Lyrebird Hill (5 page)

‘I bought it for you. You like female vocalists, and I know you’re a fan of Glen Campbell too. So, when I saw the CD in Sanity the other day, I thought of you. I kept it in the glovebox, played it a couple of times. I wanted to be sure it was your kind of thing.’

A flush of heat spread down my throat. ‘Oh.’

Flicking off the overhead, I stared out at the dark countryside. It was thoughtful of Rob to have bought me the CD. But why had he let me make a fuss before admitting he’d intended it as a gift? I wished I could shrug off my suspicions and trust him; I wanted desperately to believe his explanation about the bra. But something nagged in the back of my mind. Nothing I could explain; more a sense of uneasiness, as if, now that the cat of suspicion was out of the bag, it was tearing around out of my control.

We were passing the trout hatchery and the road had entered a dark tunnel of overhanging trees. In daylight this section of the trip was leafy and pretty, but now – draped in shadows that seemed to race beside the car in pursuit – the nightscape felt hostile, threatening.

Rob looked across at me. ‘I meant what I said in the carpark, you know.’

‘Yeah.’ My voice came out duller than I’d meant. ‘It just feels wrong somehow.’

‘What does?’

My fingers dug into the lambskin seat cover and knotted themselves in the pile. ‘I can’t pinpoint it, exactly. I just feel something’s not right.’

‘Between us?’

My brows ached from frowning. I rubbed them but it didn’t help.

‘I don’t know.’

Rob sighed. ‘Honey, it’s not healthy to be so paranoid and obsessive all the time. You’ll worry yourself into a heart attack one of these days. I care about you, Ruby. I really do. I just wish you’d accept that.’

I looked at him warily. ‘I’m not paranoid.’

‘Babe, you blow a simple misunderstanding out of proportion. Then you start looking for evidence, trying to catch me out . . . and why? Because you’re scared of letting anyone close. Scared of letting
me
close. The minute things get good between us, you pull away. You concoct all these issues between us, when the real issue is that you’re scared of love.’

I felt my cheeks go hot and was grateful for the dark. ‘You don’t know me as well as you think you do, Rob.’

‘You’re an open book to me, Ruby. One look at your face and I know exactly what page you’re on. I probably know you a far sight better than you know yourself.’

Gripping my elbows, I said through my teeth, ‘So, what am I thinking now?’

He glanced at me, then looked back at the road. ‘Your eyes are like saucers in the dark. You’re leaning away from me, arms crossed, knees pointed to the door. I’d bet my last dollar you’re thinking I’m a prize-winning dickhead and you wish you’d never met me.’

Spot-on as usual, I thought sourly. Jamming my hands by my sides, I glared at his smug profile, and in that moment I hated him. I hated his clean good looks and crisp white shirt and manicured hands. I hated his smooth confidence and
charm. I hated the way he considered the inner workings of my mind to be public property for him to sift through and analyse any time he chose. I hated hearing his voice whenever I stood in front of a mirror.
A few kilos
lighter, Ruby girl, and you’d be a real honey
. And I hated seeing the same question again and again in other women’s eyes:
What’s a tasty dish like Rob Thistleton doing with a blimp like her?

I stared out at the sky.

Rob had a knack for reading people, picking up on their vibe and making snap judgements. But was I really the person he’d described? Paranoid. Obsessive. Fearful of love. I hadn’t meant to turn out that way, but looking back I could see the truth of it: my troubled relationship with Mum; my lonely years before Rob; and now, when I had finally found someone to love me, I was more unhappy than ever.

Rob always said that too many people were searching outside themselves for answers, when the only true guidance they could rely on came from within. Pricking my ears, I listened. Wind hissed under the tyres and the motor purred quietly – but there was no word from my subconscious, no murmur from my inner self, not even a whisper.

I searched the landscape beyond my window. The roadside trees still swayed in the night wind. Stars glittered in their velvet dome. Somewhere out there, the ghost of a girl ran barefoot through the night; the darkness her friend, the riverbank her playground, the wild grasslands and dense thickets of tea-tree her home. What had become of her?

As it turned out, Jamie’s injuries were not caused by a fall.

