One clear morning at breakfast, Alice’s father announced that he had to travel south to the city to buy a new tractor on the coming weekend. He would miss Alice’s ninth birthday. It was unavoidable. Alice’s mother nodded and stood to clear the table. Alice swung her legs back and forth under her seat, hiding her face behind her hair as she digested the news. She, her mother, and Toby would have a whole weekend together. Alone. In peace. It was the best birthday gift she could have hoped for.
The morning he left, they waved him off together. Even Toby sat still until the dust clouds that trailed after him billowed and vanished. Alice’s mother gazed at the empty driveway.
‘Well,’ she said, reaching for Alice’s hand. ‘This weekend is all yours, Bun. What would you like to do?’
‘Everything!’ Alice grinned.
They started with music. Her mother tugged down old records and Alice closed her eyes and swayed as she listened.
‘If you could have anything at all, what would you have for lunch?’ her mother asked.
Alice dragged a kitchen chair to the counter to stand at the same height as her mother and helped to make Anzac biscuits, crunchy on the outside and chewy in the middle from too much golden syrup, the way she liked them best. Alice ate more than half the batter raw, sharing wooden spoonfuls with Toby.
As their biscuits were baking, Alice sat at her mother’s feet while Agnes brushed her hair. The slow rhythm of the brush on Alice’s scalp sounded like wings in flight. After her mother counted one hundred strokes, she leant forward and whispered a question into Alice’s ear. Alice nodded excitedly in response. Her mother left the room and came back a few moments later. Told Alice to close her eyes. Alice grinned, relishing the feeling of her mother’s fingers weaving through her hair. When she was done, her mother led Alice through the house.
‘Okay, Bun. Open,’ she said with a smile in her voice.
Alice waited until she couldn’t bear the anticipation for a second longer. When she opened her eyes, she gasped at her reflection in the mirror. A crown of flame-orange beach hibiscus was entwined around her head. She didn’t recognise herself.
‘Happy birthday, Bunny.’ Her mother’s voice wavered. Alice took her hand. As they stood together in front of the mirror, fat drops of rain started to fall hard and fast on the roof. Her mother got up and went to the window.
‘What is it, Mama?’
Agnes sniffled, and wiped her eyes. ‘Come with me, Bun,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
They waited at the back door until the storm clouds passed. The sky was violet and the light was silver. Alice followed her mother into the garden that was glossy with rain. They came to a bush her mother had planted recently. When Alice last took notice, it was just a tumble of bright green leaves. Now, after the rain, the bush was thick with fragrant white flowers. She studied them in bewilderment.
‘Thought you might like these,’ her mother said.
‘Is it magic?’ Alice reached out to touch one of the petals.
‘The best kind.’ Her mother nodded. ‘Flower magic.’
Alice bent down to get as close as she could. ‘What are they, Mama?’
‘Storm lilies. Just like the night you were born. They only flower after a good downpour.’ Alice leant down and studied them closely. Their petals were flung open, leaving their centres fully exposed.
‘They can’t exist without rain?’ Alice asked, straightening up. Her mother considered her for a moment before nodding.
‘When I was in your father’s truck the night you were born, they were growing wild by the road. I remember seeing them bloom in the storm.’ She looked away but Alice saw her mother’s eyes fill.
‘Alice,’ her mother began. ‘I planted the storm lilies here for a reason.’
Alice nodded.
‘Storm lilies are a sign of expectation. Of the goodness that can come from hardship.’ Her mother rested her hand on her stomach.
Alice nodded, still unaware.
‘Bun, I’m going to have another baby. You’re going to have a brother or a sister to play with and look after.’ Her mother snapped a storm lily from its stem and tucked it into the tail of Alice’s braid. Alice looked down at its quivering heart, open and vulnerable.
‘Isn’t that good news?’ her mother asked. Alice could see the storm lilies reflected in her mother’s eyes. ‘Alice?’
