Over This Backbone, page 4
Silver rings glinted on her strong hands and a hiked red dress barely covered her toned arse. A short mop of straw hair blew lightly above a vague expression. Two nose rings; nipple piercings I wouldn’t see until later. She walked with quick, springy steps to the table above the dam for her induction with Jen, who waited in the tree filtered light with dark servo sunnies shielding her eyes, her expression impenetrable.
I turned to Maya and said half-jokingly, I don’t know about her—too pretty for her own good.
Give her a chance, she warned.
Maya shared the room adjacent to mine, in the same cabin. She was ten years older than me but even wiser than her age. Tall and solidly built with a soft, kind face—she was stable and patient, an eloquent and engaging raft guide, a gentle coach for the students who shook with nerves at the abseil rock. I looked up to her, but also infuriated her, like a kelpie pup between her feet, loud and energetic.
I tried to adopt her calm tolerance as we waited to meet Dani, though inside I bristled. Jealousy? Perhaps the same angry disdain I held for my school friends who I thought vain but were, on reflection and by no fault of their own, simply beautiful.
We watched as Dani laughed, and after a time Jen raised the sunglasses onto the top of her head and laughed too.
Jen was the most volatile boss I’d ever seen or known, a woman with hawk eyes for a mistake and the capacity to elicit fear in her staff the moment she stepped onto the property. She’d come from New Zealand, was rake thin and beady eyed and peroxided. Her qualifications were largely in business management and she was good with the books, so despite our protestations, the council kept her on. To her, I was both a confidante and an emotional punching bag. Which it would be on any given day was a dice roll at best. I knew her secrets and felt her wrath.
She worked us all like dogs for our meagre allowances. We were conditioned to sweat and scurry away from her, fear her unpredictability, her fits of rage.
Maya never bowed to her, though—stood with calm defiance and hence became Jen’s personal target.
Now Dani tossed her head back and they both laughed again. Then Jen walked her to the kitchen.
I sat on the serving counter in a pair of orange overalls and watched sceptically as she was introduced to Maya and Dom and our program manager, Billie.
Dom was thrown by Dani, I could see it and it made me sick with jealousy. Not because I wanted him, he was my second cousin, but because I’d known him since I was a kid and he was my rock, and the way she oozed sex would drag him away from that job.
Dom had always been special to me. He was also ten years older but we both loved the ocean and animals, early mornings and wild weather. We’d been firm adventure buddies since our early family holidays, so I was ecstatic when, after I’d taken him on a tour of the property the year prior, he’d applied for a job at the Farm too.
I didn’t want Dani to be a part of what we had.
I’m Peta. I stuck out a hand, and she took it and smiled with her button nose crinkled. Do you want a Zooper Dooper?
Nah, I don’t eat them. I’m a vegan, she said, and it was as if she’d grabbed at my big cheeks and pinched. I hadn’t been aware that the frozen stick of cordial contained animal.
I balked and glanced at Maya with eyes that said I fucking told you she wouldn’t fit.
But she did. Dani was twenty-five and electric, enigmatic, completely impossible to read, vague and elusive. She smelled always of garlic and peppermint, believed wholeheartedly in natural medicine and dressed like it was the early 2000s. Everything about her body was firm and small—simultaneously tough and sexual. She had a habit of disclosing challenging, significant things with no emotion or ceremony.
On the day after she arrived, we trimmed the horses’ feet together.
You have to stand like this to file the back hoof, because then he won’t step on you, she said in that soft, vague voice. My horse stepped on me when I was a kid and it broke my pelvis.
What? I shouted. Did that really happen?
Yes. It’s not so bad. It probably happens to lots of people.
I don’t reckon it does, Dani!
I was intrigued and drawn to her, and somehow she became my closest friend in that beautiful, twisted place. I loved her.
