‘I really don’t think we should be talking about this.’ Rue kept her back to Olive as she worked.
‘Did Thistle ever come to our place? To help when Mum had me or Aster?’
‘Oh.’ Rue stopped. ‘Thistle doesn’t “help”. Listen to me. I think you should go back into the house, or go and play with the others.’
‘But—’
‘No buts. Enough. I’ve had it, with all of you. Just go and find something to do.’
Rue held herself for a moment before she whirled and started kicking at a rosebush, her rubber-soled lace-ups hefty against the trunk. She grabbed her secateurs again and took all the leaves off a bush and there was a noise that she was making, a kind of shrill buzzing sound.
Olive stopped at the corner of the house and looked back. Rue was wiping at her eyes with the backs of her wrists. She glanced up, saw Olive watching and waved her away.
At the back door, Grace flew down to deposit a small yellow piece of plastic at Olive’s feet. Olive bent and picked it up. She put it in her pocket and went into the house.
OLIVE WAS LYING on the floor in the Green Room. It was on the shady side of the house and the walls were myrtle-green with old-fashioned wood panelling like they had at the town hall.
She’d been there for over twenty minutes, looking at one of Lenore’s diaries. Lenore was the woman from the big painting, the lady with the lace collar and wide jaw. The writing in the diaries was hard to read and no matter how Olive squinted, it seemed only Thistle could interpret the old-fashioned letters that flourished into words on the small beige pages. Thistle had told Olive about Lenore and her husband Edgar, that the Lovelock family had been in Stratford since even before the 1900s. It was hard country, Thistle said. A wide and sandy land that produced quiet men and tough women.
‘And we are those tough women,’ she said often, when they were reading or doing a puzzle together. ‘It’s important you remember that.’
It was a place where the olden-day people had somehow managed to scratch out a start with some sheep, or wheat, and where you inherited a stretch of soil, some trees, perhaps a ramshackle house.
Edgar had been sent from England by his family moderately equipped, Thistle said, with funds and a pioneering spirit, both of which were destined to deteriorate over the next two generations. He had arrived in Stratford with his new bride, intent on making a living out of the shelly soil. Just off the bullock dray, though, he’d stood in shock while Lenore marched into their newly built house and shed several layers of weighty Victorian costumery. She reappeared in a pair of her husband’s trousers, rolling up her sleeves and suggesting they get to work. She directed him to a shovel saying, ‘Come on, Edgar.’ She had him dig holes for the moss-wrapped cuttings she’d transported in jars all the way from the city. Some of them were stubby finger-lengths from a Scots pine, and they took well enough to the loamy ground along the driveway to be dropping globate fruit decades later. Another was the peppercorn (Schinus molle) whose surface roots would provide sanctuary for the small Olive in decades time.
As she lay on the carpet, Olive’s mind kept going to the thing that was in her head, like a tongue returning to a cracked tooth. There was a mystery here, maybe one with clues. She’d decided she was going to work it out, like a detective.
Her mother had said they were going home soon and not to disappear so she hadn’t, but they were still there because Rue had decided to get the Christmas decorations out. She said it was time to do the tree and wanted the children to help her.
Her aunts came into the Green Room. Rue—calmed—was carrying a box.
‘The decorations.’
She went out again as Thistle settled on the couch, then came back in with a long box and put it on the floor.
‘The tree. Are you going to help me? What’s wrong with you today?’
Olive said she didn’t know. Rue started to open the box.
‘Good Lord, what rings under your eyes.’
‘I don’t feel good.’
‘Well,’ said Thistle. ‘You don’t feel well. Here, girl.’ She held out some tea-packet bird cards, a small fan of three. Olive got up on her hands and knees and went over to get them. Scanning them, she saw there was no King Bird of Paradise (11), Magpie Goose (41) or Eastern Whipbird (64). She lifted them to her nose.
‘Doubles?’
Thistle nodded and Olive nodded too and put them in her pocket.
