The screams are so loud now that Sam’s body is vibrating in response. She is on the stoop, right under the bathroom window, she jumps up, grabs one of the metal bars and pulls herself up so that she’s looking at the demon, staring down its vile throat.
‘Where’s Jem!’ it shrieks.
‘He’s dead. Jem’s DEAD!’
At last, the words that have manacled her and dragged at her belly and tortured her for months, have been spoken.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHARLIE PLACES HIS hand on the boulder that the water-eyed girl used to hide behind. It’s hot beneath his palm. This is the furthest he’s ever been up the hill. From here, Charlie can see the faint path through the bush where the girl made her daily journey to his door from wherever it was that she came from. He stares at the little gulley of sand and stones that winds its way upward. All he needs to do is follow and he’ll find her. Just a step, and then another.
He glances back at the barn. Through the yawn of the open doors, the discarded bits of the failed chair lie on the floor like a set of misshapen, knocked-out teeth.
Maybe it’s not his fault that she didn’t come today? Maybe it has nothing to do with him telling her she couldn’t stay? Maybe she cannot leave, for some reason?
Charlie turns again to look up at the hill. The breeze is warm, it’s late, but there are hours yet till the sun’s going down. After a moment, he steps out on to the path, following in the footsteps of the water-eyed girl.
Up the hill and over, she’s waiting on the other side. It’s so simple, all he needs to do is climb.
*
‘I knew it.’ Yolande’s eyes are open now. Sam’s words have stopped her hideous shrieking. ‘But when my mother died, Sussie made sure to get the news to me, so what’s different? Why the hell wasn’t I told about my father? You’re trying to keep my inheritance from me, aren’t you? You’re trying to take what’s mine!’
Sam is quiet again. She lets go of the window bars and drops to the ground. She sinks down to sit on the stoop, leaning her back against the cool of the wall.
‘You killed him, didn’t you?’ Yolande whispers.
‘No!’
‘How can you expect me to believe you, when you’re planning to kill me too.’
Beyond the garden, the guinea fowl gives one more rusty screech and then falls silent.
‘I’m not.’
‘Oh yeah, right. So you just locked me up in here with no food or anything for my own good, hey?’
Sam stares out at the garden. She can see the edge of the rose bed from here. The buds are still limp, and some of the leaves have yellowed and fallen off.
‘Jem died in the night,’ she says. ‘Sudden cardiac death.’
‘You just made that up.’
‘No I didn’t. It’s a real thing. I looked it up in a book when I found his body. Cold. And white with purple bits from where he’d been pressed into the mattress. Then much later, I checked on the internet.’
‘Looked it up in a book?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you call someone or get Sussie or the police?’
Because of you. The words burn in her throat, but Sam holds them in.
Something in Sam’s silence makes Yolande pause. The first eager frogs by the pond start their evening song, winding up for their nightly racket like little mechanical buzz saws. Sam closes her eyes. She feels tired right down to the marrow of her bones. If she could just lie here… curl up…
Then nothing would change.
The spider would still be trapped in the jar, the body would still lie beneath the roses, and she’d still be wrapped up in a man she cannot have.
‘Enough.’ Sam gets to her feet and walks away from the house.
‘Hey, come back! Come back!’ Yolande reaches an arm out of the window, grazing her elbow on the rusty frame. ‘Don’t just leave me here like a rat in a trap!’ She waves a useless claw at the cooling, darkening sky.
*
‘Where’s Daddy?’ Delia’s wide eyes look like two shiny chocolate buttons over the top of her blanket. ‘Why isn’t he doing my story?’
‘I’m sorry, my darling. He’s working late tonight in the workshop. He must be so busy that he’s lost track of the time.’ Liezette smooths open the page of the picture book with fingers that tremble, ever so slightly. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to. I’m sure he’s realised and is on his way back as we speak.’
‘But do you know that for definite?’ Delia asks. She sucks her bottom lip over her teeth and bites down. Liezette doesn’t answer. Outside the heavy curtains, the sky is still bright, and birds twitter in the blue gum trees at the edge of the lawn. ‘Maybe the ghost-girl got him.’
