Melliodora

Burl

If I sit here, tightly enough, the tree might gather me in its branches and swing me, gently, the sky soughing through its leaves. As a girl, I’d spent half my days in it, climbing, reading and daydreaming, leaping from limb to limb.

I let him cut the burl from it. Afterwards I wandered to the wound, leaking with sap, and touched the rough surface left by the saw. It was as wide as five hand spans. Tiny splinters caught in my finger pads.

Every summer evening I sat on the stone steps, watching him carefully pull the cradle from the wood. The lowering sun lit the hair of his forearms, drew out the smell of his perspiration. He chipped the bark surface away, slowly and methodically.

It was autumn when he came to set it on the lathe. He wore an old jumper, pushing up his sleeves to reveal the knotted muscles of his forearms. I folded my arms beneath my breasts for warmth. The lathe began spinning.

The burl’s cells weren’t aligned as with a normal trunk. Instead of following neat, straight lines, they caused the grain to swirl and curl in on itself. As he carved, the tension in the twisted grain was released. The wood thumped with a dull, uneven whup.

You can read the rest of this story at the Review of Australian Fiction.

Old Honey

Iqbal walked along the river in the fading evening light. He didn’t stand out as much, and he liked the quietness. The gum trees were in flower reminding him of the trees at home, but here they smelled sickly sweet– like drying blood.

Sometimes kids played on the banks, but their mothers – their voices pitched high with worry– called them when the sun disappeared behind the trees.

In this place called Brantley, the evenings stretched for hours. On Sundays, his mother and sisters went to church wearing the blue and red dresses donated to them by other members of the Sudanese community. There was nothing of the vibrant singing they were used to from the mud brick church in Sudan. Instead of drums, a piano corralled their voices into a staid pattern.

The church people were good people. They took the hands of Iqbal’s mother and held them. When she began to make friends, Iqbal asked if she minded him going for walks.

As long as he was back before she came home, she said, he could walk as far as he liked. “Two hours only,” she added.

You can read the rest of this story at Adda.

Unfurling

EVA HAD LOVED the first slap of cold water on her face when she dived into the pool, then the bubbles peeling away from her hands like pearls. A shoal of parrotfish passed on her right, creating a golden wall that reflected the afternoon light. Ahead was a manta ray, its flanks rippling like a silk curtain, while the walrus hovered in the corner of her vision. As she pushed through a forest of kelp, it rasped against her cheeks.

Where she lived, heat stretched into the forties before summer storms and kids were taught to swim before they could walk. Eva, once tossed into the water, never wanted to get out again.

‘It’s all that fat. That’s why you can stay in so long,’ her mother used to say. ‘You’ve an extra layer of insulation.’

‘My little water baby,’ was what her father said, for her tubby body was always rolling and spinning, slick with water.

Eva didn’t care. She imagined peeling starfish from the rocks or tapping a rhythm on crabs’ shells with her nails. Then she plucked out the band holding her plait and unravelled her hair. She exhaled and sank to the pool’s plastic floor, meditating. Her long hair floated about her in a thick, writhing mass.

You can read the rest of this story at Griffith Review.

When the World Shivered

We creep through a paddock, alert for flickers and swaying blades of grass. I’m never fast enough to catch crickets before they fly, but I love the luscious uncoiling of his muscles as he springs and snaps one in his jaw. There’s the furious whirring of wings, a quiet rumble in our throats. The cricket chirrups once, twice, is silent.

I blink, and there’s a pressed-metal ceiling spooling with vines above my head. By my side is a man, his body white in the moonlight, hair dark against the pillow. No summer heat, no blue sky.

In the kitchen, I make myself a cup of tea and drink it at the sink. When the dream recedes, I rinse the cup and return to bed. My man, half-woken, pulls me into the crescent of his body. I breathe, in and out, in and out, until I have forgotten the way the world shivered with Mirram by my side.

*

We were wee things they said, but we grew fast. There was string to play with, and stretchy hair twisties that we caught mid-air. Mirram chewed my fingers and ambushed my legs. Sometimes there was a pain in our heads, but we went to sleep and then it was gone.

Words shifted between our minds. Mirram couldn’t understand them until I did, but that didn’t bother him. We napped in patches of sunlight, Mirram curled in the hollow of my back as I lay on my stomach. If he woke first, he crawled up to my shoulder and bit my ear. It tickled, and I laughed.

When people came to visit, they peered at Mirram, whose head reached my thigh.

‘Will he get much bigger?’

‘I hope so,’ I said proudly.

‘He’s growling.’

‘No, that’s purring.’

They straightened, stepping back. Mirram and I smirked.

The first time I opened my eyes and found the world was silent, I started shrieking, No sound! No sound!

My mother and father rushed to my room and sat beside me on the bed, but in my distress I couldn’t concentrate on lipreading them.

After an hour, Mirram sauntered in with wet paws, bringing sound with him.

Where were you? I shouted.

Hunting. Sorry. He leaned against my calf, rubbing his cheek below my knee. I smelled the earth in his fur and sensed his residual excitement after swiping a bird. I moved my leg away.

I have to hunt, Phyllis.

Take me with you, then.

Later, when you’re older. You need to sleep at night.

I touched his head. You promise?

I promise.

I pushed my hand down his back, over and over, until he finally purred. After that, he always came back before sunrise.

Not long afterwards, I put Mirram in a backpack and sat him in my lap in the car. He chewed shoelaces that I dangled in his face. My mother drove. When the car stopped, she said, ‘School.’

‘School,’ I repeated.

Your voice is too loud, Mirram said.

I repeated the word, softly.

My mother handed me a sachet of meat. I tore off the top and fed Mirram with my fingers, piece by piece.

Mum says you need strength, for today, I told him.

Alright, then. His rough tongue licked my skin.

At school there was so much listening, not just to learn, but because they wanted me to speak. I couldn’t do that without Mirram telling me if the shape and volume of my words was correct. Sometimes, he fell asleep on my feet and his dreams of skittering rats interfered with the teacher’s dictation. I kicked him awake, telling him, I can’t hear.

At night, he hunted less often. We slept together for longer.

---

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The Country of Boats

She left because the seas were getting colder and she’d heard of mermaids becoming trapped in ice and frozen over.  She had never liked the cold and didn’t want to drown, so she decided to travel south, where it was warmer.  Her family thought she was mad, but then, they always had.  ‘Odd’ was what they called her, or ‘singular.’  They thought she spent too much time exploring and not enough time sitting on rocks brushing her hair.  She was not sorry to leave them, and besides, she preferred her own company.

On her journey south there were new sea creatures to play with: she confused pods of dolphins by calling scrambled messages in sonar, brushed sea anemones so they closed in a huff, and was tickled by the fins of lionfish.  She slept on white shores where the sand, unlike the prickly ice she had left behind, was cushioning.  She followed frigate birds and albatross, holding fish up in her hand so the birds would swoop down, gusting her with their powerful wings. 

Eventually, the sea became fickle and threw her against a pile of rocks.  She was so tired she couldn’t move, and went to sleep.

