by Nikki Buick
Mum didn’t stop crying for months. Pippa was only five and had just started going to school. Mum had wanted her to go to a mainstream school and Dad had wanted her to go to a ‘special’ school. That caused a lot of drama but in the end Mum had won. I wondered if that was the catalyst for Dad to start looking around for somewhere less stressful to live. Pippa didn’t really understand what was happening. She just went along with the fortnightly visits to Dad’s new place, like it was some kind of temporary holiday arrangement. Mum and Dad had never really fought much. Not until they broke up, which was kind of weird. You’d expect divorce and all that business to be the reverse. Fighting and then after the break-up the fighting stops. Most people broke up because of fighting, didn’t they? Dad thought he and Mum broke up because they didn’t argue enough.
For months, Mum was a mess. She cried and spent hours, late at night, on the phone to friends, sobbing and whispering and sometimes shouting. She got sick lots and spent a lot of time in bed, a mountain of used tissues building up beside her. She hugged us heaps during that time, squeezing Pippa and me until we could hardly breathe. Thank God I’ve got you two angels, she’d whisper. If it wasn’t for you I couldn’t go on. It felt smothering but I felt sorry for her and there was some anger too. I couldn’t believe my dad could do that to her. To us. It made me sick to think that he’d wanted some other chick more than he’d wanted to stay with us.
Naturally she became the enemy. Debbie. None of us knew her. None of us had met her. We didn’t even know what she looked like. She became known as ‘she who cannot be named’. Debbie went to her mother’s place for our visits because Mum said she wouldn’t let us go otherwise. She even insisted that all photos of Debbie be hidden during our stays. Dad was to never even mention her.
When Dad came to collect us for a visit, Mum would beg us to say we didn’t want to go. But I did want to go. I had fun with Dad. My initial anger at him was replaced, over time, with a new sense of bonding. Now I had him all to myself and I liked that. We talked more and got heaps closer than we had when we all lived together. Gradually, Pippa started carrying on and refusing to go. Mummy wants me, she would say. The girls would snuggle under the doona and tell dumb fairytales all weekend while Dad and I went camping and fishing and did other cool stuff.
Camping with Dad was great, not like this kind of road trip where we’re all packed in like sardines and are constantly on the move. Dad and I used to pitch his tent by the Logan River and we’d crack cans of Coke for me and beer for him, and we’d laugh so much. Dad was a great one for tall stories and he was as funny as a stand-up comedian.
But sometimes his face would go dark and his eyes would glaze over. I miss Pippa, he would say sadly, and ask me to talk to her. I’d promise that I would – but I never did. I liked having Dad all to myself. To be honest, it was even better than when Mum and Dad were together. If I was really honest, I enjoyed the undivided attention that Dad gave me on these weekends without Pippa demanding all the attention.
Those trips out to the bush were the best, and Dad would tell me fun stories from when he was young. Like the shark story. And then one day he started talking about his girlfriend, Debbie. She’d become this dirty secret, this thorn in Mum’s side, and yet I secretly hoped I’d meet her one day even though Mum kept saying over my dead body. Mum hated Debbie more than the devil. I could understand that. It cut her heart out really and she was always wondering if the woman was younger, prettier and all that.
I wondered the same things. Although Dad didn’t strike me as shallow, I figured the woman must have been hotter or younger, or both, than Mum otherwise why would he have thrown everything away for her? Dad told me she was a preschool teacher and that she was short with dark hair. I never did meet Debbie because she broke up with Dad after only about six months. Mum was sure Dad would come back then, but he didn’t. I just kept visiting Dad at his new little house on the mountain and Pippa stayed with Mum. Two years of weekend visits, which got me through each boring fortnight. It was something to look forward to. Just an ordinary Dad-weekend. Pizza on Friday night. Watching the football. And then, two years after the break-up, there was that Sunday down to Beaudesert. That’s when it all started falling apart.
‘First thing we’ll do a project on is the cane industry in Australia. For the history module.’
Step’s voice brought me back to the reality of driving along another forgettable stretch of highway. Was he talking to me?
