It Happened at Mount Solitary

by Alexa Aella

  Chapter 2.

  “But maybe you never really had someone, she thought now. Maybe, no matter how much you loved them, they could slip through your fingers like water, and there was nothing you could do about it.” Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels.

  I stumbled inside the house. I was back in the lounge room of my youth, with its brown, velvet sofas, and fussy nick-knacks. Everything looked largely unchanged, except for the addition of a large painting of a handsome woman over the fireplace, dressed in Victorian era clothing. Spookily, her eyes seemed to follow me as a walked across the room, and dumped my bag and coat in a heap on the floor.

  The house smelt strange and foreign, a mixture of metal pipes, mildew and dry rose petals.

  I left a lamp in the lounge room burning, and walked down the carpeted hallway to my old bedroom. I threw off my clothes, rummaged in a chest of drawers for some flannelette pyjamas, which smelt of moth balls and climbed into bed. I fell immediately into a death-like sleep.

  When I awoke ten hours later, I had been dreaming that mum was calling out to me for help. As the sticky fingers of the dream world receded, I noticed the sounds of birds chattering and the rumble of tour buses not so far away. I threw off the woollen blankets and felt dizzy and confused for a moment. I was expecting to see my London bedsit, with its mauve walls and flea market furniture around me, but instead, I was transported back to my teenage years, as I gazed around at various, yellowing posters of long forgotten pop bands. To my further amazement, I could see my old high school jumper, hanging on the back of the door, where I had probably hung it for the last time seven years ago. I shook my head, this was all too weird. I felt disoriented. I needed coffee.

  Being in the kitchen without Mum in it was disturbing, as the kitchen had been her office, and the throbbing heart of the house.

  A picture of mum came into my mind, of her singing loudly at the top of her voice, as she washed the dishes or cooked at the stove. Sometimes, dad cooked too, but he was: serious, methodical and businesslike in his food production. And, as dad couldn’t hit a note, we generally tried to discourage him from singing. One time, though, dad had a toothache, and as no dentist was available, he drank too much whiskey. I remember how he sang and danced for hours, until he collapsed in a heap on the lounge.

  As long as I could remember, mum, had been what her younger brother, Martin, laughingly called a “do-gooder”. She was always elbows deep in organising petitions to save some animal, or to help homeless people, or victims of domestic violence.

  I remembered how dad and I once made mum a soapbox for her birthday, as a kind of joke. Mum was passionate about things she believed in, and she had lots of opinions. Some people, however, found her views annoying and told her so. But mum would just say, “You should always listen to what others have to say”.

  “But why?” I would ask

  “Because sometimes, two people with opposite ideas can meet in the middle and then we can reach the right compromise, and then, we can achieve things”.

  “No my dear”, dad would reply, shaking his head and smiling fondly at her, “this is false balance. You are presuming that those other people have equally credible views to yours. And they don’t”.

  I used to feel confused. I still do.

  Just thinking about the way mum cared about others and how she tried to make the world a better place, caused a cold arrow of guilt to shoot through my body. I had, I suddenly realised, been living an utterly selfish and self-absorbed life.

  I felt like I was looking at myself from a new angle and I didn’t like what I saw.

  The words of Mr Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, floated into mind “….. Let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough.''

  I dug the coffee beans out of the freezer, where Mum stored them to keep them fresh, and poured them into the coffee grinder, drawing the glorious aroma of the beans deep into my lungs. When I finally had a delicious brew in hand, I padded into the lounge room and noted how different it appeared in the light of day, and with some sleep. The dated 1970s décor was extra jarring in the full morning light. I could only imagine the impact with a hangover!

  My suitcase and coat were still lying in a heap, bleached in the light of the early morning sunshine, which invaded the room. Strangely, some small receipts that had been zipped away in my suitcase, with my important papers, were lying scattered on the beige carpet.

  My attention was sucked away, however, by the magnificent view of the Three Sisters, an ancient and stunning rock formation, which attracted hordes of tourists. I realised that, I had forgotten just how awe inspiring and how simply beautiful the Blue Mountains are.

  I had forgotten a lot of things.

  The Three Sisters is an ancient Aboriginal place of myth and legend. When I was young, about five years old, my father told me one version of an Aboriginal story about this rock formation, one night, as the rain pummelled down and the fireplace crackled in its own particular language.

