The Geography of Friendship Read online

  Samantha couldn’t help herself. She wanted some of this girl’s confident self-awareness. She tried to hang out with her group, hoped it would rub off on her. She lasted a couple of weeks. Her relegation to the outer started with a few harmless enough pokes to her rubbery sides, but then the barbed comments soon followed: Chips for lunch again? Maybe you should eat more apples?

  When she looks back on her thirteen-year-old self, Samantha can see what those girls saw when they looked at her: someone with thick thighs, full buttocks and strong arms; someone whose kneecaps and elbows and collarbones weren’t delicate, defined lines and angles. She was a girl sheathed in softness when all around her was preferred, perfect thinness.

  When she was eventually shown a circle of backs at break time, she had no option but to turn away and show them hers. And while she can recall her departure from the group with indifference now, at the time it had cut deeply at her confidence.

  It was then that Samantha noticed Lisa, sitting alone on the steps behind the tuckshop of their school. She didn’t really know her but even then Samantha had been able to tell that the strawberry-blonde with freckles had a hair-trigger for anger. She’d seen Lisa lash out at a boy in class who thought he’d help himself to the half-eaten Mars Bar on her desk.

  ‘Don’t! Dickhead!’ Lisa snapped, and brought her hand down in a savage karate chop on the boy’s forearm so that the pen he held flew across the room. The boy had laughed for the benefit of his mates but Samantha saw how he rubbed at the spot on his arm under his desk afterwards.

  Lisa had just taken a pot shot at the rubbish bin with an apple core on the day Samantha first noticed her. The bin was two metres away and the apple core landed wide. Lisa shrugged and rested her elbows back on the step behind her, stretching her long legs out and crossing them at the ankles so that her black school shoes flopped out sideways to resemble a fish’s tail. She held her freckled face up to the sun, her long blonde hair brushing the step, her flat chest pushed to the sky. When Samantha thinks back on this image now, she thinks of a selkie with sass.

  ‘That’d give the prefects something to pick a fight over,’ Samantha said.

  Lisa looked from Samantha to the apple core and shrugged. ‘They can try and pick a fight with me,’ she said. ‘But they won’t win.’ She turned her face back to the sun and smiled.

  Samantha sensed she was welcome and sat down.

  ‘You’ll give yourself more freckles,’ she said as she stretched out like Lisa.

  ‘D’you reckon they’ll all join up one day and I’ll look really tanned?’

  ‘Nah. Don’t like your chances.’

  For a slim girl, Lisa laughed big. Samantha was a big girl and knew she laughed small.

  She turned to look at Samantha through one eye; the other squinted against the sun. ‘I’ve seen you round,’ she said. ‘You’ve got big bones.’

  ‘Yeah? So?’ Samantha decided she must have sensed her welcome wrongly, so made to get up from the step, but not before she added what she hoped was an equal insult. ‘And you’ve got no boobs, so we’ve both got something other girls don’t want.’

  Lisa grabbed Samantha’s arm and kept hold of it as she laughed that big laugh again. ‘Wish I was more like your stuck-up friends?’ She nodded in the direction of the group of girls Samantha had been expelled from.

  ‘They’re not my friends,’ she mumbled and looked away.

  Lisa let go of Samantha’s arm and nudged her thigh playfully. ‘They were never gonna be, ya dag.’

  Even all these years later, Samantha knows she didn’t imagine the warm affection in Lisa’s voice. She walks on now, allowing the past to walk alongside her, but grateful that this memory from it has been generous.

  The track is marked by the prints of many walkers. An assortment of small rhomboids, triangles and argyle patterns are pressed into the sandy soil, each a signature of the person who has passed before. Samantha wonders at the stories these feet might carry, what hardships they’ve borne.

  Previously they had set out on a mostly virgin trail, the paw prints of wallabies, bush rats and wombats the only signs of life. It confirmed their isolation, though they didn’t speak of it. That was one of their errors, not speaking enough, not being honest enough. Samantha suspects little has changed about them in this regard.

