Sweet dreams, sweetpea. See you at breakfast.
Love,
Candy Baby
Alice’s mind filled with images of newborn babies, wild women, and blue gowns that turned into flowers. Suddenly ravenous, she picked up the cupcake, peeled back the patty paper, and sank her teeth into the rich vanilla sweetness.
She fell asleep with crumbs on her face, clutching Candy’s letter to her heart.
Candy filled an old tomato can to water the herbs in the alcove behind the sink. The fragrance of fresh coriander and basil rose in the air. She set four mugs by the kettle for the morning. June’s soup bowl that she liked to call a coffee cup, the chipped enamel camping cup Twig insisted on drinking her tea from, and her own porcelain teacup and saucer, hand-painted in vanilla lilies for her by Robin. The fourth cup was small and plain. At the thought of the child’s grief-stricken face, Candy looked up at the ceiling, wondering if Alice had found her cupcake yet.
She was hanging up the tea towels when June came downstairs and into the kitchen. The pool of light falling from the range hood cast her face in deep shadows.
‘Thanks, Candy. For the cupcake. That’s the first time I’ve seen her smile.’ June rubbed her jawline roughly. ‘It’s uncanny,’ she said, her voice pinched by tears, ‘how she can look so much like both of them.’
Candy nodded. It was for that very reason she hadn’t been ready to meet Alice yet. ‘Tomorrow you can start over. That’s what you always tell us, right?’
‘Not so easy, is it?’ June muttered.
Candy gave June’s arm a squeeze on her way out of the kitchen. As she went into her bedroom, she heard the liquor cabinet squeak open. Candy had never known June to drink as heavily as she had been since the police came with the news about Clem and Agnes. People searched in all kinds of places for an escape; June found it at the bottom of a whisky bottle. Her own mother, Candy imagined, found it in a heath of wild vanilla lilies. Candy had learned the hard way that her escape was Thornfield’s kitchen.
She closed her bedroom door and switched on her bedside lamp, casting her room in diffuse light. Nearly everything she loved was here. The wide window seat with the big windows. Twig’s framed botanical sketches on the wall, all of the vanilla lily. Each one was dated, the first from the night she and June had carried Candy home from the heath. In the corner, her chair and desk, topped with her recipe books. Her single bed covered by the blanket of gum leaves that Ness, a past Flower, had hand-crocheted for Candy’s eighteenth birthday. A postcard had arrived a few years back, from a small banana plantation town up north where Ness said she’d bought a house. Some women, like Ness, came to Thornfield, took what time and strength they needed, and then left. Others, like Twig and Candy, knew they’d found a permanent home.
She sat and opened her bedside-table drawer, reaching inside for the necklace she always took off when she cooked. Slipped it over her head and held the pendant to the light. A fan of vanilla lily petals, preserved in resin, edged by sterling silver on a cob chain. June had made it for her sixteenth birthday, just before Candy had opened her bedroom window to a moonless sky and slipped out into the shadows, trying to outrun a loss that cut her to the core.
June had named her son after clematis, a bright and climbing star-shaped flower, and that’s exactly what Clem was to Candy growing up – a boy as beguiling as a star, a boy she was besotted with. She was always following him around, which he scowled about, but he still checked over his shoulder frequently to make sure she was there.
Candy went to her window and let her eyes rest upon the path at the bottom of the fields, which curled into the bush and led to the river. She was about Alice’s age the first time June allowed her to go to the river by herself. Candy thought she was alone running the winding path through the trees but, of course, she should have known better than to think Clem would let her have an adventure on her own. When she reached the river he swung from a rope tied to the river gum overhead and dropped screeching into the water, making her scream. After she’d recovered, Clem took Candy into the secret cubby house he’d built from branches, sticks and leaves in a clearing near the giant gum. Inside he had a sleeping bag, a lantern, his pocketknife, river stone collection and favourite book. They sat together, their knees touching while he read to her, tracing his finger around the illustration of Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow back on for him.
We’re stitched together, like this, Candy, he said. And we’ll never grow up. He flicked open his pocketknife. Swear it.
