Forty-Seventeen (5 page)

The parts still didn't quite come together.

He caught up with Belle and touched her fondly.

‘Sorry about the mud,' he said.

‘I can cope. I can take it.'

This was where he'd learned as a boy how to ‘take it'.

‘I'll get you a new pair of Keds.'

‘They come from the States.'

‘I'll get a pair sent across.'

‘You probably won't.'

 

In a motel on the coast they showered off the mud, dried off the dampness, turned up the air-conditioner
to warm and got slowly drunk, sprawled on the floor. Belle with a towel wrapped around her drying hair, in a silk kimono, was like a cat back in habitat.

He spread out the map of southern New South Wales.

These are my heartlands, he showed her, the English damp green tablelands of Bowral and Moss Vale, the old goldfields, the lakes of Jindabyne, the new snow resort, down to Bega where my father introduced me to the man who had a library of a thousand books of mystery and the supernatural, to Kiama where my girlfriend from school and I went for our miserable honeymoon after we married in the hometown Church of England.

And Milton, where I found ten years of
Champion
magazine in an old newsagency.

He told her how he had been a rebellious but highly proficient scout, had played football up and down the coast, had been a soldier on manoeuvres there, had surfed the whole coast, camped out and hunted in all the bush.

‘You're a very sentimental person,' she said, as she rubbed cream into a scratch on her leg.

‘No, I don't think I am.'

‘I think you are.'

‘I think not.'

‘A sentimental drunk, then.'

‘There is another territory.'

He circled the Katoomba and Jenolan Caves district.

‘My great-grandmother's territory.'

‘We've done that.'

‘And there is my grandfather's territory.' He circled the town.

But neither were ever mentioned in this territory, he told her, pointing at the first heartlands circle.

Belle was leaning on his shoulder pretending an interest, for an instant she became someone else leaning on his shoulder looking at the map, a high-spirited late arrival at a dying party.

‘Let's go,' he said, ‘let's check out now and go back to the city. I think it's over.'

 

Two weeks later he went back to the Budawangs and camped again in the same place, alone. It was a trip to erase the mistake of having gone there with Belle.

He realised, as he sat there in the bush at Mitchell Lookout, that it was a misguided effort. Coming back to erase it had only more deeply inscribed it.

Now whenever he passed the place he would think of having gone there with the wrong person, of having taken his great-grandmother into the hard country where she didn't belong. He would laugh about Belle, squatting there cooking, about the flies on her face, and Belle saying, ‘I feel quite happy about it, Hemingway.'

He said on the telephone that he would be using a German solid-fuel stove in the bush.

‘I'll put your father on,' his seventy-year-old mother said, and he pictured them passing the telephone between them, and he heard her say to his father in a very audible conspiratorial whisper, ‘He says he is going to use a German solid-fuel stove.' His father came on and said the German solid-fuel stove or any-nationality-fuel stoves were banned.

What he didn't say to his father and mother was that he intended to have camp fires regardless of the fire bans. He was now forty and could damn well light a fire, legal or illegal, if he damn well wanted to. And they were disappointing him too with this fire panic. They were bush people who'd brought him up on bush codes of perseverance and on all the bush drills. Why else as a little boy had he crouched shivering and sodden at damp, smoking camp fires blowing his very soul into the fire to get it to flame. Or suffered fly-pestered pink-eye and heat headaches in the dust of summer scout camps, his ears ringing with the madness of cicadas in the hot eucalyptus air, doggedly going about his camp routines. He'd paid. And his family always lit correct fires that caught with the first match. His family knew
that the bigger the fire the bigger the fool. He and his family had a pretty good relationship with fire.

On the way through to the bush he paid them a postponed Christmas visit. It was in fact his second trip to the Budawangs in two weeks. For Christmas he'd gone to the Budawangs with Belle but now felt he needed to go there alone. He wanted now to apologise to the bush for having taken Belle there. Belle had been wrong. Belle belonged in the Intercontinental. No, that wasn't really it, he wasn't sure why he wanted to go back into the bush again alone. He'd apologised to Belle for having taken her into the bush where she didn't belong.

As he stopped in the driveway of the family home they came out from the sunroom where they'd been waiting for him. His father leaned in the car window and said, ‘It's a ticking bomb out there.'

His mother wanted to organise another Christmas dinner, to repeat Christmas for him.

He begged off, ‘I've done a lot of moving about this year – I had my report to do – I have to go back to Canberra to present it to a standing committee – I just need to for a few days – no people. It's for the good of my soul.'

His mother understood soul.

‘We expected you for Christmas,' his father said, ‘I can't see what could be more important than family Christmas.'

