The Geography of Friendship Read online

  The moon is up but pale in the carmine sky. It is coming off full. As a child Lisa pretended that a full moon was a snow dome. She’d tell her parents that the grey patterns across its surface were the outline of the people who lived inside. She’d hold her small hand up to that big, creamy orb; shut one eye till it looked like she’d gripped it between thumb and fingers. She’d pretend to shake it then and tell her parents to look at how she’d rearranged those living inside.

  ‘Imagine not having that big old thing to look forward to each month?’ Lisa indicates towards the moon.

  ‘Beats a period,’ Nicole quips.

  That’s her, Lisa thinks. There she is.

  Samantha laughs. ‘You always cracked me up.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘I think I’d disappoint you now.’

  Lisa looks to the darkening sky and brightening moon and doesn’t say anything. After a time though, she turns to Nicole and says, ‘I don’t think we know one another well enough anymore to know whether we’d disappoint each other or not.’

  Nicole seems to think about this then nods. ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘We should play our game,’ Samantha says, and she sounds young again. ‘Remember? The one where we had to work out if we were lying or not.’

  Lisa remembers. And so must Nicole because she dips her head, the slightest of nods.

  It was a game they played at school. Each would take a turn to make a statement, either about themselves or somebody else, and the other two had to decide if it was true or not. They started playing it to make a game of gossiping about other people mostly. Amy cheated off Bec in the Maths test or Trev wears his father’s Y-fronts. That sort of thing. Then it became confessional.

  ‘Okay. Why not?’ Lisa says.

  Nicole doesn’t commit.

  ‘I’ll go first … since I suggested it.’ Samantha pauses briefly then says, ‘I thought about turning back today.’

  ‘True,’ Lisa answers, ‘because I expect we all thought about it.’

  Samantha nods.

  A silence follows and Lisa knows it’s hers to fill. ‘I’m on a twelve month good behaviour bond for driving offences.’

  ‘True,’ Nicole says without hesitation.

  ‘No. False. I’ve got one point left. If I lose that, then I will be.’

  Lisa expects there to be a long silence while they wait for Nicole to make a statement, if at all, but she’s wrong.

  ‘I’ve never received a demerit point on my driver’s licence.’

  ‘That can’t be true?’ But when Lisa looks at Nicole she knows it is. ‘Is that one of the perks of running a licensing centre?’

  ‘No. I obey the road rules.’

  Samantha pauses before she starts the next round. ‘I was already pregnant when Harry and I got married.’

  Lisa weighs this statement. She sees no reason for Samantha to lie about such a thing. ‘I expect it’s true,’ she says. ‘Hardly a big deal though.’

  ‘Not like it’s the fifties anymore,’ Nicole says and for the first time today she smiles.

  It’s Lisa’s turn again, and before she can censure herself she says, ‘I hit my ex once.’

  ‘Did he deserve it?’ Samantha asks.

  ‘Does anyone deserve it?’ Nicole looks away. Lisa thinks she’s embarrassed.

  The silence stretches out. Nicole seems unwilling to take a turn.

  Samantha fills the silence in a rush. ‘I drink a bottle of wine a day.’

  Lisa recognises the quick honesty in this statement but she won’t cast the first stone, so doesn’t answer.

  Nicole does though, and her voice is gentle. ‘I think it’s a lie,’ she says. ‘Because I bet there’s some days when you don’t finish the bottle.’

  After a while Samantha says, ‘You know … you’re right. Sometimes I don’t.’

  Nicole nods, satisfied.

  ‘My daughter is frightened of me,’ Lisa says and the pain of this fact sits like a sharp stone under her ribcage.

  ‘Why would she be frightened of you?’ Samantha asks, disbelief right there, in the folds of her forehead. ‘You’re her mother?’

  ‘Frightened of you or for you?’ Nicole asks but doesn’t face Lisa.

  ‘That’s not the game,’ Lisa says.

  But neither of them answers one way or the other, and Lisa’s surprised by how relieved it makes her feel.

