The Quicksand Pony (3 page)

The valley was short and narrow, almost a gully, except for its flat, mossy bottom. At the southern end a waterfall, fringed by coral ferns, trickled down a huge rock face. Over time it had worn away the granite below and made a smooth hollow, like a bath. In the first summer months Joycie often lay there with her baby and let the water wash over them.

The pool overflowed into a stream which meandered through the valley before disappearing into a towering thicket of swordgrass and reeds. This was the creek that Joycie had wriggled up as a little girl, pushing against the current and reeds with the determination of a salmon swimming upstream. It was as though she'd been driven by some need to burrow, to seek shelter. If she hadn't been so small, she'd never have found the valley.

A few steps above the pool a rock platform ran to the base of the cliff where a narrow fissure led to Joycie's cave. She had found this cave as a child, and she had imagined the fine home it would make . . . the bed here, the fire there, under the crevice that opened up to the sky. That had been play; a small girl's fantasy. Now she was actually living here, and her secret valley was as good as she had imagined.

The valley ran north, so it was always flooded with light. It nestled between two jagged ranges, so choked with fallen timber that Joycie didn't think anyone would ever climb them and look down into her valley. Even if they did, she thought, all they would see would be treetops.

Although Joycie had done something crazy, she had been clever enough to do it well. She wanted everyone to believe that she and her baby had drowned, so she could be alone, truly alone, until her head cleared and she was strong again. When she pushed the boat out into the current, that night she disappeared, she had left extra bags of supplies in it. It would have looked too suspicious if none of her gear washed up. In her other bags, the bags she kept, were the things she knew she could not survive without. She took a tomahawk, two blankets, an oilskin coat, a cast-iron cooking pot, some water containers, a cigarette lighter, her mother's sewing box, a good knife and sharpening stone, pencils, paper, her little .22 rifle, ammunition, a couple of rabbit traps and books. Books had always been her escape from the real world, and she could not have lived without them, or her comics. Joycie loved
Phantom
comics. She took a bundle with her, stored carefully in a watertight tin.

The days were full. Joycie was kept busy finding and cooking food. When Joe was little she did everything with him on her hip.

Sphagnum moss was perfect for lining the baby's nappies, dry ferns and seaweed made a comfortable bed underneath their blankets, and the rabbits Joycie trapped provided furs and meat. She could never bring herself to shoot kangaroos and wallabies because their faces were so sweet. She didn't need to anyway; the fish and shellfish in the bay were so easy to get that they always had plenty to eat. Joycie roasted the seeds of kangaroo grass and saltbush, and she'd brought silverbeet and rhubarb plants with her. Her dad used to say that if you had them in the garden, you always had a meal. Joycie planted them next to the stream, kept the soil fertilised with seaweed and rabbit droppings, and they grew like weeds.

The headland was shaped like a boot, with the bay at the top, the wild surf beach to the west, and a series of bays on the east, separated by rocky points. A broken chain of mountains ran through the middle, surrounded by an untidy patchwork of swamps, plains, sand dunes, forests and valleys.

The ranger lived on the west coast, and that was where the drovers travelled, so Joycie didn't go there much. She found a way to climb out of the valley so she could get to the eastern beaches, and this was her most used track. She dragged driftwood back to their camp and fitted it together to make a table, a bench, seats and a wooden horse.

One winter a sperm whale washed ashore, and months later, when its flesh had rotted away, Joycie made trip after trip to carry the giant vertebrae home. She sat them in a long line beside the stream, and one of Joe's favourite games was to jump from one to the other without touching the ground.

‘You're running along a whale!' Joycie called to him. ‘Look! Right along its spine.' She guided his fingers so he could feel his own vertebrae; the same, but so much smaller.

Over the years the valley became as decorated as a bowerbird's nest. When Joe began to walk, he toddled along the beach behind her. They played in the golden sand, and they were in the sea so often that Joe swam like a little seal before he was two. They explored the crystal clear pools scattered amongst the rocks like jewel boxes, filled with anemones, starfish, crabs and bubble weed. Each day the sea washed up something new. She threaded the treasures they found onto fishing line, and made spider webs of sea-urchins, starfish, sea-dragons and shells which danced from the trees around their home.

