The Geography of Friendship

by Sally Piper

  ‘You shouldn’t feed them.’

  Lisa turns to face Nicole but she’s not looking at her. She watches the water dragon.

  ‘They’re not made to eat our crappy processed food,’ she adds and takes a bite from her apple.

  Lisa shrugs. ‘Neither are we, I suppose. Doesn’t stop us though.’

  ‘At least we have the choice not to. It doesn’t.’ Nicole nods at the water dragon. ‘It’s opportunistic, and you’re presenting it with an opportunity.’

  ‘Does that make me a food facilitator?’ Lisa aims for playfulness. She hopes Nicole gets it.

  ‘No,’ Nicole says, and she looks directly at Lisa now. ‘It makes you careless.’

  Lisa hears Samantha sigh, a deep, here-we-go-again exhalation of air, just as she used to do when they were younger.

  It takes willpower, but Lisa holds back the snipe she wants to make and tries instead for contrition. ‘Fair enough. I promise not to feed any more of the wildlife.’

  Nicole looks doubtful for a moment but eventually nods. ‘Good.’

  Lisa watches Nicole as she watches the water dragon, and tries to remember the girl she used to know from their school days. Nicole was kinder than this back then, warmer too. And she was funny in a dry, quick-witted way. Still self-righteous and a rule follower of course, but Lisa had got used to those things about her, came to like the dependability of them. Looking at Nicole now though, she can’t reconcile her old school friend with this woman who shows none of the humour she once did. Someone who looks to walk as penance more than anything else. Did it change her so much what happened out here, Lisa wonders, or is the woman before her now the one Nicole was always going to grow into?

  The water dragon remains as motionless as if it were a moulded garden figure. Lisa tries to see herself as the reptile sees her – a large imposing shape of unknown capabilities. Does it see itself as the one at risk, the one that’s in danger? She doesn’t think this creature is frightened of her so much as wary. But it has an advantage – its speed. Lisa wonders if it recognises this.

  The water dragon makes a dash for the other side of the rock, comes close to Lisa’s hand as it hurtles past. The sudden movement startles her enough to make her cry out. She feels stupid, juvenile. She’d been watching it after all, knew the speed and unpredictability with which it could move. But she supposes fear works like this – it dulls logic and reason.

  ‘Did you think it was coming for you?’ Nicole asks, voice still lacking warmth.

  Coming for you.

  Lisa doesn’t like Nicole’s choice of words and what they suggest: that her position is known; that she’s being watched; opportunities are being sought.

  Just thinking about it makes her arms goose flesh, despite the heat in the day.

  Lisa looks at Nicole. ‘I don’t know what I thought.’

  Nicole holds her gaze this time, and in that moment Lisa sees that her eyes are the same hazel colour they used to be.

  From where they sit, Lisa can see all around the peninsula. Craggy headlands push into the sea from north to south and granite-strewn mountains fold away to the west. And the ocean, that enormous piece of rumpled silk, rolls in from the east.

  It is an ancient land, fixed in time and place, but it is also damaged and damaging in turn. Bushfires have left scorched brown patches amongst the green, probably from lightning strikes. And she has seen where boulders, loosened by floods and mudslides, have gouged trails down mountainsides, as dangerous and unstoppable as an avalanche. She’s witnessed the work of the ocean. Sea water runs gently between the fingers but it can also thrash against headlands in a fury, take fragments of granite back out with it where they’re washed up on beaches far away.

  Lisa sees the impact of these forces on the landscape but what she can’t know is how much this landscape has damaged her. Damaged them. How much of what happened here has been carried with them into the everyday, washed up in their lives like those fragments of stone.

  If she could remove just one experience from her life, it would be the one that happened in the car park at the start of their hike last time. She would choose to get rid of it above her divorce. Above the wariness she sees in her daughter’s face when she’s with her. Because Lisa suspects these things are in part legacies of this other event anyway.

  She accepts now that she drove her old Datsun too fast into the unsealed car park that day. But she was g’d-up by Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ blasting from the radio.

