by Anna Romer
I looked at him warily. ‘I’m not paranoid.’
‘Babe, you blow a simple misunderstanding out of proportion. Then you start looking for evidence, trying to catch me out . . . and why? Because you’re scared of letting anyone close. Scared of letting me close. The minute things get good between us, you pull away. You concoct all these issues between us, when the real issue is that you’re scared of love.’
I felt my cheeks go hot and was grateful for the dark. ‘You don’t know me as well as you think you do, Rob.’
‘You’re an open book to me, Ruby. One look at your face and I know exactly what page you’re on. I probably know you a far sight better than you know yourself.’
Gripping my elbows, I said through my teeth, ‘So, what am I thinking now?’
He glanced at me, then looked back at the road. ‘Your eyes are like saucers in the dark. You’re leaning away from me, arms crossed, knees pointed to the door. I’d bet my last dollar you’re thinking I’m a prize-winning dickhead and you wish you’d never met me.’
Spot-on as usual, I thought sourly. Jamming my hands by my sides, I glared at his smug profile, and in that moment I hated him. I hated his clean good looks and crisp white shirt and manicured hands. I hated his smooth confidence and charm. I hated the way he considered the inner workings of my mind to be public property for him to sift through and analyse any time he chose. I hated hearing his voice whenever I stood in front of a mirror. A few kilos lighter, Ruby girl, and you’d be a real honey. And I hated seeing the same question again and again in other women’s eyes: What’s a tasty dish like Rob Thistleton doing with a blimp like her?
I stared out at the sky.
Rob had a knack for reading people, picking up on their vibe and making snap judgements. But was I really the person he’d described? Paranoid. Obsessive. Fearful of love. I hadn’t meant to turn out that way, but looking back I could see the truth of it: my troubled relationship with Mum; my lonely years before Rob; and now, when I had finally found someone to love me, I was more unhappy than ever.
Rob always said that too many people were searching outside themselves for answers, when the only true guidance they could rely on came from within. Pricking my ears, I listened. Wind hissed under the tyres and the motor purred quietly – but there was no word from my subconscious, no murmur from my inner self, not even a whisper.
I searched the landscape beyond my window. The roadside trees still swayed in the night wind. Stars glittered in their velvet dome. Somewhere out there, the ghost of a girl ran barefoot through the night; the darkness her friend, the riverbank her playground, the wild grasslands and dense thickets of tea-tree her home. What had become of her?
As it turned out, Jamie’s injuries were not caused by a fall.
A rope of fear tightened around my insides. My skin felt too tight, as if I’d crawled into an ill-fitting garment and got stuck. I wanted to get out of myself, find the person I’d been before guilt and self-doubt had warped me out of shape.
Suddenly I was possessed by the urge to shove open my door and throw myself from the moving car. And in that moment of craziness, I glimpsed something about myself that had, until now, eluded me.
I was like a house – my doors bolted against the night, my windows shuttered to keep out the wind and rain. But all the while, the thing I feared most dwelled inside me, stalking my hallways and moving restlessly inside my rooms. I wanted to open up my doors and windows, let the elements flush away the ghosts and dust and disorder. I wanted to spring clean, to de-clutter, to strip away everything that didn’t belong so that I could show my real face.
But how could I, when my fear of the truth was holding me captive?
2
Brenna, March 1898
Hurrying along the dirt track towards the Aboriginal encampment, wishing I had wings to fly there faster, I skipped over the stony track, clutching my dillybag to my side, dizzy with expectation. The day was brilliantly hot, the sun a scorching ball in the blue dome of the sky. The morning air was thick with bush flies, and the faint aroma of charred kangaroo.
My buttoned boots were dusty, and the hem of my tweed walking skirt was dotted with grass seeds; my hat kept flying off my head, and an annoying itch of sweat had worked its way under the high neck of my blouse – but what did I care? I was nineteen, strong of limb, and brimming with excitement. I was on my way to see my ‘wild friends’ as Aunt Ida called them, and anticipation sang loud in my heart.
