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| Triptych Part 2 |
The sunroom is wonderful when the weather allows it, but this is hardly getting the day started. I open my eyes to Jane watching me with a half smile, and even as I am wondering why she says that I was smiling at something, away somewhere in my head, and I laugh. I stand and ask what she wants for breakfast, the first I have spoken today, and the improvement to my mood must be apparent. She raises an eyebrow at me and gives me a warm grin that almost says 'welcome back.'
Out loud she says, 'toast' and gets up, and we move to the kitchen where the venetian blind gives our eyes some protection while I make toast and she fixes us both coffee, a new vice for me but one I am coming to love. Jane has Vegemite, which I told her is good, because I couldn't live with someone who didn't like Vegemite on toast. She draws the line at having it as thick as I like it however, and I tell her that I am sometimes tempted to just eat it with a spoon. She groans in mock horror but I am feeling childish so to provoke her I reach for a teaspoon and the jar, slowly unscrewing the lid while she laughs.
'You can't like it that much, surely,' she says, shaking her head, and I get some on the spoon, still going slowly, waving it around like I'm not sure about it. I hold the spoon up and look serious, pout, put it in my mouth. Jane sinks back in giggles, and I fight to hold a straight face while she calms herself.
'What?' I ask, all innocence, gesturing in the air with the empty spoon. She loses it again, and I laugh with her, glad my sense of fun has returned to me. It has been almost lonely these past few days, for both of us; living together we have developed something of a routine around each other, and my withdrawal from it seemed to disturb Jane as much as I. She is supposed to be keeping up with mailing orders to customers for the various larger sizes of prints she sells from her body of work. the orders come from three galleries that display and sell her work, as well as her website and the occasional bit of publicity she gets from the press when she does a new show. but Jane had stopped work when I stopped work, as if awakening and not finding me already up and about had thrown her rhythm completely.
'Karen, did anyone ever tell you how easy you are to read?' Jane interrupts my thought and I realise I have gone silent again, staring into a space some hundred yards beyond the kitchen counter and resting the spoon on my bottom lip. I actually give a start at her voice and I realise how far away I was getting.
'What? No, no one ever did.'
'Well, you are. It's like every emotion you pass through, even just thinking, is pasted across your face like a signpost for all to read.'
I stare at her a moment, my mind beginning to go back to the depression of the last few days. I shake my head and take a sip of my coffee, and I tell her I'm sorry.
'What for?'
'For being out of it the last few days. I just...sometimes I get depressed and have to drag myself back up again. Sometimes i get angry over nothing. It's not for any reason, so...don't think it's your fault, if I'm a bit off, OK? I don't mean anything by it.'
'You don't need to apologise to me. Really, Kaz, don't apologise for who you are.' She gives me the little sad look and shakes her head, and I just look down at the bench and nod, not sure what to say. She reaches across and squeezes my hand on the bench, and I just nod again; I tell myself to snap out of it, I am not going to waste another day. I look up, meet Jane's eyes, force a smile and find I really mean it.
'What are you doing today then? The sun's out, how about a photo day?' I laugh. 'I could do with a walk, and no doubt so could you.' Jane nods agreement and then cocks her head to one side, questioning.
'Don't you have work to do? You haven't done anything this week either.'
'I'm going to do an article on nature photography.'
Jane has done every known major and minor walking trail in the area and made a few of her own in order to capture the shots she wants, but today she wants to do a few studies of small things, bark, fungi, leaf litter. I suggest we trek into somewhere undisturbed, off the beaten path as they say, and she agrees. I have grown up around here and stubbornly refused to leave, and the rainforest around the lake is like a second home; my aversion to people often leading me out into uncharted territory. We drive to a popular little tourist spot on the edge of town, a twenty minute walk on a nice gravel path up to a little waterfall, and Jane just looks at me, one eyebrow raised, and follows. We reach the waterfall and stand there a moment enjoying the spray; the rainfall has swollen the stream to something a little more impressive than usual.
