Songlines

by Carolyn Denman

  While Nicole distracted everyone by starting up her ‘new-hand-me-down’ dirt bike, and getting told off by her mum for filling the air with exhaust fumes, Bane quietly handed me a small jewellery box tied with a ribbon. That was a bad sign. Liam frowned when he saw it but Caleb beamed at me with a smug ‘I told you so’ expression as I tentatively opened the box. There was a delicate golden bracelet inside, pretty but without too much bling. It had a plate with an inscription, ‘Shalom’. I had never heard the word before and I wondered if it was in the language I had used to call the storm, but Bane wouldn’t have had a chance to have had the engraving done since then—it had to have been done earlier. He clasped it around my wrist.

  Caleb gave his brother a nudge. ‘Well that’s going straight to the pool room.’ Liam laughed.

  ‘It means “peace” in Hebrew,’ Bane explained, watching me carefully to gauge my reaction. It was a pretty gift, and I had long since become immune to Caleb’s teasing so I hugged Bane in authentic appreciation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Mrs Ashbree grinning at us.

  We survived our traditional Christmas cricket game in the shallow part of the river without anyone biting the hostess’ son, and rewarded the winner with the bone from the roast. While Blue skulked off to bury his prize, and the others were trying out the new games in the lounge room, I came out to the veranda to sip mulled wine with Noah’s mum and Aunt Lily. The currawongs were shouting their lonely cries to each other as the wind began to settle for the evening and the bush started to wake from its somnolence. Usually around this time we would all be taking bets on who would nod off to sleep first, Harry or Noah’s dad. I missed Harry.

  ‘So how are you feeling about the other day, Lainie?’ Mrs Ashbree asked, fiddling with her silver bangle. ‘Noah tried to tell me what you both did, but it’s hard for me to get my head around. You called the storm?’

  Rats. I’d been hoping she would be able to shed some light on what had happened. Still, Harry had been rather vague about what powers we had, too. I wondered if they really had any idea just how much we were actually capable of.

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Mrs Ashbree. I just sort of knew what to do. I certainly couldn’t do it again. Unless Eden was under threat, I suppose.’

  ‘Please, Lainie, I think it’s high time you started calling me Sarah. And yes, I agree. Cherubic powers only manifest when they’re needed. Until now, none of us have come across anything so extreme. Only visions and feelings. We might have spent the rest of our lives not even experiencing anything unusual if there hadn’t been a fire.’ She sounded resentful, and Aunt Lily shifted uncomfortably, perhaps trying to come to terms with how potentially dangerous this was all becoming.

  ‘I dunno about that,’ I said. ‘Harry told me Kolsom’s activities triggered some things. At least in me.’

  ‘True, but your gifts have always been there—latent or dormant maybe. When he was little, Noah occasionally mentioned that he had daydreams of people, out in the state park. And he could always find you without any problems.’

  It was true. Hide and Seek was not a game we’d ever bothered playing because we always just found each other straight away. I’d never thought about it that much and had assumed that we simply knew each other too well, but now I realised that my instinctive hunches about where Noah was at any given time were probably not that normal after all. And I had known when he’d been lost in the bush on his dirt bike all those years ago.

  A triumphant shout echoed out from the living room where Tessa had apparently slaughtered Bane’s avatar in a PlayStation bloodbath. I could see her wiggling around doing a little victory dance. I felt a bit wistful that I was missing out, but the questions that had been rolling around my skull had already been waiting too long for answers.

  ‘Have our families always been around to guard this area? Even before we became sheep farmers?’ I knew my family had Indigenous blood in its history but Noah’s family were all blond and fair with those startling green eyes. I was fishing for information shamelessly.

  ‘What?’ asked Aunt Lily, chuckling. ‘You don’t think being a shepherd is an appropriate job for a biblical character?’ She winked at Noah’s mum.

  As I choked in response to being referred to as a biblical character, Sarah kindly answered my question with a little more reverence.

