Paper Daisies

by Kim Kelly

  ‘If we’re to make the most of the day, we must leave at once.’ I attempt to sound cheerily keen, but my voice is so shrill it pierces my own eardrums. ‘Hurry up, Greta, in the buggy – without delay!’

  Ben

  ‘God’s nuts, Ben – you’ll pay for any damage.’

  He’s sincere. It’s been some time since he last referred to me by my given name. And I’m sincere too: ‘You didn’t have to come, you really didn’t.’

  ‘Oh yes, I did.’ He glares at me, as his arse thuds into the saddle again. Predictably, he is not fancying this Rebel, this roan stallion, not that the horse is playing up. Cos is finding the cadence of the trot impossible to negotiate, can’t find the beat of the rise or bring the horse to amble. Berylda Jones turns in the buggy ahead now, and she waves for us to overtake, giving me a dilemma: I am as reluctant to leave this view of her as I am to torture Cos further. One hand on her hat, the other in the air and her frown compelling me into the golden blue dawn, she is a petite but perfectly formed Aurora in her chariot.

  ‘Come round!’ she shouts, half-standing up out of the rear seat. ‘Come round!’ she urges again, leaning out over the back rail of the carriage as though our lives might depend upon it. What is this hurry? This constant charging, charging, charging of Berylda Jones? In her little chariot, more black pumpkin than buggy. Will we be turned into field mice if we’re not out the gate before the sun is fully over the hills? ‘Come round!’

  I shout across to Cos: ‘Bring him to canter and then ease him back a little bit.’

  Cos shouts back: ‘You bring him to canter if it’s that easy.’

  All right, I’ll try. I ride out ahead, to encourage the roan, and he complies now, not too surprisingly, eager for the speed, eager for the downhill rush. He stays with me and we pass the buggy to the left, and as we pull in front along the drive this Rebel finally settles into the four-beat with my Jack. ‘Well done.’ I smile at Cos. He glares at me again: I shall pay regardless. I look behind us for her again as we meet the road, but she is bending now behind the old man Buckley, driving from the front seat. What is she doing? Perhaps tying a bootlace. The sister bends too, looking down at whatever it is they are doing, and as the buggy veers slightly with the camber of the hill, the crowns of their straw hats are twin discs of Helichrysum bracteatum. Golden everlastings opening to the golden blue day, just for a second, before the red mane of their mare flies across them with the winding of the road. The crest of Bellevue is an arc above us, against this dawn, the plump little maid from the house running now along it to close the yard gates behind us, the puff of her white cap the only cloud.

  ‘Ben! Jesus, Wilber, look out – the bridge!’

  I see it, and the great pothole crumbling into the drainage ditch this side of it. Just as Jack takes it, sure hooves stamping onto the timbers, needing no direction from me. This is a magnificent horse. So is Rebel, instinctively giving us room over the narrow span, dropping back. They travel well together, this pair.

  I look over to Cos, half a length behind, and I can’t help chiacking: ‘Gee up, old matey!’ A little bit of payback for all his champion whingeing.

  He is still gripping the reins, white knuckled. ‘Bloody mad,’ he mutters, oblivious to the Macquarie scattering the day’s first diamonds at his back.

  If this is madness I’m happy to be mad. To be happy: a slightly foreign sensation of late … of quite some time, I suppose. Years. And now it’s getting away with me. Yes, Mama laughs along the wind, her old hat flying off behind her as we race over Eleonora’s fenceless ochre plain. This is happy, son, and so you should be. Happy as a child in a puddle of pink mud, dreaming up through the branches of the bimble box gums around the billabongs. I was joyful then; I am joyful now.

  The road ahead is the colour of fleece and the river in this place is overflowing with summer, the bank blushed with dog roses spilling through a veil of olive box leaf wattle, the water’s edge thick with pin rushes, thick with life – midges and dragonflies, frogs and trout. Who wouldn’t be joyful?

  ‘You bastard, Wilberry!’ Cos’s complaint punches out of his lungs against the pounding of hooves. ‘Slow down!’

  And I can only laugh at him again: ‘Go back to the pub! Go on!’

