Trick of the Light

by Laura Elvery

  Marlee waited, at the cash register, for Geraldine’s question to come.

  But other people – Milford locals and tourists who brought their children to holiday each summer at the calm water – seemed to appear at the bakery. All of a sudden those customers made up their minds, too, about what they wished to buy.

  Geraldine picked up her drink. ‘That night in the yard seems so long ago now!’

  ‘I hope Emmett is okay,’ Marlee said.

  Stepping unsteadily backwards to let another customer through, Geraldine touched a hand to her temple.

  At the end of her shift Marlee untied her apron, folded it into her bag, picked up a loaf to take home for her mother, and pushed on the door of the bakery. The air was hot. Summer wasn’t over yet. There was still a month left.

  Cold Springs

  Lily doesn’t know what to wear but she’s already late. She searches the clothes on her floor until she finds jeans and a black and white striped tee. So she puts those on and goes out to the lounge room and asks her mum what she thinks. Great, is what her mum says, as if surprised to be asked. Really lovely. She asks what time it all starts, and Lily grimaces.

  ‘Chelsea and Tim are already there. I missed the bus they were on.’

  ‘Will you be back in time for the baby?’ Her mother lies on the couch, a glass of water within reach. Lily’s parents are babysitting for her cousin, who’s in town for a wedding. No infants allowed in the Sapphire Marquee of the Cold Springs City Golf Club.

  ‘Not sure.’ Lily pauses at the door, noting her mum’s pale form. ‘Do you need anything …?’

  Her mum waves her away. ‘I’m fine.’

  At the bus stop Lily fishes two plastic rings out of her bag and a necklace to clip on. She pushes her hair to the right, over her shoulder. She hails the bus and buys a return ticket from the driver. Printed on a card next to his fare machine is a sign: WORLD’S MOST AWESOME BUS DRIVER. He snaps off the ticket, pretending to read the destination printed there. ‘Good for you,’ he says. ‘Young people, like you, getting into it.’

  Soon she’s stepping off the bus with a dozen others, spotting Tim first and then Chelsea. At one point Lily had vague ideas about pressing things with Tim, about flirting more. She’d considered fashioning Chelsea into the shape of a cuddled-up best friend. But neither of those – not free and easy high school girlfriend, nor devout sharer of secrets – suits her right now.

  They hug and join the crowds marching, yelling, laughing towards Town Hall. At the front are people with signs and flags, chanting. The Grandmas With Grenades group and the Farmers Free Action Coalition and the Lock The Gate people. Half a dozen boys in footy jerseys and green and gold caps joke, wave their signs half-heartedly. Lily recognises their embarrassment.

  The first speaker is a woman in a suit who says she met with ministers in Canberra about the earthquakes and came home with ‘binders and binders filled with bullshit’. An old man in a brown vest stands at the microphone to recall coming across a ‘hug of wombats’ who had died from contaminated bore water. Chelsea yells the loudest. Mr Lowe from their high school steps back from a stall selling cold drinks and asks Lily how her mother is. Before she got sick, her mum used to protest alongside Mr Lowe’s wife.

  Afterwards, Lily, Chelsea and Tim collapse into seats two rows from the back of the bus. It shoots towards the suburbs where dozens of apartment blocks have been built, looking at once strange and also completely at home in the new Cold Springs. In town, the rec centre has a new roof and proper air conditioning. Lily’s high school got a makeover – a multi-purpose hall was built and the football oval was resurfaced. Way beyond their school’s sporting fields, the drilling rigs are statues of light against the burnt-sugar sunset.

  ‘So your mum still has actual cancer?’ Tim asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ Lily says. ‘Ovarian.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Tim fixes his gaze out the window of the bus. ‘Fucking cancer, hey.’

  ‘The whole thing sterilises the land,’ Chelsea says, reading a flyer. She slashes her hand across the air. Sterile. ‘All that waste? It spills out.’

