Paper Daisies

by Kim Kelly

  And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!

  Thus Spake Zarathustra

  Berylda

  The label on the bottle is so very slightly crooked. The label on this bottle of Jicky perfume. This little something splashy from Grace Brothers I had to buy for myself. This bottle of Sydney from some other elsewhere called the Rue de la Paix. This scent of away I had to have. The velvet box. The satin lining. It cost almost a pound. Nineteen shillings nine pence for a stupid, stinking bottle of –

  A thud against the wall now, from my sister’s room; my mirror shudders with it, and the bedsprings stop wheezing for a moment.

  What is Uncle Alec doing to her in there? I think I might know, but I can’t believe it. And yet I do. He is molesting Greta. He is raping my sister. I know little about sexual connexion; too little, apart from the anatomical mechanics of it lately gleaned from a book; suggestions of it strewn through a handful of metaphysical poems; boys sniggering at the back of the lecture hall, at Marvell, at Donne. I put it all together now, and I am paralysed. No, this can’t be.

  I keep staring at my bottle of Jicky. You’d think Monsieur Guerlain might have had his label stuck on with a little more care, for the price.

  ‘Please. No.’ Greta’s whisper slips under the door between us and the wheezing of the springs resumes.

  My results came this morning, in the mail. One credit, in Literature, two distinctions, Latin and Physics, and I have won the Biology prize. Unexpectedly. I have exceeded my hopes. I am accepted into the School of Medicine: one of twenty-five fortunate candidates. I am congratulated by the board. Is this why he attacks my sister now, in this way? Is this some sort of revenge?

  I hear him grunt, again. Louder. Does he mean for me to hear him? Animal, rough, cruel. And there is something in Greta’s small, quiet cry, something striving for stillness, that makes me hear also that this is not the first time he has done this to her.

  Oh God.

  What can I do? What must I do? I want to slam through this door between our rooms and into him, scratch his face to shreds for what he does. For every evil he has committed against us. And now this. Oh, my sister. But I cannot move. I am petrified. I am so frightened of him, of what he does here, and of my own confusion. I cannot quite absorb –

  ‘Right,’ I hear Uncle Alec say now. Right. A favourite word of his, when he has made his point, and now, I can only suppose, a signifier that he has satisfactorily completed this degradation of my sister, this ultimate humiliation of all the humiliations he inflicts upon her. Right. It’s half-question, as if he were a bored and weary country physician feigning interest in some persistent case of dyspeptic hypochondria, when he is in fact District Surgeon of Bathurst Hospital.

  ‘Be in the drawing room and presentable by seven thirty,’ he commands her, raising his voice just enough to command this of me too. He is so sure that I am listening, I can hear the smile in his voice; I can see the sour moue of his lips. He murmurs something then about the Gebhardts, a chuckle with it, lightly snide: ‘Damnable Germans – always five minutes early for dinner. Mustn’t be caught unready, must we?’

  ‘Hm.’ Greta’s assent is barely a whimper beneath the clip of his footsteps. I hear her snuffle and whimper again. He has hurt her; he so often does. But this hurt is the worst of them. I can hear it loudest of all: a soft groan as she moves, I imagine she is curling around it, onto her side. Why don’t I rush through the door to her: why do I continue to wait? Staring into my pocket watch, its hands too quick and too slow and too gold across the blank white face. I am stunned with my own guilt – at my inaction. At my every delay.

  Staring into my copy of The Dawn on the edge of my dressing table, these thirty-six pages of elsewhere, hand-me-down cast-offs from Flo, December’s covers flopped open to a page of advertisements: P.D. Corsets. The GRAND PRIX of feminine constrictions of straight-front style, avoid inferior imitations. The sixteen-inch pinch of the illustrated waist pinches at me, though I’ve seen it a thousand times. How can a premier women’s publication conscience this obscene condonation of slavery in their journal? Because there would be no publication at all without it. Buy Holbrooks Worcestershire sauce, while we’re here. The best you can afford from Connery the Expert Hatter. Pinch your sixteen inches’ worth of lies however you can get them. What good are feminist ideals to me here? Now. It is as if Flo and all the colours of hope have disappeared.

