The Precipice

by Virginia Duigan

  No, thank you. We have everything we want, I said pointedly.

  The car did a few sputtering kangaroo hops before driving off. It was only then that I realised it was Kim who was in the driving seat. Frank must be giving her driving lessons.

  She’s only twelve, but it’s a safe enough place to do it, on an unmade road with no passing traffic. All we country kids learned to drive even earlier than that in the school holidays, dodging rabbit holes in the paddocks. Self-reliance is a fine thing, especially for girls. It tends to be in shorter supply than it used to be. Children are over-protected. Parents have succumbed to the modern disease of mollycoddling, the blight of bloated Western countries.

  I suppose I could have asked Frank to pick up the paper. But that would risk setting an unhealthy precedent.

  Everything we want. Wasn’t that a lie? White, polite and disingenuous. Because we do not have the single thing we want the most. That is the eternal complaint of my species, is it not? Teddy’s species, on the other hand, is content with whatever it is given.

  What we really want is the one thing we cannot have. We want them not to be here.

  Car, café, bike – I cannot escape these people. The girl ran slap-bang into us, coming round a blind corner concealed by heavy scrub. Or rather, nearly into poor Teddy, who was ahead of me as usual. She was riding far too fast and skidded on some loose stones. Showing off. She wobbled, came off the bike and gashed her leg.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Teddy,’ she said. Not a word to me.

  I said she should have rung her bell, then saw there was no bell on the bike.

  ‘Didn’t think I’d ever need one, not on this road.’ She was chewing that awful gum again. ‘There’s never anyone here,’ she said, rather mulishly.

  I told her that was a foolish thing to say. Even on a deserted bush track you never know when anyone’s going to be here. We were here, for a start. I could have added, I didn’t know you were going to be up in the rock, did I? But, hey presto, there you were.

  Of course the uncle and aunt had to be out. Probably at the café. And if they had a first-aid kit she didn’t know where it was. Then she should tell them they’d better get one quick smart, I said, because of just this kind of mishap. And besides, there are snakes.

  I was obliged to take her back to my place to wash and dress the wound. It wasn’t a deep cut but there was a lot of blood. I dabbed Dettol on it and applied a bandage, as she seemed hopelessly ignorant of elementary first aid. I was taught what to do in the very thorough St John’s Ambulance class I attended when I was about her age.

  ‘I missed that, didn’t I?’ she said, as if this was obvious to any bonehead. ‘Had to change schools. Again.’ A significant emphasis. Was she expelled, perhaps on a serial basis? I didn’t ask.

  We hadn’t said a word after this. The silence became oppressive, even to me. Teddy was happy, he was lying on his back having his stomach tickled. Her head was bent towards him, but I knew from long experience there was something fizzing away inside. You can always tell when a girl is brooding over something.

  Eventually she muttered, ‘You didn’t like me being there, did you?’

  I gave no sign of having heard.

  Louder, with an undercurrent of truculence: ‘You thought I was trespassing on your personal space.’

  ‘Trespassing? On our personal space?’ I assumed an obtuse expression. It occurred to me I was descending to her level, behaving childishly again.

  ‘Those rocks out there.’ The words tumbled out. ‘That’s where you and Teddy go just about every day, right? You think it’s, like, your place? You don’t want to see anyone else in your place, do you, Ms Farmer?’

  It was more statement than accusation. But I felt suddenly absurd. Awkward and gauche in a way I don’t think I have felt for quite some years.

  I said, ‘Kim, you must understand that you are staying opposite someone who has lived here since well before you were born and is very set in her ways.’

  A nod, rather too vigorous. Riffling Teddy’s fur. ‘Yeah, right.’ She looked down and frowned, screwing up her eyes. ‘I hear what you’re saying. I won’t go there again if it drives you nuts.’

  I was about to deny that it did this, then thought the better of it. No point in succumbing to the indignity of rising to the bait. ‘You’re perfectly entitled to go there if you wish,’ I said. ‘It’s not my land. I have no right to ask you not to.’

  ‘But you think of it like it is yours, yeah?’ Rather than accusing, the words sounded tentative and exploratory.

