by Karen Manton
He stood up, excited, turning the jar in his hands to see pipi, limpet, fan and cone shells, as well as a crab’s exoskeleton, complete with legs, claws and eye-like marks on its back.
‘Look!’ His finger followed a line of black and red glass beads weaving between the other shapes.
‘My mother’s necklace,’ she answered. ‘I broke it.’
He paused. ‘I hope she forgave you.’
All Greta remembered was her own mortified child-face in the mirror and the necklace clutched in her fingers, with no catch, and the sound of beads scattering across the floor.
The lid was too tight for Raffy to open. She unscrewed it for him.
He held the jar up to her nose. ‘It smells of olives and sea.’
In a rush she recalled her mother Vivian’s rare laugh, sunlit fish scales, the sound of the surf, sand-clogged fingernails. Quick as slides on high speed in the old family projector. There and gone.
‘Toby says this is a real-life bullet hole.’ His foot smoothed back and forth over a hole in the floor. ‘Uncle Vadik did it one Christmas.’
Joel had told them about this escapade during a monotonous stretch of the highway.
‘Do you think he tried to shoot Pavel?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Greta said. ‘He was very drunk.’
‘Why would he shoot his own brother?’
‘Families have wild weather sometimes.’
She was craving coffee and went to the camping box for the grinder and beans. She leaned against the sink to turn the handle. The gritty sound and aroma were a comfort. Raffy’s back was a silhouette at the louvres. He was intent on the shells, arranging them one by one.
She’d just set the coffee pot on the stove when Griffin bumped through the back door carrying a toolbox upright. He eased it onto the bench.
‘He’s heavy,’ the boy said, puffing.
Greta thanked him and opened the box to take out a tin. Her father’s ashes were inside, sealed in plastic. Frank would have scoffed at an urn, the expense and show of it, so they’d decided on his favourite tin where he kept items he didn’t want to lose—his and Greta’s birth certificates, his watch if it wasn’t on his wrist, a torch, a twenty-dollar note. And right at the bottom were precious secrets—a photo booth shot of him and Vivian the night they met, the head scarf she’d worn on her last day, the wedding ring she’d left behind.
‘When will you let him go?’ asked Griffin.
‘When I’m ready.’ She smiled at him. ‘In a wild, beautiful place he’d like.’
What would it cost you, she heard Janna say, to bring him back as he asked? You don’t have to live here.
Janna, still there in Fishermans Creek, ever angling for Greta to return, if only for a visit. Janna had been less trouble as a twelve-year-old, reading tea-leaves and fortune lines. Still, she was a saint to have cleared out that old cottage wobbling on its salt-bitten stumps four years ago, storing the boxes of unsorted gear, furniture and Vivian’s photographs in her ex-boyfriend’s shipping container on her property. She’d sent the ashes in their tin and the box of a few belongings to the orange farm where Greta and Joel were working at the time. There’d been no funeral, at her father’s request.
Griffin barged out the back door again as Raffy turned to her with a question.
‘Do you think Pavel would mind us living here?’
He’d finished with the shells and was balancing the jar by his mother’s bead boxes. Then he moved through the room with his arms out, as if testing the space and his great-uncle’s approval.
‘I’m sure he’d be glad,’ said Greta. She crunched a lone coffee bean she’d found on the bench. ‘It sounds like he was a gentle soul, Pavel.’
‘And Dad helped him build this shack anyway.’
His toe explored the bullet hole again.
‘You know there’re stone steps here under the verandah.’ He opened the front door. ‘You can see them down there through the gaps.’
‘They must be the original ones.’
‘Pavel made them up to his little house.’
She stopped herself from saying, ‘Don’t fall,’ as he walked out over the makeshift bridge, peering down. When he’d made it safely to the ground and crawled under the verandah, she went back to the open box. Her father’s oil lantern was wrapped in a hand-knitted olive jumper. She lifted it out and pressed the woollen to her face. The smell shot her back to his kitchen. There he was at the stove, boots planted on the crusty lino, eyes staring into the aluminium saucepan and its lump of burned tuna mornay.
