(draft v 1.0)
CONTENT WARNING: coarse language and adult themes

DIRT. ROCKS. IRRITABLE SCRUB that lacerates and bites. The sun is high in the sky, its stare a hot weight on his head and shoulders. Cliffs loom above the treetops, caramelising in the heat. His pack slaps and jiggles against his spine. He thinks of camels, Khartoum and deserts. Walks on for a while with a military, grit-your-teeth stride, like a man on a forced march. He just wants it to be over. Wants to find out what happened, and go home.

There’s no discernible track, but ahead of him, Ellen pushes up the incline into the teeth of belligerent undergrowth. Old enough to be his mother, she moves quickly through the uncertain terrain.

He swats through the banksias. Saw-edged leaves lash him in the face and woody fingers gouge his arms. Ellen’s hat and the top of her pack float above the brush a little to his right. He barrels through a wall of heath in her general direction. A pain in his calf. He ignores it.

He follows hard in her wake before she disappears over the rise. His tongue is as thick as steak, and glued to the roof of his mouth.

Back down the slope, there’s a discordant crunch of gravel.

“Jason?”

Christ, what now?

He turns. Fiona is mired waist deep in vegetation further down the incline, face red and swollen with effort. Her pack rides high on her back, pushing her down.
“Go to your left,” he shouts.

She battles forwards, sunburnt arms swimming in front of her. From where he stands he can see down the front of her shirt. The pack straps squash her breasts together into a deep, soft-sided cleavage.

Fiona pauses, gulps in air. “When can… we… rest?”

She’s his brother’s widow, yet the glimpse of swelling flesh makes him want her.

“I’ll ask.”

He strikes back up the path. He’s promised Belinda he won’t sleep around again. And if he does she’ll have his balls in the family court faster than you can say divorce settlement. She’d squeeze him for the Mosman house, and most of their key investment properties too, leaving him with little more than the shopping centre out in dumpsville and his yacht. Anyway, it wouldn’t be worth it - Fiona would probably be a dead-fish lay.

From the top of the rise, he sees Ellen. She’s well ahead, striding along like a skin-and-bone messiah across a rock platform. Silent. Indefatigable. Pale legs freckled with age, and the skin too loose, poke out of her Bermuda shorts. Her pack is small, half the size of his, and she’s wearing a slouching, wide brimmed hat. An arm of shadow from the rocky mass of the Wundjara Pinti points a blunt elbow at her. The ridge they’re climbing rises in fitful cliffs and ledges towards the peak of Mount Gungurra, the highest point of the range. On his left, vegetation shinnies down a steep gully, and takes refuge in the shade of pinched ravines.

“Wait up!”

Ellen stops and looks back.

“Fiona needs a rest,” he tells her.

The old woman nods. “There’s a good place to stop about five minutes on.” She turns and keeps going before he can frame a reply.

I guess we’ll see you there, he thinks.

He waits for Fiona. Instinctively reaches to check the phone in his pocket - which is not there. Snaps a branch of hakea that claws his arm. Ellen disappears around the corner.

The heat makes his head thump like a subwoofer implanted behind his left ear. He wants air conditioning; the hum of traffic; and a cold beer. Five days off work and withdrawing from the company golf tournament. For this. Kicks a pebble from the path. The baked earth is hard-packed and embossed with ancient traces of the sea. He crushes a sandstone rock beneath his walking boots.

Oh, for fuck’s sake! He bends down and flicks at a gash in his new boot -- a pale chunk of suede like a bloodless wound. Four hundred dollars, and the first time he’s worn the damn things.

Above, the sky is so huge it absorbs his presence, like he doesn’t exist, except in his own mind. He’s unsettled by the silence ringing in his ears. Half a day of trekking through monotonous scrub, and the land as quiet as a grave. The breathless hike makes talking impractical, so he’s left wallowing in his own thoughts. Introspection is not something he’s comfortable with. He’d rather not think about himself, his life, or his ghosts.

