The Book of Horses and Unicorns

by Jackie French

  He opened his eyes at the sound of Aunt Addie’s step on the path. She wore funny shoes, he noticed, sort of slippers, shining and in bright colours, almost like they were made of silk.

  She carried a tray filled with more of the peaches, and apples too and cherries, and some funny nuts, and some sort of bun thing and honeycomb in a blue bowl.

  ‘They’re hazelnuts,’ said Aunt Addie, as he picked one up curiously. ‘Your father didn’t know hazelnuts either. They’re plentiful up here. And that’s acorn bread. The baby fairies sleep in acorn cradles and the bees rock them in the wind.’

  The bird sang again, that strange sweet bird. The song twisted in his brain and carried it along. It wouldn’t be so bad living up here, thought Harry. All the fruit you wanted and green grass all year round — somehow he knew this grass never dried off no matter how hot the summer. You could swim in the pool with the water sprite and the fairies would keep you company.

  He tried to jerk his mind back to reality. But there were no fairies. Of course there were no fairies.

  ‘Aunt Addie?’ he said almost desperately. ‘What was it you wanted me to do? The thing Dad said you needed?’

  Aunt Addie’s smile seemed far away. ‘You brang it when you came,’ she said. ‘I have it here. I’ll keep it safe.’

  ‘But what was it? What do you mean?’

  ‘Sleep,’ said Aunt Addie’s voice. ‘It is a long walk back. Just sleep. Just sleep.’

  The bird sang again. Harry shut his eyes. His dreams were filled with unicorns and silver wings and the liquid singing of the bird. And then a sheep called somewhere on the hill. A dog barked in reply. The dreams changed, and Harry dreamt of home.

  The farmhouse crouched between the sheds. There was no light in the kitchen. Mum must be reading in bed.

  The old sofa creaked on the verandah. Dad looked out through the darkness.

  Harry said nothing as he climbed the steps.

  ‘So, you found her,’ said Dad softly.

  Harry nodded. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘By your face. I felt like that, too, when I first met Aunt Addie.’

  ‘It was real, wasn’t it?’ asked Harry. ‘All of it was real?’

  ‘It was real,’ said Dad. ‘Real enough, at any rate. Real enough to see and smell and hear.’

  ‘Who is she, Dad?’

  Dad moved over on the sofa. Harry sat next to him. The cushions felt stiff. Too much possum, Mum had said, though she’d tried to wash it out.

  ‘I told you,’ said Dad. ‘Your great-something-aunt.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Harry.

  Dad sighed. ‘I only know what my dad told me. What his dad told him too. It’s a long story. Sure you’re not too tired?’

  ‘Go on,’ said Harry again.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t be too tired,’ said Dad. ‘I remember the first time I went to Aunt Addie’s … Anyway, it all started with your great-great-something-granddad. He settled here in the 1840s.

  ‘It was all bush then. No paddocks. Just the trees. It was wild and isolated but he loved it. He married your great-something-gran, and she loved it too. She was the daughter of a farmer up past Black Stone Creek. She’d been born there. It never occurred to her that someone mightn’t love it too.’

  ‘Where does Aunt Addie fit in?’

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ said Dad.

  ‘Aunt Addie was your great-something-granddad’s younger sister. Twenty years younger — it happened a lot back then, a gap as big as that. Families had lots of kids in those days. They were farm kids too, almost as isolated as this probably, but different country. Very different country. Addie was only five when your great-something-granddad left to come to Australia, but she loved him, and she remembered him.

  ‘They wrote to each other — though remember in those days it took a letter six months or so to cross the ocean. He told her about his farm, his lovely, lovely farm, about his wife, his sweet, sweet wife. They’re the words Dad used to me, and his dad to him, all the way back. His lovely, lovely farm, his sweet, sweet wife.

  ‘Then something happened to Aunt Addie. I don’t know what it was. Dad just said his dad told him she’d been crossed in love. That’s how they put it back in the last century.

  ‘I don’t know what it was all about. Maybe she was engaged to some bloke who ran off on her. Maybe she fell in love with someone her parents didn’t like. Those sorts of things happened in those days. You had to marry someone your parents approved of.