By mid-year, after Dom had dislocated his knee cross-country skiing and had gone for the surgery, Dani and I moved together into the Cob Home, his empty mudbrick hut in the bottom paddock. We curled into the sagging king single each night as spoons and giggled beneath the window-framed mountains. When one of us was away for an overnight hike or river camp out with students, the other would light the fire and clean the space and leave a note or a jar of wattle.
On the rare day off, we’d pile together into the ute with the two farm dogs and she’d let me drive the rake-thin, cliff-edge roads out to town, my stomach knotted in terror and the L-plates up. As an instructor, Dani was neither clear nor decisive.
It wasn’t the first time I’d driven. Dad had patiently sat beside me in the Citroën C5, but that was a slick auto, not this walloping hunk of manual metal. We’d never gathered enough hours to get me through my licence because Otis got his first and had proceeded to drive me around so that Mum and Dad didn’t have to. Before I knew it, I’d moved to the Farm—completely dependent, with twenty hours under my belt.
So Dani had tried in vain to teach something about clutches and gears. The result had been white-knuckled fear for the both of us, a strong feeling that our survival was all luck and no control, the back tyres of the ute slipping rather than gripping up the dirt roads, me yelling, Who the hell would design a two-wheel, front-wheel, bald-wheel-drive ute anyway!
But we always somehow made it to the coast, or the river.
In the winter break we surfed and watched SeaChange and ate a fourteen-kilogram box of bananas in six days. She had a weakness for hot chips and fried chicken—the vegan thing came in swings and roundabouts but the belief in alternative medicine didn’t budge.
She taught me to squat and introduced me to running in the bone-deep valley frosts before our work day started, her anklet jangling and some tendon or cartilage in her left foot clicking loudly with each step.
I don’t know why it does that, she’d say. What do you think? It doesn’t hurt—should I see someone?
And this was the thing that drew me in more than the gorgeous illusion of her—her reliance on me, my clear role. She was undeniably more beautiful than me, but in many ways I was smarter than her and she also let me be smarter in ways that I wasn’t.
She asked me about injuries and friendship and sex and men and cheating and purpose, and I answered her with full and unfounded confidence. She took it all in as if I were qualified to say any of the things I did.
You’re probably right, she’d say and kiss my head. Thanks.
She rode and shod the horses with a fearlessness that rocked me. Cowboy boots and an oilskin coat. I waxed her strong, smooth legs and she brushed my thick hair and marvelled at it. We drank port in the fire bath and worked hard on the farm.
Sometimes, when we were pressed together in the shonky king single, I’d think of how easy it’d be to kiss her—fifteen centimetres of movement and then what? I’d breathe out in the cold night air and tuck my face into her neck and know that I couldn’t, that I didn’t actually want to, that it was just the ease of it that kept me coming back to her lips. That this was the closest I’d been to intimacy since the bassist.
We were inseparable, but I was also infatuated and I couldn’t extrapolate from these tangled emotions whether I wanted to be her or be with her. Either way, I knew that she was perilously everything.
Dom was back by September and I was suddenly eighteen years old, and for one night all of us slept together in the Cob Home, crammed three across in the king single, him with his knee strapped into a brace, me pushed tight against the window and an uneasy feeling that we would shatter, her and I.
It’ll be fun, the three of us. Why should we move out? Dani had said. I hadn’t offered any of the reasons that were rolling on the tip of my tongue.
Because it’s weird.
Because he’s related to me.
Because I love you.
I listened to it happen—chopped, ragged breaths to start, then the wet click of tongues and lips connecting and separating and those almost imperceptible sounds of shifting hands and heads. Maybe it was better for them because it was illicit, because I was there, because it was fucked up.
It was just kissing, Dani would say the next day, like it dampened the betrayal.
She was right to be confused—there was realistically nothing to betray. But a betrayal with no foundation is just a bottomless well of pain, no grounds for accusation, nowhere to rest and recover, no hook to hang your hurt on.