  As shops flash past, Lily is reminded of the video clip that Chelsea sent her last week, with CCTV footage of a woman shoplifting from a convenience store. She saw how the thief pretended to weigh up decisions in her mind, as if checking packets for ingredients or the logo about not testing on animals. The video ran for five minutes, the shoplifter stepping back and forth between the makeup and a stand of birthday cards where she crouched to drop tubs of moisturisers, mascara, lipsticks, a heavy plastic bottle. Lily watched the teenager behind the counter scanning cigarettes and boxes of cereal, never once looking up to notice the woman’s bag fattening. The video ended with an appeal for public information, emphasising that this was a family business, with the loss estimated at four hundred dollars.

  ‘That shoplifting video,’ Lily says. ‘Why’d you send me that?’

  Chelsea shrugs. ‘It was mesmerising, like, Quit while you’re ahead, lady! She just kept on stealing the fucking makeup. Didn’t you think it was mesmerising?’ She presses the bell for the next stop.

  Lily noticed the pretend-urgency in the woman’s movements and the murmurs at her lips. Going through the motions, even for herself. If someone had seen her it would have looked as though she planned to buy them all along. I’ve had this one before. I’ll try it again.

  ‘What video?’ Tim asks.

  ‘Everyone’s turning on each other,’ Chelsea says.

  Months earlier, Lily had sat in Chelsea’s bedroom, watching her copy and paste notes off the internet about stocking up on tinned food and batteries. Worry had trundled through Lily. She tried to push herself through it.

  Chelsea motions for Tim to hop up with her. ‘Not to sound dramatic,’ she says, ‘but it’s true. Call me later?’

  The bus almost empty now, Lily reads the text messages from her mum that say the baby, Pearl, has arrived. Then: the baby is gorgeous. The baby has vomited. The baby is sucking Bear-Bear’s nose. The baby is going to adore Lily. The baby is going for a walk with Lily’s dad while they wait for her to come home.

  She glances up at a man standing in the aisle at the end of her seat, all grey in trackpants and a sweatshirt rolled up to the elbows. He’s older than her dad, but not by much, and Lily smiles at him, the way she’s been taught to smile at people who have something wrong with them even if you can’t tell what it is.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, his voice licking itself on the lo.

  ‘Hi.’ Lily turns back to the window, willing him gone. Irritation creases her face at the thought of Chelsea and Tim’s absence.

  Then the man is beside her, dropping into the seat. His left arm, the one closer to the aisle, rests on the bar in front. She’ll be trapped now, listening to his story, giving him a couple of bucks. Four or five stops to go.

  ‘Had a good day?’ he asks. He slides his hand into his right pocket, a sliver of fabric between his thigh and hers. Chelsea took a steak knife to Lily’s jeans right after she bought them, piercing the denim above and below the knee, drawing out the cotton entrails with her fingers.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ Lily says, propped up by politeness.

  Even when the man’s hand in his right pocket starts moving, like he’s searching for something, and even when she realises, as she excuses herself over his knees and stumbles down the steps of the bus onto the verge and tries to force the air into a useful shape around her, that the man, who watched her with a dirty, breathy smile, was masturbating, right there beside her, all the way from Urquhart Avenue through the suburbs with their sickening brown lawns and tethered dogs leaving paw prints on soil that belongs to the CSG company, all the way to Richmond Street, four blocks from her house, Lily is nothing but polite. As the bus drives off, she swallows the panic attack she recognises she’s having: that stuck-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean feeling among
the letterboxes and the flame trees and the suffocating sky.

  She makes it home, forcing air in through her nose and out her mouth. She stands in the driveway and watches the house. She cannot go inside yet. She will have to face her parents and the baby and not go straight to her room: better to wait here. She rests a hand on the Toyota, driven less and less by her mum now. Last year, after yet another chemo session, Lily woke to find the house empty. The car was in the garage, so she knew her mum had kept her promise not to drive anywhere. Lily stood on the verandah, checking her watch. Hours later a taxi pulled up to the kerb and her mum kicked the door open and eased herself out of the front passenger seat, acknowledging Lily – now running towards her – with a wave.

  ‘Sorry, love, I got caught up.’

  ‘Mum, I thought you had died.’

