Down Under (10 page)

But all of these are as nothing compared with the delicate and diaphanous box jellyfish, the most poisonous creature on earth. We will hear more of the unspeakable horrors of this little bag of lethality when we get to the tropics, but let me offer here just one small story. In 1992, a young man in Cairns, ignoring all the warning signs, went swimming in the Pacific waters at a place called Holloways Beach. He swam and dived, taunting his friends on the beach for their prudent cowardice, and then began to scream with an inhuman sound. It is said that there is no pain to compare with it. The young man staggered from the water, covered in livid whip-like stripes wherever the jellyfish’s tentacles had brushed across him, and collapsed in quivering shock. Soon afterwards emergency crews arrived, inflated him with morphine, and took him away for treatment. And here’s the thing. Even unconscious and sedated he was still screaming.

Sydney has no box jellyfish, I was pleased to learn. The famous local danger is the funnel-web spider, the most poisonous insect in the world with a venom that is ‘highly toxic and fast-acting’. A single nip, if not promptly treated, will leave you bouncing around in the grip of seizures of an incomparable liveliness; then you turn blue; then you die. Thirteen deaths are on record, though none since 1981 when an antidote was devised. Also poisonous are white-tailed spiders, mouse spiders, wolf spiders, our old friend the redback (‘hundreds of bites are reported each year . . . about a dozen known deaths’) and a reclusive but fractious type called the fiddleback. I couldn’t say for sure whether I had seen any of these in the gardens I had passed earlier in the day, but then I couldn’t say I hadn’t since they all looked essentially the same. No one knows, incidentally, why Australia’s spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.

I studied with particular alertness the funnel-web since this was the creature that I was most likely to encounter in the next few days. It was about 1.5 inches long, plump, hairy and ugly. According to the label, you can identify a funnel-web by ‘the mating organ on the male palp, deeply curved fovea, shiny carapace and lower labium studded with short blunt spines’. Alternatively, of course, you can just let it sting you. I carefully copied all this down before it occurred to me that if I were to awake to find any large, furry creature advancing crablike across the sheets I was unlikely to note any of its anatomical features, however singular and telling. So I put away my notebook and went off to look at minerals, which aren’t so exciting but do
have the compensating virtue that almost never will they attack you.

I spent four days wandering around Sydney. I visited the principal museums with dutiful absorption and spent an afternoon in the admirably welcoming State Library of New South Wales, but mostly I just went wherever there was water. Without question, it is the harbour that makes Sydney. It’s not so much a harbour as a fjord, sixteen miles long and perfectly proportioned – big enough for grandeur, small enough to have a neighbourly air. Wherever you stand, the people on the far shore are almost never so distant as to seem remote; often you could hail them if you wished. Because it runs through the heart of the city from east to west it divides Sydney into more or less equal halves, known as the northern and eastern suburbs. (And never mind that the eastern suburbs are actually in the south, or that many of the northern suburbs are decidedly eastern. Australians, never forget, started life as Britons.) To note that it is sixteen miles long barely hints at its extent. Because it constantly wanders off into arms that finish in the serenest little coves, the most gently scalloped bays, the harbour shoreline actually extends to 152 miles. The consequence of this wandering nature is that one moment you are walking beside a tiny sheltered cove that seems miles from anywhere, and the next you round a headland to find before you an open expanse of water with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge and clustered skyscrapers gleaming in airy sunshine and holding centre stage. It is endlessly and unbelievably beguiling.

On my last day I hiked out to Hunter’s Hill, a treasured and secretive district about six miles from the city centre
on a long finger of land overlooking one of the quieter inner reaches of the harbour. I chose it because Jan Morris had made it sound so delightful in her book. I dare say she reached it by water, as any sensible person would. I decided to walk out along Victoria Road, which may not be the ugliest road in Australia but must be the least agreeable to walk along.

