by Averil Kenny
The rains did not fall.
‘Insufferable!’ Sonnet declared, taking her third shower of the morning; perspiration leaching out of her skin before the water had even dried. Her hair never dried.
‘And why do you keep shutting these windows, Fabes?’ she demanded, pushing open the pane, desperate for air. ‘Are you trying to broil us alive?’
‘I’m not, I thought it was you,’ Fable said, coming up the hall in nothing but a breast-wrapping sarong. She parked herself an inch from the pedestal fan, with a vibrating sigh. Sonnet watched, transfixed, as Fable coiled her hair up slowly at her crown; every ripe curve silhouetted against the window light.
‘Rain, just rain, bloody Hughie!’ Sonnet beseeched the sky. ‘You’re the fertility goddess!’ she muttered, turning on Fable. ‘Get out there and do a naked rain dance for us.’
*
Yellow sunbirds were building a nest on the crystal wind chime outside the bay window, made of grasses and spider webs – with long strands of red hair wound into the construction. A Hercules moth, with wingspan wider than a book, had taken up residence on the porch. Each night she flapped frantically at the front door.
Sonnet was under siege!
*
On Christmas Night, explosions drew Fable and Sonnet to the porch. They sat on the front stoop in silence, watching fireworks flower over the dark wall of rainforest. Iridescent Christmas beetles flew in a metallic frenzy around the porch light.
‘Looks like the rumours in town are true, then,’ Sonnet said as they followed a screaming rocket skywards, holding their breath for the pop. ‘That Hull boy, whatshisname, must be home for Christmas.’
A star burst overhead.
Sonnet watched the sparks cascade, realising Fable had not exhaled. She turned to look at her sister. Fable was preternaturally still; the tautness of her posture belying the soft curves of her body.
Sonnet stared at her fine profile, frowning. After a strained silence, punctuated only by whistling blasts, she said, ‘Word is he’s been in a Very Expensive Sober House in Sydney since his dramatic little disappearance. It was around your book launch. Do you remember?’
Fable said nothing.
‘If you ask me,’ Sonnet sniffed, ‘the bloody Hulls orchestrated the whole performance, trying to overshadow your big launch.’
Fable’s eyes were fixed unblinkingly on the sky.
Sonnet turned back to watch the next firework bloom – her mind spinning, spinning, spinning; ending up nowhere.
*
It was the last Friday of the year. Sonnet clattered home through the low, heat-seared cane, old Queenslanders growing farther apart with every mile. Sweat sluiced off her pinking skin, and she hankered for the forest shade. The runner who came alongside her from an adjoining alleyway did so with such beaming pride, she couldn’t help but laugh.
‘And where are you off to in such a hurry?’
‘I would say following you home, but looks like I’m going to beat you there.’
Jake took off at a sprint. Sonnet gasped resentfully, pedalling hard after him, and then beyond his long stride.
He was beaten but not slowed. She decelerated, allowing him to stay just within reach, quickening whenever he came too near. By this method, they continued on to the winding creek-side trail.
‘Why are you coming out our way?’ Sonnet asked, easing off; gratified to observe his pace slow to match hers. ‘You only just saw Fabes last Friday.’
‘We’re down to weekly appointments now.’
‘Already! She’s only eight months along.’
‘Thirty-five weeks, and almost fully engaged.’
‘Is that bad?’
‘It’s not uncommon for a first baby. It’s not particularly comfortable, either.’
‘Yeah, she’s getting around like there’s a bowling ball about to roll out between her legs.’
‘I think many women are shocked when it doesn’t simply drop out. Apparently, feels like the bowling ball has to be blown uphill, instead.’
‘And she reckons it’s a big baby, too. Poor Fabes!’
‘She’s a tough cookie, that sister of yours.’
‘I know.’
‘This humidity!’ he exclaimed abruptly. ‘How does anyone do anything in it? We need a twenty-four-hour siesta.’
‘Southerner!’ Sonnet disparaged. She stood out of her saddle and pumped hard beyond him, aware of how well her long thighs and toned glutes looked in a sprint.
