Sandstone and Skin

"In the bush, your body stops pretending it belongs to you. The terrain decides where your feet go, the canopy decides what you see, and the people beside you decide how close is close enough."

The boot of my car held everything in the order I'd packed it that morning — camera bag on the left, dry bag with spare layers in the middle, boots and gaiters on the right. Rebecca called it my "kit ritual" when she was being affectionate and my "obsessive tendencies" when she wasn't. Both were accurate. I liked things where I could find them. Dad kept his garage the same way — every tool on its peg, every drawer labelled, a place for everything and everything knowing its place. Some people found that rigid. I found it calming. When the rest of life was uncertain, at least your gear was where you'd left it.

I pulled the boots out first. Proper bushwalking boots, leather uppers, Vibram soles that still had enough tread to grip wet rock without the overconfidence that came from new rubber. I sat on the edge of the boot with my legs hanging out and swapped my running shoes for the boots, lacing them with the automatic precision of a thousand previous outings — tight enough to hold the ankle, loose enough across the top to let the foot flex on uneven ground. The gaiters went on next, Velcro and buckle, sealing the gap between boot and calf where the bush would try to get in with every step.

The thermal layer was in the dry bag. I'd worn the running shirt for the drive because changing at the trailhead was easier than changing in a service station bathroom in Campbell Town, and because the shirt worked well enough as a base layer if I added the midweight fleece over the top. I pulled the fleece out and set it on the tailgate. Not yet. The walk in would generate enough heat that starting in too many layers meant stopping to strip them off twenty minutes later. Better to start cold and let the work warm you than start warm and overheat before you'd covered any ground.

The camera bag was the last thing. I checked it the way I always checked it — body, two lenses, spare batteries in the side pocket, memory cards in the zip pouch, lens cloth folded into the top compartment. The wide-angle was already mounted. I'd switch to the 50mm once we were inside, where the tighter framing would serve the spaces better, but for the approach through the bush the wide-angle captured the scale of the forest in ways that tighter lenses compressed into something less truthful. You needed the wide to feel the immensity. The way the canopy closed over you. The way the trees stood like columns in a building whose roof was made of leaves and wind.

I heard them before I saw them. Footsteps on the gravel track that emerged from the bush about thirty metres up the road — the particular sound of two people walking in rhythm, boots hitting compacted earth with the even tempo of people who'd been moving for a while and had settled into their natural pace. Then Lena's voice, mid-sentence, the words indistinct but the cadence recognisable — that slightly clipped delivery, each syllable given its full weight, the accent turning vowels into shapes that English hadn't been designed to hold.

They came through the tree line together. Lena first, half a step ahead the way she always was, as though the world moved slightly too slowly for her preference and she was compensating by staying fractionally in front of it. Dark hair pulled back from her face, strands escaping where the bush had caught them. A thermal top — charcoal, fitted close through the torso and arms, the kind of technical fabric that moved with the body rather than over it. Her face was flushed from exertion, colour high in her cheeks, breath visible in the cold air as small, rhythmic clouds that dissolved as quickly as they formed.

Mikael followed, a pace behind and slightly to her left. Taller than Lena by a head, broader through the shoulders, moving with that particular economy of effort that large men sometimes had when they'd learned to manage their size rather than simply occupy space with it. Where Lena's movement had a forward urgency, Mikael's was contained, measured, each step placed rather than taken. He wore a black compression top that sat against his chest and arms like a second skin — the kind of garment that had no opinion about modesty and existed purely to manage heat and moisture against working muscle. His forearms were bare despite the cold, the skin flushed pink from exertion, veins standing visible along the muscle in that way they did when the body was warm and the air wasn't.

"Duncan." Lena said it the way she said most things — as a statement rather than a greeting, an acknowledgment of fact rather than an expression of pleasure. She was already looking past me, assessing my gear on the tailgate, reading the arrangement with the same critical efficiency she brought to everything. "You brought the wide-angle."