‘Delia, there’s no such thing as ghosts. We’ve talked about this. Don’t make Mama cross now.’
‘But I saw her,’ Delia whispers. Liezette looks up from the book, softening when she sees the fear in her daughter’s round eyes.
‘I know you thought you did, sweetie, but I can promise you, there’s no ghost in the fruit trees, and your daddy is just fine. I’ll tell him to come and give you a kiss when he gets in.’
‘Even if I’m asleep?’
‘Even if you’re asleep.’
‘OK.’ Delia wriggles down further under the covers, making herself comfortable. ‘Now read the story, Mama.’
*
When Sam opens Jem’s tool shed, she reels backwards at the smell of Charlie-reminiscent sawed pine. The saw is still lying on the floor from where she dropped it last night while she was preparing the bathroom barricade. She steps over its metallic teeth, grinding the fresh sawdust beneath her boots, and marches over to where Jem’s old tools hang from their pegs against one wall. There’s the spade she used when she buried him, with its corners dull from decades of use, and its wooden handle stained the colour of earth. There’s the chisel that she once used to carve out the letters on Sam-the-horse’s grave marker, what feels like a lifetime ago. There are some pliers, a hammer, a pickaxe, a garden fork, and a mallet. She touches the cold metal of each.
Sam has decided. It has to end. All of the lies and the fear and the madness, it has to end. She closes her fingers over the handle of the mallet, and lifts it from its peg.
Now.
*
Sam pulls the books from the shelf and shoves the piece of furniture away from the bathroom door with a shriek of wood on wood. She whacks the mallet against the wooden plank that’s pushed up under the door handle. Once, twice, and the third time it knocks free, clattering to the floor. Sam pushes it out of the way, and digs in her pocket for the key. In her haste, she misses the lock at first, scratching metal against metal, but then the key’s in and turning and, at last, the bathroom door swings open.
Yolande is standing beside the toilet beneath the window. Her wide eyes flick towards the escape promised by the now open doorway, and then to the heavy mallet clutched in the girl’s hand. It was once green, but much of the paint has chipped off, revealing the metal beneath.
‘You want to know why I didn’t tell anyone about Jem’s death?’ Sam’s voice is soft and low. She steps into the stuffy room, her gaze fixed on the woman by the window. Yolande doesn’t move. She doesn’t breathe. The girl’s pale, otherworldly eyes seems to be burning with a kind of terrible, blue heat. The mallet waits against her thigh. ‘Because of YOU, Yolande.’
Somewhere out beyond the open window, the guinea fowl starts up again, its high, squeaky-hinge cry grating through the evening air.
‘So I lied and I hid things and I buried things, but I’ve had enough. I don’t care what you try to do to me, I don’t care if they take everything away from me, but I can’t feel like this any more.’ Sam takes a shuddering gulp of breath and squeezes her eyes shut. ‘Because the worst thing I could possibly imagine, the very worst thing, was you coming back for me.’
‘For you?’ Yolande blinks. Soft grey shadows, like clouds of ash, have crept in to the edges of her vision.
/> ‘For Poppy,’ Sam says.
Poppy.
The word hangs in Yolande’s mind for a moment, shimmering, and then it explodes, sending waves of orange flame roiling outwards, licking against the walls inside her and melting them. Hidden memories, molten hot, course through her, dragging all the barricades with them and scouring her insides out.
In the blank raw space that is left behind, Yolande can suddenly see the girl in front of her as she was as a child: tiny and twitchy with fright and coated with grime. A baby mouse. A rat-baby. My baby.
‘Oh.’
Yolande sinks down on liquid legs, banging her hip against the side of the toilet as she falls. Not sister. There is no sister.
‘Oh.’
She shuts her eyes and grinds her crumbling teeth against each other as the truth rides in. It is armoured in shining metal and rides on bright horses. Lances stab at her from every side, until Yolande is pierced through and through.
‘Poppy,’ she breathes.
