Ro looked around the table at the others. Three years in one household. Who’d have believed it?
Mikki raised her glass. ‘We are gathered here together …’
‘On this auspicious occasion,’ Petra added helpfully.
‘Because we live here,’ said Sue.
Mikki raised her voice. ‘… to celebrate the third anniversary …’
‘Loud cheers …’
‘There should be a song …’
‘Sharing all we have. Our cars. Our bikes. Our clothes.’
‘Our vibrator.’
‘Petra! I borrowed it once,’ Ro protested.
‘Once or twice,’ said Mikki.
‘Well, you can talk!’
‘Remember when she came round to see about the empty room?’ Sue asked.
‘We were overwhelmed,’ said Petra.
‘We were honoured,’ said Mikki. ‘Your fame had travelled before you.’
‘Your reputation anyway,’ said Sue.
Ro groaned. ‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ she said.
‘Speech! Speech!’
Ro stood up. ‘I have to say this is the longest by far I’ve lived anywhere since I moved out of home. I know I can be a pain but I love you all to bits and I love living with you. And I hope we’re still together in another year.’ She sat down with a bump.
Mikki grinned at her. ‘Well said. Now tuck in everyone.’
The night was wild, branches tossing in the cold light of the street. Ro watched the shadows on her wall. Three years. And two years in one monogamous relationship. She and Gerry had shared a cake with two candles, blowing them out together and toasting each other with peppermint tea, Gerry being on the wagon again.
It was a logistical challenge, an interstate relationship. But they saw each other every couple of months at least, and that suited them. They’d settled into it. Ro no longer thought about how it would be when she lived at the farm full-time. Was that a good sign?
Ro first saw Julia on the steps of Parliament House during a women’s anti-nuke rally. She glimpsed her through a gap in the ribbons and yarn that women were weaving around themselves and each other. Julia was a sleek greyhound of a woman. Her clothing was not startling. She wore regulation jeans and blue tee-shirt with a peace symbol in black. But to Ro she was Aphrodite arising from the seaweed. Ro had no illusions. She was seaweed herself and proud of it. But she could admire Aphrodite.
We are the weavers, we are the web, sang the crowd.
Ro didn’t feel like a weaver, but what could you do? She was passionately against the nuclear industry and war in any form, but she didn’t want to work with the men in CANE. So she skulked around the pragmatic edges of FANG, the Feminist Anti-Nuclear Group, and went to non-violence training.
The rally surged across King William Street, around and up onto the bronze Boer War horseman at the corner of North Terrace. Ro linked arms with the woman next to her. Take the toys from the boys, they sang lustily. The Boer War hero almost disappeared under a festoon of women, but he clung valiantly to his rifle, bronze upper lip stiff. It was his horse who looked most horrified.
Seeing Petra nearby Ro wriggled through the press of bodies.
‘Who’s that?’ she hissed in Petra’s ear, nodding in Julia’s direction.
‘No idea. Shit, Ro, can’t you keep your mind on the job for five minutes?’
Ro coloured and made a face. ‘I’m only asking because I’ve never seen her before. Anyhow, look who’s talking.’
Petra grinned, but shook her head. ‘You watch your step, sister. I think we’ve been through this before.’
Ro was chastened by Petra’s reaction. It was true, and it was tacky to watch women in that objectifying way. She would hate anyone to think she was acting like a man, ogling women. Especially at a feminist rally. Wasn’t that the very point? To create a world free from male violence and war and exploitation and all the rest of it? She would turn over a new leaf.
A Ride Against Roxby was planned and it was exactly Ro’s cup of tea. There was an added incentive when she found out Julia was going. But Ro had a long-standing arrangement with Gerry to go to the women’s land in New South Wales. She was torn. The Roxby thing would be fantastic, an epic journey into the desert, a chance to thumb their noses. Frail humans on bikes against the hideous nuclear juggernaut. But on the other hand a trip to the women’s land had been her idea. Gerry had visited before, numbers of times, had friends living in the various communities but Ro had never been. She thought that her lesbian credentials weren’t complete until she did. For years she had wanted to go, partly in hopes of glimpsing Elizabeth Riley, author of All That False Instruction, Australia’s first out-lesbian novel. But was hero worship unworthy? And perhaps Elizabeth Riley would think that Ro should protest at Roxby instead?
She didn’t tell Gerry that she was no longer whole-hearted about their trip, partly because Gerry had become more and more enthusiastic about it as Ro became less so. Ro observed this irony in glum silence.
But when it came to the point she cheered up. She had made the arrangement with Gerry and she would stick to it. Besides, it was exciting to set off to any new destination, let alone the fabled heartland of feral wimminhood.
