Heart of the Grass Tree

by Molly Murn

  He sits face to face with the old feller who grasps William’s left hand with his own lined left hand, and William’s navel with his right hand. Navel cord exchange—belonging now among the men. Flicking and clicking his fingers away, the old feller releases William, and William notices that he can no longer smell burning ti-tree. How many moons has it been, he wonders. He asks about Emue. She is buried now, old feller says. Her bones face west. She travels over the waters on the symbolic raft of her burial platform. She returns to the island, place of crossing over. William knows he must return now too. This time he will be given safe passage. Maringani—he can’t even say her name but utters it over and over again mutely in the pit of his throat. The smoke has changed his voice.

  near King George Beach (Sandy)

  Maringani kneels at the shoreline and the waves break on her knees. Today the sun is quiet, gentle. The rushing foam swirls at her thighs and she leans forward to stop from tipping. But she should allow the water to carry her, she thinks, and the tide paws reassuringly as if to take her in. It has been three moons since she and Minnie fled from the camp. Every day she scans the ocean for a sign. Does Weellum think of her? All she knows is that without Emue and without Weellum she is cold in her bones. She is worried she’ll be caught by rough hands. Is Anderson even alive, she wonders. It will take more than kinyeri to save him.

  Maringani is becoming lighter than a pelican feather even as her belly grows. The other side of the water is a moving shadow that she tries to set down with her gaze. But it keeps drifting. She crawls into the waves and they slam at her shoulders and she rolls over and over in the bubbles. There are clouds massing over the distant mainland and she wonders if this is the sign. With long slow strokes she swims past where the waves break and she feels a kind of fizzing inside, like she’s no more than foam. She is so buoyant she cannot make headway, but she holds Weellum’s face in her mind and it propels her forward. Maringani rolls onto her back and points her feet towards the shore and works her arms like rudders to keep afloat. She’ll have to pace herself. Become like a pelican. Swim, fly, dive.

  On the beach is Minnie, working a stick into the sand for kuti. Minnie glances up and waves at Maringani furiously. Maringani gestures back and her throat is suddenly swollen with salt. She chokes and she is no longer light but a heavy stone sinking. She slips under and Minnie is running. Under the water there are all kinds of singing. And the sound of wings beating. Her lungs tighten and her blood screams and she pops back up to the surface. Circling low between Maringani and Minnie is a nori, pelican, her ngatji, protector. It sails on the wind and she follows it. Her arms become great white feathers, the black tips rustling. Maringani glides into the shore and Minnie tumbles through the shallows towards her. They embrace and the pelican looks on before standing to its magnificent height, plumping its wings and gulping as it takes flight. Maringani grips on to Minnie’s soft warm body and sobs into Minnie’s thin chest. Minnie leads Maringani out of the water to the dry sand, sits her down carefully, and then squeezes the water from her hair and drapes herself over Maringani’s cold red shoulders. It takes some time to stop shuddering, but now when she looks towards the mainland she can see nothing at all. Just the clouds bleeding thickly into the sea. Minnie hands her a pelican feather and sits firmly in Maringani’s lap.

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  The ground is cold underfoot from the night. All the heat of the previous day sucked away like Pearl is walking on a grave. But it will be hot later. This is just a dawn respite. Time of the birds. Drops of light fall through the leaves, spreading gold. The she-oaks are whispering loudly, sounding the new day. She read the whole thing last night—Nell’s little book—and now everything takes on a new tenor of meaning. Pearl had looked in on Diana sleeping and thought of waking her, pulling her out into this precarious morning. How much had she read of Nell’s story? But there was a kind of perfection in being the only one awake in a house heavy with sleep and sorrow, so she’d left her mother like she was abandoning ship. Almost ran from the house before she could be noticed. Nico will sleep for hours yet, she thinks with annoyance. Her eyes are raw and her shoulders ache with insomnia. Everything she held to be true is blurring; her whole self is leaking out at the seams. She is amorphous and only the trees hold her up. When she finds the old beehive she kicks it to pieces. It is satisfying to break it heartily, even as shudders of pain jolt into her hips and knees and lower back. It crumbles easily, like it was held together with the finest of stitching. But it is rot that makes everything, in the end, break down. Her feet throb and they’re cold. She thought Nell had always told her everything. So why did the story of Maringani and William leave her feeling as if some great part of herself had cleaved away—rocks tumbling into the ocean. Why is it we can never know anyone, not mothers, not sisters, not lovers, she thinks. We just fumble along. Her thoughts are dramatic with tiredness, she knows, but she indulges them. She is like the beehive. No longer held together.

