And then, at the bottom, Jem signs-off, as he does all his letters: Love me.
Sam looks up from the paper in her hands. The silent shadows of late afternoon slide across her shoulders. She folds the letter with care and places it back in the box before selecting another.
I think of your skin, creamy, with a bit of pink, like the inside of a red apple that’s just been sliced, and I want to taste its sweetness. I long to run my tongue up the inside of your wrist, to your elbow, up to your armpit where the sweetness becomes salt, and the scent of you makes my head spin.
Sam’s breath quickens. The wood-man on the far side of the hill has skin that makes her think of buttered toast. She closes her eyes, opens them, and reads on:
I will be there next Friday, if the car decides to behave itself this time around. Even if it doesn’t and, again, I end up in the sun on the side of the road with a wrench, cursing at all the forces of the world which are suddenly in cahoots to keep us apart, I will force the mechanical monster into action. I cannot live another week without breathing you in again, my dear heart.
Love me
Love me love me love me, letter after letter. Each one ending the same way.
Sam’s fingers tremble as she folds the paper back along its creases. Her breath sticks in her throat. She can feel her heart thumping, beating out through her skin and reverberating throughout the silent house.
*
Sam wakes with the taste of butter in her mouth. It is there when she goes into Jem’s room to open his curtains, and all through breakfast, and its creaminess lingers below the mint of her toothpaste even as she brushes her teeth. When she sits down at the laptop, the taste turns into a strange tingling feeling that starts in her mouth and is soon spreading out everywhere, down her throat and into her fingers, and all the way down into her feet, making her limbs so restless that she cannot stay still.
She gets up from the desk, walks through to the kitchen, and puts on her hiking boots. There are burrs in the laces, and bits of broken grass all over the toes. She walks outside. The butter taste gets stronger. Saltier.
‘I’m just going—’ Her voice breaks, she swallows and tries again: ‘Into the garden.’
The scent of lemon blossom is taking centre stage now that the roses are gone. The smell seems to linger on her tongue alongside the butter, and Sam feels so filled up with sweet and salt that she’s unable to think. She can only move. One step and another and another and soon she is past the oak tree and climbing the hill, past the lookout shelter and up into the land of wild scrub and skittering scorpions.
A tiny brown mole snake flicks its muscular body across her path, and for a moment, as she catches her breath, Sam almost turns back.
But she doesn’t.
As soon as she climbs high enough to see the other side of the hill with its immaculate rows of vines and its well-irrigated fields, the butter taste gets even more overwhelming, as if the warmth of her mouth is melting it to coat everything inside her in slippery gold.
Sam slows down and drops to the ground when she comes in sight of the barn. She creeps forward, taking her time. The barn doors are open, and she can hear the sound of sawing coming from inside. She makes it to the boulder in a final burst of speed, with her heart hammering and the buzz building to a frenzy inside her ears.
That is when she sees the note.
This is no paltry message scribbled on a piece of paper. This is a work of time and care, meant to be read from a distance, like ‘help’ scrawled in the sand of a deserted island beach in the hope that a plane flying past will see. Someone has taken a rake to the flat bit of dirt between the barn and the hill, and then, on the smoothed earth, has laid out different pieces of wood to spell the letters:
IT IS OK.
WATCH IF YOU WANT.
At the thought of the wood-man selecting the pieces and placing them to form the words just for her, Sam feels as if all her insides want to burst out through her skin and whizz off on papery wings, whirling upwards with joy.
It’s a poem. A song. A prayer.
For me.
She waits to get her breath back, and then creeps closer to watch him work.
*
Maybe it’s a slight change in the way the breeze blows in through the open doors, or a subtle shift in the light, but in the middle of painstakingly hollowing out a tiny notch for a dovetail joint in a piece of burled olive wood, Charlie suddenly knows she’s there. Yesterday she wasn’t, but today she is, and he doesn’t need to look outside to know it. He can feel her gaze, cool like mountain water, sliding over his skin.
She must’ve seen the message.
