The Geography of Friendship Read online

  Chapter 2

  Mind and body were in turmoil when Lisa was here last time. There was no rhythm to her steps. No synchronicity. No connection to the land whatsoever. All she’d connected with was her rage. It was that crystalline, that pure, that the significance of everything else evaporated around her.

  Now though, it’s like she’s seeing – feeling – this place for the first time. She can smell the dust that puffs and rises with each footfall. Hear the hush sound the breeze makes as it passes through the trees. Taste the oil the eucalypts exhale. Lisa feels as though nature has bubble-wrapped her thoughts, tempered them to something quiet and relaxed so that the landscape might present itself afresh. But she expects the feeling will be short-lived. It usually is.

  For now she enjoys just being on this trail. She likes the way it’s been carved to mostly go round the trees and not the trees forced to give ground for it. The eucalypts here are mostly messmate stringybarks – Eucalyptus obliqua – plus narrow-leaf peppermint and manna gums – Eucalyptus radiata and Eucalyptus viminalis. She’d checked the botanical names of the plants to expect before she left home. She wanted to know something of the place with certainty this time.

  The flora here bears no resemblance to that of Lisa’s small suburban garden. It’s not been shaped or tamed, not been made to conform. She can see where the growth has been thwarted in places by the natural elements – wind, fire – but not secateurs.

  Lisa keeps her secateurs sharp, just as a surgeon’s scalpel. The cuts she makes to her camellias – the pink japonica with its double flower and dark, glossy leaves is her favourite – are quick and precise. The plants repay her with masses of large velvety blooms. As do the Iceberg rose topiaries she’s planted alongside the short path from mailbox to front door. She’s even coaxed the often-woody lavender and rosemary into pleasing forms.

  She came to gardening late, and only then when a man she thought she could love piqued her interest in all things botanical. But circumstance or self-sabotage – would she ever really know which made her drive him away? – has forced her to love this activity alone.

  Soil, root, branch – each provides her with a welcome disconnect from the human world; they feel kinder, more generous, and the demands they make upon her are of her own design, unlike the demands other people make. In this way gardening soothes her, allows her to let her guard down, to be someone else.

  ‘Finally put yourself into therapy,’ her daughter Hannah quipped when Lisa admitted this to her.

  She hadn’t had the courage to ask Hannah to elaborate, to list the reasons why she’d make such a remark, but deep down she knew anyway. Hannah’s witnessed enough destructive behaviour in her nineteen years upon which to base any number of opinions about her mother.

  Lisa looks over her shoulder to see how far back Samantha is, but she’s out of sight. Guilt bites once again and she slows her pace.

  Samantha was never a slim girl, not even when they were young, so Lisa imagines she feels the weight of those few extra kilograms she carries round her waist now. They’ve experienced enough hardship on this trail – much of it at Lisa’s hand – and here she is again, responsible for causing more. She tries to shake off the guilt though, because the one thing that hasn’t changed about her is her determination to finish what they set out to do all those years ago, but this time without scars.

  Nicole is ahead of her, powering down the trail like a bloody mountain goat. She looks to have barely raised a sweat. Didn’t last time either as Lisa recalls.

  Still so cool. So controlled.

  And still so bloody right. Nicole takes none of the shortcuts that have been cut between switchbacks as Lisa and Samantha do. Instead, she follows the trail exactly as it’s intended, as ordered in this task as in every other. And as she’s increased the distance between them, Lisa can’t help but think Nicole’s pushing for some kind of dislocation, as though walking well ahead exempts her in some way from their collective past.

  The terrain seems more challenging than previously, but Lisa knows the contours of the land have nothing to do with it. She’s changed, not the place she walks through. A young woman negotiating rugged ground is one thing. But doing it again now in her forties, after years of bending and carrying, is something else. Now, her muscles and lungs burn sooner. The sun bites hotter. Thirst comes quicker. But worst of all is recognising all of these things. It only adds to the list of things that have pissed her off since they arrived, Nicole forging ahead being another one of them.

