The Geography of Friendship Read online

  Sally Piper’s debut novel, Grace’s Table (2014), was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award – Emerging Queensland Author category and she was awarded a Varuna Publishing Fellowship for her manuscript. Sally holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Queensland University of Technology. She has had short fiction and non-fiction published in various print and online publications, including the first One Book Many Brisbanes anthology, The Weekend Australian, WQ plus other literary magazines and journals in the UK. She currently mentors other writers on the Queensland Writers Centre ‘Writer’s Surgery’ program.

  www.sallypiper.com

  Bookclub notes are available at www.uqp.com.au

  For my friends,

  those women who walk with me.

  Chapter 1

  Samantha walks with a kind of idleness with intent; daydreaming in motion. She swings one leg in front of the other like a pendulum, foot hitting ground, heel, toe. Some steps fall short, others long; some light, others heavy. Her feet are small, but they have a nose for their own balance.

  The rest of her is large, but out here it doesn’t matter. Because everything around her is large too. Especially the mountains. They are grand and permanent. The wide-girthed eucalypts that travel up their flanks are slick-barked and gnarled. Their limbs reach up and stab silver lines into the blue sky.

  When Samantha passed through here as a younger woman she’d wanted to know how it all worked, how the land and sky and flora and fauna were connected and dependent and in tune. She’d wanted to understand their symbiosis as if knowing meant she had something to contribute, something worthwhile to add to the landscape. Now, in her forties, she knows better: not everything can or need be understood, and there is no relevance to her being here. She has nothing to offer this place beyond her attention. And for once she’s content with her insignificance.

  Last time Samantha was here she’d fluctuated between fear and inadequacy. This time it’s mostly inadequacy. She barely noticed any of the beauty around her previously. She’d felt too threatened, looking behind her as much as in front, always trying to see the hidden. She tripped and stumbled, in both character and feet. Beneath her backpack her skin had chafed and pilled with sweat and friction. She’d felt vulnerable every time she put that bloody thing on, knowing she couldn’t run with it, and again every time she took it off to make camp. Night brought another set of worries.

  Now she feels no such threat or vulnerability, though the terrain remains brutish in parts and her backpack – modern and lightweight in comparison to the one she’d worn years earlier – is still heavy with gear. But it wasn’t the terrain she’d feared, or even the restrictions of her pack. She’d feared him.

  Samantha looks up from her feet and takes in the surrounding forest once more. Eucalypts mostly. Little has changed about the nature of these trees in the last twenty or so years. They still shed dreadlocks of bark and their silvery-green leaves still talk in the breeze. Their branches tick and creak and birds still perch along them, observing more than chattering now that the day is long past dawn. Everything and nothing is as she remembers it.

  What is the same, though, is that once again she’s following not leading.

  Nicole walks in front, just as she had before. And Lisa is in the middle.

  They haven’t seen each other for years, but here they are, falling into the same old pattern as though there’s no other worth considering. Maybe it’s more to do with the place they’re walking through. Maybe the land has designs on them – maybe it always had – robbing them of the power to choose alternatives.

  But Samantha’s never been much good at free will. If she were, she wouldn’t even be here.

  No introduction had been necessary when Lisa had called her, even though they hadn’t heard from one another for over twenty years. Samantha would recognise the authority in Lisa’s voice anywhere.

  ‘Samantha. I need to see you.’

  The significance of the call had sat peculiarly with the banality of what Samantha was doing at the time – at the sink scrubbing the burnt bottom of a pot she’d used to cook bolognaise sauce. She’d seen No Caller ID displayed on her phone’s screen but accepted the call with a sudsy finger anyway. She always does. She remembers the casual way she pressed the mobile against her ear with her shoulder so she could keep working at the pot as she talked, as though it might be her mother’s daily call. But on hearing Lisa’s voice, that complacency left her. Her hands stalled in the sudsy water and her neck, cricked to one side, tensed.

  ‘Lisa.’

  That’s it. That’s all she said after all those years. But she hadn’t been able to think of anything else to say. Which is peculiar too. Once the two of them hadn’t been able to stop talking when they were together. Talk the leaves off trees, Samantha’s mother used to say of them, drive birds from the branches.

  But they’d been a lot younger then. Just girls, really. Silly, reckless girls.

  ‘How did you get my number?’

  ‘I rang your parents. They’re still listed in the White Pages.’

  Of course they were.

  ‘Can we meet?’ Lisa asked.

  Samantha’s body responded to Lisa’s request with startling familiarity: her heart thrashed against her ribcage and a metallic noise started to clang inside her head. Once again she was listening to the sound of fear.

  ‘Nicole’s agreed.’

  Nicole, too. Obviously Lisa was still as persuasive as she ever was.

  ‘Please,’ Lisa pushed, gently, cautiously.

  Which threw Samantha even more. The Lisa she used to know was never cautious.

  ‘Okay.’ Samantha heard herself say it while every other part of her – her heart, her gut, her sanity, for God’s sake – shouted for her to say No! Because nothing was okay, and hadn’t been properly okay since.