  ‘Our families have lived here for a very, very long time,’ she explained, understanding what it was I really wanted to know. ‘Apparently we take on the physical characteristics required to blend in to whatever people expect to see.’

  That fit with what Harry had said about us having human bodies in order to pass unnoticed, but it led me to another thought. ‘Does it keep happening? Changing our appearance to blend in?’

  ‘Quite possibly. I’ve always had my suspicions about your height. I think Noah just expected you to keep growing as much as he did, so you did. Why, has anything happened to you recently?’ she inquired, peering at my face.

  ‘No, not that I’ve noticed,’ I said, leaning back self-consciously. ‘I was just a bit worried that I might wake up one morning to find myself with sparkly skin or something. I don’t suppose this job happens to come with some sort of an instruction manual? Are you sure there isn’t some huge dusty tome hidden away in the attic somewhere? Or maybe my parents left me a mysterious package only to be opened on my seventeenth birthday that you forgot about?’

  Sarah slid a napkin and a pen over to me. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘Write down something about Eden. Perhaps something that you might like your own kids to know.’

  I cringed at the thought that in her mind she already had me settled down with kids, but tried to do as she suggested. It would have been nice to find the cave without having to nearly drown. Maybe a map could have been handy. The pen froze at the end of my fingers. Something deep in my chest began to tremble as the guilty feeling rose up, swamping any desire I had to draw or write anything at all. I dropped the pen, feeling sick to the stomach. I couldn’t even write the word ‘Eden’. No wonder I’d had so much trouble with that English essay.

  ‘I see.’ So that was why there was so little information to go on; we couldn’t speak openly to anyone that wasn’t a Cherub or bodyguard, and evidently couldn’t write anything down either. Personally, I was having enough trouble even talking around the edges of it while Aunt Lily was sitting with us. I wanted to ask more direct questions about Eden itself, but I couldn’t even frame them in my mind without feeling like I was trying to murder someone. I could hardly blame Aunt Lily for wanting to hang around, though. I knew how concerned she was for me.

  ‘Aunt Lily, how is it that you know anything at all about Eden if we can’t even talk about it? Are you one of us too?’ I had been wondering whether she really had been Harry’s bodyguard, as ridiculous as that seemed, but she shook her head.

  ‘As I mentioned the other day, getting information is almost impossible for me. I only know as much as I do because my brother became bonded to Annie and got caught up in something supernatural, and then I ended up raising you,’ she explained. ‘I actually know very little. Harry wasn’t one to talk much at the best of times—he never said anything he didn’t have to. Everything I know I’ve pieced together from things I’ve seen myself. I’m sorry I can’t be more help.’

  Sarah laid her hand on my arm. ‘And I’m afraid I’ve never really been very involved. As you said before, things only happen as needed. With Harry around, I … wasn’t needed.’ She suddenly looked a little lost, almost regretful. Perhaps she was quietly jealous of what Noah and I had achieved.

  My next question was a bit of an awkward one, but I bravely ploughed ahead. ‘Speaking of not being needed, do you happen to know if there’s a way to break this bond I have with Bane? I can take care of myself, and—’

  Suddenly there was mulled wine everywhere, and Noah’s mum was standing up. She’d dropped her mug from shaking hands.
/>
  ‘Don’t ever say such a thing! Don’t you dare!’

  Perhaps storming away in anger was a natural female Cherub trait, because she did it even better than I ever had.

  My aunt and I sat in silence for a long time after that, both of us wishing that Harry would just come home.

  Chapter 24

  A delicate giggle woke Harry from a sound sleep. He shouldn’t have let his guard down for so long but his body could only cope with so much these days, and it was so hard to keep remembering why it even mattered. He crept back into the bushes, hoping the girl would lose interest once he was out of sight, but she followed him curiously, her large blue eyes showing no trace of fear. He should have known his furtive behaviour would only spark her inquisitiveness. He sat down and tried to look as bored as possible instead. It usually worked with young children at home, not that he’d had much experience with those, really. He only knew that when Lainie was a child she tended to lose interest most quickly when they were doing something that even he found tedious. Like trying to teach her to drench sheep. But this girl wasn’t nine years old. She was probably more like fifty. Then again, she could have been four hundred. How could anyone tell in this place?

