Promise

by Sarah Armstrong

  She was buying time for Charlie, that’s all. She’d buy the girl a month here. She pulled out her wallet and extracted six fifty-dollar notes. ‘And there’s a hundred more for food.’

  He handed two notes back. ‘Hang onto those for now.’ He shouldered the backpack.

  ‘Thank you, Pat.’

  He ducked his head. ‘See you later, Charlie. I won’t forget to make you a couple of dolls.’

  ‘She’s not my mummy, you know,’ said the girl. She turned a jigsaw piece over and over in one hand.

  Pat nodded. ‘I know she’s not your mummy. She’s your friend, and she’s my friend, too.’ He stepped out the door. ‘See you in a couple of days.’

  ‘Bye. Thanks.’

  Anna spread the jigsaw pieces on the floor and watched him walk down the hill, through the long, pale grass of the clearing. As he disappeared into the forest, she felt time slow and stretch, as if it were looping and sagging between each minute. This place felt outside time.

  She flipped over a few greenish-blue pieces of the jigsaw. ‘We’re going to stay here for a while, in this little house, just the two of us.’

  Charlie looked around the room and touched a finger to the neat timber shingles on the dolls’ house roof. She spoke emphatically. ‘Well, this is mine now.’ She patted the miniature chimney.

  Anna took a breath. ‘Yes, for now, it’s yours.’

  •

  As dusk fell, Anna sat on the floor and lit three candles. She dripped wax onto saucers and helped Charlie stick a candle into each puddle of wax. ‘Hold the candle there for a little while till the wax goes hard,’ Anna said.

  Charlie held the candle very still, her face softly lit. ‘Is it hard now?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes.’ They were both whispering. Outside, birds barrelled past the house and into the forest, a raucous call and response as the light faded.

  Anna arranged candles around the room, on the bookshelf and window sill and kitchen bench, while Charlie sat on the floor and continued sorting the jigsaw pieces by colour. Anna used up some precious gas to make spaghetti with tomato sauce and green beans. The kitchen was surprisingly well stocked with utensils but there was no decent knife.

  They ate sitting on the bed, and Charlie lay back on the mattress as soon as she finished her pasta. The air coming in the window had cooled, and carried with it the sounds of the forest: crickets rasping, the susurrations of a thousand leaves, and the friendly rustlings of small animals going about their business.

  Anna lay beside Charlie on the musty pillow. It was almost a week since she’d taken Charlie and, at last, she could exhale.

  Charlie said, ‘The moon’s the wrong shape.’

  ‘Yes.’ The moon was a thin crescent. ‘Every month, it goes from a full circle to a thin moon, and then back again. But it’s always there.’

  Would they be here at the time of the next crescent moon?

  ‘Oh.’ Charlie rolled over to face Anna. She had a smudge of pasta sauce on her cheek. ‘I always know where you are.’

  ‘Do you? What do you mean?’ Anna smelt Pat’s lemon-scented soap in Charlie’s hair.

  Charlie closed her eyes. ‘Even when my eyes are shut, I know where you are. Even when you’re outside.’

  ‘Yes.’ Anna held back tears. ‘I can always tell where you are, too.’

  The way Charlie lay exaggerated the curves of her forehead and cheeks, so Anna could imagine her face as a baby.

  Charlie’s breath deepened and Anna curled around her on the spongy mattress. The girl was perfectly contained within the curve of Anna’s body.

  Was this what it felt like to love a child? It wasn’t love like she felt for her dad, or that she’d ever felt for a man. It was muddier, and mixed with protectiveness and fear and guilt. Anna would do anything to keep this girl safe from harm. Even if that meant not seeing her dad, even if that meant losing Dave, even if it meant jail. This murky, brimming feeling was not something Anna had anticipated when she drove off with Charlie in her back seat.

  On the phone, her dad said he knew she’d done this for all the right reasons. But weren’t motivations always tangled up, somehow, with self-interest? Perhaps she really had wanted a new life, perhaps she had wanted the experience of being a mother. Now that she had some small sense of what it was to love a child, she couldn’t bear the thought she might never have known it.

