The Geography of Friendship

by Sally Piper

  ‘I know. I heard him take them.’

  Lisa spun round to look at Nicole. ‘Why didn’t you wake me? I’d have used one of them round his fucking neck.’

  ‘You’ve just answered your own question.’ Nicole turned her back on Lisa and continued to stuff her sleeping bag into its cover.

  They’d woken to a cotton wool day of misty drizzle. Samantha’s shoes and clothes were damp, and from these the cold ran all the way to the core of her body and made her shiver. They’d pitched their tent on a patch of flattish ground not far from a small creek, so the moisture felt to rise up from the soil as much as drift down from the sky. The sandflies loved it. Samantha could feel them biting her scalp, her neck, her face and hands, any part of her where the skin was exposed. She put her cap on and rummaged for the repellent in a side pouch of her pack.

  ‘I need hot food,’ she said. ‘I’m so cold.’

  ‘I don’t think I can eat anything.’ Nicole sat heavily on a rotted log, pressed her half-stowed sleeping bag against her body and rested her head on it.

  Samantha could see she looked defeated. Her hair was greasy and hugged the contours of her skull. Her hands were limp around her sleeping bag.

  ‘You have to eat,’ Samantha said to her. ‘Keep your strength up.’

  ‘You my mother now?’ Nicole turned to look at Samantha then, but only so she could glare at her.

  ‘Don’t take it out on her,’ Lisa snapped back.

  ‘No. You’re right. I should save it for you given you got us into this fucking mess.’ Nicole stood with renewed vigour then and started stuffing the remainder of her sleeping bag inside its small cover.

  ‘How much longer are you going to play the blame game?’ Lisa asked. ‘’Cause I’ve gotta tell ya, it’s wearing thin.’

  Samantha could feel the boundaries of that spiteful tumour bulging, getting ready to rupture. She tried to hold it back. ‘C’mon, you two. Don’t start.’

  In retrospect she knows these weren’t her usual words, so in a way she supposes she only inflamed things more.

  ‘Don’t start?’ Lisa shouted. ‘From what I can tell I’m the only one keeping this whole shitfest together!’

  ‘What a fucking hero!’ Nicole snapped.

  ‘Better to be a hero than a sook like you!’

  By this stage, the Germans had stopped what they were doing. Each held a corner of their tent, but they’d stalled in the folding of it. Instead, they watched as this spectacle unfolded before them.

  When anger is acted upon and then replayed later in the mind, it always seems to move in slow motion. And in this slow remembering Samantha sees moments in which she might have been able to defuse things, but when considered in real time, she knows the events moved far too quickly for her to have done anything at all. And maybe this was what they were always going to do anyway, attack one another.

  Nicole threw her sleeping bag onto the ground and stormed across to where Lisa stood with her back to her, stuffing items inside her backpack. Nicole grabbed Lisa’s shoulder with one hand and spun her round to face her. She brought her other hand up and slapped Lisa hard across the face.

  Samantha felt emptied and paralysed and broken by this act. She knew no words powerful enough, any which were healing enough, to bring either one of them back from this. So she just stood there, mouth open, and watched as their friendship started to unravel.

  Lisa brought her hand up to her cheek. She kept it there while she and Nicole stared at one another for what seemed like minutes but was only seconds. It was time enough though for Samantha to chant inside her head: Please don’t hit her back. Please don’t hit her back.

  She doesn’t know, even now, why Lisa didn’t. But she has remained grateful ever since for this rare act of restraint, for all the good it did their friendship in the end. But who knows, on some subconscious level, maybe this is why Lisa was able to convince Nicole to come back here. Maybe Nicole believes she owes Lisa something.

  When Lisa finally took her hand from her face there was blood on it, and it was also smeared across her cheek. Nicole’s garnet ring – received with delight from her parents for her eighteenth birthday – had lacerated the skin across Lisa’s cheekbone.

