The Devil's Chord – Chapter 16
Down to Earth
Niamh has to get back to Sydney for the orchestra’s Monday afternoon rehearsal, so she’ll leave at first light. We agreed that she won’t wake us: she’ll just get up and go when her alarm goes off.
Christmas and New Year? Not sure yet. We’ll talk about that. We’ll definitely meet up before she goes to New York. Yes, she promises.
Just the same, I mean to get up and see her off in the morning.
So much for that: I wake just in time to hear car tyres crunching the driveway gravel. I slide out of bed but it’s already too late. Damn.
Ken’s still fast asleep. He always looks so peaceful when he’s sleeping. Untroubled, bless him. I slip back under the doona and lie for a while longer, listening to the sounds of our garden waking up, enjoying the warmth of the man beside me.
I think about the day ahead.
I should really stay in town and help with packing up after the Pick, but I feel a powerful need to remove myself from the scene: not to see, speak to or otherwise interact with anyone. On no account do I want to be around when Toby and his band leave.
I’ll drop Maree a text, make my excuses. She’ll be fine with it.
Then I’ll drive up into the mountains, by myself. Ken won’t mind. I’ll go for a long, exhausting hike, come back tonight in time for dinner.
It’ll give me time to think, or just to be.
Then it will all be over and done with, this mad weekend, like a strange, wild dream, and our life will be back to normal, just the same as before.
Where to walk? I need a tough hike.
I decide on part of the Mount Bogong Circuit. Ken and I completed the whole four-day walk two summers ago. Our ankles, knees and hips ached for weeks afterward.
It’s a cool, overcast day: just right for strenuous exercise. Not beyond possibility, mind you, that I’ll encounter blizzard conditions, up there on Victoria’s highest mountain. The forecast is innocuous, but that doesn’t mean a damn thing.
My hiking gear is in the mud room, so there’s no need to disturb Ken. I grab apples, bread and cheese for a simple lunch, dried fruit and nuts for energy snacks. A big bar of chocolate as emergency rations. The snakebite kit. My phone and the EPIRB. As much water as I can easily carry. A space blanket. I cram all that in my rucksack, and take my hiking poles.
I sit down at the dining table and write Ken a short note. Monty comes to see me; I scratch him behind the ears and whisper:
‘Sorry, mate. Not today. Got to go and get my shit together. Look after the Hub for me.’
Then I slip out the door, sling my pack into the back of the car … and I’m free.
I drive down to the Kiewa and turn right, but instead of crossing the bridge by the holiday village, I head down the main valley towards Mount Beauty township.
We could so easily have lost her.
My periods on the pill were always light and irregular. I wasn’t expecting to get pregnant, thought it was only women who were careless or forgetful who conceived while taking the pill. I didn’t put on weight or have morning sickness. A cryptic pregnancy wasn’t on my radar.
So I was well into my second trimester before I realised something was up. A home test was positive, then I went to my GP. She sent me into Wangaratta for an ultrasound.
The best guess was that the foetus was at nineteen weeks, meaning that conception took place round about the start of May, but as the obstetrician said to me, ‘It could be a couple of weeks either side, maybe more.’
There was no need to tell Ken about the ‘maybe more’. Toby had left fifteen days before the ‘most likely’ date.
Meanwhile I’d been drinking, smoking, stripping old lead paint from weatherboards, riding horses, doing heavy lifting, taking ibuprofen for strained muscles – living my normal, active life.
Twenty more anxious weeks ensued, but all the tests indicated that our baby was developing normally. And indeed she did: a baby girl, healthy, if a little underweight. Named Niamh Iris Newell after our mothers.
If I’d discovered my pregnancy earlier, she would have been terminated. Our one chance at parenthood, as it turned out, would have been thrown away.
Mount Beauty is a small residential settlement of plain, single-storey houses, and the streets are quiet this Monday morning. I head straight on through, then turn right at the tourist park for Mountain Creek.
What have I done?
Shh. Don’t think about that.
It’s not too late.
It is. You’ve made your decision. Stay strong. Live with it.
It’s a good, sealed road almost all the way to the little campground in its shady forest setting. There are a few small dome tents here: hikers or runners, no doubt, who’ll soon be tackling the trail themselves. I can get a head start on them, hopefully, by driving on, through the creek and up the heavily overgrown vehicle track to the foot of Staircase Spur, the true trailhead.
Maybe it’s time to stand down from my role as president? I’ve given it a fair crack. Four years, and difficult years at that. Anyway, no need to decide that yet.
I park the car, tuck a note under the wiper blade as to my intentions, and stride out.
