by Sally Piper
Lisa took in the stains on Nicole’s shorts and thighs again. All the other shades of red. Her grimy, tear-streaked face. The clean square left across her mouth from the tape.
‘And just let him get away with it?’ Lisa called after Nicole.
Nicole paused to look at her. ‘He already has.’ She turned and started to walk back down the track.
‘But he has to learn he can’t do this to people,’ she implored.
Sam looked as though a rope was tied to each of her arms that were being pulled in opposite directions.
How had she allowed herself to be so reckless? Lisa can only think now that her need to best him went beyond just this moment in time. He was the pinnacle of many moments, the ultimate bully. She’d had enough.
Nicole made her way slowly down the rise. Samantha started edging towards the trail after her.
‘C’mon, Lisa,’ she said. ‘We have to stick together.’
Lisa ignored her. Her attention remained with the man.
‘Brave enough to come down off your big rock, little man?’
She felt a trickle on her cheek. She knew without touching it that the wound there had opened up again. She felt no pain from it. She felt very little of anything. Nothing of the aches and strains or fatigue that she’d felt in her body up till then. Not even fear. She was charged. Ready.
Lisa expects the body numbs people to many things – pain, insults, humiliation. The impact of them dulled to a bearable level. How would people survive a lifetime of such assaults otherwise?
Eventually a point is reached though. Too many nerves are rubbed raw. The pain of experiencing them finally crashes home. That, Lisa thinks, is what has brought her back here. Back to this place that once wounded her. Wounded all three of them. She wants to be released from her pain.
She felt pleasure in a deep and satisfying place when she recognised his moment of uncertainty. It emboldened her further.
‘Still the coward,’ she goaded.
And this must have excoriated his nerves enough to finally bring him down from his eyrie.
Chapter 18
When the rocky headland comes into view it’s as though a guardian hand presses against Nicole’s chest and holds her back. The path shows her where her natural next step should be, but she’s reluctant to take it. She could blame tiredness or overworked muscles or even the weight of her pack for this reluctance. After four days on the trail it’s a reasonable excuse. But she’d be lying to herself because she’s accustomed to all of these things now.
She looks up at the headland. There’s no purity to its form. It’s a misshapen and bruised thing. It broods high above her. Down here, where she is now, she feels like she’s knelt in prayer at the feet of something great. But this only confirms it as a site her imagination has exalted to a level it doesn’t deserve. Sacred but desecrated ground. To attend it again now feels like a blasphemy.
It’s fear and shame that holds her back. She knows it. Each had gripped her stomach even before she left the car park. Sometimes she’s been barely able to eat. She’s tried to deceive and distract both by concentrating on every step. No two have been the same on this complicated and uneven terrain. But despite having tried to maintain an outward gaze, to focus only on the land she crosses, her memories have become something of a landscape too. And she’s been compelled to traverse the complicated terrain of them as well.
They were three young women on a hopeful exploration of their capabilities when they first struck out on this trail. This time she feels like a soldier returning to the site of a battle. The ground she walks over is its unmarked grave. And yet the land is utterly indifferent to her. It has no tale to tell. Any story it might have once carried has been grown over, eroded, slipped, subsided. Meanwhile, she’s remained trapped by the experiences it was the theatre for.
Nicole can’t know what the man was after when he planned his hike. Adventure? Fitness? Isolation? But she suspects his purpose shifted after the incident in the car park. Shifted to something beyond their comprehension. But also to something beyond their combined strength to counter. Let alone for Lisa to try and do so on her own. And yet she stood her ground against him. Challenged their right to be here in the only way she knew how.
At the time Nicole had thought her stupid. Reckless. Equal only to him as the cause of their problems. Now she thinks what a gutsy woman. There have been many times that she’s replayed the events that occurred on this cliff in her head and each time she’s wished she was as brave as Lisa. Wishes she’d had the courage to stand alongside her friend.
Nicole’s hands tingled painfully for a time after Samantha untied her. Then after a while they pulsed hotly as the blood flow was restored to them. Her legs were unreliable. She could barely stand to begin with. She still remembers the strength of Samantha’s arm around her. How utterly relieved she felt.
Meanwhile, Lisa had worked on being a figure of torment to the man atop his boulder. Her knuckles white around her stick. Defiant.
Nicole had never been able to put words to her thoughts about what happened to her. Later, she realised she didn’t even want to try. All she wanted was to begin forgetting. To put distance and time between her and the headland. Construct a dark and airtight space inside her in which to lodge her humiliation till the feeling of it left her altogether. Except now she doesn’t believe humiliation ever leaves the body. That’s the power of it. People always define themselves first by those experiences that make them feel less than.
He was right when he said she begged. She did. She submitted. Whimpered. Please and I won’t tell vibrated behind the tape across her mouth.
Lisa would have dropped to the ground. Refused to be led, no matter how much he kicked at her to get up, dragged her along by that tight, cutting rope. She’d have somehow managed to rip the tape from her mouth and scream You have no fucking right! She’d have schemed ways to storm him. Wouldn’t have mattered that her hands were tied. She’d have found a way – boots, knees, charge into him with her head – till she overcame him. And when he pissed on Nicole – Give you a wash, eh – she had looked away. Lisa would have stared right at him and he would have seen the mocking laughter in her eyes.