"Mounted and ready."

"Good. You'll want it for the approach. The canopy is — " She paused, searching for the word, her mouth shaping and discarding options. "Cathedral," she said finally. "Like a cathedral, the way the light comes through."

Mikael had reached the car and was standing beside the Forester's open boot, drinking from a metal bottle. Water ran from the corner of his mouth and down his jaw, following the line of his neck into the collar of the compression top. He wiped it with the back of his hand without looking at what he was doing, his eyes on the tree line they'd just emerged from, already back in the bush mentally even though his body was still in the car park.

"Track is clear for the first kilometre," he said. Not to me specifically. Not to Lena. Just into the air between us, information released without a designated recipient. "After that it gets tight. There's a creek crossing about halfway that's running higher than I expected. Not dangerous, but your boots will get wet."

"How wet?" I asked.

"Ankle. Maybe mid-calf if you don't pick your line."

I looked at my gaiters. They'd handle ankle. Mid-calf was pushing it, but gaiters weren't waterproof past the seal, and wet socks in winter were a misery that compounded with every step. "I'll pick my line."

Mikael made a sound that might have been acknowledgment or amusement. With him it was hard to tell. His conversational range occupied a narrow band between factual and silent, with occasional excursions into dry humour so understated you sometimes didn't recognise it as humour until several minutes after it had passed.

Lena was at the Forester's boot now, pulling out a pack — a technical daypack, compact, the kind designed for fast movement rather than heavy loads. She swung it onto her back and adjusted the straps, pulling the waist belt snug across her hips, settling the load with a small bounce that shifted the weight onto the frame. The thermal top rode up with the movement, a strip of skin appearing above the waistline of her leggings — pale against the dark fabric, the muscle definition along her obliques catching the flat winter light before the pack settled and the top fell back into place.

I looked away. Not because I'd been looking — I hadn't, not deliberately, my eyes had just been in that part of the visual field when the movement happened — but because looking away was what you did when proximity and clothing and coincidence created a composition you hadn't intended to frame.

Lena didn't notice. Or didn't care. With her it was genuinely impossible to tell, and I'd stopped trying to distinguish between the two sometime around the fourth or fifth outing, when I'd realised that Lena operated without the self-consciousness that most people used as social insulation. She stood close because standing close was efficient. She touched you when she needed to communicate something physical — a direction, a warning, an adjustment — because touch was faster than words and more precise. She changed layers at the trailhead with the matter-of-fact practicality of someone who considered clothing a system to be managed rather than a boundary to be negotiated.

It had been confronting at first. Not in a bad way — not uncomfortable exactly, just unfamiliar. The social rules I'd grown up with — the Devonport rules, the Tasmanian rules, the unspoken agreements about personal space and eye contact and the appropriate distance between bodies that weren't intimate — didn't apply in Lena's world. She'd grown up somewhere where physicality was currency, where bodies were tools first and symbols second, and she moved through space accordingly. After a few outings I'd stopped noticing. Or stopped minding. The distinction between those two things had blurred and eventually dissolved, the way it did when you spent enough time with someone whose rules were different from yours — you didn't adopt their rules, exactly, but you stopped enforcing your own.

"Ready?" Lena asked, adjusting the last strap. She was looking at me directly now, her gaze level and assessing in that way she had — not aggressive, not challenging, just thorough. The kind of look that took in everything it landed on and filed it for future reference without telling you what conclusions it had reached.

"Nearly." I pulled the fleece over my head — the movement requiring me to peel the running shirt free where sweat had sealed it against my stomach, the cold air hitting the exposed skin with a sharpness that contracted everything it touched. Fleece on. Camera bag over one shoulder. The weight of it settling into the groove the strap had worn into the muscle over years of carrying it, familiar as a hand in a glove.

