‘Sure.’ I take the picture. ‘Let’s go and see the back garden before it gets dark.’
‘Can I bring the bunnies?’
I remember Nina telling me that Helena once found one of the rabbit dolls badly mauled on the front path. Its face had been torn and its eyes removed. Nina blamed it on Reginald Forster from across the road, as unlikely as that had seemed to me. The man was the apparent target of all her fury. I’d asked how the neighbour had found the doll, and Nina explained that Helena sometimes left her toys on the porch chair where she liked to play with them in the sunshine, looking out at the day. It was strange to imagine my mother as a child, and the possibility of a man of such evil.
‘Of course. But look after them,’ I tell Ellie.
Ellie and I make our way to the back of the house, past the small bathroom and into the kitchen. The sewing room, which doubles now as a television room, is on the right and separated from the kitchen by a simple laminated benchtop. At the far end of the hallway, between the kitchen and the sewing room, is the back door and, beside it, a window that looks out onto the back garden and the mountain.
Despite the cottage’s small size, as a child I never felt cramped here because the vast mountain was just a stone’s throw away. I look around the kitchen where Nina remained stubbornly content with her old-fashioned appliances right to the end. Her only concession was to replace her wood-fired stove with an electric one. Helena had bought it for her without asking and had it sent to the house once when I was visiting. She also arranged regular home visits by a local GP, which Nina resented. I sent Helena a message: ‘Maybe you should visit yourself …’
She replied: ‘And be abused in person for my efforts? I care about Nina, Sara, but some things can’t be undone.’
Ellie rattles the latch at the back door impatiently.
‘You need to undo this.’ I flick the internal lock and Ellie pushes the door hard, spilling down the back steps and into the overgrown garden. A rampant elderflower bush keeps guard at the back door, and I have a sudden craving for homemade elderflower cordial. Each year there were enough blossoms from this bush to make a dozen bottles of elderflower syrup, which Nina stored in the cool of the garden shed.
The shed is locked, so I peer through its small side window. There are the same handcrafted garden tools stacked neatly in the corner and plaited ropes of garlic hanging from the ceiling to dry. Plump paper bags line the benchtops, no doubt containing vegetable seeds taken from the most successful plants, but it is too dark to see further inside.
At the far end of the garden, along the fence line that borders the rivulet, olive trees stand gnarled and wise, flashing silvered leaves towards the sky.
The vegetable patch hosts a jungle of tomato plants laden with fruit, most of it still unripe. Among them are scores of cherry tomatoes and heritage varieties: Green Zebras and Black Russians. Nina used to say the best tomatoes to grow in Tasmania were the ones imported from Russia, the Ukraine and Czechoslovakia. Places that had proper winters. Some migrants smuggled in seeds.
Ellie runs across to a vine that has several ripe fruit.
‘Can I have one, Mummy? Pleeaaasse.’
‘As many as you like, sweetie. We can have all of this if we want it.’ I cast my hand around the yard.
I study Ellie closely for her response. She stuffs two reddish tomatoes in her mouth and looks up at me, juice running off her chin.
She takes her mobile phone from her pocket and snaps more photographs.
Surely it won’t be this easy. Surely Ellie is just caught up in the moment and forgetting that she has friends in Brisbane, and a father, whose permission I still need to secure.
Apart from the weeds, the only difference in the back garden from when I was last here is a rosebush that has been transplanted to the edge of the vegetable patch, in full view of the kitchen but at odds with the rest of the practical, food-producing garden. Three blood-red blooms sway on the bush. I am touched by my grandmother’s decision to put a plant here for its beauty alone, but am struck by the unusual choice of location. It will be difficult to weed or pick around the rose without getting spiked by its thorns.
Back inside, Ellie hands me the other ripe tomatoes she found and collected like a pelican in the skirt of her cotton dress. I chop the larger fruit together with generous handfuls of parsley from the garden and arrange the simple salad on our plates before sliding a tray of four lamb cutlets under the grill. I open the window to let out the smoke and look again into the garden, striated with the long shadows of trees.
‘We can go for a walk up the mountain tomorrow, if you like. A special Christmas walk.’ I’m not sure she’ll buy it. A walk for Christmas.
