“I will show you a field of zebra finch
Dreaming in the shadow of the puli puli ochre
When the soft blanket of language hums
Kinship and campfires flavour windswept hair”
Ali Cobby Eckermann, Yankunytjatjara Love Poems
Six days after Loup disappeared, I returned from one job and home to another, to find in the winter dark a bundle of his clothes out on the lawn. But it was not his clothes; it was Loup himself inside his clothes, spread-eagled face down, the grass wet with dew around his ears. Dropping to my knees beside him, I had visions of Pascal and held my breath in trepidation as I turned him over. Please please God no damage. Sweet Jesus, no!
Loup was unmarked. But he was slow to awake, as if he were a very long way away. When he did open his eyes, it was as if he’d been asleep for a long time. He could only mutter broken things in French. It was so bitterly cold I was shaking and he was hypothermic, a dead weight. I hauled him clumsily up the grassy slope and with much effort, up the steps. Turning the heater on high, I wrapped him in a doona and rubbed and hugged and chided him, weeping all the time. He kept asking ‘qu-est ce que se passé?’ as if he had absolutely no idea of what had happened, or how long he had been lying on the ground in the dark. Apparently he had no recollection of leaving, of packing up all his possessions here in the hills, and then doing the same down in Melbourne. Taking every care to avoid being in each place when he knew I would be for work: playing cat and mouse. Apparently Loup had no memory of removing his wedding ring and leaving it beside my earrings in the Carlton bedroom. No memory of how he got from the hills to the City and back again. No memory of his four-page letter I find here on this frost-bound winter night. But only have the courage to flip from the first words of recriminations to the last lines:
‘Freya, I have always loved you and always will’.
‘We must get you to a hospital,’ I keep urging, but Loup refuses to move. As I peel off his sodden shoes socks and trousers, all the while rubbing the circulation back into his limp legs feet arms and hands, I feel like the Pietà. Loup had mislaid six days of his life, or else he refused to remember. Either way, I was in shock as he then makes love with such urgency it rattles me. The entire episode remains a mystery, but I am grateful that we are granted another chance: I do not wish to unravel what appears a simple gift of grace.
A few weeks later, we return full circle to the desert as a way of mending; pedalling our bikes, lumping our camping gear and enormous amounts of water. This is the thing we are made for; the thing we are made to do together. And we are challenged in every way possible: the endless red sand, spinifex sun and stars become our solitary habitat as we tackle corrugations, river rock, bull-dust, gravel, head-wind and deep sand for miles; placing our hands on ancient yellow-ochre hands, sleeping wild under an infinite black sky, bringing us back to our beginning. Making love with red in our hair and the scratching of the earth down our spine.
Dressed in nothing but our desert skin.