Songlines

by Carolyn Denman

  ‘What are you doing here, Nic?’ I asked as I waved to the old homeless guy who spent his days hanging around the park. He didn’t wave back.

  ‘Researching our Civics assignment,’ she declared with a defiant smile. ‘The one about the Dreaming.’ She pointed to a plaque the council had erected next to the tree, which outlined the local story, assuming she was being clever, but I was already a step ahead.

  ‘Good, because that’s what I told the school.’

  Her shoulders slumped.

  According to the story, Nalong had been built on the banks of a river that flowed from the time of Dreaming and spent many, many years swirling around the bones of our country, until it came out into our land in present day. It was said that the water carried the music of the Dreaming with it, and that the music helped to heal the people. I had dutifully written my own Year 8 essay on it, as had every other Nalong student since about 1980. It was a Nalong College rite of passage that even Nicole wasn’t going to escape.

  ‘Can’t I just pay that guy to write it for me?’ she attempted, nodding towards the vagrant who was picking a thread from the cuff of his pale grey business suit—probably his first pick from the Uniting Church op shop. It went really well with his bright green T-shirt and greasy dreadlocks. ‘Hi there, Mr D,’ she called to him. ‘Find any treasure today?’

  The bearded man scowled and didn’t answer, but got up from his park bench and began to wander around with his hands in his pockets, scanning the ground like he really did expect to find something useful. It was how he spent his days. Always in this park. Harry had once assured me that he had somewhere reasonable to sleep at night though.

  ‘He looks old enough to have been around when this tree was carved. I’m sure he knows more of its backstory than—hey! Ow!’

  She only just managed to save herself from landing on her head when I grabbed her ankles and lifted them, sending her sliding backwards down the sacred tree trunk.

  With a resentful stomp, she followed me to the library.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Hamilton, could I please see the local papers from November and December, 1998 and ’99?’ I was talking as softly as I could because it felt like everyone was listening. The library was in the same building as the council office, so there were quite a few people busy at their desks on the far side of the room.

  The librarian had a face so wrinkled it made me wonder if she had been heritage listed along with the old building she worked in. Perhaps one of the heritage restrictions prevented the town from letting the poor woman retire. At least it meant she was proficient at her job. She took less than two minutes to emerge from the back room with an armload of newspapers.

  I sat across the desk from where Nicole was scratching out her essay with cranky strokes. When I flipped to the obituaries in the first paper, it didn’t take long to find what I was looking for.

  Gracewood, Lucas. 3.6.1973-21.11.1998. Lost to the river and sadly missed. To Lily he was the best brother in the world. Adoring husband to Annie, and loving father to Lainie, to whom he will finish reading Snugglepot under a more graceful sky than this one.

  A vivid memory sprang up like a pouncing tiger, of Aunt Lily shaking her head at something I’d asked her and pulling a book from my shelf, which she clutched to her chest before leaving the room. She’d been trying to hide her tears but I’d known she was crying. I always knew when people were crying. I must have been very young because the room still had the pink curtains I’d accidentally torn when I was four, when I’d charged at Noah with a plastic sword. I’d never asked her to read Snugglepot and Cuddlepie to me again after she’d taken it away.

  ‘What’s the matter, Lainie?’ Nicole was leaning away from me as if my tear-filled eyes heralded some sort of contagious disease.

  Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium … By the time I got to Sodium I was able to shake my head dismissively at her, my emotions back under control. She turned back to her essay with the tip of her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, but she didn’t chew on it like Noah always did when he was concentrating.

  It took me a bit longer to find my mother’s death notice, because it wasn’t really an obituary. It was a bite-sized article in one of the 1999 papers, stuck below an article about Y2K, simply saying that the coroner had finalised his report and declared the death of Annie Gracewood as suicide by drowning. She had died exactly one year after my dad.

