by Averil Kenny
*
Sonnet prowled her book aisles the next day in a barely tempered fury, fists buried deep in the pockets of her faithful old capri pants. Her homily over breakfast on misogyny hadn’t gone quite as impressively as planned. For starters, Plum was absent, having been spirited away by Olive. And Fable, for whom the lecture was designed to serve the most benefit, closed up the moment Sonnet started in on all the injustices of being a woman. She hadn’t even shed a single tear at her sign’s defacement – though Sonnet had laboured that point excessively.
There was no opening of the Story Bar today. The few loyal customers stopping by were escorted out of the store sans long chat. She would not be justifying her new sign to anyone – friend or foe, full stop – and the surprised comments which inevitably came bounced right off Sonnet. She had one objective today, and one alone: to make her customary errand up Main Street at three o’clock.
She’d show them. Sonnet Hamilton would not be cowed, and was not beaten!
When the appointed hour rolled round, Sonnet set off to the accompaniment of a bass drum’s beating. It felt like a marching band. Certainly, the roar erupting from Cutters at the sight of Sonnet’s approach was more befitting a parade, than one woman, austerely dressed and fierce of face, merely navigating a footpath.
Only job these bludgers have, Sonnet thought, as the familiar tide of alcohol and profanity surged forth, is killing their livers every damn day!
Sonnet had wondered if Brenton might be perverse enough to appear at her regular passing. She was relieved to see his veranda littered with leaves, a broom languishing against the wall. Her breath constricted to a pant as she neared the open doorway, crude insults washing right over her. Hardening her jaw, locking her eyes on the Paragon Cafe ahead, Sonnet took her last few strides towards victory.
Who could say which vulgar cry finally punched through her steely facade? Perhaps it was the one about Sonnet ‘sucking wrinkly cocks’.
She lurched to a stop. ‘Shove your useless honeypot, Olive!’ she hissed, rounding on the pub door so contemptuously even the rollicking drunks at the entrance were taken aback. She marched into Cutters, incandescent with rage.
Brenton was at the bar and the visible blanching of his face, smirk notwithstanding, was worth each step into his lair.
He laid down a glass and swung a red-checked tea towel over his shoulder, leaning forward expectantly. Sonnet’s gaze blistered right over him as she turned to address the rabble.
Her tone scorched, like pavement on a summer’s day. ‘Who’s the coward that illegally defaced my business sign?’
The leers and knowing glances passed one to another, offering no answer.
Sonnet harrumphed. ‘Like I said – coward! Skulking in the dark with a paintbrush, trying to pretend you’re tough. But you’re just a weasel!’
Individual faces blurred into an amorphous blob of bulging eyes and hanging mouths.
‘You want to besmirch my reputation and a good man’s legacy? You want to try to shame my family? You don’t have the chops to insult any of us!’
Brenton smirked, saying nothing.
Sonnet had a flashing desire for another glass to smash, not on the ground this time, but right into his face.
She was done here.
Sonnet strode out of Cutters on a white-hot upwelling of wrath, which had no other outlet now but her eyes.
She did not halt until she was three blocks clear, shaking under the awning of a boarded-up shopfront. Her pressing fingers failed to stem her flowing eyes for several minutes.
A voice at her side made her jump.
‘Didn’t yer father teach you not to cast yer pearls before swine?’
Turning, Sonnet took in the dishevelled bulk of a middle-aged man. He was odorous with tobacco.
‘I never had a father.’
‘I’ll tell yer, then. Don’t cast yer pearls before them swine.’
Sonnet was utterly depleted. The whole town could go to hell, starting with this guy.
His brow rutted. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I see yer walkin’ stubbornly past every day and I think to meself: that girl’s got guts like this town ain’t never seen! Just like yer lovely little mum. But they’re swine! Yer don’t need to hear it, best walk up the other side of the street. Don’t yer go castin’ yer pearls there no more.’
I’m not jewellery!
‘And listen, I want to thank yer for the books yer been sending home with me kids all the time. They love those books like nothin’ else. Sleep with ’em under their little heads, turn the pages till they’re nearly fallin’ out. I keep telling ’em they’re gotta give ’em back. Just, they’ve never had any books before.’
