Poison Bay (3 page)

The sky was clear, the air crisp. Eight people alone in the universe.
 

Bryan said, “The Maori call this place Ata Whenua—Shadow Land.”

Rachel said, “Why is that?”

“The mountains are so steep that in winter some of the valleys never get the sun.”

Like many of Bryan’s comments, this one shifted the tone. “Great,” Callie said. “Does anyone else feel like those mountains are watching us?”

Adam said, “Nah. It’s not the mountains, just the mountain parrots.”

Jack chuckled, but stopped when he caught a glare from Bryan.

Before long, the hikers dispersed to their assigned tents. Bryan had separated friends and combined people who didn’t get along, but whether he’d done it as a mixer or for less cuddly reasons, who could tell? Jack was sure Callie would have preferred Rachel to Erica. As for him, despite being housed with Kain, he wriggled into his sleeping bag with a vast sigh of relief. It was bliss just to lie down.
 

***

Morning brought sullen skies, scudding rain, and even flurries of snow. Jack found the cold amplified yesterday’s muscle strains as he forced himself to walk again.

Adam was about to cross a creek ahead of him when a rain squall hit them full in the face, sending them fumbling to raise jacket hoods. The other man turned back to say, “Great holiday, huh?”

“Yeah. Who’d go to the beach when you could do this?”

Hours later, they prepared to lunch on the last of the sad little sandwiches made yesterday morning. With difficulty, Jack persuaded Bryan to authorize the gas stove for instant soup, to help comfort them in the bleak weather. The meal was eaten huddled under thick tree cover that stopped much of the rain, or at least broke its fall.

Jack sheltered Rachel’s hands with part of his jacket while she checked her blood sugar, and beside her, Erica strapped her knee, using a first-aid kit she’d brought from home. “Are you okay?” he said.

She shrugged. “It’s the twisting and turning. I’ll be okay.”

He was impressed by the discreet way she went on to dress Sharon’s blistered feet. Sharon didn’t need Bryan’s criticism for buying the wrong shoes, to add to her physical pain.

Later, his respect for Erica dissolved. She flirted with Kain all afternoon, and Kain reciprocated. They were welcome to each other, but Jack was pretty sure they were doing it to taunt Callie. She’d become unusually quiet.

When the time came for lights out, he went to the tent he was to share with Kain, but his pack had been dumped in the rain. Erica had taken his place inside.

“Where am I supposed to sleep?” He felt a ridiculous desire to report them to Bryan.

Kain said, “Go and share with Callie, Reverend. You’ve always wanted to do that anyway.” He tossed Jack’s sleeping bag out, and pulled the tent flap down in his face.

Jack stomped over to Callie’s tent. “Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?” She stuck her head out.
 

“Your new roommate. Erica’s taken my spot.”

“I wondered where she’d got to.”

“I’m sure it’s going to be a very deep relationship, for about eight more days.”

“Well you can’t sleep under the stars in this weather, so you’d better get in here.”

Jack crawled in after her, and wrestled with his rain-spattered sleeping bag. By the time he’d got himself settled, he’d become philosophical. “This might be better anyway. Kain snores.”

“Wait till Erica finds out,” she said, her voice muffled by her sleeping bag. “Better still, wait till Bryan catches them.”

“Do you think they’ll get detention?”

“At the very least.”

“Hey, what if Bryan catches
us
?”

“We’re not going to do anything. Trust me.”

“Yes, but if he sees us coming out in the morning, how will he know?”

“Bryan is weird, Jack, not a moron. He’s had to watch those two all afternoon, same as the rest of us.”

“I suppose so. But don’t you try anything. I’m a good Christian boy y’know.”

Callie giggled. “Oh shut up and go to sleep.”

After a few minutes silence, she spoke again, her voice soft. “Jack, about those foreign correspondents… you might be right. I’m sorry I was dismissive about your camera.”

He blushed in the darkness. “Don’t worry about it.”
 

“It’s just that I’ve been used to different production standards. My doccos are always about things that happen in nice, safe places.” She snorted in self-deprecation. “With electricity and plumbing.”

“I’m sorry I lost my temper. I guess I’m not sure I know what I’m doing.”

“I never had any doubts about you, only the camera. Everything you did when we were at school and uni was excellent.”

