Birdbrain (15 page)

Tears squeeze their way out from the corners of my eyes. I can’t control my loud gulps of breath.

A hand reaches out from under the curtain hanging between us. Jyrki’s arm comes to rest on my chest, wraps itself around me, pulls me and my sleeping- bag tight against him.

‘Hey. It’s only the tide.’

By now I’m sobbing — long, heaving, spasmodic sobs — because I know at some point I’m going to have to tell him I’ve lost the pepperoni.

Heidi’s cousin and her
fiancé,
both our age, not even thirty, were swept away by the tsunami at Khao Lak.

I can understand her overreaction.

I’ve got to do something. She clings on to me in the darkness.

I whisper comforting nonsense into her ears. With my body I protect her from the roaring, rushing wall that she thinks is rising up from behind the horizon.

There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream
,
remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water
;
and silence.

—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

It’s incredible how much a thin piece of nylon fabric that doesn’t even absorb water can weigh once it’s wet. As we roll up the tent, no matter how much we try to shake it, it seems to have doubled in mass.

The morning is chilly and bright and beautiful. The droplets of water blown off the eucalyptus trees by occasional gusts of wind and the muddy earth under foot are the only reminders of the storm.

My night of insomnia stings my eyes and lingers as a stuffy taste in my mouth. I’m shivering a bit from lack of sleep and the moisture hanging in the air. She pulls on her hiking trousers; I’ll make do with shorts.

As I’m boiling up some water to make a cup of tea, she suggests we might as well have some soup for breakfast.

I’m startled. Packet soups aren’t meant for breakfast.

Well. I suppose it is a fact that we barely had any dinner yesterday.

She hands me a packet of soup so quickly that she must have been holding it out ready.

I’m spooning chicken soup into my mouth when I notice something black on my arm.

After a storm like that all kinds of crap falls out of the trees. I flick at it with my free hand, but it won’t come off my skin. Then I see it swelling at one end and stretching itself out into a funnel.

I give a shriek and start flapping and shaking and swiping at my arm, but the black blob won’t come off.

Jyrki reacts, then sees something moving on his thigh, too, albeit on top of his shorts.

‘Leeches. Well, well.’

‘Get it off! Get it
off!’
I shout.

I don’t even know why I’m so supremely revolted by the thought of having a parasite on me, sucking my blood, my vitality, eating away at me, and
I
can’t even bring myself to look at my arm as Jyrki, after flicking his own leech to the ground, starts prising the thing off my skin, a thing that’s slimy and shapeless.

‘I should have remembered this,’ says Jyrki. ‘These little buggers drop down from the trees after its been raining. We should check each other’s necks every now and then before we reach open ground.’

One of our colleagues packing up his stuff has heard the scream and comes over to see what all the fuss is about. I explain that the little lady wasn’t exactly enamoured with our invertebrate friends. The bloke chuckles and hangs around for a chat. He’d set out from Melaleuca the day before, and he’s clearly more than a bit impressed when he hears we’re continuing along Old Port Davey Track. He asks about our food packages waiting at Melaleuca.

My surprise is tangible. He notices this and continues, explaining that the few people that take our route or that trek back and forth along Southy usually have extra supplies flown out to Melaleuca beforehand. You call the flight operator. You put together a packet of food and take it to the airport. All this costs a nominal freight charge because the plane takes travellers out this way almost every day, so it’s a handy way of shipping out extra provisions for your group. Then halfway along the track you can stock up your rucksack with fresh supplies that you haven’t had to break your back carrying all the way.

I glance to one side. She seems to be concentrating on pressing a piece of paper on to the spot where the leech bit her.

I quickly change the subject and wish the guy good luck for Ironbound. He says his goodbyes and walks off.

Hopefully the food-package conversation didn’t fall on the wrong set of ears. If she’s overheard him I’ll never hear the end of it.

After a two-hour hike the sun is so high in the sky that I’ve absolutely got to take off some of my clothes. I don’t bother listening to Jyrki muttering, as if to himself, that it would save time if certain people could make their minds up about this sort of thing back at the camp.