  Long ago, back in the Dreamtime, there were three sisters named Meenhi, Wimlah and Gunnedoo. These beautiful young women had fallen in love with three brothers, but tribal law forbid them to marry. The brothers, however, were determined to capture the sisters for themselves and this sparked tribal war. An elder of the tribe, in his attempt to protect the sisters and bring a stop to the conflict, turned the sisters into stone. And, as stone, the sisters still stood.

  Suddenly, I became aware of an unpleasant aroma and sniffing about, soon realised it was me! Time for a hot bath, I thought. Then, I would get down to the police station, and find out if there were any developments. If not, then I would go out and search for my parents. Myself.

  About an hour later, I was fresh and sweet smelling; I had also dumped some washing in the machine and hung it out to dry in the energetic wind. I had wept for a moment, when I saw dad’s favourite jacket, with all its zippers and pockets, in the laundry cupboard. I thought it was rather odd that, he was not wearing it on the bush walk, though. Then, I noticed that some of the front zipper teeth were missing. Dad had loved that jacket. Mum didn’t like it much though; she thought it was a bit too Rainman.

  At the police station, I was taken into a bleak and bare room and offered a cup of tea or coffee. I declined, as the coffee at such places, tends to taste like sawdust, and the tea like cat piss. I was then asked various questions about my parent’s bushwalking habits, and reassured that, everything that could be done was being done. Choppers had been scouring the Govetts Leap area and tracker dogs and volunteers had been all over the place. “We’ve found nothing as yet”, the police officer told me gravely.

  I thought about my dad’s dear old friend Cael, who was a kind-hearted, eccentric loner. Cael worked at odd carpentry jobs, simply to support his passion: training search and rescue dogs. He would most likely be out in the bush now, with his bloodhounds: looking and hoping.

  As I drove off in my mother’s Toyota, a memory ballooned in my mind that, dad always kept notes about their bushwalks, in a small book near the telephone. I pressed the accelerator and tore back home.

  I dashed inside and was making my way toward the teak, telephone table, when I noticed that, the contents of my suitcase were strewn all over the floor; my private papers littered the room. Then I heard the side gate click and I saw that the back door was wide open; the breeze rapidly ruffling the pages of a magazine left on the table. I dashed outside and ran around to the front of the house, just in time, to see a person, I couldn’t tell if male or female, disappearing at great speed, around the street corner. This person was dressed in a Lycra type of athletic suit, which covered the head as well.

  I began to feel very scared.

  I rang the police and reported the incident and the officer said she would send a unit out straight away. While I waited, I opened the small telephone table and took out dad’s notebook. I went straight to the lates
t insert and it did indeed say, “3rd August 1991, walking Govetts Leap/Gross Valley”. That is all it said.

  I was just about to make another coffee, when I remembered that mum used to keep her diary in the freezer. I saw it there when I was about eight years old and looking for some ice cream. Mum must have thought that the freezer was a good hiding place, as she also kept money in there too, sometimes. So, I raced over to the huge, old, box-style freezer and dug around amongst the frozen vegetables and vegetarian burgers, and sure enough, I found a small, plastic bag containing a diary, with a pink and blue flowered cover.

  I opened the diary and began to flip through the cold pages when my attention was caught by this excerpt:

  “I wish Peta would come home. I do miss her! I have so much I need to tell her, things that she doesn’t know. I need to tell her first, before I tell the others.”

  I was stunned by this. I felt like I had been turned into a statue, wondering what this could mean, when the doorbell rang.

  Two police officers, one female and one male, came in and I told them how I had noticed my papers on the floor and how I had heard the gate, and saw a person running. The male officer was very sceptical and kept asking me if I usually suffered jet lag. He glanced down at the empty coffee cup that I had left on the table earlier and said, “Too much coffee can do funny things to your head, you know?” I am pretty sure that he thought I was under stress and hallucinating. But what did I tell you about men? They like to write stories and women are never the heroes.

  Just as the police left the house, the phone rang; it was my cousin Tess, who had heard I was back. News travels fast! She expressed her sympathy and belief that my parents would soon be found, and cried for exactly five seconds. She then invited me over for dinner that night.

  “We can do some brainstorming” she said “And Chris and Martin are coming too”.

  With no better plan, at that moment, I agreed that I would be at her house at six that evening.

