Those bones were unmistakable, and who knew how old? Clavicle, femur, tibia. A whole verdammte skeleton, reclining by an anthill like a person who’d forgotten to come in from the sun.
Today he’ll tell her. He rehearses the words as he crushes a queen bee with his boot. Another little death. But soon the new rulers will arrive by post in their customised wooden chambers. He’s ordered these queens through a reliable supplier, a bloke whose Marburg swarm box was a piece of elegant genius. Stefan intended to build one himself. He has sourced the diagrams, the lumber. And the thought of this future carpentry – this bee-sorting box – calms him. The notion of arranging nuc, nurse bees and workers into chambers calls to some deep neat-freakery. He says a curt prayer for the queens he has killed, and a longer one for his wife.
4
Are you going to try and stop me? asks Evangeline.
Water is lapping at her chest. Jim can see the veins below her collarbones, burn scars below the left arm. Though he’s only waist high, he feels the river’s insistent tug. He takes another cautious step towards her.
No law against swimming, he says, screwing up his eyes and gurning in shock at the undertow.
A person can swim wherever they goddamn like, she says.
Absolutely.
He’s after nonchalance, but a silent fuck you bubbles up. Hasn’t he been warned about such reckless women? By Yusef, his best friend, who liked homely, bakes-me-an-afternoon-cake kind of girls and was always setting him up with one of these meek, rose-scented finds. Yusef who’d rolled his eyes when Jim turned up for one of their monthly dinners with Sylvie Bellamy. She’d immediately pissed off all the other women present with her bared thighs and a helpless search for matches which led her to every man in the room. Sylvie did not fade out, like Yusef’s women. The hair toss, the vermilion nails tapping to some secret beat, her legs crossing and uncrossing, bra straps inching out, the smoke blown high into the air: you were always glimpsing her, whether you liked what you saw or not. Yusef had picked it right away, how needy she was, how vulnerable.
This woman, though, her regnant air, her total self-containment.
She’s on her belly now, like it’s a summer pool party, giving her weight to the water.
You must be a strong swimmer, Jim says. Because … well … the current …
He grapples for a foothold on the slippery riverbed.
You think you can tell, Evangeline asks, when you’re no longer a swimmer? The moment you become a drowner?
All right then, he says as he slides on something jagged, goes under, then comes up sputtering, arms flexed high.
Jesus! he yells. Pretty sure … I’m bleeding …
But she’s laughing. Mesmerising, storm-coloured eyes. God, she’s what – not exactly beautiful – arresting? One front tooth, discoloured. Across her temple, a nacreous scar.
Surely it’s blood, pouring from his leg? Something warm and thick around his flanks.
Look at you! she cries, practically frolicking in the fast water, ducking under and gliding out, accustomed as an otter.
His lips are blue, his teeth chattering. The canopy has kept the river cold.
You’re not exactly seafaring! she laughs.
He sniffs, says, Well, I’m a city boy.
But Sydney’s a harbour city. Sydney’s famously beachy. Someone must have taught you to swim?
Yes, he says, my mother insisted I learn. But not in rapids.
Veronica had sunbaked and read novels while he took private lessons in their lap pool, pausing occasionally to shout from her recliner, Bravo darling! Veronica Parker with her salon highlights and her mani-pedis, doing her best to lacquer over the British hippie she’d once been. Well done with that flippy sort of thing you just did! When his lesson was finished Jim would stand, goosefleshed, next to her hazel skin, dripping on to her paperbacks. The Great Gatsby, Dickens, even Hemingway for God’s sake. Now Jim has a sudden flash of his small, pale, shivery self, so unaware that everything sweet would soon be over. He’s exiled himself from that life, its privileges, its clannish social codes. But what has it cost him?
When I was four my father threw me into Lunar Lake, Evangeline says, moving more frantically in the current, a little breathless now.
That’s … how I learned to swim. Then later two kids drowned in there.
He tries standing, reaching with his toes for a rock or a sunken root, scanning for a low branch. She’s dog-paddling to keep still in the flow. They’re both already downstream some way. He can only just make out their clothes. He swims closer and looks into her eyes, their downturned corners. Her hair streaming like river weed.