I sit down on my rucksack and take off my boots, then my hiking trousers with their duct-tape seam. I stand up and start pulling up my shorts when Jyrki clears his throat. Meaningfully.

‘Erm, hang on,’ he says, pointing vaguely towards the back of my knee. ‘Hang on a minute.’

I look down and this time the scream gets stuck in my throat, comes out as nothing more than a shrill little squeak, and I feel almost faint.

At the back of my knee there is something black and shiny, fat and greedy. It’s like a pulsating boil, the length and size of half a finger.

I can’t sit down again. I can’t bend my knee. The mere thought of the surrounding skin coming into contact with it is enough to make my hands quiver.

‘It must have jumped down from the trees this morning before you pulled on your trousers,’ says Jyrki. ‘And you wouldn’t have noticed it. Where’s the food?’

Food? What, are we going to stop for a snack? But Jyrki is already undoing my rucksack and rummaging around for the bag of food. He finds the resealable bag with the small sachets of salt and pepper that we’d pinched from the flight. He rips open a sachet of salt.

‘Stretch out your leg.’

I straighten the leech leg out behind me, and I feel an almost stupid sense of relief, as though I’m pushing the disgusting creature further away, even though it’s still attached to me. Jyrki sprinkles salt on the bend in my knee.

‘What are you doing?’ I’m ashamed of the shrillness in my voice.

‘This might just be an old wives’ tale, but leeches apparently don’t like salt. Should make it easier to pull it off.’

As Jyrki pulls the leech off my leg, I can’t feel anything. Not a nip, not even the repulsive sensation of it pulling away. Jyrki disposes of the thing in his hand.

‘Why didn’t it hurt?’

‘These little guys release an anaesthetic into their victims and an agent that stops the blood clotting. Speaking of which, that’s bleeding quite a bit. There are thick veins behind your knee really close to the surface of the skin.’

‘It’ll have to be bandaged with gauze and skin tape.’ My voice gradually returns to normal, because even I can do this. ‘The first-aid stuff is in the left-hand side pocket.’

A ruby-red stream of blood is trickling down my calf as if, diverted by the tampon, my period had tried to find an alternative way out of my body.

Two blokes walk towards us with surfboards under their arms.

Bloody hell, how much fuel has had to be burnt to transport all that out here?

They approach us on the path as if this is something they do every day. Little bags on their backs and their man-sized fibreglass toys supported against their hips.

As if everything I’ve been trying to escape has overtaken me, jumped out from behind a corner and slapped me in the face.

They acknowledge us casually and disappear around the bend in the path. I have to consult the map: sure enough, a little way back there’s an almost invisible trail leading away from the main path. It winds its way down to a virginal cove that these guys must have heard people bragging about. They absolutely had to see it for themselves, had to surf the waves that other people hadn’t yet polluted with their presence.

Still, you’ve got to admire them for carrying stuff all that way. It’s a thirty-kilometre round trip from here to Melaleuca. Thirty kilometres with a surfboard beneath your arm, just so you can tell your mates you’ve surfed at Hidden Bay.

After crossing the gentle shoulder of a series of hills I can see the Melaleuca lagoon in the distance, a primitive, sandy airstrip and the buildings standing next to it, and the sense of relief almost makes me burst into tears.

Buildings themselves don’t mean anything — they’re not shops, they’re not refreshment stands — but a building is still a building. It doesn’t let the rain in, you don’t have to lie there with your legs bent uncomfortably across your rucksack, the wind doesn’t rattle the walls, and if a eucalyptus tree falls on the roof the person inside won’t necessarily be crushed to death.

Buildings also generally feature real toilets, ones with walls and something to sit on. At this point in time that’s more than enough. I don’t care how much it smells, as long as my arse is high enough above the slurry of excrement heaving with innumerable life forms.

And where there are buildings there are generally other people, too. Real people. Members of the same species, not just occasional passers-by or people that happen to be sharing our campsite but representatives of a certain level of civilization. Real people, people who stay in the same place for more than a moment, people you can ask all kinds of things you could never ask fellow competitors in the never-ending how-far-out-into-the-bush-have-you-been contest. The most you ever ask these other competitors is how swollen or dry a particular river is, because everybody’s basic assumption is that they already know everything.

