Читать книгу Ricochet - Robyn Neilson - Страница 4

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.

‘Hi,’ I offer my hand to him too, but he seems unsure what to do with it. For a split-second I imagined him kissing it, Scarlet-Pimpernel-style. I was having trouble with a name that sounded like a geometric configuration.

‘I beg your pardon, how should I pronounce your name? …. Oh ok sorry, a silent ‘p’…. happy to meet you Loup’.

Rob helps us along.

‘Lou was explaining to me that his name is actually Jean-Loup, and that in French, Loup means wolf…kind of appropriate, hey?’

‘Er, I guess so…’

‘No question Frey… this dude is the bees knees, he’s ridden one and a half times around Australia, he’s been fucking everywhere… kipping in all sorts of far out places, carrying all his own kit…. No support! I’d be knackered if I’d done that!’

The wolf smiled an embarrassed smile. And when he did, his whiter-than-white teeth lit up the room. And his eyebrows made a funny twitch above his inkwell eyes. I caught a sudden glimpse of kindness deep in that well.

‘Eh Rob, vat you talking about? You done much more than dat’ retorts Loup, shaking his head.

My ear my eye my brain my heart my vulva, all on high alert after the wolves voice and uncertain accent.

And so it went for a few minutes; the young bucks air their wares, showing off despite themselves.

‘Here, have some chocolate’, Rob finally offers, and I resist pouncing on it. I am so ravenous I could eat all of their food on the table. What Rob describes is extraordinary.

He is actually running around the world, running on average two marathons per day, aiming for a Guinness world record. Having run a few conventional forty-two-kilometre marathons myself, I find this super-human and incomprehensible.

‘Tell us about your ride’ Rob says. He is a humble man, despite his achievements. His sole-less, shredded runners look more worn out than he.

I recount some of my tales, but am ashamed before the superior calibre of my comrades. Loup offers to look at my bike brakes, the pads having rubbed thin, and I notice a frown and wince when he sees the condition of my chain and gears.

‘Ah, this will need some cleaning and lube, and look the cables here; they must be tighten. Would you like me fix this?’

‘Ah if you don’t mind…that would be awesome’.

And so effortlessly, Loup overturned my bike, my heart and my life.

But it is the putting of everything back up the right way again which takes all our effort. It has turned out that maps are not enough. There are no maps that show you how to get from free-wheeling… miles from nowhere in a treeless plain in what was once thought an imaginary land: Terra Australis Incognita….to a claustrophobic hut, marooned between a rifle-range and a gypsy camp in the land of Provençe France….in a marriage that has sometimes seemed determined to match that claustrophobia.

It is the gift of the back roads that saves us. That gives us the faith to say blithely, as we did that second day after we first met, having done nothing more exciting than go shopping for new shorts for me,

‘See you next time, à bientôt’.

Loup wanted me to choose the flimsy white cotton ones… ‘You need the air to flow through, Freya, no more padding; that makes it worse’… so reluctantly, I got rid of my padded riding shorts, but gleefully chucked away my maxi-sanitary pads and toddler-size disposable nappies. When we said good-bye at the blistering edge of Ceduna on that 42-degree day, I was heading west into the wind, and Loup was heading east; we had exchanged nothing but smiles and furtive glances. Not even a hug. But he had my phone number.

All along the road, I held close a grain of hope, a tantalizing idea. That grain then became mislaid in the vast white sand dunes of Eucla. And when I returned, triumphant, to my overgrown grassy home four weeks later, Loup rang and then reappeared on his bike as if carried by magic.