Under the Flame Tree

by Karen Wood

  ‘I don’t even know his last name. I don’t know where he comes from.’

  ‘That’s why I don’t trust him,’ said Nat. ‘Why is he so secretive about everything?’

  Kirra wondered what he was doing now. Was he sleeping? She doubted it.

  ‘I reckon you should go slow until you know more about him,’ said Nat.

  Kirra nodded. ‘Yeah. That would be the smart thing to do.’

  Nat yawned. ‘I’m going to bed . . . again.’ She stood and pulled her blanket more tightly around her body. ‘Please don’t wake me with any more mass brawls or monster truck rallies.’

  ‘I’ll try not to,’ said Kirra. She rested her chin on her knees and stared out into the dark night.

  ‘You coming too?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘You’re going back over there, aren’t you?’

  Kirra gave her friend a hapless look. ‘I just wanna know he’s okay.’

  Nat rolled her eyes. ‘You can finish off that nearly kiss.’ She shuffled quietly back through the front door, leaving Kirra alone with her thoughts, which were entirely consumed by Daniel.

  She rose and walked silently across to his cottage and found the front door open. A lamp shed a pale orange glow around the room. Daniel lay on his back on the couch, his knees up, one foot tapping restlessly, one arm draped over his face.

  ‘Can I come in?’ she whispered through the flyscreen.

  When he didn’t answer, she slowly pushed the screen door open, went inside and sat on the edge of the couch. He moved his arm and stared at her.

  A nasty cut bled below his swollen right eye. He ran his hands through his hair.

  ‘It’ll never be any different. This is how I’m branded now. Wherever I go, this is what will happen. Trouble will just follow me.’

  ‘No it won’t,’ she said. ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’

  ‘Tom reckons if anything like this happens again, he’ll sack me.’

  ‘But it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Yes, it was. I shouldn’t have gone to the festival. I should have stayed home. I put everyone at risk, you and Nancy. I feel sorry for everyone here having to put up with my mess of a life.’

  Kirra reached out and touched his cheek. ‘That needs stitching.’

  ‘Leave it,’ he said, pushing her hand away.

  ‘You can’t leave it like that.’

  ‘No hospitals. No coppers. I said, leave it.’ He rolled over. ‘I want to be alone.’

  Kirra stared at his back awhile before she stood and slowly walked out of the cottage.

  Outside, she padded across the yard to the horse shed. Less than a minute later, she returned with the equine medical kit full of bandages, ointments, liniments, rolls of cotton wool and sterile syringes. She rummaged around and found what she needed: alcohol, silk sutures and a curved needle. She cut the silk into lengths, poured alcohol into a stainless steel dish and dropped them in to soak with the needle, like her mum had showed her.

  Back on the couch, she gently touched his face and inspected the cut. It was at least an inch wide.

  ‘I want to sleep.’

  She ignored him and took some gauze swabs and a small bottle of iodine, tipped one onto the other and began gently swabbing.

  He slapped her hand away. ‘I said, don’t!’

  She looked at the swab on the floor, stunned.

  ‘Get off,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  He sighed through his teeth and glared at her. ‘I’ve had enough, Kirra. My head hurts and I’m tired. Leave me alone.’

  ‘You’re going to get a huge scar if you leave it.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘You have too many scars already.’ And she wasn’t just talking about the ones on the outside.

  ‘There won’t ever be a day when I don’t wake up and think about what I did to Sammy,’ said Daniel, staring at the wall.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  Daniel didn’t respond, and she realised his past was an undertow; it kept dragging him back to the accident and refusing to let him go.

  ‘I don’t want you looking in the mirror every day for the rest of your life and thinking about the accident. I don’t want you to be reminded about it every day.’ Kirra couldn’t stop her voice from cracking. She was exhausted, but also full of new and strange emotions.

  ‘Stop it.’ Daniel’s voice was harsh and scratchy – with dust or emotion, she couldn’t tell. But his touch was gentle. He reached up and ran a thumb over her tears.