  ‘Oh, love, no.’ She shifted shopping bags along her arms. ‘There was this man in the train station, a busker. He did all these Bob Dylan covers, but he was better than Bob Dylan. Don’t know if it was the acoustics or maybe just his talent.’ She led Lily back up the steps to the front door, wiping her shoes theatrically, unnecessarily. To go shopping she had worn a long-sleeved blue dress, in spite of the heat.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I filmed it, see, and told him I was going to upload it to Facebook. Maybe Bob Dylan will see him and he’ll be discovered.’

  ‘Do you really think Bob Dylan gives a shit about some busker?’

  ‘But he was so good. He was better.’ Her mother set half a dozen kisses on the side of Lily’s face. She squirmed away.

  ‘Jesus. Stop.’

  Her mum froze, her pinky-pale skin flushing. She used to have long red hair that was for Lily to curl in her fingers and gaze at.

  ‘See?’ her mum said finally. She pulled out her phone. ‘I filmed it. Just press play.’

  ‘No. He probably wished you’d go away. He probably thought you were weird.’ Without meaning to, she glanced up at her mum’s headscarf.

  Her mother clamped her lips tight, seeming to burn. ‘Maybe he took pity on a sick old woman like me. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘You didn’t answer your phone. I thought you had died.’

  Lily is late now. She takes the steps two at a time and finds her father in the kitchen, pulling a beer from the fridge. He kisses her forehead and asks if she’s okay. He rests the beer there, a joke, to cool her down. He offers her a sip and ushers her onto the carpet where her mother holds Pearl in her lap, the baby gnawing on a ring of plastic keys. Lily’s father puts his arm around her. He motions towards the baby.

  ‘You used to be that big. I could carry you like this – right here with me. Safe as houses.’

  Her mother is holding the sleeping baby on her chest. Lily watches them breathe – her mum and Pearl. Behind them, her father works quietly to clean the kitchen. He motions for Lily to sit with her mother.

  Nobody wants to move the baby to the travel cot that’s set up in the study. Her mum explains that she made up the mattress and put a stuffed bunny in the corner, but they say no stuffed toys in beds for babies anymore, so she moved it sentinel on the carpet beneath the cot. She had found Lily’s old sheets, the pale green set with the clowns.

  ‘Do you remember?’

  Lily recalls the fuzz of flannelette sheets in winter, the electric blanket hot on the backs of her legs. ‘I remember giraffes, not clowns. Poor Pearl – clowns are scary.’

  ‘All those memories. Everything comes back.’ Her mother shakes her head a little. ‘But also, strangely, nothing comes back.’

  Her mum keeps saying weird things. Ever since the cancer, she’s been obsessed with remembering the time when Lily was young. Lily makes herself small among the cushions. She balls up her hand and snugs it inside her mother’s palm, trying to be still.

  But how physical is Lily’s desire for a fight.

  ‘How was the protest today?’ her mum asks. ‘You used to come to those things with me, helped me carry my signs.’

  Lily scoffs. ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘They’ll just do what they want with the land and the water, hey? It won’t change a thing whether Chelsea and Tim and me, or Mr Lowe or the mayor were there today.’

  ‘I thought we were having a nice chat.’

  ‘What’s the point of anything?’ Lily asks.

  ‘The baby doesn’t ask what’s the point?, do you, Pearly?’

  ‘And once it’s out, it’s out.’ Chelsea’s word: sterile. Other words: water table. Waste water. Chemical concentrations. Benzene. Xylene. Paclitaxel. Docetaxel. Cisplatin. Carboplatin. Lily’s mum texts people during her hospital stays to ask how they are coping with all the stress in town, smiling big when she gets visitors. Lily thinks her mother could save a lot of energy if she stopped trying to win at everything and everyone. Her mum has never gotten better, only worse. Only the same. ‘No offence, but you and your signs made no difference.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Her mother’s eyes are wet as she fondles Pearl’s toes, nested in the jumpsuit. ‘Wonder what they’re doing now at the wedding.’

  For an instant Lily wants to tell her about the man on the bus. But she stops herself. Too humiliating. Too fearsome. Waste of time. She will keep it a secret from everyone. It’s as though someone has cut out the man from the bus and fixed him to her insides.

