by Sally Piper
Nicole arrived here on low ebb last time. The way things disappeared – her bikini, the tent rope, footprints, the trail – had been bad enough, shifted her sense of reality in unsettling ways. She no longer knew who or what she could trust – about her friends, humanity, even herself. But then seeing him again had made him real once more.
She supposes all three of them fell apart in their own way. How else to explain that each became unpredictable? A bit wild-eyed crazy. She thinks it probably started when Lisa insisted they arm themselves. Just to hold that stick – that weapon – had put Nicole on guard. Made her view her surroundings with suspicion, to always anticipate the worst. That stick came to symbolise her diminishing faith in the general goodness of people, to include the goodness she’d always believed existed within her. She no longer believed that he, or they, would follow the rules. The world had suddenly stopped working the way she thought it did or should.
The rules are laid out for all to see this time. Written ones. Each campsite has them. There are green tent symbols on timber posts. Some have red lines through them. There are others that read Keep Out – Area Under Regeneration. There are signs in the long-drop toilets that ask for organic waste only, for the toilet lid to be left down after use and the door closed upon leaving. There are others again requesting that wildlife not be fed, that fires not be lit, that hikers keep to the track.
Nicole wonders if it would have made a difference had these rules been here last time. Would they have reminded him that he was just one member of a larger, supposedly cohesive social order? In her heart though, she knows that no amount of signage requesting people not do this or that would have made any difference. The only rules he played by were his own.
Each of the campgrounds has square timber tables throughout them now, built low to the ground and with logs pulled up to them for seats. They find one that’s free and set their tents up around it.
The campsite looks so civilised compared to last time. Previously, they laid their wet weather jackets on the ground and sat on them. They levelled their camp stove into the dirt, tried to keep their packets of food out of it as much as possible, and ate from bowls in their laps. Now they set out their individual cooking equipment and packets of freeze-dried food on the table and sit on the logs. It looks communal, companionable. Fun. Except it’s not. They are still three people brought together reluctantly. People who are trying to find some commonality, some connection to their past lives.
They are awkward together in a way Nicole remembers being with her first lover. They were both willing enough participants, but it was the gracelessness of the sex that Nicole remembers most. All the parts for which a place had to be found, like a 3D puzzle. There were things to be done with lips and arms and legs and hands. Mostly they crashed and clashed. Teeth knocked. Arms got tangled. Legs closed when they should have opened.
She put little emotion into solving this puzzle at the time, despite the intrigue of it; the way it made boys suddenly cover their groins at the beach or made girls lead with their breasts when they walked. Which is probably why she never found any of sex’s rhythm that day. The easy slip, slide and pulse, the conjoined nature of it. For her it was an experience of contrasts. Soft then hard. Tight then yielding. Tidy then messy. Then only awkwardness.
Nicole feels like that post-coital girl again now. Unsure of where or how she fits with others.
The wind had kept up into the evening last time. It blustered through the canopy and tossed leaves and twigs about. The fabric of their tent was pushed inward with each blast, then sucked outward again, liked puffed cheeks, with a ripping sound as the wind eddied about.
They struggled to protect the flame on their camp stove, despite the three of them huddling round it. The flame was pushed away from the pot’s bottom and their food cooked slowly and incompletely. They ate in silence. None of them chewed with much enthusiasm or energy; it was just another task that had to be undertaken. Nicole expects each of them was too caught up in their own troubled thoughts, and too mentally and physically exhausted, to talk their way into better ones.
Today has been an altogether different day – sunny, warm and mostly breezeless. The evening now is balmy, still and hushed. It’s one of those evenings that usually lifts the spirit, puts Nicole at ease. At home she celebrates such an evening with a glass of wine on her balcony, bare feet up on the edge of her seat, a bowl of nuts or a dip beside her. She has nothing to drink here other than treated creek water and her dinner consists of rehydrated chicken, peas and rice. She doesn’t feel celebratory anyway.
Each of them has set up their cooking gear and food on separate sides of the table, so that they sit in a U-shape. They each stir their individual pots, where previously they’d shared everything.
‘Where do you think he camped when we were here last time?’
Nicole looks at Lisa. Her directness continues to surprise her. The way she speaks of the past with such ease.
‘Not that it matters I suppose,’ she adds. ‘Given he seemed to be everywhere.’
In some ways Nicole admires Lisa’s ability to confront this time in their lives. It’s as though she can hold the experience in a glass box in her hand and view it from all sides. It’s an objectivity Nicole knows she’s never had, so she envies Lisa’s skill to be able to examine it at arm’s length.
Unable to stop herself, she looks at the thin scar across Lisa’s cheek. She’s tried not to pay it any attention since they started the hike. But it lures her. It’s small but undeniably there, despite the years since the mark was left upon her.
‘It did feel like he was everywhere, didn’t it?’ Samantha stops stirring her pot of food and looks around. ‘As much a thing of the imagination as anything else.’
‘Till we saw him … on that flat section. Nothing imagined about that.’ Lisa glances at Nicole, checking perhaps if she’s overstepped the line with their conversation.