Mikael was already at the tree line. He'd moved without announcement — one moment he was drinking water by the Forester, the next he was twenty metres away, standing where the gravel met the undergrowth, waiting with the patient stillness of someone who could wait as long as the situation required without becoming restless. His pack was on, a compact black thing that sat tight against his back, and he'd added a beanie that covered his ears and the top of his forehead, leaving a band of face visible that was mostly jaw and cheekbone and those pale eyes that registered everything and volunteered nothing.

I joined him at the tree line. Lena fell in behind me — I felt her presence there before I saw it, the particular awareness of someone occupying the space behind your shoulder that wasn't quite sound and wasn't quite sight but was something the body recognised anyway. Proximity. Weight. The displacement of air that another person created simply by being close enough to matter to your nervous system.

"The site is about two and a half kilometres in," she said from behind me, her voice close enough that I could feel the warmth of her breath against the back of my neck where the fleece collar didn't quite reach. "Mikael found it three weeks ago. Old probation station outbuilding — sandstone, mostly intact, the roof is gone but the walls are standing. It's been off the heritage register since the eighties."

"Off the register?"

"Delisted. Budget cuts. They couldn't maintain everything so they triaged — kept the main sites, the ones tourists actually visit, and let the outlying buildings go. This one's been in the bush for forty years with nobody looking at it."

"Until you."

"Until me." There was something in her voice — not pride exactly, but satisfaction. The particular satisfaction of someone who'd found a thing that other people had lost and understood the value of what they were holding. "It's beautiful, Duncan. The sandstone has lichens growing across the face — yellows and oranges — and there's a doorway where the light comes through in the afternoon and hits the back wall at an angle that is —" She broke off. Shook her head. "You'll see. You'll see it and you'll know."

I believed her. Not because Lena was given to exaggeration — she wasn't, if anything she undersold — but because I'd heard that particular quality in her voice before, at other sites, and every time the reality had met or exceeded whatever she'd described. She had an eye. Not a photographer's eye — she didn't shoot, left that to me — but something adjacent to it. An eye for significance. For the thing in a landscape or a structure that made it worth crossing difficult ground to reach.

Mikael moved first. No signal, no word — just the transition from stillness to motion, stepping off the gravel onto the narrow track that disappeared into the undergrowth like a sentence that trailed off mid-thought. I followed, boot soles finding the ground through leaf litter and mud, the camera bag adjusting its weight against my shoulder as my body recalibrated to uneven terrain. Lena behind me, close enough that I could hear her breathing settle into the rhythm of walking — steady, controlled, the exhalations aligning with her footfalls in a pattern I'd learned to recognise over months of following and being followed through bush that required attention from every part of you.

The canopy closed over us within thirty metres. The light changed — dropped, thickened, lost its directness and became something filtered, scattered, arriving through layers of leaf and branch that broke the winter sky into fragments. Like looking at light through water. Like looking at the world through a lens that someone had smeared with something translucent, not obscuring the image but changing its quality fundamentally. Every colour deeper. Every shadow softer at the edges. The greens shifting from the bright, sun-fed palette of the roadside to something more saturated, more complex — the dark emerald of mature myrtle, the silver-green of sassafras undersides catching what light reached them, the black-green of moss on fallen timber that had been decomposing long enough to have become part of the floor rather than an obstacle on it.

The smell hit next. Wet earth and eucalyptus oil and the particular fungal sweetness of decomposing wood — a smell that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant but simply true, the smell of a system operating as intended, breaking down what was dead to feed what was growing. Dad would have understood it. The garage had its own version — oil and metal and the chemical bite of solvents, each smell a signal, each one telling you something about what was happening in the space if you knew how to read it. The bush smelled like work being done. Slow work. Patient work. The kind that didn't need supervision or schedules because it ran on processes older than anything humans had managed to build.

