We heard them crashing about in their search, calling out to one another. They had lost track of us and there was no system to their hunting but that didn’t make me any less afraid. We kept our heads down and stayed silent. I listened to the men regrouping on the track above us. They were arguing about something. The voice I recognised rose higher than the others, shouting them down. Then we heard them moving back towards the hut.
‘Jesus Marko, what was all that about?’ Jonathon asked, and I could tell by his voice he wasn’t close to getting it. He was expecting a story, a full stop at the end, something we’d look back on and laugh about. Not what I had to tell him, which was just a beginning, with us right in the middle of it. I didn’t want to speak. I wanted to be anywhere else but there. I wanted there to be some way of them knowing without me having to say it.
‘Come on Marko, you’re scaring us,’ Rebecca said.
‘It’s Ms Jenkins isn’t it?’ Lisa guessed.
I nodded and opened my mouth, determined to form the words. Any way would do. There was no right way. Everything about it could only be wrong.
‘I saw them. They killed her. She’s dead. Ms Jenkins is...’
That was all I could do. I heard my own words and choked on the sound of them. I didn’t cry, I just stopped. Stopped talking, stopped feeling. There was emptiness all around me, on their faces, in the air, sucking us dry. We didn’t speak, we didn’t move, we couldn’t even look at one another. None of us knew what came next.
‘God.’ From Lisa. Not a word, more a whimper.
‘You wouldn’t joke about this would you?’ Jonathon asked, but his voice was too quiet, too soft to be his. ‘No, you wouldn’t. Sorry. Shit.’
‘You sure?’ Rebecca asked.
I nodded.
‘Well, how? What happened?’
It had to be asked and it had to be told. They gathered behind her question and I explained to them what I had seen, every awful detail of it. When I finished they looked confused, like I’d missed out some crucial point, the thing that would make sense of it all.
‘But who are they?’ Lisa asked.
‘I don’t know. You saw as much of them as I did.’
‘Not really.’
‘Just people. People who are fucked up. I don’t know.’
‘But why had they stopped her? What did they want?’ Lisa wouldn’t let herself understand.
‘What do you think?’ Rebecca replied, her voice so drained it sounded heartless.
‘No. No, that can’t be right. Nobody...not three of them. Not tramping. It doesn’t happen like that. People wouldn’t.’
‘They did.’
‘No, you must have got it wrong Marko. You must have misheard them. Or something else must have happened, before you got there.’
I knew what she was getting at. The same thing I wanted, some way of making it all not so bad, better somehow. Only there’re some things that can never be made better. It could have been a total accident. It could have happened while they were trying to help her. She’d still be dead. All the things that were Ms Jenkins, they’d still all have stopped. She wouldn’t laugh now, or complain, sweat or even breathe. Never. So how can that be made any better?
‘But what exactly killed her?’ Rebecca asked me. ‘You don’t just kill someone with a punch.’
‘It was her head I think, against the tree.’
‘But you’re sure she’s dead?’
‘They checked. They said she was.’
‘She might not be then,’ Lisa decided.
‘She is, okay Lisa?’ Jonathon snapped. ‘She is.’
‘What’s her name?’ Lisa asked. I thought she’d lost it completely then.
‘Ms Jenkins,’ I replied, as gently as I could, scared she would scream, give our position away.
‘No, I mean her whole name. We should be using her name.’
But none of us knew her name. For me that was one horrible thought too many. The pain started in waves behind my forehead and washed out as tears, loosening every muscle, wasting every expression, until the sobbing was uncontrollable.
‘Hey, it’s okay Marko,’ someone said, only it wasn’t, so soon they were crying too.
We couldn’t stay like that forever. We needed a plan, but without Ms Jenkins there was no one to suggest it. In the end it was Rebecca who was strongest.
‘We can’t stay here,’ she told us. ‘We have to get back to the hut.’ She wasn’t ordering us around, she was just being our example. ‘We have to get our gear.’
‘Then what?’ Lisa asked.
‘We walk out of here, tell the police. First we should go back to where she died, see if we can tell what they’ve done with her.’ Rebecca was back to being Rebecca now, speaking with quiet certainty.
‘Sounds dangerous,’ Jonathon said.
‘We owe it to her.’
‘They might be waiting for us in the hut,’ I pointed out.
‘No, they’ll have panicked. They’ll be wanting to get as far away as they can, cover their traces.’ ‘I’m their traces,’ I reminded her.
‘He’s got a point,’ Jonathon agreed.
‘So what are you saying we should do?’ Rebecca snapped at him. The old tension, but with new reasons now.
‘I’m saying we should be careful, that’s all,’ Jonathon said, backing down from the fight.
