Heart of the Grass Tree

by Molly Murn

  King George Beach (Sandy)

  Joe steps back and admires the basket-like mound of twigs and kindling that he and David have gathered. It’s almost sculptural, Joe says.

  David is collecting up the logs scattered around the place and is sorting them into piles by size. Yeah, mate.

  But I reckon we need some more medium and big logs for once it’s going.

  Yep. David straightens his felt hat, scans the beach, and flips open a packet of cigarettes. Might have to chop some more.

  Joe is glad for this time away from the house. The service had been quite beautiful, but he’d spent most of the time torn between worry for Lucy and worry for Diana. By the time it was all over he felt like he needed to run, or swim, or chop wood, or wank, or just stand on Nell’s verandah and let himself be blasted clean through by the wind. But Joe and David had decided it might be a special thing to have a bonfire on the beach that night. They’d bring down cushions and blankets and beers and wine and sun their faces by the fire. Nell would have approved, they’d reasoned, even if they’d had to convince Pearl and Lucy it was a good idea. I just can’t be bothered, Lucy protested. But you won’t have to do a thing. She’d rolled her eyes at him.

  David cups his hand round the end of the cigarette and lights it, turning his back away from the wind. He throws the packet at Joe. Here. Have one. You’ve earnt it.

  Ah thanks.

  Joe appreciates that David doesn’t say much, but that he’s a man that pays attention. His father-in-law is a tall man with a barrel chest, and strong planes to his face. When he smiles his face crumples. Always, he wears a dark leather jacket with the collar up, and Joe thinks of him as some kind of Indiana Jones-like figure. Even his daughters think of him as sort of heroic.

  It had taken them nearly an hour to get the wood down from the side of the house. They’d stood at the top of the dune and hurled it down in stages, sniggering like schoolboys. And then they’d scoured the scrub for kindling. At one point they’d converged and they sort of fell back into the sand together like weary camels. It was late in the afternoon and already a white smudge of moon was showing. David had told him that the evening before he’d dreamt about this exact moment, with the moon just there, and the air getting cold and the smoke of his cigarette curling up in perfect spirals. Joe had told him about Lucy being pregnant again. David had squeezed his arm in congratulations, and then asked about Pearl. Now they smoke and gaze at their handiwork.

  Gonna be a shame to set it alight. It’s bloody beautiful, David says.

  But Joe can’t wait to see the blaze of it. He’s proud of what they’ve made. He can’t wait, in fact, for this day to be over.

  It hadn’t started well. Diana and Pearl had argued in the kitchen. Pearl read Diana’s words for the funeral—Diana having left them on the table—and she’d told her mother that this was not the day to publicly vent her grievances with Nell. Joe had walked in at that point, and Diana turned to him.

  But Joe I should be honest, shouldn’t I? I’m not going to say too much, but I’m also not going to paint the relationship as something it wasn’t.

  Why would you be painting anything? This is just a chance for you to say goodbye to Nell, Pearl countered.

  Joe offered to read the notes, and he saw in those words a woman in desperate shock. He suggested that Diana take out the bit about Nell kicking her out of home at seventeen and keep it more focused in the present. Lucy had chimed in then, and said that this was all beside the point. There wasn’t time to worry about what everyone was going to be saying, and Diana could mention whatever she bloody wanted to. Joe wondered if Lucy was on the verge of getting hysterical. He folded up the papers and handed them back to Diana.

  Lucy’s right. It’s up to you Diana.

  Pearl glowered at them all, and turned brusquely from the room. Joe sank his head into his hands and did a rare thing. He prayed. Please, please, let us all get through the day unscathed. Ariel slid her thin little arms around his neck and lifted his face up with her forehead. Are you all right, Daddy?

  Joe looked into Ariel’s eyes and was galvanised. I am much better now. And he slung her over his shoulder and spun her around. She gripped his shirt and squealed. Alfie tottered into Joe’s legs and wanted a turn too, but they all fell into a heap on the mat. Then Joe noticed Lewis standing shyly in the doorway, his hair washed and combed, and wearing a suit, so that he looked like a sort of shrunken old man with a shining face.

  Alfie’s turn next and then it’s Lewis’s.

