by Nikki Buick
‘Just kidding … as if!’ I laughed and pushed her away.
‘Arsehole,’ she glowered.
‘I’ll tell Mum you said that.’
‘Will not.’
‘Will too.’
‘I’ll throw up in the car.’
‘I’ll get sick first.’
‘Will not.’
‘Will too.’
We faded back into the bush and followed the path into the darker reaches of the forest. It was dry and scrubby but greener and moister down by the creek. We hung over the railings and threw little sticks into the water, watching them spin giddily and then bounce over the rocks and pools. Pippa climbed between the railings and stood on the bank leading down to the creek. It was only about 15 centimetres deep.
‘Come back. Stay on this side, Pippa,’ I warned. She wasn’t too coordinated on her feet.
‘Nah.’ She picked up a big branch and threw it down to the creek bed where it snapped in two.
‘Come on. Get back here.’ The silly girl could fall and graze her leg and Mum would blame me for not looking after her properly. ‘You don’t want a big croc to come and take you into his rotten lair and let your dead body soak until your meat looks like that old log.’
Pippa gave me one of those cocked eyebrows that said yeah right sure, but she scampered back up to the safety of the walkway.
We decided to do the whole circuit, which was about a kilometre all round, not too far, and set about finding some wildlife. A croc sighting was highly unlikely but what was the point of going bush if you didn’t get to see some of the great Australian wildlife? What about a kangaroo or a koala or even a goanna? Something to have made the dullness of the parade of uniform gum trees a little more exciting. After six brush turkeys had been chased off, I began to wonder if those ugly scavengers hadn’t eaten all the other fauna. Perhaps they’d cleaned up and were the only ones left.
Finally we saw a tiny, beady-eyed wallaby. Pippa saw it first and motioned for me to be still. We crouched down and peered through the scrub. It was cute. A little furry, brown critter, no bigger than a possum. It twitched its ears nervously and twiddled its little marsupial paws anxiously together like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. I reached a hand out toward it but it hopped away in the other direction and was swallowed up by the crush of matchstick branches.
Pippa swore she saw another one a few minutes later, but I thought it was just wishful thinking.
‘Get Dad. He’ll find more. He was a ranger, when he was a kid,’ she said.
I didn’t know that about Step. Perhaps that was another reason that poor baby was called Ranger.
‘Why do you call him Dad? He’s not even related to you, Pippa. Not by blood.’
‘Just a word. Easier, y’know?’
‘It’s just sick how you’ve forgotten about Dad and adopted this jerk,’ I grumbled. ‘It’s like Mum could’ve married Hitler or Big Bird and you’d just straight up accept him and call him Dad. How do you reckon Dad would feel, eh?’
‘Well … Dad’s not here, is he?’ Pippa’s voice had dropped low and she walked ahead of me. Her shoulders had melted toward her chest and her head was down. She might have even sniffed.
‘Well … that’s not my fault!’ I yelled after her.
She turned and put her little hands on her hips, her eyes dark and her teeth clenched. ‘It is so your fault!’
I picked up a stick and hurled it at her. Right at her head. I didn’t think. It was just a reflex action. The stick hit the side of her face and clattered to the ground. I could see a scratch of red appear on her cheek but Pippa stood her ground, only her chin was wavering. Her face boiled into that beetroot colour and her nostrils flared like a steamed-up bull.
‘Say sorry!’
‘You say sorry.’
We stood there staring at one another – neither backing down. A big lizard ran down the trunk of a flaky tree and stopped, joining in the showdown. The creek gurgled and the insect chorus seemed to swell.
‘Sorry,’ Pippa popped the suspense balloon. ‘Sorry. It wasn’t your fault.’
My eyes stung a little and I wiped them with the back of my hand. It must have been the flecks of metallic sunlight slashing through the leaves above. I blinked and took a wavering breath. ‘Sorry I hit you, Pip, I didn’t mean … Sorry.’
