by A. J. Betts
It wasn’t climbing I wanted, but the blackwood’s raised roots that were as gnarled as the veins on the backs of aunts’ hands. I stepped over them and then, at the wedge I favoured, lowered myself to nestle in. It was the best place to sleep off the effects of feverfew, unseen.
The growlights were still green and gardeners were finishing the day’s chores. From where I lay curled, I could hear the faraway thuds of sweet potatoes and gourds falling into buckets. The slicing of knives through bamboo sheaths. And always, always, the background murmur of bees. They moved more drunkenly in the forest. They sounded fuller, sleepier, like me.
Between slow blinks, I gazed up past the blackwood’s pointed branches, up to where the growlights dangled from ceiling beams and peeked through the top canopy of leaves. There were fifteen growlights in the forest. Another six hung over the farm, and nine above the hydrostacks. Three were in the female sleeper, three in the male sleeper, and three in the baths. Even ways had four growlights along the length of them.
Everywhere in the world, the lights would be softening like the ones above me were now, transitioning from the colour of avocado to kale. Later they would shift again to violet, signalling the time for cleaning and preparing ourselves for dinner. Colours were how our days were measured, with growlights progressing through the spectrum that made sense for us and the plants. Most things made sense in that world to me then. But not the drip.
Had it been real? Or imagined?
In the knotty arms of the blackwood roots, I let myself sink, let my eyes close. Feverfew pulled on each heavy breath, dragging me under. I could visualise the pain loosening then shrinking, its hard mass reducing to the size of a gourd, then to a pink lady apple. Further still to a tomato. Then a fig. Then a grape. My pain would eventually dissolve altogether, by which time I’d be blissfully, blessedly asleep.
That’s what feverfew did. It took the pain by taking me under.
I woke to a lullaby and the scent of strawberries.
Celia.
She was with me between the blackwood roots, leaning her head against the trunk. One of her fingertips was stroking the scar on her knee – the one made on the day she’d fallen down the stairs while playing the recorder. The blood that seeped out had been almost as dark as an eggplant. I’d watched her brave grimace as the junior doctor stitched it together. She’d hated that raised scar, but I’d secretly wished for one of my own. Celia could make anything beautiful.
When I lifted my face I saw the growlights were purple. Lavender. Already? I must’ve slept through dinner.
Worried about the bees, I pushed myself to sitting. ‘I haven’t done the hive.’
‘The thermostat’s lowered; I checked.’
‘The cage –’
‘Penny shut it. She knows what to do.’
She did – I’d taught her – but at twelve, Penny was only the junior. It was my job, as senior beekeeper, to oversee the important tasks.
Celia waved a careless hand. ‘Don’t worry about the silly bees. They’re fine. How are you?’
My head was slow to move but at least the pain had gone. ‘Fair to middling,’ I said. It was one of the uncles’ sayings that always made Celia smile.
One of her arms unfurled like a tendril. In her hand was a dried lotus leaf parcel, inside of which was smoked meat. I’d forgotten it was a meat-dinner. She’d risked a lot for this: hoarding food was a wrong.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ I told her, though my stomach groaned with wanting.
‘You know I don’t like it smoked.’ Celia shrugged. ‘I would’ve brought you vegies but they were mashed . . . Your face is all wrinkled,’ she teased. ‘You look just like Aunt Maggie.’
‘Thanks a bunch.’
‘Eat.’
So I did, drowsily, gratefully, as Celia resumed the lullaby.
‘Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. And down will come Hayley, cradle and all.’
Lullabies puzzled me. They were the songs that mothers would sing to babies as they rocked them in their cribs or nursed them to sleep in their arms. The melodies were soothing but the words could be strange and terrifying. Why would a baby be in a treetop when the rules were so clearly against it? Why should a baby want to hear about another baby falling, breaking? And what was ‘wind’ supposed to be anyway? A monster? A beast? Or a giant?
