Chapter 3

s**t happens. That’s been my motto in life. Seen me through thick and thin, and I’m too set in my ways to change now. It’s what I told my daughter, Kylie, when her husband took off with his boss. His way of going up in the world. s**t happens, I said. She didn’t want to hear it, not with two babies hanging off her. I offered to help out, but she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want another thing from me, she said, or even set eyes on my face. She didn’t have to make things so final. I pushed back a cuticle with the jagged edge of a thumb nail, the pain quick and sharp. I was sitting out on my front deck, watching the last of the daylight fade out over the western rise. I don’t believe in permanence, but Kylie had held fast to that stance, for years. She’d always been tenacious. She never came down to visit me after I moved out to Peachtree. Not once. I’d abandoned her, apparently, although she hadn’t given me much to stay for in the city. I thought the little twinnies would have liked it out in the country, but Kylie said the area around Cann River was too wild. How would she know? Then again, she was right. Of course, it was wild! There was nothing out there other than bush. The place didn’t look so lush in the autumn of ’83. It’d been a long hot summer and there was little green underfoot except along the riverbank. I’d been on my own for weeks. None of the city folk who usually came out to the campsite or their shacks to fish the inlet were game enough to head into the tinder-dry forest after the fires. The whole state was traumatised. I thought it a bit of an overreaction, but then again, it had been one helluva conflagration. At Peachtree, I felt safe enough. If a blaze did pass through, I had my boat, and the inlet was a couple of kilometres wide. As for the shack, well, I’d lost a lot more in my life than that clapped out old weatherboard. I’d lost two houses on account of a man: A house to his debt, and a house to a flood. You get used to loss the same way you get used to a sore hip. You ignore it. A cool breeze stroked my face. The lights were off in the house. That’s the thing with being off grid. All I had was a generator and a 12-volt battery for emergencies. In the 1980s, solar power was just about unheard of. I relied on candlelight by night. It did me just fine. I had the dog for company and a large glass of scotch to keep me amused. And to numb the pain in my tongue. Sometimes the inexplicable happens and that was the situation with my tongue. I thought I must have gnawed it with my back molars in my sleep because I woke up with it, and only discovered the full force of the pain when at breakfast I tried to swallow some toast. A bullet of agony shot right into my ear. I nearly gagged. The scotch worked wonders. I could swallow without discomfort, although I knew the ulcer was there. It would have taken a lot of scotch to get rid of that sting altogether. Funny how the little things hurt like the big things. An ulcer matching, say, a severed foot in intensity, if only for a pointed moment. Sam lay at my feet. She was a staunch companion, a smart and loyal Kelpie, getting on in years so we were a good match. She’d found one of my old slippers and was having a merry old time severing heel from toe, when a rumble in the distance caused her to c**k her ears. Me and Sam both sat fast, listening. I’d have heard on the bush telegraph if anyone was expected. No one came out to Peachtree at night and I wasn’t due a visitor. Besides, no one I knew drove at that speed, not without a bull bar. The roos and the wombats were not given to looking both ways before crossing the road. So, who the hell was it? The clearing by the river that was Peachtree consisted of six rundown shacks, each on its own large block, all of them owned by city dwellers wanting to escape the rest of humanity now and then, do a bit of fishing, go walkabout in the wilderness, or take a hike along the beaches that stretched for miles and miles. Put a toe or two in the Southern Ocean that churned and pounded the shore. Probably no more than a foot. The coast had strong long-shore rips that would drag even a good swimmer out to sea. Swimming was advised only when the waters were absolutely calm, and that was hardly ever. Croajingolong National Park was a wild, inhospitable place in every respect. Which was why, when a sedan pulled into old Fred’s place across the dirt track, I went inside to fetch my binoculars. Not that I expected to make out much in the dark, but I wanted to see whatever I could. The driver had obliged my curiosity by leaving his headlights on. Wanted to see his way around. I assumed it was a ‘he’ and when I returned to the deck and adjusted the binoculars, I found I was right. Sam let out a low growl. I hissed at her to stay quiet. The man disappeared around the back. I heard a dull bang and then another. Sounded like he was breaking in. I could have run across and told him where to find the key, but I wasn’t about to make his entry easy. No need. He’d got in anyway. The front door opened and out he strode, all cocky confidence. He was a small, stocky man, dressed in puffed out city gear. With his big hair, I had him marked out as a yuppie. Judging by the way he ferried the contents of his boot into the house, he wasn’t that strong. Three trips later he opened the rear passenger side door. He bent in and when he stood up, I could see a sleeping child in his arms. The kiddie would have been no more than five, judging by