  ‘Who knows. But she was unhappy and she wrote to her brother, and he said, “Come out here. There’s plenty of room on the farm.” I suppose he thought there were many more men than women in the colony, too, she’s sure to get a husband here.

  ‘So he wrote to her, and she wrote back, and the next year she came.’

  A dog muttered in its sleep down at the kennels. ‘Go on,’ said Harry.

  ‘It was a long voyage out, but she was happy. It must have all been strange to a girl from the backcountry like she was, who’d never even been to a city before. But she was full of hope. She was going to a new land, a new farm, going to her beloved brother, her older brother she hadn’t seen for nearly fifteen years.

  ‘She landed at Sydney. Her brother was shearing and couldn’t meet her, but he arranged for her to be met, taken to a respectable boarding house and put on the coach next morning.

  ‘He met her up in town. He shaved specially — in those days men shaved maybe once a week. But it’d been a long shearing. His hair was shaggy. His face was brown. He wasn’t the brother she remembered.

  ‘He brought her home. His wife had made Johnny cakes and they ate them on the verandah, right where we’re sitting now, though the rest of the house wasn’t built back then, just this front bit with a sort of separate kitchen out the back. The flies sat on the Johnny cakes and got stuck in the treacle. And Aunt Addie sat on the verandah horrified at what she’d come to.

  ‘Aunt Addie stuck it out, even though they killed a snake the first morning she was here, and she was scared to go down to the dunny ever after.

  ‘She was scared of the snakes, of the bunyip howling down the creek, of the wind that tore down the hills and the heat that sent the branches cracking off the trees. She was scared of the smoke from the bushfires in the distance. But she stuck it out.’

  ‘Did she fall in love again?’ asked Harry.

  Dad shook his head. ‘There were men around. Stockmen, farmers, shopkeepers up in town. Every woman in the colony had a string of suitors in those days. But she didn’t fall in love again.

  ‘She was homesick. She missed the trees, the soft green trees. She missed the bluebells in the spring. She missed the roses over the fence at home. She missed the sound of bees in the spring blossom.’

  ‘Why didn’t she go home then?’ asked Harry.

  ‘It was a long way, remember,’ said Dad. ‘Expensive, too. And when she got back she’d just be an old maid, unwanted … and her parents were getting older and what would happen when they died? There were so few jobs for women in those days. Be someone’s servant or nurse … I doubt she had the education for governess. You know how she talks … There was nothing for her at home, except the forests and the gardens that she loved. She’d sit here on the verandah and look out at the hills and she’d remember the flowers and the stories of home.

  ‘So her brother decided they’d plant a garden for her here, something to remind her of the world she loved. She brightened up when he told her about that.

  ‘Your great-something-grandfather wrote to Sydney and ordered plants from there. He got English catalogues and had plants and seeds sent out — a long journey for them too, remember.’

  ‘And the garden grew?’ asked Harry, looking out at Mum’s tubs of petunias by the steps, the grevilleas by the front gate, the rockery where the dogs liked to sleep.

  ‘No.’ Dad looked out at the hills again. ‘Most of the bulbs didn’t even come up — either it was too hot or they’d been damaged in the ship
or they never did get used to the change in seasons. The roses died — I reckon we’ve got hardier sorts now that’ve got used to Australia. The lily shoots shrivelled in the ground. She couldn’t even get a lawn to grow. They didn’t have hoses in those days, remember, or sprinkler systems. Gardens needed the rain or they died. And Aunt Addie’s died.

  ‘Aunt Addie didn’t say anything. She didn’t say much at all by then. Then one morning she was gone.

  ‘Your great-something-granddad panicked. He thought she’d been bitten by a snake, drowned in the waterhole. All the blokes went looking — then that evening she turned up, cool as you please. She hadn’t been bitten by a snake. She hadn’t even got lost.’

  ‘Where had she been?’

  ‘Up at the hut. The one where she lives now. In those days it was just a shepherd’s hut — a place to check the sheep when they were up that way — but it hadn’t been used since the main house was built.

  ‘Aunt Addie asked if she could grow a garden there. It was cooler up in the hills, she reckoned. She’d get water from the creek in the gully.