‘Oh, you’re Joe Taylor.’ All the indignant lectures she had prepared for this man, and now there were no scolding words, only a kind of enfeebled gratitude for his presence with her on this friendless street corner.
‘I’m sorry if them kids have been pestering yer down there,’ he said. ‘Just haul ’em back any time they’re bothering yer.’
‘I would rather Jim and Jackie be in my shop than roasting away in your parked car, Mr Taylor.’ She was unexpectedly gentle where she had always intended to flay.
‘They just like comin’ in with their dad.’
Sonnet frowned. ‘I wouldn’t think any kid wants to be left in a car all afternoon only for a drunk to drive them home.’
There was no injury in his reply. ‘Gave that up years ago. Don’t touch a drop now. But there’s not many places an old farmin’ man like me can go find some solace in the company of other fellas. I just like to sit and ’ave a yarn.’
Sonnet sagged now. ‘Well, your children are always welcome at my shop. My sister Plum looks forward to seeing them every day. And the books are my pleasure.’
Joe nodded, something like a smile pressing on the corner of his mouth.
‘It wasn’t any of them blokes in there.’
‘What wasn’t?’
‘Yer lovely sign. It was a bunch of young bucks the other night. The Johnstone kid, a Logan, that Hull boy. Off their faces on somethin’ and causin’ all sorts of trouble round town. Don’t you let it get to yer, but. Just remember yer pearls.’
Of course it was a Hull! Wouldn’t be surprised if Delia Hull herself bought the paint!
*
Three days later, a large cardboard box appeared on her shop’s front stoop. A note was taped to the top:
Wish our date would have gone better. Maybe we can give it another shot one day. These are for you. Come have a chat, you know where to find me.
Brenton.
Inside, haphazardly wrapped in newspaper, was over a dozen framed paintings from Brenton’s hotel. Sonnet sank, bewildered, to the step, thumbing gently through the frames. Her first instinct was to wound with further rejection – smash them to smithereens and dump them, post-haste, on his front step.
If he thinks he can make it up to me, much less woo me back again with these paintings, he’s even stupider than I thought!
The final painting at the bottom of the box, however, was her cassowary. And it was her cassowary. That primordial gaze had haunted her dreams for night after tossing night. It stared out at her from the darkening rainforest as she pedalled home in the gloaming. Swathed in mist, it stalked outside the cottage in the morning gloom as she bustled about the breakfast table.
She lifted the painting clear of the box, so that she might behold that scrutiny boldly in kind. The sense of knowing or being known, of both prescience and presence, struck her as keenly as it had the first time. Only now there wasn’t a bloodsucker to scrape off her neck. She regarded the painting in a long silence, eyes poring over the oil strokes, unable to break the creature’s stare.
Finally, she pushed to her feet and carried the cassowary into her shop. Taking a hammer, with nail pressed determinedly between her lips, Sonnet located a spot on the wall opposite her shop counter and Story Bar. In a trice, the cassowary was hung. Against her white walls and she
lves, beneath the chandelier’s grandeur, the black sheen and cobalt blue of the bird was unearthly. His follow-you-round-the-room gaze would no doubt provide a talking point with patrons.
Sonnet blazed with embarrassment as she bound the box of paintings to the back rack of her bike. It felt like stealing; worse, like accepting a whore’s pittance.
The cassowary was hers, but what about the others? She’d probably just shove them in the back of her bedroom armoire, already filled as it was with her mother’s moth-eaten dresses.
The overloaded ride home was slow and strenuous. At every bump or wobble, Sonnet considered spinning back to return – no, throw – the paintings at Brenton forthwith!
It was almost a relief the next morning, to discover the box empty. Almost as if she’d dreamed the paintings into life, and had carted a hollow box home, instead. She gawked uncomprehendingly.
The slam of the bathroom door brought Sonnet back to her senses. That thieving little mongrel! Who else would have robbed her box but Fable Hamilton?
Sonnet grabbed her not-so-secret copy of Fable’s bedroom key from the top of the fridge, and headed for the sunroom.