Charlie pauses in his work. He doesn’t look up, but he smiles. Maybe she can see him do so. He likes the fact that he doesn’t know.
‘Hello there.’ It is very soft, almost a whisper. The girl, if she hears him, if she is even close enough to, doesn’t answer. He takes a sip of water from the plastic bottle on the bench beside him, and then reaches for his smallest rasp to continue smoothing the notch.
Silence spirals up around the barn, broken only by the frantic tweet of a fiscal shrike that rises, falls and fades again.
*
The next day, Charlie throws open the doors of the barn to let the early morning hill shadows drift in and slide over the waiting workbench with the dogs all placed where he put them last night. The air is so still that he can hear the faint far-off sounds of the farm workers in the vineyards. Something about the thinness of the early morning air carries their voices, the snip of their cutters and the scrape of their trowels all the way into the timber-scented hush of the waiting workshop. He steps outside and places a small, twisty-legged stool just beyond the doorway. There’s a silky dimple in the top of the stool that, last week, he spent hours sanding with glasspaper, finally using a piece so fine it felt like velvet. He gives the dimple a light pat.
‘For you. If you want to sit.’ No answer but birdsong and the rustle of grass on the hill. But she’s there. He can sense a spot of warmth lurking in the morning freshness. He goes back inside and gets to work.
Charlie’s not sure exactly when the girl sits down on the stool, but he looks up some time later to see that she’s pulled it into the shadow just inside the doorway. At first glance, she’s just a lighter spot of silver against the greying wood of the doorframe, but each time he sneaks a look, he sees a little more of her. There’s the slender curve of her calf disappearing into her boyish hiking boot. There’s the shape of one arm, like a spear of pale bone suddenly catching the sunlight. There’s the impossible waterfall of her ponytail falling over her shoulder and all the way down to the waistband of her shorts.
Charlie doesn’t look up long enough to catch her eyes. He doesn’t want to scare her off again, but he can feel them on him. Like a fine sheen of linseed oil rubbed into timber, something new in Charlie begins to emerge and clarify beneath her gaze. He doesn’t know what it is, but it makes him feel as if he’s taking up more space, somehow. When he gets up and walks to where the circular saw is set up, each stride feels choreographed, as if he’s performing a strange, ritual dance.
‘This is going to be loud,’ he warns. Silence from the doorway. He can see a wisp of bright hair lifting up and moving in the breeze. Charlie grins into the buzz of the power tool. Each angled piece of oak he slices drops out clean and sharp and perfect.
*
That night, after hastily finishing up the World War Two assignment and emailing it off to Mrs McGovern, Sam heads back outside. A white circle of light skips ahead of her as she moves through the black garden, coming from the LED head-torch that Jem got her for her fifteenth birthday. Everywhere she looks, the light circle dances, making her think of the pantomime fairy she marvelled at when a travelling Peter Pan production once came to Robertson. Anneke had insisted they go, despite the fact that she was having a bad week and her joints screamed throughout the long road journey back.
I did close Grandpa’s curtains, didn’t I?
Sam looks back at the closed-up house. She did, of course she did, she always does, but guilt has made her uncertain.
Beyond the edges of the bright disc, the darkness seems deeper than usual, and Sam finds herself stumbling over familiar obstacles. She’s tired. She should be in bed, but there’s something she has to do first.
Sam collects the items that she placed at the ready earlier: a trowel for digging, and a large bucket brimming with a collection of small new plants she uprooted from the garden. She’s chosen hardy things: baby lavenders that she grew from cuttings last year, two young daisy bushes and a host of little jewel-coloured portulacas and vygies whose low-growing succulent stems and leaves will be perfect, both for the arid ground of their new home, and for her planted words. She’s going to write back to Charlie, a message, just for him.
The bucket is heavy with the combined weight of the soil-encrusted root-balls. She can feel her arm pulling, and she’s not even out of the garden yet. For a moment, she stands, reconsidering. But then she remembers the perfect little stool. The dip in the top had cupped the warm, secret parts of her body like an upturned hand. She remembers the way the wood-man’s eyes crinkled up when he smiled.