When Jake caught her – breathing hard, with a brow-raising smile – it was with a challenge of his own. ‘How about no head starts this time?’
‘You’re on.’
Sonnet dropped her bike, arms akimbo.
They considered each other for a mutually appraising moment. The slight forward tilt of her head acted as starting pistol – they took off. Sonnet dived ahead of him on the narrow trail, scheming to monopolise the middle path. She suspected he’d be too much of a gentleman to push by her, and was not wrong. Hot on her tail, he stayed; panting hard at her back, feet falling in long-legged, near-perfect unison with hers.
‘There are no overtaking lanes on my runs!’ she puffed.
‘I’m happy back here.’
She slowed only when they reached the overarching bridge of a fallen tree. They both came to a stop, panting against the pungent rot of rainforest overpass. Vivid orange fungi sprouted between their leaning hands. She had only to slide her hand over one, maybe two, and her fingers would rest on his.
He turned an admiring smile on her. ‘You’re pretty fast for . . .’
‘A girl?!’
The parenthesis around his lips reached their full potential. ‘No, actually, a cyclist.’
She hooted – most unglamorous of all possible laughs, but didn’t have time to curb the sound before his honk covered her own.
‘Back to the bike . . .’ she said, growing wily-eyed.
He rocketed off first, hogging the path for himself. This time it was her turn to admire muscular calves and buttocks in full flight.
*
The next Friday afternoon, he waited at her shopfront – sandshoes knotted, doctor’s knapsack on, sweat already a dark semicircle at his polo collar. They set off in companionable silence. Sonnet did not speak until they were into the forest, well beyond the glare of sun and townsfolk, conversation finally their own.
‘What will happen with the birth certificate? I mean, with the space marked “Father”?’
He looked at her oddly. ‘That’s entirely up to Fable.’
‘But if she won’t put a father’s name down?’
He shrugged. ‘It happens.’
Sonnet sighed, without meaning to. ‘So, the poor blighter will be no different to any of us Hamilton girls, then, yet another to grow up under the curse of illegitimacy.’
‘There are far worse things than not knowing who your father is, Sonnet. Like knowing him better than any child should have to, having an actual bastard of a father.’
She heard the child’s anguish in his pant, and slowed. ‘I’m sorry, Jake.’
He waved it away, ran on watching his feet. ‘It drove me into a profession where I thought I might be able mend broken bones and hearts.’
Sonnet blinked away a mental image of his hands on her bones.
‘And I was fortunate to experience the fierce love of a single mother. Nothing quite like that strength, that devotion.’
‘Yes,’ she said, remembering it with more clarity than she had in years.
They breathed together for several minutes, sweat a not-unpleasant miasma between them.
‘Where is she now – your mum?’
‘Graveyard,’ he said, already smiling before she could be embarrassed. ‘Two years now. Part of the reason I came, grieving, to the wilds of Far North Queensland.’
‘So we’re both orphans.’
‘Well, near enough. Some men don’t deserve a second, third or fiftieth chance.’
‘Some men don’
t even get their first chance.’
‘Do you wish you’d known him?’
She rubbed at a patch of rust on her handlebars. ‘Only since I came to Noah Vale, and only because the stories of him live so strongly here. I’m tired of being the passive beneficiary. Even my mother lied about him all her life. I’d like to have my own stories.’
‘Have you ever tried?’
‘How?’
‘Make contact with his family? Ask. Then wind those tales into your own story, keeping them as long or short as you please, or not at all.’
She frowned at him. ‘I thought you were a doctor, not a shrink.’
*
The following Friday, Jake didn’t show. Sonnet waited, sweating, on her front step, watching his unit above the surgery, until rippling clouds crimsoned across the vale and the bat legions soared over.
‘Stupid, desperate idiot,’ she castigated herself, pushing off the stoop. Of course she hadn’t been stood up. He was her sister’s doctor, not her dishy date.
Nonetheless, she smarted all the way down Main Street.
