Birdbrain (14 page)

And there, don’t you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in — your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.

—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

She was holding a packet of chocolate biscuits in her hand, inching it closer to the shopping basket, looking at me all the while.

I shook my head.

She said they were rich in oats and fibre as well as chocolate. Then she said that it would be nice to reward, ourselves after a hard day or with our morning cup of tea. That you always need carbohydrates. And fibre.

Gently but firmly I took the packet from her hand and replaced it on the shelf. We already had enough to carry.

Our shopping trolley contained enough food for two people for ten days:

8        
wholewheat flatbreads (diameter
c.
20 centimetres)

1         
packet of rice and maize cakes (12 cakes)

16      
slices of pepperoni

     10    slices of processed cheese

     4     bags of instant mashed potato powder

      2    packets of tuna (chunks)

500 
ams orzo pasta

      1     tube of tomato puree

      1     large onion

1         
small bulb of garlic

250 grams length of salami

4        
packets of instant noodles

2        
packets of powdered soup

20  muesli bars

1 bag of dried apricots

1 tub of smoked almonds

In addition, we were already carrying four meat stock cubes, twelve tea bags, six sachets of instant coffee, ten packets of sugar we had pinched from the aeroplane and various
cafés,
a couple of sachets of salt and a camera-film tub filled with mixed spices.

I had decided ages ago that there was no point investing in those obscenely expensive packets of freeze-dried trekking food. With these ingredients we would be able to cook varied nourishing meals. And they’d fit into a much smaller space.

The rewards on this trip were going to come from something else altogether.

I’d never been really that hungry on any of our previous treks. Food had been more of a ritual than a necessity; it was a way of passing time. If you were especially tired, you almost had to force yourself to eat. But I wanted those cookies.

I was standing in the middle of the shopping aisle at Woolworths with my arms firmly crossed.

‘I’ll carry them.’

‘We share all the carrying. If you take them, I’ll have to take something else.’

‘They don’t weigh very much.’

‘But my rucksack is already heavier than yours.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s because you’re bigger. It’s not my fault your clothes are larger and heavier and your sleeping-mat weighs an extra four hundred grams because it’s full length and —’

‘It’s unfair to bring biology into this; that’s something we can’t do anything about.’

‘Is this about money? Those muesli bars you chose are cheap store-brand stuff. I’ll pay for the cookies.’

‘Because those so-called sports bars cost about three dollars each. We haven’t come all the way out here for fine dining. And, besides, if we get really hungry you women have extra stores of body fat.'

Eventually I had to ask her who had taken charge of the shopping for Overland. Was there ever a more skilful demonstration of effective food rationing?

On that matter she found it pretty hard to return service. She looked at me for a moment and thrust the cookies back on to the shelf. OK, she said and added that we still needed a couple of things from the toiletries department.

Plasters, I thought, and gave a nod.

Jyrki must surely know that women have periods — in the past he must surely have had had direct contact with the phenomenon — but his brow furrowed when he saw me throwing the packet of Always Ultra into the shopping trolley.

‘You do understand where it is we’re going?’

I looked at him the way you look at someone who opens their mouth in completely the wrong situation only to state the blindingly obvious.

‘South Coast Track.’

‘And
Old Port Davey Track.’ Jyrki picked up the packet; its cosy softness almost disappeared inside his enormous fist. ‘And how exactly are you planning on disposing of these once they’ve been used?’

Well... you know, the way you ... the normal way ...’ The mere mention of the subject made me blush. People just don’t
talk
about these things.

‘The normal way?’

I thought of all the instructions there had been at Overland Track, and it started to dawn on me.

‘There are some pit toilets, but only as far as Melaleuca. And anyway, you don’t put
anything
in a pit toilet that isn’t biodegradable. These have got God knows how many layers of protective plastic.’

I stared at him and realized that the furrow between my eyebrows must have vaguely resembled a double Grand Canyon.

‘Sooo?’

‘After use — that is, when you want to get rid of them, assuming you don’t want to carry them around with you — you’ll have to open up the towel, take a stick or something and scrape out the absorbent padding, the cotton wool or cellulose or whatever it is, into the pit toilet. Then you’ll have to roll up the non- biodegradable parts into a tight package. Aren’t these supposed to have some kind of wrapper with a strip of sticky tape? You could use that. The package will be about the size of a cigarette. Then you keep them in a resealable bag. And as for all that plastic packaging that’s another matter altogether . . .’