  Nico’s footfalls are soft. He is soft, she thinks, when she sees him coming along the track, the sun just catching the ends of his hair like wires of copper.

  Honey! Are you okay? What are you doing? He kneels in front of her, his face crumpled with weariness and worry.

  It’s so early. I didn’t want to wake you. I just—

  Come here.

  For a long time she rests with her head on his chest, trying to fall in with his breathing, trying not to tremble. She’s twitchy. There’s just the rise and fall of him and the fullness of sky and the light burning away at the morning. When they kiss it is only a whisper. Soft lips to soft lips. Slow-moving honey. Heating. Pooling. And when she moves him inside her, she knows that in the inmost part of her she is molten. They are the sun burning away the dross of cloud. Oh that face of his—like a face from ancient times, smooth and clear now, and warrior-like—she cradles it and anchors her fingers in his hair. He smiles and it makes him young. They are seamless. This is not the desperate clinging it has been of late, but a singing inside; this is a coming together. Skin to skin. She wears nothing now but the fine periwinkle necklace that was wrapped up inside the envelope from last night. Nico lets the string of shells fall gently into his mouth, as she leans over him. And the she-oaks cry out, and the sun ignites, and she never wants to be anywhere else, but here with the smell of them everywhere.

  As a young child, Diana had often wondered what it would be like to live inside a shell. She would squint inside their spiralled chambers and try to fathom what was in the middle. Breaking them apart didn’t help because then they were no longer themselves. She used to ask her father over and over what it would be like, and he’d always say: It would be, dear girl, to know what it is to be carried along. Diana liked that idea—to just let the swell of the ocean take you—to follow the pull of the moon, to fit exactly inside your covering. But lately, the thought of such surrender has terrified her. She’s been too passive and she’s being crushed.

  Now she no longer desires a maisonette backing onto a train line but a round house, a humpy with no right angles, or a burrow, even a lighthouse—something curved and graceful yet grounded. It has to be comfortable though, and clean. And not subject to currents or riptides. And so she begins, the drawing flowing easily out of her, and the pencil just sharp enough to satisfyingly ignite the page. The house is curved, so that the wind from any direction could never lash against it, and it is bone white like a weathered shell. It is enough just to draw it. In fact, it is drawing that always frees her in the end.

  She’d woken early, before dawn, to Pearl opening the door and peering in, but Diana pretended she was asleep. David was in her dream and she wanted to hang on to the fragment, walk through the dream again in her mind before she forgot it. But it was too late. By the time Pearl had creaked the floorboards and unlocked the back door—she imagined her daughter mounting a white horse behind the house and simply galloping away—she’d lost David again. Dancing with him last night at the bonfire she reali
sed she had no outer covering, and that what she needed was a shell house, even if just metaphorically. Protection.

  After everyone else had gone up to the house for the night, the two of them walked along the shoreline, shell fragments crunching beneath their bare feet. There was a gap between them, at least an arm’s length, as if their closeness earlier had only been possible when they were part of the larger group. Diana thought perhaps this had always been the case. She enjoyed David most when they were in the company of others. He was lighter. Less focused on her. Charming, funny even. And then when they were alone he became serious, critical, brooding. Suffocating. Something in him was softer now, though, and she felt uselessly sad for how things had gone between them.

  You never really belonged here, did you, Di?

  What do you mean? Her voice was tight. Astute—that’s what Nell had always said about him. Dangerously astute. Yes!

