Way too much time, says Sylvie, wiping grime from her window.
Huh?
On their hands, such artisanal people, she says.
I helped them restore it, Jim laughs. It was really interesting, learning all those old skills.
Around a bend, a yellow horse grazing in a dewy paddock.
Oh just look, she says.
A mare in white veils of rising mist, fairy-tale perfect.
Jim had been very solemn all morning. He was tired, he’d said, lips tight at the corners. So much had happened in last week’s storm; they’d had to shelter in a community hall, and he’d left Sylvie there with strangers while he cycled out to help the emergency teams find those who were trapped or stranded. Because of the floods Sylvie had to extend her ticket home. One day left.
Nice car, Nora of the lake, Sylvie says, fingering the dreamcatcher dangling from a sun visor. On the back bumper Magick Happens.
Nora had dropped the car off that morning, then waded through mud to the Müllers’. Evangeline was still in hospital, three hours away, and Nora had food for the family’s deep-freeze. This news had made Jim stand from the table and look at his hands as if he should have done more with them, delivered the child maybe or cut the cord.
Actually, Sylvie’s saying, dreamcatchers are meant for Native American infants. Surely Aussie adults can cope with their own subconscious!
Funny, Jim says with a half-yawn, because you’re the one trying not to look at something right in front of your face.
She groans. What are you now, my guru? My shrink?
What’s going on with you? he asks.
Sylvie turns to watch the paddocks zipping by. Jim drives fast and reckless on the rain-spruced, carless roads.
After a while she asks quietly, But why move next door to bees, Jim?
The bees are all disappearing, he says. Some kind of mite, or virus.
Ha. Apiarists must be used to that. Isn’t it just stock loss?
He looks at her. You know very much about farming?
Later, on the clifftop platform, they stare down the two-hundred-metre waterfall. Out beyond are bright hills and cabins clustered in the ferny hollows.
What do you even do in the evenings? she asks. You’re not painting. Which, I’m shocked. Does the gallery even know? I thought you were going to have a show this year? What happened to Twelve Rooms? And you’re not a gym person. You’re not Footy Guy. And there’s nowhere much to go out. So, I can’t imagine. Meditate? Mark homework?
He gives her a cold stare. Twelve Rooms. How could she have remembered his proposed show, when he’d entirely forgotten?
Jesus, he says. You’re pretty shack nasty. I guess you’re not used to it.
Your cabin? she rolls her eyes. I’d be worried if I was!
Then she laughs, It’s so totally you to choose a mother. But what will happen to her daughters, your students … ?
OK, Sylvie …
… if the school finds out?
He stands, hands on his head, ducks, trying to contain himself, and he sees that she looks frightened, as if worried about what he might do to her, or her to him, now they’ve reversed back to being strangers.
Don’t you realise people already know? she says.
What people?
That survivalist from the market. We had this nice chat while you were off somewhere. Tom Tucker. He’s quite taken with me.
Jim makes a throat noise. Tucker. The crossing guard?
Oh, who could possibly want me if you don’t? says Sylvie. But, if you’re after town history, he’s your man.
Jim steps back, tugs his T-shirt.
Aren’t we going to walk this track? she asks, and stretches a foot. Her yellow-striped Nikes look nuclear against the dowdy vegetation.
Go ahead, he says.
You’re not seriously going to sit here sulking?
What the fuck do you want from me?
Just consider what they’ll do to her – or you, Sylvie says, in Tiny Town.
But, he says, it’s you who wants to punish me, right?
He starts pacing, in his dark blue shirt, and the leather belt she’d bought him, years back, from Melbourne.
Jim, she says, hooking one finger into the belt. I didn’t have the abortion. But anyway, at about sixteen weeks, I lost the baby. It wasn’t just blood, it felt like a proper labour … and I was like some beast, alone, on the floor, at home. Later they told me I have this condition – incompetent cervix. It’s stupidly short or something. Very hard for me to carry a child.
Jim looks at her, astonished. Miscarried. It was true then, what she’d said.
She ought to have told him sooner, she says. But hadn’t known how to describe the weight and creaturely heat of what had slid out of her that afternoon. And how, not knowing where or what to do, she’d wrapped it in a towel and buried it later in the yard. What could she say except how she’d felt, during and after. A terrible, scraped-out despair.
