Paper Daisies

by Kim Kelly

  But I am yet to ask the girl what time she wishes us to return in the morning. I am yet to speak to her again at all. Why did I drink so much? I do not need further handicapping. Berylda. Where is she? There, at the opposite end of the verandah, outside the pool of light coming through the doors of the rear parlour; she stands apart from the rest of the party. She is looking up, as though at some point beyond the fireworks, beyond all this shallow frivolity, and she is indescribably beautiful against the night, her nose, her lips, her chin, a cameo in ivory on onyx; and impossibly serene with all the noise going on here, the explosions, the chattering, the incessant barking of the dog. Perhaps she won’t notice I’m drunk, or care. That I am apparently now approaching her with the words: ‘Er … Miss Jones. What time should we … Ah – and horses? Tomorrow, should we …?’

  ‘What?’ The frown is as swift as her ability to interpret drunk imbecile: ‘Oh. Yes – dawn. Be here just before dawn, please. And you may take our horses if you wish. They’re in need of a decent outing themselves, anyway.’ And the furrow deepens sceptically: ‘You do ride, don’t you?’

  ‘Ride? Horses. Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Good. There is no room for you in the buggy. All style and no substance, I’m afraid – ostentatiously small vehicle, just a one-horse.’

  ‘No room in the buggy. Yes, good.’ I am hers to direct as she wills; I will pull her buggy myself if she should ask me to. ‘Dawn then. Just before.’

  ‘Yes. Dawn then. Just before.’ She mocks me with the trace of a smirk as she returns her attention to the night sky.

  Mama’s laughter trailing through it like the fading tendrils of these fire flowers above us: Here is the study you will never return from, my dear wandering bear.

  Not an altogether attractive prospect, Mama. The girl is not interested in me. No girl has ever been interested in me, and why should this one be? Berylda Jones wishes us to come to Hill End with her and her sister as chaperones – that says enough right there, doesn’t it? And as reward I might have three days in her company, in the midst of stupefying beauty; three days exploring the Macquarie and the Turon, the gorge there, which I have never seen but have certainly heard of: steeply clad with river gum and river oak, understoreys of grevillea, banksia, all in full summer inflorescence – and that rare alpine callistemon found there. When did I read that paper on it? Was it last year or the year before? I don’t know what day of the week it is, never mind what I read when.

  Cos looms up out of the dark of the yard. What’s he been doing out there? Pissing into the vegetable beds, possibly. We must leave before the girl changes her mind about us, too. But before I can find an appropriate load of bumbling stupid to farewell her with, Cos has launched himself back up the verandah steps and is shaking me by the shoulder. ‘I believe my work here is done, Wilby. And I’m tired now.’ He yawns, a bellowing moan into the sudden quiet; the fireworks display is finished, too.

  Thank you for small mercies, my friend. I turn to the girl; I say: ‘Early start – yes, we should go. Hm.’

  But I’m not sure she has heard me. She has closed her eyes, her face again upturned to the sky. She is absorbed in some meditation, somewhere else, out in the universe, not here, and I am interrupted by another: ‘I say, we can motor you boys down the hill, if you like.’ It’s that Mrs Dunning, wanting five more minutes of Cos as much as this opportunity to show off the new wagon – 192 pounds it cost, so she’s said at the table, twice.

  ‘What, woman? We’re not leaving so soon,’ the industrialist husband corrects his wife, the blubbery neck shaking with it. He’s still stung by Cos’s Fat Man insults, rather kick him down the hill than drive him.

  So would Howell; his hand is quickly outthrust to see the back of us: ‘Good of you to come this evening, Mr Wilberry, Mr Thompson. A most colourful addition to, er, a most colourful event.’ He chuckles, fancying himself a wit as well as master of this small and eminently forgettable universe. As I shake his hand with some sort of ‘thank you’ in response, I have the sensation of touching a slug. I do not wish to see this man again. I hope not to encounter him in the morning.

  ‘Goodnight, Mr Wilberry.’ The girl is suddenly here again, taking my hand. Berylda. Her small perfect hand in my great oaf’s one. Again. How does this occur? She presses my outer knuckle and smiles that smile at me: ‘Till tomorrow. Dawn then. Just before.’