  It was a hot day and they had the car windows down, so a thick cloud of dust poured inside the car. She can still remember the feel of that gritty dust on her arms; the velvet film it left over the car’s dash; the way it made the interior smell like drought.

  The brown plume also drifted out and covered the only other car parked in the car park that day – a red Ford Falcon – along with a guy standing at the car’s boot.

  ‘You’ve really pissed him off,’ Nicole said.

  Lisa looked across to the tall, thin man standing at the open boot of the Falcon. He held a large khaki backpack upright between his legs. He looked to be in his late-twenties, so a few years older than them.

  He mouthed something as he flapped his hands in front of his face. She couldn’t hear what he said, but it was clear he was angry.

  ‘He’ll get over it,’ she said, and cut the engine.

  Samantha opened her car door and got out. ‘Sorry,’ she called to the man over the Datsun’s roof. ‘We didn’t realise it was so dusty.’

  The man held his hands out wide. ‘Fuckin’ look around you,’ he said. ‘It’s a dirt car park.’

  ‘Yeah … well … like I said, we’re sorry.’ Samantha ducked her head back inside the car.

  ‘That’s why you never apologise,’ Lisa said, shaking her head at the man. ‘Nobody ever appreciates it.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ Nicole muttered.

  Lisa nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t mean him. I mean you.’

  ‘What’d I do?’

  ‘Drove like a maniac.’

  ‘All I did was drive into a car park. It’s not my fault it’s not sealed.’ Lisa opened her door with enough force for it to bounce back off its hinges and almost close again. ‘Must be gang-up on Lisa day,’ she said as she got out of the car. ‘Great start.’

  Lisa heard Samantha say to Nicole, ‘Just let it go. Okay?’ before she slammed the door closed behind her.

  The man wasn’t about to let it go though. He came up to Lisa as she fumbled with her keys at the Datsun’s boot.

  She remembers how she stood as tall as she could as she turned to face him, chin lifted, but was still a good head and a half shorter than him. ‘How many apologies do you want?’ she asked.

  It’s funny now to think of the things she noticed about him. It had been his eyes and the long dark lashes that framed them. She remembers thinking how on a better structured face – one where the chin hadn’t been forgotten, where the overbite wasn’t so pronounced – that they’d be striking.

  He didn’t answer. He just stared at her for a time.

  She grew increasingly discomfited by his gaze because those handsome eyes showed no humour, no compassion, and neither did his mouth. It was set in a thin, cruel line.

  He bent down, easily as she recalls, despite the bulky pack on his back by then, and scooped up a handful of dirt.

  She remembers how she watched him do this and yet didn’t think about what might come next. Not even as he pulled his arm back like a pitcher and pelted the dirt into her face.

  She brought her arms up to deflect it, but too late. Small stones had already stung her skin, knocked against her teeth. The dust was already in her eyes, her mouth, coated her tongue. Later she would dig it out of her ears with a fingernail, blow it from her nose onto a tissue as dark snot.

  Lisa thinks i
t was Nicole who got to her first, but she can’t be sure because she couldn’t see. But it was Nicole’s voice she heard shout beside her, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  Sometimes their friendship was fragile if threatened by internal forces, but threaten it by external ones and it was indestructible. Lisa was grateful for the loyalty Nicole and Samantha offered that day. She felt it in their arms, the way they kept them round her as she spat and coughed and tried to wipe the grit from her eyes.

  When she finally cleared them enough to see the man, he was in front of them still, calmly wiping his hands down the front of his trousers. She remembers how he grinned at her before he turned away. She’s never forgotten the smugness in that victory smile.

  Her body shook for a time after that, but not with fear. It was a familiar tremor, one she’d experienced before, and since. It was the tremor of rage. Her heart set up a rapid tattoo against her ribs. The blood roared into her head. Visions of punching his self-satisfied face flashed before her eyes. Her hands flexed for action.

  Lisa shook Nicole and Samantha off, bent down and scooped dirt into each hand. She ran a few paces towards the man and threw it at him as he walked away. It hit his backpack with a dull, unsatisfying patter. It did little more than put dust over the small spade and binocular case strapped to the outside of it.

