The Geography of Friendship

by Sally Piper

  He rested his soft pharmacist hands on her shoulders so tenderly, so soothingly, that a floodgate was opened and she wept uncontrollably. It seems stupid now, to think she allowed a simple act of kindness to leave her vulnerable. Especially when it turned out not to be an act of kindness so much as an act of control, with her submission laying the groundwork for his unending belief that she owed him something.

  But she supposes she colluded with their mutual deceptions. She presented a version of herself that was neither genuine nor sustainable either.

  Matt was – is – a greedy man. Always took more than his fair share. His speech booming louder than anyone else’s. Always asking questions but then never listening to the answers. His elbows were pointy V’d weapons when he stood. Knees wide when he sat. Time and money was his to spend. Hers to earn.

  While Lisa contributed financially, he was happy. Then she stopped work for a few years when they had Hannah. His perceived value soared. Hers plummeted. She was a poor investment. She was never enough.

  The ATM’s home!

  Easy day by the pool, ladies?

  Jokes, he said, but they stung.

  She might have had a dollar value put on her, but not so the things he bought. Expensive bicycles and surfboards and gym equipment littered their garage; golf weekends filled his calendar. Ted Baker shirts and Hugo Boss jeans hung in his wardrobe. The Celica was upgraded for a Honda Prelude, the Prelude for a BMW.

  ‘I thought things were tight this month?’ she’d say.

  He’d shrug.

  Lisa went back to work. She had two jobs. Only one she was paid for. Barely covered after-school care. Her other job was billed to womanhood.

  The real Lisa eventually returned. The fighter.

  She challenged him, chin out, a toddler on her hip. She argued, shoulders squared, a pre-teen standing alongside her. She raged at night. She raged in the small hours.

  She fought for relevancy. She fought for respect. She banked neither.

  Hannah, not even an adolescent: ‘Can’t you two ever let it go?’

  Matt laughed. Because he knew Lisa couldn’t.

  Their daughter chose another way at these times. She calmly laid her magazine or book on the sofa or gathered up her homework from the table, and left the room. She always closed her bedroom door quietly behind her. She never cranked up the music to drown them out. She was too certain of who she didn’t want to be.

  Lisa’s anger broke items she loved. Risked seven years of bad luck. It gave Matt more reason to do and be less.

  Eventually, reluctantly, he signed divorce papers.

  And finally she had proof that she’d added value. The courts told him how much. It’s the only time he fought back. He slammed her up against the doorframe when he walked out of the house for the last time. Left bruises on her hip and shoulder the size of saucers. Lisa wore those purple, green and yellow hues with pride. They were the colour of her worth.

  Hannah stepped over the carnage of their separation and moved out as soon as she finished school.

  Matt has a new partner now. Lisa’s never met her. Hannah says she’s nothing like her, that she’s softer. Lisa doesn’t know if Hannah means this woman doesn’t have her hard-angled bones or is softer in nature. Possibly both.

  ‘Do you like her?’ she asked Hannah.

  ‘She’s nice enough.’

  Enough. Adequate. Satisfactory. Hannah never speaks in extremes – love, hate, terror, ecstasy. She is an emblem of forbearance.

  ‘She seems to make Dad happy enough.’

  Enough.

  ‘They don’t argue. Not that I’ve heard anyway.’

  Lisa tried to imagine Matt without a sparring partner. She could see only a man who looked bored.

  ‘Is he kind to her?’

  Hannah shrugged. ‘From what I can tell he treats her much the same as he treated you.’

  Lisa’s still not sure whose behaviour was normalised the most for Hannah – Matt’s or hers.

  ‘Do you think they’ll marry?’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘Dad said there’s nothing in it for either of them to bother.’

  Lisa doesn’t regret her anger. Only her inability to harness it into something more eloquent. It is an isolating trait. But to capitulate is worse. The equivalent of an apology for who – what – she is. An apology for not being enough.