Electric hum and muggy gloom pressed in on Sonnet as she pedalled, manically, alongside the creek. Shadows sprang, branches whipped at her face, sticks under wheels snapped up to bite at her ankles. Oh, for a headlamp! She jutted her chin harder still against her thudding cowardice; and the ache of humiliation.
A dark figure loomed in her pathway. Sonnet shrieked, tried to brake, and went flying over the handlebars, crash-landing among roots and rocks.
She lay winded, in a world of pain. Slowly she rolled to half sitting, looking for her accoster.
There he was, still planted unyieldingly on the path. But not a man, worse, a visage straight out of her nightmares: a towering cassowary, with its antediluvian eye fixed upon her.
Never turn your back on a cassowary, she heard Gav say. Back away slowly. Never run. Do not make yourself appear bigger than you are.
Sonnet whimpered, unable to move for pain, waiting for the bird to garrotte her, ear to ear. He waited too, with a velociraptor’s cold grace and beauty. He tilted his helmeted head to the side, heavily lashed eye boring into hers, red wattles swinging.
Sonnet squeezed her eyes shut, expecting at any moment the leap – talons thrust forward – a scarlet smile opening at her creamy throat.
Terror pounded under her ribcage. A scream gathered at her throat. When she squinted open again, there were three small, striped birds at his feet.
His babies.
The chicks skittered across the pathway, disappearing between the trees. Sonnet bowed her head against the ground, shrouding her eyes from his maddening amber stare.
Please leave me alone.
Leave me alone.
Leave me.
Leave.
At last, the heavy crunch of leaf litter as he moved ponderously away, and silence.
*
Oppressive blackness had dropped by the time she groaned to her feet and hobbled to her fallen bike. Her limbs were all scraped up; how badly she couldn’t tell. Her bike was damaged. Her heart must have beat right through a rib, based on the pain each breath took. The worst was the humiliation of her long, slow limp back into town to her bookshop. She didn’t dare go the way of the cassowary on this starless night.
Sonnet dumped her bike unceremoniously on the stoop, wobbled through the door and flipped the lights back on with a stifled sob. She hadn’t cried yet; she wouldn’t start now.
Sonnet stood boldly before her cassowary, aching all over.
‘What do you want from me?!’
His implacable stare went unblinkingly on.
‘And where’s my first-aid kit, you bloody useless bird,’ she cursed, scrounging under the counter.
The knock at the door made her yelp. It was, of all people, Jake. She felt the sob, still caught in her throat, threatening to dislodge.
She nodded ascent to his mimed request, and the door jangled open.
‘Saw your lights on. I was just on my way back from Heartwood.’
‘You went without me?’
His brow corrugated. ‘I left you a note on your door at lunchtime! Didn’t you get it? I wanted to let you know I’d drive out today.’
Sonnet pushed back against the urge to blubber.
‘I thought it might be better to meet you there in future. I’m sorry, Son.’
Sonnet shrugged, finally locating the kit.
Jake seemed to take in her condition at the same instant she retrieved the medical kit, emblazoned with serpent-entwined rod.
‘What have you done to yourself?’ he cried, immediately at her side, lifting her arm gently.
‘Nothing. Just went a gutser over the handlebars.’
‘Geez, look at the skin you’ve taken off. Come, sit here.’ His hands went around her waist, lifting her effortlessly onto a bar stool. Sonnet tugged a corner of her lip into her teeth as he began his ministrations.
The man kneeling at her feet, unzipping the first-aid kit with cool expertise: that was the last straw.
She broke.
Jake worked quickly and unflinchingly through her shoulder-racking sobs to assess, clean and cover each wound. His professional mantle did not waver – though if Sonnet could have seen through her tears, she might have noted the tremble in his hands, and how he pressed them periodically against his chino pants to still them.
‘There we go,’ he said, looking up again. ‘No major harm. You’ll be right as rain in a few days.’
Her gaze remained over his head, unfocused: blue and red and black and amber distorted by tears.
‘Are you okay, Son?’