  ‘I want you to wake up every day and think of me,’ she whispered. ‘Not Jarred Young.’ She reached to the side table and took what was left on the little roll of silk thread. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and with shaky fingers reeled off another length.

  ‘Kiss me,’ he said.

  She ignored him, reaching for the hand that was on her cheek.

  ‘Kiss me,’ he said again, his voice still edged with frustration and anger.

  She took his hand from her face and began wrapping the thread around his little finger.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Restraining you.’

  ‘I could break that by breathing hard,’ he said, watching her hands work on his.

  ‘But you won’t,’ she said, taking the other one and doing the same. In a moment he was tied by his pinkies, with little more than a thread of silk, to the rail of the couch.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked, staring at his fingers.

  ‘Because if you can get through this without breaking the thread, I’ll kiss you.’

  His bemused smile told her she had a deal.

  That was better. She smirked at him. ‘Will you be needing something for the pain?’

  ‘Do you have anything?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  She reached for the iodine and swabs that still sat by the bowl on the table and set to work. She wiped the dried blood from his cheek and then dabbed more carefully around the wound. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Okay so far.’

  She grinned, bent to take up her needle and caught his horrified face as she sat up again. ‘Relax,’ she said, holding it in her bandaged hand. ‘I do this to horses all the time.’

  ‘You’re not seriously going to stab me with that thing, are you?’ His hands twitched and his eyes widened.

  She took a suture and threaded it. ‘Ahuh.’

  He looked like a frightened puppy. Adorable.

  ‘I’d rather like to kiss you too, so please don’t move,’ she said, then carefully pierced his skin.

  He scrunched his eyes closed, and a high-pitched noise escaped from his throat. Some of the worst language she had ever heard whistled through his teeth.

  ‘Did you learn that filth in prison?’ she asked as she pulled the suture through and tied it off. She snipped the ends with the scissors.

  ‘You better be very good at kissing,’ he answered in a strangled voice.

  She threaded another suture. ‘I’m better at needlework.’ She shrugged and pierced his skin again. ‘I did go to a lady’s college, you know.’

  His next comment was unintelligible, but his hands didn’t move. His feet did kick the wooden couch end to a point where Kirra thought he might break it.

  ‘Now,’ she said, as she pulled the silk through, tied it off and snipped it with the scissors, ‘this is going to leave a tiny scar. When you look in the mirror each day I want you to remember who stitched it up for you.’

  ‘I can’t even look at a cattle trough without thinking of you,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Can I kiss you yet?’

  ‘No, I still have one to go.’

  ‘You’re cruel,’ he said.

  She pierced him with the needle again. ‘I am,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever forget it.’

  14

  Kirra was horrified when she woke in the middle of the next day. She sat up and groaned. Then she licked her lips. She was parched. She twisted around and p
eered out the window. Holy moly, it was, like, midday!

  Outside, Daniel and Steve stood staring at a dented-up ute with their hands in their back pockets. Steve was shaking his head slowly.

  Kirra felt everything rush up inside, as though she was plunging feet-first into deep cool water, drowning in a weirdly wonderful joy. Her eyes lingered on Daniel, his butt, his legs, his everything. She could gaze out the window at him all day. If he had a phone, which he didn’t, she would ring him and tell him to get his deliciously kissable self straight back inside for some more urgent medical attention.

  Instead, she leaped out of bed and had a quick shower, smiling like a lunatic as she dried off and rewound the bandage around her wrist. She pulled on her jeans, and in the pocket she found the threads of silk snapped from Daniel’s fingers. She had hardly pulled the final stitch through his cheek before he’d broken them, run his hand around the back of her neck and attacked her with his lips.

  Their legs had tangled, and she’d squealed into his kiss when he brushed her bruised thigh. His breath had sucked through his teeth when she accidentally tugged at the thread that was still attached to his cheek by the needle in her clumsy bandaged hand. They threaded their hurt together in a tangle of lips and arms and delicious winces and grimaces, until they found a place where pain didn’t register.

