by Karen Manton
A ute behind her beeped. She turned left into the general store car park. Over the road she noticed the pub, and next to it a high-fenced yard with faded signs: Timber Yard, Scrap Metal, Sand and Rocks.
The store was raised off the ground, with a low-roofed verandah that wrapped around one side of the building, leading to the adjacent post office. Two old petrol pumps were outside, both out of use. An elderly woman wearing sunglasses sat at a corner table on the verandah, watching people come and go. She nodded as Greta went into the store.
There was no air conditioning. The shelves were lined with tins and packets of food, and a few hardware items in one section. Vegetables, dairy products and bread were crammed into a loudly humming fridge. She bought a few groceries and a chocolate muffin. Outside she read the local noticeboard. There was a reward for a dog lost on Fireworks Night and a poster for last year’s Rosella Festival. The pub had a family meal deal and karaoke on Friday nights. A ride-on mower, a tractor and a tinnie were for sale.
She paused at an ad for an old 35-mm SLR camera, with lenses, filters and camera bag, as well as black-and-white film, developing gear and an enlarger. Who’d buy it now, she wondered, with everything digital?
The camera was an Olympus OM-2—light, easy to carry, Greta remembered. She’d used her mother’s one back in year twelve. Just as well Vivian hadn’t lived to see the end of film photography. Digital, never! she would mutter, and suck on her cigarette so hard it popped.
Greta whisked the ad from the board.
‘You must be Joel’s missus.’
Greta turned, conscious of the ad in her hand, and saw it was the old woman at the table who’d spoken.
‘Heard he was back.’ She smiled at a young man coming up the steps, and stood to leave with him. ‘Tell Joel we’ll see him round.’ She was a little breathless.
Greta smiled, ‘I will,’ and then followed the verandah around to the post office.
There was a queue inside. She filled out a form for a PO box.
‘Come at the worst time of year,’ said the woman behind the counter. ‘That build-up is here already.’ Her nametag said: I’m Dee and I rule!
Greta passed over the form and money. Dee slid a key towards her and Greta smiled her thanks. The bell above the door clanged as she left. Dee would be putting two and two together. This is the wife of Joel, who’s back in town. We’ll see what we think of her.
Across the road the strange castle beckoned. The three-legged dog from the school found her there. She pushed aside low-hanging branches and the woody tendrils of a vine.
The air smelled of flying foxes. Above her dark greenery trembled. She walked around the castle’s stone wall. It had a little gate that said: Make a Wish. The moat was empty, its waterwheel still. There were three cylindrical towers, the largest in the middle. None of them was ramrod straight; they had a curvaceous sway. Each had three windows one above the other, and a spiral staircase leading up to a moss-coloured roof. Every window had a green, curved overhang, like an eyelid. Even the tower roofs had these eye windows. The entire structure gave her the feeling of an Escher drawing. She couldn’t tell if she was watching or being watched. Or if the castle was innocent or sinister. A sign—Pavel’s Castle—was fastened to a rock at the back. Joel’s uncle, surely! Why hadn’t he mentioned it?
The foliage above her was suddenly alive with disgruntled squawks. She’d disturbed the flying foxes. Black wings stretched along slender branches, jostling for space.
She ducked under a low branch and escaped to the shade of the rain tree by the oval. Delicate white flowers were strewn across the ground. Ibis stabbed their curved beaks at the lush grass lining the cricket pitch. The rest of the oval was yellow dry, like the park behind her. She ate half of the muffin and put the rest back in the bag for Joel, feeling a niggle of guilt that she’d stopped so long.
Greta came back to find the shack empty and a note from Joel on the bench, held in place by the spider conch shell she’d left on the louvre. It was unwrapped. She wondered if Joel or one of the children had discovered it. She picked the shell up and clutched it tight, sliding her fingers between its bony ones.
