Spotted Lily (22 page)

His head jerked back. 'Condescend?'

'Shit. It doesn't sound nice on you.'

'I was accommodating, I thought.'

His voice said he was telling the truth, and furthermore, that I'd hurt him. Would he
never
fit in?

I reached over and touched his shoulder. '"Shit" doesn't sound worthy of you. And when you say that, it makes me want to stop saying it, too. How about neither of us says "shit"?'

He smiled at me in a sad way, acknowledging personal failure—his.

I changed the subject. 'How many dead, do you think?'

'I don't know yet. Perhaps twenty thousand people, if that's what you mean.'

'Shit!'

Shit. You know how it is. You try to stop saying a word, and then it's the only word in your vocabulary.

'Probably the same number as the Indian earthquake ... remember?'

I didn't.

'The one in oh-one?'

Thinking back ... 'Which century?'

'Just a few years ago, my dear. Your years. You did read about it?'

The heat of my blush rose from my chest to my forehead. When the earthquake happened, I didn't bother with news. And in my frenzied period of news engorgement, those Indians in that one incident had been crushed under the weight of events.

—36—

'Well?' I asked.

Brett had been avoiding me all morning, and regardless of the fascinating history that he was absorbed in—something on parchment, in ancient Icelandic—he was escaping. The curve of his shoulders was a dead giveaway.

'Well?' I repeated. 'What did he say about the tree and the grain silo?'

'Do you have further reference details?'

'He didn't know sh ... anything, did he?'

'He can't know everything, Angela.'

'Your omniscient? Why are we running?'

A great sigh escaped him. Or maybe it didn't escape. Maybe he wanted me to think it escaped.

I ignored it. Reykjavik's food was disgusting and I couldn't be bothered looking for a
Barbara
in their barbaric language. And this library made me sneeze. 'Brett, or should I call you—'

'No, Angela. Please. I am ready.'

'Good.' Anything was better than this aimless travelling, no one to talk to, nothing to do except read my book. 'Where do we go next?'

'Burrup? Is that right?'

'Buenos Aires?'

'No. Where you
come
from.'

'Bettawong?'

'No.'

He couldn't mean ... 'Bunwup?'

'Yes. Sorry. But no. Your farm, whatever you call it. Where you grew up.'

'Wooronga Station? Where Mum lives?'

He slapped his forehead. 'That's where.'

Cold sweat ran down my back. I would rather cross a Bangkok street on foot with my eyes closed, than go back there—where I had left at seventeen, for good.

'It's going back.'

'Yes, my dear? Don't you want to?'

With all my heart, no! 'Why do you want to go there? There's no library. Not even any
streets
.'

'You don't want to go back to visit your mother?'

With all my heart, NO!

'Sure.'

The sarcasm zoomed straight past his head. He smiled, lifted his arm and I grabbed it.

'Whoa, Brett. Remember your come-on way back when?'

'Come on?'

'Don't tell me you don't. Hey little girl, wanna peesa candy? Oy, Anj baby, Wanna develop your true potential?' 

'Ah.'

'Was that a wink wink, nod nod, to your own selfish desires ... and as for me...'

My question dangled, partly because I couldn't think of how to end, and partly because a sob cut me off—my own.'

His strong arms gripped me at arms' length. 'Angela, my dear. I was serious ... I was
serious
about developing your true potential.'

'And I still am,'  he said, as he gazed into my eyes.

My legs felt weak. My guts, like melted chocolate.

'And love?' I whispered.

His hoarse laugh rang out—a heresy in this tomb. 'More loved than you can imagine.'

—37—

Flies clustered at my tear ducts like beasts at a waterhole. I blew one out of my nose and sniffed. That air, hot and acrid, was the air of my childhood—translucent, pink as face powder, and scented with eucalypt.

