Paper Daisies (19 page)

He sees something now, staring into the abyss: ‘Jesus!'

I gee up Jack to let him go for it, stretch him out, and he brings Rebel with him. The quicker to get to the river crossing too, to her – to try to talk to her again.
Courage.
That's all that's needed here, and I have it.

‘Ben! You mad arse!
BEN!
'

I crack Jack on some more and yahoo like Wild Bill, higher and further into the hills, and I'm flying over that bridge: ‘Yee-ha!'

Berylda

‘
H
ello! Hellooo, Greta Jones!'

My sister was made to lean out of the side of moving vehicles, shouting her name into soulless, stone-faced valleys – as much as I was made to close my eyes for fear of falling headlong into them.

‘Just about there,' Buckley turns and chuckles – at me – enjoying himself almost as much as Greta is.

I stare hard into the floor of the buggy to try to still this vertigo, reach for Gret's sketchbook there between our boots, to find a focus. But Gret smacks my hand away: ‘I said don't peek!'

She's making me a surprise of the picture she began at the willows and doesn't want me to see it until she's finished. I could say don't worry, I'm sure I won't see a thing, really, but I can't speak. I am too fixed once more with listening to the slip of every stone that falls from the edge of the Track into this bottomless valley in our wake.

‘You can look now, scaredy Ryl – we're going downhill. See?'

I'd rather not, but I glance up again, right into her beaming face, her happiness, telling me: ‘I wish I could be in this shiny,
shiny
air every day.'

I wish I could tell her,
Soon you will, whenever you like.
I reach into my pocket for my watch yet again, as if its tiny hands will tell me precisely when. They only tell me it's not quite twelve o'clock. Lunchtime. My empty stomach groans around the hour.

‘Here we are, misses,' Buckley says, and I look out at the bush. We are indeed inside it again, rather than above it, and I feel my shoulders relax a little in gratitude. I don't know how Buckley knows that we could be anywhere, though, through all the sameness of the trees, the forest as thick as thatch, but my stomach groans again, in its own gratitude: I'm so very hungry now I could eat that whole tin of jam – and its label. Sally picks up her step, head high at a jaunty trot; she's hungry too.

But, ‘Oh!' the sound leaps from me now as the Turon comes into view and I am on the edge of my seat again as memory floods me. This place, this scene – it's as if we were here only one summer ago, not five. ‘Gret – look.' I grasp her arm and point ahead across the river to one tree that stands apart and taller than all the others. ‘That tree over there – do you remember it?'

It's a huge gum tree, perhaps taller and broader than any I have ever seen, and certainly more striking: a tangle of white limbs streaked with umber, the colour of dried blood. I remember this tree so well, standing guard over the crossing. It must have been here for a hundred years or more: what journeys it must have seen. How wonderful, how substantial it is, as if it somehow marks this way with proof that we were really here.

‘Yes!' Gret remembers too. ‘That's where we came down from that very steep part of the Track, so fast, we thought we'd hit it – remember the splash we made when the wheels hit the water?'

I do, suddenly. Yes, I do. Our blouses gaily bespattered. I could almost cry for the fun we had. My skin shivers with that warm, prickling sensation, filling me now from some depth I never knew was there. The oddest sensation yet passes over me. I never cry, for anything, and yet now what is this? This tingling … everywhere. More an aberration of my hunger than anything else, I'm sure. I'm a little dizzy from it. And tired from my sleepless night. So tired.

Sal pulls up suddenly, snorting and stamping, jolting it away, jolting me back into myself. That's it for her, she's had enough, too. She's more than earned her rest. ‘Whoaaa, my girl, that's the way,' Buckley coaxes her further along on to the bank, though, into the shade of a stand of those straggly, shaggy trees I don't know the name of: they look like some sort of dying pine undecided as to whether they might keel over into the water or shimmer away completely in the heat. That sort of tree, like so many trees – the wattle, the waratah, the whatever bush in general – that cause me to wonder, if there is a grand design to this world, why did its maker save the weariest looking ones for this corner of the earth?