‘Okay, Hunter? How about a 1,000-word research assignment on sugar cane? That ties in with your Australian history module.’
He had to be joking. A project on sugar cane? It couldn’t get more boring than that. I got sick just smelling the stuff. A thousand words? No way!
‘You can borrow Mum’s laptop and do some research,’ he added smugly.
‘Excellent idea,’ Mum nodded.
This wasn’t funny.
‘Can I do something else? Anything else?’ I pleaded. ‘Captain Cook was better than that. How about crocodiles or cane toads – yeah cane toads – that’s like cane, or Ned Kelly.’
I was grasping, desperately, but the thought of getting at Mum’s computer was exciting me. I could finally get on to Facebook, say hi to everyone, stalk Katie, the usual stuff.
‘Nope. Sugar cane,’ Step replied, doing the worst impersonation of a teacher. ‘You like eating sugar. So you can suck on that assignment for a couple of days in the bush.’
I could have said something real smart back but it would have gotten me into a heap of crap, so I kept my mouth shut and chalked up another reason to resent my mother’s husband.
‘Where’re we going?’ Pippa asked brightly, pulling some powder-puff pop music out of her ears.
‘Jourama Falls. Middle of nowhere. Just south of Ingham,’ Mum said. ‘It looks really lovely in the pamphlets. Lots of swimming holes and lookouts and wildlife.’
Yeehaa, I thought. And mossies. And boredom. And dried-up scrub. And stinking rotten brush turkeys that’ll eat the food off your plate if you so much as blink. And a 1,000-word project on sugar cane!
JOURAMA FALLS
Step was really getting under my skin. I was letting out my frustration by kicking some random tree trunk. Bits of spongy bark flew off my shoe and scattered on the bush floor. Kick. Kick. My toes hurt with it. It was juvenile and pointless but it felt kind of good. I was not really sure whether he annoyed me on purpose or whether I was just hypersensitive. It was normal enough to resent a new stepfather, wasn’t it? I was just acting out in a normal way. It wouldn’t really have mattered who he was or what he was like, I would have found him intolerable no matter what. Pippa and Mum thought he was so nice. Even Grandma thought he was the loveliest man on the planet. He was a nice guy. A nauseatingly nice guy, but it just felt fake. He tried too hard and I found that a bit suspicious.
He’d moved in when Mum was in the early stages of her pregnancy. Yep. It was a shotgun wedding. I would never, ever voice this to Mum, but I often wondered if Step would have married her if she hadn’t been pregnant with Ranger. Was Step just ‘doing the right thing’, ‘being honourable’, ‘being forced’, or did he really love her? It worried me because my mother was not an easy woman to live with. Dad had hung in there for years and years and even he left, even though they shared two children. Part of me hoped that Step would move on and leave us alone, but on the other hand I knew that Mum needed him. I wouldn’t be living at home in a few more years and her moods were unstable to say the least, so having someone to keep her grounded was good.
It would probably have been more ‘normal’ for me to have just gotten used to Step by now, perhaps even adopted him as a role model or something, but he just grated on me. And if Dad was around, I might have been more able to. If they each had a designated part in my life it might have been easier. But now there was just Step.
There were times, rare times, when Step was okay. But most of
the time he was like the mosquito you kept hearing in the middle of the night. But if he left Mum, geez, it wouldn’t be pretty and I’d be terrified that it would trigger another deep pit of depression for her that she might not survive. That was what her condition did to her. Swept her along in a ‘Land of Oz’ super happy energy and then at the slightest hint of tragedy it dumped her like a big wave in the surf. Medication and Step seemed to keep her okay.
That was why I was so shocked back in May, when she’d come a cropper. Mum had always had a delicate relationship with depression. Ever since she’d had kids, she reckoned. Her medication had kept her stable but then three months ago it had all gone pear-shaped. What had tipped her and almost killed her? She wouldn’t say. Said it was everything and nothing. But I wanted to know. I wanted to know so I could try to prevent it ever happening again.