We'd landed halfway up a slope. Looking around the scrubby forest, I didn't see any landmark that struck me as familiar. Not that I'd ever paid any attention to them in the past, but it was disconcerting not to know which way to walk. It was useless asking Brett. I had told him as close as I could, where to go. But not having pointed Wooronga Station out on a map, it not exactly being a place of world renown, we could be anywhere.

I decided we'd walk down-slope, as I was thirsty and the forest was thick in the valley, and I could get a drink from a creek if there was one running.

My boots were not made for this kind of walking, and Brett picked his way along as if he had corns. When we were almost at the valley base, I noticed a bit of black barbed wire sticking out like a finger from a large tree, the rest of the wire having been absorbed into the tree's growth. This was once a fence, and the tree was a post. Nearby, a lemon tree as thorny as a rose proved me right because just ahead, we came upon a pile of stones, a rubble chimney, and a set of iron bedsprings, now entwined with passionfruit vine.

'This isn't our land.'

I would have known it, as we kids would have played here. We had patches of valley forest, too, but no homesteads there.

'Where is this?' he asked.

I hadn't a clue, but there was a creek running and I had a drink. The water was brown and  tasted like tea. I had forgotten that.

He walked back up the slope with me, and though his feet must have been sore, he didn't complain.

When we got to the top, I saw rolling hills all around but nothing familiar, and no habitation. There was, however, a power line maybe two valleys over—and that meant a road somewhere. I led, and he followed.

Rocks that we had to climb and navigate between, twisted our ankles. Small trees the likes of which I'd never seen, bristled with brown needles, needle-sharp and just as long. Then we waded through an area of waist-high blooms of pretty yellow flowers, obscuring shiny leaves, serrated as steak knives. Candy-green vines pulled at us, and didn't break when we stumbled and fell. Flies were of three kinds: the moisture-suckers, which we waved away (Brett was chuffed when he waved and I praised the style of his Australian salute), hard biting flies (they land on the back of your neck without you feeling them, until they bite), and soft biting flies (which loved burrowing into my hair).

I led, and if he lost sight of me, he could follow my words: 'I hate the bush! I hate the bush! I hate the fuckin' bush!'

With its flies and its stinks and its dirt, and its ... there was a tick crawling up my leg. 'And its ticks!'

I would have kicked something, except that would have hurt me more than anything.

Brett watched me politely, helping me to stand when I fell.

Always in the bush, things are farther than they appear.

By the time we got to the power line, our shadows were lurching monsters.

Brett looked to me for direction. For a few moments, I was ready to tell him to do his wafting thing, to get us to some city again, but it hurt my pride, so I didn't.

I was trying to get my bearings when, to my left, just beyond a fringe of trees, a heavy truck rumbled by.

It wasn't a busy road, but I got us a ride in twenty minutes. He was a thirty-something salesman who'd once backpacked around Europe, and was disappointed when he heard my accent. Brett just listened.

'That's where we're going,' I told him when he said he was just stopping in the next town.

'Car in service,' I explained, not caring whether he believed me or not.

'McVickers?' he asked.

And wouldn't you know it? He went out of his way to drop us at McVickers, on the other side of town.

 At least that gave me my bearings. We had passed a small motel a few blocks back, so at my suggestion we walked back, and Brett checked in.

Then we walked a few blocks further, to the post office in the centre of town. Above the entrance to the post office, in big white letters were the postcode and the town's name—LYREBIRD FLATS.

We were only a few hundred kilometres south and east of where I grew up. Considering my directions and the elevation we must have travelled at (I never peeked) and the distance, our missing the mark by a few hundred kilometres and a few different terrain's worth of flora and fauna, the missing 'home' part of homecoming was a trifling affair.

Actually, Brett was the one to call Wooronga my 'home'. He didn't get the message that I had discarded Wooronga Station as 'home' when I left. I had wanted to feel 'home' about someplace ever since, but that had never happened. I had once felt that home could be Sydney, until he dashed that hope. And now that we were in this boring, comfy town, as comfortably far away from what Brett called my 'home' as I had felt in Sydney, I was happy enough.