The encampment was on the southernmost corner of my father’s three thousand acre property. My father estimated that there were sixty or more Aborigines living in the area permanently, while another hundred or so migrated along their traditional routes – travelling the western slopes and up onto the tablelands, then along the eastern falls. As traditional hunting grounds were being grazed flat, and worse, being zealously patrolled by cattlemen with guns, food was becoming scarce for the people.
As I approached the camp, a thin woman of about forty walked out to greet me. She wore a dusty yellow European-style dress that my aunt had given her. Behind her, a cluster of bark huts surrounded a charcoal pit, which still smouldered after last night’s meal. Marsupial pelts were strung on the low branches of a nearby salmon gum, among them the hide of a large grey kangaroo.
I felt a thrill of pleasure to see my friend. As I dashed along the track towards her, my hat bobbed off its ribbon and I felt the full warmth of the sun touch my face; Aunt Ida would disapprove, but at that moment the farmhouse with all its rules and proprieties seemed a world away.
‘Aunty good?’ Jindera wanted to know.
It was always her first question, although Aunt Ida had never been to the camp – at least not as far as I knew – and Jindera never ventured up to the house. Yet whenever I queried this, Jindera always insisted that she and my aunt were friends.
‘Aunt Ida is well,’ I said, hanging my hat on a branch beneath the drying pelts. Shaking out my hair, I lifted my face to the sun, savouring the fragrant air. ‘But she’ll be in a sour mood when she gets out of her bath and finds me gone.’
‘You stay short time.’ Jindera’s voice was reedy and melodic, and she spoke the English language with a shy sort of exuberance. ‘Get back before Aunty know you gone.’
‘We’ll see,’ I said, laughing. Jindera’s idea of a ‘short time’ stretched anywhere between five minutes and five days – which suited my way of thinking nicely. As we stood smiling in the shade of that old salmon gum, a feeling of peace settled over me. I wanted to pull off my boots and stockings and go barefoot like Jindera, burrow my toes into the soft dirt and feel the pulsing bedrock beneath me. I wanted to lie on the ground so the scent of gumnuts and yellow-buttons and warm granite would cling to my skin and be with me always.
Instead, I looked around the camp. ‘Where’s Mee Mee?’
‘She collecting seed.’ Jindera smiled, pointing to the prickly grass pips stuck to my hem. ‘Like you, Bunna.’
I laughed in pleasure at her observation, but found myself gazing wistfully at the spot under the shady red gum where Mee Mee liked to sit with her grinding stones. Mee Mee was Jindera’s mother, a lanky woman with huge liquid-black eyes and a quick smile who always fussed over me when I visited.
Jindera gestured to the bag slung over my shoulder. ‘You bring book?’
My dillybag was roughly the shape and size of a large flattened nightcap, with a single strap that fitted comfortably across my chest. Jindera had woven it for me from grass fibres, coloured with red and black and yellow dyes made from barks and berries. Besides my book of botanical drawings with its pages of notes and thoughts, it was my most treasured possession.
Taking out the leather-bound journal, I placed it in Jindera’s hands and we walked back to the encampment.
As we approached her hut, a gaggle of children raced into the camp from the direction of the river. They yelled happily when they saw me, and I dug into my dillybag again, this time pulling out a handful of unshelled almonds. In th
eir haste to secure a few nuts, the children knocked them from my hands and had to scrabble in the dirt for them, jostling each other good-humouredly before running off laughing and shouting to crack open their dusty prizes with river stones.
I paused for a moment, watching them dart away through the trees towards the embankment. Some nights, I dreamed about that embankment. It was a magical place by day, when the current gurgled over the stones and then rushed over a deep natural spillway to the rocks below. But in my dream, the voice of the river was dark and desolate. It sang of death, and figures looming on horseback, and screams that seemed to rise up out of the earth and echo against the night sky. There was always the smell of burning – flesh and hair, bones. And the sense that I was trapped in the dark, my small body shuddering in fear.
I turned to see Jindera watching me, as she often did, from the darkness of her hut. Her eyes were velvet-black, her smile warm. She beckoned me in.
