The Geography of Friendship

by Sally Piper

  ‘Girls always wanna be found, Mum. The ones at school do anyway. Especially Alice. She’s the worst hider. I always find her first because she doesn’t even try to hide. Then she sticks to me like a leech and doesn’t even help while I look for the others.’ He clamped his arms straight by his sides to demonstrate Alice’s closeness.

  Samantha stood on the other side of the breakfast bar this day. She was peeling an apple for him, trying to do it in one long ribbon, the challenge he always gave her. ‘Meeting a girl isn’t the same as a game of hide and seek.’

  ‘Sometimes it is,’ Harry said and laughed. ‘There’ll be some girls you’ll wanna hide from, mate.’

  ‘Like Alice?’

  ‘Your Alice sounds like she might be trouble, so maybe.’

  Samantha looked up from what she was doing. The ribbon of apple skin broke and fell to the floor. ‘And there are men that women need to hide from.’ She stabbed the air in front of her son with the knife. ‘Don’t be one of them.’

  ‘Whoa!’ He reared back, nearly toppled his chair.

  What kind of mother points a knife at her seven-year-old child, practically threatens him with it?

  ‘Reckon we need to hide from Mum,’ he said to Harry and giggled behind his hand.

  ‘She’s armed and dangerous, all right.’

  Her son’s laugh was young, squeaky. Harry’s was deep and old enough to know better.

  Her youngest son is seventeen now. He no longer expresses an interest in finding a wife. And Samantha expects he’s kissed more than a girl’s cheek. She hopes he treats them well.

  Her younger self probably reached the end of the beach walk in worse shape than the older version of her does now. Samantha had looked up to the next boulder-strewn headland they were to climb. It was no higher than the many others they’d had to walk over, but in that moment it seemed insurmountable.

  She had thrown her stick onto the sand, unbuckled her pack and let it thump down at her feet. She then slumped onto a rock, rested her forearms across her thighs and lowered her head onto them. She was spent. Done in. She just wanted to sleep, the deep, deep sleep of a child. To go home.

  ‘Come on, Sam,’ Lisa coaxed. ‘You can do it.’

  Lisa nudged Samantha’s leg gently with her stick. Samantha still recalls how this action sent a rush of heat from somewhere deep in her belly all the way up into her head. She snapped her head up and glared at Lisa. Her face must have looked fierce because Lisa took a step back.

  ‘Can I, Lisa?’ she shouted. ‘Can I really fucking do it?’ What a spiteful, hateful voice. But she hadn’t stopped there. ‘Maybe I could have done it, if just for once … just one fucking time in your life you had the brains to let it go!’

  Samantha still can’t believe that she felt a moment of pure hate for Lisa then. The same girl who only a short time before had comforted her, let her leave a trail of snot and tears down her T-shirt. The girl, who now, more than twenty years on, has taken some of the weight from her pack because she still wants to believe Samantha can do it. The rush of hate had left her as quickly as it arrived and silence crashed in around her, broken only by the heft of her breath.

  For all her feistiness, Lisa said nothing. She just looked at Samantha, her face impassive. Unsurprised. She hadn’t even looked taken aback or upset. For a while Samantha thought Lisa must have been in the midst of gathering the force to unleash her own anger, but nothing came. It was as though she’d simply allowed Samantha’s words to wash over her. Like they were intended for someone else, someone behind or beyond her. But not even this was right. Because in that calm quiet, what Samantha eventually came to realise was that Lisa’s silence said, Yes, I should have let it go.

  Samantha still doesn’t know if it was exhaustion or fear that made her say the things she did. Probably a combination of both. Whatever it was though, regret soon took over and she was close to tears again. She turned away from the others and hauled her pack back onto her shoulders. She hadn’t wanted them to see just how out of control she was. Just how weak.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled to the ground somewhere near Lisa’s feet.

  Lisa gently pushed her backpack with her hand, propelled Samantha forward. ‘You can shout at me all you like if it gets you over this fucking mountain.’