I was thinking all these heavy thoughts in the car, barely listening to the drone of Step’s voice. I forced myself to focus because my unbidden thoughts of Mum’s depression were depressing me. The doctors changed her meds after the suicide attempt and ‘touch wood’ they seemed to be working.
After an hour of listening to the correct way to lay out an essay – introduction, body, conclusion, references, bibliography – I was ready to go bush. Just nick off and live like a wild hermit, eating berries and wearing kangaroo pelts. My history module demanded three essays on three different aspects of Australian history. If I had to choose, I’d do Ned Kelly, the Port Arthur massacre and Azaria Chamberlain, the baby who got taken by a dingo. These were topics with some substance, some passion and some gore.
But Step, in all his boringness, was suggesting I study sugar cane. And if that wasn’t bad enough he was treating me like a preschooler. It was not the first assignment I’d ever done. Beginning, middle and end. I got it. It wasn’t rocket science. It was an essay. Basically – sugar cane was a plant that was grown an awful lot in Queensland. It stunk. It was good for making lollies etc. It was very boring to look at. I liked sugar but sugar cane was dull. The end. No real references needed. How was I going to drag that out into 1,000 words?
And after an hour of this tedious explanation and dissection of an essay, he had the guts to ask me if I wanted to visit a sugarcane mill? How about – NO! That was when I started kicking the gum tree in frustration.
‘I don’t like this attitude, Hunter. I’m trying to expand your general knowledge.’
Step never raised his voice unless he was singing. But I could tell he wanted to. He wanted to grab me by the hair and scream at me to stop being a little brat. I knew I was being a pain in the arse. But I was revelling in it. I just loved giving a little back. He drove me nuts and I liked to make him squirm. If he had to stay in our lives, he had to earn it. I was putting him through the pits. He kept looking over to Mum. He couldn’t say and do what he wanted to, because she’d have a fit. I knew deep down that Mum would side with me against Step if it ever came to that. If he ever took a hand to me, she’d make a stand. At least I hoped so. Man, if he ever took a hand to me, I’d take him down so fast he wouldn’t know what had happened. And if he ever took a hand to Mum, I’d snap his neck. But of course he never would, because he’s so NICE!
‘We’re here for three days,’ he said under his breath. ‘And you can have that ready for me by the time we leave. As well as all the modules from school. You can use the laptop to do some research. And you’ll finish Hamlet before we leave as well. If you have any questions, I did a lot of Shakespeare in amateur theatre so …’
‘You listen to Dad,’ Mum called from the camp kitchen. ‘Do everything he says.’
So much for having her on my side.
Step gave me a patronising wink and a nod. ‘What’d the poor tree do, eh? Give it a break. It’s an unfair fight.’
Just then Pippa came skipping over. She’d collected a container full of flowers and petals and made them into mock-soup.
‘Dad, can we make something with this?’
The kid was as sickly as sugar cane.
‘He’s not your dad,’ I said between clenched teeth and began to walk away.
‘What was that?’ Step bristled.
I should have kept walking. I should have said oh nothing but I didn’t. I turned around and let fly. ‘I said you’re not her father because you’re not.’
My voice started taking off like an aeroplane. There was no going back. ‘And you’re not my dad. You’re Mum’s husband. That’s it. You’re her friend. Not mine. It really bugs me that you think you can pretend that you and I have the same blood. You can’t be a place filler. ’Cos there is no place to fill.’
Mum came over, shielding her eyes from the sun. She had Ranger struggling against one hip and her jaw was set for war. ‘What’s going on?’
‘He’s not my father. He’ll never be my father. I already have a father. Everyone gets one father, that’s it! Anything after that is fake! Fake!’ I looked at Mum.
She stopped and stared at me.
‘You can’t make me forget Dad, you know, Mum. Just because he broke your heart, doesn’t mean you have to break mine!’
‘Your father left me, you’ll remember, Hunter. He left us!’ Mum shouted.
‘He left you!’ I screamed back at her. ‘He didn’t leave me and Pippa. He left you!’