Joycie made a swing for Joe from washed-up rope and driftwood, and she turned an old fishing net into a fine hammock—under the shady blackwood in summer, and strung beside the cave-fire in winter. She had to do something, make something, every day, or she felt the heebie-jeebies creeping up on her.

Winter was the hardest time, especially when Joe was tiny and it was too cold and wet to take him outside. Then, sometimes, they stayed in the cave for days, drawing, reading, keeping the fire going. Once she'd done her work she could relax, and then she and Joe would lie in the hammock, playing and singing together. She played his favourite tunes on the old mouth organ, tapping out the time with her foot, smiling as he sang and danced around on his chubby legs. She loved the bush, and although the sadness in her heart did not fade, she was quiet and restful, compared to the jumpy way she felt in town.

Ron was on her mind a hundred times a day. The little time they had together seemed like a dream now. She had a photograph in a silver frame of them on their wedding day, looking so happy; a lifetime ahead of them. So they thought.

She missed her brother and dad, too. She still talked aloud to them. She didn't realise just how much she talked until one day she heard Joe murmuring as he played in the sand, ‘Sorry Mick, sorry Dad.' Over and over in his baby sing-song voice, ‘Sorry Mick, sorry Dad.'

Joycie didn't have a calendar to count the days but she put a charcoal mark on the wall of her cave every year when the purple flags started to flower. The day Joe was born she had looked out the hospital window and noticed a clump of them blooming, so that was how she remembered his birthday. She knew the date, October the fifth, but she had no way of telling exactly when it was; she just knew that when the purple flags flowered it was time to celebrate Joe's birthday. Joycie was shocked to realise one day that there were eight marks on the wall.

She felt very close to her mother on the headland. In the blue-and-silver tin, in a box, safe in the cave, was a photograph of her cradling baby Joyce and smiling stiffly for the camera. Joycie knew her smile wouldn't really have been like that. It was just the way a photograph made you feel: all shy to be looked at so hard. She had such a tender face, with soft olive skin and crinkly black hair.

Another photograph was of her brother Mick, and her father, both on horses, squinting into the sun. They sat easily, with their feet forward, stockwhips looped over their shoulders, ready for anything. Joycie's heart always skipped a beat when she thought of them. It was a terrible thing she had done. She promised herself she'd go back, explain to them, ease their pain. But it was always too hard. She'd tell herself they were tough, they were men; her father had kept going when their mum had died, hadn't he? But it nagged at her. Nagged like the pain that had been poking at her for nearly two years now.

When it first happened, she thought she'd eaten too many rock oysters. The next time, the native cherries were to blame. But the last pain had brought her to her knees when it hit, and put her into a dead sweat. For the first time she thought she really might have to go back. When she came to live at the valley, all those years ago, her biggest fear had been that Joe would get seriously sick; sick in a way that she couldn't fix with tea-tree oil or a cool cloth. But he never had. He was always well. And now her body was letting her down. Joe couldn't care for her if she got really sick. He was only eight. He was too little to be on his own.

When she thought like this, she would take out her mother's shell necklace from the tin. The necklace came from Seal Island, her father had told her, beyond the headland. It was made from hundreds of tiny shells, each a luminous green, and shone as though it had an energy of its own. Even in the faded sepia portrait of her mother it seemed to glow at her throat. It was Joycie's most treasured thing.

Joycie and Joe rose with the sun and went to bed at nightfall. As Joe grew older they had more and more fun together, spearing fish in the shallow lake, body surfing out at the ocean beach, laughing at the old echidna who trundled into their valley. He was always so intent on finding ants that he'd come right up to them if they lay very still in his path. Once Joycie grabbed him with her jumper, so his spikes didn't stick in, and they turned him over and pulled the ticks off his furry tummy. His fur was like brown velvet, so soft you could hardly feel it, and he was as shy as a timid child, covering his face with his little clawed hands.

