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gestures. But then when we had actually played it out he never gave me the prompts I’d rehearsed.
    I’m in limbo, without a script. Spastic with panic, adlibbing and it’s all wrong – nothing cool about it. Instead I seem desperate, sad, shallow and slow in the head.
    I’m reliving it over and over – the low zapping like a cattle prod and the dull numbness dragging like gravity boots. The worst part is when I think of all the things I could have said and done in place of the awful things I actually said, and then a new movie scrolls across my brain and I’m clinging to the hope, like a lowered cable in the dank mine-shaft of my humiliation, that I’ll have the opportunity to try again.
    Just before I’d left he’d said that thing about rescuing me. I thought he’d been flirting, but now I’ve been thinking about it too much, how could I be sure that I wasn’t replaying it in my head the way I wanted it to happen?
    Soon the paddocks were behind us and we coiled along a narrow road, alongside the river. The vegetation rose up beside the road and enclosed us in a moist, mineral smell like green tea.
    Wendy jumped out and slid open the door for me. She handed me a duffel bag of supplies and pointed me towards a path snaking through the trees towards the river. I couldn’t see it, but underneath the bus engine’s idling I could hear the white noise of water rushing over stone.
    ‘Enjoy yourself, Mackenzie,’ she said, with a kindly expression. They all wear it. I’d seen it in art class. A Botticelli Madonna.
    ‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said, breathing in the earthy coolness. The craggy trees arched over me in slants and angles. There was a log across the path that looked as though it had been placed there to stop vehicles.
    Wendy stood behind me, waiting, and I suddenly felt claustrophobic and panicky. I was Gretel, abandoned in the woods, and out there were witches, wolves and giants, all hungry, and I had no defence against them but my wits. I’ve read all the stories. I don’t have those skills. I have never been any good at talking my way out of a situation.
    What would they think of me if I changed my mind? Could I go back to the camp now and admit I was scared by fairytales?
    ‘See ya,’ I mumbled. Wendy swung back into the cab.
    The path was soft and my passage along it silent because of a carpet of casuarina spines, damp leaves and twigs. At the end there was a grassy clearing about fifteen metres wide, and then a skirt of smooth, round rocks at the water’s edge.
    The river was narrow in front of the campsite – about ten metres across. Rocks and boulders jutted out of the water in haphazard lines and heaps, steering the water in lazy eddies, and then dropping away over shallow, choppy rapids into a pool below.
    Further upstream the river spread into a deep pool. The water surface looked turquoise, but from the edge I could see the brown and grey stones at the bottom and tiny fish slipping between them. Slanting up from an arc of sand there was a large grey rock platform, patchy with lichen and pocked with hollows.
    A crusty grill and dented billycan propped each other up like a pair of old drunks. Next to a circle of blackened rocks for a fireplace there was a tent in a bag. A square of flat dirt facing the river was obviously the place for the tent. I considered pitching the tent somewhere else just to be different, but there was no one to see, so I rolled out the canvas in the assigned flat spot.
    They’d given me a yellow plastic flag on a stick and a metal stand with three feet – a tripod. It was supposed to remain outside the tent, slightly to the right of the opening at all times, and I’d been told to drop the flag into it if I should require attention. That’s how they phrased it: ‘should you require attention.’ They didn’t use words like ‘distress’, ‘danger’, or even ‘help’. It might have put people off.
    Several larger logs had been cut up for me. They don’t