  Nicole had given up her position in the lead that third day without argument. Lisa took her place. Her stick was a pendulum at her side. She led them with authority. She was Boudicca. Resolute. Unflinching. Each time she brought her right foot down she stabbed that stick into the ground alongside it. She left a line of deep pockmarks in the earth behind her.

  The day was cooler than the previous one, the heat sucked up by a low-pressure system building to the southwest. Dark, broody clouds were clotted along the horizon.

  The trail out of their second campsite followed the coastline initially, first through low-lying swamp and then a sinuous, sandy line that threaded between tortuous coastal tea-tree. Their upper branches arched over the track in parts, met above her head like steepled fingers. Lisa had to stoop in places to pass. Fleshy toadstools grew in shaded areas. Some had toxic yellow underbellies; their tops blackened and leathered like torched skin. Others were the colour of perfectly browned meringue.

  It was easy going. The hills and gullies neither steep nor long.

  She walked quickly. In part because she no longer had to hold herself back to wait for Samantha. Mostly though because she was wired, tight as a spring, with fury. The only way she knew to release the trapped energy of it was in the rapid turnover of her legs. Her anger pushed down through the soles of her boots. The ground witnessed the force of it. If she hoped for some kind of purification though, she’d be disappointed.

  She put distance between herself and the other two. Not enough to lose sight of them. Enough though, that they didn’t have to see Nicole’s red bikini bottom when she came across it. It was laid out in the centre of the trail with care. The gusset pointed towards her. An image was drawn in the sandy soil beside it. A cock with balls. The tip of it penetrated the bikini’s left leg hole.

  Lisa supposes she should have grown fearful at this point. Sensed the perverted risk of the man. But she didn’t. Instead, she was furious. It was the childishness of it that enraged her. The image he’d drawn reminded her of the graffitied desks and textbooks and toilet doors of her school days. If it wasn’t Foo woz here or arrowed hearts scribbled across these surfaces, it was this silly, slit-eyed tuber. Never vulvas. Occasionally some caricature of a girl with F-cup breasts. Mostly it was this stupid image that littered these surfaces. Always majestically erect, lest she forget they existed inside boys’ trousers, looking for opportunities to burst out.

  Lisa glanced behind her. Nicole and Samantha were just rounding a gentle curve in the trail, their heads down.

  She wouldn’t be able to hide the bikini top they’d find later, but she’d been able to hide this.

  She hooked her stick under the stained and stiffened garment and flicked it into the scrub where it landed out of sight behind a clump of sword-sedge. She quickly scrubbed out the crude image with her boot and walked on.

  She grew wary after that. Sensate. Vigilant for acts of cunning. Attacks.

  Her anger became less indignant and more vengeful throughout that day. It flared and hissed inside her, like water on hot rocks. She was no longer simply on a girls-only hike. She was on a crusade. Her long staff tapped along to the drumbeat of her marching feet.

  They stop for lunch in a gully. Water from a narrow creek chatters across mossy rocks. Hardy tree ferns – Cyathea australis – provide shade. The open trail pushes upward either side of where they rest into full sun. They are in the cool oasis of its V.

  Nicole lies on a flat rock, pack as pillow, knees drawn up. She
has pulled her peaked cap over her face. Samantha has taken her boots and socks off and cools her feet in the water.

  ‘Why didn’t you stick with selling real estate?’ Nicole asks Lisa out of the blue, words muffled under her cap.

  Lisa’s started many things in her life. Many remain unfinished. Unfulfilled. A Bachelor of Arts. A marriage. Jobs. Selling real estate just one of them. Disillusionment derailed some plans. Anger others. Forced her in different directions. Brought about a new purpose.

  ‘I was too honest,’ she says.

  Nicole lifts her cap from one eye to look at Lisa. She doesn’t try to hide her disbelief.

  ‘Buyers liked that about me.’ Lisa tries not to sound defensive. ‘But it made me a lousy seller.’

  ‘How does honesty fit with what you do now?’

  Lisa thinks about the work she does, fitting out properties for sale with furniture packages to enhance their appeal. She does it prettily, but often impractically.

