The Geography of Friendship

by Sally Piper

  The girl got a tidy sum deposited into her bank account. A nest egg. A bribe. A little something to take the sting from her humiliation.

  Samantha’s son got high-fives.

  Even if there had been such a thing as this callous, disconnected sharing of information when she was at school, Samantha knows the three of them would never have succumbed to the disloyalty of it. They were united. Impenetrable. Their fealty sworn by their pacts and actions, through their repertoire of gestures that sought to warn or protect one another. Without this unity, Samantha would have lived her school years on the knife-edge of someone else’s favour.

  As a girl, she imagined there was an invisible string that held their friendship together. It gave a little, but not much. She liked that it didn’t. If there was an absence of one, or some ill feeling between them, she felt that string strain. She saw it as her job to pull on it, to reel them back in, keep them close. But then she stopped even trying and that string snapped. The frayed end of it has trailed after her ever since.

  Samantha adjusts her backpack, settles the belt lower onto her hips, frustrated by its weight as much as by her thoughts.

  Despite the hardship of what she’s doing, she bears the burden of both pack and path without complaint. Just as she bears the blister on her right heel, the size and colour of a sugarplum when she checked it this morning. Just as she bears the itchy sweat rash under her breasts, the stinging chafe between her thighs, the deep ache in her lower back.

  She’s managed to separate mind from body. Ignores its pleas to Stop! Each footfall is just another beat to the drum that sings her onwards. Because to stop, to give in, to give up, will only leave that tattered string trailing in the dust behind her forever. This is her one opportunity to make amends. And she can’t waste it.

  There was a shift when they left this campsite last time too. After Nicole’s bikini and the tent rope were taken, and she told Samantha something about the shape she’d seen through the tent during the night, the kissing noises, a sense of unease entered their group like a fourth person. It was someone who talked too much, joked too much, laughed too quickly and with a shrill and unnatural pitch.

  ‘Maybe a koala’s wearing it now.’ Samantha pulled a low eucalypt branch in front of her face as she said this, pretended to eat the leaves while she batted her eyelashes at Nicole. She also remembers that she giggled like a child.

  Nicole forced a laugh. ‘It’ll probably fit his skinny arse better than it fitted mine anyway,’ she said and dismissed her bikini with a flick of her hand.

  And the two of them laughed a bit more.

  But Samantha knows now it was the hysterical laughter of girls who recognised they were out of their depth.

  The shift in Lisa was different. She didn’t laugh. Instead, her anger steadily built throughout that third day. It began with a declaration.

  ‘We need to arm ourselves.’

  Samantha and Nicole were sobered by her remark. They remained silent as Lisa marched off into the bush. She came back a minute later brandishing a smooth-barked branch, half as tall again as her. At its thickest it was the size of an axe handle. She measured the stick against Nicole, eyed it from top to bottom then laid the narrower end across her knee. She grimaced with the effort as she snapped through the red bark and into the blond fibrous timber. The splintering crack confirmed the wood’s hardness. Lisa pushed her weight down on it to test its strength. Satisfied, she handed the stick to Nicole who reluctantly took it. She headed back into the bush then and returned soon after with two more. She measured, broke to length and tested the strength of each without saying a word.

  Lisa took the lead that day, her staff an unyielding iron-like rod beside her.

  Samantha doesn’t recall having felt any braver for holding a length of timber, no matter how hard the wood.

  Last time when they crossed the wetland the track had taken them round the fringe of coastal lagoon, the safe-looking tufted peaks of swamp-mat and brookweed proved an illusion of high, dry ground though. More often than not they collapsed under Samantha’s weight and her boots sunk into the mud. They ended up caked in the stuff. Several times the peat-rich mire was reluctant to give up her boot again. When it did, it was with sucking, kissing sounds.

  She remembers how the murky water released a symphony of plops and splashes. Water skaters left hovercraft wakes across its surface. The air vibrated with the manic whir of cicadas and there was a steady drone of petrol-coloured dragonflies. Stealthy sandflies left red welts on bare skin. Mosquitoes whined round her head. Her slaps rang out like the crack of dry timber. The air smelt of wet dog.

  Once again, the body of water is as busy as a city with insect life. But now Samantha’s boots clatter across a timber boardwalk that’s been erected over the swamp. She’s high and dry. Protected. Safe. It’s a reprieve from the steep climbs of yesterday.

  Change isn’t always as obvious as these new planks of wood though. Sometimes it comes about in small imperceptible shifts, till one day, you think: Hold on, how did that happen?

  The changes to her marriage have occurred like this. Slowly. Insidiously. Small shifts and adjustments unknowingly made till they’re normalised.

  She recalls a day when Harry rested his hand on the back of her chair in her home office. The fabric is badly worn from the years he’s done this. Sometimes she thinks about how she’d have one shoulder lower than the other if he rested it there instead. But he doesn’t.

  ‘You haven’t billed the right work to the McGovern job,’ he said, and pointed to the computer screen.

  ‘Haven’t I?’

  ‘Looks like you’ve mixed it up with the Miller job. Here, let me find it.’ He bent forward, gripped the mouse and scrolled down.