  Well, I just mean that you’ve always had to get away from here as fast as you can. Always itching to leave. Not really a country girl at heart. But this time … is different, I imagine? And in the way his voice kind of faltered she knew that he loved her. Not like before. But without agenda and with sorrow.

  She thought about what he said. It was just that everything happened so slowly here on the island. And everyone knew you. It was either too windy or too sunny or too deathly quiet. Exposed. Sandy. Diana had never been outdoorsy—not like the other island children—with their bleached by the sun hair and long brown limbs, surfboards attached to their hips, their freckled shoulders and their ability to swim like they had gills. Diana was afraid of waves, of being dunked by waves, and hated how sand got into everything. Ears, fingernails, scalp. Nell, too, had been different from the mothers of her friends. She wasn’t a tea and scones kind of a woman; she wasn’t in the crochet club (though she loved to crochet); and she wasn’t a member of the Pioneer Association, although she knew everything there was to know about the history of the island. She was more of a fierce loner, especially after Reg died. The married women saw her as a threat to the wandering eyes of their husbands, or so Nell thought, and so she befriended the rabble as she called it, the flotsam and jetsam that turned up on the island. There was at least one thing Diana did have in common with her mother. With those they loved, they were uncompromising.

  When Diana fled to Adelaide as a young woman after Pearl was born, the suburbs with their plush gardens and flat neat tree-lined streets were well kept, well mannered. Adelaide was the stately elder. Composed. Whenever she stayed on the island too long, she started to feel like her mind was losing its sharpness. Like she was pickling and she might never have the wherewithal to get up and leave. She could petrify.

  The girls are finding it hard. There’s a lot to do. And—

  You want to be here?

  I don’t. Well. Yes, I do, she said quietly.

  David fumbled in his jacket pocket and found his cigarettes. He stopped to light one and then loped up to the dry sand and eased himself down. Diana hovered uncertain until he took off his jacket and spread it out for her, patting it encouragingly. She sat beside him, hugging her knees to her chest, tiredness chilling in the small of her back and making her yawn in great gulps.

  So she’s left the house to you. What will you do?

  Diana had given this a lot of thought, but last night hadn’t been able to answer David. He hadn’t pushed her, he’d just said, Do something for yourself, Diana, but don’t rush. Mull it over. She hated mulling, so her first instinct had been to sell—a clean slate. She needed the money, really needed the money, and sitting at Nell’s trestle table delicately shading the side of the round house with cross hatching, the pencil making a soothing sighing sound, she considers the two things her mother has given her: art, and now shelter where she thought there’d be none. But the shelter doesn’t have to be here, in this wily place. She could build anywhere. With the money, she could start over.

  There is the beginning of a plan, but it is too early to take root. She will try to talk to Joe about it later, hopefully, without interference from the daughters.

  When she finishes the drawing of the round house and is satisfied with how she’s managed to turn a vague sensation of being unmoored into something material, something she can visualise—a thought projected—she takes another piece of paper and places it on top of the sketch, securing it with a couple of stones. Diana moves carefully and deliberately, building up to another urge, which had come to her in a flash during yesterday’s funeral service.

  The cap of the ultramarine blue tube of paint is stuck fast. Diana rummages in the drawer for pliers and then remembers they’ll be hanging on the far wall, a black outline traced around their shape—like they’re in a crime scene. She supposes this is a trespass, of sorts.

  Nanny Di, what are you doing?

  Diana turns with a start, pliers in hand, to Ariel framed in the doorway, the sky behind her still milky it’s so early.

  How come everyone’s up already? Ariel says rubbing her eyes. I heard Pearl go and then Nico. And you’re up. And Mummy’s being sick in the toilet. And Daddy’s cross because I woke up Alfie. I didn’t mean to.

  Diana hears the edge of hysteria in Ariel’s voice. She’s so over-tired, poor little thing.

  Come here, sweetheart. You can help Nanny.

  Ariel makes her way around the trestle and folds into Diana, her fairy floss hair so light it tickles Diana’s clavicle as she bends over her granddaughter. Ariel’s thin little matchstick arms are cold and Diana rubs them and then drapes her own cardigan around Ariel.

