by Sally Piper
‘Yep! This is it!’
Lisa beamed too enthusiastically at these times, pleased to offer Samantha something reliable. It didn’t matter that all she was really offering her was the same shitty trail in the same shitty location with the same creep out there somewhere who was hell bent on tormenting them. But Lisa had to hold on to the fact that it was their trail too, and eventually it would take them home.
Except the time when neither Lisa nor Nicole were able to offer Samantha any trail at all.
They reached a stretch of stone that was long and narrow. It curved in a gentle arc from end to end as though mapping the very contour of the earth. Typically the undergrowth grew thick to its edges. The usual heath and bracken mostly, plus scrappy melaleucas and native grass trees, their spiky filaments fanned out like enormous fibre optic lamps. The shaded areas of granite were covered in lacy green lichen and clumps of spongy moss. The vegetation was undisturbed whatever direction they looked.
They walked the perimeter of the expanse of stone trying to find where the trail began again, as they’d had to do in similar situations previously. But they could only find the track from which they’d approached, not the one along which they were to continue.
‘It’s got to be here somewhere,’ Nicole said.
Lisa had felt the frustration she could hear in Nicole’s voice. The track’s disappearance was as bewildering to her as it would be if someone had tried to tell her that one plus one no longer equalled two.
They walked around that marooned slab of rock several times – clockwise and counter-clockwise – looking for what they thought had to be there. They found what looked like the trail, a narrow worn path that was mostly overgrown with bracken. But when Nicole followed it into the scrub, about three metres in she stood like a half person in the waist-high bracken and raised her arms in a helpless gesture.
‘Must be an animal trail,’ she said. ‘It peters out to nothing.’
‘Maybe we went wrong further back?’ Samantha suggested. ‘And we haven’t really been following the right track at all. Maybe we haven’t been for ages.’
They’d had to weave their way through so much stone, followed a trail that was little more than a thin strip of gravel in a number of places, but Lisa knew it was undeniably there. She shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We haven’t. The track’s been obvious to this point.’
And it had been. She was sure of it. She thought back to how the trail widened again once they’d finished going through the last of the tall boulders, how the gravelly line of it clearly curved and crested with the topography. She knew she hadn’t imagined any of that.
‘It’s like his bloody footprints,’ Samantha said, and Lisa could hear the panic rise in her voice again. ‘It’s just disappeared.’
‘It has not,’ Nicole snapped. ‘We just need to find it.’
‘But we’ve looked.’
Lisa thought Samantha was about to cry again. For a brief, sickening moment she had a vision of slapping her hard if she did.
‘We just need to keep looking.’ Lisa tried to keep her voice level, but she could hear the edge to it, the bite of impatience.
Samantha said nothing. Instead, she walked clockwise round the flat stretch of granite again, but Lisa could tell she was only going through the motions of searching. Her gaze was on her feet, whereas Nicole kicked at the scrub that surrounded the rock to see what was beneath. Samantha looked more like a shuffling monk. All she lacked was a prayer wheel.
Lisa felt her temper build. She didn’t trust herself not to release it, so she walked back down the track the way they’d come to check if there was something they’d missed on the way up.
The thick bracken obscured the track in parts. It scratched at her bare legs as she pushed through it with her stick. She ran her other hand across the succulent tops as she went.
She could still hear Nicole talking, mostly to herself Lisa assumed, as she couldn’t hear Samantha reply. ‘This is stupid. It’s got to be here.’
What was stupid was that they’d allowed themselves to be unnerved so much by the games the man played. What was he really other than an ego-massaging fool? She imagined how he’d probably been laughing at them. She expects he thought himself clever. Superior. But she knew the truth. Or she thought she still knew it then. It was easy to be a clever coward, hidden away as he was. Not ever having to confront anyone over his actions. Everything he’d done to that point had been done on the sly, anonymously. Lisa feared him less because of it. She could pretend he wasn’t real.
She stopped and looked around. Hoped to find some clue to where the trail had gone. The tea-tree and melaleucas either side of her were gnarled and twisted and their branches grew off at contorted angles in this higher, exposed ground. Branches had broken off and lay on the ground in untidy twiggy bundles. The papery bark of the melaleucas reminded her of sunburnt skin, the way the creamy bark split and shed from their trunks. She imagined peeling it away, layer by layer, just as she’d peeled the skin from her shoulders as a child.
What a messy place. But then she started to see beauty in the disorder. The way the trees had adapted and rerouted themselves out of necessity. The bends and twists to trunks and branches needed to accommodate the trees standing alongside. Others were forced in new directions by the wind, or their attempts to reach for the sun. It was a landscape configured for survival not aesthetics.
Lisa turned and started to walk slowly back towards the others. She was in no rush. Samantha’s panic was tedious. Nicole’s Girl Guide diligence wearing.
She cast her eyes around the growth either side of the track. Looked for gaps in the undergrowth. Places where a trail might wend its way between the trees. On her right was a collection of dead branches that had crushed the undergrowth. But she could see that the bracken and heath it covered was still green.
A new fall, she thought. Very recent.
She lifted a branch from the top, threw it aside and pushed through the undergrowth a little further to reach the next branch. She threw this one aside too.