‘Don’t send me there, Gret,’ he’d said.
But what else could she do? After the fall out on the reef, the wound on his leg that wouldn’t heal. He couldn’t travel. And he couldn’t live alone.
‘You can’t come with us, Dad. You know you can’t.’
She might never forgive herself for those words. She knew he wouldn’t last at the respite place in Adelaide, far from the waves, the quiet river. She knew it when she saw his hand on the child-lock gate.
His watch slipped from a sleeve of the jumper. The face had yellowed and the wristband was broken. She set the time and watched the second hand do a revolution.
The last things in the box were her mother’s sewing scissors, and a spider conch shell in bubble wrap. Greta put the wrapped shell on a louvre above Raffy’s treasures.
The coffee pot bubbled on the stove. She turned off the gas and poured herself a cup. Griffin’s hand-drawn calendar stared at her from the end of the bench. Days one and two were crossed off. The remainder stretched in wavering lines from the beginning of September to the new year, followed by a line of question marks.
Outside, Joel sounded the earth with a crowbar, breaking up soil, edging in under rocks to lever them out. He and Toby were levelling ground for the cabin. Two bedrooms, a bathroom and a balcony at the escarpment end, with a skillion roof, was the plan. Greta could hear Joel explaining the importance of foundations, if they weren’t right the cabin would be skewiff forever. He’d chosen a site by a beautiful scarlet gum, not far from the shack. Close enough for bedrooms, distant enough to be a separate dwelling.
Mick would pay Gabe to help, Joel said. Gabe, who’d lived on and off with Joel’s family. No one knew where Gabe was just now, only that he was off working somewhere. He came and went. Hopefully he would appear well before he and Joel were due to go fencing and mustering for five weeks in late October. Gabe had rung about this plan during their drive up north.
‘It’ll see us through,’ Joel assured her, since Mick was paying them only a little more than supplies.
You’ll have to master the run of this place before then, Greta told herself.
Again the lake came to her mind’s eye, whispering of underground aquifers. Where might the poison leak? She imagined hidden channels of toxic water trickling around buried rocks, seeping through the soil into the bore, gushing from the kitchen tap.
There was not always reliable phone reception here either, she’d realised, on the theme of threats and emergencies. It was as if the faintest breeze could deliver or erase it on a whim. Best to walk up nearer the homestead, Joel had advised.
She pushed the lake aside in her mind, unrolling the kilim to stand on it and feel the rich colours underfoot.
Raffy came flying across the plank bridge and through the door. He was breathless. ‘No one can find Griffin.’
‘He was just here,’ she said.
‘Well, he isn’t now. He’s completely gone.’
She checked her father’s watch. Maybe half an hour had passed since Griffin was inside. The binoculars were missing from the shelves, she noticed. ‘Ah, Griffin,’ she sighed, and went out into the glaring sunlight, as if she might see the boy with her mother perspective.
She scanned downhill across the gamba and outcrop of rocks to the lake, and up the slope to the homestead. The place expanded while she looked at it, an endless stretch of bushland to the escarpment. This land could swallow him, make a
dead leaf of a child. She shivered.
Raffy ran to check the shower and the outdoor toilet. Toby joined the search, climbing up the banyan tree to use the platform as a lookout. Greta looked in the red ute that Gabe had left. There was no boy in the four-wheel drive or the trailer.
From the mahogany tree near the rail freight van a flock of white cockatoos watched the humans, their yellow crests fanning and contracting.
Raffy went to Joel who kept on with the crowbar for a few moments, then stopped. ‘Griffin!’ His voice rang out sharp across the valley.
The cockatoos took flight with loud squawks. Griffin, griffin, griffin echoed back the escarpment. Raffy hurried over to Greta to watch for any sudden reappearances. But the place was silent and nobody came.
‘Cut it out, Griffin!’ Joel shouted.
The rocks, the burning sun and the wandering child. They’d snapped his patience. He threw down the bar with a clang.
The branches of the mahogany squeaked bravely. The door to the cargo van opened. A shape appeared in the doorway.
‘Griffin!’
