by Nikki Buick
‘There you go,’ I said, letting him go while I went in search of some more. I played with them, studying them in detail. I guessed we were a bit like turtles on our trip. The Range Rover was our shell.
I wanted to take one back to show Pippa but decided I couldn’t break up their little turtle families. Getting back out of the rock pool was trickier than getting in but I finally dragged my sodden self up to dry rocks. I lay there like a lizard until I’d dried out a bit and then climbed back to the track. I was too tired to take in the waterfall lookout and headed back to camp. A yellow speckled snake slithered over the path, giving me a start.
I still hated Step. But the hatred wasn’t quite as murderous anymore because he was just a part of the problem. Not the whole thing. Mum and I really had to talk. I had a lot I wanted to say to her.
Lazy flies plodded through the air, their song sounded like it was being hummed by a depressed chorus of blues singers. The mood was definitely flat but with a string of tension running across it, like blue-and-white police tape. Mum looked like she’d been crying but avoided looking me in the eye. Pippa had her werewolf scowl. Step was overly cheerful. Ham acting. Tupperware friendliness – as pliable and plastic as the piles of containers Mum ordered from the catalogue. Ranger lay on his belly on a rug, lifting his body up as if in a yoga pose. He was almost getting up onto his knees, but not quite. The kid looked up at me and gave a gaping grin. He must have been about six or seven months by now.
‘Steak and sausages are up. Grab your plates everyone.’
While I’d been gone, Step had rumbled the Rover back up to Ingham and picked up some meat and soft drink for a proper barbeque. Mum had told me in a mumble, with loaded subtext, that it was a peace offering for me.
Whenever Mum or Pip referred to him as ‘Dad’ it set something off in me. Why couldn’t they see that for what it was? It was as if my father had never existed. I was carrying his DNA around in me, not Step’s. He had Ranger. Ranger was his kid and he was Ranger’s dad. Why was that not enough? But a steak in my belly would certainly put me in a better mood and I wasn’t about to upset Mum again.
I should have been calmer and just swallowed it back. I shouldn’t have lost the plot and run into the bush like a spoiled kid having a tantrum. These people had things that bugged me. Lots of things bugged Mum and we were sensitive enough to skate around them. But me? I was supposed to just listen to Mum call her husband my ‘dad’ and bury the pain that went with that.
We passed our plates around and Step plonked frizzled up, blackened chunks of meat on them. I splashed some tomato sauce over the charcoal and shoved the meat between a soft doughy poppyseed bread roll and bit into it. The sheer joy of eating something that was not baked beans was to be treasured and I chewed slowly, letting the meaty, smoky, glutinous mass roll about in my cheeks. I washed it all down with some cold, sparkling lemon squash. No-one spoke. We ate in silence, no-one was looking anyone else in the eye. Chewing and swallowing like a herd of cattle.
MORE JOURAMA FALLS
I helped Mum wash the dishes. We half-filled a bucket from the tap and boiled up a saucepan of water to add to it, popped in some suds and, voila, we had a washing-up sink. I dried the dishes and put them on the wooden picnic table.
The tension between me and the adults had grown ice over it during the course of the week, like an early morning frost that never thaws. I’d been reading Hamlet and was struck, quite violently, by the parallels to my own life. I certainly could relate to the Danish prince missing his father and resenting the new dude who came along and married his mother and tried to take his place.
When Mum gave Step the nod and he took Pippa and Ranger into the tent, I knew we were up for one of those talks. You know the ones? The conversation that everyone wanted to have but skated around because it dredged up painful stuff that would make everything feel worse before it felt better. The talk that felt like ripping a bandaid off your grazed knee. Afterwards you wondered why you were being such a wimp. The anticipation and avoidance was worse than the actual short-lived sting. This talk was going to be one of those. The ice-breaker.
‘Hunter, we need to talk.’
I’d seen that coming.
‘Hmmm,’ I said, pouring another soft drink.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Mum suggested.
I nodded, sculled my drink and followed beside her as she took careful and slow steps toward the path leading to the lookout. The sun was wilting in the sky and the colours of the bush were changing to a bronze and golden glow.
‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ Mum smiled and slipped a hand around mine.
I was getting a bit old to be walking around holding my mother’s hand. It could have been kind of creepy and if we’d been walking down the Queen Street Mall, I would have shaken her off. But in the bush with no-one else around, it felt kind of nice. Comforting and warm.
‘I know you have trouble seeing Brad as a father figure,’ she started and my dinner moved up from my gut to my throat.
This was taking a massive wrong turn and heading somewhere I did not want to go.
‘I’m never calling him Dad.’ I was very clear about that.
‘I know, I know … and I understand that, Hunter. I really do … but “Step”? Can’t we come up with something better than that?’
‘It’s just a word. It’s a term of endearment,’ I lied. ‘What do you suggest, Dad the second? The Sequel? Part Two? I tried Brad but he didn’t like that. “Too informal” he said,’ I blabbered. ‘I’ve been calling him Step for a year, why change now?’
‘Well maybe you two should sit down and work that out together,’ she suggested and gave my hand a little squeeze.
I couldn’t think of anything worse than sitting down and talking one on one with him about something serious and real. It was hard enough to do schoolwork with him. One session of homeschooling together and I’d almost broken a toe against a tree and run off to live with the wildlife.
‘Whatever,’ I said, dismissing that line of conversation. ‘I don’t really see how what I call him is such a big deal. I want to talk to you about Dad.’
There I’d said it. Straight out. Mum shrivelled into herself a little and she let go of my hand.
We took the turn along the path that led to the darker area of the forest. Mum put her hands into her pockets and picked up the pace. I hurried to keep up with her. We walked up the smooth well-worn track until Mum stopped and reached up to touch a pale flower.
‘The cocky apple tree,’ she said, not to me but to herself and then she turned and smiled at me. ‘Look Hunter.’
I stumbled over a loose jumble of stones and looked up at the delicate pink-and-white flowers hanging from a tree.
‘They only open at dusk and then close up in the morning. A nocturnal flower. Isn’t that amazing?’ She was stalling, trying to distract me from the direction I wanted to take with this bushwalk/heart-to-heart discussion.
‘Whatever.’ I shook my head and shrugged. ‘It’s a flower.’
‘A nocturnal flower,’ she said again.
It was kind of nice, I suppose, but not as flashy as a hibiscus or as classic as a rose. There was a bulb of fruit tucked away on the branch. I snapped it off with a crack that sounded louder in the quiet of the murky bush.
‘It’s edible,’ Mum said with a smile, urging me to take a bite. I wondered if she was tempting me to eat a poisoned fruit like something out of Snow White. That would solve all of Mum and Step’s problems. With me out of the way, they’d have their perfect little family.
‘Sure it’s not poisonous?’ I narrowed my eyes at her.
‘No. Dad and I read about this in the book we’ve got about North Queensland. We’ve been learning all about the flora and fauna of the area.’
Couldn’t she just say plants and animals?
‘He’s not my dad and he’s not your dad, so don’t c
all him Dad when you’re talking to me, okay?’
She went quiet and looked down at the flower she had picked. ‘He’s a good man, Hunter. Don’t blame him for everything that’s happened.’
‘What? Like you blame Dad for everything? If I get a bad mark on a test, it’s because of Dad. If I get into trouble, it’s Dad’s fault … if I …’
‘Stop it. Okay? Stop it,’ Mum raised her voice and pulled another piece of yellow fruit from the tree. She bit into it and pulled a face, gagging.
I laughed, the negative charge between us suddenly easing. I took a bite of the fruit in my hand. It was sour and I scrunched up my nose. We both laughed and threw the mangled leftovers into the creek, watching as they bobbed and wobbled over the pebbles, heading downstream.
‘Dad was no saint, Hunter …’ Mum started.
‘But he isn’t the devil,’ I countered. ‘We all make mistakes …’
‘But I’m your mother, Hunter, and I love you. It’s my job to protect you. To keep you safe and …’
‘Dad didn’t …’
‘He nearly killed you, Hunter.’ Her voice dropped low and she stood perfectly still, looking deeply into my eyes. The hazel in her own flickered in the dying light of the day. ‘That’s something we all have to live with and it’s very hard.’
