Old Magic(12)
‘It’s not far.’ Her persistence is manipulative. ‘C’mon, Jarrod. Give me a break. I want to make up for what happened this morning, with Jillian and the … you know,’ she shrugs. ‘Snakes.’
The incident with her grandmother shook me up more than that unusual storm in the lab. That at least is a foggy memory. I try to look unfazed. ‘Forget it.’
‘You’ll love this place. It’s enchanted.’
Enchanted! That does it. ‘Uh-uh.’
She realises instantly her mistake and scrunches up her nose. ‘No, I don’t mean … You know, in a magical sense,’ she corrects quickly. ‘Just pleasant, endearing.’
‘Hmm.’ I’m being obstinate, but I’ve had a gutful of this magic nonsense.
‘Look,’ she persists annoyingly. ‘This place is really special to me. And I bet you haven’t seen much of the mountain yet.’
She has me there as we only arrived a couple of days ago, and I’ve spent most of that time fixing the old place up to make it comfortable for Dad, easy for him to get around with his crutches. ‘So what?’
She takes my arm by the elbow. Her fingers are firm and warm. I look down into her face. She’s a fair bit shorter than me, at least a head length. Her blue-grey eyes reflect the sunlight as her face expands into that smile again. She tugs my arm, and without giving it any more thought, I follow her into the forest. ‘You’re dangerous.’
She laughs but doesn’t answer. And for the next twenty minutes neither of us says anything as we fight our way through a maze of thick hanging vines and half-rotted fallen trees that are now probably residences for goodness knows what forest animals. My mind flips through a mental list of the many different creatures that are probably right now hanging on to my shoes, inching their way up towards the first sign of exposed flesh – ticks, leeches, snakes!
Finally we get there, and I have to admit the serenity of the place is really breathtaking. There’s a shallow stream tumbling down a collection of haphazard boulders, the water so clear I can see every smoothly-shaped pebble beneath the surface. On the other side of the stream stretches a field of deep green bracken ferns, thousands of them, about knee-high to thigh, dancing to the musical notes of a very light breeze.
‘Well, what do you think?’ She’s standing beside me, gazing proudly across the crystalline stream as if this picturesque scene was all her own doing.
I pick up a small pebble and attempt to skip it. It sinks on the first hit. ‘Nice.’
She frowns, disappointed, but I’m fed up with being agreeable. She says, ‘Is that all you can say, just “nice”?’
I sit on a spilled log, start checking my shoes for leeches. ‘OK, very nice.’
She sits beside me and groans, apparently conceding this is the most she’ll get. ‘Sorry about Jillian going off like that. You probably won’t believe this, but she’s known around here for her extreme tolerance and calm under duress. Sometimes she might appear a little abstracted, but that’s just her way. She’s intelligent, loves nature, is a wonderful magi–’
Wisely, she doesn’t finish. ‘She raised me from a baby when my mother did a runner.’
She shrugs her shoulders as if her mother’s rejection doesn’t concern her any more. I don’t need to be psychic to see that it does. Jillian’s hysteria gradually begins easing into a distant part of my memory. ‘Hey, look, forget it. It was no big deal.’
We’re quiet for a minute, taking in the pleasant surroundings – water spilling over rocks, a gentle breeze playing tag with the ferns and vines and millions of eucalyptus leaves, an earthy smell of damp soil and moss. Kate is sitting beside me, her head angled, eyes gently closed, totally involved, relaxed with herself. Suddenly I envy her. This mountain is her home, has been probably all her life. This forest is her roots; and it’s obvious she loves it. It’s something I’ve never had the pleasure of enjoying – a place to call home, a group of friends to call mates. ‘Is it just you and your grandmother then?’ I wonder fleetingly if she will think I’m intruding.
She just shrugs. ‘Yeah, I don’t know who my father is. There was never a name.’
‘Hey, that’s rough. He could be anybody. Do you have anything to go on?’
She gets defensive. ‘Who says I wanna know?’
She glances away, but I can see her eyes are troubled. When she finally speaks again her voice is soft. ‘I know he was a camper, here in the forest. That’s how he met my mother. She used to come here, sit by the river and dream about living in a big city one day. She never liked the mountain.’