The attempts Nicole made for freedom were short-lived. She didn’t believe or trust in herself to succeed. Survival shows dignity no favours. Once hers was taken from her, everything else that was strong and good about her was taken away as well.
She lost her faith in humanity that day. And she’s been unable to restore it since. A hollowed-out place exists inside her where it used to rest. A place that’s empty of feeling and kinship. Her humiliation sits like a small, hot stone at its centre.
Who or what might she have been if these things hadn’t happened to her? Would she have trusted enough to marry? Gone on to have children? Kept her friendship with Lisa and Sam, instead of believing that discarding it was part of her repair?
Not knowing the answers to these questions sometimes makes Nicole weep.
In moments of stillness she sees him coming down from his high place again. Her mind pictures every detail of him. He makes a slow and self-assured descent. His knees dip softly as he steps from rock to rock. He doesn’t pause for balance. Doesn’t need to steady himself. When he steps onto the ground he stands with his shoulders back, that weak chin pushed out to make as much of it as he can. Sometimes there is a smile on his lips. Other times a sneer. Always he is taller and broader and more certain than Lisa.
Nicole only faltered when she heard Samantha scream Run! She stopped for a moment. Wrestled with her need to leave, to begin forgetting, and her duty to stay and protect. She was paralysed to move back up the trail or down it. It was the beginning of a paralysis that has come to define her life.
Chapter 19
They could have chosen not to take the diversion this time. Turned their backs on this section of their past. Samantha watched as Nicole
paused first, then Lisa. Tempted, like her, she supposes, to continue on round to the right. On to their final campsite. Bypass this section altogether. Walk away.
Last time Samantha and Lisa had no option but to come this way. The arrow on the ground indicated the direction they must take. They followed it without question or hesitation.
The trail to the headland weaves and winds between and around the ubiquitous towering granite. Born of liquid fire deep in the earth’s belly, Samantha knows what she sees here on the surface are just the crumbs of something larger. This time she stops to observe the grand curves and angles of these great stones. She runs her hand across their roughened surfaces. Feels the heat they trap by day. Marvels at their vulnerability to the patient agents of salt air and rain. In places, the coarse face of them is eroded into deep crevices and shallow bowls. Many have collected enough soil to become small gardens for everlasting daisies, milkwort and squat tufted grasses. Down at sea level she’s witnessed the scouring work of the ocean on this stone to form rock pools. They glint in the sun like sequins on a granite dress. They are home to limpets, turban snails and small translucent blennies that dart between crops of seaweed. A whole different world lives within these eroded bowls. Busy. Unstoppable. Oblivious to what goes on around them.
The shadows cast by the boulders don’t bother Samantha as they had previously. Last time they created twilight places used to predatory advantage, as Nicole learned. Back then, fear and the imagination brought a sinister artifice to these dark, secret places. Now though, she notices how the shadows are home to a host of things that thrive in these gloomy areas. Piecrust-coloured toadstools. Plates of brown and orange fungi striped with growth rings. Delicate, dendritic-like lichen. She has no sense for the trickery of the landscape this time. The terrain feels honest.
Samantha tries to apply a similar honesty to her thoughts of the past. What she knows to be the truest of all is that she was more terrified on this headland than she ever had been before or since. She was terrified of the man’s capabilities. Terrified of Lisa’s apparent disregard for them. Terrified of the isolation and the risk of the three of them being split up once more. Which is why she’d felt so stricken – sickened – when Nicole walked away, while Lisa seemed determined to stand her ground.
Samantha learned something about the survival instinct that day: it’s a place people go to in order to make unbearable choices bearable.
A chant had played inside her head as she drew further away from Lisa: Don’t make me choose. Don’t make me choose.
But she succumbed to her lack of courage. She made the unbearable choice bearable. She backed away.
‘Lisa! We have to stick together!’
Her impulsive, angry, beautiful friend hadn’t even looked at her. Samantha thinks Lisa went to a place of her own that day. Some place beyond all of them. The place she might still go to in order to find the strength to avenge wrongs.
‘Some friends,’ the man taunted. ‘They’re leaving you for dead.’
When Samantha thinks about that day now, she doesn’t think so much about which friend she chose so much as why they allowed themselves to be put in a position where a choice had to be made. And just as she sometimes hears Lisa’s voice inside her head, demanding she Keep up, Samantha’s often wondered if Lisa hears a voice too, one that whispers Stick together. Are they words that have tormented her over the years? Do they cast their own criticism?
On the days when Samantha feels charitable towards herself, she pretends the only reason she chose to follow Nicole and not stay and stand alongside Lisa, was because she believed her leaving would encourage Lisa to do the same thing. She expected her to shout a few more derogatory comments at the man, wave her stick about, but that she’d then back away as Samantha had.
How could she have underestimated her so much?
Lisa had no intention of standing down. She wanted to mark him in some way. To leave him with a scar too, a permanent reminder that he’d picked a fight with the wrong girl. A scar like the one on her cheek. Something he’d also have to invent a story around, rewrite its origins to his family, his friends.