  She looks up at the backs of Lisa and Nicole now. She recalls how when they set out that first day they walked like they were already buggered, head and shoulders down. Nothing piqued their interest. They passed the landscape without remark. What happened in the car park had killed some of the joy of their anticipated adventure.

  Samantha remembers how, in wanting to lift their mood, she had called out to those beaten backs. ‘We can just ignore him if we see him.’

  Lisa had stopped abruptly and swung round to face her. Nicole hadn’t looked at either of them. Instead, she gazed off into the bush, eyes lifted high above the canopy.

  ‘Very wise,’ Lisa snapped. ‘Typically, very rollover safe.’ She’d turned then, pushed past Nicole and walked on, thin legs working hard. Lisa didn’t look beaten after that, she looked angry; something that propelled her for the remainder of the hike.

  It’s easy to pinpoint all the comments and actions that if retracted, could have made a difference, Samantha’s suggestion that they ignore someone’s behaviour being just one of them. None of which is possible now of course.

  So what is now’s job? Samantha wonders. What is there to gain, after all this time, in facing their past actions as Lisa said she wanted to do?

  Samantha had gained Harry’s attention. That much she knows.

  His embrace when she left had been awkward. He had his work cap on, the one with their company’s name and logo embroidered on the front – Titus Plumbing – and the hard ridge of its peak had blocked his face and knocked against her head when she leaned in. She had to reach up and remove it in the end, just so she could kiss his cheek.

  Samantha got into her car and wound down the window to say goodbye. He rested his hands on the car’s roof and this giant of a man had to dip his knees so he could see in. For the second time that week, she could tell he was really looking at her.

  She can’t deny the thrill she got at becoming more visible as she prepared for the hike. She’d thought she was after peace or understanding or forgiveness in coming back here. But maybe all she wants is to have her presence noted by its absence?

  Harry had looked bemused as the equipment accumulated.

  ‘What’s it for?’ he asked again.

  ‘I told you. A hike.’

  ‘A hike?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘What kind of hike?’

  ‘A bushwalking kind of hike.’

  He scanned the gear laid out on the bed in the spare bedroom.

  ‘Do you hike?’ he asked eventually.

  Samantha didn’t answer because she knew he was asking himself this question, not her.

  She watched him as he picked up a walking pole and inspected the mechanism of it before he put it back on the bed. He moved to a packet of freeze-dried food, brought it close to his face and studied the label.

  ‘Beef stroganoff,’ he read and shook the contents of the packet.

  Next he picked up a resealable plastic bag with first aid gear inside, something she’d been tasked to carry.

  You always had the strongest stomach, Lisa had said to her, so you should be in charge of it.

  But Lisa’s memory was wrong. Samantha had the weakest stomach.

  Harry studied the contents through one side of the clear plastic – blister plasters, strapping tape, triangular bandage, safety pins – then turned it over and looked at the contents through the other side. He bounced it in his hand a few times, perhaps testing the weight of it, before he placed it back on the bed.

  ‘How many days are you going for agai
n?’

  ‘It’s a five-day circuit.’ A loop, a circle, the end coming back round to the beginning again, except for them it only ever marked the end.

  ‘Five? And you say you haven’t seen these women for what … over twenty years?’

  She shrugged. Tried to make light of the fact. ‘We were close.’ She didn’t add once.

  He ran a finger up the pile of folded clothes, across the T-shirts, trousers, a fleece, wet weather gear. As drab and unflattering as these items were, Samantha imagined them like a high-vis vest to Harry’s normal order of things.

  Then for the first time since his inspection of her gear started, he really looked at her. ‘Should you be doing this?’ he asked.

