by Karen Manton
He smiled politely. ‘Kids happy at school?’
‘They’re loving it. New friends.’
The tea was hot, she gently blew into her cup. Ronnie kept his gaze on the ridge. His fingers were too large for the cup handle. She saw now that his middle finger was cut short, a thick stub.
‘Rhianna is it?’
‘Yes! They adore her.’
‘My daughter went to school with ’er.’ He paused to let the news sink in. ‘She’s over on the east coast now. Beautician. Lookin’ after all those Gold Coast ladies.’ He smiled at the thought of them and sipped his tea.
Greta curled her dirt-caked fingernails into her hand. ‘Did you grow up here in Lightstone?’
‘Nah. I come along after Joel’s family left—must’ve been ’97. They’d gone a couple of years before. Seb was here still; had a wreckers’ yard up there at the old place. I only knew Joel by hearsay.’ He smiled briefly at Greta, but the escarpment was his comfort. He kept going back to it.
‘Wasn’t till he come back with his brother Danny, ’bout fifteen years ago, that I got to know Joel. Danny was a bit wild, but Joel did some grading for me on that road past Brynn’s place. It’s bitumen now. Used to be dirt.’
‘I didn’t know he’d come back then.’ As soon as she said it, she wondered if she had been told, and forgotten.
Ronnie shifted in the chair. ‘Didn’t stay long. Few months maybe.’
Greta was quiet, thinking.
Ronnie took refuge in the tea, drinking the rest of it without a pause. As soon as he heard a truck rumbling in he stood and eased his chair into place at the table.
‘I’ll be going then, Greta.’ He smiled. ‘Hope that bus isn’t in your way.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Last stop.’
‘I reckon there’s life in her yet.’ He seemed lighter now he was going down the steps. ‘Not sure if she’d make it to Adelaide. Halfway maybe.’
‘I’ll remind Joel of that when he says we’re taking off in it.’
He waved to her from the truck, which did a U-turn and hauled away, churning up dust.
Why hadn’t Joel ever told her he’d returned after his family left, she asked herself. And a voice in her answered, Why would he?
Joel and the children returned just before sunset. The bus caused a stir of excitement. Greta was on the verandah, drilling a hole for a hook into one of the posts, so she could hang up the chimes from the homestead.
‘The bus is great, don’t you reckon?’ Joel came to give her a cold beer. ‘Kids’ve got their own place.’
‘Sure,’ she said, screwing the hook into place.
‘Where’d you find those?’ he asked.
‘Up at the old place.’ Her fingers untangled the strings. ‘Careful of my plants.’
He stepped back from the heliconias and ginger plants she’d planted to keep the galangal and turmeric company. The chimes tinkled softly.
‘You don’t want them here?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Have them if you like.’ He sipped his beer.
‘Did your sister make them?’
‘She might have,’ he said vaguely.
‘Come and sit with me,’ she said, stepping down from the ladder.
A flock of lorikeets chattered past in a flash of red belly and green wing. Across the valley the escarpment had deepened from gold to russet. The merciless glare of the day was gone.
Joel sighed into the chair next to her. There was a silence between them. The sun had lowered, casting a softer light everywhere, except for the four ghost gums that were a luminous white.
‘You never told me your mother was buried here.’ Greta’s fingers pulled at the beer label. ‘Or your sister.’
He leaned forward, his gaze on the bottle in his hands. ‘It’s a long time ago.’
She looked at him. ‘I don’t have to know things if you don’t want to tell. The kids might find them, that’s all.’
‘It doesn’t worry me.’ He leaned back in the chair. ‘I’ve never been one for visiting cemeteries. The person’s gone. No one’s there.’
The daylight across the hill dimmed. Only the gum trees’ branches kept their glow.
‘I’m not a grave person,’ he added, mock serious. ‘I’m a funny man.’
She reached over to ruffle his hair. ‘Is that so?’
‘Not really.’ He gulped a mouthful of beer. ‘Danny’s the comedian. Every family’s got one.’ He bent forward, wincing at a pain in his back, and moved the crate table closer. He hooked up Greta’s foot to rest there next to his.