What had been more important than family Christmas had been trying to forget his work on the nuclear fuel cycle, and turning forty. He'd tried with
Belle and it had worked except for the bush part. He was going to try the bush part again, alone.

‘It's a very silly move from a number of points of view,' his father went on as they moved into the house, ‘the ban is total.'

He said he could smell rain about.

They didn't comment. His family didn't believe that you could ‘smell' rain. He wasn't sure that he believed you could smell rain.

His mother wanted to freeze his steak he'd bought for the bush but he told her not to freeze it.

He asked her though to mend his jeans – as a way of giving her some part to play.

‘You're old enough to know better,' his father said, punishing the newspaper with slaps of his hand.

His mother came back with her sewing basket. ‘I'll mend it with especially strong cotton,' she said. ‘My mother used this cotton.'

‘Your mother used it – that same reel?'

‘You don't use much of it,' she said to block his incredulity, ‘so it never runs out.'

She mended his jeans by hand.

‘You shouldn't go into the bush in old clothes,' she said, ‘you don't want clothes falling apart in the bush.'

He'd not forgotten that dictum.

‘I've put your steak in the freezer,' she said, biting the thread through with her teeth.

Later he excused himself from the room and removed the meat from the freezer.

After years of opposing frozen food his mother now
preferred it. From pre-refrigeration days of her youth, his mother now obsessively feared ‘things going bad' and in her old age froze everything.

Regardless of his wishes she put together a repeat of a family Christmas.

‘What are you going to eat out there?' his nephew asked at the meal.

All questions from nephews and nieces were trick questions.

‘Mainly tinned food,' he said, knowing this would lose him marks.

‘You're not walking far then,' his nephew said with the smile of the experienced.

‘No, I'm not walking far,' he said, an apology to the whole family for having included any tinned food for a camp. ‘It's a lazy camp.'

They didn't know of such a thing.

‘I've never carried a can of tinned food into the bush in my life,' his brother declared, ‘freeze-dried is the go.'

‘If he can carry it he can take it,' his sister said, quoting an infrequently used family dictum; used only to excuse foolishness, eccentricity. It was like an appeal to the High Court on some nearly forgotten constitutional ground. He smiled thankfully at her.

‘You won't be able to heat them,' his father said, seizing on this as a way of stopping him. ‘How do you think you're going to heat them with a fire ban on?'

‘With this heat they'll be hot enough to eat straight out of the can.'

His father grunted.

‘You'll need a hot meal in the evening,' his mother said, ‘for strength.'

‘I think, Mother, he's old enough to feed himself,' his sister said, again acting as his advocate.

‘Run to the fire and out the other side,' his nephew said to his father, talking across him, ‘isn't that the way you handle bush fire?' His nephew smirked. He now had him trapped in a bush fire.

‘If it isn't burning on the other side,' his brother said, ‘and if it doesn't have a second front.'

‘And that's if you get through the first wave of fire,' his nephew said, with an estimating glance at him which indicated that he didn't think he was the sort of person who would make it through the fire.

‘Wet the sleeping bag, unzip it, and pull it over your head,' he said to the nephew and brother. ‘Isn't that how it's done?'

His brother said yes, if there was enough water around to wet a sleeping bag and if the sleeping bag wasn't synthetic.

‘Don't try to beat the fire uphill – you won't,' his nephew said.

‘I wouldn't try,' he said to his nephew.

His nephew obviously thought he was the sort of person who would try. His nephew tossed a nut into the air and caught it in his mouth.

‘I know the fastest way to be found if you're lost in the bush.'

‘What's that?' His nephew was sceptical.

‘You stay where you are, mix a dry martini and within minutes someone will turn up and tell you that you're mixing it wrong.'

The table looked at him unsatisfied, and he knew they hadn't got the joke, they weren't a martini family and they blamed him, he could tell, for making a joke outside the comfortable boundaries of their shared lore. He'd blundered again. He didn't handle being a member of a family very well.

‘Why are you going?' his brother asked.

‘Foolhardiness,' his father said.

He told them he was going to the upper reaches of the Clyde River which he hadn't done yet in his walking. He wanted to look at Webb's Crown, a remaining block of plateau around which the river had cut itself on both sides, leaving Webb's Crown like a giant cake in the middle of the river.

‘It's nothing to look at,' his nephew said.

He couldn't very well say he was going into the bush to apologise to the bush for having taken the wrong person to that part of his metaphorical self. Or that he'd taken his great-grandmother replica into the bush when he should've taken her to Las Vegas.

And when would he be able to go aimlessly into the bush, without plan?

His family always worked the plan.

As a kid he'd just ‘gone into the bush' and one thing suggested another, invitations were issued by caves, clearings, high points, creeks – they all called you to them.