When she woke, she found herself on a shore so bright she could barely see.  Her hair was knotted around her body and scales flaked from her tail.  Squinting, she made out stunted grass and thin, grey trees beyond.  By no means did it seem a friendly country, but she was exhausted and the warmth of the water was appealing.  So she stayed, swimming beside the beaches.  She loved waking to the slap of a tide and birds’ cries from the bush.  When the weather heated, shrubs lining the shore erupted with constellations of tiny white flowers.  As the sun drew away into winter, she followed the land north and didn’t ever get cold.

Some time later, while she was teaching whale calves to leap in the ocean, she saw people with dark skin rowing in bark canoes.  They sailed where the water permitted and carried their vessels where there was land to cross.  When they came to the country where she lived, they travelled south.  As they observed the land becoming hotter and drier instead of remaining moist with sea air, they put down their canoes and kept walking.

 The mermaid didn’t mind their arrival, because a little company is always good, and soon she came to like them a great deal.  They were clever people and she enjoyed the sound of their laughter as they sat by their fires at night.  The men’s thin spears caught fish from the sea and the women’s fingers slipped into wet sand, drawing out shells.  Their children loved water sprinkling upon their skin as they jumped through the shallows.  Sometimes they saw the mermaid and waved, and she would play a trick of flicking water into their faces with her tail, then hiding herself deep in the sea.  Slowly, she learnt their language, and they accepted her. 

Over the thousands of years that they lived together, the mermaid noticed her skin gradually becoming darker, like theirs.  She lost fat from her body because she no longer needed it for warmth, and her hair turned from gold to brown.  She often wondered what her family would have thought of her if they saw her again.  They would probably still call her ‘odd’ and ‘singular’.

One morning, while she was dozing on a rock, she saw a vessel like the ones the dark people had rowed in, but many times larger.  It was topped with huge sheets catching the wind like wings.  She swam up to investigate and found it encrusted with barnacles.  It must have been travelling for a while, then.  She looked up and was startled to find the figurehead was a carved, wooden mermaid, and that there were fair-skinned men upon the decks.  She had become so used to seeing her dark friends that she’d forgotten about these other ones, who could have been her own people except they had legs and their language was not the same.  She watched their muscles as they slung and worked the ropes and wondered if she could ask if things were still frozen in their part of the world.  Then she saw him — that man at the helm with dark hair and a billowing white shirt — and her heartbeat disappeared.

She remembered her nanna, the only one who didn’t mind that she never brushed her hair.  Her nanna would do it for her, with a tough comb carved out of a turtle’s back, and told stories as she brushed.  One of these stories was about a mermaid who fell in love with a man and asked to have legs instead of a tail so she could walk with him.  However, the old merwoman who gave her the legs took her voice in exchange, so even though the young woman with legs was very beautiful, the man couldn’t know her because she could not speak.  Bereft, the young woman went back to the sea and drowned herself.

‘Never,’ warned her nanna, ‘go near a man.’

But, the mermaid thought as she followed the ship, watching as the sailor climbed the rigging and strode upon the decks with confidence, her nanna had never mentioned this desperation to be held by a man. 

The ship dropped anchor and men leapt over the side, swimming to the shore.  The mermaid swallowed as the man with the dark hair found his feet and strode across the tumbling waves, his shirt and trousers clinging to his body.  Soon they were all fooling and tumbling in the shallows while an older man scratched on a dull, metal plate.  When he was done with scratching he attached it to a plank of wood and banged it into the sand.  Meanwhile, the men ran into the bush and shot wallabies for dinner.

The next morning, the mermaid swam close to the ship, hoping to see the man.  There was a shout, then running, and suddenly he was beside the figurehead, raising a musket and firing at her.  She was shocked.  He lifted the gun again and she dived deep underwater, catching a current that carried her far away.

She headed south until the water turned chilly and froze into icebergs that edged through the sea.  Occasionally they bumped into one another in a friendly way, but the din from their jostling was frightening.  There were seals slipping through the water too.  Sensing that the mermaid was sad, they raced her, or nipped her on the arm.  The water was bitterly cold, but the mermaid bore it. 

After watching the icebergs and the seals for a time, she began to feel happier and headed back to the familiar coasts of her country.  She swam lazily in the bays and glided up the river with black swans.  Sometimes she sat on the riverbank, her tail lost in thin green grass, casuarinas covering her with their hair while flocks of cockatoos blanketed the sun.  If the dark-skinned people passed, their children would run to her, begging for a ride on her back in the river.  Although she had learnt their language, she liked to speak to them in her old tongue because it made them drop to their knees with laughter.

She was dismayed to find that, in the wake of this ship came another, burdened with men and women who were haggard, their eyes dull.  When they staggered from the boats that took them to shore, they tried to look cheerful.  The mermaid felt sorry for them as they stared, as if stunned, at the mass of dry grass rising beyond the sand, the scraggly trees and unbearably bright sky.  Then they stuck a flag into the soil and sang a dreadful song, so sombre it was like a dirge.

These people didn’t sail on, but stayed.  The mermaid thought they would come to love the place as she had done and to live with it like the dark people.  Instead they pulled down trees and built roads and huts, then houses of mud that they painted white.  They released animals with fur that she recognised from her old home in the north.  Some of them bred beyond control and upset the animals that lived among the grey trees.  When the dark people became angry at the fair people’s deeds, they were killed.  It was a sorry thing to do, the mermaid thought, hovering by the shore and flinching at gunshots in the bush.  At length she swam away, disgusted that she could have admired one of the fair people at all.

She remained out in the ocean for a while, but it was lonely, with no one to speak to except an occasional passing whale and odd creatures near the ocean floor that grunted in monosyllables.  She missed the company of the dark people and there were no children to play with.  Eventually she visited some reefs, for the clownfish darting among the bright coral always cheered her, and she liked the quiet glow of phosphorescence and the haziness of haloclines.  Sometimes she fell asleep on a rock and woke to find a turtle sunning himself beside her.  She placed a hand on his shell, the warmth seeping through her fingers, and remembered her nanna brushing her hair.

Her body grew leaner still as she travelled, her tail a powerful wedge of muscle, her arms stringy with sinew, while her breasts became small and compact.  She didn’t know where she was going, although she often felt as though she were swimming in circles, for she began to recognise the outlines of the coasts.  It was at this time that she noticed the boats.

Some of them were large, rusting old hulks, and as she swam alongside them she heard people inside, rustling, talking and hushing their babies.  Others were sloops with people huddled against one another, cold from the seawater that thrust itself at them spitefully.  The mermaid watched their faces.  Some were taut with fear, but in others she could see the blood beneath their skin glowing with hope, so they carried a red haze.

She stayed in that part of the ocean, trying to understand what they were doing.  The people in the boats usually had dark skin, like hers, but where her hair was a gnarled rope, theirs was a black river.  She wished, then, for her own comb to make her hair sleek.

Sometimes the bigger boats intercepted the smaller boats, and men standing rigidly on the decks barked at the dark-skinned people.  They gathered up their sorry bundles and climbed onto the bigger ships and were taken away.  At other times the dark people reached the shores of her country and collapsed, laying their cheek against the hot sand.  Often, they cried.

