The World Without Us

by Mireille Juchau

  Later, like most of Tess’s clothes, the dress was passed to Pip. How many times had she worn it? Once on Fair Day – the raspberry slushie stain had remained. And again, on the day the test results had shown Tess was not a match for Pip. Tess had stood in the hospital ward and stared at the dress as if the stain was her own useless betraying blood.

  Now she approaches her father’s desk. His coat on a nearby stool. She shuffles over, slips his wallet into her jeans as he turns.

  Tomorrow, he says, is two years since Pip died. Time just passes so differently, you notice?

  Tess breathes in so sharply she goes faint with guilt. She feels empty, and thinks of her mother, wandering with that empty pram. She hears the hallway clock, a sound she’d hated on those nights with Pip, willing the morning to come faster than time permitted. She’d look through her window at the stars and name them for her sister. The names had come from The Star Book, which had on its cover whirling pools of light. At some point Tess noticed how certain nebulae resembled some pictures her parents were given, of leukaemia cells under magnification. After that she could not look at the Angel or the Eagle Nebula, or any of the stellar nurseries, without thinking of her sister’s decreating blood.

  Will they go up to the Red Crest for the anniversary? That’s where Pip is buried. What happens two years after? Is it like a birthday, marked every year? Or do the rituals change? Birthday is wrong, though, she thinks; it isn’t a celebration, even if the funeral people said that’s what they ought to call Pip’s wake.

  Tess watches her father gulp from his cup then set it down, very carefully, on his desk. She grips his chair to steady herself. Maybe the blood, making her light-headed. When will it stop? How will she deal with it overnight? And what about the egg? She imagines chickens, the sound they make when they are on the lay, and feels sick. She isn’t ready to be a Young Woman, which you became when the blood started. Has she really even been a girl, knowing what she already does about the ebbing end of life?

  I suppose that’s why your mother’s gone off, her father says. I try actually to work, I try to chust do what I normally do.

  He wipes his brow on a sleeve, smiles, then turns back to his books.

  They all used to gently correct his English. His chust instead of just. His ken instead of can, and men instead of man. Don’t blame me for being Cherman! he’d say. And oh, she remembers the looks her mother cast her then, a secret sharing, reserved for her, the eldest. A radiant glance that, even in its mockery, cast no other person out. But the teasing stopped after Pip died, and the glances too. And her father lapsed into his mother tongue, as he called it, when he felt most at home.

  The breath, from his talking, heady with whisky. On his desk, the Imigran, the Maxalt.

  He adjusts his glasses, reads aloud,

  Man may believe, if he chooses, that possessing the queen, he holds in his hand the destiny and soul of the hive … he can increase and hasten the swarm, or restrict and retard it; he can unite or divide colonies and direct the emigration of kingdoms.

  Tess raises her eyebrows, wipes her nose, shucks her shirtsleeves above her elbows.

  That is Maurice Maeterlinck, he says. No better guide to bees. He will actually be yours when I’ve finished with him, he says, tapping the old book.

  Tess nods, shifting from one sneakered foot to the other. She feels the damp paper towel in her pants, the throbbing in her belly.

  Her father read Maeterlinck’s fairy play, The Blue Bird, during Pip’s last summer. He’d hoped to stage it but there were too many roles for their family, so he did all the voices. He did Mytyl and Tyltyl the sister and brother, the Fairy, the forest animals, the bread, sugar, milk, water and fire. There were even roles for feelings, for STARS, SICKNESSES, SHADES, LUXURIES, HAPPINESSES and JOYS. Tess loved her father then, most of all, for trying to keep them distracted. Their mother’s fear had been so tangible, her private weeping, her face dissembled by grief. The more she tried to hide her distress – the starker it became. The rest of the family took other roles in their grieving; the sisters had learned to be stoic, or blithe; their father uncommonly gentle.