Brett, on the other hand, was confused. He stood on the pavement, taking up valuable space, as the going-home townspeople moved around him to post their letters before the PO closed.

He was so embarrassed at his off-landing that he didn't notice his nuisance value or the
tsk
s as people avoided him. 'I'll take you tomorrow,' he promised.

That was a damper on my mood, but across the street was a pub. If it didn't have steak on the menu, I was sure they could serve up a steak and kidney pie.

~

I was finishing off my second pie, leaving the pastry, just going for the meat, when Brett made me choke on a piece of kidney.

'Wasn't that beautiful today,' he said. 'I never knew.'

I took a swig from my bottle. 'Just what, exactly?'

'The plants, and those beautiful birds, and those animals.'

'And the flies, and the ticks.' He had collected a whole patch of minutely small tick nymphs, some of which I picked off for him (he couldn't see them). I chuckled. As I drank my beer and he reveried, those nymphs that had escaped my fingers were most likely growing fat and grapelike as they filled up at his balls.

'A mere peccadillo of yours, my dear, this concentrating on the tiny ways we're inconvenienced by nature.'

'Nature!'

'We don't have nature, you know.' He was only half-speaking to me. 'Only people in hell. I never knew a sweet little animal, or the elephant who never forgets, or the jabberwock.'

'The jabberwock is mythical, Brett. Fiction.'

'And the majesty of those vines ... that
strength!
The little flowers that open, the tiniest birds that sing. I never saw them, Angela. I never heard them.'

'Birds can be nice,' I allowed. 'You want to look in the pet shop?'

'Would you mind awfully, Angela...'

I hated the bush. I hated the bush.
I hated the bush!
But it was better than going 'home'.

However, there was another consideration—the one that had brought us here in the first place. 'What about your "he's coming, whooo whooo!"'

Maybe it was the beer, but 'he' made me laugh, and so did Brett's running from him—Brett's impending act of jumping, in which he wanted me to hold the door open or something. My beer caught in my throat as I giggled, and it spurted through my nose in a burning froth, only making me laugh more.

'We've got a little time, I'm sure,' he said.

'A little time. It's so sublime, in naaature!' My slap on Brett's back was drowned out in the five-thirty drinking crowd.

He picked at his food dreamily as I sucked the last drops from my bottle.

~

The next day was busy. I bought a new ute (what's money for?) so I could drive us to the forest tracks he wanted to explore. Actually, he didn't think of the tracks. I did. His idea of exploring was the trailblazing we had done together, but once is enough, and he'd had his once.

Then I got a map, thick socks and pair of bushie boots at the farm supply store.

The only things Brett wanted—and he bought a lot of them—were books about the flora and fauna of the region.

We threw his books into the cab. After I looked at the map, we took off, the empty back tray rattling. The look of us in the ute without a dog running around on the back tray, struck me as funny—as unnatural as if Brett had appeared in front of the Post Office without his jeans. A dog running back and forth on the back tray, woofing at everything that passed and everything that didn't, was a ute's natural state.

It was odd also, how automatic it was for me to change gears, listen for the sounds of the engine—to enjoy driving as much as I did, since I hadn't put my foot on a pedal since I'd left Wooronga Station.

We drove south for a while before I turned off the main road, checked the map, and drove down a dirt road, through rolling hills where paddocks stretched out on both sides of the road and cattle grazed on the short green grass.

Doing my job as tour guide, I said, 'The length of the grass now and its greenness, means there's been a bit of rain, but it's still drought here.'

'Do you have droughts where you come from?'

'Does a dog bark? Worse droughts, actually.'

'Did you ever pray for rain?'

That earned him a withering look, but a short one, as the ute slewed on a curve. Then I had to back up, because we had just missed the turnoff I planned to take.

We bumped along on what had become little more than rocks and ruts.

Grunts came out of Brett, who grinned and grimaced in rapid succession.

'Sit sideways. Hang onto the back of your seat."

'Ta,' he grinned. 'My tail.'