‘How far away is it?’
‘Christmas is tomorrow, sweetie!’
‘No. I know that.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘How far away is the mountain?’
‘Just there!’ I laugh, pointing out the window at the rising mass of earth and rock in front of us. I try to see the mountain through Ellie’s eyes, and realise that here, on its doorstep, we are blinded by proximity. We stare into the surrounding bush like children confronted with the hairy feet of a giant, too close to see its scarred craggy face.
‘Oh.’ Ellie sucks on a piece of tomato.
‘So, you like it here?’
She nods, taking another piece and peeling off the skin. ‘Would you like to live here one day?’ I know it’s too soon to ask, but I can’t help myself. I have to know.
‘What about Daddy?’
‘He’ll want to stay in Brisbane. You know he and I will be living in separate houses from now on, don’t you?’
She bites on a small whole tomato from the salad and sends a spray of juice across the table, hitting me. She covers her mouth and laughs.
‘Good shot,’ I tell her.
‘He could visit with Ben and Sylvia,’ she says.
I turn my back as I load the cooked cutlets onto our plates. Breathe.
‘What about my friends?’ Ellie asks.
‘They can visit, too. Whenever they want. And you can phone them.’ I point to the new phone, now my ally. Somewhat spookily, the phone beeps and Ellie checks the message, proficiently for a child her age, I think.
‘Daddy has sent a photo back,’ she says. ‘Look!”
I lean in and see a picture of Ian poking out his tongue. A fair-haired woman is in the background, moving quickly through the frame. May she keep walking, I think. May she walk right out of our lives.
Later, as I lift the quilt over Ellie, a southerly wind rattles the windows, creeping in through leaky wooden frames.
‘Dobroi nochi, moya dochenka,’ I find myself saying, and Ellie looks up at me. ‘That’s what Nina would have said if she was tucking you in. It’s what she used to say to me. It means: “Good night, my girl.”’ I kiss her. ‘Santa comes tonight.’
I’m pleased we don’t have to rush off anywhere tomorrow and that I only hired the car for one day. It meant delivering it to town this evening and catching the bus back up the hill, but we made it an adventure. Now we don’t have to go anywhere, except by foot, for the next couple of days.
A loud crash in the kitchen jolts Ellie upright.
‘Is it Santa?’ she asks.
‘Shh,’ I tell her. ‘Something must have just fallen over with this wind. Lie down.’ I give her a pat on the back and make my way down the hall. In the kitchen, the wooden cutting board is on the floor, and the tail of a large brushtail possum is disappearing through the open window and out into the night. I clap my hands loudly twice.
‘It was just a possum,’ I call back, shutting the window and locking it. Ellie is sitting up in bed again when I return.
‘Inside?’ She looks afraid.
‘They’re very cheeky,’ I tell her, catching her nose between the backs of my first and second fingers. ‘A bit like you. Now, off to sleep. Santa won’t come if you’re awake.’ How readily we lie to our children, I think.
Back in the kit
chen, I turn on the enamel kettle for a cup of tea and listen to it crackle as the element heats. As it reaches its welcome crescendo I crouch to take a jar of tea from the cupboard where it has always been, beside a one-person silver teapot wrapped in its crocheted cozy.
While the tea steeps, I open Nina’s sewing-room drawer and find her small box of Christmas ornaments and tinsel. Nina used to dig a pine sapling from the forest and use it as her Christmas tree, but it is too late for that tonight. Instead, I go outside and break a small branch from a young eucalypt.
The spinning gum leaves are grey, almost metallic, and look beautiful in the corner of the room in a brass vase. I wrap them in tinsel and hang the glass baubles. Underneath, I put several presents for Ellie: a second gift from Ian and three from me. My gifts are a box of artist-quality colour pencils, art paper, and a fold-up scooter that I managed to fit diagonally into my suitcase. Ian’s second gift, he told me, is a fairy dress. He had asked me Ellie’s size.
6
Hobart’s summer sun wakes me early, stabbing me in the eyes. Take thy thoughts to bed with thee, for the morning is wiser than the evening. How many of Nina’s sayings do I have in my head, each of them just waiting to reemerge when the time is right, so I don’t forget how to live?
