Birdbrain (18 page)

Conrad forces his way into my mind, just as the fatigue is about to lull me to sleep.

And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night. . .

And just then Jyrki snaps, as an exceptionally loud thud can be heard from the bush. No, even closer than that. Through the chink in my eyelids I see him furrow his brow, put down his book, get up and unzip the tent door.

Feels warm next to my heart. There in my jacket pocket, glowing with its own heat. It’s a butterfly, a claw, grown on to my chest, but still separate. At any moment I can take it out, and when it hits something stupid and annoying and irritating everything changes colour and the air turns and everything changes. Someone walking past, full of himself, he doesn't know how close it is. Guys shoving me about at the bus stop, talking shit, they dont know bow close it is.

I can pull it out any time. You there, laughing, staring too much, the wrong look on your face. It will appear, ready to take a breath. It hisses as it draws air, then it's time. Any time. Any time it feels like it.

She’s walking behind me, her head lowered.

I should have made her bury the rest of the bread properly, but there was almost nothing left of it.

When we stop to eat our muesli bars I show her the list of additives listed on the wrapper. I try to bring a note of reconciliation to my voice as I run my finger down the list and read the names out loud.

Everything that doesn’t form part of wild animals’ natural diet is potentially harmful. Refined sugar. Processed wheat. Hard fats. Salt — particularly salt.

She nods her head, but there’s a stubborn look on her face.

That expression annoys me just enough that I feel I’ve got to put things a bit more pointedly. We have a responsibility to take care of our environment. Of course, any animal will eat something that tastes good and that it instinctively senses will give it sustenance. But animals can end up being poisoned. Animals can become ill just from the quantity of salt in some foods. Animals can react in unexpected ways to different food additives. Animals can develop behavioural anomalies.

I tell her about seagulls, crows and rats. No animal in this world is as unpleasant as one forcing its way outside its natural environment, feeding itself off human waste like a parasite. A creature eating only rubbish saturated in additives with no nutritional value will change its form and forget all about its evolution and its ecological niche.

I tell her about crow fledgelings whose mother feeds them with food she picks up at the bins outside fast-food restaurants. Because of this, the feathers in their wings grow so weak that the young birds will never be able to fly.

She gobbles down her muesli bar quickly, as easily as drawing breath, and I don’t know whether she’s listened to a word I’ve said.

‘That’s just the kind of thought process that’s probably been left over from your job,’ Jyrki lectures me, his nostrils as wide with indignation as if I’d just suggested his trekking equipment included a wooden cup and a flannel shirt. ‘We feed people shit that’s made to smell nice, and we don’t give a damn about the lasting effects it might have. Just so long as they swallow it.’

The shock makes my teeth miss the final raisin in my muesli bar. Jyrki has never said a word about my work. At least he’s never said anything to make me believe he has something against my job. Well, my former job, that is, but he doesn’t know about that yet. He thinks I’m only on unpaid leave.

‘Isn’t it nice that at least one of us does something decent for a living. I mean, you sell poison — openly and with society’s blessing.’ I manage to find a lingering, unhurried tone in my voice. ‘Shall we count up the bodies?'

Jyrki is taken aback; he wasn’t expecting a counterattack. For a moment he has to fumble to find the right words.

‘People know what they’re doing. They know the risks. I can’t be held responsible if customers walk into a pub completely compos mentis. I don’t pour booze down their throats. You, on the other hand, create nets, then you ruthlessly drive people into them. You manipulate people and have them believe only spin, only see one side of things.’

By now my throat is totally dry.

‘OK, we put ideas in people’s heads. They either believe them or they don’t. Your business makes its money by treating people like ducks in the park. You feed them for a while, then they can’t live without you.’

Jyrki is silent like someone cut to the very core.

‘And besides . . .’ I can’t help myself. The words just bubble from my muesli-sticky mouth. ‘Besides, I don’t work there any more. I quit. For this trip. I actually quit. So think about that: what have you really been prepared to sacrifice for all this? For anyone? I sacrificed my career.’

Jyrki stands up, his mouth set tightly and starts hauling his rucksack on to his back.

‘And my hair.’

He doesn’t respond, just slips his other arm through the strap and strides off in great bounding steps along the path, his lopsided hiking poles making him look endearingly crippled and imperfect.

We cross the shoulder of Lindsay Hill in utter silence. Yet again today’s leg is for fucking lightweights. It’s not easy; it’s just far too short. For a while we walk at a higher altitude, about a hundred metres or so up. The path roughly follows Spring River, which looks like a frilly strip of verdant undergrowth to the left. The mouth of the river is in Page Bay, our last glimpse of the sea on this trip. A string of hills rises up on both sides of us: Erskine Range and Rugby Range. They are both about six hundred metres high, worn and curvaceous. By the early afternoon we’ve already started making our way down into the damp, almost boggy valley at Spring River.

Today might be a good opportunity to air the sleeping-bags properly, the silk bag liners, all our extra clothes. The tent floor could be cleaned of all the eider feathers that have come out of the bedding. Someone could scrape clean the rucksack pockets and seams of all the fine stubborn sand stuck in there. After all, there’s plenty of time and idle hands.

I step into the bushes, crouch down, pour water over myself. The cool water is always a shock to the system as it runs along your warm back. It feels like acid. I soak off the layer of salt that has dried at the sides of my face and around my hairline. I splash my armpits, my neck, wipe away the grime and sand and sweat from around my calves, then look towards my crotch, where a weary-looking thread, reddened at the root, dangles limply between my legs.

I look at everything I have with me. My sarong, the wombat bottle, my clothes and a scrap of magazine — and the all-important resealable bag.

