The Geography of Friendship

by Sally Piper

  She remembers when she learned about the principles of Newton’s first law in physics at school, the one that declared an object exists in a state of rest or of uniform motion, and she thought: That’s it! That’s my parents! Once she also learned that external forces could unbalance this state, she looked for opportunities to become that force.

  She vacillated between being a perfect teenager and a horrid one. All the usual things. Room tidy one minute, a tip the next. She gave them backchat or sulked or was smugly secretive. She might do her homework diligently one term, then the next her parents would receive calls from her teachers. Once she declared herself vegetarian, only to resume eating meat after her mother had replanned their entire menu and adjusted her food shopping accordingly.

  But it was an experiment that failed. Lisa got nothing. Not an angry word. Not a sigh or sideways glance. No hint of frustration at all. It infuriated her. She was an only child. Weren’t her parents meant to try and control her life?

  Sometimes she fantasised that the restraint her parents exercised at home was a façade for people capable of much worse out of it, like shoplifting or acts of road rage. But they were both relaxed drivers and it was Lisa who took up shoplifting.

  It started when she was about twelve, and for no other reason she expects now than she wanted to be noticed. She stole cosmetics or sweets mostly. Stuff she had the pocket money to buy but the desire to own only by theft. She ate the sweets but used little of the other items. She didn’t even try to hide from her parents what she took. She arranged the growing number of lipsticks and bottles of nail varnish on a shelf in her bathroom, almost like a dare for them to challenge her over their origins. But the steadily accumulating items remained ignored.

  When her mother received a call from a shopping centre security manager, requesting she come and discuss the circumstances of Lisa being in his office, her languid mother arrived as if collecting a parcel from the post office.

  She listened serenely to what the manager had to say, that Lisa had been caught slipping an eye shadow into her school bag. The security manager said he wouldn’t report the incident to the police. Said he’d give Lisa the benefit of the doubt that it was a one-off, so long as her mother saw to it that it never happened again.

  And it didn’t. Not because Lisa’s mother shouted at her or grounded her or raised a hand to her. She didn’t do any of those things. Lisa stopped because she was embarrassed by how her mother failed to rage at her in front of the security manager, or to even look ashamed.

  Later, when she made the transition from adolescence to adulthood, Lisa questioned what it was her parents tried to achieve by raising her in this way. She struggled to come up with an answer beyond the possibility that they genuinely didn’t care what she did. But as she matured and started to look beyond her own self-importance, she wondered if her parents were doing their level best to prevent her living a life that was entirely of their making.

  Then, when Lisa had a child of her own, she realised just how difficult it must have been for them to maintain such calmness, such restraint, when faced with the trials of her adolescence. And how much she hated the sound of her own shrewish voice when Hannah tested her as a teenager.

  Now when Lisa thinks of her parents, she thinks what extraordinary people they were for their time. And she wishes she’d chosen to be more like them.

  They stop to rest on a rocky outcrop at the top of a rise. The view is more spectacular than Lisa remembers.

  There are no tall trees on this exposed point. What grows here is tortured and stunted. The air is almost still now, but the vegetation suggests this isn’t always the case. Gnarled coastal trees tilt inland. Their trunks curved like the spines of the elderly. Spiky sword-sedge and shrubs of bottlebrush and kunzea – Callistemon pallidus and Kunzea ambigua – clutch to the hungry soil between granite boulders. Lisa likes the resilience of this vegetation. She likes the way it’s yielded to its environment but not surrendered. She likes the way it holds on.

  She holds on to very little. Lets little hold on to her.

  She thinks of the lovers she’s had since Matt. Relationships she’s tried to build from the ground up but which always seem to be set out on the bedrock of what could go wrong. She’s built few walls from what could go right. The effort of maintaining civility defeats her she thinks, that and not trusting herself to do so. She imagines it’s hard for a man to want to be with a woman who is quick with a putdown.