Enraging as it was to find the paintings in her younger sister’s brazen possession, there was a sense of . . . rightness to the scene that greeted her. For not only had Fable stolen every last painting from the box, she’d already affixed them to all available wall space. This wasn’t mere pilfering; it was a flagrant assumption of ownership.
The sunroom had become an art shrine to Noah Vale: mist-roped mountains, noble rain trees, blood vine snaking up stone ruins, a pair of paradise kingfishers, secret waterfall grotto, a fire rainbow daubed over the valley, glittering sugarcane arrows, and Moria Falls, above the window seat, in pride of place.
Sonnet’s indignation dissipated. She couldn’t name another person who would revere and cherish these artworks as Fable could. They should be in an art gallery, or up for sale. But perhaps there was serendipitous justice in this, after all. If Fable had lost anything in her sign’s defacement, she had gained infinitely more in return. Sonnet eased the door closed on Fable’s reliquary with a quiet click.
CHAPTER 25
THE BUTTERFLY PATCH
November 1960
F
able was on her belly in the luxuriant tangle of her garden, ministering to a sketchbook – oblivious to both the spring sunshine overhead and the barefoot visitors approaching the gate, towels slung over shoulders.
Around her, bloomed the pentas and ixora flowers she’d taken as cuttings from gardens all over the valley. Her foraged flowers thrived like weeds, attracting her two favourite butterflies to the garden: the peridot Birdwing, and cerulean Ulysses. Hidden inside the flowers, slept Fable’s faerie garden; rather, Olive’s tiny tombstones.
Fable hated how weird Sonnet got whenever the graves were mentioned. Even after all these years, the adults maintained the pretence that they were faerie houses. So, faerie houses Fable had defiantly made them, weaving Olive’s river stones into her drawings of ferny glens and linns. Long had she laboured over this theme, adapting it from her water nymphs of earlier years.
In the last two years, as Fable’s garden had sprung into glorious, fertile life, so too had her journals burgeoned. Between the pages lived a bevy of faerie folk, with butterfly wings draped around whimsical figures, and clothes spun from rainforest blooms or fruits.
Today she was filling in the iridescent peridot wings of a faerie frolicking on a bird of paradise flower. Absinthe, she had named this, her favourite heroine. She had resolved at day’s beginning, not to get sidetracked by yet another rendering of blue eyes.
*
Two young men leant over the fence to watch Fable, her face hidden by a long fall of red-gold, feet kicking together. Their convivial chatter dwindled into silence.
The first young man smiled at his friend as one might an endearing toddler. The playful urge to ruffle Fable’s hair, however, had melted into distant memory. Marco never touched Fable these days, except inadvertently, and each time it nearly stopped his heart with fear she’d think it deliberate, and incongruous with his loyally platonic presence. Always lurking, was his terror she might withdraw from him, as she had every other male of the old Glade Gang.
Ever since that hullabaloo with her sister’s bookshop sign – no, earlier than that, ever since the hurriedly stamped-out controversy with Vinelands – Fable had removed herself entirely from their group.
Marco knew just enough about Fable’s near-miss at Vinelands to guess why. But only because he’d been there the night Raff came over to the Lagorios’ and ripped shreds off Vince about his involvement in it. If not for overhearing that, Marco wouldn’t have had a clue why Fable went so cold, so quickly on the Gang. The Hulls, after all, had put a self-serving embargo on the whole topic. Marco had never pressed Fable directly to explain herself, though Fable, guardedly, and only once, had offered this: ‘Boys have changed.’
And sure, boys had. Although Marco, loath to contradict Fable, might have pointed out that girls had changed first, and with few exceptions for the better. Gone was the easy mateship of the Glade Gang days. Now it was impossible to find a girl without a head filled with dating wars, movie-star fixations, and trends changing so fast they could give a bloke whiplash. Marco preferred girls without all the artificial gloss, and unknowable motives. In truth, Marco didn’t prefer girls at all.
Fable was his only exception. He wasn’t stupid; he could tell Fable put on her airs, too – like all that makeup she wore lately. He wished she wouldn’t because it ruined her wholesome naturalness. But at least Fable showed little interest in that incomprehensible female triad of gossip, fashion and flirtation, and was immune to the wild romantic vicissitudes of their peers. When all the other seniors gathered in Raintree Park after the Friday-night movie at the Royale, with nicked bottles to imbibe, Fable was never in attendance.