One day, as the mermaid followed a creaking, clanking ship, a storm punched the vessel and it fell apart, scattering sheets of tin and people.  The mermaid held her hands to her ears against the screaming.  The waves were in such a strop they pushed everyone underwater to silence them.

Then the mermaid saw, amidst the maelstrom of thrashing arms and legs, a woman holding aloft a tiny baby.  His skull was slick with dark hair and his caramel-coloured skin was tinged with blue.  The woman snatched mouthfuls of air, but it wasn’t enough to keep them afloat.

The mermaid swam towards them and took the baby, clasping him awkwardly.  His mother slipped below the surface and the mermaid grabbed her, but it was too late.

The baby’s heart fluttered as though a bird were trapped beneath his ribs.  If she carried him to the nearest shore, he wouldn’t survive.  The next best thing was a ship.

The mermaid moved out into the ocean and listened, turning until she could hear a motor.  She swam towards it.

‘Over here!’ She shouted as the rusting freighter came into view.  She spoke in the language of the white-skinned boat people, of which she had learned a little before she left.

‘Here!’  She was at the side of the ship.  She lifted the boy above her head.

There was shouting, men peering over the deck.  Someone fired a harpoon.  It narrowly missed her, the rope thudding against her waist.  She held the child higher.

‘Help!’  She tried again.

They pointed to a metal ladder attached to the side of a ship.  She showed them her tail and their voices rose.  Finally, they threw down a rope.  She wrapped it around her powerful arms and they hauled her up.  She fell onto the deck with a slap and they stood over her in a circle.  The man with the harpoon touched her breasts and she bit his hand.  He howled louder than the baby.

After that something stung her flank and she fell back, the boy sliding away.

The men who captured her handed her to the army, who passed her onto the scientists.  When the scientists finished snipping at her hair, scales and skin, she was put in a glass tank and placed in the middle of a busy mall.

Eyes and camera lenses peered at her.  She was talked about ceaselessly and many people would have climbed into the water with her, had security guards not been present.  The only joyful part was when children squashed their faces up against the glass and the mermaid made faces back at them.

At first, the people who gaped at her said, ‘Oh, she isn’t real.  It’s just some computer-generated model.  Everyone knows there’s no such thing as mermaids.’ 

This made the mermaid sad, for she realised her nanna could no longer be alive. 

To prove the people wrong, she decided to speak.  She told them of her swim from the north to the south of the world, of watching the dark people come, and then the fair people, and how the country had never been the same from the time a man stuck a plate on a stick.

The listening crowd filled up the mall and the surrounding streets.  The mermaid was watched on screens all around the country — in homes, shopping centres, bars and schools.  As she spoke, the people’s eyes rounded with absorption, and then they began to frown with dismay, anger and, finally, shame.

One night, someone dressed in dark clothes placed a sign on the side of her tank.  In the morning, office workers stopped with their coffees and read the sign.  The mermaid watched their mouths.

‘Detention Centre,’ they said.

She could not understand this, but even more cameras appeared.  She heard the scientists talking about moving her.

Another night, when the security guards were having a smoko, three more people in the dark clothes appeared.

‘We’re getting you out,’ a woman said as they lifted the lid of her tank.

The mermaid gripped the sides and, to her dismay, found her arms had become flaccid.

‘I want to go back to the sea,’ she said hoarsely.

‘That’s where we’re taking you.’

The mermaid wept and the woman touched her cheek.

In the truck, they wrapped her in wet towels and poured jugs of water over her.  When they pulled off their hats she found they had the same sleek hair, oval eyes and dark skin as the mother of the child she had rescued.  That made her feel better.

As soon as they lowered her into the water she swam away.  She was alarmed by how quickly she ran out of breath and how soon her tail began to ache, but she pushed on until she reached the icebergs.  There she was so lonely and unassailable she might as well have been frozen, but the seals remembered her.

---

Unearthed

Felton sat on the bench against the wall of the pub, watching evening darken through the gauze windows.  He’d just returned from a month in the city for work and the quietness of the country town was a relief.  Back in his empty house, however, it would become oppressive.

A young woman pulled up outside on her motorbike, her black cattle dog leaping from the seat behind her.  Felton straightened.  It was the girl who’d moved in next door to take care of Maxwell’s farm while he battled with his liver disease.  The checkout chick at the grocery store said she’d been there for a couple of weeks. 

The dog jumped onto the verandah and drank from a plastic icecream bucket of water, then flopped beside it.  The woman strode into the pub, a newspaper beneath her arm, and nodded to the bartender.  She was tall and thin, with honey-coloured hair bundled into a rough knot at the nape of her neck.  Her shoulders, broad and angular, strained against her khaki shirt, which was rolled up at the sleeves to show freckled forearms.   She straddled a stool at the end of the counter and unfolded the newspaper.

The bartender placed a tall glass of beer before her and said loudly, ‘No trouble tonight, orright Ellis?’

She gazed at him, but didn’t reply.  The barman gave her a long look and resumed his conversation with a pair of farmers at the other end of the bar.

Felton wondered if he should introduce himself.  The girl’s jeans gripped her hips and stretched tightly over her round arse.  Jake, a pig farmer from the north side of town, was also watching her.  Felton drained his beer and went to the bar for another.

‘Heard from that wife of yours, eh Felton?’ Jake called.  ‘We’re still waiting to bank our money!’

Felton ignored him and slid a five dollar note across the bar.  The girl frowned over the crossword in the newspaper, her shirt open far enough to show the slope of her breasts.  She had chewed her pen, staining her lips with ink. 

‘Need any help?’ Felton asked, but she didn’t look up.

The bartender broke away from his conversation and poured him a drink.  ‘She can’t hear you, mate, she’s deaf,’ he said.  ‘You’ve gotta get her attention first.’

Felton, feeling awkward, instead took his drink to his seat by the wall.

An hour later, the pub was filled with people, cigarette smoke and Jake Robertson’s loud, grating laugh.  Felton decided it was time to go.  As he reached for his hat, Jake made a beeline for the girl and wedged himself onto a stool beside her.  

‘Nice arse,’ he said, in a voice too low for her to hear.  Then he shouted in her ear, ‘Are you deaf or something, Ellis?’ 

He laughed uproariously, but she didn’t respond. 

'Didja hear what I said?  I know youse can hear some things.’

Ellis didn’t move, and Jake’s leer faltered. 

'Ah, fuck you,’ he spat.  

Ellis turned and rammed her fist into Jake’s pudgy jaw.  He reeled, but quickly recovered, his swing connecting with Ellis’ cheek.  She stumbled, then found her balance and landed a hook in his pudgy side.  As he staggered, she kicked him in the crotch.

There was whistling and calling, the men spraying beer as they laughed. 

The bartender pulled Jake away and shoved Ellis out the door to the dusty carpark.  ‘Christ, I told you no trouble, young lady.’

There were low guffaws from inside.  ‘Young lady, huh!’  

Ellis stumbled down the verandah steps and fell to her knees, lowering her bruised cheek to the ground.

