by Nikki Buick
Standing up, I rubbed my hands through my hair. Sand snowed down over the sleeping-bag.
‘I am really sorry, Hunter,’ Mum sounded twisted with guilt.
‘It’s okay,’ I shrugged, rubbing that raised pink scar on my shoulder that itched whenever anyone mentioned the crash. My bone had speared out of my shoulder and needed to be put together with pins and wires. I’d almost lost it. Now it only ached and felt stiff after lots of rain or if I slept on it the wrong way. In this nightmare of an existence, living on an airbed in a tent for so long, it was beginning to give me pain again, just a dull throb that beats away in the background making everything else just a little bit crappier.
‘Schoolwork before play today, Mister,’ my mother said and then gave me a salute. She’d clearly absolved herself and moved back into military-mode.
I nodded, figuring I could race through a module or two without too much trouble and still catch a quick paddle in the lake before we got straight-jacketed into the back seat again.
After finishing a dead-boring series of questions about probability and a stupid comprehension piece for English and having another slog through Shakespeare’s confounding language in Hamlet, I packed away the pencil case and textbooks and grabbed a beach towel.
I was actually getting into Hamlet. He was obsessed with his own drama. Negative to a fault and he pretty much seemed to hate everyone. I could relate to a dude like that. He was so enraged by everything that he was kind of comical and, what with ghosts and skulls and gravediggers and a chick going mental over flowers, it was actually not a bad story.
‘Come on, Pippa, I’ll race you to the lake,’ I yelled as I began to run.
It started raining. At first it was easy to ignore. We were going to get wet anyway. But as it got heavier, we decided to pack it in and wrapped our wet towels around our heads and ran back to the tent.
‘Damn rain. Had to happen eventually, I guess,’ Step said as he started packing away the wet tent. We had been lucky. This was the first rain we’d seen on the trip.
Ranger sat in his car seat and slurped on his bottle, while Pippa and I helped Mum pack the boot. It was like a frustrating game. We seemed to have more stuff than would fit in the car. It had to be packed just right. If the big suitcase didn’t go in first, right up the back, then nothing would fit properly. Whatever missed out on the boot got wrapped up and shoved on the roof racks. We’d only lost one boogie board so far. That had come sailing off the roof like a foam frisbee, just missing the car behind us. Step had nearly had a coronary. We didn’t bother going back for it. As Mum pointed out, it had only cost five dollars from some discount outlet. She said she’d replace it but she never did.
The rain got heavier as we all piled into the car and waved goodbye to Cairns. The flower-thick trees all glistened and the hot, wet smell of moist dirt and leaves was rich. The scenery along the coast, as we headed north toward Port Douglas, was spectacular. Little secluded beaches were as white as snow and the ocean was postcard blue. Leaning palm trees completed the perfect picture. The rain eventually drifted out to sea and the sun turned up the volume and began pumping out some fine rays. Step stopped to take some photos and Mum insisted that we all pose against the tropical backdrop. She wanted hard evidence, proof, that we had in fact gone somewhere. I hated having my photograph taken with these people. It was just embarrassing.
‘Do you want to go into Port Douglas or head straight up to Mossman?’ Step asked.
‘We can see Port Douglas on the way back. I think it’s just a resort sort of town,’ Mum answered. ‘Just head up to Mossman.’ Mum turned to talk to us back-seat dwellers. ‘I came up here when I was a little girl,’ she told us. ‘I have memories of mangos hanging from the trees. My parents took us on a trip just like this.’
God, I thought. A road trip with Mum and Step was bad enough. I couldn’t imagine being trapped for any length of time in a car with my grandparents. Nanna wouldn’t stop talking about the good old days and Pop would complain about everything. And I thought I was in a living hell. Poor Mum would have been in the realm beneath hell. The hell you went to if you were too bad in hell. My grandparents were aliens masquerading as old people.