I strode for shadeless miles through zones of factories, warehouses and railway lines, then miles more of marginal commercial districts of discount furnishers, industrial wholesalers and dingy pubs offering surreally unappealing inducements (‘Meat Raffles 6-8 pm’). By the time I reached a small sign pointing down a side road to Hunter’s Hill my expectations were flagging. Imagine then my satisfaction at discovering that Hunter’s Hill was worth every steaming step – a lovely, hidden borough of plump stone mansions, pretty cottages and picturesquely clustered shops of an often impressive venerability. There was a small but splendid town hall dating from 1860 and a chemist’s shop that had been in business since 1890, which must be a record in Australia. Every garden was a treasure and somewhere in almost every backdrop lurked a glimpse of harbour view. I could not have been more charmed.

Reluctant to retrace my steps, I decided to push on further, through Linley Point, Lane Cove, Northwood, Greenwich and Wollstonecraft, and rejoin the known world at the Harbour Bridge. It was a long way round and the day was sultry, but Sydney is such a constantly rewarding place and I was feeling ambitious. I suppose I walked for about an hour before it dawned on me that this was actually
quite
ambitious – I had barely penetrated Linley Point and was still miles from the central business district
– but then I noticed on the map what appeared to be a worthwhile short cut through a place called Tennyson Park.

I followed a side road down to a residential street and about halfway along came to the entrance to the park. A wooden sign announced that what lay beyond was preserved bush land and politely requested users not to stray from the path. Well, this seemed a splendid notion – an expanse of native bush in the heart of a great city – and I ventured in eagerly. I don’t know what image ‘bush’ conjures up in your mind, but this was not the brown and semi-barren tract I would have expected, but a wooded glade with a sun-dappled path and tinkling brook. It appeared to be scarcely used – every few yards I would have to duck under or walk around big spider webs strung across the path – which lent the whole enterprise a sense of lucky discovery.

I guessed it would take about twenty minutes to cut through the park – or ‘the reserve’, as Australians call these things – and I was probably about halfway along when from an indeterminate distance off to the right there came the bark of a dog, tentative and experimental, as if to say: ‘Who’s that?’ It wasn’t very close or intimidating, but it was clearly the bark of a big dog. Something in its timbre said: meat eater, black, very big, not too many generations removed from wolf. Almost in the same instant it was joined by the bark of a companion dog, also big, and this bark was decidedly less experimental. This bark said: ‘Red alert! Trespasser on our territory!’ Within a minute they had worked themselves up into a considerable frenzy.

Nervously I quickened my pace. Dogs don’t like me. It is a simple law of the universe, like gravity. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never passed a dog that didn’t
act as if it thought I was about to help myself to its Pedigree Chum. Dogs that have not moved from the sofa in years will, at the sniff of me passing outside, rise in fury and hurl themselves at shut windows. I have seen tiny dogs, no bigger than a fluffy slipper, jerk little old ladies off their feet and drag them over open ground in a quest to get at my blood and sinew. Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.

And now here I was alone in an empty wood, which suddenly seemed very large and lonely, and two big and angry-sounding dogs had me in their sights. As I pushed on, two things became increasingly apparent: I was definitely the target and these dogs were not messing around. They were coming towards me, at some speed. Now the barking said: ‘We are going to have you, boy. You are dead meat. You are small, pulpy pieces.’ You will note the absence of exclamation marks. Their barks were no longer tinged with lust and frenzy. They were statements of cold intent. ‘We know where you are,’ they said. ‘You cannot make it to the edge of the woods. We will be with you shortly. Somebody call forensic.’

Casting worried glances at the foliage, I began to trot and then to run. It was now time to consider what I would do if the dogs burst on to the path. I picked up a rock for defence, then discarded it a few yards further on for a stick that was lying across the path. The stick was ludicrously outsized – it must have been twelve feet long – and so rotten that it fell in half just from being picked up. As I ran, it lost another half, and another, until finally it was no more than a soft spongy stub – it would have been like defending myself with a loaf of bread – so I threw it down and picked up a big jagged rock in each hand, and quickened my pace yet again. The dogs now seemed to be
moving parallel to me, as if they couldn’t find a way through, but at a distance of no more than forty or fifty yards. They were furious. My unease expanded, and I began to run a little faster.