  But not good old obliging Sam, the girl – and now woman – who’d always said Yes to this friend, regardless of how unreasonable or stupid or dangerous her request.

  Samantha asked herself then, and has been asking herself ever since: What have you changed about yourself? In all these years, what have you fucking changed?

  But they’d been close once – all three of them were – girls brought together in high school, misfits amongst those who believed they weren’t. So naturally, and inseparably, they’d become friends. Now though, they’ve built their lives many suburbs apart.

  Samantha agreed a place to meet and soon after ended the call.

  She didn’t hear Harry walk into the kitchen behind her after she put her mobile back on the bench. She was too distracted trying to restore sense.

  ‘You all right?’

  Stolid uncomplicated Harry. A man who’d barely noticed any of Samantha’s mood shifts in the past several years of their long marriage, suddenly decided to tune in to that one moment of unease. Go figure?

  ‘This fucking pot, is all.’

  She must have shocked him, if his sharp intake of breath was anything to go by.

  ‘Must be bad,’ he said. ‘Want me to bring in the gurney?’

  Any other day she might have laughed. But not that day.

  She’d felt him shrug and soon after heard him leave the room. For once she’d been glad of his lack of persistence.

  Samantha put her back into scouring the pot again while that accusing voice – Lisa’s voice – whispered criticisms in her ear.

  This mountain is a bastard of a thing. Sure, the long switchbacks take some of the steepness out of it, but not nearly enough for the level of fitness Samantha brings to the task, which is next to n
o fitness at all.

  Nicole pushes ahead, just as she did last time. But there’s no need for them to stick together now so Samantha doesn’t even try to keep up.

  It’s been less than an hour since they left the car park and already the back of her T-shirt is soaked under her pack and she can feel moisture trickle down between her breasts. Maybe her easy sweating is another of those physiological responses – like the clanging sound that started in her head when she heard Lisa’s voice on the phone – a cautionary warning of the body reminding her to take care. As if she needed reminding.

  She’d arrived at the car park ahead of the others. She half expected to see his car still parked there when she pulled in, abandoned, unclaimed. For years Samantha has imagined the panels of it rusting away in the salt air, the red paint blistering in the sun, long grass growing out around perished and airless tyres. But it wasn’t there of course. Too much time has passed.

  Samantha’s face feels hot and she knows she has the flushed look of the unfit. She looks down and sees a crescent of moisture on her T-shirt under each breast and a wet ring round her navel. She was never the dry one at school either. She was always the heavy-set girl with dark moisture lines on her PE uniform, even during the warm-up. By the end of the netball or hockey game her uniform would be soaked.

  She stops and rakes her hair up off her neck. She holds it on the top of her head with the flat of her hands, elbows out wide, walking poles swinging at her sides. The breeze is warm, but it still cools her bare neck.

  She stays like this and watches Nicole as she moves along the trail above. Still athletic, Samantha thinks. Not especially tall, but sturdy and muscled and dogged. She sees that Nicole approaches what they’re doing now with purpose not pleasure. She strains ahead like a horse heading for home. Or is it that she intends to get what they’ve started over with as quickly as possible? Samantha wouldn’t blame her if she were.

  Lisa, on the other hand, moves with the kind of determination Samantha remembers her for. When Samantha was younger, she’d always admired Lisa’s long legs. They were fast, endurance legs; legs that refused to give up. They knew what they were striking out for.

  Lisa stops now and turns to face Samantha, feet planted wide, thumbs loosely tucked under the chest straps of her pack.

  ‘How’re you going? All right?’ she calls back to her.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Samantha releases her hair and the heat immediately starts to build beneath it.

  Lisa turns again and Samantha watches her still-enviably lean legs as she presses away.

  ‘Take a break as often as you like,’ she calls.

  Samantha doesn’t answer. To say Yes, I will or No, I’m fine sets her up for either commitment or lie.

  ‘I’ll wait for you.’

  And neither does Samantha want Lisa to have to wait for her. She wants her to believe that she can do it this time. Samantha wants to believe it of herself.

  She takes another shortcut through a switchback, hoping Nicole won’t notice. She doesn’t like cheating, but limited fitness demands efficiency. Samantha should love the freedom of this slow and repetitious movement. She should love the way it lets her dismiss the usual domestic clutter, thoughts about household chores and the bookkeeping tasks of a plumber’s wife. But she doesn’t.

  She remembers a time she’d have relished the peace. The time she walked out on the children early one evening. Fled really. Slammed the door behind her. Didn’t care that she’d left three boys under eight in the house on their own. Didn’t care that they had no understanding for what drove their mother into the twilight. It was very film noir. A dramatic domestic escape.

  It was the climax of what had been an escalation in tears, tantrums and squabbles throughout a school holiday afternoon. Too many calls of ‘Mu-um! He! Hit! Me!’ Too much whining. Too many demands. Too little relief.

  A switch had flicked inside her. It wasn’t a case of knowing she had to walk away or she’d harm them. It was about self-preservation and nothing to do with the safety of her children at all.

  She’d walked out on the hard footpath in sandals, each step a sharp slap against the concrete.