A sweet, pungent odour lingered in the confined space, perhaps kangaroo from last night’s feast. Jindera spread a beaten bark mat across the dirt floor and we sat upon it. Placing my journal between us on the mat, she reached for a hide pouch of water and passed it to me. I drank thirstily, then handed the pouch back to Jindera and wiped my lips. Jindera drank, then set the pouch aside and took up my book.
Carefully she opened to the page I had been working on. It was a rock orchid, its delicate pink throat freckled with brown markings. It was common to this area, springing up in early summer, its brilliant colouring leaping from the grey-green foliage of the bush.
Jindera did not speak, but pleasure radiated from her. I knew she wasn’t admiring the drawings for their beauty. She had often tried to explain that her people’s drawings captured the spirit of the creatures and plant life they depicted. She said their paintings called to those spirits in the language of dreams.
My paintings – the flowers and seedpods, orchids and ferns and gumnuts that proliferated on the rocky granite slopes of Lyrebird Hill – were of interest to Jindera because she understood my passion for learning about their healing or dietary properties. Although the subjects of my botanical drawings were beautiful and oftentimes strange, they were not for decoration alone.
Since the age of fifteen, I had spent every moment of my spare time compiling notes and creating detailed watercolours that catalogued all the edible and medicinal plants known to Jindera. She had asked permission from the clan elders, who had at first forbidden her to speak to me. Much danger, they had warned, but how much danger could there be in the friendship between two women? Besides, Jindera had existed on the periphery of my life since I was a baby. My frequent visits to the camp had begun when I was fourteen, when we had formed a strong and unbreakable bond. So Jindera had persisted with the elders, and finally – after I presented them with my father’s old muzzleloader, with which they could shoot wallaby – they eventually agreed.
Jindera paused at a sketch of tubular pink blossoms. Her fingers hovered over the neat lines of copperplate. Though she had no use for reading, I suspected she knew those words by rote. I’d read them aloud to her so many times, page after page until my throat was hoarse. We’d picked over each description in our stolen hours together, Jindera making corrections, adding new facts that occurred to her, snippets of memory, old stories from the vast reserves passed on to her by Mee Mee or one of the other elders. Meanwhile I scribbled frantically – dashing out notes, refining my descriptions, clarifying names – in a bid to keep up with her.
I tapped the page she was studying.
‘That’s the correa we found on the flatlands that day, on the place where the clan fought that southern tribe, do you remember?’
Jindera shook her head and laughed, her eyes gleaming. Reaching out, she gently squeezed my wrist. ‘You got good memory, Bunna. That happen twenty year before you born.’
I turned another page and pointed to a drawing of clustered leaves in the shape of four-leaf clovers.
‘And this fern, it was sprouting from a pile of wombat bones after the big rain last year.’
Jindera nodded. ‘Nardoo. Hard time food.’
I found myself going through the pages, pointing out drawings I considered particularly successful, or reading anecdotes that held special memories for us of shared adventures.
Jindera reached for the water skin, and again we both drank. My heart was large with her unspoken approval. In our own way, we had fought an important battle – not with spears and nulla-nullas, but with brush and ink, with knowledge and quiet observation. My collection of drawings and Jindera’s vast store of experience that accompanied them were a testament to our friendship. We had refused to let fear dampen our alliance, and we were both the richer for it.
‘Brenna?’ came a voice from outside.
A shadow darkened the hut’s doorway, and I caught a whiff of horse sweat and tannery leather, rifle oil and gunpowder; scents that did not belong in the tranquil darkness of Jindera’s hut.
I emerged into the sunlight, Jindera close on my heels, to find my foster brother, Owen, dismounting his horse. He was tall for a twelve-year-old, and lean; the grey shirt and breeches he wore seemed to hang off his skinny frame. The sun had bleached his hair, and his eyes shone blue as lagoon water.
Owen’s face lit up when he saw my companion.
‘G’day there, Jindera.’
‘Hello, young Owen. You be good boy for Aunty?’
‘I try.’
‘How them fish biting upriver?’
‘I caught a couple of turtles this week, but no trout.’
They bantered for a while in their easy way, while I bundled my journal into my dillybag, only half listening.