  He stopped though, and turned to face her again. She remembers how calm and controlled he looked, how much he seemed to be enjoying himself. This, she realised later, should have unnerved her more than anything else; warned her of his potential.

  He held both hands out towards her, palms up, beckoned her closer with his fingers. Daring her. C’mon, he mouthed. C’mon.

  Sam reached her first, wrapped her strong arms around her. Held her firm. Lisa supposes she can’t blame Samantha for not trusting her to refuse the man’s challenge. She doesn’t recall having refused too many in the past.

  ‘Crazy bitches,’ he said and laughed.

  He held up the middle finger of each hand and pumped the air with them before turning away again.

  ‘Fucking prick!’ Lisa shouted.

  ‘Leave it, Lisa,’ Samantha said softly. ‘He’s dangerous.’

  But Lisa didn’t give a shit about danger. She was too angry.

  ‘Think you’re a big man, do you?’

  ‘Let it go.’ Samantha was pleading by then.

  ‘Where’s your chin you ugly bastard?’

  Lisa felt Samantha’s arms tighten their grip, but she wrenched herself free. She walked in crazed, impotent little circles. She kicked at the ground. Puffs of dust rose up and covered her boots and bare shins.

  She thought about running after him, fist-sized rocks in her hands, continuing the tit for tat till blood was drawn. But something held her back. A restraint she would later lose.

  Instead, she hurled puny take-that taunts at the man, belittled his physical failings. ‘People like you should be locked up, you scrawny dickhead!’

  He never once looked back. Never once feared them.

  Lisa only stopped shouting insults once he entered the trailhead and his backpack bobbed out of sight. She watched the empty trail for a time, breathing hard. She worked her fists, felt the gritty dust on her palms and between her fingers.

  Eventually she stopped looking at the spot where he’d disappeared. She tried to find calm or purpose, she’s not sure which. She put her head between her knees and raked the dirt from her hair with her fingers. To a passer-by she must have looked like some crazy woman by the way she ripped and tugged at the snags in her hair.

  ‘You all right?’ Nicole asked.

  ‘No, I’m not all right. I’m fucking pissed off.’

  Lisa stood upright again and with purity of purpose walked over to the man’s car.

  ‘Lisa? What are you doing?’

  She ignored Nicole. She went round to the passenger’s side, gripped the metal aerial in both hands and tried to wrench it from the panel. She wanted it to come away rubber seal, wires and all, to leave it dangling down the side of the car like entrails. But not even her anger gave her the strength she needed to dislodge it. Frustrated, she bent the metal rod backwards and forwards till it finally snapped off.

  Lisa remembers it as a small and disappointing trophy in her hands. So she dragged the jagged end down the side of his car.

  This memory still makes Lisa breathe hard. Still makes her heart race. She tries to steady both with the breathing mantra she’s taught herself – In, two, three. Out, two, three.

  Samantha turns to look at her. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m fine.’

  Lisa looks out to sea again, but she feels Samantha looking at her still and she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t want either of them to slip into their old roles – Lisa needing to be assessed for risk. Samantha countering it.

  Lisa stands. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Still calling the shots?’ Nicole says, but gets up anyway.

  Lisa keeps count as she sets out on the trail behind Nicole – In, two, three. Out, two, three – until calm is restored. But her anger is never far beneath it.

  When they reach the cove where they’re to camp for the night, Lisa sees that it has changed a great deal. There is less vegetation than she remembers. More space cleared now for hikers’ tents. Only serious walkers ventured this deep onto the promontory previously, which was part of the attraction to their younger selves. All part of their pursuit of independence. Back then they’d camped where they could find a clear enough space for their tent, which often meant flattening bracken first. They buried their rubbish along the way. Their shit too. Now there is a designated camping area, with No Camping signs outside of it. And a self-composting long-drop toilet. There’s a gravity-fed black polypropylene pipe. It provides a water source directly to the campsite now where previously they’d had to tramp up the creek a little way to collect free-running water that was less tannin-stained, the water taking its colour from the vegetation along the stream – coastal tea-tree and swamp paperbark mostly – Leptospermum laevigatum, Melaleuca ericifolia. The water still has to be treated but at least one step in the process of collection has been removed.