  Samantha remembers how the German men shook their heads and looked awkwardly at their feet. They finished packing up their gear quickly, shouldered their packs and left soon after. They didn’t even look in their direction. They headed out the way the three of them had come in the previous day.

  She thinks about how permanent reminders of mistakes that have been made are a torment. Because how do you explain a scar like Lisa’s to others? What has she said of it to the man she married, her daughter? What does she tell herself each time she looks in a mirror?

  Samantha expects such scars eventually find their place in the repertoire of life’s lies. But what a heavy burden it is to be someone who knows the truth.

  Chapter 14

  Lisa senses more than feels that the day will be warm again. There’s a kind of lethargy to the stillness, as though the inhabitants of the landscape can’t be bothered rousing themselves. She can hear the soft muttering from the creek just behind her tent, but little else.

  She feels this lethargy within her body as well – in her calves, back and shoulders. She is reluctant to get going, to start the day’s work. And it will be work, as all the days have been so far. To try and navigate a safe way through or around the lines that she has crossed in her past takes its toll.

  She lies a while longer, legs pushed into the soft cocoon of her sleeping bag, bare arms up and hands interlaced under her head. She watches the magnified shadow of a fly as it moves across the outside of her tent. It walks in short, rapid bursts then pauses, most likely to dip its proboscis into droplets of condensation. At other times it stops to scratch its hind legs together. She can hear birds now as the day lightens. She recognises the fluid warble of a magpie. She thinks the other sharper call might be a crimson rosella.

  It’s hard not to think about the day ahead, the days that have already passed. Each footfall has taken her across a mostly unchanged terrain. But it’s her hope – perhaps a naïve one – that in retracing the route from years before that she can redefine the contours of it in her mind. She wants to be able to tell herself a different story about what happened out here, build a new future for herself with the reimagining. One not defined by the actions of the man. Or how her actions against him might have precipitated them. This is her hope. Because she’s never quite trusted herself since. And she wants to go into middle age at least liking the person she is. Maybe then Hannah will like her more as well.

  Hannah never leans in when they sit across from one another at a table. She doesn’t speak of her fears or ask advice or whisper secrets.

  ‘Even she sees you for the hateful cow you are,’ Matt said one spiteful day. ‘No wonder she moved out when she could. Probably worried you’d rub off on her.’

  Such an easy shot, to cast those jagged stones of blame against her without once looking in the mirror.

  But what if he is right? What if Hannah believes there is something contagious about her; that anger is something passed on like blonde hair or blue eyes?

  Lisa knows others have sensed something dangerous about her. To some a single woman carries a nefarious scent.

  ‘She’s divorced now, you know? Have to keep an eye on our husbands.’

  Lisa heard this said of her. In a school ground. As far as she could tell she was the only divorced woman amongst the dozen or so there waiting for their children to come out, so the woman with the loud whisper must have been speaking about her.

  These words had felt like a slap. She’d gone the full circle: once prey, now predatory woman. A still-young divorcee let loose and looking to steal another woman’s husband. She decided this woman thought too highly of her partner. Or maybe it was that she didn’
t think of him highly enough.

  She expects there were others who thought she’d let the team of long-suffering women down. She hadn’t soldiered on like them, no matter how miserable she was. Others apologised as though she’d suffered a death.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ they said, and looked it.

  ‘I’ve divorced him, not killed him,’ Lisa said to one simpering soul.

  No one celebrated her divorce. No one gave her high-fives. No one said, Good for you! or Congratulations! or Happy days! No one paused to think that it might be a step towards amelioration. If Samantha and Nicole had still been around, she knows they’d have said all of these things.

  In truth, Lisa admires her daughter’s decisive and early escape from the home where her mother raged. She must tell her so when she gets back. She can already feel the fullness of pride in her words. ‘You’re a good person, Hannah,’ she’ll say. ‘I could learn from you.’