  ‘I provide buyers with the means to imagine. That’s all.’

  ‘So you’re paid to create an illusion?’

  She wants to tell Nicole that the truth isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, so why not fiddle with the edges of it, make it more palatable. But she doesn’t. Instead, she shrugs and agrees with her. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Hard to believe people can’t see through it,’ Nicole muses. ‘How they let a few baubles and cushions cinch the most expensive deal of their lives.’

  Lisa doesn’t argue with her. She knows what Nicole’s doing. She’s trying to pull her character apart. See what new faults she’s cultivated over the years. Surely Lisa doesn’t have any room inside her for more than those she already carries?

  She wonders how much of the anger that flickers inside her comes from the chemistry of her conception, and how much from the steady drip of circumstance and experience. It’s been with her for as long as she can remember, so something of it must have been planted like a seed in those first cells. Sometimes it rumbles softly inside her like distant thunder. Other times it’s close and dangerous and sparks like downed powerlines.

  Hannah has always sensed it. Lisa thinks it was this that unnerved her as a baby. Made her cower as a child. Embarrassed her throughout adolescence. Then, as soon as she could she escaped it. Made a new home well away from Lisa’s, and Matt’s, in a share house that not even Lisa could tart up.

  Lisa doesn’t think either of them deserved such a gentle daughter anyway.

  Samantha lifts one foot from the creek, shakes the water from it. ‘At least you get to source different baubles,’ she says. ‘Same shit, different sewer when you keep the books for a plumber.’

  Lisa smiles at this. At life.

  Later, as they breach the rise of a headland and start the descent, the trees thin and through them Lisa glimpses patches of pale sand. She knows even without being able to see all of it that it’s the long beach, and that it curves in a gentle arc all the way round to the next headland.

  Long beaches make Lisa think of sex. Think of the way the sand moulds to the shape of the body. How grains of sand drift from pockets and cuffs and seams for weeks later.

  Sex was a commodity at school. Traded and bartered for popularity, attention, kudos. Lisa wasn’t interested in any of that. But she was interested in sex. How some girls knew, as if by instinct, the postural tweaks and adjustments – chin lifted, thigh turned out, just so – that bestowed them with its pervasive power. She’d watch these courtship performances but never copied. There was something needy about having to work for it.

  Lisa ambushed her first lover. No pouty lips or hair flicking required. Or maybe he ambushed her?

  She was on a beach holiday with her parents. There were few other fifteen-year-olds staying at the resort, so she spent a great deal of time on her own. As an only child she was good at this.

  Their resort was at one end of a long beach. Lisa would go beachcombing after the tide went out most days. She combed for shells, driftwood and sea glass. She found plenty, kept none. She lost track of time and distance on her hunts. Which was mostly the purpose of them, to take a large chunk out of the long days. She could easily make it to the end of the beach, some two kilometres long, without realising it till she looked up and saw the rocky headland that marked its end just ahead of her.

  She was about halfway along the beach this day when a brown-haired boy walked out from a track between the dunes and came onto the beach. He was barefoot and wore unevenly rolled up Levis with ripped knees and an unbuttoned checked shirt that blew open so that she could see his tanned, hairless chest. She doesn’t know where it was he had come from or where it was he was going to, but he fell in step with her and she slowed her pace.

  He was older than her. Maybe twenty. He spoke of university share houses and seasonal fruit picking and having seen INXS and Duran Duran in concert, of Bob Hawke and Mikhail Gorbachev and the Rainbow Warrior. She listened mostly. She didn’t talk about her family or school or any of the preoccupations adolescents have. She didn’t want to show him how little she’d lived.

  Lisa doesn’t know if neurochemistry exists between two people, if there is something unseen that attracts one to the other, like sodium attracts chloride, hydrogen does oxygen. But that day, she felt that there was.

  Their conversation came easily and naturally to sex.

  ‘Have you?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said and didn’t feel embarrassed to admit it.