But the damn ghosts won’t leave him alone. He sees memories of Sam lingering in the tepid shadow of boulders. Every crunching step reminds him of his failures and shortcomings as a brother. It’s why he is here. Chasing Sam’s ghost up a bloody mountain to atone for his stupidity and callousness.

Sam is dead. What difference will it make to him? Face it, you’re here for your own selfish need to know. To make sense of his death, so you can keep living. And somehow to make amends for fucking up. He could have helped, intervened, if he hadn’t been such a self-absorbed dickhead. But he didn’t know what was at stake. Just thought Sam was going through a thirty-something crisis.

He hears her before she struggles over the rise. Her face and neck are lobster-mottled with heat and exhaustion. Sweat glazes her skin, and her eyes have a swollen look.

“Ellen says we can rest in five,” he says, and sets off without her. Doesn’t want to linger near the weakness that pours off her like fumes. Sometimes he just wants to tell her to get her shit together. Sam is gone. She has to go on, and not mope on about him forever.

Nearly two years, and there’s still a deflatedness in the way she walks, a leprosy of determination. Yet here she is. He gives her credit for that.

His parents had told Fiona about the Gate. In the unobtrusive manner his mother had, Patty quietly suggested that it would be fair to ask her to come. Don agreed she should at least be given her the option of saying no. But she’d surprised them all.

“Don’t I have as much right as you to know what happened?” Fiona had said.

“And what do you think you’ll find if you come?” He asked her.

“What will you find?” She’d sounded angry then.

And he admits it would have been worse without her. He crunches along, knowing that he’s been unfair. She is, after all, family. As much as a prick he can be about most things, he knows it means something. Maybe too much. He’s here on this god-forsaken goat-track for family. To understand what went wrong, why Sam abandoned them all. Maybe it’s him and Fiona slogging up the path, but they’re walking for Don and Patty too.

Ahead the track dips. Ellen sits in a grove of tall white trees, maybe thirty feet tall, with long straight branches reaching skyward and banners of bark dangling towards the ground.

He sits heavily, and eases the pack from his shoulders. He can hear water, giggling and succulent, somewhere nearby. He gets up to explore the stream. It’s like he’s walking on air, without all that weight on his back. The rivulet is narrow and curls around moss and algae wrapped stones. Water lumps and bumps over brightly coloured pebbles and flows sluggishly around a shallow sand bar. The air smells green and wet. He walks out onto the waterlogged sand, sinks slightly, dashes water into his face, and drinks his fill.

The ghosts at his back are quiescent for a moment, lurking in the damp shadows.

He hears voices, the two women talking. Fiona’s breathy complaints and the old woman’s brief answers. A breeze chills the sweat clinging to his skin. A twist in his gut, and his head as suddenly buoyant as cloud, reminds him he needs to eat. He heads back to the clearing.

Fiona has her back to a tree, half lying, half sitting like she’ll never get up again. Her shirt is a stain of perspiration. Her legs are bent, and the unflattering shorts ride up. He glimpses a white silken crotch.

The old woman looks relaxed, like she hasn’t even broken a sweat. Her walking boots are scuffed and ingrained with dust. Had a hard life, like their owner, he thinks. She’s chewing on some oaty-muesli looking snack. He pulls a handful of plastic wrapped bars from a side pocket of his pack. He rips open a limp bar of chocolate. None of that cardboard health food for him, just full-fat sugar and cream softness.

“You right to go, lass?” Ellen asks Fiona.

Fiona pulls an apple out of her bag and nods. “Yeah, I’ll be right.”

“Good girl. There’s a lot of ground to cover. We have to go at a good pace if we’re going to reach the base of the Gate in two days time.”

He glances up at the mesh of trees that hides Mt Gungurra. Ever since that day, watching his mother in the mournful rain, the Gate has called to him. The shadow of it stretching over Patty’s goodbye to her youngest son, arms crossed over her breast, holding in the colourless haemorrhaging of sorrow. Don’s eyes like drought stricken skies. All that controlled grief over Sam’s betrayal ignited a simmering anger in Jason.

The Gate. He can hear it above the silence of sunburnt earth and the ringing monologue of cicadas. The dry smell of ancient stone is so close, he can almost touch it.