Oggi eased himself out of the truck and limped towards a small timber house with a wide, low-set front verandah, red cotton curtains and an open front door.
‘Oggi?’ A voice called from inside. The black-haired woman with the red lipstick emerged from the house. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Oggs had a bit of trouble at school,’ Candy said as she got out of the truck.
Boryana spoke a torrent of words in a language Alice didn’t understand. She fussed over Oggi’s purpling bruises and spinifex cuts. He held his hands up as if in surrender and replied in the same bubbling language. Harry barked from the back of the truck until Candy let him off his lead. He sailed off the tray and ran to Boryana’s side, yapping at her hands as she gesticulated.
‘Sorry, sorry, Harry.’ Boryana patted Harry’s head to reassure him. ‘Everything’s all right. Ognian here is a big boy who can take care of himself, apparently, and won’t tell me who did this.’ Boryana crossed her arms.
‘We’d better get going, Bory, and leave you two to it,’ Candy said, nodding. ‘C’mon Harry.’
‘What? No! You have to come in. For a quick tea. June won’t mind.’
‘She bloody well will,’ Candy said. ‘It was this one’s first day at school’ – Candy put her arm around Alice – ‘and June will be keen to hear all about it. Bory, this is Alice. June’s granddaughter. Our newest Flower.’
Alice smiled shyly, though couldn’t take her eyes off Oggi.
‘Well, now, how lovely it is to meet you.’ Boryana’s words sounded like they were coated in something thick and rich. She took Alice’s hand and pumped it up and down.
‘You and my Oggi are friends?’
‘We go to school together.’ Oggi stepped forward.
Boryana nodded. ‘Very good.’ She glanced at Candy. ‘You really won’t stay for a quick cuppa? Looks like there’s a lot to catch up on.’ Boryana raised an eyebrow. Alice looked pleadingly up at Candy.
‘All right, all right. A quick one,’ she surrendered.
Candy and Boryana walked arm in arm into the house, their heads bent together, gossiping. Oggi and Alice stood awkwardly.
‘I’ll show you around.’ Oggi gestured to the river. Alice nodded. She clicked her fingers behind her. Harry licked her wrist as he followed.
Behind the house was a small, well-kept rose garden and a coop holding three fat chickens. Alice sat under a paperbark tree as Oggi opened the coop to let the chickens roam. Harry sniffed after them but then curled up, uninterested.
‘This one’s Pet, she’s my favourite,’ Oggi pointed out a fluffy black chicken, wincing when he stretched his bruised arm too far. Alice squeezed her eyes shut but could still see her mother’s naked body, covered in bruises, coming out of the sea.
‘Are you okay, Alice?’
She shrugged. Oggi went to his mother’s rose garden and gathered a collection of fallen petals and leaves. When his hands were full he carried them back to Alice and placed them on the dirt around her. Back and forth he went, between the rose garden and Alice, until his circle was complete. He jumped inside it and sat down.
‘After my dad died I did this to make myself feel better.’ Oggi wrapped his arms around his knees. ‘I told myself, anything inside the circle is safe from sadness. I’d make the circle as big or as little as I’d like. Once when Mum wouldn’t stop crying I made a circle around the whole house. Except I had to use all of the petals on her roses to do that, and she didn’t react the way I thought she would.’
Yellow butterflies fluttered over the roses. As Alice watched their wings, tiny lemon flames, she remembered how they hovered over the sea in summer, basked in the casuarina trees, and tapped against her bedroom window at night.
‘The mine Dad was working in collapsed. For a while Mum sat on the verandah every day waiting for him to come home. Always with a rose.’
Just like the queen who waited for her love to come home for so long she turned into an orchid. Alice rubbed a shiver from her arms.
‘Are you cold?’ he asked. She shook her head. They both sat looking at the river.
‘That’s why I pick you flowers and leave them in your boots at night,’ Oggi said, quietly.
Alice let her hair fall down over her face.
‘I know how it feels. To be sad and alone.’ Oggi turned a rose petal over in his hands. ‘We were only meant to be here for a little while, until Dad made enough money for us to move on, but since he died we have to stay here now. Mum doesn’t have the papers to do anything else.’
