by Nikki Buick
I really felt pressured by Mum’s insistence that I go to university. It was not the idea of university, because from all accounts university was a lot of fun. Maybe even too much fun. It was just that I hadn’t figured out what course to do and after 13 years of school, I knew I was not going to be in a hurry to sign up for another four years straight up. Ideas. Law? Medicine? I didn’t have the marks or the inclination. Teaching, as I’ve said, is a big no. The journalism thing was a contender. I could see myself as a foreign correspondent in some war-torn wasteland. Like I’d stepped into one of my Xbox games. But I was getting ahead of myself. I was already stressing about what subjects to take next year. Basically I was just trying to pass everything. I’d have to do better than pass before I could even consider university. And with my Maths marks the way they were, that might prove difficult.
One bottle of beer and I was contemplating deep and meaningful things, staring into the fire pit like a zoned-out zombie. I came back into the moment, into reality and the present, as Jacques and his mates began strumming their guitars. I was really grateful that they’d invited us along. It was the first real fun I’d had in weeks. This road trip already felt like it had dragged for months but it was only just nearing the middle of August. Not even a month yet. Not quite three weeks.
A tall, skinny bloke with dreadlocks and an arm tattooed with turtles banged a pair of bongos and sent the beat out into a night sky that was flecked with sparks from the fire. Mum clapped along and gave me a smile. Sometimes she wasn’t so bad. I just needed to get her away from Step. She was always more serious and irritable when she was around him, like she was trying too hard to impress him with her ‘sensible mother’ routine. When she was just with Pippa and me, it was like the old days. She was fun and happy and looked at us like we were everything in the world to her. Only Dad was missing. Mum threw another smoky glance over Pippa’s bobbing head to my knees bouncing on the spot. She gave me another smile but this one was different. And I knew she knew what I was thinking.
Some of those not playing instruments began to dance and move about to the music. Hips jiggled and lots of hair was thrown about. Megan stood up and grabbed my hand. I blushed a little and Mum gave my bum a push.
‘Go dance, Hunter.’
Megan pulled me into a clear space and began to shake her arms. ‘Hunter, eh? Like Hunter S Thompson?’
Yeah, like Hunter S Thompson. The deranged gun-toting, drug-muddled lunatic. I wish I was that interesting. I was just Hunter James, dorky schoolkid on a completely stupid road trip with my lunatic family. I wanted to say all that in a clever, throwaway voice. But I just kept my mouth shut with a goofy smile and watched Megan’s boobs bounce loosely under her top, while breathing in the bitter floral scent of her tanned skin. She was completely and utterly the sexiest woman I had ever gotten close to. I felt my pulse quicken and when she touched my arm, goosebumps exploded and ran up and over my itchy chest and down to the dark and swirling place in the bottom of my stomach. All thoughts of Katie Ford were swept from my groin.
Later that night, I lay on my uncomfortable inflatable mattress and listened to the faint giggling and murmuring from next door. Pippa’s breath came in little puffs from beside me and I could already hear Step’s gurgling. The smell of smoke was still in my hair and the moonlight had cast a silvery glow in a streak across the side of the tent. I felt peaceful and ready for sleep. Almost like I was on a boat or in a hammock. It was the best night on the trip so far.
Dad pulled into the main drag of Beaudesert. It was a dry town full of neat little wooden cottages. It was only half an hour from Dad’s new place but it seemed a world away. Dad’s mountain home had vines and ferns creeping out from the rainforest below and the place was so green it was almost black in places. Beaudesert, on the other hand, was all pastel green, yellow and brown. I waited in the car while Dad went into the motel to do a quote. He was a painter. Not like Vincent Van Gogh. He painted houses. Inside and out. Bottom coat. Top coat. Stuff like that. It was hot that day. Too hot. Dad left the airconditioning running, but the haze over the road outside shimmered like a mirage in an old Western movie. I fiddled with the radio but the car was new and I couldn’t figure out the buttons. I pressed a few but all I got was white noise – a wild buzzing like I’d just kicked a hive of bees. Dad didn’t take too long.