She hid her face in her mother’s neck and squeezed her eyes shut, inhaling the scent of her mother’s skin, trying not to cry. Knowing there was a kind of magic that could make flowers and babies bloom after storms filled Alice with dread: more precious things in her world her father could harm.
Overnight the weather swung about and blew in another storm. Alice and Toby woke the next morning to torrential rain sobbing at the windows and battering the front door. Alice yawned, wandering through the house, dreaming of pancakes. She tried not to count the hours left before her father would be home later in the day. But the kitchen was dark. Alice fumbled for the light switch, confused. She flicked it on. The kitchen was empty and cold. She ran to her parents’ room and waited for her eyes to readjust to the darkness. When she understood her mother was gone, Alice ran outside, calling for her. She was soaked in seconds. Toby barked. Through the downpour, Alice caught a glimpse of her mother’s cotton dress, disappearing through the saltbushes in the front yard, headed towards the sea.
By the time Alice reached the ocean her mother had already shed her clothes on the sand. Although the rain hadn’t let up and visibility was poor, Alice managed to spot her mother in the water. She’d swum so far out she was no more than a pale dot on the waves, dipping, arcing, thrashing her way through the water as if she had a fight to win. After a long time, she bodysurfed into the shallows and screamed violently at the sea as it spat her onto the shore.
Alice wrapped her mother’s clothes like a pelt around her shoulders, calling her mother’s name until her voice was weak. Agnes didn’t seem to hear her. She rose from the sand, naked, haggard and out of breath. The sight of her nakedness silenced Alice. The rain beat down on them. Toby cried, pacing back and forth. Alice couldn’t take her eyes off her mother’s body. Her pregnant belly was bigger than Alice realised. Framing it were bruises, blooming along her mother’s collarbone, down her arms, over her ribs, around her hips, and inside her thighs, like sea lichen smothering rock. All this time that Alice thought there’d been no storms, she had been gravely mistaken.
‘Mama.’ Alice started to cry. She tried wiping the tears and rain from her face. It was no use. Her teeth chattered from fear and emotion. ‘I was worried you weren’t coming back.’
Alice’s mother seemed to look right through her. Her eyes were big and dark, clumps of her eyelashes stuck together. She stayed that way, staring, for a long time. Finally, she blinked, and spoke.
‘I know you were worried. I’m sorry.’ She gently unwrapped her clothes from Alice’s shoulders and pulled them onto her wet skin. ‘C’mon, Bun,’ she said. ‘Let’s go home.’ Agnes took Alice’s hand and together they walked back up the sand in the rain. No matter how hard she shook, Alice made sure not to let go.
A few weeks later, just before the afternoon when she read about the phoenix bird, Alice and her mother were out in the garden among green pea and pumpkin seedlings. Curls of black smoke rose on the horizon.
‘Don’t worry, Bun,’ her mother said, raking new dirt for the veggie patch. ‘It’s a controlled burn at one of the farms.’
‘Controlled burn?’
‘People all over the world use fire to garden,’ her mother explained. Alice sat on her heels where she’d been tugging weeds from the freshly turned dirt and considered what her mother had said, incredulous. ‘Truly.’ Her mother nodded, leaning on her rake. ‘They burn back plants and trees to make way for things to grow. Controlled fires reduce the risk of wildfire too.’
Alice wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘So a little fire can stop a bigger one?’ she asked, thinking of
the library book on her desk about spells that turned frogs into princes, girls into birds, and lions into lambs. ‘Like a spell?’
Her mother nestled seedlings into the rows of fresh earth. ‘Yes, I suppose it’s just like that, a spell of sorts to transform one thing into another. Some flowers and seeds even need fire to split open and grow: orchids and desert oaks, those kinds of things.’ She dusted her hands and pushed her hair off her forehead. ‘You clever girl,’ she said. For once her smile reached her eyes. After a moment Alice’s mother returned to her seedlings.
Alice went back to her work too, but all the while, out of the corner of her eye, watched her mother, backlit by afternoon sun, willing new things to grow from nothing. When her mother looked around the property and her face fell at the sight of the shed, Alice understood with swift clarity: she had to find the right spell, the right fire in the right season, to transform her father from one thing into another.