A rope of fear tightened around my insides. My skin felt too tight, as if I’d crawled into an ill-fitting garment and got stuck. I wanted to get out of myself, find the person I’d been before guilt and self-doubt had warped me out of shape.

Suddenly I was possessed by the urge to shove open my door and throw myself from the moving car. And in that moment
of craziness, I glimpsed something about myself that had, until now, eluded me.

I was like a house – my doors bolted against the night, my windows shuttered to keep out the wind and rain. But all the while, the thing I feared most dwelled inside me, stalking my hallways and moving restlessly inside my rooms. I wanted to open up my doors and windows, let the elements flush away the ghosts and dust and disorder. I wanted to spring clean, to de-clutter, to strip away everything that didn’t belong so that I could show my
real
face.

But how could I, when my fear of the truth was holding me captive?

Brenna, March 1898

H
urrying along the dirt track towards the Aboriginal encampment, wishing I had wings to fly there faster, I skipped over the stony track, clutching my dillybag to my side, dizzy with expectation. The day was brilliantly hot, the sun a scorching ball in the blue dome of the sky. The morning air was thick with bush flies, and the faint aroma of charred kangaroo.

My buttoned boots were dusty, and the hem of my tweed walking skirt was dotted with grass seeds; my hat kept flying off my head, and an annoying itch of sweat had worked its way under the high neck of my blouse – but what did I care? I was nineteen, strong of limb, and brimming with excitement. I was on my way to see my ‘wild friends’ as Aunt Ida called them, and anticipation sang loud in my heart.

The encampment was on the southernmost corner of my father’s three thousand acre property. My father estimated that there were sixty or more Aborigines living in the area permanently, while another hundred or so migrated along their traditional routes – travelling the western slopes and up onto the tablelands, then along the eastern falls. As traditional hunting grounds were being grazed flat, and worse, being zealously
patrolled by cattlemen with guns, food was becoming scarce for the people.

As I approached the camp, a thin woman of about forty walked out to greet me. She wore a dusty yellow European-style dress that my aunt had given her. Behind her, a cluster of bark huts surrounded a charcoal pit, which still smouldered after last night’s meal. Marsupial pelts were strung on the low branches of a nearby salmon gum, among them the hide of a large grey kangaroo.

I felt a thrill of pleasure to see my friend. As I dashed along the track towards her, my hat bobbed off its ribbon and I felt the full warmth of the sun touch my face; Aunt Ida would disapprove, but at that moment the farmhouse with all its rules and proprieties seemed a world away.

‘Aunty good?’ Jindera wanted to know.

It was always her first question, although Aunt Ida had never been to the camp – at least not as far as I knew – and Jindera never ventured up to the house. Yet whenever I queried this, Jindera always insisted that she and my aunt were friends.

‘Aunt Ida is well,’ I said, hanging my hat on a branch beneath the drying pelts. Shaking out my hair, I lifted my face to the sun, savouring the fragrant air. ‘But she’ll be in a sour mood when she gets out of her bath and finds me gone.’

‘You stay short time.’ Jindera’s voice was reedy and melodic, and she spoke the English language with a shy sort of exuberance. ‘Get back before Aunty know you gone.’

‘We’ll see,’ I said, laughing. Jindera’s idea of a ‘short time’ stretched anywhere between five minutes and five days – which suited my way of thinking nicely. As we stood smiling in the shade of that old salmon gum, a feeling of peace settled over me. I wanted to pull off my boots and stockings and go barefoot like Jindera, burrow my toes into the soft dirt and feel the pulsing bedrock beneath me. I wanted to lie on the ground so the scent
of gumnuts and yellow-buttons and warm granite would cling to my skin and be with me always.

Instead, I looked around the camp. ‘Where’s Mee Mee?’

‘She collecting seed.’ Jindera smiled, pointing to the prickly grass pips stuck to my hem. ‘Like you, Bunna.’

I laughed in pleasure at her observation, but found myself gazing wistfully at the spot under the shady red gum where Mee Mee liked to sit with her grinding stones. Mee Mee was Jindera’s mother, a lanky woman with huge liquid-black eyes and a quick smile who always fussed over me when I visited.

Jindera gestured to the bag slung over my shoulder. ‘You bring book?’

