Rural Dreams Read online

  ‘Jesus, sorry,’ Louise was saying. ‘I must have knocked it and...’

  ‘The phone was in there wasn’t it?’ Nicole interrupted, Anna nodded.

  The phone, tins of food, water and her clothes. Inwardly, she railed. ‘Can’t be helped now,’ she said, ‘we’ve got enough food between us and there’s some staples at Baynton’s. And at least you’ve got the binoculars,’ she said to Louise. ‘I might need to borrow a jumper at some stage, but otherwise we’ll be fine.’ She thought of the phone and the cost and the pain of the forms she would have to fill out. ‘You ok?’ she asked Nicole and the other woman nodded, brushing herself down.

  Mood soured further, the three trudged on, unsettled and tired. Nicole’s ankle was sore, she stopped to give it a rub. The sun sunk low in the sky. It would be dark in less than an hour.

  ‘Jesus, what a trek,’ Nicole said.

  Anna grunted and trudged on.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about that man,’ Louise answered. ‘What the hell was he doing running without water?’

  ‘He forgot his bottle, remember?’ Anna said, motioning for them to get moving.

  Nicole looked up at her before getting to her feet. ‘Did he?’ She said. ‘You’re pretty trusting for a social worker.’

  ‘Why, what do you reckon he was doing?’

  Nicole looked at the valleys, silver and grey in the late afternoon light. ‘Oh, I’ve got my theory.’

  ‘What about not letting the bastards get us down?’ Louise’s voice was high.

  ‘What’s your theory?’ Anna said. ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘Watching.’

  Anna snorted and shook her head. But she remembered; there had been no other cars parked near the entrance to the walk. A low cloud blocked the sky for an instant and a lone bird cried out. The women were silent. Weak sunshine again. Anna urged them on.

  ‘Why not push on to Patterson’s tonight?’ Louise said. ‘Let’s not stay where that creep was.’

  ‘Impossible,’ Anna said. ‘We can’t climb up Mt Craven at night it’s far too dangerous. And it gets so cold here. We’ll be right.’

  ‘Besides anything,’ Louise said, ‘I need a hot shower.’

  ‘No showers at Baynton’s,’ Nicole’s voice was flat.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Louise began to walk.

  ‘I’ve been here before.’

  ‘Really?’ Anna turned around.

  ‘Yeah.’ Nicole’s tone was bitter, and she spun the ring on her finger around. ‘What makes you people think I’ve been nowhere?’

  Louise went quiet.

  ‘I came here once, few years ago,’ Nicole continued. ‘Clint liked to come up the mountains for deer shooting and he took me up here in the early days.’ She grew quiet, got to her feet and started walking. ‘It’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here.’

  ‘You want to think about him?’ Louise said bitterly, ‘After what he did to you?’

  ‘I want to think about what he was like at the start. Before it went to shit.’

  ‘What kind of shit are we talking about?’ Anna asked in a low voice.

  ‘Before he started showing us his real fucking colours. Red and black. Bruiser was his nickname at school you know? I should have guessed.’

  ‘You weren’t to know.’

  Nicole ignored them and looked around. Looked at the deep valleys and clumps of snow daisies, which hid steep cliff faces. She could remember very well the beauty of this place and the undertone of danger she had felt here. It hadn’t gone away. She bent down and held her ankle tight before moving on. ‘Clint’s a violent arsehole, but he was the son of a violent arsehole too. There was a time he was good to us. I don’t forget that. He’s in the right place now though.’

  Anna gave Louise a look.

  They walked heavily now, unsettled and terse. The path grew ever thinner and more difficult to navigate. Coldness set in. Anna wished herself at home with her husband, sitting on the couch watching Netflix. Louise gave her a spare jumper from her pack, but it was too light, and she rubbed at her arms and kneaded her fingers. They walked. At last, a little hut emerged from beneath a clearing of snow gums.

  ‘Baynton’s!’ There was relief in Anna’s voice. ‘Just in the nick of time.’ She half jogged toward the little wooden hut, before slowing when she noticed that the front door was ajar. She hesitated and held her arm out straight beside her to stop the other women from entering. ‘Hello?’ She called out, half poking her body inside. ‘Anyone here?’ A cold feeling came over her and she stood for a moment, her mouth opened and shut. From somewhere far away a gunshot rang out across the valley. Her breathing quickened. She felt the others behind her jump.