The track narrowed quickly. What had started as a discernible path — compacted earth, a gap in the undergrowth just wide enough for a single person — deteriorated into something you navigated by inference rather than visibility. Mikael moved through it without apparent effort, his body turning sideways to pass between tree trunks that had grown into the track's former width, his hands lifting branches with the casual familiarity of someone returning to a route he'd walked recently enough to remember where the obstacles were. He didn't look back. Didn't check whether we were following. The assumption of competence was a compliment he paid without knowing he was paying it.

I followed the gaps he created — stepping where he stepped, ducking where he ducked, the rhythm of it becoming automatic after the first hundred metres the way physical patterns did when you stopped thinking about them and let the body do what it already knew. My hands worked independently, pushing branches aside before they caught the camera bag, testing the stability of fallen logs before committing weight, maintaining the constant negotiation between forward progress and equipment protection that bush photography demanded.

Behind me, Lena moved with a different quality. Where Mikael created space and I followed it, Lena seemed to occupy space differently — not pushing through the bush but finding the places where it yielded, reading the undergrowth the way I read faces during interviews, identifying the paths of least resistance and flowing into them. I could hear her but I couldn't hear her struggling. No branch-snapping, no stumbling, no muttered profanity when the undergrowth grabbed at clothing or gear. Just the steady sound of boots on earth and the occasional rustle of fabric against foliage, rhythmic and controlled.

Every few minutes she'd close the gap between us. Not deliberately — or maybe deliberately, I couldn't tell — but the result was the same. I'd feel her presence compress the space behind me, the distance shrinking from a body-length to an arm's reach to something closer, until I could hear individual breaths and feel the heat of her exertion radiating into the cold air between us. Then the track would widen fractionally and the distance would re-establish itself, only to compress again when the bush tightened.

It was like walking with a tide. In and out. Close and not-close. The rhythm of it so consistent it stopped registering as unusual and became simply how we moved through the bush — Mikael leading, me in the middle, Lena behind me at a distance that fluctuated between professional and personal without ever quite declaring itself as either.

Twenty minutes in, the terrain tilted downward. The track — such as it was — descended through a gully where the canopy dropped lower and the undergrowth thickened to the point where movement required active negotiation with every step. Ferns rose to waist height, their fronds wet from overnight moisture that the winter sun hadn't reached, soaking through my running tights from the thigh down with a cold that felt personal, targeted, as though the bush had identified the gaps in my clothing and was exploiting them systematically.

Mikael stopped at the bottom. The creek he'd mentioned — wider than I'd expected, running fast over rounded stones, the water dark with tannin and leaf matter. Not deep, not dangerous, but enough to guarantee wet feet if you got the crossing wrong. He was already scanning the options, reading the water the way I read light — looking for the line, the sequence of stones and shallow stretches that would get a person across with the minimum amount of boot submersion.

"There," he said, pointing to a route that angled upstream — a chain of flat stones spaced at irregular intervals across the current, each one just wide enough for a boot if you placed it precisely. "Watch the third one. It moves."

He went first. Long legs, confident placement, weight centred over each foot before transferring to the next. He made it look simple, the way physically gifted people made everything look simple — the effort invisible, the competence so complete it erased the evidence of itself. Three steps, four, five, and he was across, standing on the far bank with water barely touching his boot soles, turning to watch us follow.

I went next. The first stone was solid — good purchase, the kind of river rock that had been sitting in place long enough to have settled into the streambed like a tooth in a jaw. Second stone, slightly angled but manageable. Third stone — the one Mikael had warned about — shifted under my weight, a small lateral movement that sent my balance sideways and made my arms flare instinctively, the camera bag swinging wide.

Mikael's hand was on my arm before I'd finished registering the slip. Not a grab — a stabilisation. His grip firm around my upper arm, fingers pressing through the fleece into the muscle beneath, the contact point precise and controlled. Not more force than needed. Just enough to counterbalance the shift, to hold me steady while my feet found their purchase on the moving stone. The grip lasted two seconds, maybe three, and in those seconds I was aware of the strength in his hand — the particular quality of a grip that could hold your weight without strain, that had held weight before and knew the mechanics of it.