  I stand up and stare out of the window. Our every breath is a bargain, and yet each one is as unstoppable as the last. I am breathing. The river snakes along indifferent at the edge of the road beyond our garden here, and I breathe. The turrets of the hospital remain indifferent sentinels at the edge of the town behind us, at the edge of the bush, at the edge of each breath. And the hills all around us are as blue as corpses. Chloroformed.

  ‘Ryldy? Ryl, are you there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here, Gret. Of course I am.’

  I rush to her now. How do I ever conscience not being here all the time, every moment, every breath, for her? And yet I lingered in Sydney with Flo that full fortnight longer than I had to, making excuse after excuse to myself to avoid coming home. What did I bring Gret for it all? What did I get her at the bargain tables? A parasol, which she adores, a sweet and womanly broderie anglaise parasol, but it’s just a stupid, pretty thing. I am so ashamed that I have failed my sister in this way. I have failed to protect her. How have I failed so despicably?

  We turn the handle of the door as one, my darling sister and I. Five years, it’s been. Here. Five years he has subjected her to his constant contempt. And now this new attack. This progress of his violence. Her eyes are wild and wounded, her voice trapped in the aching sinews of her throat. Five years. How many more? Before …

  I do what?

  I hold her to me. ‘Gret – Greta – tell me. Tell me what he has done.’

  Ben

  ‘It’s getting on,’ Cos complains. ‘Do you have to climb every mountain you see?’

  I ignore him and push on, up towards the homestead ahead of us at the top of the hill, more heap of dirt than mountain. I want to look back over the floodplain from there. I don’t remember Bathurst being this interesting to look at, geographically; but then, that school rugby trip was over a decade ago, I was seventeen: it was all mud and scrummages and possibly a mild concussion.

  ‘Yes, you must,’ Cos mutters. Then he sighs, in that extravagant way of his, and stops on the road. ‘I’m having a pipe – right here, Wilber. And then I’m returning to the pub.’

  I shake my head at his predictability, and tell him as I do daily now: ‘I will forgive you should you decide to go home.’

  ‘Couldn’t possibly do that.’ He calls after me: ‘Someone must bear witness to your descent into madness.’

  ‘Ascent.’ I correct him and keep on. And I smile to myself: he is concerned for my health? So much for the country air having any effect on his temperament. But I remain glad he chooses daily to remain with me, not least because he can make me smile. If complaining were a sporting event, he’d be the champion of the world. He’s been hard at it from the moment we got on that steamer from Brisbane, over two weeks ago now: the air was too cool, the sea too choppy, the food terrible. All this way and not even a decent match on at the Sydney Cricket Ground to compensate, and who could ever want to live in that city anyway? A boil on a bloom, he called it, and sketched it in wrung-out mood the day after his near arrest: the view from the club, from Bligh Street, back towards Circular Quay, a crowd of chimneys disgorging their filth of fast money and even faster smog – bursting out of the centre of a flannel flower. He really is an exceptional artist, in any mood; the sharpest eye I know. Stopping the past two days in Katoomba, he kept to the hotel while I made my explorations of the Jamison Gorge and the Three Sisters, and when I returned he’d made a drawing of the button grass I’d collected earlier from some falls at nearby Leu
ra – such exquisite accuracy, such life in all he captures on a page, and he made that drawing for me without my even asking.

  Most accurately, though, Cosmo Thompson is a lazy bugger; always has been. Look at him: lying down there in the grass on the verge above the road. He’s a potbellied wallaby stretched out in the last of the sun, smoking his pipe and reading his little book of Nietzsche, his new philosophical fascination, gospel according to Zarathustra, whoever he is. Cos is at his most content half-grogged and freshly serviced.

  There is smoke coming from a rear chimney of this homestead ahead, I see; I imagine a family inside it, contentedly dressing for church, for this New Year’s Eve. It’s a grand-looking house, though not all that large. Bluestone and iron lace and roses climbing about the verandahs, set high behind a white picket fence. I look south, back towards the town, Bathurst, though there is no view of it from here, not much for the untrained eye to see at all but the occasional clump of stubborn and stunted prickly wattle, a distant stand of candlebark: the wind must surely belt across this place, across the marshes of the wide river flat of the Macquarie below, and right up to this homestead. Isolate, like the town itself, it’s as suddenly here as not, amongst these cleared hills of tussocky wire grass that tumble out from the forests of the Great Divide.

