The Geography of Friendship Page 22

  ‘Nicole!’ Lisa’s voice cuts through the fug. It’s loud, more urgent than Samantha’s was. Bossier too. Nicole is momentarily surprised by the familiarity of it.

  She senses more than sees a blur of movement below. A brisk shift of arms and legs and then there is just one face looking up. It shifts in and out of focus but she’s familiar enough with it again to recognise it as Samantha’s.

  ‘Sit down!’ Samantha calls. ‘Please. Just sit down.’

  Nicole doesn’t sit. Instead, she thinks about closing her eyes. Closing them to the contours of the land – the mountains, the ocean, the sky. Closing them to the contours inside her. The rise and pitch and plummet of feelings she’s navigated all these years.

  And because her eyes have to take in so much, must look so far, she does close them. And in the thin darkness that follows her breathing eases. Her throat hushes. And for a moment she thinks she might feel joy.

  ‘Hurry Lisa!’

  Nicole wishes she could shut down sound the same way she’s shut down sight. Samantha’s voice is an intrusion. It’s a handwringing sound. One she doesn’t want to feel responsible for.

  ‘For God’s sake, Nicole! Sit down!’

  There’s no breeze but Nicole’s body sways as if there is. She feels herself tilt and correct on proprioceptive cue. She thinks about how she need only lean forward, push out with her chest to begin with – just a little, just enough – and the rest of her will follow as she tips the balance. Just as the man’s balance was tipped. And she’ll finally have an end. A hard and beckoning bottom. Just there. Just there in that no longer seen space before her. Not falling. Surrendering.

  Chapter 22

  Samantha doesn’t build a cairn on the headland. She thought about it. It was going to be a large one if she did. Monumental. Precise. Sturdy. A thing of beauty. Her best yet.

  But she doesn’t build one, not here. Instead, she edges around the end of the barrier. Squeezes through the gap between rock and mesh, hitches herself up taller, thinner, until she’s standing on the precipitous side of the fence.

  Lisa sits on the ground a few metres behind. Nicole sits between her legs, resting back against her chest. Their heads touch. Lisa has her arms round her. Nicole shivers still, just a little, even though the day is warm. Samantha knows Nicole’s safe in those arms.

  There’s a fizz in her gut and a blood-thump in her ears from being on this side, the wrong side, of the barrier. No one’s forced her to be here. It’s her idea.

  ‘I need to know more,’ she said to the others.

  They didn’t say anything. But neither did they disagree.

  She holds onto the railing with both hands and tries to channel some of Harry’s nerve.

  He is always calm in a crisis. He never gets flustered or angry or shouts. He thinks clearly, practically. Slips into whatever man he needs to be to suit the situation. Samantha thinks she sensed this protective calm in him when they met. Maybe this is what she fell in love with first, his ability to absorb fear or worry so that she didn’t have to. Sponged it up like a water spill. Kept her on her dry pinnacle. Safe. That he could do this and love her back had seemed more than she deserved at the time.

  Samantha rests her forehead on the top bar of the barrier. She stays like that for a moment until her breath steadies. Then she looks down to find her first foothold.

  Lisa doesn’t call for Samantha to be careful. Neither does she come and watch her progress, advice at the ready. Samantha is pleased about this. She wants her faith, not her guidance.

  She looks down, but doesn’t let her gaze travel all the way to the crashing waves fifteen metres below. She tasks her eyes only with finding a spot where she can place her foot. There’s a shelf just below and she lowers her right leg down to it, gripping the mesh with clawed fingers.

  Her boot slips. The shelf is covered with ball bearing-like gravel. Her heart tumbles in her chest. She pauses to steady it, carefully clearing the surface of gravel with her boot. She hears it patter against rocks as it falls.

  Samantha tests that the shelf has the design to hold her. She gradually increases the load on it. The wire cuts into her fingers as she eases her body down till her leg bears all of her weight. It holds.

