by Molly Murn
Yep.
Diana is smoking on the verandah outside. Even from a distance Pearl can see the slight shake of her mother’s fingers. When she was a child she would take Diana’s hand in hers to make it more still. She desperately wanted her mother to be more solid. From behind, Diana could be mistaken for a young girl. Slim and narrow-waisted. Thick hair. Straight-backed. A delicate heroine. People were always falling in love with her—even if just for a moment. In shops and in cafes and on the street, admirers would keep her engaged in conversation just that little bit longer than usual. She would brighten under their attention. Later, when Pearl or Lucy called her on it, she seemed oblivious in some way. Surprised. Oh no, that’s how people talk to everyone, she would argue. Her beauty was a given.
And Dad called. He wants you to ring him back, says Lucy.
Pearl thinks that if she were to see David walk into the room she would not be able to hold herself together. She would howl, swear and fall into his arms. But she’s sure he won’t come. Diana would give him too much of a hard time. When they separated, Diana became unhooked. She needed him to soften things for her: the spikiness of the world, her tendency to overthink everything, her lack of confidence in parenting and her fears that she wasn’t a good enough artist. And if she wasn’t a good lover, parent, teacher, artist, then what was she, she used to scream down the phone to David after he’d moved out.
How is he?
He’s good. Sad. He’s going to come. Just for a day or so.
Does Diana know?
Um, maybe. She’ll be pissed off if he does. Pissed off if he doesn’t.
Hmm.
As if she knows they’re talking about her, Diana turns towards the window and flattens down her dark bounce of hair. She is incongruous here in this wild place, with her buttoned shirts and bangles and make-up. Pearl smiles at her, but Diana doesn’t see anything past her own reflection.
I’m going for a quick swim. I’ll be back soon.
I want to come, says Ariel.
No, you’ve just been for a swim. Pearl won’t be long, Lucy says firmly.
Pearl kisses Ariel’s sweaty hairline. We can go for a morning swim together tomorrow, okay, darling?
Okay, she says with a pout and slumped shoulders.
Good girl. And Joe, I’ll have that gin and tonic when I get back. Pearl grins at him as he carefully slices lemons. She knows that Joe’s painstaking slowness to complete simple domestic tasks drives Lucy wild but what would they all do without him? He is unflappable. Sometimes he reminds Pearl of the cows she and Lucy passed on the streets of Rajasthan—lumberingly calm, gentle-eyed, slow to blink, long muscles on fine bones. I must be delirious, she thinks.
The best and longest to make gin and tonic ever, Joe calls after her.
Can’t wait.
Once outside, Pearl takes a quick inventory as she bends to do up her sandals. Nell’s sandshoes by the back door. A pile of cuttlefish and tiny bones and stones in the wheelbarrow—perhaps the beginning of a project? The peg basket tipped over on the concrete. A spill of buckets and spades and plastic animals. A skirt of Nell’s wrapped impossibly around the clothesline. Pearl wonders if she should unhook it. She doesn’t.
It is warm and still. The sky billows: a vast blue tent pegged down at the horizon, saturated with colour. No wind at all. It is so bright today that Pearl is panicked. Since hearing the news four days ago, she’s been all curled up inside, relishing darkness, seeking small rooms, Nico’s tight embrace, finding little shells of protection in everything. Now she’s exposed, shrinking in the heat and beneath the endless unforgiving sky. Pearl takes a deep breath, wraps her red cotton shawl around her head and takes the path at the back of the house that goes through the scrub and along the inlet—mostly to avoid Diana, who’s rummaging in the shed, and because she and Nell walked this path many times together. Our path. She follows the wallaby scats, the native grasses crackling under her sandals. She thinks of Nell and how her feet were always bare. How the skin on her heels was thick and callused, so that she could walk along these tracks and along the beach unfettered and without flinching as she stepped over prickles and rough stones. Nell was terrified of coming across a snake, though, so she used to bang the ground with a long stick to frighten them away.
Stomp, Pearl, when you walk. Let the snakes know you’re here.