Samantha had paused for a time in her conflicted escape and watched the man as he came down from his grand rocky platform. He was tall, lean and athletic. He negotiated the narrow ledges and long drops with wily self-assurance. He jumped the last metre from the boulder to the ground. Landed as smooth and soft-kneed as a cat. He shifted his long damp hair from his eyes with a quick flick of his head. He grinned at Lisa.
‘So you wanna play?’ he said.
Samantha recognised instantly and sickeningly that his purpose and pride were far superior even to Lisa’s.
‘Run!’ she screamed, but too late.
The man rushed at Lisa.
Lisa got the first blow in. She swung her stick round with the force of a hammer thrower and struck him across his back. He drew up his arms to protect himself. Drew up his shoulders. Pulled his long tortoise neck in. Made even less of his weak chin.
Lisa swung her stick back, ready to strike him with it again, but he stepped quickly out of reach. When Samantha thinks about it now, she doesn’t believe he even considered for a moment that he might come off second best. That he might be in danger. But neither did Lisa.
Samantha’s feet were fused to the ground. Only her voice functioned. ‘Run!’ she screamed at Lisa again.
But the opportunity for Lisa to escape diminished by the second.
Samantha looked down the trail to Nicole, who paused and looked back up at her. She seemed as reluctant to act as Samantha. Fine friends they were.
Samantha’s heart stampeded inside her chest. It had a sonar reach up into her neck and ears. Her stomach fizzed.
Where did her lack of courage to act come from, when Lisa seemed to have such an abundance of it? Was it formed by the early challenges and small knocks that defeated her in her youth? Or was it the years of hearing her mother’s advice against the dangers in the world: Don’t ask for trouble. Walk away. Turn the other cheek. Had this instilled her with self-preserving restraint?
The man smiled. ‘Look at you,’ he said to Lisa, ‘with your little stick. Think you’re going to hurt me with that?’
He pretended to rush at her, and then quickly stepped back again. He made the same manoeuvre once more, thrust forward, reared back, as sure-footed as a fencer.
Lisa, confused, thrashed her stick before her but it never ended up where it needed to be. Every movement she made had a tormented delay to it. Once again he was playing with her.
Frustrated, Lisa lunged forward, swept the stick in an arc before her. He reared back. Too fast for her again.
He lunged at her then. Grabbed the stick with his hand before Lisa had a chance to pull it away. He wrested it from her. Tossed it to the side where it clattered over the edge of the cliff.
Even disarmed, Lisa didn’t run. ‘Fuck you!’ she screamed.
There was nothing between the two of them then except their panting breath and rage. He dropped one shoulder and charged.
Lisa had her back turned, so Samantha couldn’t see her face. But she heard the loud grunt of air that rushed out of her as he slammed into her chest. She reeled backwards. Tried to regain her balance with her arms, but failed. Her head was the last thing to hit the ground. It crashed against a rock with a sickening thud.
Samantha still remembers her split second thought of Stay down.
But Lisa didn’t. She shook her head groggily then tried to haul herself up again.
The man stood over her. He lifted one giant boot-clad foot and placed it on her chest so that she was pinned to the ground. Lisa, still sluggish from the fall, tried to scramble out from under it, her arms and legs worked like a crab’s. He leant forward, placed more pressure on his foot, more pressure on his trophy.
Did he mean to crush her?
Samantha st
ill wonders who that girl was, the one paralysed to act even as her friend looked set to have her ribs crushed in.
‘No!’ she heard Nicole scream behind her.
Samantha’s not sure if it was hearing Nicole close again that finally gave her the courage to act. Or if it was shame. When she finally responded, it didn’t feel like a victory blow. It felt like a single convincing stand in the face of many failed ones.
Samantha charged at the man with a lion’s roar. She head-butted him hard in his skinny gut. Her head smashed up against his ribs. She felt them press in then spring out again as she bounced off the drum of his stomach muscles. The shock of the impact travelled all the way from her crown to the base of her spine. Later, she would notice that she had neck pain. It’s a pain that still flares up, even now.
She remembers wishing she had horns. Ones sharp enough to gouge him wide open. She wanted to hear him scream with pain. Wanted to see his shock at discovering his spilled intestines. Wanted to smile at his futile attempts to hold the slippery coils in.
She shocked him well enough, that she remembers. And badly winded him too. And she got some of the satisfaction she was after when she saw his confusion and uncertainty as he tried to pull air into his lungs, and how for some time nothing came of his efforts. With all his attention focussed on trying to breathe, he paid no attention or thought for the edge behind him as he stumbled backwards.
Samantha saw it though. And some part of her, that place that still held some sense of goodness, thought to warn him. She’s never questioned the fact that she didn’t. And she refuses to start now.
He was kept up like a leaf in the wind for a while. His feet held to the edge but eventually his upper body overreached itself. His fear was real then. His breath finally came back to him so she did get to hear him scream. Oddly, it gave her no satisfaction. Only a disgusted sense of involvement in something unnecessarily cruel.
And then he thought he could fly. His flapping fledgling arms were the last things she saw as he disappeared over the edge.