A Stone’s Throw Away

Friends in Low Places: The Fall of Australia’s Favourite Bent

Front Bencher

by Phillipa Davenport

Pip stared at the title page on her screen and gave a frustrated sigh. A total of fourteen pages from two days of writing.

She pushed back the chair from the kitchen table irritably and walked outside onto the back verandah. What the hell is wrong with me? she wondered forlornly as she took in the view before her. She had peace and quiet, nothing but paddocks and bush for as far as the eye could see. How much more bloody peaceful did it have to get before she could relax and write?

This wasn’t like her. She was a seasoned journo! She pumped out articles even on her worst days.

With a final, irritated growl, she stepped off the verandah and kept walking. This was bullshit, sitting around hoping for inspiration. She needed to do something. She needed a distraction.

The dry grass crackled and crunched beneath her feet as she picked her way through the paddock filled with long, dead-looking stalks before she suddenly—and nervously—remembered about snakes, but with a quick glance over her shoulder at the house she realised she was already some distance away. Snakes were either attracted to or repelled by vibration, she recalled, but the specifics escaped her, so she took a chance and loudly stomped the rest of the way across.

When she reached the gate on the other side, she noted with relief that the ground was clearer. It was rocky, though, with a lot more dirt as it gently sloped down towards the dam.

As she reached the nearest bank, she surveyed its vast outline, standing with her hands on her hips and wiping away the beads of sweat dotting her forehead. It was either ridiculously hot or she was a lot more out of shape than she’d thought. The dam wasn’t a neat circular hole designed to catch water like the ones she’d seen from the car during her trip—this one was more of a figure eight with one end rounder than the other. In the middle was a small island, its banks eroded over time. The exposed roots of a large tree with a dangerous lean seemed to be the only thing holding the little piece of land together.

It was deep. Where she stood at the edge was maybe only six feet or so from the bare dirt, but further in it sloped down and she estimated it to be three times deeper at least. She walked around the edges, marvelling again at its size. Maybe it wasn’t manmade, she thought, studying it critically. Maybe it was a billabong, part of a river, before it changed course a long time ago. She could imagine what a beautiful spot this would be to relax by when it held water. The trees surrounding it, which partially hid it from the rest of the property, would normally be shady and green, she suspected. At the moment they looked faded and the leaves drooped listlessly. Everything around here just looked … hot.

There was a strange stillness about this place, she thought, tilting her head back to take in the barely moving leaves on the tall trees that surrounded the waterhole. Maybe it was just the heat sapping whatever energy anything had left and sucking it out of the atmosphere.

Something nagged at her as she stood there—like trying to remember someone’s name, on the tip of her tongue but just frustratingly out of reach. It was an odd sensation and she pushed it aside to think about later.

She squinted across to look at the rubbish that was now exposed as the water level had evaporated. Drums and old car parts were some of the more recognisable things she could see. Surely that couldn’t be good for the environment? She toyed with the idea of climbing down to poke about to see what else was down there but had visions of getting stuck and having to remain there until someone eventually came out looking for her.

Someone like Erik, perhaps, when he came out to check on the place for Uncle Nev. The idea that he could just happen to drive past unexpectedly sent a brief flutter of excitement through her. But then, she realised with a disappointed sigh, that was before she told him she was out here housesitting, leaving little need for a drive-by.

Still, it was a shame such a beautiful place was littered with so much crap. Uncle Nev popped into her mind and she had an idea. Maybe if she got someone in to clear out the dam and stack all the junk in a pile somewhere, Uncle Nev could sort through it when he got home and maybe use some of it. What he didn’t use he could sell for scrap. And in the process, his water feature would be clean and junk-free like it hadn’t been for quite a number of, well … decades, by the look of it.

Again she felt the weird urge to jump down into the empty waterhole and … do what? She wasn’t exactly sure. There was nothing particularly interesting that caught her eye about all the junk, it was mostly rusted-out old tin. There was a very antique-looking washing machine, twisted and bent and half buried in the muddy remains of the dam floor and yet … Pip shook her head to clear away the strange brain fog that had hovered about and turned away.

She went back to the house with the first bit of determination she’d felt in a while. It was just a shame it wasn’t directed at her book.

The woman sat on a blanket in a small clearing under a huge old gum tree, her blonde hair pulled back from her face and large bouncy curls pinned at the nape of her neck. Her head was bowed over the small notebook on her lap as she wrote.

There was something familiar about her, Pip thought. Like she’d seen her before, but she wasn’t sure where, or why she was even out here.

Pip saw the woman wipe a tear from her eye, but she didn’t look up from her scribbling, and Pip wondered what she was writing about that made her so sad. Pip could feel the woman’s sadness radiating from where she sat on the blanket—so much loss and pain. Was that what she was writing about? Pip took a tentative step closer. Her foot stepped on a branch and the loud noise broke the bubble of silence they’d been trapped in moments before, and the woman’s head snapped up in alarm—

Pip turned her head and groaned at the red numbers on the bedside clock before pulling out the pillow from under her head and covering her face with it. All she wanted was just one good night’s sleep. Was that really too much to ask?

