Solo (4 page)
‘And you’ve got to keep all your limbs under the sheet. Did you ever do that?’
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. It wasn’t the same thing. It was a tangent.
‘I still do!’ Callum says.
‘I’ve got it under control,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t die. I’m the star of this show.’
‘Really? What’s my role then? Do I come in just before the end and rescue you?’
I opened my mouth. I tried to think of something cool, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I’d been so proud of the star-of-the-show line. A good recovery from the tangent. It sounded spontaneous. It was a passable quip. I’m shit at quips usually. And now I had nothing. Instead I blushed and in that moment I lost him.
There was a pause like a Chinese burn in the conversation.
‘Are you going to do a Solo?’ I asked.
‘No way!’ he grinned again. ‘It’s way too outdoorsy for me, and anyway I’m afraid of the dark. I’ve signed up for “Fingerpaint your way to healthy family relationships”.’ He waggled his fingers at me and I laughed. ‘Well, have fun then . . .’
He was searching – trying to remember my name.
‘. . . Mackenzie.’
I was glad he remembered. I still felt stupid, though. His name had been on my lips every night before I went to sleep. I felt the kind of stupid that makes you want to leave the country.
It was a twenty-minute ride on the camp’s eighteen-seater bus from the main camp to the Solo site – just me in the back of the bus with the window open.
Stefan and Wendy sat in the front talking. The wind whipped the words away so I could only hear snippets. Something about how she’d contributed an article to an environmental website. She wondered how they would overcome the commercial machine (or maybe she said ‘consumer’, or ‘corporate’).
I stopped trying to listen and watched the trees closest to the road blur past my eyes instead.
The paddocks on the way into the valley were a lush crayon green. The cattle were so fat their low, swinging bellies dragged the skin taut over their bones. They pitched and rolled on graceless legs and stared at us with faces so vague and crude they looked as though they’d been pinched out of clay.
The trouble with crushes is the lows. The highs are fantastic when you’re having one, tripping on your own dreams. I’d run my few conversations with Callum through my head as if they were a movie – no, more like an ad – a thirty-second clip of myself being confident and desirable, speaking words that came out in the right order and with exactly the right inflection and well-timed provocative gestures. But then when we had actually played it out he never gave me the prompts I’d rehearsed.
I’m in limbo, without a script. Spastic with panic, adlibbing and it’s all wrong – nothing cool about it. Instead I seem desperate, sad, shallow and slow in the head.
I’m reliving it over and over – the low zapping like a cattle prod and the dull numbness dragging like gravity boots. The worst part is when I think of all the things I could have said and done in place of the awful things I actually said, and then a new movie scrolls across my brain and I’m clinging to the hope, like a lowered cable in the dank mine-shaft of my humiliation, that I’ll have the opportunity to try again.
Just before I’d left he’d said that thing about rescuing me. I thought he’d been flirting, but now I’ve been thinking about it too much, how could I be sure that I wasn’t replaying it in my head the way I wanted it to happen?
Soon the paddocks were behind us and we coiled along a narrow road, alongside the river. The vegetation rose up beside the road and enclosed us in a moist, mineral smell like green tea.
Wendy jumped out and slid open the door for me. She handed me a duffel bag of supplies and pointed me towards a path snaking through the trees towards the river. I couldn’t see it, but underneath the bus engine’s idling I could hear the white noise of water rushing over stone.
‘Enjoy yourself, Mackenzie,’ she said, with a kindly expression. They all wear it. I’d seen it in art class. A Botticelli Madonna.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said, breathing in the earthy coolness. The craggy trees arched over me in slants and angles. There was a log across the path that looked as though it had been placed there to stop vehicles.
Wendy stood behind me, waiting, and I suddenly felt claustrophobic and panicky. I was Gretel, abandoned in the woods, and out there were witches, wolves and giants, all hungry, and I had no defence against them but my wits. I’ve read all the stories. I don’t have those skills. I have never been any good at talking my way out of a situation.