‘Is he ever going to come and help you, this brother of yours?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t bet on it.’
She drew in her breath. ‘Anyway, I thought I’d tidy up around those gravestones. Plant a couple of trees. One for your mother, one for your sister.’
Greta felt oddly emotional. She could feel the jarring spade at her core.
‘Sure.’ His foot gently tapped hers. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Just tired. Staying up too late printing photos. And up early digging in the garden.’
‘We need a fence around your vegies or pigs’ll get in.’
‘You and your fences.’ She smiled.
‘There’s cows on the roam too’, Joel said. ‘I saw a few up behind the old place.’
She sat up straight, remembering. ‘I think I met Trapper today, down the hill with a metal detector. He says one of his cows has gone through your shit fence.’
Joel laughed. ‘That’ll be him. Cranky bastard. Our fathers had a running argument over fence lines, stray cattle.’
‘He’s got a permit to fossick here, apparently, since Mick didn’t reply to a formal request. Says he goes where he likes.’
‘Like a mining company.’ Joel gulped his beer. ‘Let him. Might fall down a shaft. Step on an unexploded bomb. Do the world a favour.’ He flashed a quick smile. ‘Just joking.’
‘I don’t like it, with the kids. Him snooping around.’
‘He won’t touch them.’ His voice was firm about it.
Greta wasn’t much comforted by his talk of mine shafts and undetonated bombs.
‘We can do this verandah roof tomorrow,’ said her husband, oblivious to the threats all around. He left his chair to check the beams above him. He smiled back at her. ‘Dawn start, before the sun’s too high.’
‘I’ll have to ask my plants about that,’ she told him. ‘They thought I was working with them.’
She looked up through the gaps between the beams. The last tinge of pink sky was fading into twilight. Already she could see bright Venus. She didn’t want a roof over this verandah. She wanted the stars. The welcome night.
9
Greta splayed out her damp hair on the pillow. The fan purred gently over her and Joel. There was a new kind of silence at night with the absence of the generator.
A gecko clicked, cuk, cuk, across the ceiling. Her arms ached from digging foundation holes with Joel, and helping with the verandah roof. The shack felt more closed in now, with another layer between the humans and the sky, the land.
This night was especially dark, with a new moon tomorrow. Sun, moon, earth would align.
In the distance a curlew cried out, wailing that deep lament. It was more than a call. There was something else in it. The sorrow of souls, layers of grief across the ground. The dark rocks would recast the notes, press them down into sediment lines.
When the curlew cried again the sound was so human Greta sat up to listen. She went to the back door with her torch. Griffin was outside the bus in his pyjamas, his eyes wide in fright. Behind him the moon was a skinny silver hull carrying a dark ball.
‘Did you hear the bird?’ she asked.
He was confused, still tethered to a nightmare. ‘I saw someone. A face at the window.’
She remembered the terror visions of her own childhood, twig fingers scraping on a windowpane, the peering faces of shadows. Those other-worldly shades that entere
d a nightmare and were still in the room when she woke with a pounding heart.
‘I don’t think anyone’s there. They’d need a ladder to see inside the bus.’
‘Do you think?’
She guided him into the shack. He curled up on the couch.
‘It’s like when we first came,’ he said softly.
He fell asleep quickly, as if he’d come up for just one breath in the real world then returned underwater.
Greta lay down again. She listened to the chirruping crickets, the gentle woof-woof of a barking owl. And then a different noise, like footsteps. The verandah boards creaked with a weight. She sat up, her back against the stones of the inside wall. Step, step, pause. Step, pause. She was not imagining it. And it wasn’t an animal. It was a person looking for something. She heard a bump against the table.
There was a long silence after that. Only her own breath and the nose-whistling snuffles of Griffin. She fumbled for her torch but couldn’t find it and so waited, ears on high alert.
The footsteps and a small, hovering flame roused her. She saw a hand holding her father’s lantern and a face peering through the flywire above Joel. Greta’s heart raced. She tried to think what she could use to defend herself—Joel’s wrench maybe. It was under the kitchen sink. For now she couldn’t take her eyes off the intruder.
