Ricochet Read online

  Dedication

  For Caitlin and Claire.

  And for Bob and Luc.

  Prologue

  A lone woman sits at a scratched table in a bleak hut. Alone, but in rapture with all that is good and bad about love and solitude. She has attended to all the morning's chores, listened to La Bande Originale, and now is silent and uncertain of what to do next. The shutters are closed against the assault of the mistral. Being inside and still leads her to a kind of contemplation, an interrogation of loss: a haunting of her new husband and his family. Wondering dogs her. Not that at times she does not despise this her only friend, but she learns to be led.

  Thus her memory meanders, like her wayward sewing threads: the weft of time weaving it into line, not as chronological time, but as sensory time. She imagines the donkey trails of old France, their meaning revived and rewritten each time she attempts that same route from one place to another. The woman wants to keep a record because she has little else to do. She imagines the writing will bring to her daily life a purpose; a semicolon against the unravelling. Nothing grand will be achieved, rather a steering away from the spectre of loneliness, the shadow of a spell, causing her to pause and draw deep breath in the place in which she stood.

  That place is France; and three distinct places within, which she summons as if they are something she has swallowed. Where she begins the remembering is a derelict mobile home rented from gypsies. A hut with three views: the first being the outdoor latrine which she and her husband dug in turns, grimacing at the limestone, and over which she cobbled together a shelter; their second view being the cyclone fence of a rifle range which could not conceal the beauty of trees beyond it; and their third view, which she ingested without being close enough to savour or inhale, being the distant hills of Les Alpilles in their soft violet blue rise and fall, reminding her of home in Australia.

  But Freya had had two previous homes in France. The first was Auriol, the second La Ciotat. She writes out of necessity: to explain to herself her alteration. To tell of how each place grew into her, grafting her. Finally she realizes that being untethered from home puts her on the path between all of her homes. It is along that path where Loup and she found each other, deserted each other, and where she later returned, believing that she might retrieve what they had lost. The woman alone. Her ego resisting the idea that she is no longer young, clings to the idea that memory is the salve to prepare her for what is to come.

  Freya suddenly finds her beginning. She shoves her chair back on the faux-timber plastic floor, pleased with the result of her morning’s sweep and scrub, and strides a couple of metres to their bed, squeezing sideways between the bowing wall and her side of the bed to retrieve her secreted ‘emergency’ two litre bottle of water, and her laptop which she hides under the mattress. She boils water on the camping stove, inhales deeply the aroma of her Orange Pekoe Broken Tea Leaves, (the intriguing and exact title of the leaf tea she has triumphantly found in the distant Carrefour supermarché), and arranges her laptop on a pile of books on top of her bike box.

  Freya decides she will write whilst standing.

  Terra Australis, The Nullarbor Highway.

  “Go west young man, and grow up with the country.”

  John B Lane Soule, the Terre Haute Indiana Express,1851.

  “The sea is where the sun goes at the end of the day, where it lives while you sleep. I have a fix on things when I know where west is.”

  Tim Winton, Land’s Edge.

  It is October 1998. The afternoon sun sears my eyes; sweat drips into them, adding insult to injury. The flesh between my legs feels permanently damaged. This is why you came here, I remind myself, for the western sun and the pain.

  Push pedal pump push pedal pump push pedal pump.

  I welcome the physical pain; its straightforwardness is refreshing, obliterating every sordid panic that I had previously endured. I am in love with the stark simplicity of my ride. Every morning I crawl out from my tent, light my little stove for my first majestic cuppa, hoe into fruitcake or dates and nuts, and then pack up my city, my roving planet. Everything that is important to me must be carried by me. I remember when I was younger, returning from my inaugural solo backpacking tour, declaring piously, ‘From now on, I am getting rid of all unnecessary stuff. From this day forward, I am acquiring only what I can carry on my back.’ Such fabulous idealism lasted a week in the real world.

  Now, eight days into my ride from Adelaide to Perth, via as many coastal and desert detours as possible, I have already posted excess things home. First to go was my helmet. Second was my bulky K-Mart sleeping bag. How is a puny plastic bike helmet going to save me from a monster road train that needs a whole kilometre in which to brake?