Alice tipped her head to one side.
‘We’re not Australian. I mean, Mum wasn’t born here. So we’re not officially allowed to be here. If we try to leave town or go anywhere else, Mum says we could be arrested and separated; she could get sent home and never be allowed to come back again. Which Mum doesn’t want, because this is – was – Dad’s country. That’s why we keep to ourselves and Mum doesn’t work anywhere too much, and I’m not allowed to have friends at school. Besides, no one wants to be my friend. They call my mum a witch. Like they call all the women at Thornfield.’
Alice’s eyes widened.
‘No, no, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s not true.’
She sighed, relieved.
Oggi picked at a stone in the dirt. ‘Mum dreams about going back to Bulgaria one day, so that’s what I’m going to do when I grow up. Make enough money to take her home to the Valley of the Roses.’
Alice lifted a rose petal to her nose. The fragrance reminded her of dreams of fire.
‘That’s where Mum says I was born. In the Valley of the Roses, back in Bulgaria. Not that it’s a place. Mum says it’s more a feeling. I don’t really know what that means, though. Except kings are buried there, and the roses grow as sweet as they do because there’s gold buried in the ground with their bones.’
Alice raised an eyebrow.
‘Okay, so I made up that last bit about the gold and the bones. But wouldn’t that be cool? If the bones of kings and treasure were buried underneath these magic valleys of roses?’
Footsteps approached.
‘We gotta get going, sweetpea,’ Candy called.
Alice and Oggi stepped outside the rose petal circle and followed Candy to the front of the house where Boryana was waiting for them.
‘Here, Alice. A little something to say welcome.’ Boryana handed her a small glass jar topped with cloth and tied with ribbon. Inside glistened pink jam. ‘It’s made from roses,’ she said. ‘It does magic things to toast.’
‘Bye, Alice,’ Oggi called. ‘See you at school tomorrow.’
Tomorrow. Alice waved back at him as Candy drove towards Main Street. She’d see him tomorrow.
As they headed home, she touched her fingertips to her hot cheeks. Sunbeams, she imagined, were shining out of her face.
12
Cootamundra wattle
Meaning: I wound to heal
Acacia baileyana | New South Wales
Graceful tree with fern-like foliage and bright golden-yellow globe-shaped flower heads. Adaptable, hardy evergreen, easy to grow. Profuse flowering in winter. Heavily fragrant and sweetly scented. Produces abundant pollen, favoured for feeding bees in the production of honey.
June shuffled down the hall in the dark, switching a few lamps on. The grandfather clock struck two in the morning. Come sunup, she had the big drive to the flower markets in the city. But that was a couple of hours away. Just one nip.
For weeks now the nights had stretched on, empty and restless. June’s bed was weighed down with too many ghosts, sitting at her feet, holding boughs of wattle in bloom. Winter was always the hardest season. Flower orders dropped right back. Old stories turned where they lay under early frosts in the earth. And this winter Alice had come home.
Although she wasn’t speaking, Alice was smiling more often. Something at school had awakened her in some way, stirring her from the deep paralysis of grief. She hadn’t wet the bed for weeks. There hadn’t been another panic at
tack. Twig had eased off on her push for counselling. Alice always had a book open in her lap, with a pressed flower between the pages. Or she was at Candy’s side in the kitchen or the herb garden, helping her concoct a new dish. Or she traipsed around in her little blue boots, following Twig like a second shadow through the workshop.
But no matter how much June tried to keep an eye on her, and even with the temperature cooling every day, Alice still managed to vanish and come home with wet hair sometimes. June knew she’d found the river. And likely, the river gum. Yet, June couldn’t bring herself to tell Alice Thornfield’s stories, of the women from whom she was descended. Once June spoke Ruth’s name, there was only one direction that story could flow: to Wattle, then June, and then straight to Clem, Agnes and the choice June had made.
