At school, though, Meg cannot openly love her.
Love is something permitted, she sees. It does not run free as a golden river like Gizelle says. Love’s a bossy word, like run, chop, throw, sleep, hold, listen, slide, push, put and beg. What the f— does Gizelle know anyway, Meg thinks, remembering how her father said that lace bodice, so cinched, must surely cut circulation to Gizelle’s brain.
Meg’s best friend Sharon likes to play Twins. So Meg had braided her hair that morning. She rolled – not folded – her white socks at the ankle. She’d followed the previous day’s instructions, issued by Sharon on a Hello Kitty Post-it. But Sharon, thinking on it for the whole of lunch break, decided they couldn’t be sisters. Meg’s plait was a normal fishtail, hers a labour-intensive mermaid. Plus Meg’s shoes were totes wrong. Vitally, Sharon said, as she often did, her shoes buckled, but Meg’s Velcroed. At Sharon’s Tudor-style home in the new development, Meg has learned that thongs are bad for growing feet, that there are three species of apple juice, that mince isn’t considered meat, and nor is a toilet the loo. At Sharon’s there’s a preferred word for fart that her family invented aeons ago, but it’s spoken in such subaudible tones that Meg can never quite catch it. Sharon prances across the playground with a high-necked head, her luxury plait swinging, her lunchbox full of contraband: cheez-stix, froot roll-ups and yogurt inhaled from a bag. Meg rubbed dust from her school shoe with one saliva finger. She saw they were actually quite orthopaedic, as Sharon had said, so lobbed them in a hawthorn hedge on the long walk home.
She doesn’t want to get like Tess, wandering round the school basketball court with no one, her hair unbrushed from three days before and totally full of flyaways. For a while after Pip died Meg had tried spending lunch with her sister, both girls gnawing sawn chunks of charity rye from the neighbours. But Tess didn’t seem to care about being alone and Meg really, completely did. So now she hides in the library and reads about insects that eat their own young and how to tie a tourniquet. She borrows to her limit, every book about horses, and stashes the rest in Astronomy, a subject Sharon calls lame. At home she snaps the arms off one of Sharon’s dolls and flushes it. It will not go under. It floats, freaking everyone in the house when they need to wee.
This afternoon, Meg had checked if she had two holes and not just one as Sharon claimed. Sharon, who hated being naked because she believed her parents had a spyhole in the bathroom wall. Sharon, who wore a cozzie in the bath that time she’d slept over. Sharon, who Meg cannot stop loving, even more now she knows how vitally wrong she is about anatomy.
She tries to be a hater of the horses Sharon favours. Lists them all now, in her tiniest hand. But soon after, tears it up and watches the white paper drift through the kitchen. As she sketches the stately head of the white Camargue, she knows these creatures hover far above human pettiness. If you were a horse, which would you be? Sharon had asked her once, risking her immaculate braid by leaning it on Meg’s shoulder.
Equus ferus, Meg had answered, or Przewalski’s wild. They were the true wild, along with the tarpan. Most others considered wild came from domesticated horses – brumby, mustang, the New Zealand Kaimanawa. So, what’s to love about those Polish beasts? asked Sharon. The Przewalski, once endangered, now thrived in the zones where humans couldn’t live. Meg recounted this history, recently read. But the nuclear disaster that shadowed this story left Sharon blank and mistrusting. She did not like to dwell on dark events, or wild places. She liked steady-tempered Hanoverians with their pretty manes tightly knobbed for dressage. These horses excelled at showjumping and eventing. What could you do with a feral horse? It’d simply run away.
Meg dreams of fires and her sister’s body on the final night of her life. Meg had been the one who’d found Pip, then run into the fields and told. Her parents were standing, hand in hand, peering into the unlidded bee boxes. After Meg reached them their fingers let go and they tore back across the fields. The sight of them, sprinting over the vivid grass, somehow both childlike and much older than their years, has become as indelible to Meg as the image of Pip, so still. Her parents, running, seemed like people from another time. And her sister, in the bedroom, was Pip, and not Pip at the same moment. Her face unguided by any Pip-ish spirit, her body so suddenly loosed from pain.
