by Karen Manton
‘Can we go home now?’ asked Raffy in a small voice.
‘I’ll drive if you like,’ Joel suggested.
‘No, I will.’
She reversed the vehicle onto the road. There was no sign of the mystery beast. Toby leaned out the window to look behind him.
‘I can’t see anything.’ He sank back, disappointed.
‘It’ll be long gone,’ said Joel.
And something in the way he looked at Greta made her say, ‘It was there. I saw it.’
Don’t touch, Maria says to the hand with the ice in the red-chequered tea towel.
It is her son’s hand.
Magdalen’s cries whimper along the hallway.
Go to her, says Maria. Go and comfort her.
Shh, Joel says in a low voice. She’ll sleep. She’ll forget.
Turn off the lamp. There’s too much light in here.
He switches off the lamp. Now in the dimmer room she dares to look at him. He is almost a man.
Her gaze shifts to the open door. The curtains billow with a strange breeze, transparent white veils across the windows. The embroidered flowers on the material whisper what they have seen. The breeze strengthens and moves into the room. Through the door, the windows, there is a stirring.
It is coming from the lake, she says, and she shifts herself in the chair, her eyes on the gap of the doorway to greet the phantom breath. One day it will take us.
Joel says nothing. She will talk of the lake now and tire him. She will conjure it up as a worse menace than his father’s fist. He quietly straightens himself. Her eyes are closed. He moves out onto the verandah.
Nothing will kill him more slowly than this family, than the air in this house. The withering heart.
8
Greta gazed in disbelief at the entrance to the new firebreak. Along either side of the graded track tall grasses shimmered. She’d heard Ronnie’s tractor slashing over the past couple of days while working on the garden and converting the freight car into a darkroom, but she hadn’t imagined this. She was looking on a direct road to the poison water, to the meatworks, to the forbidden world below.
The four-wheel drive pulled up behind her. Joel came to speak with her.
‘You’ve made a highway to the lake,’ she said.
A flicker passed over his face. ‘It had to be done.’
‘True. But now the kids …’
‘I’ll build a yard fence. Keep the wild things out. And in.’
He looked up to a cloud that bloomed white overhead. One of the children beeped the car horn. He pulled a list for Darwin from his shirt pocket. Industrial fan, chest freezer, air con and exhaust fan for dark room were highlighted. She’d found everything second hand. Now the electricity was connected she would swoop on bargains.
‘If I don’t find these today?’
‘Nothing for you,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’
He kissed her firmly on the mouth. ‘Careful not to go too far and lose your way.’
‘I’m not Griffin.’ She smiled, and then added, ‘He reminds me more and more of you.’
‘You reckon?’
‘I’m not sure why exactly. His mysteries maybe. Mr Elusive.’
He laughed gently. ‘It’s not just my birthmark he copied then.’
They both had a crescent stain on their necks. She’d been surprised and moved when Griffin was born with the identical little imprint in the same spot.
Toby tooted the car horn. Joel held up the list like a promise.
‘Bye,’ called Raffy as they pulled away. ‘I’ll bring you back an ice cream!’
She waved. She could eat that little boy.
Her father’s watch said ten o’clock. Take the photos and be back by midday was her plan. Noon here was like midnight in Raffy’s fairytales. Be home by twelve or mutate. The humidity was up ten percent since yesterday. Every day it increased. She took a drink from her water bottle and returned the watch to her back pocket. Then she walked up to the homestead to check her mobile for emails—a message from a craft shop about her jewellery, a hello from Janna wanting Greta’s PO box, and a school notice about a regional schools swimming carnival at Lightstone pool in November. They felt like messages from an outside world.
She walked down to the crashed station wagon where Magdalen was born. Greta had never had much talent when it came to photographing nature or humans, but the car wrecks on this property fascinated her. So many of them, so many poses. Each one its own drama.
She set up the camera and tripod. A muscle twitched in her forearm and there was a tremor in her fingers as she adjusted the focus and shutter speed. The camera is like an eye. The film is waiting for light to touch it. Vivian’s voice came to her, explaining aperture, depth of field. How much light to let in, how much to keep out, that’s the secret.
