Wrong Tent

I boarded the train in Adelaide at half past seven on a Tuesday evening, hauling a suitcase I had overpacked by half. The conductor, a friendly old bloke named Warren with a silver mustache, checked my ticket and pointed me down the corridor.

"Sleeper compartment four, love. Bunk's already made up. Tea's in the corridor if you want it."

"Thank you, Warren."

"You're welcome. Long night ahead. Get comfy."

Comfy. Right. Here's something you should know about me before we go any further. My name is Krystal, I am sixty-one years old, and I retired from being a sleep technician three months ago. Thirty years of watching other people sleep on monitors, and now I could not sleep to save myself. Funny how that works.

I heaved my suitcase up and wedged it under the lower bunk. The compartment was narrow, two bunks, a fold-down table bolted to the wall, and one little window showing the last of the daylight over the rail yards. I sat on the lower bunk because I had paid for it, and I arranged my book and my water bottle on the table like I owned the place.

Married at twenty-two, divorced at thirty-five. That is thirteen years of my life I gave to a man named Geoff who thought camping was a motel with a microwave. When I finally left him I promised myself I would do all the things I had put off. Then I worked another twenty-six years and put them off some more. So this trip, solo camping up at the national park near Alice Springs, was supposed to be the grand start of the new chapter. Actually, I had been planning it since my last shift at the sleep lab.

The train pulled out at eight on the dot. I felt the sway of it and thought, well, at least the rocking might put me to sleep.

Then the door slid open and a woman came in with a camera bag and a backpack and an apologetic smile.

"Oh. Hi. Sorry, am I in the right place?"

"I think so? I'm in four."

"Me too, apparently." She shoved her backpack under the upper bunk and stuck out her hand. "Esmeralda."

"Krystal."

"Krystal. That's a great name. Very rock and roll."

"My mother was very optimistic." We shook hands and I got my first proper look at her. Forty-ish, dark hair cut short, tan like she lived outdoors, which she clearly did. Hands rough from work.

She climbed up to the top bunk with the easy grace of someone half my age and started strapping her camera bag to the little net shelf. "You doing the Outback trip too?"

"Camping at the national park. You?"

"Photography assignment. Wildlife. They want a hundred good frames of things that mostly come out at night, which means so do I." She patted the camera bag. "Did you book through the park service?"

"Yes, months ago. I've got a tent site booked for five nights."

"Hmm. They changed the campground layout last year. Hope you got the site you wanted." She leaned over the edge of the bunk and looked at me properly. "Can I ask you something? Do you mind?"

"Ask away."

"What made you do a solo trip out there? Most women our age, well, my age anyway, go with someone."

I could have said something polite. Instead I heard myself say, "I spent thirteen years married to a man and the twenty-six years after that waiting for the right moment. The moment never came, so I made one."

She grinned. "Good for you. Honestly. I broke up with my girlfriend two months ago after twelve years, so I'm out here getting paid to look at lizards and calling it healing."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Don't be. She's a good woman, we just stopped being good together." She hopped down and sat across from me at the fold-down table, all long legs folded up somehow. "Tea? I saw the urn in the corridor."

"Actually, yes, please. I'll come with you."

We stood in the corridor bumping against the wall with the sway of the train, and she made two cups of tea while I held the paper cups and felt like I was on a date, which was ridiculous, because I was on a train, with a stranger, in my sensible traveling cardigan.

Back in the compartment we sat knee to knee at the little table because there was nowhere else to sit. She got her phone out and pulled up a map of the park.

"Show me your booking. Which site did they give you?"

I dug out the printout. "Site fourteen. Redgum Loop."

She made a face. "Okay, so, small problem. Redgum Loop is the group sites now. They rezoned it. Did you get an email?"

"I got an email about a fee change."

"Well, that's the bad news. Good news is my site, eighteen in Mulga Loop, has a spare spot since my second photographer pulled out. If they haven't given your site away you can probably swap at the visitor center. If they have, you can pitch next to me and we'll split the firewood."