  The smile that drives right into me, seeing me. Could it be? Could she find something in me? Something beyond some pleasure at paralysing my mind altogether by taking my hand? She is dropping it now. Unreadable, exquisitely so. Turning away again …

  I suppose I bid them all goodnight as we leave. Cos leans into me as we amble back round to the front path, and something touches my left hand through the dark as we reach the gate – something wet. The dog. The staghound, Prince. ‘Where did you come from, boy?’ I’m sure someone said the dog was chained. Well, he’s placid enough now, anyway. I pat his head: ‘Good night, Prince.’ I hear him pant; his tail wags against my thigh but he doesn’t attempt to follow us out of the gate.

  ‘God’s hairy eyeballs, Wilb, that was bloody terrible,’ Cos says as soon as we’re on the descent to the road; tripping into me over tussocks, belching into my ear: ‘And that was mutton, too. The things I do for you. The things I do. And now we’re changing course from Manildra, wherever that devil of a hole in the ground might be, for Hill End. Hill End – doesn’t the name tell you something? End of the earth, Wilby, end of the earth it can only be in this place.’ As though the place by the same name in Brisbane is famous for anything but flooding and, at three miles from Woolloongabba, being the western boundary of all his tolerance.

  ‘You can go back to Swamp paradise whenever you wish,’ I remind him. ‘And I mean it. I’m all right now. Really. Drunk, quite successfully drunk, but in fair condition. You don’t need to look after me any more, such as your looking after me ever is.’ And it’s true, I think; something’s shifted. Mama is gone, but she is here. And it’s all right. Nothing I can do about it anyway; it is what it is. ‘Thank you, old matey of mine, thank you for keeping me company,’ I tell him. ‘But not for the banana song.’

  ‘You loved it.’ He belts a shoulder into me.

  ‘No, I didn’t – honestly.’ I laugh. ‘But really, all the embarrassments you’ve ever caused me notwithstanding, go home to Susan. Don’t worry about me from here. You don’t want to come rambling with me – and you never did. You don’t want to come trail-riding to the End of the Earth with me now. Your effort on my behalf thus far has been valiant – well done. Epic.’

  ‘Epic.’ He grunts. ‘Might as well see it through to its grisly end. I’m in no burning hurry to get home to Susan.’

  ‘Why? Do you have trouble in paradise?’ I ask him, surprised, and not only because he’s been moaning so loud and often about being away. Susan and he are made for each other, in the way that flotsam and jetsam go together, and I realise I haven’t much asked him about himself these past three weeks; too preoccupied, obsessing about daisies and being off my head with grief.

  ‘Huh,’ he grunts. ‘She’s more interested in the babies than she is in me. She doesn’t care about me.’

  ‘Aw, Cossie,’ I mimic Susan, and the tender smile that is always in her voice, for what is really her third child, in Cos. He’s jealous of the twins, I imagine, of the time they take up, taking Susan away from him. I see his last portrait of her in my mind now as we walk, full of worship: her coffee-coloured breasts, her full lips, and those huge dark eyes that come from another world – literally. She wandered into Cos’s life looking for work, two years ago, scared that the Protection Act for the blacks would see her picked up off the street and shoved onto a mission. She’s not that black, she has no tribe. She has no story, as she calls it. Just something in her past that has made her content to hitch up with a mess like Cos. There’d be plenty of story to Susan, I’d say. Susan Turner fro
m Caboolture. I look at Cos, shambling along beside me, falling down. She was looking for a job: she found one in him. And she cares for him absolutely, despite his many faults. I am jealous of what they have, I suppose, even if the children don’t bear Cos’s name. But then I’ve never really known what I might want in that regard. Always been too shut up in myself, maybe too scared to embark on that sort of exploration. Too certain of failure.

  Our way is lit by bonfires now, all the way into the town, blazing on every corner, drunks sing and stagger down the main street, the last straggling crackers let off in soggy, halfhearted afterthoughts behind a row of terraced shops promising a city and only delivering: ‘Oi Bluey, you got another bottle at home, ain’t ya?’ We could just as well be somewhere in Brisbane right now. Anywhere in Australia. But we are in Bathurst.

