THE BLOOMFIELD TRACK  by Sue Robertson

Nancy floats on her back oblivious to anything but the water beneath her and the sky above.  The clouds are indistinguishable from the rest of the sky - gunmetal grey and no variation. The river, after months of drought, of being no more than red cracks and crevices spearing into a bed of rocks, is full and flowing.  The water, jostling and tumbling over the boulders and pebbles, works her muscles like a skilled masseuse, its temperature a thrilling mix of icy cold, and as soft and warm as embryonic fluid.  She paddles with her hands and daydreams.  She is centre-stage in a watery amphitheatre rimmed with the heavy green foliage of the Daintree.

She hears Bill whistle.  Twit twoo.  Startled, she feels the full weight of her body, she feels the water closing over her, she flounders and spluttering pushes back to the surface. Looks to see if he has seen - seen her graceful, confident, taunting display become a manic flaying of limbs.  He hasn’t, his back is to her, the only witness to her fall was a Monarch Butterfly hovering above her, its electric blue/black wings vibrant against the grey sky.  She settles, hears him again … twit twoo. He wants her back.  Lately it seems he always wants her back.  She rolls onto her stomach, and dog-paddling, swims toward him - toward his ungainly body bulk poised on the only man-made construct in sight - a fragment of a bridge jutting into the water like a giant splinter.   A memento of the time in the eighties when hippies and greenies chained themselves to tree trunks and threw themselves into the paths of bulldozers to save the rainforest from the loggers.  Thing is, it wasn’t the protesters got the roadwork stopped, it was the weather.  Huge downpours flooded the road and made the carting of timber infeasible.  Nothing new then, she finds herself thinking, only now instead of lumbering logging trucks it is the grey nomads in their camper vans, and the backpackers in their barely refurbished sixties Wicked combi-vans, the weather is blocking.

‘We’d best get going,’ she hears Bill shout.

She flips onto her back.  Stares up into the grey.  ‘Not yet,’ she murmurs confident enough again to let the current carry her.  The river is narrowing.  The tree branches strain to form an arch over her.  Now, she thinks of what she was doing in the eighties.  Knew it sure as hell had nothing to do with saving the environment.  It was enough of a struggle to save herself, get the kids to school and herself to work.

‘Come in and join me ... the water’s fine,’ she calls and when he doesn’t respond, she calls again, ‘Three steps,’ she urges, flip-flopping.  ‘Just take three steps.’

His voice is hammered by the sound of water clattering over the rocks.  ‘And why would I do that?’  he wants to know.  He is wearing his travelling ‘uniform’ - khaki shorts, beige shirt and long beige socks. His Akubra hat worn low on his forehead, sports a dark band of sweat ringed at its base.  ‘Come on,’ she urges.  ‘Drop your shorts and come join me.’  She floats closer.

His face glistens, his tongue juts lizard-like between his lips, he shakes his head.  ‘Can’t do that, love,’ he says.  He mops at his face with an olive green towel and looks down the river toward the horizon.  In the direction of their campsite.  He looks at her.  ‘You come here.’

Something burns at her.  She bites into her lip and strikes out and away from him, flipping her canvas-clad feet like a cartoon dolphin, circling back to where he stands balanced on the rotting wood.  ‘No,’ she says, ‘You come here.  A couple of steps - that’s all! It that too much to ask?’

He takes a step.  Wavers. Regains his balance.  Waits until she is closer.  The noise is growing. It is getting darker. He huddles in the towel.  ‘A couple of steps and I’m off this frigging bridge, Nance.  For heavens sake, luv, get out, it’s going to rain again and you know what the river does when it rains.  How fast it builds.  It’s frigging dangerous.’  And with that the rain begins - heavy drops pummelling their heads and biting at their shoulders.  Nancy gasps, strikes out, pulls against the current and as she struggles to reach the bridge, she scrapes her belly against rocks that only minutes earlier glistened benignly in the silver light.  Bill was right, give it another few minutes and three steps and he would be in the river, with her, being tossed around like a rubber duck in a bath with the taps still on full, and what would that prove.

‘It is not as though you can’t swim,’ she says hauling out of the water to sit beside to him.  ‘You just flap your feet about and your arms.  Remember?’  She touches his knee, ‘It’s like riding a bike, something you never forget.  Your words, not mine.’