  My aunt had always been gentle with me whenever I’d asked about my parents. I knew my dad had drowned trying to save my mother and me. There had been some flash flooding and my mother had lost her footing; she couldn’t even grab onto anything because she was carrying me. Dad had managed to get us both to safety, but got swept away in the process. I’d also known my mother’s death had been suicide, but the drama of it … one year exactly …

  ‘East of the state park. Along Old Redwood Road,’ came a smooth male voice behind me.

  ‘You mean the Gracewoods’ place?’ Mrs Hamilton asked, distracting me from my soap opera imagination.

  Nicole and I looked at each other. She peered around me to see who was talking. Kolsom, she mouthed silently.

  ‘Yes, I need to see a copy of their land title,’ the man replied.

  I turned in my seat to see a man in a dark suit leaning towards the librarian. He looked to be in his early thirties and had a serious chin, soft hands, and a briefcase with a Kolsom logo on it, and he was frowning at his mobile phone as if bewildered by the lack of reception. Mrs Hamilton flicked her eyes to me, subtly asking my permission. Kind woman. Smiling, I gestured to her to go right ahead.

  For five minutes or so I sat with my hands behind my head, chewing on my pen and amusing myself by listening to the man’s frustrated sighs as he checked, rechecked, and cross-checked the title with no less than three different maps. Eventually I gave Nicole’s essay a quick skim-read and then we prepared to leave. I glanced back at the man holding his phone up to the window looking for Nalong’s ephemeral reception, and a shiver ran down from my hair to my toenails. Just like I could tell when someone was crying or being deliberately devious, I suddenly had no doubt that this man was someone who made Nicole look as honest as the bathroom scales.

  Chapter 5

  The last class of the day dragged on, made worse by a nagging feeling that everyone was invading my space. All I wanted was to get home so I could finish my Biology revision and then pretend I was going to yell at Harry for an hour or two. Which, of course, I wouldn’t do because he might say something else I didn’t want to hear.

  Nicole had been given a detention when the school found out she didn’t have permission to be in town, but being able to produce her completed essay saved her from a worse fate. Not that she seemed in the least bit grateful to me. Had I ever been that annoying?

  I crossed out the maths problem that I was stuffing up and started again.

  ‘I heard he was so upset he left town altogether.’

  My head snapped up to see who was whispering. It was Taylor, one of the blonde Barbie dolls in the front row. She was using the sort of whisper that wanted to be heard by the whole class.

  Tessa leant forward, her manicured nails gripping the edge of the desk as she whispered just as loudly. ‘Who left town?’

  ‘Bane. I heard he came in this morning, emptied out his locker, and just drove off again. Exams are only a month away!’ Scandal dripped from Taylor’s voice.

  Personally I thought there was a bit of a jump between emptying his locker and leaving town. But what if he really had been expelled? I hadn’t yet had a chance to report him for the knife incident but it had hardly been a private scene. Anyone could have dobbed him in. Although I should have felt relieved that I didn’t have to be the one to do it, I was actually a little bit worried. Okay maybe not worried, but I did want to know if it was the incident with the knife that had made him leave. I decided to just be an adult about it
so after class I went straight to the office.

  ‘I have a book that Ben Millard lent me that I need to return to him but his locker is empty and I haven’t seen him today. Has he changed lockers?’ A little false backstory wasn’t very mature of me, but it seemed simpler, and no one else seemed to mind telling a few lies here and there.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s no longer attending this school,’ Mrs Carpenter replied as she pushed her glasses up the bridge of her long nose with one hand and smacked her mouse against the desk a few times with the other.

  That didn’t really tell me if he’d been expelled or left voluntarily. More sweet-talking required.

  ‘Did he change schools? Should I drop the book in at St Catherine’s or will he come back for graduation?’

  She stopped trying to move her cursor and peered at me. ‘I’ve left a message for his mum to call us, but I don’t think he’ll be coming back. He swung past to tell me he was dropping out, wouldn’t give a reason, and refused to wait to talk to Mr Davis. You might just have to keep the book.’