  She blew out the last candle. Outside, the breeze picked up, and the shadowy treetops moved against the sky. The roots of those trees reached down into the dark, moist soil, burrowing and tangling with others until there was a great web of roots underground, mirroring the spreading, arching branches overhead. The shape of the silhouetted tree tops outside seemed familiar to Anna, and comforting, as if it was something she had known long ago.

  •

  Anna woke in the night, and slowly realised the sheet under her was cold and wet, and the back of her t-shirt was damp. She sighed. Damn. She’d forgotten to take Charlie to do a wee before bed. Anna lit a candle. Charlie was deep asleep. Anna peeled off the girl’s wet undies and t-shirt, and rolled her to a dry part of the bed. In the storeroom, she found a cardboard box of books and a nest of musty woollen jumpers, then a box with a few rolled-up towels, worn thin and fraying at the edges. She laid four towels over the wet patch, slid a pair of dry undies up Charlie’s heavy legs, and lay back down, the towels rough under her.

  Anna’s mother used to change Anna’s pyjamas and sheets when she wet the bed. Luke had told her so. Anna didn’t try to conjure pretty pictures of her mother sliding dry pyjamas onto her, but one thing she did remember was lying in bed listening to her mother walk up the hall in the middle of the night. Anna had known, in a fundamental way, without thinking about it, that those sounds of her mother – her footsteps, the rustle of bedclothes as she climbed back into bed, the murmur of her voice – belonged to Anna. She felt those sounds right inside her. They belonged to her because her mother belonged to her. Anna had been so certain of that, until the cancer came and vaporised her mother.

  Charlie stirred and murmured. Anna looked out at the stars and the sliver of moon. She and Charlie were only a tiny part of the life up there on the mountainside; they were surrounded by the indifferent forest and animals and sky. They could do their own thing in this house, it was theirs.

  Anna closed her eyes. She must not hide from the fact that she had effectively vaporised Charlie’s mother.

  •

  Later, she woke to the frogs and their surround-sound chirping. It was still dark but felt close to dawn. She pulled the sheet up over Charlie’s shoulder.

  ‘Anna?’ Charlie’s voice was quiet.

  ‘Oh, you’re awake.’

  ‘I dream about Mummy sometimes. Is that okay?’

  A twig clattered onto the tin roof.

  Anna shifted to face Charlie, she could just see the outline of her head. ‘Yes. That’s completely okay. Did you dream about Mummy just now?’

  ‘It was sort of her. Sort of not.’ The girl paused. ‘Do you think she misses me?’

  ‘Yes. I think so. Do you miss her?’

  ‘Yeah. We used to have fish and chips,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yum.’

  ‘She could come here.’ She sighed. ‘But she’d tell him.’

  ‘Do you think she’d enjoy it here?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘We’re going to stay here for a little while. This is our home for now.’

  ‘For a little while?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Anna listened to her falling back to sleep. She would never fill Charlie’s mummy-shaped hole. Just as no one had ever filled it for Anna. Gabby was the one person who could give this little girl what she needed, and she’d turned her back. Bloody Gabby had laid waste to something so precious.

  Anna had tried hundreds of times over the years to conjure the memory of her final moments with her mother, but she got no further than transposing an image of her mother lying on the sunroom couch to a g
eneric hospital bed. She imagined her mother would have been even thinner and maybe sleepy with morphine. A white sheet stretched over her.

  She heard her father’s voice in her head, Don’t sit on the bed, it will hurt your mother.

  Anna’s breath caught. She’d never recalled that before. Then she saw her own small hand on a stark white sheet and her mother’s familiar hand over hers. It was a hospital room, the too-bright light coming in the window, the smell of disinfectant. Anna could feel her mother’s fingers gently rubbing the back of her hand. Slow, deliberate, gentle circles. Anna let herself weep there in the dark next to Charlie.

  Charlie rolled over and tucked herself into Anna, her warm knees in Anna’s side. Her small hand came to rest on Anna’s collarbone.

  Anna moved so they were almost touching foreheads, Charlie’s warm breath brushing her cheek.

  Her mother’s fingers had traced a gentle circle on Anna’s hand, over and over.

  She would have to let Charlie go one day, as her mother had to let Anna go.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  In the morning she woke to small fingers tapping her cheek. Charlie’s face was only a few centimetres away, her eyes bright.