  Joe saw something like sunlight break across Lewis’s face. Being eleven, he had started holding himself back where once he would have rushed in. Is this how childhood disappears, Joe thought, in the slow holding back of yourself?

  Please stop razzing them up, Joe, you’re messing up everyone’s hair, Lucy said, just as he’d hoisted Lewis over his shoulder.

  So it would be a wonderful thing to finally set the pyre ablaze, thinks Joe, and this day could burn away into something softer and kinder and more tolerable.

  The others start snaking down the dune, Diana with Alfie on her hip, Ariel slipping and skidding, Lewis running in great leaping strides, Nico and Uncle Jim carrying the esky between them, and Pearl, Lucy, Marian, Red and Caroline balancing their way carefully down, loaded up with cushions and blankets.

  David is standing in the shallows with his jeans rolled up. He looks beyond the ragged line of them all coming down the hill to Nell’s house squatting behind the sandhills. From the shoreline you can hardly see the house; only the sloped green galvanised iron roof, which blends in with the scrub, and in the late afternoon the glint of the sun reflecting off the top of the windows. Now it’s lit up from the inside like a lantern, and he wonders whether the sound would carry down the hill if he put the stereo on up there. David watches Joe instruct the children to screw up pieces of newspaper and stuff it into the construction of branches. They squat around its perimeter like lost bees nudging the outside of the hive.

  When David and Joe kneel down and hold a flame to the tinder, there is a network of snaking orange before it catches, fierce and bright, and everyone steps back, sloshing their champagne over the tops of their glasses.

  To Nell, says Jim. You old bugger. He raises up not a glass of champagne like the others, but a dented metal water bottle and pours water over his face.

  To Nell, the others respond in unison. And Ariel spontaneously claps.

  Later, with the ring of faces softened by fire glow, the children drowsy in laps, and Van Morrison’s ‘Beside You’ crooning down the hill, David wonders whether, essentially, he’s made an irrevocable mistake. The feeling has been gnawing at him for years really but tonight it grows into something sinewy and rangy and pins him down. It sits on his chest and taunts him. He wishes he could take it all back. Perhaps then he and Diana might have made it. But when they found out Diana was pregnant with Lucy, he insisted they get Pearl back from Nell. Let’s be a family, he pleaded with Diana. Pearl belongs here with us. Her biological father was a sandy-haired country boy, as David liked to imagine then, who’d fallen in over his head with Diana, and been left like roadkill in her wake. He’d moved to Darwin before Pearl was born and was not going to have much of a role, if any, in Pearl’s life, and so David wanted to be there not only for his beautiful huntress Diana, but also for the little dimpled daughter.

  Diana was in the bath, with him perched on the edge, when he announced his idea, and his heart was melting for her. She was so delicate-boned and tragic. She almost shone in the water, her breasts dewy and milky with pregnancy. And those big sad eyes—he just wanted to wrap his coat around her, like in the Rolling Stones song, and protect her. Diana wasn’t like anyone else he’d been with. They merged together like white light and her face when they made love was clearer than quartz. But she lowered her eyes and shook her head. I’m not sure, David. I’m just not sure about it at all. When they arrived at Nell’s to collect Pearl, Nell slammed the door in their faces. Yet Pearl eve
ntually came to live with them—David found a lawyer—and things between him and Diana were never the same again. Or Diana and Nell for that matter. Or between anyone.

  David glances over at Diana now. They are all sitting in a ring around the fire. The sun has slipped into the sea and the sky bleeds red. Already, the night is coming on cold. Diana and Nico are talking. David knows Nico tries hard with her, perhaps hoping to be some kind of bridge. Diana is deftly rolling a joint. Her face has a deepening beauty, he thinks, like antique fabric. She hasn’t spoken a word to him yet, but when ‘Sweet Thing’ came on she’d winked at him, or so he imagined.

  So I found Nell’s stash, she says, giggling.

  Lucy and Pearl break into laughter at this and lean in, clutching on to one another, Lucy eventually wrapping her arms around Pearl and holding her close. David’s heart lurches, and for a moment it’s like he’s thrown the clinging animal from his chest. He’s been watching Pearl swig from a bottle of red all evening and he thinks, God, she’s worse than me.

  You’re such a teenager, Mum, says Lucy. And David knows it to be true.