  ‘Of course your great-granddad said yes. Anything to make her smile again. She spent the next year digging up the shrivelled bulbs from round the house, carefully separating the lilies from the hot soil, uprooting the roses in case there was still a spark of life.

  ‘Years went by. Sometimes she asked her brother for seeds — grass seeds, forget-me-not seeds, hollyhock seeds. But mostly she just wandered up there in the early morning and came back late at night. Finally your great-something-granddad stopped worrying about her. She knew the way. She always came back safely.

  ‘More years went by. Your great-something-granddad had kids — your ancestor and a few others too. Aunt Addie told the kids stories about “home” — the beech trees dappled against the sky, the fairies and the unicorns. I reckon by that time she didn’t know what “home” was really like — memories of her childhood were all mixed with her stories and … well, who knows with what else.

  ‘She spent more and more time up at the hut.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone ever go up to see what she was doing there?’ asked Harry.

  Dad shook his head. ‘She asked them not to. She said they could see it when it was done. Her brother and sister-in-law did what she asked. I reckon they thought that garden was probably dead, too, and Addie just wouldn’t admit it, would keep on hoping that one day things would grow.’

  ‘But surely some of the stockmen would have passed by!’ objected Harry.

  ‘You’d think so,’ said Dad. ‘You’d think someone would have come by. But they didn’t. We can probably guess why.

  ‘Then one day … the first of May it was, just like today, her nephew thought he’d follow her.’ Dad’s voice died away. A possum shrieked out in the gum tree by the shed, and then was still.

  ‘What happened then?’ asked Harry.

  ‘What happened to you, I reckon,’ said Dad. ‘What happened to me and my dad and my granddad, too. He met Aunt Addie. And he saw her garden.

  Aunt Addie didn’t come back to the farm that night. She never came back again. For years her brother tried to find her hut. But the only one who ever did was her nephew. Every May Day he went up there. Just like me. Now just like you.’

  ‘But … but you don’t go there anymore,’ said Harry. ‘Did you have an argument? Did she ask you not to come?’

  His father shook his head. ‘No argument. Just one May Day I couldn’t find it anymore. I hunted for hours. I was sure I’d gone the wrong way, gone up the wrong gully — but deep inside I knew what had happened.’

  ‘I … I don’t understand …’

  ‘I had grown up. Aunt Addie didn’t want me in her garden anymore. Not with the unicorn, the water sprite, the fairies — didn’t you see the fairies, too?’

  ‘I think I did,’ said Harry.

  ‘That’s all that ever happens,’ said Dad. ‘You think you might have seen … Grown ups don’t fit into the world of fairies. And no man can ride the unicorn.’

  ‘Then one day I won’t be able to find Aunt Addie’s either,’ said Harry slowly.

  ‘One day,’ said his father. ‘In a few years’ time. Then one day you’ll have to tell your son how he can find Aunt Addie’s.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Mmmm?’ His father’s eyes were on the moon, round as a golden hill, emerging from the black behind the ridge.

  ‘Did Aunt Addie ever ask you into her house?’

  ‘No,’ said Dad.

  ‘Why not?’

  His father grinned. ‘What maiden lady of last century would ask a gentleman into her bedroom? Even one as young as you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Harry. ‘I thought it might break the spell.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said his father gently. ‘I don’t think the spell can be broken now.’

  ‘You know,’ said Harry after a while, ‘I almost stayed there. It was so beautiful. So strange. I thought I could never leave.’

  ‘Then you remembered home,’ said his father.

  ‘How did you know?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Because it happened to me, too,’ said his father. ‘Just like that. I remembered the sun on the hills and the sheep by the rocks. And I came home.’

  Home, thought Harry. The bare gold hills like skulls, their shape all clean and clear under the dead grass. The hot haze of eucalypt oil around the trees that made the distance blue. The sunlight baking on corrugated iron. The hunched backs of rocks in the paddocks …

  ‘What was it Aunt Addie needed?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Haven’t you guessed?’

  Harry shook his head.

  ‘Maybe you will next time,’ said his father. ‘It took me a while, too.’

