Wildlight (23 page)

The first part of the South Coast Track meandered through coastal scrub and along sandy beaches. Tom found a discarded spaghetti tin purged by the ocean, its razor-edged lid prised back. He could use it as a tinderbox. He peeled the slimy label to dry inside his pocket.

At dusk Tom stopped at a clearing within earshot of hikers’ laughter and the crackle of their campfire. He huddled in his jacket until the night was quiet.

When he circled their campsite he saw in himself a scavenger whose need for warmth and nourishment had no room for shame or indecisiveness. He shovelled dying coals from their fire into the spaghetti tin, imagining what he might say if they woke and caught him in the act. He could put on an indignant face the way Frank would have done to tell them that fires were prohibited along the South Coast Track. He sneaked around the tents like an opportunistic quoll, surveyed a rubbish bag pegged to a line, whose contents amounted to three used tea bags, plastic wrap, a tampon wrapped in a wadding of toilet paper that Tom tore off for later use.

Tom would no sooner seek help than admit to anyone his gnawing hunger. He shuddered at the prospect of being the object of people’s pity, or kindness, or one pushed inside the sleeve of the other. He returned to his scratching. To sleep. To manage alone.

*

Beyond the prospect of warmth from the embers he carried in the tinderbox, Tom’s world grew sodden and reduced. Even as he walked he shivered. His padded jacket, the only thing that kept his body warm and dry, dripped rain onto his jeans until the denim dragged and chafed. The elastic of his underwear drew bands around his legs.

The track veered inland from the coast. He trudged through depressions turned to waterholes, across submerged boardwalks. Where the boards ended the track turned into wading pools of mud. Tom sank to his thighs. Twice he fished through the slurry to retrieve his gumboot. His clothes smelled fetid. His toes rubbed against the rubber of the boots. His soles and the pads of his toes grew loose and puckered from being perpetually wet. Hikers took on this walk with the same optimism as those bygone Diggers who’d signed up for war on the promise of adventure. Bog-ridden battlefields. Mud and filth. Trench foot. Facing death day after day. If they could manage all that, he could do this.

The track was clear of hikers and Tom was grateful not to raise attention. People would think he was an idiot in jeans and gumboots, nothing but a ratty daypack. No proper shelter in which to retreat and wait for the rain to stop. Nowhere was completely dry. Tom’s only barrier was a torn sheet of plastic he’d foraged from a shoreline that reeked of rotted kelp.

He carried the tinderbox, fed the coals with tiny twigs he husbanded along the way. Tonight he’d make a roaring fire, cook himself a good hot meal.

Rain dripped from his cap. He passed through threads of mist. He couldn’t see three hundred metres along the track. Tom grew to resent this sodden walk in the same way he resented his brother as the cause of all his hardship.

*

The track crossed Louisa River. The course of water that flowed to Louisa Bay where he and Stephanie had spent a day. This leg of the river was a long way inland. A sign warned against crossing when the water was high and fast-flowing. A safety rope was strapped from a tree trunk on Tom’s side of the river over to the other side. The water rushed, dark and deep. He would camp on this side, wait until morning to cross. He laid out the plastic sheet. What if the river was still rising? By morning it could be too high to cross. He remembered a saying: rivers that rise fast fall fast. But Tom didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the water to reach its peak and then subside. He hadn’t enough food to last.

He wrung out his socks, folded his gumboots, stuffed all his worldly goods inside his pack. The tinderbox he packed in a sock and wedged at the top.

The skin of Tom’s feet looked sallow through the liquid brown. The iciness of water stole his breath. He gripped the rope and pulled himself across. His arms felt on fire with the effort. He couldn’t touch the bottom.

The night was still and cold. Mist hung in branches. Mosquitoes were fierce. Tom camped on the edge of Louisa River beneath a grove of towering trees. He scoured the ground and scrambled beneath bushes for anything flammable and dry. He trembled with the cold. The spaghetti label still felt slimy and damp. Tom fished inside the other pockets of his jacket and felt a boyish thrill to find a piece of yellow paper—graph paper—folded around a dried sprig of tea-tree. Necessity was all he saw. He shook out the small cluster of coals—the tin felt barely warm and he fretted that he’d left the coals too long. He tore the yellow paper into strips and latticed them on top. He hunched over the coals to shield them from rain. He used his breath—not so hard as to dislodge the paper—halting at the first spindle of smoke. Tom watched the paper curl and singe and the instant it flared he was ready with the sprig of tea-tree that ignited in an instant—an ember glow that quickly died away. It reminded him of sprinkling dried herbs into sauce, but this was a pinching of tea-tree litter from the lining of his pocket. His eyes smarted with smoke. He waited. It caught. He laid upon the top a single leaf and listened to it spit against the moisture and then catch light. Another leaf. Another. Tom felt a tiny halo of warmth. He added a handful of twigs and felt his chest tighten when the wet bark doused the flame. He stopped his mind imagining a night as cold as this, a person wet and hungry without shelter and warmth.

