Paper Daisies

by Kim Kelly

  ‘Oh yes.’ My smile is as irrepressible as my desire is murderous. ‘Typhoid? That is excellent. That is more than excellent.’ He will suffer as he dies. He will suffer as Libby did.

  Ling places the bottle on the table. ‘Be careful, lady. Do not get on your skin or the poison will get inside you too. Do not get the poison in your heart, this poison of vengeance, clean your heart of this, or you will follow after him. You understand what I say?’

  Not really, but I nod. I will understand. I will not get it on my skin and I will not carry this in my heart: we will be free. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

  ‘Be careful. You not sure, do not do this. Throw it away and do not do.’

  ‘I will, I will be careful and I will be sure.’ I promise him, a promise I can more than guarantee. ‘What do I owe you?’ I reach for the note in my pocket, torn as it is, it’s still a pound’s worth, and I reach for my precious watch in the other: he can have both if he wants them.

  But Ling holds up his hand again: ‘You don’t come back. I don’t know a lady, you don’t know a Ling.’

  ‘Of course.’ This transaction never took place.

  He smiles and pushes the tiny bottle of freedom towards me, but before I take it, I want to know, I must know: ‘How many women has Howell hurt?’

  ‘I do not know,’ Dr Ah Ling says to the bottle, and his eyes slide away out the door to my right. I follow them, and as I do I find the source of the sickly sweet fume: incense, clouds of it, coming from yet another hut, a tiny temple, not ten yards away, between the tobacco and the poppies, bundles of joss sticks burning at either side of its open front. The rough-cut boards of the temple walls are painted red, with twin copper lions of verdigris jade incandescent against them. I gasp: How did I fail to see that before?

  I look back at Ling. He continues to look away towards the temple. He does know something and deeply, I am sure: I can feel his vengeance is as close as mine, a sister, a niece, a daughter: someone he knows. Something that his honour and his religion will not allow him to divulge. Is this why Alec Howell didn’t want me coming here? I am too close to the truth in more ways than I know?

  A newspaper paragraph read on the train two weeks ago comes to me – two weeks ago when Alec Howell was last here – that glancing mention in the Evening News of the nameless girl gone missing at Hill End. Was she Chinese? Was she one of the girls?

  ‘The girl who was reported lost –?’ I begin to ask Ling.

  But he raises his hand again for me to be quiet, and then he nods, still staring at the temple.

  And I can’t be quiet: ‘Has she been found?’

  He nods again.

  Alec Howell’s predilection for molesting little yeller gals is littered through these hills and he remains unpunished; somehow untouchable. Such is the limit of Ah Ling’s reach and opportunity, the worthlessness of his word; such is the power of the district surgeon. And he is gathering in depravity the more his ambitions are realised. Whatever the precise details of his outrages committed quietly in this hidden backwater, it’s too late for Alec Howell to stem the consequences of it now. My own knowledge is truth enough. Conviction enough. I will be his justice.

  I clasp my fingers around the bottle and ask Dr Ah Ling one last question, one for my grandmother, for all the poppies cast across this Gold Country. ‘May I ask what brought you here, Dr Ling, to this place in the world?’ This elegant gentleman, with his joss sticks and his medicine and his utmost discretion, here in a tin hut on the wrong side of the Hill. Why?

  He smiles, with the trace of a chuckle on his breath: ‘My father sent me from Shanghai to get my brother to come home. This was twenty years ago. I can’t help brother Sung, so I help you.’

  ‘Well, I am very grateful you are here,’ I tell him. ‘More than I can say.’

  ‘Yes.’ He nods and he gives me a parting instruction: ‘Three drops, no less, on sweet food and throw the rest away. Throw it away in the ground or in the fire, not in the river. This poison is strong. Good luck to you.’

  ‘To you also.’ I wrap the bottle in my handkerchief and wedge it deep in the pocket of my skirt as the doctor ushers me out with a sweep of silk sleeve, closing the wire screen behind me.

  And outside, the sun is bright and hard and merciless.

  Ben

  ‘I don’t know about you, Mr Wilberry, but I am famished,’ she says as she steps out from the Chinaman’s hut.