  ‘I don’t own it. Nobody does. But, yes – I suppose I have thought of it like that.’

  ‘Because I guess you always had all this whole entire place to yourself, before. You and Teddy.’ He thumped his tail.

  Because we did have it all to ourselves before, that’s just it. You’ve hit the nail squarely on the head. I said none of this, however.

  ‘Do you wish we weren’t here?’

  Only a child would have asked that direct, confronting question. But I was momentarily taken aback. She looked at me searchingly with wide, dark eyes. Unfathomable eyes, I thought, like a pair of ink blots on an exercise book. Or, more charitably, like a pair of black opals. Flawless and rather beautiful.

  I thought it more tactful not to reply. Although I’m told tact has never been my strongest suit.

  She said, ‘I would, if I’d had this all to myself for such a long time. I’d wish we’d never come here.’

  There was my chance, Oscar. Wouldn’t you have wanted me to say, with brutal honesty, of course I wish you had never come. I wish it more than anything in the world except for Teddy’s wellbeing.

  Instead of which the girl found herself transported to the principal’s study. I said in a carefully measured tone, ‘You had better tell me how you came to discover it, Kim.’

  ‘It? What do you mean, it, Ms Farmer?’ The ink-blot eyes had now taken on a look of wilful obtuseness. A childish expression irritatingly reminiscent, I had to concede, of the one I had assumed earlier. We regarded one another with this surreptitious mutual awareness.

  ‘That rock is not at all easy to find is what I mean. As you know perfectly well.’

  ‘Well, I did. I just found it. It was easy. Easy-peasy.’

  Goaded by the singsong intonation, I said sharply, ‘It is not easy-peasy in the least. It took Teddy and me a very long time indeed before we discovered it. It took you a matter of days, did it not?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Did you follow us, Kim?’

  She darted a covert glance at me, then looked away. She had the same shutdown look I have seen on the countenances of any number of miscreants.

  I waited. She said, ‘Anyone can see where you go on your walks, can’t they? Like, you know, where you take off into the bush? I just went the same way, didn’t I?’ Unapologetic. And faintly pious, with a new undercurrent of impudence.

  ‘I just came to them. Exactly like you did, Ms Farmer. No way was I spying on you.’ She had assumed an emboldened air of wounded innocence. ‘No way known. Or on your own, private, secret rocks.’

  I suspected that the heavy emphasis on the adjectives was intended to annoy. If so, it succeeded. The word spying was the giveaway. I thought of all those old adventure books Sandy mentioned. The methods of their sleuths might be old-fashioned but they were still effective: broken twigs, snapped-off branches, the smudged imprints of shoes in the dust. Prying eyes and prying hands were never out of date; it was as well for me to remember that.

  In my mind was a fingerprint on the wall of a tiny museum.

  I said tersely, ‘Not rocks plural. It is an intact sandstone rock formed in one piece, but weathered and moulded into many shapes. It’s not mine and it’s not exactly private or secret anymore, is it?’

  The eyes widened, brimming with righteous indignation. ‘It so is, Ms Farmer. I haven’t told anyone. Not Frank, or Ellice, or anyone, that’s the honest truth. I don’t have anyone else to tell anyho
w, do I?’ The hint of a grin. I sensed she knew it was risky. ‘Teddy knows already and the others are totally clueless.’

  But you have a clue, I thought. How long will the secret be safe from you? We were in the kitchen. She peered out in the direction of the rock. The windowpane, I noticed, was crusted inside and out with baked-on dust. She seemed to be distracted by it, and simultaneously to be trying to second-guess what I was thinking.

  ‘I can go somewhere else to read and stuff. It’s not like there’s a huge shortage of spare room round here. We don’t need to trip over each other, right?’ She gave me another fleeting grin and a direct, impish stare.

  ‘Right. We have no need to get in each other’s way,’ I said, ‘but you were fortunate not to get lost, you know. Do you live in the country or the town, Kim?’

  She didn’t reply but gave me an odd look. I decided to deliver a little lecture that was obviously overdue.