  Tess looks at the worn hardback of The Life of the Bee, handed through the Müller family. Her great-grandfather, the first to tend bees, had taken honey to his neighbours through a bombed Berlin after the war. On his rounds he’d passed burning buildings, a dead horse being butchered right on the road, a soldier sawing bread with an officer’s dagger. From these stories Tess learned you could endure. Bees kept Henrik busy, her father would say, when all of Europe was in disarray. Stefan had involved Tess and Meg with the bees more than ever when Pip was ill, teaching them how to smoke them gently, how to check the honey flow and operate the extractor. How to supp feed with sugar and water.

  Tess runs a hand across his shoulder, tugs the hair at his nape.

  Meg comes in breathless, holding the phone.

  For you, Daddy. A Detective Someone.

  The sisters stare as he straightens.

  OK then, he says, waving them away. Outside the door they listen in. The word accident so their stomachs plummet, so they think right away of their mother.

  Ten o’clock. Velvety dark rims every form outside; the moon is obscured with cloud. Their father has stayed in his study so the girls guess he can’t have had news of their mother.

  In the kitchen Tess fills a mug with liquor, then beckons for Meg to follow. They lie on the porch taking mean little sips, pursing their lips with exquisite disgust.

  Plerk, says Meg. Yuck. Let me guess. Sloupisti from Schlepzig. Single Malt No. 1?

  Then reaches again for the mug, saying, My turn, my turn.

  Tess feels the hot throb of liquor down her throat, like speaking in reverse. It warms her stomach and dulls that low-down pain. But how will she hold everything in if she gets like her father does, going all wordy and sad and in need of too much from everyone, most of all, their mother? Lina, Lina, a man will stay thirsty even if you take all his drink away. Sometimes, very late, she hears him stumbling in the front hall, or the sound of his key stabbing the lock, and knows how thirsty he has been. Other nights she’ll watch his random path across the fields, his pause in moonlight to waltz with no one, conduct the stars or lie beside the hives.

  The sisters, on their backs, with their eyes on the sky, soak up the day’s warmth in the porch timber. They search for planets, scan the Milky Way. They watch a star searing and pick out constellations, though the world, with each sip, tips and whirls.

  Are you OK? Meg asks.

  Tess realises, Meg doesn’t understand that the blood will happen to her too. She takes out their father’s wallet. Hands Meg five dollars.

  Tess! says Meg, but pockets it with a private grin. Then pulls herself up. Hey, I found it!

  And there it is, hovering above the Ghost Mountains. The bright star they’d named for Pip, eighteen months ago.

  They stay outside for another two hours. They drink and drink and grow dizzy and full of desire for all the things they cannot name yet. Tess losing touch with the pain in her belly, forgets the confidence required for the challenge of blood, forgets to worry about who she’s becoming today.

  And then, a form shimmering out of the dark. A small cobalt light, picking its way across the bee field. Their mother in her blue dress, coming home.

  6

  As he headed home in the coppery afternoon, Jim’s skin tingled from the river, from her. Still stupefied at the feeling of her flesh against his. I’ll be off then, he’d said, expecting her to follow him down the mountain. It had grown dank by the water once the sun sank below the treeline. But Evangeline had sat, nonplussed, as if they’d just had coffee together. See you, she’d waved him off without a glance.

  On his way out of the glade he passed the decorated tree, a great quandong, its roots fanned out along the earth, and remembered the tools she’d brought with her, the fact she had some private business with that hammer and rope. As he trudged down the mountain he realised
, the tree must be an offertory, some kind of memorial to her daughter.

  And so, what of it? He guessed that having lost Pip, the fire was of little consequence. He stood at the tree and put his palm against it. He thought of his mother then, and of mothers throughout time. Then, ravenous, he thought of eggs, toast, butter.