‘You remember now?’ Sam’s voice floats in from miles away.
Yes, Yolande remembers.
For the first time in over a decade, Yolande remembers waking up too late about the pregnancy and thinking that perhaps this was it, this was the thing that would make everything right. She remembers the ripping and the shrieking and then the months of squalling, the slapping and the shaking. Worse. The child made things worse. Now there was a little hungry face always looking at her and wanting something and her never being able to give it. She remembers hating herself and then hating it and then hating herself more. She remembers thinking she could get some money for it. Sell it. Use it.
But she didn’t.
And now Yolande remembers her one moment of mothering, her one kindness: she remembers letting her father take the child away.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
THERE’S SAND IN Charlie’s canvas trainers. Just a little, but enough for the fine particles to grind between socks and skin until his feet feel peeled raw. He can now see why the water-eyed girl always wears hiking boots. He sits down on a rock, checking first for scorpions, and pulls off his shoes. His socks are damp with sweat, making the sand hard to dislodge, so he tugs them off and whacks them against the side of the rock to loosen the grit. Now that he has a chance to take in his surroundings, he’s surprised to see how little ground he’s covered. He’s not even halfway up the hill. How many hours did the water-eyed girl spend hiking every day to see him? It’s an uncomfortable thought.
The sky is turning mauve in the west, and down below, spreading out towards the horizon, le Roux’s magnificent vineyards look like a roll of ribbed green corduroy, spread out and waiting to be cut and stitched. Charlie’s workshop seems shabby from up here: the roof is a patchwork of corrugated metal in various stages of disrepair. He’ll have to get that fixed before the next rains. In the scruffy yard between the barn and the hill, the water-eyed girl’s little garden is bright against the dusty ground. Charlie gazes at it as he picks burrs from the hems of his jeans, wishing he’d thought to bring a bottle of water.
And then, suddenly, the coloured blobs of the plantings no longer look so random. There’s a pattern there. Charlie’s mouth goes dry. It can’t be. He stands to get a better look, unaware of the sharp stones and scratchy scrub beneath his bare feet. It’s impossible. A cold fog seems to bloom at the base of his gut and blossom outwards, filling his body with ice. He remembers his own clumsy little note laid out in that yard with bits of wood, meant to be read from just such a vantage point. Did the girl purposefully plant those flowers to form words too, or is he just seeing things?
I must be making it up, he tells himself. Why would she spend so much time planting words that he would most likely never be in a position to read? He wants to shrug it off, but the longer he stares, the clearer it becomes that the garden was laid out with consideration and care, the colours arranged to form two short words in amongst the low-growing green succulents.
LOVE ME.
Is it a salutation, or a plea?
A command?
An incantation?
He’s been watering those words all this time, making them grow.
What the fuck have you been thinking, Charlie?
Charlie forces his feet back into his grainy socks and then into his shoes. He makes his numb legs move, back the way he’s come, back down the hill. He feels ill. He goes faster and faster, skidding and stumbling and sending insects scurrying out of his path, but he can’t outrun the feeling, and with each step, he sees himself clearer.
This is a life you’ve been messing with, man. A heart. Did you think that just because she was quiet and strange and seemed to appear out of nowhere that she didn’t have one?
He keeps remembering his stupid timber note. What was he thinking when he laid out those pieces? What was he hoping would happen? How the hell did he think it would all end up? As Charlie slips and scrambles down the slope he feels the full weight of the life and hopes of the water-eyed girl hanging heavy from his shoulders. When he reaches the yard, he doubles over with his hands on his knees, panting. Indigo blotches swim across his vision, darkening the ground beneath his feet. He squeezes his eyes shut, appalled at how close he came to climbing over the hill to get the water-eyed girl back again, just when she was trying to get free.
*
Sam leaves the bathroom and goes outside into the garden. Her old name is still burning on her tongue. She goes to the borehole tap, and then connects the hosepipe to the faucet. The plastic tubing is warm from the heat of the day, and coats her hands with dust when she pulls it over the ground towards the rose bed. It’s been too long since she watered. Perhaps it’s too late.
