by Jessie Cole
‘Ready?’ I asked.
‘Ready.’
‘What are the rules?’
He thought for a minute and then he replied, ‘Hold on tight. If you lose your board swim to the side. Make sure you’re off before the bridge.’
‘And watch out for giant logs!’
I kicked off with my feet. Hamish followed a beat behind me and we were away.
At first the water carried us along quite gently. Hamish stopped clutching the board and looking grim. He actually started to smile.
‘Okay, there’s a rough patch up here—keep your knees high,’ I called back to him. The boulders beneath the water made it bumpy, and every so often you jammed one of your knees on a rock. Hamish was heavier than me—I could only assume he would come out a bit banged up.
The current started to quicken and the water bounced us around. We were pushed along so quickly it was hard to think about anything much. I heard Hamish grunt behind me and knew he’d scraped a rock. Riding the creek always made me feel a touch light-headed. It was kind of a thrill. I started giggling, and then I couldn’t stop. We went round a few sharp bends, ducked beneath a couple of branches and then the bridge was in view, way off in the distance.
‘Start swimming to the side!’ I called over my shoulder.
We paddled against the current until we were out of the rushing water. Climbing up the bank we flopped onto the grass and sat there panting. A few days ago the flood was up over this stretch of paddock and now the grass was all flattened beneath us. Hamish lay on his back, staring at the sky.
‘Mema, that was great. Creek-riding. Another notch on my belt.’
It was a foreign concept, this belt notching, but I was distracted by the way the hair on Hamish’s chest formed whorls when it was wet. It wasn’t dark, his chest hair, but it wasn’t blond either. It was a light woody colour. I watched him while he watched the sky.
After a bit he sat up and stared back at me. Sitting there beneath his gaze my skin seemed to tighten.
‘So, what else do you do around here, Mema?’ His question came out slow, his voice soft.
I looked away from him, thinking about what Anja and I would do. Raising myself up, I wandered back to the creek to collect some rocks from the shallows. ‘You’ve got to come close to the water,’ I called.
Hamish got up and moved down the bank towards me.
‘Painting-rocks,’ I said and crouched in the shallows. I rubbed the ochre rock I’d found against a bigger, smoother rock until it started to make a paste. Once I had enough, I reached out my hand.
‘Come on.’ I motioned for him to come closer.
‘Will it come off?’
‘Yeah, silly, it washes off in the water.’
I reached out to his shoulder and drew a long line slowly down his arm.
‘See?’
He looked down at my hand and then up at me.
‘And then you do dots,’ I said, my voice a bit raspy. I didn’t know why I was whispering. Dipping my little finger in the paste, I pressed careful dots beside the brown line on his arm.
‘There’s even different colours.’ Fishing around in the shallows, I handed him a dull-looking yellowish stone. ‘I like the bright red ones best, though,’ I said, holding up a darker one.
I rubbed my stone on the smooth rock till there was more paste and then reached up a hand to paint his face. Perched beside me in the shallows, he stayed motionless beneath my touch. Goosebumps broke out across his shoulders and he closed his eyes. Hamish had been clean-shaven when he washed up, but now the regrowth on his face was thick, and up close I could see every hair. I drew a line from the middle of his forehead straight down his nose and then dipped my finger in the paste again and painted a line horizontally across each cheek. Taking the yellow stone from him, I rubbed it into a paste and drew a yellow stripe beneath the red one on his cheeks, then dipped my little finger in again and pressed on a row of dots.
‘There,’ I said, and he opened his eyes. Against the rich ochre, his eyes seemed strangely bright. Intense and otherworldly.
‘Now your turn,’ he said, surprising me and dipping his finger into the paste.
I closed my eyes and he traced a line down my forehead, gently, as though I might break. Stopping to get more paste, he ran his finger down my nose, right under it till he touched my lip. He added dots and a few more stripes and then he said, ‘Done.’
When I opened my eyes, his face was so close I was startled. He bent his head, searching for stones in the space between us. After a minute he glanced up and said, ‘You look pretty, Mema. Like a warrior princess or something.’