The face seemed familiar somehow. Suddenly she recognised who it was—the girl from the wreck near the banyan tree.
Her eyes were fixed on Joel, watching him sleep. She never moved, just stared. It was unnerving, obsessive, this watching him while he slept. Her fingers touched the flywire, curious and tender, as if they might defy physics and reach in to brush his forehead. How did she know him?
Griffin coughed. The girl’s eyes switched to him. The couch was pushed up against the flywire. There was almost nothing between her and the sleeping boy. She manoeuvred the lantern to see him better. His neck was exposed. The light fell on his birthmark. Despite the flywire and the shadows, Greta saw a change come over the girl’s face—as if she hadn’t expected to see the little boy and was discomfited by him, or his existence was against some surety of her own. There was something sinister, menacing in her gaze.
‘Joel!’ Greta called in a loud whisper. She stood up.
Her foot kicked the torch. She grabbed it and shone it on the flywire.
The girl stared back, aghast. Before Joel had fully stirred the girl was gone, a faint ‘No!’ singing into the night as she flitted across the verandah and leaped to the ground.
Greta flew from the room to chase her.
‘What is it?’ Joel’s voice mumbled against the bump of the door.
The girl was a fleeting shadow, the lantern a disembodied light beside her. I’ll never be quick enough, Greta thought. But the girl tripped and fell hard to the ground. Before she’d struggled to her feet Greta caught up and seized her arm.
‘What do you want?’ She clutched the girl’s arm so tight she could feel the bone.
The girl raised her chin in defiance and yanked herself free.
She’ll run, Greta thought.
And yet the girl stayed. Greta’s finger marks were on her skin.
They were both quiet, each listening to their own and the other’s breath.
When Greta had steadied herself, she asked again, ‘What do you want?’
The girl flicked open her hand. An amethyst sat on her palm. ‘I took this,’ she said.
‘Have it.’ Greta wondered at herself, chasing off a child like this. ‘Where do you live?’ she asked.
‘Down that way.’ The girl’s hand swept towards the valley.
‘In the hut?’
In the torchlight the girl’s face was a picture of innocence. She ignored the question, or didn’t hear it. Her eyes were focused on Greta’s face. She moved closer and stretched out her hand to touch Greta’s cheek. She said, ‘You are very real.’ Her eyes locked on to Greta’s. ‘You have lost someone. Someone very young.’ Her gaze didn’t waver. ‘It’s a sad thing to lose a friend.’
A tightness wrapped around Greta’s lungs. The curlew cried into the night. The girl shivered. Her right hand moved to her left wrist for comfort. It was then Greta noticed she was wearing a wire bracelet with rusted metal charms.
There was a sudden scuffle at the water tank, a chicken’s panicked squawk, a metallic ding. Greta turned to shine the torch behind her. A rufous owl was perched on the tank with Raffy’s white hen limp in its clutches.
When Greta looked back the girl was gone. She’d only turned her head for a few seconds. She shone the torch past the ghost gums and up to the ruined homestead, then switched it off. Only then did she spot the lantern’s bobbing light disappearing through gamba alongside the firebreak.
‘Wait!’ called Greta, alarmed.
The girl didn’t look back.
‘If you drop that lamp in those grasses, we’re all gone,’ Greta whispered.
10
Greta sliced through the blue water of the local pool. The black lines of the lane wavered beneath her.
You have lost someone. Someone very young. It was unnerving, the way those blue eyes had looked into her. You are very real.
Where had she come from that first time Greta saw her by the car? And last night? Down that way. Near the outcrop, the hidden valley. The hut.
I wouldn’t go in there if I were you. Did Trapper know the girl was there? The thought sickened her.
It’s a sad thing to lose a friend. Gavin’s face floated up to her from the pool floor. She sucked in water and came up spluttering at the wall. She’d reached the shallow end without knowing it.
