by Sally Piper
‘You look great!’ Lisa said and she ran her hands down Samantha’s sides, moved her own body in sync to Samantha’s curves.
Samantha went and stood in front of the long mirror on Lisa’s wardrobe door. She stared at her reflection for a good while, turned from one side to the other. Nicole was right. To accentuate her waist, neat compared to her hips and bust, gave her form. She did look curvy and in proportion, and not oversized. She looked up at them, reflected in the mirror behind her and nodded. ‘Better,’ she agreed. ‘Maybe not as gorgeous as you two, but definitely better.’
Lisa frowned. ‘I hate that word,’ she said. ‘The way girls say Oh you look gorgeous in that.’ She drew the word gorgeous out in a high voice as Samantha had heard girls do when they praised one another.
‘But you can just tell what they really wished was that the other girl looked like shit,’ Lisa continued.
‘They’re mint Aero bars,’ Nicole nodded. ‘Chocolate sweet on the outside. Green on the inside.’
Lisa laughed. ‘Exactly! And I don’t ever want us to be Aero bars.’
Even at fourteen, Lisa was so certain of herself.
Samantha quite liked a compliment if she could get one, so she was a bit disappointed that it looked as though they were about to come to an end.
But then Lisa said, ‘I’ll always think you two are gorgeous whether I say it or not.’
The conviction in Lisa’s voice made Samantha believe it was true. But she also felt that her words were meant just for her. That she was saying it didn’t matter what Samantha looked like, it didn’t matter what she wore or how her clothes wore her, she would always be good enough. Lisa allowed Samantha to believe that she was beautiful too. But then their friendship had unravelled and Samantha doesn’t think she’s felt good about herself since.
So is that why she’s agreed to do something she doesn’t have the fitness for, to put herself at risk, just to be with the people who once made her feel beautiful? It’s a shallow thought and she doesn’t want to believe it of herself.
Besides, this morning she’d felt anything but beautiful when she crawled out of her tent. In the crisp, early morning light she saw all about her things of natural beauty, not manufactured. She saw the way individual parts complemented one another. How the sea made the otherwise dull, grey granite glisten as it washed over it. How the melaleucas shed their paperbark like onion skins to reveal a soft sunrise of colours beneath. The way the red throats of Mistletoe birds shone like cherries in the trees.
Samantha stood alongside her yellow tent in purple and white spotted pyjamas (packed because they weighed practically nothing, but in that moment they seemed ridiculous), and had felt unnatural and garish in comparison. A bastard hybrid of the animal kingdom trying to insinuate itself on the real thing. She clambered back inside her tent. When she came out again a few minutes later in charcoal trousers and a black T-shirt, she still didn’t feel like she belonged but at least she blended in.
At home, she doesn’t dress to blend in. She dresses to be noticed. She’s like a solitary rainbow lorikeet fluttering its plumage in her colourful tops and dresses, always worn nipped at the waist now. Harry used to notice, proved her mother wrong in fact. She knew by the way he used to nuzzle and cup her breasts that he thought them her greatest asset. In fact, he used to navigate all the contours of her body with care and attention. They were hands she trusted.
Then his touches became perfunctory. His hands traversed her body by rote. They often rushed. Darted from one previously tested spot to the next.
Here’s always worked, his fingers suggested. Or here.
She expects he believed they gave enough. But they were like the recruits of enforced charity.
And now they’ve stopped altogether.
She spent her earlier years wary of boys who might want to grope at her, and here she is now with a man at her fingertips who no longer chooses to touch her. She never thought when she opted for marriage that she’d co-opt into her own eventual sexual irrelevance.
Which is why her hands take their time, to disprove this. She runs them over the contours of her body with curiosity as much as desire. Here I am, her body says beneath them, the physical sum of me, laid bare.