Apart from that great umber-streaked gum over there. It's a wild and gargantuan apparition of a thing. Papa told us a story about it as we picnicked that day, one of his fabulous, spellbinding stories, right here. I can see him twiddling the ends of his moustache comically, rocking on his riding heels.
Well, let me tell you a little something for nothing, my lovely ladies …
that was the way he always began such tales. Greta had asked what sort of tree it was, why it looked so different from all the other trees, and he'd said it was because it wasn't a tree at all, but the bewitched spirit of a murdered trooper – someone he'd once known personally, of course, as Papa knew everyone from Newcastle to Narraburra – and whenever gold thieves passed this way, the limbs of the tree would reach out across the water to pluck them up and cast their spoils into the river, back into the water, from whence the treasure came. God, oh God, but I loved my father so. I think perhaps love might have stopped for me that day; that last day in his arms, in this place, looking across the river at this very tree:
Don't you believe me, Ryldy Ryl? Funny little mathemasceptician you are.

‘Hm. Where are our faithful and handsome chaperones?' Gret is looking about as she hops from the buggy, the contents of her paintbox clattering as her feet meet the ground, and her tone changing as quickly to worry. ‘I can't see Jack or Rebel, either. They should be here, shouldn't they? There's no other way for them to have gone. Where could they be?' The sudden panic on my sister's face is the sum of all her loss, our loss, the crime of it: that she should be brought to fear so automatically at a meeting delayed.

As I am, too. Of course our visitors have plunged from a rocky height and disappeared forever into this endless ocean of trees. Even as I say: ‘I'm sure they're not far, Gret …'

‘Not far at all,' Buckley's brick-dust rasp is sure behind us. ‘They've gone for a swim, misses, downriver a bit, caught sight of 'em from the road. They'll have heard us comin'.'

A canter of hooves over pebbles informs us that in fact they have and they did, and that Buckley can apparently see straight through walls of forest.

‘Hey there!' Mr Wilberry waves from the saddle, from the lead, his hair damp and his shirt buttons half-undone. Walter Scott could not have imagined him at all. One would have to be completely blind to avoid seeing him. I cannot force my eyes away, not this time. My God, the manliness of him. Impressive. Excessively. As he pulls up before us, Jack's shoulders ripple with a pleasure all his own too. I imagine he knows he has a man astride him, for once.

‘I must apologise.' Mr Wilberry is in this instance superbly unapologetic. ‘The water was too much to resist and we stayed far too long in it. Was your journey good?' he is asking me.

Me.

‘Yes,' I reply, the journey already forgotten. I am too swept away by wonder, by curiosity, and too suddenly. Even from this height he does not look down upon me; he invites me up to him. How is this possible?

‘Beautiful country.' He radiates with some beauty deeper than I know; that something I so dearly want: to be, in the world, as he is, with such gentle, rightful liberty. ‘I must thank you for inviting us.' He is humble once more; hesitant. ‘It's … hm – invigorating. To be out. And about.'

‘Hm.' He is a fine human being, uncrumpling a battered hat from his haversack, a Huckleberry slouch of coarse straw. ‘And you must be hungry too,' I suppose.

‘I'll try not to choke to death this time, shall I?' A bass note that seems to prickle up through the soles of my feet. He is the sun under battered Huckleberry straw. He is buttoning up those last two buttons of his shirt, tiny buttons, such a large hand; my heart demands:
Don't do that.
And I suspect I am now hungry in ways I have never known before. This is not an invention of my exhaustion, is it? No.

Greta sniggles surreptitiously behind me, behind her hand, a
ha-ha
dare, before she assures him: ‘
I'll
cut the tomatoes this time, Mr Wilberry, don't you worry. I won't let my sister near them.'

My face flashes with a dreadful heat as I find my will and reason to turn away now, to fetch the picnic from the buggy, and as I do I see Mr Thompson, waterlogged and weary as the bush, his Panama sat on his head like a wilted lettuce leaf. He is not the effusively obnoxious bon vivant of last night; without his dinner attire and a steady stream of wine, he is thoughtful, and quiet, and he is watching me. Watching over his friend. Measuring me with a cold and sober stare. As well he should.

I do not raise my eyes from the task of setting out the picnic: blanket, crockery, basket …

‘Let me help you with that,' Mr Wilberry offers, stepping near.

‘No need, thank you. Our guest.' I wave him off, and I sound like some sort of strangulated harpy.

Buckley has the fire going and Greta sets to slicing the tomatoes, while I attack the bread and the cheese with all of my attention. She is chatting merrily, and I am sure she is enjoying my discomfort now more than anything, asking Mr Wilberry lightly: ‘So, have you always been a vegetarian?'