She moved around the car, framing her shots, seeking different perspectives. The mangled nose of the bonnet. The mottled patterns of corrosion. She crouched to find a new angle, where the red bead tree’s strength held back not just the car but the stony hill, the burnt-out house and its companion wrecks. The clouds above were witnesses.
A curlew cried nearby. She’d never heard it in the daytime. She stopped to listen. A quarrel of squawks came from further along in the turkey bush, and the curlew’s shrieks cut in urgent and quick. This is my place, it’s mine.
Greta crept in among the bushes to follow the sound. The leaves were fine green needles and the flowers were pink stars. The bird kept silent. It would be watching her boots pass. She searched through gaps between branches. No sign of the bird. But two white rocks came into view. They looked like strangers carried from elsewhere and planted here.
She pushed past the turkey bush to discover a line of tangled barbed wire part buried around the stones. Each one was roughly etched with a name. Maria Elena. Magdalena. Greta stared at them, shocked. She was sure these were graves, though there were no dates on the stones. She knew the year they’d died, 1994. She wondered if Joel had chiselled the names.
She pulled at a vine wrapped around Magdalen’s stone. It cut her palm with a sting. She’d have to come back with secateurs.
The cicadas started up their rasping chant. The air pulsed with their noise.
She stepped back to take a photo of the stones. A sudden hiss from behind startled her. A long-legged bird rushed forward, wings held out in a warning banner. Its legs were slender, pale grey with a bulging knot at the knee. A dramatic black stripe stretched across each underwing. And it had a striking long eyebrow, creamy with a rufous tinge. The bush stone-curlew had found her out. It stopped about a metre away and hissed again. She didn’t move. After a while the bird called a truce and folded its wings. The feathers were a haphazard mix—brown, grey, cream and black. There was something of the dishevelled messenger about it.
‘Cryptic plumage,’ she recalled Griffin reading aloud from his bird book. ‘Reptilian eye.’
The bird quick-walked away into the bush. She spotted it again soon after, standing perfectly still among a cluster of grey twigs and branches. A second bird was next to it, huddled low on the gravel.
‘No nest,’ Griffin had told her. ‘Just a scrape in the ground. Two eggs.’
She took a photo, swapped to the long lens and quietly positioned the tripod. Neither bird moved. Did they do this when dingoes or feral cats were after them? She focused on the eye of the one standing guard. It was watching her. A translucent eyelid slid across the yellow iris. Click. The nictitating eyelid. That elusive membrane. It reminded her of the camera shutter’s magic, the black iota of a second when only the camera has vision.
You’re shooting blind. It’s all about trust.
Greta moved away to find a gap in the turkey bush. The incline down to the lake was rocky, with scatterings of sand palms and cycads. She hummed to feel light-hearted, but the strangeness of the lake affected her even this far off. She felt increasingly nervous moving among the trees. Vacant cicada shells clung to their furrowed bark. Th
e empty eyes watched her. She picked off a couple for Raffy. Now she noticed the trees were oozing sap, caramel-like flows or trails of honey gathering in a bulging, amber gem with ants scurrying to and fro. Among the grasses she came across half-buried forty-four-gallon drums corroded and split open, packed with dirt, and numerous rusted car wheels and brake drums.
Closer to the water the ground was carpeted in leaves. She kept alert, ready for a death adder curled in its nest. Griffin had warned her. From where she stood, Greta could see how the dam was an uneven circle. On her side the bank was high and fell in a sheer drop to the water. As Joel had said, she could see all the way down to an underwater tip of rusty drums, discarded pieces of machinery, the bleached bones of a cow.
Her boot set off an avalanche of small stones. She watched them splash and drift to the sandy floor. It wasn’t too deep, she guessed, four metres perhaps, more in the middle.
There were no fish or turtles. No long-legged egret tiptoeing along the waterline. Even the surrounding bush was strangely quiet. She listened for animal rustlings, bird calls. Nothing. The water was deathly still. And awake. So transparent, so clear it shocked her. It was unnatural. The place was a crystal-clear trap.
