On a cold winter’s night just like this one, the man digging alongside her proposed under the jacaranda, on one knee. She collected the little trumpets for confetti at their wedding, oh, so long ago, and remembers him staring at her in wonder through a veil of purple rain. They were so young. Too young, perhaps?
Within a minute she is overheating and throws off her coat and rolls back her sleeves. They don’t speak. Their breath wafts in the frigid air. The only sound is that of the spades whacking into the dark cold earth. She doesn’t know how much time passes before he says, ‘You can stop. I think that’s enough.’
She helps him carry Monty to the grave and lower in the corpse. ‘Good boy,’ she murmurs, as he begins shovelling dirt over the body—
‘Wait!’
She runs to the back of the house where she found the wood, and ducks under the latticework. The tennis ball she saw earlier is pulpy and threadbare, but she recalls Megan as a little girl throwing a ball to Monty, her grandfather beaming, watching with his hands on his hips. Happier times before the bank intervened. Once, their farm extended beyond the jacaranda all the way to the purple hills. It belonged to her father, and his father before that, passed down from father to son, or daughter. Paddocks of lush green alfalfa, a veggie garden where brown and white chooks pecked and scavenged while a sow and her piglets rooted in the nearby earth. Now all turned to dirt, to dust. To nothing. Wrecking their marriage, ruining their lives, filling her father with despair.
She drops the ball into the grave, and gulps back a fresh bout of tears.
‘Get out of the cold,’ he tells her, picking up the spade. ‘I can finish here.’
In the house, she stirs up the dying fire and lets the remaining dogs lie spreadeagled in front of it. They are quiet and sombre, already missing their friend. Already learning the nature of the empty space where something, someone, should be. As she has never managed to do.
Grimy with sweat and soil, she finds a towel in the linen closet, and showers. When he comes in she is sitting in his old track suit bottoms and worn grey hoodie at the table.
‘Tea?’
‘I think I need something stronger.’
She pours them both a shot, her best intentions beaten to a pulp, and without saying a word they raise their glasses to Monty.
He tells her he’s going to clean up, then, and touches his hand to the nape of her neck. How much courage that takes. She knows, finally, why she is here.
Mycorrhizal Networks
Lynette Washington
I’ ve been watching these trees a long time. I listen to them rather than to people, but I like it that way. Most days I put my ear to the ground and listen for hours. I can lie there, the damp bush floor seeping into my clothes and then my skin and then my bones for hours, until I feel like I am becoming part of the ground. I go in with the sun high and come out with it low.
The trees don’t talk to me; they talk to each other underground, in the otherworld. The talking they do above ground, with their leaves and branches, is just entertainment, fluff, superficial. Maybe they do it to entertain each other. On still days the chatter is quiet, but it’s always there. If you walk quietly enough, you can hear it. Sometimes you have to stand still. Windy days sound like city traffic, too much busyness and rush. It reminds me. I stay out of the bush on windy days.
But it’s the otherworld that I want to know about. I want to hear those secrets. I know they share things with each other— where the food is, where to stretch to get the water that is always so scant—and I know that the mumma trees look after their young. After forty years here, I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen the mumma trees protect their own kinfolk and turn dark on the others.
Thinking about the mumma trees makes me turn dark on myself. When I start thinking that way I tell myself to imagine the mycorrhizal networks. That’s what the scientist told me they are called when she came out to study my trees. She wanted to replicate what Canadian scientists had found, see if the same thing happened here on the Point. I make the words swim around my mouth, I practice them over and over so that I won’t forget them. I say them like a kind of prayer. Mycorrhizal networks. Mycorrhizal networks. The scientist showed me a map the other scientists had drawn of what went on underground in Canadian forests, all the lacy tendrils the fungus puts into the ground, like train tracks laid by a drunk. Millions of them, she said. That’s how they talk, I said, and she looked at me like she didn’t know if she should be scared of me.
What do you mean, she’d asked.
They talk, I said, feeling shy. They tell each other things. Like where the food is, where to get water. And they share, but only amongst their own. They’re funny like that. They’re like a little family, looking after each other, turning dark on those who try to take what they need from them.
She kept looking at me. It was like she was shrinking into the dirt.
From my kitchen window I can see the bush. It seems to be creeping closer every year. Last winter I had to move my veggie patch because the shade the banksia threw was killing my lettuces and stopping the carrots from growing. I watch the mushrooms creep closer in the shade of the trees and I wonder who is leading who. Probably the mushrooms come last, their need for shade and all that, but then without their networks, the trees don’t make it. They need each other, but I can’t figure out what comes first. I turn back to my pot and stir some more.
I think about the scientist. She came back every day for six months and then vanished. I watched her from my kitchen window, go into the bush with her packs and gear, and come out hours later, smiling, always smiling. And then she stopped. Just stopped coming. I didn’t realise how much I relied on her until she was gone. It wasn’t that we’d become friends, but just the sight of another human being was enough for me. It was like knowing that you haven’t fallen off the edge of the world yet.
I decide to go and look at what she’d left behind. See if it might mean she might be coming back. I put my boots and parka on and walk.
The magpies follow me when I walk out my door.