  Be warned, it’s very strong, Marian says, the sheen of her teeth catching in the firelight.

  Red giggles. Yes, remember the last time we smoked it with Nell? We ended up down at Pelican Lagoon at midnight fossicking for animal bones to go in her sculpture.

  Oh yes, I remember!

  I can’t believe Nell was seventy-seven and still smoked that stuff, says Lucy.

  Ah, but she took it for her back pain, didn’t you know? Diana says teasingly.

  David lies back on the sand and above him the stars are crushed glass. When they arrived home with Pearl that first day, Diana just stared at her daughter from underneath a crochet blanket his mother had made and simply did not know what to do with her. David was gentle with both of them and tried to find ways to bring them together—he bought a baby swing and showed Diana how to strap Pearl into it, or he put a doll and a pile of doll’s clothes between them on the floor. Sometimes he would just place Pearl directly in Diana’s lap, and Diana would look at him sharply, and Pearl would wriggle around and reach her arms out for him. It was a little better when Lucy came along because Diana seemed gentle again like when they’d first met. Pearl was interested in everything to do with Lucy and followed Diana around like a flitting shadow. But by the end of Lucy’s first year, Diana’s face hardened and where once she’d slithered on top of him in the middle of the night, placing him gently inside her, now she turned away from him, and the dark smudges beneath her eyes became even more pronounced.

  The joint gets passed around the circle and when it reaches David, he takes a long deliberate puff and stands unsteadily on his feet. He makes his way over to Diana, hands the joint to Red and reaches out to Diana, bowing slightly. Dance with me?

  Everyone is silent, and Diana stiffens. In a gentlemanly effort to break the tension, Joe turns to Lucy and asks her to dance with him. And then Marian and Red help each other up and embrace. When Diana rests her head on his shoulder and he places his hand at the small of her back, he closes his eyes and wishes he’d understood her better. He knows now he’d put her on a pedestal—his ideal woman. But she was just an ordinary girl, probably with postnatal depression. He’d hoped Diana would return to herself one day and to him. Her body hasn’t changed a bit, he thinks, but she burns hot and he can’t find her rhythm. Through the thin silk of her shirt he can feel her shivering ever so slightly with tears. Stepping lightly like a ballerina.

  When Diana places her cheek on the cool leather of David’s jacket she loses all sense of orientation. She’s falling but he holds her up around the waist and she is weightless. She is expanding out towards the stars and then she is shrinking to a point of light, and David is the fulcrum. I am Alice in Wonderland, she thinks. The smoky sandalwood smell of David is so familiar she can finally rest. It’s like there’s more space inside her skull, her shoulders are wider, her hips more spreading. Her womb aches and she presses against him. She hadn’t been ready for his love all those years ago—the intensity of it, his neediness. This is the last time they’ll be this close, she knows. When the tears come they seep like water from the face of a mountain. A slow and necessary leaking out, like she’s become too full.

  Uncle dances with his black Akubra on, head bowed towards Pearl, and she concentrates hard on her little footsteps in the uneven sand so as not to topple over, and trying not to lean too hard on Jim’s arm. There’s a wheeze in his chest—a whistle on the in-breath. He is springy, wiry, ageless even. The same age as Nell, Pearl wonders. As a child, she remembers him coming to visit the house whenever he came to the island, and she’d always thought of him as older than Nell, but now she’s not so sure.

  Jeez you remind me of Nell, Jim laughs, and the corners of his eyes crinkle.

  Why?

  Jim takes a deep, slow breath and exhales a long thoughtful hum. Hard to pin down. Lightning eyes. Smart eyes. Pearl winces.

  Not to offend, Pearl. You’re both sort of mysterious. I bet you keep that poor Nico on his toes. Jim laughs again and coughs turning his head away from Pearl.

  Uncle?

  I’m fine. He stands still for a moment and thumps his chest. Pearl stands back, her hand resting on his elbow, and Jim’s cough is deep and gravelly. Caroline glances up at him with concern. He winks at her.

  The wind picks up and Pearl shivers. She is tired suddenly. The fire creaks and pops and the sea whispers. Everything seems to pulse and quiver around her—like there are unseen currents running between the spinifex and the stones and the wind and the firelight and the blue-black sky and the murmur of voices. A humming. Connective tissue.