Felton followed her out and stood over her prone form, wondering if he should take her home.  He’d never seen so much excitement in a pub since the slug-eating competition up north three years before, after which two of the participants had been rushed to hospital with rat lungworm disease.

‘Don’t worry about her, mate,’ said a grazier named Campbell, clapping Felton on the shoulder.  ‘She’ll be right. Happens every week.  It’s that bugger in there you should be worried about.’

Felton smiled faintly, listening to Jake’s groans.

Ellis’s dog had taken up sentry near her body.  Felton let the dog lick his hand, stroked its head, then headed for his ute.

---

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A Mercurial Man

I thought it might have been the mercury that sent our father mad, but Luke, his grimy finger pointing to the entry in the encyclopaedia, insisted that it couldn't have been.

“Symptoms of mercury poisoning include sensory impairment, disturbed sensation and a lack of coordination,” he read in his clear, loud voice.  “He couldn't have hit mum if he was uncoordinated.”

There were other words we had to look up to check their meaning, such as parasthesia and desquamation, but he didn't seem to have those either, or Luke would have heard about it.  Because I was deaf, Luke told me everything he overheard from Mum and Dad.

“So it can't have been the mercury,” he concluded.

I kept reading.  “It says it comes from cinnabar, which is the source of vermillion.”

“So?”

“He might use vermillion.”

We stared at the image of the pigment next to the text, ground into a poisonous red pile.

“Let's go and check,” Luke said.

We ran across the grass, warm already from the morning sun, to Dad's studio.  On his desk was a painting of a man riding through the main street of a deserted town at sunset.  This must have been the fourth time Dad had painted that picture.  

We poked among the tubes of paint in the worn cardboard shoebox.

“Here.”  I held up the wrinkled tube with a band of red across the top.  “Vermillion.”

Luke looked worried. 

---

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The Sea Lovers

‘I love Ewan McGregor!’ Hannah cried as the Elephant Love Medley from Moulin Rouge began.  ‘I wish he’d leave his wife and marry me!’

No-one spoke.  No-one had said anything much for days.  Hannah turned up the volume.

Evelyn sat in the back, staring at Rick’s neck as he drove.  She concentrated on her breathing and on not feeling anything.

It was windy when they pulled up in the carpark at Suicides Beach.  Behind the open boot of the station wagon, they pulled on their wetsuits.  The cold air snapped at their bare skin.  

Hannah was chatty with tension.  ‘My God, check out those waves!  I hope they don’t cancel it.’

Rick nodded, scarcely looking at her.

Evelyn waited for him to zip up her suit, facing the wind so it blew her hair away from her face.  She wiped sunscreen over her cheeks, reading the numberplates of the cars around them.  Most were from Western Australia, but there were a few from New South Wales.  She figured most interstate competitors would have flown instead of driving a beaten up Ford across the country. 

‘How’re you feeling, Ev?’ Hannah asked.  ‘Nervous?’

Evelyn ignored her.

‘For God’s sake, Evelyn!’ 

She picked up her board and strode down to the sand.

*

It was the end of their three-week drive from the Indian to the Pacific, a holiday to celebrate the end of uni.  In the few days left before the competition, they drove around the south-west, surfing and sightseeing.  At Elephant Rocks near Denmark, Hannah clambered down to the rocks surging from the sea.  She sat on a formation shaped like an elephant, so that she seemed to be riding on its neck.  She slapped her backside, bouncing up and down, and Rick snorted with laughter.  Evelyn wandered away.  There was a pungent smell wafting about; she traced it to a white, star-shaped flower.

‘What is it?’ she asked Rick as he came to stand beside her.  His parents owned a nursery in Byron Bay and he worked there during the holidays, on long weekends, and while studying for his exams.  He stepped closer, breathing in Evelyn’s scent of sandalwood and sweat.  The wind had parted her chestnut hair at the neck, exposing her skin.  He wanted to touch the vulnerable spot, but stopped himself.  

‘It’s a sticky tailflower.  See, the leaves are sticky.’

Hannah bounded up behind them, her blue eyes sharp and alert.  ‘What’s going on?’

‘We’re having a look at this flower.’

‘Pong!  It smells like my twat!’

Rick and Evelyn walked along the sandy trail back to the car, Hannah following.  It was the formation they used when they swam out to the waves: an inverted isosceles triangle with Rick and Evelyn in front, Hannah behind.

In Busselton they checked into a youth hostel, then drove to Wonnerup House where some Europeans, the Laymans, had settled in the 1830s.  It was a sunny day, the lawns surrounding the buildings smooth and glossy.  They read the laminated information brochure.  There had been a massacre of Aborigines, it said, in retaliation for the landowner’s murder.

‘Poachers,’ Evelyn said absently.

‘Who?  The Aborigines or the whites?’ asked Hannah.

‘The Laymans, of course.’  Irritated, Evelyn headed across the paddock to the stables.

At lunch they sat on the soft green lawn and unpacked baguettes.  Rick joked and laughed with Hannah.  Evelyn felt unsettled and wondered if she was getting her period.

When they'd eaten the baguettes, they climbed back into the car.  They drove past stands of big, gnarled eucalypts.  

‘They’re called tuarts,’ Rick said.  ‘Aren’t they grand?’

‘Oh, they are grand,’ Hannah mimicked with a posh accent.  Rick smiled and Evelyn noticed the tension at the sides of his mouth.  She wasn’t surprised; it wasn’t his kind of humour.

‘What’s with all the lilies?’ Evelyn asked.  The white flowers dotted the grass beneath the trees, stretching for kilometres.

‘They’re arum lilies, and they’re impossible to get rid of.  If you pull them out of the ground, it disturbs the mother bulb and they proliferate.  It’s a weird mechanism, all this activity in response to stress.’  

He stopped the car and they clambered out.  A breeze stroked the long grass and the lilies nodded heavily.  Evelyn felt chilly in the tuarts’ shadows.  She wanted to leave immediately, but Hannah was posing for Nick’s camera, a lily stem between her teeth.  Evelyn sought the small patches of sunlight, trying to remember if she’d packed tampons.

*

The waves were high and savage, like mouths opening and closing.  Hannah and Evelyn were among the first competitors.  Evelyn watched as Hannah twisted her board up and down the waves, outwitting them for a long time, until one gracefully closed over her.  

Rick stood further back on the shore, when ordinarily he would have been at Evelyn's side.  She resisted the urge to turn and seek him among the crowd.  She was sick of loving throbbing inside her like a clot.

*

They drove to Margaret River and found a café in the main street.  Evelyn ordered the coffee while Rick and Hannah found a seat.  

The stocky man behind the counter had laughter lines around his eyes.  As he took her money, Evelyn asked, ‘That place Wonnerup, that’s near here – what’s the name mean?’

Wonnerup?’  He punched the keys of the cash register.  ‘It’s Aboriginal.  Means "place of the wonna", I think.'  

‘What’s a wonna?’

‘An Aboriginal woman’s digging stick.  They found a whole lot of skulls there once.  The ladies must’ve had it in for each other.’  He smiled, tipping change into her hand.  