‘I don’t know if that freaked me out more or if his disappearing footprints did,’ Samantha says.
‘At least seeing him made him real.’ Nicole hears the flatness in her voice, and so must Lisa.
‘But he’s not real anymore.’ Lisa looks right at Nicole this time.
Nicole holds her gaze for a moment then looks down to her pot of food again. She thinks about the scar on Lisa’s cheek once more, how real it is. And she wonders how Lisa’s not forced to remember him every time she sees it. Nicole has no obvious scars, but she still sees him most days.
They eat in silence after that, while darkness rises from the ground up and later is host to a weakening moon.
An assortment of soft glows dapple the camping ground as other campers turn on lights inside tents and at their tables. The occasional laugh rings out from the school group. Otherwise the soft talk of these young people is a distant and indiscernible murmur of differing tones and pitches.
Nicole has set the spaceship light in the centre of their table. Its portholes of soft blue light illuminate beneath Lisa’s and Samantha’s chins. It gives their faces an eerie glow. Nicole imagines that hers looks no different. It’s probably a good thing, not being able to see one another’s eyes. It makes them honest.
‘Who are your close friends now?’ Lisa asks no one in particular.
Nicole doesn’t answer and neither does Samantha.
Nicole suspects Lisa has read the silence accurately when she says, ‘Neither have I. Not really close ones, anyway.’
There was such an intimacy to their friendship. Each deeply embedded in the life of the other that Nicole never dared to replicate it. Never had the courage to leave herself open to such dependency again, not with women or men.
A man at work has accused her of building walls against friendship.
‘Are you coming to work drinks tomorrow night?’ he asked her recently.
‘Not this time.’
‘You didn’t last
time either. Or the one before that.’
Nicole shrugged. ‘I didn’t know you were keeping a work social record?’
‘It’s a personal record. Not a work one.’
He’s divorced. The losing party in the break-up supposedly. Although Nicole doubts there are any winners in such an event. He strikes her as a mildly broken man. Not needy or angry so much as fatigued by the thought of starting again. She supposes this is one of the advantages of never having started in the first place.
He has flirted round the edges of pursuing her for a while. She doesn’t know why. She hasn’t given him any encouragement. She’s often wondered if it is a conquest for him, the unattainable made sexier. Either way, he’s kept up his pursuit, looked for that small chink of light through which he might enter and stake a claim on her. She doesn’t mind him as a person. But caution still tinkles its tinny bell and to this she’s always listened.
‘Like I said. Not this time.’ Nicole turned away, went to head back to her desk.
‘You build walls, you know, not bridges.’
He didn’t say this unkindly. It sounded more like a thought bubble that accidentally popped out unbidden. When she turned to look at him again, he seemed embarrassed. And because she knew what he said was true, she saved him from his discomfort.
‘Walls have a purpose,’ she said. ‘They hold up a roof. Stop the rain getting in.’ She turned away again.
‘What if I like rain?’ he called after her. ‘What if I like getting wet?’
‘Go swimming.’
Maybe Nicole’s dependency on Samantha and Lisa has never really left her. Maybe that’s why Lisa was able to coax her back here. Even though she argued against it in the bar that night.
‘It’s not going to change anything,’ Nicole had said.
‘But I need to go back,’ Lisa insisted. ‘It’s the only way I know how to fix things.’
Lisa’s comment had made her angry. How could she hope to fix something that had already happened? What made her think she even had the right to try after all this time? It was as though she thought she could place a fork under the preceding years and lift them out of their lives, leave bookends of then and now with nothing in between. And yet more than half their lives had been lived during that time.
‘Don’t you have a therapist to help you do that?’ Nicole snapped. ‘Isn’t that what people do about their hang-ups?’
She knows if Lisa had spoken to her in the same way that night, she’d have picked up her bag and walked out of the bar. But she didn’t. She sat there as though what Nicole said was the therapy.
‘This isn’t a hang-up,’ Lisa said, voice calm. Nothing like Nicole remembered it being when they were younger. ‘It’s become a way of life.’
Nicole refused to admit to having similar hang-ups. Told Lisa she’d left it all behind her years ago.
She knows she sounded like a fraud though. What she said was too scripted, too rehearsed, as though she’d been telling herself the same thing for years. She hadn’t fooled Lisa.
‘We all still hurt,’ Lisa said. ‘There’s no shame in admitting it.’ She then went on to say how difficult it was to explain why she wanted to go back when it was more about the doing than the intention of it.
Nicole must have understood something of what she meant though, because here she is after all.
‘It’s hard to trust,’ Nicole says now, breaking the silence.
She sees both Samantha’s and Lisa’s ghostly chins move up and down.
They had been relieved to see that the German backpackers were at the campsite when they arrived last time. Foolishly they had equated them with safety and protection. Nicole remembers how Samantha hummed while she flattened bracken with her boot to give ground for their tent.