When I asked her, Celia shook her head. ‘It’s just a song; just made-up words to fit the tune. Not everything has a meaning. Speaking of which, you would’ve laughed at the children’s new song this evening. It was a rhyming one about the source. Do you know how many words rhyme with source?’ She listed them on her fingers: remorse, endorse, sauce, gorse, rocking horse. ‘The rocking-horse has very little in common with the source, if you were wondering.’ She pulled a silly face. ‘At least it was more entertaining than the sermon. Guess what it was about.’
The priest’s dinnertime sermons would usually tap into familiar themes, such as kindness, honesty, cleanliness, or attention to detail.
‘Humility?’
‘Patience.’ The back of Celia’s head knocked against the trunk with frustration. ‘The best things come to those who wait, in case you’ve forgotten. Patience is a virtue, etcetera. Good thing you missed it.’
Again, I felt gratitude for her. Right now Celia should’ve been with Krystal and Heidi and the other gardener girls close to our age. She should have been discussing which netter boy she’d choose when it was her turn to marry, and which flowers she’d make into a bouquet. She should have been brushing her hair and oiling her skin. She shouldn’t have been sitting in the dirt beneath a lonely blackwood tree trying to distract me from headpains and the threat of madness.
‘There’s something else you missed.’ Celia grinned. ‘New seeds.’
‘Really?’
She nodded eagerly. ‘Two.’
New seeds were a true cause for excitement. New seeds held tiny secrets that were unknown to most of the gardeners. Some were mysteries even to the oldest seeder aunts and uncles.
Stored in jars in tall cupboards of the cold seeder house, seeds were watched, noted and sketched into diaries. When the records indicated it was time, a single seed would be taken from its jar and buried in lit planters where seeders watched, waiting for small shoots to grow. These were measured and scrutinised and, if necessary, the plant would be shifted into a pot for observation.
Some seeds, though, required more space than the seeders’ pots allowed, which was when they came to us. In a corner of our forest, new holes were dug for these plants to settle into. Sometimes they were familiar from years past, such as choko (which we’d hated and removed as swiftly as we could) or cocoa (which we’d been permitted to keep for four whole seasons). But mostly the plants were strange and none of us could guess what they might become.
Unlike us gardeners, seeders didn’t grow for food – the seed was the thing that mattered – so when the plant had grown old enough or big enough, its fresh seed would be plucked, scrubbed, dried, recorded and stored anew. If it was deemed less nutrient-dense than the vegetables in our farm, the plant itself would be ripped out from the roots and made into compost for the worms. It seemed like a waste to us, but the seeders were unsympathetic. The continued replenishment of the seed was all they cared about. ‘It’s God’s will,’ they would tell us with condescension when we cheekily goaded them for a single almond, cherry or coffee seed. ‘It’s for a greater purpose than your palate.’
But the best seeds, I believed, were nothing like the boring staples we had to grow for the sustenance of the world. The best seeds were the ones that grew into fruit. And the best fruit of all had been the plum.
Plum. Just the name would make me salivate. Its word was perfect, round and full, the ideal shape for a fruit; its fruit the ideal shape for a mouth. F
irm and purple and plump.
Because I’d been the newest gardener, at ten, I’d been given the honour of tasting the first ripe plum from the tree. I will always remember its tight skin and the sweet juice that escaped my lips and dribbled down my chin. In that moment, I forgot any lingering sadness of leaving the nursery. I understood then that, despite the soil stains and stink of compost, there would be surprises in the garden I couldn’t yet comprehend. Seeds didn’t care for our days or seasons, but kept their own cycles and made their own rules. If a bumpy brown seed could clench itself in a tight puzzle for many years then quietly shoot roots into the soil and rise up into a tree whose branches offered me a perfect purple plum, then what other secrets might I discover in the garden? What other forms of magic might there be?
I’d sucked the plum seed clean then returned it to the seeder house, where it was washed, dried and jarred again on a cold shelf among other precious seeds which were cherished in the memories of aunts and uncles.
And though I couldn’t know how long it would be before that plum seed would be planted again, I hoped it would be in my lifetime.
