In the days when people were still coming up to the Blue Mountains, the Carrington was a lively place. Katoomba was the hub for wealthy day trippers, a watering hole for their ‘country set’ up from Sydney. It was where Amy Johnson gathered her entourage when she touched down for a leg of her all-states tour after that implausible flight she’d made hopping across the Empire from England. That was in ‘31, and neither the façade nor the grande dame interior had changed much even since those blithe, unfettered days. If one listened intently, one could still hear the tinkling of crystal glass; champagne bowls and chandeliers; the murmur of gay young voices on the dance floor...and of course the crash of the odd silken screen as some intoxicated debutante lost her moorings.

I was there last in the years immediately after the war. Tourism was almost dead by that point, the heart gone out of it, and the tea dances already an echo in the empty palm courts. There wasn’t the money around, and even the intangible blue mist suspended about the dark swathes of gum trees on the cliffs and valleys, once ethereal, seemed now to be a hangover from all the yesterdays of a world with an almighty headache. Yet the Carrington plodded on forever.

On my last return, after the start of the Snowy River Scheme in ‘49, I stood at Echo Point one sultry afternoon in December, measuring myself, as I often did, against the immensity of the view. Its mesmerising carpet of eucalyptus and sassafras rolling out to an edge of pure tourmaline, then melting into cloud.

That day something made the panorama seem stark, an insubstantial world’s edge where reality itself resigned to disappearance. For some reason it seemed to me to contain an overwhelming sense of fear about the edge of everything. I felt unaccountably like ancient mariners must have felt approaching the uncharted.

That vista was one I had absorbed so many times in simpler years, usually with a young-thing on my arm. Often in the pressing dusk, and always in a swim of gins and desiccant ‘Manhattans’; but whatever state one was in it made a worthy pilgrimage. We all felt that about the place. Our group had made pacts at various times to return year on year, but they were never kept. Made in the hope, certainly, of losing ourselves once again in it’s curiously enerving poise, but it was never to be... these were, in actuality, things we could never really revisit. Perhaps its strange quality was something to do with its being forever half-way between the metropolis and jungle. Too raw in its essence, and yet not far away enough from unremarkable realities.

Such places are, however, hallowed for their elemental being, their absence of fixity; the impression of being nowhere and in the midst of nothingness. They lack any perpective on scale, distilling just the sense of the vast unbridled world stretching out beneath you, and the feeling that you might want to throw yourself off, in the hope of soaring.

As I stood that night alone, those old sensations returned, yet they came with a new distance. So much so, that I could feel for the first time in many years that child I once was, shuddering within me, gathering his tears. It was a welling emptiness of something lost.

At the very lip of the chasm, out from the observation balcony, I rested my tightening hands on the cold steel rails. I shouted into the still haze. Briefly breaking the peace of the place, trying to speak my heart, but only till my voice returned, fading as it repeated itself, somehow static and insignificant. The words that came were familiar enough...

‘Laura...Laura...Laura...’

From behind me suddenly there came a voice. Although it was utterly surprising, since I thought I had been completely alone, it did not startle me. It was so benign and familiar in its tone, and being female seemed to overlap so easily with my half-dreaming state.

‘Hello, old chum. I thought I might find you up here. ’

Before I turned round to smile in its direction I knew it was Jane. The ‘hail fellow, well met’ was how she had come to be with me. Always very much ‘one of the boys’ now, in my company. She had left behind the tenderness we’d once had and all our passions had mellowed into an easy friendship.

‘Still looking to find her out there?’

She knew well all my old sores, the ones that never went away, those which niggle in a man’s soul till only some entirely new attachment might sweep them aside in a flash-flood of hopes. Laura had given me those once, but today, older and just a fraction wiser, I was less expectant of any new experience. Jane had come before and Jane came after, Jane had stayed around and become my fixed point. She and Laura had got on well, even when the fire was still alight for Jane and I.

‘Oh, Harry, Harry, you are such a silly fool.’

‘It’s not what you think. I was just turning over some old memories. Laura is the last thing on my mind these days.’

I had turned forty four just three weeks before and the ache of being past the peak had finally set in. The ebullient long climb of youth, that started after Knox College and went on, unremarkable yet adamantine through my thirties, was over. The view from the top had been somewhere after Laura and I had finally made our excuses and drifted off into separate lives. She to Europe, and me clinging to the only tranche of territory that felt true enough to sustain me. For a while it had felt like a bold and new freedom, anchored in no particular place but with all the seeming possibilities of my teenage years again unfolding. That lasted as long as the summer that followed. I had golfed and danced my way through this new oblivion until the smiles I was receiving were just painted. The laughter hollow.

Whenever I made my mistakes with women I always came back to the countryside of my youth, the forest and the rock, where at least I felt a small part of something, rather than amongst the lost souls of the coastal cities, where worlds came and went on the naked decks of ships. That night there was uncharted wonder in seeing Jane.