Eventually Jane can stand it no longer and asks, is this my idea of uncharted territory? I just smile and beckon for her to follow. We walk back the way we came, the path cut into the side of a hill as it gently slopes down from the waterfall landing. After only twenty metres I stop, point up the hill at the side of the track, and begin climbing up the rockface. It is steep but craggy enough for safe holds, an easy climb, and I soon reach the little ledge high above and edge along it, back in the direction of the waterfall, until it widens into a secondary path, a natural path, well above the ranger-maintained one below. Jane stands beside me on the little stone path, looking down to the pool at the top of the waterfall below. I lead her on, the ledge curving around the side of the valley above the stream. We come to a place where a small landslip from above had knocked the ledge away, and climb up and around until we can walk the ledge again. I try and remember the last time I came up here but it has been around five years and it occurs to me that we might reach a dead end shortly, but when we reach the place where the ledge ends I am relieved to see the rope I left is still securely in place. i had injured myself scaling the cliff to put it there and had no wish to relive the experience. Jane laughs when she sees the rope but after seeing the impossibility of continuing without it she is grateful. The hillside is sheer and slippery from here, and the rope allows us to descend to the creek and continue along the rocks and ancient log jams, making our way slowly further into the rainforest, more climbing than walking.
From time to time we scale the banks beside small several series of falls, eventually finding ourselves out of the valley and in a sea of ferns below the canopy with a network of long fallen trees like raised walkways. It is a wild place not touched by saw or axe, a place further than any machine had even been heard. When I had first come this far, alone, I had stopped on one of these logs and just listened, looking up at the giants above and imagining dinosaurs, and wondering if maybe no white man or woman had ever came this way before. From the expression on Jane's face as she stands on a leatherwood long uprooted by storms, looking in every direction at the endless shadowed land, she may be thinking similar thoughts. We pause for a drink and then it is down to business, as I show her the bright, neon coloured mushrooms, red and blue, that grow on the wet, dead logs, and the scatterings of light green lichen and tiny, pale, dusky pink mushrooms that cover exposed rocks along some stretches of the creek. We seek out the huge growths on the standing dead trees, jutting out like shelves or steps from the craggy, rotting high-rises. We look at the detail of tiny branching ferns and tiny myrtle leaves, the patterns of the water rippling over the stream bed, the patterns in the spreading branches of the giants stretching overhead.
It would be easy to lose track of time here; in this place time seems to have stretched out, stopped even, but we are only on a day walk and I want to make sure we get back to the public track before we lose too much light to be climbing safely; plus everything is harder when the temperature drops. I'm glad it is early summer and so we have a couple of extra hours of day, but we don't risk it and find ourselves walking back to the carpark as the sun is finally painting the sky. Jane pauses and leans forward, running her hands through her messy cropped hair, shaking loose the leaves caught there. the reg-gold mop settles back as soon as she is done, looking almost neat. I put a hand up to my own head to assess the damage and she laughs. my hair is longer and pulled back out of the way; it is unruly at the best of times but now Jane is trying not to laugh as she puts on the mask of false sympathy and picks bits of rainforest debris from where they had been trying to nest, blending well with the dark brown mess so well I may have never got them out. at the car I find a comb and try to smooth it out, glad to be going straight home and not having to be seen in public.
Jane seems to have taken over my mischievous mood from this morning; as we drive through town she pulls in to a take-away store and looks at my hair, looks at her watch and announces it was too late to cook tea.
'Someone else can do it. Come and order something.' She gets out of the car shaking with silent laughter while I swear under my breath and pull the comb back out.
After we have showered and eaten, we transfer the photos to Jane's laptop and she curls up on the couch with a blanket while I flick through them, studying the images that we are calling a good days work. We are both exhausted and I sit on the floor in front of the couch with the laptop balanced on my knees so Jane can see the screen over my shoulder as I browse from picture to picture. I come across a snapshot she has taken of me, crouching on a rock by the stream, staring off at something. I've always hated photos of myself but I like this one, and I turn to tell her; Jane's eyes are closed, her breathing deep. I smile, and shut down the laptop, leaving it on the coffee table for her. I dim the lights and before I go to bed I crouch by her and pull the blanket up over her shoulder; she stirs and opens her eyes, reaches out for me. I squeeze her hand and she whispers goodnight, asleep again in seconds.
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Posted by spencerdj on 2009-11-06 22:04:16 | Rating: | Views: 27
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