  He’d just got out of the shower. He smelt of Dove soap and his hair was still damp. Samantha felt the coolness of it alongside her face. He was so close that she turned and kissed him, soft as a breath on his cheek.

  He didn’t react or pause in what he was doing. ‘Miller. Miller. It’s gotta be here somewhere.’

  She kissed him again, but this time she left her lips on his cheek for a moment. His skin was warm and freshly shaved smooth. It smelt faintly of Gillette shaving cream. It is a scent so familiar that she instinctively finds it calming.

  He continued to scroll down. ‘Ah, here it is,’ he said.

  She took his chin in her hand and turned his face towards hers. ‘And here I am.’

  He looked at her for a moment, this shape in the room. She saw his confusion at what he should do or say.

  ‘So you are,’ he said and stood tall again. He returned his hand to the back of her chair. She felt it sink a little under the weight of it.

  ‘No need to do anything with it tonight,’ he said. ‘It can wait till the morning.’

  He is good to his employees. Patient. Generous with time off if needed. They – she – work hard for him.

  ‘Everything else looks good.’ He patted the back of Samantha’s chair twice. Job done.

  She remembers how an image of a bee had come to her, the way they bump up against a window when trapped inside. Like the bee, all she needed – wanted – was right before her, but it was unattainable. Some days she fantasises about changing the view.

  ‘Thanks boss,’ she saluted.

  Harry paused at the door, then turned to face her. ‘I know you’re here,’ he said, ‘and I’m glad of it.’ He tapped the doorframe twice before he left the room.

  Samantha focuses on her pain. It’s the one thing that’s true and loyal to the past.

  She can tell there’s a blister on her left heel now as well. The blister on the right one macerated and split yesterday. She’s covered each with a blister plaster but she still walks tenderly. And her left knee clicks and creaks. Sometimes it’s so loud she wonders why the other two don’t remark upon it. The three of them walk with t
heir bodies leaning forward, chins pushed out. They’re a study in counterweight and balance. Samantha imagines a musician could play a tune on the thick cords of her neck muscles.

  There’s a dull, nagging ache in her lower back. It reminds her of the back pain she had when she was in labour. No amount of repositioning or massage or pain relief helped with it then either. The only remedy was to expel the source of the pain, and once she did, the relief had been almost instantaneous. Somehow, unlike delivering a baby, an excruciating act that ultimately brings joy, Samantha doesn’t expect any instantaneous relief or moments of joy from her current labours. Not even once she takes her backpack off for good at the end of it. She might eventually lose the muscle memory of having carried it, but not so the memory of when she was last here. It’s woven a durable thread in the fabric of her life.

  Her memories threaten to pull her under sometimes, like this muddy swamp had tried to do previously. She has also been pulled under by – felt drowned by at times – the responsibility of raising good men. She’s been up against it time and again, the narrative of respect she wants to instil in them countered by an alternative one.

  Samantha has worked around men a great deal, being the wife of a plumber. She has delivered parts to Harry on site, dropped off forgotten lunches in the early days when money was tight and the budget didn’t extend to buying it. She contributes to their business from home mostly now, it being successful enough that Harry employs enough lads who can run the errands and he buys his lunch three days out of five. But she still remembers the times she’s had to pick her way round concrete wash and sheets of reinforcing mesh to drop things off to him.

  Once she had to deliver a special order to him. She pulled up in front of the site in her car and looked for Harry amongst the men there but couldn’t see him anywhere. Her eldest son was with her, off sick from school, and the other two, too young for school, were asleep in their booster seats in the back. It was a quick errand, so she left the younger boys in the car, took her eldest son by the hand and headed off to find Harry.

  A small team of bricklayers was on site this day. Samantha felt the scrutiny of them as she carefully picked her way across the boggy ground. She felt it in the way their voices fleetingly softened, how their flurry of activity momentarily stalled.

  She still couldn’t find Harry so headed over to the men to find out if they knew where he was. They stopped work and stared as she approached. Experience sends her conflicted messages on how best to hold herself when she must confront a group like this, and while she might sometimes have haughty pretensions – chin lifted, shoulders pressed back – she almost always adopts the cautious pose she’s been taught – shoulders rolled in, head dipped.

  She spoke to an older man. Harry, he said, had ducked off to get something. Samantha thought her husband’s timing lousy.

  This man put his hands on his sun-spotted knees so his face was level with her son’s. ‘You’re a lucky boy having such a pretty mum,’ he said.

  Her son, a shy boy, pressed closer to Samantha’s side.

  The man stood tall again. ‘And your dad’s a very lucky boy too.’ He said this to Samantha’s breasts, his lascivious grin aimed right at her cleavage. One of the younger men chuckled behind him.

  She expects the man thought he was being generous, that he was doing what good blokes do, complimenting a woman, acknowledging her assets. Samantha hadn’t known what to say. She gave the man a half-hearted smile and hated herself for it.

  She gripped her son’s hand firmly as she turned away. She doesn’t know if it was her imagination or years of feeling as though her body was there for the entertainment of an audience, but she had felt the eyes of those men on her arse in the silence that followed her retreat. Then before long the sound of scraping trowels and the tap of bricks resumed.