She ducks under. He holds his breath till she reappears.
How long do you like to stay in? he asks.
The water briefly calmer now, eddying.
You’re worried, she says. Sweet! But don’t be. My childhood was all about surviving.
Does she mean in the commune? He glances across to the riverbank. On the trunk of a huge tree he sees some bright objects tied with rope. Very small red shoes, blue patterned fabric. What looks like white boxes flattened against the bark.
When he turns back he catches her rapid look at that tree and her face transfiguring – her eyes limpid and beseeching, her jaw loose, her lips making a soundless shape. Some younger self shimmering up, primal and defenceless.
For a moment he floats; for a second, everything’s suspended, the sky open through a break in the canopy, the water glass-sheer. Neither of them breathing. Only the deep current, jerking their slack limbs around. Then he anchors his feet against a rock and gets his head and chest out of the water.
And those who are hurt will hurt without rest
and those who are frightened by death will carry it on their shoulders.
He recites the lines, head leaning left, a tendency that Sylvie had photographed; a quizzical manner that she’d called an affectation.
Evangeline looks suddenly frightened, then says, Tess likes your classes. Of course she doesn’t say … but I can tell.
The current surges again. It carries them a full ten metres, her head sailing ahead of him. He’s struggling now, and freaking out. He can hear the more furious water racing towards the cliff. A sheer two-hundred-metre drop. On his tongue, the metallic tang of panic.
He grabs her hands, hearing her gasping breath, feels her legs pedalling madly underwater.
Let’s get out, he says, and tugs her towards him.
Her face is shadowed, her eyes clouded. But she lets him pull her sideways. He grips her elbows to prop her up while she kicks. They’re eye to eye, as he surges backwards, then turns and pulls her towards the shore. To get her out he has to drag her body against his and squirm up the steep muddy bank – he doesn’t want to risk letting her go first. For a second or minutes, she’s on top of him. Then he rolls sideways, freeing her. They lie, side by side, breathing hard, the sky throbbing through the trees. Far off, beyond the ridge, a booming, the earth shaking. New gas wells all over the mountains.
Evangeline stays put, shivering, while Jim fetches their clothes, following the river back downstream, pausing at that decorated tree, passing the hammer and the rope. On his return he looks more carefully at the trunk. Pharmaceutical heraldry on those white boxes: standard cautions, customised type. Prescription medication. He remembers the office secretary speculating. Why does the woman carry an umbrella when it hasn’t rained for months? The staff widening their eyes and nodding gravely. As if grief was no excuse for peculiarity, for a halting gait, a wary gaze, her elsewhereness. So he’d said, I hear there are cities where women carry parasols – rain or shine. Then left the staffroom to stand, unseen, as Evangeline passed down the corridor, her cedary scent in the air.
He holds out her clothes but she just sits vacantly, gripping her knees and staring downstream. He can see more clearly now, the stippled skin around her back.
Were you in that commune fire?
Evangeline shoots him a narrow-eyed look. Then wipes water
from her arms curtly, over and over to the very last drip.
She’s blinking fast as she asks, What do the kids in your class call the place? A commune or a cult?
Jim shrugs.
You’re bound to hear the rumours, she says. Meg brings them home. Drugs, group sex, teenage pregnancy.
Well, at a school, people talk, he says.
Which is why I stopped going in there, she says. Then scratches her leg, bends forward. The broken skin on her back.
The Hive was good until it went bad! she laughs. That’s how my mother put it. She was probably talking about me.
The haughty tenor in her laughter makes him think, again, of Veronica.
He looks at her steadily, the grave set in her eyes, the way she’s gripping her knees. Sylvie used to accuse him of being evasive when he wouldn’t get into things with her. Maybe things don’t go as deep as you think, he’d said once, though he knew they could be fathomless. He’d just pretend incomprehension with Sylvie, to take the opposite side. Now, looking at this woman, naked, slick with river water, he sees he hasn’t really saved her. It’s herself, he suspects, that she’s trying to escape. And only private acts will achieve that.
She bends her head back.
Were you ever tempted, she asks, to just go feral? How long do you reckon you could fend for yourself ?
In the wild? he asks. Doesn’t every kid have that fantasy?