Marco was secretly glad his friend shunned the popular crowds – even if it was only around the farms she would abide Marco’s company too.
At school or down the street, Fable drew right back. She spent her school lunches with the motley misfits and oddballs who congregated loosely near the art demountable. Fable hung out a lot with Sally Hobson, an Aboriginal artist whose traditional techniques so contrasted with Fable’s whimsical watercolours. Marco supposed Fable was glad to have found someone whose love and knowledge of the rainforest surpassed even hers. In a reversal of her alliance with Marco, Fable’s relationship with Sally was mostly confined to the schoolyard and raucous Paragon booths. Outside hours, they went to much different sides of Noah Vale.
Somehow, despite surrounding herself with social pariahs, Fable couldn’t escape the aura of small-town celebrity. All eyes, ears and tongues were always on her.
For the boys, it seemed it was all about her long hair and big norks. The girls’ ongoing obsession with Fable was harder to understand. When they gathered behind the toilet block to have a mild Virginia, Fable was their number-one topic. Did they hate everything about her, as they readily professed, or did they envy her allure? Other kids weren’t sure how to pigeonhole or neutralise Fable. She acted like a tomboy, dressed like a charity-shop raider, drew weird pictures, had that crazy harlot mother, hung with D Block Losers, yet outshone them all. Fable Hamilton was the most hateable thing of all – an impervious girl, who thought she was too good for everyone else.
Marco whistled tunelessly over the fence now and grinned as the strawberry head lifted slightly, and an arm flew into the air, one finger raised.
Marco spoke in an aside. ‘That means she—’
‘Needs one more minute, I get it. Never interrupt an artist.’
Fable rose to her feet, brushing grass from her sundress, kicking pencils into a pile. She turned to Marco with a warm smile.
Discovering he was not alone, however, her smile vanished.
Marco lambasted himself. He thought he was bringing along one of Fable’s few remaining allies
from the old Glade Gang days, but evidently not, from that panicked look on her face. He should have known better than to bring a Hull over!
For a protracted second, he thought she might even run away. But she came towards them after all, and Marco released a breath, as much in relief, as admiration.
Fable Hamilton, just gone eighteen, was a vision to behold: hair aglow in the sunshine; mint sundress, a relic of earlier years, too small on high curving bust and womanly hips; and those large eyes, fixed wide upon the pair.
‘Hey, Fabes! Whatcha doing?’
Fable smiled at Marco, but it was to his companion she turned to speak.
‘Hello, Rafferty.’
‘Fable.’
They just seemed to stare at each other then. It went on way too long. Marco shrank, wondering if Fable might actually tell Raff off for stepping foot on her soil. You never did quite know with Hulls or Hamiltons.
Instead she said: ‘You’re late home.’ There was the smallest furrow between her brows.
‘Early, rather. I’m here for Adriana’s graduation.’
‘Our grad!’ Marco interjected. ‘About time, too. This last week of school is going to draaaag. Can’t wait for next weekend! We’re going to have the biggest party this town has ever seen, hey, Fabes?’
Fable ignored him. ‘Are you staying on till Christmas?’
‘No, I’ve got to get home before then.’
‘Home?’
‘Back to work. I’m with a firm in London now.’
‘You’re a bona fide Londoner?’
‘I wouldn’t say that, yet. I still feel like a tourist most of the time. Though I’m grateful for the expat community in London; keeps the homesickness at bay.’
‘So, you do miss Noah.’
‘Noah will always be home. I’d be lying if I said I miss the cane-growing life, though. Still, my old man reminds me constantly he’s just waiting for me to step into his shoes and take my “rightful position” over Summerlinn.’
‘Do you have plans to?’
‘None.’
‘None?’
Raff’s answer was akin to a sigh. ‘I’ve well and truly outgrown my boyhood dreams, confined as naively as they once were to the valley. Real life and most careers are out in the world. You guys will find that out soon enough now.’