Joel’s note was wordless, just little sketches of barbed wire, fence cutters, a stick figure holding a crowbar and a pile of rocks sprouting a flower. The boys loved these quick cartoons he left in a cutlery drawer or pegged to a tent rope. He didn’t say much, Joel, but he had a wry humour and his own way of expressing himself. A quirky little sketch. A pretty feather on the dashboard for her. A pearly shell to shift her mood. She wondered sometimes if it was the travelling that had held them together, the being on the road and not settling in one place. It kept them occupied, distracted. He wasn’t one to delve. She’d liked that about him.
‘Tell us the story of how you met, tell us again,’ Raffy would plead, nose pressed to the window, watching the reflectors with their red eyes pass, listening for the tyre to edge onto the ridged white line and give him a fright with its noise.
‘Well, he was a surprise, that’s for sure,’ Greta would begin.
First she’d seen the surfboard swirl in along a narrow, foamy channel. With no surfer in sight, she’d panicked. But then two hands grabbed the rocks below her feet and he hauled himself up like a sleek, dark merman with the sun a pink ball behind him. He smiled at her for an introduction and leaned down to rescue his board. There was a cut on his ankle, and watery blood trailed across his foot. He peeled the wetsuit to his waist and inspected the board. Old scars glistened across his torso, welts glowing white against his olive skin.
‘Where are you headed?’ he’d asked.
‘And the rest,’ Toby liked to chime in, ‘is history.’
‘Or the future,’ Griffin would add, ‘depending on how you look at it.’
Greta drew a second flower on Joel’s sketch and listened for the red ute as it ambled along in search of bedraggled fences to repair, replace, reinstate. She was worried for him working in this heat, the sun bearing down on him hour after hour. She saw his boots on the cracked earth, his body shrouded by the terrible grasses, the endless infestation of them.
She’d often worked on fences with him, singing the wire into place. But here he wanted to work alone or with Toby, urging her to start on a garden.
‘Plants aren’t my thing,’ he said. ‘I kill them.’
So he was down the hill, marking his lines. She would mark hers here, by the shack, reinventing Pavel’s garden beds and creating her own. Garden tools and the plants that she’d bought on their trip to Darwin were waiting for her. A native gardenia, quinine bush and a sandpaper fig. A bush apple and native hibiscus. A couple of water pots.
Nothing had prepared Greta for this earth. The ground was rock-ridden. With every jarring slam of the spade another landscaping dream evaporated. She chipped pointlessly at land-locked stones, shifting crumbs of soil around them. Her shirt clung wet to her skin. Blisters stung her palms. She gave up on the spade and smacked the hoe into stubborn dirt. Stones, gravel, clay smarted back with their tougher resolve. The ground didn’t want her. After an hour all she’d made was a haphazard patch of dents. After two hours she was too light-headed to keep on. This was a task for dawn.
Defeated, she headed for the shack. Inside was no comfort. It was a box of stifling air. The sun was overhead, beating down on the roof. She couldn’t drink enough water to quench her thirst. She moved onto the verandah, across the floor’s scaffolding to a hammock she’d strung up between two posts and collapsed into it.
The ruin on the hill shimmered behind a heat mirage. Even from this distance Greta could hear the odd noises it made, the shifting roof, the slip of a beam. A whirl of dust strutted across the front of the burnt-out house. There must be a breeze there. She willed it to herself. Nothing came.
The closest shade was at the banyan tree. It had become a hub for her children. Not only for the ladder and platform, but for the track they’d worn from it down to the creek. The shadows under the tree tempted her.
She slipped on her thongs and made her way there.
Aerial roots enmeshed the tree like woody snakes around its trunk, propping up the branches. Joel and Toby had strung up a tyre swing on one branch. Repairs on the platform and its three-walled cubby would be the next project. Joel had built the cubby for his sister, he’d told them. It was her escape from raised voices, frayed tempers, her father’s belt.
Magdalen was the only girl and the last child in the family. Dead by her early teens after a terrible car accident on the highway, a fire that gave Joel his scars. He rarely talked about it, or his sister. Greta knew only that she’d followed Joel around and had trouble at school, and was often unwell with ear infections. She’d left school after year three. Joel took Magdalen with him wherever he could. On fishing and hunting trips she was the car DJ, choosing tapes to play. When she lost it and spiralled into a meltdown, only Joel could calm her. Greta knew even less about the five brothers. They’d drifted apart when they left this place, after losing their mother to cancer, their sister to the car accident and the house to flames.