  But what added to this sensation as she walked away was the filth all around her – the mud and slurry and litter, the oily puddles afloat with cigarette butts – and how out of place she was amongst it in her floral blouse and skirt. Her mother’s words had come to her: You’re asking for trouble.

  ‘Do you know that man, Mum?’ her son asked as they headed back towards the car.

  ‘Never seen him before.’

  ‘He likes you.’ Her son sounded pleased.

  She’d had to pull him along to keep him moving, so keen was he to keep turning back to feed his curiosity over this man whom he thought admired his mother as much as he did.

  She wanted to tell her son that the man didn’t even know if he liked her or not, that he only knew that he liked parts of her. She thought about how she could explain it to him by way of drawing comparisons with the lollies her son favoured in a sweet shop – red frogs preferred over green, Fantales over Jaffas. She wanted to tell him that a woman’s body wasn’t a confection though; that women weren’t a free-for-all feast of the eyes with some bits of them looking tastier than others.

  She said nothing to her son though. Instead, she hurried him on to the car.

  In this she knows she failed him.

  Samantha had felt she was asking for trouble when she was here last time. That the pain she experienced back then was something she deserved; that everything they experienced was something they deserved. Now she knows the real problem was that she lacked the confidence to believe she had the same right as the man to go where she pleased.

  So she doesn’t think of her aches and pains and chafing as a punishment now. She thinks of them as a rite of passage. She steps off the boardwalk and leaves the teeming primordial body of water behind her.

  Chapter 8

  Lisa stops and waits for Samantha. The track is wide enough here for the two of them to walk alongside one another. Lisa sees how pinched Samantha’s face is as she approaches. She hasn’t complained once, but Lisa can tell she’s hurting, even on this easier section of the trail. When it’s time to end the breaks they take along the way, Samantha grimaces even before she rises. And then when she does, she moves off with something like fear on her face. Nothing like the wide-eyed panic of last time. This is more hand wringing. A fear of failure perhaps, not of harm.

  Samantha is a dogged, albeit one-geared walker, with a slow, steady pace regardless of the terrain. Yet her feet touch the ground with surprising lightness.

  ‘You’re a graceful walker,’ Lisa says as her steps fall in time to Samantha’s. ‘I stomp.’

  ‘Still angry?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Samantha nods. ‘Figured as much.’

  ‘Why’d you ask then?’

  ‘To check you did.’

  How couldn’t she? It’s the one thing that’s kept her upright. There have been periods when there’s been a diamond-hard purity to it. Like on this hike all those years before. To walk with anger foremost in her mind then had allowed her to walk without fear.

  ‘It’s the one constant thing about me,’ Lisa says.

  ‘And how’s that served you so far?’

  Lisa’s shoulders slump. It’s a rare moment where she feels defeated, because she knows it’s served little that’s good, not for her or Hannah.

  ‘Don’t you get it?’ Samantha says, ‘If you stay angry, he wins.’

  ‘So just act like nothing happened?’

  ‘No. Just don’t let him keep controlling how you feel about what happened.’

  Samantha slows then, lets Lisa pull ahead.

  There was a time in her past when Lisa let go of her anger. Exhaustion from carrying it was probably what drew her to Matt in the first place. Always being at the ready, always on the lookout for those willing to take her down. She’d become a hand-to-hand combatant in her own war on life. She thinks she was probably worn out from the fight. So when Matt offered to help her down from her high horse, she willingly took his hand, believing he was her best opportunity for change. And she was content for a while with being less.


  Equally though, she’d lost the two people who were worth fighting for. She thinks that took some of the pluck out of her. Maybe if she’d still had to look out for them, then they’d have looked out for her and steered her away from a man they would have recognised as good at manipulation where Lisa hadn’t.

  If she were a better driver – a slower, more attentive one – two things might have been different about her life. She wouldn’t have come up against the man in the car park, and all that followed. And she wouldn’t have met Matt.

  She’d been distracted on the day they first met, one hand scrabbling round inside her handbag on the passenger seat trying to locate a packet of gum. If she’d been paying more attention she’d have seen the traffic lights change. Seen the red Toyota Celica come to a halt in front of her. As it was, she drove her Datsun into the back of Matt’s car with enough force to throw her handbag from the seat. It landed upside down in the footwell, contents spilled. When it came time to pick it all up again later, there wasn’t even any gum amongst it.

  He got out of his car, long legs first, broad shoulders followed, with a pugilist’s glare. His neat white-collar-worker hands were in tight fists at his sides. Once he saw Lisa though – young, pretty, vulnerable – his stance softened to something more cavalier. He walked her safely to the kerb, hand at her back. Rallied passers-by to push her car off to the side. Organised the tow truck. Took the pen from her hand when it shook too much for her to write down her details. He took charge of everything and she let him.

  She’s surprised now by her meekness in the face of this event. Anger is a weighty thing to carry though. And hers had already caused the loss of her two greatest friends. Here was a chance to prove she could let it go. That she could be a better person.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said, when Lisa couldn’t control her quavering chin or tears any longer. ‘It’s not that bad.’