Bill looks down at his wife of some forty-odd years, an unforgiving veil of torrential rain separating them,  ‘You know I can’t swim, Nance.  Not anymore.’  Rain drips off his nose and dissolves into the downpour.   His whole hat is now the colour of sweat.  He hands her the towel.  It is drenched and falls limply on her shoulders.  She waits, the rushing water and squeals of the birds, deafening to them both.  When the noise abates for a second, she says,  ‘Then why the fuck bring us to this god-forsaken place. There is nothing to do here but to swim.’

She drags herself upright and together they trudge back up the track stepping as they do, over a yellow A-frame sign warning of recent crocodile sightings.  Battered by the rain, they leave it there, flattened and floating in a puddle.  When they arrived, it was upright and the elders of the community were on the riverbank fishing and their grandkids, swimming.  Bill had taken their photos – even though they had hidden their heads and asked him not to.

~

They’d arrived here a week ago yesterday after shunning the crowds, the frozen Margaritas and comfortable hotels of Port Douglas, and had stocked up in Mossman.  Done the obligatory visit to the Gorge, as per Bill’s itinerary, swum in the crystal clear waterhole – or Nancy had, Bill sat on a rock as he always did, clipped his toenails and studied his maps for their next destination.

Then they had taken the ferry across the Daintree River, wound their way through the moist green rainforests of Cape Tribulation and arrived at the southern end of the Bloomfield Track - pronounced impassable in the wet, but for the time being, open to 4 Wheel Drives.   Fording the river was part of the experience, and so they did, the underbelly of their camper grumbling and dragging across the river floor.  They drove until Bill found the perfect bush camp – midway down the track – on a deserted beach where the mangroves sank so deep in the sand they looked like cauliflowers.  Three days in the rain started.  Their campsite was a quagmire, their wheels stuck tight. The toilet had backed up and there was no mobile phone reception.

~

The camper had their names painted in cursive on a sign by the back door.  Bill and Nancy.  And of course Nancy knew there was more to do than swim, but they’d been travelling for weeks, stopping in campgrounds and national parks.  And it wasn’t all bad, sometimes there were amenity blocks and rec rooms, maybe even a laundry with a coin operated washing-machine and dryer, but more often than not, especially this far north, it was the real deal.  Bush camping at its finest – a chemical toilet and a bucket upended and strung from a low hanging branch.

That night, the evening of day eight, Nancy prepared dinner on the single burner.  Tinned tuna, boiled potatoes, carrots and minted peas.  And a bottle of warm Hunter Valley Chardonnay, the only white wine, not in casks, Mossman IGA had on sale last week.  They ate in silence, huddled inside the camper, listening to the rain on the canvas roof, she thinking of clean sheets and hot showers, him of whatever a man who’d been planning this trip for the past thirty years thought of.  It was their forty-second wedding anniversary.  She turned to Bill and said.  ‘Do you realise we have been married forty-two years, tonight?’  He looked marginally surprised, pulled at his ear, checked his diary, and touched her glass with his, ‘You’re right,’ he said.  The moulded-plastic glasses that served as wine-glasses, barely made a sound.  Then he said, as he always did when his diary and his retirement fantasy collided, ‘I wonder what the plebs are doing now.’  He scratched, farted and said.  ‘I could do this forever.’ He laughed and glancing at the downpour said, ‘If this keeps up, we will be here forever!’

Nancy took her glass and swished its contents out the open door and into the rain.

‘Why did you do that?’  Bill said, his glass held out for a refill and Nancy said, ‘If you don’t know then I’m not going to tell you.’  Then she climbed into her bunk, picked up her book and turned her back to him.  She knew what he would do when she went to bed … he would finish his meal, and in all likelihood, the bottle, then tidy up - returning every little plastic container to the plastic box designed to store it, finally he would take the empty bottle to the recycle bin by the roadway - no amenities block but a recycle bin, go figure she thought as she let her eyes grow heavy and close.

They should be further south by now.  He’d wooed her with promises of home.  Of taking her grandkids to swimming lessons, to school, to ballet.  It was warm at home, hot even, not raining in sheets.

‘A couple of steps,’ she muttered into the din of the rain hitting the canvas walls, ‘And you couldn’t even do that.’