  But I slow us down, back to a walk. We have pulled ahead too fast, it seems: we’ve lost sight of the buggy. But as the road leaves the river again, bending north across the flood plain, we soon see them coming on behind, and then not as the road bends west, and then north once more. I look out to the basalt-topped slopes that ring this wide valley like a great mounded barricade of mineral wealth: millions in it, as they say in San Francisco. A hamlet of rather more humble weatherboard homesteads and tin sheds is settled here along the flats, though, a dairy yard, a sheep run, another dairy, and then a paddock turned over to goats, no doubt to rid it of burrs, which the goats will only assist in spreading further. I hear myself laugh again now as a trio of kids, as white as the paddock is green, chase us along the fence line at the verge. Fearless. How can it be possible that they do not know their own happiness? Impossible as goats ridding paddocks of burrs.

  Beyond the next bend the road stretches out as far as forever, cutting across a sea of pleasantly undulating pastoral idyll. Summer rains have been kind here: this sea is looking pretty green. But if I didn’t know it would all lead into forest and soon, I would be disappointed. Dense wilderness lies patiently just at the backs of these blocks: I can see it; taste it in the air.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Cos has had more than enough of it already and we’re only two miles gone, if that. ‘How long is it to the End of the Earth?’

  I look past him to the buggy coming on behind us, a little above us on the swell of an easy rise. The girls’ hats swaying in this cool morning breeze might be the only two daisies left to discover in the entire world, and I tell him: ‘I don’t care.’

  Berylda

  ‘Is it passing, Ryl?’ Greta is still holding my hand, stroking the backs of my fingers with her thumb as we lurch about in the rear of the buggy.

  ‘Yes.’ I nod, although it has not quite passed: this urge to vomit, which has had me doubled over in the effort to suppress it since we set off. It is only the relief at being gone, I’m sure: surges of nausea rushing in over surges of panic. My head is still bowed, my eyes fixed upon the filigree of Gret’s bracelet, our grandmother’s bracelet, its pattern of minuscule fans slipping about before my eyes like snakeskin, but it is passing. I am calming. I can hear my breath, loud in the cave I have made of my chest, hear it above the churn of wheel on road. Listen to it, and insist that it slow, until it is slowing, at last, and I am returning to the present once more.

  I look up, and find myself inside the pleat at the back of Buckley’s waistcoat, trace it up to his leathery neck, to his Sunday best felt hat. Our Buckley: this sight of him is comforting to me; this firm shape of goodness travelling with us, gravel voice soothing Sal: ‘Ten miles for a rest, girl, there girl.’ He would protect us, truly, if anyone ever could. As I cool my senses around him now, I see in my mind his hand reaching for me, when I slipped on the ice on the back steps, last winter; his eyes alarmed, that I might fall, before he caught me by the elbow, and he laughed then, with me. A reflex of goodness – one that left a thumbprint on the inside of my arm. A kind bruise, a sparing bruise.

  ‘Better?’ Gret squeezes my hand and the injury there shoots slivers of glass through my veins, into my heart: restoring hatred with my composure. I see the toe of Alec Howell’s slipper smash into the back of my hand, over and over. Why did you kick me? Why do you do these things? Why?

  ‘What do you think it is, Ryl?’ my sister is asking me again, my sister who knows far worse violence than this. ‘Do you think it was something we ate? You were a fidgety-bug in bed all night long.’

  ‘Was I?’ I pretend ignorance, shake it off with all other questions and assure her: ‘You’re probably right,
probably something I ate. But it’s nothing now. I’m sure it’s gone.’

  ‘Hm, I hope so,’ Gret replies. ‘I didn’t feel so well when I woke, either. I wasn’t going to say anything to you about it, but when I went to wash I really felt quite queasy.’

  ‘You did?’ I look at her. ‘Were you sick at all?’

  ‘No.’ She pulls a face, scrunching her nose, a grimace over a smile. ‘Too desperate not to be, I think – I wasn’t going to miss out on getting away today by being ill, was I? But I’m not sure that lamb was the best.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say but I’m not so sure her queasiness has anything to do with bad meat. It might just as likely be emesis gravidarum, mightn’t it? Morning sickness, find it in the fine print on a bottle of Lawford’s Fluid Magnesia – and that’s a sign of pregnancy, isn’t it?

  I ask her: ‘Are you still tender, inside?’

  ‘Only a bit – it’s nothing. Bloated.’ She puffs out her cheeks. ‘When whatsit arrives, I’ll be fine.’

