‘I got this with Mum near the river,’ he whispers.
‘What type of tree is it from?’
‘The river red gum.’
‘What colour is the bark of that tree?’
He frowns in concentration. ‘Brown.’
‘It’s all different shades of brown, isn’t it, Benji, depending on whether the bark is new or old. Did you notice the colour of the trunk under the bark?’
‘A whitey colour.’
‘Excellent. Can you tell us some more about the flower?’
‘You get seven buds or nine buds …’
At the start of the year, Amy’s parents were concerned when I put her at the table with Archie and the much younger Benji. Since then, they’ve realised that Amy is far happier at this school than she was at her last. She works hard and independently, without the anxiety she used to have that she couldn’t always keep up with the children in her year group. When she reaches the front of the room, she methodically takes six different species of grasses from her bag.
‘What a great idea, Amy.’
She smiles. ‘Dad says these are the ones that grow best at the farm. They have seeds and they spread them by …’
After the lunch bell sounds, the children file out of the classroom. I open my desk drawer and pull out my phone, but there’s no word from my father.
‘Miss Brown?’
Mary stands at the open door, awkwardly holding a sheet of cardboard half as tall as she is, with foliage and flowers stuck all around the edges. I think it’s supposed to be a border, but it obscures most of the writing in the middle. ‘I’m doing wattle,’ she says proudly. ‘Can I put my poster on the whiteboard now?’ Mary wasn’t much more than a toddler when her parents’ marriage disintegrated. Her older sisters, settled at school and mad about horses, wanted to stay with their father, and her mother agreed that would be best for Mary as well. Peter is a great dad, but busy on his farm and not one for helping with homework. All Mary’s work is her own.
I attach the cardboard, heavy with wattle, to the whiteboard with as many magnets as I can find.
‘Do you like it, Miss Brown?’
I lift a thick bunch of slender leaves to find a hand-drawn diagram at the bottom of the cardboard. Straining to see through the smudges, I make out the words.
‘You’ve labelled the anthers and filaments and all the other parts of the flowers,’ I say. ‘I can’t wait to hear your talk after lunch.’
‘I’m the same as you, Miss Brown. I love the flowers best.’
I can’t remember a time when Gran wasn’t making crepe paper flowers. Even before I went to Buenos Aires, she’d taught me how to follow a few simple patterns. After we’d moved back to Canberra, where she lived, I’d take the bus and visit her on the weekends.
I stayed with her permanently after my father took Mum to the clinic that specialised in drug and alcohol abuse. There was nothing wrong with the treatment she received, but in-patient programs rarely work if people with addictions don’t go there voluntarily. Mum hated leaving me and the few friends she still had, but went along with my father’s plan because she couldn’t think what else to do. In the end, she said she didn’t care where she lived, so long as my father allowed her to see me. He thought my refusal to live with him would be a temporary thing, that I’d change my mind and move back home, and then to England when he was posted there. He thought I wouldn’t last five minutes at the local government school. But I was determined to avoid him and live with Gran at her house. It was only a short bus ride to Mum from there.
And Gran, who had liked my mother and didn’t agree with my father’s approach, was happy to have me. We’d sit opposite each other at her laminate kitchen table and, as I cut and shaped and glued, she’d talk about the times when she was young and married to my grandfather.
‘Even then he had his head in the clouds,’ she once said.
I trimmed the lacy petals of a pink and white carnation. ‘Why do you say that, Gran?’
‘He was a classics professor at twenty-nine, and from a good family. His people were hard up, but very well respected. Who’d have thought a Beresford-Brown would want to marry me?’
‘He was no better than you were,’ I told her. ‘You didn’t have the advantages he’d had, that’s all.’
She winked. ‘I was a pretty girl, don’t forget that. It was important to the Beresford-Brown men. Your father was the same, he always liked the pretty girls.’ She leant across the table and patted my hand. ‘You’re not only clever, Sapphie, you’re pretty as well. You can marry whoever you want.’
