Blue Skies by Helen Hodgman

I need to be by myself to think about it properly.’
    â€˜I’m sorry if I disturb you.’
    â€˜Jesus. We can do without all this fish-and-chips-for-the-lady false humility. Let’s go.’
    We went on.
    Birds screamed up in the trees. I looked up and saw they were large and black. Dislodged bits of dry twig, and showers of shrivelled leaves, fell on our heads as the birds crashed from tree to tree. A big group of them seemed to be moving up the hill with us. The bush grew thicker. We zig-zagged to avoid the pieces of tough old growth that scraped at the bare skin above our waists.
    And then we stepped out of it, onto the small area of clear rocky land at the top. The grass was short, greyish-green and springy, the rocks large, sandy-brown and warm, lying on the ground like butchers’ blocks. Ben slung down the rucksack, kicked off his desert boots and unzipped his jeans, signalling that I do the same. He crossed to one of the largest stones and stood beside it naked, his arms folded across his narrow chest, his hat tilted forward to shade his eyes, chewing the leather chin strap, watching me. I undressed, crossed to the stone and lay down on it, flat on my back, staring into the sun—until he towered darkly over me in the best romantic tradition and blotted it out.
    â€˜What about the view?’ I murmured.
    â€˜Fuck the view,’ he murmured back, as if he were insulting it.
    Sometimes I wondered, but now was not the time to question his attitudes. His chosen stone was slightly hollowed out at the centre. It set us into a curious rocking motion as we moved together on top of it. The day came and went. Little flashes of light and dark.
    Time passed, well spent. The sun moved in the sky. Ben’s hat fell off. Perhaps the earth moved under us. We simmered gently in our hot rock crucible, slippery with patchouli oil and sweat. We slept. Waking simultaneously, we stared into each others eyes, put our noses together, screwed our eyes back shut, opened them again at the same time and wondered at the one enormous super-eye that looked back. We unpeeled ourselves and sat up. Ben fetched the water and the bag of biscuits. He rolled us an extravagant joint to finish up the picnic. He waved the empty pouch in the direction of everything else.
    â€˜And now,’ he said, ‘you may look at the view. Since that’s what you came for.’
    I knelt up on the rock and looked at it. But not for long. The land below bled away in a runny blur of colours. Rainbows slowly dripped at the edges of the visible world. I was trying to see through some bars that had appeared in front of my eyes. I recognised my eyelashes.
    I woke up alone. It was very quiet and very hot. My jeans lay carefully folded at my feet, shoes on top, toe to toe. A roll of paper stuck out of one shoe, with a message written in back-sloping capitals: MEET YOU AT THE TREE TRUNK. HURRY UP .
    I hurried to dress, scared of being alone so close to the sky in the silent heat of mid-afternoon, and raced back down the hill. I had a feeling of being watched, of being followed. As twigs snapped under my feet, so twigs snapped behind me, echoes under someone else’s feet. They snapped off to one side. Then the other. I was surrounded—escorted, it seemed, off the hill. I stopped, and so did the snapping sounds. Looking up, I saw the birds—silent, dull black and dusty, watching. Narrow shapes flickered in the green light between the tree trunks. I shouted in terror and they were gone. My terror called back to me, rebounding through the trees, carrying the memory of the sinister flounder-fishermen at the beach, the pictures in the museum—the squashy white figures, the staring Aborigines. But there were no Aborigines left in this state. They were dead—the last a woman who ended life as a fashionable pet in all the better drawing rooms of Hobart Town. Alone on the hill I knew I was being watched—being willed away, by a