She hefts up the bucket and begins to climb the hill. When she looks around her, the head-torch picks out the light-glows of many pairs of eyes in amongst the black tracery of bush. Green, gold, white and even red. Snakes, mice, spiders and hyrax. She’s not sure which ones belong to which, but she’s glad she’s wearing two pairs of thick jeans tucked into her boots.
*
Much later, Sam drops into bed like a puppet with cut strings. Her hair is still wet from her hasty bath, soaking her pillow through almost as soon as she lies down. In the brief moments before sleep pulls her under, she smells wet, unwashed linen. When did she last launder the bedding? The towels? When did she last sweep up, or wash the kitchen floor, or scrub the loo with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda?
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t remember. There’s no space in her head for anything beside the hot-resin scent of sawn wood, and the newly-cut-pine creaminess of the skin on the undersides of the wood-man’s arms where the sun has not been.
*
Sam dreams of a huge bird with copper-coloured feathers. It rises up on vast, outstretched wings, scattering rosy reflected light in bands across the valley floor below it. She stands on the tin roof of her home and watches the creature come, riding the thermals over the distant mountains and speeding towards her. Warm air rushes into her face as it approaches, and her eyes are held in its steady, golden gaze. The giant dream bird gets smaller as it gets closer, smaller and faster, until it slams right into her chest like a bullet. The air is punched from her lungs as the creature makes contact. Everything goes dark.
And then, there’s the sensation of feathers brushing her spine and clawed feet gripping her heart. Wings unfurl inside her until the wingtips brush the bones of her shoulders. Sam breathes in and the bird inside her swells. She opens her eyes to see that the darkness has passed and the valley spreads out before her: vineyards and fields and orchards and dirt roads bright in the sun.
Sam is aware that somewhere behind her pale blue eyes, a pair of golden, predatory ones are looking out too.
*
Sam is woken by the frantic ringing of Jem’s old alarm clock. She slams her hand down on it to silence the clamour. It can’t have been more than three hours since she set it. Her hair is still wet, glued to her damp cheek on one side of her head, and it’s still dark. Good. She switches on the bedside light and blinks. Her eyes are gritty with tiredness. She climbs out of bed and pulls on her clothes. She aches to climb back under the covers, but she needs to be on the other side of that hill when dawn comes. She doesn’t know what time the wood-man starts work and she doesn’t want to miss the moment when he sees what she’s done for him. Will he read the words she’s planted, her greening, growing reply to his earlier message made of wood?
As Sam heads up the dark hill once again, with her legs stiff and her damp hair hanging heavy and cold against her back, she notes that a path is now appearing amongst the vegetation on the route that she’s been taking. Even with only the headlamp to light her way, it’s becoming clear that she’s wearing away a channel in the grass, breaking twigs with her boots again and again, carving up the landscape with her need. Even now, in the dawn grey, and with her eyes still dusty from sleep, she navigates with ease. One hiking boot in front of the other, and then again and then again and – STOP.
Sam freezes mid-step, trying to keep her balance. There, in the path ahead, is a snake. Not just any snake. This one is patterned with chevrons in brown, black and cream all down its short fat body, and its head, facing her down, is wide and flat. A puff adder.
It doesn’t move, and neither does she. Sam rocks on her toes for a terrible moment, holding her breath. Another step and she’d be on him. Another step and she’d be dead. Carefully, slowly, Sam reverses away from the thick, tapering menace that bars her way.
The first time that Jem warned her about puff adders was on the way to school one morning when he spotted one coiled up at the side of the road. He’d pulled over and switched off the bakkie’s engine so that she could take a good look from the safety of his lap. ‘Don’t let that big fat belly fool you, my love,’ he’d whispered. ‘Puff adders are the most dangerous of all, and you want to know why? Because they’re not scared of humans. They don’t just slither off when they hear you coming.’ Sam still remembers the warmth of Jem’s chest pressing into her back, and the plastic of the steering wheel beneath her fingers, worn smooth from her grandfather’s hands resting there, day after day, year after year. ‘It’s all too easy to step on one of these guys, Sam. Keep your peepers open.’
