As we filled in our room card, the waiter informed us that if we wanted to eat in the restaurant we’d have to order within the next twenty minutes.
We were back there in ten.
As we showered — to save time we showered together — and set a new world record for changing into fresh clothes, I was kicking myself because Punga Cove was so nice. Swimming pools, poolside bars, an obviously gourmet-standard restaurant, a room the size of a suite with its own door out on to a large private terrace shaded by a grove of palm trees and equipped with rattan furniture — all this and we only had one stupid night to enjoy it.
The issue of money came to mind again as I pulled my new, dizzyingly expensive, ultra-light but very warm Capilene shirt — which I had bought at Jyrki’s suggestion — over my damp skin.
I was in the PR business after all; I was well aware of the power that came with reputation and information.
In the end it hadn’t been all that difficult to get Antti-Pekka, the mid-level boss of the oil company, into a situation towards the end of a shared sauna evening in which he, after responding to my copious hints, went a bit too far with his chubby, greedy paws. I had been right in imagining that a drunken boss, thinking he was about to get lucky, would forget even the most elementary rules of caution. And it was no accident eithier that the changing-room we’d slunk away to was precisely the one in which Riitta had left her handbag, and I knew she couldn’t survive for more than fifteen minutes without it. And so I got an eyewitness, and one from whose perspective the incident was clear cut.
I sobbed and trembled and talked about attempted rape, but when Riitta suggested I should press charges I seamlessly began talking about sexual harassment and indicated in a roundabout way that, as a developing professional in the field, I knew all too well that this wouldn’t do the octane boys’ public image any favours whatsoever. However, harassment was such a serious crime against humanity in general — and women in particular — that it would be wrong, so wrong, to hush it up.
Erkki shouted, Riitta anxiously tried to be understanding, Antti-Pekka was justifiably ice-cold and sarcastic, and it didn’t take long for the oil sheikhs to dig ten thousands euros out of their bottomless pockets.
But at least I hadn’t had to cause Dad the disappointment of resigning from the job he’d done so much to set up. After this little incident, the oil company said it couldn’t foresee continued cooperation with our PR company and neither could the PR company with me.
For a moment I wondered whether I could have appealed against my dismissal, but that might have created too much of a situation.
I didn’t answer any of Dad’s telephone calls. I didn’t answer when the doorbell rang.
He must have heard. And perhaps now he realized I could get by, using all of my own finest assets, in the hard-edged world of business.
But once we got to the restaurant and I had ordered my first bottle of lemon-flavoured Monteith’s Radler, a lager that soon became the vin ordinaire of our New Zealand trip, lamb and roast vegetables with salad and parmesan risotto, I looked at Jyrki across the table (and, yes, at the end of the table there was a candle, and the panorama of fiords behind the window had turned a dark blue), and my heart melted like butter and sank down into my stomach.
Jyrki’s eyes were locked on mine.
He reached his large angular hand across the table and placed it over the back of mine, and I felt almost dizzy.
‘It’ll soon be time to hit the sack.’
The words said one thing and his eyes another.
The mixture of lust and endorphin-induced euphoria brimmed and bubbled inside me so much that my hand was quivering beneath his, and I sensed that he could sense it.
You can fit a decent-sized one in your jacket pocket. Something bigger than a fist will make a nice dent when it hits the roof or the boot lid. The best is when it falls straight on the windscreen or bounces off the bonnet and back against the windscreen. Ante says he got a bounce once, and the car swerved into the lane of oncoming traffic and the brakes on the bus screeched as it tried to avoid the car, but there wasn’t nothing about it in the paper.
There they are, in a line down below. Like quick, scurrying beetles.
Ante says they never put this sort of thing in the paper. Like they don’t run stories about people that jump off observation towers. You’d just get more people wanting to have ago.
He says he saw the what-the-fuck look on the driver’s face as the glass shattered in front of him. I doubt it. You can’t see people’s expressions at that height or speed. Then there’s all them shards in the way and all.
SOUTH COAST TRACK, TASMANIA
Surprise Bay
Tuesday, March 2007
Jyrki
I wake up to find her prodding me. Her nervous whisper cuts the sticky air like a saw.
It’s impenetrably dark. The rush of the waves forms a thick sonic backdrop to the night.
Then I hear it, too.
A thud. A thump, the sound of something being dragged, then another thump.
Something is moving the dishes in the vestibule of the tent.
We haven’t bothered washing them up, just wiped them with a scrap of tissue paper. They are probably still giving off the strong smell of pumpkin soup. The bag of food is in my rucksack, tied securely behind an array of clips and drawstrings. Nothing should be able to get into that.
I undo the zip on the sleeping-bag. The sounds stop immediately. Someone or something freezes on the spot and listens.
The night air is biting. I reach my hand into the corner pocket inside the tent. The headlamp case is right there. I kneel down and open the case. I fumble with it to make sure it’s the right way round, then place it on my head and switch it on.