With a fingernail, Celia drew a small oval shape onto my thigh.
‘The diarist said it reminded her of a crabapple seed, but Aunt Maggie thinks it could be a . . . a star fruit.’
‘Stars are fruit?’ I asked. I’d heard the mothers sing the word in a lullaby. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so bright, like a magic glowing light. I’d thought star was just another made-up word.
‘What if,’ Celia began, ‘what if the new plant grows up really high, like the giant beanstalk?’
‘The what?’
Celia sighed in mock disapproval. ‘Hayley the beekeeper, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about poor Jack and his beanstalk.’
‘I guess I have.’
My forgetfulness bothered me, though I suspected it was because of all the feverfew I’d taken. I couldn’t recall stories as accurately as Celia. Neither could I so skilfully impersonate the teachers who told them.
‘Once upon a time,’ Celia proclaimed, in the proper manner of stories, ‘a seeder woman brought a magical seed to the forest that grew up and up and up again, higher than the blackwood and up some more, up past the canopy and even the growlights, as high as the ceiling then even further up than that.’
I laughed at the silliness. There was nothing beyond the ceiling. We all knew that.
‘Shhh, don’t spoil it.’ Celia jutted out her chin and wiggled her eyebrows in the manner of Teacher Sarah at storytime. ‘So, a mischievous gardener called Jack climbed up to the ceiling and looked through, which is where he found the tallest man he’d ever seen. A giant, no less, who growled a deep fee fi fo fum. Even more frightening was the beast alongside him – a monster, no less – with a lo-o-o-ong neck.’ She stretched her neck as far as it would go, just as Teacher Sarah had done. ‘Stranger yet was what this monster did. Do you know what it did?’
I shook my head as I was supposed to.
‘When the monster had a certain urge . . . it would poo a golden eggplant, no less!’
I spluttered a laugh and nudged her. ‘You’re mad,’ I said.
‘I’m mad?’
She hadn’t meant it – not like that – but in that thoughtless instant there it was, the fear she’d been trying to distract me from.
Madness.
It silenced us. Terrified us once again.
Growlights dimmed to thistle. Around us, the forest shadows deepened. It was evening. We should have been clean and fragrant, our teeth brushed, our hair soft. Along with the other girls and women, we should have been leaving the baths and moving to the sleepers, where we’d roll into our bunks and say our prayers as the lights dimmed to gunmetal grey, then dimmed completely for night.
Celia stared at me with her dark, soft eyes. She whispered, ‘You’re not going mad, Hayley.’
‘But I tasted it,’ I confessed. ‘I tasted the drip.’ The water had been salty and real.
‘Then when I come with you tomorrow, I will taste it too. But for now, let’s get ourselves to bed.’ She abruptly stood, dusted the dirt from her legs, then held out her hands. ‘Before the monsters come.’
Chapter 3
Monsters weren’t real, of course. We knew they were fabrications meant for children. In the teachers’ tellings, monsters would be hairy and hungry, but never too terrifying. With their big eyes, big teeth and big ears, they were the best parts of stories, and they would dwell in our thoughts as we drew our night-dreamings on the walls or made up stories of our own.
I’d thought, as a child, that monsters were the reason the sleeper doors were locked at night. I’d thought that, beyond the sleepers, monsters and giants roamed the unlit world – fee fi fo fum – sniffing out naughty children to munch on.
When I’d come to the garden house at ten and heard whispers about the urges of men and women, I understood that sleeper doors were locked at night not for monsters but for other, human reasons that had something to do with sin.
Monsters vanished completely from my thinking soon after, for why would I need to conjure terrors when something worse had come to stalk me? My headpains manifested once every season, then twice. Then every third week. They grew more frequent and fierce, and I had to learn to hide them, knowing what the doctors, or others, would suspect.
Madness wasn’t very common, they said. Sometimes it even skipped a generation. Even so, madness lingered in the world’s consciousness, seeping out as all fears did, with sly jokes or juvenile mimicry.