“Flattery doesn’t work with me, Cal.”

“It’s the truth. If you believed in yourself more, you could do anything.” She sighed. “I always felt inadequate around you, to be honest. It’s all smoke and mirrors with me. Day after never-ending day.”

He fought the urge to reach for her hand in the darkness.

4

Ellen Carpenter was working late again, because work filled the hours. She knew she must go home, or run the gauntlet of the muggers that populated her imagination when the university campus grew dark and creepy.

But her Brisbane home was silent too, tonight. And so she lingered.

On her desk, three faces smiled out of a photo frame; her own between Roger’s and Rachel’s, a family holiday at the Great Barrier Reef. Was it only two years ago? Before they even knew anything was wrong. Before she noticed the dark blotch on her husband’s back.

Thanks to Ellen’s encouragement, her only child was on the other side of the Tasman Sea tonight, engulfed by wilderness, while her mother tried not to worry about the dangers and whether she’d packed enough supplies to manage her diabetes.
 

And Roger was so much further away than that.

Ellen turned to her calendar and calculated the number of days before Rachel came home.

5

With every day that passed, Callie’s anxiety grew. Why had she agreed to come? It was so much harder than she’d imagined back in the lunchroom at work, telling her colleagues stories of daring and danger, while not really believing them herself.
 

Now she was living the reality of her foolish decision. There were times she wondered if she would survive. She had followed Bryan’s instructions and trained till her body ached, weekend after weekend in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. But she was no athlete, and now her body was betraying her. Every muscle and ligament seemed to be debating its level of commitment to her bones. Her thighs turned to jelly on the downhills. On the uphills, her heart roared in her chest, to the point that she wondered how many twenty-seven-year-old women had heart attacks. Her shoulders and neck throbbed from the dragging weight of the rucksack. She counted down the hours and minutes till the next break, when she could ease it off her back and plonk it into the mud for short-lived relief.

At lunch on Day Three, she tried to talk to Rachel about it.

“I’m not coping. I don’t know what to do.”

Rachel frowned. “What do you mean? You just put one foot in front of the other, that’s all.”

“I’m afraid, Rachel. We’re not even halfway there.” She felt tears gathering.

“Don’t be silly. You’ll be fine. It’s just walking.”

Callie felt abandoned. Dismissed. Misunderstood. Rachel had always been exercise crazy—her way of keeping a sense of control over her diabetes. She was forever at the gym, or cycling, or swimming, or hiking—she was a
machine
. She obviously didn’t have a clue what it meant to be inside Callie’s skin right now.

Callie was engulfed in a longing for home—not Sydney and its emerald harbor, the city she’d lived in for the past five years, but Brisbane. The refuge of childhood. In her mind, she saw its gently rounded hills, dusty gum trees, the sleepy brown river.
 

But most of all, she longed for its great big sky. There was no sky in this place. Just a narrow gap between granite cliffs overhead, and even that disappeared when the clouds fell down.

And fall they did.
 

The storm that descended later that afternoon had been busy beforehand, up in the tops.

Callie watched Sharon ahead of her soldiering onwards on ruined feet, sloshing through water shin-deep from the swollen river. Every step must be an ordeal for the poor girl, but Callie had yet to hear a complaint pass Sharon’s lips.
 

I’m such a coward
. Tears slid down her face, and she didn’t care. In these conditions, who would see?

Rain pounded on her jacket hood, bounced off her rucksack’s rain cover. She became aware of a roaring noise, even above the sound of the rain. There were shouts from up ahead. Through the downpour she dimly saw people running. Uphill. Away from the river.
 

When the wave of water hit Sharon, it lifted her off her feet and threw her at Callie. They both fell, and were swept for meters before a tree snagged Callie’s rucksack. She instinctively reached out and grabbed the slender trunk with her left hand, wrapping the other arm under Sharon’s armpit. She struggled to maintain her grasp on either. Slowly, she found purchase under the torrent, her boot connecting with rock, and she worked her way forward till she could get the tree wedged into the crook of her left elbow, and bring her hands together to grip each other across Sharon’s chest. It was a fight to keep the other woman’s face out of the water. If Callie tipped back too far while trying to help her friend breathe, they’d both be swept away.

