by Sally Piper
Later, when Hannah was too big to lie on her chest in the bath, Lisa wondered if what her daughter had really heard when her ear was pressed against her was the humming current of her anger. The same way that electricity hums as it travels along high-tension powerlines, something unseen, but alive and dangerous. And if this is what Hannah sensed, then maybe it was fear that stilled her tiny body and not the tick of her mother’s heart.
Lisa hears Samantha swim towards her. She drops her feet to the bottom and stands in the chest-deep water as Samantha comes and stands alongside her. They look inland. Samantha moves her head from left to right and Lisa follows her gaze, past the dune line and the scrappy coastal tea-tree, up to the silvery-leaved eucalypts that follow the design of the mountains behind.
‘I thought I saw something up there when we swam here last time.’ Samantha points to a spot on their right.
Lisa looks where Samantha indicates.
‘It was a double flash of light. Like when the sun reflects off glass.’
Binoculars, Lisa thinks straight away. She looks at Samantha, surprised. ‘You never said anything?’
‘I don’t think I wanted to believe it was real.’
‘That was my problem. I didn’t want to believe any of it was real either.’ Lisa’s anger and the truth were incompatible back then, despite it being there in the facts for her to see all along.
‘It still creeps me out,’ Samantha says, ‘to think of him spying on us.’
‘We were sport to him. A game.’
Just as her rages were a sport to Matt.
‘With no winners,’ Samantha says.
‘No. No winners.’
And they’ve never learned who ended up losing the most.
For the first few years of Lisa’s marriage there were no winners or losers. Matt treated what he called her wifely disobediences with humour. He’d shake his head and smile when his underpants, socks and T-shirts were returned to him clean, but still inside out. When she pretended she could no longer start the lawnmower. When the leaves built up in the carport; the lid wouldn’t close on the too-full bin under the sink.
‘What am I going to do with this lazy pixie?’ And he’d pinch her arse – not too hard – then kiss her neck.
She returned his smiles during these small intimate campaigns. She thought these, what still felt like, friendly challenges were how two young people started out in a marriage – a harmless clash of expectations until finally a common path upon which to tread was established.
Sex was their great unifier. He liked that she wasn’t shy. Liked that she’d initiate it. Liked that she demanded variety, satisfaction. He had a deft touch, staying power. She suspects it was these things that kept them together for as long as they were. A common path found in sweaty, primal nudity.
They often had sex after an argument. Not with any redemptive gentleness. She thinks it was some perverse attempt to continue the fight, take it into the bedroom like a bar room brawl; sanctioned the use of nails and teeth and hard, deep thrusts. What was more perverse though was that she suspects they both enjoyed this sex best. There were no winners or losers with it. They both got what they wanted. They both slept soundly afterwards. It allowed them to start the next day with a clean slate.
Nicole walks over the low dune and onto the beach. She wears a brown bikini; her blue chamois towel slung over one shoulder. Nicole is perfectly proportioned, muscular and athletic. She moves further along the sand and places her towel on a rock. She strides down to the water’s edge without looking in their direction, walks out till she’s thigh-deep then dives straight under as Samantha had. She swims out to the deep with an equally precise stroke, only faster.
Lisa watches her power through the water. She no longer knows why Nicole drives herself so hard. In her youth it had been to meet the demands of her high-achieving parents. Now she can’t be sure. But it hurts to see her push herself as she does, to watch her compete against what seems to be nothing more than her own determination. Lisa wishes she could put a restraining hand on her shoulder as Nicole used to do with her. Because it might give her the permission she won’t give herself to slow down, to ease back, to enjoy these small moments where nothing and no one is making demands upon her.
She told them she has never married. No children.
Noisy pests, Nicole said as they filled in some of the gaps of their lives in the bar that night. Like fruit bats. They don’t shut up till they go to sleep.
So what does Nicole have if not these things, Lisa wonders, beyond her public service career, a two-bedroom apartment and a detached manner?
Is her absence of love and family by chance or design? In what way has Lisa contributed to it? How much is she to blame?
But maybe Lisa is wrong and someone is making demands of Nicole, right now. What if she is?
And it’s when Lisa has thoughts like these that she wonders why she thinks she can make anything better by bringing them back here. What gives her the authority to even try? And what if in trying, she only ends up making everything worse.
Chapter 6
The beach is exactly as nicole remembers it – nestled calmly between the arms of two protective headlands. In contrast, as she walked today she could almost forget that she’s been here before because the tracks are so well maintained now. The further they penetrated this land previously, the narrower and more uneven the trails became. The scrub grew right to its edges back then, and some of the tea-trees’ branches formed a low roof across it in places as though trying to reclaim the territory taken from them. There were times when she had to force her way through the blade grass. It cut her naked legs and left fine lines of blood that clotted and scabbed to the colour of liver. Saw-toothed banksia leaves did the same to her bare arms, and the scrappy branches of these gnarled trees snagged her pack and jerked her backwards. She’d been more wary of snakes then too, frightened that one would be asleep exactly where she was about to place her foot on the obscured path.