4
Blue pincushion
Meaning: I mourn your absence
Brunonia australis | All states and territories
A perennial found in woodlands, open forest and sand plains. Medium to deep blue flowers usually in spring, in hemispherical clusters on a tall stem. Can be difficult to establish. May die after a few years.
Alice, can you hear me? I’m here.
The voice. Softly.
She drifted in and out of consciousness, only catching moments long enough to sense her surroundings. The sharp smells of antiseptic and disinfectant. The glare of a white-walled room. The sweetness of roses. Scratchy, starched bed sheets. A rhythmic beeping at her side. Squeaky shoes on a squeaky floor. The voice. Softly.
You’re not alone, Alice, I’m here. I’m going to tell you a story.
Her tongue thickened with longing. She strained to answer the voice, to stay close to the smell of roses, but too quickly she sank back into the murky depths, her limbs heavy with the silt of memory.
Thin amber light shot through the nothingness that pressed in on Alice from all directions. She edged towards it. There was a hardening sensation under her feet, as if she’d reached the sandy bottom of the shallows after swimming in the deep. She realised she was on her beach, but something was very wrong. The dunes of silver-green seagrass were burnt and smoking. The sand was soot-black, and the ocean was gone, a tide lower than Alice had ever seen. She kicked her feet through the blackened shells of dead soldier crabs and cracked pipi shells, their pastel colours charred. Cinders drifted like flaky stars, and clumps of salty ash gathered in her eyelashes. Far off in the distance the low tide shimmered, orange embers under a dark sky. The air was hot and smelled foul.
I’m right here, Alice.
Tears burned her cheeks.
Alice, I’m going to tell you a story.
She searched the blackened shoreline. There was an acrid taste in her mouth. She sensed the heat on her skin before she turned towards the sea.
The embers shimmering on the distant horizon exploded into flames. Fiery waves rose, crashed and rose again, a stampede of glowering beasts. It hurt to breathe. An ocean of fire thundered towards her on the black sand.
Heat from the towering waves scorched her face. All she could smell was roses.
Wave after wave curled and crested, gathering strength as it raced towards her. She tried to crawl away, scrambling to get further up the beach, but she couldn’t get traction in the soft sand. Trapped, she turned, helpless as the ocean of fire wheeled over her, a swirling wall of flames. Pressure surged from her gut, but when she took a deep breath, all that tumbled from her lungs was a silent scream of tiny white flowers.
She floated on coral and flaxen flames. What she thought was a sea of fire was not seawater at all; it was an ocean of fiery light. Around her it rippled, constantly changing, a flare of aqua, a splash of violet, a burst of tangerine. She combed her fingers through the colours as her body was immersed.
The room was dark. The scratchy sheets were too tight. The air smelled so sharp it made her nose and eyes fizz. She tried to roll over but was not strong enough; the bands of light transformed into thick and flaming snakes, coiling around her body, burning as they tightened. She coughed violently, crying for breath as her lungs constricted. Fear snuffed out her voice.
Alice, can you hear me? I’m here.
She was outside of herself, watching the fire snakes consume her body.
Just stay with my voice.
Sally finished reading the last page aloud and closed the book in her lap. She sat back in the chair by Alice’s hospital bed, almost unable to bear the sight of her pale skin and bruises. How different she looked, two years older than the young girl Sally first met on that melting-hot summer day when Alice showed up at the library in her nightie, dirty, neglected and vivid as a dream. Now she lay lifeless, with her long hair spilling across her pillow and down the sides of the bed, as if she were a character from the book in Sally’s hands.
‘Can you hear me, Alice?’ she asked again. ‘Alice, I’m here. Just stay with my voice.’ She searched Alice’s face, studying her arms resting on top of the hospital sheets, looking for the smallest movement. There was none, other than the rise and fall of her chest, assisted by the machines beeping and whirring alongside her. Alice’s jaw was slack and there was bruising down the right-hand side of her face. The oxygen tube pushed her mouth into a collapsed O.