I’d been close to the olds when I was little. Mum and Dad were always palming me off to them for sleepovers and school holidays. They were stuffy but nice. Everything smelled like talcum powder. I was close to my dad’s parents too but I hadn’t seen them since the accident. They’d come to see me in hospital and brought some chocolates, but they’d been so consumed with their own pain at that time that it seemed like they were distracted and annoyed at having to visit me. I was probably reading it wrong but they were fidgety and didn’t even mention Dad, which in hindsight I thought was strange. I’d been a bit whacked out on painkillers so I might be remembering it all wrong. I still got a 20-dollar note in a card for every birthday and Christmas, but nothing more. Three years. I wondered how they were sometimes but if I brought them up and mentioned to Mum that I wanted to see them, she’d look hurt. It was as if when Dad had gone, they had to go too. The last time I’d seen them was in the hospital. After that, like Dad, they just vanished. All they were these days was a couple of cards and a guaranteed giver of 40 bucks a year.
My nanna on Mum’s side had once asked me if I wanted to talk about the accident and everything that happened afterwards. That was nice of her. But like I always did, I shied away from opening up about my feelings.
‘It was such a wonderful trip. Best ever. Such great memories,’ Mum said, smiling back at me.
Old people were always doing that. Comparing the past to the present and the past always seemed to come out on top. Best ever? I somehow doubted that. That was completely unlikely on the balance of probabilities. I’d just been studying probabilities so I could say that with some authority. Chances were that the ratio of good and bad in the past matched or came close to being the same as in the present. Conclusion? Memory airbrushed the past to iron out the crappy bits. I wondered what time frame we were talking about, though, because my memories of that awful day three years ago were still raw, and there didn’t seem to be any hope that I’d be able to polish it up into anything better … ever.
Maybe my reluctance to talk about it with people like the counsellor or Nanna was holding me back and stopping me from moving on. I was kind of hoping that all this stuff that was swamping me on the trip might be like lancing a boil. I wasn’t enjoying my own brain dragging me over the hot coals of memory but without Xbox, Katie Ford and the skateboard park to distract me, all I was left with was my annoying stream of consciousness. It was like I had some alter ego or subconscious personality that was throwing this stuff at me like a monkey throws poo in the zoo.
We drifted down the main street of Mossman. The rain had stopped and the sun was back out, high in the sky. A large green mountain hovered over the town and a hat of cloud sat on its peak. The cemetery was littered with bright snatches of coloured flowers. We passed a shopping centre and some sleepy old pubs. We had to stop for a bin-train. A long stream of metal cane-buckets clattered across the road.
‘There’s a big sugar mill here. In the past, the Islanders were brought here as slaves, to work as canecutters.’ Mum sounded like a textbook. Information being distributed disguised as conversation. ‘That’ll be something you’ll want to put in your project on sugar cane,’ she added.
‘Oh, Hunter’s working on another project now,’ Step said, turning to give me a wink. A wink. Who does that? I gave a shiver of creepiness.
‘Really?’ Mum sounded miffed that she had not been informed of this update.
‘No, Mum, I’ve decided to just do the cane thing,’ I replied.
We puttered across the tracks and passed down a dim street overhung with black feathery branches. I leaned my head out the window and the shadows of the canopy tattooed my face.
‘Awesome,’ I muttered to myself.
<
br /> A closer inspection showed that the branches of the tree were covered in hairy ferns.
‘There. Look. Pull in there,’ Mum directed Step. ‘That’s the park we read about.’
We pulled in slowly to a council camping park and waited while Step went in to book and pay for a site. The place was right on the edge of town – an easy walk to the shops. Directly beside the park was an Olympic-sized pool. I could see kids dive-bombing and running around flicking each other with towels.
‘Guests get unlimited free entry to the local pool,’ Step said as he got back in the car. He then drove us to our designated spot.
‘Can we go to the pool, Mum?’ Pippa whined.
‘Go ahead. Dad and I’ll unpack. Grab the sunblock. You watch her like a hawk, Hunter.’
‘Pippa’s fine. She swims better than me,’ I said.
‘I’m more worried about her wandering off or talking to strangers.’
‘Whatever,’ I shrugged.