It feels like a kind of rebirth, waking here. And on Christmas day. I chuckle at the cliché, then think of Helena giving birth to me, and my mood changes. How did she feel when she saw me for the first time? Did she hold me to her chest and offer me her breast as I instinctively offered mine to Ellie?
Helena finished the last months of her schooling in Sydney, away from prying eyes. It was a school for girls in her predicament. Nina paid for private tutoring so Helena wouldn’t be disadvantaged and was delighted when Helena was accepted into medical school.
‘You have no idea how difficult it was to attend university classes in the final weeks of pregnancy,’ Helena told me when I started university. ‘The remarks I got. The stares. Thank God times have changed.’
It seems I was causing my mother grief even before I was born. I have no idea how Nina convinced the authorities to let her adopt me, but I am grateful for it. Even if she lied to me for much of my childhood, telling me I was hers and that Helena, who visited a handful of times from Sydney, was my adult half-sister; that my father was a kind Russian man who had returned home because he did not feel welcome in Australia. I was about to turn twelve when Nina told me the truth: Helena was my mother. She explained that Helena had fallen pregnant too young and that it had been best for both her and me, that she, Nina, raised me as her own. Nina apologised for the deception, but I knew she had been trying to shield me from being the child of a teenage mother. Besides, Helena was more focused on her studies than on me. And the world got an award-winning paediatrician from my sacrifice. Hooray!
I shake my head. Ian always said sarcasm didn’t suit me.
Wrapping myself in Nina’s dressing gown, I peer into Ellie’s room and see that she is still sound asleep, her lips plump and parted, showing the bottoms of her milk teeth, her perfect skin smooth like porcelain. The rabbit toys are lined up beside her under the covers, each with their head poking out. In the kitchen, I turn on the kettle and, as I wait for it to boil, do some yoga stretches: half-moon sideways bends and forward lunges, finishing by planting my feet firmly on the floor and extending my arms straight down at my sides – the mountain pose.
I open Facebook and write Rebekkah a message: ‘Hi Bec, Happy Xmas. Long time no see. I hope all is well. I’m in Tassie for a holiday, maybe longer. Catch up sometime?’
I reread the message and check that it doesn’t sound too desperate, then send it, promising myself to make more of an effort with friends.
Over a cup of strong tea with a slice of lemon, I watch dawn illuminate the mist shrouding the mountain. I picture the view from the summit when the mist clears: all the way to the wild southwest, still mysterious and, in parts, unchanged since the first white men – also immigrants of a kind – set their heavy feet here two centuries ago. There, if you walk off the track, you might be the first person of any origin to put your foot upon that exact square metre of earth, so wild and inaccessible are parts of this island.
A message comes back: ‘Sara, how nice to hear from you. What a surprise! Happy Xmas to you, Ian and Ellie. I’d love to catch up, but we are overseas for the year – living it up in France. Stay in touch. Bises. Xxx’
Damn. I reply: ‘Enjoy! Let me know when u r back. Xxx’
It doesn’t feel right to tell her of the divorce in a Facebook message. Through the window, the roses wave at me from the transplanted bush. I take a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer, slip on Nina’s gumboots at the back door and traipse across the muddy vegetable patch to cut two blooms to put in a vase. A young myrtle tree hangs over the back fence and I remove a leaf the size of a fingernail. One day the myrtle will tower over all of this. Back in the kitchen, I place the two perfect roses in a crystal vase on the table and slip the myrtle leaf underneath a thin sheet of unlined notepaper before rubbing a pencil sideways across the top. It’s something I used to occupy myself with for hours as a child – collecting different types of leaves and cloning impressions of them on paper until I knew all their names by heart. I’d return home from the mountain, my pockets bulging with sprigs of mountain berries, snowberries, hakea and casuarina. Afterwards, I’d mix the leaves with water from the rivulet and make pretend potions, offerings to Nina’s Russian gods: Dazhbog, the sun god, and Mat’ Syra Zemlya, the earth goddess. I celebrated Koliada, the winter solstice, and Kupala, the summer solstice.
