Those Hamilton Sisters

by Averil Kenny

  ‘Get away, it stinks!’ Megan screamed

  As he passed Fable, the vulgarity went louder still, the stinkhorn stabbing towards her shorts.

  ‘Pull your head in, Eamon,’ Raff said with quiet deadliness.

  Eamon paused. His eyes flicked between Raff and Fable, narrowing. ‘Oh, that’s right,’ he muttered, ‘can’t offend Fayyyyble, can we?’ He thrust the stinkhorn once more at Fable with a dramatically expulsive motion, and fled his brother’s expression for the higher falls.

  Fable was avoiding Raff’s face herself.

  The girls, at Adriana’s direction, were assembling for a group photograph: limbs draped over one another, hair perfectly flipped out, legs crooked just so. Christy and Adriana, front and centre of the loose pyramid, gazed into the camera with matching head tilts and aggressively confident smiles. Eamon, leaning precipitously from a rock ledge, waved his stinkhorn at them. A strident cheer went up, and the shutter clicked.

  That Fable was so casually excluded from ‘the girls’ made her wilt. She fidgeted with a loose thread on her bag. It was one thing to live daily as the outsider from across the creek, but another indignity entirely to have it demonstrated to Raff.

  Raff inclined his head towards Fable. ‘You know, the falls actually got their name because of the fireflies you can see glowing here at night. They look exactly like faeries. Or, at least how I’d always imagined faeries.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Not even a little bit. I used to sneak up here at night when I was a kid to try to catch them in a jar. It was one of my favourite spots in all of Noah. I wanted to see for myself if they were actually faeries.’

  ‘And did you ever manage it?’

  ‘No, sadly I—’

  His answer was interrupted by Isabella, sliding between them. She pressed a bottle of tanning lotion into his hands. ‘Would you do me, Raff?’

  Fable averted her dismay.

  ‘I’m sure one of the girls can help you with that,’ he said, returning it.

  ‘Here, let me,’ Fable said, reaching for the lotion with a beatific smile.

  Isabella snatched it back with sibilant haste. ‘As if I would!’

  The slowly mouthed word as Isabella spun away – h-a-r-l-o-t – set Fable’s face afire. She felt, rather than saw, the tension jumping in Raff’s jaw.

  ‘Well,’ she said, regaining her composure, ‘if you routinely decline offers like that, no wonder you failed to catch any pretty faeries.’

  ‘Alas.’

  They shared a wry smile, which lasted some time after each had looked away.

  ‘Fire flies but water falls,’ Fable murmured, mostly to herself, but Raff tipped his head to better hear her. Though he hadn’t moved an inch closer, the distance shortened intimately.

  Quiet lay between them, full and soft.

  Fable patted her rucksack, wondering what she was dreading most – the moment Raff should move away, or the day’s curtailing before she’d had a moment to sketch.

  At length, reluctantly, Raff roused himself. ‘Hey, tell you what, I was actually going to get the rest of them moving on now – you should stay behind and get some drawing done.’

  He left her.

  Promising them another lookout, an hour ahead, offering a panoramic view of the gorge, Raff spirited the group away. They fell in without a backward glance at Fable. In all the clamouring to be near or outdoing Raff, she was forgotten.

  Only as the last braying note of laughter died away did Fable exhale and let loose her grip on the journal. She was alone, and Raff’s gift of Faerie Falls was finally hers to unwrap.

  A shudder of immense happiness ran through her as she scaled the rocks, unfastening her rucksack.

  *

  Feverishly she worked: pages turning frantically, hands throbbing with urgency, gathering as many details as possible. She had roughly two hours before Raff and his groupies returned, and did not pause for a moment. Fable was alone in a candy store, gorging herself sick.

  At the hour of their expected return, Fable concealed herself down inside the sunlit grotto, to watch the slender cascade spin dazzling light as it dropped into the pool beside her. She sagged back, exhausted, with the journal splayed open on her lap. Vision and breath softened into a languorous daze

  She drifted into dreaming.