You and I had a baby. But I don’t even have an ultrasound photo. There’s no trace of him at all.
He puts an arm around her. It takes him a moment to register. A boy?
But Sylvie has turned to the forest, her eyes behind her hands.
He has a second’s doubt, that it’s a kind of trap, then says, We never talked about if you wanted kids.
Do you?
Yes. But I don’t think I’m ready, says Jim.
You’ve hooked up with a pregnant mother. You’d give up your profession, your reputation … ?
… I don’t have to explain myself, he says.
But you had a chance with me!
She dries her cheeks with the back of her hands. I haven’t even asked, she says, if that beekeeper baby is yours.
2
Come on! Stefan appears, sock-footed, smelling of leaf sap, hewn timber, engine oil.
Get in the car, he tells the girls.
Time to visit Mum! Meg announces, an unbelieving light in her eyes.
She swings off her chair and scouts the kitchen, listing aloud what they ought to take. Healthy snacks because of hospital food, essential oils to hide hospital stinks, herbal teas, Bach flowers. Their mother used to keep them packed in a bag, for when they visited Pip.
Meg pauses, says, And Asher!
And Stefan leans across as he passes, tugs Meg’s neatly braided hair. Of course, he says. You didn’t think I’d forget your brother?
Tess, watching from the doorway, is very still and sombre, some element of herself suspended since her mother had been stretchered and carried off. She’d floated away with newborn Asher in a rescue dinghy while Tess stayed back with the emergency-services woman till the floodwaters subsided. Asher lay on her mother’s chest, wrapped in a sheet that slowly discoloured. Tess couldn’t figure out who all that blood belonged to, and during the long wait in the house she replayed that receding sight. She leans against the doorframe now, chewing her lower lip. She hasn’t spoken since her mother departed and doesn’t know any more how, or what, to feel.
They find her in lilac-coloured Ward B. She’s sitting in the bendable hospital bed, still pale after the transfusion, but her colour rises when she sees them all coming in. She reaches across to Meg and Tess, wincing, because her lower body has been stitched. She takes their heads in her cold hands and kisses them on the forehead. Someone, in a curtained bed beside them, burps. Someone else rattles a cup. Their father has carried wailing Asher out into the corridor, he’s gone to ask the nurses when they can take their mother and brother home. The nurses’ station. Tess used to wish she could stop with the nurses, back when they’d visited Pip. She would have liked to remain at the station with no destination, just a glossy mag and an open box of thank-you chocolates, running a finger down a clipboard.
Was it some kind of plan, you two going off? their mother is asking. She’s looking everywhere but at their faces.
The girls glance at each other.
Hitch-hiking was Pip’s dare, Meg pipes up, her fing
ers hovering over bedside levers.
Please don’t pretend what you did has anything to do with Pip, Evangeline says.
The other women in the ward are all curtained, but through fabric gaps Tess glimpses wedges of flesh, huge breasts, dark nipples the size of saucers, tiny feet and fingers, folds of belly, bandages, blood. She tears her eyes from this tableau, the infants, just days ago alive inside those women, now out and eating, sleeping, shitting, breathing. So needy, so noisy. They’d have been safer staying put.
Meg’s murmuring something about those dares made years back. She glances at Tess to check if she’s put the right spin on it for their mother.
But why would Pip ask you to do that? their mother says, her white fist holding the bed rail.
Her anger, missing from their lives for so long is a surprise and relief. Her anger confirms – she’s fully present, feeling something.
Maybe because she couldn’t go anywhere, Meg says, very quiet.
Evangeline bows, visoring her eyes with her hands.
Sometimes, she says, I worry I’ve damaged you more than grief.
Tess stands by the bed, very grave, saying nothing, even though she has recently shouted while hammering the front door in rain and flood. Mum, are you there? She might have been asking that question the whole of her teenage life.
She’d found her, in the kitchen, a small, damp boy in her hands, his cord uncut. Beneath them both, the blood and the peculiar veined sac that had cradled her brother, and looked wrong on the floor, and seemed somehow still alive.