Pearl remembers Nell’s feet stretched towards the campfires on the beach, her fourth toe curled in and nestled against the middle toe like a small prawn. They all have a curled fourth toe—Diana, Lucy, Pearl. But not Ariel, she has fine, long, just slightly crooked toes like Joe’s. And not Alfie.
Pearl, a curly toe is very useful for climbing trees and picking things up with your feet. Prehensile. It makes you special, my dear, Nell used to tell Pearl. As a teenager Pearl thought her feet very ugly. Hated wearing sandals that showed her ungainly toes. Nell used to give the children a dollar to pull gently on her toe to lengthen it and hold it straight, loving the sensation of straightening out a kink. Pearl has started paying Ariel to do the same.
As she nears the inlet, she can smell the brine. It is the end of summer and with no rain in months the creek has narrowed to a brown, stagnant ribbon, snaking through the gully. Tomorrow she will bring Ariel down to lay some nets, she thinks. The water could be just deep enough and brackish enough for catching yabbies and marron. There are flies and midges trying to get to the moisture of her mouth and she spits them away. Nell used to swim in this creek when she was a girl, but now it’s really no more than a boggy puddle. Pearl remembers paddling in the mouth of the inlet at certain times of the year when it would swell out to the sea, but she hasn’t seen it flowing like that since she was a child.
She thinks of the Ngarrindjeri sisters that once camped along here. Nell used to tell it like a love story. They ran away from the sealers’ camp and lived here for a time with the white son of a sealer. He’d run away, too. She wonders how the inlet looked to them, how much has altered. The she-oaks with their timeless whispering, what did they say? She remembers yesterday morning with Nico, she astride him, moving relentlessly until he came. They’d had to. Right day, right hour, Pearl the correct basal temperature: small window of fertility. But the look on Nico’s face was of worry and not of desire: and then he had wept, his face turned away from her, hiding quiet tears.
The sun is getting so fierce that her walking ambles to a stop. I’m sorry for all this, Nico, she whispers. He and Lewis, her stepson, are coming on Thursday and she hates to admit that while Nico isn’t around, there is relief from having to worry about the labyrinth of her body—its core temperature and hormone levels. She knows he doesn’t want to think about those things, either. Ever. And that is part of the problem. She kicks at an abandoned, broken beehive, splintering the wood further along one of its seams, and then sits herself down beside it, wiping at her temples to stop the sweat from running into her ears, and brushing away twigs at the back of her thighs. She wiggles one of the trays from the beehive, and there is the sudden smell of dust and candles and honey. Desiccated bees entombed in wax drop around her feet like dead, curled leaves as she pulls out the tray. It is achingly quiet. So quiet she can feel the wings in her chest spread just a little. And there’s a warm hum behind her navel. She tries to shove the tray of old honeycomb back into the box but it jams, catching on something. Giving up, she tosses it to the ground and dust mites whirl and eddy. Pearl picks at the layers of peeling white paint. The drooping whispering she-oaks and the stillness of the creek water and the hot wind and the smell of honey coax something out of her. A tiny rasp of tension.
The inlet, stained brown from gum leaves and shallow warm (like wee, she and Lucy used to say), peters out. She takes off her sandals and then carefully picks her way through the spinifex and saltbush at the edge of the dune. Nell’s beach. Our beach. Heart place. The wind picks up and she makes her way to the rocky outcrop that skirts the curving trace of the inlet. Here, the sheer edge of a hill blocks the wind. The
stony face of it looms shadowy. Later, lit by the sun, it will glow gold. She jumps from rock to rock, like she and Lucy used to do as girls. They would try to walk all the way around the edge of the outcrop without touching the sand. A slanting foothold gives way beneath her step and, as she catches herself, she jags the edge of her foot on a point of slate. The pain is instant and searing. She clamps her hand over the cut and manoeuvres onto a flattish bit of sand.
Nell is everywhere: standing on the verandah waving them in for dinner, walking slow at the water’s edge and bending at the hips to pick up shells, walking brisk in the morning to warm the chill in her knees, picking her way over these rocks to scrape salt, sitting here contemplating the silver line of the horizon. A person leaves so many traces, yet no trace at all. Pearl wishes she could just retrace the seams and tracks she’s made since she last saw Nell—the lines that led her away—and follow them back like gathering in a roll of skein. It would take her to their last moment together, at the ferry terminal, and the feel of the warmth of her hand would not be a memory that disappeared the more she tried to snatch at it, but solid and material—their hands a furnace together. Those paths are ghostly corridors of something else now. Closer to dreams. She gropes at them.