  Breaking from his kiss was like trying to pull apart north and south magnets, but she’d eventually seen the time on Daniel’s watch – which looked expensive.

  ‘Is that stolen?’ she’d joked through his kiss.

  ‘Gift,’ he mumbled back.

  ‘From who, the juvy mafia?’

  He’d laughed so hard she thought he would fall off the couch.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ she said. ‘It’s a fake. Does it keep the right time?’

  ‘I hope so.’ He was still laughing.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. You’re just cute.’

  ‘Thanks. But according to that thing, real or fake, it’s way past my bedtime.’

  He’d kissed her all the way to the front door and onto the porch. They’d crashed into the table on the way out and both of them groaned as various bruises flared up. Then they’d tripped over a chair on the porch, making Kirra gasp loudly. Even then it proved extremely difficult to untangle her lips from his. She was still laughing as she gave him a final kiss goodbye, pushing with her hands but still clinging to him with her mouth. ‘I have to go.’

  It wasn’t until she dragged herself home through the lounge room, where her dad sat reading at one o’clock in the morning, walked through to her bedroom and saw the lights that were still on in Daniel’s lounge room that she realised they’d been lip-locking with the blinds fully open. She’d peered back down the hallway to where her dad sat, seemingly fixated on his book. It was a tractor manual. And it was upside down.

  Kirra cringed slightly at the memory. But nothing could dampen her mood.

  ‘Where did you get to last night?’ It was Nat. She stood in the doorway in a pair of spotty pyjamas. Somehow she still managed to look well groomed: hardly a hair out of place.

  Kirra gave her a dreamy smile and collapsed backwards onto the bed.

  Natalie walked into the room, stared out the window to where Steve and Daniel were still discussing the ute, and then looked down at Kirra. ‘You’re right. He is kind of hot.’

  ‘You have no idea,’ said Kirra, grinning stupidly.

  Natalie gave her a long scrutinising stare.

  Kirra leaped up and kneeled at the window again. Daniel and Steve were walking back towards the flame tree. ‘Let’s go get lunch.’

  They passed her mum in the kitchen on the way out. Jocelyn still wore her nurse’s uniform as she sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

  ‘Morning!’ Kirra said in a sing-song voice and hurried Nat out before her mum could pin them down and ask about the previous night. The girls skipped down the steps and made their way to the flame tree. Hardly a flower was left on it, and its crown was beginning to thin as winter approached. Everyone was eating lunch. Daniel sat between Pete and Paul with a twisted strand of baling twine in his teeth, as the three of them made crackers for the end of their stockwhips. His face looked like a squashed eggplant, and her stitches, like tiny black spider legs, made it look all the more gnarly.

  ‘Hey,’ Kirra said, smiling breathlessly.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, grinning back. ‘How’s the arm?’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘How’s the eye?’

  Pete and Paul got up and moved to a pair of chairs closer to the tree. Probably because of the way she was staring at Daniel.

  ‘What?’ he laughed, and then his face fell suddenly. His shoulders stiffened and his eyes set on something behind her.

  Kirra whipped her head around and what she saw hit her like she’d been shot in the chest.

  A police car rolled slowly down the Moorinja driveway and towards the homestead.

  Kirra’s mouth dropped open and she spun back to Daniel. His head was already in his hands, his face hidden.

  The mood under the flame tree shifted dramatically. There was a shocked silence as two officers stepped out of the car and made their way to the table.

  The door of the main house flung open. Boss Carney barrelled down the front steps. Nancy stood in the doorway, watching.

  ‘How can I help you, officers?’

  ‘You had some fighting going on here last night,’ one officer asked in a questioning tone.

  ‘We did,’ said Tom, folding his arms over his chest and standing with his feet wide apart. ‘It’s all sorted now.’

  ‘Mind if we talk to some of your staff?’

  ‘Not if you tell me what’s going on first,’ the boss replied.

  The police officer’s voice lowered to a mumble and everyone at the table stopped breathing as they strained to hear the conversation. Kirra could barely make out a word.