  Lisa looks behind again. Samantha comes into view round a bend about fifty metres back. There is dust on the knees of her hiking trousers and her face is one of deep concentration. Every step looks to be a study in caution, even though the terrain has levelled off now and the going is easier.

  Lisa calls to Nicole for her to stop, mainly because she suspects Samantha won’t. ‘Let’s rest for a bit,’ she says.

  Nicole turns to face her. ‘Again?’ She doesn’t hide her frown but stops anyway.

  When Lisa reaches Nicole, she moves past her and rests the base of her pack on a stump. The stump is rotting from the centre out. It’s funny to think it might have been a thriving tree when they were here last and now is on its way back to the soil. Samantha reaches them and leans her weight onto her walking poles. Nicole stands, feet wide, thumbs hooked into the hip belt of her pack. She sways slightly from side to side, as though reluctant to cease movement.

  ‘Remind me why we’re here again?’ Samantha breathes.

  ‘For answers.’ That’s why Lisa’s here anyway.

  ‘Answers?’ Nicole scoffs.

  Lisa presses back the flinty rise of her anger. It’s one of the things she wants to soften about herself, wants to prove to Hannah that she can.

  ‘I thought you’d be looking for forgiveness?’

  Lisa looks hard at Nicole. She hopes to shame her. But she never flinched under such scrutiny in the past, and neither does she now. Lisa pushes down her anger again, bites back the words that almost spill. Because she knows Nicole’s calling her out right now. Trying to make her say Yep, all my fault, so she can have a clear conscience. But Lisa can’t bring herself to say it. She lifts her chin and holds Nicole’s gaze. She won’t give her the submission she wants.

  ‘Why did I ever think you’d change?’ Nicole’s pack knocks against Lisa as she pushes past on the narrow trail.

  ‘None of us is innocent, you know,’ Lisa calls. ‘No matter how much you want to tell yourself otherwise.’

  Nicole ignores her. Lisa curses her no-good self for not having the same restraint. She feels guilt again too, because they relinquished the right to speak to one another like that years ago.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she calls after Nicole. ‘That was out of line.’

  Nicole lifts one arm in acknowledgement and walks on without looking back.

  ‘C’mon,’ Samantha says and she raises herself tall again.

  ‘You go first.’ Lisa stands and moves to one side. ‘You can set the pace.’

  ‘And break old habits?’

  Which is exactly what Lisa wishes they’d do.

  Samantha waves Lisa on with her walking pole. ‘You go. My pace will only frustrate you as much as it did last time.’

  ‘It didn’t frustrate me last time,’ Lisa says, and she knows they both hear the lie.

  Lisa moves off, recognising that patience is something else she needs to work on.

  She resolves to follow the trail exactly as it’s intended. No shortcuts. It’s as good a place as any for her to start following the rules.

  Lisa’s anger has always been curious about its capabilities. As a girl, she tested it regularly – on other girls, boys, her parents. When she thinks back on her early anger now, she thinks of it as something that existed inside her but was outside of her control. A force with its own free will. She’d like to think that she has contr
ol over it more than she used to, that she commands it more than it commands her.

  She remembers a day when she was fourteen or fifteen. She was on her way to the back of the tuckshop to meet Samantha and Nicole for their morning break. As she got closer she heard the chant, Catfight! coming from the back of the building.

  Lisa’s first thought was Why is anybody settling a score here? This is our spot.

  Then she had a second thought: What if the score being settled is with Nicole or Samantha?

  This was the thought that made pinpricks of light flash before her eyes and a band of muscle tighten round her head. She’s known these responses many times since. She recognises them as the body’s way of sharpening her senses. There have been times when she’s welcomed the acuity.

  She’d broken into a sprint along with several other curious students who’d heard the combat cry. By the time she reached the back of the tuckshop there was a large circle of boys and girls. In the middle was Samantha, doing her level best to hold her own against the school’s indestructible girl-thug.