  Lisa feels a sense of smugness at having known this place at its purer, less trammelled best. She thinks today’s hikers are deluded in thinking they are the rare witnesses of a wilderness. As she looks around her now, she knows she’s seeing a landscape that has been tamed somewhat, that it has been forced by the will of the people wanting to walk it to give a little in order to accommodate them.

  ‘Where do you want to pitch our tents?’ Lisa asks Nicole.

  Last time they’d all slept in a three-man tent. This time they have individual tents.

  Nicole, hands on hips, scans from left to right.

  Previously, they were the only people camped at this site. Now, there are two other tents already set up. Couples sit on logs in front of each. They watch pots boil on their camp stoves.

  ‘I’m going over there.’ Nicole indicates an area beyond the other hikers. It’s a spot suitable for only one tent.

  ‘Won’t you set up with us?’ Samantha calls after her.

  ‘Not tonight.’ Nicole walks on to the place she’s chosen.

  For the first time since Lisa has brought them back together, she feels her confidence in the decision falter. Has she banked too much on the success of it?

  She hides what she feels from Samantha though. ‘She’ll come round,’ she says, then turns away and starts to unpack gear from her pack.

  Lisa looks across to Nicole’s site from time to time as she fumbles with her own unfamiliar equipment. But Nicole erected her tent quickly, stowed all her gear inside and headed off into the bush.

  Lisa sits alongside Samantha on a large boulder that gently slopes down to the sea. They don’t sit so close that they touch. There are year
s between them now.

  Both are bare-footed. Lisa’s feet are tender from the long day in walking boots. The granite feels rough under her soles. Thankfully there were no blisters when she took off her socks. She notices a red weal on Samantha’s right heel though, a little cushion of fluid at the centre of it.

  Samantha stacks small stones, one on top of the other, to construct one of her towers. This one keeps falling down. Lisa admires the persistence of her attempts to make it stand tall. She needs to use flatter stones, but Lisa doesn’t tell her. Instead, she watches the gloaming sky. The colours on the horizon have shifted from shades of pink to bruised-purple now. The cove is quiet and tranquil. Sound is suspended in the calm.

  The cove is a small, pretty one. Prettier even than she remembers, which only confirms how mood realigns perceptions. It is protected from the ocean swell by a narrow opening between two steep headlands. The sea laps soundlessly at the beach. The water is so clear she can see tide ripples on the sandy bottom all the way out till it meets a dark line of sea grass about twenty metres offshore.

  Nicole comes out of the bush at the other end of the short beach. Lisa doesn’t recall seeing a track exit from there when she walked the length of the beach earlier, so she’s surprised to see her come out from where she has.

  Samantha looks up from her stone stacking. ‘She’s been gone for ages. I wonder where she’s been?’

  Lisa shrugs. ‘Who knows. Will you call her over? She’s more likely to come if you ask her.’

  They both wave when she gets closer.

  ‘Come and join us,’ Samantha calls. ‘It’s a great spot for watching the sunset.’

  Nicole pauses then changes course to head towards them. She takes off her boots and socks and puts them side by side above the water line, then walks through the ankle deep water to get to the rock they’re on. She steps from boulder to boulder with ease to reach them.

  ‘Haven’t walked far enough today?’ Samantha asks.

  Nicole sits further down the rock from them. ‘I guess not,’ she says.

  ‘God, I have,’ Samantha says.

  Nicole draws up her knees, feet wide, and dangles her hands between them. Her shoulders look soft and relaxed. Lisa’s still feel tense from carrying her pack. Nicole looks the most at ease with where they are, what they’re doing. She didn’t hesitate to seek out solitude in the campsite. Explores the area outside the perimeter of it on her own. Steps easily just now over the coarse granite in bare feet, despite the many kilometres they’ve already walked today. It’s like she’s at home here, like she owns it. Lisa envies her.