A look of nothing but utter seriousness radiated from Jyrki’s face. I grabbed the pack of towels and threw it back on the shelf then snatched a much smaller box of tampons and brandished it in front of his face.

‘What about these?’

‘Hmm, I suppose they’re OK. They don’t have any of those applicators. But all that cellophane . .. And once they’ve been used you can’t leave those anywhere either, no matter how much cotton is in them. OK, the box is made of cardboard, but you can dispose of that here.’

‘And what about the used ones?’

‘You carry your own refuse.’

I dropped the box of o.b. tampons into the trolley.

Jyrki didn’t know that I also had a couple of panty liners in my rucksack, but this wasn’t the moment to get into a discussion about them, too.

I remember one of my classmates who had decided to start having children in her twenties. On one of her rare nights off, she and I went out for a couple of ciders together. Suvi told me how guilty she felt about the volume of nappies she got through with her children. She had been told that disposable nappies were the work of the devil. Under no circumstances should people use them because they create plastic, shitty Mount Everests at dumpsites up and down the country. But when she’d thought of switching to terry nappies, she had serious doubts after learning about the effect on the environment of 90-degree white washes and the quantities of phosphates in all that washing powder. On top of that, there was the question of whether it was better to let a child become traumatized by walking around in soggy cotton nappies versus letting them get so used to being in ultra-absorbent Pampers that they would never see the point of learning to use a toilet. And imagine what fun it must be for the kid starting school with a bag of spare nappies. She rounded off her outburst by concluding that the most ecological solution was to feed the offspring to the neighbours’ huskies at the first convenient opportunity.

It made me shudder to think that I had once fantasized about starting a family with Jyrki.

The best place to dump stolen bundles is in the toilets at restaurants or department stores. A bus has got to be pretty empty, so nobody notices you just walking off. Sometimes a park bench or the top of a bin will do nicely.

When you take the target out of its pram you’ve got to do it quickly but not in a rush. So it looks like you’re the kid’s parent or some family member. Then walk away. Stay cool.

It’s a pretty big deal. The brat might start screaming, and that always attracts unwanted attention.

Ante says the fuss that breaks out over these things is in a league of its own. We’re not just talking about a runaway dog here.

Dogs are easier. Still, they can find their own way home. Sometimes. Depends what we’ve got in mind for them.

Cox Bight is a miniature paradise.

From the sands at the shore it’s only a half-metre step up to the embankment, covered with short velvety grass.

The campsite is situated right next to the beach, sheltered by the trees and bushes. This is clearly more worn away and in more regular use than any of the other campsites after South Cape Rivulet. This place is evidently visited by far more people, but that doesn’t mean that the spot isn’t lovely and idyllic. Apparently the leg from Melaleuca out here is a day’s walk and seems every bit as popular as the stretch from Cockle Creek to Rivulet. That means tomorrow’s leg will be an easy stretch with a decent path. To one side, a small distance from the shore, where the path leads off towards the pit toilet, there is even a small, roofed information hut, not quite big enough for someone to fit inside. More of a small stand with a registration book.

Or, rather, there should be. Now all that’s left of it is a pile of charred remains. The ring-binding has survived along with the soot-edged stubs of pages a couple of centimetres in from the spine. Someone clearly got a kick out of torching this. Perhaps it was the same person who had scraped away at one of the booth’s legs with a knife and singed it with something like a cigarette lighter. The idea was presumably to bring some excitement to a leisurely Sunday-afternoon walk.

‘They’re determined, I’ll give them that. First the flight from Melaleuca, then a thirteen-kilometre walk just to vandalize something that’s vitally important to other people,’ says Jyrki.

So yet again we can’t register ourselves.

A little way further into the campsite there are a few clusters of tents, all people trekking in the opposite direction. The fact that we’re from Finland always causes surprise; all the others are Aussies from the mainland. They find it amusing that we’ve come here to enjoy the heat: for them Tasmania is a cool spot where they can escape the 40-degree heat back home. They ask us about Ironbound, and we tell them that it certainly lives up to its reputation.

Jyrki shows them his crippled hiking pole like an old war wound. I don’t bother pointing out my thighs, my shins and my arms. Anyone with a pair of eyes can see the blotchy leopard-skinned pattern covering them. The variegated bruises of different shapes and sizes are interspersed with nasty-looking scabs and scratches that I picked up yesterday before pulling on my hiking trousers. The
magnum opus
is in the middle of my right thigh, a bruise the size of my palm, blue in the middle and edged with a pretty yellow coloration, making some of it look a distinct shade of green.