  I am haunted by the tragedy of a Japanese cyclist freshly killed by one such goliath. Not the driver’s fault. Nor the cyclist’s. How can one assign blame in this devastation? As it was told to me, the cyclist was turning in from a side road, just before sunrise, with no headlamp on. It appears he was sucked into the slipstream between two road trains travelling in tandem. The first driver radioed his colleague behind to say watch out for the crazy cyclist, but the response, ‘What cyclist?’ spelled the horror of what had just happened. Gone in a split second, pulverised under the 50-metres long, 200-ton leviathan. The woman behind the counter in the roadhouse recounts this to me as a cautionary tale; scalding and adding rhetorically ‘Don’t you have family?’

  I could understand her disapproval, given that she and her husband and neighbouring farmers were the small group that had to meet and greet the disconsolate Japanese family. Friends of hers were down on their knees upon the tar; scraping up bits and pieces of flesh, cradling what might have been a hand, a heart, a smile. ‘And the driver,’ she admonishes, ‘spare a thought for the road train driver whose life has been scarred forever’. As I pedal slowly past the memorial site…. flowers still fresh… a mute Japanese flag fluttering…. the wound in the road still blood stained…. I momentarily doubt the rightness of what I am attempting. If I never see my daughters again, that would be the most wrong thing I had ever done.

  Still, I posted the helmet home. Its absence may even teach me to ride with more caution. Although, riding until 11 o’clock at night just to get to Iron Knob, a forgotten mining town as gritty as its name suggests, was close to the most wrong thing. I refused to stay put in Port Augusta, a big town. But too late, it became evident that the highway was under reconstruction. All along its tacky-tar edge, I careened into dark ditches to avoid forcing a road train to swerve. Experience taught me that these drivers, although they thought me hare-brained, were kind and respectful. It was important to keep them on my side.

  Arriving in Iron Knob, shaking with exhaustion, cold and fear…what was this god-forsaken place, where ghosts linger behind boarded-up windows, dogs growl, and the smouldering end of a lone cigarette glowers through a cyclone fence? The only place to stay is the desolate motel beside the highway, but its bell is unresponsive. I push my bike up a dim lane, looking for a likely door to knock upon. Thinking this itself might outweigh the stupidity of riding at night or posting home those things that were supposed to save me.

  Instead, I am greeted by a man with radial-tyre skin wearing short pyjamas, who willingly sends his wife back down the lane with me to open up the motel. My room for the night is a shipping container; cast aside in orbit from the main hangar. This separation pleases me.

  ‘I am sorry, I can’t offer you any food, do you have enough to eat tonight?’ says the tanned, Scandinavian-boned woman.

  ‘Oh yes thank you, I’ll be fine.’ Despairing of my remaining rations: two chocolate bars, some peanuts and a solitary orange.

  Betraying my goal of simplicity, I revelled that night in a heater, a bar fridge,
a hot shower and a TV. I remember watching the barbaric end of Silent Witness and ringing my ex-husband and waking up my daughters. Words and love tumbled out; we laughed, I strained to hear each hushed breath of my girls. Finally, we cried a little. Their voices carried the wisdom of children; the courage I needed to keep going.

  I then watched a late night movie adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. I couldn’t think of any greater symmetry than watching this parable here, where I was, on the edge of something big. Something as indefinable as the vast deserts to my north, the Southern Ocean to my south, and the Nullarbor to my west. An absence of sense in my life had compelled me here, to this random place. But it was an abundance of sensibility, which would see me through. Awaking late and stocking up at the motel kiosk, kindness followed me into the day and as I explored the town in daylight, I could sense Iron Knob softening under her eerie mantle. People were restrained, but friendly. Dogs were happy. Sprinklers were watering the civic lawns and filigree peppercorn trees shaded picnic tables. It was the kind of place I would like to go back to.