‘It was just an accident and he would have said sorry, if he’d had a chance …’ My throat tightened and strangled my breath into a cough.
‘I can forgive him a lot of things. But I can’t forgive him for that.’ Mum’s voice was just a whisper as she turned and started walking away.
There were no more words for a while and I just followed my mother up the path, climbing up the steps by the water pools, up past big, jagged rock faces. The sound of a waterfall gurgled and rushed in the distance, getting louder as we moved closer to it. I had a pain in my chest, right in the middle.
We reached the lookout and stared at the cascade of water flowing over the rocks. The noise came like the whoosh of a high-powered hose and we just stood there. Silent in ourselves. I shut my eyes. The warmth of Mum’s hand rested on my shoulder.
It was a great lunch and we laughed a lot. Dad sucked the froth off his beer and I drank a big schooner of Coke. The chips were good. Just how I liked them. Crunchy on the outside and powder soft inside. We talked about school and I told him about the new kid from Fiji. Dad told me a few stories from when he was at school. He sounded like the class clown, always playing some practical joke on someone. The smart-arse. I was more of an academic, I guess. I liked soccer but never made the school team. I liked computers and music so I guess I was a bit of a nerd. Dad gave the waitress a wink and asked for another beer. I got a big bowl of ice-cream with chocolate topping.
Then Dad gave me a couple of coins for the games. I liked the one where I got to shoot big game – lions, tigers and deer. I wouldn’t like to hunt in real life. Besides, they’ve got laws about all that. You couldn’t just run around shooting animals. That was how they got endangered. But on the game machine with a fake gun – it was fun. While I did that, Dad went and put a few dollars through the pokies. I heard him laughing with some mates.
After another round of drinks we walked back to the car. We had to make a move as Mum was picking me up from Dad’s at six. We climbed into the Cherokee and headed back against the afternoon sun. The road was long and dull but we saw a few wallabies grazing by the side of the road. They always came out in the early afternoon. Dad flicked on the stereo and sang loudly along to some country and western drawl. I put my feet up on the dash and let the breeze play with my hair.
It happened like a flash.
I heard Dad shout, ‘What the hell?’
And the car jolted and the sound of squealing tyres came just before a shattering of glass and the bloodcurdling screech of metal.
The next thing I remembered was being upside down.
There was silence except for a hissing sound and a regular drip, drip, drip like the ticking of a clock. I couldn’t see properly and I couldn’t move my head. My arms hung down and I reached across and felt Dad. He was warm but quiet.
There was a siren and lights.
It got dark.
I was dizzy and kept drifting into blackness but remembered being pulled and twisted out of the car.
And then I heard screaming. Just this long drawn-out scream. It was a woman’s voice. It sliced through the night like a razor-sharp machete.
That’s when I always woke up from the dream and the scream seemed to follow me into consciousness. It hung like an echo. Sometimes it was Mum’s voice calling from her own dream, down the hallway. One way or another, it was always her voice that woke me.
LAKE PLACID
A stranglehold of tension gripped us all on the stretch from Ingham to Cairns like a headlock in a wrestling match. My view from the window seat for the last part of the long journey had changed from thirsty farmlands to a lush and fertile all-you-can-eat fiesta of colour. We were definitely in the tropics. The thick swelter from outside blew in like a warm burst from a fan-heater. Summer was still three months away but it was never far from your mind this far north. Spring here felt like the middle of summer down south.
Step and I had called an unspoken truce. We spoke civilly, in an almost forced politeness. I spent more time at Jourama with the turtles than I did the family. But I’d managed to take Mum’s laptop out into an open field, allegedly to do research on Hamlet and some history. The research I was more into doing was getting onto Facebook and getting some updates on the Beggsie/Kelly developments. It didn’t appear to be news that was ‘out’. There weren’t any status updates mentioning the ‘P’ word. Kelly hadn’t been on for weeks. She was clearly lying low or her parents had sent her off to some convent to hide out until it was all over. Beggsie wasn’t online and I wasn’t going to say anything about it until he told me himself. I found a picture of me looking miserable on a beach, holding a dead crab, in Mum’s recent photo file, and shared that as my new profile pic. It was a bad one of the crab but I looked okay – healthy but just surly enough for Katie Ford to think I was sexy (or so I hoped). The frown, the floppy fringe. My shoulders looked mildly tanned and I was somewhere exotic.
