by Tim Winton
‘It’s just that we should be able to name all the birds we see. It makes seeing them worthwhile,’ she said. ‘Commonsense.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. While you’ve got your beak in that book you’re not even seeing the birds.’
They walked another twenty minutes. The bush, as the light grew, turned blue and was unbroken on every side, unmarked until the paler blue of the sky capped it at the uneven horizon. On the spine of a long, granite-studded ridge they took compass readings and, looking eastwards down the valley, saw – for only a moment – a metallic glint. When they moved their heads it flashed. The man took a reading from it. She thought: metal? This is wilderness. God, don’t let it be a car. The idea itself was a desecration to her. Neither spoke. As they cut down the valley through the thick strew of boulders on the slope, the bush rang in their ears. They lost sight of the flash immediately. For five days there had been wilderness, no person, no sign of a person, not even a footprint. They moved down in the direction of the flash.
The valley was thick with head-high trees and dense, scrubby undergrowth around lozenges of granite in the cracks of which grew nests of pigface. The walking became difficult.
Bush-bashing, he thought; just what we need.
They stopped before a thick wall of growth that appeared impenetrable. Resting, packs cast aside, they were beset with a strange feeling: they had left their planned route, broken the timetable. In all their walks this was the first time. They had digressed.
‘Maybe it was something in the rock that glittered,’ the woman said, fingering her book.
‘Like fool’s gold.’ He sighed and opened his canteen. He saw seams of dirt in the earliest lines of her face. ‘We said we’d walk six hours. We’ve exhausted ourselves.’
‘This isn’t as good as the Bibulman walk,’ she murmured. ‘Or others.’
‘There’s a gazetted stream a kilometre east.’
‘Funny, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘how we always walk to water.’
‘Commonsense, I’d have thought.’
She looked at him and sucked her furry teeth. It was the same answer she’d have given to such an uncharacteristically whimsical statement. After all, she thought, chastising herself, who but a mad person would walk out away from water?
Hoisting themselves into motion again, they skirted the dense growth for several minutes until they came to a space, a tunnel in the tangled and matted foliage, that looked as though it had been made by animals. The man bent down to it. On his belly, there was enough room for him to move forward with his pack. The woman stood behind, watching his rump disappear, thinking: we’ve gone off course for a flash in the bush. It amazed her. A ludicrous thing to do, quite out of character. She got onto her belly and followed the scent of his sweaty buttocks.
The undercut in the bush widened until the man and the woman could crawl abreast of one another across the tortured roots and between the stems and wizened trunks of the vegetation. Marsupial droppings and the shadows of birds coloured the detritus. The woman and the man came out into the light together and helped each other to their feet. What they saw caused them to cry out simultaneously. Fifty yards further downhill in the clearing stood the aluminium frame of a dwelling.
‘My God,’ she said.
He shook his head. Within the frame hung a wooden door. A petrol-powered cement mixer stood to one side and with it, a shovel, a trowel and a screed. An aluminium window as big as a man leant against the near side of the frame.
‘This is wilderness,’ he said.
‘Impossible,’ she whispered. All around the cleared site, the scrub was the same: knotted, olive-drab and seven feet high. The lower side was confused and thickened by boulders and some taller trees. The woman pointed out the stumps and dead brush trodden flat on the ground all about. The clearing was man-made, someone had slashed the vegetation flat.
The man went to the door and opened it. It was eerie to step over the threshold and into the square of ground enclosed by that cage of metal. He walked through the space where the exterior wall would be.
‘Yes,’ he muttered, ‘impossible.’
‘And illegal,’ she added in disgust.
‘How could people carry all this gear in here? The nearest vehicle track is eight kilometres away.’