But when I was young, she says, I wanted the city. All that excitement.
And now? You still want to escape? he asks.
She laughs again, a private mirth. It is no invitation. The pitch of her laughter veers in and out of control. Slightly mad, Jim thinks, which isn’t unappealing.
Mothers don’t do that, she says.
Hasn’t he noticed, she tells him, a mother’s leaving is never heroic or epic. Only ever betrayal. Men come and go, leave their families for war, for work, or private mental business. As if it’s natural, their powerful need to flee! But mothers can’t leave with impunity until they’re dead.
And not even then, Jim thinks, feeling a sudden disdain. He checks the cut on his shin, still bleeding. She’s imperilled him on this August afternoon. The river’s a mirror, furrowed with broken clouds. The clearing is dusky and still.
Suddenly she straightens, snatching up her clothes. Then, looking down on him, says,
Yes, I was in that fire. So, what of it? No one died if that’s what you’re wondering. And the place was already …
Her voice, very loud, grows reedy. Another, earlier self floats up. Pigeon-toed, pouty. Just now, the early teen, he thinks. Teen Evangeline.
OK, he says. But that’s pure fantasy – running away, starting over.
She puts her hand on a bare, jutted hip, sceptical.
I read somewhere, she says, very intense. A physicist. Time isn’t real, only change is, she says. Something like that. Have you heard?
5
See, says Meg, flinging her lime-green Derwent across the table. She hasn’t come back.
The way she says it, Tess thinks, like it’s my fault!
There’s been no sign of their mother. Their father busy all day with the bees, in the honey shed, readying his truck to move some hives north, and laddering, as Pip used to call it when he lopped trees or cleared gutters. He’s come inside twice for some phone calls, and medication. Migraine again. About their absent mother he hasn’t said a thing.
Outside, the darkness pours from the mountain and over their fields till it meets the lake of light cast from their house.
Tess looks back at the table. Meg has spent the whole afternoon in the airless kitchen, drawing trees in fog. She set out her cup of pin-sharp pencils, her daisy sharpener and eraser and got to work, barely stirring for hours. You could not begin to count the trees Meg’s drawn these past months and Tess learned, long ago, not to suggest another subject. Meg, say the girls who hang by the demountables, is all about trees.
Like, you can’t actually draw mist, Meg’s saying. Only what comes through it.
Sienna, the name of her sister’s pencil. Burnt ochre. Bark. A field of meaning Tess is fenced off from. Meg and her mother arrived in the world just knowing how to put colours together, how to nudge them into something else. A tree or house. A field with horses. A total mystery. Light French Ultramarine, Prussian Blue, Mars Violet. Her mother once said all the old masters and the richest pigments came from elsewhere. She’d never get there, she said, and Tess didn’t know if she meant the places where art began, or some scene she was painting her way towards. Her mother’s brushes sit where she’d left them, stiff and dusty. All her large canvases are ghosts in the studio, shrouded in white drop sheets. Except for one, with its daubs of damp paint. Just picturing it, newly uncovered, the sheet bunched beneath it, gives Tess a queer, awkward feeling.
They hear the thunk of their father’s boots.
Lina? he calls, as he treads down the hall. Lina?
Not here, shouts Meg, with a querulous pitch.
Through the window Tess watches the particular dark of the macadamias, greenish-black, pocky. She runs an eye along the Ghost Mountains – those old volcanoes, full of rhyolite and trachyte – and sees the great bald patch down the westward flank. Forest of Forgetting, Meg used to call it, when she told stories to help Pip sleep. Stories of the Powerful Owl, with its lonely woot oot. A bird that sleeps with meat in its talons. Tales of Pip’s favourite, the tawny frogmouth, a bird so rustily mottled it seemed jigsawed from the trunk of its tree.
Sometimes Pip, in pain or boredom, had croaked, Would you both just really shut it? But Meg kept on in a lowered tone, because those Forest Stories were her own solace, they were how she brought all the extinct creatures back to life.
Little eagle, Parma wallaby, stuttering frog. Endangered or vulnerable. Tess tries to imagine a world without the barking owl or the warty Boorolong frog. If you don’t keep track, things can disappear entirely. At the River School, Tess has done water watching and jerked out the death throes of a quoll in drama. She’s learned about cleared streams, agro-toxins, increased UV radiation. Radiation. A word for her time. And not just because of Pip. Some people say it’s killing the bees.