A huntress, I thought, like my name. But I didn’t say it out loud.
Mum didn’t believe in mirrors, so there were none in the house. I always got a surprise when I was out somewhere and I stumbled on one. I was much darker than everyone else in my family. Dark skin, black hair. Seeing myself made me think about my dad. About how different he must have looked from the men that came before. Mum had told me he was a ‘handsome beast’, and that after him she stayed well away from beautiful men. He was gone by the time I was born, but Sophie told me Mum didn’t get out of bed for weeks. He was the last bloke she’d ever let stay the night, so I suppose in the scheme of things Hamish was getting an easy ride. I’d always felt I was pretty, and there was no one to tell me I wasn’t, but I didn’t know what to make of Hamish’s words.
‘Thanks,’ I said, a little confused. ‘You look pretty too.’
He looked at me but he didn’t speak. The silence felt dense and odd. It hung there, building around us. I don’t know why but I stood up and scrambled back to the grass.
‘Shall we ride the creek again?’ I asked him, feeling jittery. ‘We have to go back to the tree to get our clothes either way.’
He watched me for a few seconds then nodded and slowly pulled himself up the bank.
We could have crossed the paddocks, it would have been quicker, but we wandered along the creek bank instead. There were trees and it was shady and cool. The sound of the water tinkled beside us, and we were quiet. I was thinking of Hamish, of how the air around him felt charged. I was wondering if it was him or me that made it that way.
Sometimes when I walk through the bush, I stop seeing where I am. I get so lost inside my head that I don’t notice much around me. But it’s not always like that. Sometimes it’s the opposite and everything outside myself becomes heightened. Every tiny curled frond emerging, every raised root beneath my feet. The tiny beads of water gathering on leaves, gradually gaining weight until they fall. At those times, it is as though I can sense every drop of water hit the earth. Time slows, and instead of moving through the land, I am somehow just within it. The hum of the place starts up inside me. But that day with Hamish I was lost in thought and so I didn’t see the snake until we were almost right upon it. I stopped mid-step and Hamish bumped into me from behind.
‘What is it?’ In the quiet his voice seemed to boom.
‘Shhhh,’ I whispered, holding a finger up to my lips. ‘It’s a snake.’
The python was curled neatly in a spiralled lump at my feet. We were virtually on top of it. I tried to step back but Hamish was right behind me.
‘Where?’ Hamish whispered, looking at the bank on the other side.
‘Right here!’ I pointed down at the ground in front of us. ‘I didn’t see it.’
‘Shit!’ he said, stepping back quickly. ‘You nearly stood on it.’
‘Yeah, but it’s only a python.’ I moved backwards too. ‘And look, it’s not moving. It hasn’t even stirred.’
‘You can still get an infection from a carpet-snake bite,’ Hamish said, shuffling back another metre and staring at the python.
I knew a lot about snakes because Anja was obsessed by them. She’d been bitten plenty of times. ‘I used to think pythons were completely harmless,’ I said, studying the perfect spirals of the snake, ‘until one tried to eat my cat.’
‘I’ve heard
stories about them eating full-grown pets,’ Hamish said. ‘Hard to tell if they are true.’
‘I was sitting inside eating breakfast and I heard this terrible screaming sound. I thought the cat had caught a bird, even though I’d never heard a bird make a sound like that, and I ran outside to rescue it.’ I paused, remembering. ‘But when I got there I saw a python had my cat, had wrapped itself around her neck, and she was screaming, the air slowly squeezing out of her.’
‘I don’t really like cats,’ he said from behind me. It seemed a cold thing to say, and I half-turned to look at his face. We hadn’t washed the rock-paint off, and the ochre was drying, going pale in colour.
‘’Cause they kill the birds, right?’
‘They’re an environmental pest.’ His eyes were still fixed on the snake. ‘A menace.’
‘Cats have instincts. They follow them. It’s not their fault.’
Hamish’s lips were pressed together, hard.