Then she thought: Here is order.
This was not nature culling its dead wood. This was coward’s work.
She walked in further and threw a third, then a fourth and fifth branch aside. She used her stick to lift the bracken crushed beneath to reveal the trail. She walked further in amongst the trees and the trail became obvious again.
She suspected others had been fooled by this subtle veer in the track, walked the fifty or so metres on to the large, flat slab of granite. Created a false trail in the process. She wondered how many before them had lapped that expanse of stone looking for what wasn’t there. Wondered if they’d felt as bewildered and disorientated as they had.
Lisa placed her hand on the papery trunk of a melaleuca and paused before going back to get the others. A gust of wind pushed through the scraggly tree and with it she caught a writhing movement of something hanging from one of the tree’s upper branches. The movement startled her. She reared back. Almost fell under the weight of her pack. She backed slowly away from the tree.
It was the bright yellow tent rope that caught her eye first when the wind gusted again. She registered what was tied at the end of it seconds later.
The water dragon was a juvenile. Its spiny scales along its back were still short. Its head and feet were too large for its body. It curled its tapered, muscular tail upwards and kicked furiously with its hind legs in an attempt to free itself. But the yellow cord was tied securely behind its forelegs and in front of its distended belly. It was clearly distressed. Its cheeks were puffed out and its throat was blotched with orange, blue and yellow. It thrashed about again. But its efforts seemed weak.
‘Sick bastard.’
Lisa leant her stick up against the tree, took off her pack and rested it on the ground. She reached up to the branch where the other end of
the tent rope was tied and released the knot. She lowered the restrained reptile gently onto the ground. Once there it didn’t even try to lift its head or run off. It was exhausted. It must have been hanging from the tree for a while. Up close, she could see the rapid flutter of its heart beneath its leathery skin.
The cord was tied round it with a firm reef knot. Tentatively, she tried to loosen it. She picked at it with her fingernail. But it was too tight. She got cross at her timidness, for holding back from this small creature. What could it do to her?
She lifted the hem of her T-shirt and used it to carefully grip the reptile. She could feel its sharp, spiny scales through the fabric, along with the quick pulse of its heart. It fought against her initially, tried to claw her with the long toes on its hind legs. Later, she would notice that it had left a thin, red scratch on her stomach.
She worked at the knot with her free hand till she’d loosened it. She set the water dragon down amongst the undergrowth at the side of the trail then and sat back on her heels and watched it, willed it to run off. But it remained motionless, head and body pressed low to the ground. She couldn’t tell if it was injured, exhausted or too terrified to move.
Lisa hid the yellow tent rope deep amongst the bracken, not wanting Nicole or Sam to find it. She hoisted her pack onto her back again, collected her stick and returned to the main trail.
‘Found it!’ she called, waving at them.
She wouldn’t tell them about what else she’d found. Another secret, where previously she’d kept none.
Chapter 12
The trail wends gently down, then across a flat, exposed region between two headlands. It is a cupped palm of land. Nicole remembers it as the only wide-open space they encountered previously. The trail is easily seen reaching into the distance; it cuts a narrow silver ribbon through the thick, squat scrub and grasses. Every now and again it disappears inside a clump of taller trees, then pops into view again on the other side, whereupon it continues its serpentine course to the next rise. The plain has areas of soft grasses which change colour as the breeze shifts across them like velour stroked against the pile.
Oddly, this section of the trail had calmed Nicole when they reached it last time. She could see all around her. There were no boulders or crests or bends around or behind which someone could hide. The going was easy. The ground was hard but even. She could trot along it if she had to. That calm was hijacked though, about three-quarters of the way across.
Nicole remembers the urgency in Samantha’s voice when she called, ‘Wait up!’
She turned to see what was wrong, expecting Samantha had stumbled or seen a snake. But Samantha looked back in the direction from where they’d just come, hand over her eyes against the sun, her elbow wide at her side.
‘What’s wrong now?’ Lisa asked.
‘I saw him.’
‘Where?’ Lisa drew the word out on an impatient sigh.
‘Back there.’ Samantha indicated to a point several hundred metres back. ‘I’m pretty sure it was him.’
‘Pretty sure?’
Nicole shaded her eyes from the sun as well and scanned the trail all the way back to the hill they’d made their way down only an hour before. She trained her eyes up and down the length of it, paused where it disappeared behind trees, waited to see if someone came out the other side. She couldn’t see a soul.
‘I saw a tall shape in a dark top,’ Samantha said. ‘Then it disappeared behind that clump of trees.’
Lisa lost her earlier impatience then. She became animated. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s find a place to hide and wait for him.’ She turned and looked again in the direction they’d been heading. ‘There,’ she said and pointed to an outcrop of tall, thick scrub not far ahead. ‘We’ll wait for him behind that.’
‘Wait for him or hide from him?’ Nicole asked.
Lisa looked directly at Nicole as she edged past her on the narrow track. ‘Wait of course.’ Lisa’s stick struck the ground with force as she strode off.
‘Are you going to ambush him?’ Samantha called after her.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
‘No,’ Nicole said. ‘You never do.’