  Tom’s expression gave nothing away, as he stood hard-faced, listening. Eventually he nodded and then stood his ground, looking grim as they approached Daniel.

  Kirra felt horror seep through her, panic scratching at her insides. What were they doing here? It couldn’t be good.

  ‘Somewhere private we can go for a chat, Daniel?’

  Daniel stood. Kirra and everyone else at the table watched all three of them walk to his cottage and disappear through the front door.

  Pete started cursing the Blackbrae boys, calling them rednecks and troublemakers.

  Paul defended them. ‘Don’t forget they got dragged into it too. Daniel accused them of something they didn’t do to try and get himself off the hook. It was a pretty low thing to do.’

  ‘He did not!’ said Kirra. She didn’t know what the truth was, but she had only ever seen Daniel be courageous and honourable. It couldn’t be true.

  She felt Nat’s hand slip into hers and squeeze. Kirra pulled it away.

  ’I knew this would happen,’ said Jamie, in a matter-of-fact voice.

  ‘Knew what would happen?’ said Kirra, spinning around and glaring at him. ‘What did you know would happen, Jamie?’

  Jamie looked startled. ‘Nothing,’ he said, and gestured towards the police cars. ‘Just . . . this. Trouble.’

  ‘And how did you know that?’ Kirra demanded. ‘How did you know there would be more trouble?’

  ‘Don’t attack me,’ said Jamie. ‘None of this is my fault.’ He stood and stalked away from the table. ‘I don’t want to know about any of it.’

  ‘That Daniel was trouble from the start,’ said Liz. ‘I never liked him.’

  ‘He’s a good kid,’ said old Jack angrily.

  As an argument erupted, Kirra rose from the table and fled to the horse shed. In the harness room, she sat on a drum and stared hopelessly around the walls.

  ‘Hey.’ It was Natalie, peering through the doorway. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘I just want to be alone for a minute, if that’s okay.’ Kirra’s thoughts were doing somersaults i
nside her head.

  ‘Sure?’

  Kirra nodded.

  ‘Okay. You know where to find me if you need me.’

  She heard Nat’s footsteps retreat.

  It wasn’t long before Daniel appeared at the door. ‘Thought I might find you here,’ he said quietly. The two police officers waited as he came inside.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

  ‘I have to go to the police station in town and give a statement about what happened last night. Tom’s going to come with me.’

  Kirra nodded, desperately trying not to bawl like a two-year-old. ‘Will you come back?’

  He didn’t answer. The look on his face made nausea roll over her. They were taking him back to juvy?

  ‘Hey, tough girl,’ he said, holding her cheek. ‘Where’s my jump-castle warrior?’

  ‘This hurts worse,’ she whispered. ‘Daniel, this is all wrong.’

  ‘I told you it would never be any different. I’m trouble, Kirra. I’m no good for anyone.’

  ‘You are good for me. You’re good for the horses too. You’re good for Moorinja.’ She raised her eyes to meet his, wishing he would tell her what was going on. What was the big secret he was hiding? Was it really worth all this? She reached her hand to his face and touched the stitches under his right eye. It would leave a scar, one that would fade but never completely disappear.

  He opened his mouth, said nothing, and closed it. He was searching her face again, looking for something. ‘See you again,’ he finally said.

  ‘You better.’

  They stood staring without speaking for what seemed like forever. ‘What is it?’ she asked at last. ‘What do you want to tell me?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ He shook his head. ‘Makes no difference to anything.’ He leaned down and kissed the corner of her mouth, pulling at her lower lip briefly and letting it go. It robbed her of the chance to kiss him back, leaving her open-mouthed, wanting more. ‘I don’t want to stuff up your chances of going to college next year. You don’t need all my problems holding you back.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  He gave a cheerless laugh, turned and walked out.

  ‘Daniel.’ She ran after him. He turned, caught her and held her, wrapping his arms tightly around her. It was like the hugs her mum would give her on the train platform whenever she left for boarding school. It was the kind of hug that was meant to be carried for a long time, because there would be no others for a while. It was a goodbye hug.