‘What’s this word say?’ She held out the diary to her aunt, her finger marking the place.
‘That says “liminal”. And do you ever wash your hands? Give it here.’
Olive handed the diary over and crawled back to her position on the floor.
‘What does it mean?’
‘In between. In the middle. One thing was the climate, you see.’ Thistle opened the book. ‘The extremes. The other, though, was the vegetation. While some of the lichen crusts and winter mosses were familiar, Lenore missed the furze and whinstone of her home country.’
Rue sighed.
‘The Mallee flora discombobulated the young Lenore and Edgar,’ Thistle said. ‘Eddie she writes here.’ Trees that shed their bark through the year, the stark, hostile landscapes with their eerie inter-dune swales and odd heathlands. The hoary frost hollows, Thistle interpreted, reminded Lenore of home, but only when viewed from the periphery. ‘She has quite the turn of phrase.’ If she turned to study them directly, they were as foreign and bizarre as she imagined another planet might be. It was a landscape both unsettling and hostile, as if border to an infinite void.
‘A distant place where everything is inverse,’ Lenore wrote, and Thistle read aloud now. Rue was opening the boxes. ‘The air is constantly awash with particulate matter. Shadows stretch and retract during the day when the sun is at its height but it is at nightfall, when the blinding heat of the day can be subsumed by a dank coldness, that a person feels,’ Thistle read, ‘she might be living in two entirely disparate places at the one time and it has a state of liminality that persisted for longer than it might have had we gone to settle elsewhere in the world. There is no gloaming here. I feel I’m constantly walking widdershins.’
‘What a word,’ said Thistle, squinting at the tiny writing then closing the diary. ‘Widdershins.’
‘Where was she born again?’ Olive asked. ‘Which island was it?’
‘The Shetland Islands,’ Thistle said and drew a finger between herself and her niece on the floor. ‘Lenore was like you and myself. Quite a spiritualist. A woman of independent inclinations.’
But it wasn’t the isolation or oddness of the countryside, or the meaning of smoke in the sky, that most threatened to undo Lenore, Thistle went on. Nor had it been the cycles of war and drought that followed, conditions that made it hard to succeed on the land. No, for Lenore, it was her trouble holding a pregnancy.
‘Lots of stillbirths,’ Thistle said, mouthing the last word, but only because Rue had straightened with hands on hips. Thistle wasn’t coy and did not believe in censorship, but her sister could be loud in her objections and boring with her talk of protecting children’s sensibilities. ‘Yes, she was a tough bird. She would deliver on her own and hand them across—dead—to her husband in a wrap of fabric with an apology. Girls I knew just birthed into dirt holes and covered them up, which was not the same as losing them. That was hiding them.’ Thistle paused. ‘All Lovelock children have battled the cervix to be born and struggled to grow in their own mixed type of soil. Patchy fertilisation up here, you know. “What canna be changed mun be accepted.”’
Thistle could be a bit dramatic and Olive lost interest whenever her aunt began to mix her own fairytale narratives in with the diary stories.
Rue straightened with a piece of Christmas tree in her hands.
‘Is it the top or the bottom?’ she said. ‘I really should label it.’
‘That’s what you say every year,’ said Thistle. ‘Doesn’t she?’
Olive nodded. It was true. It was what Rue
said every year.
‘Are there lots of ponies on the island?’ Olive asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Thistle said. ‘Lots of ponies where?’
Olive sat up.
‘Was your mum kind?’
Rue went to sit next to Thistle, pressing her fingers into her sister’s arm like a cat’s paw, nesting and pushing. Outside, the boys shouted in the distance. Rue’s fingers moved up and down.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Did she give you hugs?’
‘Oh. Ours was definitely not a hugger.’ Thistle crossed her arms. ‘She did not care for my theatrics. We were told it was best for a person to keep their problems to themselves. Reputation. The people and so on. She didn’t like my infernal singing either. She called me Babylon.’
Rue laughed and said that wasn’t true.
‘My plays, my plays, she did not like my plays.’