  I wasn’t looking forward to seeing her brother, Chris, my least favourite cousin, but I was looking forward to catching up with Martin, mum’s younger brother. Martin was very gentlemanly, and always a source of interesting conversation. Mum used to have a much older brother, named Vincent, but no one had heard from him for years. He disappeared before I was even born, twenty five years ago!

  Realising that I still hadn’t looked properly at mum’s diary to see if she had written anything about the bush walk, I returned to the kitchen, where I had left the diary lying on the table.

  Quickly, I checked the last page of writing in the diary and soon found that mum had written in her distinctive looping script:

  “We will be walking to Mt Solitary this Sunday. What fun! Bob will finally be wearing his new coat, but what a lot of clever persuasion needed on my part, to get him to wear it! The zipper breaking on his old coat did the trick. I had to tell him that, it was I, who bought it though. Really! Families can be so exhausting!”

  This was interesting, but very odd. Why did mum’s diary entry say that they were walking to Mt Solitary? And yet, dad’s notebook said they were going to Govetts Leap, near Blackheath? The police had been searching the area around Govetts Leap. What if mum and dad had actually gone to Mt Solitary? What if they were lost out there, wandering around and wondering why nobody seemed to be looking for them?

  These thoughts cooled my blood.

  Also, who bought dad the new jacket and why? And why did mum tell dad that she had bought it, when she didn’t? How confusing and strange.

  I walked into the lounge room and pulled the curtains wide open. I could see Jamison Valley and Mt Solitary spread out before me, from the front window.

  “Mum and dad where are you?” I whispered.

  Bloody Hell! I am like one of those characters in the soapies who soliloquise to themselves!

  I realised that I should let the police know about this new information, and so, I grabbed the car keys, and shot out the front door again, almost tripping over Tristan the black cat, who had gone to sleep on the front mat, in the warm sun. I stopped to scratch his velvety ears and he purred happily. He fell back into a blissful slumber.

  Luckily, a more sympathetic police officer was on duty when I lurched into the police station and presented mum’s diary and showed him the entry about going to Mt Solitary. He said he would report this new finding straight away, and that a chopper and a search party would be sent out there. I felt a sense of relief at this, as I was trying to gear myself up to trek into the bush to look for my parents myself. The problem was that, I was only used to walking on stilettos to the night club!

  I needed to buy some food and things from the supermarket, so I drove into the town and parked under the shopping centre and whizzed up the escalator. I threw a few things like: pasta, sauce, milk, Parmesan cheese and a few blocks of chocolate in my basket, and made my way to a cashier.

  I was standing in the line, going over things in my mind, when someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind.

  My brain kind of buzzed and short circuited, when I found myself looking at Scott Valentine, who had been my boyfriend in the senior years of high school. We broke up when I went off to university and he stayed in Katoomba, and began a trade as a carpenter.

  I was just getting my mouth into gear to say, hello when Scott said, “hi Peta” and shoved Pamela Prince into my face, adding “this is my wife Pam”. Then, he did this fake slap on the forehead thing, “that’s right you both know each other from school!” They both sniggered, and her horrid breath hit me like a bomb.

  For the second time that day, I felt like I had turned to stone. You think you know someone, and then you find out that you don’t. Pamela Prince had been my nemesis, my arch enemy at school. Her gang had bullied and hounded me for years. I had tried running away from them, retaliating, reporting them to teachers. Nothing worked. Scott knew all this, and he had seemed to be very sympathetic when we were a couple. Obviously things had changed.

  As I stood there with my mouth open and with my brain scrambling for something to say, the silly hornbag said in a sickly and sarcastic voice, “sorry about your parents”.

  I turned around and they both snorted with laughter like the teens that we had been some years before.

  I just paid for my groceries, thought longingly about London, and got out of there as fast as I could. As I was about to walk into the smelly car park, eager to get away, an athletic woman in a yoga outfit stopped me, and pulled a leaf and spider web from my hair. “Latest fashion?” She laughed. My face burned.

  As I drove out of the car park, I tried to slow my breathing and glanced out at the magnificent view of craggy, ancient rocks, with blue mist in the distance.

  It helped.

  Suddenly, a sound like the beating of my heart, told me that a chopper was pulsating directly overhead, before it swept away, toward Mt Solitary.

  “Please,” I said to no one in particular “find my parents. Alive”.