So, I left that day, thinks Pearl. I should have stayed.
She takes her hand from the cut on her foot and licks the spot of blood from her fingers before walking carefully towards the shoreline, letting the ridges of sand massage her arches, the cut foot stinging. At the threshold of water and shore she is very still. And then she walks in, gasping as the water reaches her thighs, the cold shock of it making her cross her arms over her breasts protectively. The waves break forcefully against her and she lets herself be taken. Pearl opens her eyes underwater and it is grey and emerald. It is so cold it’s like being slapped all over. Everything sharpens.
She swims in long, slow strokes, stretching into her fingertips, flexing her toes, and for just a moment she can’t be sure whether the brine taste is the water or tears as she slips under. The taste of olives. But she won’t cry yet. She always makes a wish when she swims in the ocean. Lately, it’s the same wish. She resurfaces and there’s a sea eagle with an elegantly hooked neck diving for fish, neat as a dancer. It sits on the surface of the water carried back and forth by the swell and then dips below. She thinks of Nell’s sea eagle feathers lined up on the windowsill, and turns and floats on her back, her arms outstretched. She squeezes her eyes tight. Sometimes in the periphery she sees the children she can’t have. Wisps of blonde and light dancing at the edges of things. Please. Can you see them too, Nell? she whispers.
Diana wonders where Nell hid her marijuana. She knows it will be here somewhere and, now that she’s had the thought, she wants to smoke her mother’s weed in her mother’s shed. The task gives her something tangible. It occupies her. She’s never really spent any time in here. This was Nell’s sanctuary and Diana had not felt welcome. She scans the space indulgently and feels like a trespasser. Tools hang neatly on the wall at one end. There are shelves of Vegemite jars containing nails and screws and hooks and every small part you might ever need, carefully labelled in Nell’s jerky hand. The cream Morris Minor, long in automobile-repose, is shrouded in a thick and dusty canvas sail. But the other end, the light end, is where Nell spent most of her afternoons priming canvases, selecting colours—an act of divination, and then marking out the broad outline of her compositions before the intricate labour of the detail. Beside the easel on an old beehive box sit her paintbrushes and mixing palette.
Diana takes in a deep breath of the dry smell of dust and paint. And she is reminded not of her mother, but of her father, Reg. Nell had been the one to have a shed after Reg died and something in her seemed to flower. She threw herself into painting, and as Diana had become more and more amorphous, insubstantial, upon Reg’s death, Nell’s outlines had deepened, strengthened. It was like she gave off solar flares and Diana thought her mother’s fire would burn her up like dross. When Pearl was a baby Diana missed the grounding presence of her father even more. Every time Pearl cried, or even when she pawed her tiny scratchy fingernails at Diana’s breast, Diana felt she was being scattered. She imagined finding parts of herself flapping like a rag on the barbed-wire fence that edged the paddock behind the house, or flung against the hill and pinned down by the wind. She was only seventeen then, and yet Nell expected her to know what to do with the baby. She could never have guessed at how much babies needed to be held. They did not lie in baskets all day purring with sleep. And so she concentrated on becoming nothing more than vapour; she imagined herself a wisp of blue flame so that nothing could break her, so that no sound could penetrate her, until eventually Nell had sent her away to study in Adelaide. And Pearl became Nell’s.
Diana had been glad to give her up. Glad to flee the chaos of that house, baby toys scattered everywhere, dishes teetering in the sink, piles of tiny clean jumpsuits on the kitchen table never making it back into drawers after being washed. Glad to leave the sweet smell of milk and powder and washing detergent. And glad to leave Nell, who paid Diana no attention, so consumed she was with fussing over Pearl. Her body could belong to her now, as though the pregnancy and birth were an illness she’d had to endure and from which she’d now recovered. Diana decided that she would concentrate on filling herself in again. She imagined the thin blue flame that she was expanding outwards until she was a ball of golden light spreading in all directions, spreading right to the edges of the universe. She imagined she was a bird with a puffed-up chest, her feathers rustling and gleaming.