  *

  It was into this beguiling image of girlish repose that Raff blundered a half-hour later. Arriving back ahead of the others and finding the falls uninhabited, he assumed Fable had gone back down the mountain. He whipped off a sweat-soaked shirt and was leaning out beneath the flume to shower when he was startled to spot Fable slumbering in the grotto below; light caught in her strawberry tresses, the pages of her journal glowing blindingly.

  Raff jerked back and, overcorrecting his balance, toppled forward into the faerie pool.

  Fable roused to find a man falling bodily through the air towards her, as though in a most fanciful dream. His drenching splash was bracing reality.

  When Raff surfaced, Fable uttered the first thing that came into her mouth. ‘Look who’s fallen head over heels.’

  Laughter broke Raff’s face wide open.

  The last dreamlike vestiges drained away as Fable watched Raff pulling himself out of the water onto the ledge. This bare-chested man, raking hair back from his forehead, was most certainly flesh and blood.

  ‘Oh geez, your book!’ he cried. ‘All your drawings!’

  Fable stared dumbly at the lines of sodden colour leaking across her page.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Let’s put it in the sun to dry.’

  She climbed out of the grotto after Raff.

  He turned to her, stoop-shouldered. ‘I’ve wrecked it for you.’

  She should have been dismayed at the ruination of her day’s zealous work, much less the many months before that, but all she perceived was the surging heat, low in her belly, at the sight of Raff, saturated and shirtless, holding her book in his large hands.

  Vulnerability was a throbbing bruise, seeping in revelatory colours across her countenance. Raff stepped mutely forward and placed the journal back into her hands.

  Dropping her gaze, Fable peeled pages apart. Most of it was indeed ruined – drawings leeching one into the other, bleeding from the page.

  None of that mattered like his current proximity. She’d have thrown every journal she owned into the falls just for this breathing closeness to last longer.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s just a rough journal. I wouldn’t have brought my best one up here, would I?’

  His exhalation proved it one of the sweetest fibs she’d ever told.

  ‘See,’ she said, turning sodden leaves. ‘Nothing important.’

  ‘I beg to differ, Fable,’ he said. ‘You’re . . . gifted.’

  An ache crept up her throat. She shrugged.

  It was Raff’s curious expression that made her glance down then at the open journal. A thunderbolt seemed to run through her. A disembodied pair of eyes, rendered finely in graphite, had caught Raff’s interest.

  They were his own.

  If a long-extinct volcano had opened, right then, beneath that gorge of stone wonder and faerie falls, to swallow Fable in one belching, magma gulp, she might have felt marginally better than she did at that moment.

  Raff studied the drawing, brow gathering, tilting his head.

  Did he note the way her hands shook in bilious terror?

  For nearly six years, she’d sketched Raff’s eyes compulsively. That motif had captivated her more than any other. If she had any skills, any at all, they were encapsulated in those eyes.

  She hovered, surely, on an abyss. How can he fail to see?

  And yet, she saw not the dawning repulsion most feared, but open admiration. With the artlessness of a child, she blurted, lie of all lies: ‘They’re mine.’

  Raff looked up to consider her true eyes. Fable’s heartbeat had overtaken her body. She throbbed.

  ‘It still n
eeds colour,’ she squeaked out.

  ‘Let’s see, then. Amber – no, more like a glowing caramel – and shades of violet, too. You have the most unusual eyes, Fable. They remind me—’

  He went silent.

  Fable’s lashes lowered to shield her eyes. She pressed the journal firmly closed.

  His sentence, when finally he finished it, was almost – but not quite – a casual addendum. ‘Your eyes are the same colour as the water in the Glade. You could call this piece “Fable of the Glade”.’

  He moved away then in search of his shirt, leaving Fable to shiver uncontrollably where she stood, heedless of the warm rays on her shoulders, the sunshine in her heart.

  For the first time in her life, Fable was thankful for the sight of Adriana and friends trooping into the clearing, reeking of cigarette smoke and teeming with complaints over the cloud-impaired view, inadequacy of their snacks, the ancient Aboriginal rock art Raff refused to let them pose in front of, and the speed at which their no-longer-loyal guide had pressed ahead of them.