  She hadn’t known what she was walking towards, only what she was walking away from. Eventually she reached a point, many blocks from home, where she stopped abruptly on the footpath. To anyone who saw, it must have looked as though she’d come up against a pane of glass. She’d turned then and headed back the way she’d come.

  When she arrived home more than an hour later, the three boys were sitting close together on the sofa watching television. Three sets of eyes turned to face her.

  ‘Where’d you go?’

  ‘I missed you, Mummy.’

  ‘We had Oreos for dinner.’

  Harry was back by then. He glanced at Samantha cautiously as she passed him in the kitchen. He never questioned why he’d come home to find three small boys home alone. She was glad he didn’t. It made him complicit in her neglect.

  Samantha still doesn’t know who the truest version of herself was that day: the woman who walked out or the one who came home.

  She expects the same can be asked of all three of them now.

  When Samantha pauses to rest again she doesn’t call out to the others to wait. She doesn’t need them close as she once did. She knew that the minute she saw them in the bar. So why did she agree to come away with them?

  It’d be easy to blame the wine she drank that night. If she’d stuck with mineral water, maybe she wouldn’t have fooled herself into thinking that past steps can, or even should, be retraced. Because while the place she takes those steps in now seems largely unchanged, being of rock and soil, her memories of being here are, and always will be, amorphous. And rarely do they cast her in a good light.

  Lisa was gentle in her persuasion at the bar that night, not pushy or talking over the top of them like she used to. That extraordinary difference in her allowed Samantha to believe that change was possible for any one of them.

  ‘Don’t either of you have regrets?’ Lisa asked.

  Nicole’s answer came quick and sharp. ‘No. What’s the point of them?’

  But Samantha thought Nicole sounded like a fraud, her shrug too rehearsed.

  Samantha had squirmed in her seat because she had a lot of regrets. None she wanted to share. Maybe once she would have, but not now. That’s probably when she started to give too much attention to her wine glass, emptied it too quickly.

  ‘I have regrets,’ Lisa admitted. ‘And I’d like to face them … face who we were.’

  She was reminded again of how fearless Lisa was.

  ‘Face who we were or who you were?’ Nicole asked, finally looking at Lisa.

  ‘All right,’ Lisa acquiesced. ‘Face who I was.’

  Mollified, Nicole returned her gaze to the table.

  ‘I don’t know how else to fix it,’ Lisa added, her voice uncharacteristically soft.

  Nicole said nothing but nodded as though she understood.

  Samantha struggles to even picture her twenty-year-old self, to give this girl shape or form, let alone face who she was. Maybe in coming back here, she too will find the courage she needs to find that girl again. Maybe even learn to like her once more.

  ‘Do either of you even remember why we decided to go out there in the first place?’ Lisa had asked them.

  This Samantha had been willing to answer. ‘To grow up.’

  For her, it was an opportunity to stamp a footprint on her independence. She wanted to prove that she could be self-sufficient and make her own choices, away from the familiarity and security of her parents and her family home. Back then it was about the doing, not the journey – the victory air punch at the end and the shouts of I did it! Except there were no air punches. No victory cries. No sense of achievement.

  ‘And how did that work out for you?’ Nicole scoffed
into her whisky, neat, no ice.

  True, not well, but Samantha didn’t say so. Instead, she took another sip from her glass.

  She supposes it was a naïve belief to hold anyway, that a girl can walk herself into womanly confidence. Still, she admires this idealism of her younger self to even try. She figures in some ways she did grow up, because the girl who entered the trailhead all those years before wasn’t the same one who left it days later. But it wasn’t greater confidence that delineated the girl who started the hike from the one who finished it. It was a loss of innocence.

  The ascent isn’t so much steep as unending. Lisa is slowly increasing the gap between them but Samantha can still see the metronome swing of her blonde ponytail. And Nicole is a good distance further ahead again. She has short, grey-flecked hair now, so there’s no hiding the way her neck muscles strain, the way she leads with her head.

  Samantha’s happy to accept her place as the tail-end drifter, just as she had been at school. There, she hadn’t been the one who decided where the group sat for breaks or the pecking order in which they gathered around a table. Her stories weren’t the ones others wanted to hear and neither was her opinion ever sought. She was the dull fragment at the end of a blazing comet pulled along by the pheromones and chutzpah of the girl leading it.

  Samantha wonders if much ever changes in the hierarchy of school friendships. Somehow she doubts it. She expects many are still maintained by the unchallenged belief that the one calling the shots is the one who should. Being the loudest or the bossiest and, in the case of a bunch of thirteen-year-olds, the prettiest or the most physically developed assures that.

  The assumed leader of the group she’d been desperate to join was a tall, attractive girl whose breasts had developed well before anyone else’s – anyone except Samantha’s that is, but even they hadn’t been currency enough to make her popular. This girl had Brooke Shields hair, which she claimed to spend an hour each morning blow-drying into alluring flicked-back waves. She was a girl who got noticed – by other parents, by teachers, and by boys. And she noticed that she was noticed; a feedback loop of positive reinforcement.