So the time drifted by. Even on our last full day, when food was getting short, no one could be bothered going all the way back to the Landrover to get more. Instead we improvised, and put together snacks that at any other time we would have chucked at the nearest rubbish tin. We ate meals that I wouldn’t have fed to our chooks. There was no butter left, no powdered milk, no condensed milk because we’d sucked the tubes dry on our first day. No fruit, no tea, no cheese. No chocolate – that was serious. But not serious enough to motivate us to get off our butts. ‘It’s catch twenty-something,’ Kevin explained. ‘If we had chocolate it’d give me the energy to get up to the Landie to get some more. But without it I don’t think I could make it to the first step.’
It was hot, that was our main excuse.
Homer was still rapt in Fi, always wanting to talk to me about her, trying to accidentally put himself wherever she happened to be going, turning red every time she spoke to him. But Fi was being very frustrating. She wouldn’t discuss it with me at all, just pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about, when it must have been obvious to anyone short of a coma.
The seven of us had got through five days without a serious argument, which was good going. Quite a few little arguments, I admit. There was the time Kevin had blown up at Fi for not doing any cooking or washing up. It was after the Great Snake Shemozzle; I think Kevin was embarrassed that he hadn’t come out of that with much credit. Then his Sausage Surprise got such a poor response, so he probably was feeling a bit sensitive. Still, Fi was getting a reputation for disappearing when work appeared, so Kevin wasn’t too far wrong.
There was Corrie’s frequent cry of ‘That’s not funny Homer’, heard when he tipped cold water on her in her sleeping bag, when he did cruel and disgusting things to a black beetle, when he dropped a spider down her shirt, when he tore out the last page of her book and hid it so she didn’t know whether the lovers made up or not. Corrie was one of Homer’s favourite victims: he only had to give her a glimpse of the red cape and she charged straight at it every time. He was lucky she didn’t hold grudges.
If I’m going to be honest I’d better admit that I managed to annoy one or two people once or twice. Kevin told me I was a know-all when I made a few suggestions about rearranging the fire. In fact the fire got me in trouble a few times. I guess I liked fiddling with it a bit too much. Whenever it died down a little, or the smoke started coming in the wrong direction, or the billy wasn’t over the best coals, I’d be in there with a stick, ‘fixing’ it. Well, that’s what I called it. The others called it ‘being a bloody nuisance’.
My worst fight was really stupid. I don’t know, maybe all fights are really stupid. We started talking about the colours of cars, which ones are the most conspicuous and which ones the least. Kevin said white was the most conspicuous and black the least; Lee said yellow and green; I said red and khaki; I forget what the others said. Suddenly it got quite heated. ‘Why do you think they paint ambulances and police cars white?’ Kevin yelled. ‘Why do you think they paint fire engines red?’ I yelled back. ‘Why do you think they have so many yellow taxis?’ Lee yelled a bit, although I don’t think his heart was in it. It went on and on. I thought I was on safe ground with khaki for inconspicuous, because that’s what the Army uses, but Kevin told some long story about how he nearly had a head-on with a black car a week after he got his P’s. ‘That doesn’t prove black’s hard to see,’ I said, ‘it just proves you shouldn’t be allowed on the roads.’ I can’t even remember how it ended, which goes to show how stupid it was.
But on our last night, sitting around the fire playing True Confessions, Robyn unexpectedly said, ‘I don’t want to go back. This is the best place and this has been the best week.’
‘Yeah,’ Lee said. ‘It’s been great.’
‘I’m looking forward to a hot shower though,’ Fi said. ‘And decent food.’
‘Let’s do this again,’ Corrie said. ‘Back here in the same place with the same people.’
‘Yeah, OK,’ Homer said, obviously thinking of another five days to spend adoring Fi.
‘Let’s keep this place a secret,’ Robyn said. ‘Otherwise everyone’ll start using it and it’ll be wrecked in no time.’
‘It is a good campsite,’ I said. ‘Next time we should have a proper search for where the hermit lived.’