the size. Moments later he was back at the car, and out came another one, about the same size as the first. My heart squeezed in the looking. I wanted to think the guy was just some devoted dad taking his kids on a holiday, but old Fred never let his shack out to anyone with kids, and judging by the way he’d entered, the guy was more likely not meant to be there. If he’d been a woman, I’d have rushed over to offer my support. As it was, I felt torn between my concern for the welfare of those kiddies and wariness over that man. The father? Had to be, surely? How did he know about the shacks? A local? Not dressed like that. Someone who’d been there before, on holiday? There was no point dwelling on it. I’d phone Fred in the morning. Sam made low throaty grumbles. I thought any moment she’d bark so I tugged her collar and yanked her inside. I had to sit with her, stroking her back, keeping her calm, while I tried to think what else to do. I poured myself another whisky. Then I drew the curtains and locked all the doors in case the stranger went on a nocturnal walkabout. I sat there in the kitchen in the dark with my whisky and my dog, hoping daylight would bring sanity to the situation. The dark always brought the dark along with it. I kept thinking he had to be a child abductor, a paedophile, a snuff movie maker, a serial killing psychopath about to do those kiddies unspeakable harm. Who knew? My mind was running away with me. I couldn’t sit there speculating. I drained my glass and went over to the living room and stoked the wood stove for the night. Then I made a quick brew with the water still hot in the kettle that I’d set to the edge of the hot plate. I took my tea, black and sugarless, and Picnic at Hanging Rock to bed. Picnic at Hanging RockMy bedroom was at the rear of the house, its window facing the back yard. In there, I could safely light a candle. I put down the tea and the book and started to get changed into my bed wear. It occurred to me as I was pulling my thin grey sweater over my head that I might need to leave it on. All I took off were my boots. Two chapters in and I put the book down, deciding Hanging Rock was a stupid place to take a group of flighty schoolgirls. Then I thought those girls and that teacher couldn’t all have simply disappeared. There’d have been traces, ripped clothing, droplets of blood, screams someone had to have heard. The ground hadn’t opened its jaws and devoured them. In all, the setting, Hanging Rock, was ludicrous as it was essentially an exposed mountainside. I’d been there with Kylie when she was small. You could see and be seen for miles. Not like Peachtree. You could walk ten feet into the bush of Croajingolong and never be seen again. It was hilly terrain, riddled with creeks and rivers, a few towering gums and a lot of thick undergrowth. Then there were the tea trees, banksias and heathland beside the coast. Not that folk were in the habit of going missing in Croajingolong. Just that the wilderness coast could devour a person if they let it happen, and people had to show the place respect. I wasn’t from round those parts. I was a Tassie girl by birth, my family hailing from Ulverstone in the Apple Isle’s north west. We were farming folk, taking advantage of the rich red soils of the northern slopes that came down off the Central Highlands and met the coast. It was a homely existence, plenty of potatoes to fill the belly, hard work out in the fields, and not much to trouble us. I had a perfect childhood. No complaints there. I loved my mum and my dad and my sisters, Clara and Flo. My younger brother was a cry baby, but I managed to ignore him until he was old enough for fishing. We’d go off for hours then, me and dad and Clive. We’d come home with dinner, and mum would have the spuds cut for chips. My family were what folk called well-adjusted and comfortably off. We were not religious or political, none of us were gamblers, and all of us played sport. Mum loved tennis, Dad was into cricket, Clive kicked balls, with me and Clara it was netball, and Flo loved to swim, which we all said went nicely with her name. The only dent in that cradle of familial happiness was when I, the eldest, met Mal, the brickie, and we took off to Melbourne after the wedding. My Kylie came along three years later, and that was when I discovered my darling Mal was a gambler. The day the house we’d bought and lovingly done up was sold from under us to pay off his debts, I left him. That was in the late 1950s and it was no decade to be a single mum, but I got by working in the office of the Younghusband Wool Store in Kensington. I would have been about thirty, and I only survived the workplace, and the stench of fleece that went with it, because I was a farm girl who knew how to fish and peel spuds and get her hands dirty. I toughened up quick and repeated all of Mal’s tales and jokes as if they were my own. I guess that was also when I learned how to lie if I had to, if it came to saving my own skin. I could keep other folks’ lies too. Like Con and old Pat’s at the roadhouse. Wild horses couldn’t prise out of me what I knew about them, but I could never help the shudder that passed through me whenever one of those young backpacker girls crossed the state border in a coach, heading west to heaven knew what El Dorado was in her head. When I went into Cann River to check the mail and have a catch up with Frankie, there she’d be, the latest after the last one got away, all wet behind the ears, slaving away at the counter.