Owen had been orphaned a decade ago when an accident on a neighbouring farm took his parents. My father – Fa Fa, to those close to him – had found the little boy wandering along the road in the dark, hungry and as skinny as a stray dog. Fa Fa brought him back to the farmhouse, where our Aboriginal housekeeper Millie fed and bathed him and swaddled him in one of Fa Fa’s old shirts. Owen soon became my father’s shadow, perched on the saddle behind him when he rode out to check the fences, sitting at his feet when he smoked his evening pipe, sleeping at the foot of his bed. He had been a cherub of a child, eager to run errands or lend a hand with chores, a golden boy we all adored.
‘Is Aunt Ida on the war path?’ I asked warily.
‘Afraid so, Sis. You have a visitor, and he wasn’t all that pleased to arrive and find you not there.’
‘Oh dear.’ My heart kicked over. ‘It’s Mr Whitby, isn’t it?’
Owen made a face and nodded.
I sighed. Poor Mr Whitby. Owen disliked him intensely, despite the fact that Whitby was one of my father’s oldest and most trusted friends. Whitby lived in Tasmania on a large property, but often travelled to New South Wales on business. He had bought nearly a dozen holdings on the New England tablelands after the property crash in 1893, and liked to keep his finger in the pie of their management and occasional sale. Although he was in his mid-forties – a few years younger than my father – he had never married. Aunt Ida said that he was wed to his work, but my father scoffed at this. Carsten is a private man, he would declare, he keeps his personal affairs close to his heart.
‘Where is Whitby now,’ I asked with more calm than I felt. ‘At the house? Has he brought news of Fa Fa?’
Owen examined a hangnail and took his time to answer. ‘Fa Fa is still at the auctions in Newcastle. Aunt Ida’s bailed up Whitby in the parlour. She’s feeding him leftover Christmas cake and bottled apricots. Whitby seemed anxious for you to join them.’
Jindera was frowning at me, her eyes dark with quiet disapproval. She shared Owen’s lack of esteem for Carsten Whitby, although she would never admit as much. Whenever I told her that he had visited, or if I enthused about his polished manners or fine looks, Jindera always managed to find something of greater interest – a gumnut fallen from a tree, or snake tracks in the dirt, or the dusty wrinkle
s that time had drawn across the palm of her hand.
We said goodbye to Jindera, and Owen climbed on his horse and hauled me up behind him. He clicked his tongue, and the mare plodded along the track towards home. I hooked one arm around Owen’s middle and settled myself for the ride back to the house.
‘Did Whitby mention the nature of his visit?’ I asked.
My brother shook his head, and nudged the horse into a trot. I twisted around, trying to see Jindera’s shadow in the doorway of her hut, hoping to give her a wave.
The only movement was a breeze ruffling the animal hides strung on the branches. The camp looked deserted, as though its inhabitants had fled.
Sitting at my dressing table, I hurriedly brushed my hair. It was more tangled than usual, and soon my brush was full of knots. I emptied some sweet almond oil from a bottle into my hands, and smoothed the oil over my wayward strands. As I pinned my chignon, I heard a shuffle in the doorway.
Aunt Ida moved into my bedroom, clutching a jar of cornflour. Pink blotches coloured each sharp cheekbone, and her eyes were as sharp as a bird’s. ‘I declare, Brenna. The sooner you’re married off and away from those people, the better for all of us.’
I made a sour face in the mirror. ‘Jindera’s my friend. I’ve no intention of staying away from her.’
Aunt Ida’s frown carved crevices between her brows. ‘I’ve got Carsten Whitby in the room downstairs, of which I’m sure you are aware. I’ve spent the last hour apologising for your absence.’
Taking out a handkerchief, I wiped it over my face, getting rid of the dusty smears. ‘Did he bring news of my father? When is he coming home?’
‘Whitby didn’t say.’
Something in her voice made me glance at her. It was no secret that she disapproved of my frequent visits to the encampment, and we often had words. But today she seemed subdued, almost depressed.
‘What is it, Aunt?’
There was a long silence. Finally she said quietly, ‘The clan doesn’t want you there. Jindera is indulging you by letting you visit, but the elders resent your presence. They see you as a threat. You might not care about putting yourself at risk, but when are you going to learn to think about others?’