“Sharon! Callie!” It was Adam. He’d shed his rucksack somewhere and clambered towards them, a rope in his hands. Behind him came Kain.

Adam looped the rope around his chest and passed the other end to Kain. Callie couldn’t hear their conversation over the roar of the water, but Adam’s gestures to Kain made the plan clear. Kain would brace the rope around a sturdy tree, playing it out as Adam needed it, and help haul them back in when the moment came.

Adam shouted, “Callie, you’ll need to let go of Sharon the moment we start pulling, and grab the tree at the same time. Can you do that?”

“I think so.” What else could she say? She tried to wedge her boot more firmly into the notch in the rock below.

“Sharon, give me your hands! On three. Ready? One. Two. Three. Let go!”

Callie released and Sharon was free. The force of water swung Callie backwards but she fought her way back, renewing her grip on the narrow trunk.

A few more moments and she too was up and out of the flood. She huddled with Sharon in the mud, holding her tight as the rain poured down, both of them weeping aloud. And she didn’t care who saw her tears this time.

***

Callie looked for a chance to talk to Jack alone. She got it the next day, as the group lunched on crispbread and peanut butter, sitting in tussock grass on a mountain pass. They’d been climbing steeply upwards for hours, and she knew Bryan would crack the whip and drive them onwards again before she’d had nearly enough time to recover. At least it wasn’t raining
.

A fat and fluffy green and brown parrot walked right up to Jack’s rucksack when he was distracted, and used its hooked beak to explore and then grasp his boot-cleaning cloth where it dangled from the straps, drying. It tugged the cloth free, and waddled away with it. Jack crept after the kea, apparently hoping to trade a piece of his lunch (precious) for the cloth (irreplaceable).

Callie waited till the hostage-ransom exchange had taken place, then walked over quietly to join man and bird, who were now “chatting”. The kea turned its head from side to side as Jack explained how much trouble he’d be in with his expedition leader if he couldn’t clean his boots at night.

Callie smiled. “You’re a nutcase, Jack.”

“Yeah, but you’ve gotta admit he’s cute.”

She laughed. “He’s a thief and a vandal.”

“He reminds me of Rufus. My dog.” When she gave him an incredulous look, he added, “It’s the head tilts. Rufus does that. It’s like kryptonite, I’m powerless before it. He might have just shredded the bath mat, and I’m trying to tell him off, but three head tilts and all is forgiven.”

She laughed again, and felt some of the tension ease out of her shoulders.

Jack said, “Oops. Attila alert.”

She glanced around. About ten meters away, Bryan glared at them. For a conservationist, he had a patchy attitude to wildlife. He’d made his intolerance of the cheeky and destructive parrots quite clear during several previous encounters.

Callie sat down on a rock. “Speaking of Attila… does he worry you?”

“Yes.” He held her gaze, his face serious. “Something’s not right.”

“He was always weird, but this is… different. Like he’s barely keeping his anger under control. And he just keeps pushing us, like recruits at boot camp, who need to be humiliated.” She looked at the ground. “I’m having trouble. Not fit enough.”

“Me too. I expected a challenge, but there’s nothing like this terrain at home.” She could have kissed him for the admission.

“I’m worried about Sharon,” she continued. “She needs rest. Her jeans are still damp from yesterday. Her thighs must be red-raw by now.”
 

The two women had been sodden after the flash flood. As they were designed to do, Callie’s hi-tech garments had dried quickly, and they were wearable and warming even while wet. Sharon’s cheaper versions didn’t perform so well, and her jeans were hopeless. An hour steaming over the campfire hadn’t dried them.

Jack said, “Erica’s knees are a mess too. It’s the downhills. She’s never been anywhere you have to descend so steeply for so long.”

“Could you talk to Bryan? Ask him to slow down? You were always closest to him at school.” She saw Jack tense at that statement, and wondered why.

“I’ll try.”

She watched him have a discreet conversation with Bryan as they prepared to depart a short time later. Judging by Bryan’s posture, it wasn’t going well.

***

Days passed, and nothing improved. Callie found distraction in helping Jack with his documentary. Here at least was something she was good at. She wangled interviews, set up shots, smoothed irritations when people resented the camera. They gradually grew immune to its watchful eye, as people do with any sustained intrusion.