And we were careful. We spent half an hour creeping the 500 metres back to the hut, and another half hour after that circling round, looking for signs of life. Jonathon volunteered to go inside first. He was meant to give a morepork call once he’d decided it was safe, a bit useless in the daytime but it was the only one we could think of. It didn’t matter anyway, because what he called out instead was ‘Fuck them!’ loud and angry. We were still trying to work out whether that counted as an all-clear when he appeared on the balcony.
‘Are you coming in or what?’ he called to us.
‘We didn’t hear your morepork,’ Rebecca told him.
‘The morepork says “fuck them”. Come and look at what they’ve done.’
They’d been through all our packs, taken the food, the sleeping bags and most of the clothes. The rest was strewn about the floor.
‘Now we’re screwed,’ I said, even though I knew it didn’t help to say it. Nobody disagreed.
I think when you’re faced with something like that, a situation so serious it could kill you, there’s a battle that goes on between two parts of your brain. There’s one part that always wants to keep on fighting, no matter how impossible everything seems. Then there’s another part that’s always only the smallest excuse away from giving up. I think those parts are always there, and most of the time we never find out which is stronger. For us, over the next ten minutes, in amongst the mess of our few discarded possessions, our heads full of shock, the giving-up parts started winning. We sat around and started talking and all we could say was how terrible it had all become.
Then something else started happening, with Jonathon and Rebecca. Whatever one of them said, the other one attacked, like there was a battle for control going on. Jonathon wanted to stay put in the hut. He said it was too dangerous to go out without any gear, that it would be the first place Search and Rescue would come looking when they realised we were missing. I think it was more just because Rebecca still wanted to move on.
‘You can’t rely on Search and Rescue,’ she said. ‘If there still is a Search and Rescue they’ll be too busy digging people out from buildings. The only people coming back here are those bastards and their guns.’
‘You’ve changed your tune.’
‘I’ve had time to think about it.’
‘Well you were right first time. They will have freaked. Think how you’d feel if you’d accidentally killed someone.’
‘It wasn’t an accident.’ She sounded so sure, for someone who hadn’t been there. ‘They’re murderers.’
‘So you seriously think we can walk out of here, without getting lost, or starving, or freezing to death?’ Jonathon challenged.
‘Yes.’
‘Away you go then.’
‘You’re all coming with me.’
‘Pass.’
‘You don’t speak for the others.’
I didn’t want to have to decide, same as I didn’t want them to argue. I wanted there to be just one option, and I wanted someone to explain it to me. Rebecca did her best.
‘We won’t get lost. We head east, into the morning sun. Two valleys and we’re out of here. What did it take to walk in here? Not much, right? And this time there’s no gear to carry. It’s two days max. We won’t starve. You can go weeks without food, if you have to. All we need is water and there isn’t exactly a shortage of that up here. And freezing isn’t going to be a problem either. Look, they’ve left the packliners. Jonathon, pass that stupid knife you’re always carrying.’
‘What are you going to do, Xena, hunt us some dinner?’
‘Just do it.’ Rebecca flipped open the blade and with three neat slits the bag became a raincoat. ‘So we go. Come on you two, what do you say?’
I wanted to believe her, because it was so much better than believing nothing. And I knew staying in the hut frightened me more than the bush did.
‘Yeah, it does make more sense,’ I said.
‘I think so too,’ Lisa agreed, but she sounded even less convinced. Jonathon looked at me like I’d personally betrayed him.
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ he muttered.
‘So it’s agreed then?’ Rebecca stared straight at him, forcing him to concede.
‘You’re the boss,’ he shrugged.
‘Good. Right then, let’s get everything together that might be useful and stuff it into this spare packliner. We’ll put it in Lisa’s pack, it’s the smallest. Marko, can you take us back to where it happened?’
‘What do we want to do that for?’ Jonathon challenged. ‘I thought we were in a hurry to get out of here.’
‘I want to find her body.’
‘Don’t see why. She’ll still be dead.’ I don’t think he thought about how that was going to sound. If he didn’t realise as soon as he said it, it came to him a second later in the form of Rebecca’s fist. Not a ‘stop pissing me off’ warning blow but a full-blooded punch that knocked him off his feet. When he stood back up his nose was bleeding.
‘What the fuck was that for?’ Jonathon asked, not just to Rebecca but to all three of us, standing in a line now.
‘No jokes about her okay?’ Rebecca said.
‘She’s right,’ Lisa added. ‘We have to find her body. For the family.’
‘And it will be evidence,’ I added. That came out badly.
‘Okay, whatever. I’m sorry. Lead on then, mighty one.’
As we packed together the few warm clothes we had, along with an extra stash of scroggin Jonathon had hidden in a sock, the air was tense. Tense with Jonathon and Rebecca, but more tense with Ms Jenkins, who was already getting difficult to mention.