Mum plonked Ranger onto the ground on a blanket and pulled a tube of 30+ out of her pocket. Quick draw. I caught it. Pippa threw me a towel and I wrapped it about the back of my neck. Our campsite was closest to the camp kitchen, which would be handy. The fridge was a minibar fridge and the microwave was prehistoric. At least there was a television that pumped out a relatively good picture. I stopped and watched 30 seconds of a news update before moving out toward the camp shop.
We wandered through to the pool. There was a large green grassy area with a playground and sandpit and to one side was a paddling pool for toddlers.
‘A pool for Ranger,’ Pippa noted.
I threw a sneaky glance over to a group of kids about my age. They noticed me and I could see that they were all talking and nodding our way, clearly discussing our arrival at the pool. I always got nervous and a bit defensive when I saw kids we didn’t know. I worried that they might give Pippa a hard time. This was the first time I’d seen a bunch of kids roughly my age at a campsite. We covertly checked each other out as I sat at a table under an umbrella, headphones plugged in, music thumping, watching Pippa splash like a seal in the shallows.
The group was laughing and fooling around. They were all in board shorts and bikinis and were deeply tanned. There was a big boy, who looked like Buddha, sitting on the edge of the pool kicking his feet in. He had about four doughy rolls of fat. I got the impression he was the odd man out. One of them, but not. There were two girls. One who stood out. She stood out because she was smoking hot. This girl made me completely forget Katie Ford. Just like that. Katie who? That sounded a bit harsh but a bird in the hand and all that.
This girl was the opposite of Katie. Katie had marble-white skin and jet-black hair and always wore striped stockings and dark clothes. This Mossman chick was almost butt-naked. She wore a tiny blue bikini that showed off her athletic bod and long brown legs. She had a lion’s mane of caramel blonde hair and she was cartwheeling about like a rolling tyre, so full of energy and life. I might have been imagining it but I caught her throwing me a furtive glance every few minutes. Two of the boys were wrestling on the grass and I wondered if they were all camping in the campground or just locals. It was a local council pool that just happened to be located next to the council-run camping park. Another boy arrived through the turnstiles, bag slung over his shoulder. He called out to them.
‘Oi, fools. Catch!’ He dropped a soccer ball to the ground and kicked it.
The checked ball cleared the entire pool and came to land near the group after bouncing off the tall metal fence. One of the wrestling boys rolled and jumped up, jogging to the ball. He spun on his feet and gave a solid kick, sailing the ball back toward the pool entrance walkway. It dropped short and came to land near my foot. All eyes tracked my way and everyone seemed to freeze. The question of what the long-haired stranger boy was going to do next was obviously on all their minds.
I pulled my headphones out of my ears and put the iPod onto the plastic table before standing and walking over to the ball. I bent down, picked it up and gave them a nod as I threw it underarm back at them. I aimed directly for the blonde girl in the bikini and our eyes met and locked for a second longer than was polite.
She stepped forward, caught the ball and gave me a grin and a wink. Yes, a wink. And then she waved me over, beckoning me to join them. I gave a look back to Pippa but she was sitting on the stepladder making whirlpools with her hands. She was right for a minute or two. Pippa was a total water baby and I knew that she’d be fine. I walked across the lawn toward the kids, self-conscious about how I appeared to them. I was wearing a black metal singlet and my board shorts flapped around my skinny, hairy knees. I gave a poncy toss of my hair to flick it out of my eyes and squinted against the glare of the sun.
‘Gidday, I’m Sophie. Where you guys from?’ the girl spoke up first, rolling the ball in her hands.
‘Brisbane,’ I answered. ‘You?’
‘Awesome, Brisbane,’ she said and gave another smile.
She had a gap between her front teeth and the darkest brown eyes I’d ever seen. I couldn’t help but notice that her ‘bikini’ looked even better up close. She filled it very, very nicely. I forced myself to stop gawking at her in case of a red-blooded male response that might get awkward.
‘I’m from Wonga Beach, just up the Daintree road a bit,’ she said, cocking her head to one side. ‘The rest of these bozos are all locals.’
‘I’m Hunter,’ I said, kind of cringing because it wasn’t a name like Josh or James or Tom or Liam. It was pretentious and a bit embarrassing.
