Tracks (12 page)

What had I done?

Rick was flabbergasted at the mood change — from the dizzy heights of joyous success to the gloomy pits of hideous doubt and self-hating in one hour. Rick tried to comfort, Rick tried to placate, Rick tried to reason. But how could I tell him that he was part of the problem? That he was a nice guy to talk to but I didn’t particularly want him or his Nikons or his hopelessly romantic notions along on my trip. I can deal with pigs so easily, but nice people always confound me. How can you tell a nice person that you wish they were dead, that they’d never been born, that you wish they would crawl away into some hole and expire? No, not that, merely that you wish fate had never caused you to meet. In retrospect, I should never have allowed myself to see Rick as a fellow human being at all. I should always have regarded him as a necessary machine without feelings, a camera in fact. But I didn’t. Rick was part and parcel of my trip willy-nilly and I kicked myself for allowing it to happen. I should have laid down the law then and there. I should have said, ‘Rick, you may come out three times for three or four days at a stretch and I want you involved in this thing as little as possible and that’s that.’ But as usual I let the situation play itself out. I allowed my will to put off till tomorrow what should have been done today, and said nothing.

Rick had not been through the preparations, did not comprehend what had gone before, did not perceive that I was as feeble a human being as any other, did not understand why I wanted to do it, and therefore projected his own emotional needs on to the trip. He was caught up in the romance of the thing — the magic — a side-effect I had not expected, but one which I had seen in many people, even my close friends. And Rick wanted to record this great event, my traipsing from point A to point B. My mistake in choosing Rick became apparent to me. I should have chosen some hard calloused typical photographer whom I could be nasty, vicious and cruel to without a trace of conscience. Rick had an outstanding quality, apart from his practised lovableness, and that was his naivety. A fragility, a kind of introverted sweetness and perceptiveness that is rare enough in men, and virtually unique in successful photographers. I liked him. And I realized that he needed this trip perhaps as much as I did. And that was the burden. Instead of getting away from all responsibility to people, I was heading straight into a heavy one. And I felt robbed.

I flew back to Alice in a lather of conflicting emotions. Was I being too precious about this thing? Why shouldn’t I share it with people? Was I a selfish child? A bourgeois individualist even? Suddenly it seemed as if this trip belonged to everybody but me. Never mind, I said, when you leave Alice Springs it will all be over. No more loved ones to care about, no more ties, no more duties, no more people needing you to be one thing or another, no more conundrums, no more politics, just you and the desert, baby. And so I pushed it all down into the dim recesses of my mind, there to fester and grow like botulism.

I came home to a monumental flood. The 150 miles to Utopia was a red swirling river and I tried twice in four-wheel drives to get there.

I eventually made it, walking the last six miles in water up to my thighs. When it rains out there, it rains. The camels had disappeared once again, and it had been too wet for anyone to follow them. We waited a few days, and after tracking them with the vehicle, we spotted them high up on a hill, stir-crazy with fear. Camels cannot handle mud. Their feet are not designed for it. They bog in it hopelessly or their feet skid out from under them and they can crack their pelvises. Conditions like this always worry them. Besides, they were away from home and in times of stress I believe they felt it strongly. They had been heading south, back to Alice Springs.

The cheque arrived. I set a departure date. I commissioned a traditional Afghani pack saddle from Sallay. I bought equipment and food. I arranged transport for the camels back to Alice Springs. My family wrote saying they would come out and say goodbye. People gave me gifts for the journey and everyone, everyone, seemed to be involved in a mounting excitement. As if we all suddenly believed it was true, that I was actually going to do it, after having just played a two-year game of pretend, or as if we had participated together in a dream, and had just woken up to find it real. The preparations had been, in a sense, the most important part of the event. From the day the thought came into my head ‘I am going to enter a desert with camels’ to the day I felt the preparations to be completed, I had built something intangible but magical for myself which had rubbed off a little on to other people, and I would probably never have the opportunity to do anything quite as demanding or as fulfilling as that ever again.