June stood at the kitchen counter with the open whisky bottle and poured herself another glass. She was tired. Tired of bearing the weight of a past that was too painful to remember. She was tired of flowers that spoke the things people couldn’t bear to say. Of heartbreak, isolation and ghosts. Of being misunderstood. When it came to telling Alice about her family, June struggled with the thought of bearing any more blame for the secrets that grew among Thornfield’s flowers. There had to be another way for the child to heal than to be accosted with the truth about her family, which, despite the morning when Alice seemingly recognised her face, June was fairly sure she didn’t know. Nothing indicated that Alice knew why her father took her mother away from Thornfield, or that June could have changed her mind, surrendered to Clem, and maybe saved Agnes. But she’d let her son go, and he’d taken Alice’s mother with him. Because June would not yield to his rage. Because Agnes loved him more than she knew how to love herself.
She took the whisky into the lounge room, drinking straight from the bottle. On Alice’s first day at Thornfield, when she’d curled into June’s arms and tucked her face into the curve of her neck, June had felt her body fill with a love she hadn’t dared to let herself remember. She couldn’t risk losing that. She couldn’t bear Alice thinking badly of her. Day after day, the stories remained unspoken. She kept moving the mark. When Alice starts school, I will tell her. When Alice smiles, I will tell her. When Alice asks, I will tell her. Be careful, June, Twig warned. The past has a funny way of growing new shoots. If you don’t treat them right, these kinds of stories have a way of seeding themselves.
June sank into the couch, the whisky bottle lolling in her hand, the past gathering around her. Thornfield’s stories were never far from her thoughts.
Jacob Wyld’s murder broke Ruth’s mind. She gave birth to his baby alone by the river, and named their child after the wattle tree that first flowered during the drought. It was all that was left of Ruth’s garden, and all she could give her daughter: a name that might embolden her to survive growing up in a house with Wade Thornton and his abuse. I was determined not to let him do to my mind what he did to my mother’s. Her eyes were as empty as the cicada shells in the dust where her flowers once grew, Junie, Wattle used to say.
The townspeople became willfully blind to Thornfield after Ruth stopped selling flowers and let her garden wither and die. When they saw Wade in town, no one challenged him about rumours of his violence, and they mostly ignored Wattle, the girl some said had been raised more by the birds than by her own mother. But not Lucas Hart, who first saw Wattle when he was a boy walking alone along the river. He’d thought she was some kind of river mermaid then, the way her skin shone green under the water and her long black hair was tangled with leaves and flowers. Though he never saw her at school, or in the shops, or at church, she irrevocably captured his imagination. Whenever he went to the river he hoped to see her swim. It always struck him that her sinewy limbs cut through the water as if she had a score to settle. Over time, they both grew up. She became a reclusive young woman, hardly ever seen in town, and he went away to finish his medical studies. Neither city life nor an education could distract him; thoughts of Wattle ran through his veins like a fever. He moved home, took up the local GP residency, and walked the river path nightly. He’d heard the rumours about Wade Thornton. No one seemed to have intervened, though; family business was kept private between a man and his wife. Except, Lucas always wanted to say, Ruth Stone never was Wade Thornton’s consenting wife, nor, as the story went, was Wade Wattle Stone’s father. Every night that Lucas walked the river he promised himself he would go up the steps to the front door at Thornfield, knock and introduce himself. Inevitably, every night, he got as far as Thornfield’s boundary and turned on his heels. Until the night he heard a woman scream, followed by a single gunshot. Then silence.
Lucas ran down the path from the river into Thornfield’s dusty yard, where Wattle Stone was holding a rifle, crumpled over Wade Thornton’s body, soaked in blood so dark it could have been ink. Are you hurt? Lucas cried. Is it you bleeding, Wattle? Are you hurt? Wattle sat up, rigid and frighteningly pale, her eyes as dark as the blood around her feet. Wattle? Lucas yelled. Slowly, she shook her head. It’s not me, she whispered, the gun shaking in her hands. They searched each other’s eyes, each making a silent vow.