I’d witnessed madness three times in others. The first was the kitchener woman I’d seen while I was a child. The nursery occupied half the second-level house, the sickroom filled the other, and the bamboo wall that divided the areas offered little privacy. We’d watch through the gaps as she shouted about things that weren’t there – colours, people, sounds. Sometimes she’d cry, or plead. She could switch in an instant between foolishly loud and intensely quiet. Teacher Jeremy scolded us for teasing her. He said the kitchener woman had been the honey-keeper once, uncapping the fat cells of the hive frames and filtering the amber liquid into jars. She’d also shaped wax into moulds for candles, he said, before she’d ‘lost her marbles’. It made me careful never to lose sight of the five that were mine. A doctor gave her special medicinals, but the treatment didn’t work. She died one night. A few years later, a seeder uncle was treated too. He survived, but in a foolish, infantile state.
As did Fiona, the gardener. She’d been a diarist, before then, drawing pictures of the harvest each day and the seasonal changes to the flowers. Her drawings of bees had been so detailed that Llewellyn had used them when she trained me. When Fiona went mad, I heard, she’d stabbed her arm with scissors and bitten off half her tongue. She was only twenty-four. Her treatment took a whole winter, and when she was allowed to return to the garden she was like a child who didn’t speak, empty-headed and private, but at least she was no longer mad. Her treatment, they said, had been a success.
Now she slept alone in a top bunk not far from the one I shared with Celia.
I wondered how her madness had started. Was it a drip, imagined? Or was it something bigger? How long had she been able to keep her headpains secret?
Once I am shared I no longer exist.
I couldn’t share my secret. I had to keep my headpains hidden as long as I could for there was a chance, I believed, I might yet grow out of them, just as boys grew out of squeaky voices and girls grew too old for period cramps. There was a chance, I hoped, I might still be well.
Celia rolled against me and murmured with her strawberry breath.
‘Go back to sleep,’ I whispered.
I listened to the rustles and sighs of twenty-seven females: twenty-one women and six girls. I envied them their contented dreams. Fiona, though, I pitied. When growlights blu
shed the first pink of morning, I looked across at her. Lying on her back, Fiona stared vacuously at the ceiling.
Please, God, I prayed, please, don’t let me be mad. Don’t let me be mad like her.
‘Are you in pain?’ Celia whispered, brushing hair from my eyes.
‘No.’
‘Then why are you frowning?’
I was frowning?
‘Hayley, you frown too much. I’ll come with you after breakfast. We’ll see. It will be okay.’ She circled it into my palm with conviction.
Okay.
The sleeper door clicked open for morning.
Under the pink growlights, the garden smelled dewy and new. Red poppies had opened through the night.
As we did every day, we changed into our dresses, washed our faces, oiled our skin, brushed and plaited our hair. Then we carried empty jars through the way to the commons where everyone else in the world was gathering to circle the well, taking it in turns to fill their jars at the base of the source. I stood behind others – enginers, seeders, kitcheners, netters, teachers and children – who collectively shuffled forwards, closing in on the perfect, God-given water.
Beside me, Celia caught my eye then lifted her brows, reminding me not to frown. I nodded, tried to smile. My headpain was gone, thanks to her feverfew, but the threat of madness remained. I wished to get this over with. I needed to return to the engine-service way.
At the well I held my jar under the falling water. My face misted with spray as I mouthed my silent prayer of gratitude, but not, this time, for water. God, thank you for Celia, my friend. And then, again, in case He was listening, Please let us find the drip. Please show us that it’s real.
With my jar filled, I followed the stream of people arcing away from the source and across to the edge of the commons. As every other morning, the tables had been set up by the kitcheners and laden with bowls of porridge. I took the nearest bowl and carried it with my free hand, returning to the garden where silence finally broke as gardeners shared their night-dreams or discussed whatever changes the plants had made overnight. We each emptied our jars into the three-legged kettle where Aunt Carrie stirred the morning’s tea. Bowls were compared and exchanged according to individual porridge preference: lumpy, sloppy, pale or dark, some with more stewed fruit or less.