He kept his head low to hide a sheepish grin. The binoculars were around his neck. He tried to move away, but Joel’s hand was too quick.
‘There’s no hiding here!’
Griffin kept his eyes averted. He waited for Greta to move closer and wriggled free.
Joel was a coiled spring. ‘If you get lost out here, that’s it! You’re gone! We might never, ever find you.’
A blue-winged kookaburra flew in to claim the mahogany branch above him. Griffin sidled away.
Joel moved off with a glance to Greta. ‘Those kids need to go to school.’
Toby followed him back to the crowbar. Raffy turned in little circles, watching his shadow on the ground.
The kookaburra started up a raucous laugh, then with a flash of blue wing took off.
Greta walked across to the freight car, noticing how the ground was uneven, and that stones lined patches of dirt. She was walking the sunken map of Pavel’s garden.
The van was from another era, perhaps the old North Australia Railway. It had been fitted out with a table and bench seats, cupboards and a bench. A rusted fan hung from the wall at the far end, above where a bed might have been. Raffy snuck in under his mother’s arm.
Griffin reappeared and pushed past them both. He stood on the bench seat behind the table to look out one of the windows. ‘There was a golden tree snake winding up this tree.’
He searched through the binoculars for the vanished snake. Greta could see a palm trunk frilled with green vine leaves. Higher up, a cluster of red berries hung among the fronds. A white pigeon with black-edged wings feasted there. Griffin focused on it, and then pulled his bird book from his back pocket. ‘What I’m really looking for is a hooded parrot.’
The pigeon flew away, and he sat down to slap a rhythm on the table. ‘We could make this a cubby.’ He smiled at Raffy, pleased with the find.
Greta ran her hand along the faded blue laminex benchtop, and noticed the lino floor had buckled and cracked.
You could patch this up, she thought, make a room of one’s own. All it needed was a lick of paint and an air conditioner.
The idea of fixing up the freight van took hold while she threaded beads onto a necklace wire after dinner. She worked at the camping table out on the back verandah. Her father’s lantern glowed beside her. Joel had told them that his parents lived in the van when they first came to Lightstone, when his brother Mick was a baby. Greta imagined her mother-in-law, Maria, with a new baby and then toddlers in the cramped space. Was it like the train she’d fled in across Europe, in the same freight car where Fedor and his brothers were also hiding? Greta saw them cowering in the dark, hearts thudding to the clacking rhythm underneath, being carried into an unknown future.
Raffy came outside to see what she’d made. He picked up a pair of earrings and dangled them at his earlobes. ‘How do I look?’
‘Real flash.’
‘Raffy!’ Toby called. ‘Dad’s going to read to us now.’
Raffy dropped the earrings in the tray and hurried inside.
There was a snap of wicker as Joel sat down. ‘What chapter are we up to then?’
Greta put the necklace aside and wandered out to the edge of the hill to have a moment on her own. The cooler night air was a comfort after the glare of the day. Joel’s voice drifted after her. She stepped down to the bowl of rocky ground where the cycads were and found a boulder to sit on. With the night the land had changed. The world of silhouettes had returned. There was no moon yet, just a spill of stars above. Far off, a dingo howled its long, high notes. Others joined in, calling their age-old song. She looked back to the shack. The lantern flame flickered.
The unseen valley drew her in again. Her eyes followed the line of rocks and trees from the outcrop down to the glimmer of that poison water, so pure under the moonlight, so alluring. Even it might alter under the spell of this night, turn innocent.
In the humid darkness a woman’s feet search the ground. She’s moving downhill. Her steps are erratic, lurch and pause. Loose stones clatter ahead of her. Her breath is uneven because of her fear, and the weight she holds. Clasped against her is a squalling child, under one year, face twisted in a purple contortion, a small and shivering fist at the swollen, pulsing ear. Every cry escalates. The mother holds the baby’s head in her hand, the hot skull of pain. The weight of the body, the weight of despair.
The father’s angry yell barks from the house back up the hill. The dogs rattle their chains and yelp his disquiet. She turns her head to look back towards the muted light of the house beneath the glinting iron of the roof. She hears the thud of a fist slamming into gyprock, the renewed commotion of the dogs.