  ‘My father wishes my mother would die,’ Nicole says.

  ‘I expect it’s true from what you’ve said,’ Samantha answers.

  Nicole nods but doesn’t say anything more.

  None of them speaks for a time and Lisa is pleased. She doesn’t want to play anymore.

  But then Samantha breaks the silence. ‘Harry and I haven’t had sex for two and a half years.’ She flushes pink when she says this.

  ‘You’ve made that up,’ Lisa says.

  Samantha blushes further and Lisa knows she hasn’t.

  ‘Do you miss it?’ Nicole asks quietly.

  ‘Yes. It’s like a small death.’

  The game stalls again, then Nicole says, ‘I don’t.’

  Too many truths. And Lisa can tell it hurts each of them to admit it.

  Chapter 3

  Nicole doesn’t like the slow, steady rhythm of walking. She prefers to run. For brief moments she’s airborne, both feet off the ground, weightless. Not so with walking. It demands at least one foot always on the ground, planted, bound to the earth.

  Here her feet feel as though they’re hitting the trail with more force than they ever do the footpaths around her home – no levitational lightness, no weightlessness. Because she’s angry. A rare thing for her. Anger was always Lisa’s bag. Which is one of the reasons Nicole’s upset now. It used to be so easy to read Lisa. She was always the stroppy one, the loose cannon, the firebrand. The one of little control or restraint. But at least she was predictable in this. Not anymore. Which is why her reasonableness to date is unsettling Nicole so much, messing with her sense of certainty.

  She won’t deny that when Lisa admitted in the bar that she had regrets and wanted to face who she was back then, it had made Nicole think about what might also be possible for her. Because who wouldn’t want a more innocent time returned to them? But now it just feels like Lisa’s brought them on some kind of pilgrimage. It’s as if in offering them back to the landscape that took things from them – from Nicole – that she believes they’ll have what they lost returned to them. Fat chance of that. All they’ll get is fatigue and blisters. And as for all that looking for answers bullshit Lisa mentioned earlier. Answers to what? There aren’t any. Shit happens. People move on. That’s the answer.

  Nicole reckons what Lisa’s really after is absolution but won’t admit it, not to Nicole and Samantha, and especially not to herself. While she’s prepared to go along with it until Lisa’s ready, it doesn’t mean she has to smile and joke her way through the whole process.

  As for Samantha, why did she even agree to do this? Watching the way she struggles only adds another layer of worry to the whole thing. Nicole’s been alone for too long so she’s not sure she’s up to the dependency, not anymore.

  She still feels a fondness for Samantha though. She was always the integral third wheel in their friendship. In her absence, Nicole and Lisa often stalled, brought to a standstill by their mutual stubbornness. Sam was the one who drew them in till their foreheads touched with her harmless gossip and unifying pacts that set their trio aside from others.

  But time doesn’t look to have done Samantha any favours. Nicole doesn’t think this unkindly. Sam was never someone she could feel anything but charity towards. When she watched her walk into the bar that night, she looked weighed down by more than a couple of extra kilograms. Maybe it was the prospect of them seeing one ano
ther again. Nicole knows she was anxious. Or maybe what she saw was the person Sam is now, a woman made heavy by cares and responsibilities. Once she’d have felt she could ask her – maybe even guessed at it – but not anymore. Time and circumstance have taken away not just the insight, but also the right to ask the question.

  By the time they left the bar that night, after Lisa had conned them into agreeing to this (for surely that’s what it was, a con?), Samantha looked lighter for the decision when she walked away. Nicole doesn’t think it was the alcohol she’d drunk that made her stand taller. And as she watched her hail a taxi, her arm was out more forthright and determined than she’d ever remembered it being in the past. And part of Nicole, the part that still cares, was pleased that Lisa had been able to do that, to bring about this sense of purpose in Samantha. Because it had hurt to see any of Sam’s easy-going, younger self diminished.

