Wife on the Run

by Fiona Higgins

  Paula nodded, desperate to ask the same question.

  ‘And there are lots of blokes out there who want their wife to look a certain way. From watching porn, I guess, everything all neat and tucked up.’ Sienna rolled her eyes. ‘I mean, what a hide.’

  Paula had seen those sorts of vulvas before, in a stash of pornographic magazines she’d found when cleaning the top of Hamish’s wardrobe. She’d sat for twenty minutes on the edge of their bed, leafing her way through airbrushed images of hairless twenty-somethings with full breasts, intimate piercings and half-closed eyes. And symmetrical, petal-like labia, undamaged by childbirth or gravity.

  Paula hadn’t mentioned her discovery to Hamish, because the magazines had dated back to his late teens. Predating her, even. But the images sometimes haunted her when they made love; did Hamish actually want a woman who looked like that? So on the one occasion he’d suggested a Brazilian, she’d completely overreacted.

  ‘It’s not as if men’s bits are very attractive, are they? Hairy and dotty and dangly.’ Sienna laughed again, smearing wax in the vicinity of Paula’s anus.

  Paula had to stop herself from diving off the bed. ‘Do you wax around the . . . ?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Sienna ripped the wax away.

  Paula screeched.

  ‘Okay, not long now,’ Sienna chirped. ‘Almost done. Just tidying up your landing strip.’

  ‘My what?’ Paula raised her head and looked down.

  Sienna was now tweezing around a thin vertical line of hair she’d left where a triangular thicket had once been. Angry red dots surrounded it.

  There’s that plucked turkey.

  ‘Your husband’s going to love you for this,’ Sienna cooed, after a moment. ‘That’s if you’re . . .’ She glanced at Paula’s left hand, looking for a wedding band.

  My husband wouldn’t believe me if I told him.

  ‘All finished,’ said Sienna. ‘You can get dressed now.’

  She disappeared out the door.

  Paula swung her legs off the bed and let them dangle there for a moment, noticing the altered sensation. Bare skin on smooth vinyl, where hair had previously protected. It felt cool, nude and slightly bruised.

  And, she had to admit, just a little sexy.

  She stood up and looked at herself in the full-length mirror, twisting her hips left and right.

  I’m almost forty and, bugger it, I am sexy.

  She slipped her underpants back on, noticing how bare it felt.

  Then she smiled to herself.

  Having practically wept with the pain of having her pubic hair removed, one thing was for certain. She was going to enjoy this Brazilian.

  17

  ‘I need to take a piss, Frank.’

  Frank rolled his eyes at Hamish in the rear-view mirror. ‘Again?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘It’s all that farken water you’re drinkin’, mate.’

  Hamish nodded, feeling virtuous.

  He’d refilled his water bottle three times already. Normally, his morning consisted of several coffees and not much else, but today, for the second day in a row, he’d drunk close to two litres of water before breakfast. Collecting it straight from the creek where they’d camped for the night. It had been energising for Hamish, stuck in the middle of nowhere with a blackfella whose bush skills put his to shame.

  Hamish looked out the window of the mini-bus. It was only nine o’clock, but menacing clouds hung low in the sky. It would bucket down soon.

  He leaned forward and tapped Frank on the shoulder. ‘C’mon mate, I need to go.’

  Frank slowed the bus, pulling over in the red gravel shoulder at the highway’s edge.

  They were somewhere north of Kununurra, about seven hundred kilometres from Darwin.

  Hamish walked around the back of the bus to take a leak. When he’d finished, Frank pointed at a craggy escarpment in the distance.

  ‘Look at that, mate,’ he called. ‘Barramundi dreaming.’

  Hamish squinted at the rocky outline, khaki green against the grey sky. After a while, he began to see it. A natural formation that suggested the shape of a fish, shimmering purple along the spine. Shiny silver flecks in the rock layers, a hint of scales. He’d heard Aboriginal stories before; about the rainbow serpent, the Willy-Willy man, the Dreamtime. But he’d never seen them reflected in the landscape.

  He looked over at Frank, who was smiling like it was Christmas morning.

  ‘Why barramundi?’ he asked. ‘We’re a long way from the sea.’