She draws the child closer into her breast, to muffle the cries. The baby writhes, arches back, howls curling from its wet mouth.
As if the night could be her last hope, the mother holds her child out, an offering to the darkness. She pleads with the night, whispering her terrible supplication.
The child shrieks, a sick and twisted wail.
The air is shocked silent. The trees darken. The rocks close their ears against the sound.
And the still lake breathes its quiet, the dark mirror for a moon caught in the tendrils of a horrified tree.
4
The school was an old community hall, weatherboard with louvres down both sides. Near the front door were three flagpoles, flying the Australian Aboriginal flag, the Torres Strait Islander flag, and the national one that Griffin never liked to see flying alone. He’d been admonished at his last school for omitting it in his school project and refusing to sing the national anthem.
Greta thought her angel ruffians might have clung to her on their first day, but Griffin and Raffy bolted for the climbing frame under a blue shade cloth, and Toby went to the oval, which was unnaturally green. A three-legged dog romped across the grass after a shoal of children chasing a soccer ball.
Greta went inside to find the teachers. There were two, she’d heard, and only thirty students. The classroom was one large room. Pegs for bags lined the back wall and a fridge hummed in one corner. The smell of lunchboxes and pencil shavings was in the air. A divider curtain down the middle had been pushed to one side. The louvre windows gave a split view of the playground, the oval and a bush block.
Wooden desks scoured with graffiti faced a blackboard that took up most of the end wall. Beside it was a slightly open door with Teachers Only stencilled on it.
‘Hello?’ Greta called.
‘Hello!’ A woman came through the door, laughing.
She wore a bright orange headscarf. Her smile was infectious. She was called Miss Rhianna and she was the sun.
She shook Greta’s hand and gave her the enrolment forms. ‘Don’t read it all at once, you’ll get a headache!’ Her voice was husky, she might be a singer.
‘When did you arrive?’
‘Last week.’
‘Still find
ing your feet!’ She chuckled and moved out to the porch. ‘Let’s find your boys—Toby’s twelve, Griffin’s nine and the little one’s six, right?’ She looked across the playground. ‘Ah, I see them! Straight into it!’
Greta waved to Raffy. He came over and considered Miss Rhianna, taking in the diamante stud in her nose and the eagle claw tattoo above her ankle.
Miss Rhianna passed him the school bell. ‘Here, can you ring that for me?’
Another boy ran up. ‘I’ll help you,’ he offered.
It was heavy. They worked out their fingers on the handle to ring it together. Children started heading for the schoolhouse, lining up at the bottom of the steps. Rhianna took Raffy’s hand and eased him in among them.
Greta sat at a lunch table to fill out the enrolment forms. The children were inside by the time she finished. As she was leaving the school grounds a mobility scooter zoomed up the path. She stepped sideways just in time. An older woman was driving it, with a toddler on her knee and a boy standing at the back. He jumped off at the school door.
Greta wound down the car window and continued along the road to a T-intersection. A Welcome to Lightstone! sign greeted her on the corner. An arrow pointed towards the general store and post office. The main street was lined with white frangipanis. The air smelled of them. Immediately on her left was a swimming pool. She slowed the car to read the opening times on the gate. A faded yellow shade cloth hung above the inviting water. On the other side of the road an abandoned church stood in the middle of an unkempt block. A dirt road separated it from an oval overlooked by a shady rain tree. Behind it was a frighteningly high, old-fashioned metal slide and a set of swings. The buildings on her left were boarded up—a bakery, hardware store and a couple of unmarked shopfronts. Last in the row was one with a sign: Op Shop, Saturdays.
She headed for the general store further up on her left. The park opposite ended with a thicket of trees and bushes. Glancing across, she caught sight of a model castle among the dark trees. Greta was so surprised she stopped in the road, engine still running. It was a salmon orange colour, a couple of metres high and wide, with a stone wall. Greta stared at it, almost unbelieving. She’d have expected a giant crocodile, or a bull rider. Instead, a changeling monument dropped by a raven from another hemisphere, or tipped out of a fairytale book to take root where it landed.