She turned back to the table, wondering if it had been ghosts in the grass that caused her discomfort.  Rick was by the window, watching people pass by in the street; she loved his distant, crumpled look.  Hannah had opened a newspaper, but her eyes were on Rick.  She was wired again.  Evelyn saw it in the tautness of her body and in her thin-lipped smile.

‘Look at this,’ Hannah said as Evelyn slid into the seat beside Rick.  For emphasis, she shook the paper, a week-old copy of The Sydney Morning Herald with the crumbling World Trade Centre spread across the front.  ‘The American President can’t understand why anyone would want to attack America.  What a dope.’

Hannah hadn’t noticed that her voice was too loud for the small café.  At any other time, Evelyn would have told Hannah to shut up, but she didn’t feel like a fight.  Their coffees arrived.  She stirred sugar into her latté and drank it too quickly.  It made her nauseous.  She laid her head on the table and closed her eyes.  Rick reached across and stroked her hair.  She sighed, feeling better immediately.

*

Rick and Hannah stood on the shore, their arms touching.  They watched Evelyn watching the wave.

‘Christ, she can't manage that, can she?’ Hannah asked.

Rick didn’t answer.  The wave was huge, gathering handfuls of water to itself.  His stomach turned.  Of the three of them, Evelyn was the most skilful, the most daring. 

Hannah felt Rick’s muscles flex as he folded his arms.  She'd met him through their mathematics course at uni.  They always seemed to end up sitting next to one another in the lecture hall, so Rick invited her to lunch.  For an hour, Hannah had delighted in his humour, intelligence and large brown eyes.  She was starting to think she'd found the other half of her life’s equation, when Evelyn arrived.  The same height as Rick, Evelyn was tanned, her body hard and lean.  She held herself with a composure that came, Hannah was to find, in her effortless confidence.

‘Hannah, this is my girlfriend, Evelyn.  She’s studying Arts.’

‘The degree’s for mum and dad,’ Evelyn said.  ‘I only want to surf.’  

Hannah couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.  She shook Evelyn’s hand and found her grip firm, her gaze steady. 

Then Rick’s arm circled Evelyn’s waist and the numbers jumbled.  Ever since that day, Hannah had been figuring out how to make them work.

*

Evelyn kicked towards the wave.  The wind was ferocious, but she beat against it steadily and strongly.  Her head was no longer crammed with thoughts of Rick; there was only the coldness of her bare feet, her hands slicing through the water, the salt stinging her bitten lip.  She pushed herself up, her toes gripping the board, her body poised.  She tipped the board down the throat of the wave. 

*

Rick watched sunlight hit the arc of water.  It was turquoise, magnificent, glinting with fish.  Despite his fear, he was envious.  He knew that she’d win and want to go to America, just as he knew she wouldn’t want to leave him behind.

There had been long summer evenings on her verandah smoking dope, giggling, and holding hands lightly while their parents played tennis on the town courts.  Often, he’d pluck a passionfruit flower from the vine hanging over the railing and push it behind her ear, then kiss her delicately on the lips.  In the morning her bedroom reeked of marijuana and mint air freshener.  They made love slowly and sleepily, until Evelyn woke up properly and bit him sharply on the shoulder.  He was saturated with love with her; he always had been.

They’d grown up a street apart in Byron Bay.  Their parents were friends and, whenever they met for barbeques, he and Evelyn would kick a football, the air laden with heat and scents of frying meat and frangipani.  They’d begun surfing seriously when they were ten.  First it was every weekend with the Surf Club, then every afternoon in summer and, zippered into wetsuits, in winter.

Their first kiss had been in the dunes.  The wind was frisky, whipping up the sand and making the wiregrass bristle.  They were clumsy, sand and hair getting into their mouths.  It made them laugh until Evelyn, suddenly serious, pulled Rick down.  Her hands searched and explored him with an intensity that was surprising, but which, later, he always keenly anticipated.

They hadn’t intended to go to the same university in Sydney, but when they found their offers in the newspaper, they laughed.  It wasn’t unexpected; they’d started finishing each other’s sentences.

In Sydney they rented a flat in Maroubra.  Mornings came to mean the smell of salt, the slap of cold water and Evelyn floating on a board beside him, smiling. 

*

Evelyn's pulse rushed as she felt the strength of the wave in the sliding, pulling water.  The sea clawed, longing to get her under, but she resisted.  Evelyn liked this kind of anger — it was something to contend with — unlike Hannah’s, which you had to learn to bear. 

‘You’ll win, alright,’ Rick said as they walked out of the sea at Maroubra, the morning before they left to drive across the country.  ‘You’ll make it to the States soon.’

‘I’m that good, am I?’ she replied cheekily, turning to him.

‘Yeah.’  He dropped his board, cupped her cheeks with his wet hands, and kissed her. 

Evelyn pushed away the memory of his tongue touching the inside of her mouth.  She crouched lower on the board, the wind thrusting her through the tunnel of water.

There were cheers when she waded into the shore.  She smiled, expecting Rick to rush from the crowd to embrace her, as he always did.  When he didn't appear, she remembered Hannah, and her shoulders sagged.  

*

Hannah, who had a thing for lighthouses, had wanted to visit the model at Cape Naturaliste.  By the time they’d climbed to the top of the lighthouse and down again, Evelyn was too tired to move.  She collapsed on a piece of grass by the entrance while Rick and Hannah set off on a walk around the Cape.

‘We won’t be long,’ Rick said.  ‘Maybe an hour or so.’

‘We might see whales!’ Hannah cried.

Evelyn smiled and lay back in the sun.  She slept for a while, then sat up, waiting for them.  The sun dropped towards the sea and it became cold.  When they appeared from the bushes smothering the track, they were holding hands. 

They saw her face and their fingers untangled.  Hannah looked embarrassed.  Rick’s expression was blank.

Evelyn realised her restlessness hadn’t been premenstrual at all.  She pushed herself up, brushed grass from her palms and walked back to the car.  She sensed Rick and Hannah draw together as she walked away, like water closing in the wake of a ship. 

*

The sea was furious as Rick paddled out.  Ordinarily, he relished the vagaries of its tricks and temper, but today it irritated him.  Even as he listened to the sloshing and sucking around him and watched the waves arching ahead, Hannah and Evelyn intruded.

Hannah, small and compact, with her short tufty hair and quick movements, had a sharp wit, but a terrible temper.  She got angry about a lot of things and went off like a firecracker.

He’d never known Evelyn to ignite.  Hannah had once half-jokingly referred to her as an integer, so whole and self-contained that she never needed anyone else, but Rick disagreed.  It was more that she was so deep she was impossible to define, even though separate elements of her personality were clear to him.  

Her endurance impressed him most.  She’d always lasted longer in the water, so that when he waded out to the shore, his limbs aching, he’d turn to watch her.  It was then that he imagined tidying up at the end of the day at the nursery in Byron, watering the palms, wheeling the display pots back inside, misting the orchids and picking dead leaves from the ferns, then driving to the beach to join her in the surf.  When the light faded they would rinse their boards and head home, languid with exhaustion and contentment.