He closed his eyes to the spindly trail of smoke. Tom conjured an image of heat. He created a cloudless blue sky and a day thick with sunshine. When this was over he’d go some place warm, escape this state as his father had once done. But Tom wouldn’t come back.

He pictured his father at his age in a rundown jeep, in baggy shorts and rolled-up sleeves, roaming Australia’s north-west, working town to town. The flame took. Tom snapped a branch into smaller pieces, fed it bit by bit. Lee Forrest, a good week’s work—labourer, cattle hand, a two-month stint of mining, cash in hand. His farewell gift from Wittenoom a shard of blue asbestos embedded in his lung that wouldn’t show itself for twenty years.

Tom corralled the small fire with a wooden border of larger pieces that he didn’t dare add before they’d dried. His stomach gurgled with hunger. Steam rose from the knees of his jeans. The rain had stopped. Tom warmed his hands. He laid out the contents of his backpack on the plastic sheet: four cup-a-soups, two meals of pasta with creamy bacon sauce (
8 minutes to cook
), the smashed remains of a packet of Iced VoVo biscuits, a half-tube of sweetened condensed milk. His second big mistake: the two Mars Bars he’d scoffed down before he’d understood the need to ration. He pulled out the three misshapen tea bags he’d stolen from the hikers’ rubbish bag. With the tannin colour of the water, Tom couldn’t tell if they had any actual tea left in them. It was more the ritual. A keeping-up of domesticity.

Tom rinsed the tinderbox in the river—it nearly slipped from his hand in the rush of freezing water. He used his pocketknife to pry the lid enough that it would fully bend back without snapping off. He half-filled the tin with water, careful not to let it topple when he set it down among the bed of coals. He added wood to the fire, fashioned a branch into a stirrer.

His father’s decline was a slow-cooker measure. Even through his final year, his mother spoke about him bouncing Frank, scarlet-faced and breathless, Frank too old to settle on his father’s knee, too young to understand he should. The start of spring, the fruit trees outside his parents’ bedroom swelling with new buds—
Lee’s favourite time of year; he really loved his garden
. Tom saw his father look through the bedroom window at a world burgeoning with life as his own wound down. Tom arriving in the world three days before his father left it.
Miracle baby
, Frank called his conception in a way that made his mother blush.
The old man still had it in him.
Tom was special to his mother. No one acknowledged it out loud but Tom knew and Frank felt it too. The naming of the boat, all the things his brother paid for. If Frank couldn’t be first in their mother’s affections he’d be first in both their debt.

Tom extracted every chip of dried pasta from the sachet to add to boiling water. He licked the foil lining. His stomach cramped with emptiness.

What Mum earned barely made the payments on the house.
His mother and Frank had excavated the entire back lawn and turned it into growing beds.
Weekends I’d be digging chook poo into the compost while Mum delivered eggs.
What she hadn’t fed the three of them she’d bartered at the shops or sold to help with bills.
You were too young to remember, Tom-Tom. She worked all the time. It was killing her. It wasn’t fair on you.

Tom remembered scraps of it. Frank arguing with Mum, his brother hellbent on leaving school early to assume their father’s role. Frank talked to a man who talked to a man who gave him a tryout as deckhand on his cray boat. Then Frank was gone for weeks and the house turned still and dank, as if Frank had yanked away its energy and scattered it across the ocean in foaming streaks of white. Inside, the house smelled of stale lavender and a feeling that only now, sitting alone by a campfire beneath these trees, Tom identified as loneliness. On their mother’s bedside table sat a cut-crystal bowl, her rosary beads as polished as river stones; above on the wall a miniature Jesus with womanly hands nailed to the cross. Growing up, those trickles of painted blood had made Tom dig his thumb into his palm and hold his breath until he launched outside and filled his lungs with citrus air. The garden an ocean of blossom, rainbows of poppy and freesia, the air tangy with lemon and the sleepy drone of bees.

