Triptych

I

First step out of the refrigerated carriage is like going from Pluto to Mars. Hairs on the back of her neck sizzle and her skin shrinks from the sun as from a barbecue flame. Sweat between her bag and shoulder already. She anticipates the flood to come to come and lengthens her stride.

Down the colonnade from the station, the first obstacle is the outdoor mall. The Avenue of Broken Dreams, she tries not think but it’s too late and her inner judge judges her for judging. Drunks slumped at the steps, prisoners of fate staring into space or arguing confidently with themselves. Sober as a nun and as faithless as Judas Iscariot, she envies them their delirium. Instead of forking out she breathes in: bread, piss, two-dollar-shop plastic, over-ripe fruit and synthetic perfume. She watches her feet hitting the herringbone pavers and flaps flies from her clammy lips. A tide of anti-urbanism washes grey over her vision and her pace begins to drag. You wanted to get away from your tiny provincial life. Now you’re going to be trapped in this metropolitan maze forever.

Unless Something changes. She looks up just as she passes the fruit and veg shop, straight into a display of blueberries and climbs through into last summer.

Sweat sheeting down her face. Bucket in hand and berries on the shrub in front of her. A girl’s fluty voice in her right ear: her picking-mate, revealing more of her life story. The frosty bloom on the fruits; hunting perfect navy marbles through the moss-green-hedge-green-shiny-new-tip-bark-brown lattice. Noon approaching and not a quiver of breeze. She is reduced to eyes, fingers, a bucket, one ear. The boss’s voice from yesterday, telling her that she needed to pick faster. Her second and final week.

She exits the blueberries and strides on up the street. You couldn’t last outside the city anyway. That requires real work. Not standing around behind a bain-marie avoiding eye-contact with customers.

She turns around, walks back to the homeless guy and fishes out her container of takeaway-mistake.

II

Before cobalt starlight slides into lilac-grey she is up, bedding packed and dewy tent balled temporarily into a corner of the car boot. The hatchback ghosts down the steep gravel track, craggy gums staring down at her through the open window.

She pulls into the lookout at the top of the falls, coasting unobtrusively into the empty carpark. The only person here. So far. A veil of fog dangles over the valley, auguring later heat. No time to waste. She locks her two-wheel-drive home and starts out towards the ridge.

Xanthorrhoeas, Leptospermums, bloodwoods and smooth-barked mallees stand out from beside the sandy path. Petrophiles, small Asteraceaes that she’ll stop to look at later. The sky is silver through the leaf gaps, and already she feels the sun grinding upwards towards the lip of the valley, senses the waking of the human world and the tourist traffic making its way towards this track.

She turns a corner and the sand underfoot becomes sandstone, hits a 4wd track that heads up a short hill, crossing a small creek. There is no telling what will be at the bottom of the gorge, or how long she’ll have this privacy so she listens briefly for approaching cars; hears nothing and washes quickly in the shallow pool. It only takes a few minutes but by the time she’s walking again the light is well and truly hastening into sunrise, cricket and frog-song fading out into chortle of waking birds.

Sun floats up, track winds down, leaving sandstone ridgetop woodland and meandering into moist sclerophyll coolness, then the jewel-green exotica of subtropical rainforest as it hits the valley floor. Cabbage palms, wrinkled lianas, the cathedral-pillar buttresses of figs, booyongs and carabeens. Names she’s forgotten, looped to memories she doesn’t want to stir. Lyre-birds call her attention back to the path. A shadow rustles in the leaf-litter. She stares harder and sees the log-runner, who catches her gaze her and bounces shyly away out of view.

The falls are exactly the sort of miracle she hoped for. A kilometre above her, the creek leaps down successive shelves that trim down the curtain of water, making it tame enough to swim to but sufficiently forceful make a decent roar as it drops into a perfect, boulder-edged volcanic bowl; deep enough to be bottomless and utterly empty of human presence.

It’s not yet eight-thirty. The lookout is obscured from here by the cliffs. She watches the path for a few minutes. No voices, no movement. She strips off, leaves everything on the rocks and kicks out towards the spray. For a solid ten minutes there is no past, no future. She. Just Is.

III

The pardalote comes down towards the water, flashing from branch to leaf clump. There is a shallow pool shaded by the drooping branches of a Callistemon, high enough from the ground to be safe from cats, shallow enough to sip from. It watches the water from the safety of a dense screen of twiggy Eucalypt seedlings. With jerky, turnabout hops, it approaches the pool, backtracks, moves a bit closer. Finally it reaches the rim, steals a final glance around and dips in its grain-sized beak.

A person watches it from the floor of a rough wooden verandah, less than ten steps away. The sun has taken its leave for the day but left behind the residue of its merciless, incapacitating heat; still it pulls at whatever meagre moisture is left from distressed leaves and balding earth, showing through the clumps of withered grass and heat-blasted herbs. It sucks sweat out to bead and slide down the human’s motionless legs.

A breeze limps intermittently past, playing unenthusiastically with the sun-struck plants. The pardalote looks up from the water, sees no predators or competition and take a few more sips. It dances back into the cover at the base of the tree, then flits to the mesh under the pool and hangs off it sideways, scanning.

The pool is a plastic container balanced on top of a roll of wire, set away from the tree and surrounded by an assortment of small shrubs, herbs and tree seedlings that have been arranged there by the human, inside the oasis of shade that the big old bottle brush creates. Outside of that island, the small, young and weak plants are perishing, being badly maimed or at least somewhat traumatised by the continual withholding of rain. 

Under the clay, the Callistemon’s roots go on pumping up water, fine fingers seeking moisture. There is a spring on it eastern side that fills with water, flooding periodically every seven or so days, with smaller trickles in the afternoon and night. Further out from its rootzone is another spring where thick, soupy water flows more regularly through the day, oozing onto a small swamp that feeds, amongst other more ephemeral beings, a termited mulberry tree, a feral teenage palm tree, a small family of privet and a coppicing camphor-laurel that tries to keep to itself.

Interlocked with the roots of the plants are fungal hyphae, exchanging sugar for metal and other important molecules. Bacteria breed frivolously in the hot, rich spaces where moisture lingers, and still in the dryer, colder, poorer parts beings continue to colonise, bloom, expand, die, nourish; create substrate, germinate plants which respire, feed animals, furnish cities, birth societies who propagate, disperse, construct, seek meaning, exchange…

The human holds her breath, waiting to see what the bird will do next.