In all the bushwalking they had done over the years they had never come upon anything as inexplicable as this. They had done a lot of bushwalking. In their five years of marriage they had become connoisseurs of national parks and wilderness trails. The passion had not visited them by chance. After their first married year when it became evident that beyond their shared enthusiasm for courting, they had almost nothing in common (they read little and disliked team sports, and though minor, their musical interests were irreconcilable), they drafted a list of hobbies a husband and wife could share, drank a bottle of wine over which they had bickered bitterly, and arrived at two final possibilities: the Gestalt Club and bushwalking. Being afraid of religion and expense, they chose bushwalking. They bought their equipment, did their reading, and after the first year found they had a taste for it. Being teachers, they had a good number of lengthy holidays and their walks became more adventurous. Between walks they bored their schoolteacher friends with their hobby. In time, they were not invited to dinners and parties. They stayed at home and planned new walks. To the fresh crackle of survey maps, they filled their evenings with sensible conjecture and reminiscence. They upgraded their equipment. They became connoisseurs.
The husband lowered his pack to the ground and sat. ‘I want to find out about this,’ he said, wiping his brow with the sleeve of his shirt.
‘Me too,’ the wife murmured. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
Later they retreated to the hedge-like vegetation and crawled just inside its shade and its tintinnabulation of cicadas. He took water from his pack and she the Hexamine stove from hers, and they made a billy of tea. They rested in the shelter drinking tea until the late afternoon, each secretly annoyed that they were allowing this strange discovery to distort their itinerary.
‘It makes no sense,’ she kept saying. ‘You don’t build houses in a gazetted wilderness.’
‘And if you do, you don’t build a kilometre away from the nearest water, and you don’t build a house with those materials. And hack your own clearing. Only a lunatic would.’
They settled in to wait.
Night fell. They unrolled their duck-down sleeping bags, and after a meal of reconstituted rice and vegetables, slept lightly, listening to the rustlings of tiny animals in the invaded space beneath the scrub. The husband woke in the darkness before dawn with an aching bladder. He slid from his sleeping bag and crawled out into the clearing and was only beginning to relieve himself when he heard a metallic rattle somewhere out of his vision. He cut himself short, cursing inwardly, and slipped back under cover. The sound repeated itself. He woke his wife. They listened, peering out into the dark. A jarring thud; it was closer, but the bush, they knew, was deceptive. The thud again, and the rattle. Excitement prickled in the man and the woman. They strained until they thought they could hear each other’s pulse. Then the bush down across the clearing began to vibrate and they heard scrapings which continued for several minutes. She was the first to see the outline of the figure that emerged and the shape that so slowly followed it. She touched her husband’s arm and whispered: ‘There.’
‘A bloody wheelbarrow,’ he whispered.
The figure was hunched and moved with the hesitancy and weakness of an old man. His coarse breathing was quite audible. With the convergence of dawn upon them the man and the woman began to see with less difficulty. For some time the man stood over the barrow, grunting and cursing. Then he straightened, puffing, each breath a bellow, and kicked the barrow over. A bag of cement thudded to the ground. A few tools chattered down beside it. Then the man himself fell. He did not move. For some time the wife and husband remained silent and motionless, watching, but there was no movement. They stared.
The woman shifted her gaze to see her husband in the corner of her eye and she felt something turn in her belly. She thought: he looks sort of handsome when something gets his whole attention. Like a child, all intent. She had never experienced this distracted, disturbing sensation before; she was admiring him. At her side, he was thinking: this is a madman we’re watching. We’re losing walk time.
From beneath their shady hollow the wife and husband felt the day’s heat creeping overhead, taking hold of the wilderness, claiming back the glittering jewels of dew, and as the morning came on and on, the man in the clearing by the houseframe and the spilled barrow did not move. They assumed he was sleeping; there was no sign even of his being alive.
But the man lying beside his battered barrow was breathing, albeit in narrow snatches. He had walked eight kilometres in the night, pushing his barrowful of cement, and he intended to repeat the trip as soon as it was dark. Inside his exhausted body he was dreaming. In his dream there was only the ultramarine sound of the wilderness sky and the sound of his heart labouring and he felt a profound satisfaction as he was raised up into Heaven. Flies dozed on the domes of his eyelids. Not even they sensed the intruders on the perimeter of the clearing he had hewn in the wilderness.