  She imagines any one of her sons making this two-metre descent with quick ease. Fearless. Agile. One, two, three steps and they’d be down. They’d trust the rocks they stepped on to bear them. Trust their ability to choose them well. Once on the ledge below, she imagines how they’d sit with their legs over the edge of it, feet swinging. As calm and at ease as a Pacific gull taking a breather.

  Samantha takes an unreasonable amount of time to decide where to place her foot next. She tests one spot, then another, but she’s too cautious to trust any of them. Just pick one! she thinks. And so she does.

  Her fingers go red from gripping firstly the mesh then once it’s out of reach, they go red from gripping rock ledges. She must trust all four points – hands and feet. It’s a descent of faith as much as one of nerve.

  She concentrates so hard that she doesn’t notice the thump of fear again till she’s reached the ledge. Once there, she doesn’t trust her legs so she gets down on all fours. She crawls back from the edge of it and sits with her back pressed up against the cliff face.

  ‘Made it,’ she calls as agreed.

  ‘Okay,’ Lisa calls back.

  Not Well done or I knew you could do it or Be careful. Samantha appreciates Lisa’s restraint.

  She rests her head back against the cliff face, eyes closed, till her breathing and heart steadies. She opens them again after a time and looks out across the ocean.

  Silver gulls are suspended on thermal currents before her. They hang there like a child’s mobile. Some are almost at eye level. She can see their red legs pulled up into the white undercarriage of their bellies. Their wings are spread wide and are mostly still as they hold their bodies aloft, except for the tips of their feathers, which quiver in the soft breeze. They change course with slight tilts and dips. Others flap vigorously past, a destination in mind. Beneath them, beneath her, is a vast body of silken water. There’s a tanker in the distance. Red. The size of a paperclip.

  Now that she’s here, Samantha welcomes the solitude. Her muscles finally relax and her back moulds into the rock face behind her. She stretches out her legs. They don’t quite reach the edge. She places her hands flat beside her. She feels the long history of scars on the stone beneath them. She can think about Nicole now that she’s here, cry if she wants. There’s no one to see her quick blinks or quivering bottom lip, which in front of Nicole earlier, she’d had to pinch between thumb and finger to keep steady.

  To think of Nicole is to think of the kind of trust Samantha needed of herself just now to reach this ledge. Not being able to trust in others is one thing, but to realise you can’t trust in yourself is something else altogether. Because who are we left with, if not ourselves? Who pulls us back from the edge? Who’s the last one to stop us falling, if not ourselves?

  Lisa has stopped Nicole for now. She wrapped those thin, strong arms around her, pulled Nicole back from the edge of herself. The same arms that always fought for them, always had their backs regardless of whether or not the recklessness of them was the reason she needed to act. Then Harry took Lisa’s place for Samantha.

  She thinks back to the conversation she had with him as she was leaving for this hike. Her backpack still smelt shop-bought on the back seat of her car, not the filthy sweaty thing it is now.

  ‘Do you ever think about when we first got together?’ she asked him.

  Harry rested his forearms on the frame of her open car window. He picked at a spot of dirt on his arm, tried to scrape it off but didn’t have the fingernails for the job. ‘Not really,’ he said.

  Samantha looked ahead over the car’s dash. ‘I do. I think about how you called me after that first night and
asked if we could do it again … the meeting one another … but sober.’ She turned to look at him. ‘Do you remember that?’

  Harry didn’t pause to think. He nodded straight away. It surprised her.

  ‘Yeah. I remember.’

  ‘I think we need to try that again,’ she said. ‘The meeting one another.’

  ‘But I know you now.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You have an idea of who I am, but it’s built on what you expect me to be.’

  ‘What if I don’t like the new you as much?’ he joked. ‘Can I get the old one back?’

  ‘This is serious, Harry. Our marriage is failing.’

  He finally stopped picking at the dirt on his arm and looked at her. For the first time this safe, reliable and predictable man showed Samantha his fear.

  ‘Is it?’ he asked.