  The long straight stretches of the Eyre Highway are, I discovered, simply long straight stretches of highway. Until I reach the Nullarbor Plain and then what motorists call ‘boredom’ becomes my euphoria. Rhythmic silence…. or sprinting rapture… as Iggy Pop’s The Passenger propels me on an endorphin high…. then settling into the bush for the night…. humping my bike on my shoulder… the distant drone of the road trains…. the manifesto of stars…. the hard red ground awake under my sleeping mat…. the regret of no sleeping bag…. water bottles frozen in the arid cold…. the immeasurable pleasure of gathering dry sticks and burning off my toilet paper in the morning. The intoxicating fear that this lump of land upon which I rest has a shark-bite out of its side. And that if you go too close to the edge, the desire for that blue will pull you under.

  Scrub sky sand sun scrub sky sand sun scrub sky sand.

  Smells became acute. Small things become big.

  The road signs signalling ‘Five kilometres to Kimba’, for example, are an event of disproportionate importance in my days. Each town duly informs me when I only have five kilometres to go. In a car, that would barely give me time to ask and decide ‘A Magnum or an Iced Coffee?’ On a bike, I have time to savour the dark skin of chocolate; letting it first crack at random, not forcing the melt, high on the aroma of dark cacao and white creamy vanilla, before its edges give in to my tongue.

  When I had first dreamed my trip, maps spread wide across the floor in our forest home, I was determined to follow in the seminal footsteps of Robyn Davidson, her troop of camels and Diggity dog. Determined to escape from tall trees and lush ferns; to seek open space, which I imagined teeming with the sound of emptiness. However, as I lapped up every step of Davidson’s ‘Tracks’, I had to concede that being a mother of two young daughters was more pressing than traversing the centre of the continent alone by mountain bike. That was an expedition that even I, irresponsible though I was, realized needed meticulous planning and most of all, time. Months of time, which I did not have.

  So, as a compromise, I chose East to West, riding into the sun, into a headwind, into oblivion. I chanted the towns on the map in my head; my song lines, as I ran along the fern-dense trails of our valley town. Funnily enough, the first two towns after one daughter and her best friend…Clare and Laura, followed by Wilmington, Iron Knob, Kimba, Wudinna, Poochera, and then, Streaky Bay. One of my many detours; turning south off the endless Eyre, turning left towards the broken Bight. I could not have imagined a crescent of sea and sand more perfect. Even the buildings were perfect; history and charm and nature in honeymooners’ harmony.

  But my trip was not supposed to be a joyride… I had left my bathers behind. Not a restriction I resented, rather the simple task that I had set myself. I must gain an average of 100 kilometres each day; otherwise I would miss my plane home. And as much as I fell for the beauty here by the sea, I knew there were more obscure places to discover. So I left Streaky Bay late in the afternoon, pushing on to its lesser neighbour, Smoky Bay. I thought covering seventy-five kilometres would be a pleasant ride before nightfall. I thought wrong. The first half was uneventful, simply more of the quiet, scrappy bush which had become my habitat. But then the bush thickened, the trees loomed larger, and the sun slid down behind them. In the shadows, the road itself grew cold and I stopped to put on my leggings, fleece and hooded vest. I removed my earphones, saving Nick Cave for a bad day, for when I needed him most. Now that the light was leaving, I needed to hear what might be coming behind.

  I was not prepared for what I heard.

  Out of nowhere, roared two hotted-up cars, weapons more than cars: screeching and wheeling and swerving up beside me, pushing me into the gravel. Young men leered out of the windows, yelling abuse and hurling things. Then, with a flash of operatic bravado, the cars burned-out; tore off on two wheels, bucking up over the hill, and I thought I was safe. But no, within minutes the hoons hurtled back down towards me, and then I thought I was dead.

  Miraculously, I managed to not fall off my bike; I kept riding with my head down, eyes fixated on steering through the gravel. My tactic was to pretend I was a guy: I could not let them see my face, smell my fear, or give away that I had wet my pants and was about to vomit. But after their last onslaught of obscenities, the cars just as quickly vanished; their twin exhausts spewing out stink into the tea-tree, roaring back to where they had come from. Perhaps the boys realised I was in fact a girl, and their Lutheran farm upbringings reigned in their rampage.