  CHAPTER 27

  FRANGIPANI CORONATION

  Late November 1960

  F

  our faces at the Heartwood dinner table were trained on the long hallway down which a fully arrayed, adorned and accessorised high school graduate would sashay at any moment.

  ‘We’re ready for you!’ sang Olive.

  ‘We don’t want to be late,’ Sonnet added. ‘It’s going to be hell finding a parking space at the school.’

  ‘Sonny,’ whined Plum. ‘Why is she taking so looong?’

  Gav said nothing, as though even his droll humour was held back by the formal suit constraining his hulking shape.

  Sonnet had been oddly touched by Gav’s insistence on wearing a suit – something he didn’t even do for Sunday services, and a feat which hadn’t been achieved, Olive declared, in the thirty years since they’d been married.

  Olive hadn’t scrubbed up too badly herself, Sonnet thought, glancing at her aunt in her specially tailored dress.

  This was a historic moment for them all: the first Hamilton to finish Grade Twelve at Noah Vale School! Sonnet felt a secret flash of affection for Olive. It had been an unlikely partnership, fraught with conflict, but together she and Olive had propelled that exasperating, talented girl through her high school years. They’d made it to her graduation and, as far as Sonnet was concerned, Fable’s springboard right out of Noah Vale’s suffocating limits.

  The hesitant creak of the bathroom door cast an expectant hush over the table. A few seconds of anticipation followed before Fable stepped, eyes downcast, into the hallway.

  Oh she’s a bride, was Sonnet’s first thought. And truly, she could have been. She was sylph-like in a white dress that flowed from delicate spaghetti straps, through sweetheart neckline and along perfect hourglass curves to puddle daintily at her feet. It was not a tiara or veil she wore, rather a simple, shining coronet braid, pinned thrice with white frangipani flowers. Strawberry-gold waves tumbled below her breasts.

  As she came towards them, the sconced lights set every crystal on her bodice twinkling and turned her hair to spun gold. Sonnet corrected herself: no, not a bride – a faerie queen en route to her coronation.

  It was Gav who first found words to speak. ‘You little beauty.’

  Olive was speechless, and Sonnet wondered why the old girl wasn’t patting herself on the back right now for a job well done. This gown had been Olive’s idea, after all.

  When the graduation ball invites had arrived, weeks back, Fable had desperately wanted to wear one of Mama’s mothballed gowns from the cottage wardrobe. Sonnet had acquiesced readily, glad both to save money and play her own small part with the alteration of Fable’s dress. When she’d mentioned the idea to Olive, however, she had been vehemently opposed.

  The green dress Fable selected with such dreamy reverence was unsuitable, Olive said. Too grown-up, not a fashionable colour, impractical for climbing the steps to the graduation stage or celebrating wildly at the after-grad party, not to mention the fine crystal beading would make alteration a difficult if not impossible task for a seamstress of Sonnet’s ability.

  None of which Sonnet had actually believed. It didn’t take a genius to figure out Olive’s waffling refusal had less to do with fashion and practicality than it did some mawkishness relating to that particular dress. Fable’s dismay and Sonnet’s suspicions had been allayed by the speed at which Olive swooped to order and pay for a brand-new gown for Fable from her favourite supplier. Sonnet’s initial scepticism of the colour choice, or lack thereof, was quashed by Olive’s insistence that no other girl in town had come into Emerson’s to order anything white, everyone else would be wearing long lace sleeves, and this simple dress was a nostalgic nod, instead, to the Noah balls of yesteryear, held in a grand riverside mansion called Vinelands.

  Noting Olive’s pensive pinch now, Sonnet intuited the white dress had not quite produced the picture of virginal innocence she’d engineered. On the contrary, the girl who stood before them now was utterly desirable. The white dress hid nothing of her figure, only highlighted her magnificent colouring, and the pinned frangipanis, with their fragrant yellow hearts, conjured up sultry, far-flung isles.

  Fable looked exactly like she was too good for this damned town, and wouldn’t be stuck here much longer! Sonnet heartily approved.

  Aloud, though, she said, ‘You look fine. Now let’s go!’

  ‘Wait!’ cried Olive. ‘I want to get a photo with our dear girl.’