Pippa gave a shrug but the adventure was over. We’d both lost that sense of wonder that a new place could bring and found ourselves wading through old terrain. I knew it was my fault. I didn’t treat my sister with kid gloves the way some people did. Mum was such a smother mother when it came to Pippa, and Step and my grandparents were almost as bad. They treated her like she was made of glass or something.
But she was a tough little kid. She’s had to be. Hell, she’d been poked and prodded by doctors so often as a baby. They were always monitoring her heart, her hearing, her eyesight – being super vigilant about anything that might be wrong that had been missed. But she was strong and healthy and, if I was honest, sometimes even fun to be around.
I looked out for her, I really did, and if anyone gave her a hard time, I would have lost it. Big time. I had the ‘red-devil temper’ of a redhead, my mum always said. I got that from her. And she was right. But chucking a stick at my sister was totally unforgiveable.
‘I’m really sorry, hey, Pip,’ I said, putting an arm down over her shoulders.
Back at camp, Mum looked a bit more relaxed and Step was poking at a fire that was refusing to play the game. Mum was sitting at the picnic table, her wet hair pulled into a ponytail, a plastic glass of red wine in her hand. I got the distinct impression that they’d gotten all loved up while we were gone. Disturbing.
‘The showers are cold but kind of refreshing,’ she smiled and waved as we trudged back, gnarled walking sticks in our hands.
‘I can’t wash my hair in cold water,’ I complained.
‘This is an exercise in learning to live without all the comforts … like hot water … and television and microwaves …’ she began.
‘And friends … and decent food … and Xbox … and Facebook,’ I added, wanting to go on until I’d run out of breath.
‘People did without all those things in the past … and survived. Beethoven didn’t have electricity and Einstein got clever without an Xbox,’ Mum said with the sigh of someone who couldn’t imagine not being right.
‘Yeah, well … we’re still using a big petrol-guzzling tank to get around and your baby’s wearing a disposable nappy.’
‘Well … it’s a start,’ called Step. ‘By the time we get to the Cape, we might all be wearing skins and bark. It’s time for us all to drink a cup of concrete and harden the …’
‘Yes. Yes. We get it, Brad!’ Mum called and laughed.
I couldn’t see Step through the haze of smoke. I didn’t know if he was just trying to make me snap. Probably. I didn’t give him the satisfaction though, instead I just grabbed a towel and kicked my way over to the shower block. Harden-the-fuck-up. I could teach him a thing or two about that! Pippa just disappeared inside the tent.
It was iceberg cold in the dark, musky shower block and a slippery green tree frog sat and watched my every move from the cracked louver above my head. He had a permanent grin on his slimy face and I wondered what was so funny.
I took him back to the camp. My skin prickled with the cool night breeze. The frog was sticky like snot in my cupped hands. I decided to give him to Pippa, as a peace offering. She had gone straight to the tent after our walk, probably to get something warmer to wear. I shook my wet mop of hair out of my eyes and saw her coming through the tent flaps toward the picnic tables.
‘I’ve got ignition! I’m the man!’ Step shouted.
Dork. Really. Total and utter dork.
Pippa gave one of her blistering belts of girl-squeal as she caught sight of our ne
w green playmate and broke into a run toward me. Mum turned her head our way. She looked younger in the early evening light.
‘What happened to your cheek, love?’ she called to Pippa, moving across to have a better look at the gash and the frog.
My sister looked at me and narrowed her eyes.
‘Oh … it’s just a scratch. Nothing, Mum.’
Pippa drove me nuts a lot but she was a good sister, sometimes. I smiled at her, appreciating her for not sharing the incident with Mum.
All of it was forgotten, however, as the enemy forces arrived. They flew in en masse – a shadow of menacing sirens – just before sundown. It was a shock and awe mission. The mosquitoes attacked without warning and they were savagely ruthless blood-sucking psychopaths that took no prisoners.