  Samantha was on her back on the ground and the girl sat astride her, legs in a vice-like grip around her soft sides. Both girls’ school dresses were hoicked up so that their knickers were on show – Sam’s pastel floral, the other girl’s cream-coloured and lacy.

  ‘C’mon chubs,’ the bully taunted, slapping Sam around the head as gaps opened up in the shield she’d made with her arms. ‘You can do better than that.’

  Nicole was in the fray too, trying to pull the girl off by her school jumper. But she wasn’t having much success; the knitted fabric stretched and pulled away from the girl’s long frame but the weight of her remained.

  Looking back, Lisa knows she gave no thought to her actions. Certainly no thought to how much smaller she was compared to this girl. Before she knew it, she’d launched herself at the girl from a running start with a cry of her own. Nicole later told her she sounded and looked like something from a Mad Max movie.

  She smashed into the girl’s side so that she tumbled from Samantha to the ground. The rolls were reversed then – the bully on her back and Lisa astride her. But where the girl had used an open hand on Samantha, Lisa made hard little fists of hers. She brandished them in a flurry upon the girl wherever she could find an opening – face, chest, arms. The girl couldn’t defend herself against Lisa’s assault no matter how much she flourished her arms about. Before long the girl was a blubbering wreck, bleeding from nose and mouth, begging Lisa to get off.

  Lisa was reluctant to give up on her quarry though. She still remembers the thrill she felt at the girl’s submission, her triumph at being able to overpower her. And there was something else too. At the time she might have called it courage. But she knows now, having the words, having more experience, that it was something much more. It was a state of mind that overlooked risks and consequences. It cared nothing for dignity or honour or reputation. What she’d felt then, and has felt since, was a wildly primal compulsion to protect at all cost.

  ‘At least no one will fuck with my friends again,’ she’d said to Samantha and Nicole after they’d finally hauled her off the girl.

  Sam, despite still being red-cheeked, had beamed at her. Lisa feels a trickle of pride come down the years and touch her once more.

  In contrast, Nicole had looked pale and worried. At the time Lisa thought it was the stress of the incident. Now, she thinks she misread her. It was fear that she’d seen on Nicole’s face that day. Not fear of the wilful violence of the school bully, but fear at the force of Lisa’s retaliation to it.

  She’d been right though. That was the first and last time any one of them was picked on by a girl at school.

  On the summit of a headland, Lisa suggests they stop for a snack.

  Samantha looks at her relieved. Nicole shrugs. ‘If we have to.’

  ‘I have to.’ Samantha unbuckles the waist belt of her pack and lets it slide down her rump till it drops to the ground with a thud. She lowers herself onto a large, flat slab of granite, drags her pack towards her and starts rifling through a side pouch.

  ‘Want some?’ Samantha asks, holding out a bag of dried apricots to Lisa.

  Lisa takes one before slipping one arm free from the shoulder strap of her pack, swings it round to her front and lowers it to the ground with both hands. The sudden weightlessness feels good. She feels as though she could blow away if there were a breeze. She sits beside Samantha – not close as they once would have – and stretches her legs out in front of her. She takes a muesli bar from her pack and rips open the packaging.

  She watches Nicole ease off her pack and lower it to the ground with one strong, tanned arm. She stands with her back to them and looks out across the ocean.

  ‘Beautiful view,’ Lisa calls to her.

  Nicole doesn’t respond. She continues to stare out.

  Lisa follows her gaze. The air is so clear that everything before her is preserved in crisp, precise lines. The blue ocean stretches out till it joins an even bluer sky to form a perfect seam on the horizon. And the rocky headland and sword-sedge in the foreground is in such sharp relief to it that it makes Lisa think of a child’s paper cut-out held up against this larger backdrop of blue.

  Eventually Nicole shrugs a reply. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Better visibility this time,’ Samantha says.