  She’s not attracted to men with clean, clipped nails and smooth, flawless skin anymore. She likes scarred, calloused hands, ones with a bruise under a fingernail, evidence that here is a man who’s taken risks.

  She came close to spending more than a few months with a landscape gardener once. She liked that he smelt of sweat, peaty compost and the limey bite of fertiliser. She also liked that he spoke about his work in Latin – Phlox subulata, Felicia amelloides, Dianthus barbatus. Matt, a pharmacist, spoke of inhibitors, suppressants and antagonists, drugs that were anti-this and anti-that.

  This man’s hands were stained and imperfect, gentle and commanding in turn. He could haul rocks about to build a retaining wall then kneel down to tickle the delicate root ball of the perennials he’d plant behind it. But in the end his hard-working hands were probably too gentle. Too often put off by the force of her.

  ‘I’m not the enemy you know,’ he said.

  She expects she’d rebuffed him in some way. He sought to put an arm too firmly round her waist. She didn’t like the feel of the ownership.

  ‘There’s the potential for an enemy in everybody,’ she told him.

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose if you keep looking for one, then that’s what you’ll eventually find.’

  She left him in the end, before she did more damage than he deserved. He left her with an enduring interest in botanical names. She often practises their pronunciation, as with those plants about her now, Banksia marginata, Correa reflexa: silver banksia, native fuchsia. She does this to exercise her memory as much as her memories of him. She also likes the decisiveness of a plant’s real name.

  Lisa thought of Hannah earlier when she passed through an area charred by fire. Saplings filled the space where the understorey had been destroyed. Lithe, like Hannah, they strove without pause. Their shape was defined by their habitat. Steal their sunlight and they pushed in new directions, found a new way.

  Hannah hasn’t always been shown a sunny life.

  Yet at just nineteen she is so sure of herself, so sure of who she’s not and never will be. Lisa thinks her daughter is too young to have a live-in boyfriend. She tactfully suggested as much.

  ‘You’re not even who you’re going to be yet, so why give someone else a say in it.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll end up a better person for being with him.’

  Lisa wanted to argue this point, tell her daughter that she alone was best placed to build her own character. But then she decided against it, because what did Lisa know about building anything?

  But the other thing that silenced her is that Hannah’s boyfriend is a nice boy. It’s a bland word nice. It suggests ordinariness. Someone staid. Boring.

  He looked Lisa in the eye when they first met. His handshake was firm. He called her Lisa without asking if he could. She took it as a sign of his commitment, not disrespect. And Hannah makes no attempt to talk him up. There is nothing about him she tries to manipulate or massage.

  They have cute nicknames for one another. They are inseparable. When Hannah speaks to him, he pauses in whatever he’s doing. If he doesn’t agree with her he says I’m sorry, but before he explains why. She does the same with him.

  Lisa’s never seen him sulk or get angry. She’s never heard him raise his voice. But neither has she seen him laugh himself to tears.

  Maybe the word she should use to describe him is good. He is a good man.

  Matt doesn’t like him. He t
old Hannah so.

  Not man enough, he said. No spine.

  Hannah told Matt to keep his opinions to himself and didn’t ring him for a month. Good girl. Maybe there’s something of her mother in her yet.

  Sometimes though, Lisa worries that this boy is too steady for Hannah. That she’ll give him her best years only to discover that she feels the lack of a challenge. He demands nothing of her, beyond her presence. Lisa thinks this is the rub. Their reliance on one another gives neither the opportunity to be more when necessary.

  Hannah silenced her on this too.

  ‘Maybe I’m all I need to be.’

  ‘Which is?’

  Hannah hadn’t answered her and neither did she need to.

  Because they both know what she isn’t. She is not her mother. And neither is she her father. She doesn’t need to best, to win, to triumph. That was the sport of her parents.

  Lisa holds her tongue now. Because who is she to think she can guide this certain but gentle girl on how to be her best self? What would she know?