She took a couple of photos and then walked around to the opposite side where Joel had first showed them the lake. Not far from the bank a gutted car had sunk, bonnet scalped to one side, boot lid up like an open mouth. The back doors were torn off, the windows smashed. It was a cousin of the wrecks up at the homestead. Behind it the branches of the drowned tree reached up in a flailing paralysis.
A breeze stirred, the surface of the water ruffled. She watched the disturbance spread, the way it marred that pure transparency, as if the lake might erase a given insight. She waited for the distortion to settle, the ripples to disperse. The water resumed its glassy stillness. Once again she saw the buried secrets.
Nothing on the floor of the lake had moved, but she felt an alteration. The stillness was more intense. A loneliness closed in on her. The heat in the air was singing and the cicadas rasped their fast beat. The water was a frightening silence, an absence of the living. Imagined or real, she understood that inexplicable thing Maria and her daughter had feared. If you stand close enough it will take you.
Above the water the clouds were in conversation with each other and their reflections below. She set up the tripod and changed lenses again to capture these ever-changing shapes. They inspired her. Contrast, shadow, light. She could hear her mother again.
At last she crossed to the other side of the firebreak. On her left the hill rose in a wave of gamba. The shack wasn’t visible, only a sky that glared cruel sunlight. Ahead of her a path of flat, grey rock separated the grassy hill from a rock-scattered incline on her right.
Greta checked her watch again. Eleven fifteen. She should go back now. But ahead of her a willie wagtail urged her on. Every time she came near, it flew on a little way and waited for her. She followed the bird to a hollow tree stump bound with termite mud. It danced there, tail jerking, head cocked at her. Just as she was about to take a photo, it hopped behind the stump. She edged around, eye to the viewfinder.
‘God!’
She’d already taken the shot. But not of the bird. A dead wallaby’s grin filled the lens. The willie wagtail tittered from its grassy hide. She lowered the camera. How oddly similar to a car wreck this mummified corpse looked, with its furless body torn open to expose a clutch of ribs and sinews dried out like crisscrossing threads of rusty wire.
Further on, the path led her to three stone pillars. One stood alone, the other two leaned in to balance a spherical rock between them. When she passed them she felt as if she’d gone through a gate.
Ahead was the outcrop she could see from the shack, a network of rambling boulders and overhangs, corridors and chambers. The rocks were a range of hues, from grey to brown and black. Others had warm orange tones.
How must it sound in the wet here? she thought. With tumbling water at every turn.
The cicadas ratcheted up their song. Greta wandered among the formations in awe of their colours and textures. Tiny shells were embedded into the rock. Jagged lines of white or orange ran in lightning bolts through the stone. She was in a labyrinth, a parallel world. Heat radiated from the walls either side of her. Specks of quartz and mica glinted in the sunlight. Her children would love this place.
‘Wouldn’t go in there if I was you,’ came a sudden voice.
A stout man stood behind her, blocking the entrance to the passageway she’d entered.
‘Might run into the devil!’ he snickered. A metal detector was in his right hand. His dark hair fell in greasy locks from under a misshapen leather hat. He reeked of sweat. ‘You Joel’s woman?’ he asked.
She didn’t like his eyes. They mocked. And his body was like one of those forty-four-gallon drums packed tight with dirt.
‘I’m Greta.’ She tried a smile and asked if he was the neighbour.
He snorted contempt.
‘Find much?’ She gestured to the detector.
‘None of yer business, missy!’ He drew in a breath. His shirt moved like a skin. ‘I’ve got fossickin’ rights!’ he barked. His chest swelled with authority.
She wasn’t sure what he meant, which annoyed him further.
‘Me fossickin’ request! Mick never said nothin’. Two months and consent is deemed!’ He was clearly pleased with himself and pulled out a piece of paper to wave at her. ‘I go where I like on this block, Joel or no Joel.’ He frowned at her camera then took a few steps back to consider the hill.
Greta took her chance to escape into the open.
