The Geography of Friendship Read online

  Chapter 20

  The hushed beauty of the headland makes it difficult for Lisa to conceive that lives were changed by violence here. Previously, clouds sliced off the tops of mountains, made plateaus of them. The ocean thundered against a shoreline that was difficult to see. There was no real horizon to speak of. It felt as though they were marooned on a pinnacle of rock.

  In contrast, today is a perfect day – still and clear. The ocean has a placid, metallic sheen beneath a sky that is the kind of blue that draws people outdoors. A day to lie back and hold your face up to the sun, eyes closed.

  Not today though. Today Lisa stands rigid on the headland. Her hands grip the barrier that now stretches along the cliff edge. The tubular metal rail is warm and rough with salt and corrosion. The mesh below it is bowed seaward from the feet and knees that have pushed up against it before hers. It did little to stop the vertiginous swoon she’d felt when she first looked down. But it does make her wonder what difference this simple structure might have made to their futures had it been here previously.

  Lisa lifts her gaze from the swirling sea at the base of the cliff and looks outward. She expects many have done the same before her. She turns slowly away from the ocean to the mountains that rear up behind her. It’s a majestic view. One that people would comment on in awe.

  Lisa has no words of admiration for where she stands though. All she can think about is how different her life might have been had she never set foot in this beautiful, treacherous place. Maybe she’d have stood a chance of eventually getting rid of the fight that seems always to live inside her. To set a torch to her quick rage once and for all until it burnt itself out. Instead, she continues to carry the smouldering coals of it. She stokes it often.

  ‘No wonder he wasn’t threatened by us.’

  Lisa turns and looks up at Nicole. She sits atop the same boulder the man had that day. Her knees are drawn up tight against her chest, arms wrapped round them.

  Nicole pushed ahead of Lisa and Samantha once they reached the side trail to the lookout. Her calf muscles bulged as big as ox hearts as she pulled away from them. She looked more machine than human. Someone propelled by rigid cogs and straining pulleys, and not the loose limbs of a walker. By the time Lisa and Samantha reached the headland, Nicole’s pack was already on the ground and she was sitting up high.

  ‘From up here we’d have looked insignificant.’

  And yet it’s Nicole who looks small and withdrawn on her rocky summit.

  ‘He thought we were insignificant no matter where he sat,’ Lisa calls up to her. ‘That was the problem.’

  ‘I thought the problem was your damaged pride?’

  Lisa doesn’t reply. She knows she won’t be kind if she does. Instead, she looks back to the gentle undulations of the ocean. She imagines the water washing over her. She tries to picture it cooling her anger.

  The last four days have been long and hard. She’s tired to the bone and the aches and pains run as deep as them too. And now that they’ve reached this point, she wonders what it was all for. What did she hope to achieve in bringing them back here? Did she really think they could become those young women again? Those three school friends, once united by their differences, only to be dragged apart by them?

  But she knows what the real problem was back then, and it wasn’t her pride.

  ‘We didn’t stick together,’ she calls over her shoulder to Nicole. ‘That was the problem.’

  Samantha turns and frowns at Lisa.

  ‘What?’ she says to her. ‘It’s the truth.’

  What good has it done her to hold down the one thing that has sustained her all these years? Her anger is the single most perfect thing about her, and she’s exhausted as much from pushing back against it as she is from doing this hike. Exhausted from pretending to Samantha and Nicole that she’s changed.

  ‘Talking about blame does none of us any good.’ Samantha says this loudly, so Lisa figures her comment is intended for Nicole as much as it is for her. Sharing the words out, just as she used to. Divvying them up. Equal. Fair. Reasonable. The peacekeeper.

  ‘Don’t you ever want to shout?’ Lisa asks Samantha. ‘To punch walls?’

  Samantha looks away. She doesn’t answer.

  Maybe she does, Lisa thinks. Maybe she also pretends she’s something – someone – else.

  ‘Why don’t you admit it?’