  He was halfway down the lane when he saw the bee. It was steering haphazardly but following the line of the road. Probably from the Müllers’ apiary. The same ones, he guessed, that haloed the tangled mounds of lavender outside his cabin. Apis mellifera. And in the stretched seconds of the bee’s approach he was struck by this transit of pollen and nectar, from his small garden, across and down the lane to the Müllers’ hives and the bright, lofty home with those ethereal daughters and the candlelight by which he’d dined one evening and, after, admired the framed pictures by the middle girl, Meg, and some abstract oils by Evangeline, who’d painted so keenly, Stefan Müller had told him, for five years after the commune. She’d had amnesia, he said, after the fire. Painting helped reassemble the past. The girls had led Jim out to their mother’s studio. See this, Meg said, plucking a fine paintbrush from a jar, Mama made it from my baby hair. And this one’s from Pip’s. And then she’d gone silent and the sisters left the room while he stayed another moment to gulp down details, half starved of such rituals – he’d forsaken his own painting since Sylvie and the pregnancy. Evangeline’s canvases were draped in white sheets. Whether they were being protected or hidden, he could not say. He’d peered beneath the fabric covering the largest work. Go on, feel free, Stefan had said, coming up behind and startling him. Have a good look, friend, I don’t mind. But lifting the sheets on the wife’s paintings, while the husband stood by with an incomprehensible expression, was just too weird so Jim had walked out to where Tess and Meg were hanging from the massive Moreton Bay, and switched into teacher mode asking them something anatomical about bees. The woman’s paintings, with their anchorless forms – horses, trees, hills, water – were technically flawed, but the flattened perspective, the naive style and the tension produced from her rapid, small brushstrokes were compelling. They had a peculiar, elusive effect. Recalling these took him back to the mountain – to what she’d said about time being abstract – this was in her paintings, disparate events layered and revised.

  Stefan was a thoughtful, enthusiastic man. Jim had liked him immediately. Over dinner he described a family history with bees and showed photos of his grandfather’s traditional German hives. Brightly painted, and beautifully kept, these wooden huts looked like doll’s houses, as if by being part of the family the bees required a similar standard of accommodation. They were carnica bees, Stefan said. Gentle and dovelike. Really? Jim had laughed, he’d never considered any bee appealing. Ah come on, Stefan had chided, don’t you think of teddy bears when you see their fuzzy little bodies?

  Despite their losses, the Müllers’ home was captivating, like certain lived-in houses Jim had visited as a boy. The kind of home where you lose count of how many rooms and how they lead on to each other. It was bright, cluttered and unkempt, but still essentially clean. In his childhood home everything had been slotted carefully away. In the mornings the emptied, coffee-scented expanses of hall and lounge, his mother and father at each end of the bespoke table, turning and turning their pages. In his home, bare surfaces had so reigned that objects acquired a slightly shameful aspect, intensified by how they were secluded behind nifty sliding cupboards. The eye was tricked into thinking there was nothing, when there was plenty. It had bred in him a lifelong unease about possessions and what they could mean.

  As Jim neared the cabin he saw someone in his garden with a large canvas bag. For one panicked moment he thought: Sylvie. Medium height, dark-haired, slight. In the diffuse dusk he couldn’t make out her features. But then she bent and yanked a clump of something from his yard. Well, Sylvie would never garden.

  He heard a loud droning. That bee again. Hurtling directly towards his head.

  He’d been too sheepish to tell the Müller family after dinner that night, as he’d retrieved his bike from the back of their house and the sisters came running to stack his arms with jars of gold leatherwood. How could he have said, after Stefan had offered, next time we’ll give you a tour of the hives. James Matthew Parker, thirty-two, object of heated town speculation, teacher at the River School, tall, motherless climate pilgrim from Sydney, out of touch with his high-flying father, ignoring calls and messages from Sylvie, deliberately unwired and incommunicado in his leaky rental cabin, perpetually hungry for something and only just realising how lonely. How could he say, I am fatally allergic to bees?

  He saw the stranger raise an arm at his approach. He saw the Müllers’ undulating fields and, beyond the mountains, an adamantine sky. As he registered the approaching bee he remembered: he hadn’t renewed his epinephrine since moving here, even though, he’d realised after signing the lease, he was just metres from a fair-sized apiary. Honig Farm, for God’s sake. There were so few bees left in the city, he’d just stopped carrying the EpiPen around.

  He thought of Sylvie, naked on the bed with her legs crossed, towards the end of their five years together, smoking furiously and diagnosing, You’re still just a boy, though he felt he’d grown away from her. At that particular moment, he’d been a father. Then, as the bee made contact, he threw himself on to the verge and closed his eyes.