I’d only been living with Gran for a few months when she started to ask the same questions over and over. She’d lean across the table and touch the petals of whatever flower I was working on. ‘Where is your mother, Sapphie?’
‘She’s still in the clinic. Remember?’
‘That’s right, the clinic.’
Gran was only in her early seventies. No one else had any idea how severe the dementia was or that, on a bad day, her memories came and went like early morning mists. She’d lived in the same house and neighbourhood for the past forty-five years, so was good at finding her way around, and remembering most of the things she needed to know. And what she didn’t know, she made up in a believable way.
Most of the concerns my father had about Gran he attributed to her perceived eccentricities. She’d always cooked, sewed and made things with her hands; she liked watching game shows on TV and reading trashy magazines. He’d looked after her finances for years, ever since Grandfather had died. Uncle James lived on a property in Queensland and deferred to his older brother. It wasn’t in Gran’s interests, or mine, to tell her sons how forgetful she’d become—particularly after Dad hinted that it might be time to think about aged care facilities—so I kept her failing memory to myself.
‘I don’t want to live longer than nature intended,’ Gran used to say. ‘I want to die in my own home.’
I selected school subjects that didn’t challenge me too much academically, which meant I could mostly keep up with my schoolwork, and I took Gran to the doctor when she wasn’t feeling well and made sure she filled her prescriptions. I used to put paper and templates on the table in front of her in the mornings, before I went to school.
‘Lovely, dear.’ She’d pick up pieces of crepe. ‘You have a good day now.’
‘Good luck with the dahlias.’
‘Roses today.’ She’d smooth out the folds of whatever petals I’d carefully made an hour earlier.
I knew that by the time I got home from school, she wouldn’t have progressed with the flowers. Even though she generally remembered things from long ago better than things that had happened only recently, she had little memory of how to cut and shape the petals, let alone how to put them together. She’d make herself cups of tea all day, get out ingredients but never cook anything, and potter in the garden. Then she’d go back to the flowers, fold and refold the paper, and rearrange the templates. She thought she was busy, and that was the main thing. Elderly neighbours often dropped by to have a chat. And once a week, the community bus would take her to and from a local club, where she’d catch up with friends and play bingo. She couldn’t shop alone any more, so I took care of that, or we’d go out together.
The accident happened on my sixteenth birthday. I knew she’d want me to have something special, so I suggested we make hamburgers. For the patties we bought minced rump steak and mixed it with grated carrot, zucchini and onion. Her secret ingredient was homemade tomato paste, with parsley and oregano from the garden.
Before school that morning, I picked and chopped the herbs and assembled everything we’d need to make the hamburgers. The rissoles were rolled into balls on greaseproof paper and stored in the fridge with the salad. The bread was in the pantry.
Gran wasn’t good at initiating anything much by then, so I thought I’d arrive home to find her in front of her favourite TV game show with an unread copy of a magazine on her lap.
I planned to change out of my uniform, cook the rissoles and set the table. Gran and I would load our hamburgers with cheese, lettuce, beetroot and tomato.
I’d had a milkshake with my friends after school, so I caught the late bus home. As I checked the letterbox, I wondered why the light in the kitchen was so bright. And then I saw the flames. I dropped my school bag onto the path and ran ran ran towards the house. The blind was on fire; flames licked at the glass in the window.
‘Gran!’
I’d left the rissoles in the fridge and the frying pan in the cupboard and the oil in the pantry. Had Gran remembered it was my birthday? It’s not like she didn’t have prompts, because I’d hung a Happy Birthday banner on the living room wall behind the television and my father had sent flowers and a card. Friends from my class had given me a bunch of helium balloons and I’d tied them to the table in the hall.
Or maybe it was nothing to do with that? Maybe Gran had remembered it was my birthday all on her own—even though it had slipped her mind that morning—and she was determined to cook a favourite meal.