Petra changed the oil and checked the brakes on the Kombi. Ro cleaned it out, washed the sheets, stocked up on meths for the Trangia, and bought a new pepper grinder. She was prepared.
They drove into Sydney in Ma and Pa Kettle style, clanking and banging. The Kombi, despite Petra’s care, had developed alarmingly explosive outbursts, which Gerry diagnosed as muffler problems. She drove the last stretch along Parramatta Road while Ro sat perched in the passenger seat, waving regally at startled pedestrians.
They stayed with friends of Gerry’s in a rundown squat in Glebe. A bunch of grubby children collected to watch and try all the door handles while Gerry crawled under the Kombi.
‘Hoy. Out of there!’ Ro shouted.
The children withdrew to the footpath.
Gerry reappeared feet first.
‘The muffler’s done for,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to get a new one.’
They made the most of the delay. Ro had never been to Sydney and Gerry was happy to do all the touristy things, ferries and walking. More ferries. Suburban trains whisking through filthy tunnels. Ro was bewitched. One day, she decided, she would live in Sydney, be a sophisticated, artistic person. A writer. That was her most secret wish. Probably she and Elizabeth Riley would be friends.
Even the giant cockroaches in the Glebe house were an interesting Sydney phenomenon. But the fleas were another matter. There was a glob of sticky blu tack on the arm of every chair. Their hostesses demonstrated. You sat with the blu tack in one hand and banged it down swiftly on any flea that appeared on your body.
Despite the blu tack, Ro was covered in bites. Gerry proved immune. She was sympathetic but unbitten. Ro changed her mind about living in Sydney and was relieved when they headed north again in a much quieter Kombi. She inspected Gerry and herself all over before she let them get into the bed that night.
They stopped on the track to Downland to check out a particularly deep and slippery gully. A bunch of girls came bucketing toward them in an old jeep.
‘Can’t get through in that,’ they called cheerfully, gesturing to the Kombi.
Ro and Gerry introduced themselves.
‘Oh yeah. Martha’s expecting you.’ They surveyed these ancient thirty-three-year-old visitors doubtfully. ‘Are you okay to walk?’
Ro’s flea bites were hot and unbearably itchy. She scratched her belly above her jeans.
‘Of course we can walk,’ she said, affronted by the implication.
Gerry was more thoughtful. ‘Are you coming back in today?’ she asked the girls.
‘Yeah. But not till this afternoon.’
‘Could you bring the boxes of food? We can manage the rest.’
She fished out a spare key while Ro watched. Was it okay to give these girls free rein with the Kombi? They hardly looked old enough to be driving.
‘It’s fine,’ Gerry said, as the jeep bounced away from them. ‘They grow up fast here.’
Nevertheless Ro cast several anxious glances back as they set off. The Kombi looked so abandoned. As they moved along the track the trees closed in but she could see flashes of valiant blue through the leaves, a last despairing signal.
Before they’d gone very far she had other worries. Her sneakers were soaked through and she eyed Gerry’s boots with envy. Gerry’s longer legs were an advantage too. Certainly she did less slipping and slithering than Ro and seemed unconcerned by the weight of the pack on her back.
Around the next bend they came across two women carrying a plank. One was tall and one was short, so balancing the plank was a challenge. The women were brown and wiry and wore nothing but shorts and boots, except that they were draped all over with tools, loops of wire over their shoulders, belts holding hammers and saws and bundles of smaller items.
They lowered their plank carefully to the ground. The small woman immediately took the opportunity to sit down. The tall women stretched her shoulders back, hands supporting the small of her back.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Gerry, isn’t it? I heard you were coming. And you must be …?’
Ro supplied her name. She wasn’t sure how to feel about this role as Gerry’s shadow. Everyone had heard of Gerry.
‘What are you building?’ Gerry asked with interest.
‘New hut,’ the tall woman said. ‘Up there.’ She gestured vaguely toward the forest. ‘I hear you’re a carpenter?’
‘Sort of,’ Gerry said.
‘Come up and see it while you’re here. You staying in Downland?’
‘No. With Martha. Upland.’
‘You know the way?’
‘Yeah. I’ve been before.’
‘It’s a bit of a hike,’ the small woman said, grinning at Ro, who was hunched disconsolately over her pack. ‘Lucky it’s not raining.’
It was a bit of a hike. The track went up and down, a switchback. Ro couldn’t decide which was harder, the steep uphill stretches when she thought her lungs would burst, or the steep downhill stretches when she thought her knees would give way.
Every now and then Gerry stretched out a hand to help her, rock-hopping across the small creeks. Eventually she suggested a breather and Ro sank thankfully onto a large rock. She was dripping with sweat and felt the weight of the forest pressing down on her head. The air was still and her sweat was slow to dry. It was probably no wetter than Gerry’s place, but the heat added a whole other dimension.