  I follow the fence line round towards what appears to be a cherry orchard, just over the leeside of the hill. Now, that is something delightful, I suppose, in a chocolate box kind of way. Cherries, roses, bluestone and iron lace atop a grassy knoll, with this great blue sky arcing over all.

  I’m about to call out to Cos, tell him that he should come up and have his pipe here. Or rather, we could make a raid on the orchard. There must be at least twenty trees and they are heavy about their business, I can see even from here. But then, just beyond the last of them, on the fore edge of a dam, I think I see something of far greater interest to me. No, it couldn’t be – the silvery sheen of the foliage, the scatter of white blooms. A drift of Helichrysum elatum? That favourite native of Mama’s garden at Indooroopilly. Here? In the ranges of mid New South Wales? Surely it’s too cold here for them; the spring frosts would be too harsh; I think it even snows. Of course I am imagining I see Mama’s elatum here. This is only an hallucination, a trick of my grief. I am mad: daisies on the brain.

  I am reminded that Professor Jepson will have received my letter by now, informing him that I must delay my return to Melbourne and the work I am commissioned to continue with for the Agricultural Board, and most directly for Dubois, as I wish to undertake a period of personal field study, on Helichrysum, and I don’t how long I’ll be. I shall inform you of my progress – that’s what you say to the Dean of Natural Sciences, isn’t it. Ally or not, Wilberry or not, grief-mad or not, I might well lose my job for this one; it’s not the first time I’ve wandered off. Dubois will want my head on a platter. I can hear him going on: Daisies? What is this outrage for? What is the use of native Helichrysum but to give bloat to the cattle? I’d better return with some fairly incredible daisies then, hadn’t I.

  Plenty of daisies in the world. Ninety-four genera of aster on this continent alone, of which there are many, many hundreds of species, and of which Helichrysum is but one of twelve suborders, with many, many varieties in each of them, and I’ve looked at so many daisies over the past few weeks, a cornucopia of Compositae, so many illustrations and interpretations of Mama’s humble and beloved elatum, too, no wonder I’m seeing a mirage of one now.

  And it is getting on, isn’t it. We should go back to the hotel. Get a good night’s sleep. We’re going out to Manildra in the morning, then on to Mama’s old property, for what it’s worth. I have not found a single red daisy in any of the literature at my disposal: nothing in Flora Australiensis, nothing in the crate-load of chief colonial botanist’s records, no hint in any scrap of enthusiastic scribble; no forgotten glimpse retrieved from any of my experience, either, and I’ve seen a few daisies in the field throughout my not insubstantial rambles, from the northernmost tip of Queensland, to the southwest foot of West Australia, and as far southeast again across to Bruny Island. But we have to go and have a look. I do, anyway. Mama said it bloomed in January, so if it’s there along Mandajery Creek, I’ll find it. The creek in its entirety is about seventy-five miles long, a week’s exploration; perhaps two. Perhaps what I’m looking for is not of Helichrysum at all but of rare Helipterum or Xeranthemum, and never recorded before; or perhaps a new subtribe altogether. Something to discover, in a part of the country I’ve never studied before. And therefore not very mad at all for this botanist to be going after. Not just some glimpse of Mama’s last dream, spoken through an opium haze.

  A few steps further on, though, as the pickets give way to post and rail, I’m sure it’s Mama’s common subtropical elatum I see here by this dam in subtemperate Bathurst. Dappled by the branches of a pretty spectacular old melaleuca, too. Like a corner of her garden has somehow … I blink but they remain: the familiar habit of the stipes, straight and woody tough and yet so supple they sway with the breeze. The blooms float; tiny angels. Unmistakeable. It must be elatum. Or some cooler climate species very near to it, and one I’ve never heard of. I’ll just hop over the fence for a closer –

  No, perhaps I will not.

  A great unchained staghound bounds out through the orchard, decidedly against this idea.

  Berylda

  He licks his finger of the velouté, draws it out with a kiss: ‘Mary, that is perfection.’