Their valley was filled with birds. They had no fear of Joycie and Joe, and flitted and perched all around them: wrens, parrots, warblers, and their favourite, the grey thrush. The only time they would dart for cover was when the shadow of a hawk or eagle crossed the valley floor. Joe could mimic all their songs, and knew their nests and where they built them. He and Joycie collected feathers and jammed them into cracks around the cave. Joe would lie in bed at night and watch them quivering in the draft from the fire.

Joycie showed Joe piles of mussel shells left by the people who'd lived on the headland for thousands of years. ‘You know those dingoes we hear sometimes at night?' she asked. ‘That howling? Well, their ancestors would have belonged to those people. They would have been the women's dogs. When the people were driven away, the dogs became wild.'

Joe liked to think of people living on the headland, just like him and Joycie.

They fished mainly on the rugged eastern coast of the headland, where they were less likely to be seen. Not that there was anyone much to see them. They sometimes saw cattle on the flats behind the ocean beach, and occasionally boats came ashore for water from their little creek. Joycie collected dingo droppings and scattered them through the swordgrass there, to put the fishermen's dogs off the scent.

Once they were nearly discovered by a group of men and women who came so silently through the sand dunes that Joycie and Joe had to race into the scrub like the wind, leaving their oysters unshelled on the beach. The people camped at Middle Spring for a week, walking every day to different places collecting flowers and taking photographs.

One day Joe crept into their camp while they were out exploring and did some investigating of his own. He reached into the tiny tents and gasped at the softness of their sleeping bags. He searched through the food, gorging himself on chocolate and spitting out the bitter coffee he tasted. As he left, he brushed away his footprints with a branch, and his visit would have stayed a secret but for the beautiful red knife that fell out of his shirt as Joycie tucked him into bed that night. She had told him not to touch any of their things, to stay away, and she felt sick when she saw the Swiss Army knife. She smacked him, the only time she ever did, and told him terrible stories about what the people would do to little boys they found snooping in their camp. Then she took the knife and rushed out into the night, leaving him sobbing and confused at the way she'd turned on him.

But when he woke the next morning, she was laughing. ‘I crept up to their camp and they were talking about the knife. See, you naughty boy, they already missed it. You can't take people's things. I sat and waited until they went to bed and then I tossed the knife, a big high toss, and it landed right in the middle of all the tents. I was about to leave when, suddenly, out of one tent pops a head, staring at the knife lying there in the firelight. He must of heard it land. The man crawled out and picked up the knife and he scratched his head. He just kept scratching his head!'

Joe kept his distance after that, but he could see they were gentle people. They seemed to care about this place of his and the animals and plants that lived in it, and he really couldn't believe the stories Joycie told.

It was the same with the drovers. When they brought the cattle down, or came to muster, Joycie tried to keep him in the valley, and told him what bad people they were. But as he grew older, Joe could see this wasn't true.

In fact, Joycie knew who the drovers were. It would be the Frasers. She used to muck around with Dave Fraser when she was a kid. But she wasn't going to tell Joe that. Dave was probably just like the rest now.

Joe was used to the cattle—they were around all winter—and they were fun to chase, if Joycie didn't see. But the horses, Joe loved the horses—their manes, their swishing tails, and the gentle nickering that greeted him when he crept up to pat them in the night. The last time the drovers came, Joe defied Joycie and shadowed the cattle and horses for two days until they left. He wasn't game to let himself be seen, but at night he lay in the dark like a hungry dog, devouring the scraps of stories and songs that drifted from the campfire. He went back to the valley determined to make Joycie see that she was wrong, that these people would not hurt him, but she was so distraught, so crazy with worry that he couldn't begin to explain. When she finally calmed down, she held him fiercely and wept into his hair. ‘I thought you'd gone. I thought they'd taken you.' Her voice was thick against his neck. ‘You think they look like nice people but I know. I've been in the town. Never, never let anyone see you. They'll take you away. They killed your dad. Even Pops couldn't save him.'

Joe sighed and hugged her close. It wasn't Joycie looking after him any more. It was him looking after Joycie.

That night they sat on the whale rock that jutted into the sea at Whiting Beach. Joycie hummed a tune but Joe didn't join in. His mind was racing. Joycie's fear made him wary, and he was bound to stay and care for her, but the lights across the bay were drawing him like a moth to a flame.