What would they think of me if I changed my mind? Could I go back to the camp now and admit I was scared by fairytales?
‘See ya,’ I mumbled. Wendy swung back into the cab.
The path was soft and my passage along it silent because of a carpet of casuarina spines, damp leaves and twigs. At the end there was a grassy clearing about fifteen metres wide, and then a skirt of smooth, round rocks at the water’s edge.
The river was narrow in front of the campsite – about ten metres across. Rocks and boulders jutted out of the water in haphazard lines and heaps, steering the water in lazy eddies, and then dropping away over shallow, choppy rapids into a pool below.
Further upstream the river spread into a deep pool. The water surface looked turquoise, but from the edge I could see the brown and grey stones at the bottom and tiny fish slipping between them. Slanting up from an arc of sand there was a large grey rock platform, patchy with lichen and pocked with hollows.
A crusty grill and dented billycan propped each other up like a pair of old drunks. Next to a circle of blackened rocks for a fireplace there was a tent in a bag. A square of flat dirt facing the river was obviously the place for the tent. I considered pitching the tent somewhere else just to be different, but there was no one to see, so I rolled out the canvas in the assigned flat spot.
They’d given me a yellow plastic flag on a stick and a metal stand with three feet – a tripod. It was supposed to remain outside the tent, slightly to the right of the opening at all times, and I’d been told to drop the flag into it if I should require attention. That’s how they phrased it: ‘should you require attention.’ They didn’t use words like ‘distress’, ‘danger’, or even ‘help’. It might have put people off.
Several larger logs had been cut up for me. They don’t leave axes lying about, not around ‘youths with potential’. They gave me a rubber mallet, though. Maybe that’s why they sent me out last? They’d given me twenty-five kilometres of isolation in case I went on a rubber-mallet rampage.
I took a long time setting up the tent – one elephant, two elephant between each strike of the pegs with the mallet. I enjoyed building my nest. I suppose that’s why they left it packed up like this – to give us a sense of ownership.
In the duffel bag there were vegetarian sausages wrapped in plastic, three raw potatoes, half a loaf of bread, a first-aid kit, two cans of baked beans, a tin of peaches, a carton of long-life milk, two packets of cereal, three apples and five teabags. There was a plastic plate, some tinfoil, plastic cutlery, and an enamel cup.
No chocolate.
They’ve given me matches too. They must think I’m safer with matches than hammers.
The tent was taut and ready, the sleeping bag rolled out neatly inside, and my belongings set in symmetrical rows.
Now what?
I sat on the rock platform and stared at the water. The needles from the casuarinas dropped like light rain into the river, where they floated on the surface in sluggish swirls and corkscrews.
Sometimes I could hear a branch crashing through trees on its way to the ground. It could have been a fox or a wild pig. Maybe a dingo.
Or a monster.
The river was loud and after a while I had the sensation that there was a noise under it that I couldn’t quite hear, like a baby crying, a car approaching, or a mobile ringtone. I tilted my head on the side to listen, but there was nothing but the roar of water over stones and the occasional birdcall.
Lying back against the rock I watched the clouds drift over. Tiny biting midges hovered around my forehead, irritating like a forgotten word.
I sat up suddenly, brushing the leaves and seedpods from my clothing, with no sense of how much time had passed.
I built the fire and kept it going, feeding it one stick at a time – rationing it, and being attentive. Every now and then I would stand up and collect another stick, singing all the time, or humming to let the snakes know I was about.
What did I sing? Something annoying. It was a jingle, ‘Be sure to go to Carroll’s, for the whole lock, stock and barrel. Be sure to go to Carroll’s, you’ll be fine’ – over and over.
Although I wasn’t really hungry, I started to peel the plastic off the sausages I found in the duffel bag. Then I stopped and put them back.
It seemed ridiculous that I was trying so hard to avoid what I’d been sent out here to do. What I’d come out here to do. (I hadn’t been sent. I’d volunteered. I could have done finger-painting.)