After a time of banging, beeping and kitchen noises, their father comes to the table. He glances at Meg’s pictures as he clunks down three bowls of baked beans.
Meg drops her pencil, staring. Their mother has always laid a place for Pip, and arranged flowers there. No matter how often she’d gone off, she’d always be home by dinner, shaking leaves off her shoulders, pinning up her wet hair, placing the vase at the table. Now there are two spiracles where people ought to be, and air soughing in and out. Even their father gives these spots a wide berth, his hips swerving past the empty chairs.
What’s the problem, Margaret? he asks. Would you like to be telling?
Meg bites her lower lip and continues shading with chicken yellow.
Tess spreads out the Bidgalong Bugle. On the front page, Geoffrey Godbold pictured with the bass he’d caught fly-fishing by Emigrant Crossing. The fish has two heads. It’s an angry purple, with tarnished scales. That’s from chemical run-off, say the townspeople, from the macadamia farms. It’s the Carbendazim. It’s the rain, washing poisons from the gas mines downstream.
That fish belongs in Krazy Town, Tess thinks. She almost tells Meg – it’s become such a habit – collecting odd things for this world the three sisters invented years ago. They’d started a book, illustrations by Meg, of Krazy Town Tales. Joe Romance was on the first page, feeding his pet rat, Tuesday, a freekeh patty. Page two was Ainslie Abbott in the hot-pink toy Cadillac that her bum so did not fit.
Their father comes back in, takes the paper. Then reads aloud, Let’s keep cool heads says the mayor.
Beside that story, a headline about fracking, methane emissions and poisoned aquifers.
Gas, says their father, it is the new gold.
Show me that fish, Papa, says Meg, one hand on her spoon.
; He turns the paper around.
Will they eat it? she asks.
The Godbolds aren’t starving, Meg, he says. Would you?
But we’re eating beans from a tin. Bisphenol A. And you microwaved them. With Cling. What would Mum even say?
He winks, spooning his beans in three minutes flat.
Tess watches Meg sketch the two-headed fish and the mayor’s head inside a freezer. Cool heads, she writes beneath the sketch. It’s amazing how she does it, making them both look so cold. But how? Something about their pinched lips, the stiff angle of their heads beside an ice-cube tray and one, stray, frostbitten pea.
Well, that is quite cute, their father says, chewing his final spoonful. You ought to send it to the paper, Meg.
Then he turns to Tess.
Pour me a drink, bitte. The Sloupisti. And please be giving it plenty of ice.
He cracks open the blister pack, lays two pills on the table.
When Tess returns with his whessky he’s gone.
He’ll be taking it in his study, Meg says, looking sternly back at her trees.
As Tess leaves the room, Meg calls, You going to tell him then? About that blood?
Tess narrows her eyes, hurrying off, liquor slopping on the hall runner. She pauses, takes a long, deep, caustic slurp.
Inside the dim room, her father is bent over his books, his half-moon glasses down his nose. Melliferous Plants, The Twelve-Frame Dadant Hive. Voirnot, Langstroth, L’Apiculteur. In his large, lined notebook he’s writing about the bees’ disappearance. She pauses, reading over his shoulder.
Hive like human home. Protection from elements. Security, food storage, resting and comfort (love?). Plus favourable place for members to communicate info about events inside and outside hive that affect survival.
By his cup, a yellow Post-it with a name on. Sgt Anderson.
Do you know, my snappy girl, he says, taking a long draught, what is tomorrow?
Tess shakes her head, leaning against the side of his chair. She has a flash of him hanging out her damp undies while she passed him the pegs. And of her white dress, which flapped off the clothesline once in a grubby wind. He’d had to climb the ladder to reach that dress, lodged high in the magnolia like a snagged cloud. He’d told a story for the next five nights, about the dress that wished to escape Bidgalong. It travelled on salty winds across the Indian Ocean, it flew over the Great Wall of China, sunned itself at the Grunewaldsee and slid down an Alaskan iceberg.
The World Without Us Page 3