  She thinks of the quiet way he has of diverting disputes. His softly spoken, I’ve got this, said with a steady hand to a shoulder, almost as if he hopes to take up the person’s tension through his palm. But in that moment beside the car, Samantha saw that he didn’t have this. This was something beyond his control or ability to mop up. In fact, she doesn’t expect he even knows where to begin.

  So it’s down to her. Has she got this? Is she prepared to keep him safe? Safe with her?

  They’re both imperfect, but he’s always accepted her as good enough, something she’s never accepted of herself. Maybe each of them is being the best they know how to be? Maybe they’re as good as they’ll ever be?

  Half her life has been spent with him. And while he doesn’t always see her, she expects this is because he trusts he could put his hand out, even if they were to live in complete darkness, and know it would find her. Maybe she’s being childish in still wanting – expecting – the first flush of a new relationship after more than twenty years. Maybe what they have now is what the intense and complex emotion of first love subdues into. Something that in truth might be more beneficial to the longevity of a relationship – contentment in belonging.

  She takes this time now to cry. Not big hitching sobs. She expects they’ll come later. Her tears are mostly silent. She cries for all their losses. Their innocence. Their courage. Their friendship. She cries for what could have been.

  After a while, she dries her cheeks on the hem of her T-shirt. Takes some deep breaths. She’s ready to start her search.

  She doesn’t know what she’s looking for. What could still be here after so many years? Stupidly, she expected to see the branch still up against the cliff face when she first looked over the edge. A callous reminder of how unhinged they were. But of course it would have rotted away or rolled into the ocean long ago. It will be in a million tiny, scattered splinters by now.

  She shifts along the ledge on all fours. She still doesn’t trust herself to stand. She runs her hand across the cliff face as she goes, studies its grey surface. She scours the ledge. She looks for what? Bones? Teeth? Die cunts gouged into the rock?

  She finds no tufts of dark hair. No dented water bottle wedged into a crevasse. No scraps of khaki fabric. No wristwatch or buttons or zips.

  There’s litter: a soft drink can, a faded muesli bar wrapper, a desiccated apple core. Bird shit. Leaves. Twigs.

  And there are loose stones. She gathers together as many suitable ones as she can find.

  It’s a small, imperfect cairn. It’s not sturdy or precise or beautiful. But it’s here on this secret-keeping ledge. And she built it.

  Chapter 23

  They set up their tents at the final campsite but decide not to sleep in them. Instead, they lay their sleeping mats side by side on the ground. Together, they’ve decided to sleep under the stars.

  They hadn’t stopped here last time. They’d rushed back to their packs as quickly as their shaken, battered bodies had allowed. Nicole hadn’t even argued against it when Lisa and Samantha took some of the weight from her pack. They walked through the night, following the weak beams of their torches. They walked in silence. The air was damp and carried the medicinal scent of eucalyptus oil. The trees dripped moisture; it rained down upon her if any breeze caught their leaves.

  Lisa walked behind the other two. She wanted to be the first one he came across should he follow. If he even could.

  She saw them stumble. She saw them fall. She helped them up.

  The night was rich with sounds – the strangled, vibrating growls of possums, the grating chirr of nightjars. Cricket orchestras played. There were whistles and warbles and shuffles in the undergrowth. Lisa startled often. She expects the others did too. Paired lights shone down on her from branches or through the scrub – eyes that were red, white, amber. Mostly they disappeared as quickly as they appeared. By dawn, her nerves were as raw as a wound scoured by a wire brush.

  They didn’t talk about the man they’d left behind on the ledge. They didn’t talk about the fact that she had wanted to throw his backpack from the cliff into the sea. Leaving him with nothing.

  Samantha stopped her. ‘Don’t!’

  The force of her voice had startled Lisa enough to make her drop his pack back on the ground.

  Nicole wouldn’t look at them, let alone tell them what he’d done to her. This was – still is – left for them to imagine.

  The detail seems immaterial now. How Nicole’s world looked afterwards is all that matters.

