The Stars at Oktober Bend

by Glenda Millard

  i would tell

  heaved a rock

  overhead then

  smashed it down and

  down and

  down while the other

  one tried to stop him they

  argued shouted wrestled and

  the lamp fell

  glass shattered and set

  the grass alight

  flames for danger for

  warning for old charlie and joey

  to come

  running.’

  quiet then. all my dark sayings burnt to ash and bone and blown away. me emptied, aching, raw as if i had swallowed swords. manny’s arms gathered me, and in their strange new circle i thought a dazzling thing. the one who most needed to know that being alice was a good and decent thing to be was not manny james. it was me.

  ‘i am alice,’ i whispered, and my words fell new-made against manny’s shoulder.

  ‘still i am

  alice

  no less

  no more

  just different

  alice

  still.’

  my voice had not changed but my words were a song.

  43 ALICE

  river sonnet

  manny stayed until late afternoon. when he said he must leave, we went with him. bear and me. took him along our secret route to the railway station. i led, manny followed and bear came last, our feet quiet on the earth. only crickets in their trumpety holes could have heard us. my magic hands unlocked hidden tunnels through the towering grass. ours was a quiet kingdom of plants and earth and air. too soon we came to where the fence was a wall of weedy creepers. i peeled back the corner. manny took my hand. stepped through. would have taken me with him. but i shook my head. guilty for leaving gram for so long. anxious joey would be angry.

  i watched manny pick his way across the shunting yards. haul himself up on the platform, disappear through a doorway marked ‘travellers’ rest’. saw him again, smaller, in kennedy street. two boys approached him. their faces far away, unknowable. but it seemed clear they knew manny. they jogged beside him towards the scout hall. bombers, i thought. over there is manny’s world. a world of friends, football, school and big houses. i pushed the wire back into position and ran home.

  ‘where’ve you been?’ asked gram. sour as green apples. ‘a woman could be dead, for all you care.’

  ‘the river,’ i said, jamming logs into the fire. wishing i was jamming them down her throat. wishing i’d gone with manny. wishing for someone to share my happiness. i made a pot of tea. spoon-fed gram with buttery sops in thin chicken soup.

  ‘where’s joey?’ i asked, guessing he was somewhere with tilda. mad he hadn’t stayed with gram.

  gram shrugged.

  ‘you all right?’ she said. better now, with some food inside her.

  i nodded. felt strong. still alice, i told myself. no less, no more, just different alice. different from what i was yesterday. different because manny had searched for and found me.

  after i’d fed gram, i emptied the bucket she peed in, filled a basin with warm soapy water, washed her face, hands and feet, rubbed ointment onto her chest and back, and helped her into a clean singlet and nightgown. i brushed her silvery hair and braided it, and when i tucked her into her fireside bed she took my face in her hands and my heart by surprise.

  ‘you’re a good girl, alice.’ she said. and even after what she’d done to me, what she’d said last time, her unexpected words left me wanting to climb in beside her. under the tartan rug with nearest. with kin. tell her all i knew. ask her what i didn’t. say i love you.

  instead i went outside. stood beside the rainwater tank under a tree hung with oranges. tiny planets between glossy leaves and sprigs of blossom. i picked one, peeled it and separated it into segments. twelve small sticky smiles. i took them inside and ate them at old charlie’s table with my back towards my grandmother.

  later, i spread the tools of my trade on old charlie’s table. the inks glowed like jewels. the empty paper awaiting the touch of a nib. i wet my pen and marked the page. i wrote in claret and finished with gold. a recipe i wrote, for a lure yet unmade.

  name: river sonnet

  type: dry streamer

  hook: #3

  thread: pearsall’s gossamer silk

  body: purple silk ribbed with silver tinsel

  hackle: sacred ibis – dyed kingfisher blue

  wing: peacock

  faulkner would never set eyes on this lure. but i made a note at the bottom of my page. imagined it as it would appear in one of his advertisements.

  note: this unique lure was conceived by bridgewater flymaker, alice nightingale, as her response to a pact made with the god of flying things. and although its design is practical, the river sonnet is not intended for use as a fisherman’s lure, but rather as a collector’s piece. a fine example of the craft of fly tying.

  i smiled to myself when i read it. then i heard a soft thud as joey’s boots fell by the door. heard his muffled footsteps cross the floor towards gram. i lay down my pen, twisted caps onto ink bottles while my recipe was drying. when joey saw me he came and sat at the table. read what I’d written.