That day a thought had stolen in and never gone away: I’m the youngest now, I’m the youngest. Is Pip still her sister? Or something else like air, water, clouds over valley? Meg had asked Tess after Pip was gone. She’d fidget in bed. She could not sleep. Where was Pip really, what would happen to her body? Tess had stood in then for their mother, who was not to be disturbed. Tess had answered what she could and then one day burrowed deeper into absolute quiet. When there was no one left to ask, Meg began to draw.
It’s been a long while since the family has even glanced at her pictures of trees. They line the floor around her bed. They sprout in her schoolbooks and grow on the walls in her study nook. People trees with arms in the air. Plaintive trees, weeping willows moping into brooks. Trees morphing into houses to protect the small people she sketches in her faulty grip, crouched and huddled inside. Suitable trees for steep slopes. Trees for koala forage. Swamp mahogany. Flooded gum, whitish and columnar. Grey ironbark. Bunya pine, the kauris. She keeps a notebook under her pillow, and must draw and draw on the nights that she wakes in darkness, her heart pounding, the bed soaked. She’ll peel off her wet pants and sheets and huddle, naked, with only pen and paper to help her find a way back to herself.
Putrid trees, Meg mutters, scrunching paper. Today’s drawings souring in the swiftly closing day.
Sometimes a person can paint a picture so large it must stay for ever where it was made. Meg had helped her mother prime the large canvas. She’d sanded till it was smooth as paperbark. Maybe she can become useful like that again? Meg’s longing, recurring, desultory, clogging up her days.
Her mother had left that huge painting dressed in a sheet. Meg goes in some nights and stands underneath, peering at her mother’s painted horses on the green hill. They gallop, encircling something unfinished. Only the dark ashy outline, and charred grass around it, waiting to be explained with contour and shading. Meg stares and tries to figure the breed and pedigree. The Hanoverian is characterised by an elastic ground-covering walk, a floating trot and a round, rhythmic canter. Such facts have colonised her head, learned by heart one fervent evening, when she’d stayed up till star blackout, taking notes from The Equine Compendium, desperate to win back the cooling heart of Sharon.
FU Shaz, she writes. Then, emboldened. PUCK YOU!
She looks out the window. Sheer cliff faces of rusty red. Rock pinnacles exposed by erosion. And three great patches on the east and west flanks of the mountains. Every now and then a massive tearing. She used to imagine the forest advancing at night, the trees shuffling closer to the house. But it’s really the opposite. One day she’ll find a barren brown mound strewn with the bones of northern blue box, blackbutt candlebark, nightcap oak. The trees giving way for new mines. At school they’re writing a song on it for final assembly. Sharon was asked to rhyme a word with methane, but her father, who worked for Clear Energy, sent back an excusing note.
It’s time, said Nora Roberts, Nico and Lou Perkins at the Saturday market meeting. It’s time to start triaging nature.
Here’s her mother. Coming up the drive, pinning straggled hair back into its knot. Meg, overcome with a lonely passion, clings to the sight of her, knowing that she cannot be enough for any of them, not even for herself.
Her mother lifts an arm, waves, turns her umbrella back into a stick. Then goes inside her studio. It should be enough that she’s returned before dark, that she’ll be there at bathtime to cocoon Meg in the white towel, to kiss her forehead as she anchors the bedsheets and promises that the morning will be better, renewed somehow by darkness. There is one second’s haven in this ritual, when her mother bends over, her long hair surrounding both their faces so it must appear as if they are join
ed. Meg gazes into those grey eyes and her mother looks back, very steady. In this tiny, curtained privacy she breathes the sour, milky smell of her mother’s breath; she remembers, it is enough to simply be alive. After this she will try not to follow her solid shape across the bedroom and out into the hall, the heavy way she walks and pauses by the empty bed to put one hand flat upon it.
Our Pip, Meg writes in decorative cursive beside her best sketch, her most resolutely arboreal tree. Chunk-trunked, frankly branching, shrubby at the canopy. Its tiny rosulate leaves, if anyone should look closely, love-heart shaped. But she cannot picture the real Pip any more. Only the pale shadow that passed through their house, always in pyjamas. Our Pip, there are such trees … When she runs out of words, she draws her way back to Pip.