  A patchwork of clouds cast dark shadows over the ocean. Where the sun shines through gaps, a beam of ethereal light reaches down and touches the water. Her eye would have the ocean ending on the eastern horizon, but she knows it’s a trick, the deception of a vanishing point. Lisa pictures how it continues to curve round the full belly of the earth, barely interrupted by land for thousands of kilometres.

  Nicole also looks east across the ocean. ‘We’re nothing compared to that,’ she says.

  Lisa doesn’t answer. Instead, she turns her mind’s eye away from this expanse of water and observes them as though her body has been borne up by one of the silver gulls that drift overhead. She sees them as tiny specks with this new world view. She decides she doesn’t like this reductive image though, which only seems to diminish them, so returns her gaze to Nicole, sitting on a boulder across from her.

  What she prefers is the clear and defined detail of Nicole, the complex matrix of skin and muscle and bone and tendon. Lisa knows a heart beats in her chest; that her lungs fill and empty; that a network of nerves transmit an endless current of important messages from her brain right throughout her body. She feels. She hurts. She expects she loves and hates. She is real. They are real. None of them is an inconsequential speck.

  ‘You’re right,’ Lisa says. ‘We can’t compare with something like that.’ She indicates towards the ocean. ‘But I don’t think we’re nothing. Not then. Not now. We’re something. We’re important. We always were.’

  When Nicole turns to look at her, Lisa glimpses some of the fear and vulnerability from last time.

  She thinks about how guarded Nicole has been since they met up again, how distant and closed off she is from her and Samantha. In a cowardly way, Lisa wishes Nicole had remained behind that barrier just now. She could keep up the pretence then, just as she knows Nicole is, that they’ve put their experiences from the past behind them.

  ‘Our mistake,’ Lisa continues, ‘was allowing him to treat us like we were nothing.’

  Nicole looks at her a while longer. It becomes an unfriendly stare again, her vulnerability pushed back to the place where she holds it tight inside her.

  ‘I thought the mistake was you not realising he had the capacity to do that right from the start.’

  Lisa forces silence. Looks away. She tries to be more like her daughter. Certain of who she doesn’t want to be.

  It is late afternoon when they step off the track and onto the fine white sand of the beach. Like last time, the grains squeak like mice under Lisa’s boots.

  That second day, when they reached this beach, they stripped down to their underwear and raced into the sea. Lisa floated on her back, arms and legs out like Vitruvian man, small breasts pushed to the sky. She remembers how the shrill whir of the cicadas that she’d heard on and off that day was extinguished by the briny water as it filled her ears.

  ‘Should we have a swim, then set up camp?’ Lisa asks the others now.

  ‘I’m going to set up first,’ Nicole says and walks off.

  Lisa watches Nicole as she heads up the beach to a path that cuts through the narrow band of coastal dunes and on to the camping area in the bush just behind. Her strong tanned runner’s legs and the black gaiters that cover her shins are about the only thing she can see of Nicole’s body between the ground and the sky; her large backpack obscures the rest. Before long even they march out of sight over the grass-bristled dune. Lisa’s left to stare at the footprints she’s left behind.

  Samantha takes a step forward as though to follow, then stops.

  Lisa wrestles with indecision too. Should she give Nicole the space she thinks she wants or fill it with the company Lisa knows she needs? She can’t force her though. She has to be patient. Restrained. Things that don’t come easily to her.

  ‘Should we follow her?’ Samantha asks.

  ‘No. Let her go.’ Lisa lowers her pack onto the sand. ‘I don’t think we should crowd her.’

  Samantha looks uncertain then eventually agrees. ‘You’re probably right.’ She frees one arm from her pack and swings it round so that it lands, then topples, on the sand in front of her. ‘What a relief,’ she says and rolls her shoulders. ‘I feel like I could float away.’

  ‘Light as a feather?’

  ‘Yeah. A featherweight.’

  Lisa wants to tell Samantha that she’s proud of her. That she knows what they’re doing isn’t easy. That she thinks she’s tough and dogged and brave. But her words would feel like too much too late to make a difference.