It’s a body that’s changed over the years. It has a hardy worn-in-ness to it now. Her breasts fall off to the sides a little when she lies on her back, so that they rest gently on her upper arms. Her nipples have matured to a pliable, well-oiled leatheriness. Her abdomen is a sea of soft undulations. There is a silky, silvered caesarean scar, a legacy from her third, stuck son, still numb after seventeen years. Her pubic hair has coarsened. A soft, fatty pillow cushions the bone beneath.
But the centre of her sex, that place which has been numbed, scoured and electrified with fingers, tongues and cocks, remains unchanged. And with spit-moistened fingers, she has come to know herself. Her fingers remain committed and present.
It seems ironic that at home she wants the full image of her femininity noticed. Celebrated. Revered even. But out here she wants to blend in with nature’s palette. She expects it’s because this place once made her feel like an intruder. That it was somewhere she shouldn’t be.
Back then she wanted to pass unchecked beneath the shadows of trees. She didn’t want to be seen coming from behind boulders or over crests or around corners. She didn’t want to leave her footprints on the beaches or leave the grass flattened where she slept. She wanted to slip through unnoticed. Undetected. And it seems part of her still does.
So where is it that she truly belongs if not here, but not at home either?
She walks on now in her muted, sweat-stained tones, grateful for the reprieve of not having to see that the man she still loves no longer celebrates her womanhood. Who for reasons she doesn’t fully understand is as disconnected from her as she is from this place in her silly spotted pyjamas.
There is some relief from the heat as the trail finally leads them out of the rocky cove and into an area of thick bush. They must cross a saddle of land before they head down to the next cove. Ubiquitous eucalypts shade the track. These trees huddle together like kin. Their crowns touch to hold back the light from their feet so the moisture is kept there. The understorey is a thin and scruffy mix of saplings and low scrub. The humus on the forest floor doesn’t smell of decay so much as a place moist and rich with life. The track is carpeted in crescent-shaped gum leaves. They make the ground soft.
Oddly, Samantha doesn’t recall this part of the trail. That’s how disconnected she was.
What a Harry, she thinks and smiles to herself.
Except it was no joking matter back then. Not when her attention was always drawn to what could lie ahead instead of what beauty was around her. She’d thought nothing of nature’s trophies offered along the way. She never noticed the tree hollows, let alone took time to consider the years in their making or what might live in them. She never once saw a bark-blended nightjar, head pulled into its neck as it dozed on a branch. So far she’s seen three. And last time she only noticed the toadstool caps, like those that still push up through the litter on the forest floor, if they were recently crushed or broken. She is surprised now by the great variety of colours in these fungi. It’s like looking at the various shells of eggs from home-reared hens, with some as bright as their yolks.
Back then she searched for things mostly unrelated to the land – aberrations and anomalies to an otherwise harmonised terrain. She looked only for signs of the man – discarded food wrappers or a flash of uncharacteristic colour amongst the trees or scrub. Recently snapped branches. More human waste.
She was given a clue to his whereabouts when they swam at one of the beaches along the way. It was a clue she neither heeded nor shared with the others.
To have the heat drawn from her feet by the cold, crystalline sea water had been a heavenly thing after hours of walking in thick woollen socks and
leather boots. This time she wears thin Climalite socks and her boots are made of breathable Gore-Tex. She’s still footsore, so the times she’s bathed them have felt just as good as it had before.
She swam warily last time. She stripped down to her underwear quickly and sprinted down the beach. She wanted to get her body under the water as soon as possible. Not so she could hide it from Lisa or Nicole, or even from other hikers (there were none on the beaches back then), but to hide it from a creepy, spying guy who she imagined would sneer when he looked at her body. The same guy who thought it reasonable to throw dirt in a girl’s face, to leave his shit on a rock.
Samantha felt his presence the whole time after she stepped over his filthy turd. She tried not to think about him being out there, tried to adopt some of Lisa’s insouciance. But she’d never been able to ignore the agendas of others, not the way Lisa could.