I led them back to the place, not letting myself feel anything, preferring the numbness of the watching bush, bush that could outlast blizzards or earthquakes, floods or fires, and could keep on coming back. Twice we stopped because someone thought they’d heard something but both times were false alarms. When we finally reached the rise in the track I had to walk back round the corner to be sure. It looked so unremarkable, so like everywhere else, as if nothing unusual could have happened here. Nothing important.
But it was the place and it was the tree. Jonathon got on his hands and knees and found a stone with dried blood on it. He held it out on the palm of his hand and we all looked but nobody touched it or said a word. He let it drop back to the ground. It became impossible to keep out the memories. Ms Jenkins, so far away from dying, just pissed off and tired and not needing their aggro. Death, with no sense of occasion, turning up anyway, uninvited.
‘They’ve hidden her somewhere,’ Rebecca said, sounding less sure of herself now we were there. ‘Somewhere easy. They will have been panicking. Any ideas?’
‘Bush is thickest down that way,’ I said.
‘Other side’s off the track though,’ Lisa noted.
‘There’s a slip over there.’ Jonathon pointed ahead. ‘That’s where I’d put her. Easy to dig up later, and it could look like she died in it.’
‘We’ll split up then,’ Rebecca said. ‘Yell out if, well, you know.’
‘I’m not going by myself,’ Lisa told her. ‘I’m going with you.’
We looked. I scrambled down the nearest slope, knowing how important it was to find her, but also hoping we wouldn’t. I didn’t know how I would handle it. I was already close to breaking down. The shout came from Rebecca, on the other side of the ridge. I met Jonathon on the way back up. He caught my eye and cocked an eyebrow. I shrugged. I saw his shoulders rise as he took a deep breath, preparing himself.
I suppose it should have been easiest for me. I’d already seen her. I was there when it happened. Still, I was the first one to turn for the support of a tree, and then, sinking to my knees, throw up. I looked back to the others, still standing over her, looking down like their eyes couldn’t turn away until their brains properly understood. Only that would take forever.
She’d been moved quickly, dragged, by the amount of dirt on her clothes, then dropped into a cavity beneath the roots of a fallen tree. A single punga frond was draped over her. It was a careless, hurried attempt at hiding her. On the side of her forehead congealed blood had stuck down a clump of hair.
‘Fuck,’ Jonathon groaned, low and toneless. It was Rebecca who stepped closer and put her arm around him. I still hadn’t been able to get to my feet. Lisa stood alone.
‘We should move her,’ Lisa said. ‘Take her someplace so they can’t find her. In case they come back. We could bury her and mark it out, for later. For the police.’
No one disagreed.
‘Where?’ Rebecca asked.
‘How about Jonathon’s idea? Down at the bottom of the slip.’
‘It’d be easy to find later.’
‘Okay.’
Then we waited, like we were hoping something else would happen, so we wouldn’t have to do this thing. Nothing did, so we waited some more, for the strength we needed. Then, cautiously, we moved. We started out trying to be gentle, like you might imagine an undertaker would do it, quiet and dignified. But this was the outdoors, steep and awkward. This was a different sort of death. It was real. The body was heavy and we were tired. We took a limb each, although that meant her head hung back, the way you’d never want to see it. I didn’t want to look, or smell, or hear. I didn’t want any of those things getting inside my head because I knew they’d never get out.
Halfway up the slope I let go. I staggered to the side and retched again but my stomach was empty. I was shivering with cold, my head was fuzzy and my legs collapsed beneath me. I felt the dampness of decaying leaves against one cheek, while tears ran down the other. It wasn’t happening. None of it was happening.
‘Hey Marko.’ It was Lisa, hand on my shoulder, speaking softly, not letting me get away. ‘It’s okay.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I spluttered. ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’
‘It’s all right. We’ll manage.’
So I stayed there, I don’t know how long, hugging my knees to my chest, thinking nothing, being nothing, while the others got on with doing what had to be done. I was useless. When it really came down to it, when we all had to be strong together, I was useless. I let them down, Ms Jenkins too.
When I walked back to the ridge and looked down, they’d already clawed a shallow grave in the loose dirt of the slip. By the time I got down there they were covering her over. No one spoke to me as I tried to help, losing myself in the feel of the soil in my hands.
‘We should say something,’ Lisa said, when we’d finished.
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Something about her.’ I tried to think but I knew no words would come. Then a gun shot exploded above us. I looked up to see all three of them standing together on the track, less than a hundred metres above us. Ms Jenkins might have been an accident. The next one wouldn’t be.
We ran, down through the thick bush below the slip, Rebecca leading, Lisa’s light pack slung over one shoulder and bouncing wildly, as if it was as frightened as the rest of us. Below me I could hear the chatter of a stream, mixed with the heavy breathing of the others. Above me I could hear the men giving chase.