I trucked the camels back to the ranch. New people had bought it and they were more than willing to let the beasties stay in the yards for a few days. Dookie, Bub and Goliath had never been on a cattle truck before, so were gullibly easy to load. I left Zelly till last, knowing she would balk and hoping she would eventually follow the others. I breathed a sigh of relief at the end of it. I had never loaded camels either and I wasn’t sure whether I should tie them down or not, I carpeted the floor with sand and envisaged broken camel legs sticking through the bars at the side. We hadn’t gone ten miles when Dookie decided he didn’t like hurtling along rough dirt roads in trucks at fifty mph any more and tried to jump out. Whoops. For the rest of the journey I sat precariously on the roof of the cabin, alternately bashing him over the head screaming, ‘Whoosh, whoosh!’ and stroking his sweaty neck and crooning loudly above the whistling of the wind, ‘Take it easy, little camel, it will all be over soon, do stop bellowing now please, there’s a good boy.’

‘
AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH! WHOOSH, WHOOSH, YOU BASTARD!
’

Their shit had turned to water by the time we got there. So had mine.

I had given myself a week in Alice to tidy up all last-minute details. That involved getting together in one enormous pile all my fifteen hundred pounds of baggage, picking up the saddle from Sallay and seeing if it fitted, and buying all the perishable foodstuffs.

It also meant spending a week with my family, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year, and arranging with Rick when I would see him on the track and how, and saying countless goodbyes. In short, it was one hell of a hectic week.

Rick came laden with every trapping under the sun. The people from whom he had bought his four-wheel-drive Toyota in Melbourne had seen him coming a mile off. ‘Hey, boys, here’s a live one.’ They had sold him every survival gadget they had, from a winch the size of a bull to a rubber dinghy with paddles that took half an hour to inflate.

‘Rick, what on earth … what’s
THAT
for?’

‘Well, they told me it might flash flood out here, so I thought I’d better get it. I don’t know. I’ve never been in a desert before.’

We were all at Sallay’s at the time, and after we had picked ourselves off the ground where we had been rolling convulsed and pointing at Rick, we teased him unmercifully.

He had also bought me a two-way radio, and a huge gleaming contraption that looked like one of those chrome-plated exercise bicycles that plump people use.

‘Richard, I’m going to be walking twenty miles a day. Why would I need an exercise bicycle?’

I didn’t want a two-way radio, and I definitely didn’t want this stationary bike either. It was for generating power, should the batteries fail on the radio. Imagine sitting out in the middle of nowhere, pedalling as hard as you could saying ‘help’ into a microphone. I’d feel silly.

An argument ensued, with me saying that I refused to take either of these machines, and everyone else saying things like, ‘But you must,’ or ‘If you don’t, I’ll worry myself sick,’ or ‘Oh, my heart,’ or ‘What if you break a leg?’ or ‘Please take it, Rob, for us. Just to make us feel better.’

Emotional blackmail.

I had thought long and hard about a radio, and had decided that it was somehow not right to take one. It didn’t feel right. I didn’t need it, didn’t want to think of it sitting up there, tempting me, didn’t want that mental crutch, or physical link with the outside world. Foolish I suppose, but it was a very strong feeling.

I eventually gave in grudgingly to taking the set, but refused the pedal part point blank. I was angry with myself then, for allowing other people to stop me doing things the way I wanted to do them, for whatever reason. And angry because that other one of me, the boring practical self-preserver, had said, ‘Take it, take it, you idiot. You want to die out there or something?’

It was another tiny symbol of defeat. Of the trip not really being mine at all. I stashed it away with all the others.

Meanwhile, I watched my family. My father and sister. Between us, it seemed, there had always been invisible ropes and chains that we had chafed at, fought against, thought we had escaped from only to find them as strong as ever. We were bound together, since the death of my mother, by guilt and the overwhelming need to protect one another, mostly from ourselves. It was never stated between us. That would have been too cruel — the opening of old wounds. And, in fact, we had managed to bury it successfully, hide it behind set patterns of relating. And if sometimes one of us cracked with the pressure of it, we hastily explained it in terms that would not hurt, that would protect, that would cover up. But now a certain awareness pleaded from behind blue eyes, and begged for recognition in the set of three similar faces. It was like electricity. A need to lay a ghost, I suppose, before it was too late (i.e., before I karked in the desert). It was painful. We none of us wanted to make the same mistake twice, of leaving too much unsaid, of not at least trying to state the unstatable.