  The girl smiled and came to sit down, practically in his lap. She hugged him tightly and her glossy dark hair tickled his nose, and then she looked him in the eye, curious to see what he would do next, so he kissed her on the cheek and smiled.

  He was finally becoming re-accustomed to these people. On the day he’d arrived, he’d been given a quick, joyful kiss on the lips by a hulk of a man with legs like gate posts and a thick black beard who wouldn’t have seemed out of place at the Nalong pub. There’d been no flirting in his intimacy, which almost made it harder because he was quite talented at rebuffing that sort of attention without it becoming awkward. He’d had a lot of practice. The kiss had caught him by surprise though, and when he’d stumbled back, the Edenite had looked really confused. The behaviour of the people here was completely natural. There was no such thing as social etiquette in Eden because there was no need for it. He might just as well get offended by an infant burping at him as with anything these people did.

  Harry shifted away from the girl and tucked a couple of flowers into her hair. No matter how adult she appeared, he just couldn’t think of her as anything but a girl. Everyone here looked like a young adult except for the very occasional true children, who were doted on by everyone. But they all behaved as children. Very, very intelligent children.

  Pulling himself to his feet, he tried not to look as tired as he felt. The pain was getting worse. The girl watched him in delighted amusement. As he knew she would, she reached out and picked a yellow Fruit from a nearby tree and offered it to him. He shook his head, trying hard to keep his face passive. She looked surprised but tossed the ripe golden treat carelessly over her shoulder. Great, here we go again. Now she would follow him around to see when he would eat, until she eventually got bored and gave up. Perhaps he should talk to Annie again. She would know how to send the girl away without being rude.

  He looked across to the lake where he knew she was busy collecting water chestnuts for the evening meal. Speaking to her had its consequences. He reminded her of a past life, and despite her enthusiasm for his company, his visits always ended the same way. He had come to Eden to try to address the problem of the sad music in the River, but his presence only seemed to be making it worse.

  A gentle nudge reminded him of his friendly shadow. The girl had noticed his less than chirpy expression and was holding out another piece of Fruit, expecting him to eat it.

  But no matter how bad things got, he refused to do anything that would make the River cry for him.

  Chapter 25

  On the Friday after Christmas I called the fire department to ask if they had completed their investigation into the cause of the blaze. They said they had found no trace of accelerants in the area where the fire started and suggested the most likely scenario was that hikers had left some cigarette butts around. I was pretty confident that innocent hikers wouldn’t be wandering around in the bush smoking at four in the morning, but I could hardly prove what I’d ‘seen’. It would have been easy enough to start a fire without using anything more than a couple of matches with the bush so dry.

  Even though I was not naturally suspicious, I was sure the fire had to have been arranged by someone at Kolsom. It would have been an easy way for them to gain access to the valley if they were trying to obtain more data for their report. Once they were in they could collect more samples and then just backdate the findings. I could only hope that meant that they didn’t have enough data yet. Was this mining project really worth risking lives for?

  In the afternoon we had a meeting with Senior Sergeant Mick Loxwood.

  ‘I’m telling you that if any of those miners set so much as a big toe on our land I will prosecute.’ Aunt Lily’s jaw was clenched and I could hear the thinly suppressed fury in her voice. I hadn’t heard that particular tone since I was eleven years old and Noah had thought it would be funny to open a couple of gates in the portable sheep yards so the sheep came around in a big circle and re-presented themselves for drenching. I had a healthy respect for that tone of voice now.

  ‘With all due respect, Ms Gracewood, we only have limited resources here and I can’t afford to send a patrol car out into the bush every day looking for stray mining surveyors.’ The sergeant sounded patient, but he was spinning his pen around the base of his thumb much faster that he had been when we’d first arrived.