  And I have just met a girl called Berylda. I look behind me and see the half-moon is sinking behind the hills. Silver-frosted hills. What am I chasing after now? I’m not sure it’s the sort of joyful thing Mama had in mind.

  I ask Cos: ‘What do you think of the girl, really? What do you think of Berylda?’

  ‘She’s pretty,’ he says. He stops, unbuttons his fly to relieve himself again on the step of some shop: BLUNT’S WATCHMAKER & JEWELLER. ‘Very pretty. Pretty. Tiny. Freak.’

  ‘Freak? She’s – what did you say?’

  ‘What did I say?’ He is a lot further schnigged towards oblivion than I am: cross-eyed with it. ‘I’m sure I have no idea.’

  ‘And me probably less.’ I keep on towards the pub, the quicker to be asleep, the quicker for it to be morning. To see her again.

  Cos laughs after me: ‘I say, but that uncle doctor was mad enough to flog a cat, wasn’t he? Reckon that’s what he’s up to now? Got all his little kitty cats in a pretty little line.’ Cos shouts up the street: ‘Step up now, kitties, step up and take your flogging! Roll up, roll up, get your floggings here! ’

  ‘Happy New Year, gentlemen.’ A constable nods, plodding wearily past, truncheon clasped at his back. ‘Must be time for nighty-night bedtime, ay?’

  Must be.

  Berylda

  Gret is wiping tears from her eyes as I climb in under the covers beside her, the best tears of laughter, fuzzy-brained, as I am, in some state above and beyond fatigue; past fear. Hysterical: ‘Poor Mr Wilberry. He very nearly didn’t leave here alive, did he!’ Gret can very nearly not speak, recalling the tomato canapé debacle.

  I lie beside her and tremble helplessly with it too. ‘Poor Mr Wilberry indeed. What has he got himself into with us?’

  ‘Trouble!’ Greta squeaks. ‘I can’t believe you …’ She can’t get the words out but I know what she means. She can’t believe the poor man nearly choked; she can’t believe I then practically demanded he escort us to the Hill. She can’t believe I challenged Uncle Alec as I did.

  I can’t believe it, either. It’s half-past one. God, but I don’t know how I will sleep I am so far gone and fidgety inside. What a night. I thought the Dunnings would never leave, J.C. Bullfrog very nearly putting us into a standing coma on the verandah with all his overpickled blabbering about the hard line we liberals must take with conservative values if we’re going to win this thing. Blurb, blurb, blurb. I tremble and snort some more at that: liberal conservatism, modern conservatism – isn’t it all oxymoronic blabbering? If it wasn’t so serious. So dreadful.

  ‘And Mr Thompson.’ Greta gets that far before squeaking and weeping again. ‘Oh Mr Thompson.’

  ‘Isn’t he the worst?’

  ‘No! He’s the best!’

  ‘You’re only saying that because he flattered you,’ I tease her.

  ‘I am not. He’s wonderful.’

  ‘What if he turns out to be as depraved as he is outrageous?’ I tease her again.

  ‘He’s not depraved.’ Greta reaches for my hand to assure me, all silly giggling suddenly stopped. She stops my heart: for she knows what depravity is, even if she won’t say what has happened to her. She squeezes my hand, and now she snuggles towards me and whispers: ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What for?’ Leaving you to suffer alone as I do, all the long weeks I am in Sydney? I’m so sorry, Gret, for all you have endured.

  ‘For our little trip away.’ She pokes me in the centre of my shoulder: ‘Thank you, Ryl. We’re going to have a lovely time, I know it. Do you remember, when we went there before, and I wrecked my gloves with chocolate ice cream at that fair? Mother was so cross with me.’

  ‘Hm.’ We smile together at the memory, at the streaks of sweet sticky mud ruining new ivory silk. Careless. We smile together that Mother was never cross. I don’t remember ever being truly scolded for anything, except for straying beyond the fence at Echo Point, too near the cliff edge.

  Greta takes a strand of hair escaped from my plait and curls it back around my ear. ‘Mother and Libby would have liked Mr Wilberry. He’s a prince, a real one – that’s why Prince likes him. And that’s how I know Mr Thompson is a good sort of fellow, too. Mr Wilberry wouldn’t have any friends about him he didn’t really like.’

