Heart of the Grass Tree

by Molly Murn

  Gone, Emue says, looking away.

  Where she gone? slurs Anderson, wiping spittle from the corners of his mouth and then raising his arm at Emue. Yer bitch. Yer lyin’, and he lurches towards Emue, his hand coming down hard across her face before William has time to intervene. He rams his boots into Emue’s stomach over and over. William notices the glint of sharp rock in Anderson’s hand. Sees him fall.

  Leave it, Father. Leave ’er, William cries, before everything goes quiet, but for the blood pounding in his ears. The rage in William is hot and sharp in his chest. He has never moved so fast, skimming lightly past the flayed skins hanging and the mess of bottles and kindling.

  William pulls his father off Emue by grabbing him under the arms and rolling him sideways. Anderson is too drunk to resist properly, although he spits at William’s feet and tries to get up, but cannot support himself and keeps falling down, a puppet with cut strings.

  I’m yerr farrther … hisses Anderson trying to swipe at William, who kicks his hand away sharply, getting him in the ribs as he does so. Anderson moans and rolls in the dirt. Wheezing.

  William smooths Emue’s long sailor’s shirt back down over her body and pulls up her trousers. He bundles sealskins under her head and spreads one over the top of her.

  You a gin lover, are yer? calls out Everitt, flicking his roll-up at William. Everitt leans against the hut, his mouth contorting in a smug grin.

  Yeah he just can’t help himself, can he? Leave ’er be so we can all ’ave a go at the hag.

  William could break their skulls. He scrabbles for rocks and hurls them at the men. He can hardly breathe.

  Get away. He slides in the dirt and scoops up more stones. Everitt and Munro laugh nervously, sensing the force of him—perhaps his father’s son after all—and retreat into the hut. Gin lover, one of them calls out, disappearing inside.

  Poll, Mooney and Puss emerge from the bushes and crouch down beside Emue’s head, whispering to each other. Poll smooths Emue’s hair away from her temple. A bruise is purpling, thickening.

  Fire, she murmurs to William.

  The four of them manage to lift her enough from the ground so that William can find his feet beneath the weight of Emue and grip his left arm firmly under her knees and his right arm beneath her shoulders, swinging himself upright. He staggers along the track to the women’s camp, his eyes fixed on Poll, who walks ahead. It is dark by now, but the white sand of the track and the flecks of quartz glimmer in the moonlight. The shallow river water is cold. Anderson and his men don’t follow—too drunk now. Once William and Poll have her safe inside the wurlie, William stokes up the fire while Poll sits with Emue singing gently. With a heavy stone, Poll is bruising yalkari leaves against another flat piece of rock. Mooney and Puss are on lookout, listening.

  Where’s Mari and Minnie? William asks.

  Poll doesn’t answer him, just keeps on preparing the leaves and points with her lips towards the scrub.

  Will they be right do yer think? William responds, straightening up and looking out into the shadowy bushes.

  Again Poll doesn’t answer, but she looks up at him with watery eyes and makes a slight nod. She then bows her head towards Emue. William walks over to the entrance of the wurlie.

  What can I do, he asks as he kneels down and has a closer look at Emue’s injury. It is then that he notices the blood trickling out from the corner of her eye.

  I hear minka bird today, Poll says softly.

  Minka bird? What’s a minka bird?

  Small bird. Got eyelashes. Long ’uns. Always hidin’. Crying like a woman. That mean a woman is going ter die, Poll continues as she applies the leaves to where Emue has been hit.

  William feels as though someone is kneeling on his chest.

  She gonna be right? he whispers.

  Poll answers by jutting her chin and pointing her lips towards the inky sea.

  William swallows as he considers the near impossibility of her request. It’s a wild stretch of shoals and crosscurrents and William’s not sure they’ll make it in a rowboat, the only vessel he could feasibly steal without attracting attention. He replies, The mainland?