‘When I was a girl, sometimes the farmers would drop strays off to me. Stray kittens, stray pups. Back when no one desexed their animals. I don’t know how they knew I’d look after them. They’d just drive up in their utes and drop them out the window. Sometimes they didn’t even say a word.’
‘Bet your mum loved that.’
‘Yeah, well, if we had too many we’d take them to the market and see if we could find someone who wanted them. Usually someone did.’
‘Sounds like you ran your own animal shelter.’
‘Not really, just sometimes.’ I thought of Old Dog, of the muted slapping of her tail-wag, and wondering how much longer she would last. Crouching down to get a closer look at the snake, I tried to push the thought out of my mind. The snake was bright and shiny in the dappled light.
‘Anja is crazy about snakes,’ I said over my shoulder.
‘Yeah?’
‘She’s always kept them as pets, all different sorts.’
Hamish stepped forward and out of the corner of my eye I could see him rub his collarbone the way he did when he was anxious.
‘Her dad made her all these cages, but none of them were exactly tight, so they were always escaping. Sometimes when I was younger, I’d stay at her place and a snake would escape and I’d wake up in the middle of the night with it wrapped around my legs. It was a bit creepy.’
I never stayed up there anymore, but it wasn’t because of the snakes. Anja’s dad had gotten worse. You could never tell how he would be.
‘That sounds … bizarre.’
‘Yeah. I’d have to wake Anja up so she could unwind it.’
He looked sceptical, as if I was making up stories. Lots of things about Anja were hard to believe once you said them out loud. Like when she found a dead animal, she liked to skin it and dry the skins out in the sun. I guessed that was something it was best not to mention.
‘Do you think this snake has just shed?’ I asked, turning to look at Hamish. The orche paint was starting to crack.
‘I’m not much of an expert on snakes.’
‘You’re an environmentalist, right?’
‘I haven’t done a lot of fieldwork.’ He reached out and plucked a leaf from a tree, twisting it between his thumb and forefinger. ‘I specialised in communication systems. You know, how they affect the dissemination of information? That type of thing. I don’t come from a biological background.’
He looked so serious.
‘Are you talking computers again, Hamish?’
I watched the leaf in his hand.
‘No, not only computers. It’s a bit complicated. What I studied back at uni was the way information spread, and which kinds of information are more likely to instigate change. It’s not something I really use now I do the consulting.’
He tossed the leaf into the air and it fluttered to the ground. The snake stayed curled up tightly. There was no sign it even knew we were there.
‘So, what did you do when the snake got your cat?’ Hamish finally asked. ‘Could you get it off?’
‘It was awful really. I loved that cat—Isis—and knew she was dying, but all I could do was scream. I guess I went into shock. Mum was in town and there was no one around, and I couldn’t make myself do anything. Anja must have heard me screaming from up on the mountain because she came tearing down.’
Even though it was a bad story I smiled when I thought of Anja bursting through the trees.
‘It took her ages to unwrap the snake ’cause it was so tightly wound. It kept striking at her hand the whole time, sinking in its fangs. It was crazy. She got a lot of bites, but she got the snake off, put it in a pillow case. Isis was dead though.’
Hamish just looked at me, didn’t say a word.
‘Anja tried to resuscitate her. She’d done CPR at school.’
‘She gave the cat CPR?’
‘Yep, but it didn’t work.’
I stood up from where I was crouched over the snake. ‘Anja dug a hole and helped me bury Isis, and then we let the snake go out in the bush.’
Hamish raised his eyebrows, nodding. Behind all the pale ochre I couldn’t really tell what he was thinking.
‘Did she get an infection—from all the bites?’
‘No, she was worried about me ’cause I’d screamed so much, so she came down the mountain and stayed with us. She looked after me, and I looked after her bites.’ I moved away from the snake, closer to where he was standing. ‘Kept them clean, put some cream on. She was fine.’
‘She sounds like your knight in shining armour.’
‘Yeah, I guess she is.’ I hadn’t thought about it that way. ‘Anja is a lot of things.’