‘Hunter, like as in a crocodile hunter?’ she laughed.
‘Well, yeah although I’m clearly not a crocodile hunter. I’m just on some lame adventure with my family.’
‘Well you can come and kick the ball around with us if you like,’ she said, smiling. ‘Is that your little sister?’
I nodded and waited for her to say something or ask something about Pippa, but she didn’t. She just nodded, satisfied with that much of an answer. I liked her a little more for that.
Sophie introduced me to her crew. The big kid was Greg, the wrestling duo were Jarrod and Phoenix, and the other girl with the serious face and severe red, bobbed hair was Hayley.
We dribbled the ball around between us and the lads put together a makeshift goalpost made up of backpacks. It was kind of fun to be doing muck-around stuff with actual teenagers instead of moping about with Step and Mum and the annoying little ones. I worked up quite a sweat ducking and weaving about the ball. I even rumbled with one of the guys as we tousled for control of the ball. Sophie was on my team so I didn’t get the chance to get too close to her. The other team won. I’m not the best at ball sports. My knees are a bit stuffed from all my old skateboarding injuries. I still zip about the skate park occasionally but it’s tamer than it used to be. With pins in my shoulder and dodgy knees, hard-core skating is a thing of the past.
The group decided to go for a swim to cool off. I stripped off my sweat-soaked singlet and threw it on the ground. My hair was wet and the perspiration ran in rivulets down my back, feeling like the dance of flies over my skin.
‘Wanna race?’ Sophie said, tossing her head toward the pool. ‘You any good at swimming?’
‘Sure,’ I said, breaking into a trot toward the diving boards.
‘Loser buys the winner a Mars bar,’ she yelled and beat me to the head of the pool.
We perched, poised to dive, arms stretched out behind us.
‘Now!’ she shouted and we leapt.
The water was cold and fresh. I spun my arms as hard as I could. Freestyling like a champion. One, two, three, breathe. One, two, three, breathe. I followed the painted black line on the bottom of the pool. My legs were going like an outboard motor. And bang. I hit the tiles at the other end. Sophie was two strokes behind me.
‘You owe me a Mars bar,’ I laughed when she s
urfaced.
‘Got no money … I’ll have to owe you,’ she giggled and slapped the water, splashing me hard in the face. ‘No-one’s ever beaten me before.’
Sophie gave me this Cheshire-cat smile and my chest felt like it had dropped into my stomach. I hadn’t swum seriously for a few years but I’d been pretty good in primary school and got to go in the Districts. Funny how it all comes back when you’re trying to impress a chick. And I was seriously trying to impress Sophie. Seriously. Katie who? My right arm ached like it had been hit with a sledgehammer but it was bittersweet.
THE GORGE
‘Wanna come out to the Gorge?’ Sophie asked me the next day.
We were sitting on the grass at the pool, drinking poppers. Jarrod and Phoenix were wrestling beside us. Phoenix – now there was a name you didn’t hear every day outside, perhaps, of that spectacular bird in ‘Harry Potter’. It made Hunter sound plain. Phoenix wore his name well though. He was a larrikin and I couldn’t imagine anyone giving him a hard time over his name. He just oozed urban superiority. Not sure about the wrestling though. Seemed like he and Jarrod had some kind of bromance thing happening.
Pippa was sitting on the edge of the paddling pool watching Ranger splash about in Mum’s arms as she spun him around in circles. I could tell Pip was a bit grumpy about being stuck with the women and children instead of the teenagers. But I really didn’t want her being an idiot around my new friends. Ten-year-olds and teenagers just didn’t go together. That particular ten-year-old, in particular!
‘What’s the Gorge?’ I asked.
‘It’s out of town. My dad’s a ranger and he’s going out there later. I just thought you’d like to see it. It’s a real magical place. If you’re game you can swim. But it’s cold. Super cold.’
That was a challenge right there. I could so do cold water.
‘I’ll ask Mum,’ I said and nodded. ‘Sounds awesome.’
Mum, of course, was reluctant.