He never mentioned these reveries to her; he sensed they would be received with a tender, but bemused, smile.  All she could think of was America.  Yet he knew that if he followed her, he’d lose himself.  He wanted to go back to his family’s nursery, not serve in an American burger joint while she surfed.

He blinked, realising he'd been on autopilot.  A wave was rearing before him.  His mouth dried as he struggled to turn his board, but it was too late.

*

Evelyn glanced at the officials behind her.  The wind brought snatches of their conversation.  'Cancel ... getting too dangerous,' she heard.

She watched Rick swimming out to meet the waves.  There was too much force whirling about him.  She dug her feet into the sand, sensing he wasn't strong enough to master it.  

When the sea pulled the board out from under his feet, Evelyn stared so hard her eyes dried.  After a few minutes, she saw the leaf shape of his board, but he didn't come up with it.   

'Get the ambos!' she screamed, sprinting into the water.

Evelyn had woken from this dream on thousands of nights.  She fought with the sea as she swam, terror pouring adrenalin into her muscles.  She dived beneath white, snarling foam, waiting for bleary light to shine through the surface and signal an all-clear.  

She’d forgotten the sea could be malicious; it had been a lover for so long.  She'd always relished the shock of water against her shins, the way it made her nipples erect, the crackle of foam rushing out of her ears and the surprise of rough kelp wrapping about her ankles.

At last she saw the sea rolling his limp figure.  She propelled through the water, her heart about to burst.

The board was still attached to his wrist.  She tried to pull it closer so she could manoeuvre him onto it, but the sea was too rough, slapping about them.  A wave slammed into the back of her head.  She held onto Rick's arm, but sea's grip was tighter.  It squeezed the air from her lungs and forced her down to the sea floor.  The sides of her vision grew dark; she couldn’t see where the surface was. 

She’d had a dream, once, that Rick was Jesus.  It was true: no one could get enough of him, least of all her, even though she was with him all the time.  Perhaps she should have done more, said more, been more passionate, but there hadn’t seemed to be any need.

The sea pushed another fistful of water down her throat.  It was time to let go.

*

'What the hell do you think you were doing?' 

Evelyn spluttered into consciousness.  She rubbed her stinging eyes, her chest a cavity of pain.  They were on a lifeboat, the sea chucking itself at them in fury.

'We could've had two dead bodies!'  A bald man in a lifejacket glared at her.

'Shut up, Tom!' shouted a woman at the rudder.

Evelyn sat up, sparks shooting along her spine.  She saw Rick next to her, another man in a lifejacket pumping at his lungs.

'Is he alright?'

'Not yet, he isn't.'  

Evelyn struggled towards him, but the bald man held her back.  His face softened with concern.  

'Lie down, love, you've gone green.'

'Rick!' Evelyn called, and vomited.

*

After a few days, the doctor moved Rick from intensive care to the general ward.  It was the first time Evelyn was allowed to be close to him after they'd been taken from the ambulance.  The ward was dark but for the lamps above each bed, glowing like tiny halos.  One patient, at the far end of the ward, was reading through her insomnia.

Rick slept with his back turned to her.  Evelyn watched his shoulders rising and falling.  She'd loved walking behind him, admiring the wedge shape made by those shoulders and his torso.  Apparently this was to be Hannah's privilege now.  

Evelyn had done nothing but think, for these past few days and nights as she waited for Rick to mend, about why he had pulled away from her.  No satisfactory answer had presented itself, other than the appeal of Hannah's mediocrity.

Rick rolled onto his back, flinging out his hand.  Evelyn took it and stroked his arm, her thumb brushing against the grain of his hairs.  There was no point in asking him, she thought sadly.  She had not been enough, and that was all there was to it. She touched his strong fingers with their neat, clipped nails.  Or perhaps she had been too much.

Evelyn gazed at Rick's face, noticing tears seeping from beneath his lids.  She brought his hand to her lips, and kissed it.    

*

Rick leaned against the bonnet of the car, waiting for Hannah to come in from the surf so they could begin the drive back to Sydney.  She was a nimble thing — not as strong as himself or Evelyn, they'd always agreed — but quick to find the right waves and ride them.  Rick banged the heel of his hand against the worn, dented bonnet.  He had to stop thinking of the word ‘they’.  

Hannah floated on her board, watching the waves form.  It was the mathematics of surfing that she liked most; the shapes made by the breakers, the speed at which she was travelling, the point at which a wave crested.  The sea was full of algorithms.

She twisted around to see Rick.  He stared at the ground, his head lowered.  Evelyn had left a week ago, refusing to travel back across the country with them.  Rick called her a taxi for the airport and walked her to the road.  When he came back his face was white, and he didn’t respond when Hannah kissed his cheek.

‘Have we got time for one last surf?’ she asked as they packed their things at the hostel.

He nodded distantly.

When they rolled into the empty carpark and Hannah skipped down to the shore, he gazed steadfastly at the horizon.

Hannah flattened herself on her board; a fine wave was curving out of the sea.  She began paddling towards it.

Rick had told her, as they walked around the rocky headland of Cape Naturaliste, that things were finished with Evelyn.  ‘She loves surfing more than she loves me,’ he’d said.  

Hannah studied him, calculating.  She adored his brown eyes, his dirty blonde hair, the way he often stared into the distance, thinking.  She had thought that you couldn’t interrupt a relationship that had started in childhood, but perhaps all it took was rearrangement.  Like shifting the sides of a triangle.

The wave was almost perfect.  Hannah stood up and caught it, delighting in the equations of velocity that whirled about her.

*

A fortnight later, Evelyn, who'd been staying with a friend, met Rick in a Thai restaurant in Kingsford.  They sat silently, without appetite, picking at their tofu and noodles.  

‘Rick?’

‘Mmmm?’

‘I’m moving my stuff out.  I've found somewhere to live.’ 

‘What?’

‘Don’t be dumb.’  She twisted noodles around her chopsticks, sucked them up and wiped sauce from her lips.  ‘Hannah will move in.’

‘Have you asked her?’

‘No, but I’m sure she’d like to.’  Evelyn stabbed at her tofu.

‘Where’s your place?’

‘Not in Maroubra.  A different beach.’  

‘Will we still surf together?’

‘No.  Hannah can do that with you.’

He sighed.  ‘Why don’t you ever get angry?’

‘I do.  I just don’t show it.’

‘Are you angry now?’

‘You bet.’

He stared at her.  Even Hannah’s little explosions, which scattered words like shrapnel, were easier to understand than this.  

‘I thought I knew everything about you,’ he said.  He poked at his food, frowning.  The white paper tablecloth was stained with florets of sauce.  It occurred to him that Evelyn’s fury, like the lilies under the trees at Wonnerup, would help her thrive and flourish for years.  He glanced up and found her regarding him.

‘Likewise,’ she replied softly.  ‘I thought you loved me.’

Rick grabbed his wallet, a flush breaking across his collarbones.  He left too much money for the bill.  

A gust of evening air brushed Evelyn’s face as he stepped out the door.  She watched him cross the street and turn the corner, leaving her sight.  For a moment she felt bereft, but then her anger resurged, as steady and persistent as an incoming tide.