‘So sticky,’ she said.
Gerry laughed. ‘And this isn’t tropical. Not seriously, not the way Queensland is.’
Ro thought about this and looked around. It was a great ooze of trees and damp vine-tangled undergrowth, mud and fungus and creepy crawlies. Slimy things rotted and grew again from the slime. Every dry Adelaide cell of her body was affronted. There was something terribly not-right about all this. It was exotic and beautiful, no doubt, but deeply repellent at the same time.
The owner of the tepee was away, so Ro and Gerry had it as a bedroom, a dark conical space, tall and surprisingly wide. The musty canvas walls stretched above them over poles that came together in the middle. A canvas flap blocked the hole that would allow smoke to escape in dry weather.
The weather was not dry. All night rain pattered quietly on the canvas. Ro could hear slow drips that she hoped were nowhere near the bed. Her sleep was uneasy. She was too aware of the strange space above her.
In the early hours she woke with a jolt, a pin prick in her finger. Instinctively she threw her hand sideways, feeling the weight and warmth of a living creature. There was a thud on the other side of the tent. She reached for her torch and flicked it on in time to see a shadow disappear between two boxes.
‘What is it?’ Gerry mumbled, emerging tousled from her sleeping bag.
‘I don’t know,’ Ro said. ‘Something bit me.’
She examined her finger. There was a small red mark and a bead of blood.
‘Probably a rat,’ Gerry said, yawning.
‘A rat?’ Ro was horrified. A shudder worked its way through her body from her gut to her violated finger. ‘What will we do? We can’t stay here. We might get rabies. Or bubonic plague.’
Gerry grunted and settled herself back into the bedding. ‘Hopefully you’ve scared it off. Probably a bush rat come in out of the rain … don’t think they have much bubonic plague up here …’
The last words were a mumble and her eyes closed.
Ro sat rigid, outrage tingling in every inch. She played the beam of the torch around the floor of the teepee, daring the animal to reappear. It was impossible. There were trunks and mouldy boxes piled all around the edge of the space. It could be anywhere. She turned the torch off but kept it firmly in her hand as she wriggled down again and lay rigid beside Gerry.
In the morning Ro was stiff and grumpy and it did not help that Gerry joked about their night visitation. Ro trailed around all day in Gerry’s wake as the women walked them up and down mountainsides, through creeks and dense forest, showing off bursting green gardens and ambitious half-built huts. Ro was tempted to go and hide with a book but she didn’t want to be in the tepee without Gerry, and if she sat anywhere else leeches galloped toward her across the rotting forest floor, leapt aboard, and in no time were the size of footballs.
In the afternoon they climbed to the top of the land. The view opened out in every direction, mountain upon mountain. Gerry went riding with the horse women and left Ro perched on a drum sipping a mug of smoky tea. She passed the time imagining all the things she might buy and eat if she was in the city: cakes, fish and chips, kway teow noodles, smoothies.
She thought about the forest below her. It was a lot like Gerry’s place, the trees closing in over your head so that the sky was green and dripping. Dripping dripping dripping. But at Gerry’s the crisp cold made the rest bearable. Here it was different. If you stood in one spot for too long things would start growing on you. Fungus and mould of every sort. Growing and crawling on you.
Probably Gerry and the others didn’t mind that. You couldn’t stay here if you did.
Ro’s thoughts turned to Adelaide. She was homesick. She wondered, not for the first time, what Julia was up to. Studying probably. Apparently she was an engineering student. Engineering for goodness sake. It was admirable and all that. The world certainly needed women in those jobs, whatever they were. Ro was vague about that. Bridges, she thought. Or highways.
Her own career as a student had been brief, though a golden period for her mother. Ro was the first in her extended family to get into university. It had been worth it for that alone, the summer after school when her grandparents and her mother and brother were all suddenly proud of her and prepared to overlook her other failings.
The moment was short-lived. She’d launched into philosophy and psychology with gusto and a completely mistaken idea about what they might involve. Psych I turned out to be rats in mazes. And philosophy … she didn’t know how to describe philosophy. It was completely and totally unintelligible. She understood most of the words, more or less. But she didn’t understand the way they were strung together. She couldn’t understand the questions, if they were questions. Let alone the answers, if they were answers. And there were the swans, white and black. All swans are white. This bird is white. Therefore this bird is a swan. Obviously it was bullshit, but apparently to say so was not enough.
She dropped out before the exams. It was a relief to wash dishes in a smelly restaurant kitchen. She knew what to do with the dishes, and they remained dishes, didn’t turn into anything else. Swans.