Eventually I parked. He stuck two books into his shirt, and followed as I led the way along a path, my bushie boots clonking loudly, to my unaccustomed ears, on roots and rocks.

It was only meant to be a two-minute walk, but he stopped at practically everything, and flipped through pages looking for the picture that told what the thing was.

'You'll see all you want later,' I told him. 'Now, come!'

He obeyed, and if you think I should have said 'good doggy,' I didn't grow up doing that. A pat on the head was sufficient.

I led and he followed until I heard a gratifying gasp behind. Then I sat on a convenient rock while he timorously crept past and uttered a series of incoherencies.

'Don't go closer than you are,' I called. 'Or nearer to the water itself.

Just beyond him, the waterfall dropped two hundred feet to boulders that had broken off this granite cliff.

The rock he stood on had been worn smooth over millions of years by erratic, but violent water-rush. Now, the waterfall was relatively tame, the flow not taking up more than a quarter of the slick area of rock, but the drop was so great and the flow of water so much, that where the fall hit far below, a cloud billowed up.

He stood, leaning slightly over, for the longest time. Luckily, there weren't any bugs bothering either of us, and the sun was pleasant, so I didn't mind waiting.

Eventually he put his hand over his heart and declaimed into the mist that rose around him, 'The pearl of a runlet that never ceases, in stir of kingdoms, in wars, in pieces.'

'Did you write that?'

A whipbird called out
whwueeeeewuip!
though it might not have bothered, for all the attention he paid it, standing in a sort of trance.

I gathered up some gumnuts and threw them into the little pools near my feet, watching them get taken up and carried on to the next pool, and then the next, and then along the race to the inevitable oh-ver! In a hundred years, any of them could be giant trees.

My rock was warm but not hot in its bit of shade, so I shut my eyes, leaned back against a boulder backrest, and dozed.

~

'Furuike ya!' Brett's side was to me, and he crouched on the slick dry rock in front of a water dragon that was still as stone except for its neck, which puffed like silent bellows.

'Kawazu tobikomu, mizu no oto,' Brett whispered, which the lizard took to mean that this creature of the big shadow
did
see him, and that it was time to move, which the water dragon did at a furious pace, head high, the front of its body held off the rocks by fat fully armoured front legs.

'Did you see that?' laughed Brett as he turned to me.

His eyes shone brown and blue in the dappled light, full of sparks of brilliance caused by running water lit by the bluest of blue skies overhead. He walked to a place beside my rock and picked up a handful of leaves, flowers (already shrivelled), and strange nuts. 'Look at this,' he said, and he proceeded to teach me all about them.

'This is the fruit ... yes, I know it doesn't look like a fruit, but it is the fruit. See where the seedpods are? of the spiny hakea. Those things you hated yesterday. Well, one of them...'

There were a dozen plants he had found the names for in his books, and every one of them went into his shirt pockets after showing me. 'And do you know about all the things that you call one thing, but is really something else?' His enthusiasm was so real, it was childish, and charming.

'No, Brett,' I smiled.

'I know you do, but I'll tell you anyway. There's native peach. And it's not a peach. I can't find any here, but it's supposed to be here. And native plum. But I don't think there's any here. And native cherry. No relation at all. Cupressiformis, in fact! Do you think this looks like a cherry?'

He placed into my hand, a small green berry sporting a little red bopple on top. It was cute, but not something I'd ever noticed before.

'It comes from that tree.'

A lovely weeping willow sort of tree stood modestly just a few feet away.

'It's a parasite!' he said, his eyes big.

'No!'

'Yes,' he chortled. And he launched into telling me all about how it leeches off the roots of certain eucalypts.

And then he dragged me to look at the sundews clustered in the damp places in the track. Their small beads of clear sticky insect-trapping syrup caught the sun like tears of joy.

I had planned for the waterfall to be a quick stop. Then we'd have lunch back in town and a short walk in the afternoon, maybe along the beach. Instead, I barely got him into the ute by the last gasp of day.