  Lisa knows Nicole’s disconnection began that night. She eased away from them step after step. Moved to the other side of something. A place where neither Lisa nor Samantha could follow her or hope to pull her back from.

  By the time they reached the car park just before sunrise, the Nicole that Lisa had known for years had gone.

  Lisa likes the unfamiliarity of tonight’s campsite. It’s lack of history.

  It’s a pretty site. Inland. A shallow creek runs beside it, so the grass is lush and spongy underfoot. The water is cold and clear and a balm for worked feet. The trees are at rest. The afternoon sun is kindly. After the heavy burdens of the day, she feels lightness now for having arrived here. For having made it.

  There are three other tents set up in nearby clearings. A comfortable chatter comes from each. Lisa feels like they’re a part of something more. She wonders at the difference it would have made if the area had been as frequented by hikers then as it is now. They could have walked, camped, with others. Found civility in company. Been less susceptible to the animal actions of an individual. Become less like animals themselves.

  But she’s not here to find excuses or to reimagine what could have been. She’s here to forgive the person she was back then. The one she’s been since. It’s a big ask. She knows she’s not even close yet to achieving it. But at least her older self has started a conversation with the younger one. They might yet become friends.

  A buttery moon nudges up from behind the crown of a tree. It looks like one half of a broken biscuit. It also looks close enough that Lisa could reach out and pluck it from the night sky.

  ‘I kept an eye on the newspapers afterwards,’ Samantha says.

  Lisa feels Nicole nod beside her. ‘So did I.’

  They lie on their backs in their sleeping bags. Nicole in the middle. Lisa had held back laying out her sleeping mat. She felt like someone playing a game of three cups. She watched for where the one with the stone landed.

  ‘I’m okay,’ Nicole said when she settled in alongside her.

  Lisa liked that she hadn’t sounded embarrassed.

  It’s cooler now the sun has set. But it’s cosy in her downy sleeping bag. With hands under her head, Lisa looks up and admires the vapour trail of stars that make up the Milky Way.

  ‘I never found anything though,’ Samantha continues. ‘No reports of a rescue. Or a missing person. Or of a body being found. Nothing.’

  Lisa doesn’t admit that she didn’t even look. It’s not that she forgot about him, be
cause she never has. It’s just that she didn’t care enough about him to want to know his fate.

  ‘I thought about driving back here a few weeks later,’ Samantha says. ‘See if his car was still in the car park.’

  ‘Did you do it?’ Nicole asks.

  ‘No. I didn’t have the guts.’

  The half-biscuit moon lifts slowly above the tree.

  ‘Does it matter what happened to him?’ Lisa feels Samantha and Nicole turn in her direction. She doesn’t know why they do. There’s nothing for them to see in the dark. She takes it as a sign of their disapproval. ‘Because I guess he’s still out there anyway,’ she adds.

  ‘Do you think so?’ Samantha sounds young, hopeful.

  Lisa doesn’t answer. Instead she watches a satellite blink across the sky. Before long she loses it amongst the litter of stars.

  Epilogue

  Nicole hadn’t intended to take the side trail up to the headland. She’d planned to walk right past the detour. But her feet shifted to the right as though they were in charge. No shortcuts, they said, where obviously her mind was prepared to allow them. Before long she was back on the rocky point.

  There are more clouds today. They bring new shadows to the theatre. Dark curtains fall across the surrounding boulders and then lift quickly away. There is a strengthening wind too. She thinks about how different things could have been in a breeze like this, that moment when she teetered with the dissonance of being grounded and not. This breeze then could have been the hand to her back that took away choice.

  But there are choices this place has taken from her. Her world was made smaller because of her experiences here. She pulled in the parameters of it, pruned it back like a rose bush, but unlike the rose, she didn’t grow stronger or fuller for the treatment. No, she pruned her life back so hard she no longer knew how to blossom at all. Was she meant to be a partner to someone? she wonders. A mother? It’s easier to think not than to think that she had cut this branch from her life. But if not a mother, then she might at least have been a godmother.