  Poll holds his gaze, and he knows by the firm set of her eyes that she means for Emue to be returned, to be taken home.

  near Hog Bay

  Maringani lays the skins down on the sandy patch she has cleared and puts William’s coat over her and Minnie as a cover. For now, they will camp by the lagoon. She dares not light a fire in case Anderson has decided to go looking for them. Minnie tucks her bare feet between Maringani’s legs for warmth, her hard knees jutting into Maringani’s ribs. Maringani strokes the hair away from Minnie’s face until her whimpering gives over to a deep and exhausted sleep. Maringani isn’t sure exactly how long they have walked for, or quite where they have ended up, but her calves feel tight and there is an ache deep inside each hip joint from stumbling through the dark with her sister on her back. In the light of morning she will be able to work out where they are and find some food. She knows there will be trouble back at the camp. She knows that she and Minnie will have to stay away for some time. Maringani shudders, remembering the damp, sweaty smell of Anderson. The weight of him and the raspy breath of him hot in her ear, just one moon ago. She whispers to the moon. Weellum.

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  Pearl wakes with something like panic. She’d been dreaming of fire. Flames wrapped around a grass tree like a banner coiling and swinging in the wind. An upward stream of embers and eddying flicks of light. Spiky leaves like a flare of fireworks, then black nothing. And the spear that runs right through the middle of the tree smouldering orange like a lamp, a beacon. But it was the sound that woke her. A crackling rushing whip and roar as if she were underneath a plane. The terrifying suddenness of fire, lingering now as dream residue. And an acrid burning in her nose, like the fine hairs had been singed. Face, stinging hot.

  Nico’s arm is draped heavy across her hip. She moves slightly to shift him and he gathers her in. They’re sleeping in a swag on the floor of the lean-to. The mattress feels hard and compact beneath her.

  You okay?

  Um, yeah. But he has gone back to sleep. Lewis makes little sighing noises in the bed beside them.

  She can’t shake the feel of the dream. An alertness, as if she’s shot through with something foreign like metal. A quickening. A burning tree seared in her mind. And the feeling that she’s somehow implicated. The red wine that last night softened the edges of everything leaves her raw and sharp now. Bloody shocking headache. There are no hints of white at the gaps in the curtains. Not even dawn yet. The house creaks and shifts like a boat—its old joints accommodating the slack and pull of the elements. Pearl always dreams brightly here.

  But she remembers being scared here, too. As a child, Pearl would often still be awake when Nell came to check on her, the sound of the sea so loud that Pearl imagined it to be giants looming up the dune, crinkling paper in their oversized hands. The outside so vast, she felt lonely. Stooping to fit underneath the top bunk, Nell would peel back her covers, laugh at her granddaughter’s wide eyes, and take Pearl to bed with her. Lying beside Nell writing and sketching in her journal, Pearl would fall asleep instantly, her irrational fears dissolving as she pressed against the solid form of Nell.

  She scratches at her scalp and sand rolls under her fingers. Nell always shook the sheets out before the girls went to sleep. Lucy was like the princess and the pea and couldn’t sleep if there was a speck of sand in the bed. Pearl just wanted company. But she’s frightened now too. She squashes her hands to her breastbone to stop the flurry of wings that beat in her chest. Great pelican wings. Nico runs his hand along her thigh and then rests it on her stomach, as if he reads her, and in his sleep his penis swells against her hip. But she feels like a trapped animal. Today is Saturday. Day of the wake. Wakefulness. She is too awake.

  Nico wraps himself around Pearl from behind, props her up. Her hair is damp—he’d washed it f
or her in the bath earlier—and as she leans back into him, he rests his chin on the top of her head and breathes her in. Orange blossom. He knows she is heightened today, too open; he can feel her heart hammering through her ribcage. There is a particular energy at funerals, he thinks, a kind of charge that runs through the air making everyone tense and electric and Pearl is taking it all on. Nico can’t wait for this part to be over and then he can down a Scotch. Pearl will have red wine and her body will get softer. He has decided that today his job is to be with her and to hold her up. Really, she’s lost a mother. And lately, he is just so worried about her falling into an even bigger gap of sorrow. Three years they’ve been trying to have a child, and she is strung out. Even this morning, he knew it was still on her mind. Always on her mind. And always in her body—like she carries a heavy twisted root of absence, and is growing taut and stooped around it.