When I enrolled in plant taxonomy at university some ten years later, I barely had to open the textbook. The next semester I enrolled in plant genetics, delving deeper into nature’s laws, and learned that myrtles have remained unchanged since the time when Tasmania was joined to the rest of Australia, and Australia to that ancient, forested landmass known as Gondwana. It’s still astonishing to think that myrtle leaves of the same shape as the one in front of me were in existence back then. I marvel at the loyalty of the genes contained within this leaf to have replicated themselves faithfully generation after generation for countless thousands of years. It is a comfort to know such a thing is possible when I don’t know my own origins, my own father. Perhaps my fascination with genetics was predetermined at birth.
‘What are you doing?’ Ellie asks huskily from the end of the hallway, her half-awake eyes struggling to see behind a maze of hair, messy from sleep. She is again holding the rabbits.
‘Come and see.’
I move the leaf under a fresh piece of paper without her noticing and gather her and the bunnies up onto my lap on the kitchen chair.
‘Rub the pencil just here,’ I say, brushing her hair out of her eyes, and pointing.
Ellie’s eyes widen as she sees the pattern emerge. She lifts the paper and unearths the secret.
‘It’s from that little tree out there.’ I point to the fenceline. ‘One day, maybe in a hundred years, when your daughter’s daughter has a daughter, that will be an enormous tree, covered in tiny leaves just like that.’
Ellie looks out through the window and up into the sky, already seeing something that isn’t yet there. She turns her attention to the two roses in the vase and puts her finger into one of them, separating the velvety layers of petals. She leans forward and smells the heady perfume.
‘And happy Christmas, sweetie.’ I hug her and nod at the makeshift Christmas tree and the presents, which she runs across to, smiling.
‘Which one is from Daddy?’
I hide my irritation and point. ‘Look at the card.’
She gives the card a cursory glance before tearing off the thin red and green Christmas-tree dotted paper, and sings with delight at the pink tulle dress inside. She holds it up against herself. There’s even a crown.
‘You’ll look very pretty in that,’ I tell her. I open Ian’s card. ‘Daddy says, “Happy Christmas, Ellie. Now you can
be a real fairy. Please send me a photo of you wearing the dress. I hope I got the size right. Love Dad.” Ha!’
‘What’s funny?’
‘Nothing. No. Hop into it, sweetie. I’m sure the size will be spot on.’
Ellie steps into the costume, hauling it up over her pyjamas.
‘Beautiful,’ I say, and she twirls before vanishing into her room to look in the mirror. When she returns, I say, ‘Now, open the other ones. They’re from me.’
She opens the art pencils first and appears underwhelmed, standing again to admire herself in the dress and taking a photo of the skirt with her phone. What did I expect? This is no longer 1970. Yes, she likes drawing, but not enough to want pencils for Christmas. Even good, expensive pencils. I realise I’ve forgotten a present from Santa. While she isn’t looking, I take a felt-tip marker from the container on the dining table. I push the wrapped scooter towards her and discreetly write ‘From Santa’ on the packaging of the art paper. I’ll be blowed if Santa will take credit for the scooter.
I remember that I have a few chocolate Santas left in my handbag and take them out, secretly posting them inside the art-book wrapping.
‘A scooter!’ Ellie exclaims as she opens my gift.
She is genuinely pleased, and I resist the urge to ask her to say thank you.
She reaches out for the last present. ‘And this must be from Santa!’
‘Must be.’
She opens the art paper and gathers up the three chocolate Santas that spill out, unwrapping one straight away and eating it.
‘Do you want one, Mummy?’
‘You have them, but thank you for asking.’
Ellie runs into her room and comes out with a small box.
‘Daddy said to give this to you. It’s from him and me.’
I feel like crying. The card reads simply: ‘Happy Christmas, Sara.’ Inside is a pair of silver drop earrings from a local Brisbane maker Ian knows I like, and a button bracelet, all greens, gold and white, that Ellie tells me she made at school in Brisbane.
‘Oh, they’re lovely. Thank you, sweetie.’ I kiss the top of her head.
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