  ‘I’m not asking you to patrol it, just give them fair warning and remind them that the law is on our side,’ my aunt argued between clenched teeth.

  ‘Them who, exactly? Do you believe the company executives are after revenge because you threatened to sabotage one of their bulldozers? Or is it a particular surveyor?’ The sergeant’s calm demeanour was starting to crack.

  Aunt Lily narrowed her eyes dangerously. ‘The “who” is Mr Alex Beckinsale. He’s the young Property Liaison Lawyer at Kolsom who is trying to bully his way onto our land.’ She leant toward him, her eyes pleading. ‘I’ve been advised by my solicitor that if the company gains enough evidence of gas pockets they may have the right to a compulsory acquisition for that part of our land because it isn’t being actively farmed.’

  I looked at her, aghast. No way could they take our land by force, could they? How was I supposed to stop them? If there was one thing superpowers couldn’t help with, it would have to be a scheming lawyer. I thought back to the man I’d seen in the library checking our land title and remembered the impression I’d had of him. If he really was Alex Beckinsale then his devious ambition could be a big problem for us.

  The police sergeant sat back in his chair, running his fingers through sandy hair that betrayed just one or two greys. His frustrated frown stood out in contrast against his reassuring blue uniform. He had been living in Nalong for decades and understood just how attached farmers were to their properties.

  ‘Okay, Ms Gracewood. All I can suggest at this point is that if you have any indication that someone might be trespassing, call the station immediately and we’ll send someone to investigate. Your best bet is if we can catch people who are knowingly in the wrong place, then maybe you can press charges. You did put those Private Property signs up like we discussed?’

  ‘As many as we could. No way could they use that as an excuse.’

  ‘Assuming, of course, that the damage hasn’t already been done. If they managed to get the information they needed before you put the signs up they’ll only plead ignorance at the time it was collected,’ he explained, shaking his head slightly.

  ‘Sergeant Loxwood?’

  He turned to me politely.

  ‘Just hypothetically, if the bushfire had come through our place last week, would we still have had the right to stop people from coming on to our land?’

&n
bsp; He glowered at me as he put down his pen. ‘In the event of a natural disaster there are certain people who are legally authorised to have access to private property. Emergency services obviously, as well as certain other personnel who would be required to assess the safety of the area after the fire has passed. Please tell me you aren’t suggesting what I think you are, Lainie. You would want to have some pretty hard evidence before accusing someone of lighting a bushfire.’

  ‘Of course. I was just making sure I understood our rights if the fire had come through, that’s all.’ I tried to smile sweetly at him but I wasn’t very good at it. He kept frowning.

  ‘Thanks for all your advice, Sergeant,’ Aunt Lily said, standing to leave. She probably wanted to get me out of there before I got myself into any real trouble. ‘I wish I’d realised what was happening sooner. I just didn’t think it could be possible in this day and age to use legal loopholes to take away someone’s property rights. I feel so foolish.’ She shook his hand and then hooked her handbag over her shoulder.

  ‘I understand. I’m sorry I can’t do more to help,’ he sympathised as he showed us out of his office to where Bane and Noah were waiting. ‘Just make sure you call us straight away if you think they might be snooping around again.’

  I certainly would, and I’d know the minute they tried.

  The next day I helped Bane to build a temporary enclosure for the joey who had just about had enough of her fake pillowcase pouch unless she was being carried around, and she was getting too heavy to do that too often. We were arguing over the best way to build it. Bane wanted to build solid fences so she couldn’t see out and get tempted to escape, but I argued that she wasn’t stupid and already knew perfectly well that there was more to the world than her little patch of grass. The fences were going to have to be as tall as we could make them, and even then we weren’t going to be able to keep her in for long. Hopefully just long enough for her to mature to a point where she could survive on her own. I was happy enough to care for her as long as needed, but she belonged in the bush, not in a pen.