News of Wade Thornton’s death sent an overnight fire of speculation through town. Some said Ruth bewitched him and made him suicide. Others said it was Ruth’s daughter who murdered him. The Stone women and the language of their flowers were decried as bad luck; a curse on the town since Ruth’s failure to maintain the flower fields had taken away people’s incomes and hopes. Fishermen at the river were quick to join in, claiming they’d seen Ruth at night, talking to something in the shallows. When the sighting of a Murray cod was reported, it caused further uproar. The River King shouldn’t have been anywhere near a waterway that far north; she’d conjured a bad omen. That Ruth Stone and her flower farm once saved the town from drought was forgotten.
The slander didn’t stop until Dr Lucas Hart went public with his testimony: he witnessed Wade Thornton stumbling around in a drunken stupor, firing off his hunting rifle as he tried to clean it, and ultimately shot himself dead. The police wrote his death up as accidental, and the town turned its eye in another direction. Wattle Stone married Lucas Hart, carrying a bouquet of wattle down the aisle. They lived together at Thornfield, with Ruth.
Then we had you, Junie, her mother would always say at that point in the story, looking directly at June, her eyes brimming. And people started to be kind again; you broke Thornfield’s curse.
With June in her bassinet by her side, Wattle blew the dust from Ruth’s notebook. While Lucas was at his clinic, she methodically went about gathering books from the town library, reading them aloud, naming Ruth’s sketches and writing lists of the seeds she would need to order from the city, while June cooed along. Over a dozen seasons, Wattle cajoled her mother’s flower farm back to life. People started to nod approvingly at the bouquets that appeared for sale at the town markets. Return of happiness, spoke one bouquet of waratahs, each the size of a human heart. Devotion, rose boronias said, a bunch of fragrant cupped flowers. Soon the buckets were empty. Once again Thornfield’s flowers were in demand.
Although Wattle revived her mother’s beloved garden, she couldn’t settle the madness in Ruth’s mind. Wattle doted on her mother the way she did on her own child, trying to make her happy, but Ruth still crept out of the house every night. Wattle lay awake listening to the floorboards creak, until one moonlit evening, with June snug against her chest, she decided to follow her mother to the river. She watched as Ruth laid flowers in the water, talking the whole time.
Mama, Wattle stepped onto the sandy river bank in the silver starlight. Her mother’s eyes were lucid and bright. Who are you talking to, Mama?
Your father, my love, Ruth replied simply. The River King.
Bubbles burst on the surface of the river as a flower was dragged under, but by what, Wattle didn’t see. She turned and fled, back to her husband, warm in bed.
Ruth died in her sleep when June was just three years old. The morning Wattle found
her, Ruth’s hair was damp from the river, filled with gum leaves and vanilla lilies.
Her will left everything to Wattle. Ruth asked only one thing of her daughter: to ensure Thornfield was never bequeathed to an undeserving man. And in the generations since, it never was. To Clem Hart’s unforgiving fury.
Pay attention now, Junie, her mother’s voice rang in her mind. These are Ruth’s gifts. These are the ways we’ve survived.
June sighed deeply as first light appeared in the sky. She stumbled from the couch into a standing position and staggered towards her bedroom, the last of the whisky sloshing in the bottom of the bottle.
On the first day of the winter holidays, Alice stood at her window, gazing at the chalky white path that cut away through the bush to the river. She and Oggi were meeting there the next morning, as soon as they woke up, for her tenth birthday. Oggi was the best friend Alice ever had, which she reasoned was fair because Toby was a dog, and Candy was much older, and Harry was also a dog, and a book wasn’t actually a person.
She turned from the window to her homework, which was spread out on the floor. Harry wagged his tail as she sat down. She had a holiday assignment to do: write a review of a book she loved, and why she loved it. Although the other kids groaned, Alice twitched with excitement when Mr Chandler handed out the assignment sheet. She knew straight away which book she would choose: the selkie stories Sally picked out for her in the library, the book June gave her at hospital before they’d met.
Alice went to the bookshelves, walking her fingers along the spines until she found the selkie book. When she slid it off the shelf another book came with it, falling to the floor. Alice picked it up, a clothbound hardcover with gilded lettering and a faded illustration on the cover. It was the story about the girl with her name, and the wonderland she fell into.
Alice opened the front cover. As she read the inscription, her body went cold.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Page 13