He used the stirrer as a scoop and made himself eat slowly. He savoured every noodle, every lip-smacking mouthful of cheesy bacon sauce. He’d normally scoff at packet mix—Frank called him a food snob—Tom usually hated creamy sauces and would turn up his nose at dehydrated chips of bacon that were probably synthetic. But this, Tom relished the salty aftertaste, the coating of fat on his lips—this was superior to any gourmet dish he could name. Pasta with creamy bacon sauce was possibly the finest meal Tom Forrest had eaten in his life or would ever eat again. He felt a giddy rush. He used his finger to gather the last smears of sauce from the sides and bottom of the tin. He licked his fingers with squelching noises that could have been Frank chewing bones. He felt ravenous. Tom contemplated cooking up the second packet—he needed all the energy he could muster to cross the Ironbound Ranges. He went to tear open the second packet. Reason kicked in. He was days from finishing the track at Cockle Creek. He barely had food for two. He squeezed condensed milk onto his finger—a five-cent’s worth to cut the longing for savoury and line his mouth with decadence. He turned his back to the fire to dry the seat of his jeans. The contrast of air felt chill and damp. The night sky was moonless. The river rushed by. Small glints in the dark reflected from the fire—eyes watching through the night. Tom was cut off from the ocean.

His brother would be out there now, scouring it of life while others in the fleet did the decent thing. Tom couldn’t dwell on Frank. He had to push his focus on tomorrow. He had to be up and on the track first thing. He had to make it up and over the Ironbound Ranges in daylight.

*

Tom woke to pain. His hip and shoulder ached, his right arm and leg had numbed to pins and needles, impressed too long upon mortuary cold ground. His neck cricked. He stretched his limbs. Grey sky. Rain. His face and hands itched with bites. Tom slapped at a mosquito hovering about his hair. He’d overslept.

He picked at the remaining coals: not a skerrick of warmth. His hands and fingernails looked as grimy as charcoal. With a surge of resentment he pictured Stephanie, her model family, her friends, her clean-cut life. He needed to walk, take his mind off food, off pain, off feeling miserable and cold and sorry for himself. A mosquito whined around his ear. ‘Fuck you.’ He smacked his head and left Louisa River Camp.

The boarded walk through bushland gave way to open muddy slopes, the wind bitter and strengthening along the rising trail. Tom buttoned the collar of his shirt, drew his jacket hood tight. The low clouds that rolled in belonged to a different season’s sky, laden and silvered with hail or snow. The high steps that cut into the mountainside made his muscles burn. Tom was out of shape for climbing, too long confined to the deck of a boat. He lost concentration and tripped over his gumboots, fell hard on his elbow and arm. He picked himself up. He was high enough now that he could look out to the ocean, down to Louisa Bay that appeared as a gleaming crescent. It glittered like shiny bullion, then dulled to tired metal beneath a new front of cloud. Out to sea a blur of islands: Maatsuyker and the Witches.

Tom stopped to catch his breath at the first bluff, felt sweat chill on his skin. The rock was marbled white and earthy pink, jagged formations with overhangs and shallow caves. He looked to the ascent before him, looked back down from where he’d come. In different circumstances he’d have savoured the view, sat with his lunch to take in the coastline. He’d been on the track for hours. He felt winded and weak. By his calculations he should by now have reached the top if he was going to make it down the other side before nightfall. He pulled down his beanie to cover his ears, found his spare socks and pulled them on as gloves. He trudged to the next bluff, stopped to catch his breath, made himself push on. He reached a saddle that was level with the cloud; to his left, wind whooshed up the wall of rock, bellows of air that Tom reached out to touch. He crossed an open plain and made his way over lengths of bleached boardwalk, rough-hewn planks so old they’d paled and split. Was this the top? The vegetation had turned alpine, cushion plants, pandani trees, highland heath stunted from a mean wind that shunted Tom forward. It pummelled his back and slapped his sides and punched him off the track into the scrub. He got himself up, trudged on. The second his focus wavered he stumbled, dizzy and light-headed when he righted himself. The rock, the vegetation: everything worn down by weather. The wind was determined to do the same to him. He felt conspicuous, an alien being, as out of place as that burrowing crayfish he’d seen in the middle of a track. He couldn’t remember back to where that was. His teeth chattered. Even with his jacket zipped and his hood drawn tight, he couldn’t stop the shaking. The afternoon light slumped in a portent of rain. Clouds split open but it was sleet that the wind gathered and hurled like lead shot against his back. Tom scrambled for shelter; he could see nothing higher than his knees. He left the track for a narrow trail that led uphill to a knoll—was that the top?—he found a meagre overhang and squeezed his body beneath. He wrapped the plastic sheet around his legs and hunkered down, his head on the crook of his arm. The sky turned jackhammer, the noise deafening. Bullets of hail pummelled the rock and ricocheted from the ground.