A hospital trolley clangs past and a gust scented with mashed pumpkin and gravied meat makes all three Müllers briefly lock eyes, and grimace. Yerk.
When I was young – just seventeen, Evangeline says, looking hotly at Tess, I got pregnant.
Both sisters stare, their bodies tilt closer; a feeling, in that ward, of the antiseptic air giving on to an otherworld.
But she hadn’t wanted to stay with that particular man, she tells them. So their grandmother, Anita, and Jack Hodgins arranged to give the baby to a woman in town. She was connected with an art school, a gallery up north. In exchange for the baby she’d promised some of her land.
And for me, their mother says, she promised art lessons, painting supplies, even an exhibition at a city gallery! I had all these small canvases. Little painted scenes from The Hive …
… The ones in the lounge? asks Meg.
Yes, those, she laughs. I actually believed I was gifted. But, I couldn’t give you up, she says, turning to Tess. As the months passed I made up my mind. I had you. I kept you …
… But then … says Meg. Who’s Tess’s father?
Their mother’s gaze jumps from one to the other.
You’re all mine, she says very quietly. Does it matter who your father is?
Should I be worried where this conversation is going? They had not noticed Stefan entering the ward. He pauses then bends over the boy in his arms and inhales the air all around his head.
Whether it matters, he says, well, that surely is up to the child? He turns very deliberately to Tess.
Tess wants to know, don’t you? Meg asks, urgently pulling her sister’s hand from where it’s hanging limp and passive by her side.
When a baby’s born the whole world’s unfamiliar, says Evangeline. But its mother’s voice is a bridge from the womb to the world.
Tess listens, aware of how her mother is, even now, changing the subject. She feels so flimsy, she could float away. Where did you say you are from? she’d asked Marta, in that strange garden, in the rain. And she’d replied in a deliberately mystical voice, nowhere, and everywhere. Now, a curtained baby hiccups. Tess hears the whimpers, the lusty wailing and primal sucking; she listens to the low harmonies of all the mothers, soothing the newly born.
Babies know nothing, Tess thinks, feeling hot and tight as if she’s outgrown her own skin. All they have are feelings. Disgusting, to realise she is plagued by the same affliction.
I’ve never forgotten the sound of your voice, her mother is saying. Even in the eighteen months and seven days you’ve kept it from me.
Tess stares at her mother’s desperate face. Somewhere inside, there’s the relic of a will – to be heard, to be seen, even if her mother’s sufferings outclass her own. And so, fighting everything walled up, a shaky, depleted feeling running through her, she asks,
Well then, who was he?
And all the Müllers turn as one, eyes very bright and only just noticing that glassy timbre, and how Tess speaks – atonally – like a person who has never spoken before.
Three weeks later, the small boy governs their home. His routine dictates how quiet or loud they may be, whether anyone can finish what they’ve begun before his cries reverberate down the hall and beyond to the yard where the girls have hung a baby monitor in a tree. Such volume! Their father seems especially proud, as if Asher’s sturdy lungs guarantee him a brilliant future.
This morning, though, he’s asleep in his hammock as Meg and Tess follow their mother over the bee field. They pass the hives, noiseless in the hesitant light, pass the sleepy Charolais, their steamy shit in the low grass. The roos are down, but wary; they hark as the three approach, then bound off, daubs of grey through the forest green.
Inside the studio, the pram in the corner, a faint smell of turpentine. Then they see the largest canvas, the fresh sheen on it, radiant in the gloom.
But when did you? Meg asks.
Her mother whistles a bit through teeth. At night, when I couldn’t sleep. Before Asher, she says. I still have some way to go.
The girls stare at the painting with its raw backing frayed around the edges. The new details give the scene an eerie urgency.
Why horses all the time? Meg asks.
Evangeline sighs, looks nervy. She leans against a trestle table, scuffing the floor with a bare toe.
I started noticing, on my walks, how even animals turned from me. Only the Petersons’ horses ever looked at me squarely, she says.
In the foreground, the hazy shape of a baby. In the distance, two twig figures, a van on a hill.
