Chapter 27 Another Life #2
“Thanks, darl’.” The old woman leaned on Nev’s arm to stage whisper. “This is the twenty-first century, love. Life’s too short to worry what some man thinks.”
Ronnie turned away, stifling a laugh. When they were alone again, she leaned against the iron railing. “Have you ever—”
Nev interrupted. “Intermission’s over.”
Inside the church, classical music resumed.
They returned to their seats for the second half of the concert. Ronnie sat with her jeans touching Nev’s in the wooden pew. The theremin joined the string quartet. It made sounds like a giant flute, then like a human voice, making an open-throated oooo, woop, woop, oooo.
Like a Sarus Crane on the banks of Lake Tinaroo at dusk.
In the truck on the drive home, Nev said, apropos of nothing, “Your mum calls you Ripper.”
“Rip. Ripper. Jack the Ripper. My initials.”
Nev’s gaze remained fixed on the road. Ronnie knew her friend couldn’t open up yet—maybe never would. Part of her must be tempted, or she wouldn’t look like this.
“It’s good,” Ronnie said, like reassuring a wild animal. She had to be so careful with this one. “I liked the concert.” They rode in companionable silence.
Nev drove back to Stone House. Ronnie watched her pour herself a drink and swallow a pill before feeding the dogs.
“Want to have a fire down by the creek?” Nev asked.
“Good idea.”
They walked downhill with head lamps, carrying bedding, eaten alive by mozzies.
The screen house loomed over them in the dark.
If they finished fixing the roof, she could sleep there.
While she was gone, a scrub fowl had made a large nest in the clearing out of leaves and a few sticks.
A circle two meters across and half a meter high.
Nothing was in it. Maybe it had been there before, but she hadn’t noticed it.
Beside the campfire, Nev finished her beer, cracked another one. “After University my line of work wasn’t conducive to long-term relationships.”
Ronnie melted into her camping chair.
“I travelled between assignments. Work had me moving around countries in Asia and Africa, never staying in one place longer than two months. I had relationships with women who were in the closet, for one reason or another, which ended. None of those relationships were great. The ADF, Aussie Defense Force, overturned their gay ban in ninety-two, but people were reluctant to come out for career reasons, and because so much of the work was overseas in places where it would have been dangerous to show PDA. The Americans started ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in ninety-three. ”
“How many lovers have you had?”
“No comment.”
“When was the last time?”
“Oh, a fair while ago.”
This did not surprise her. Nev seemed like someone who hadn’t been touched in twenty years. “How do you feel about BDSM?”
“Rough stuff? Not my cup of tea, but if it’s someone else’s that’s fine. Why? You like getting spanked?”
Ronnie chuckled. “Shut up.” She sipped her beer and slouched in her camping chair, slapping a mosquito on her arm. People assumed she liked to be in control because of the way she looked. Usually, she didn’t bother to correct them. This was why.
“You don’t like the word ‘spank.’”
“No. I don’t. It’s an instant turn-off.” It sounded silly.
“Good to know,” Nev said.
Ronnie sipped her beer.
“Do you feel different?”
She shook her head, then realized that wasn’t true.
“You have changed, you know,” Nev said.
“How?” She tried to remember how she had felt before, couldn’t.
“You’re more open. Your voice is softer.”
“Really?” She found that hard to believe, but the more she thought about it, the more it felt true.
She felt more receptive now, more sensitive to changes in ambient temperature.
With only a limited amount of energy to draw from, each movement had to be intentional and serve a purpose.
Before the accident, she would have been multitasking right now, tending the fire, searching the forest for dead branches to burn, cooking, listening to a game on the radio, texting someone, and running her mouth about god knows what, analyzing the next stages of the roof repair project, without paying attention to anything she was doing, because her mind would have been somewhere else.
Now she was content to watch flames lick wood.
She remembered cutting down that dead tree, chainsawing up the limbs, carrying them behind the barn in the front bucket of the mid-sized Kubota tractor, splitting them with the wood splitter, stacking them behind the barn.
She sipped her Carlton Mid, watching Nev crouch beside the campfire to add another log.
“Who made the firewood before I came?”
Nev looked surprised. “We didn’t really have fires before you came.”
What?
“What? What do you mean you didn’t have fires before I came?”
Nev shrugged. “Camping is your thing. Kazi and I never did this. Rick-Rac and Barney go home at night.”
She tried to imagine life without campfires, couldn’t.
“What’s the point of living on a farm in the bush if you don’t have fires?”