The brightness of the LED light feels almost like a slap in the face.
I open up the zips straight away, with both hands, at both sides, the mosquito net, the door.
The pot and the plates are no longer in the vestibule. One of the cups is lying on its side beside our boots and gas cylinder.
Still on my knees, I unzip the vestibule door and shine the beam of light emanating from my forehead out into the thick Tasmanian night. I let out a frightening shout, allowing a mixture of roaring and bellowing to pour out of my throat.
I hear two frenzied rustling sounds, then swooshing, pattering. Footsteps, paws, a tail — or what?
Another snap, further off. Then silence.
The roar of the waves mixes with the rush of blood in my ears.
I crawl outside and stand upright. The LED cuts a slice out of the darkness, leaving everything outside its beam utterly impenetrable. I switch it off. After a moment I begin to make out the swaying boughs of the trees against the slightly lighter sky. I see a couple of stars between the frenzied churning clouds. A dim glow can be seen behind the trees; the moon has risen but is hidden behind the clouds.
I see a lighter patch on the ground. The plastic bag with the dishes. The pot hadn’t been dragged very far; it must have been too heavy. I flick the headlamp back on. Yes, the other cup and both plates are lying on the ground, one of them upside down. I pick up the dishes and put them back in the plastic bag. At least our multipurpose spoon-cum-forks are still at the bottom of the bag.
The beam of light shines in her face as I crawl back into the tent. She turns away, squinting, and raises her hand up to cover her face. I throw the bag of dishes into the corner.
‘Some possum must have taken too many steroids,' I tell her.
And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
NEW ZEALAND
Kepler Track
February 2007
Heidi
The subtropical forest at the start of Kepler Track was something incredible. It was full of twittering, buzzing and the ch
eeping of birds. It wouldn’t have taken long to come up with several dozen chirpy new ringtones.
Every now and then, great panoramas looking out towards Lake Te Anau opened up through the trees, all the more awe-inspiring the higher we climbed, and it was then that I began to understand Jyrki properly. Hiking itself isn’t the prize; this is the prize, these views that you can look at from places you can reach only on foot.
Rain started falling in a thin drizzle, and we stopped at the resting place to change our clothes. A brown bird the size of a chicken came over straight away to greet us. It didn’t seem at all scared. Jyrki told me it was a weka, the New Zealand equivalent of the Siberian jay. It was a very social bird that waited for hikers to drop something nice to eat. I broke it off a few morsels of puffed rice from the top of my energy bar.
Jyrki
I had said my quiet goodbyes to hotels, hostels, restaurants and tiled bathrooms.
Back at Queen Charlotte you would have no trouble finding some sort of accommodation for the night. And after thirty sweaty kilometres what was wrong with being able to have a shower then retire to the terrace restaurant for a bowl of fruits-de-mer soup and some garlic bread? Now at Kepler it was time to move on to some tougher challenges. Or so I thought.
I chose Kepler Track on the South Island, one of the so-called Great Walks. It was great for a number of reasons.
For a start, according to the guidebooks it wasn’t as outrageously popular as Milford or Abel Tasman. You could ramble along Kepler Track without booking months in advance, although needless to say we had done so anyway. What’s more, you could reach the start of the track from the town of Te Anau on foot — after all, what was the point of hiking if you had to rent a car or take a taxi to get you to the start of the track?
In addition, Te Anau seemed like a much smaller, more pleasant base for our hike than places like Queenstown which were crammed with tourists.
At Te Anau we took care of our registration. We were given hut tickets and were told that they were binding: you had to spend the night in the cabins you had reserved. No improvisation. Not because of the weather, not for health reasons, under no circumstances whatsoever. Arrive at the wrong cabin at the wrong time and you’d get slapped with a fine on the spot.
It makes the mind boggle.
It was less than an hour’s walk from Te Anau to the start of Kepler Track. I almost burst out laughing when I heard that there was — wait for it — a shuttle service from the town to the start of the track. A few poxy kilometres. Taking a minibus just to be able to walk.
According to the instruction leaflets, the first leg should take about six hours. By half past one we’d seen a sign saying it was another forty-five minutes’ walk to the Luxmoor cabin.
I almost lost my temper. We’d completed the leg in about half the estimated time, yet we had no choice but to stop here for the night. Given that these cabins cost the same as a fairly decent hotel, you would think we would at least be given the chance to choose our own prison.
Still, a thousand metres above sea level, when the drizzle started to turn to sleet, the idea of being able to shelter under a proper roof didn’t feel so bad, but when I saw the cabin from the inside the urge to yell welled up yet again.
The place was filled with kitchen surfaces holding dozens of gas hobs. Just turn the knob and start cooking. There was a shower and an indoor toilet.
A coal fireplace.
If it hadn’t been sleeting outside, and if all this hadn’t already been paid for, I would have turned around and walked right back to Te Anau.