  Mostly when Nicole glances over her shoulder to the other two, they are a good way back. Sometimes they have disappeared from her view altogether, lost around a bend or over a rise. They aren’t walking as friends might – in a close and chatty group – and Nicole knows that in great part she’s to blame. She pushes ahead as if she’s walking alone, keeps the distance between them and the past they share. Maybe she thinks if she moves quickly enough she can outpace her thoughts, leave them and her memories behind. She can’t say that it’s working so far.

  What are they to each other now anyway, Nicole wonders, friend or enemy? Is that one of the questions Lisa wants answered? Is that part of the reason why she’s brought them together again, to find out? Maybe she’s afraid of what they might one day do to each other with their collective history, their shared knowledge. Or is that what still obviously binds them, the past, in inexplicable but necessary ways, like an oath, a pledge, a blood-sharing pact? Maybe Lisa recognises – perhaps aptly – that it’s time to check the facts.

  The rhythm of Nicole’s feet, the lift-plant-push of one then the other, pulses on, as does the memory loop. Thoughts fill the minutes, the miles, recycle a history she thought – she’d hoped – she’d forgotten. Anger often comes from fear, she knows that, but if that’s the case, what is it she’s afraid of? He’s not on the trail anymore, so it can’t be him. Maybe it’s her younger self she fears.

  No matter how much Nicole wishes she could distance herself from the others, there’s no denying that the two of them claimed her once and she still feels the pull of that friendship.

  Nicole blames her parents for this.

  She’d come along twelve years after her brother, and she imagines her arrival was something of a shock to her teetotalling, say-Grace-before-meals parents. A change of life baby. A flagrant declaration to the neighbours that they still had sex. She reckons that’s how her brother saw it anyway. He described her to his mates as that embarrassing little sprog.

  Her brother escaped the family home by the time she was seven and she doesn’t recall him coming back too often afterwards. Which left her the sole beneficiary of her parents’ attention in their time-rich retirement, and to this task they applied consummate diligence. Strict study rules were put in place. ABC television only. Friends were vetted and rationed.

  When they sold up their business Nicole became their new work project. She was home-schooled to thirteen because they didn’t trust anyone else to the task. When she failed to measure up (and their measure of failure was anything less than an A) they expressed their disappointment with a weary shake of the head and comments of Try harder.

  So she tried as hard as she could, but genetics and neural connectivity were only ever going to allow her to achieve an A-minus. Her parents had set the bar too high; placed their ambition over her ability. And no matter how diligent they were, no matter how many times they shook their heads or told her to lift her game, she could never be as successful as their pre-Internet newsagency.

  The legacy of this upbringing was that she started her school-based education (and only then because her parents had coached her so well in persuasive arguing) a self-reliant child. But one who had never seen an episode of Neighbours or Hey Hey It’s Saturday and neither had she ever had a friend over to stay for the night.

  Nicole entered the large Assembly Hall of her new school and was assaulted by the noise inside. At home, learning was associated with the soft ticking of the kitchen clock and the ABC World Service News at lunchtime. But at high school the shrillness of the girls’ voices, and the other, even shriller ones, which she later recognised to be the unbroken voices of the boys, reminded her of a gibbon enclosure at feeding time. This, along with the ineffectual shouts from teachers asking everyone to All take a seat, please! Now! (her parents never shouted, they never needed to), put her in auditory overload and in the front row of the hall. She questioned the merit of winning this particular argument with her parents as she sat there (an argument based on the belief that she was missing out on something), while she tried to shut out the sea of chattering children behind her. Fortunately, she was calmed somewhat by the Headmaster’s orientation talk, which included the rules and expectations of the school. She could draw similarities to those expected at home.

  Nicole wasn’t a girl who knew how to find a companion. She’d always relied upon a companion finding her, and then hoped that her parents would allow her to be kept.