  ‘Hello,’ Anna said. It must be late, the room was bright.

  Charlie sat back on her heels. ‘I saw Macky but I didn’t say hello to him ’cause I felt shy.’ She shrugged. ‘Then I falled back to sleep.’

  ‘Macky? Here?’ Anna jerked up to sitting. How did he know they were here?

  Charlie threw back the covers. ‘There are towels in the bed.’ She lifted the corner of one towel.

  ‘Yes.’

  Charlie crossed to the front window, the back of her hair a mass of knots that sat out from her head. ‘Look what he did.’ She pointed.

  Anna heaved herself up. There, on the front path, in the dappled light, was an arrangement of russet-coloured leaves, twigs and green berries. They’d been carefully assembled into a sunburst shape with an orange, misshapen papaya in the middle.

  Bloody hell, Beatie would know they were here. And Beatie was a friend of Jo’s. They were not safe at the cottage after all.

  Charlie hurried outside and picked up the papaya. She called back to Anna, ‘What is it?’

  The girl, almost naked and pale-skinned, standing among the fallen leaves and greenery, looked like a mythic child from one of Anna’s childhood books, The Waterbabies.

  Anna slid open the window. ‘Papaya. I’ll show you.’

  She found a butter knife in the kitchen and sat on the front brick steps and sliced open the fruit, revealing the orange-red flesh. She scooped out hundreds of small, glistening black seeds and tossed them into the bushes, and cut a slice for Charlie.

  The girl took a tentative bite. ‘It tastes funny.’ But she ate the whole slice, juice on her chin.

  Anna cut herself a piece. It was sweet and they finished the whole fruit, sitting there on the step, looking down at Macky’s creation. Had he followed them up the hill yesterday? Or was she just being paranoid and jumpy? She didn’t like the idea of him shadowing them. She should tell Pat that Macky knew they were there but she wouldn’t – not yet – it would just worry him.

  She wiped her fingers on her t-shirt and focused on the birdsong. There was such an ocean of noise around them that it was hard to pick out individual calls, except if a bird flew by right at the moment it called. There was a wonderfully matter-of-fact and optimistic quality to the birdsong. Everything was okay right now, Anna thought. Right now Charlie was safe. They had a home. They had sweet papaya to eat, and she could still conjure the memory of her mother’s hand on hers.

  •

  Anna wrestled the mattress outside and propped it in a patch of sunlight at the side of the house. She’d have to move it during the day to follow the sun. She laid the two pillows in the sun, and in the small bathroom, half-filled the bathtub with water and dropped the bedsheets in to soak.

  On the front steps they ate porridge with Beatie’s creamy milk and brown sugar. Charlie scraped her bowl then squatted in the dappled sunlight beside Macky’s creation. She laid four dried leaves in a cross, then arranged small yellow blossoms in a circle around the leaves. She found the discarded clump of papaya seeds, and teased out each seed to place them one by one between the flowers. She wiped her fingers on her undies and leant back to regard her work.

  Macky materialised from the trees on their right. He was barefoot and carried a small daypack.

  Anna sat forward. ‘Macky!’ she said, then regretted sounding so sharp.

  He smiled easily at her. ‘Hello.’

  Charlie grinned at him from where she squatted by her leaf-and-flower pattern. ‘I saw you!’

  ‘Did you?’ He grinned back.

  ‘We eated the parpary.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’m making one like yours.’ Charlie turned back to her project.

  ‘I like it!’ He sat beside Anna on the step.

  ‘Thank you for the papaya,’ Anna said.

  ‘That’s okay.’ He fiddled with a twig, using his long thumbnail to peel back the bark. ‘It’s good someone’s staying here again.’

  ‘Did you know the people who lived here?’

  ‘Yeah. Of course.’ Macky shrugged off his pack and glanced back at the house. His face was narrow and fine-boned and he had his mother’s big grey eyes. He pointed to the clearing in front of them. ‘That was going to be their orchard. My dad helped Ivan clear it. There’s a few fruit trees over that side but they didn’t get to planting it up like they were going to.’ He nodded to a weedy patch not far from where they sat. ‘And that was one of the veggie beds.’ He turned to her with a grin. ‘We just put in some more basil at home. I could bring you some seeds.’