She must have known something was missing. Was she waiting for me to come home to tell her what it was? Did she turn on the gas at the stove and add more and more oil to the pan as she waited? By the time I ran into the kitchen, the window was blackened and the blind was incinerated. Gran had already fallen. She was lying near the pantry.
‘Can you help me up, dear?’
The pan of oil was bubbling like a deep-fry basket at a fish and chip shop. Flames licked the cornice and curled to the ceiling. My phone was in my bag but that was on the footpath, so I ran to the living room for the landline. I had the phone in my hand and was talking to emergency services when I noticed the oven mitts on the bench. If I could turn off the gas and take the pan off the heat, the oil would stop burning. I was giving the operator Gran’s address when I lifted the pan and put it into the sink.
I was sixteen—just. I should have known better. There was water in the sink. Oil and water make steam. Boiling oil bounces and splashes.
By the time the fire engine arrived, lights on and sirens blaring, the fire was out. The police officers came next and asked a lot of questions. Gran’s tendency to defer to anyone in uniform took precedence over the pain in her hip, but she couldn’t remember what had happened. When the officers called her local doctor, the doctor gave them my father’s number. He was living in London by then, but promised to book a flight back to Canberra.
‘Your son will be here within the week, Mrs Beresford-Brown,’ the officer said. ‘We’ll save the rest of our questions for then.’
‘It was my fault,’ I told the officer. ‘I was cooking and the fat caught fire.’
‘You were on your own?’
‘We were cooking together.’
I didn’t feel much pain then, but my uniform was darkened with oil and water. ‘Were you hurt?’
‘No!’ I held my left arm tightly by my side and crossed my right arm over it. ‘My uniform got a bit splattered, that’s all. I’ll go and change.’
I pretended not to hear when he called me back. By the time I’d stripped off my uniform, rolled it up and shoved it under my bed, and dragged a T-shirt over my torn and blistered skin, the officer was outside with the ambulance.
I had second-degree burns from the steam, and third degree burns from the oil, but it was two days later, when the pain made it impossible to sleep and my father was due to arrive, that I went to the emergency department at the hospital. ‘You can’t tell my father about this,’ I reminded the plastic surgeon. ‘I’m sixteen years old, so you won’t, will you?’
The children keep me busy all afternoon, so it’s after three-thirty when I check my phone again. My father sent a text two hours ago.
Sapphire,
I’m on my way to Horseshoe Hill, so we can meet at any time from five (I’ll stay overnight in Dubbo). Please let me know when and where would suit.
Dad
I text back immediately.
I’ll see you where we usually meet in Dubbo, the pub on Elizabeth Street near the park. Is six OK?
I start when I see Mary inside the door, her hands pressed together as she bounces up and down. ‘Did you like my talk?’
‘Very much,’ I say, as I shepherd her out of the classroom. ‘And I’ll tell your dad all about it when we have our parent–teacher interview. He’ll be even more proud of you than he is already.’
She skips into the sunlight, her plaits bouncing merrily. ‘Thanks, Miss Brown!’
Sapphie Brown.
Sapphire Beresford-Brown.
Dubbo is an hour away, and I haven’t driven a car since late last year. How do I get to my father by six? When I dial Pa Hargreaves’s number, he answers straight away.
‘Hello, Sapphie. How are you, love?’
CHAPTER
8
As I wait for Pa Hargreaves at the schoolhouse gate, Tumbleweed winds around my legs. I smile and rub under his chin.
‘I’d prefer to stay here. You know that, right?’
I found Tumbleweed mewling behind a skip in a shopping centre carpark when he was seven or eight weeks old. He was just a scrappy ball of fur with a pink nose and sharp, pointed teeth. We shared a meal together—the tuna sandwich I’d stolen from the supermarket. When workers from a charity service picked us up the following night, they had no idea Tumbleweed was with me until they took me to the refuge. I begged to keep him and was told he could stay until the morning. I worried about that all night, trying to work out how I could feed him properly on the streets. Kittens needed milk and warmth.