By noon the husband and wife had become quite uncomfortable in their nook, changing prone positions carefully, front, side, back. They hardly dared crawl back whence they had come for fear of alerting the man in the clearing. They did not consider revealing themselves and greeting him as if by accident. He looked unpredictable. Besides, their curiosity had grown and their resolve had hardened with every uncomfortable hour. They communicated by facial expressions and occasionally a whisper. As they waited and endured, an exciting sense of complicity took hold of them. In that cramped lair there was a novel intimacy. It was unnerving. He fed her tiny bits of chocolate, taking infinite care with the foil so as not to make a sound. She took it on her tongue silently as a communicant, tasting the salt on his fingers, holding one fingertip captive between her lips until his thumb buttoned her nose back and he smiled.
There was none of this at home. Their home was a place of business. No time, no gestures, no thoughts wasted. There were careers to attend to, unlikeable children to teach, Remedials to suffer, Exceptionals in whose glory to bask. Evenings were begun with sociable complaints about the staff and equipment of their respective schools. Then papers were marked, lessons prepared, and before bed a little mild gossip was exchanged. It was not a frivolous life. Even in their walking they were not frivolous. They mapped out their journey, they walked from A to B to C without unnecessary deviation or lingering at any point, and they gained their satisfaction from telling themselves, and the few who would listen, that they had done this walk and done that wilderness trail. Walking was a means to an end. They did not believe in things that were ends in themselves.
Somewhere inside her, the woman, taking chocolate from her husband, felt the impulse to explain their behaviour as a means of passing time. But the feeling was hollow. Instead, another sensation, a springing of nerves in her pelvis, in her chest, her feet, had come upon her, and though part of her demanded to stifle it, she drew it upon herself deliciously, licking her husband’s fingers, pinching the tips in her teeth, holding her tongue out to him before he had another piece of chocolate to hand. And she noticed his quickened breathing, the reckless way he opened a second bar, the way he thrust his finger into her mouth and moved it across her teeth and around her gums.
Without pausing from this intensifying ritual, the woman unbuttoned her heavy cotton shirt and saw her husband’s teeth meet and his lips move as she revealed her small, damp breasts, and from that moment, as she pushed him back onto the uneven ground and felt his breath in her mouth and his belt buckle hard against her belly and her waistband stretch and the vegetation against her shoulders and in her hair like frenzied fingers, the man prostrate in the clearing was forgotten. She heard her husband’s breathing in her ear. She tasted chocolate and sweat and felt him reaching inside her without fear, without reserve, without precision. He bore her down on him. It was passion. It made no sense.
In his dream, the man in the clearing rose out and away from the curve of the earth, the compromising sounds of nature, the expressionless and unseeing eyes of those ugly little boys he lived with five days of the human week, the spiritless books that crowded his bedroom and his reference lists, the bloodless words and meaningless syllables he taught – all of them fell behind as his exhausted body and his burning soul lifted free and rose and rose. He felt himself yodelling and hooting, tumbling upwards to that clean, well-lit, sensible and airy room in which he would be received.
When he woke to find himself earthbound, he let out a groan and watched the dusk sky passing overhead. His legs, his feet, his back, his head ached. He thought: dark . . . time to go again . . . time to work. In one ragged movement he got to his feet, righted the empty barrow and began his agonized shuffle back across the clearing to the scrub. Down on his hands and knees, he dragged the barrow through and under the clot of vegetation. Twigs and trunks tore at his hands and his hair, snagging on the awkward shape of the barrow, until he was through and into the thinner open scrub outside where he could wheel the barrow ahead of him, jolting it over the rocks and stumps downhill. It was eight kilometres to the Land Rover.