Her mother’s disappointment was something she had to endure. And it was nothing new. There was comfort in lapsing back into their familiar friction, rebellious daughter and disappointed mother.
She remembered engineering students from that year, beefy young men who played rugby. What on earth would a sleek young lesbian like Julia do among that lot? Maybe there were other women there too by now. Maybe … Ro slipped into a fantasy where she herself enrolled for engineering. Why not? She’d always hung onto the idea, in the back of her mind, that she would go back and get a degree, one that didn’t involve philosophy. And a job where she earned lots of money. Presumably engineers did that.
In no time she had arrived at a picture of herself and Julia in the library, holding hands and looking up from their books to smile softly at each other. They could build bridges. Wear overalls and hard hats.
This idyll was interrupted by the reappearance of horses and riders, exhilarated and sweaty. Ro came to herself, once again, on a kerosene drum next to a reluctant camp fire. She had been bitten by fleas, leeches, rats and she was fed up.
She had forgotten her apple-pie fantasy, where Gerry would swing down out of the saddle and sweep her off her feet. In any case there were no saddles here and the returning women, including Gerry, were absorbed in rubbing the horses down and feeding and watering them. Ro played no part in any of this.
She and Gerry made their way back down the mountain in silence. Gerry was tired from the afternoon’s activity but content. She imagined that Ro had been drinking in the beauty of the place and had no inkling that she might not be content too. Ro said nothing because she felt very distant from Gerry and was ashamed of her own infidelity, however imaginary.
She would have been lost as soon as they were back in the forest, but Gerry had a map in her head that included every creek and tree. She led them safely back to her friends’ encampment.
The kitchen was a flat area with two tarps stretched above it, arranged so that the smoke from the camp fire could escape without the rain coming in. Or that was the theory. Ro could see that none of the others minded the drips or the fact that their clothes were in a constant state of damp. At least it wasn’t cold.
There were kitchen chairs with their legs cut down, which was infinitely better than squatting in the dirt. Ro began to cheer up, and chopped vegetables for Martha, who stooped over the fire, frying onions. Gerry and the other two lounged on the ground on the opposite side of the fire. Beyond the kitchen space the light was fading, which made the fireside feel all the more cosy. Ro began to unwind. It was okay after all. In fact it was great, real pioneering.
Martha lifted her head and signalled to Ro to be still.
‘Maude’s coming,’ she said.
Ro looked about with interest. She hadn’t heard Maude mentioned before.
‘Where?’ she whispered back, since whispering was apparently required.
‘Down there. See? Between us and the garden.’
Ro looked where Martha was pointing and realised to her horror that a snake was winding across the clear ground toward them. Not any old snake, but a giant primeval snake, a nightmare snake. A snake from another world, alien and terrifying.
‘What is it?’ she hissed, voice catching in her throat.
Martha stretched and went back to stirring the onions. ‘A python,’ she said. ‘She often comes up to the fire when she’s cold.’
‘Here?’ Ro squeaked.
Martha laughed quietly. ‘It’s okay. She’s completely harmless.’
Ro watched with sick fascination as the snake made its way into the kitchen space, head swinging from side to side, tongue flickering in and out. It wound its way through the rungs of a chair, sleek sides gleaming in the firelight.
‘She’s amazing,’ Gerry whispered. ‘What an incredibly beautiful animal.’
Ro glanced at her. Was she for real? She saw not Gerry but a weird stranger, probably more closely related to the snake than she was to Ro.
The snake’s head and first metre or so were beginning to coil into a cardboard box of tins next to the fire. The middle part of the snake was sliding through the rungs of the chair and its tail was now visible at the edge of the kitchen space. Occasionally there was a faint hiss from the box as the head adjusted itself to too much or too little heat.
‘Wow,’ Gerry said and the other women laughed softly
‘Maybe you should try and get her to come into the tepee with you. She’d make short work of any rats,’ said one of them.
Gerry nodded enthusiastically.
Ro looked at her with cold detachment.
The python pretty much summed up Ro’s feelings about the women’s land.
She asked half-heartedly about Elizabeth Riley, though she was no longer sure that they would be soulmates. She was no longer sure that anyone who chose to live in New South Wales could be a soulmate.
‘You mean Kerryn? Her real name’s Kerryn. You have to drive and then walk the last part. But I’m pretty sure she’s away.’
So that settled that.
Ro wished she was bold enough to live the way these women lived, but she knew now that she wasn’t. The rainforest was beautiful, she could see that. But it was too elemental, too sticky, too sweaty, too everything. It was with great relief that she eventually dropped Gerry at home and drove back to Adelaide. Nice dry Adelaide.