She wanted to believe it was different once. Here, under the banyan’s vast shade, she saw another kind of vine—invisible, encircling each child, binding them to this place and to one another. And the vine that held Joel to Magdalen was the strongest. Greta was jealous—not of the love, but to have a sibling.
She reached out a hand and gave the tyre a push. The branch creaked, the rope moved in a slow twist. She turned the swing faster, around and around. In the whirling O of the tyre she glimpsed a little boy. Gavin from Fishermans Creek. He hadn’t come to her like this in years. Odd for it to start again here. He’d had a tyre swing too, at the caravan park where he lived. They’d spin each other around and around. The ground would tip afterwards, they’d walk crooked.
Greta grabbed the tyre and held it still. The boy was gone.
A soft tinkling came to her from the other side of the tree. Griffin’s chimes were dangling off a low-slung hook at the end of a chain hanging from a branch. She wondered if the hook was for a car engine or a carcass. Her fingers tapped the chimes to make them ring. She ventured out of the tree’s shade.
The sun was fierce. The gamba was as tall as her and all around. The dry, yellow stems whispered. A narrow track wove between them, it might take her somewhere. A few steps in she glimpsed a black shadow and froze, thinking wild pig.
A loud screech ripped the quiet. Three black cockatoos squawked upwards, their wings and the blood sign of their tails stark against the cloudless blue sky.
In their place was an abandoned car, marooned on a mound of red earth. Its rusted bonnet pointed skyward. The boot was sinking into the ground. The back wheel was off. Next to it was a mangled nest of metal cables. An axle jutted up through the centre like a bony arm. Leaves and crushed glass covered the car’s floor. The seats were metal cavities. The steering column was a headless neck.
A warm breeze shivered through the grasses. Someone coughed. Greta spun around.
A girl of about thirteen or fourteen was staring at her, hands poised against brittle stalks she’d pushed aside.
‘God!’ Greta stumbled backwards. ‘I didn’t see you there.’ She smiled awkwardly.
‘Careful of snakes,’ said the girl. Her words were slow, a little slurred. She didn’t smile.
A shiny black ribbon eased from a lughole in the car’s front wheel. Greta watched the slender tail disappear into the grass. The cicadas screeched louder. The air was a suffocating vibration.
The stranger didn’t move. She wore no hat, but her skin was terribly pale. A blue vein pulsed at her temple. Her arms and legs were spotted with small red bites. One at her knee was infected, raised into a pustule. She smelled of stale sweat, campfire smoke and gamey meat. Her dress had been white once and was dotted with blue daisies. A dirty lemon cardigan clung stiffly to her arms. Greta wondered at her wearing it in this heat. She was strong-boned—tall for her age, perhaps. She seemed young. Innocent. Greta tried to take her in without staring. The girl was listening to the odd notes of the chimes under the cicadas’ racket. Her eyes were on the shack.
‘You live here,’ she said.
‘My husband lived here,’ said Greta, ‘when he was a boy.’
The girl didn’t look at her.
Greta tried a smile. ‘We’ve come to clean the place up.’ She paused. ‘Joel’s brother asked us to fix it.’
She waited for the girl to speak. Nothing.
‘He’s got five brothers. That’s a lot, isn’t it?’
The girl twisted a grass stalk tight around her fingers. ‘Joel,’ she murmured.
‘You know him?’
The girl was rattled then. She breathed in with a shudder and looked from Greta to the escarpment. Her fingertips were strangled white.
‘I meant does your family know him—he would’ve lived here before you were born.’
‘I’m on my own,’ the girl said.
She waited for a last ripple of notes from the chimes and then moved away, her hands parting the long dry stalks. Greta tried to keep sight of her, but the grasses took the girl quickly, and all Greta saw were yellow rods shimmering in the heat.
