Paper Daisies

by Kim Kelly

  Nothing has happened to Mr Wilberry.

  But the weather is changing. The bright tops of fat silver clouds are rising above the hills behind us, coming up from the south, promising a squall. Oh jolly good, it’s going to rain, and we’ll have a river for a track and bogs to contend with, too.

  Hurry up, Mr Wilberry.

  But Buckley’s call goes on: ‘Cooee! ’

  ‘Honestly,’ Mr Thompson sidles up to me, with his stale tobacco breath and crumbs in his beard, staring down his long nose at me, so convinced of himself. ‘He’ll only have forgotten all about us. He does that – loses himself in the bush. He’s quite at home here, Miss Jones. Quite secure in the natural world.’ The sarcasm of this man makes me want to slap his face, to leave him in no doubt as to how handsome I find it. ‘You’re not worried about Wilber, are you?’ he asks, large, round eyes blinking grey crystal scorn.

  ‘Worried? Why should I be worried?’ The scritch in my voice is high and hard enough to shred stone, and turn from him to attend to the mess of our picnic remains. ‘We must get away, that’s all I’m worried about.’ I shake the last drops in the wine bottle onto the grass: Mr Thompson drank it all bar the sip each the rest of us had. Needed it to wash down those three pieces of cake, didn’t you, Fatso.

  But he’s not drunk. He’s turned from me, too, and is packing Mr Wilberry’s botanical paraphernalia into his haversack, muttering as he does: ‘And for a moment there, dear, I thought you cared.’

  ‘What did you say?’ I snap and challenge.

  ‘Merely talking to myself, Miss Jones. Talking to myself.’ He shrugs again, folding his own sketchbook away.

  I glare at him, to let him be sure I heard exactly what he said. How dare you presume that I don’t care. I never don’t care. But he doesn’t look up from his buckling of straps. He stuffs another pipe when he’s done, and stares down the river.

  ‘Cooee! ’

  Instead of thumping Mr Thompson on the shoulder as I’d like to, I snap at my sister once more, as we begin folding the picnic blanket: ‘No – take the corners this way.’ I shake it at her, hurting my own sore shoulder as I do, and just as the breeze whips into gusts and tears one side of the blanket from her hand. ‘Oh, come on, Gret.’ I scowl as the light falls and falls and the bush closes in. The hills range higher, tighter, around us, and the rising clouds above them are bright bruises filling the sky; a rumble of thunder and a burst of low sun flashes over us all, picking out each leaf lurid against the bruises, picking out the blood of the great tree and making it run.

  ‘Ahoy!’ Mr Thompson shouts now, and when I look back at him I see he is jogging into the wind. To Mr Wilberry.

  ‘Mr Wilberry!’ Greta might run, too, if I didn’t have her by the blanket corners.

  Of course, there he is, looking just as he did when he left, just as he did throughout my thoughts: a man walking along a riverbank. Conversing with Buckley about something, pointing back to the west, now turning, to see his friend jogging towards him. Mr Thompson is not a man used to such physical exertion: he half-stumbles as he runs. He was worried about Mr Wilberry, too, then.

  Irritation scrapes at me. How dare Mr Wilberry make me care so much. I call into it: ‘Hurry up – hurry up, it’s going to rain!’

  The three men stare at me for a moment – is she insane? – before Buckley waves and breaks off from them to attend to Sal. My face is scalding me with – what is this strange rage? This strange palpitating of my heart?

  It is the storm. Only the storm. How I hate storms. Thunderstorms: there it goes again, rolling up through my bones.

  ‘Ouch – Ryl, what’s the matter with you!’

  I have trod on Greta’s toe, pushing over her to heave the basket back up into the buggy.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and I am sorry in every way, but the thunder comes yet again, and I am wild: ‘Get in, Gret – now. The storm.’

  Mr Wilberry calls out something to Buckley but it is lost to me on the wind – the force of which I am fighting as I try to raise the canopy of the buggy against it. ‘Help me, Gret!’

  ‘Don’t fret, Miss Berylda, we’ll make it,’ Buckley assures me, chuckling rumble under his brim, winking at Gret. ‘There’s only about three and half drops of rain to them clouds, I reckon. We won’t be washed away today.’