I reach down between my thighs, take a firm grip on the thread and pull. The tampon comes out gracefully, slippery with redness.

I stand upright and dangle it in my hand like a hunter examining a small rodent, perhaps weighing up its nutritional value. I look at it from all sides, this hazardous human waste, this podgy self-satisfied parasite that has sucked my blood and with whom I have an involuntary symbiotic relationship.

I straighten my body and raise my arm.

It starts spinning in a dizzying, deliberate circle, building up great centrifugal force, so much so that I can almost feel the blood collecting at one end of the tampon.

And when I release my grip and let the tampon hurtle into the air, it flies, glides into the distance, so jubilantly that I can almost hear the air whistling. It reaches its zenith, then disappears in a glorious curve deep into the Tasmanian wilderness, and for a moment I am small yet defiant, the rebellious David, with his tiny, insignificant weapons, crushed on all sides by the mighty Goliath.

The moon shines brightly that night.

Our camp is protected by the trees, but if you look up you can see the stars.

For people used to the northern sky and the glow of city lights, seeing this sky is like diving into the depths ol darkness. There are more stars than I’ve ever  seen, as though sugar crystals had been sprinkled on black velvet, with Ithe Milky Way running through the middle like a widie strip of sulver dust. There are far more stars here than in the Northern Hemisphere, as the Southern Hemisphere faces right towards the centre of the Milky Way while lthe Northern only faces its edges.

Apart from the Southern Cross all the constellations are strange to me.

An alien sky.

This is the closest I'm going to get to being on another planet.

This is why I don’t like staying in huts but want to sleep in the great outdoors.

She comes back from her evening piss. The LED light on her forehead kills the three-dimensional landscape in an instant. The brightness of the moon, filtered through the swaying boughs of the trees, is flattened into a wedge of banal light, into a two-dimensional photograph of a field of vision in which there are no longer any colours, any depth or subtlety.

Lanterns, the assassins of moonlight.

She goes into the tent. Once the LED light is only shining through the green fabric of the tent the magic returns, and the trees are bathed once again in glints of silver.

There’s a sudden rustle in the bushes, so loud that it can’t possibly be the wind.

Her startled voice comes out of the tent, asking what it was.

Maybe some representative of the local fauna has turned up looking to see if there’s another party, I tell her.

'That animal has a charmed life,’ he said; ‘but you can say this only of brutes in this country. No man —you apprehend me? — no man here bears a charmed life.’

—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

The region opening up in front of us today has possibly the greatest name I’ve ever heard.

Lost World Plateau.

When I wake up that morning my first thought is that Melaleuca and the Tasmania infested with surfer dudes and aeroplanes is behind us now. And that’s where it will stay. Two day’s trekking and the sound at Bathurst separate us from them. Now we’re on our own.

It sounds so good that if I were a poet I’d try to make it rhyme.

This solitudeit gives me kicks; now we’ve crossed the River Styx.

I stretch my limbs in the freshly hatched morning. I pour water from the Platypus into the pot and open up the cooker. I screw it on top of the gas cylinder and start fumbling in the side pocket of my rucksack for the lighter.

I haven’t worried about the lighter running out of gas. Even though it’s only a stupid little one I got at a kiosk — trivial, orange, smooth — you could use it to light the stove almost until the end of time. The flint will produce a spark long after the gas inside has run out.

But the lighter isn’t in the left-hand pocket of my rucksack.

The pocket is slightly open, and I’ve always made sure to close the zip properly. Always.

Jyrki’s agitated voice takes me aback as I try to perform the intricate ritual of emptying the air mattress.

‘What use would I have for it?’

‘It’s not in the pocket.’

I crawl obediently out of the tent to share in his confusion. ‘It was you that last used it yesterday evening.’

‘Yes, and I put it back where I’ve always put it.’

‘Sure it didn’t accidentally end up in the pot? Or in the food bag?’

Jyrki rummages in the woefully measly bag of food, then over-dramatically tips the entire contents out on to the mat of eucalyptus leaves.

‘Is it here? Is it?’

I have to admit that it is not.

‘What the fuck are we going to do now? All our food needs to be cooked.’

Well, that’s not strictly true, as we’ve still got a couple of rice cakes, but.. .

Right then I remember something and dart back inside the tent, take out my bumbag and dig around for a minute. The matches from the bar in Spain. I find the packet, and behind the card with the scratch strip at the back there are still four cardboard saviours. I hold the matches out of the tent door.

‘Here. I’ve got a light.’

Jyrki looks at me, and for a moment it seems as though he could light a fire with his eyes.

‘Four?’

‘Better than nothing, isn’t it?’

‘We’ve still got days to go. Cooking dinner alone will use them.’

‘Are you sure you’ve looked everywhere?’

Yes, he is.

We skip boiling water for morning tea. Instead, we wash down our rice cakes with water shaken together with a little sugar. We’re almost out of the sugar we took from the aeroplane, too. Neither of us normally uses sugar in tea or coffee. Out here we add some for its carbohydrate value.

Cardboard matches and scratch strips. They could let you down at any moment, won’t light anything, flare up and go out straight away. They could be blown out by a sudden gust of wind.

I can feel the nervousness in my stomach. I can somehow understand the pepperoni. She’s probably eaten it. It would be obscenely disloyal but just about understandable. I can even understand her record-breaking stupidity with the bread. But why steal the lighter and hide it? Revenge? For w
hat?

When she says there was a shelf full of matches at the hut in Melaleuca I’m a blood-red millisecond away from slapping her.

In retaliation I point out that if we'd stuck to my original timetable we’d have arrived in Scott’s Peak today and be putting our feet up in the comfort of the bus by midday.