It was twenty years before Ro went back to the Otways.
She was due in Melbourne for her niece’s wedding, a bag full of respectable clothes in the back of the car. She drove round the long way by the Great Ocean Road, aware that she was testing herself, filling in a great blank that had existed in the map of Victoria for the last two decades. This time she would drive past, skirt around the edge. Then at least the outline would exist again, the coast.
The sea was steely grey, great waves slashing at the shore. It was a relief when the road turned inland and wound through lush farming country. She drove straight through Apollo Bay without looking to left or right, though she knew it was ridiculous to be so self-conscious. At Skene’s Creek she made a sudden decision and turned up into the mountains.
She had forgotten. Impossible in Adelaide to preserve the memory of such green, a dripping misty forest, plunging valleys, trees meeting overhead and giant ferns cascading down mountainsides.
She crawled along at fifty. Along this road, on one of these bends, Gerry had gone over the edge, become airborne, crashed down into silence.
Ro pulled over and sat with her hands on the wheel. Emerald, jade, sage, apple, lime, pea-green, sea-green. She wanted to be under the tree ferns, looking up at the green sunlight.
After a couple of wrong turns, she found her way to the farm gate. But it was wrong, shockingly wrong. Instead of paddocks and orchard the valley was densely packed with blue gums, trunks marching in all directions up and down the slopes. The gate was new and fastened with a padlock. She thought about the time-honoured expedient of lifting the whole thing off its hinges. But the gate was heavy duty, its businesslike nature underlined by a sign forbidding entry to unauthorised personnel. Ro kicked it experimentally. Was she unauthorised personnel? She’d been here first, long before Southern Forests Inc. She was Gerry’s proxy. But, on the other hand, there were people who’d been here long before Gerry, generation upon generation, stretching back millennia.
She fingered the padlock. On the whole she was an inoffensive intruder compared with Southern Forests and their blue gums. Even compared with Gerry and her farming predecessors. If Ro was answerable to anyone it should be the descendants of the Indigenous owners. Not Southern Forests. Though of course they might be one and the same.
For fifty metres on either side of the track the fence was as forbidding as the gate. Beyond that it was another matter. Southern Forests Inc had no animals to keep in or out and had not bothered to maintain the fences. All they cared about was tracks and trucks. Ro picked her way through a tangle of barbed wire, tearing her jeans, and set off down the hill through the trees. Better than pines, she supposed, but how Gerry would hate it.
It was impossible to get her bearings. Surely she should have reached the creek by now. The ground had levelled out. Could the creek disappear? She crossed into another aisle. If she followed the contour of the hill she should come back to the track. Bark and leaf litter crunched under her feet and she stumbled over a fallen branch. It didn’t have the feel of a well-tended plantation. She looked up, but the trees cut out most of the light. Would she be able to find her way to the road before dark?
She was deciding that she must turn back when she saw an opening ahead of her, daylight between the trees. She stepped out into a clearing.
The house sat untouched in its hollow. The effect was as unreal as a fairytale computer game. With one click the hillside had been changed from sunlit orchard to dense forest where no sun would ever reach. With another click the background might become a snowy waste, or a desert of yellow sand, or pink polka dots.
The house itself was unchanged.
Or so Ro thought at first. When she drew closer she saw that this too was an illusion. Lichen and moss were creeping up the walls and the door sagged on one hinge when she pushed at it. She climbed past into the main room. It was dark and very empty. The stove had been torn out and so had the stained-glass windows. There were daubs on the walls that she didn’t want to interpret, and broken glass and drifts of leaves strewn across the floor. Someone had lit a fire under the chimney where the stove had been and the wall and ceiling above it were stained with smoke. She picked her way across the floor to the bathroom. More glass, and the window gaped. But there, framed by the opening as it always had been, was the apple tree.
Ro hesitated about the bedroom. But she had come this far. And it was no worse than the rest, stripped, empty. She climbed back out through the front door and went around the side. The tank was upright but would never hold water again. The sides were rusted through and the roof had collapsed inwards.
Down the hill the dam was a hollow choked with blackberries
The dunny was still in place, weathering slowly along with the rest, settling back into the hillside at an odd angle.
She stepped closer, and could see traces of blue paint on the door.