  No, of course we won’t. I know this. We have been here before. But even so I hold my breath as we watch our visitors take the crossing, the hooves of the stallions ringing on the pebbles, and then they’re quickly up to their knees in the river, and I don’t let this breath out until I see they are well past the middle, and making their way up the other side. Just as Sal takes it and us with her and Greta knocks against me: ‘Oh but I love the sound of wheels through water.’

  She loves all of it: lightning, thunder, this gale steadily unpinning the coil of her plaits, strands of hair whipping against her happy face. Her arms are held wide around the rails, as mine are held fast to edge of the seat, my knuckles white.

  As thunder shakes the air again, a rumble that goes on and on. I look up the steep incline ahead, one which will go on and on, these last few miles, all the way to Hill End. Mr Wilberry and Mr Thompson are already out of sight around the bend. Hurry up, Sal, I dare to take one hand from the seat to grasp the losing-half wishbone in my pocket, but I know our little mare can’t go any faster. She snorts hard to say she’d like to but Buckley won’t let her. ‘Whoa, Sally, whoa,’ he warns her and warns her.

  And the thunder continues to rumble and crack, rainless, so that I’m waiting for lightning to split a tree and start a rampaging fire next. I am held and surprised by how much I hate this. This endless bashing through the bush. Did I hate it as a girl with Papa at the reins? I don’t remember it being so, but I can’t be sure. I glance back out of the small round window in the canopy for the great tree, but it is gone, as the river is gone too. All is the bush: even the trees close in together here.

  ‘Whoa, girl!’ Buckley pulls Sal up suddenly, veering right with a sickening crunch of branches through spokes. ‘Whoa!’

  The thunder is growing louder. ‘What?’ I almost scream it. The thunder is bearing down on us. ‘What?’ Can it be?

  ‘Steady girl,’ Buckley is warning Sal again more urgently, a note of fear in his voice too, I’m sure of it.

  Because it’s not thunder but another party, careering down upon us.

  There is no room here for another vehicle to pass. To pass us it must crash through forest or rock or take to the air.

  Why, oh why did I choose the Bridle Track? Picnic? Greta and I shall find our freedom in annihilation any moment.

  ‘Oh Ryldy.’ Her arms are tight around me now.

  And I hold her as tight to me.

  As we wait for the collision.

  We hold each other as we watch the hooves smashing down through the dust towards us, and I am too stuck in terror to look away. It is a hundred-hooved demon of dust.

  But there is no vehicle behind it.

  The riders pass us in a single file, without breaking their gallop, without acknowledgement of any kind, only a savage urging of their horses.

  ‘Yar! Yar!’

  ‘C’mon!’

  ‘Gorn! Yar gorn!’

  Three or four of them, I could not tell.

  Buckley turning to us: ‘It’s all right, misses, yous are all right.’ He brushes a hand through the air, a signal to us to keep where we are and keep steady, and he’s warning Sal once more and firmly: ‘Wait, girl, wait.’

  What are we waiting for?

  Two mounted policemen in pursuit. Naturally. This is Hill End. The journey would not be complete without encountering a gang of bushrangers and a couple of troopers flying down the Turon Gorge after them, would it? One of the policemen touches his cap as he passes as if to say good afternoon.

  And my afternoon wouldn’t be c
omplete without Mr Wilberry galloping down behind them, pulling up as he finds us, Jack rearing and tossing his mane; man and beast as one with the question: ‘Is everyone all right? Are you safe?’

  In a more incredible world where great trees do truly pluck miscreants up from river crossings, I might be.

  ‘Yes,’ says Buckley. ‘We’re right. Other feller good, your Mr Thompson?’

  ‘Oh, he’ll live.’ Mr Wilberry replies and begins to ask Buckley, ‘But what in the –’ His nostrils flaring as Jack’s, he’s ready to gallop on in pursuit at a word.

  Buckley shrugs: ‘Dunno. Only young fellers – thieving maybe, or most likely fighting. Must’ve got up someone’s nose properly to have the coppers after them, anyway, aye.’ Our Buckley, so steady himself, you’d think he stared down sudden death every day.

  ‘Well, as long as there’s no harm done here, I suppose …’ Mr Wilberry looks at me; smiling, tentatively, searchingly. Looking to see that we are still friends.