  ‘Not fair,’ said Harry. ‘Tell me now, Dad.’

  His father shrugged. ‘Reality,’ he said. ‘That’s what she needs from us. A little bit of reality to ground that world of hers. A little bit of something that’s not memories and dreams. Otherwise … who knows …’

  The clearing had shimmered when he’d first seen it, Harry remembered. And by the time he left the shapes and colours were clear …

  ‘Do you think she’s lonely?’ asked Harry finally.

  ‘No,’ said Dad. ‘She’s got her unicorn, her water sprite and her fairies. I reckon she’d say we were the lonely ones. But we’re not. There’s another sort of magic here that Addie never learnt to see. Come on. Your mum will be waiting. It’s time we went inside.’

  Amfylobbsis

  The hospital bed was cool, the sheets were straight and firm. You didn’t need eyes to tell it was a hospital, Grandma decided. The smells, the sounds, the very feel of the air conditioning on your skin was enough to tell you where you were.

  ‘Grandma?’ The voice at the door was eager. ‘Have they taken the bandages off yet?’

  ‘Emma, is that you, pet? No, tomorrow. They’ll take the bandages off tomorrow.’

  ‘But we’ll be gone tomorrow!’ The voice came nearer. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can Amfylobbsis come in, too?’

  Grandma smiled. ‘I’d love to see Amfylobbsis.’

  ‘But you can’t see,’ Emma pointed out. ‘You won’t be able to see until tomorrow.’

  ‘Not even then, pet,’ said Grandma gently. ‘It’ll take weeks for my eyes to get better.’

  ‘But you’ll be able to see again properly? Really properly?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Grandma.

  I hope, she thought. Why do we always lie to children? Why do we always tell them everything will be all right?

  ‘Is Amfylobbsis here yet?’ she asked aloud. Emma giggled. ‘No. He had to hide from the nurses.

  They might be angry if they find him in their hospital.’

  ‘But no one ever sees Amfylobbsis except you.’

  ‘They might hear him though,’ said Emma seriously. Something clattered outside — a trolley perhaps, thought Grandma. ‘He’s here now,’ said Emma.
‘Say hello to Grandma, Amfylobbsis.’ She paused. ‘Amfylobbsis says to say hello.’

  ‘Hello, Amfylobbsis,’ said Grandma.

  Emma was silent for a moment. ‘You’re the only one who believes in Amfylobbsis except me,’ she said finally. ‘Everyone else says he’s just imaginary. I’ll miss you when we’re in Darwin, Grandma.’

  ‘I’ll miss you too, pet,’ said Grandma. ‘And Amfylobbsis,’ she added. ‘But we’ll see each other often.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise,’ said Grandma. She tried to sound convincing. Darwin was so far away …

  Emma was silent.

  ‘Emma, what does Amfylobbsis look like? Is he big?’

  ‘Really big,’ said Emma. ‘Almost as tall as me.’

  Grandma smiled. ‘It must be hard for him to hide so no one sees him, then.’

  ‘Amfylobbsis says he’s had lots of practice hiding,’ said Emma matter-of-factly.

  ‘Is he a boy? Or a dog? Or a monster? Or …?’

  ‘Of course he’s not a monster. He’s sort of like a horse,’ said Emma. ‘Like a white horse. But he’s different. Like a fairy horse maybe.’

  ‘Has he got wings?’

  ‘No.’ Emma sounded regretful. ‘Just this big horn thing in the middle of his head. It’s sharp. I was scared of it at first but Amfylobbsis said …’

  ‘Then he’s a unicorn!’ said Grandma.

  ‘Is that what he is?’ said Emma excitedly. ‘I didn’t know. Have you seen unicorns before, Grandma?’

  ‘No, they’re …’ She was about to say they were imaginary. She stopped. ‘They’re pretty rare,’ she said instead.

  The nurse’s voice came from the doorway. ‘Visiting hours are nearly over,’ she said.

  Emma sat quite still. ‘I don’t want to go,’ she whispered.

  ‘I’ll see you before you go tomorrow.’

  ‘But everyone will be there then. It’s not the same. It’s hard to bring Amfylobbsis when there are so many people.’