  None did find her that first day of school or for several weeks after it. She spent her breaks wandering mostly. She made laps of Main Block, the Home Ec and Science buildings, the tuckshop, Sports Hall and playing fields. Occasionally she’d hang around the fringes of a group of girls, mostly unnoticed, but if she was ever given a What d’you want? look, she’d set off on her rambling journey once more. On wet days she went to the library where she put her A-minus brain to work on Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

  So no one claimed her. Her wandering didn’t allow them to.

  It took the miscalculation of the steps at the back of the tuckshop, a tumble and a badly grazed knee to finally do that, when her wandering landed her at the feet of a largish girl who wore her brown hair pulled forward over her chest and a skinny, long-haired blonde who seemed to wear a perpetual frown. The larger girl helped her up. The skinny one frowned deeply at Nicole’s knee and told her to sit down on the step so she could clean her up.

  ‘Am I going to live?’ Nicole kidded to hold back the tears from the stinging pain.

  ‘If you’re lucky,’ the blonde girl said as she gently dabbed at Nicole’s wound with a tissue.

  ‘I hope so. I haven’t even seen Return of the Jedi yet.’

  Nicole figured their kindness meant she’d been found, so her wandering ceased.

  But ultimately their friendship had fallen apart and for Nicole the fracture had felt first like a necessity, then before long a habit. She’d wanted to carry what they experienced out here on her own, till she could forget it. That way the truth could be whatever she wanted it to be. But then Lisa digs it all up again, and with the three of them together once more, the truth can only be itself and Nicole is reminded that she can’t have buried everything. And maybe this is what she is afraid of.

  ‘Do you ever wonder what sort of people we’d be now if things had ended differently?’ Lisa had asked them in the bar.

  ‘Or started differently,’ Nicole reminded her.

  ‘Yes, that too.’ Lisa looked calmly at Nicole when she said this and there was surprisingly no accusation in her voice.

  Nicole felt her confusion grow. The past started to take on a new landscape, one she’d not negotiated before: that Lisa could have regrets.

  ‘I feel like I’ve lost so much,’ Lisa said.

  Nicole’s temper flared. This, she thought, was typical of Lisa, so selfish. ‘You didn’t lose anything,’ she snapped, and the conversation stopped for a while after that.

  And then Samantha took the tension from the air, just as she used to do. ‘We
lost each other,’ she offered.

  Nicole calmed again, because she couldn’t argue with that.

  Their friendship has been the yardstick for her friendships since. None have measured up. It’s as though their union all those years before embedded itself into her psyche and refuses to be given up or allow others in.

  So here she is, back in a place she never wanted to see again, surrounded by a bushland she only remembers as hostile. And all the while she’s trying not to notice just how hard Lisa is trying to make everything right again.

  Nicole has sharp vision. It works with safety in mind. She saw a snake’s tail yesterday as it slithered off the trail and into the undergrowth. It was a brown one, not too thick, but thick enough to have a bite that could be lethal. She imagines there have been others, ones she hasn’t seen, too camouflaged or hidden even for her eyes.

  All her senses are heightened when she’s out running. Sometimes when she runs she feels like she’s being pursued and not like she’s the one pursing something – fitness, endurance, release. The truth is, she’s often afraid. She imagines hands reaching for her from behind walls or trees or the corners of buildings. Fingers ready to pluck her from the footpath with too-quick ease. She can’t surrender fully to this favoured exercise because of the fear that another person’s agenda will be written over it.

  Men have gone out of their way to harass her when she runs. Men as old as her father. Others young enough to be her son. Some wear business shirts; others are shirtless or in high-vis. They drive round roundabouts a second time to take the exit to the street she’s run down. Do illegal U-turns at traffic lights to get onto her side of the road. Some have driven past so close that she’s felt the air sucked from around her by the movement of their car. One guy jumped the median strip in his four-by-four once so he could crawl along the kerb beside her and asked if she’d blow him instead of all that hot air. They’ve called Nice arse! more times than she can count, whistled, made kissing noises, blasted horns right alongside her, banged their hands on the sides of their car doors. She’s been startled enough by these sudden, close sounds to stumble. Once she fell. They laugh as they drive away.