Olive flipped onto her side. Her stomach was hurting.
‘Do you remember?’ Thistle said. ‘The time Grandfather died and Mother caught us in his room?’
‘Were you looking at his things?’ Olive liked to look at her dad’s toiletries. His razor, his shaving brush sitting squat and upright, the ivory-backed hairbrushes that had no handles and fitted together like twins. His stick deodorant that smelled of him instead of the other way around.
‘No, we were looking at him,’ Thistle said. ‘He was on the bed, in his pyjamas.’
‘While he was dead?’ Olive thought of her own grandfather, lying in a box. She hadn’t seen him dead, hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral because Rue didn’t believe children should be present.
‘It wasn’t only me,’ Thistle said. ‘My sisters were there as well but they wouldn’t even touch him. They were up against the wall, those scaredy-cat sisters in their flower frocks. I remember how soft his eyelids were. Mother came in as I was looking down his pants.’ She clapped her hands and they made a boom. ‘The sound of the elastic, as it snapped. I can still hear it. Just like that.’ She clapped her hands again.
‘I think—’ Rue began.
‘Let me guess. A nice cup of tea and a biscuit.’
Olive listened from the floor. She imagined a mother grabbing three girl children, pulling them out of the room in a clump of skinny legs and floral-print dresses with bows at the back. Rue smiling confusedly, her mother calm with a bobby pin in her hair and Thistle grim and with scabs on her knees.
‘It was all such a long time ago, please try to forget, dear. And I am going to boil the kettle. We’ll do the tree later.’
‘I do forget, I’m forgetting all the time but it comes back and when it comes there’s no stopping, you don’t understand. What it’s like. A train.’ Thistle’s fists moved to bunch on her thighs.
Archie ran in and announced there were some big birds sitting in a tree along the driveway, that they looked like Grace. He ran out.
‘That boy is stunted,’ Thistle said. ‘Am I the only one to notice these things?’
‘Can you read the ballad again?’ Olive liked it when her aunt read aloud.
Thistle flicked through the diary. ‘Is it in this one? Oh yes. Here it is.’
‘With the accent?’
‘Naturally. As I was walking all alane
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the ither say,
“Whar sall we gang and dine the-day?”
“In ahint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And nane do ken that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound an his lady fair.”
“His hound is tae the huntin gane,
His hawk tae fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady’s tain anither mate,
So we may mak oor dinner swate.”
“Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I’ll pike oot his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We’ll theek oor nest whan it grows bare.”
“Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken whar he is gane;
Oer his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.’
Olive stretched on the floor after the words ended. She loved the poem. She loved the way you got most of the meaning, how it didn’t really matter that she didn’t understand all of it exactly. She loved the sounds of the words and she loved the spaces around the sounds, spaces that had meanings of their own. It was a better poem, she and Thistle always agreed, than the other one, the one with the three birds. It wasn’t realistic, but apart from that, there was no way they could see that lacke and back could ever rhyme. But this poem had beauty in it, in the words, even if you didn’t understand them.
Olive got to her feet and went to the trees.
•
Archie stood down the driveway under the pines with his head tipped back. The birds were ravens but bigger than Grace, a group of them lined up along a branch, crouched black and thoughtful, their beaks curved into what Thistle said was Roman-style. Olive stood beneath the tree, and in her mind sent each one a message about Grace. She wanted them to leave Grace alone. Not take her away. Now Grace was flying down to the end of the driveway to meet them when they came back from going out on their bikes. How happy it made Olive to see the bird waiting on top of the letterbox with a piece of bright green wool in her beak, or a coloured glass bead from Mandy’s broken bracelet, or a twig-tool.