Lisa ignored her.
‘Maybe it wasn’t even him,’ Samantha said.
Nicole admired her optimism.
They followed Lisa, but Nicole looked over her shoulder often.
Up until then everything had indicated that he was always ahead of them. But had he been, really? How could they know given this was the first time any one of them had actually sighted him. Ahead or behind made no difference anyway. Nicole felt the threat of him no matter where he was.
‘Don’t crush the bushes as you walk in,’ Lisa said as they reached her chosen hideout. ‘Step over them. Let’s beat him at his own game.’
Game? Nicole remembers thinking. But that’s what it still was to Lisa at that stage. It didn’t matter that there weren’t any rules.
They made a high-stepped detour off the track till they were concealed behind a line of thick scrub. They took off their packs, laid them flat on the ground out of sight then nestled close to the ground behind the screen of mostly heath, tea-tree and banksia.
They waited.
Well, Nicole and Samantha waited. Lisa spent a few minutes gathering together fist-sized rocks, which she set out beside her. She then pushed peepholes through the branches, which allowed her to see back down the trail. Her stick lay on the ground beside her.
Stillness wasn’t normally Lisa’s strength. In boring classes at school she fidgeted with trapped energy. She drew intricate geometric designs in her exercise books or sharpened every pencil in her pencil case to a fine point. She could never just sit there. But she mastered stillness this day. She lay on the ground like a sphinx beside Nicole. She pushed her hair behind her ears, maximised the function of those dainty cups. Her breath was calm. Her hands steady. Nicole envied her. Samantha lay at Nicole’s other side and pressed in against her. She doesn’t know if Sam sought her protection or if being close made her feel braver and stronger than they really were. She felt a slight tremor in Samantha. Or maybe it was Nicole who shook.
It’s strange the discomfort an alert body allows the attention to overlook. It was only later that Nicole saw the deep red dimples left on the skin of her knees and elbows from the stones and gravel that dug into them, or the ant-bite on her calf. She had been too preoccupied with sound. The wind created a singsong of auditory frauds. Creaks and scrapes sounded like boots dragging along the trail. The sigh of leaves became the sigh of a man. The uncertainty of these noises jangled Nicole’s nerves like the chalkboard scrape of fingernails. The only sounds she trusted as real were those inside her own body, the throb and whoosh of her heart and blood.
‘Just let him go past,’ Nicole whispered to Lisa.
Lisa ignored her.
‘Lisa?’
‘Shh.’
When it came there was no mistaking the crunch of gravel. The whispering chafe of trouser leg against trouser leg. Samantha stiffened beside her and Nicole felt how her friend’s warm breath came in shallow pants against her shoulder. Instinctively, Nicole pressed lower to the ground. Lisa wrapped her hand around a rock.
They watched him pass. His stride was long. His back was straight under the weight of his backpack, his shoulders squared. He walked with his thumbs casually hooked under the chest straps of his pack. His bent elbows pulsed softly at his sides with each step, like saddlebags.
Nicole knows the three of them walked with the uneven gait of the fatigued. Their shoulders sagged under the weight of their heavy packs. Lisa and Samantha had dark rings under their eyes. The frown lines on their foreheads and the creases in the skin under their chins were filled with grime. It made them appear older, more worn, than they were. Nicole didn’t doubt she looked the same. In comparison, the man moved with ea
se. He seemed fresh and energised and capable.
Nicole rested her hand on Lisa’s arm. She doesn’t know why she did this any more than she knew why Samantha pressed closer to her. Was it to restrain Lisa if needed, or to take courage from her? Nicole felt both were needed so she left her hand there. She thought the fact that Lisa allowed her to confirmed Lisa’s own uncertainty about what she dared do. Nicole foolishly believed that despite her stick and stones they’d reached the limit of her bravado.
The man stopped suddenly about twenty metres further along from where they hid. He unclipped the metal water bottle from his belt, unscrewed the lid and took several sips. He returned it to his belt clip again then hooked his thumbs back under the chest straps of his pack. He was in no hurry to leave. He looked slowly from west to east. His gaze skipped across where they hid and back along to where he’d just come. On his return gaze though, Nicole thought he paused when his eyes reached their position. Just for a single breath, half a dozen rapid heartbeats, nothing more. She wondered if she’d imagined it.
He looked up to the broody sky then and Nicole saw how his beard had come through dark under his small chin. He closed his eyes and smiled up at the clouds.
‘Perfect isolation,’ he said, loud enough for them to hear.
When he looked down again, it was directly at where they were lying.
Nicole saw then that he wasn’t as fresh and at ease as she’d thought. He was dark around the eyes too. Fatigued, she imagined, from his commitment to the long hunt. But his dark eyes shone as they flickered across the line of scrub where they hid and his mouth twisted into an amused line.
He laughed as he walked away, a low, playful rumble.
Then he was ahead of them again. Nicole never doubted that he knew it.
There are no German backpackers at the camping ground this time. Instead, there is a remarkably quiet outdoor education school group, three couples and a family of five, the parents of whom Nicole imagines are trying to de-screen their children by forcing them to go cold turkey in the great outdoors.