Greta was surprised to see Joel outside the open shed when she got back. The fences must have frustrated him. He was chopping wood for the outdoor oven. Toby was keen to make pizza after school. He’d already swept the hearth free of leaves and twigs and the skull of a small mammal. Greta was looking forward to trying it out for bread or a stew in the cast-iron pot. It was a friendly oven with its brown stones and bright mosaic door. The children had been proud to learn Joel had built it with his uncle. She wondered if the chips of coloured tile Pavel used for the door were broken for the mosaic or by someone else’s temper.
Greta watched her husband chopping with a steady beat, not pausing. She could sense an agitation in him. As if he’d met an adversary down there at the fences and was gathering his resolve. Splits of wood jumped out, warning her back.
She told him about the girl, her voice sounding between blunt thuds.
‘Can’t think who that might be,’ he replied.
‘I was wondering if Trapper had a daughter.’
He stopped and caught his breath. ‘He doesn’t have kids.’
She let him begin with the axe again, and then said, ‘I wonder if she’s been squatting here with someone. We might have put her out.’
The wood split. He wiped the sweat from his face with his arm. ‘Kids roam places for fun if nobody’s there. Word’ll get round we’ve moved in.’
He was in a world of his own again, wielding the axe.
‘Well, I hope she’s not in trouble or something, on her own.’
Another piece of wood broke open.
He smiled at her then, one hand holding the axe. ‘You’re too kind worrying about people, you are. Just like my mother.’
5
‘Here,’ said Greta, handing Toby the camera ad with its mud map. ‘Don’t let me get lost.’
She crunched the red ute’s gearstick into place. For all its quirks she was growing fond of this vehicle. There was a distinctive rattle inside it, and a squeak from the fan belt, but it felt trusty, like it would go forever. It reminded her of the truck her father drove when she was a kid, with the tray full of fishing nets and crab pots.
Toby studied the arrows and lines leading to a hand-drawn star and a name. ‘Who’s Brynn?’
‘I don’t know, but she’s selling her camera.’
They buzzed along the road, past bushland and across a creek that was a gaping dirt channel. The car dipped to a floodway by a billabong that had retracted to leave a wide stretch of baked mud. A white egret paused in its fishing to watch them pass.
Toby called out for Greta to slow down as they climbed a hill and saw a tractor tyre painted white against a fence. The gate was open. The car skidded lightly up the steep dirt driveway to a small dwelling with grey fan palms planted along the wall. A flock of indignant guineafowl immedi
ately surrounded the car. Greta stepped out into a cacophony of squawking. The three boys followed.
‘Anyone home?’ she called, moving tentatively towards the house. The birds hustled her on, red chin skins flapping, blue faces bobbing alarm.
‘Here,’ a voice answered.
To the right of the building was an outside laundry. A woman was at the clothesline with a knife in her hand, working on a dead wallaby strung up by the hind legs. A bucket was underneath.
‘I’ll finish this now I’ve started,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d come earlier.’
Greta felt slightly chided. On the phone the woman hadn’t specified a time.
‘I’m Brynn,’ she added, for the benefit of the children, perhaps.
Greta introduced them. They gave little waves, not wanting to shake hands. The woman was skinny and wore faded denim overalls with a black singlet underneath. Her silver hair was cropped short and her eyes were dark and held a savage sorrow. Her feet were bare and tanned with dirt.
Toby edged closer to watch her cut away skin from the wallaby’s ankle and peel it downwards. The flesh gleamed white and pink. The smell of it smacked Greta’s nostrils. Toby picked up a severed arm and tapped the stiff black claws.
‘Have them,’ said the woman. ‘They make good back scratchers. Give one to your brother.’
Toby held out the other arm for Griffin, who folded his arms against the gift.
‘The camera’s on the back verandah.’ Brynn pointed the way with her knife.
Raffy and Greta walked around the side of the house, while Toby and Griffin stayed to see the wallaby’s belly slit open, the guts spill into the bucket. Brynn yelled at the dogs. Toby’s voice lilted on the breeze, explaining why dogs couldn’t eat offal and how to check hearts and livers for worms. His father’s meatworking days here, and his grandfather’s fastidious, fiery reputation, were serving him well these first few days in the playground. He put them to use with this Brynn.