The forest of scrubby eucalypts is quiet, as if the grey sky has subdued its inhabitants.
It’s a brutally steep ascent, and I’m soon out of breath – and wishing I’d been less comprehensive in my packing.
At Bivouac Hut I’m disappointed to meet a group of three hikers. They look and sound like foreign students, and the sum of their ages probably equals mine. Day hikers, since they’re not carrying a tent. They seem lightly equipped and dressed. Too lightly?
I wish them a brisk ‘Good morning’ and press onward. They probably wonder why this mad old chook is charging up the mountain.
There’s three kilometres left to the summit, and I’m not out of the trees yet. The path is rugged, rocky and steep, and I have to concentrate on where I’m putting my feet: a turned ankle up here would be no joke.
I’m seriously out of puff now, and my back is soaked in sweat under the rucksack, but I force myself to keep going. Punishing myself.
Above the tree line now. The breeze has picked up and shifted from mild northerly to blustery north-westerly. The cloud has burned off and the sky above is a pale blue, but to the west there are serried ranks of cumulus. Hmm, we could get some rain this afternoon, or even snow.
The land drops away to west and east, and the broad, domed summit looms ahead. My breath is coming in gasps and I’m feeling dizzy.
No wonder: I’ve just climbed over a kilometre into the sky. Five kilometres on the ground. In two hours’ walking.
This is mad. Stop and rest now.
I sit on a sun-warmed, flat boulder in the lee of a twisted snowgum, open my pack and tuck into bread and cheese. I’ve had nothing more than a couple of handfuls of trail mix all morning.
I check the hydropack. I’ve drunk more than expected – nearly a litre and a half. Half a litre left in the pack and an emergency ration of a half-litre bottle. There should be tank water at Bivouac Hut if I run out. Probably full of wrigglers.
It’s the most awe-inspiring view. As exhaustion fades into mere tiredness, I have energy enough to register it. Spur after spur, dark green, fading into the bluish mist.
Then, when my mind is rested, it starts to think.
Did I need to do this awful thing? Really?
Yes. For Niamh and for Ken, I did. One way or another, Toby’s just going to keep picking on that thread until our lives unravel.
Enough. Come on, old girl: onward and upward. Don’t let the lactic acid build up in your muscles. You don’t want to cramp up. Not here.
Those clouds to the west are getting closer and thicker.
I press on to the summit cairn. Seventeen hundred metres higher than where I started my walk. I look out over mountains like the backs of a vast herd of monstrous cattle, filling all the land to the horizon, dappled with the shadows of clouds that pass, giving them the illusion of movement. I am the highest creature with its feet on the Earth, between Antarctica, three thousand kilometres to the south, and Kosciuszko, a hundred to the east-northeast.
‘Awe-inspiring’ doesn’t do this place justice. We’re so hooked on superlatives in this gushing social media era, it seems our language has lost all facility for expressing true wonder.
‘Fuck me – what a VIEW!’ I yell.
Let it not be said that Megan Newell is not a poet.
I spend half an hour at the summit, resting and being amazed. It’s tempting to press on: I know that the best features are in the magnificent, broken country to the south and east: the rocky defile of Cairn Creek under louring Quartz Knob; Weston’s and Howman’s Falls.
I didn’t come prepared for an overnight stay, though, and I have just enough time to get down safely off the mountain. None for excursions.
There’s no sign of the three students, as I retrace my route, watching my step on the loose, shaly rocks of the ridge. Hopefully they changed their minds.
Maybe they looked at my red, sweaty face and skinny old arse charging by – and decided you have to be mental to come up here.
‘Got that out of your system?’ asks Ken, as we lie in bed.
I affirm that I have. In spades. My legs are going to be as stiff as hell, tomorrow.
‘Not surprised. Mind you, I’m sure it’s done you good … Been a tough weekend for you, hasn’t it love?’
Yes, that is indeed the case.
‘Still, it all went well, I thought, and I don’t know about you, but I’m quite glad to have caught up with old Toby,’ he continues. ‘Maybe not quite as much of a bastard as I remembered. Niamh seemed to like him, too.’
I murmur something non-committal.
He squeezes my thigh under the doona.
‘Ah well, just you and me again, and a nice, quiet house, eh?’
This is incontrovertibly so.
‘I know you’re knackered … but there’s good evidence, and I say this as a veterinary practitioner, that sex is good for sore muscles.’
‘As a veterinary practitioner?!’
Next Tuesday in The Devil’s Chord: The final chapter!
Title image ‘Snowgums’ an original photo of mine enhanced in Gemini AI.
Good choice Meg! One of my favourite hikes.
Fancy a walk? she asked.