Samantha imagined his eyes on her when she came out of the water that day and towelled herself off. She wondered what he thought as he glimpsed the dark triangle of hair at her crotch through her wet knickers, her flabby waist. The way her thighs chafed and how her cold nipples pushed out hard against her DD-cup.
Fat slut.
If it hadn’t been so hot, if the cleansing of her body had not felt so good, she probably wouldn’t have risked the exposure at all.
And when she spotted that double flash of light amongst the trees on the hill above the beach, like sun hitting glass, she told herself that she’d imagined it. When she caught the glint for a second time, she hastily dressed.
Chapter 5
When Lisa thinks back to the girl she was all those years before, she sees the smooth, unblemished face of her daughter walking this trail. The Hannah of now is not much younger than the Lisa of then. She sees her slim shoulders pressed down by the load she carries, her long legs propelling her forward.
Is it possible that a similar history could repeat itself in her daughter? Could – does – Hannah have the same reckless disregard for danger in her urban terrain as Lisa had in this wild one? Somehow she doubts it. Hannah is far more cautious. Always has been.
Lisa had watched her daughter through the front windscreen of her car one day as she walked through the school gates. She recognised her easily amongst all the other students. It could have been Lisa at the same age: no breast buds or waist, her torso a straight conduit punctuated top and bottom by bony shoulders and hips. A gangly girl with disproportionately long feet and fingers. But in contrast, Hannah’s jaw has always had a soft, doll-like curve. This is where physical mimicry between mother and daughter diverge. Lisa knows her jaw has kept all of its hard angles and that her face leads with it.
She noticed how Hannah’s school dress was rucked halfway up her long thigh by the heavy bag she carried across one shoulder. She knew the bag would contain neatly written and detailed class notes. She noticed also the still perfectly bowed navy ribbon at the end of her long blonde plait which she wore pulled forward across one shoulder, yet strands of hair had pulled free from it and they fell untidily around her face. She saw the neat turndowns of her still-white school socks, but the way she dragged the heels of her scuffed brown school shoes, which wore them down prematurely. Hannah was an adolescent emblematic as much of order as disorder. Would she eventually grow into one over the other? Lisa wondered. Did she even have a choice?
Lisa was still watching Hannah’s progress when a group of boys came gambolling up behind her daughter. They represented disorder in every way – uniform, gait, grooming. The group split like water to pass either side of Hannah, and merged again in front of her. They all walked on except for one tall boy. He turned and walked backwards to face her.
Hannah stopped walking and so did the boy. She moved to the left to slip around him but he followed, arms out wide as though herding an animal. She moved to the right, he did the same.
Lisa felt the familiar tightening in her hard-angled jaw, the sharpening of her vision that allowed her to scan widely, to take in and assess the actions – the danger – of all the boys in the group, not just the one badgering her daughter. Fleetingly, she wondered what caused this acute attention, was it memory or motherhood?
From what she could tell Hannah didn’t say anything to the boy. She didn’t even look into his face. She gripped the strap of her school bag with both hands and tried to manoeuvre round his outstretched arms again, shifted quickly left, then right. But the boy matched her pace. After one more attempt, Hannah stopped and stood motionless, gaze fixed on the ground.
Was she crying? God, Lisa hoped not. Where would that get her? She watched Hannah blush, that awkward rush of colour she still gets. It starts somewhere below her neckline and travels all the way to her ears. The boy must have liked this response because he threw his head back and laughed.
The fighter in Lisa slipped off her heels and reached for the handle of the car door, but she pushed down her protective instinct. She restrained it with another – one that told her not to embarrass her adolescent daughter in front of her peers.
When the boy moved in to stand only centimetres from Hannah and coiled her long plait round his hand to force her to look up at him, Lisa responded on autopilot.
Her pencil skirt was tight but she still managed to cross the ground quickly from car to school gate in bare feet. She gripped the boy’s shoulder in her hand when she reached him, dug her nails in as she turned him to face her. She still remembers the thrill of feeling the hard press of bone beneath them.