Lying in a stupor, feeling the sweat dry on their skin and the guilt creep into them, the wife and husband heard the man go. His groan of disappointment had made them flinch because they had forgotten him. They followed the progress of his shuffle and the creak of the barrow wheel across the clearing, and then listened to him bashing through the scrub until nothing more was audible.
‘That’s bloody odd,’ the husband said, startled by the sound of his own voice after so long a silence. It was the longest period without speaking he could remember.
‘Is it safe?’ she asked, noting the lack of intimacy in his voice.
‘I suppose so.’
She scrambled out to stretch and to urinate and brush herself clean and button herself up. Stars had appeared in the sky and a chip of moon was illumined just above the uneven horizon.
‘We need water,’ he said, tasting the residue of chocolate on his tongue.
‘Why is he doing this, do you think?’
‘He’s either a criminal or a lunatic.’
‘And he’s coming back, I’ll bet.’
They had wandered cautiously down the clearing to where the bag of cement lay near the door of the skeleton house. In the moonlight they could plainly see the weals his boot heels had left in the ground.
‘He’s no econut, that’s for sure. Look at the materials, the way he’s hacked the bush.’
‘Still curious?’
He nodded. ‘What about water, then?’
‘We’ll get some and bring it back. He’s got hours to cover. We could find water pretty quickly, if we’re lucky. Enough for tonight and some of tomorrow.’
He shrugged, agreeing. But he was still uneasy about the broken itinerary.
They took the waterbottles and the billy and with a map and a compass, made their way east, the same way the man had gone. It was difficult and dangerous work in the dark. There was no time for small talk.
It was late in the night when the man came willing his body up the incline towards the clot of scrub. Two bags shifted and shook in the barrow before him, one of builders’ sand, the other of bluemetal, and he held them in his gaze as though they were sacks of precious stones. Sweat slicked him, and his lungs felt blistered and broken. He didn’t even bother to confuse his movements or to stop and start again at odd times or to swap trails or lie and listen anymore because he knew deep in his rawness of exhaustion that any deviation, any pause, any confusion would be final, that if he lost sight of that tangible bar that connected him, pointed him to the scrub clot on the slope – he couldn’t tell if the white bar was light or pain – then it would be over. All his life, it seemed, he had been working towards this.
Energy burned white in him even now, but his body was failing him; it did not understand that all things were possible. God help, God help me, he thought. Fifty weekends, a hundred trips, had not been enough. He had taken sick leave, holidays, even a day-trip after which he fell asleep in front of a class of thirty-eight teenagers. But still the structure went up slowly, awkwardly, fell down and was put up again as he read from how-to manuals and held screws in his teeth and felt the righteous annointing of sweat on his body. At first the work had been frenzied and the results quick to be seen by the eye. He cleared the circle in the scrub in four days: his machete flew, blinded him with its sunflashes, moved of its own accord. But the structure, the carting under secrecy and peril of darkness, the logistical odds . . . Men, he knew, had dragged riverboats through jungles and over mountain ranges, built pyramids, towers, walls that were impossible but for the will. It would go up because he had will, and because it was the most logical thing in the world.
From their position under the nest of scrub at the perimeter of the clearing, the man and woman heard him coming. They had washed and drunk at the tiny creek at the bottom of the valley, finding it by ear in the end. They had returned several hours before, and were roused from their light sleep by the noises. The woman, washed of this afternoon’s stickiness, felt a renewed excitement at the sound of his approach. It was as if a great secret was about to be revealed.
The husband moved back slightly further into the foliage. There was no wind, no bird sounds, only the wispy, close movements of nocturnal animals and the distant creak and rattle of the wheelbarrow. The man was already wondering how he was going to make this story credible to the others in the staffroom. He never listened to a story that was not credible, and he would certainly not tell one. He was proud to be a teacher, a man of reason, disseminator of rational learning. This afternoon’s incident in the bush had unnerved him. He tried to organize the past twenty-four hours in his mind, but the creak of the barrow wheel, ever louder, distracted and confounded him. He gave up and listened to the madman’s pained respiration.