‘He might have just had a shelter here and it’s fallen down,’ Lee said.
‘But he built that bridge so well. You’d think he’d build his shelter even better.’
‘Well maybe he just lived in a cave or something.’
True Confessions resumed, but I went to bed before they could make me confess to all the things I’d done with Steve. I figured I’d told enough already, so I got out while the going was good. But I still didn’t sleep well. Like I said, normally I was a heavy sleeper, but the last few nights I just couldn’t settle down to it. To my own surprise I realised I was quite anxious to get home, to see how things were, to make sure it was all OK. I did feel some kind of strange anxiety.
In the morning everyone got moving early, but it’s a funny thing, you can have ninety per cent of the work done in the first hour, but the other ten per cent takes at least two hours. That’s Ellie’s Law. So it was nearly eleven o’clock and starting to warm up before we were ready to go. A last check of the fire, a regretful farewell to our secret clearing, and we hit the track.
It was a steep climb, and we soon began to realise why we hadn’t been too keen to do day trips back up onto Tailor’s Stitch. Our biggest motivation, apart from Fi’s enthusiasm for showers and food, was to see where the track started at the top. We couldn’t figure out how we – and all those other people over the years – had missed it. So we kept plugging along, sweating and grunting up the hardest bits, sometimes pushing the person in front through a narrow gap in Satan’s Steps. I noticed Homer stayed close to Fi, giving her helpful pushes whenever he got the chance, and she’d smile at him and he’d go red. Could she possibly like him, maybe? I wondered. Or was she enjoying stringing him along? It’d serve Homer right if a girl did that to him. One girl could get revenge for all of us.
Our packs were lighter, thanks to all the food we’d eaten, though after a short time they felt as heavy as ever. But soon enough we were close to the top, and looking ahead to see where we’d come out. The answer, when we got close enough to tell, was surprising. The track suddenly veered right away from Satan’s Steps and struck out across a landslide of loose gravel and rocks. This was the first time we’d been out in the open since leaving the campsite. It took a few minutes to find it again on the other side, because it was much fainter and thinner. It was like going from a road onto a four-wheel-drive track. It was in public view, but it still would have been invisible to anyone standing on the arete. And anyone stumbling across it would have thought it was just an animal track.
It continued to wind upwards then, finishing at a big old gum tree near Wombegonoo. The last hundred metres were through scrub so thick that we had to bend double to get along the path. It was almost like a tunnel, but it was very clever because people looking down from Wombegonoo would see only impenetrable bush. The gum tree was at the base of a sheet of rock that stretched up to Wombegonoo’s summit. It was an unusual tree, because it had multiple trunks, which must have parted from each other in its early days, so that now they grew out like petals on a poppy. The track actually started in the bowl in the middle of the tree: it brought us cunningly into the bowl by leading us under one of the trunks. The bowl was so big that the seven of us could squash into it. Either side of the tree and below it was the jungly scrub of Hell; above was the sheet of rock which, as Robyn said, would leave no tracks. It was a perfect setup.
We took a break on Wombegonoo, not for long because we had virtually no food left and we’d all been too lazy to carry any water up from the creek. It was about a forty minute walk to the faithful Landrover, which we found where we’d left it, backed in under the shady trees, patiently waiting. We fell upon it with cries of delight, getting into the water first, then pigging out on the food, even the healthy stuff that we’d rejected five days earlier. It’s amazing how quickly your attitudes can change. I remember hearing on the radio someone saying how prisoners of war had been so grateful for any little scrap of food when they were liberated at the end of World War Two, then two days later they were complaining because they got chicken noodle soup instead of tomato. That was just like us – and still is. That day at the Landie I was dreaming of an ice cream I’d chucked out from the fridge at home a week earlier, because it had too many little ice crystals sticking to it. I’d have given anything to have had it back in my hand. I couldn’t believe how casually I’d thrown it away. But after an hour or two at home I guess I would have thrown it away again.