  ‘You may not be sufficiently aware that you have to respect the land when you’re staying up here.’ The area behind her aunt and uncle’s house was virgin bush. If she tried to go walking in there she would almost certainly get lost, so she shouldn’t think of it. ‘Even if you intend to stay close to the house. Off the beaten track you have to be very careful until you get some sense of the lay of the land. Most people never get it.’

  ‘I’ve got my mobile. A mobile phone.’ Pronounced with cheeky emphasis, as if talking to a Luddite. She fished it out of her pocket and flourished it for proof.

  That was all very well, I said, but mobile reception was notoriously erratic here. It dropped in and out, and mostly out. You couldn’t count on it and she should never rely on a phone.

  ‘I guess you always had Teddy when you went exploring,’ she said. ‘You knew he’d get you home okay.’

  This was true, I granted. Without Teddy I’d never have gone into the bush. She should leave a well-defined trail for herself if she ever ventured out of sight of the house, even for one minute. A brief lapse of concentration was all it took to get disorientated. Only last summer a bushwalker had vanished.

  ‘People disappear here, you know, and are never found.’

  She seemed unworried. A sagacious nod. Oh yeah, she knew about all that stuff so as not to get lost, no worries. Stuff like tying bits of brightly coloured string on branches.

  Then, before I could comment on that, she said, ‘It’s important in life, right? To have somewhere sort of private of your own where you can, like, get away from people, and commune with nature?’

  Commune with nature. Odd phrase, coming from her, but fitting. She must have read it somewhere. She’s not as well spoken as her aunt and uncle, nowhere near, but she comes out with the occasional surprising word.

  ‘You’re quite right. Getting away from people is most important in life,’ I said.

  The brittle atmosphere between us seemed to have eased somewhat, also rather surprisingly. I asked how she was getting on with The Greengage Summer. Her mouth fell open. I explained that Mr Fay at Lisa’s Second-Hand Bookshop was a good friend of mine.

  ‘Phew, I thought you must be, like, incredibly psychic, Ms Farmer. Yeah, he wanted me to read it that very night. I haven’t started it yet, but. Don’t tell him, will you?’

  ‘All right. I won’t.’

  ‘He must be a cool guy to have as a close friend. It’s awesome how tall he is. I think he’s the tallest guy I’ve ever set eyes on.’

  I thought the awesomely tall Sandy would be quite tickled to hear himself described as cool. I might even tell him. Then I wondered if close friends was an accurate description of our relationship.

  ‘It’ll be back to school next week, won’t it?’ I said. ‘I suppose you’ll have to be going home.’ I still haven’t established where she lives.

  ‘Home? Huh. Okay, right!’ She shot up like a jack-in-the-box. I hadn’t meant that home or that precise moment, but she was already halfway out of the open door.

  ‘Thanks for doing the bandage, Ms Farmer. See ya. See ya, Teddy.’ And she was gone.

  Just as well the school year starts next week. I wondered idly how many schools she has attended.

  I can’t imagine what possessed me to think I had the luxury of three choices for my homework. The house is far too painful a subject. Far too raw and recent. I couldn’t begin to write about it and I doubt if I ever will. You need a measure of emotional detachment for writing.

  Or do you? I am not exactly detached emotionally from the other two subjects, but it’s a different kind of attachment. I didn’t bring them into being, and therefore they exist on an altered level of consciousness.

  Or do they? Perhaps the only difference is, I haven’t loved and lost the other two. Or not yet, I mustn’t tempt fate. In two out of those three cases fate has so far treated me kindly. Perhaps it feels it has a deficit to make up.

  Rock dreaming. Does Oscar go for timelessness and serenity? Does he go for ancestral hidden treasure? I’m sure he would, but he probably goes for the adrenalin rush more, I suspect. The rush of danger. For that, coupled with awe-inspiring spectacle, there is no contest.

  It has to be the ledge, the precipice. The forecast is good for tomorrow. I will take my notebook.

  Beyond the rock where Teddy and I had the shock of seeing Kim, about thirty minutes’ brisk trek further on, our route intersects with the public walkway. This is the popular, well-maintained track that clings to the top of the ridge. Our ghostly path appears to end at this junction, but that is an illusion. It doesn’t end there at all. This is only the halfway mark. We resume a little further on, hidden from the inquisitive gaze of others.