Olive had tried to sleep with Grace at the farm. She’d waited until Mandy was still then gone to the window where Grace waited, eyes glossy behind the glass. She lifted the sash as quietly as she could, neck twisted towards her cousin, checking the rising and falling of her chest, making the gap larger until the bird stepped in and made her small noise. The first time Olive had heard the noise Grace made it had been unexpected and surprising. It sounded like the hard, single knock of a knuckle on a door and seemed to be produced from deep within the bird, from the centre of her. Now whenever she heard it she thought of it as Grace saying ‘Hi’ in raven. That night, as Mandy slept, Olive took Grace into her bed and got her under the sheet with the torch. Grace was lying down beside her, on her back in the funniest way, feet up in the air and wriggling from side to side to scratch her back when Mandy woke up saying she was thirsty.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘Nothing. Go back to sleep.’
Olive waited but Mandy got up and lifted the sheet anyway.
‘I’m telling Mum.’ And she had and Olive told her she hated her.
Another time she had smuggled Grace home from Serpentine in a box. She told her mother there were flowers in there, she’d collected them in the garden and was going to press them into books. Her mother hadn’t found out for several hours and it had been a blissful time, together in her own room, showing Grace all her things. Grace had sat on her windowsill and gently moved the wishbones with her beak. Then she had looked out into the McCullers backyard for a while. She walked across her blanket and rested her head on the pillow. Olive had brought a shallow dish of water and put it under her bed, along with some newspaper that she hoped Grace would do her messes on. She made a small nest under there too with one of her old windcheaters, preferring though that the bird would sleep with her, maybe she would, she really hoped so. Grace could lie on her pillow, beside her head, and they could look each other in the eyes until they fell asleep. In the morning, she would continue to teach Grace the words she’d been learning: Hello. Love. I and You.
Thistle had told her: Grace is a wild animal and she is choosing to be with you. Even though she is free and can go where she likes, she is choosing you. So Olive had decided she wanted to give Grace something back. She had decided to give her words.
She’d crept downstairs to get some minced meat from the fridge, reshaping the ball in the white paper packet so that her mother wouldn’t realise any was missing. And she played soft music on her clock radio t
o cover the sounds of them chatting. But it was the music that made Grace become louder and louder. She sang and made her cawing and even though Olive switched off the radio and tried to shush Grace, Audra came. She just opened the door without knocking and found them on the bed, Grace lying on her back in the crook of Olive’s arm wrapped in a tea towel, relaxed as a baby after a feed. Olive was brushing her feathers with a toothbrush. In that moment, before the door opened, Olive had never been happier, but the door did open and Audra raised her hands in the air and said for Olive to come on, put the bird in the box, they were taking her back to the farm.
And so, even though it was half past nine at night, Audra drove Olive and Grace back to Serpentine. Olive begged all the way for Grace to stay just one night but her mother stayed very cold. It would have been easy for her mother to say yes. It wouldn’t have been hard at all. She had begged and begged but still her mother had said no.
For the first time that night, with the cool beak against her cheek and the little murmur Grace made in her throat when she was stroked on the head, like a gentle cough, Olive had let herself imagine what it might have been like not to be the only kid at her house. Grace was everything she wanted in a companion. Constant. Fleet. Smart. Funny.
Olive and Archie went back to the house, the ravens behind them making their chorus of ark ark aaaarrrrrks, the wavering tail end of the call dropping away behind them as they ran. Archie was begging her to play a game of Around the World. She said no, said no again, then finally she said yes and they played.
Around the World goes like this: The house is a boat going to America and everything else is ocean and the goal of it all is circumnavigation of the house. You have to keep your feet off the ground. If you step down you drown and there is no coming back to life (until you play again, and it has to be another day, it can’t be the same day, no one was quite sure why).
After fifteen minutes of playing, Olive was at the side of the house with one foot precarious on the garden tap and trying not to step on the block of hand soap wedged there. Her front foot stretched across the weatherboards as it sought purchase on a jutting piece of board where the wooden slats joined unevenly. ‘The joining of the house,’ they called it—the centre line—but Rue called it a mistake. ‘It was meant to be less obvious than that,’ she said. ‘The builders didn’t match it properly. It was supposed to be exactly in the middle but it’s slightly off.’
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