  Bingo. I knew it wouldn’t take much to get her to sing. Mrs C had such a trusting heart that it would never occur to her that some people might like to keep their business to themselves. So, not expelled then. For some reason a tiny part of me felt a bit sad that he’d come so close to the end of VCE and not finished. Still, he must have had his reasons. I thanked her, reached over to plug her mouse cord in properly, and then left.

  Utterly ridiculous. Some sort of cruel joke? Unlike Harry. My fingers were going numb so I rolled over onto my back again. That made three whole revolutions since I had woken at 2.17am. I was like a lamb roasting on a spit. A sleepless, very annoyed roast lamb. Basting in the memory of Harry’s words. Your mother’s grave is a lie. At the time, his warm brown eyes had seemed so placid, so peaceful, like he was telling me that all I had to do was click my heels together three times and I’d wake up in my mother’s arms.

  Stubbornly, I kept my eyes shut because opening them would be admitting that I was awake. If only I could sleep without hearing that mournful music! It was painfully beautiful. At least, I remembered that it was beautiful but I couldn’t quite recall the music itself. The conflicts were frustrating. I dreaded the pain of it, but still longed to sleep so I could hear it again, and I was exhausted, but too tired to endure any more of the sadness that came from sleeping. So I flipped over yet again. The backs of my eyelids were really boring.

  Your mother’s grave is a lie.

  What possible reason could Harry have for saying something like that? There had been a coroner’s report. Nothing mysterious. Hideous, sad, tragic, but not at all mysterious. But I couldn’t keep pretending Harry hadn’t said it.

  The floorboards were freezing as I crept down the hall to the study. It took a while to dig under the piles of poultry magazines leftover from that time when Aunt Lily decided to enter her Orpingtons in the Nalong show, but I finally pulled down the old photo album with the faded green vinyl cover. I didn’t have a lot of family history from my mother’s side, and it was pretty much all in the one album.

  The desk lamp threw the old sepia photos into stark brightness, so that I imagined the young couples in the pictures were about to cringe away, squinting. I apologised for disturbing them as I flipped through to the back of the book. Just a few coloured pictures graced the pages. There was one of a man holding a child above his head by her ankle with a woman standing nearby tilting her head upside-down to look the girl in the eye. They were all laughing. There was a 1970’s lime green Ford station wagon in the background, so the child was most likely my mother. She had wavy light brown hair, same colour as mine but not nearly as thick and crazy. There was another photo of my grandmother, riding a bay stockhorse at a country show, and the next page had a picture of a young guy standing on a beach with his wetsuit peeled down to his waist. He was leaning on a surfboard wedged into the sand and his wet hair was an explosion of long curls. Man, my dad had kind of nice abs.

  The wedding photo on the next page made my eyes flood. My mum’s dress was exquisite, and my dad couldn’t take his eyes off her despite the two groomsmen behind him who were about to pour their glasses of champagne over his head.

  The last photo in the book was slightly blurry, as if the photographer had tried to take a sneaky shot. In it, I recognised myself as a toddler, and my mother was clutching me to her chest with one arm and pulling back the blue curtains to open my bedroom window with the other. It looked like she was singing …

  Eight seconds later I burst through the door to my aunt’s bedroom, switched on the light and slammed the album onto the bed violently enough to make Inara hiss. I was too upset to speak. All I could do was point to the photo, my trembling finger tapping against the curtains in the picture. The blue curtains. The ones that had replaced my pink Barbie ones after I’d torn them with the plastic sword Noah had been given for Christmas. The Christmas after my mother had died.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Calm down, Lainie. Just breathe.’ My aunt squinted at the photo, her eyes still trying to adjust to the sudden brightness. ‘Yes, that’s your mother. I don’t understand what the problem is.’

  To my suddenly suspicious eye, she looked kind of nervous. Her eyes drank in every detail of the picture.