  When Jim looked up, Juniper Peterson, otherwise known as Junie the Extraordinary, was standing over him. He felt his neck, he checked his breathing. He seemed to be alive.

  Are you right? asked June. I saw you fall.

  He sat up, blinking idiotically. Groped beneath his hips to dislodge a rock. Looked around.

  It was a bee, I thought … he said.

  Well, did it get you? asked June.

  I don’t think so.

  Might’ve been a hornet. Or wasp, she said, narrowing her eyes. You didn’t sprain anything?

  No, I’m really … Jim clambered up.

  But there’s blood on your jeans. How peculiar, she said.

  Ah yes, from this morning.

  Really? Your blood?

  Jim straightened, ignoring her.

  I’ve been waiting, like, ages, June said, and jerked her head towards his cabin. Where’ve you been?

  Sorry? Did we have an appointment?

  He brushed the dirt off his jeans, felt welts rising on his arms from where he’d fallen into a patch of burrs and razor grass. His nose was running, his hayfever had grown worse each day with the pollen count, paspalum and the dry wind. So much for medicinal country air.

  Together they walked up to his cabin, a three-roomed, hand-built place with a sagging shingle roof. A short wooden porch overlooked the square yard with its relics of a cottage garden: overgrown, dried-out grasses, leggy rosemary and lavender. On certain cool, shadowy days he imagined this yard had an artful Piet Oudolf aspect; ramshackle, unstructured, the bowed seedheads sowing their drifty spores.

  On the doorstep was a large cloth bag. Jim thought right away of prisons, the great grey masses of laundry.

  You left this stuff at the Red Lodge. No forwarding address is why it’s taken this long to find you, June said, tapping a foot, schoolmarmy.

  Stuff? He didn’t understand. Had he, in his fall, lost some memory?

  Clothes, she said. And another of them postcards.

  She stuck a hand in her backpack, waggled it, then passed him the card.

  He knew the sender immediately. Sylvie.

  We thought of bringing them up to the school but Agatha said how would it look turning up there, with those? June said, and pointed to the laundry bag. People talk, you know.

  Yes, he said. But what could they say about T-shirts and shorts?

  June looked at him crossly. She was only eighteen but seemed much older. Papery skin, small, slight, with unbrushed hair and bitten nails. How could he have mistaken someone so tousled for Sylvie? But there was something plaintive and gutsy abou
t both women. He’d once seen June grinning, gap-toothed, on her uncle Bo Peterson’s pick-up with two hounds and a shot hog. In her hands a rifle, aimed skyward. He’d once skirted the Petersons’ rambling acreage on his way home. Six horses gave off a moony glow against the green rise. Snowcap Appaloosas. Nearby there was a stream with a neat hand-built bridge, a ruined stone house on the lee side. Now he remembered, those horses, that bridge and brook. He’d seen a similar arrangement, in thick strokes of deep colour, a scene rendered mythical, alive with mysterious energies, in Evangeline’s studio before Stefan walked in. That painted canvas, so large, he’d noticed, they’d have to raise the roof to get it out of there.

  He looked at the postcard. Then turned it over. Weeks old. Two lines only. Jim, please call me! There’s something about the baby we need to discuss. Sylvie.

  Baby? Sylvie had never referred to the pregnancy that way. Maybe just trying to get a reaction. He hadn’t phoned or written. He wasn’t sure he would.

  Is she going to join you then? asked June, who’d of course read the postcard, and no doubt the many others that arrived before it.

  At the Red Lodge where Jim stayed for a month when he’d first arrived, June cleaned, passed him his mail and taped messages to his door. Sylvie called 4.45 pm, 5.20 pm, 6.00. Any laundry? Breakfast at 9. Please close high window, storm coming. Magick Show in the Lounge at 8 pm. Sometimes the postcards had been slid under his door. Sylvie, regretful, pleading, could they at least talk? Sylvie demanding he send his new number.

  I thought maybe she’d ditched you, said June. But why would she leave her clothes? June pointed to the bag. Plus, they look expensive.