  I search her eyes again for any understanding that she might have conceived a child, but she only smiles and says: ‘Stop worrying about me.’

  How can I? And how could she know about the workings of her body in this respect? I doubt Mother would have taught her anything much; it’s not a conversation to be had until one is engaged to be married, is it. Unlike me, Greta doesn’t read packets of pills or pinched library books or poetry. And I am wholly returned to myself now. She will be purged of his abominations soon.

  ‘I don’t think Mr Thompson is very comfortable – at least not on a horse.’ Greta changes the subject, tilting her head round Buckley now, her grin impish. ‘See how his legs are jiggling about? Not like Mr Wilberry – he was made for the saddle. Look at him. Jack seems pleased with him too. See how fine they look together?’

  I tilt my head to the other side and see that Mr Thompson’s legs are in fact jiggling in the stirrups, quite comically, the brim of his Panama jiggling in time above them too. I can’t see Mr Wilberry so well from my angle, but I can see how tall and straight he’s sitting, the easy rock of his shoulders with the rhythm of Jack’s gait that says perhaps, like Jack, he’d rather be out here, on the road, than penned. He seemed a different man last night, shoulders hunched too large above the party, constrained in tails at the table, uncertain, or not quite amongst us there. He is conversing with his friend now, pointing out something along the side of the road, the breeze catching the sleeve of his rustic hayseed calico shirt as he does so, and something about this easiness of his makes me want to hear whatever it is he’s saying. And something else: an odd impulse, that I should be the one riding beside Mr Wilberry, hatless and free as he is. As if I’ve ever been inclined to ride before at all. As if I’ve ever been inclined to such silly romantic thoughts.

  As if he might have heard this one, he looks over his shoulder now, and he waves. A small, brief gesture but it somehow traces his gladness across the air between us. He turns back to his friend, his face to the rising sun, and my cheeks prickle with that sensation I can’t name – that warmth. The sun is in his hair, all through that too long flaxen hair. He is sun-like: bright and large and somehow necessary.

  ‘If I could choose a man for you, Ryldy, I would choose Mr Wilberry.’

  ‘What?’ I snap from my own abstraction. ‘Don’t say such a silly thing.’

  ‘Silly thing?’ Greta is hurt by my sharpness, my scowl. ‘Mr Wilberry is a nice man, and he seems very obviously taken with you. What’s so silly about that?’

  ‘Mr Wilberry is indeed a nice man and you can choose him for me all you like, but it’s not going to happen and you know why,’ I say to my sister, as I say to myself. It is fantasy, of course. A nice thought. About how things should be: nice men and nice women who get married and live together forever hatless and free. A nice ballad of mutual admiration and respect penned by an otherwise idle wife for The Dawn. Crochet it into a doily. It doesn’t exist; certainly not for Greta and I; perhaps not for many at all.

  ‘Well, there you are then, Ryl,’ says Gret, moving her hand from mine. ‘It’s not going to happen if you don’t want it to. I’m sorry I opened my silly mouth.’

  Oh no, don’t be cross with me, please; don’t begin our journey this way. ‘Don’t be sorry, Gret. I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m out of sorts. I –’

  ‘Yes, you are out of sorts, aren’t you.’ She looks out over the fields, away from me; I know she’s blinking back the sting of it. Of everything.

  If only it wasn’t such a silly romantic thought. If only this nice man could really carry us off and away. But it can’t go that way. Not for me; not any more than it can for Gret. We are both defiled in our different ways and, together, spoiled beyond repair. There is no man I could ever trust, in that sense. Marriage? Never. One gaoler for another? Never. I look ahead to Mr Wilberry again, sharing some joke with Mr Thompson, deep warm voice carrying back to us, a trail of sunshine too. Yes, perhaps in another time, another life, it might make some sense, to imagine, to hope for such things as admiration and respect. In this one, I should never have suggested that these two accompany us anywhere. Poor Mr Wilberry, if he is in fact taken with me, caught up in my losing game. I must make things clear with him, be careful not to encourage him any further than I might already have done. I like him as much as Gret does. I truly do.

  She shifts beside me, away from me, fiddling with the catch chain on her bracelet; looking over her shoulder, into the fields.