‘I'd like to go into the bush without a plan,' he said, to see how they'd jump, ‘to go into the bush idly.' The word ‘idly' was strange to the dining room.

‘Plan the work: work the plan,' his father said.

‘If you didn't have a plan how would you know where to go next?' asked his nephew.

An existential question.

‘It's the journey not the destination,' his ever-protective sister said.

He thought it was both. But he didn't want to have her offside too. ‘I hated all that up-at-dawn, fifty-kilometre-day regimented walking we all went in for as kids,' she added.

As he was putting his things into the car the next day his mother gave him a two-litre plastic container of water and told him to put it in his pack.

It wouldn't fit in his pack but he told her he was going, anyhow, to the river.

He tried to ask casually, ‘Which side of the family were bushwalkers – was grandmother a bushwalker?' he asked.

‘Oh no,' she said, ‘she was a city lass.'

‘Great-grandmother?' He knew the standard answer.

‘She's a bit of an unknown quantity,' she said, ‘she lived in Katoomba and that's about all we know. She worked at the Caves.'

He wondered again if that was all she knew. He never got further than that answer.

His father wouldn't come out to say goodbye. His going into the bush in direct refusal of an order.

His mother said she would pray for rain.

‘Well don't flood the river on me,' he said.

He drove as far as he could into the bush and then, hoisting his pack, left the car – going through the Act of Severance, the break with habitation and people, the solitary swimming out into the wilderness.

For him it always required a mustering of will and it always brought about a tight alertness. He'd taken 15 mg of Serepax on the drive up to the bush to counteract his family's sapping and to calm him for the bush.

He's taking drugs, his nephew said.

But the tightness continued. Again, as always, the small cold warning spot of fear switched on as the connections with safety receded.

As he walked deeper into the bush his mind monitored his system, running over his body like a hand, a detector listening for fault.

The bush flies were thick but he'd seen them thicker and anyhow he'd make a détente with the flies. He said peace to the flies, peace.

He talks to the flies.

He came to the slab of rock and he laughed to himself about making love to Belle, holding her so the flies crawled over her face. There were three kinds of flies this time, he noticed, which he wasn't allowing to bother him.

Something about fucking a girl on the rock and flies.

As he stood on the slab and recalled the perfect Christmas dinner she'd cooked, he realised that his efforts this time to somehow ‘erase' the mistake of
bringing Belle into the bush was not going to work. He had inscribed it deeper by doing it. And it didn't worry him now anyhow. She was maybe a re-enactment of his great-grandmother and that was that. Whatever that meant.

He's not going on about the great-grandmother again?

He decided to go down into the gorge by way of a descending creek, barely running, which led him to a rainforest on the slope of the gorge. Vines, moss, a dense overhead canopy of branches and vines, silence. He liked the dank chambers of rainforest – they were like a nightclub in the daytime, broken sunlight, a smell of trapped staleness. He sat for a while in the dankness. The flies would not come there.

Maybe this is where Belle and he should have come for Christmas. Or maybe this was where he should lie down and never rise, there in the decay.

He wants to lie down in all the crap.

But he went on, down the remaining stretch of creek, blocked here and there with boulders, and then dropping steeply to the river. Reaching the river was a minor exultation. It was no great river at this point but it ran with enthusiasm and had a thin waterfall. He stood under the fall naked – waterfalls, however thin, always suggest that you watch them or stand under them.

He's standing there under the waterfall testing a notepad of waterproof paper.

After two hours or so of more walking he began to lose alertness and decided to make camp.

He wasn't a follower of the Fung Shui approach to camp sites, the search for the most propitious site. He accepted ‘good' camp sites when they came around the corner – the running creek, the camping cave, the grassy knoll. But most of all he liked making camp in unpromising situations. He liked to shape an unpromising site into shelter. Sometimes he was reluctant to leave those camps he'd won from rough conditions. He supposed this was ‘very Western'. He used to say in restaurants back in Sydney and Vienna that he went into the bush to have a dialogue with Western Man but instead he invariably became a Man from a Western.

He took off his pack and declared ‘this is it'. As the gypsies would say, anyone who now approaches this place would have to ask permission to sit by ‘his' fire and should not walk between him and his fire, and should approach with sufficient noise so as not to be mistaken for a stalking enemy. But in all the years he had walked in the Australian bush he had never come across another person.

Something about gypsies, he's talking about gypsies.

There had been times when he'd fancied he heard someone ‘out there' and sometimes he kept his loaded Luger pistol at hand to keep away the phantoms. There were also the times when he would have quite liked someone to come out of the bush to join him and drink bourbon at the camp fire. He heard voices at times, but knew them for what they were.