My dillybag was roughly the shape and size of a large flattened nightcap, with a single strap that fitted comfortably across my chest. Jindera had woven it for me from grass fibres, coloured with red and black and yellow dyes made from barks and berries. Besides my book of botanical drawings with its pages of notes and thoughts, it was my most treasured possession.

Taking out the leather-bound journal, I placed it in Jindera’s hands and we walked back to the encampment.

As we approached her hut, a gaggle of children raced into the camp from the direction of the river. They yelled happily when they saw me, and I dug into my dillybag again, this time pulling out a handful of unshelled almonds. In their haste to secure a few nuts, the children knocked them from my hands and had to scrabble in the dirt for them, jostling each other good-humouredly before running off laughing and shouting to crack open their dusty prizes with river stones.

I paused for a moment, watching them dart away through the trees towards the embankment. Some nights, I dreamed about that embankment. It was a magical place by day, when the current gurgled over the stones and then rushed over a deep natural spillway to the rocks below. But in my dream, the voice of the river was dark and desolate. It sang of death, and figures
looming on horseback, and screams that seemed to rise up out of the earth and echo against the night sky. There was always the smell of burning – flesh and hair, bones. And the sense that I was trapped in the dark, my small body shuddering in fear.

I turned to see Jindera watching me, as she often did, from the darkness of her hut. Her eyes were velvet-black, her smile warm. She beckoned me in.

A sweet, pungent odour lingered in the confined space, perhaps kangaroo from last night’s feast. Jindera spread a beaten bark mat across the dirt floor and we sat upon it. Placing my journal between us on the mat, she reached for a hide pouch of water and passed it to me. I drank thirstily, then handed the pouch back to Jindera and wiped my lips. Jindera drank, then set the pouch aside and took up my book.

Carefully she opened to the page I had been working on. It was a rock orchid, its delicate pink throat freckled with brown markings. It was common to this area, springing up in early summer, its brilliant colouring leaping from the grey-green foliage of the bush.

Jindera did not speak, but pleasure radiated from her. I knew she wasn’t admiring the drawings for their beauty. She had often tried to explain that her people’s drawings captured the spirit of the creatures and plant life they depicted. She said their paintings called to those spirits in the language of dreams.

My paintings – the flowers and seedpods, orchids and ferns and gumnuts that proliferated on the rocky granite slopes of Lyrebird Hill – were of interest to Jindera because she understood my passion for learning about their healing or dietary properties. Although the subjects of my botanical drawings were beautiful and oftentimes strange, they were not for decoration alone.

Since the age of fifteen, I had spent every moment of my spare time compiling notes and creating detailed watercolours that catalogued all the edible and medicinal plants known to Jindera. She had asked permission from the clan elders, who had at first
forbidden her to speak to me.
Much
danger
, they had warned, but how much danger could there be in the friendship between two women? Besides, Jindera had existed on the periphery of my life since I was a baby. My frequent visits to the camp had begun when I was fourteen, when we had formed a strong and unbreakable bond. So Jindera had persisted with the elders, and finally – after I presented them with my father’s old muzzleloader, with which they could shoot wallaby – they eventually agreed.

Jindera paused at a sketch of tubular pink blossoms. Her fingers hovered over the neat lines of copperplate. Though she had no use for reading, I suspected she knew those words by rote. I’d read them aloud to her so many times, page after page until my throat was hoarse. We’d picked over each description in our stolen hours together, Jindera making corrections, adding new facts that occurred to her, snippets of memory, old stories from the vast reserves passed on to her by Mee Mee or one of the other elders. Meanwhile I scribbled frantically – dashing out notes, refining my descriptions, clarifying names – in a bid to keep up with her.

I tapped the page she was studying.

‘That’s the correa we found on the flatlands that day, on the place where the clan fought that southern tribe, do you remember?’

Jindera shook her head and laughed, her eyes gleaming. Reaching out, she gently squeezed my wrist. ‘You got good memory, Bunna. That happen twenty year before you born.’

I turned another page and pointed to a drawing of clustered leaves in the shape of four-leaf clovers.

‘And this fern, it was sprouting from a pile of wombat bones after the big rain last year.’