  Sorry, Pearl. I’ve had a bit of a cold. Jim puts his arm tightly around Pearl’s shoulders.

  It’s okay, Jim. And it’s getting late—chilly. Perhaps we should head up.

  Jim nods and reaches into his pocket. I want you to have this, Pearl. He places something small and tapered into her hand. She peers at it and it looks like a piece of polished yellowing wood—tooth-shaped. It is carved, and in the firelight she can’t make out the pattern.

  It’s a scrimshaw. Old one.

  Oh. Wow, Jim. Where’s it from?

  Aunty Hettie passed it along to the cultural centre. At the Coorong. She said it was made by a sealer. Islander. I was going to give it to Nell—she always admired it. But, well, it’s yours. For you. It’s bone.

  He shakes his head and takes the cigarette packet from his breast pocket. His hands tremble slightly as he places a cigarette at his lips and his face is illuminated at the flare of the match. Jim exhales and the smoke clings in the cold air.

  Pearl holds the bone to her forehead and it is so smooth, so worn. She shivers.

  Caroline stands and takes Jim’s elbow. It’s getting cold, Uncle. We should be getting going.

  He sighs, Yep it’s about that time, Caro.

  Pearl takes Nico’s hand and pulls him up to standing. I’m tired. Let’s head up too.

  Getting back up to the house is difficult. The sand dunes are steep and in the dark it’s hard to stay on the path rutted with roots. Pearl, carrying an esky and a blanket, keeps slipping forward onto all fours. Nico, following behind, squares his palms to the back of her thighs for support but then he’s falling down too and Pearl is laughing so much she loses all the strength in her arms.

  I can’t do this, Nico. I’m just gonna dump everything and come back for it in the morning.

  He puts his arms around her and rolls her off the path. His hand is hot and dry as it snakes up the inside of her T-shirt. When they kiss, they mash their lips together hard, teeth clashing.

  Nico, you’re not helping. I need to get up this damn hill. In. To. Bed.

  But when he takes her breast firm in his hand, pressing down on the nipple, she moves closer to him and the sand is cool and yielding against her shoulders.

  Oh my god, you two. Lucy gives Pearl a friendly kick in the side, and then dumps a pile of
cushions on the esky. Fuck! I can’t carry another thing! So steep.

  Leave those, Lucy, I’ll get them. Nico sits up and rearranges Pearl’s T-shirt gently, pulling it down.

  Lucy frowns and moves aside for Joe, who is staggering up the dune, occasionally falling to his knees with Alfie draped over his shoulder, and Pearl thinks to herself how absurdly loud the crickets are. Whirring through her brain with mad song.

  Later, when they’re in the bedroom, Pearl confronts Nico in a hushed voice because Lewis is sleeping. What did you mean?

  About what? Nico pulls the covers up around the hump of Lewis.

  About Lucy not carrying anything?

  I didn’t mean anything. Just that it was too hard. We’re all drunk and tired. What a fucking day!

  Lucy hardly drank a thing. I’m her sister. I notice these things. She’s pregnant, isn’t she?

  Nico moves behind Pearl and brushes his lips on the back of her neck, hand to the inner edge of her hipbone. Come to bed. It’s so late.

  But she spins away from him, crashing into the dresser. There is a crunch as her hand lands in the tray of jewellery. She pulls her earrings out and chucks them down, and fumbles with the clasp of her necklace.

  Fuck’s sake! Why’s it a big secret. What must you all think of me?

  She could start a spot fire. Little rings of flame all around the bedroom. She could make an inferno.

  Nico lies down on the swag and sighs. We just thought about getting through today. That you had enough to deal with.

  Oh my god, Nico.

  And she thinks of Lucy, fertile as a river. Putting out spot fires. Beautiful sister. She could cry but the wine makes her agitated. Sexual. But she won’t make love to Nico. Not now. He is barely awake. Just cajoling her. And her body is a fine-feathered thing. Downy and silken but armoured with feathers. Like a high priestess in a jacket of wings. No one can reach me now, she thinks. And she sinks beside Nico and lays her palm in his, all the heat gone out of her sadness and rage because what is there to rail against? Lucy’s joy? You don’t need to manage me. Don’t keep things from me, Nico. I love my sister.