  She imagined him looking for ways in as he studied her face, trying to connect with her usual sense of reason, looking for the calm, acquiescing woman he was used to. She recognised in that moment that if she allowed him to tap into these soft, safe places she risked losing her newly found courage. This gatekeeper would absorb any of the self-determination and spontaneity she’d recently developed. She felt an insurgent rush then. She stopped herself from saying what she was really thinking, which was Probably not.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I should.’ And the conviction in her voice had surprised her.

  Samantha thinks familiarity has been their enemy. They live their lives with insufficient surprises.

  She supposes she’s to blame for this as much as him. She gave up on taking risks when she gave up on her friendship with Lisa and Nicole. Which probably explains her quick acceptance of safe monogamy as soon as it was offered.

  She had woken that first morning to this bear of a man – the man who would become her husband – taking up more than half of her double bed. For a moment she couldn’t recall how he came to be there. Then she remembered the smoky nightclub, too many tequila shooters and the loud disco beats from the night before.

  He slept on his back, one arm slung above his head and he breathed softly – a bonus, she remembers thinking. As she watched him sleep, she recalled the thrill of running her nails through his thick chest hair – hair their future sons would be relieved they didn’t inherit. And she liked the dark regrowth across his jaw. There would be a period during their marriage when it would become a thick and full beard. She’d had few lovers – and one she couldn’t even call that – but when she looked at this one, she thought of those others as boys. This time she’d brought home a man.

  He was surprisingly shy when he woke. He kept the sheet across his naked torso as he scrabbled about for his clothes on the floor beside the bed. He sat on the edge of the mattress to pull on his underpants, so all she saw was the brief flash of his pale muscular buttocks.

  As she watched his self-conscious dressing she wondered if he’d liked to have been able to un-choose the outcome of the evening before.

  He asked for her number before he left though, and he rang her that night. Her hangover was gone but the memory of him lingered.

  ‘Can we try that again,’ he asked. ‘But sober?’

  ‘What? The sex?’ she teased.

  ‘No. The meeting one another.’

  She’d felt young and foolish then. But she also felt flattered. ‘I’d like that,’ she said and meant it.

  She wonders now what happens to the fire and pluck of love’s first vigour? Where does it go? Is it completely extinguished by the burden of parenting, working, providing?

  She wishes all the texture of their early relationship could be returned to them – the crushing passion, the fear of absence, the urgency with which they seized love in order to not risk losing it. As it is, they might still have one another, but mostly they are lost in the same home.

  When Samantha reaches the top of the next rise, the other two are already making their way down the other side. She doesn’t mind. She takes the opportunity to catch her breath. She lowers herself onto a boulder. Her bottom lands with a thud in the last few inches. To have the weight of her pack now resting on granite and not her shoulders is bliss.

  She looks about. The area seems familiar, which she suspects is more from expectation than any actual memory of it. In coming back she knew she’d see eucalypts and bracken, banksia and she-oak. She knew there would be mountains and gullies and that each would require rigour to negotiate. She knew there would be rocky headlands, their granite faces slapped by a turbulent sea. All of this has proved accurate. But for her to say she has seen that tree before, or this boulder, is impossible.

  What she can identify with clarity though is the feeling that comes with being here. This sensation is more reliably familiar than anything her eyes might be able to land upon. She feels it in the band that slipped round her stomach the moment she drove into the trailhead car park, and which hasn’t eased off since. She feels it in the fluttering panic that keeps visiting her heart. These things she can point a finger to and say, I know you, we’ve been acquainted before.

  Samantha gathers together an assortment of small flat stones from beside her. She places the largest of them – no broader than a blood plum – on the rock where she sits and builds up from there. It takes some balancing but eventually she has a small cairn, five stones high, the last no bigger than her thumb. It’s a wonky tower, skewed off to the right. On reflection she should have used a better foundation stone. A flatter one.

  She knows these patiently enduring stones won’t last in the form she’s given them. She expects they’ll topple with the next walker who sits here or the next storm that brings along a cavalcade of twigs and branches, and they’ll be arranged in a new order on the ground. Still, for now it’s a pleasing little thing to look at. It’s evidence that she’s been here.