"Third one," he said, as though reminding me of information I'd already received, which I had, which made the whole exchange feel less like a rescue and more like a footnote to an earlier conversation.

"Yeah," I said. "Got it."

He released my arm. The impression of his grip stayed — not pain, not pressure, just the residual awareness of contact, the way your skin remembered a handshake for a few minutes after the hand had gone. I crossed the remaining stones without incident and stepped onto the far bank, boots damp but not soaked, balance restored, the camera bag settling back against my hip.

Lena crossed behind me. The third stone caught her too — the same lateral shift, the same momentary loss of centre — and her hand found my shoulder.

Not my arm. My shoulder. Her fingers closing over the trapezius muscle through the fleece, the grip different from Mikael's — not steadying from the outside but anchoring from behind, using my body as a fixed point while she recalibrated her own balance. I felt her weight transfer through the contact — not much, not full body weight, just the fraction of it that the unstable stone couldn't support. The warmth of her hand through two layers of fabric. The adjustment of her fingers as she found her grip, tightening and then easing as her balance returned.

"Okay?" I asked.

"Mm." The sound was affirmative but distracted — her attention already on the next stone, the next placement, the contact with my shoulder maintained a beat longer than strictly necessary before she released it and completed the crossing.

She landed on the bank beside me. Close. Closer than the bank required, but the flat ground was narrow and the slope began immediately behind us, and two people standing on a strip of earth between a creek and a hill were going to be in each other's space whether they intended it or not. Her shoulder touched my arm. Her breathing was slightly elevated from the crossing — I could hear it, feel the expansion and contraction of her ribcage against my elbow through the layers between us. Warm air on my neck again, a brief exhalation that could have been relief or exertion or just the body doing what bodies did after a moment of physical uncertainty.

Mikael had already moved on. He was ten metres up the opposite slope, finding the track's continuation through undergrowth that looked impenetrable until you were standing in it and realised the gaps existed if you knew where to look. He didn't wait. Didn't look back at the two of us standing on the creek bank in our compressed proximity. Just kept moving, which was what Mikael did.

Lena stepped away first. A small adjustment — sideways, forward — that re-established the gap between us with the same absence of ceremony that had closed it. No acknowledgment. No awkwardness. Just the practical reality of bodies in space, reconfiguring as the space changed.

"The site is another kilometre," she said, already walking, her voice carrying the slight breathlessness of the crossing and the slope. "The bush gets thicker before it opens up. Stay close to me through the myrtle section — the fallen timber is unpredictable."

Stay close to me.

I followed her up the slope. The wet ferns soaked through the last dry section of my tights, cold fabric clinging to my quads and hamstrings with the insistent intimacy of something that had no intention of letting go. Mikael was a shape moving through green ahead of us. Lena was a presence at arm's length in front of me — the rhythm of her pack, the swing of her stride, the dark hair escaping its tie and catching on branches that she pushed aside and I caught before they swung back.

The bush thickened. True to her word, the myrtle closed in — ancient trees with trunks wider than my arm span, their branches interlocking overhead in a lattice so dense the sky disappeared entirely. The light dropped to something close to dusk. The temperature dropped with it. The undergrowth became a maze of fallen timber — logs in various stages of decay, some solid enough to walk on, others that would collapse under weight into soft, wet fibre that swallowed your boot to the ankle. You couldn't read them from the outside. You had to test each one, or you had to trust the person in front of you to test it for you.

Lena tested. I followed. When she stepped over a log, I stepped over it. When she detoured around a root system, I matched the detour. When she stopped — suddenly, completely, one hand going back to touch my chest in a gesture that said stop here, don't move forward — I stopped. Her palm flat against my sternum, fingers spread, the pressure light but definite. I could feel my own heartbeat pushing against her hand. Or maybe I was imagining that. The bush was dark enough and close enough that the boundary between sensation and interpretation had started to blur.