  ‘have i seen this one?’ he said.

  i shook my head. ‘i haven’t made it yet.’

  ‘i like the label. sounds like something faulkner would write. it’s good. really good. professional.’

  ‘thanks.’

  ‘let me know when you’ve got enough ready for faulkner.’

  ‘this one’s not for him,’ i said.

  ‘oh?’

  ‘it’s for manny.’

  gram snorted in her sleep. turned over in bed. joey looked across at her.

  ‘about the other night,’ he said, ‘gram probably thought she was doing the right thing. you know, when she said –’

  ‘it’s okay,’ i said. my grandmother’s words, short-circuiting electricals and the things they made me do were not something i wanted to go over.

  ‘d’you think she’s going to die soon?’ i whispered. ‘is that why she said it?’

  ‘i dunno, alice,’

  ‘but you’re not eighteen yet.’

  ‘don’t worry about it. want some soup?’

  he filled two bowls from the saucepan on the stove.

  ‘i went down to the river again, before i left. you looked like you were okay . . . you and manny,’ joey said. i didn’t answer. too busy thinking about me and manny. his making fire for me. me leaning against his shoulder. telling him things i’d never told anyone before.

  ‘tilda says he’s a good bloke,’ joey said, and his words took my air away.

  ‘you talk about me and manny? to other people?’ i said.

  ‘only to tilda and only once. i asked her what she knew about manny, that’s all. he’s in the same year as her brother . . . they play football . . . ’

  ‘but you said my name and manny’s together?’

  ‘i don’t know, i might have. geez alice, you’re my sister, can’t i mention you?’

  it’s okay. ‘mention’ is different to ‘talk about’, alice nightingale, i reminded myself. that is what other people do.

  joey finished his soup. wiped the bowl with bread.

  ‘i’m going to bed now,’ he said. but he didn’t. he watched as i began to draw a cover for my label. i blocked in the ‘n’ for nightingale. the pencil strokes on the page calmed me.

  ‘i don’t want anyone to hurt you. that’s all,’ joey said.

  ‘i’m almost sixteen. i can look after myself.’

  ‘sixteen,’ he said, ‘so you are!’ he messed my hair and i let it be. this time i did not hear the sound of his feet on the stairs. or my grandmother’s breathing.

  i sketched

  flowers and feathers and

  fish that i modelled on the beautiful

  book of kells

  amongst the other

  creatures, damselflies and liliums

  in the place

  where joey’s face ha
d always been i drew

  a dark boy with troubled

  eyes french

  knots on

  his head and flames

  in his hands.

  it was cold when bear and me at last climbed the stairs. i pushed my bed across to the wall where the kitchen chimney came up through my bedroom floor and out through the ceiling. pulled the blankets over my head. lay on my side, back to the chimney bricks, bear at my feet. heat seeped from the bricks into our bodies. i was asleep in moments. but not before i wondered if manny james had asked anyone what they knew. about me.

  44 ALICE

  letting manny in

  manny came often in the school holidays. sometimes we worked in the paradise garden with joey, pruning fruit trees and grapevines. lopping willows by the river. binding the cuttings into sheaves to dry under the house. saving them till the winter solstice of the following year.

  before papa went away, we celebrated the solstice every year with a bonfire. when my skull was split open like a pademelon, not all memories of before were lost.