  She’s almost crying. She sits up and runs her fingertips up and down her mum’s arm.

  Her mother shuts her eyes. ‘Oh, I love that.’

  ‘Remember,’ Lily says, ‘when Dad got a speeding ticket on our way to Uncle Bill’s wedding? And I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to tell people, so I announced it at the church – Hey, everyone. Dad got pulled over! – and he was so embarrassed.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘You were furious.’

  Pearl opens her mouth, maybe searching for milk, kissing the air. ‘Tell me a secret,’ Lily hears her mother beg. ‘Pearl and I won’t tell. Look. It’s just between us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m your mum and you used to tell me everything. Before there were boys, you used to tell me all your secrets.’

  Lily stops tickling and releases her other fingers from her mother’s hand. ‘There are no boys. That isn’t a thing.’

  ‘What about Tim? He’s a boy. You being careful?’

  ‘Mum, we’re just friends.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she hisses. ‘That’s all I care about.’

  Lily stares at the baby. Pearl’s lips are a rosy fruit. For a few seconds it takes her mind off things.

  ‘Is he good to you?’

  ‘He’s not my husband. He doesn’t have to be good to me.’ Lily sees her mum’s horror. ‘But, yes. He is.’

  Lily touches her mother’s blanched skin and lightly feathered scalp. She doesn’t wear the scarves anymore – she used to, in the early days, when she still went to big rallies.

  ‘He’s not anything. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Tim?’ Lily feels tricked into saying his name.

  Her mother says softly, ‘You think he’s something, but he’s not even a blip. This boy, that boy, it doesn’t even matter.’

  What matters are the flames and the heat and the road trains out on the highways that are impossible to pass at night. It’s the farmers selling up and the farmers killing themselves, quietly, while their wives drive to town to shop for Christmas presents. It’s the chemicals injected into her mother’s veins, teeming in her blood.

  ‘Here.’ She lifts Pearl from her chest. ‘Your turn. I need to lie down.’

  In mid-air, Pearl’s arms and legs jerk outwards, then curl back into themselves. She starts to whimper.

  ‘Is it time for a bottle?’ Lily asks, but her mother is already stepping around the coffee table, untying her fisherman pants
on the way to bed.

  Eh eh eh. Pearl fusses.

  ‘Doug?’ her mother calls from the bedroom.

  ‘Mum needs you. Dad?’

  When no answer comes, Lily eases off the couch and carries Pearl out onto the front verandah to look for her dad there. She closes the screen door behind her.

  A tremor.

  It shivers through her body, like car sickness. The earthquakes in Cold Springs once seemed so frightening, so cinematic. But now they don’t amount to much.

  ‘Coming, Michelle,’ her father yells inside. ‘Hon? Did you feel that?’

  In the distance, the flames from the wells look like solar flares rising up from crystal columns of lights. Beyond the horizon, the man on the bus wanders the aisles. He lurches from seat to seat, from secret-keeper to secret-keeper. And the secret of Cold Springs is not a secret at all, but something under the ground that is so huge it’s easier to be mesmerised by it all, to never wonder at what it would mean to just stop. Quit while they’re ahead.

  The earthquake subsides. Under the silk of the Sapphire Marquee, champagne glasses will have stopped chiming.

  ‘Pearl,’ Lily whispers. ‘Did you feel that?’ In the air, a somersaulting heat. The palm trees in the front yard sway.

  They say the Cold Springs boom could last for one hundred years. Lily studies the curled-up baby slipping once again towards sleep. In one hundred years, Pearl will be an old woman, back to her purees, in the scar-tissue white light of a nursing-home sunroom. A carer will be tethered close, patting her hand, talking loudly and slowly about the land and the sky beyond the window.

  Lily pictures the boom ending like a dying star.

  But that takes millions of years. So she pictures it decaying like cancer, which is still years, yes, but unmistakable.

  Brushed Bright Bones

  One thing people don’t understand about reincarnation is that it’s not about whether you’re good or bad, it’s about whether you’re interesting. And I just keep coming back.