The day after I found Tumbleweed, Ma and Pa Hargreaves found me. They were in their mid-fifties by then and the last of their foster children had left home. Ma was having problems with her knees and Pa was working twelve-hour days in the supermarket, but they thought they could manage one more troubled teen. The agreement was that they would take me and my cat so long as I was prepared to move to Horseshoe and communicate with my father. It was hoped I’d see things differently after a break and that we might reconcile. Twice a month, Pa arranged eight-hour round trips to Canberra so I could see Mum and visit Gran in the nursing home. My school grades improved and I learnt to ride. Most afternoons after school, I walked home via the farmhouse.
When Pa’s van pulls off the road, I put Tumbleweed onto the grass. ‘Go inside and stay warm, puss.’
Pa, who has very little hair, wears a peaked woollen cap all through the year. He leans across the gearstick and opens the passenger door. ‘I’ve got the heater on full blast, love.’
I take deep breaths as I remove my coat, throwing it with jerky movements onto the back seat. I haven’t seen the psychologist for a month, but her advice rings in my ears. Face your fears. Meet the anxiety head-on.
Reaching for the handhold above the door, I pull myself into the passenger seat. ‘I’m sorry to put you out, Pa. I hoped there’d be a delivery truck that could give me a lift to Dubbo.’
‘And how would you get home again?’ Pa says, raising his brows. ‘Not another word, Sapphie. Ma’s perfectly happy to close up the store, and I’ll pop in to see old Artie Jones in the hospital while I’m waiting.’
As soon as I’ve fastened my belt, I focus on my exercises. Breathe slowly and deeply. Use your abdomen when you exhale. The anxiety is a creature in your mind. Face it and push it away. When we turn off the loop road and onto the highway, my hands clench the seatbelt more tightly.
Pa smiles sympathetically. ‘How’s it going then?’
I swallow. ‘It’s been seven months. Sometimes I worry …’
‘You hit a kangaroo, Sapphie, and your car was written off. That can happen to anyone. You’ll be driving again soon, don’t you worry about that.’
I grit my teeth and open my fingers, loosening my grip on the belt. ‘I get anticipatory anxiety before I get in the car. Then I get full-on anxiety. After that, I get post-anxiety anxiety.’ I take more deep breaths. ‘Being a passenger is bett
er than it was.’
‘There you go, then. That’s good news.’
‘My psychologist says I have to reprogram my brain to accept that nothing bad will happen.’
‘We’ll take it slowly. Your dad will forgive a short delay.’
‘Daylight helps.’
‘You’re nice and high in a van. You get a better view of what’s happening around you.’
‘I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or not.’
‘You were a careful driver, Sapphie. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I’ve been feeling more confident. It’s just—’ I swallow down the acid that comes up. ‘I’ve had a few things to think about in the past couple of weeks.’
‘You’re always busy with one thing or another.’
‘Can we have the radio on, please?’ I tip back my head and close my eyes, but that makes things worse so I open them again. The bitumen is smooth and there’s barely any traffic. The paddocks either side of the road are mostly cleared for crops. Visibility is good.
There’s not a single kangaroo in sight.
I shortened my name to Brown well before I moved to Horseshoe, and changed it by deed poll after I turned eighteen. I don’t tell people I’m the daughter of Robert Beresford-Brown unless I have to, but I never deny it if they ask. If I’d met my father at the schoolhouse or the pub, the locals wouldn’t take much notice. But Horseshoe is my home. I don’t want my father there. I don’t want unhappiness on my doorstep.
‘This will be fine, Pa,’ I say, pointing to a layby near the park. ‘I’ll walk from here.’
‘Right you are, love,’ he says as he pulls over. When he switches off the engine, I open my door to get some air before I reach into the back for my coat. ‘Your dad sees things different from you, Sapphie, always has. But he tries to build fences.’
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