  ‘The curtains. The curtains are the problem. What year was Noah given his sword for Christmas?’ It wasn’t that I was unsure, but I wanted to see if she would lie or hedge. She did neither. Instead, she burst into tears.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Lainie! I didn’t know what else to do. The last thing I wanted was to lie to you, and I tried not to for so long, but the truth was going to tear your life apart!’

  I stood with freezing feet and waited for her to explain.

  ‘Your mum left us,’ she sobbed, one hand clutching her bed sheet. ‘She tried to stay, for you, but every time she came back it just made things harder for both of you. I took that photo knowing it would be the last time we saw her. You lot never like getting photographed. My brother used to laugh at that.’ She wiped a tear from the page, and then her finger traced the edge of the photo of my dad on the beach.

  ‘Is she still alive?’ I asked through clenched teeth. Feeling confused and angry, I just wanted her to come up with an explanation that would put my mother safely back in the grave, because if she were alive that would mean she had abandoned me.

  Aunt Lily answered with the deepest of sighs, the gentlest of tears, and the barest of nods. ‘Pass me my Bible,’ she said. ‘And hop in here where it’s warm. I’ll tell you what little I know.’

  Chapter 7

  There were two types of special trees in the Garden of Eden. One was the Tree of Life, whose leaves were for healing the nations. The other was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God told Adam and Eve that they could eat from any tree in the garden, except from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But the serpent tricked them into eating from it, and so God cast them out so that they couldn’t eat from the Tree of Life and live forever. Then He stationed Cherubim, and a revolving sword of fire, east of the garden, guarding the path to the Tree of Life.

  At approximately 2.30am, Tuesday 2 October, my life tried to shift me over to a whole new paradigm in the moment Aunt Lily told me that my mother was a Cherub, and so was our farmhand, Harry Doolan. Apparently my mother had gone to live in Eden a year after my father had died, leaving Harry to guard the pathway to it, and leaving my aunt to try to explain to a four year old why her mother was never coming home.

  After patiently listening to her garbled explanation and numerous apologies, I kissed my aunt and told her I loved her, then I walked the nine steps down the hallway and slammed my bedroom door shut behind me so hard that the plaster cast of my hand I had made in kindergarten fell off the wall and smashed into thirteen pieces. One piece for every year my mother had not been around. One for every year my aunt had been lying to me. And she still didn
’t have the decency to stop with the faerie stories and just tell me the truth.

  Noah and I ate our lunches in our usual spot under the tree near the oval, where the peppermint-scented leaves helped to disguise the pervasive smell of hundreds of schoolbags. Noah finished off my second sandwich while I wove daisy chains out of cape weed—anything to keep my hands busy and my mind away from thoughts that I didn’t want. Between exam study, stressing over my aunt’s and Harry’s insanity, and obsessing over the possibility that my mother might still be alive somewhere, I hadn’t had any decent sleep all week. And when I had, the grief-filled music in my dreams left me so wrung out I could barely function. It felt like my mother was singing to me from the grave. It had been three days since I had spoken more than single words to either Aunt Lily or Harry. So long as I got my chores done before I could be asked, it was easy to avoid people on a sheep farm as large as ours.

  Noah shifted the bony shoulder I was leaning against.

  ‘Hey, how’s Nicole doing?’ I mumbled, trying to sound more alert than I really was. I tore up the chain I had made and began to collect more flowers so I could start again.

  ‘Okay, I guess. Mum apologised to her, believe it or not. She’s been cranky as a constipated cow for the last few weeks, but the other day she actually admitted that her volatile temper might be causing a few of their issues.’

  ‘Good to hear. I’m glad they sorted it out. We won’t be around for much longer to keep her out of trouble.’

  ‘Yeah. Not much longer at all.’ Noah watched the kids on the oval playing footy. From the look on his face I could almost hear the music to the montage of memories playing in his head. For a bloke he could be ridiculously nostalgic. So could Aunt Lily, refusing to read Snugglepot to me after my dad had died. And my mother? Had she even thought about me since she’d left?