  Samantha stands and adjusts the waist belt of her pack so that it sits on her hips again but the weight of it still pulls down on her shoulders. She looks to the descent ahead and feels a mixture of relief at the ease of going downhill and trepidation at the loose gravel she’s to negotiate on the steep slope. Walking on this stuff is like walking on rice in new leather-soled shoes.

  If Harry were here, she pictures him going confidently down the trail ahead of her. But he wouldn’t think to hold his hand out to her. Wouldn’t think to look back to see how she was going. He wasn’t always like this. There is a layer to him that is missing now. It’s the one she fell in love with.

  What’s gone is the man who had a quiet way of letting her know that he had her back. The man who used to hold her hand when he led her through a crowd, his body twisted just enough to place her behind him. The man who walked kerbside on a footpath. The man who quietly insisted That’s enough, to a lewd, drunken mate. Samantha thought these acts would be there forever. But she was wrong. And now that they’ve gone it raises the question: is he less threatened or is she less valuable?

  She scans the ground before she takes the next step, looks for the safest spot to place her foot, the most reliable. It’s exhausting, this cautious progress. The fear that every step might be the one that takes her feet out from under her. She knows with a pack on her back that she’s a heavy load to drop from standing.

  Nicole is out of sight. Samantha imagines her at the bottom of the descent by now, probably even negotiating the next rise. Lisa is a good way ahead. She could easily keep up with Nicole. Samantha knows she’s going slowly on purpose, but she wishes she wouldn’t. If she falls she doesn’t want any witnesses. Samantha slows and is relieved when Lisa disappears behind a bend in the trail.

  The fall when it does come is sudden and surprisingly graceful. One second she’s standing, the next she’s flat on her back. After the initial shock passes, her first thought is if she feels any pain. The exquisite kind. The type that sets off alarm bells of a tear or a fracture. Thankfully, she feels nothing beyond the general aches she’s felt all day. She doesn’t have the energy or strength in her legs to push herself up, so she lies there for a while, like a turtle stran
ded on its back, and takes in her new sky view. She feels the depth of her exhaustion acutely. It’s a fatigue she recognises, one that runs deep to the bone. The kind she’d felt as a mother with a sleepless newborn, then another and another, till she had three under four, and she’d blink asleep, sometimes standing up.

  It’s only mid-afternoon but from her low spot on the ground the sun is out of sight behind the tree line along the mountain ridge. White pillows of cloud amble along overhead. She imagines one of them soft under her body. A wagtail peers down at her from a gnarly old banksia branch. It pivots its head left and right a couple of times, then flits off with a quickness that her eye almost misses. She thinks about how light and ably equipped it is for the environment. Then there’s her, a large and awkward thing. A blight on the landscape.

  Samantha feels the hopelessness of her situation and thinks she might be about to cry. What she’s doing is too hard. She wants to go home where the floors are soft and safe and she can walk across them in bare feet. Where there is air conditioning in every room and flyscreens on every window and where cold running water comes straight from a little spout in the fridge door. She wants to stop this false bravado and go back to the predictability of her life. Go back to the routine and sheer mundaneness of her days where a fall such as this is inconceivable.

  She considers turning around and going back. It’s too late in the day to do that now of course. But she could do it in the morning. There’s nothing to stop her. She’ll wave Lisa and Nicole on their way – they don’t owe each other anything after all – and she’ll walk back to her car. Drive home. Return to all the things she knows so well.

  And this thought makes her move. It makes her roll off her back and onto her side. It makes her get onto all fours. It makes her push up with her arms and legs till she stands again, facing the way she’s come and not the way she was going. And with as much care as she can muster, she turns and looks downhill again. And because she knows only too well what is at home and not enough about the woman who lives there, she looks once more for the best spot to place her foot. And tomorrow she’ll do the same. And the day after that.