  fragments

  became tangled in the rosy spikes of bottlebrush

  woven into wattle-and-daub nests of river swallows

  and drowned in the sticky throats of correas

  even our sandy river flats sparkled

  as much with memories as with micah

  and i, despite my fishbone stitches and crazy wiring, still remember the excitement leading up to those smoky, black velvet nights. in the weeks before, joey and me spent days loading anything that would burn on our pram-wheel and pallet billy cart. nights we spent under the house. a bare bulb burnt like a caught sun in a wire cage while we two fashioned twiggy arms and legs. papa fastened them with a bag needle and string to a straw-stuffed potato sack. i can’t remember gram ever being there. it was always papa. papa with no religion, no faith except in me and joey, who tried to teach us what little he knew about traditions in sweden, the place where our mother was born. where snow fell like mae petals at christmas time.

  in the land of our mother’s people the longest night was celebrated in december, with bonfires and candles. it was called saint lucia’s day, after a girl who was good and kind.

  ‘what’s a saint, papa? is it like an angel? does it have wings?’

  old charlie wasn’t sure. ‘a halo, maybe. dunno about wings,’ he said.

  papa said that the longest night at oktober bend fell in june. said we could build a bonfire then. we small nightingales liked the idea of angels and saints, wings and fire. even joey did. so began a new tradition on the longest night of the year. the paradise garden was decked with hurricane lamps. an orchard angel floated above the bonfire. joey and me sat on the rocks. papa stuffed a kero-soaked rag under the sticks. stood back and tossed a match. we watched in awe as our higgledy-piggledy tower of sticks exploded into flames. orange, yellow and scarlet licked at the angel’s potato-sack skirt and brown-paper wings.

  i remember the first year we burnt the angel, how old charlie looked behind us into the dark. i looked too, to see what it was that caught his attention. lamps winked in the apple boughs. beyond them and above, our kitchen window hung in the sky like a painting. a picture of gram, standing at the sink watching the fire. watching us burn the angel. papa turned back to us.

  ‘i might have got this part wrong, kids,’ he said. ‘i’m not sure if the saint’s supposed to burn.’ but happiness was ours then. we worshipped life. danced on the elephant’s back and drew pictures across the face of dark with red-tipped sticks.

  we never celebrated the solstice after papa went away. gram said she was scared a stray spark might set fire to our old house. joey and me knew different. it was because she couldn’t think of anything worth celebrating.

  sometimes, still, i see her staring out from inside the kitchen; i think about the bonfire and the angel. about the window hanging in the dark. gram in the kitchen. i wonder what she was thinking then. wonder what she was thinking when she watched manny work with me and joey. hauling prunings under the house on the billy cart. mixing whitewash. painting the trunks of the fruit trees to stop the bark splitting. was it the trouble she’d seen in manny’s eyes that made her watch him? or was it because she liked him? was it both? another person to love, another to lose. was that what she thought? was that the reason she never invited him in?

  but i did

  i let him in

  through a crack

  in my heart i let him come

  the day he found me lying

  on the little hill of green

  my broken mind whirling

  giddily

  into my waking

  and sleeping

  he came and now

  into my home and up

  the stairs i let him

  in.

  on the floor of my bedroom i spread my lures. manny, on his knees beside me. wanting to know why i had made them and of what. wanting to know everything about them. about me.

  ‘papa taught me when i was ten. small fingers tie tiny knots. i didn’t forget.’

  ‘does he still make them?’

  ‘he didn’t take his tools,’ i said. not saying where papa was gone. not yet. that was his story. i thought it might be a betrayal to tell manny.

  ‘could you send them to him?’

  ‘he doesn’t need them. i make all the flies now.’

  i showed manny my collection of

  hair and hide

  fleece and fur and feathers found

  on fences in

  fields and forests.

  he looked at my dye pots. i told him the ingredients i used to make them. when he saw my labels, he sat back on his heels and shook his head.

  ‘you made these? you really made them?’

  i nodded and wondered if manny would say words like the ones faulkner did. instead he said, ‘these are gold!’

  ‘joey bought the gold out of the fly money,’ i said, mistaking his meaning.

  ‘no, alice, i do not mean the ink. in this country, if something is very excellent, it is the custom to call it gold. your labels are gold!’

  we laughed at my mistake, like gram and i had laughed on the elephant rocks. then i asked manny if he knew what ‘comeuppance’ meant and he didn’t. so i told him about jack faulkner and how joey found out he was underpaying me. i explained how then i’d made labels for the lures and sold them to faulkner for fifteen dollars apiece.