  The memory of the ascent is still strong to Samantha. ‘It doesn’t look any easier,’ she says to Lisa now.

  ‘It will be,’ Lisa says, with the same conviction she’d had last time.

  Samantha thinks it was their collective shame that contributed most to the splintering of their friendship. There were too many hateful incidents like that one which had to be put behind them; too many assumptions about their friendship that had to be discarded. How are they to step over the litter of their past mistakes?

  At the time, Samantha believed they were acting outside of themselves. That their behaviour was beyond anything they could control. But she knows now that this was an excuse, a poor justification for crossing the line between civility and barbarism.

  And poor Lisa. She ended up proving herself capable of taking any measure of abuse for or from either one of them as their control slipped steadily away.

  Chapter 11

  It’s easy now for Lisa to see how successful he’d been at terrorising them. He gradually took their courage, then their sense of reason and finally struck a blow at the very foundations of their friendship. He played them like puppets. Pulled their strings. Made them dance.

  He always had the advantage. Like any good hunter, he observed his quarry. Came to understand something about them. Lisa expects his binoculars were trained on them many times. Saw their confusion when they came to the dead-end trail of his footprints. Probably laughed out loud, especially if he witnessed Samantha’s meltdown in the face of it. Saw later how stress and fatigue allowed them to forget who it was they were fighting as they started to fight against one another instead. She imagines he rejoiced at the way things unravelled.

  And yet, while he observed all of these things about them, by the third night they still hadn’t laid eyes on him since the car park. What a slippery bastard he was.

  It takes Lisa a while to adjust to the extra weight of Samantha’s gear. Those few items of clothing pushed down on top of her own makes a bigger difference than she expected. Nicole must notice it more. She has Samantha’s tent now, secured at the base of her pack along with her own. She’s also taken the first-aid kit and Samantha’s spare bottle of water. She’s jammed both into a webbed side pocket on the outside of her pack.

  Samantha refused to give up anything initially.

  ‘I can do it,’ she said and went to walk on. She held herself tall and proud, and in agony, Lisa expects.

  It was Nicole who eventually made her change her mind. She put her hand out to Samantha. Rested it gently on her arm as she went to walk away.

  ‘You did it for me once. Remember?’

  Lisa felt an unexpected and inflated sense of happiness at Nicole’s words.

  Samantha paused. They exchanged a look of understanding, one that spoke deeply about a shared experience. Without saying a word, Samantha lowered her pack onto the sand. Allowed them to separate out some of her gear.

  To think back on those disappearing footprints, reminds Lisa of her inability to accept facts. She still marvels at her stupidity in not fully acknowledging the threat of the man, despite all the signs indicating otherwise.

  But denial, no matter that the facts placed before her are often damning, is a fault she seems unable to shake. Matt is no better. Neither of them took responsibility for how much they damaged Hannah. They both still suffer the consequences of their neglect.

  Hannah’s relationship with her mother is on her terms now. Lisa rings her often, but sees her less so.

  ‘I’ve got exams coming up,’ Hannah said during last week’s call, when Lisa asked to see her befo
re she came away.

  ‘Not now though? You’re not actually in exam block now are you?’

  ‘No, but I’m studying for them. No good studying for them in the week I sit them.’

  ‘No. I suppose not.’

  There was a moment of silence in which Lisa didn’t bother to argue against her daughter’s logic, only to wonder at the honesty of it.

  She hasn’t seen Hannah for four weeks now. She misses her. Worries that the time between visits will only get longer.

  Lisa’s like an awkward boy with a crush on a too-good-for-him girl around her daughter. A boy that’s desperate to be noticed but knows that he’s punching above his weight.

  ‘When do you finish them?’

  ‘Soon enough.’

  Never soon enough. Never enough.

  ‘What’s with this walk thing you’re doing anyway?’

  How to tell her daughter it was for her as much as it was for Lisa?