≈

Nancy wakes to the sound of birds, and the soft swish of waves on the sand. The rain has stopped and Bill’s bunk is empty.  The table is cleared and the bottle gone.  So much for a shift into the unpredictable, she thinks as she surveys the debris strewn sand.

The sun is high in the sky when she finds him.  He is back at the waterhole, sitting on the bridge, the soles of his bare feet resting on the surface of the water.

He doesn’t see her - his attention on the children on the bank opposite jostling in the foaming waters where the feeder stream tumbles over the rocks into the waterhole.  He doesn’t have his camera, and he is wearing his old swimming trunks.  Rivulets of water trickle down his bare back.  He looks up at her as she approaches and smiles, ‘Ah, my beautiful bride,’ he says.  ‘Sleep well?’

She shrugs and sits beside him, stares at the kids and rubs the flat of her hand over his wet skin.  ‘So you can swim,’ she says.  ‘That’s your secret.’

He pushes back on to his hands.  Arches his back.  Looks young again.  ‘No secrets, luv,’ he says.  ‘Three steps you said and that was all it took.  Just an attack of age and fear,’ he says. ‘Actually I thought you were trying to do me in.’  Her hand on his back freezes.  ‘Only kidding,’ he laughs.  ‘Forty-two years, and they said it wouldn’t last!’  And with that he lurches off the jetty and hits the water in a not-so perfect dive. The water is shallow but he surfaces easily.  Nancy struggles to steady her breathing.  Now it is Bill urging her to join him.  The kids catch onto the chorus.  ‘Nancy … Nancy …’

She slips into the water.  ‘The road crew should make it through today,’ he says coming up behind her, wrapping his arms around her pulling her close.

The water is cold on her skin but his breath warms her face. She lets her body relax into him.   He releases her, steps back - his hands supporting her shoulders she floats.  Today the sky is that infinite blue - there is not a cloud to be seen.

‘Nancy?’  She hears her name.  ‘Are you Nancy?’  She flounders, finds her footing on the uneven riverbed. She looks up at two dark shapes on the jetty. The sun is blinding and she is forced to shade her eyes with her hand.

‘You shouldn’t be swimming alone, Nancy,’ the younger of the two says.  She sees he is in a uniform of sorts, they both are, one clearly a policeman - probably one of the five who patrol the community, and one less formal.  The RACQ - the road-crew - come to get them moving again.

She looks around, hears, ‘… couldn’t get here any earlier … road closed both ends.  Not the only ones stuck.’

She is only half listening.  She can’t see him.  ‘Bill,’ she cries.  ‘Bill.’  And when she gets no response she screams.  ‘Stop mucking around.  Where are you?’

‘Nancy, can you come out of the water, please.’  The voice is young but firm.

‘My husband,’ she says, thrashing around.  ‘Where is he?’  She strikes out away from them.  ‘Where the fuck is Bill?’  She is screaming now.  The kids are gone, dissolved into the greenery.

‘You need to find my husband.’

‘We did find your husband, Nancy,’ a calm voice says.  ‘Now, come out of the water.’

‘He was here.  You saw him.  Help him.  Bill!’  She duck dives and when she surfaces the policeman is in the water with her, he has stripped down to his jocks but his boots and watch are still on.  He manhandles her to the jetty and she is half pulled, half pushed up onto the rough timber surface. Wrapped in a towel, just as she was yesterday.   Today it is navy blue and white stripped. And dry.

‘We found him, Nancy.  At the campsite recycling bin… I’m no doctor but my guess is massive heart attack sometime in the night …  when it was still raining.   He was saturated.  The medics are on the way.’  She hears, Blah Blah Blah … Is there anyone we can call, Nancy?’

Nancy.  Nancy.  Nancy.

‘How do you know my name?’ she says.

The older man leans down tries to re-wrap the towel.  His weathered face, an unlit hand-rolled cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, is close to hers.  She can smell the tobacco.  ‘It’s on the back of the camper, luv,’

‘The camper,’ she says.  ‘Of course.  Bill and Nancy.  We came here to swim,’ she says.  ‘Yesterday as well.  There was a sign - crocodiles, but it is safe here.  Protected.’  The towel slips off her shoulders and heat of the sun bites at her skin.  ‘He wouldn’t swim yesterday …he was here,’ she says.  ‘Right here.’

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