Nev looked sheepish.
Ronnie felt warm and tingly. The invisible cricket bat she carried around inside her for emergencies was gone, maybe forever. She moved differently without it, cautious, compensating. Her center of gravity had shifted. She would be slow until her abdominals grew back.
“Your eyes,” Nev said.
Ronnie might have been horny and felt drunk, but her friend was actually drunk. An ant crawled along the back of Nev’s hand. Nev took her guitar out of the case and taught Ronnie how to play a C chord, G chord, A minor and F chords.
Ronnie closed her eyes, inhaled weightlessness.
She felt somewhere between a steam engine with a red-hot boiler and a spitfire pilot who had just landed in the dark without wheels or landing gear; bruised, shaking, adrenaline-sick but clear-headed and sharp—lucky, sensitive, nervy and ready, one length ahead of the lightning, locked-in, unable to fail…
“All right?” Nev asked.
Ronnie kept her eyes closed. “Yeah.” Being back here was triggering her old stuff from ten years ago.
“What do you need?”
“Nothing. Give me a minute.” She did deep breathing, asked her body what was wrong. The guitar was something solid to hold onto. Smoke from the fire kept some of the mosquitos away. No wind.
Cold.
She shivered. The aircon inside the place had been icy the night Rainbow was born.
The connection made sense now. She opened her eyes.
Nev lay beside the fire, hand behind her head, ankles crossed.
Ronnie slid closer to the fire, wincing, then warmed her long arms and legs as if she was giving the fire a hug.
Immediately she felt better. The clearing smelled sharp and sweet, like eucalyptus.
“I’m back. Sorry, what were you saying?”
“We don’t have to sleep here,” Nev said. “I don’t actually want to, if I’m being honest.”
Ronnie’s incision itched. Under the skin tugged.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
The walk up the hill in the dark took longer than the walk down had. Nev carried the sleeping bags and guitar.
Back at Stone House, in the glass and marble guest bedroom bathroom Nev had remodeled nine years ago into an accessible bathroom for her aging father, Ronnie checked the wound below her waistband in the mirror. She had overdone it tonight and was lucky that it hadn’t reopened.
She ran a shower, waited for hot water. Lights danced in the corners of the room.
A soft knock on the door.
“Come in.”
Nev stepped in, sized up the situation, and shut the door behind her. “Can I join you?”
“Please.”
Nev undressed, folding clothes that smelled like woodsmoke and lining them up on the bench smallest to largest. Ronnie stepped into the steamy shower and turned the heat down from scalding to hot before Nev joined her.
They took turns under the stream, keeping a respectful distance apart, not touching.
Ronnie averted her eyes like she would if she was showering with a friend in the locker room after football practice.
In the master bedroom they sat in the big bed under the fluffy white duvet and listened to Chopin. Women’s football on the telly, muted, with subtitles. Ronnie sprawled on her back with her head on her arm.
“Is this all right?” she asked. As she asked, her phone vibrated. Incoming call from Maude.
Nev glanced up from her book, watched her send the call to voicemail, but made no comment. “Do you need anything?”
“I’m good. You sure you don’t mind?”
“What do you need?” Nev asked.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me if that changes.”
Ronnie took over-the-counter painkillers, drank water. “You didn’t like being down there.”
Nev shook her head. Ronnie hadn’t either.
The older woman set her phone on the bedside table and slid her reading glasses up into her hair.
Ronnie put a hot water bottle on her stomach, Nev’s hand warm on her knee. There was still so much they were not saying, maybe never would say about that night down by the creek. The night she almost died. Technically, maybe she had died.
It wasn’t clear why Nev had reacted as if the loss was her own. That was Nev’s personality, to be responsible for things.
Like a nocturnal animal, the older woman wasn’t always there in the day, or if she was she wasn’t always on the right foot, but she was there at night, in the ugliness and pain.
Nev was the veteran in the darkness, found it beautiful, saw more clearly at night, knew all the hidden paths and ways.
When traveling in a foreign country, hire a local guide. Nev was that interpreter.
Ronnie’s phone rang. It was Rainbow’s number. Ronnie answered. “Hiya, babe. What’s going on?” She glanced at Nev, who was reading a James Baldwin book.
Rainbow’s voice. “Hi.”
The burn started in Ronnie’s chest, then travelled to her throat and eyes. She cradled the phone against her ear. “Everything good?” She really needed to figure out video calling.
“Are you feeling better?”