  Instead, she says, ‘None of us is as fit as we were.’

  ‘Was I ever fit?’

  ‘Yes.’ And she means it. ‘You just never gave yourself credit for it.’

  Samantha looks down. Lisa thinks she’s pleased.

  ‘Come on,’ Lisa says. ‘We stink.’

  They don’t strip to their underwear as they did last time. Instead, they find a spot behind some boulders at one end of the short beach and with their backs to one another they change into their swimming costumes – a black bikini for Lisa and turquoise one-piece with deep sides and a supportive bra for Samantha.

  The temperature of the sea water is a shock initially. Lisa’s feet are hot and feel swollen from being in socks and boots all day. Once underwater though, the skin pales and pickle-wrinkles. Her abdomen retracts from the cold as she walks out. Then as she dips down to cover her shoulders, her temperature soon normalises with the sea and the cold becomes a salve for overworked muscles.

  Samantha, in comparison, walks a short way out into the water then dives straight under. She swims out and away from Lisa, her strong freestyle arms windmilling as gracefully as she remembers them from their school days. Once out in the deep, Samantha stops and treads water. Lisa watches as the gentle swell lifts her then lowers her again like a sigh. Still weightless, she thinks. Still lighter and fitter than she allows herself to believe.

  Lisa stretches out and floats on her back. The water washes over her body and fills her ears till the only sound she can hear is the pulse of blood going into her head. She closes her eyes and enjoys her own weightlessness after the burden of carrying a pack. She’s bruised in places from the bite of it – collarbones, hips, tailbone. The water soothes these sore places. Soothes her mind. The sensation reminds her of Hannah.

  She was a nervy baby. Startled easily to most sounds, soft or loud. She rarely out-and-out bawled. It was more of a needy mewl she had. Lisa learned that the best way to settle her was to fill the bath and hop in with her. It was a tricky business to get two wet and slippery bodies out and dried off again later, but it was worth it to see Hannah’s fretful little body stilled. Lisa would lay her against her chest and lap the warm water across her downy back. Eventually she’d quieten but rarely did she go to sleep. She imagined Hannah’s tiny ear pressed to her chest like a st
ethoscope, hypnotised into calmness by the steady lup-dup of her heart as her fragile body moved up and down with the bellows breath of her lungs.

  Matt came home to this watery scene many times. He never offered to take their baby and wrap her in a towel with his soft, clean pharmacist hands while Lisa dried herself off.

  Instead, he’d poke his head round the bathroom door and say, ‘Great. Everyone looks happy here. I’m off to the gym.’

  Or a cycle. Or a run. Or to play Tetris, headphones on.

  ‘Hold on!’

  But he never did hold on. Not to their child or for any of the other things Lisa could have used his help with.

  She’d flounder and splash with Hannah in her arms to get them both safely from the bath. Hannah would startle back to her nervy, edgy state again so that she squirmed like a slick fish against her.

  ‘Couldn’t you have given me five minutes?’ she’d flare later.

  ‘For what?’

  His bemusement at these requests angered Lisa more than if he’d looked at her with contempt for having asked. The way it never occurred to him that he could act differently. How a small gesture like wrapping a towel round his child could make her life easier with little hardship to his own. Not understanding the notion that they were meant to be in this together. That they were a team. Equals.

  She doesn’t know how many times she shouted at him. Threw things. Pushed past him to leave a room, felt the satisfying hardness of her shoulder against his. He never retaliated to these outbursts. They seemed to amuse him more than anything. A childish game that he tolerated. He never doubted his superiority. She never doubted her determination not to have a second child. Because what did he give up for someone to call him Daddy?

  She often asked herself if his restraint during her outbursts made him the better person. Once she might have believed so. Before the taunts and name-calling started, the way he goaded her because he knew he could. Crazy woman. Hormone fever. Want some medication for that mood?