Erin was there, skinny and tanned and wearing a black bikini. A section of plastic wrap covered a fresh tattoo above her left breast.
‘Tryin’ to get fit?’ she asked.
Greta smiled, breathing hard. ‘A few laps after school drop-off keeps me sane.’
‘I can’t swim yet.’ Erin pointed to the tattoo. ‘Don’t let me stop you.’
Greta readjusted her goggles and swam on. She kept seeing the girl’s distorted face against the flywire and the amethyst in her hand. It might have been a dream if Griffin’s amethyst hadn’t been missing this morning, along with the lantern.
At the deep end she stopped and eased herself up onto the ladder. The blue water rocked. Erin had gone.
Afterwards Greta went to the post office and checked the letterbox. There was one letter. She recognised Janna’s handwriting.
Hazel smiled at her from her usual table. ‘You’ve been swimming,’ she noted. ‘It’s the weather for it.’
‘Sure is.’ Greta sat down with her, shy. ‘The kids are in the creek every day. Joel says there’s no crocs.’
‘There’s traps set up. But you gotta watch out. When the rain’s coming, you know.’ She nodded to a woman entering the store.
Greta wanted to ask Hazel about the girl, if she’d heard about or knew the mystery visitor. But Hazel spoke first.
‘As long as you’re not swimming in that lake.’
‘Joel’s warned us off it.’
The air was humid, close around them.
Hazel looked out to the empty car park. Her breath rattled a little. ‘There was poison water where my mother grew up.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Not like that one where you are. I’m talking different water.’ Her hand waved through the air to change the place. ‘To get rid of us, you know?’
She stopped to breathe. A cough took hold of her. When it passed she spoke again. ‘Makes people sick. More and more of that poison, little bit every day, kills you.’ She closed her eyes and passed her hand over her face.
Greta felt her stomach drop and a horror run through her, for this story and all the untold ones, the ones she didn’t know. They were quiet, the two women, their fingers almost touching on the table. The store door opened and closed with people coming and going.
A four-wheel drive pulled up close to the verandah.
‘I have to go now,’ Ha
zel said, slowly standing.
Greta walked with her to the car, with Hazel holding her arm and sucking air in quickly now and then, because of a sharp pain in her legs, she said.
Greta opened the car door and gave her a hand up.
‘My son, Trenthan,’ Hazel smiled.
Trenthan nodded to Greta.
‘Thanks, dear,’ Hazel said.
‘No worries.’
‘Slam it,’ Trenthan told her, for the door.
Hazel’s words stayed with Greta on the way home. There was poison water where my mother grew up. Flowing through everything, Greta thought, and she shivered as she turned into the property.
On the verandah she opened the letter from Janna. A faint smell of ylang-ylang wafted out. It was an invitation to ‘our wonderful locals’ to take part in the Fishermans Creek community arts and crafts show in January, when the town swelled with holidaymakers. Sell your work, show off your talent! A handwritten note urged Greta to send jewellery and frame a few photos. They’ll sell for sure honey, and I know you need the cash. You could deliver it yourself, have a beach holiday. Greta turned the note over. And can you give me a call? It’s about your dad’s place.
Greta returned the letter to its envelope. Fishermans Creek was still chasing her, even this far away. But her father’s house would slide into the river one of these days if it hadn’t already. She knew that. And Janna wouldn’t want his furniture and Vivian’s photos in her ex-boyfriend’s shipping container forever.
She watched Joel slam the crowbar into the earth over at the cabin site. He was digging foundation holes.
The wise man builds his house upon the rock. Even her atheist mother had quoted that to her husband, who’d built their house on a sandy hill. A river changes course, Vivian had warned. It was passing too close. And the tides were coming in. Any minute we’ll be a boat. Wasn’t that what Frank wanted—to sail into the horizon? Vivian beat him to it by walking there.
Greta took out her mobile phone to check the reception. It wasn’t strong enough. She’d have to walk up to the homestead. Later maybe. She wasn’t sure she could withstand the force of Janna. Deliver it yourself, have a beach holiday. Not yet, not yet, something in Greta said.