The next morning, Pip stepped outside and breathed in the bushy smell of eucalypt and a sweet native floral smell from the flowers high up in some of the gum trees she could see. She was discovering a whole new side to herself since coming out here. Exercise was something she usually avoided like the plague. She owned a multitude of T-shirts and coffee cups friends and family had bought her over the years that would attest to the fact. One T-shirt said: Run? I thought you said Rum! And another: If my body is ever found on a jogging trail, know that I was probably murdered elsewhere and dumped there. However, lately she’d taken to going for a walk each day to clear her head, and she was finding that she looked forward to them.

She wasn’t much of an early riser usually, but she’d discovered by accident that coffee on the front verandah just after the sun came up provided the most gorgeous of views, with the glowing red and gold rays of morning light filtering through the long, wispy grass out in the paddock. It was a reprieve of sorts to breathe in the fresh, clean morning air before the sun continued its rise and went on to scorch everything below.

This morning she bypassed the dam and headed along a well-worn, narrow cattle track, which remained despite no cattle being on the property since Uncle Nev bought it. She felt something like a small rock digging into the underside of her foot and stopped, tapping her heel on the ground to try to dislodge it. She felt it move and the discomfort stopped as she continued on.

Her T-shirt stuck to her chest and she pulled it away from her skin irritably. Loud insects zoomed past her, buzzing loudly, while the odd fly followed her, dive-bombing her face and dodging her flapping hands. The track beneath her feet was washed-out in places and eroded in others as it wound its way through the paddock and the bush surrounding the property. It was only wide enough for a person to walk on single file, and Pip smiled as she imagined what a herd of cattle following each other in a long procession from the waterhole must have looked like.

She stopped near a large gum tree and leaned against its massive trunk as she took off her shoe and knocked it against the palm of her hand to dislodge the annoying pebble. It was quiet here, sheltered by the bush that bordered the dam. Native grasses grew in clumps, not pasture like the rest of the property in the cleared paddocks behind her. The trees here were tall and their massive canopies stretched high into the sky, creating a cathedral above the clearing below. This was a nice spot, she thought. A feeling of peace settled within her.

As she replaced her shoe and straightened, she experienced the most incredible sense of déjà vu. For a moment she felt disorientated, and she frowned, wondering if she might have a touch of heat stroke. As she pushed away from the tree, she turned and felt the ground tilt slightly.

She took a few steps back and stared up at the huge tree she’d been resting against before her gaze fell to the ground below it. All it was missing was a blanket on the ground, she thought numbly. For the past few days she’d been trying to remember the dreams that had woken her in the early hours of the morning. Now she remembered. The woman with the notebook.

She shook her head, more to dislodge the thought than in denial. It had to be some weird coincidence. She sent a nervous glance around the clearing, half expecting a woman to come walking out of the surrounding bush any moment carrying a blanket and a notebook, but then she dismissed the ridiculous notion. Maybe this afternoon she would have a nap and catch up on some of that sleep she’d been missing. She clearly needed it.

Two days later, Pip was drawn to the front window as a rumbling sound caught her attention, and she watched as a semitrailer with an excavator on the back crawled up the driveway. She finished washing up the breakfast dishes, and by the time she went outside, a short, round man who looked to be in his late sixties jumped from the truck cabin and called out a hello, followed by a tall, willowy younger man, maybe in his early twenties, who looked like he was trying, unsuccessfully, to grow his first moustache.

‘Hi. I was worried you might not get up the driveway,’ she said as the driver began undoing clamps and hooks and a variety of other gadgets that secured the huge excavator to the back of the truck.

‘Nah, piece of cake. This is one of the easier places to get to. Bob,’ he said extending a slightly dirty-looking hand. ‘And this is my offsider for the day, Danny. You must be Pip.’

‘Yep,’ she said, shaking his hand quickly and then nodding towards the younger man who was leaning against the truck with his hands in his back pockets. ‘I thought I’d do something constructive while I was here and oversee the dam clean-out for my uncle.’

‘Usually you’ll find it’s from earlier—before they brought out all these rules and regulations,’ he informed her. ‘Bloody greenies,’ he added, dragging out the word like it tasted bad.

‘Yeah, well, I’m sure we all miss the days of metal and poisons leaking into the waterways,’ she muttered, but Bob didn’t seem to hear. ‘Will you be able to get down to it?’ she asked, eyeing the large excavator doubtfully. It had a considerable distance to cover to reach the dam from where the truck was parked.

‘Yeah. No worries. Only good thing about having no rain—less chance of getting bogged,’ he said cheerfully.

Pip looked around and shaded her eyes against the early sun. ‘Maybe on the other side, out of the way and out of sight.’

She gave them a nod and left them to it, deciding that maybe this would be the day she could settle in and get some writing done. She was feeling positive. Today was going to be a good day.

Three