She offered the tender centre of her palm to him. I swear, she said, gasping at the quick, piercing pain.
Blood promise, he crowed as he sank the knife tip into his own palm and pressed his hand to Candy’s, lacing his fingers between hers.
Candy rubbed the tiny, faint scar on her palm with her fingertip.
As she grew up, Clem was indeed the bright and ever-climbing star in Candy’s sky. But when she was fourteen years old, and Clem was sixteen, everything changed the day the Salvation Army brought Agnes Ivie to Thornfield. Clem turned pale, moody, and his eyes no longer fully focused on Candy; he was fixed upon Agnes. She was the same age as Candy, and an orphan too. Arrived with sprigs of wattle in her hair, a copy of Alice in Wonderland, and big, deep eyes that followed you wherever you went, like a painting. June set her straight to work and Agnes took to her tasks as if she had a fight to win. Out in the flower fields from dawn to dusk, she worked until her hands blistered, and then until they split and bled. She worked until her spindly arms gave out, carrying buckets of fresh cuts from the flower fields into the workshop. She studied the Thornfield Dictionary with a furrow in her brow. At night she sat in the bell room and sang what she had learned of the language of flowers to the moon. Candy started following Agnes around Thornfield, hovering in long shadows as she worked, studying the girl Clem loved more. She followed her to the river and hid in the bushes watching as Agnes took a pen and wrote stories on her skin, down each forearm, up each leg, before she undressed and swam in the green river water until she was washed clean. When a twig snapped nearby, Candy saw Clem hidden, watching Agnes in the river too, with a look upon his face as if he’d found a star fallen to earth. When Candy saw he’d carved his and Agnes’s names into the trunk of the giant gum, she knew she’d lost him. All she could do was watch on, helpless, as everyone at Thornfield fell under Agnes’s spell, most of all Clem. Agnes seemed to wake something inside him, something entitled, something cruel. He was never the same with Candy again.
When Clem and Agnes left Thornfield, the wake of his violent rage and the totality of his absence tore the belly out of Candy’s world. She had splinters for a month after she scratched Agnes’s name from the giant gum in a grief-stricken frenzy. Nothing eased the pain. Not even leaving Thornfield herself.
Her memories of the night she ran away were still visceral: the burn in her legs as she ran in the moonlight through the bush to the road, lured by a lover’s promise to be there waiting for her. Candy had been sneaking into town to meet with him ever since the afternoon he’d pulled up in his car alongside her on her walk home from school. He gave her vodka and smokes. Told her stories about where he’d come from, a place like paradise on the coast. He was passing through town on his way back there. Did she want to go with him? He’d teach her how to ocean-swim, and get them a place with her own garden. The sense of freedom Candy had felt the night she met him on the highway was intoxicating. She got into his car, he put his foot down and they launched into the pale silver night, headed for a place where the haunting pain of Clem’s absence wouldn’t find her. But, only a few months later, Candy walked up Thornfield’s driveway with no more than the cotton dress she was wearing and the vanilla lily pendant hanging from her neck. June and Twig had been sitting on the front verandah. They took her in, set a third place at the table, and didn’t say a word. Her bedroom was exactly as she’d left it; she was crushed to find it unchanged. June and Twig knew Candy had acted a fool and would be back. They’d see
n her mistake before she’d made it. Candy had thought she could escape grief.
Candy looked at the ceiling again, thinking about Alice, Agnes and Clem’s silent daughter, caught in her own world of memories, sifting through them, trying to understand what had happened to her life. Candy had overheard June telling Twig the story: Clem had beaten Alice unconscious, and Agnes’s pregnant body wore bruises that told a similar story. What sort of coward did that? What kind of beast had he become? And what now of Clem’s baby son, Alice’s brother?
She pushed the questions away. Ran the pad of her thumb over the pendant, focusing on the language of the vanilla lily: ambassador of love. Since June’s great-grandmother Ruth Stone created a flower farm from drought-stricken land in the nineteenth century, Thornfield’s motto had remained the same: Where wildflowers bloom. It was the one thing Candy and every other woman who came to June for safety knew to be true.