Both men wore their dark hair to the shoulder. They were unshaven and their khaki T-shirts had white stains at the armpits and across their backs and fronts from where perspiration had soaked the fabric then dried. They carried a sharp odour of stale masculine sweat. Nicole expects the three of them carried a female version of the same smell. It is the animal scent of hikers, of those who walk and sleep, walk and sleep, often in the same clothes. Nicole’s always liked this smell. It implies effort.
They tried to strike up a conversation with the two men, but they spoke as little English as they did German. Nicole had persisted though, she wanted to find out if they’d seen any other hikers that day, specifically a solo male. She used the only key words she’d retained from her inadequate home-schooled German, realised that in some realms her parents had failed her.
‘Ein Mann?’ she said, and held up one finger. ‘Walking.’ She mimed the act by using two fingers as legs. She was met with shrugs and confusion.
They set up camp only metres from the Germans. They did this without any discussion. Nicole can’t speak for the others, but she knows she was drawn to these other hikers as a cold person is drawn to a flame. The men looked askance at one another as they laid out their tent, then got back on with finishing the set-up of their own. The men ignored them after that.
Proximity to others made no difference in the end. And the following morning it only served to give the men a close-up example of what female friendships were capable of. Nicole still feels ashamed when she thinks back on it, how these men might still go about their lives believing – and telling others too, quite possibly – that women can treat one another very badly.
The man still came to their tent through the night. Lisa and Samantha slept through it, probably with a newfound complacency due to their campsite companions.
The German men had gone into their shared tent not long before the three of them went into theirs. Nicole listened to the unfamiliar lilt of their accent for a time, then to the sound of their soft snoring. Hearing them must have soothed her because she fell asleep quickly.
There are three certainties for most women till death, or menopause: shitting, pissing and menstruating. They are also the three greatest inconveniences of camping in the wild.
Nicole woke in the night with a familiar rat-gnawing pain deep in her pelvis and an all too familiar stickiness between her legs. She’d got the period she wasn’t due to get till the following week.
‘Why don’t you go on the Pill like every other girl?’ Lisa asked her once.
Nicole never had. Partly because she’d had so few sexual partners at that stage and saw no reason to take a drug for the few times she might. But mostly because it sanctioned neither care nor responsibility for the man.
‘It’s taking control, not responsibility,’ Lisa said, exasperated.
‘But they don’t even ask. They just assume.’
Nicole rummaged around inside her backpack at the foot of her sleeping mat till she found the tampons she’d thankfully packed anyway. She unwrapped one and inserted it in the dark. She lay awake for a while after that. Felt dirty and desperate for the shower she knew she wouldn’t get for another two days. She lay on her side, pulled her knees up against the pain, and wished the crotch of her knickers would hurry up and dry so at least that discomfort would be gone.
She tried to work out if it was close to daylight by how dark it was in the tent, if there was any pre-dawn bird chorus. But she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face and the wind had dropped off by then, leaving the night hushed and still. The Germans had stopped snoring. Lisa’s and Samantha’s breath came in soft, rhythmic sighs. All should have been well with the world, except it never was for long back then.
If Nicole were a proper animal, one better equipped for safety and survival with an astute sense of sight, sound and smell, she’d have picked up the scent of him. She’d have heard him shift through the bush. And if she were a real animal in the wild, she’d have recognised the danger of him and taken flight. As it was she froze in her sleeping bag, made her breath inaudible. She listened with her dulled human e
ars as the pain in her pelvis pulsed.
His tread was soft, slow and purposeful. If one footfall was loud, then there was a pause before the next. It was a cautious, stalking approach. A fox walker. The final soft crack before his footfalls stopped was so close to her head that she was sure if she pushed her hand up against the tent’s fabric she would come up against his leg.
There was a whisper of a hand sliding up a cord and then a cutting sound began. A soft, squeaking saw. He used a knife, she decided. Not scissors. They would have made a single snip as he severed the cord from their tent. She heard this sawing sound twice and she knew even before she heard his soft footfalls fade away again that when they came out of their tent the following morning, two ropes would be cut from it.
Chapter 13
When Samantha thinks back on their escalating tension, she thinks of it as being like an expanding tumour. It stealthily enlarged inside each one of them until it could no longer be contained by its own perimeters. Then it spewed its vile, ugly contents. How else to explain why they started to fight one another instead of staying united?
The third night was something of a reprieve for her. The German backpackers made her feel safe so she’d slept deeply until dawn. Even so, she still had to force her aching, leaden body out of the tent the following morning.
The two men had already started to break camp. Samantha waved to them. She remembers how she hoped they’d walk in the same direction as them, be at the same campsite that night as well. All she wanted was to sleep easily again and get back to the car the following day.
Little has changed with how she feels this morning, except that her body aches even more than it had previously. But at least this time the ropes on her tent hold it as taut as they did when she erected it yesterday. Last time, their shared tent sagged lopsidedly when they crawled out of it. And Nicole looked to sag along with it.
‘Two gone,’ Lisa said.
Samantha thought them odd trophies. But she knows now this wasn’t what they were to him. They were proof to them that he could get close without them knowing. Except Nicole had.