Perhaps it isn’t.
She stands with her back to the hill and directs the spray onto the thirsty ground. The droplets glitter in the air for a moment, catching the last of the daylight before sinking into the baked, dry earth, towards the waiting roots beneath. Her head swims with the loamy scent of newly wet soil. Sam breathes it in in huge gulps. She waters the base of each rose bush, taking care not to get too much spray on the leaves, repositioning the hose until the sky is navy blue above her head.
In the gloom, the black shapes of the trees and plants look like the backs and shoulders of benign creatures clustering close. The warm wind sighs like breath through their branches as they encircle Sam to keep the dark away.
When she’s finished with the roses, Sam drags the hose around the entire garden, watering the vegetables and then the fruit trees, moving on to the herbs and the flowers and the fragrant-leafed shrubs that line the path in the place where the poppies used to grow.
*
Yolande lies in a crumpled heap with her face to the wall. Through the bathroom window comes the chorus of crickets and frogs, and the sound of water rushing out of the hose attachment. After long minutes, her one arm snakes out and her searching fingers find the corner of her bag. She drags it towards her, bringing it in close, holding it like a baby against her body. Then she reaches out again, feeling for the syringe which still lies on the bathmat. She holds it tight, fist pressed against the bones of her chest. Beneath it, her heart flutters and fumbles, trying to find its rhythm.
Yolande’s memories continue to come, streaming like blown ash through her skull. When she let Poppy go with Jem, she shut them all down, but now they’re loose and flapping free, whipping against the empty insides of her until she’s bruised all through.
I could cook up some stuff to stop it.
The vitamin-and-vinegar smell of the remnants in the syringe make her whole body salivate.
I could cook up all of it.
Yolande bought enough for a few days, and she’s only used once. There should be enough in the bag. But then she thinks of the tiny girl with her broken tooth and snotty, tear-stained face that always made Yolande feel sick and empty and full at the same time. The child needed a mother, and that was supposed to be me. And now? A girl on the brink of womanhood with no one to
look after her, letting some unsuitable man use her, doesn’t she need a mother right now?
Could I be that?
But with her next breath Yolande knows that there’s no more chance of that happening now than there was all those years ago. The very idea of it is ludicrous. But she did do one thing right, when Poppy was little: she remembers watching the child reach up to take Jem’s giant hand in her small grubby one, and she remembers thinking Poppy will be safe now, and she knows that if she has any more acts of kindness left in her rat-self, it is this: she needs to abandon the girl one last time.
This time, Yolande thinks as she pulls herself up to sit against the icy wall, and puts the needle back into its pouch inside her bag, I need to stay gone. Not the dead-and-broken-and-covered-in-vomit-on-her-bathroom-floor kind of gone. She gets to her feet and drinks long and deep from the basin tap.
Away-gone. Never coming back.
For good.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
THE TIMBER OF the doomed chair is a liverish colour in the flat blue of the barn’s neon overhead lights. Charlie stares at it for a full minute before shutting the workshop door behind him.
He makes his way over to the van in the dark and climbs in, but before he can start the engine, Charlie suddenly remembers, as if it were yesterday, sitting at that little yellow craft table on the evening after his mother’s funeral. He’d felt so numb and light that he’d had to hold on to the painted tabletop to stop himself from floating up and drifting around the room like a crumpled leaf on a breeze.
He forces himself back to the present and turns the key in the ignition. The van’s headlights blaze into the orchard, casting sharp shadows between the espaliered branches, and catching the rosy globes of plums almost ready to be picked. For a second, he thinks he spots the pale flicker of something move between the trees. As he drives towards the house, he can’t shake the feeling that Delia’s ghost-girl is out there with her pale eyes and white hair, watching him from the dark.
*
Sam enters the kitchen with bare feet, leaving her hiking boots, wet from watering the garden, on the stoop to dry out. The tiles she cleaned the night before are smooth and cold beneath her soles as she stands and watches her mother spooning instant coffee into a flask.
Bone Meal For Roses Page 27