‘OK, Grandpa,’ she’d promised.
Taking a different route to avoid the snake adds precious minutes to Sam’s journey over the hill, and the eastern sky is turning from peach to pale blue by the time she crests the rise and starts to make her way down the other side. She turns off her headlamp in case the workers, whose voices she can already detect as they make their way into the fields, spot her white light and sound some sort of alarm. She hunkers down and eats an apple and two crackers that she brought along with her. To her left, the sky lightens to a pearly grey-blue, and before her, the farm takes shape, bits of it emerging out of pools of night shadow, until it is only the furrows between the grapevines that seem to clutch on to the dark. The layout of the fields and buildings on this side of the hill are now almost as familiar to her as the garden she’s left behind, but it is the barn she knows best.
She creeps down to the boulder, crouches behind it, and waits for him to open the doors.
*
The first thing Charlie sees when he pushes open the workshop door is a brilliant fleck of colour lying on the ground outside, as if someone has dropped a crumpled piece of orange tissue paper. He squeezes his way through the gap and stares. There’s colour all around the spot where he spelled out the note in bits of wood a few days earlier. Not from crumpled tissue paper, but flowers: red, orange, yellow and vivid pink, as well as waving lavender buds on stalks of bluey-green. The plants poke up out of the newly dug earth in a strange row, bunched together in spots, and then set apart in others. The whole odd arrangement is flanked at either end by a daisy bush, each one encrusted with flowers like blue stars.
Charlie finds that he has forgotten to breathe. Behind the astonishment, a faint little note of discomfort sounds somewhere deep inside him. He shakes it off, and walks towards the vulnerable new garden, bending down to touch the satin petal of one of the bright things. It clings to his fingertip, so soft it’s almost as if the flower isn’t really there at all. He looks up at the hill, searching for the white hair, the pale eyes. There, peeking out from behind that big boulder, the smooth curve of her forehead. Her eyes are in shadow.
‘Thank you,’ Charlie says in her direction. ‘It’s really… great.’ He knows he should
say something more appreciative, give credit for what has clearly been an enormous amount of nocturnal work, but he’s not sure which words would be the right ones. There’s no precedent for this. The note of discomfort pings a little louder, but it is lost beneath his wondering how exactly all that spun sugar hair smells when it moves against her neck. He remembers the outline of her body silhouetted against the light yesterday, showing clearly though the thin fabric of her frumpy top. He stands, goes inside, and fetches the stool for her once again. ‘My name is Charlie,’ he says, loud, so he can be sure that she hears.
Charlie. Sam receives the two syllables as if they’re a gift he’s given her in return for the fresh new garden at his feet.
*
Some days, when Sam comes over the hill, she brings more plants with her, and now there are a number of succulents nestling in between the blooms, filling out the patterns of colour with clumps of green and grey. The words she’s planted are clearer, stronger. Surely he can’t fail to read them now?
The dimpled, twisty-legged stool is always waiting for her. Sometimes she uses it, and sometimes she leans up against the wall inside to watch, and sometimes she sits on the floor amid the powdery sawdust. She’s become bolder, moving around the workshop as if the space is her own.
Charlie is constantly surprised that his work doesn’t suffer in her silent presence. He’s keenly aware of where she is at any one time, but instead of it being a distraction, beneath her gaze his hands are surer and his labours result in items of such purity that the wood seems to breathe beneath his fingers. In the hours before she arrives and after she leaves, he can feel the old tension building up between his shoulder blades. Don’t fuck up. But when she’s there, everything he does is close to perfect.
One evening, Sam stays later than usual. The light outside is softening with the lowering sun, making shadows bruise the space beneath the workbench and in the corners of the barn. When Charlie glances up from the bench, he finds himself looking directly into the girl’s eyes.
Bone Meal For Roses Page 17