  Push pedal pray push pedal pray push pedal pray

  An hour and a half later, when I arrived at Smoky Bay, I was a wreck. All of my implicit belief in the rightness and therefore safety of my endeavour had eroded away with every lurch of those cars. I locked myself in an on-site van, until I realized I was being ridiculous, and so wandered around watching families gut the fish they’d spent all day catching.

  Corner of Flinders Highway and Eyre Highway, Ceduna.

  A riding-Frenchman and a running-Englishman are not the kinds of people you expect to meet in an Australian caravan park tilting between the desert and the sea. Actually I had no expectations of meeting anyone, certainly no more men. After recovering my faith overnight at Smoky Bay, I continued riding, but the idea of a rest day was taking hold. Today would be day eight, and by the time I arrived in Ceduna, I would have pedalled eight hundred and fifteen kilometres.

  The western sun is relentless, and despite wearing sunglasses, my eyes are under siege; pelted by grit from passing road-trains, piss from veering cattle trucks, stinging-salt-sweat from my own brow and flies, fucking flies, which stick inside my eyelids and make me blind with fury. So blind in fact, that just as the minor road I am on merges into the larger Eyre Highway, one of those high-rise cattle trucks thunders past and I brake suddenly to avoid another shower of piss and shit. My worst manoeuvre yet: my wheels jack-knife in the bull-dust, I’m propelled over the handlebars, my panniers and I all landing in a cursing heap, maps and sunglasses and Walkman and eye drops splayed amongst bits of flattened kangaroos, eyeless birds and discarded coke bottles full of truck-driver urine.

  Fucking truck muck fucking truck muck

  Brushing myself off, rescuing my things, plucking the bits of gravel out of my bloody knees, elbows and palms; bizarrely glad to have this childlike reminder of grazed flesh, I decide I shall take that rest day.

  So I head straight for the first caravan park.

  ‘Blimey love, I just gave me last cabin away, you wouldn’t believe it… to a crazy Cockney… bloody running round the world he is… and a mad French bastard on a bike! Geez love, I reckon you should team up with them’, grins the wide-hipped lady.

  ‘Yeah maybe, but first I need a shower…I stink’.

  ‘Well love, I’m not gonna’ agree or disagree with you on that point…tell you what…if you don’t mind roughing it a bit, I’ve got an old caravan down the back…she’s a bit rugged
, but at least you’ll have a bed and a break from your tent.’

  So off we swagger, me trying to compose myself to look amazing and worldly with my less than exemplary bike, in case the mad French bastard or the Running-man happen to be watching. Of course they were; watching and waiting for a skinny blonde with bloody knees and blood-shot eyes and a bruised and battered vulva.

  Well, of course they weren’t.

  But as I showered hastily in case I missed meeting them, I did notice how lean I had become, how my hip bones jutted, how my small breasts were almost all nipple, and how down there was a mangled mess. I spotted and gingerly prodded, large weepy sores and scabs on top of formerly healed, large weepy sores. Every morning’s first perch on my bike saddle was torture. I spent a lot of time standing up in the pedals, just to avoid the tear-inducing agony of sitting down. It provided a certain guarantee that that area would remain in quarantine, just as in a non-committal fashion, I had hoped.

  Dousing my red eyes with anti red-eye drops, applying my essential Nullarbor mascara, I slip into my only dress, a navy blue singlet dress, which I approved of now that my forty-year-old body had reverted to that of an adolescent. In the centre of my chest is a subtle ‘Billabong’ logo of stylized aqua waves. I vainly imagine that either the Frog or the Pom would notice how this brought out the turquoise in my eyes. And then I hide them behind sunglasses. And then I wander up nonchalantly, and knock on the door of Cabin 8.

  Rob the running Englishman beams at me and invites me in. He is eating chocolate.

  ‘Hi, I’m Freya,’ I say as we shake hands with intent, not limp formality. Immediately, I feel welcomed into some kind of random Hall of Fame for Weird Adventurers.

  ‘This is Loup,’ he gestures to his friend, whose dark features are further obscured by three-day whiskers and long bleached hair.