In my stumbling haste, I rounded a bend too fast and ran headlong into a giant spider’s web. It fell over me like a collapsing parachute. Ululating in dismay, I tore at the cobweb, but with rocks in my hands only succeeded in banging myself on the forehead. In a small, lucid corner of my brain I remember thinking: ‘This really is very unfair.’ Somewhere else was the thought: ‘You are going to be the first person in history to die in the bush in the middle of a city, you poor, sad schlubb.’ All the rest was icy terror.

And so I trotted along, wretched and whimpering, until I rounded a bend and found, with another small and disbelieving wail, that the path abruptly terminated. Before me stood nothing but impenetrable tangle – a wall of it. I looked around, astounded and appalled. In my panic – doubtless while I was scraping the cobwebs from my brow with the aid of lumps of granite – I had evidently taken a wrong turn. In any case, there was no way forward and nothing behind but a narrow path leading back in the direction of two surging streaks of malice. Glancing around in desperation, I saw with unconfined joy, at the top of a twenty-foot rise, a corner of rotary clothesline. There was a home up there! I had reached the edge of the park, albeit from an unconventional direction. No matter. There was a civilized world up there. Safety! I scrambled up the hill as fast as my plump little pins would carry me – the dogs were very close now – snagging myself on thorns, inhaling cobwebs, straining with every molecule of my being not to become a headline that said: ‘Police find writer’s torso; head still missing.’

At the top of the hill stood a brick wall perhaps six feet high. Grunting extravagantly, I hauled myself on to its flat summit and dropped down on the other side. The transformation was immediate, the relief sublime. I was back in the known world, in someone’s much-loved back garden. There was a set of old swings that didn’t look as if they had been used in some years, flower beds, a lawn leading to a patio. The garden appeared to be fully enclosed by brick wall on three sides and a big comfortable-looking house on the fourth, which I hadn’t quite anticipated. I was trespassing, of course, but there wasn’t any way I was going back into those woods. Part of the view was obscured by a shed or summerhouse. With luck there would be a gate beyond and I could let myself out and slip back into the world undetected. My most immediate concern was that there might be a big mean dog in here as well. Wouldn’t that be richly ironic? With this in mind, I crept cautiously forward.

Now let us change the point of view just for a moment. Forgive me for getting you up, but I need to put you at the window beside the kitchen sink of this tranquil suburban home. You are a pleasant middle-aged homemaker going about your daily business – at this particular moment filling a vase with water to hold some peonies you have just cut from the bed by the drawing-room windows – and you see a man drop over your back wall and begin to move in a low crouch across your back garden. Frozen with fear and a peculiar detached fascination, you are unable to move, but just stand watching as he advances stealthily across the property in a commando posture, with short, frenzied dashes between covering objects, until he is crouched beside a concrete urn at the edge of your patio
only about ten feet away. It is then that he notices you staring at him.

‘Oh, hello!’ says the man cheerfully, straightening up and smiling in a way that he thinks looks sincere and ingratiating, but in fact merely suggests someone who has failed to take his medication. Almost at once your thoughts go to a police mugshot you saw in the evening paper earlier in the week pertaining, if you recall, to a breakout at an institution for the criminally insane at Wollongong. ‘Sorry to crash in on you like this,’ the man is saying, ‘but I was desperate. Did you hear all the racket? I thought they were going to
kill
me.’

He beams foolishly and waits for you to reply, but you say nothing because you are powerless to speak. Your eyes slide over to the open back door. If you both moved for it now, you would arrive together. All kinds of thoughts start to run through your head.

‘I didn’t actually
see
them,’ the man goes on in a judicious but oddly pumped-up tone, ‘but I know they were after me.’ He looks as if he has been living rough. Smudges of dirt rim his face and one of his trouser legs is torn at the knee. ‘They always go for me,’ he says, earnest now, and puzzled. ‘It’s as if there’s some kind of conspiracy to get me. I can be just walking down the street, you know, minding my own business, and suddenly from out of nowhere they just
come
for me. It’s very unsettling.’ He shakes his head. ‘Is your gate unlocked?’