  ‘In monsoon they’re everywhere, mate. Rivers and estuaries.’

  Hamish wasn’t an angler; he’d always thought barramundi was an ocean fish.

  Frank waved a hand at the land around them. ‘This was all sea once anyway, back in the Dreaming. You can still find shells in the dirt sometimes.’

  Hamish had found a few shells like that in his backyard in suburban Melbourne.

  ‘Our bodies are from the sea, too,’ Frank added. ‘Split us open, we’re all just salt and water inside. That’s what blood is, you know. Everyone bleeds the same.’

  They stood in silence.

  ‘Come on, fella,’ said Frank finally.

  As they headed back to the vehicle, Hamish noticed a sign not far from where they were parked. Weather-worn, wooden, hardly detectable on the side of the road: St John of the Gorge.

  It was staked beside an overgrown wallaby trail that meandered in the direction of a broken-down barbed-wire fence.

  ‘I’m going down there,’ Hamish said, nodding at the sign.

  ‘Why?’ Frank looked wary.

  ‘Need to take a shit.’

  It was an honest answer. But there was something more, too. Something about the mystical landscape, the soothing silence, the enigmatic sign, the wallaby trail disappearing into the scrub; it all made him feel like an eight-year-old again. Excited and intrepid, like a colonial explorer. And whenever he felt that ball of nervous possibility in his gut, he felt compelled to walk towards it. And, inevitably, he needed to take a shit, too.

  Frank made a grumbling sound. ‘I’ll wait here.’

  Hamish tramped through the long grass at the side of the road until he reached the fence. Scaling a pile of rocks at a post, he jumped down with a thud on the other side. And it wasn’t too hard on his knee, Hamish realised. I’m back. He turned for a moment, flicked one thumb up at Frank, then kept following the wallaby trail.

  He had to crouch several times to avoid low-hanging branches; the sweat collected across the small of his back as he scrambled along. The sun emerged from behind the clouds, and began beating down on his bare head.

  Bloody crazy weather of the north. I should’ve brought my hat.

  He suddenly thought of Paula, who never forgot such things. But she’s not here. Might never be again.

  His eyes stung.

  The earth sloped downwards, and the trail became harder to detect. The undergrowth was still damp, with morning dew that brushed his sneakers and ankles. His shorts were soon covered in small furry pods, sticky with a sap-like substance. As the pressure on his bowels intensified, he emerged into a small clearing.

  A wooden shack stood next to a boab tree. It was clearly uninhabited, but Hamish checked anyway: it was empty inside except for leaf litter strewn across the floor and a large bark mat in the corner. A simple cross, fashioned from sticks, hung from a nail in the doorframe. A sharp white tooth was bound to the centre of the cross by a thin strip of leather.

  Hamish inspected the tooth; it looked canine, like a dingo incisor. A ring of stones at the door suggested a campfire hearth, next to several large flat rocks.

  Who lived here once, and when? A religious hermit?

  Hamish’s stomach clenched with anticipation. He really needed to take that shit.

  Striding away from the hut, he looked for the right spot, straying further down the slope. Not more than five metres on, the earth suddenly fell away into a long, narrow cleft.

>   He edged towards it, then peered over.

  The cleft turned into a rock wall of sandstone and quartz, leading down to a green gully. At the bottom, a slow-moving river wound its way between two sandy banks. A waterhole had formed at one edge of the gully, where rocks had created a natural dam. Sunlight speared down onto the pool’s surface from the cleft above, creating flashes of emerald and lime.

  The kids would love it here.

  He began climbing down, finding one foothold, then another. Not far below was a wide rock ledge; he dropped onto it with a grunt. Beyond that, it was an easy scramble down to the riverbank.

  The air was cooler here and his gut churned with the beauty of it all.

  The urge to shit was overwhelming.

  He dropped his pants and had barely crouched before the faeces spurted out.

  ‘Crap.’ He looked down at his calves, spattered with brown.

  Something was wrong with his stomach, he decided. Northern Territory Belly, or was he detoxing, after all these years? With no alcohol or coffee for the past few days, perhaps his system was shitting itself, literally.