Pointing to a gap in the trees, he stepped towards it, back out into the sunshine of the paddocks.
‘I vote we go around the snake,’ he said, taking the lead.
I took one last look at the bright skin of the python and then I followed.
8.
When we got back to the secret tree neither of us felt like riding the creek again, so we grabbed our clothes and re-stashed the boards. The paddock walk was hot and Hamish had turned a little pink.
‘I think you’re sunburnt,’ I said and touched his shoulder.
‘Probably.’ He looked down at his body. ‘It doesn’t take much.’
‘We should have smothered you in mud.’
‘What?’
‘Sun protection.’ I grinned. ‘You’ll probably get stripy suntan marks around the face-paint.’
‘Sunburn marks, you mean.’ He touched his fingers to his face. ‘I hope not.’
‘You could jump in the creek and wash it off,’ I said, tilting my head towards the water.
Hamish looked at the creek for a few seconds. ‘Maybe I’d rather have a shower, if that’s okay. But you jump in if you want.’
I waded back into the creek, the water inching up my thighs. It was wider here, and the flow was gentle where I was. More like a lazy river than a tumbling creek. Facing the current, I closed my eyes and let my hands drop so they were hanging in the flow. There were all different ways I liked getting into the water. Sometimes fast, diving straight under, so my whole body tingled in shock, and sometimes slow, so that by the time I was immersed my body could hardly tell itself from the water. I waded out real slow and let the water flow up around me. When it was deep and it hardly felt cold, I ducked under and pushed against the current. My hair flowed out behind me, the water tugging at my plait. I resurfaced and pulled the elastic off the end, unravelling my hair and going back under. Staying under as long as my breath would hold, I didn’t burst up for air, but drifted to the surface. I liked to imagine I could breathe under water.
I went under again and this time my breath held longer. When I came up I could hear someone calling my name from the other side of the bank. I looked up, brushing the water from my eyes. It was Billy.
‘Hey, Mema,’ he said, lifting up his council shirt and wiping the sweat from his face.
‘Hey.’
Billy looked from me to Hamish, star
ing hard, and Hamish lifted his arm in acknowledgement.
‘What you doing?’ Billy called out, though I guess it must have been obvious.
He was a good few metres away, so it was hard for me to hear. I didn’t want to swim closer to him ’cause the current in the middle was stronger.
‘Just having a swim.’
‘Who’s the guy?’ He motioned to Hamish with his head.
‘That’s Hamish.’
‘I never seen him before.’
From what I knew of him, Billy was alright, but he wasn’t the type to beat around the bush.
‘He’s not from around here.’ I shrugged. It was hard to explain about Hamish.
Billy looked hot, and I wondered if he wanted a swim. I didn’t know if I should ask him.
‘What you doing here?’ I asked instead, thinking he must be working somewhere nearby.
‘Tree came down in the rain. Blocked off Old Gordon’s driveway.’ He kept looking across at Hamish while he talked. ‘He can’t get out. Asked me to chop it up.’
‘The creek’s still over the bridge here.’ I squeezed the water from my hair. ‘Did many trees come down?’
‘A few about the place.’
‘Any damage?’
‘Nah, not really.’ He peered at me intently. ‘What you got on your face?’
I realised I hadn’t rubbed the paint off yet.
‘It’s just some ochre, you know?’ I splashed water up to my face, trying to rub it off. ‘Painting-rocks.’
Billy didn’t say anything, just watched me. It was making me feel funny, the way he stared. My nipples tightened beneath my shirt and I hoped he didn’t notice. I crossed my arms over my chest.
‘Well,’ he looked at Hamish one more time, ‘I guess I’d better get back.’
Turning around, Billy headed off across the paddock. He must have seen us from a mile away and come to check us out. My cheeks were hot and I dipped down one more time, scrubbing my face underwater. Since Billy had asked me out, seeing him got under my skin. I didn’t know quite what it was, but something about him made me feel more alert, sensitised. I guess I was conscious of being watched in a way I wasn’t used to.