Conveniences like this are only convenient if you actually want them.
Inside the cabin an Israeli guy was boiling up some pasta. Of all the equipment in the world, this first-rate amateur was carrying a three-litre aluminium pot, the kind you use in your own kitchen. And he was wearing a long-sleeved white cotton shirt.
The most impractical colour and fabric you could possibly imagine. Once it gets wet it loses any advantageous qualities it ever had. The shirt would take a lifetime to dry.
What were these people doing? Or what did they think they were doing?
It’s usually baked beans or fish fingers or yoghurt or something like that. Sometimes there’s a slice of some fancy ham or a jar of something that’s obviously cost a bit. A length of liver sausage or something else soft can do the trick in the toilets in a department store or café; or you can drop an egg down a hole, somewhere it’s impossible to get it out, and hope it cracks. But mostly I just look at ’em. Imagining what they would’ve done with this or that food.
People are always turning their backs on their shopping bags. When they’re packing another bag or waiting for the bus or looking through the bus window waiting to get off.
Five fingers and Bob’s your uncle.
If there’s a driver’s licence or some other photo ID in the wallet; I check to see what someone that buys tinned pineapple or granary toast actually looks like. What kind of kids they’ve got. Gormless idiots mostly. And I take the money, too.
If there’s something halfway decent in the bags, like cake or chocolate, I might even eat it.
Once I found a pair of expensive leather gloves; they’d just been bought, receipt still attached and everything. Too small for me, and I could’ve swapped them with that receipt for ones that fitted better. But if I need leather gloves, I tell the old man my hands are cold, and before you know it I’ve got three pairs, and one of them’ll probably have fucking mink lining.
You need to call him Dad. Works every time. Just start off with ‘Hi Dad.’ Honest, that word’s like magic; it’s hard not to laugh when you see it in action. After that it’s easy to tell him that such-and-such a policeman was a sadistic fucker, or the woman in the shop was a paranoid menopausal bitch. You need to look at him with your head tilted a bit to the side, with the left eye slightly forwards. Don’t smile too much, or he’ll say there’s nothing funny about it. Then again, if you’re too serious he’ll think you’re worried or afraid. When he’s having a rant, you need to look at his lips and sometimes his eyes and nod and try to kill time.
I left the whole fucking lot in the foyer at the cinema.
Kenu always tries to leave the bags at the station or in the bank or some place where people notice an unattended bag pronto. Said he’d once watched from the sidelines while a police bomb squad crawled up to a black leather bag with pincers in their hands, only to find nothing but a sack of potatoes and a porno mag.
TASMANIA
Surprise Bay to Deadman’s Bay
Wednesday, March 2007
Heidi
A few hours after leaving Surprise Bay we come to a fork in the road leading to Osmiridium Beach.
‘Some idiots try to divide the leg in two by spending the night over there,’ Jyrki says, pointing his hiking pole down towards the beach. The spot is almost an hour’s walk away.
Although I can hardly deny that this would be enough for one day, thank you very much, I realize that setting up camp and killing the hours until it’s time to go to bed would bore us both to death. It feels almost macho to continue on our way without giving the matter a second thought.
Naturally everyone who embarks on one of these hikes has to bid farewell to all normal ways of keeping themselves entertained. Of course you can’t force an adult to give up their mp3 player, a gadget that weighs only a few grams, but the chuckle of disdain that Jyrki can give in just the right way when he sees something he doesn’t approve of is enough to make you think twice.
Though the beach extends as far as the eye can see, swimming isn’t recommended here because there are very strong currents in the water. That said, I wouldn’t want to go swimming if I couldn’t have a fresh-water shower afterwards. Anyone who’s ever swum at the seaside and got dressed without a shower knows what it means to feel stickier than sticky; your hair feels as though you’ve used syrup instead of conditioner.
It’s occurred to me here for the first ti
me that, more often than not, people tend to eat and drink simply as a way of passing time. We have a coffee and a slice of cake because there’s nothing else to do. We sit having a beer. We go for a kebab. Out here, in these conditions, you eat to give yourself energy, and there’s absolutely nothing extra to nibble on.
Ergo, there is nothing to do.
Back in New Zealand I still carried a book with me. Almost every backpackers’ hostel had a bookshelf where people could leave the books they’d read and pick up something new. I chose the smallest and thinnest paperback I could find: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I enjoy reading, but I didn’t know anything about this book. It sounded promisingly like a horror story. It wasn’t. Or rather, yes, it was.
I read it four times. Maybe five.
But now I have nothing to read. There’s no room for being a hero when it comes to the weight of your rucksack, or so I’ve heard. The best way to kill time is simply to march onwards, especially while the terrain is bearable. When we cross a pair of logs across Tyler’s Creek, the stream from which people collect drinking water once they get down to Osmiridium Beach, Jyrki stops to examine the water.