  He stood up and kicked off his pants and boxers, then lifted his t-shirt over his head and threw it onto the ground.

  He looked at the waterhole. Then, without testing for depth, he took a running dive.

  Paula would’ve killed me for that.

  But it was as deep as it looked, he couldn’t even touch the bottom.

  He swam out into the middle and trod water. Then he reached down and began brushing the backs of his calves, cleaning the shit off.

  When he was confident it was all gone, he floated on his back, gazing up at the cavern walls. Rocky swirls like whipped cream and folds of chocolate, tiny green shoots poking out of impossibly inhospitable places. Life triumphing, despite the conditions. That’s what life does, Hamish thought. Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done, life doesn’t judge you. It just keeps going.

  As river water filled his ears, Hamish listened to his own heartbeat, feeling its calming thud within his chest. Dappled sunshine drifted through the cleft above, golden shards of light touching the deep green.

  I’m truly alive here.

  His leg brushed some river debris.

  And then he heard a voice. Muffled, from beneath the waterline.

  He lifted his head to see Frank scrambling down the rock wall.

  What’s he doing here? Hamish wondered, mildly irritated by the intrusion. He raised a leisurely hand in Frank’s direction.

  ‘Get the fark out! SALTY!’ Frank’s eyes bulged with fear. ‘SWIM!’ Hamish’s stomach somersaulted. And then, as if in slow motion, he began to swim.

  Freestyle, feeling like he was hauling himself through quicksand.

  The water was rushing into his eyes and nose and lungs. He swallowed some and spluttered, then swallowed some more. The coughing plunged him under the water.

  He felt something brush his leg again and he lost sight of the bank.

  He tried to find a point of focus. Where was Frank?

  Suddenly, something gripped his calf.

  This is it.

  A moment later he was face down on the sand.

  Frank was standing over him, thumping him between the shoulderblades. ‘Get up! Farken move!’

  Frank yanked him upright and they fled the riverbank.

  Reaching the rock wall, Hamish tried to find a foothold but slipped.

  Frank half pushed, half lifted him up the side.

  They only stopped climbing once they reached the safety of the wide rock ledge, more than half way up.

  Hamish flopped down on his back, wheezing.

  Frank crouched next to him, dripping wet, peering at the gully below.

  ‘Look.’

  Hamish sat up.

  A saltwater crocodile now lurked in the shallows, its beady eyes and spiny tail poking above the waterline.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘St John of the Gorge,’ corrected Frank, still panting. ‘The croc hunters give ’em holy names up here, if they’re hard to catch. Sign of respect.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  How could he have known?

  Watching the crocodile, Hamish contemplated how close he’d come to certain death. He’d seen a Discovery Channel documentary about salties once; how they flipped you over and over in a death roll, before stuffing you in an underwater cavern, coming back to bite chunks off you.

  Hamish shuddered. ‘Frank, I—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  Frank was shaking.

  ‘Of all the farken stupid things you’ve ever done, and you’ve done more than your fair share in the time I’ve known you, that farken takes the cake, fella. What the fark were you thinkin’?’

  ‘I didn’t know there were crocs in—’

  ‘It’s a farken billabong and we’re in the farken Northern Territory, fella.’ Frank shook his head in disgust. ‘And didn’t you see the farken croc hunters’ hut?’

  Suddenly the crucifix with the tooth made sense.

  ‘I thought it was a dingo tooth . . .’

  ‘Dingo tooth, your naked arse.’

  Hamish felt suddenly self-conscious; he’d left his clothes on the riverbank.

  ‘Farken skinny-dippin’ in a croc-infested billabong.’ Frank stood up. ‘Yer farken lucky that croc didn’t snap off yer dick and have it for breakfast. Now for the love of God, come back to the van and put some farken clothes on.’

  Hamish looked up at Frank, already scaling the rock wall with the agility of a spider.

  ‘Frank, I . . .’ Gratitude flooded through him. ‘I owe you one. I mean, more than one. And I’m sorry.’

  ‘You should be, fella. You’re about as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kickin’ contest.’

  Hamish couldn’t help but laugh.

  He laughed and laughed, until he almost wet himself.

