First the sound, loud as gunshot.
Sun flared between trees and she was blinded.
Cockatoos screeched like sirens. Something had fallen. Someone was hurt.
Sound’s shrapnel lodged in her body.
A fair but heavy payment.
For what she saw when the world broke open.
28th February, 9.13 am
Belly-down, cheek jammed against dirt, trunks horizontal, the track’s edge a disorienting vertical. She had opened her eyes to the world on its side. There was grit in her mouth; the air was blurry with dust that had plumed in the impact.
She’d been struck from behind. Someone was holding her down with a knee on her spine. But except for Louis, sniffing anxiously near her face, she was alone. She scanned herself frantically. Am I hurt? Can I move? What just happened?
It took her several seconds to piece it together: the cannon-fire boom (she’d thought it was thunder), the blow to her shoulders, the slam of her body against the earth. Now the iron weight across her back.
Her breath raced with shock, with the sudden urge to sob—the blow had been so violent, so angry. Stop it! she told herself. It’s not an attack. It’s an accident. A fallen branch.
She did not feel pain, at least not yet, just the smarting on her skin where the limb had hit her and an odd loosening in her lower skeleton, a sensation that her body was soaking into the ground.
Louis whimpered, confused by this pause and his mistress’s odd position. Nellika reached up with her left hand (her right was wedged tightly under her body) and stroked his chest as he panted furiously. From this vantage she could see the ridges on the roof of his mouth and the floppy black labial tissue that hung around it. It’s okay, she murmured as he dipped his snout to lick her cheek. We won’t be here long.
She couldn’t tell what her injuries might be, or if she was even injured at all (although now she was becoming aware of a deep ache in her spine). It could just be shock that held her legs so inert. She was pinned; she knew that. The limb lay across her middle back, its enormous heft pressing her chest into the ground. The pressure was far greater on her right shoulder, and there was no way she could free that arm, already numb beneath her.
Her left arm she could move easily. She used it to brace herself as she slowly turned her head to face the right, which she could also do without pain. Ah! There were her keys, about a metre away, glinting in the leaf litter, but her phone—stupid, stupid woman— remained on the passenger seat of her car. She never took it into the forest. Hated its intrusion. What an idiot she was.
She had no water, of course; she hadn’t planned to be long. She would be okay for a few hours until she was found, but what about Louis? He was a lab. He drank litres and litres and was already panting heavily. And what about her students? If she got free in time she might still make it to class this afternoon.
Only after these spinning thoughts, did Nellika begin to understand that she was in agony so profound that she was not breathing. The branch held her by the shoulder blades but the greatest pain was in her lower spine and pelvis. It must have landed on her hips then shunted forward after the first impact.
She took tiny, shallow gasps of air. The limb seemed to drop a little further every time she exhaled, so that it was just slightly more difficult to take the next breath.
Think, Nellika. Think.
Though this wasn’t one of the tourist tracks, she often saw locals here. Still, it might be an hour before anyone passed. There was no other choice; she had to at least try to pull herself out from under this branch. She took a few seconds to prepare, then braced her left palm on the ground beside her in readiness to drag her torso forward.
Three.
Two.
One.
The scream was like no noise she had ever heard herself make. The sound of someone tearing apart. But it was not the pain that stopped her. It was simply that the bough was stronger. It would not let her go.
Her thrashing heart stole her breath. I’m drowning. Stay calm! She shut her eyes and forced herself to inhale slowly. She could not allow the panic. She needed to stay clear.
Her children were at school. Sean was at work. On Wednesdays he picked the kids up from the bus stop because Nellika needed to leave by 3 pm to make her class. No one would expect her home before nine tonight. No one would even notice she was missing until five o’clock, when the students turned up for class and just assumed they’d missed an email, too pleased to have an unexpected night off to bother notifying anyone.
She noticed a dampness, a thickness, between her legs, the buzzing of flies, and realised her bowels had released as the tree struck her. Her bladder also. She could smell it now, rich and human, and wondered how she would bear the humiliation when she was found.
And she would be found.
She did not doubt that.
It was just after 9 am. There would be no early morning walkers now, but there would surely be trail runners, dog walkers, some of those teenagers who lit the fires and left the empty beer bottles that often littered the path’s edge.
Someone would come. She was certain of it.
She just had to stay steady and wait.
Earlier
It had been a difficult morning.
Derailed by the rifle-fire rudeness that only a fifteen-year-old asked to pick up a wet towel could dispense.
You’re not doing anything, Mum. You do it.
Nellika’s breath caught. She had already done two loads of washing and cleaned up yet another of Louis’s accidents this morning, while her children lingered over poached eggs (Can you make them? Yours are so much better, Mum) and basketball highlights.
Right now, Lily, or I won’t drive you to the station.
Fine. I’ll stay home. I’ve got plenty of homework anyway.
So why did you stay up till midnight watching make-up tutorials?
Her gorgeous daughter looked up from the floor, where she was sitting cross-legged in front of a full-length mirror, applying black eyeliner. You’re just cranky because I didn’t want to watch your boring documentary.
It was true. She had been disappointed last night. She had been waiting for weeks for a quiet evening to show her daughter the film about one of her favourite artists, a painter and printmaker, who had lived and worked on the same sandstone foreshores where Nellika had grown up. But Lily, who normally loved art, had fidgeted and drifted away after ten minutes.
I thought you were mature enough to appreciate that, but clearly I was wrong.
A wound flickered in her daughter’s face. You’re a horrible person, Mum.
Just pick up the towel.
Lily half-closed one eye to apply her liner. If I have time.
Just pick up the fucking towel, you rude brat!
And there it was. Her inevitable leap from the moral high ground into the dark swamp that ran around it, where the simple matter of the towel was lost to something far uglier.
Great parenting, Mum. Did you learn that on one of your stupid courses?
She hid in the laundry to weep. Why could she never float above the formulaic sitcom horrors of life with adolescent children? After all, her two young teenagers were not smoking drugs or failing school or harming themselves or anyone else. Their sins were stock standard and entirely predictable: disrespect, dismissal, disdain. And yet how quickly she found herself lashing out as if under real threat, like a mistreated dog that bit out of fear.
She blew her nose on a pair of her underpants from the laundry basket.
Somehow there was something threatening in the kids’ reluctance to unload the dishwasher, walk the dogs, cook a meal. She felt petty, but these small tasks choked her. She knew how easily they accrued into a lost hour, a lost day. How easily they erased her.
This is an extract from Ilka Tampke’s How to Love the World (Simon & Schuster), available now at your local independent bookseller.