  Just past the junction the public track is diverted by a deep fissure between the cliffs, a vast gorge of eroded sandstone. And very early one morning many years ago, one bright morning when he was a young and frisky puppy and we were both more energetic and agile, Teddy and I made a seminal discovery.

  Instead of staying on the official path as it veered inland, we struck away to the side like a pair of reckless skiers venturing off-piste. Keeping as close to the fault line as we could, we forged a scratchy passage down through a maze of brush until we hit a creek – a thin, fast-running stream of ice-cold water.

  We followed it, stumbling and scrambling and sliding downhill. Eventually we pushed through into an arc of sunlight and found ourselves at the foot of a steep overhang. The water was heading in the direction of a narrow aperture, a cleft in the rock. Coming closer, it resembled the two arms of a bridge, nearly but not quite meeting in the middle. An almost intact arch framing a theatrical vista of valley, blue ridges and sandstone cliffs.

  The ground levelled abruptly there and the bubbling water fanned out and flowed around our feet. Teddy stopped and lapped it up with enthusiasm. I cupped my hands and drank.

  I remember Teddy taking a few bounding leaps towards the gap ahead and coming to a skidding halt. I froze momentarily. Then, as I reached his side, I saw just where we had emerged. We were standing on a flat remnant of layered rock, a ledge flush against the escarpment. We were at the top of a waterfall.

  I stood recklessly close to the edge on that first day and looked down, the water spilling over my boots. From this slippery footing it was a vertical plunge to the floor of the canyon, a sheer drop without obstruction. Not an obstacle below, not a single tree or rock shelf to break a fall.

  There are many lookouts on the official walking trails along the cliffs and canyons. Mostly they are fenced and quite safe. They may be tame and touristy, but they’re no less striking for that. This one has not been tamed. This pristine place we stumbled upon is the second great secret of our lives. It thrills me even now, after so many years, to describe it. I have never encountered anyone else here – not man, woman or dog. Nor a child on a bicycle either, thankfully.

  It has remained safe from such casual intruders because it’s hidden from view until you are upon it, obscured as it is by towering cliffs. Only from the slender aperture in the rock wall is it expo
sed to the wide blue yonder. To the blue-grey ridges unfurling away to the far horizon, and the blue-green floor of a valley, whose shimmering leaves move in unison like the surface of the sea.

  Out here it is as untouched as it has been for millennia. There are no rubbish bins, no fences, no warning notices, no sign of human pestilence. It is a gateway to a wilderness, undefiled and primeval. And over everything lies this quality of intense stillness. It’s not a brooding silence, there is nothing disturbing or eerie about it, but I feel a sense of eternity (as opposed to religiosity) in the absence of noise that I have never experienced elsewhere. Certainly not in any man-made cathedral.

  It is not an implacable silence because it’s not absolute. There is the light, trilling fall of the water punctuated by other orchestral sounds, the music of bush life. The fluting of bellbirds, and the raucous tambourine screeches of the white and black cockatoos. The soft feathering that is the rustle of wind among the leaves. These sounds exist within the overarching silence and are part of its definition.

  Did my left-handed cave painter come here? I have a conviction in my bones that she did. When she was alive there must have been human voices echoing across the vastness of this canyon. Explorers foraging in the remotest corners, people who were adventurous and spirited, in tune with the landscape they roamed. And animals that used to populate the mountains in their thousands – kangaroos and koalas, rock wallabies, bandicoots, wombats, dingoes. Nearly all these original inhabitants are vanished from here now.

  I too am an intruder, on this reckoning. And Teddy as well. I should never let myself forget that.

  I remember standing there on that first morning, a restraining hand on my puppy’s collar. He was an excitable boy, but I think both of us were silenced, struck dumb by our surroundings, just as we have been on every subsequent visit since that first momentous discovery. We were both affected by it. Equally moved, I firmly believe, in our own ways.

  I think of it as a trinity, ironically enough; secular yet sacred. The enveloping silence. The grandeur, which is profound. And thirdly the danger, whose profundity is of a different order. The danger, potent in its allure, of one misstep, one single false move.