  Then Frank started laughing too. Leaning against the rock wall, heaving and cackling and clutching his stomach.

  ‘C’mon,’ said Frank, finally, drawing breath. ‘Ya dumb fuck.’

  Stark naked and shoeless, Hamish followed him up the rock face.

  They arrived at Darwin’s outskirts by sunset.

  ‘Where’re you staying, fella?’ Frank idled the bus outside a derelict community hall.

  ‘There’s a backpackers. Let me just look it up.’ Hamish reached for his mobile in the pocket of the fresh trousers he’d donned after his close encounter with St John of the Gorge.

  Frank cleared his throat. ‘Some of my mob lives out at Brinkin, not too far away. Be staying there a week or so myself, doing a few jobs up here. It’s grog-free. You’d be welcome too.’

  Looking at Frank, Hamish realised he wasn’t joking.

  ‘Mate, thanks.’ Hamish’s heart felt light enough to fly right out of his chest. ‘That’s really generous, but I don’t want to be any trouble . . .’

  ‘Trouble?’ Frank sniggered. ‘Trouble’s haulin’ your bare arse out of a billabong, fella.’

  They pulled out onto the road again.

  Twenty minutes later, they parked in the driveway of a nondescript cement house in Darwin’s north. A wide veranda encircled it and five wooden steps led down to a neat yard and vegetable patch. Beyond the backyard, parkland stretched out onto wide coastal flats.

  Frank sounded the horn.

  Dogs barked from a shed nearby, and a baby cried from a house across the road. But all else was quiet; they waited to see if anyone would emerge.

  ‘Get comfortable, fella,’ said Frank. ‘They’re not home.’

  Hamish checked his watch.

  ‘Don’t start with that,’ said Frank. ‘Get used to waitin’, mate, it’s the farken tropics. You know what they say about the Northern Territory?’

  Hamish shook his head.

  ‘That “NT” is short for Not Today, Not Tomorrow. Not Tuesday, Not Thursday.’ Frank laughed. ‘Hang on, here’s good news.’

  A white four-wheel drive carryin
g far too many people pulled into the driveway behind them.

  ‘Hey!’ Frank climbed out of the van and greeted them all. Kissing some of the women, shaking hands with the men, lifting the children into the air. They all seemed to be talking at once in their own language.

  ‘Everyone, this is Hamish.’ Frank waved a hand in his direction. ‘He’s a mate.’

  The words made Hamish’s eyes watery.

  Out of all of this, I’ve made a friend.

  He hung back a moment, not knowing what to do. Not wanting to stuff it up somehow, wreck a friendship before it had really begun.

  Should he shake hands with everyone?

  Two children ran forward and grabbed his hands, forcing him to drop his bag. Wavy hair, inquisitive eyes and spectacular white smiles.

  ‘Namura, namura!’ they shouted, tugging him in the direction of the backyard.

  A woman smiled and spoke to Frank.

  Frank turned to Hamish. ‘The kids have found some oysters down at Dripstone Beach. They want to show you.’

  ‘Uh, okay.’ Hamish let himself be led away by the children.

  ‘I’ll take your stuff inside,’ called Frank. ‘Ever shucked oysters straight from the sea, fella?’

  Hamish shook his head, grinning.

  Then he followed the children as they danced and skipped over a well-worn path to the beach. Every now and then they stopped to point out something of interest—a flower, a bird, lizard tracks in the sand—using words he’d never heard before. When he attempted to repeat them, they fell about laughing, presumably at his accent.

  In the hazy light of a Darwin sunset, holding hands with two children with whom he shared neither language nor history, Hamish felt the happiest he’d been in a long time.

  18

  Paula checked her reflection in the mirror and, for the first time in years, didn’t critique it. Her skin was sun-kissed, her limbs looked longer, her stomach flatter. Sure, her breasts were still disproportionately small, but there was something about her that was radically different. She looked healthy. Blooming, her father said.

  The long blue dress she’d bought at Casuarina Mall was particularly flattering for her figure; a billowy, strappy number that showed off her toned arms and shoulders. When paired with cork wedges, she looked taller. Her hair had grown a little, and tonight she’d taken care to style it in feminine waves that floated at her neck.