  Charlie stood up. ‘Let’s plant parpary.’ She picked up the leftover papaya seeds.

  ‘You need a man and a woman papaya plant then,’ said Macky.

  ‘Why?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘That’s how it works.’

  ‘Oh.’ Charlie used her foot to adjust the position of a leaf in her sunburst.

  Macky stood up. ‘Let’s weed your veggie patch, Charlie.’

  At the overgrown bed, he pulled out a yellow flowering plant and tossed it to one side. Charlie and Anna joined him. Anna worked steadily, pulling weeds and knocking the soil from their roots, such a familiar and satisfying action. The raised bed was gradually revealed. She could plant herbs and leafy greens. There was only smallest chance that they’d be here to harvest them but it would give her pleasure to see them sprout and grow, and she could only imagine Charlie would enjoy it.

  ‘Long worm!’ said Charlie and lifted a writhing worm into the air.

  Macky examined it with a serious face, then squatted on the split log that bordered the bed and used a stick to loosen the soil. ‘There’s fifty million worms in here!’

  ‘How did you know we were staying here, Macky?’ asked Anna.

  ‘I saw you coming up the hill yesterday.’

  ‘Were you following us?’

  ‘No. I was up the mountain.’ He hopped down from the bed and beckoned to her. ‘I’ll show you.’

  She followed him out into the clearing and he pointed to the mountainside of trees. ‘You see up there? That’s my cave. I saw you walking up and Pat leaving.’

  ‘Oh.’ She couldn’t see any cave. ‘We don’t want people to know we’re here.’

  ‘I know. When I told Mum I’d seen you up here she said I mustn’t tell anyone. She said you’re running away from a bad man.’ He looked straight at her. ‘It’s okay. I won’t tell. I promise.’

  ‘Thank you. It’s really important that no one else knows.’ Anna went back to weeding but couldn’t help imagining the police silently appearing from behind the trees just like Macky.

  •

  The next day, Macky turned up after breakfast and led them down the hill. They passed through a cool, dim forest where mottled trees grew close to the path and vines brushed agains
t Anna’s hair. Macky used his stick to push bushes off the path. It was not the path they came up with Pat, and Anna hoped she could find her way back.

  It was still early but already the sun was hot and the cicadas’ thrumming relentless. For a few minutes as they traipsed down the hill – Charlie right on Macky’s heels – the sound of the cicadas and birds reached such a volume and pitch that it seemed to stop all thought, and Anna felt like they were in suspended animation, the three of them walking single file, moving dreamily through the forest’s dappled light.

  At the bottom of the hill they passed through a copse of what must have been old-growth trees, their massive trunks and buttress roots scaled with moss and lichen. Then they emerged onto a flat sandy area scattered with smooth stones and shaded by trees. The wide creek was fast-flowing and shallow, burbling noisily over rocks and around a dozen grey boulders before slowing in a shady oval pool.

  Macky said, ‘The creek here is way better than the waterhole. The waterhole’s just close to our place.’

  He pointed over the other side of the creek to a fenced paddock of lush grass. ‘Look, Charlie. Goats.’ He turned to Anna. ‘They’re Stef’s. He milks them.’

  She could see only one white goat, grazing in the distance.

  Charlie took off her clothes, but left her undies on.

  ‘Are you coming for a swim?’ she asked Anna.

  ‘Sure am.’

  Macky kept his shorts on, although Anna had seen him naked at the waterhole just the other day. He waded in and stepped lightly from stone to stone until he reached the middle of the creek, where he squatted in the sun on a low rock and looked upstream, the water surging around him. Dragonflies skimmed by, wings flashing.

  At the creek’s edge, Charlie balanced on a rock, her arms outstretched. She smiled at Anna and pointed. ‘I want to go right out there, with Macky.’

  ‘I’ll help.’ Anna shucked off her shorts and waded out. The current wasn’t as strong as she’d imagined but the stones were a bit slippery underfoot. She took Charlie’s good hand and led her across the rocks, the sound of the rushing water loud around them.

  Macky watched as they approached. Beyond him, upstream, a low, dilapidated timber bridge spanned the creek. Detritus from floods – sticks and grass – was trapped on the other side.