As we chat with the trekkers heading east, I can see Jyrki’s back straightening — without his even noticing it — and with that same expression of fake indifference, the same nonchalant shrug of the shoulders that was all over the body language of the guys we’d seen at Cockle Creek who had already crossed Southy.

I splash myself with water straight from the small brook. Further downstream there’s only the beach and the sea, so it’s fine to wash myself here. No point lugging water up to the campsite, and for once there’s no need to be frugal with it.

Once I’ve towelled myself off and started pulling on my civvies I hear a rumble. I look up.

This weather front can’t be coming in across the sea, from the Antarctic, the way they normally come. If it were coming in from the sea, we’d be able to see it a long way off. This one is coming from behind the forested horizon, from the west-north-west. This is a freak air current, a weather phenomenon that’s becoming all the more common across the globe.

I grab my hiking clothes and the wombat bottle, which I’ve been using to scoop up washing water. I stick my feet into my Crocs and make my way straight towards the campsite. The tent is a few hundred metres to the west of the brook.

Just then I feel the first raindrops.

I’m convinced I left it on that tree trunk. Absolutely convinced.

There were still about half the slices of pepperoni left in their opened vacuum pack. I was supposed to cut them into strips with the Swiss Army knife and mix them with the mashed potatoes. I had been keeping a beady eye on the water we’re heating up — because we mustn’t, mustn’t,
mustn’t
waste any of the gas in the cylinder — and I’d gone back into the tent, for a minute at most, to change my panty liner for a tampon then come straight back out to sit on the tree trunk and use my body to shelter the cooker from the strengthening wind coming in from the sea.

And now the pepperoni has vanished.

Could it have been the wind?

My eyes scan the surrounding scrub.

I sigh with relief: the wind. It’s been gaining in strength all the while; by now it’s pretty blustery, and the sea is white with the crests of waves. The plastic pepperoni packet is flapping in the wind a few metres away at the foot of a bush. It’s flown a good distance.

I take a few steps and pick up the packet.

It’s empty.

I crouch down in a panic, run my hands through the grass and undergrowth, my eyes darting across the ground looking for something round and a browny-red colour.

I can understand the packet being blown away, but I can’t see how the slices of pepperoni — tightly packed together and sealed with fat almost into a single chunk of meat — could have been picked up by a gust of wind if it had rolled out of the packing.

Possums are timid and only move around at night.

Rats?

I stop for a moment, frozen. It’s as though I can see myself, I can almost smell the pepperoni — cumin, peppers, magnificent animal fat. I can remember — and the more I think about it the more real it seems — how my hand could have reached up towards my mouth, as if by magic, how my teeth could have sunk into the slices of sausage; the thought of my molars squeezing the dizzyingly salty, spicy meat juices on to my tongue . . .

‘No,’ I hear myself saying, but my tongue is still twisting around inside my mouth, searching for the taste of pepperoni and strips of meat, and I fall to my knees once again.

‘Please be here, please be here, please be here,’ I chant out loud, crawling in increasingly large circles between the bush and the tent.

Right then I hear a boom of thunder.

The raindrops are so large and heavy that they soak you right through, leaving spots the size of coins on your clothes.

Our rucksacks are lying open beside the tent, open bags of clothes and supplies carelessly hanging out of the loosened drawstrings. The food bag is open, too, propped up beside the tree trunk we’ve been using as a kitchen.

I jump to my feet, forgetting all about the pepperoni, and take wide running steps.

I unzip the vestibule and the mosquito net and hurl first one open rucksack in on top of the beds then the other. Then the bag of food, my sarong — still damp — all the socks, shorts, T-shirts hanging on a nearby branch, then a quick glance towards the cooker, which is now hissing angrily with each raindrop that strikes it. I turn off the gas supply and plonk the pot into the vestibule along with the cooker. Finally I dive inside behind everything else.

By now the rain is now drumming on the roof of the tent.

I can hear the sound of heavy footsteps and panting, then Jyrki comes crashing into the tent, almost uprooting the guy ropes in the process. It’s chaos inside the tent: our damp rucksacks, the two of us half soaked, the bundle of trekking clothes in Jyrki’s hand dotted with droplets of rain. I hurriedly zip up the doors at the entrance.

The rain is coming down like a roaring wall.

It’s coming down so hard that grit and loose sand is being splashed halfway up the tent’s outer walls; from the inside of the tent it looks black and grainy. Jyrki tries to find a comfortable position. He can’t: rucksacks and bags and clothes fill the space. I could never have imagined that, compared with this, normal life in the tent feels quite spacious. We’re literally drowning in stuff.