‘Hey, son. Let’s go get some lunch. Put some meat on those bones of yours.’
Dad was a big guy – over six foot. I was such a puny wimp. Mum said I had Dad’s grey eyes. Lately she’d been saying I had Dad’s same surly attitude as well, whatever that meant. I would rather have had Dad’s height and shoulders. Maybe one day. My stomach was grumbling. A big steak sandwich would definitely help flesh me out a bit. I could only hope.
‘There’s a good pub just down the road. Come on, we’ll walk.’
I got out. Dad locked the car and put his big hand on my shoulder as we walked down the street together. I tried to keep up with his long strides.
I woke up in a panic, struggling claustrophobically in my sleeping-bag. My skin felt cold and wet, and my chest was ticking like a clock. I put a hand over my heart, patting it like you might a frightened pet. I listened to a lonely night bird calling out. The muffled sounds of sleep inside the tent were comforting. Ranger snorting. Pippa puffing. The rustle of sleeping-bags. I was determined not to go back to sleep. Sleep was not always soothing. I did not want to go back to that day. That … not so nice day. It was a day that had lodged itself into my dreams and could not be extracted easily. It had its tentacles wrapped around my night-times and would not let go. I lay awake until what seemed like hours turned into actual hours.
Finally, a deep purple sword of colour snipped the edge off the night to let morning creep through. I carefully curled myself off the mattress, slipped on a pair of sneakers and unzipped and zipped up the back flap in extreme slow motion, so as not to wake anyone. I took a mango from the esky, and a knife. If I didn’t eat something soon after waking up, I felt sick. I wrapped the knife in a tea towel and tucked it and the fruit into a backpack with a bottle of water. I’d decided to make the trek to the ball of rock that the guys had been talking about. From the ocean it had looked like quite a lofty hike.
The other tents in the park had orange halos around them and the whole world held its breath. I made my way back down to Horseshoe Bay, to where I’d seen a sign pointing to the bushwalk track that led up to the boulder pimple. Mother Beddock rock.
The track was steep in places and I breathed deeply as my legs pushed, one in front of the other, over the narrow stone steps cut into the hill. And then there it was. The pimple. An impossibly balanced rock was teetering precariously on the edge of the greatest view I had ever seen.
It was like a painting hanging in a faraway gallery – something precious that was only displayed in public once every hundred years. The sun had begun to burn a hole in the horizon, blistering up from the golden sea into the pale blue flannel of the morning sky. It seared and sizzled. The sea stretched out before me and the curve of Horseshoe Bay looked like a tiny diorama. To the south I could see the sharp line of definition between land and ocean. A tiny cupcake of an island rose from the still water and birds all around me sang like they were in church.
I stood there and cut through the soft skin of the mango, slicing the sides off. Then I made a crisscross pattern of slashes and turned the flesh inside out. The square buttons of sweet fruit slipped over my tastebuds. I didn’t know how mangos had escaped me for so long. I thought it went back to some mango puree Mum had made years ago. She’d mixed it with passionfruit or something and it just hadn’t worked. After that, mangos had been kind of down on my fruit list – behind bananas, grapes, apples and well, most other fruit. But the foreign mangos were the bomb. Luckily we had them to keep us going when it wasn’t mango season in Australia. That mango was a long way from home, just like me. We were tourists keeping each other company. May
be the lack of junk food had stimulated my tastebuds.
The morning light bathed me in a surreal tangerine glow. It was a fuzzy spotlight. I was on top of the world. The king of the castle. The superhero surveying the planet I had just saved. Well, for a few more moments, before the sun lit the day and everything began looking more normal. I could even hear a voice from behind my shoulder, gloating, whispering, not bad, eh?
The sticky mango juice dribbled down my arm. The voice sounded just like Dad’s. I dropped the pulpy seed to the dirt as it hit me hard that this morning was the first time in years that I hadn’t been weighed down by the hole in my heart where Dad was. I’d woken up from the nightmare of that day and found a brand new, brilliant, day.