Perhaps once again, although it’s just for a moment, we can feel like part of a group, a community, feel that somebody else might shoulder some of the shared responsibility for one another. If Jyrki were suddenly to collapse with a brain haemorrhage I wouldn’t have to panic all by myself, to flap around and try to do something. I’d be able to find other people to take control of the situation. People who know better, people who know what they’re doing.

What’s more, this place has that blessed little sandy airstrip. With the help of that airstrip, it’s only an hour from here to the heart of a more civilized civilization than we could ever dream of demanding. So if Jyrki did have that brain haemorrhage — just a minor one, of course, but he’d be unconscious for a while and need immediate treatment — or if I tripped on the duckboards and sprained my ankle just badly enough, then we wouldn’t be in too much trouble. If there’s a runway there must be working links to the rest of the world, and if you have money and credit cards and a communication link to civilization it’s almost as if you’re already there. The rest is just a matter of sorting things out. But if your foot slips out in the middle of some God-forsaken place like Ironbound, or if a tidal wave smashes you against the rocks at Granite Beach, or if you’re out in the bush — of which there is plenty in Southy — and step on a venomous snake (and there are plenty of them, too), then you’re basically dead. Although in theory — and I really mean
in theory
— you’d still have hours to live.

As the buildings grow larger and larger I become more and more excited. Here there are even two huts. No need for all that obsessive palaver of the tent; here we can spread out and relax on a bunk. You can cook food sitting on a real bench; you can eat at a real table. Someone might have left an old magazine or a frayed paperback in the hut. The very thought of having something to read brings water to the virtual mouth in my brain.

We’ve hiked like the wind. After leaving the coast there was a slight incline, but the path has been so good and dry and easy that it’s only midday, and it would appear that the rest of the path up to Melaleuca runs along duckboards. A lazy afternoon — I mean a real lazy afternoon with something civilized to do — opens out in front of me like the Holy Grail.

I can’t help smiling as we reach the edge of the runway. There’s a water tank by the side of the airstrip building. That feels like civilization, too; this is a place where you don’t have to drink from brown murky ditches. Here you can drink from something built by human hands.

I start filling the Platypus with water from the tank, careful not to let any go to waste. Well, after last night’s generous downpour the tank should be full again.

Although we’re over ten kilometres away from the actual coast, the lagoon at Melaleuca, even though it’s far inland, is connected via a narrow sound to Bathurst Harbour, a vast inland body of water that joins the sea to the west. This waterway has enabled people to ship in machines and equipment by boat, to maintain the old tin mines and this cluster of buildings in Melaleuca. I’m surprised there aren’t any old tractors rusting away in the bushes.

She's eyeing the narrow dirt track that leads towards a bird-watching shack partially hidden in the bushes and from there on to the huts. They look like they’re made of corrugated iron. Yuck.

It’s still very early, and the weather’s good. Old Port Davey Track runs across the airstrip and winds off to the west. I remember that according to the map it crosses a river then continues north-west through an easy-looking flat section of terrain. It then reaches Joan Point where you have to cross to Bathurst Narrows by boat. You can’t spend the night there; there’s no drinking water. Across the sound at Farrell Point there’s a brook and a designated campsite.

I take another look at my watch. Another four, five hours and we’ll have reached the crossing.

I ask her why she isn’t filling her water bottles.

She looks at me as though I’ve just crawled out from beneath a stone.

I tell her we’ve got plenty of time to reach Farrell.

She pauses for a long moment. Then she asks what we’re going to do with the extra day. Weren’t we supposed to arrive at Scott’s Peak on Thursday?

I remind her that there’s a suitable bus connection leaving Scott’s Peak on Tuesday, too.

She asks why we’re suddenly cutting two whole days out of our agreed timetable. I can hear from her voice that she’s retreating further and further into her dug-out, assuming defensive positions.