  Except Lisa wonders if she ever will. She’s rarely chosen to run from things she probably should have. And neither is she like those animals that lay low to the ground – water dragons, rabbits, quails – playing dead, playing safe, playing invisible. Mostly, she’s stood her ground and taken up the fight. Except for that one time.

  She runs a finger across the thin scar on her cheek. This morning it gives her hope. Reminds her of the person she can be.

  She would like to bring Hannah here, if she’d come. She could teach her botanical names along the way. Let her hear the enduring complexity of them. She’s a bright girl. Lisa thinks she’d pick them up quickly.

  But mostly she would like just to walk with Hannah, be present without demands. She can be anyone or no one then, not just mother and memories. And a walker is free to be honest. Stories told to the feet, not the face. She would explain to her daughter that wisdom comes from the gathering of mistakes and that Lisa’s stockpile must make her very wise. Maybe Hannah would laugh at that.

  And in the hands-wide greatness of this place Lisa would show Hannah that she does know gratitude. That she can live humbly. That she can live without angry expectation. And if she can make her daughter believe that of her out here, then why not also at home? Why not?

  She can hear soft voices amongst the clatter of pots outside her tent.

  My turn, she thinks. I have to face this day too.

  She pushes her sleeping bag off her legs and crawls out of her tent on all fours, then forces her body to stand.

  It may as well be an altogether new region Lisa walks through. She can actually see the tubular pink flowers of the common heath – Epacris impressa. They offer a vibrant flash of colour either side of the track, as do the yellow flower spikes of the silver banksia. And the tender new growth on the eucalypts lends these trees a halo of lemony-green.

  She’d seen no such colours on this day previously. They’d walked through mist. Trees and boulders were blurred as though viewed through a layer of frosted glass; mountaintops were lost from view. Being mindful of places where someone could hide was pointless, given everything was hidden.

  Today, little is hidden. Certainly not the escalation in Nicole’s disquiet. She looks to be always thinking, thinking. Her earlier gait has lost some of its sure-footed form. She holds herself even tighter than usual; muscles still tensed when they rest, the deep lines across her forehead rarely soften.

  But what does she think about mostly? Lisa wonders. How differently things might have turned out if she hadn’t stormed ahead that morning? Or does she run through the mathematics of blame, calculating Lisa’s greater portion?

  Lisa doesn’t care about these things. She thinks about their friendship more than anything else. How she’d banked too much on the ultimately false belief that the bond between them was too strong to break, and not enough on the fact that it was something that had to be nurtured and cared for, like a garden.

  Last time Nicole had packed up her gear quickly and left the campsite before the blood had even dried on Lisa’s cheek.

  In the absence of a doctor to give the cut the couple of sutures it probably needed, Samantha cleaned the wound and pulled the edges of it together as best she could with strapping tape.

  It stung for most of that morning, and her head ached, so Lisa didn’t give much thought or concern for Nicole well ahead, and on her own. When she thinks back on it now, she sees how they played right into his hands.

  Lisa remembers how Samantha started to panic.

  ‘Should we go faster?’ Samantha said. ‘Try and catch up to her?’

  ‘Really? Do you think you can catch up to her?’

  Samantha had looked away hurt, but Lisa didn’t care. She still had the mindset of the victim. Samantha had pushed past her, changed her pace to something between a fast walk and a slow trot.

  ‘You’re gonna kill yourself.’

  Samantha stopped and looked back at her. ‘She shouldn’t be on her own,’ she said and continued on in her peculiar lock-kneed gait.

  But it wasn’t sustainable as Lisa knew, and she soon caught up with her again.

  Samantha stopped and cupped her hands round her mouth. ‘Nicole! Wait!’ she called.

  Lisa listened half-heartedly for a reply that never came. Samantha called again. Still nothing.

  ‘She’ll stop and wait for us eventually,’ Lisa said and took the lead once more.

  The drizzle distorted everything that day – time, sound, distance, the shape, form and colour of all that was wrapped in it. So when Lisa walked round a bend and up ahead saw a low dark shape against a misty-edged boulder, she thought it was Nicole, sitting on the ground, finally waiting for them.