Of course there was no-one actually standing behind me, but I felt that he was with me on some level. Maybe the half of me that was Dad, genetically speaking, was waking up and becoming a man, kind of filling his shoes. It sounded dorky and new-age but I felt as though I was seeing the world with new eyes like in some initiation ceremony. I was watching the world wake up. For a little while everything looked brighter and cleaner.
I threw the mango skins into the scrub beside me, sat down on the cool ground, put my arms around my knees and cried, really, really loud. I filled the space around me and let my voice run out over the sea. Just let myself turn inside out like the mango. It hurt but it felt sweet at the same time. I was crying tears that had built up for years. The tears from when Dad left and walked out on us, the tears for Mum and her suicide attempt, the tears for the accident and tears for all the loss. I’d never even said goodbye to Dad. He’d just ceased to exist. Yeah, mostly I cried for Dad. I don’t remember the last time I cried. But it seemed like a very long time ago. Not since I was a little kid.
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
As the Range Rover rattled back up the highway, heading north, I pressed my head against the window and stared at the unfolding sheet of bland Australian farmland. It wasn’t really farmland because I couldn’t see much growing or grazing going on.
I’d visited the ‘pimple’ quite a few more times before we left Bowen and would miss those early morning sessions. It was kind of like praying I supposed. Not that I’d ever done much praying to compare it with. Mum had always taught us that God was in and of Nature. In us and all around us. I thought I understood what she meant now. Step was more of a meat-and-potatoes Christian. He subscribed to the Colonel-Sanders-in-the-sky brand of religion. God was ‘out there’ and we were the experiment in the fishbowl, being watched, so we’d better be good – always.
I’d googled religion once to see if there was any clear evidence about what was right and what was wrong. I learned that there were over 19 major religions and over 35,000 different brands of Christianity. If you counted all the others – whacky cults and sects – you’d go off the chart. There were so many it made my head spin. They all said they were telling the truth, which meant there were a lot of liars or fools out there. I decided to sit on the fence until something or someone showed me something I could believe in. I guess I was an agnostic. Open to possibilities.
As I stared out through the streaky glass, acres of cane fields began appearing, along with that accompanying sickly sweet smell that lodged in the back of my throat. I watched trains pull long parades of empty bins, racing north along the track that stretched beside the road. They just kept coming and coming. I got sick of counting the bins. The constant rattle of big metal, bucket after bucket after bucket, was hypnotising. It was like counting sheep and kept putting me to sleep. The jostle of the car or a pointed squeal from Ranger would wake me and my head would snap back, almost giving me whiplash. The phone rang from Mum’s bag and she looked at the screen.
‘Bloody Prize Home people again,’ she said.
‘It’s actually not funny anymore, Mum,’ I snapped. ‘If you won’t talk to them, give it to me next time and I will! I’ll tell them to piss off and stop ringing you.’
‘Piss off. Piss off,’ Pippa started parroting.
‘Shut up, Pippa!’ I shouted.
Mum clenched her jaw and her fists. ‘Everyone stop! It’s no big deal. Just forget it!’
The atmosphere in the car was suddenly smokin’. No-one wanted Mum to bubble over too much so everyone fell into a simmering silence. It was so eerily quiet that I could hear the music leaking out around Pippa’s ears, over her headphones, and the snotty rattle in the back of the sleeping baby’s gullet.
Step started whistling. I’d begun to notice that he did this when he felt uncomfortable and didn’t know what to say. I’d also started noticing other quirky mannerisms. For example, he clicked his fingers on both hands when he was angry. How crazy was that? Maybe goofball was more complex than I gave him credit for. These were little things I’d never observed before.
The guy had lived with us for just over a year, but it felt like a decade, and I kind of did this thing where I pretended he was not even there. Mum constantly told me I was being ‘remote’. And I guess that pretty much summed it up. I was deliberately remote with Step. He and Mum had merged into one unit and they spent most of the time cooing over the baby or fussing and focusing on Pippa. When I was at home, I spent nearly all my time holed up in my bedroom listening to music and gaming. I lived at least half my life inside a virtual reality.
