so their leaves flickered.
A dark blob came into view on the branch of a tree. Nicole thought it might be a possum. Its shape rocked from side to side as it shifted along the branch. She watched its slow progress for a while then it suddenly took off and disappeared into the canopy.
A new shape came into view.
She tried to blink and squint this vertical shadow into the silhouette of a kangaroo – she’d seen plenty of them in the bush each day. She’s not sure if it was her imagination that made the shadow’s head too large and its shoulders too broad for it to be this marsupial. And neither did she have the chance to find out. The shape disappeared as a cloud passed across the moon and all went dark for a time.
Senses alert though, she sat up once more. Her imagination was left to fill in what she could no longer see and it had no problem giving the silhouette the shape of a man. Before long her ears started in on the act as well.
She heard kissing noises. Soft. Wet. Close.
Her body froze around a galloping heart. Did she even breathe? At the time it didn’t feel like it.
It’s a possum, she reasoned.
But her imagination was having none of that. It could only be the taunting, smacking lips of a weak chinned man.
Lisa suddenly sat up too and Nicole stifled a cry.
She expects Lisa was woken by her dream, the one that made her toss about like she was running.
‘What’s wrong?’ Lisa whispered.
‘I thought I saw something. A shadow. Outside the tent,’ Nicole said quietly. She hoped Samantha wouldn’t wake too. She didn’t want to panic her.
Lisa remained still. Nicole expects she listened, watched, just as she was. They stayed like that for several minutes. But there was nothing more to see or hear. The moon came out from behind clouds but only trees took shape through the tent’s fabric.
‘You probably imagined it,’ Lisa said and she lay down again.
Everything about that night became a discordant mess after that, like musicians tuning their instruments before an orchestra plays. Nicole lay down again too, but she held her body tense as she listened to the susurrations of the bush. Each sound amplified and distorted and reimagined. Every one of them became the result of a single, dark shape. Her imagination placed him only centimetres from her head. It gave him a log to smash it in. A knife to slash through the thin fabric of their tent. Through her skin.
She eventually became inured to the sounds, or was too exhausted to be kept awake by them. She woke when the sky was transitioning from night grey to dawn pink and things couldn’t hide so easily in shadows.
But reality was so altered for her by the time she crawled out of the tent on that third morning, puffy-eyed and groggy with fatigue, that she thought her memory couldn’t be trusted anymore either.
She wanted to go for a swim. Wake herself up. She looked to the place where she’d hung her bikini to dry from the day before. It wasn’t there. In her mind, she retraced her steps of the previous day, pictured herself drape it over a low branch.
The loss of her favourite bikini hadn’t disturbed her as much as the thought of the person who had taken it. She imagined him doing unspeakable things with it, and only hours after it had touched her skin. It would still have carried her scent.
Later, when they packed up the tent, they discovered that one of the tension ropes from the tent’s fly had been taken.
Darkness, Nicole decided, might give free rein to the imagination, but that doesn’t mean it lies.
Chapter 7
Samantha notices a shift the next morning. The shift is in Nicole. She doesn’t forge ahead as usual; chin out, neck muscles straining to pull away from them. This morning she walks only a few paces in front. She says little still, but Samantha doesn’t mind. Just to have her close is enough.
It’s easy to forget that they’d been children for the greater part of their lives when they were here last time. Now here they are again, and the opposite is true.
Lisa and Nicole were the steady hands that guided Samantha through the insecurities of her adolescence. They held her up when others sought to push her down.
Girls can be vicious. They chip away mercilessly, insidiously, at the confidence of others in order to bolster their own. Some girls frozen out by silence and cold stares. Others attacked from all sides with cruel words. No one was safe.
Didn’t you wear those knickers yesterday?
Nice shade of slut you’re wearing.
I heard she let him finger her behind the sports shed.
Secrets confided at morning tea were currency against the confessor by lunchtime. Backs were stabbed. Alliances shifted and morphed from one day to the next.
But Sama
ntha knows it’s not just girls who can be unkind. Boys can be too.
Her middle son has an accusation of thoughtless unkindness that hangs over him. Or is it a crime?
He told Samantha the unkindness grew from a dare. So somebody else’s fault? The actions of a boy too unsure of himself to refuse. An honest boy but not a smart one. Led, not a leader.
This is when Samantha feels unfit to mother sons. Love is too powerful. It masks blame. Negates possibilities of guilt. And there are so many dialects to the language of it – those for her son, those for the sons of others – which erode any common language.
The accusation involved a mobile phone under a desk. Photos. The spread-wide legs of a girl who … what? Wasn’t told, like Samantha, to keep them together? Who liked the attention she got when she didn’t? Who just didn’t think or care or notice that she hadn’t? A naïve girl? A defiant one?
Samantha’s sons live in a sharing world. But not the age-old exchange of labour or goods. They share for Likes. They share for re-shares.
A lot of people liked the image of the girl’s floral knickers. A lot of people shared it. Girls as well as boys. This astounded Samantha almost as much as her son’s actions. That others, especially girls, could look and click in a heartbeat, before the blood from it had even reached their brains and made them think about whether they should or not.
The school was involved. The Headmaster. A suspension.
Threats of the police. Threats of a lawyer.
‘Family’s tryin’ to ruin the kid,’ Harry blustered in private.
Should have kept her legs together, friends said.
Never had a photo taken of her on the beach in a bikini?
I hear she liked the attention.
Harry nodded at these remarks, but he didn’t protest in public.
Samantha didn’t acknowledge or rebuke these scapegoat comments either. She stuck to the script. The one her mother began for her when she was a child. The one that says blood is thicker than water. The one she bought into wholesale when her first son was born. She still feels ashamed.