7
Glories
Cloud streets, parry arcs, updraught turrets. Horseshoe vortices, whales’ mouths, billows. Meg’s favourite section is haloes, rainbows and glories. She’s stared so long that when you even touch it the book falls open abracadabra! at those exact pages.
Your father had The Weather Book for ages. Then he gave it to you. He’d bought it secondhand when he came to Bidgalong Valley. Back then he had long hair and flappy trousers. You can see them in the photo he used as a bookmark. His chest is bare. He is smiling on a cliff.
Beside the different kinds of weather he’d put a tick to say what he’d seen. Mostly on the mountain, when he’d visited your mother. You can sort of imagine him, staring at a light pillar, castellanus, floccus. But you can’t recognise the woman he describes.
‘She lives up high, among the clouds,’ he says. ‘She comes floating from the Emerald Forest escorted by bees. In her hands, fresh honeycomb; in her hair, purple flowers. Your mother is a forest being, with a leftover wildness from her time on the mountain,’ he says.
One afternoon she stood in the doorway. She had dark smudges under each eye. ‘The town’s gone quiet,’ she said. ‘It is very very still.’ You felt scared so you turned back and started reading out from glories. In China they call it Buddha’s Light – a coloured halo, said to come upon enlightened people. In science it’s light backscattered by a cloud of identical raindrops. It’s easier to spy a glory from a mountain or tall building. And on a plane you might see your craft’s shadow below you, spotlit against the cloud. This is called the Glory of the Pilot.
Meg asked, ‘Why are you shouting?’ Your mother was sitting beside you. She was really listening hard. The heavy book was open flat. The glory looked like a rainbow-coloured target in the sky. ‘We do not know what to believe in,’ your mother said. Her voice was small. She held your hand. You were surprised to see that your palms nearly matched. It didn’t seem possible that you could be growing. It felt like time in the house had stopped.
Also you did not understand why some people said Pip was now of the earth and heavens. After the funeral came some mighty storms. In the wet it was hard to tell what was river, what was rain, when the dry earth turned to mud. All the lines between things became blurry. Meg worried at night about the coffin in all that rain. You did not know a thing to tell her. But Pip, you knew, was wholly here among curtains, chairs, carpet and table. Pip was part of the weather inside.
8
How go your bees? asks Jim, fists clenched in his back pockets.
On this first dry Sunday he’d come to the market, hoping to find Evangeline. He hadn’t been with her for weeks. Minor floods had blocked the lane, cut off access to her house and swamped the road to town. The rain had been gentle but unrelenting for twenty days.
He stands now at the family stall: Honig Farm – Honey, Wax and Candles, a small booth on the sunnier side, with a jaunty orange and black striped awning.
How to compose himself in public with her? He hadn’t considered this when running a hand through his three-day growth and glancing that morning, for a second, in the cracked mirror above his sink. He’d made an effort, pulling on the least torn jeans, a shirt that Sylvie had once favoured, shunting his sleeves to his elbows. But his undisciplined face would betray him, his brown eyes grow keener the more he strives for nonchalance.
Evangeline, hands on hips, with damp half-moons under each arm, blows hair off her face. She’s pretty unkempt, he sees, and feels reprieved. It’s more real, what’s between them, he tells himself, without the usual primping, without the first-date posturing.
We’re trying a new hive, she says. The People’s Hives, they’re called. Invented by a French monk. Stefan’s ordered a dozen.
What do you think’s causing it? he said. This Bee Rapture?
He’s tried saying it without emphasis, the throbbing word, rapture, but his chest goes tight.
She wipes her forehead, shrugs, reaches into a gumboot to scratch a shin. She isn’t meeting his eye. He looks around; no one close enough to overhear, though the market’s thronging, everyone stir crazy after the rains, and the floods, everyone embracing like they’ve been away and just returned, checking the stats about their properties – the stock and crop losses, the tracts of ruined fences, if their power has returned.
Look, he says. I can’t just come over, can I?
He’d like to grab her by the arm and pull her home with him.
Not now please, she says, shaking her head.
Then he realises he’ll make her miserable in every location but the neutral zone of his house. Even there he suspects she’s performing a self, and who is this performance for?