‘I heard you were in town. Jack Swain at the hotel said you were up here. Or at least you’d headed out in this direction. I thought I’d find you here.’

She knew my patterns of behaviour at least as well as I did, had certainly been a better observer of them over the years than I had.

‘It’s good to see you. ...You look... not a day different.’

I pronounced this with some odd hesitation but essentially meant the words as they emerged, yet knew once they were out that it was a lie. I was able to lie convincingly to her simply because she knew me so well and I had nothing to hide, and I wanted her to know how warmly feelings still came. At the same time I wished not to tell her how very tired she looked. I thought the four years since I’d last seen her had changed her. The cares of life after the war; probably her brother’s death in the main, had taken away her girlishness and replaced it with a slightly steely womanhood. Despite that, she was beautiful and the hints of grey at her temples were dignified. They were a badge of age we both now carried, and it felt good to have known her for so long and to have shared so many stretches of the journey together.

‘It’s hard to grasp, how many years have gone by.’

‘I know. I hardly see the old crowd now. Wally was up here a few months ago, but the weather set in and he was off before we could really catch up. I think he had hunting in mind.’

We paused, clear in our thoughts together, images of Wally and his antic ways playing over in our minds. Those silhouettes of many evenings, making sport as only we could, horsing by the pool, running in the darkened streets... everyone of them shimmering in memory.

‘I was going to look you up.’

I said it, but again I wasn’t sure I meant it, and yet seeing her was a great reassurance, a confirmation that at least some things remain solid. We had come to a kind of love that was almost like sibling understanding. Slightly competitive and at times antagonistic but basically sympathetic... yet unimpassioned. Or so it seemed.

‘Of course, you were.’

Her humour always had a bracing cynicism, never taking me with any seriousness, at least superficially. The reality was I still found her enormously attractive. In the gathering dusk she looked warm and vivid; the deep valley between her full breasts, on show in a wide-cut neckline, infinitely inviting.

‘Come to me. You look like you need some compassion.’

She offered her open arms and I was suddenly enormously grateful. I went to her without thought. It was like peeling away all the years in between, and we were once again the fresh young things. Her mouth was hot and our tongues circled searching out familiarity. The feel of her slightly uneven teeth, the tight string of her fraenum which she liked tickled by my searching tongue. She tasted as fresh and liquid as the first time; the mingled odour of lipstick and face powder and the hint of perfume, underscoring a main theme of her sweet and slightly salty watering mouth. We were fevered with desire so quickly once that first contact was made that we forgot where we were.

I hurried her across to a bench, laid her down and in the twilight I raised up her dress and hooked my fingers into her lace-edged knickers, eager to see again her broad dark bush that she’d so long ago often kept ‘warm’ for me. I drew down the loose cloth past her stocking tops. The coffee coloured suspender-belt and straps holding the silk hose tight, were reminiscence for me bordering on an ache, and she looked magnificent in the soft pink light of the evening. The tangled matt of her silky hair, spread across her lower belly and down into her groin, was like the red-sand colour of a ghost gum fruit. It grew its spidering branches out across her mound and into the split of her cunt and crept onto the skin where the full round of her thighs met her body. The skin as white as gum bark. This living thing had roots which seemed to spring from the little red birds-mouth of her pussy.

I opened her legs wider and went down to the apex of her of cunt where the tiny nub of clit was beginning to emerge. The skin around her opening was hot and dry, and smelt of cologne and the bright sugary odour of her juice. The little frills of the inner lips were livid with blood and my tongue was cooler as it met them. I followed them up and down with the tip, feeling her shiver, then I split them, going into the heart of it, spearing my tongue as deep as I could, and catching the tang inside. She lay still in the glow of evening and let me make my way into her.

I eased down to her bum, to its earthy taste, feeling the sprinkle of small hairs coarse against the smooth flesh, the little knots and wrinkles around her anus, testing its tight resolve. I buried my nose into the wet pool of her pussy as I nudged further into her, wanting to merge with her for the first time in so long. I sucked out her juices, swallowed them back, tasting them along the regions of my tongue; sour, honeyed, sea-sharp. Knowing that if I stopped devouring all of this, it might melt away. I wanted as much of her in my mouth as it was possible to have. To feel the harshness and the softness of her hairs right back in my throat. Burying my face wholly in her. She moaned in rhythm to my tongue, breaths sobbing out of her like she had waited endlessly to have me there.

I knew then, from that night... from that concordant moment, that we would stay as we were.

When she came at last, convulsively, the night air seemed immeasurably quiet, and the gulf of empty space beneath us, far out into the whispering forest, seemed to sigh a long and understanding sigh that was a part of who we were.

I kissed her on the mouth, placing her scent and taste upon her own lips, making her, for the first time, my one purpose.