‘Not now,’ I say to them.
They follow me as far as the scrubby trees on the edge of the bush and then stop. They will wait for me there.
I push through the dense scrub. The track the scientist wore down is becoming overgrown, but I can still find the places where her feet fell. It takes half an hour to get through the scrub, but I make it to the spot. It’s dark under the canopy of the trees. The trees she planted as seedlings have grown, but not much. Their little colony is surviving, supporting each other, I suppose. I lie down amongst them, my head in the lap of their shade and wait. Soon the rustle of the wind is the least obvious sound I hear. Soon, I can hear the worms in the ground, burrowing slowly, leaving their castings behind. I can hear the roots stretching out, searching for each other and for food and water. It sounds like the movement of dirt. Then I hear a sigh that is the trees acknowledging that I am a friend, part of their circle. I close my eyes and wait. All of these things I’ve heard before, I know them to be the sounds of the scrub, but maybe there is more here, where the scientist left these special trees.
I wait so long that I begin to fear it will soon be too dark for me to make my way home. Reluctantly, I raise myself from the dirt and brush myself down. I am damp and dirty.
When I emerge from the bush, the maggies are there in wait.
‘I know, I know. I was gone a long time,’ I say to them.
The baby squawks at me, a bitter and mournful sound, utterly unlike the complex warble her mother can produce. I give the baby a sidelong glance. I resent her.
‘Mother, get your baby under control,’ I say. ‘She’s rude!’
‘Mother! Mother! Mother!’ the mother sings back to me.
‘I am not your mother,’ I say, and stomp away.
Those damn birds have got into my head again with their cries and calls. Mother. It’s all I can do not to swipe at them with a broom when they get like this. Instead, I do the only thi
ng I have left to do at this point in the day. Make a toasted cheese sandwich and go to bed.
Sleep won’t come, though. All I hear is that damn bird. Mother! Mother! Mother! It’s my own fault.
I wake, and as always, share my breakfast with them. I flick them some peanuts.
‘You’ll have to find your own worms,’ I say.
‘Mother! Mother! Mother!’ sings the mother bird.
‘Damn bird,’ I mutter.
The weather is fine today, and the sun has come out from behind the clouds. I feel the sun warming me in a way that is as familiar as the damp of the earth. I shut my eyes and let it soak me.
My eyes closed, I instantly see the mycorrhizal networks of the mother tree, or the hub tree as the scientist calls it, with all the passion of someone without a heart. The interlaced web of thousands of reaching roots and tendrils. I look for the dirt, but it’s not there, all I can see is the network, and then I realise it’s red, not brown, as I usually imagine it to be. There is a mound and they are lapped around it, like a protective layer, and they are pulsing with heat. It is vile and bloody.
I open my eyes quickly and go about my day.
When I hear my name being called, I start. There are so few people in the world who know who I am, and even fewer who know where I am. Forty years I’ve been alone out here.
I go to the door and peek out, nervous in a way that annoys me.
It’s the scientist.
‘Did I tell you my name?’ I ask her, instead of a greeting.
‘Yes.’
‘I’d forgotten.’
‘Did I frighten you? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.’
‘What are you here for anyway?’
She looks taken aback, and I realise I’m being rude. Out of practice with proper conversation.
‘I haven’t seen you for months,’ I add, trying to be softer with my voice.
‘Yes, the project finished, and I moved away for a while. Got a grant in Queensland. But I’m back, and I was wondering how my trees have been going. Have you been watching them?’
It’s funny how she calls them ‘her’ trees. For so long I have thought of them as my own. I adopted them.
‘Oh yes, I’ve been watching them. I’ve been listening to them.’
She clears her throat and looks at the ground when she asks me the next question.
‘Have they been talking? To you?’
‘Oh yes, well not to me, you see. They don’t talk to me. They talk to each other. I just listen in.’
The scientist nods. The false smiles of our first few meetings seem to be gone. She seems to believe me now, though I don’t know why.
‘There’s so much new research, Martha, so much, it’s incredible! We are just beginning to learn what you knew all along. They are talking to each other, they are looking after each other, they care for their families, just like you said! They send messages and nutrients, they have the most complex conversations!’
I nod and look at the bush, just a few metres from my door.
‘Well, good, then.’
The magpie family settle on my fence railing and they catch the scientist’s eye for a moment.
Mother sings, ‘Mother! Mother! Mother!’ and the scientist laughs.
‘Did you teach her that?’
‘She’s a mimic. Good thing I don’t swear too much.’
‘Did she hear your children calling you that?’ she asks.
I wasn’t expecting that. I ask the scientist to leave.
When I look up, half an hour later, the magpies are still on the fence railing, waiting for me.
‘Thank you for watching me,’ I say to Mother.
The scientist is in the habit of returning to the forest again. Not every day, like she did when the project was running, but several times a week. She always parks as far as she can from my house, ducks into the scrub, spends an hour or so, and then sneaks away. I watch her from my kitchen window. She never looks at my house, never knocks on my door. My gratitude is tinged with sadness and loneliness.