  Her smile is glittering, casting diamonds all around and spinning me upside down with these changes in her mood. She is striding towards me and yet past me again for the buggy, smiling wide, up into the tops of the ribbon gums that tower behind me, drawing in the sky with her eyes.

  ‘Famished?’ I think I say, following the sway of her skirt as she nears.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Let’s have our lunch back in the gully, shall we, and fast?’

  ‘The gully?’ She stumps me again. She didn’t seem all that comfortable back there; I thought she might have been a bit spooked, but what would I know? I’m nodding, and thinking I wouldn’t mind taking a closer look at the alluvial grasses along the creek bed there – because I’m sure she’d find that terrifically interesting.

  ‘What’s your hurry now, Miss Jones?’ Buckley steps out from the side of the hut, where he’s been listening for any murmur of trouble through the joins in the tin sheeting there, while I remained here at the front, by the garden bed, in reach of the buggy and the pistol, it being far preferable in the eyes of the law that I shoot a man should one need to be shot. I try to catch Buckley’s eye before Miss Jones turns to him, but all I catch is the grim set of his mouth.

  ‘Hurry?’ she replies with a cheerful toss of her head; captain of the ladies’ tennis team: ‘I’m hungry, and I hope that’s not yet a crime, Buckley.’

  ‘Nope,’ he says bluntly, stamping after her, tight-shouldered. He seems annoyed; perhaps he heard something he shouldn’t have. I don’t blame him for listening, though; I would have, too, had it not been wiser for me to stay here.

  ‘Well, isn’t that a relief.’ Miss Jones smirks – at me, sharing her teasing of Buckley with me.

  She captivates me, thoroughly. And how light she now is; some weight appears lifted from her, perhaps some difficult question has indeed been answered by the Chinaman, perhaps something for her sister’s health procured, not that I’ll ask after anything like that again. I ask her instead: ‘So, you were successful then – you got what you came for?’

  ‘I did, in fact, yes,’ she says and her smile drives into me, lifting me somewhere above the trees.

  From habit, I hold my hand out to help her back into the vehicle, and this time she takes it. She presses her fingers into my palm and as I hand her up she looks down at me and my chest explodes in her diamonds.

  I tumble up after her; she moves across the seat to make room, continuing to smile at me, her face haloed by the brim of her boater, and for the first time I am sensibly and logically speechless. Who would not be lost? In this hope that I shall by some divine stroke be allowed to always be beside her. I am so alive in her gaze, I am … made something else altogether.

  ‘Oh, but we must stop first for that plant you wanted to see, mustn’t we?’ she says as Buckley moves us off. ‘The grevillea, was it? Crimson?’

  Was it? I hardly care in this moment. Something has shifted here, today, in me, again and deeper, something that cannot be reversed, as a bud once opened can never again be closed.

  Berylda

  I can’t stop myself. I want him too. Oh, how I do. Doesn’t this wanting quiver between us? So strong it is the pulse that moves cicada wings. This screaming song. I know that I am high with excitement, with anticipation, and, yes, with what can only be called lust. I am so high, I must have him too: Ben Wilberry.

  A real man. A good man. Just once, before I am ruined by worse sin. Before I make myself unworthy of love
of any kind.

  So I shall love him now. I am already sorry for what I do to him, but I shall do it anyway.

  Grasp at this slim and tender reed of happiness. Before it dies for all time.

  Ben

  ‘Do you play tennis?’ I ask her.

  And she says: ‘No. Why? Do you?’

  I say: ‘No – not me, far too clumsy.’

  And we laugh, and laugh. At nothing.

  She sits amidst a carpet of hill daisies on the low bank at the mouth of the gully, a colony of saffron lilies bobbing their heads in the breeze along the ridgetop at her back, the toes of her boots ochre dusted.

  ‘Hm!’ she says now, swallowing the last of her sandwich. ‘Cheese and quince paste – I do believe Mrs Wheeler makes the best quince paste I’ve ever tasted. Unnaturally excellent, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is.’ Even if I couldn’t disagree with Berylda Jones to save this gully bursting into flames. Watching her eat the sandwich has been unnaturally excellent enough.