MACKAY
We were out of Red Rock before the sun found us. Those little vectors had sucked gallons of blood from our family and left us feeling drained and itchy. We had sat the whole night in the cramped tent listening to the onslaught bombarding the mesh windows, the stench of Aerogard choking us. But every time someone went for a leak or to grab something from the car, a guerrilla ambush would occur. Mum spent the early part of the night shining a torch neurotically about the blue polyester tent, slapping and clapping at the air like a mad tambourine player. The next day we were all a bit shell-shocked and covered in bites.
The trip to Mackay was long and dull. I listened to some decent music on the iPod to drown out the retro pop that the oldies had blaring from the radio. Pippa was irritable and kept moving her leg to my territory and then I copped it when I slapped her. Her grazed cheek blinked like a red alarm bell at me yelling bad big brother. It wasn’t that I was a sister-basher. It just looked that way.
The rash on my chest had spread all over my body and I scratched until I had blood and flesh under my fingernails. Ranger was the worst hit by the vampire-insect attack and looked like a reverse toadstool – all white with red spots.
The landscape was still as bland and tasteless as a stale bread roll. Windmills stood about with nothing to do. Cows looked ready to roll over from boredom and rickety fence-posts staggered on the side of the dusty road, like drunken old blokes struggling to hang on to the threads of barbed wire strung between them. It looked like a tug of war after a beer-drinking competition.
I passed the time by counting road kill. If it was so flat you couldn’t make out what it had been, it didn’t count. It had to still be juicy, at least fresh enough to identify. I even got Pippa into the game and we tried to outdo each other. I got 16 roo carcasses, seven rodent things and about 30 birds. Pippa kept cheating and tried to count bits of burnt rubber but, even so, I won hands down. The whole highway was a black zone for wildlife.
We also passed a lot of faded and forgotten crosses that marked the spots where people had died on the road. I felt a pain in my throat, like a snagged fishbone, every time I saw one of those little wooden crucifixes. I guess those ‘last’ places helped people grieve and served as a remembrance – kind of like Anzac Day – but I still looked away whenever I saw one by the side of the road, and there were plenty. One spot had six crosses and I had to turn up the headphones and squeeze my eyes shut to block out that image.
The outskirts of Mackay were lost in history. Stretches of cane fields swayed across the flat land. A sweet sugary smell blew through the car windows and I stared at the tidy little wooden houses on stilts in the middle of the farms. They looked like white Lego blocks built onto a pale green platter. Cars seemed ancient and the few locals we saw out on tractors looked like wizened old farmers who’d been tied to their rusty rides for generations.
‘The kids need a comfy night in a motel after being mauled by mossies last night,’ Mum said.
She was going for the ‘Mother of the Year Award’ – definitely winning points with me. I knew it was also because she wanted a hot shower and a toilet that didn’t reek of possum crap. Despite the new-age cheesecloth and moccasins, Mum liked comfort and I could tell this camping trip was some kind of weird ‘self-challenge’ for her. She tried to make out it was for us but I knew better. She was testing herself, trying to prove that she was stronger than the woman who had almost given it all away permanently, back in Brisbane.
‘Pool. Pool. I want a pool,’ Pippa chanted.
‘And a little fridge full of soft drinks and chocolate,’ I added.
‘And a spa bath and a basket of fruit and complimentary champagne.’ Mum laughed.
‘And I’m made of money!’ Step elbowed his way into the conversation.
Step was a lot of things but one thing he wasn’t, was rich. The clapped-out vintage Range Rover was testament to that. Mum had fallen for a guy who had decided at the age of nearly 40, to go back to university to become a teacher. He was studying a part-time post-graduate diploma in Education, which equalled no income outside of the dribs and drabs that Mum made as a freelance journalist – and that was not much. The bloke did some occasional hospitality work. Just casual waiting on tables. Embarrassing. Jesse’s father was a tradie and Katie Ford’s dad was a dentist. My lame stepdad was a part-time waiter. That’s a teenage job. Honestly! Some catch! A middle-aged student who was studying to become a teacher. A teacher! He had a year to go. This semester he was studying externally but the next one would be made up of pracs in a real school. The kids would eat him alive.