I learn her routine very quickly. After all, there’s not much else for me to do. There’s only so much time one can spend talking with magpies, even if they talk back. It’s Wednesday, Friday and Sunday that she comes. Always at 7 a.m. She must be coming before work.
Each day I ask myself, should I? But I never do. And she never knocks on my door again.
I watch as the winter begins to fade into spring and new flowers pop out of the ground. I talk to them, too, and listen. I wonder if the flowers also talk underground, but I can’t tell. Listening to the flowers is like feeling a feather brushed across your cheek. Unlike the trees, who, if you listen close enough, can sound like a road train.
He was like a road train. He bashed his way through life, and I was the road kill. Michael, too. Michael was the feather. Delicate, fragile, too small to say what he needed, although I knew. I knew. He didn’t need a father like that. He didn’t need a mother broken into pieces.
It was for the best, I remind myself. I haven’t had to chant that to myself for such a long time. It used to be that I would say it from sun up to sun down, no other words passed my lips, no other thoughts entered my mind. It was for the best.
But between the scientist and the magpies and the mother trees, it seems that all around me, everyone wants to remind me that I was a mother. Once upon a time. Before the trees spoke to me, before the magpies called to me for dinner, long before I told the scientist my name. Martha. My mother told me that she named me that because it was a name for an artist. It was long out of fashion. But she hoped that I would become an artist. She knew from the moment I was born, she said, in the way that only a mother does. And I understood as soon as Michael was born, what a mother automatically knows. I never became an artist. And I didn’t leave when I should have. And I knew Michael, from the moment I set eyes on him, did not have his father’s constitution, did not have the capacity to stand up to this man. So I gave them up, Michael to the agency and his father to the wind. And I ran. The scientist is back. She won’t look at me. I send the magpies to her. I say, ‘Go, Mother, tell her to come to me,’ but Mother just looks at me, cocks her head to the side and I know she won’t leave me, not even for this.
‘What about you, Baby? Will you bring her to me?’
Baby squawks and stares at me in that way I don’t like. Baby has never had the charm of its mother.
‘You are a useless bird, aren’t you, Baby? When will you start to make your own way in the world? Worms don’t come for free, you know.’ I feel cruel, and it feeds something in me that I need.
The birds look at me. Constant. I know they are waiting for peanuts. And I have none to give.
I sigh. I guess it will be up to me, then. I pull on my boots and zip up my jacket. I trudge to the forest and make my way along the trail, which is starting to look more well worn again after these weeks of the scientist being back.
When I find her, she is kneeling on the ground, her ear to the surface next to the largest of the seedlings.
‘You found Mother,’ I say.
She startles and flushes as she jumps up and brushes herself clean.
‘Yes, the hub.’
‘She prefers Mother,’ I say.
The scientist nods.
‘What is your name?’ I ask.
‘Miranda,’ she says. ‘I’m Miranda.’
She extends her hand for me to shake. After all these months, after a year I suppose, she wants to shake my hand. Awkwardly, I take her hand and shake it.
‘I’m so sorry about the other day. I know I shouldn’t have made any assumptions.’
‘Do you hear them yet?’ I ask, pointing to the trees. ‘Mother is the loudest, the busiest, I suppose, like all mothers.’ Not that you would know, I hear in my head. I arrange my face into something resembling normal and force myself to look at the scientist.
‘I’m afraid not. Maybe it’s a gift you have? I’ve been trying so hard, comin
g here every chance I get, listening for as long as I can. But I just can’t hear it. Am I doing something wrong?’
‘You talk a lot,’ I say. ‘Do you talk to them, or just listen? You have to listen.’
‘I only talk to them once in a while. I am a bit of a motormouth, everyone always says so.’
‘Try not talking. And try listening to the mother. You’ll hear if you are patient enough.’
‘I’m not very patient, which sucks when you’re a scientist. Patience is sort of in the job description.’
I nod. I feel out of words. Surely this is the most I’ve spoken to another human in a very long time.
‘Keep trying,’ I say to her as I turn to walk away.
‘Martha,’ she calls to me. ‘Would it be okay if I came over one day and asked you some questions, you know, about the trees? I have so many questions.’
‘About what?’
‘How you know these things, I suppose. How you know something instinctively that science has been trying to prove, that science didn’t even know to think about until very recently.’
‘When you have as much time on your hands as I do, you start to see the world differently, that’s all. No big secret.’
‘But maybe you know other things? That might guide our research? A cup of tea, one day? I’ll bring something—scones? Strudel? Carrot cake? I’m a great cook. A better cook than a scientist!’
Carrot cake. I remember making that when Michael was just a few months old. I’d finally got him to sleep long enough to mix the cake and make the cream cheese frosting. I even found some walnuts to crush for the top of the cake. I felt so organised, in control. I placed the cake in the centre of the dining room table, proud. Accomplished. It was my first achievement, aside from keeping myself and my son alive, the occasional shower and sinkful of dishes, since he had been born. Later, I cleaned the frosting from the dining room wall long after he’d gone to bed. I used the chore as an excuse to not crawl, aching, into the bed that we shared. I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned, until Michael woke at 2 a.m. demanding a feed. He had slept through all the rest of it.
We'll Stand In That Place and other stories Page 7