  ‘Admit what?’ Samantha asks, looking at Lisa again.

  Lisa can see Samantha is genuinely confused and for a split second she hates herself. But obviously not enough.

  ‘That we all fucked up. We all killed him.’

  ‘We don’t know that!’ Nicole shouts and Lisa feels the air shift around her as much as hears something whistle past.

  A rock clatters down the cliff face. It takes a small shower of stones with it into the sea.

  The pain in Lisa’s head after the man charged at her and she crashed against the rock was intense. The space before her eyes sparkled with pinpricks of light. Eventually the pain found its rhythm as a deep, dull throb. Later, she found a boggy swelling behind her right ear the size of a toddler’s fist. It took weeks to subside.

  At the time, the pain was nothing compared to the cold joy she felt as she watched the man’s windmilling arms disappear over the cliff’s edge. She thought nothing of what he might be falling to, or how far.

  She hauled herself up on all fours. She doesn’t remember noticing the rocky ground digging into her bare knees or hands. She was wrapped in cotton wool. Not from the low misty clouds all about that day. Her senses were in a fug. Motion slowed. Reality had tipped on an axis so that she no longer held her thoughts straight in her mind.

  She remembers the way Samantha looked on expressionless at the space where the man had been. Then wasn’t. Her arms were limp at her sides. Lisa expected to see anguish or fear on her face. But she showed neither charity nor concern.

  Nicole walked to the cliff’s edge with what seemed deliberate slowness. Or was that just the effect of Lisa’s fuddled thinking? Because surely she’d have rushed.

  She watched as Nicole leant forward at the edge of the cliff and looked down. She turned and walked back, trance-like, to the copse of trees where she’d been tied. With patient force, she worked a broken branch free from the undergrowth, half as thick again as her arm. She dragged it behind her to the edge and lowered the thickest end down. She lay on the ground on her stomach then, head and shoulders over the edge. She gripped the branch in two hands and from there Lisa saw how the small but pronounced muscles in her arms flexed as she shifted the branch about.

  Lisa managed to stand. She and Samantha walked slowly towards Nicole as though summoned by a siren song. They lay on their stomachs beside her and peered over the edge.

  Two metres down, the man lay unmoving on a ledge the size of her Datsun. Beyond that was a fifteen-metre drop into the roiling sea.

  He lay crookedly. His left shoulder was flung back so she could see all of his unshaven face. His small chin sagged towards his chest. It pulled his mouth open. His long hair obscured his right eye. The other she could see. It was opened no more than a slit. A trickle of blood tracked from his hairline down his left temple and into his ear. Lisa looked down the length of his body. His dented metal water bottle was still attached to his belt. He mustn’t have screwed the top on properly after his last drink because it had left a wet stain on the front of his khaki trousers. His right boot was hooked awkwardly under his left calf in a way that would be uncomfortable if he were aware.

  Lisa looked back up to his chest. It shifted up and down slowly.

  Not dead then.

  It felt like a bland diagnosis. One that brought her neither relief nor disappointment.

  She remembers thinking Who am I? as she looked down at the unconscious man and feeling nothing for his predicament. She also remembers feeling a
rare stab of fear at no longer knowing with any certainty.

  Nicole hadn’t acknowledged them as they lay alongside her. She doggedly kept up her task of trying to wedge the branch under the unconscious man’s shoulder.

  Lisa looked sideways at her. The girl she saw was a cicada husk of the one she knew, an incomplete version of the real Nicole. That girl wore her righteousness as proud armour. She was someone Lisa relied upon to be her guiding compass and point her away from her own recklessness. But this girl, the one beside Lisa then, was more interested in applying the laws of load and leverage to a lethal task than those of compassion or safety.

  Nicole looked neither disappointed nor frustrated by the difficulty of what she was attempting to do. She quietly persisted. Tried different areas along the length of the man’s body under which to lodge her branch. She managed to hoist his left leg over his right so that at least his hips were directed towards the edge of the ledge. She set to work on his shoulders once more after that. Got his left arm across his chest briefly, but then it clunked back on the rock behind him again.