As she readied herself for bed, Candy wondered if Alice knew yet, in even the smallest way, that no matter where she’d come from, or what had happened to her, she had come home.
9
Violet night shade
Meaning: Fascination, witchcraft
Solanum brownii | New South Wales
A member of the nightshade family, often toxic. Commonly associated with death and ghosts in folklore. Latin name comes from ‘solamen’ meaning to quieten or comfort, and refers to the narcotic properties of some species. Used as food plants by the larvae of some butterflies and moths.
Alice bolted upright in bed, dry retching. Her skin was covered in cold sweat. In her dreams ropes of fire were choking her. As the heat began to fade from her face, she lay back on her damp pillow, squinting in the glare of the morning light. Candy’s letter lay crumpled beside her. Alice picked it up and traced a fingertip over the curls of the handwriting. The dream fire had been different this time. It was blue. The colour of her name, of Candy’s hair, and a woman’s gown turned into an orchid by grief.
She tried to stop the tears, but they came anyway, signalling Harry like a whistle. He padded into her bedroom, his collar tinkling, and nudged her bare knee with his wet nose. His vast size made her feel safe.
Alice closed her eyes and pressed her fingers over them, hard, until it hurt. When she opened them her vision was full of black stars. As they cleared, she noticed someone had been into her room and set out clothes and a tray of breakfast on her desk. Harry licked the side of her face. Alice half-smiled at him and got up.
Laid over the back of the chair was a clean pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Socks and knickers were folded on her desk, and her boots sat neatly on the floor. There was also a broad-brimmed hat, and a little apron just like the one the Flowers wore. Someone had embroidered her name in azure thread on the pocket. Alice ran her fingertips over the stitched lettering. It was the colour she imagined the queen’s gown in Candy’s favourite story. The thought of waiting so long for love to return that you could turn into something else made Alice’s head hurt.
She reached for a slice of peach from the tray and popped it in her mouth. Her cheeks ached from its sweet juice. After another slice, she wiped her hands on her pyjama bottoms and picked the T-shirt up. It was the kind of cotton that felt like it had been worn a thousand times already. Her mother used to have one just like it. Alice loved to wear it to bed after Agnes had worn it long enough for it to smell of her.
‘Morning.’
June stood at the door. Harry snuffled happily. Alice’s hair hung over her face. She made no move to push it behind her ears as June stripped the bed again and left the room wordlessly. She came back up the stairs moments later, slightly out of breath, carrying a clean set of sheets. Shame burned Alice’s cheeks. Leaning against her, Harry licked the tears from her face. June’s knees popped as she crouched next to Alice.
‘It won’t always feel this strange, Alice,’ she said. ‘I promise. I know you’re hurting, and I know everything is new and frightening. But this place will look after you, if you’ll give it half a chance.’
Alice lifted her head to look at June. For the first time, her eyes weren’t far away, on the horizon. They were right there, close and full, focused on Alice.
‘I know everything seems pretty awful now, but it will get better. You’re safe here. Okay? No more bad things are going to happen.’
The longer Alice looked at June, the faster her heart beat in her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut. It grew hard to breathe.
‘Alice? Are you okay?’ June’s voice started to sound like she was far, far away. Harry paced around them, barking.
Alice shook her head. Memories broke apart inside her. Before Thornfield, before the hospital, before the smoke and ash. Back further, before.
Inside her father’s shed.
The carved wooden figures of a woman and a girl with flowers.
June’s lips were moving but Alice couldn’t hear her properly. Everything sounded as if she was underwater, sinking and floating at the same time, looking up at June through the filter of the sea. Her face swam in Alice’s vision, except for a fleeting moment when she was perfectly clear.
Finally, Alice recognised her.
June: her expressions, her hair, her posture, her smile. Alice had seen them before.
She struggled to breathe.
June was the woman her father carved over and over again in his shed.