  Baynton’s and the door open, it was not right. This didn’t feel like the hut she knew. Taking a breath, she pushed the door further open and stepped in, heart sinking. The others piled in behind her and stopped short. Inside was a mess. Dirty dishes, a chair upturned, a window left open and the cold air streaming in at force. Some crumpled tissues on the floor. Anna walked through to the bathroom where a magazine lay opened on the floor – a nude women with legs splayed and distant eyes stared out from the pages. She kicked the magazine aside and gripped her hands. She felt sick. Louise walked in behind her and she jumped.

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ the young lawyer’s voice was shaky. ‘I just can’t.’

  ‘Can’t see a water bottle,’ Nicole’s eyes were darting about, looking about the room.

  Anna walked out of the hut and took a deep breath. In the outdoors, she felt better. The other two joined her and sat on the porch, huddled close and talking in low tones. Without mentioning what she was doing, Anna walked up a small hill beside the hut and looked around. The sun was a low red now and the valleys were cast with uneven shadows – black and grey. Anna circled about slowly, looking toward the path they would follow in the morning and the path they had come from. There was no way they could move tonight. There would be no moonlight and the night would be too cold. They’d have to stay. Get a grip, clean the hut up and stay. She looked up and down the path again. On the Saddle, the trees bent like sentinels and a flock of birds swirled overhead. Shadows shifted, lengthened. She tensed, peering into the uncertain light. Something was moving. Something was moving along the Saddle. She squinted her eyes. A black shape was moving, steadily along the ridge. A kangaroo perhaps? But there was no leaping, no detouring from the ridge. The baby inside her moved sharply downward and she winced. She closed her eyes for one, two, three seconds and opened them again. It was darker now, but she could still see the sleek figure making steady progress along the flattened path. She called down for Louise to bring her binoculars and once handed to her, bought them to her eyes, adjusting the focus for an evening sky. At first, nothing. Anna put down the binoculars and tried to locate the moving spot again. There it was. She raised the binoculars again and saw nothing. Until, until – she did see something. A figure, human, running along the ridge, a hood covering the head. Wordlessly she passed the binoculars to Louise who looked through the lenses before passing them to Nicole. The three women looked at each other.

  ‘How long till he gets here?’ Louise said.

  ‘An hour, maybe less,’ Anna said.

  ‘Is that a gun he’s holding?’

  Anna looked again. The figure was holding something. A hiking stick probably. Probably a hiking stick. ‘Unlikely it’s a gun.’

  ‘I want to go,’ Louise said.

  ‘I’m going,’ Nicole said. ‘I’m not waiting around here for him to come back. No fucking way.’ She began walking toward the hut.

  ‘Hey wait a minute,’ Anna said. ‘We don’t know who it is – it could be someone else, some runner, some hiker – someone completely fine.’

  ‘I’m going with Nicole,’ Louise said. ‘I’m willing to take the risk.’

  Anna thought of what lay ahead in the dark, Mt Craven with its visible summit and thin, windy path.

  ‘You can’t,’ she said
flatly, ‘you’ll fall or die of exposure. There’ll be no light at all. Just wait till tomorrow.’ The two women looked at her. ‘Plus, there’s three of us. One of them.’

  Nicole snorted. ‘We going to fight him off? And maybe a gun? Get real.’

  The women grew quiet. Anna wanted to resist, fought within herself to resist and be practical and calm, but couldn’t. Something about it all felt twisted and wrong. She raised the binoculars and looked again at the dot – now a fully formed figure, running, running along the ridge. Whoever it was, was moving at a fast pace. They had 45 minutes maximum.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We’ll go now – but not up Mt Craven to Patterson’s. There’s another way. We won’t fight him off, or stay to find out whoever that is – we’ll leave. We can take the back trail to my old farmhouse, then cut across the Precipice to Patterson’s tomorrow. We’ll miss Craven completely and we won’t have to deal with who-ever that arsehole is coming up this track.’