  But as she drew closer, Nicole’s backpack took shape. Shoulder straps curved to the sky.

  Anger drove how she felt at first. How could Nicole just abandon this thing that held all they needed to survive? Childish, she thought. Attention-seeking.

  But she knows now this was her mind disconnecting her from the truth, softening it with easy outs. Because soon enough the full force of what Nicole’s discarded pack meant barged through. About the same time a tremor started in her hands and bile rose in her throat.

  When she saw Nicole’s stick, that stupid, useless toy of a weapon she’d given each of them, discarded a little further on, the fullness of the truth rushed in. Nicole was left with nothing and no one to help her.

  Chapter 15

  The geography that Nicole’s walked through till now has carried elements of familiarity. She’s had an impression of having been here before. Now she’s in alien land.

  Her memory of this terrain has been wiped, if it was ever stored in the first place. The things she sees are the things she expects to see. Granite boulders scattered like giant marbles. Wounded bloodwoods that bleed red sap down their trunks and drip clots of it onto the ground. The trail is still pockmarked with ant nests, although she expects the occupants of them have changed a thousand times over. Birds still call; take flight. Leaves quiver. The undergrowth continues to be alive with mysterious rustles and scrapes. It’s all as she’s come to expect. But is nothing as she recalls.

  Her body feels reluctant today, more than any other so far. She has a sense of holding back. She’s pushed herself till now, not so much willingly as purposely. She knows the only way for her to get home is to keep going. But it feels like a Sisyphean punishment.

  The one thing that’s still crystal clear to her about that day from many years before is how she’d burned hot with shame. Not even the damp air had cooled it.

  The thin white line across Lisa’s cheek now is a rebuke. But it is a rebuke of Nicole’s own making because Lisa hasn’t so much as rested a finger on it from what she’s seen. Does she at home though? Does she hide it under heavy make-up? Or maybe Nicole’s magnified this small wound in her mind, made it wider and longer than it really is. Made it bigger in the way she knows Samantha still sees someone bigger
when she looks at herself in a mirror.

  Nicole’s often wished Lisa had struck her in turn that day. One wound countered with another. But she just stared at her with sad blue eyes. Even to see her angry would have been better than that. When Lisa dropped her hand and Nicole saw the blood, she’d looked away and hadn’t been able to look back again. Her shame ran too deep.

  It still hurts to realise she’s not always been a good person. Sometimes she fears that she hasn’t been since.

  There is a unique silence all around today. Everything seems stalled and attentive in this un-transmitting quiet.

  Nicole wishes an animal would appear to break the stillness. A large muscular one, like a kangaroo. In her mind’s eye she sees this animal and her poised in unison as they regard one another in this suspension of sound. Almost as though they stand outside themselves. She studies its features closely. It studies hers. She gets an understanding for the muscles it uses to hold itself still. The right-angled bend of its long muscular tail that keeps it balanced. Its meaty, muscled rump tensed and rippled, ready to leap, but holding back. The droop of its front paws, one slightly higher than the other, purpose stalled. She even sees the patter of its heart in a space between its ribs. The flare of its nostrils.

  She thinks about the man and how he might have held his muscles while he hid behind the boulder. She imagines they were tensed and rippled as well. She imagines also that his heart quickened, that his breath whispered in and out in soft pants. She sees him with his left ear turned away from the granite, towards the track, filtering sound. Tuning in to her steps as they came closer, closer.

  Without his pack he had sprung quickly and easily. She had no time to react. No time to call out. Too much time to believe she was going to die.

  He knocked her to the ground. Lay across her chest to pin her there. Crushed her throat under his forearm, her mouth under his hand. He was close enough for her to see black slugs of dirt caught in the corner of each of his eyes. She pulled and pulled for breath. But never got enough. She fought with her legs. They fought with air. She fought with her hands. Nails. They secured threads of his skin. Not enough. Nothing enough.