June whipped her Akubra off the hook by the front door, jammed it onto her head, and grabbed her keys from the sideboard. She raced outside and down the front verandah steps, squinting against the glare of the morning as she strode to her truck. Yanking the door open, she yelped in surprise to see Harry inside. He’d just been upstairs with Alice, but there he was sitting to attention with his tail curled around his feet, staring at her.
‘You bloody escape artist,’ June muttered. ‘You never fail to amaze me.’ She ruffled his big ears. As she climbed into the truck, she broke out in a cold sweat recalling the look on Alice’s face upstairs; the recognition deep in her eyes. June tried to settle her shaking hands, having to make three attempts before she got her key into the ignition. She patted down her pocket and pulled out her flask for a quick swig.
‘June,’ Twig called from the front door.
She quickly slipped her flask back into her pocket. The whisky burned as it went down.
Twig hurried to the truck and stood at June’s window, waiting. They hadn’t exchanged more than clipped sentences since Alice arrived. June braced herself for another flare-up in their ongoing argument, which was becoming the kind that either ends old friendships or makes them stronger. They’d had some doozies over the decades, but here they were in the middle of another, still pulling together. As family was meant to do.
When June rolled her window down, Twig took a pointed step backwards and she cursed herself for not having any breath mints.
‘She’s okay,’ Twig said after a moment, keeping her voice even. ‘She’s resting in the lounge room with Candy.’
June nodded.
‘I rang the hospital –’
‘Of course you did,’ June scoffed.
Twig ignored her. ‘The nurse, Brooke, said it sounded like a panic attack. Alice needs rest, company and a close eye. She also needs counselling, June.’ Twig stepped forward and put both her hands on the windowsill. ‘She needs to see someone.’
June shook her head.
‘Everyone needs someplace and someone to belong to.’ Twig’s voice was barely audible over the truck’s engine.
June smirked; Twig knew what she was doing, repeating the very words June herself had said, years ago when Twig first came to Thornfield. June threw the truck into gear. She would not be manipulated.
‘I’m going to enrol her in school. Where she belongs,’ she snapped. Twig leapt back, stung.
As June drove away, her skin crawled as the full weight of Twig’s words settled. What the hell was she thinking, taking responsibility for her son’s daughter? Who was she, other than Next
of Kin on a form? The flicker of recognition in Alice’s eyes that morning played over and over in her mind. The same question nagged at her: how did Alice know her face?
Alice lay on the couch by the windows and listened to the rumble of June’s truck fade into the distance. She was trying to connect pieces of information. The statues in her father’s shed were of June. June was her grandmother, but was also her father’s mother. Why hadn’t Alice ever met her before? It couldn’t be that her father didn’t love June; why else would he spend so much time carving statues of her? Alice sighed, snuggling deeper into the couch. A magpie’s song drifted through the window. She closed her eyes and listened. The ticktock of the grandfather clock. The slow beat of her heart. The evenness of her breath.
After June had carried her downstairs into Twig’s care, she’d disappeared out of the house and hadn’t come back again. Twig had made Alice a cup of something sweet, which made her body feel like chocolate left in the sun. Her eyes drifted closed and when she opened them again Twig was gone. But sitting in front of her was Candy Baby, her long blue hair like waves of unspooled fairy floss.
‘Hey, sweetpea,’ Candy said, grinning.
Alice drank in the sight of her hair, the sparkling gloss on her lips, her chipped mint-coloured nail polish and the enamel cupcake studs in her ears.
‘Good to see colour in your face, little flower.’ Candy took Alice’s hand and gave it a squeeze. Unsure of how to respond, Alice just continued to stare. ‘I’m baking biscuits,’ Candy went on. ‘They’re for morning tea, but I need someone to taste them before I give them out. Wondered if you might help me out?’
Alice nodded so vigorously that Candy laughed, suddenly and deeply from her belly.
‘Well, would you look at that?’ Candy tucked a piece of Alice’s hair behind her ear. ‘Loveliest smile I’ve seen at Thornfield,’ she said. Only her mother had ever told Alice her smile was lovely.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Page 9