‘Joel should’ve burned it all orf by now.’
‘He’s waiting for the first rain.’
‘Is ’e?’ He spat on the ground. ‘Place’ll be toast before then. I seen this place burn like hell!’ His boot gave a triumphant little stamp. ‘Not that I’d give a shit. Place’s cursed.’
She adjusted the camera around her neck, which cut the grin on him. He glared at her.
‘An’ you can tell Joel one of my cows’s gone through ’is shit fence!’
‘He’s fixing the fences.’
‘Like fuck ’e is!’ The greasy hair shook at her. ‘Movin’ star pickets’s what ’e’ll be doin’. Like ’is land-creepin’ father ’n’ uncle. Boundary fuckin’ stealers. Whole fuckin’ fam’ly. Migrators! Fuck ’em!’
She watched him go on down the track and steeled herself against the tremor she felt. Where was he off to, she wondered. When he’d gone she slipped back inside the passageway, curious to see where it went. Around the corner the corridor narrowed and the rock walls rose higher, leaning in at the top. The sky was a sliver of blue. She edged her way along, hands pressing against stone. Sediment and shell, grit and fibre, iron. Each step became a tighter fit for her boots. The closeness of the walls started to unnerve her. Any minute her breath might disturb an underlying presence and wake the rocks to shift, press together. Suddenly she didn’t want her children to know about this place at all. She saw the thin arm of a child snatched through a crevice. Heard a squeak behind a jagged crack. It was a relief to turn another corner and find an arch leading out to a rock platform.
Below were the valley and the creek. The descent was steep and rocky, and the cycads were a different species, with silvery-green fronds. At creek level the land flattened out in a grassy expanse. It seemed dry now, but Greta imagined it would flood in the wet season. There were a few eucalypts with creamy white flowers. The numerous pandanus had long beards of dead fronds. They mustn’t have burned in years.
She drank water and splashed it on her face then set off downhill. Her boots slipped on loose stones. At the bottom she came to a mango tree with a sprawling head of leaves. She wondered why it was growing here. She wouldn’t have expected it. The fruit were green, hanging ornaments. A flock of magpie geese feasted underneath. One honked a warning. A crowd of wings rose up.
As the air cleared a wooden hut came
into view—a ramshackle outfit with the walls patched in places and the roof strung together with odd sections of corrugated iron that might lift off in a gale. The narrow verandah at the front had tree branches for posts.
There was something strange about it, as if it had only just landed when the geese pulled aside an invisible curtain.
Wouldn’t go in there if I was you. Might run into the devil! What had he meant by that?
She hid in the shadow of the mango tree to see if anyone appeared. Insects flew from the leaves around her. There was no movement at the hut, but the sound of little bells came to her, alluring, beckoning. She took out the camera and focused on the verandah. A set of chimes dangled from the corner eave. Just like the ones from the creek and the homestead. Click.
Greta returned home later than she’d intended to find a bus parking alongside the shed. The door sighed open and Ronnie stepped out. He seemed almost startled to see her.
‘Joel bought it off me,’ he said, glancing back at it. ‘Says it’s a kids’ bedroom till the cabin’s done.’
‘Really?’ It was the first she’d heard of it. ‘He’s a man of sudden inspirations!’ She’d learned to ride with them in exchange for a few of her own.
‘You happy with it there? I can move it.’
‘I’ll sort it with Joel.’ She smiled to reassure him.
He half turned to consider the mahogany tree. ‘That’s got some height in it.’
‘I hope it doesn’t come down while we’re here.’
‘They’re known for it.’
He squinted out to the escarpment rather than meet her eyes. He’d run out of words.
‘Do you need a lift back into town?’ she asked.
‘Nico’s gonna pick me up in about half an hour—young bloke doin’ some work for me.’ He smiled awkwardly. ‘Joel said you weren’t here. I was just gonna drop it and go.’
‘I’ll make us a cuppa.’
He followed her to the verandah and sat at one end of the table with his left leg underneath, the other out to the side. She went inside to make the tea and returned with two cups.