I was going to miss Bowen. It had been the first bit of fun, the first time I’d relaxed while on this insane adventure. For a while, when I was dancing in the smoky night air and when I was looking out over paradise, I’d forgotten to be wound up and angry about this whole thing. Very briefly, I’d been struck with the idea that Mum had made the right decision to get away. She was doing really well. I was confident that the old Mum was starting to grow back from the wounds and scars. I couldn’t pin it on anything in particular, but I was filled with a little bit of hope. Hope that all the crappy things about life might start making way for some new growth, like green shoots sprouting up from the ashes after a bushfire.
I’d pushed away most of my feelings for so long. Apart from anger and frustration over school and home, there wasn’t much else. Maybe a little lust whenever I thought of Katie Ford. She was a bright spot in a dull world. Whether I liked it or not, this trip was forcing me out of my discomfort zone into something else. Mum didn’t seem to know where we were heading and neither did I and it didn’t really bother me. It was like treading water, just bobbing along without a concrete destination.
I started letting myself venture into territory I’d built a fence around a long time ago. Driving in a car was good for that, particularly when there was no-one else you wanted to talk to. Thoughts just floated in the window and got wedged in my head. More than once on this trip I’d felt like I was going off into a hypnotic trance, looking at cane fields and cows, and it was like my short life was flashing before my eyes. Thoughts. Emotional stuff. Mum and Dad stuff. The accident.
I’d gone to a counsellor for a bit and she’d always wanted me to talk about my feelings, but I didn’t feel comfortable opening up my head and letting some stranger poke around in there. It was too sensitive. Too private. I got so used to shutting out the counsellor that I ended up shutting myself out of those feelings too. The only time I ever thought about Dad these days was when that dream crept up and grabbed me in a vice. If something happened – like when I told Pippa she had turned her back on Dad by accepting Step, and when I’d made that remark to Mum about Dad not being here – it just slipped out like a sneaky burp or fart, unintentionally. But up at the pimple-rock, I’d let myself go over some stuff. Let myself remember and feel.
Mum and Dad broke up when I was 11. It was a bit of a blur now, how and why it happened, mainly because of things that had happened since. But I’d made myself go back there because that was really when everything started going downhill. Downhill, like you’d lost control of your bike and you were heading for a stack. That day that kept punching into my dreams, the day that
Dad and I went to Beaudesert for a boys’ day out – that was the stack.
Dad left Mum for another woman. I know that much. I’m not sure why he did that. I think that was kind of worse than if he’d just left because of some fight or because he was bored or having a midlife crisis. But this way there was ‘someone else’ and Dad had made that ‘someone else’ more important than all of us. More important than Mum and Pippa and me. Some stranger had made him disregard his own family. It hurt on a level that was so deep it went beyond pain. It was black and empty and rotten. That father–son bond that we’d always had suddenly felt like a banana you found in the bottom of your bag a week after your mum had packed it for lunch. He just chucked us away, like rubbish, to go and live with ‘someone else’. Like slipping on a new pair of shoes.
He came to school one afternoon to tell me. Just like that. Sorry kiddo but I had to do what I had to do. He’d already packed his bags and moved out during the day. He told me her name. But I had so much white noise in my ears that it didn’t register. We’ll see each other on weekends, you, me and Pippa. It’ll be great. You’ll have two homes and I’ll help Mum out financially. And then just like a random taxi driver, my father dropped me home and cried as he watched me move like a zombie up the driveway. He cried. I wanted to, but I just got an ache behind my eyes like a sharp headache. The tears were there, they just wouldn’t surface. I was numb.
Inside, Mum was lying on the couch with a tall glass of something with ice on the coffee table. Her eyes were puffy and red. The bastard, she hissed and then began to sob. You poor boy. What a bastard to do this to you. To us.