I clambered over them after half an hour and sat in the frozen paddock with Buccalow, the milking cow, for the remaining four hours of darkness, my head tipped back against her belly and great angry sobs heaving out of me. The bovine was comforting. I hated myself—had chilblains the size of fifty cent coins on my arse and thighs, and my cheeks had grown chubby again because pasta was cheap and this place had no money and I’d lost the warm body that’d been curled beside me for the better part of a year.
All it would have taken was a shift of fifteen centimetres. But I didn’t have the courage.
I wallowed in self-pity, then milked the cow as the sun rose across my red-raw face. Afterwards, I dragged myself to the kitchen with a bucket of steaming milk.
It was over.
I moved back into the room beside Maya’s and slept alone, and Dani stayed in the Cob Home as the valley defrosted. I felt like my world had imploded. The feeling was unstoppable because I had no perspective, because life and work were stewing together in the pressure cooker. Because I was just a kid.
Maya slipped a disc in her back, could barely walk, and I broke my heart. We started to lean on each other. I started to grow up.
I did my job, all the spring and summer programs with students who still smelled the scent of those early days and couldn’t see that we were socially deprived, desperately tired, riddled with burns and injuries and fungi and chilblains, slowly losing it.
I never spoke to Dani about it again, and since she was the master of ignorance it slipped away and we settled into something almost normal, almost healthy. I started swimming in the river each morning, running without the left-foot click of her, trying to widen the pinprick as she and Dom became something that she and I would never be.
And, suddenly, the last program was over and it was December and Dani said, I told Ben to come up for a couple of nights.
Who’s Ben?
Ben Granger.
I raised my eyebrow in exasperation. Not helpful, Dan.
A friend. I reckon you’ll get along. He’s from Western Australia—he’s really tall and really smart. You’ll like him.
I nodded in the smoky kitchen but didn’t believe her, and carried on kneading the bread dough with an aggression that was both unnecessary and unstoppable.
It was pitiful that she thought she could replace the thing we’d lost so easily, but sadder that I believed a thing could be lost when it had never been had.
61 km
I’m certain that I’m wallowing on a water bed when I wake. By the time I’ve sloshed about some and shaken myself alert, however, I know that my tent is partially adrift in a bog. Didn’t hear the rain, but it must have come because this low ground certainly wasn’t a puddle the night before. The tent is new, the high-sided floor still waterproof, so although I can feel the liquid shifting beneath me it hasn’t percolated through to the orange dome.
I pack up the inside and ferry the various pieces of equipment to a high rock. Pad barefoot through the deep, clear puddles. Don’t bother with breakfast. The temperature has plummeted. I strike out in the fog and mud.
Though no fence curves into the bush from either side of the metal gate marking the state border, the road on the Australian Capital Territory side is clear, while the New South Wales side is caked with horse shit. I walk around the gate and wonder why a horse wouldn’t do the same. It’s senseless.
I deal with the screaming in my feet for just under an hour until I can rest on the wide verandah of Oldfields Hut and bite into an apple while that fog still sits heavy. Crack the visitor book on an entry that reads, Beware rattus. Will eat anything in sight. If not in sight, will find. So long, headtorch button.
I scoff. It was probably some crafty native marsupial—an antechinus.
If you put your shit away it won’t be eaten, I mutter with hangry disdain. Some people know nothing.
I finish the apple, close the book and walk on.
There’s a junction that disorients me an hour or so later, and it’s around this time that the pain takes over my brain and the drizzle sets in. I’m looking at the map fiercely but can’t concentrate so rip the laces loose on the boots and kick each off with an animal snarl. They tumble across the peat while I stand in my wet socks and re-read the map.
As the pain ebbs I decipher the route, then unfasten the big Crocs from the pack to slip them on. I waddle to the boots and tie them to the outside of my bag.
