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.
Australia: November 1998 until December 2008.
“Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds” William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
“Love is…going back to something very old knit in the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.” Louise Erdrich, ‘The Antelope Wife’.
The ten intervening years defy eloquent retelling. And much is best left unsaid. A chaotic decade: indicated by reductive headings, or through memories as undisciplined, as the years were themselves. Like the place names on maps enticing us toward ‘Cape Adieu’ or ‘Mount Disappointment’, Loup and I were ready to risk déception. Not in the English version of romantic betrayal, although that of course was part of the hazard, but in the French meaning of disillusion or a grand disappointment. We would be lured by anything that, like the scatter of gleaming caravans clutching a crescent of white sand beside the sea of Esperance, could conjure up hope, or daring.
On the map of France, the villages of ‘Joyeuse’ and ‘Tristesse’ are separated by 401 kilometres. They follow roughly the Chemin de Compsostelle. In the end, it had been deceptively easy to journey from joy to sadness; and blindingly obvious that Loup was the only one who could bring me back. Or so I believed. Believed badly, like my obstinate belief in divinity. And like a repentant prodigal, I put Loup up on that pedestal of deity.
He liked to say, ‘Just call me Jesus.’
And I did not resist.
Some events can be described in detail along that ten-year path of believing. They have no more importance than other things, apart from the fact that I remember them well. And they remember me, reminding me of how lucky I am. They fall under three headings.
Tilia x vulgaris, Wild Lime .
Today is already yesterday. Seventeen years of yesterdays collide with the present. I crave for my grown-up daughters. Ironically, it is the first-town-on-the-map daughter who now inhabits that same distant place. As if the distance between Europe and Australia was not enough, we must now inhabit far-flung states.
I picture her twelve-week old baby; struggle to comprehend that he is vivid, imbued with exquisite design, about the size of a lime. His heart has now learned to beat. His fingers and toes have now learned to uncurl and reach out. His eyes have moved to claim their spellbinding dominance