Walking into the grounds of the University of Adelaide for the first time, Diana remembers, she was struck by the lush green lawns, the pretty arches of the Cloisters, the students with their flares and satchels and open handsome faces. How important it all looked. She felt ridiculously out of place and was sure everyone could tell that she was not from the city. Surely her dusty steel-toed boots gave it away. But David had been gentle with her and he seemed to adore her, so she’d started hanging out with him on Mondays, catching a bus from the Teachers Training College to the university, where David studied. That first time on the lawns, waiting for David, she’d pulled off her boots and shoved them into a bin. He’d been unfazed by her bare feet, there were plenty of others with bare feet, and later when her soles ached, he’d carried her to the pub on his back. They sat outside because she had no shoes.
The next day she’d bought a pair of long brown boots with an insert of olive green suede from John Martin’s. She used up her monthly allowance from Nell in one go and so had to rely on David ‘to put her in the way of food’. They went to exhibition openings and ate the cheese and gulped the wine, they went to the Hare Krishna place where they gave out free sloppy yellow dhal at lunchtime and copies of Bhagavad Gita, they went to parties and ate dope cake, and sometimes they shoved packets of rice and pasta down their fronts when they were in the deli and hurried out without paying. But her boots, her lovely boots that softened and crinkled with fine beautiful lines as they aged, made her feel at last like she knew who she was. The brown of the leather matched the brown curtain of her hair and she loved the way her legs rose out of them, golden and shapely like the legs of a dancer. She was taller in them, more beautiful; no longer a country girl in work boots whose breasts leaked great alarming circles of milk whenever her baby cried.
Diana sidles between the trestle and a stack of cardboard boxes lining the wall. Fuck, she says, as a button from her blouse catches on the edge of a dusty box and pings off. She brushes the dirt from her top. Bloody Nell, what is all this junk? How will we pack this up, she thinks to herself. The concrete floor is cool and gritty with sand, and as she rounds the trestle to stand in front of the easel, her skirt snags on a splinter of wood. Oh for god’s sake! Diana unhooks herself carefully, straightens her top and moves towards the easel. She stares at the unfinished painting. The shapes begin to make sense, like watching a Polaroid photograph taking form. A grass tree�
��long strokes of green and brown and gold and black—and in the red middle, a baby perhaps. Around the edge is a circle of tiny periwinkles stuck to the canvas. And there is a layer of background Nell hasn’t filled in yet. Madonna blue, thinks Diana. The paintbrush sits stiffly in a pool of dried paint. Diana runs her fingers over the shells, gently, lovingly, fleetingly, and then yanks her hand away as if she’s been stung. It’s the thought of Nell’s fingers touching those same shells, assembling them into place. She sees her sorting through the shells on the trestle, picking out the ones that are just the right size. She lowers herself down onto the stool and pictures herself filling in the rest of the painting with the blue. Would that be wrong?
And then she sees it, not even hidden away. On top of the beehive is a round silver tin. She pries it open and the smell is sweet and damp and thick. She takes out the Tally Ho papers and licks two together, placing them flat down on the beehive top. Then pinching a little morsel off the bud she sprinkles it along the papers, scraping pieces from her fingers sticky with resin. She takes her time rolling, her tongue nipping deftly along the seam, and then turning it over in her hands, marvelling at its symmetry. David had taught her to roll an expert joint—one of his many talents, like polishing shoes and selecting the perfect avocado, that he undertook with relish. She narrows her eyes to watch the blue flame as she lights. The paper sizzles, and she sucks in deep, and her throat burns. But she holds the smoke down in her lungs and it’s like she’s filling up with bubbles of honey. She coughs and the smoke expels suddenly, the lighter skidding across the beehive box as she flicks it away. Her eyes water and she stares at the painting again and coughs. The leaves of the grass tree seem to shudder slightly, as if there’s a breeze coming under the gap in the door. And the red of the centre pulsates, like every atom of the painting is jostling and spinning in its own small universe. Diana takes another puff of the joint and blows the smoke forcefully at the painting, stirring the baby.