There had been deep washouts in gravel sections of the trail then, which made the descents treacherously slippery in parts. In other areas the ground was a tangle of braided roots that threatened to trip her up. Branches and whole trees had fallen across the trail. In places it looked like the forest was playing a game of giant pick-up-sticks. They had to clamber over or under them. At other times, when they were too large, they had to cut a path through the scrub round their broken, splintered trunks or network of roots ripped from the earth. Trees and branches still fall, but now the obstructing section is cleared by a chainsaw and she simply passes between two neatly cut ends.
Nicole’s imagination ran away from her last time. Many of the places it took her mind to seem silly now. Like the way she pictured the faces of grotesque monsters on the weathered surface of the granite boulders. She conjured misshapen noses and lopsided eyes in those big Frankenstein-shaped domes. Fracture lines gave up grim mouths full of broken teeth. Patches of lichen became poxy green and orange lesions on illusionary cheeks. They were the games of a child, like looking for animal shapes in clouds. But at the time it hadn’t felt like a game at all. It had felt like the reasonable manifestation of a deep and warranted fear.
Little seems to have changed about these boulders in the years since Nicole last passed them. If she wanted to she expects she could still imagine a ghoulish face, still find things to unsettle her on these eroded and stained surfaces.
And she remembers how she fretted over Samantha. Her parents’ penchant for nature documentaries hadn’t helped. They’d taught her about vulnerability and how this was what predators looked for in their prey. The way they sought out the weakest or slowest. The straggler. Nicole didn’t worry for Lisa in the same way. Lisa was a fighter.
Nicole was, and still is, a compulsively fast walker. She was already a keen runner back then and hadn’t known how to slow her body down, how to make it fall in with t
he slower pace of others. If she tried to, she became agitated with restlessness. A kind of madness in stasis. Her body tensed with the urge to move. She had to consciously hold herself back like a pulled bowstring, while her mind – her conscience – said that she must stop, that she must wait. The mind and the body wrestled for a time, but the body nearly always won out. Samantha would barely come into sight on the trail behind her and Nicole would be off again. She was the hare. Samantha the tortoise.
The day had been warm and her T-shirt was soaked with sweat beneath her pack when she took it off at the second campsite. It was the sweat of hard work, of putting in. The best kind.
Sections of the trail were mean today, steep descents, slippery with scree. They demanded much of the knees. Her boots threatened to slip out from under her at every step. The weight of her pack didn’t help. It pulled her off balance as she slipped more than stepped downwards. She looked only to the ground, always searching for the best place to next put her foot. Attention limited to a zone little more than a metre in front of her.
Leather boots suddenly filled that zone when she was here last time. She’d let out an involuntary squeal when she saw them. She hated herself for doing it. It made her feel weak.
Nicole had looked up slowly from those brown boots, recognised them for a man’s footwear. She looked up from their silver eyelets and black laces. Up khaki coloured trousers to the wide hip strap of his backpack, gripped low on his waist. Up the sweat-stained grey T-shirt that covered his lean torso. And she remembers wondering if she’d eventually reach a weak chin, a cruel mouth and dark hateful eyes. Nicole expects this search from boots to face took only seconds, but at the time it felt like those seconds moved through tar.
‘Sorry, love. Did I frighten you?’
His face was tanned and creased in kind lines. His smile was easy and full. He was an older man with grey at the sides of closely cropped hair. It seems odd to think that he was probably only ten or fifteen years older than Nicole is now.
She wonders if he’s still fit enough to hike. If so, does he continue to come here, loving the region still, as he told her he did back then. Maybe he was even amongst the group of older hikers she’d passed earlier that day. It’s unnerving to think that she might share this place now with someone she’d met here previously. Because if that kind-looking man was here, then why not the other, hateful one? Is it even a possibility?
Nicole recalls how she blushed and mumbled something about being easily startled, despite the fact that she wasn’t, not normally.
They chatted briefly about the terrain and distances and water supply.
‘You’re not on your own are you?’ he asked. He sounded concerned, fatherly.
‘No. There’re two girls behind me.’
‘An all-girl adventure,’ he said, and nodded his approval.
‘Something like that. Have you passed anyone else?’
In retrospect she knows she asked this too quickly, too keenly.
‘No. You’re the first person today. Not such a busy area. That’s why I love it here. Get away from the city nutters. Our little secret, eh?’ And he tapped the side of his nose just as her father would have done.
‘Don’t forget there’s two after me,’ Nicole called as the man moved off. ‘They’ll probably scream too.’
‘I’ll whistle then.’ He started up a tune she recognised as ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. It was a tune her father liked to whistle.
They’d passed so few hikers till then that her isolation had felt all encompassing and absolute. But she remembers how after this encounter she felt strangely calm for a time. She stopped seeing rock monsters. Stopped jumping at shadows and fearing concealed bends and sudden movements in the bush. She stopped listening for sardonic laughter and imagining boulders being levered down upon her. Meeting this time-seasoned man had made her think of her father. A sensible and practical man. Someone who would never allow an irrational imagination to spook him. And Nicole knew her father would have laughed at her for having allowed hers to.