  ‘It’s a stroll down memory lane.’ Lisa laughed at her own understatement.

  ‘From where I sit, there’s not much of it worth strolling down.’

  Hannah didn’t sound bitter. She sounded weary, wearier than you’d expect in a nineteen-year-old. And even though she couldn’t see her daughter, Lisa pictured her lethargy at their conversation. She imagined Hannah slumped in her chair, maybe she even studied a fingernail while she spoke or doodled on a notepad.

  ‘You wouldn’t know this particular lane,’ Lisa said. ‘It was before your time.’

  ‘Were you different then?’

  Lisa didn’t answer straight away. She thought about lying. Telling Hannah she was. Telling her about her two dearest, irreplaceable friends, women her daughter has never met. How she believed they brought out the best in her, until they didn’t. How she hopes to have the qualities of their friendship returned to her and all the goodness that might come with it if it can be.

  ‘No. If anything, I was probably worse.’

  ‘Jesus. And you wanna spend time with that person again?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m going to tell her off. Make her change her ways.’ Lisa laughed her silly, trivialising laugh once again.

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  This silenced Lisa for a time. Hannah was getting braver with her criticisms. Lisa suspects her daughter’s newly found independence has opened her mind to alternative ways of being in the world. There was little that Lisa feared, but the possibility of not being a part of Hannah’s life terrified her.

  ‘Listen … do your walk and I’ll see you when you get back. Okay?’

  Lisa knew the okay wasn’t a question. It was an assertion. Time was up.

  She kept Hannah on the line a little longer though, as long as she could, asked after her boyfriend.

  ‘He’s good.’

  ‘Studying too?’

  ‘Uh-huh. The whole house is. It’s like a mausoleum. Only we’re still breathing.’

  Her pretty, witty, scarred girl.

  ‘I love you.’ Lisa tells her daughter this every time before she ends their call.

  ‘You too.’

  Hannah’s witnessed too much. Heard too much.

  You selfish bastard!

  Bitch!

  Fuck you!

  The whistle and shatter of cups.

  She’s seen the ease with which the two people who made her can tear one another apart.

  When Lisa looks at Nicole she sees something of her gently guarded daughter. Both are damaged. Both have a loss of faith.

  When Nicole said, ‘I need space,’ at the end of this hike last time, Lisa wasn’t surprised that she meant permanently. What does surprise her though is how quickly and easily she’d given it to her. But she doesn’t think she allowed it out of respect for Nicole. Lisa thinks it was the only way she knew how to hide from her own worst self.

  Hannah didn’t ask her mother to give her space, she just took it. Now, Lisa has to find a way to encourage Hannah to allow her to fill it again, before the habit of distance effortlessly slides into estrangement.

  Before they tackle the climb, they take off their boots and bang them upside-down on rocks to remove the sand from inside. Samantha peels off her socks as well and inspects her feet. The blister plasters have lifted at the edges and sand has worked its way under them. Lisa knows they’ll be more abrasive than cushioning. So must Nicole.

  ‘I’ll re-dress them.’ Nicole takes the first-aid gear from her pack. She kneels down on the sand in front of Samantha.

  Lisa sits on a rock away from them and watches as Nicole takes one of Samantha’s feet in her hands and wipes the sand from the tops and sides of it with long, gentle strokes. She removes it from between each of Samantha’s toes with her finger; runs her flat palm across the sole. She then carefully removes the blister plaster from her heel, clears the sand from the skin beneath it and applies a new one. She rests the foot back on a rock out of the sand then starts on the other foot. She handles each as though it is a precious thing.

  Lisa’s overcome by the tenderness of this scene. It’s more like watching an anointment than someone attending first aid. She’s equally moved by the fact that Samantha allows Nicole to do it.

  Nicole reapplies the final blister plaster then turns each of Samantha’s socks inside out. She slaps them against a rock several times to release the sand caught in the weave. She hands them back to her, turned once more in the right way. She helps Samantha then, who strains against the grip of tight hamstrings to reach forward, to pull each back over her feet.