After a long silence Tess says, You’re really good at doing horses. It’s so hard to get the heads right and the legs. Not to mention hooves.
Evangeline turns, her grey eyes grown milky.
Tess, she says, you don’t have to make me feel better about the things I’ve done.
But isn’t that what families are for? Tess thinks. And if not, what else?
Not long after Pip died, I went into town, Evangeline says. A woman came up to me. She said, I heard you lost your youngest. I was so desperate then for any kindness. I told her yes. And then she said, an eye for an eye. And walked away.
Who was she? asks Meg, making fists, a small force, out for her mother’s own good. What does that even mean?
Evangeline doesn’t say how Lana Beaufort had paused in her leaving. How she’d turned back to say, Your art was utterly shit. And that whole story about the gallery and your talent – God, what a ruse and you bought it! A couple of sable brushes, a tube of Quinacridone Gold and you’re Michael-fucking-angelo? Her laugh was forced, erratic. But Evangeline heard the grieving undertone and knew then how alike they’d become, hauling their losses around.
Did you ever see my dad, in town? asks Tess very brightly. You never said where he’s at.
Had she passed him many times, in the street, at the market? Did he know her, or was she a stranger, with same-coloured hair and eyes? Had he spoken to her once or twice, by accident or deliberately? Had he sought her out? And what, come to think of it, even was his actual name?
3
Tess met the city girls one open-skied morning. Three green coaches turned down the main street and rolled in, slow, important. These girls from Sancta Sophia had crisp navy pleats in knee-length tunics, their hair sleekly pinned despite hours on the Bruce Highway. Blazers and straw boaters, shined black shoes that dulled as they leapt from the high metal coach steps into Bidga
long’s red dust. Some had badges on their lapels. This one Prefect, this for Public Speaking, that for Good Citizenship. In the raw morning sun the pins zinged off gold arrows of light.
Tess stood, waiting to meet them, with the other seniors from the River School. A ragged bunch in mismatched cream and burgundy. Their socked legs, lined up, graphed varying degrees of care. Seeing these immaculate girls file out, Tess bent to pull her knee-highs, but their cheap elastic was failing. She finger-combed her rampant hair, then stood very straight as the city girls shrugged their backpacks on to the street.
They’d come two hundred kilometres to join the River School in planting five hundred saplings on Stan Baker’s land. The trees had arrived the day before. Hardy pioneer species. Forest oak, doughwood, rough-leaved elm. They stood in black hydroponic bags by the Bakers’ drystone wall. The girls had come for the reforesting – not just for their future, but for the generations – and they’d felt so exulted, journeying out, do-gooders with very clean, manicured hands. But they quickly forgot all of that; they were city girls in a new scenario and they looked up and down the street, paused and locked eyes with the locals. Scowling boys with mussy hair and the surprising shoulders of men. So pleased to meet them, the girls extended their soft palms, hello!
After the planting, there was a cookout in Stan’s field below the Ghost Mountains’ tallest peak. The paddock, once kept trim by Black Angus, had been cut that afternoon by Tom Tucker demonstrating the art of a hand-tooled Austrian scythe. Chairs and mats were laid out, lanterns hung from the Moreton Bays and a line of tables was slowly filling with trays, platters, cutlery, bottles. Older locals brought Flo Bjelke Peterson’s pumpkin scones and sponge cake, their adult kids decanted gluten-free – quinoa salads, chia breads, claggy pomegranate molasses. Guests from the intentional communities offered invasive species: salads of fat hen, wood sorrel, turkey rhubarb; a crock of wild blackberry and humanely trapped rabbit. The miners and their wives had all declined to come.
Tess sat by the entrance to Stan’s. Beside her crouched Nikki, Sachiko, Kate and Aggie from Sancta Sophia’s Year 8. They’d spent all afternoon together with trowels, compost, dung and Seasol, stamping fresh-dug earth around the new trees. As they worked they’d quizzed Tess on the boys who sauntered by, pretending not to look at this new variety of girl. Now they watched the locals coming along the lane with Eskies, Tupperware and rainbow-coloured sheetcake. Tess named each arrival, her hands folded, her cheeks flushed, newly indispensable with her local lore.
The World Without Us Page 21