  But what are you doing, Nanny? You’re always in here these days. Mummy said so.

  Taking Ariel’s hand, Diana leads her to the easel, lifting her up on the stool. I guess I just like it out here. It’s very peaceful.

  Is it because you’re sad about old Nell?

  Diana takes a swallow, her back to Ariel as she struggles with the stuck cap and the pliers. Of course they’ve all been talking about her. Probably even with David, too.

  Nanny?

  Yes, I am sad. A little bit. About old Nell. She smiles.

  But what she doesn’t say is that mostly it’s because she likes the smell of sheds, especially the painty, dry, comforting smell of this one. And Nell’s private coveted space is somehow now slowly becoming hers. She’s never been this close to Nell before.

  Diana can feel Ariel watching her sceptically as she sets out the palette, the linseed oil and the brushes she cleaned earlier. When she squeezes the blue from the tube, having freed the cap, it is glossy and thick, and Ariel makes a small gasp of pleasure.

  Nanny. Are we painting?

  Diana doesn’t answer but begins adding a little of the linseed oil to the blob of paint and mixing it through. This is not her medium, and she knows it will be impossible to get exactly the same hue and thickness that Nell has used. Her eyes flit between the dried layer of blue on the canvas and the swell of wet paint she’s working up with the brush. It takes days, weeks, sometimes, for oils to dry, so the painting is still a changing thing, and Diana begins working in the new layer with a kind of restrained ferocity, painting over Nell’s last strokes. It’s a feeling of being underwater as she becomes lost in the blue, eddying in the swirls and currents made by her own hand. She doesn’t notice Ariel slipping down from the stool and coming to stand at her side, even as Ariel places her hand on Diana’s free elbow, steadying her. Filling in the background, working the paint right to the edges and then back in to the outline of the grass tree, she is happy with the way this final layer of blue, Madonna blue, deep and glistening, thrusts the central image forward.

  It’s a baby made of bones, Ariel says with finality, as though she’s been trying to work it out all this time, and breaking Diana’s one-pointed focus.

  You think?

  Ariel sneaks a hand up to finger the pointy tip of the shells.

  No, Ariel, don’t touch. It’s wet.

  The little girl withdraws her hand as if she�
��s been slapped. And then Diana is sorry she’s snapped at her. She puts the brush down and stands back from the painting, sweeping her arm around Ariel’s shoulders.

  What do you think, Ariel? Happy with the blue? Diana would like to keep going, but she’ll let this layer dry as it is now, shocked at how like Nell she sounded when she scolded her granddaughter.

  Yes, Nanny, Ariel whispers, barely audible.

  Do you know what those shells are, sweetie?

  Diana can feel the quick breathing of her granddaughter through the slip of cardigan, her shoulders shuddering slightly, the back of her neck a little damp. She’s always run at a higher temperature, this one. A higher speed, higher metabolism, as if she’s burning on some other fast-acting fuel. She was born early, her little body whittled to just the essentials, all bone and muscle and sparkling wide eyes. Gappy teeth. Diana sits on the stool and lifts Ariel into her lap, stroking her damp hair away from her high, glossy forehead.

  Let me tell you a story.

  Ariel nods and leans back into Diana, her frame softening now she’s been forgiven.

  Great-granny Nell had a special shoebox with some very precious things in it. Did she ever show it to you?

  No.

  Okay. Well some of the things in that box were two necklaces made out of those little shells like the ones in the painting. They’re called periwinkles. From a tiny seasnail.

  Like teeth. Did Nell wear them—were they hers?

  Diana has often wondered that herself. Had tried many times to suggest Nell donate all the objects in the box to the South Australian Museum, or even the Penneshaw Folk Museum. It seemed selfish her holding on to them for so long. Diana didn’t get it.

  Did Nell cut them up for the painting?

  The thought hadn’t occurred to Diana, but of course, she probably did do that. She lifts Ariel from her lap, the edge of the stool digging hard into the back of her thighs, and stands.