  The entree. Creamed chicken tartlets with truffles, it will be, and served at precisely eight forty-five.

  Mary titters behind her hand like a girl, although she’s hardly that. ‘Sir.’

  I stand at the kitchen door, watching them. Watching his back, the expansion of his ribs at a breath as he says something else to Mary. And I want to kill him for what he has done. I am here for the wishbone, though, for Gret, at her behest. We are fond of a secret wishbone, my sister and I, small rituals of hope; and we need one now: she remains lying wretched on my bed, refusing to speak of what just occurred, except to say: I’ll be all right in a little while, Ryldy. Because he has done this before and so you know how it goes? How many times? When did it begin? I think I might know, and the picture I am assembling in my mind is a horror worse than anything I could have imagined. He’s been odd in his temper since October – you know, with all the goings-on with the Liberal League. With his election as treasurer of the Bathurst branch of the Free Trade Party; yes, I know: his self-admiration must have swelled with his success, and with it comes sharper cruelties: that’s always been his way. Don’t worry, Ryldy. He’ll soon go back to ignoring my existence, you know what he’s like. He frightened me this time, that’s all. I’m only so sore and moaning around now because my whatsits are so late, I’m all emotional and tender inside. How long since your menses should have come? Oh, three weeks, four … I’m sure that she does not know what this might mean. And I’m not going to explain it to her. Yet.

  The fowl carcass is sitting in a dish by the stove still. Good. I could step out from this threshold and snatch it. But I am transfixed by Uncle Alec. Leering at Mary. She’s a gristly old boiler, our housekeeper, but not unattractive. He’s a small neat man made large by his own vainglory and the like dimensions of this town. Purportedly handsome, in appearance and character. What a man he is to take such interest in the running of his household, what taste, what style; what a man he is to have such affable relations with his underlings. How very modern. How very liberal. Our Man for the New Age, the electioneering pamphlet will say. He smooths his moustache, leaning over a pot on the stove, peering down the muslin at Mary’s décolletage as he does. Does he make connexion with her, too?

  Don’t worry, Ryldy, honestly. I’ll be all right. My sister’s ability to disconnect from the facts is even more advanced than mine. What is this black dream we live inside? When will we wake?

  Prince is barking incessantly
outside, and has been since I left Gret a minute or two ago. It must be the fellow come with the fireworks, waiting at the gate. What a man Alec Howell is to treat his guests to the spectacle of a firework display for this most special of New Year’s Eves. Twenty-eight sky rockets, no less, so the entire district cannot fail to know about it.

  ‘And what is for the main course?’ he is asking Mary now, sampling the anchovy paste for the late supper canapés, continuing to flirt with her. He knows very well what is for the main: he instructed it down to the last crumb a week ago.

  ‘The lamb, Mr Howell.’ She flutters her eyelashes. She makes my stomach turn. ‘With the ’aricots and my special roast parsnips and taties – and the minced tongue croquettes of course. All just as you like ’em, sir.’

  ‘I had better like them, Mary,’ he teases and grins: a small, neat wolf. ‘Or I’ll mince you.’

  I’ll mince you. There’s a knife lying by the mutton tongues on the table behind them. I could pick it up and drive it into his back. Would I have the strength to get through? Possibly not. You’ll never be a surgeon, Berylda, he reminds me at every opportunity, not merely to state the obvious that women are not permitted into that field, but to belittle me, gratuitously, because he can. I will never be a surgeon as he is. Slight of stature he may be, but he’s strong as a rat trap, lost count of the femoral shafts he’s sawn through, the skulls he’s drilled into, along with the occasions upon which he’s boasted of such skill. And I am slight as air beside him. No, I don’t think I’m strong enough to push a blade through those muscles, through his ribs – through to his black fetid heart. Moreover, I am too cowardly to try.

  And Prince is still going at whatever poor fellow he has bailed up out there. Uncle Alec appears deaf to it as Mary pretends to scold: ‘No, sir! You may not have any more of my anchovy paste! Get away with you and your naughty fingers.’ She shoos him and then snaps out an order at the maid, little Lucy, who’s just coming in from the laundry under the load of napery she’s pressed for the event, but the master remains un-shooed, poking now through the chicken carcass by the stove.