I walk on. The road is slick with mud, and it doesn’t take long for the moist dirt to squirrel into the Crocs’ holes. It’s slippery enough that I’m almost skating, the weight on my back sending me sideways. I catch myself with my walking pole again and again.
I’ve gone half a kilometre in this unsteady manner, across the undulating plains, when I hear an unmistakable chicker and peel, a high-pitched ratcheting—plovers.
I know they are mostly all show, but out of nowhere the birds start coming in for the money shot, swooping low and fast for my eyes. I wheel my pole overhead as violently as I can, and while my shoulder burns, it works and the plovers back off a little. After a while they give up entirely and their screams fade. I lower my arms.
It’s peaceful in the fog without the pain. Just the wet sucking of the Crocs and my hot breath heaving small clouds into the air.
An hour passes before the next attack.
I hear wings before the impact. Something corks me in the back of the skull with feathered ferocity and my legs slide out from beneath me. My right hip collides with a rock, though there is no time for theatrics or pathos. The magpie comes in from the front this time. As I stagger to my feet, the hiking boot that hangs off my pack swings to kick me hard in the ear like it hasn’t done enough. I heave the pole up in the air again and the magpie hooks to the left and hoovers back towards the snow gums. I touch the back of my head with my free hand and feel the sticky viscosity of blood, already clotting.
It’s all so absurd that I’m racked with laughter.
Once again pasted with mud and still whipping an arm above me, I continue the slow slide towards Blue Waterholes. The bird takes another couple of dives but they’re half-hearted. I don’t lower the pole for a long time after the warble has faded.
The plains are eerily gorgeous in this dense white. A song phrase starts running rings in my head and I can’t shake it loose.
On the black spur, what if I don’t make it down.
I hum, and think about rinsing my hair and about the snacks that will inevitably appear with my parents, about whether I should feel guilt for accepting these—for seeing them.
It’s when the landscape starts to pitch me down towards the campsite that the dogs come. They appear from nowhere—beautiful and menacing and still. They stand clumped and disorganised a stick’s throw from where I’ve halted. The fog thickens and absorbs all sound. We stare at one another. I think about the pole and how little it would do against the feral six of them, but I know already that they don’t want me—they’re as caught out as I am. So when they turn away I notice that my heart is quiet and settled like the low cloud into which they evaporate once more.
I keep sliding.
On the black spur, feeling the great weight bear down.
Just another feral animal in this unending menagerie.
When I’m set up and the sun has finally scorched through the fog, I slip into the green-blue water that pools and babbles intermittently over shallow rock races between the high canyon walls. Mud and blood washed away, the knots in my hair finger-raked free.
I sit by the turquoise pools and wish I knew the name for this place, because ‘Blue Waterholes’ isn’t its first name. There will be another—a First Nations name—that speaks to the soul of the pools rather than the pure physicality.
I’d spent time in the lead-up to the track searching online, in bookshops, in libraries and through friends for information on the First Nations People of the Great Divide. Whose land would I be walking on? It seemed that so many groups had been dispossessed and torn from Country at the hands of white invaders that ownership boundaries were tricky to define.
Once, during my year at the Farm, I squatted down by the river with an Elder from Gunaikurnai Country who’d dropped through on his way to survey an archaeological site on the high plains.
What do you do, I asked, when you don’t know for sure who to pay your respects to, who to ask for permission, when you don’t know whose land it is?
And he said, The People and the Country are the same thing. They’re all wrapped up together, and one doesn’t own the other. So as long as Country knows you, you introduce yourself, and you treat Country well, you’ll be orright.
How do I introduce myself to Country?
However you reckon, he chuckled. I like to throw a stone to the river and tell it my name, thank it for having me. At least it knows I’m there.
Didn’t do it at the Orroral, but here I take a rough stone and roll it in my palm, then toss it to the centre of the pool. I say, Hello Country. I’m Peta. Thank you for taking care of me.
The sound echoes between the canyon walls, and I sit a while before I turn back.