  Nico calls Lewis over to stand beside them, and they all three look up to watch a flock of birds arc one way then turn back on themselves and curve the other way, retracing retracing retracing like the tide. Fine black lines against a white sky. How do they know what to do, Nico wonders. How do any of us know what to do?

  He feels sorry for Diana, who seems adrift. Joe stands with his arm around her, at least. Alfie wants to be picked up, put down, picked up by Lucy. Ariel fidgets. Jim and David talk to each other in low murmurs. People float past and squeeze Pearl’s hand and kiss her forehead and whisper comfort. Wind-whipped faces. Sun-scorched. Hard, kind faces. And they all begin to move inside. How do you feel anything in such a concocted place, he thinks. Neat chairs, trickling water, tulips everywhere with their fragile bending necks. Nell lying over there. When they’d arrived, Pearl had said, I want to stay outside—I need natural light, trees, dirt, insects, wind. I want to carry Nell home, and put her in the earth, she’d said. So weightless, Nell would be now. And he imagined himself carrying Nell’s body through the scrub, past the grass trees, and running like a fugitive. Earlier, when they’d looked at her, it was like she was carved from some other material. Not flesh. Finer than paper, sunken, chiselled, lightweight. Nell, but not Nell at all.

  Nico remembers when he’d first met Nell. Lewis was only five then and he and Pearl were just at the beginning. He’d never been to the island before and he couldn’t believe how pristine it was. Even though there were paddocks and farmland, there was still so much scrub, still so much untouched. He loved how the gums grew in canopies over the dirt roads, softening everything into winding, wooded tunnels, and how the greens and yellows of the foliage seemed somehow more concentrated. He loved the uncluttered skyline, the clean and fierce ocean. The sweet dry air. He had never wanted to leave. It was bright and spacious where his dear Melbourne was muted, moody.

  They’d come off the ferry and, after first greeting Pearl, Nell hugged him and Lewis like she’d always known them. Nell’s hair was completely white and surrounded her face in a soft dense halo, her cheekbones were high and fine and she had a kind of haughty look that might have been more to do with her very straight posture rather than something in her attitude. Pearl was like Nell moreso than like Diana—grandmother and granddaughter both had that sort of shining quality that he loved, and when the two of them were together he thought of two flowers bending in exactly the same way towards the sun.

  The service is about to begin and Pearl turns to him. He takes her hand and jams it on his thigh. Every now and again her hand jolts with a tremor and he stills it. Sometimes when she is tired, she looks even more beautiful, her eyelids damp and shiny like tulips, he thinks. And before long he cannot stop noiselessly weeping. The tears slide in runnels down the lines of his face. He knows somehow it is disturbing, even annoying Pearl, who sits still and rigid, but he does not know how to stop. It is almost ridiculous. Is it because he is worried that Pearl will move even further away from him, go deeper into herself, now that Nell has gone? Will she leave him? Or is it simply because he is sad about Nell? He cannot think straight, but it is clearer and clearer that nothing in his life seems to fit together. Mostly he spends his time in the car driving between the practice and home and Lewis’s school and Annie’s house, and Lewis’s soccer training, so that by the time he sees Pearl he feels scoured out on the inside. And being with Pearl does renew him, but she looks at him these days as if he is some strange animal that she doesn’t quite know what to do with. He feels as if he is not quite in his own skin.

  He thinks about something Nell said to him on his first visit to the island. Nell had taken them to the Contemplation Steps just before dropping them to the ferry for home. Pearl and Nico sat beside each other on the polished wood sculpture—the natural curves and hollows of the wood forming a canoe-like seat perched high on the hill. Lewis sat at their feet and traced over the names set in concrete—Tuery, Suke, Mooney—while Nell stood looking out to the mainland, explaining to Lewis that the steps were built to remember the Aboriginal women who were stolen and brought here from the mainland, and Tasmania. Little Bird, Long ’Un, Sally Cooper. Lewis had wanted to touch every single name and even though they were running late for the ferry, Nell said curtly, Don’t rush him—the names are disappearing. She stood at the top of the hill, with her hair flying out in all directions, and Nico had felt a little bit terrified of her then. Later, as he’d stepped away from Nell to board the ferry she’d grabbed his arm and hissed loudly towards him, head inclined, I like you, Nico, and please please, love that girl. Love that girl.