  ‘What sort of daisy is this?’ She picks one of the tiny blooms at her side now, darting from one observation to the next, and I am slow in answering, caught once more by the sprig of crimson Grevillea lanigera in her hatband, the cutting she insisted I make for her as we left the Chinamen’s place. My own observations move dopily from her hatband to the daisy in her hand via the ivory ribbons threaded either side of the section of lacy embroidery set at the front of her blouse, and back along them to the hazel fire set inside the sky of her eyes. I look at her without reserve now, all of her, and she is asking me to with those eyes. She holds me with her eyes as I lie beside her on this carpet of flowers, as she asks me now: ‘Is it even a daisy?’

  ‘Yes, it is a daisy,’ I tell her, as easily as I am looking at her. Incredible. Sensational. ‘It’s a hill daisy,’ I tell her; suddenly suave about it, too, as though I had not been inept an hour ago, or indeed for the first twenty-seven years of my life. ‘Brachyscome. Common.’

  ‘Not an everlasting sort, I don’t suppose?’ She grins. Unnaturally delightful. ‘Is it even a native?’ she asks. ‘It looks like a daisy daisy, to me, you know – a real one – one a child might draw a smile inside.’ She laughs. She holds me in the softest petals of her laughter.

  ‘It is a real one, and it’s a native,’ I tell her; it is nothing short of magical. ‘It’s not an everlasting, though – these little ones only last a day or two.’

  ‘Only a day or two? All that work to make a flower, just for a day or two …’ She frowns into the daisy, studying it, and then she looks at me again. She studies me for what I hope will be eternity, before she says: ‘Kiss me, Ben Wilberry. I want you to kiss me. Now. Here.’

  I have not the slightest idea how I might kiss Berylda Jones, but something in me seems to know what to do. Somehow her rosemary scent guides me, my lips finding hers, and I kiss her on this carpet of hill daisies, with the saffron lilies looking down on us, and with the touch of her hand on my face. Her hand on my chest. She tastes of sweet quinces and black tea.

  Her hand slips into mine as she moves her face away as suddenly, springing up to her feet. ‘Show me all the flowers here, Ben. Show me all the flowers you can see – tell me what they are, each of them.’

  ‘All right.’ She pulls me up and along the ridge, and the weeping meadow grass is thick beneath our boots as I show her the red bush peas here, native bluebells and wild sorghum, tendrils of cobalt sarsaparilla cascading off a ledge. ‘So small,’ she says. ‘One would never know there were so many, the flowers are all so small.’ I would tell her the best things evidently are, I would tell her there were many much smaller, but that I find a rangy clump of endemic Helichrysum apiculatum, its hands of a dozen tiny golden pompoms each almost spent, and I have to bend to pluck a sprig of it for her, and tell her instead: ‘This is a daisy too. The most common of the everlastings, actually.’

  ‘Of course it’s a daisy, actually.’ She smirks at it, threading it through that lacy embroidery of her blouse, so that it sits above her left breast. ‘It looks precisely like a wattle to me.’

  It looks nothing like wattle, but I suppose it must to her.

  ‘And look,’ she says as we walk on, ‘there are some more of my wattle daisies over there, only it’s a shorter plant. I’m quite the expert now, aren’t I. Or is that just a bunch of dandelions?’ She eyes the plant she’s pointing at with playful suspicion. How could I have read her so wrongly? There seems no trace in her now of that serious, charging girl I met at that weird house in Bathurst. Is she not that girl at all? What is happening here? Has she changed, or have I?

  ‘Neither,’ I hear myself reply to the dandelion wattle daisy at her feet. ‘That plant is called button wrinklewort.’

  ‘No. It is not.’ She snorts; most unladylike: most lovely. ‘That is not a real name.’ She taps me on the arm with the tips of her fingers. ‘Does it give you wrinkles? Does it carry a curse of an old crone?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you that,’ I say, and I put on a bit of a stupid lecture hall voice for her. ‘But I can say that goats love the stuff. They’re eating it to extinction up and down the eastern seaboard. I’m having a bit of a battle over it with my superior at Melbourne, at present, actually, this very plant, amongst several others. He’s convinced it’s a weed. He’s convinced your wattle daisy is a weed too. He’s French.’