  Was she being groomed? Possibly. Did she care? No. He was the one. She wanted him.

  On soft, dry sand in a dip behind the dunes, Lisa took off her sundress and laid it on the ground. He took off his shirt and laid it over her dress. She thought this chivalrous at the time, but suspects it was something more practical. He took his wallet from his back pocket and removed a condom from inside. She remembers thinking that at least one of them knew what they were doing.

  It didn’t hurt at all which surprised her. In fact it was the most respectful, gentle and ardent sex she’s ever had. A gift. Something given with no known past or any expectation there be a future. They had just that moment. She didn’t waste it being shy or self-conscious. She approached it with all the curiosity a new experience deserves. He taught her things about her body she didn’t know it capable of. In some ways he spoilt it for later lovers.

  Afterwards, they kissed goodbye and he walked on. She walked back. She didn’t learn his name and neither did he learn hers.

  This glimpse of sand Lisa spots through the trees now doesn’t bring back sensuous feelings of unselfish sex. It brings back feelings of confusion, trickery and cunning.

  At the time she thought the other two made too much of the man. He was a shapeshifter. And they, the people for whom his deceptions were intended, had decided the shape of him. So just as darkness makes sounds bigger than they really are, Lisa believed Samantha’s and Nicole’s fear had made the threat of the man greater than it need be. They’d left the door open for this bogeyman to come and go as he pleased. Lisa refused to let him in.

  That’s how sure of herself she was back then. How stupid.

  Lisa looks down the trail to Nicole. She’s not striking out for distance between them today. And she pauses to look around more often. Lisa watches as she stops now and casts her eyes up to the canopy. Is she looking for something new, she wonders, or something familiar?

  ‘What have you spotted?’ she calls to her.

  Nicole looks at her briefly before she walks on without answering. Lisa pauses to scan the land too.

  Rocks. Mountains. Trees. Trail. It’s difficult for her memory to discern any one of these things as uniquely familiar. But collectively the contour of them forms a picture of having been seen before. She doesn’t know if this is because this place is connected with an experience, or if the shape of her life since that experience has connected her with this
place. Either way, she feels this land has something of her and its not likely to ever give it back.

  She wonders what the others see when they look around. Maybe the terrain represents something altogether different to each one of them. Courage. Loss. Fragility. Can any of them see just its beauty without also feeling their own pain?

  And what shape does the man take in Nicole’s and Samantha’s minds now? Do they keep the door open to him still, through which he comes and goes? Or are they, like her, able to keep it tightly closed against him?

  Lisa might have little physical memory of him now, but what she hasn’t been able to shut out is the ugly geography of her own failings in the face of him.

  This is the thing that haunts her. Not the man.

  Chapter 9

  Last night nicole slept poorly again. Her body felt sluggish when she set out this morning, older than its forty-four years. Even though the sun has slipped past its midday high, her limbs still carry this earlier lethargy. It has caused her to slow her pace, shorten the gap between her and the others. She isn’t sure if this is a good or a bad thing.

  It allowed her to hear all that Lisa and Samantha said earlier about anger and forgiveness though. She could have contributed something to their conversation, but didn’t, for reasons of charity. She doubts she’d have been as generous to Lisa as Samantha was.Lisa’s right. Her anger is the one constant thing about her. And while it lacks nothing in function and form, it’s also her Achilles heel.

  Despite today’s trail being familiar in a distant-through-time kind of way, Nicole feels she’s rerouted herself on it somehow. Taken a subversive detour into what she thought was an abandoned past, but which in truth hasn’t really been abandoned at all.

  When she thinks about the terrain she’s crossed, she thinks about how it must hold some impression of her having been here no matter how much time has passed. She broke branches, which must have caused trees and bushes to push in different directions, cast new shadows and with it alter what grew beneath their canopy. Or the rocks she disturbed that found new ground and provided an alternative haven for creatures beneath them. They fashioned hideouts. Forged new trails. Shortcuts. Diversions. These things must have left some imprint of her story.