  I look down into the bruise across the back of my hand, spreading like an ink stain, the stamp of Alec Howell’s claim, his troth to me. ‘I wish there was some gentle, easy way out for us, Gret. I do but …’

  There is not. The carriage wheels grind on over gravel.

  ‘Hm,’ my sister sighs. ‘So much wheat in these fields,’ she says, ‘it’s difficult to imagine there are enough people in the world to eat that much bread, don’t you think, Ryl? But even more difficult to imagine that not every grain would taste the same if you could separate them out. All the bitter from the sweet.’

  I look up and find myself inside her eyes, imploring me; my sister, my mother and my aunt all at once. ‘Please don’t let him take everything from us. I want you to be happy. I need you to be happy, Ryldy, even if I can’t be. Perhaps because I might never be.’

  Her hand moves to her belly, and I don’t know what she is telling me by it, except perhaps some truth of how deeply she hurts. A thousand emotions grab me by the throat, and I promise her with my eyes: This will be gone from you; he will be gone from us. As I promise her aloud: ‘I will be happy. And so will you. We will make our own happiness. Our own wonderful life for two. That’s always been our plan. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiles. Angel face. ‘We’ll say no more about unhappy things. Enjoy ourselves, enjoy today. Isn’t it a magnificent day? Every colour has come out to meet us.’

  ‘Yes, it has. It’s a beautiful day, and I hope you paint every corner of it,’ I say to her as I look over my shoulder now, into the dust kicking up behind us, fear clenching around my empty stomach for all that I must do, for our chance, not at happiness, but at some life free of fear. This relentless fear. I see the flicker of a black shape through the dust, some distance away, and panic surges once more. For a sliver of a moment it is him, come after us. But it is only a crow.

  I look ahead. I must keep looking ahead, into the distance beyond Mr Wilberry, beyond all impossibilities imagined or real; I must remain fixed upon what might actually be achieved, what has to be achieved: tomorrow I will visit the herbalist Ah Ling, to discuss and procure poisons, and in three days’ time, when we return to Bathurst on Thursday evening, Alec Howell will be dead, and so will all his seed.

  But today, for Gret, let this be one beautiful, happy day. It is the very least that she is due. Try then – try – Berylda. Try to enjoy this day.

  Ben

  ‘You really do
love all this, don’t you?’ Cos is making a study of me in this scene, resentfully. ‘All this monotony of the bush. And for what? Destruction of the arse.’

  He’s still thumping around in the saddle, still winded at every word. I could tell him to shut up to conserve his energy, meditate to the rhythms of life, let go. Or I could just tell him to shut up and turn back for the pub, as nature intended. Both pointless options, and we’re too far from town now for him to turn back on his own anyway. Only about five miles from town, in fact, and he is helpless. He’s definitely not coming to Mandajery Creek with me after this. I’ll lock him in his trunk and post him home.

  ‘I don’t know what you see in this sort of country,’ he keeps on, because he’s the epitome of commitment in this regard. He is also sobering from last night now, and badly. ‘It’s just all one giant bird’s nest.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because it is.’ I laugh. We are in wooded terrain now, a forest of yellow box, full of robins and honeyeaters. A flock of bright green budgerigar rises up from the understorey as we pass.

  ‘Nothing to look at – nothing.’

  I keep on laughing at him; he’s journeying entertainment of a sort, isn’t he? Can’t see the forest for the trees.

  ‘Nothing?’ I give him some mock astonishment. ‘How can you say that, Cosmo? Open your eyes, man. See, under the tea tree there.’ I point into the bush at the roadside, up to his left. ‘There’s a pile of wombat shit. Fresh, too – see how it shines?’

  He cringes in disgust and says: ‘It’s only funny that I’d forgotten just how peculiar you are.’

  ‘I’m peculiar, am I?’ But I suppose I am. Under the shedding bark of the yellow box here, I see the clumps of spinifex that feed both wombat and budgerigar, and am reminded that Professor Dubois would agree – he finds my enthusiasm for indigenous ecology a waste of public money, never mind peculiar. I wonder if he’s had his latest rant yet at my letter to Professor Jepson; convened a special meeting for Wilberry eradication. I wonder if Professor Jepson has finally given in; if I still have a job. Does it matter if I don’t? Probably not, except that the bush will have lost its only advocate in the department if I go. I am what I am, I suppose. A mopoke blinks at me from a knothole now: Yep.