  ‘No harm whatever,’ says Gret beside me, squeezing me around the waist quickly and with mischief before drawing her arms away. ‘I’m sure that by the time we’re at dinner we’ll all find that was a great load of terrific, won’t we?’ She is exhilarated by the whole thing, of course.

  ‘Ha!’ Mr Wilberry smiles at her – briefly.

  Before returning his smile to me. An open smile. A forgiving and insistent one that is asking me directly: ‘Yes?’

  I don’t know what to do with my own face any more than I know how to answer his hopeful question; but I barely have the chance to consider either before Mr Wilberry’s attention suddenly shifts elsewhere, somewhere into the bush behind me.

  He dismounts and hands his reins to Buckley. ‘Would you mind? I’ll just be a – excuse me. Callistemon – ah, won’t be a moment.’

  As he leaves us to stalk his floral prey just beyond these roadside trees, Buckley chuckles again to himself: ‘Funny feller.’ I can’t reply to that either, predominantly because I have just become aware how close we are to the edge of a chasm here, and that Mr Wilberry has grasped a too-spindly trunk to lean out over it from a rocky ledge for … Is that a banksia he’s plucking from that raggedy scrub? The man would risk his life for a common ratty scrap of banksia bush?

  ‘Oh Ryldy, look – look, it’s a bottlebrush. A golden bottlebrush. Painted on the sky. How lovely is that!’ Greta cries as he holds his prize up to show us. ‘Look at that colour,’ my sister shouts, soprano soaring around the walls of the gorge. ‘I’ve never seen a golden bottlebrush before.’

  ‘Hm,’ is the best response I can utter, and I don’t see the delicate gilt quills of the bottlebrush, don’t see them at all, or the very lovely way he is smiling at my sister now as he gives her one of the flowers she is reaching across me for, explaining: ‘It’s an alpine species. I was hoping to see one in the field, and here we have it. What a day this is.’ I don’t smell the salt of his sweat drifting to me from soft, crumpled calico sleeve, or see his effortless lope back into the saddle, either. The sinking sun has parted the clouds now and blinds me.

  It stays in our eyes for most of the rest of the way up, and I am glad of the sting of the empty tears it forces. I never want to see this most excellent man again.

  ‘You’re not feeling unwell again, are you, Ryl?’

  ‘No, darling – just a bit weary.’

  So very weary. This cruelty is too much, a labyrinthine trap that lengthens and shifts by the moment. Transform me then, too, so that I might be as cruel, to find our way through. I am not in this place to love. I am in this place to find the means to kill. I look into the hills, into the mine entrances peppered all around their blank-faced slopes now, the timber lintels of all our many portals into hell.

  The Hill

  Untroubled, scornful, outrageous—that is how wisdom wants us to be:

  she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.

  Thus Spake Zarathustra

  Ben

  ‘What a sad little shitter is this End of the Earth,’ Cos says as we sight what I take for the main street.

  And continue to ignore him. The light is dimming, the sun well behind the ridge that sits over the town, but it dims nothing of the place: a dogleg of pubs and faded shop awnings advertising their wares along with their inventive approaches to architecture. There would not be a square in any joint here but by accident, I’ll bet. The whole town is an accident, of the rushes, now half-forgotten, and more than half the shops appear permanently closed, boarded up, just as several huts on the rather less colourful dogleg in looked abandoned and half-scavenged of their tin and timbers, bark roofs long gone. The yard we are passing now is bounded by wire-strung pickets lurching drunkenly in want of a nail, and all that stands in the yard is a brick chimney – all that’s left of whoever once dwelt there. Extraordinary to think that, not so long ago, no further back in human history than the year I was born, this would have been one of the richest places on earth, teeming with optimism, but there’s not a street lamp to be seen as testament to it today.

  ‘You just let me know when I’m supposed to be glad I almost died for the privilege of being here, won’t you.’ Cos is sniffing the air, discerning that the stale manure pervading beneath the wood smoke is both equine and otherwise. Not too much indoor plumbing around this place, by the strength of it.

  I laugh, and finally respond: ‘You did not nearly die. Though I’m sure in a town like this arrangements could be made …’

  Cos stares at me, and he does look half-dead. I should congratulate him for making it to our destination, but he’s not dead enough yet to stop whingeing: ‘And I suppose you’re happy to be here, are you?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I am.’ Apart from wanting to explore what I can of the terrain tomorrow, there’s something about the impermanence of these sorts of mining towns that cheers me: nothing Man could ever do can last forever. We’re as ephemeral as gold strikes themselves; the bald and slaggy hilltops all around us will recover one day, too.