Combustion

It’s 8:30 in the morning and the sun is eating at Harriet’s shoulders.  Sweat runs down her cheeks and beneath her jaw.  Her fingers, greasy with sunscreen, grip the white plastic handles of the buckets of water.  Marcus won’t let her use the hose because the wells are too low, but she isn’t going to let twenty years of work fry into crisp leaf litter.  So – five trips a morning to the dam, ten buckets of water that Marcus doesn’t know about.  Although she has to admit that, since the phone call from Elsa, watering the garden is starting to seem a little stupid. 

As she waddles through the front gate to the brown lawn, water sloshes onto her already-wet thighs.  She pours one bucket along the golden sweet Alice and the other over the agapanthus which, regardless of the heat, always manage to look sprightly. 

Harriet started this garden the day after they arrived.  They’d driven up from Sydney, but as the house wasn’t ready they spent their first night at a pub in Boggabri, the nearest town to the property. The bed sloped towards the middle and Marcus breathed in her ear in time to the beat of the local band downstairs.

Marcus had bought a house on a nearby farm, organised to have it sawn in two and then each half strapped to long trucks.  He’d hired some local men to do the work and the next day they drove out to the property to join them.  Harriet found it surprising to watch him among them.  He slapped their shoulders, laughed harshly and swore, ‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ’ as one half, slowly being dragged up the hill, started to slip. 

It took most of the day to get the house to the top, one half at a time, the ropes creaking and the trucks swaying.  Finally, when each part had been slipped onto the measured stumps and the men had gone home, Harriet and Marcus collapsed onto the soil before the front door.  They gazed at the sun setting beyond the small, purplish hills.  It was then that Harriet decided to create the garden, so her daughter and future husband could make their wedding vows before this same view.

It was hard to get the garden going, at first.  She didn’t know anything and the soil was dry.  Sometimes sheep got over the fence and nibbled down what green shoots there were, so she had to go and buy more.  But things started flourishing in winter – for some reason she just got it right with the bulbs.  She loved watching the jonquils stretch their long, skinny arms into the air, then slowly burst open with a sweet smile of yellow or white petals.

Harriet puts her hands on her hips, pulling back her shoulders.  One more trip to go.  As she heads down the hill to the dam she sees, with a jolt, that there’s smoke near Leslie’s place.  She squints, then realise that her eyes are playing up - it’s only low-lying cloud.  The last big blaze Leslie did was on Christmas Day near the Rock, some crown land about twenty kilometres away, and Marcus worries that he’ll soon make a move closer to here.

She feels a line of sweat leak from under her bra and slide down her stomach.  It was a pretty magnificent bushfire – they always were.  Marcus’ parents were over and after lunch everyone slumped onto cane chairs on the gauzed-in verandah.  As they sipped coffee and chewed Christmas cake, they heard a car at the bottom of the hill.  From the sound of the engine, they decided it was Danny and figured he’d come to give his Christmas greetings.  But when he stopped at the gate and sprinted up to the door, Marcus stepped swiftly out of his chair to meet him.  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘There’s a fire on, near the Rock!’ breathed Danny.

‘Jesus!  Not Leslie again?’

‘Yes – the hill’s covered in flame.’

‘Righto.  We’ll be there in half an hour – have to fill the drums.’

Danny ran back to his car, Marcus to the garden shed to get the hessian sacks and drums, and Harriet to the bathroom to find some buckets.  Before leaving, she told Marcus’ parents, who were stifled with bewilderment, that she’d be back in two hours. 

There were about ten vehicles parked in the paddock.  Smoke ballooned through the air and Harriet’s eyes began to water.  Stretched along the wall of flame was a line of men, beating at it with hessian sacks.  A ute carrying drums of water chugged slowly up and down behind them, stopping often so they could dip and wet their sacks.  Others drove shovels into the earth and upturned soil onto the flame, so that clouds of dust rose with the steam and smoke.

In spite of Marcus’ fury at having to fill two drums with precious water, the danger of a sudden gust of wind throwing fire against out bodies, the heat that had them shielding their faces with shirts, Harriet was thrilled.  The roaring of the fire as it rushed through undergrowth, the hiss of a wet sack meeting fire and the men’s muscles gleaming with sweat and glowing in the light of the flames all had her jumpy with excitement.

So it was more than two hours before she got back to Marcus’ parents and found his mother trembling in a chair on the verandah,  ‘You said you’d be back three hours ago!’ shouted his father. 

‘It was a big blaze,’ she calmed them, trying to keep her voice level and thinking how they’d be another fight if Marcus found out, ‘they needed help.’

By evening Marcus was yelling again, anyway.  ‘But they’re your parents, not mine!’ she screamed back at him.  ‘Why should I be responsible for them-’

‘Because I was out fighting a bloody fire, that’s why!’

‘And so was I-’

‘No wonder Elsa left – all you give a damn about is your garden!’

Harriet reaches the bank of the dam and steps down to its muddy edges, which are dotted with cow hoof prints.  The animals, thin from the drought, come here for their evening drink and sometimes the weaker ones get stuck in the mud.  She squelches into the water in her gumboots and slides in the buckets. When they’re full, she staggers back up to the garden again, heading for the pond.  This is where she imagined Elsa would make her vows – next to these fire lilies and red hot pokers, with the scent of the banksia rose drifting through the early summer air.  She pours the water onto the lilies and watches the goldfish drifting in the pond.  It’s taken her twenty years to perfect this garden, yet with one simple phone call Elsa says that it hasn’t been necessary.

She turns and climbs further up the hill to the house, leaving the buckets at the bottom of the verandah steps.  The dogs are sitting beneath the house – the coolest place they can find.  She says hello to them and their tails thump limply in the dust.  Inside, she makes herself a cold lime drink and lies on the verandah floor, positioning the fan so it blows up and down her body.

This summer is as hot as the year that she was pregnant.  Then, when the heat became unbearable, she forced herself to swim in the dam.  It was smelly and, she imagined, full of leeches and other biting things.  She wallowed in the cloudy water and held her breath when she felt yabbies darting by. 

But even more frustrating than the heat was that she hadn’t the energy to tend to the garden.  Of course Marcus was useless.  She told him to water it in the mornings before he went to work, but all he did was turn the hose on for five minutes, in one particular spot, then turn it off and drive away on his motorbike.

‘You didn’t water the garden properly this morning,’ she’d say to him when he came home.

‘I did exactly what you told me – I watered the yellow plant and the oleanders-’

‘The oleanders don’t need watering – you never listen to me!’

‘But I watered them, didn’t I?  That’s all they need-’

‘How can you be so stupid?’

And so another fight began.  He, too, had a short temper and after he’d been working all day and Harriet had been boiling over her elephant of a body, it was, oddly, a kind of relief to yell at each other.  They’d made up by the time they headed to bed, usually because Harriet asked him to help her wash herself in the shower.  She could have done it herself, but she knew how he loved sliding that cloth under her breasts, over her swollen belly and between her thighs.