I felt a rise of warmth wash into my cheeks and had a twitchy pain at the corners of my mouth. I turned and ran up toward the toilet block and just kept running.
I heard Mum call after me, but I kept going. One foot pounding after the other. I ran blindly up the path, past the wooden sign that pointed to Jourama Falls. Dried twigs crunched under my feet and the fingernails of bald branches scratched at my arms. I followed the path and only stopped for breath when a painful stitch stabbed into my left side. I stood and panted, bending over. Then I threw my head back and let out a howl like a dingo. Ahhhhoooooooo. My voice rolled out into the valley and up over craggy rock faces, bouncing and bounding from boulder to tree and back again until it came back to me tired and defeated.
I set off again – into the darker corners of the national park where the sun was blocked by large leaves and twisted trees. Cooler air bathed the sweat on my skin and I watched my tattered skate-shoes as I navigated my way over big, rounded, grey boulders alongside the trickle of a creek. The water bobbing over the rocks sounded like the hiss of a goblin or the whisper of a wood elf. I followed the call and wandered, tripping and climbing, along the water’s edge, throwing the occasional stone into the flow to watch it bounce and then sink.
Mum would be crying. I pushed that aside and tried to just merge into the forest. Lose myself. Step would be comforting her and Pippa would be thinking that I was the big bad wolf … again. The little trio. With that blubbering baby to cement them all together. A happy little family. How dare I challenge that. But it was a lie. A fantasy. And there was a big piece missing and there shouldn’t have been. There should have been a place for Dad in there somewhere. I grabbed more stones and threw them. Now that I’d started thinking about these things they were coming at me like a cyclone and I couldn’t defend myself against them.
Pushing deeper up the creek, I found I had to climb larger boulders and the footholds became trickier. I stumbled over another track and followed some steps up away from the creek. Perhaps the lookout over some waterfalls would be worth checking out. I was already halfway there. A couple of older people came back the other way. Grey nomads.
‘Nice view up there, son,’ they smiled and said. ‘Just another couple of hundred stairs. Phew.’ The woman wiped her brow and cackled.
I figured they belonged to the flashy big campervan parked near our car in the camping area. I waited until they had passed and kept climbing.
The steps were steep and narrow and carved sharp U-turns about the hill. I tripped on a jutting tree root and pushed a wispy branch out of my face. Down to my left, and about 200 m
etres off the track, was a sheltered area of rock pools. It was easy to imagine they were out the back of a five-star resort in Las Vegas. Water spilled from one pool down to the next. Tiers. Layered baths. I ducked under the metal handrail and tried my luck.
It was hard going but I found a way over the big rugged rocks and finally ended up sitting on the slope of a large grey mass, looking down into the clean, clear water. The surrounding mountains and rock faces looked down on me. Back in the campsite, my problems and my anger had seemed like the biggest thing in the world, but now I had the unexpected feeling of being quite unimportant. In the big picture, I was a dot. A spot.
These thoughts began to lighten my mood and just as I was thinking of heading back to camp, I noticed a shadow moving in the water. The sun was high in the sky and I had to pull my cap down further to get a better look. I frowned and inched myself further down the rock. A little black shape swam beneath the surface. A round figure with moving bits on either side. A turtle. I let my eyes adjust and relax and saw that the water was thick with them. There were dozens of turtles, from the size of a coin to the size of a small pizza. I loved turtles. Ever since I was a little kid and Dad had read Yertle the Turtle to me. And don’t even get me started on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I let myself slide further down but hit a patch of moss and slid straight down into the water. Shiiiiitttt – what a rush. The water was cold. Gaspingly cold. I was soaking like a teabag, shoes and all, and had to laugh. My laugh spread out into the wilderness, growing into a comical roar. I began to paddle around looking for turtles. They were so easy to catch and I grabbed a small slippery brown one. His little face looked like a bird’s with a pointy beak of a nose. His eyes were reptilian. And his arms and legs waved like he was an air traffic controller. The claws were sharp and gave me a scratch.