  This time. Last time, Lisa thinks. And so much time in between – twenty-four years – in which to screw up a life, or two.

  Lisa had one shot at raising a child who loves her and sometimes she thinks she blew it.

  She and Hannah are self-conscious when they embrace. They never whisper heartfelt or giggly secrets across a table. The territory of their conversations is mostly censored. But Lisa supposes that’s better than no conversation at all, which she sometimes worries is only one poorly considered remark away.

  Except for that time when it wasn’t censored at all, and Lisa still doesn’t know why.

  She was waiting for a service call for her dishwasher that day.

  ‘When’s that bloody repairman getting here?’ Lisa looked at her watch again. Four-forty. ‘They said between twelve and five. A person could die waiting.’ She slapped the fabric swatches she was looking through onto the kitchen bench. They slid off and loudly hit the floor. She left them where they landed.

  ‘You can stop the fight now you know. You’re divorced.’ Hannah can’t have been more than fifteen at the time. She was at the kitchen table in her school uniform as Lisa recalls. She’d been living between two houses for close to six years.

  ‘I’m not fighting.’

  Hannah looked at Lisa like she was the child, the one trying to get away with a lie. ‘Yes you are. You’re fighting right now,’ she said. ‘And the person isn’t even here. Sometimes I think you do it because you enjoy it.’

  It’s a harsh judgement, especially to have made against her by her child. But it made Lisa wonder, and she doesn’t think she’s stopped wondering since: does she take pleasure from her anger?

  She’s always had strong opinions, always stood up for herself, stood up for others – and she’s been proud of that, sees it as a strength. While it has caused a few fights it’s also something she thought people admired in her – that she’s strong, that she isn’t afraid. Besides, what’s the alternative? Risk being complicit in your own victimhood?

  ‘There’s nothing for you to prove anymore,’ Hannah continued.

  Lisa thought of the time she’d struck her now ex-husband. Slapped him hard across the face. It was close to the end of their marriage. Any civility they might have still had was gone. Matt had intentionally broken something they both loved – an antique vase – so that neither of them could own it. It was a petty and spiteful act. Lisa snapped.

  She remembers how there was a satisfying heat in her hand afterwards. The skin tingled and prickled in a way that
told her it was awake, not asleep, as she’d expect with such a sensation. She flexed her fingers a few times. They felt charged, alive. But she also recalls how enlivened Matt looked, how pleased he seemed, despite the red imprints of her fingers on his cheek. She thinks she’d finally proved to him that he was the better person.

  ‘There’s always something to prove,’ Lisa said to Hannah.

  ‘Not to me. And not to Dad anymore. So prove what? To who?’

  And she’d got her there. Because who – what – was she fighting against really?

  Nicole turns away from the ocean and sits on a rock across from them. Lisa looks over to her. She wants to catch her eye, draw a smile from her. But Nicole is yet to hold much eye contact with either one of them.

  Once Lisa had made a game of counting the distinctive brown flecks in Nicole’s hazel eyes, likened them to counting her own freckles. Now she doesn’t even know if Nicole wears glasses.

  A water dragon pops its thorny head over the far end of the rock where Lisa and Samantha sit. It hauls its body further onto the flat surface with its claws. Its scaly skin is striped in brown and lichen-coloured green. On the ground it could easily pass for a branch.

  The reptile comes fully onto the flat stone. It pauses, its Zorro-banded head lifted to reveal a pale, aged-leather underbelly. It seems more inquisitive about their presence than frightened by it. Lisa breaks off a piece of her muesli bar and throws it towards the water dragon. It scurries in and snatches up the offering.

  Before long a second, smaller water dragon comes onto the rock and a territorial claim ensues. The larger one dashes towards the smaller one, an intimidation that seems based on size and speed as much as anything else, because no contact is made. The smaller one acquiesces and retreats over the edge of the rock again. The larger one strikes a prehistoric pose, thorny crown held high.