  *

  It was only later, as they settled into their school-hall pew, the reality of where they were finally struck Sonnet.

  She turned to Olive in mute distress and was just in time to glimpse Olive swallowing a telltale aspirin from her purse.

  It was true then! This was the infamous school hall in which the Hamiltons had been stripped of their pride, their reputation, and all their hopes for their gifted younger daughter. This was where Pandora’s box had been opened.

  Sonnet’s panicked gape settled on the heavy curtains still drawn on the stage. Had those curtains hung there these past twenty-six years? On which pew had Lois and Malcolm Hamilton sat when their daughter’s transgressions had been exposed for all to know; worse, to see?

  ‘On the school stage, in flagrante delicto,’ Sonnet imagined she could hear, not in distant memory on Alfred’s lips, but like a viper’s hiss at her shoulder. Sonnet spun accusingly, and found plenty of closely tipped, murmuring faces fixed on the Hamilton-Emerson clan. Sonnet’s eyes dropped quickly to the programme quaking in her hands. Her stomach fell faster.

  Bloody hell, I might have been conceived on that very stage!

  And how many people here were thinking the exact same thing, with the spitting image of Esther Hamilton about to cross that stage this very evening.

  From the studious way Olive was avoiding her niece’s eyes, she was most certainly thinking of nothing else. Poor Olive, her unflappable belief in the fundamental kindness and mercy of Noah residents had taken a severe hit since ‘The Sign Episode’. Sonnet was sorry to have witnessed the taint of Esther Hamilton’s misfortune seep back into Olive’s cheerfully respectable life, but there it was.

  Still without looking in Sonnet’s direction, Olive took another aspirin from her purse and slipped it across into her hand. Touched, Sonnet forced herself back against the wooden seat, gripping the medicine in her lap as though it were the last cyanide pill out of captivity.

  OK, breathe.

  She just had to grit her way through a few inevitably verbose speeches, definitely roll her eyes through Adriana’s valedictorian address, cheer Fable across that stage to accept her certificate – digging nails into her palms as every jaw in the audience dropped – then wave Fable off to the after-graduation celebrations at Moria Falls.

  She could handle this.

  The Hamilton girls were making history here tonight, not repeating it.

  *

  The clock was about
to strike midnight on the after-grad party and Fable, sober and sombre, was ready to go home. She was sick of the leering lot of them! Skirting yet another crowd of revellers in various states of frottage, she slipped through the teahouse doors, and sucked in a breath of balmy air.

  She’d survived. All of it: not only six years of school, and the shame and fame that had preceded her each step of the way, but also the terror of ascending that stage tonight in front of the whole town, and somewhere out there in that huge audience, a pair of cerulean eyes.

  But it was done. She would never again spend time around her school peers, with two exceptions: Sal, when she might come back to visit Noah from her job at the newly opened Aboriginal cultural centre up north; and good old Marco, whose dad was giving their retinue a lift back to Heartwood tonight. No sign of Mr Lagorio yet, though – the car park was dark and empty.

  And that gave Fable precious time alone to explore.

  Ebullient now, Fable veered off between floundering flame-lit torches into the hedged tea gardens.

  CHAPTER 28

  TORRID TORRENTS

  T

  he tea gardens provided still, shadowy respite from the spilling laughter and music. The roar of the falls drew her ever closer until she was descending stepping stones to the lapping edge of the pool, where a line of rowboats languished under the full, bright moon.

  She was leaning to unbuckle her preposterous heels, yearning to have her toes in earth, when a male greeting arose. She yelped and half toppled into the closest boat, just catching herself on the edge.

  It was Raff Hull, supine on the boat before her, as though moon-bathing beneath the myriad stars.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Fable of the Glade,’ he said.

  ‘You startled me.’

  ‘Now we’re even, then.’

  ‘At least I made it look elegant, though . . .’

  ‘I just had further to fall.’

  Fable laughed – a great bubble of warmth releasing. ‘What are you doing at a high school party, anyway?’

  He sat up with a mock start. ‘Oh, am I in the wrong place? I thought this was my misspent youth.’

  ‘Clearly not – where are your groupies?’