My sister was married with four children. We appeared on the surface as different as chalk and cheese, but we had that closeness that only two siblings who have shared a traumatic childhood can have. And it was between us that the conspiracy was strongest and most clearly stated and accepted. The need to protect Pop. The duty. To save him pain at any cost. It is odd that both of us spent most of our lives doing just the opposite.

And as I watched our reactions, as I saw his eyes mist over when he thought no one was looking, or glance away in confusion when he knew someone was, I got an inkling of just how much emotional charge was being focused on this trip. I began to see how much it meant to him and how much it would take out of him. Not just because he was proud of it. (He had spent twenty years in Africa, walking across it in the 1920s and 1930s, living the life of a Victorian explorer. He could now refer to me as a chip off the old block.) Nor simply because he was frightened. But because all the stupid meaningless pain our family had suffered might somehow be symbolically absolved, laid to rest through this gesture of mine. As if I could walk it away for all of us.

This is all conjecture. But the time for me was excruciatingly sad. There was a poignancy in the air, though well masked, as always, with our roles and our patterns, now a little shaky, a little transparent, and our jokes.

Sallay offered to truck the camels as far as Glen Helen, a spectacular red sandstone gorge, seventy miles west of Alice. That way, I could miss the bitumen road and the tourists and the curious townsfolk. I arranged to meet him at the trucking yards at dawn on my last day. Pop and I rose at three a.m. to walk the camels down. It was still dark and we weren’t talking much, just enjoying moonlight and night noises, and each other’s company.

After about half an hour of this he said, ‘You know, Rob, I had a strange dream about you and me last night.’ I could not remember Pop ever telling me anything as personal as a dream before. I knew it was difficult for him to talk like this. I put my arm around him as we walked along.

‘Yes, what was it?’

‘Well, we were sailing in a lovely boat together on the most beautiful tropical turquoise sea, and we were very happy, and we were going somewhere. I don’t know where it was, but somewhere nice. And then suddenly, we were on a mud-bank, or a sea of mud rather, and you were so frightened. But I said to you, don’t worry, darling, if we can float on water, we can float on mud.’

I wondered if the dream meant the same to him as it did to me. It didn’t matter, it was enough that he had told me. We hardly spoke again.

The night at Glen Helen was normal enough. Sallay cooked chapatis, Iris made us laugh, Pop and I went for walks, the kids had rides, my sister and brother-in-law Marg and Laurie wished they could spend more time out bush and Rick took pictures. To my complete surprise, the minute my head touched the swag I fell asleep.

But oh how different the dawning. We all woke up with tight forced smiles which soon enough disintegrated into covert then overt weeping. Sallay loaded the camels for me and I couldn’t believe I had so much stuff, or that any of it would stay there. It was ridiculous. I could feel anxiety and excitement bulging the back of my eyeballs, and playing violins in my stomach. I knew they all had that sinking feeling that they would never see me alive again, and I had the sinking certainty that I would have to send messages from Redbank Gorge the same day, saying, ‘Sorry, muffed it on the first seventeen miles, please collect.’

Josephine started bawling which started Andree which started Marg which started Pop, and there were hugs and good lucks and ‘Watch out for those bull camels like I told you,’ from Sallay, and feeble little pats on the back, and Marg looked deep into my eyes and said, ‘You know I love you, don’t you,’ and Iris was waving, and then everyone was waving, ‘Goodbye, sweetheart, goodbye, Rob,’ and I grabbed the nose-line with cold sweaty shaky hands, and walked up over the hill.

‘I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, to down all the glory of that magnificent heaven.’

I could not remember how the rest of it went but the words were dinging around in my head like an advertisement jingle. It was just how I felt. As if I were made of some fine, bright, airy, musical substance and that in my chest was a source of power that would any minute explode, releasing thousands of singing birds.