  The two other women nodded, visibly relieved, and within ten minutes the three of them were negotiating a small rocky path behind two water tanks. The sun sank, and darkness descended all along the Great Dividing Range. A deep silence took hold of the three women and they walked quietly – following Anna and waiting patiently when she took time to negotiate her surrounds. This was an old track – there was an easier way to reach the old farm from the valley, a steep road winding up the mountain which led directly to her old place. This was a shortcut for when they walked the Saddle. Sometimes used by hunters and Parks people, but not many people knew the way.

  Eventually, the women came to a clearing – the path spun round the side of the mountain and Anna cautioned them to be extra careful. ‘Keep one hand on the mountain face,’ she said. ‘There’s ledges, but in places it’s a 1000 metre drop the other side.’ She kept talking as the path spun a slow wide arc, barely visible in the moonlight. ‘Over there – in front of us,’ she pointed to an area where the path flattened out and spread out in a wide ledge. ‘That’s the actual Precipice,’ she said. ‘The story goes it was where Aboriginal people were forced to jump off the cliff, hounded by the settlers for supposedly encroaching on their land.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Louise said.

  Anna thought of her own settler background. The grainy black and white photos of men standing proudly by ring barked trees and holding up possum skins. Over the years, her father had built up as small collection of tools found in the earth when digging up the ground for dams and fence posts. Shiny rocks, smoothed over and pointed at one end. Another time, a midden with broken animal bones, bits of an old kangaroo skin cloak and what was later identified as the parts of a fish trap. A picnic, she thought now. It looked like the aftermath of a picnic. She imagined whole groups of people, gathered in this area, celebrating some important event. Her settler relations wrote home to Ireland in wonder at how many of the valleys and mountainsides were cleared perfectly for livestock – as if that was the whole purpose of them! No thought then, for the original land-owners who managed the land. No mention of the violence and dispossession. The Precipice. It held a fear, the stories of old and that dark thought that it may have been her ancestors who had done the chasing. So close in her bloodline, the killing.

  They trudged on, finally coming across the gates to the old house, wooden and rotting and filled with silver spider webs. Then the house itself: fallen into itself and covered in animal shit and dust. Most of the windows were still intact and the old crab apples thrived in the alpine weather. Even those roses that her mother planted were still there – tall and wild sparks of colour in the green grey of the bush. She stepped inside and jumped lightly up and down on the floorboards. It was fine. She gave a small, delighted laugh before turning to the others.

  ‘Come in, come in!’ Anna said, waving them through the doorway. ‘It’s warm inside, come and get out of that wind.’

  The three women hurried indoors, shutting the door behind them. Inside, it was warmer and, using a torch, Anna managed to find some old candles left over from her last stay in the house with her husband. Once lit, the place became a little home. After scrounging the old woodshed, Anna managed to light the open fireplace. After a few minutes of being encased in smoke – the chimney cleared, and the place took on a rosy glow. Together, the women cooked the ready meals over the fire and ate them with camp forks from their packs. Anna made do with a spoon borrowed from Nicole and as she ate the hot food, she felt a sense of relief that all had turned out ok. The anxiety from the track seemed a long way off. From beneath her fluffy jacket, Louise pulled out a small hip flask.

  ‘Well I never!’ Nicole laughed. ‘You?’

  ‘Whiskey!’ Louise said. ‘Best thing for pain.’

  Anna looked on as the Louise poured Nicole a generous amount into a tin cup before swigging from the hip flask. Louise tipped the flask toward her, ‘Drink?’ Anna shook her head.

  ‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘Pregnant.’

  ‘Well congratulations,’ Nicole said after a moment of silence. ‘You don’t look it.’

  ‘And here I am complaining about a blister,’ Louise said.

  ‘I’m only 13 or so weeks.’

  ‘But still, to be out here on a hike – in the middle of nowhere!’

  ‘It’s hardly the middle of nowhere. This place is somewhere.’

  Louise nodded, her eyes grew misty and she took another swig. ‘I hope one day I’ll have a baby.’

  Nicole looked at Anna. ‘You feeling okay?’

  ‘Yeah – bit tired.’

  Nicole drank from her mug, ‘Well good on you. A walk in countryside like this, reckon it’ll do your little one good.’