I was happy to see that Katie had updated her relationship status to single and there were lots of new pics of her and her posse of babes. I really wanted to hit the Like button on them but refrained. Her friends would tease her about it. They were an annoying gaggle of hyenas that were on a lower social level to Katie. She could do so much better. Her bestie, Taylor Jands, was just plain awful. I’d kissed her at some random party once and she’d tasted like stale butter. She was the sort of girl who farted and then brushed it your way while laughing in a hacking snort. After that kiss, she’d completely decided we were engaged or something. She’d put up on Facebook that we were a married couple. I kid you not. I had to have an intervention and get half the class to sit her down and explain that sometimes a kiss is just a kiss. Really. Girls can be such psycho-princesses sometimes.
But not Katie Ford. She was a classy chick. She had style and she had my utter respect for everything she did. She was pretty, smart, funny and played the piano and sung like a bird. The only thing I didn’t respect her for was falling for that dumb-arse jock, Mack Bentley. Everyone had thought it was so hilarious. Ford and Bentley, two car brands. Yeah, yeah whoopee doo. There were two kids in senior who had the surnames Buick and Holden but that wasn’t a valid reason to hook up.
It hurt to see pictures of Jesse and Beggs at the skate park, pulling faces. There was one of Jesse in the Spiderman beanbag that he’d stolen from his little brother. He was covered in popcorn and had a full mouth of straws sucking up some fluorescent-looking slushy drink. I missed the lads. A lot. My crew had been my family over the last few years. We never really talked about heavy stuff but just being with them, goofing around, helped me stay sane.
I messaged Jesse and promised that I’d drop him a postcard from somewhere and ring him whenever the phone nazi let me. As soon as I saw that Taylor Jands was online, I leapt out of Facebook altogether, to avoid her starting up a chat, and began downloading some notes on Hamlet. The notes at least were in a form of English I could understand.
Cairns was like a colonial outpost. A big tropical veranda perched on the sea with the smell of mosquito coils and seafood sizzling on an outdoor grill. The buildings were white and there were wooden shutters and louvers everywhere. Inside and out blurred, with only a wafting gauze or net to scare away the insect life. The heartbeat of the place pulsed with the ticking of ceiling fans.
Most of the parks were full. It was the peak season for the grey brigade and they’d clogged up all the vacancies in town. Step complained that a cabin or a motel would set us back too much and whinged and complained about the travel budget. Loser. It wasn’t his dead grandmother who was funding the trip.
‘There’s one more park at Lake Placid, just north of the city,’ Mum said, her finger tracing the map in her lap. ‘Might as well try.’
We found a small spot for our tent; although we were wedged between a crop of hibiscus plants and a road. The narrow road was only used by guests but I was glad I was up the back of the tent so that no campervan would run me over in my sleep.
Mum sent Step and me down to the camp kitchen to fire up the barbeque and grab a table. Step and I shared a look – one of those looks that happened when your teacher paired you up at school with your least favourite classmate. He felt as uncomfortable as me after my meltdown in Jourama Falls. I didn’t dare argue and cause more drama, so I skulked off behind him, like a naughty pet dog. I couldn’t bring myself to upset Mum again.
Step wasn’t as big as Dad but he was still tall and had a head of ridiculous curls. The sort of curls you’d find on a poodle. He usually tried to tame them with a fistful of gel but since we’d been nomads, he’d gone a bit wild and the afro was buzzing about his head like a halo of fleas. His usual uniform of khaki shorts and only mildly flamboyant shirts had slipped into an embarrassing pair of Batik pants or a sarong and a cheesecloth shirt. Mum had certainly been influencing him. He was a chameleon. He’d morphed from a yuppy to a hippy in the space of a few short years. He could now have been mistaken for a mad guru instead of the boring school teacher he hoped to soon become.