Harriet closes her eyes, thinking of Elsa.  She always loved walking with her daughter in the evenings, pointing out how the spinifex cast shadows like a thousand pins in a pincushion, or listening to her read by the light of a winter fire. Occasionally Harriet would became distracted by the flames twisting and swirling against each other, until Elsa’s strong voice pricked her, ‘Mum?  How do you say this word?’  Best of all, though, was when she was beside her in the garden, pulling out earthworms or digging holes with her small yellow spade.

Things started to turn sour with Marcus when Elsa left for boarding school.  They still shouted to relieve the long days pent up in our shoulders but, more often, Harriet detected a note of malevolence in his voice.  Once, as she cooked lunch, he suddenly shouted, ‘Get the hell on with it!  The wheat’s got to be done before the rain comes!  Why can’t you bring lunch to me in the paddock like other wives-’

‘You never asked!’

‘You spend too much time in the garden, that’s the problem!  If you don’t do the things I ask I’ll pull up every fucking flower you own-’

‘Like hell you will!’  She turned swiftly to face him, but her forearm knocked the pot of potatoes boiling on the stove. Water splashed over the edge onto the burning gas and flames billowed out  a few centimetres from her face.  Marcus grabbed the tea towel to whack them down, but some slithered onto Harriet’s hand.  She didn’t notice the pain until five minutes later, for she’d been dazzled by the brightness of the fire.  She’d thought it a piece of rippling orange silk, reaching out to stroke her cheek.

She swirls the pale cordial, then turns her head to check that it really wasn’t smoke she’d seen.  Bushfires have been breaking out like rashes this season.  There are still clouds just above the horizon, but they aren’t murky enough to be smoke.  Harriet finds it disconcerting to have Leslie as a neighbour when the police station and fire brigade are a half hour’s drive away, over rough roads.  And they told her they can’t stop him lighting the fires unless he’s caught in the act.

When Leslie moved in, Harriet and Marcus invited him over for dinner – just a courteous gesture – but as the evening progressed he became drunk.  He started playing with the candles Harriet had put on the table for decoration, seeing how close he could hold his palm to the flame before it burnt.  Eventually Marcus said, roughly, ‘Enough of that, mate,’ and took him out to his ute.  They hadn’t spoken to him much since then. 

Still, Harriet could understand why people like him went potty out here.  No one to talk to all day, and the heat and dust and tiredness got you down.  That was why Elsa left – as soon as school was done she got that job in Sydney, worked her way up – the way Harriet heard other’s children do, but never her own – and now she’s in London with this partner.

Sometimes, in the nights, Harriet feels her daughter’s small hand at her breast, or in her hair, and aches to see her again.  She’d caught the train to Sydney once, about a year or so after Elsa had started working, as Marcus wouldn’t drive her and she couldn’t have done the eight hour trip by herself.  Staying with Elsa, Harriet realised how much she’d missed the place – its fast beat, the motley collection of people – slick, rundown, ethnic – the sudden blasts of air conditioning from shops as she walked past their doors.

But she also missed not being able to wake to the delicate Iceland poppies outside her window and after a few days the pollution got to her – she wanted to smell the jasmine on the breeze instead.  She’d been in Sydney two weeks when Marcus rang to say, ‘The flowers are starting to look pretty droopy.  What should I do about them?’

‘You idiot!’ she cried.  ‘You’re supposed to be watering them!  If I come home and they’re dead I’ll murder you!’

After that Harriet figured she’d better get home as Marcus had probably forgotten how to turn on a hose.  That evening she began folding clothes into her suitcase.  Elsa sat on the bed, watching.

‘Why don’t you come home for a bit, love?’ Harriet asked her.  ‘We miss having you around.’

Elsa shook her head.  ‘It’s a war zone there.  You’re always shouting at each other.’

‘But that’s how it’s always been.  We don’t mean it.’

Elsa traced patterns on the bedspread, chewing her bottom lip.  Harriet wanted to explain that she loved the heat and fierceness of the arguments, but she didn’t think her daughter would understand.

‘Mum, I just think that … if you put as much work into your relationship with Dad as you do with your garden, you wouldn’t fight nearly as much.’

Harriet raised an eyebrow, then folded up a shirt precisely and put it neatly into the suitcase.

She lifts her head, listening.  A car has paused at the bottom of the hill, and now it’s driving off.  The postman.  She pushes herself off the floor, takes her hat from the hook near the door and steps outside.  The heat washes against her skin, but she sets off down the hill.

As Harriet reaches the letterbox and lifts its rusty lid, she thinks of the scene that happened a few days after Elsa’s phone call.  She was forking over the mulch near the roses.  Marcus drove through the gate on his motorbike then stopped it and watched her.  Soon, he yelled, ‘Why don’t you give it up, you stupid woman!  It’s your fault she’s not going to get married.  You didn’t watch out for her enough – you sent her to that bloody girls’ school so you could spend time on your garden and now look what’s happened!’

Harriet ignored him and continued to turn the straw.  He screamed again, ‘And if you don’t give it up soon I’ll poison it!’  He turned the ignition in the bike and revved off to the garage.

Harriet takes out the newspaper and bundle of letters held together with a rubber band, then hears a shout from down the road.  It’s Leslie, running clumsily towards her.  ‘Hello,’ Harriet says warily when he approaches.  ‘How are you?’

‘Me ute’s busted.  Run out of petrol.  Was wondering if I could borrow some of yours?  Just enough to get me home, of course.’

She frowns and bites her lip.  She knows she shouldn’t give him any – in fact, she can hear Marcus’ voice in her head telling her he wants the petrol to blow something up – but he is a neighbour, and if he isn’t lying then she can’t leave him stranded.

‘Alright,’ she says, noticing how red his face is, ‘but you’ll have to bring the drum back when you’ve finished.’  He’s effusive in his thanks and she detects a whiff of alcohol on his breath. 

They walk up the hill silently, though at the gate Leslie comments that the garden is nice.  For a moment Harriet thinks she’s going to tell him that Elsa rang the other day to announce she had a partner, whom she called her ‘soulmate’, and that the partner was female.  But the words slide back down her throat.

From the tin shed behind the house she gives him the plastic drum of petrol that’s used for the lawnmower.  He tells her he’ll be back in a minute.  Harriet nods and turns to leave, but something white in the corner of the shed catches her eye.  A hessian sack is draped loosely across it.  She walks over and pulls off the sack, then draws in her breath sharply.  It’s a drum full of weed killer.  And not the sort that she use, but something more concentrated.  She places her hand against the tin wall and blood rushes to her head.

By the time Marcus gets to the hill half an hour later, the house is in flames.  Leslie reels backwards and forwards behind the agapanthus, laughing and shouting in a high voice.  Behind him is a series of black, serrated sticks against a background of orange plumes.  Little shivers run over Harriet’s skin.  She can’t do anything except stand there.  The dogs, chained to the fence to keep them from dashing into the fire, bark insanely.  She stands at the gate, wiping away the ash that floats onto her cheeks.  The fire’s roaring is so loud that she can scarcely hear Marcus screaming and swearing at Leslie.

When the flames reach the lilies by the pond, Harriet can no longer hear anything.  She feels strangely still and quiet.  Her hand slips into the pocket of her shorts and twists the catch of the cigarette lighter.