  ‘That’s what I think.’

  ‘See this?’ Nicole held up her hand, showing a small gold ring on her finger. ‘Got this ring when Tyler turned one. Never take it off. Reminds me of him you know?’ She played with the ring, turning it, rubbing it as she spoke. ‘Life may be shit a lot of the time, but it’s kids that make it bearable.’ She gave the ring a quick kiss and rubbed it some more.

  ‘That’s a nice idea, getting a ring on Tyler’s first birthday.’

  ‘Best thing I own.’

  Louise, still musing about the wonders of pregnancy, began rolling out her sleeping bag and climbing into it. Nicole followed suit. Anna borrowed sleeping sheets from the other two and rugged up as best as she could, lying closest to the fire. With the flickering light of the flames and the sound of the wind against the wooden beams, the women were lulled into a sleep. All about them were the mountains, ancient and huge. Cattle, wild pigs, rabbits and foxes roamed, creating havoc with the native vegetation, but the mountain remained and as the introduced species failed or prospered, the mountain would remain still. The women dreamt of big landscapes, of wide skies and powerful winds. Without realising, they huddled closer together in their sleep and when they awoke in the pre-dawn – Anna was gone.

  Nicole, barely awake, was not worried, but Louise sat up and shone the torch all around. She felt a small prickle of fear and wondered why. Nicole murmured before turning over that Anna was probably just going to the toilet outside. Louise lay for a moment and tried to relax. Something scuffed against the side of the hut and she sat up, listening. Awake and alert now, she rubbed her arms. It was cold. Really cold. She put on her puffy jacket and found her boots in the near dark. Not knowing if the other woman was asleep or not, she whispered that she was going outside. Nicole grunted faintly in response. Louise stumbled outside and called softly. Nothing. She tried to peer into the growing light to see. ‘Anna!’ she called again, a little louder. There was a crunch behind her and before she could whip around, someone clasped their hand over her mouth. She froze.

  ‘Be quiet,’ it was Anna, whispering in her ear. ‘There’s someone here.’ For a moment the two women stood completely still, listening. Anna covered her watch with one hand to hide the glow and looked at the time, 5:30am. It would be light in half an hour. She put her face close to Louise’s and li
fted a forefinger to her lips before pointing to the track ahead that led to the cliffs. Louise stood still for a second before following, her breath loud in the still air. After a minute or so there was the sound of a large branch breaking and Louise gave a small scream. A wallaby jumped across the track in front of them. She laughed. ‘Well there you go,’ she said. ‘There’s your stranger.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Anna sounded uncertain. ‘It must have been moving outside the hut looking for fruit from the orchard. I don’t know what I was thinking. But it’s weird, I heard something.’ Anna stopped talking, didn’t mention that she also felt something, felt that something was out of place. She began walking on the track again, trying to dispel the unease. ‘Come on,’ she said to Louise. ‘I’ll show you something really spectacular.’ Dawn strengthened, and the sky presented a pink and yellow glow. Cushion plants and small shrubs took on sharp colours of silver- grey and a bird began to sing, loud and insistent. Louise followed Anna, walking in the growing light to a place where rock, not dirt, was beneath their feet and Anna stopped, holding out her arm and telling Louise to take care. They were near the edge of a mountain cliff and the view spread out before and around them. The landscape became everything and as the sun emerged, orange and red, the mountains were ablaze in light. The women were silent, and Louise thought briefly that this was one of those moments in life she would always remember. The sun rose a fraction more and the leaves around her shimmered in light and shade. The whole world was taken up with sky and mountain and bush.

  ‘To think!’ Louise said, ‘this was once your home!’

  ‘Once,’ Anna said. ‘Briefly.’

  Anna stood. Louise sat on a dried branch from a fallen tree. They took in the view. After a few minutes Anna spoke, ‘Better get moving, Nicole might be up.’

  Louise yawned and stretched before standing up. She started walking back into the darker trees and the track, Anna following. A loud crunch sounded at the back of them and as she turned around, Anna felt someone grasp her arm. She gave a low yell from deep in her throat and was yanked back. Louise turned and stood stock still in shock as a large man stepped out on the track, grinning.