  ‘That’s inarguably true of Prince.’ I grin and we dissolve into spluttering gusts of hilarity again. Oh how our Prince bailed up Reverend Liversidge just as Mr Wilberry and Mr Thompson left, went straight for the clergyman, springing up onto the verandah out of the blackness, nearly frightening the man out of his skin before Buckley caught him by the collar, just in the nick of time. Don’t know how he got off the chain; perhaps Buckley slipped it accidentally when he was locking up after the fireworks. ‘Our trusty hound saves his best for hypocrites, doesn’t he?’

  ‘The look on Reverend Liversidge’s face …’

  ‘Berylda.’ Uncle Alec wraps on the bedroom door, bang bang bang. ‘Return to your room – now.’

  Gret stiffens beside me and I call back: ‘No. I am sleeping here tonight.’

  ‘You will return to your room now.’

  I dare: ‘I will not leave my sister tonight.’ You will not touch my sister again.

  The door flies open. Alec Howell’s face is made of stone. He says nothing. He drags me off the bed by my plait and onto the floor before I can take a breath. My scalp screams.

  ‘No!’ I try to scream with my voice but the sound that comes from me is too small. It is trapped inside this dream. It cannot reach Buckley in his room at the rear of the stables; it cannot reach Mary and Lucy in the cottage beyond. But still I scream and scream.

  Alec Howell drags me across the floor by my hair to the door that adjoins my room with Gret’s.

  ‘You will never touch my sister again!’ I wail with everything I have, my bare feet slipping on the boards, slipping on the edge of my nightdress as I try to stop him from dragging me.

  Prince yowls outside; he cries for all that I can’t.

  Alec Howell barks into me: ‘I decide what I do. You will do as you are told.’

  ‘No!’ I grab at the door frame and as I do I see Greta watching, silent in her terror and her pain, her face removed of all expression, as if collapsed, drained of life. I see the flowers on her night stand. Mr Wilberry’s paper daisies, untidy featherheads shadowed large upon the wall. I whisper to them as if they might truly hear: ‘Help us, please. Help us. Someone, please help us.’

  Alec Howell kicks my hand from the door, pulls me up by the wrist and throws me into my room. Blue spurt of a match now as he lights the lamp on my table, then he slams the door closed behind him and stares at me. Steady. Cold. Dead-hearted.

  He says: ‘I have no need of Greta – not tonight.’ As a matter of fact. Not tonight? How many nights do you need her? He says: ‘Tonight I need you.’

  And I don’t believe he means he needs to thrash me. What does he mean then? What does he need from me? Oh – this is my punishment? He means to rape me too? Whatever it is, whatever he does, I am steel. Let me be colder and more dead-hearted than him.
I will take his violence and I will show him nothing for it. No fear. No hurt. I will not cower or flinch. Whatever happens now, he cannot harm me more than he already does by terrorising my sister.

  He continues to hold me in his stare. He can do whatever he wishes, and he will.

  I hiss back at him: ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’

  He chuckles, brushes a piece of fluff from the lapel of his dressing-gown, and says, ‘Hm. Right.’ And now he smiles, and I gasp with the chill of it as he says: ‘Berylda, you are capital.’

  What? He is playing with me. His smile is one of such pleasure I am caught in its horror, caught suspended in anticipation of what is to come. What violence will it be? What will he do to me? How does it happen between a man and a woman? I have read the book, but I do not know. I am bracing, bracing, bracing.

  He fondles the cord of his dressing-gown.

  What?

  He steps towards me. He brushes the side of my face with the back of his hand. And I immediately betray myself, recoiling under his touch. An almost gentle touch, I feel the scrub of his coarse hair against my cheek. I don’t understand. He has bested me, I know this even now, but my mind is a leaf lost in a storm.

  His right hand reaches around my neck, thumb caressing my throat, the tenderest threat: he can kill me if he likes. He leans towards me, his left hand at my back as he presses himself against me, closer and closer, his breath stale, rancid with wine, and he kisses my cheek, my ear, my neck. His beard flays my face; my whole body wails. Paralysed.

  And then he stops. He releases me and smiles again. ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Good girl.’

  ‘Good girl?’ I hear myself ask him, my voice so far from me, so far from here. What cruelty is this? What does he do now?