  The man groaned softly each time she dug the branch under him. Lisa imagined how the sharp, splintered end of the wood must have bruised or broken the skin beneath his clothes.

  ‘Nicole?’ Lisa said, finally finding her voice.

  She still recalls the gentleness of her tone. And yet she doesn’t know what made her think she had to be gentle. Maybe, subconsciously, she remembered schoolgirl tales of the dangers of abruptly waking a sleepwalker. Because surely it was a similar state that Nicole was in? All Lisa knew with any clarity was that she shouldn’t startle Nicole. That she shouldn’t risk some confused action that could put any one of them on the ledge alongside the man. Or worse – to the place below where she seemed determined to push him.

  Nicole ignored Lisa. She kept up her prodding with the branch.

  ‘Nicole?’ Lisa said again, but louder. She placed her hand on Nicole’s arm.

  Nicole looked down bewildered at Lisa’s filthy hand with its broken nails and bloodied knuckles. She shuffled away from her a little, as she might if an accidental but unnecessary intrusion on her space had occurred on a bus or a train. A small, discreet repositioning as though not wanting to offend. She returned then, to her deadly but determined task.

  It was a selfish thought Lisa recognises now, but part of her had felt a sense of relief at what Nicole was doing. Because while not exonerating the role Lisa had played, it made her feel that at least all three of them were complicit then. That in some way Samantha’s, then Nicole’s actions reduced her own culpability.

  Nicole managed to get a branch-hold under his left shoulder again and with a grunt she pushed him over so that he was fully on his right side. She moved the branch down to his buttocks after that. She pressed it into the soft flesh and pushed.

  ‘No.’ Samantha spoke so softly that Lisa could barely hear her.

  Then she spoke again and her voice was loud and firm. ‘Stop.’

  Samantha hauled herself onto her knees and shuffled in closer to Nicole. ‘Stop,’ she said again and placed her hand on Nicole’s arm. ‘No more.’

  Nicole turned to face Samantha for a moment. Then turned back and looked down at her hands, wrapped round the branch. She frowned at them as though uncertain about whose they were. She carefully rested the branch against the cliff face and gripped the rocky edge of the cliff with both hands. Her knuckles whitened. She opened her mouth wide as though to scream. But no sound came out. Instead, her shoulders hitched in big, strangled sobs while tears streaked through the dirt that covered her face.

  They turned their backs on the headland after that. They turned their backs on the man. Left him alone on the ledge. Left him to whatever was to happen to him next. They walked away soiled and bleeding and altered by what happened there.

  Nicole pulled away from them on the trail back down. Already working on building the distance between them. Not once did she look back. And as they drew further and further away from the headland, Lisa stopped looking back too. She gradually started to close down that part of her life as well.

  Chapter 21

  How to articulate shame? How to stop it existing only as a deadening of feeling? To give it a face and character, some purpose, so that it might be studied from all sides and better understood, used for good?

  Nicole has never been able to find the words to describe hers. Even though it lives on in her. It is an experience that’s never grown out of, never reconciled. Something that has marked her in permanent ways. It’s made its home inside her, but radiates no homely comforts, only cold numbness. It shuts out the forces of warmth and joy and kindness. It tells her she doesn’t deserve them. And it has a long tail. One she’s learned to live with, but never beyond.

  Nicole envies Lisa’s apparent lack of it. Maybe if Nicole had her pluck she could have avoided it too. She might have fought more forcefully against the man. Avoided being led like an animal. Not grovelled and pleaded so quickly and easily. As it is, she feels complicit in her abduction. Too willing to comply with the terms of it, as though there was no other option available to her. And when she finally found the courage to exert her will against his, it was only when it was safe for her to do so. Once he no longer posed any threat. In this, Nicole knows herself to be no better than him. They both acted outside of the rules.