‘Fine.’
‘Like hell you are.’
She looked at the man still on his haunches before her, head tilted with concern – antithesis of the painted face above him – and smiled fondly. A single pearl of sweat ran from clavicle to belly button. The scent of books mingled with iodine and musk of man.
Jake cleared his throat. ‘After Fable delivers, hopefully not too long from now, I was hoping you might be able to find another family doctor.’
‘What?’
‘Maybe one in Cairns, or Innisfail.’
‘Why?’
He seemed to taste his words carefully before they were ready to leave his lips. He laid a hand on a non-bandaged portion of calf. Sparks leapt along her skin, setting points alight at groin, belly, bosom.
‘Sonnet Hamilton, I would very much like to not be your family doctor, so I can kiss you, instead.’
‘Seems like an awfully long way for me to have to drive, just to get a kiss.’
‘I’m a rather good kisser.’
‘You’d better bloody be.’
*
Alone in her bookshop again, now nursing an unrequited thirst in the pit of her being, Sonnet went to stand once more before her cassowary. So many hours she’d stared him down and yet never before had she noticed that dark shadow within the bird’s right eye; in the bottom of the iris. It had only occurred to her this evening, after seeing those eyes in the flesh.
She grabbed a print magnifying glass from her desk and placed it over the amber orb. The shadow shimmered like a mirage, seemed to dance and flicker and leap, before finally differentiating into a circle of text.
A hidden signature . . .
Archer L. Brennan, 1935.
Her father, the year of her birth.
CHAPTER 39
THE SERPENT
January 1965
P
lum knew where Fable got the baby. Plum had seen, that night, the lights in the forest: first, just the one – dancing across the field, weaving lightly between the trees – then the second, striding out, converging on the first. They’d whirled sharply into a single light, and disappeared.
Fable had gone away on the train the next day, and nobody mentioned any of the lights Plum saw. She had been relieved, for Fable’s sake.
But then Fable came home again, and all hell had broken loose. Because Fable was
pregnant, and she wasn’t married!
Babies born outside wedlock were a ‘monstrous problem’ in society – it had said so in Olive’s book, the one she had given Plummy some months back, when asked how babies were made.
Plum had stared at Fable across the dinner table, trying to imagine her sister in contortions of monstrous-problem-making until Fable had tossed a bread roll at her and told her to take a picture because it would last longer.
Since then, Plum had watched Fable sitting longingly by the window, all pent up and sputtering, and she’d known Fable was thinking about the forest, and the lights.
Plum wondered if Fable knew just how much trouble she was in now.
When Fable moved to the cottage to be with Sonnet, but really to be closer to the creek, a terrible thought occurred to Plum: perhaps Fable could actually die in childbirth, punishment for this abominable thing she’d let happen to her. Women did die, all the time! Plum had seen it in movies, read it in books. Ergo, childbirth could also kill Fable.
It was up to Plum to protect her.
Ever since, Plum had been keeping vigilant guard over the cottage, and over Fable. She closed and locked the cottage windows whenever she found them open, and sealed the front gate with vine. She filched a box of nails from Uncle Gav and dropped them in a perfect perimeter around the cottage fence. Three times a day, compulsively, Plum performed her checks on the cottage – plus once more after she’d been sent to bed. She didn’t miss a single check.
Which was how she came, one sweltering morning, to find the serpent.
As she passed the cottage, creek-side, there it was: the iridescent sheen of an amethystine python, coiled beneath the dove orchid. It was thicker than a man’s arm, with a waiting maw wide enough for Plum herself.
When Plum flapped onto the veranda at Heartwood, crying alarm, it was already an outpost of urgency. Her shouts were lost in the general commotion. Gav was boarding up windows and Olive was atop a ladder, removing hanging ferns. Sonnet was unpacking bags of canned food, divvying them into piles, distracted thoughts playing across her brow. Fable was nowhere to be seen.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked, cross at their indifference.
‘The red pennant is out in front of the post office. The Wet’s finally coming in, on the front of a monster cyclone.’