  I do.

  Yes, but Nico, is it enough?

  He thinks about those words now. What did Nell possibly mean? He’d dismissed them at the time. But was everything already mapped out? Did she already know something? And with a slow spreading feeling of desolation, he realises now that perhaps his love is not enough. He cannot give Pearl the thing she most wants.

  Lewis places his hand on the back of Nico’s shoulder. It brings Nico back to himself with a jolt. He wipes his face with his sleeve and kisses Lewis on the cheek, and then turns to Pearl and puts his mouth to her ear. Let’s move back to Adelaide. Let’s make things better, honey. Do you want to?

  She looks at him puzzled and then laughs shaking her head. Ssshh, Nico.

  Yet he thinks he sees something in her that he hasn’t seen in a long time—something clear and solid like relief, and he could burst with crazy joy. I’m a mess, he realises.

  It is about halfway through Uncle Jim’s eulogy when Diana decides she will not read out the words she has scribbled down. Diana hasn’t accounted for feeling so strange. The blood drums in her ears and everyone around her is moving too fast or too slow. And her thoughts keep wandering as if they are leaking right out to the edges of the room. She hopes she’s turned the hose off properly at her flat in Adelaide, imagines a lake in the pit of her front garden, ducks dipping their wing tips in as they skim past. I’m drowning. She thinks resentfully about all Nell’s stuff. It will take months to sort through. Old bat, hoarding things. And she wonders how much more time off work she can realistically wrangle out of her manager, even given what’s going on. Another week or two? But can she afford it?

  She can hear the wheel and screech of corellas outside, even above Uncle Jim’s voice and everyone coughing and shifting in their chairs. Too heightened, she thinks, and wishes she’d taken something to dull the brightness, the alertness. When she was pregnant with Pearl everything sharpened, especially her hearing. High-pitched hums reverberated in the height of her skull and kept her from sleeping. Everything tasted awful, too. Strong and metallic. Bitter. She imagined the pregnancy was some kind of honing of the senses that could help with her creativity. Instead, she became too jittery to even hold a pencil, and the lines on the page didn’t come out how they were meant to. She found it devastating, like she’d been taken over. And Nell could hardly deal with her. Sit still, she would snap. Or, You look peaky. Are you not sleeping properly? Sometimes she felt like that seventeen-year-old Diana was hiding somewhere, crouching in a dry hollow of rock,
protecting herself, waiting until it was safe to come out again.

  Uncle’s voice is deep and round and it’s something to hold on to. Such a calm man, she thinks. But she’s missed most of what he’s saying. All she can focus on is Ariel’s knees like scrubbed little mushrooms blooming on the seat beside her. Ariel swings her feet and the mushrooms bob up and down. She imagines how she would draw them: velvet white caps pushing up through the black earth. When Uncle introduces her to speak she shakes her head and feels a roomful of eyes at the back of her neck, and the air still and thin like she’s at high altitude.

  Lucy leans and takes her elbow. I can read it out for you, Mum?

  Diana shakes her head again. Not now. Sorry love.

  Lucy shoots a dark look across at Pearl. It’s not because of the argument earlier, Diana wishes she could explain. It’s because there is simply nothing more to say. Nell is gone. There’s just the earth taking everything back in as it will, even those silken mushrooms.

  I want to set fire to our tree. I want to set fire to our tree so that it can keep watching over where we’ve been. If our tree remains, then we too remain. I want to hear it roaring with flame and with life. I want to smell the spitting oil of it, follow the volumes of smoke wrapping thickly upwards and not be afraid. But I am afraid. I don’t want to set the island on fire—I nearly did that once, emptying coals I thought had burnt out into the scrub at my back door. It took only a couple of minutes for flames to lick menacingly through the low-lying grasses. Marian and Red and I stamped them out, panic-stricken. Perhaps it is enough to just imagine our tree burning. Write it. Perhaps this is something words can do—make sense of grief. Give shape to the unknowing. Give form to that which cannot be enacted. Resurrect memory. Set down the future.