  From where she sits now, up high on the boulder, she feels as though she’s in the balcony seats of a theatre looking down upon a stage. This stage, while unconventional, is no less capable of drama. It’s a relatively flat dais of rock. Cushioned in places with low, wombat-nibbled grass. The sea crashes against the shoreline and provides a fitting soundtrack as the waves build into a series of threatening crescendos. And the light and shade of shadows brings shape-shifting life to the boulders that surround it. They take their place as characters in this play, either villain or hero depending on the imagination. The man-made barrier along the cliff edge is the only impurity to this natural set.

  Nicole felt a surge of anger when she first saw the barrier. It made the site of her drama look too safe. She stared at it for some time. Felt her hands clench and unclench at her sides. Felt her jaw tighten. This salt-scarred structure would have taken at least one scene away from the performance. It would have allowed her to remain better than the man.

  She felt she was owed some kind of explanation for its installation. Stupidly, she looked for a sign that read Erected because followed by a list of all the falls or near falls that had necessitated its construction. She could have believed then that what happened here was an avoidable accident. That it had nothing to do with her at all.

  She looks down from the boulder to where Lisa stands now, hands on the top rail of the barrier, looking out across the ocean. Even though Lisa seems small from up here, Nicole can still see the signature signs of her rage. It’s there – has been all along – in her shoulders, the way the tightness in them forms a gully down her spine, shortens her neck. She’s held it in check so well. But Nicole knows the burden of suppressing emotions, be that anger, shame or guilt. It’s like wrestling smoke. It’s all around, affects the way you see things, but is impossible to hold.

  Nicole doesn’t feel good about the accusations she’s levelled against Lisa along the way. But that’s all part of wrestling with something that can’t be gripped. Cruel remarks leave the body unchecked. Rocks are thrown. Nicole won’t deny that to be able to blame someone else has been a welcome relief from the steady internal monologue of no-good accusations she levels against herself.

  Now that she’s back here, Nicole realises her return doesn’t change or solve anything. The bitterness of this thought surprises her. She must have hoped that she’d find a fix. An easy new beginning. Did she expect to arrive at the headland and it would all be exactly as she’d left it more than twenty years before? All she had to do was tidy up any sign of ever having been here, like pic
king up the dropped stitch in a knitted garment? Set the place aright and along with it her life?

  All she’s discovered is that this place holds no trace of what happened to her. It is completely indifferent, thriving even. It’s as though she’s been told that what happened here was insignificant, unworthy of any record. And that she doesn’t matter either.

  This realisation hits her like a knee to the stomach.

  Nicole drops her head onto her forearms feeling physically winded. She tries to pull air into her lungs but everything inside her feels tight and closed. Or tighter and more closed, because she can’t remember a time anymore when she felt anything but.

  She hauls herself up to her feet. She needs to get her breath, but her legs don’t feel fit for purpose. She bends forward, hands on knees, and tries to draw in air. She hears a soft animal noise rise up from somewhere. She realises it’s coming from her. It builds to a low keen. She doesn’t recognise the sound as her own and neither does she recognise the feeling that drives it. But if she were to give it a name then she’d probably call it the sound of wretchedness.

  Standing here, stooped over on this grand, aeons old boulder, Nicole feels such an insignificant and fragile thing in comparison to all that surrounds her. What does she bring to this landscape? This life? What is her purpose? What is her function? And because she can’t think of an answer, her keening grows.

  ‘Nicole?’

  Samantha’s voice is a distant-through-time sound. A call from another era, back when hearing the concern in her voice might have made a difference.

  Metres below, Nicole sees them both gaze up at her. Their faces seem dulled. Fragmented. It’s like they’re disappearing.

  She stands tall and forces herself to relax, to let go of muscles she imagines she’s held tight for years. She wants to feel softness. She wants to feel something of who she used to be. And with this loosening comes a sense of lightness. An unburdening. She thinks she must be swaying because the two pale faces below seem to drift about like Chinese lanterns on a breeze.