Evangeline tugs her T-shirt lower, stretching it. Shifts from one foot to the other. This skittishness has nothing to do with him, he thinks. It’s the rains that’ve kept her from coming around, that’s all. But their meetings, so sketchy and infrequent, have taught him barely anything about how to read her. Sex gilds the illusion of understanding. And as for intuiting each other’s thoughts? Just a trick the mind plays in the afterglow. Chemicals, neuronal firings. He’d cadged that psychic sensation often enough from local weed. So it was hardly remarkable, was it?
He looks about. Tess and Meg are standing with some schoolkids near where the market fades into cow fields and meadow. There’s a huge ash where the stalls end, casting a circle of welcome shade. Something odd about that tree. It’s seething. Then he sees: the branches are crawling with kids, even in the highest twigs.
He picks up a jar of honey and reads the label. The first honeybees came to this country in 1822 on the convict ship the Isabella.
Convict bees? he says. Christ.
He swats an insect hanging around his neck, gazes at her, separated from him by a line of jars along the stall table. Someone approaches, peering intently at the small bowls with their samples of honey. Evangeline casts Jim a look that would silence a stonier man. He waits as she serves the customer, wrapping three candles in yellow tissue, applying a bee sticker.
Now she’s scanning the market, standing on her toes. Could you find … Can you see Stefan at all? I’m so tired suddenly.
Eva, I’ve upset you.
It’s this rawness that he loves after all, despite her efforts to hide it. Now, though, she’s closed up, looking every direction but his.
It’s only for seconds he can pretend she doesn’t have another life. When she’s moving above or below him, his fingers in her hair. The way he searches the sweep of their land, their house at night, smouldering below the mountain, surrounded by cows and rusting machinery. Sometimes when the mists billow the place seems to drift, majestic and huge; it appears to throb with a secret power. In the frank daylight, cycling by, he sees it is merely a house, run-down like most others round town, the paint flaking, roof tiles missing, the decayed, detaching guttering.
Once, through his cabin window, he thought he saw the silhouette of a man, as if Stefan were looking directly back, his gaze travelling over field, fence, verge and road. But Jim knew it was a trick, or a desire to be caught, was perhaps even his own reflection in his own glass. And which was a lonelier sight? Part of him wants to finish it. There’s Tess – sitting very
still in his classroom or aimlessly drifting around the playground. Her presence makes him feel more compromised than when the husband waves from across the fields, or passes him on the main street with that quizzical eye, singing out his Chus!
Jim despises the man he’s become, carnally knowing his neighbour. Is this happiness? It’s so chimerical, it is something deeply dredged from a dream. It is perhaps nostalgia, a forgotten feeling of home.
She hands him two unlabelled jars. This is goodbye for now, he supposes.
Here, she says brightly, Patterson’s Curse.
Ah, possibly thanks? he says.
She musters a smile, holds out an ice-cream stick swizzled with honey.
Farmers might hate the curse but bees love it, she says. We give it away for free.
She puts the stick in his mouth, then pulls it out. He feels the sweetness on his tongue, the rough wood scraping his gums. Then forgets to taste, and to swallow; his eyes on hers are a challenge.
Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers/ Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers, he says.
Oh yes, she says, Shakespeare.
Then reaches over, wipes a finger across his chin.
You have … honey, she says, then puts the finger into her mouth and sucks it clean.
And now he sees it. The line of her belly against the loose T-shirt. A curve he hasn’t yet felt under his hands. Unmistakable in Sunday’s vigilant light. She’s pregnant.
9
Tom Tucker’s recurring dreams embarrass him on waking. In these his father wavers up, a giant crossing a primordial landscape, sweeping trees from his path, wading through lakes as if they were puddles. The man is always headed right for Tom through over-saturated jungles, fetid swamps, limitless canyons. A superhuman, impervious to pain and weather.
These dreams leave him doubly haunted – first by the father who never catches up – then by the penumbra of loss after waking. He snorts salt water from a neti pot. His sinuses get purified, but the dreams clot, sticky and persistent as ectoplasm. He’ll walk out to find his mother spooning Milo into the teapot. He’ll cross the kitchen and butt his head on her bony shoulder over and over saying gently, Stop, Ma, please just stop.
The World Without Us Page 12