I thought about Callum first. I imagined his face from every angle. I imagined him smiling at me over some shared joke. Better still, one that I’d instigated, shocking him into a delighted laugh – tipping the balance in my favour just for an instant.
Good thoughts. The Solo had been a good idea.
Then ugly, perverse thoughts barged in like bullies. All those thoughts I’d pushed aside, dammed, saw their opportunity to come out with renewed vigour. Refreshed, distilled and potent.
In normal life there were all kinds of routines, obligations and distractions that I could use to push those thoughts back into their corner, until they were almost a ‘Where’s Wally?’ bad thought hidden amongst all the others, but out here there wasn’t a thing to distract me.
That was the whole idea of going solo, wasn’t it? Still, I wondered if isolation could send you mad. Or is that the point? I’m already nutty and I’m out here to go sane.
You can travel in your mind, if you give it the chance to do so. Faster than the speed of light. Tripping. Astral projection.
I’d already been to three of those secret hiding places that I’d avoided for a year at least. Each detail returned and magnified.
The chemist’s shop. Dinner with the Winters. Nan and Pop.
No wonder humans invented Nintendo.
The difficulty is to decipher what’s real. I’ve done it before – hallucinate, manufacture, fantasise, lie, depending on your perspective. I can’t remember how much I fabricated.
Unravelling.
(1) This sentence is false
If (1) is true, then (1) is false. On the other hand, assume (1) is false. Because the Liar Sentence is saying precisely that (namely that it is false), the Liar Sentence is true, so (1) is true. We’ve now shown that (1) is true if and only if it is false. Since (1) is one or the other, it is both.
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HILOSOPHY
When you are really young, you can make something up so well that you end up believing it.
I used to tell people my father was away on business.
When I was at Infants school we had a cottage at the beach that we visited on weekends, with a gardener who came to mow and trim hedges. I wore a hat and blazer to school, and the other girls were from ‘old money’. We looked like the kind of family whose father went away on business.
After Infants, though, at my new school, I never invited home people who I had told the business-trip story.
In Year 4 I told Rebecca Holdenstodd that my father had disappeared. She wanted to know all about it and asked me lots of questions.
We sat cross-legged in the corner near the cricket nets with our knees almost touching while the Year 5 boys played a rambling game of footy nearby.
My dad disappeared on one of those afternoons when the heat hung over you like syrup and the clouds draped across the sky were a greyish-green colour. There was a storm coming, but it hadn’t arrived yet.
I knelt in front of the window and my dad was in the armchair reading the newspaper with one leg folded over the other and his glasses perched on the end of his nose as though he was an old Salvation Army volunteer rattling the collection box – the kind who sits outside the supermarket and shames people into giving their change. Every now and then Dad would turn the page and glance at me with the shame-look, because I was supposed to be finishing my homework sheet on skeletons and starting my BTN report.
The last time he looked at me like that I said, ‘I’ll do it in a minute! OK? Jeez!’
I didn’t know that’s the last thing I would ever say to him. I was looking for old Mrs Katsourinis. Every day she stepped off the 417 bus across the road from our house in her long black dress and support-hose. Old Mrs Katsourinis had a face like a scrunched-up brown-paper bag. It was so rubbery and pleated that I was sure it was a mask. One day whoever was under there would lift it up to sneeze, blow their nose, or itch their eye. I didn’t want to miss it.
This day, though, I didn’t see the bus. I didn’t see anything moving. Even the cat on the porch next door lay on its back with its legs splayed as if it was dead. Everything was so still before the storm it was as though the whole day was holding its breath.
Then the wind whooshed along the street pushing leaves and papers before it. It pressed against the oleander trees on the median strip. They’re poisonous, you know. My dad said you shouldn’t touch them. Some kids used oleander branches to toast marshmallows over a campfire. They got poisoned and died. The branches folded over sideways. The laundry slapped on the line and the tops of the wheelie bins smacked up and down in time.
You could see the hail marching across the rooftops before it reached our house.