‘Those have to be packed up and put in the vestibule.’

Jyrki starts shoving things into his rucksack. Not in his typical systematic fashion; the main thing is that everything is inside. He is ready long before me and opens up the inner zips.

Water is running through the vestibule. The ground simply can’t absorb a flash flood like this, and now water is flowing in under the vestibule walls which aren’t attached to the ground. The gas cylinder with the cooker on top and the kettle are like small crags in a flooded river. For once Jyrki is speechless. His hand falls limply against his rucksack.

‘What about the rucksack covers?' I suggest.

‘They might keep the rain out, but the water will get through if they have to swim in this. Then, in no time, it’ll have soaked through to the stuff at the bottom of the rucksack.’

‘But isn’t everything in plastic bags or those waterproof things?’

Jyrki shakes his head. ‘Imagine what those rucksacks will weigh tomorrow if they suck up water all night. Then they’ll be wet on the inside, the DrySacks will be wet on the outside, and the plastic bags won’t keep anything dry. At least the tent’s waterproof’ He zips up the vestibule and we look at each other for a moment, both leaning against a rucksack the size of our upper bodies. ‘Let’s try and stack them over there, on their sides against the walls at the foot of the tent. We can sleep with our legs together.’

I nod.

We try to hang the dampest of our clothes from the guy rope running along the inside of the tent’s roof, forming a curtain between us.

And with that we are in separate rooms, in a space no bigger than three square metres.

The air is so thick I feel like I could suffocate.

Once it’s almost dark and the adrenalin in my blood has dropped off a bit it occurs to me that we haven’t eaten anything.

From the other side of the makeshift sarong-and-T-shirt curtain she says that the cooking water didn’t have a chance to heat up properly.

I clamber to my knees and peer into the vestibule. The ground is nothing but mud. All the food we’d put aside for dinner needs boiling water. I suggest we cook dinner inside the vestibule. The mashed potato will be ready in no time, and we can mix in some strips of sliced pepperoni.

She panics at the thought. Surely you can’t light a fire beneath a roof of nylon fabric. Candles can set fire to things very high up, she says. Isn’t nylon fabric highly flammable?

I tell her I’ve cooked inside the vestibule before, and that some people even use the cooker inside the tent itself, although I wouldn’t go that far.

She’s clearly worried — and with good reason. People die in tent fires, and losing or damaging the tent in these conditions would hardly be the ideal scenario.

Still, it’s annoying that she doesn’t trust me. But, on the other hand, it’s a fair point that we need to conserve our gas.

We’ve still got flatbread and rice cakes, she says. And cheese.

I point out that we’ve been saving them for breakfast and suggest pepperoni and dried apricots instead.

She is quiet for a moment then says she’s not really hungry, adding that the last thing she’d want to eat is those sour, sugary apricots because she can’t imagine how she could go outside to brush her teeth in these conditions.

I listen to the incessant rush of the rain, like a waterfall drumming on the tent. The storm front seems to have been caught right above Ironbound. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be over any time soon.

I think about the sweet, sticky layer the apricots leave in your mouth. Perhaps we should have picked up some xylitol chewing gum after all. Then I remember that nuts neutralize the pH levels in your mouth.

She gives an indifferent response of sorts. We eat smoked almonds. I count out fourteen and a half per person.

We had a stroke of luck, I tell her. Judging by the volume of the rain, anyone looking for the ultimate extreme experience will be sure to find it trying to cross Louisa Creek tomorrow.

We’re lying inside the tent, in the deep darkness.

I can’t move my legs; they’re wedged between Jyrki’s legs and one of the rucksacks. The air is so moist that it sticks to my fingers.

The storm is still rumbling with no sign of letting up. Although I’ve closed my eyes I can still sense the bolts of lightning forcing their way beneath my eyelids like flat needles.

Then I hear it.

It starts quietly, but it’s getting louder all the time. It’s like an approaching squadron of fighter jets moving in behind the drone of the rain and the howl of the wind. At times it fades a little, but each time it grows the roar is even more penetrating than before. The trees are rustling and wailing in the forest around us. Every now and then I can hear something large, heavy and rotten falling or dropping to the ground with a crash.

I let out a quiet cry. The bottom of my stomach is aching with fear, my heart’s racing at a million kilometres an hour. The raging sea is far too close; I imagine it would only take a second for it to breach the half-metre embankment separating us from the beach. The creaking trees, crying out in agony, are right next to us, above us, ready to topple.