My dead great-grandmother was funding this excursion. I was not kidding. There was no way Mum and Step could have afforded to do this if my 105-year-old great-grandmother on my mother’s side had not finally died after being sick for years. She’d left Mum just enough money to fund this insane outback adventure. To my way of thinking the money could have been better spent on getting Mum some decent psychotherapy and maybe a car for me so I could learn how to drive. But no, she wanted to have a holiday. A retreat from reality.
Step was studying and living off us like a leech. And I couldn’t imagine him as a school teacher. He was too much of a hippy. Not a trippy dreadlocked hippy but just his whole attitude to life. The guy was so laid-back he was horizontal. I think that was the appeal for Mum. She was sold on his ‘peace-out’ persona. Since they’d gotten together he’d even begun to adopt some of Mum’s way-out fashion choices and he got around in sarongs half of the time. Sarong was just another word for skirt! Just sayin’.
I’ve had the occasional not-too-bad teacher. Miss McKechnie, for example, was hot and I had a massive crush on her. But generally speaking I was not a big fan of teachers. It seemed to me that they were learning stuff out of the textbooks at the same time as us. Half of them couldn’t spell and if you knew more than them – you got ‘punished’ instead of rewarded. They all talked in the same patronisingly robotic way – you’ve got one mouth and two ears … so listen; do you want to come up and do my job for me? Perhaps you’d like to share that with the whole class, young man. I figured you could learn how to be a teacher in six weeks. Learn how to have eyes in the back of your head, talk down to little people and become angrily defensive of any criticism at all. It was as simple as ABC. After all, everything they taught us – they learnt when they were at school. Why do it all again at uni?
‘Have you finished the geometry module that we were working on, Hunter?’ Mum asked, snapping me back into the moment.
‘Um, kind of,’ I lied.
‘You understood all the work we did together, didn’t you?’ she kind of growled. ‘I’m not one for Maths, Hunter, but if I managed to understand it, surely you did. So have you got all the work for me to mark?’ she went on.
‘Look Mum,’ I started to explain. ‘I just don’t really get the whole Maths thing. I can add and subtract and multiply. I can tell the time and count out correct change. I don’t need geometry or trigonometry or any of that rubbish and …’
‘That rubbish will get you the marks you need to get into university, Hunter!’ she replied tersely.
‘I don’t even know what I want to do yet!’ I countered.
‘Well it’s about time you started figuring it out. You’re in year 11 next year and that’s serious stuff.’
‘I’d be happy just to work at JB Hi-Fi or EB Games and then do some stuff on the side.’
‘You’ll just work in a shop?’ Mum sighed.
‘Yeah!’ I said back angrily. ‘What of it? Your husband here was a cab driver when you met him and now he doesn’t even work.’
‘I’m studying,’ Step snapped defensively.
‘I don’t want to go straight from school to uni,’ I continued. ‘I want a gap year to just bum around and figure stuff out.’
‘Bum around?’ Mum turned to me, raising her eyebrows over her sunglasses.
‘Yes, Mum!’ I yelled. ‘Bum around! And I hardly think you’re in a position to knock that when that’s exactly what you’ve got us all doing right now.’
There was silence for a while until Mum finally broke it and said in a small and even voice, ‘The geometry module, Hunter. If you don’t understand it, I’ll pull the textbook out now and read you the whole damn thing again and I will read it again and again until you get it. And you are not having a gap year. You will be going to uni from school so that you can get a job one day that is not working in a shop selling ridiculous video games!’
‘Dad didn’t go to uni and he was good enough for you … once,’ I snapped.
The silence was cold and hard.
I waited. There would be a backlash for sure.
Slowly, Mum spoke again. Her voice was low and trembled a little like it always did when I mentioned Dad. ‘Hunter,’ she almost whispered, ‘you’re a very bright boy. You have so much potential. You are the top of your English class and I’m not going to watch you throw that away. Your art is lovely but it won’t make you money, unless you teach Art … or do a bachelor degree in Journalism or English teaching.’