"That's very kind."

"It's actually self-interest. I talk too much at night and I need an audience."

I laughed. I had not laughed like that in a while, if I am honest with you, and it felt good.

The desert went dark outside the window and the stars came out the way they only do out there, in stacks. She turned off the little reading lamp and lay on the top bunk and I lay on mine, and the train rocked us along through the middle of nowhere.

"Krystal? You awake?"

"No."

"Ha. What do you do, anyway? You've got that look. Nurse? Teacher?"

"Sleep technician. Thirty years."

"No way. You watched people sleep for a living?"

"Wired them up and watched them sleep. You'd be amazed what people do in their sleep. Some of them sing. One man conducted an entire imaginary orchestra every night at two a.m."

"That's the best job fact I've ever heard." She was quiet a moment, and then, "Can I ask you another nosy question?"

"You're on a roll."

"Do you ever regret things? Like, the things you waited on."

I stared at the underside of her bunk, which had a reading light mounted in it, and thought about Geoff, and about the sleep lab, and about a woman named Wendy I had met at a conference in Perth when I was forty-eight and thought about, well, more than I ever admitted to anyone.

"Sometimes," I said. "Some things I waited too long on."

"Yeah," she said softly. "Me too."

"Goodnight, Esmeralda."

"Goodnight, Krystal."

I did not sleep much. That was fine. I was used to it, and I had a lot to think about.

* * *

In the morning Warren came through the carriage with coffee and a weather report. "Bit of a warm one up top today, ladies. We're on time for Alice, eleven forty tomorrow morning."

"Thank you, Warren," I said, and Esmeralda and I sat at the table drinking it, and she showed me her best lizard photo, and I thought, actually, the wrong tent might turn out to be the right one.

We were still at the table when she said it. "Actually, forget the swap. Pitch with me. Site eighteen has plenty of room and my tent's huge. I got it for the gear and now it's just gear and loneliness in there."

"I couldn't impose."

"Krystal. I talk to my lenses. Come be a person."

"Well. If you're sure."

"I'm sure. Firewood split, gas stove shared, and I'll show you where the dingoes yell at three a.m." She went back to her photos and I sat there feeling lighter than I had in months.

The train ran on through the morning. We talked about cameras, about Geoff in a roundabout way, about her ex, whose name was Bea and who apparently still watered her plants when she traveled. Then, somewhere past Coober Pedy, the talk went somewhere else.

"Can I ask you something else nosy?" she said.

"You've got a lifetime supply of those, apparently."

"When you said you waited too long on things. What kind of things?"

I looked out the window at the red dirt and thought, well, here it is, sixty-one years old and about to say it out loud. "When I was forty-eight I went to a conference in Perth. I met a woman there named Wendy. We talked for three days about sleep architecture and bad hotel coffee, and I thought about her for a year afterward. And I never once picked up the phone."

"That's a long time to think about someone."

"I wasn't even sure what I was thinking. I'd been married to a man. I liked it fine until I didn't. But every so often in my life there'd been a woman who made my chest do something odd, and I filed it all under admiration and shut the drawer." I turned my cup in my hands. "I have never done anything about it. Not once. Not in sixty-one years."

She was quiet. Then she said, "For what it's worth, I've been with both, and the chest thing is the same chest thing."

I laughed, and it came out shaky. "That's oddly comforting."

"And for what it's worth," she went on, "Bea and I stopped touching each other about two years before we ended it. I miss it. Being touched. Not even sex, just hands. I've been on three work trips since and nobody's put a hand on my shoulder." She looked at me then, and I felt my face go warm. "Can I tell you something without it being a big deal?"

"Try me."

"I've been enjoying talking to you since last night. Enough that I keep noticing your hands."

"My hands," I said. "I've got sleep technician hands."

"You've got nice hands. And you can tell me to shut up and I'll shut up, but I'd like to kiss you. If you want that too."

You could have knocked me over with the