  ‘joey said that was faulkner’s comeuppance for cheating me on the lures,’ i said.

  ‘so comeuppance is when a person gets the punishment they deserve? is that what it means?’

  ‘something like that,’ i said.

  ‘do you think faulkner deserved to be punished?’

  ‘he thinks i have no brains because of how i talk. i wanted to see his face when he saw my labels. that was best, not the money.’

  my voice was tired from the many words i had already said. i wanted to go out on the roof. wanted to show manny my special place. i fetched my book of pages, undid the latch on the window and pushed it open.

  ‘come,’ i said to manny.

  ‘will you be okay?’ he asked.

  ‘i am safe here. never fall. not once,’ i said. we stepped out onto the balcony. i showed manny the best way to climb up to the ridge. showed him how to grip the iron. where to put his hands.

  ‘like this,’ i said. ‘with hands and knees. if you slip, you’ll slide, not fall. the chimney will stop you.’

  we perched like birds on

  the nightingale nest

  our knees scabbed

  with roof moss

  the house hemmed in

  by the rain-fattened river and

  the railway

  we watched the ebb and flow of

  day and night

  over our frail winter

  garden of sticks

  and stalks scratching

  the swollen stomach

  of the low sky

  saw the far and aw
ay

  spires and steeples and ordered streets

  the many-windowed

  homes and all

  the other glories of

  men glowing small

  as worms in the mouth

  of infinity.

  a freight train broke the spell. trundled past the silos. hooted a husky warning at the foundry boom gates. i opened my book to put words to the things i’d seen and smelled, heard and felt. a loose page from an exercise book fell out. manny slammed his hand on it. stopped it slipping off the roof’s edge into space. he turned it over.

  ‘may i read the writing on this paper, alice nightingale? would you mind?’ he asked hesitating to give it back to me. it was a story. one of my first tries when i was relearning to write. some of it was true, some imagined, because no one was willing or able to tell me all that happened. heat swarmed through me. i mumbled an excuse for the spidery red letters that crawled across the page in crooked sentences. but i nodded to manny, hoping he would understand.

  for all its many faults, i had given my story a title. wrote bold across the page, the stars at oktober bend. i held gram’s torch while manny read.

  once there was a greatmother and a greatfarther that took care of the boy called joey and the girl called alice because the other farther was dead and the other mother flew away. the greatmother and greatfarther and joey and alice all lived together up in the sky where the stars and other shiny things were very close and on the ground under the sky was the garden that the greatmother made by putting magic pills in the dirt and the greatfather played music and sang songs. when alice was number twelve she was sitting on the very small mountain near the garden and she was numbering the stars at oktober bend when the robbers came along and set the world on fire then joey pointed and the greatfarther went fast to the very small mountain and he saw what the robbers had did. the robbers ran to there car and the greatfarther ran home very fast and got his snake gun and went under the bridge. the greatmother lu-la-layed alice in her everlasting arms until she went to hospital because her head and other parts of her were bleeding. then policemen came and said the greatfarther did a very wicked sin and they wanted to take his snake gun away and he said it was with the fishes. and they said he would not be able to live near the shining stars anymore but they did not say anything about the very wicked sin the robbers did to the girl called alice. the greatfarther was allowed to stay home until the judgement day but he was not allowed to run away. they told him that after the judgement day he would have to live in another place that was not called hell but there were no windows and no stars. while he was waiting to go to that place the greatfarther made a hole in the roof of the room where alice sleeped when she was not in the hospital he hammered sticks and nails and maid a window and outside the window he hammered more sticks and nails to make a balkeny. and the greatmother of alice said the girl will fall down from the balkeny and be dead because she carnt fly far away like her mother did. and the greatfarther said i will hammer much more sticks so she carnt fall. and he did it and when the girl called alice came home she loved her window to the stars and she was never afraid of falling.