‘No,' he replies, and I see his knees across the blanket by hers, as I feel his voice
travelling through my own. ‘There was a drought, through '85 and '86. It was a pretty awful time, the cattle began to starve at our station and I began to wonder. You know, that they would endure such pain only to be served at our tables.'

‘And unceremoniously massacred at school,' Mr Thompson adds as he lounges by him, legs stretched out towards me, boots almost at my skirt, I am sure symbolically: Keep your distance, woman. As if he sees how I might use his friend. ‘Remember that steak and kidney pie we got on Monday nights? That was enough to put anyone off – I almost might have gone the same way as our Wilb.'

‘Where did you go to school?' Greta asks them both, passing Mr Thompson the bottle of wine to open. I glance up at him, and he is more than happily at that task.

‘King's School,' Mr Wilberry answers and I look up at him now across the cutting board; I can't stop myself. ‘You?' he asks, and he is addressing me.

‘St Cat's,' I say, by rote. Meaningless.

‘Ha. We are of the same tribe then.' He laughs softly. It takes me a moment to find my way back to the conversation to understand what he's referring to. Same tribe. Ah yes: King's, St Cat's, we are the daughters and sons of privilege, sent to Sydney for school. He keeps smiling, into some memory of his own, plucking a grape. ‘On one of our few civilising excursions we went to a so-called
dance
instruction afternoon with the ladies of St Cat's – and I'm pretty sure I'd never seen a girl before. The poor young lady I had to stand hopelessly with – Miss Pentridge was her name – told me I stank.'

‘Oh dear!' Greta exclaims. ‘What a nasty girl.'

‘Not entirely,' says Mr Thompson with a plunking of the cork. ‘He did smell pretty bad, as I recall it.'

Greta laughs so much at that she keels over onto her elbow, waving the knife in the air. She makes a little sobbing sound of delighted hysteria, and it makes me laugh too. I simply can't stop myself. But as I join in the laughter my hand slips into my pocket for my wishbone half, right down to the bottom of my pocket, and I grasp it tight:
Please
, as I beg that this laughter might come from my sister every day from this day forward, I beg too that whatever might be occurring here with Mr Wilberry will not distract me from all that I must do to see my sister safe. Safe from the monster who hurts and perverts her. To see myself safe from him too, the pinch of his fingers, the wrenching of my arm:
You will stop this resistance, Berylda – you ungrateful little slut.
I am somewhat and bizarrely calmed by this more urgent, more desperate need; calm enough to assemble the logic here, at least: I am clearly attracted to Mr Wilberry; I have never been attracted to a man before; it was going to happen one day, doubtless, and Mr Wilberry is an attractive man. Attractive to me specifically. There is nothing wrong with that. It's merely inappropriate. Ill-timed. And all very amusing for my sister. Breathe.

I do, and the air is sweet. We eat, and we talk about how nicely sharp this Dunkeld cheddar is, how crisp the Mount Olivet Chablis, and how well aged the jam; I watch the ducks playing on the water and Buckley watches us all from under a tree, further up the bank. He rolls a cigarette as Greta decides: ‘I'd like to get on with colouring my picture now, please. Forgive me then for abandoning you all for a time, won't you?'

‘Now that's an idea,' Mr Thompson says. ‘I think I'd like to sketch you, painting your picture, then. What about it?'

‘Oh!' Greta couldn't be more pleased at the suggestion. ‘No one has ever made a sketch of me, Mr Thompson, I'd love that. Thank you.' And she grins at me, with a dismissive princess wave: ‘You and Mr Wilberry will just have to do without us – I want to get as much done as I can in this magical light.'

‘Of course you do.' I squint at her in pretend reproach; let her have her game with me. Her fun. It is magical enough for me to feel that I am claiming her back; moment by moment, here, my sister returns. Her strengths returns; perhaps, I dare to hope, there is no child in her at all. Only my fear.

I am not so thrilled at the idea of Mr Thompson sidling up too close to her, though. Don't trust him any more than I suppose he trusts me. And he's had his wine, swilled down a full tumbler of Dubbo's finest, now reaching for another …

‘Yes. Ah.' Mr Wilberry clears his throat. ‘I'd like to walk back down along the river, Miss Jones.' Mr Wilberry is addressing me again: ‘There's a marshy patch I saw earlier and I'd like to – I mean, what an invitation that must sound. But would you care to –?'