  Lisa feels an uncharacteristic sting of tears as she watches. She must blink fast to hold them back. She doesn’t want the others to notice. But little still gets past Nicole.

  ‘If you’re going to cry about it,’ she says, not looking at Lisa, ‘I’ll do yours too.’

  Lisa sniffs loudly and shakes her head.

  She’s not sure what the tears are for. Whether they’re for what they’ve lost or what she hopes they’ll regain.

  This time the climb takes them through a damaged terrain. Bushfires have ravaged the area and the landscape is deeply scarred. Some trees have blackened hollows burnt into their trunks but despite these deep wounds their canopies continue to flourish. Other trees haven’t been so lucky. They are without bark, their wood the colour of old bones, and their barren branches push into the sky like broken swords. Strident saplings fill the gaps now, and the charred branches of older, surviving trees hold up bushy fists of succulent regrowth.

  The landscape is parched. Fit only for survivors. Xanthorrhoea australis abound. The height of some of these native grass trees indicates their great age. Their bristled, fire-blackened trunks speak of their hardiness. They are indomitable. Sentries to this ancient land.

  Small drop-tail lizards scarper across the track, others bravely hold their position and stare up at Lisa from rocks. The gravelly trail is pocked with jumping jack ant nests. She doesn’t dare stand for long in the one spot in case these aggressive armies take hold of her with their nasty yellow pincers.

  All the headlands they’ve crossed have been characterised by weathered and fractured granite. This part of the trail weaves between these monolithic boulders. These once molten upsurges push out of the ground like the big blunt heads of sperm whales. The track zigzags between them. The gap between boulders is narrow in places and because she is as deep with a pack on her back as she is wide, there’s no turning side on, she has to push through as best she can.

  Lisa thinks back to how jittery Nicole was as she walked between these boulders last time. She led as she almost always did, so Lisa saw when she startled, which was often and easily. She looked up regularly. Sometimes she stopped altogether, ear tilted skyward. Attentive.

  ‘What’s up?’ Lisa asked her at one stage, even though she could guess.

  These towering rocks, with thei
r flat spectator platforms and shadowy corridors, unnerved Nicole.

  ‘Nothing,’ she had said and moved on.

  This time Lisa runs her hand across the rough surface of the boulders as she passes them. She marvels at their longevity. Previously, she’d not considered there to be anything marvellous about them at all. The only good thing was that they’d offered some protection from the wind that gusted on and off all of that day.

  Animals go crazy in the wind. Birds hide their heads under their wings. Dogs whimper and go to their kennels. Horses get spooked enough to roll the whites of their eyes, and shy or bolt and get their legs tangled in wire fences.

  They were more like horses.

  The wind whistled through the tree canopy. It took leaves with it and made branches creak and scrape. Sometimes Lisa imagined words travelling on the wind. Slut. Cunt. Bitch. Sometimes the wind laughed.

  After a while, Lisa became more like Nicole. She looked up often and startled easily.

  Near the top of the headland, the tall boulders are replaced with vast flat slabs of granite. As Lisa walks across them, she wonders how deeply they penetrate the earth. These grey expanses are five, sometimes ten metres across so she pictures them to be like icebergs where the greater part of them is underground, out of sight. Hardy heath and bracken grows right to the edges of these subterranean boulders, despite the shallowness of the soil.

  Last time it was a disorientating terrain. As much from their lack of bushwalking experience as how few people walked the trail back then to keep it worn and easily identified. The granite only added to their confusion. A couple of times they walked round the perimeter of these masses of flat stone looking for where the track began again. Sometimes Samantha panicked during these searches.

  ‘Are you sure this is it?’ she asked more than once when they located what was sometimes a poorly defined entry point to the trail again. ‘What if it’s just an animal trail and we lose the real one altogether?’

  To appease her, Lisa or Nicole would walk along it for a way, assess if it petered out or was the real thing.