‘What the fuck?’
‘What d’you think you’re doing?’
The boy flushed crimson. ‘I’m not doin’ nothin’.’
Lisa wished she could have kept her nails hooked under the edge of his collarbone for longer, but it wasn’t to be. He wrenched his shoulder free and skulked off, muttered something that sounded like mad bitch.
‘What did you say?’ she called after him.
But he walked on without answering, hands pushed deep into the front pockets of his school trousers.
‘I know your face now,’ she said.
His mates laughed hard. His ears were as red as Hannah’s by the time he caught them up. ‘Pussy,’ one goaded, which set off another round of laughter.
Hannah wouldn’t walk alongside her back to the car. Lisa made the barefoot journey alone.
‘Why did you let him intimidate you like that?’ she asked, once they were in the car.
‘I wasn’t intimidated.’
‘You looked it. You should have thumped him one. I would have.’
‘I’m not you though! I never want to be you!’
Lisa turned to face this soon-to-be young woman, with her soft, sweet chin and her big trusting eyes, and she realised that Hannah was right, her daughter wasn’t like her. That she’d never be like her. Hannah would never be a fighter.
She’d got it wrong. It wasn’t order or disorder Hannah would grow into. It was a version of herself that was as far removed as possible from that of her mother. Lisa hadn’t known whether to feel proud, disappointed or terrified for her.
The bush thins again as the track takes them back towards the coast. It also means more boulders. Lisa waits to help Samantha up another of the many they’ve had to negotiate that day.
‘I’ve got this one,’ Samantha says.
Lisa steps back. Gives her space. She resists the urge to grab the strap on the top of Samantha’s pack and help haul her up by it.
‘Hopefully that’s the last one,’ she says to Samantha as she steadies herself.
‘I can do it, you know.’
‘I know you can.’
Lisa also knows that she doesn’t want her to wait for her, so walks on, leaving Samantha to take sips from the tube that connects to her CamelBak reservoir. Nicole is ahead and out of sight. For a time Lisa has a sense of being alone.
The sun is still off high, but already wa
rm. There is a gentle breeze that helps cool her, only a little but it’s better than nothing. The air around the eucalypts is stained mauve. She can taste their breath when she takes her own. The trail meanders through an area of thick, untidy scrub, punctuated with stringybarks and native grass trees resplendent with their up-do of long needle-like leaves. Xanthorrhoea australis they’d be labelled in a plant nursery in the city, with a price tag of several hundred dollars apiece. Here Lisa enjoys them for free.
A pair of swamp wallabies stare at her from atop an area of flat granite amongst the scrub about thirty metres in from the trail. They rest, pear-shaped, on their haunches, poised in perfect stillness, black noses lifted. Their ears twitch as they cup the sound of her approach. A laughing kookaburra starts up a racket. The wallabies don’t even flinch. She’s the interloper. As she gets closer, they bound off, rumps working hard.
That was one thing the three of them didn’t have to work hard at: escaping their friendship. It was easier than she’d ever have thought possible. Memory might try and serve it differently, that one person instigated the split more than another, but in truth they were all complicit in the rupture. Nicole didn’t return calls. Lisa stopped making them. Samantha didn’t insist they must. It only took two weeks to undo eight years. Maybe it was better like that.
Back then Lisa believed it reflected the weakness of their bond, reduced it to the equivalent of a passing schoolgirl crush. But the truth is they weren’t old enough, hadn’t lived enough, to understand the subtext of it. Now she knows they weren’t running from each other. They were running from themselves. She thinks she probably still is.
Unlike Hannah, Lisa chose not to be like her parents for the wrong reasons. Because the traits she disowned in them were probably the ones she should have adopted. Her parents lived their lives on a plateau of calm even-mindedness. Not once had she known either of them to take themselves to the edge of their personality to see what might exist beyond their bountiful decency.