  ‘Must you be so vomitously happy about it, though? You did almost kill me, you know. In fact, this is the worst thing you’ve ever done to me. You do know that, don’t you.’

  ‘I’ve done this to you?’ For the hundredth time I remind him: ‘You didn’t have to come.’

  ‘Oh, yes I did,’ he mutters.

  And I return to ignoring him, leave him to grumble around all his weird anxieties. He was never in any danger; our horses are too well trained and dauntless – they were never going to startle in the gorge or bolt when those tearaways came down on us. But I am probably a bit annoyingly cheerful, it’s true, and weirdly so. Or perhaps settled is the better word. Saner than I have felt for some time, perhaps; possibly ever. Berylda Jones might despise me, or she might think nothing of me – that would represent little deviation from my general experience with women – but I came to realise on my solitary walk along the Turon that it’s quite beside the point what she thinks of me.

  In the first instance, I have discovered what I am fairly certain is a new species of native daisy, and that is something to be very cheerful about, no matter what she or Cos or anyone else might think of it, or what name I give to it. Whatever it is, it will entirely justify my absence from the university this time, too. Professor Jepson will be nicely pleased when he is informed of both the discovery and my intention to return to Melbourne directly after my explorations at Manildra – I’ll be back within the month – the sooner to get a paper out on the find and then get back to the work that the whole faculty would much prefer I apply myself to: collaborating with the Board of Agriculture on the development of that science as a university degree course. While maintaining whatever influence I might exert on the classification of so-called ‘native weeds’, and all in good time before lectures resume. So Dubois can despise me all he likes, and to no effect.

  In the second instance, and of more se
rious consideration than anything else, Berylda Jones is in some jeopardy. I don’t know what it is, but on my walk I listened and relistened to our conversation, and there is something there. Something wrong. As much as she made her lack of affection for her uncle clear, I am sure she withheld as much as she revealed about him. About this conflict between them, the conflict in her. She is determined that she and her sister will be independent of her uncle; why? Odious as he is, why eschew the comforts and connections that man might afford her? Then there is the sister’s painting, of the river sprite tethered into the tree, it comes back and back to me, haunting indeed, as does the image of the bruise blooming across the back of Berylda’s hand. There is a picture to be made of these pieces, a picture yet obscured. A most unhappy one, I am sure.

  And in the third and simplest instance, Berylda Jones has suffered a terrible amount of misfortune and grief in her young life. Little wonder she frowns. It is arrogance to imagine she frowns specifically at me. She does not know it yet, but she is alone no longer: I will help her in any way I can. I will be her friend.

  ‘Whoa, ahead,’ Buckley calls from behind us, catching up as we have slowed, and I see the awning of our final resting place: WHEELER’S FAMILY HOTEL emblazoned in carnival lettering propped along the length of the rusting tin roof that’s nevertheless bordered with a wooden frieze of blue ocean waves. The building itself is painted yellow – an eye-watering yellow even in this light. This is an establishment one could not fail to notice, or wonder at its displacement from the seaside amusement pier it surely belongs to. What a fantastic wreck of a thing it is.

  ‘Well, blow me down,’ says Cos, livening a fraction. ‘It’s the tart shop at the End of the Earth.’

  ‘And you’d know, wouldn’t you.’ I laugh as the buggy overtakes us, and the sister, Greta, wonders almost in my ear: ‘Where have all the people gone?’

  I don’t hear Buckley’s reply to her, but I look up this crooked street again: little sign of life but for the puffing chimneys and a bored dog wandering from side to side, sniffing the dirt – no, actually, that’s a goat. Eerie, as though the Wild West Rodeo has just left town, taking every cowboy with it. But then, it is New Year’s Day, isn’t it – perhaps the miners who live here are sleeping off last night and couldn’t be bothered with Federation either. More than past it now myself. I yawn, and as I do I hear the creak of boards outside the pub. I look around, back to the verandah, and find myself looking right into the round, ruddy face of a man stepping up on a ladder, to light the lamp under the awning.