She rarely hears her father laugh now. Much of the joy has been taken from his life by her mother’s Alzheimer’s.
Nicole thinks her father takes a guilty pleasure from her singleness. She’s the child who left home but who always comes back. No one else makes demands on her time, so he can and does. She imagines he now considers his unexpected late-in-life baby a great boon. She’s always good for a late night call when her mother wakes confused between night and day.
‘Where’s Dad?’ Nicole asks her.
‘Oh, just having a lie down. I should probably wake him. I expect he’ll want his tea soon.’
Her mother hasn’t been able to cook for years.
‘Look out the window, Mum. What can you see?’
Nicole hears her mother’s shuffling feet, her wet breath.
‘Pretty stars,’ she says. There is always the sound of youthful optimism in her mother’s voice.
Nicole doesn’t mind these calls. It’s a bonus that she remembers enough at these times to recognise Nicole’s name on speed dial. She often stays on the line with her and they chat for a while. Sometimes she gets a glimpse of the wise teacher her mother once was, the woman who knew the difference between a clause and a phrase, made the rules of algebra seem easy. Someone with an understanding of the changes that come with the seasons or the effects of an illness.
The crepe myrtle’s early this year, she might say, or Your father seems tired. I expect he worries about me.
They’ve never asked Nicole why she hasn’t married. Not that she’d have been able to answer them if they had. There’s an abstraction to the reasons, which she’s never been able to put form to. All she knows is that she followed the rules but then the rules proved liquid. Maybe she decided she couldn’t put her faith in something whose contours might shift.
She doesn’t like to think about who will orientate her to the world should she need it, by telling her to look out her window.
For a couple of hours after her encounter with the older hiker that day, Nicole heard her father’s encouragement amongst the bush sounds and not the malevolent laughter of the man from the car park.
Pull yourself together, she imagined her father saying. You’re meant to be enjoying yourself.
So Nicole did pull herself together for a time. She stopped listening to the childish follies of her mind and channelled her father’s robust home-school teachings instead. Particularly the one that said if she wanted to achieve a task then all she need do was apply herself to it.
So she decided to make this rarely visited and special landscape hers, just as her father would have wanted her to. She’d own it. Not the car park whacko. Not the city nutters.
She was reminded of why she chose to hike out here – to prove to herself that she could do it; so she could grow, not shrink – to feel untouchable for a while. Capable. But it was a short-lived confidence. Because then she lost her way and in doing so learned that her father didn’t know everything.
There was little signage on the track back then. There was a faded map locked inside a scratched Perspex-fronted noticeboard at the trailhead. It seems primitive compared to the covered structure that’s there now, with its extensive information boards about flora and fauna, safety and rescue. And the map of the area at the trailhead is large now. The You Are Here printed on it is almost worn away by the many fingers that have touched it. Nicole carried a copy of the original map with her previously, but the detail was limited and often proved inadequate.
There had been the occasional timber sign with a directional arrow along the trail, mostly where geographical variations might cause confusion for hikers. Now there are many.
She was ahead of the other two when she reached the narrow gorge last time. She could still hear bits of their chatter, so assumed they weren’t far behind.
The trail till th
en had followed the shoulder of a mountain. It took them gently upwards and inland for a few kilometres. The further they moved from the coast, the hotter it became. And the breeze she’d felt earlier dropped off altogether once they moved inland.
A breeze like the soft one that blew today makes branches creak, leaves quiver, grasses rustle. In the previous stifling and still closeness, sounds were mostly the scratch, buzz and whir of insects and the tinnitus thrum of cicadas.
The track had narrowed the further inland they went, and became rocky underfoot as it wended round increasingly larger outcrops of granite. Nicole’s father would have called it a goat track. It was hard going underfoot and she had to lean away from some boulders to get around them. When she held her hand to them she felt the heat stored there. And the vegetation – mostly prickly tea-tree and she-oaks – looked parched.
Nicole suspects now that the gorge she wrongly mistook for the trail was a dry watercourse. It probably only flowed after heavy rainfall. It looked the wider of the two options when she came to the unmarked bifurcation. The trail to her left seemed to peter out a few metres on. Later, she would learn that a large overhang of rock obscured where it continued round.
At the time, the gorge had looked the obvious way. She veered to the right and continued on over increasingly boulder-strewn ground. The map indicated only that the trail travelled inland for a good way, then veered right to take them back down to the coast. She assumed this was where they were to veer right.
When she thinks back on this day, she thinks of her stupidity at not waiting for the others. She sees a careless young woman, someone who was more like Lisa. But back then she’d felt so certain, so sure of herself under the spell of her father’s insistence for confidence. And she could still hear the other two at that point – Lisa’s voice had a loud confidence to it, so Nicole heard it cut through the stillness, bounce off rock walls. She hadn’t considered herself alone so much as a short distance ahead of her friends.