  ‘Oh!’ But she jumps away from me, and I’m not sure that she heard a word of what I just said: she’s waving madly at a bee that’s followed the apiculatum onto her blouse, turning her back to it to try to get away. ‘I hate blowflies. Dirty – fat –’

  ‘It’s only a bee.’ I smile, cupping it away from her.

  ‘A bee!’ She jumps again. A beautiful girl jumping away from a bee.

  ‘And it’s a native, too,’ I tell her. ‘It won’t hurt you at all, this one. It doesn’t have a sting. Native bees don’t.’ Which is fortunate, as this one is determined to hang about her.

  ‘No?’ She looks at it now, studying it too, as it hovers again over the flowerheads on her blouse, and she then watches it, curious, as it finally flies away. ‘Well, what do you know, a native insect that doesn’t have a sting – who has ever heard of such a thing?’

  I would tell her that there are native flowers that sting insects, too, but I can’t say anything more for a moment, dumbstruck with my own incomprehension: Did I truly kiss her on the bank just now? Or was that just a dream?

  ‘I’m sure it was only confused by your perfume,’ I say, and I’ve forgotten what we were talking about altogether.

  ‘My perfume?’ She is studying me once more.

  What am I talking about? Perfume. ‘Yes, what it is? Your scent, it’s …’

  ‘Oh, just some silly overpriced thing I had to have in Sydney, because … I can’t even remember why.’ She waves it away. ‘I thought it was pretty, but it’s just some bunch of weeds I don’t know anything about. It’s called Jicky. It’s French, too.’ She laughs again, kicking her feet now through the grass ahead of me, following the bee. ‘I wish I could take off my shoes and run barefoot.’

  ‘I won’t stop you,’ I say, and I say her name, too, for the first time out loud: ‘Berylda.’

  ‘Hm.’ She turns and studies me again, smiling. Sure. ‘Some other time, perhaps,’ she says, pressing the side of my hand with all of hers and my hand has never felt so small. ‘But we should go now. I should return to my sister, to Gret.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you should.’ I return to the world, the one that has others in it apart from the pair of us, or at least I attempt to. ‘We should get back.’

  It must be some time after two, I imagine; we’ve stayed here so long. I look down at the old man Buckley in the shade of the gully wall opposite, flicking the last of his smoke into the billy coals before kicking dust over them, stamping them out.

  Berylda turns again and darts back down the ban
k without me. As I follow, I smile into the shape left by her hand upon mine, and I am a small boy balancing along the top of a wall, risking all with every step and wilfully. Because I am alive. I am so alive with her.

  Berylda

  He points out koalas and gang-gang cockatoos high in the trees along the way back into Hill End and I see none of them, it’s all grey against greyish green-grey to me, a flicker of tangerine head feathers just missed, and I laugh with the rough and lively shouting of the birds above us, the splashing of the cartwheels through puddles, and I allow myself to enjoy it, the sounds of this make-believe happiness, brief as it must be.

  Before we sight the first cottages of the town, I reach for his hand again, and I pull him towards me again. I must, as if some magnetic influence drives me to. I cannot push this wanting away. I feel the crack in his bottom lip against mine and I caress it with my kiss, just for the barest moment, no more than our faces meeting with a sweet bump in the road, the tingling brush of his beard, soft, warm, that sort of beard which might be clipped short or might merely be the result of his neglect to shave, impossible to say. And then I look away from him again, with all my terrible thoughts. My desire for him, for this one fleeting chance to be free with him, overlays a need to test my nerve, my skill at deceit: Can I make Ben Wilberry love me? Tonight? This one night that might be ours. A whisper in the darkness that none but us will hear or know. As no one must ever know what I will do tomorrow at Bellevue. Our hands are held hidden under the folds of my skirt at our hips; his large, warm hand around my bruised one; the bottle of poison lies hidden there too. Can I dare love him? Just this once? Before …

  ‘Berylda,’ he whispers to me now, his breath so gentle and warm against my ear. ‘Berylda, does this mean …?’