"Soft ground," she said, not removing her hand. "Mikael's finding the way around."

I looked past her. A section of forest floor that looked identical to every other section of forest floor — leaf litter, moss, the dark soil visible where something had disturbed the surface. But Lena and Mikael read terrain the way I read light, and if she said the ground was soft then the ground was soft, and stepping onto it would mean sinking into something you'd rather not sink into.

Her hand stayed on my chest. Not pressing. Not restraining. Just resting there, a point of contact that served a practical function — keeping me in place while the route ahead was being resolved — and also served as a reminder that in the bush, with these two, physical contact was just another form of communication. A vocabulary of touch that we'd developed over months of moving through spaces that were too loud with their own sounds for voices to always carry, too dark for gestures to always read, too narrow for distance to always exist between bodies that needed to coordinate.

I was aware of my breathing. Aware of her breathing. Aware of the way the two rhythms existed in the same small space without aligning — mine slower, deeper, hers quicker, lighter, the two patterns occupying the same air like instruments playing different parts of the same piece without either one adjusting to match the other.

Mikael's voice came from somewhere ahead and to the left. "This way. Watch your step — there's a drop."

Lena's hand lifted from my chest. The absence of it registered the way the absence of sound registered after a sudden noise — not as silence but as the awareness of something that had been there and wasn't anymore. She moved forward. I followed. The myrtle pressed in from every side, branches dragging across my shoulders and back, the camera bag catching on something I couldn't see and pulling me off balance until I freed it with a twist that brought my hip into contact with a trunk so close I hadn't registered it as a separate object from the darkness around it.

The bush was consuming us. That was the only word for it. Not hostile — not deliberate — but absolute in the way it filled every available space, leaving nothing unclaimed. You moved through it by negotiation, by finding the gaps it permitted, by accepting that your body was an intrusion it tolerated rather than a presence it welcomed.

Ahead, Mikael had stopped. He was standing at what appeared to be the edge of something — a drop, as promised, though in the filtered light it was hard to tell how far the ground fell away. He was looking down at whatever was below with an expression I couldn't read from this distance — or from any distance, really, Mikael's face being a surface that reflected light without revealing what was underneath it.

Lena reached him first. She stepped up beside him and looked down, and I watched her posture change. A small thing — the straightening of her spine, the lift of her chin, a shift in her centre of gravity that moved her from "walking" to "arriving." The transition from journey to destination, visible in the body before the mouth could name it.

"There," she said, turning back to me. Her face had that look — the one I'd seen before at other sites, the one that told me the photographs would be worth whatever the bush had charged us in wet boots and scratched forearms and mud-caked everything. Satisfaction and invitation combined. "Come and see."

I stepped up to the edge between them — Mikael on my left, Lena on my right, the three of us standing on a lip of exposed rock where the forest floor dropped away into a shallow depression ringed by myrtle and oversized man ferns. Below us, half-swallowed by undergrowth but unmistakably present, unmistakably real, unmistakably worth every step of the walk in —

Sandstone walls. Golden, even in the flat winter light. Lichens mapping the surface in yellows and oranges that blazed against the stone like something burning in slow motion. A doorway, dark and open, framing a rectangle of interior shadow. The remnants of a roofline where the beams had given way to sky but the walls still held, still stood, still maintained the shape of the room they'd been built to define a hundred and seventy years ago by hands that understood stone and weight and the particular Tasmanian sandstone that held cold like memory and turned to gold when the light found it.

Lena's hand was on my arm. Not steadying. Not guiding. Just there — her fingers resting against my forearm below the rolled sleeve of my fleece where the skin was bare and cold and suddenly very aware of the warmth of her touch. She felt me see it. The building. The light. The thing she'd brought me here to find.

"I told you," she said.