Sally wiped a tear away as a thought circled through her mind like a snake eating its tail: she should never have let Alice out of her sight that day she walked into the library alone. Or, the quieter, deeper, harder truth: she should have tucked Alice into her car and driven her home to her house where she could have cooked her a hot meal, run her a bath and kept her safe from Clem Hart.
Twitching with regret, Sally sprang from her chair, pacing at the end of Alice’s bed.
She shouldn’t have listened to John when he said Sally had no legal rights. She shouldn’t have accepted the story John relayed to her: after Sally called the station from the library, a patrol car went to the Hart property. Agnes welcomed the two officers in. Offered tea and scones. Apparently, Clem came home while they were there. Alice is just a mischievous kid, he’d said. No harm done. For John’s sake Sally did her best to let it rest. But meeting Alice had an effect on her she couldn’t control; she became all Sally could think about. A month or so after Alice visited the library, Clem walked brazenly through the door with the selkie book and Alice’s taped-together library card, as if he had every right. Sally hid behind a stack of books and let someone else serve him. After he left, she shook so hard she went home sick. Ran a bath. Drank half a bottle of scotch. Still, she shook. He’d always had that effect on her. He was her darkest secret.
Now, years later, Clem Hart was all anyone in town was talking about: the charming farmer who had kept his beautiful wife and curious daughter locked away, like a dark fairytale. So tragic, some exclaimed. So young, others said, averting their eyes.
The heartrate monitor beeped steadily. Sally stopped pacing. The veins in Alice’s closed eyelids ran like tiny violet rivers under her translucent skin. Sally wrapped her arms around herself. She’d met dozens of children in the library since Gillian died; none had unsettled her like Alice Hart. It wasn’t a coincidence, of course. It was because she was Clem Hart’s daughter. From the night John came through the front door and told Sally about the fire, she’d gone to the hospital every day, reading to Alice while the police and welfare authorities huddled together outside, deciding her fate. Sally made sure her voice was soft, clear and strong, in the hope that wherever Alice was inside herself, she would hear her.
The door slid open.
‘Hi, Sal. How’s our little fighter doing today?’
‘Good, Brookie. Really good.’
Brooke fussed over Alice’s charts and checked her drip, smiling as she took Alice’s temperature. ‘You’ve made her room smell like roses. I think you’re the only person I know who’s worn the same perfume all their life.’
Sally smiled, comforted by the warmth and familiarity of their old friendship. But the sounds of the machines filled her head. Unable to bear listening to them, Sally started talking.
‘She’s doing really well today. Really well. She loves fairytales.’ Sally held up the book she’d been reading. Her hand shook. ‘But who doesn’t?’
‘Right. Who doesn’t love happy endings?’ Brooke smiled.
Sally’s smile faltered. She knew as well as than anyone that happy endings weren’t always what they seemed.
Brooke watched her closely. ‘I know, Sal,’ she said gently. ‘I know how hard this is for you.’
Sally wiped her nose on her sleeve.
‘I haven’t learned a thing, not in all these years,’ she said. ‘I could have saved her. I could have done something. Now look at her.’ Sally’s chin wobbled uncontrollably. ‘I’m a stupid woman.’
‘Nope.’ Brooke shook her head. ‘Not on my watch. I won’t have that kind of talk, you hear me? If I were Agnes Hart, God rest her poor soul, I’d be so bloody grateful to you, coming here every day out of the love in your big heart to keep Alice company, reading her stories.’
At the mention of Agnes, Sally’s guts churned. She’d seen her a few times over the years. Twice driving through town, sitting in the passenger seat of Clem’s truck. Once in line at the post office. She was a wisp of a woman. Fading somehow, as if she might vanish right in front of your eyes. Standing behind her in line, Sally could hardly bear the fragility of her shoulders. Her reasons for being in the hospital aside, sitting with Alice was the least Sally could do for Agnes.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Page 4