Paper Daisies (27 page)

I know. He is wonderful for the wonder he takes at the life he finds around him. And Buckley has no business pointing that out to me. And at what suggestion? I turn to Buckley: ‘Mr Wilberry can do as he pleases.'

And I cannot. I cannot believe what have I just heard, either. Is the gardener playing fantasy matchmaker for me, in league with my addled sister, or is my mind beginning to unravel? Mr Wilberry is no solution to my
rushing about
; he is no timely and convenient rescuer. His loveliness can do nothing for me other than taunt from outside the bars of the cage. For Alec Howell is keeper of my keys, my guardian, and he will certainly do as he pleases: he will drag me by my hair to the altar before Mr Wilberry could so much as think the word
wife.
But Buckley doesn't know any of that; couldn't do. Just as he couldn't possibly have been proffering marriage advice to me just now. Strange old man, merely being strange, telling me to take a moment to smell the half-dead bracken fronds. Being kind in his gravel-gruff way; catching me from a fall; being my friend. He shrugs into my wonder now and walks away, back inside the gate, and down towards the stables.

And I turn back to Mr Wilberry. I watch his powerful form, twisting off a sprig of whatever it is that's caught his eye there. His hands, his back, the crouch of his knees: all powerful. And I have a power over him. Yes, I do, and I have known this from the first moment, too.

I could, if I must, make him do anything.

Whatever I must do, I shall. And courage, you will not fail me again.

Poison

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness

will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Ben

‘
H
ow is your sister now?' I ask Berylda as she approaches the stables from the rear verandah of the hotel, her hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun rising over the hayloft. As she strides straight past me. She has been busy for the past hour or so, that swift and heavy footfall charging back and forth from the kitchen to the room she shares with her sister, and now from the kitchen again with a basket of food for today over her other arm. Busy, busy, busy, she is. And possibly worried; no pretence in my concern, either: sylphlike as the sisters are, I wonder if there is not something more delicate about Greta. Perhaps Berylda didn't hear my question?

I am about to ask again when she replies, to the mare at the head of the buggy: ‘My sister is comfortable enough, thank you for asking.'
She glances behind her, in my direction, as though she has only just become aware of my presence, or perhaps she is still embarrassed about having to ask for that bit of cash; terrible thing, being forced to beg and justify the smallest amount, as Mama always had to, as though she might have spent a ha'penny too much on a packet of pins or a length of ribbon for her table arrangements.

‘The headache powder?' I ask Berylda. ‘You got some all right, then?' I presume so, as she hurried in and out of the hotel earlier.

She doesn't reply for a moment, though, settling the basket under the seat of the buggy, before glancing behind her again: ‘Oh yes.' And I sense she is indeed embarrassed, so shut up about it, Wilberry.

‘Buckley,' she asks the old man, who's busy at the coupling straps of the harness, ‘what is the name of this horse? She's a pretty thing.'

‘Whiskey,' he says, not looking up from his work, a careful man checking over every aspect of the vehicle twice.

‘Suits her,' Berylda says.

‘It does,' I say, as the name might suit any sorrel chestnut. ‘She's a very pretty animal,' I add, as pointlessly, because Berylda still doesn't look at me. But I will have her look at me. She will not shut the door in my face again, not so soon. So I attempt another line: ‘Cosmo won't be joining us. He's taken ill himself, in a manner of speaking – not interested in getting out of bed is the truth. Couldn't be bothered sending his apologies.'

‘Ha.' Berylda turns to me now, slowly, at last, and with something of a sardonic smirk under her hat. ‘Ill? I should say your friend is by far the one in need of headache powder, no?' She raises her face a little more and her eyes seem to be smirking too. Strike me but the wit amidst her beauty is a song; perhaps one only I can hear, but it is everywhere and real enough, to me. She's asking me something; what? She asks me again: ‘I said, did he drink all that angelico himself or did you help him?'

‘Ah. Yes. Solo effort, that one was.' I smile back, and cringe: how anyone can drink that sort of fortified cough syrup at all I don't know.

She doesn't either; she twitches her nose and our smiles are one inside the other as she says: ‘I saw the evidence of the empty bottles in the kitchen – you know that wine contains over twenty percent alcohol? It's amazing that Mr Thompson is still with us. Mrs Wheeler and her maid are most impressed at the effort – and they thought you had
shared
it.'

‘He's a problem.' I nod.

‘One best left behind by the sound of it.' She nods back, sharing the joke with me, a little twist to the smirk again; and she's pleased he's not joining us? Well, that's good too, then, isn't it.

And as much as my guts are twisting into idiot knots right now, I am struck and struck again with some kind of joyfulness: I am about to spend all of this morning and perhaps even some of the afternoon almost entirely alone with this girl. Berylda Jones. What sort of fortune do you call this? Of all the random occurrences in the world, I meet her now. Of all the drifting I have done, I drift here. At a time when I perhaps have never been more ready to believe –

‘Now, listen to me before we get anywhere,' Buckley says as he steps up into the driving seat, warning above the creak of carriage springs: ‘I'll say it again so you are in no doubt that I mean it – if I don't like the look of things out at Tiger Sam's, we will turn around, no arguments about it.' This is for Miss Jones, but Buckley adds a nod to me: the pistol lies in his utility box, which sits under the swag roll at his feet there at the head of the buggy, should either of us need use of it.

‘Oh Buckley, I'm sure I'll see worse than sly tobacco plantations in my time.' She ignores my offer of a hand up into the vehicle too, grasping the side rail and taking the distance at a leap. ‘I intend to be a doctor, remember.'

‘There's worse than sly tobacco out there – it's an ope house too.' Buckley is adamant. ‘You don't know what goes on.'

‘As no one knows what goes on in any house,' she mutters as she bends to sit, but I hear it clearly, and I want to know: what goes on in her house? What goes on at Bellevue? What sorts of worse has she seen already? But of more immediate concern: where should I sit? Beside her or with Buckley? Indecision grips me for a moment. Beside her is too near, isn't it? The seat is so narrow. To be so close, for this journey of what will be at least an hour outwards, or even two, depending on the state of the road? But then, I
should
sit beside her, shouldn't I, in case –

‘You getting in, cob?' Buckley grunts like a cabman, a chuckle at me in it, one which is becoming a little too customary, and forces my choice as he kicks off the brake lever: ‘Git up, Whiskey.' It's beside her or nowhere at all.

I'm still half-standing on the footboard as we move off, calculating how I might avoid sitting on her. ‘Er, excuse –' She shifts across with the slightest of glances, and as Buckley pulls out of the gate and heads slowly up a lane off the main dogleg, she remains turned away from me, looking out across the scarred hills to the west, over the tops of make-do cottages that might have been scattered here by the wind. An elderly woman looks up from her vegetable patch, harvesting marrows, and she waves a good morning to us; I wave back, but Berylda doesn't seem to notice her at all.

‘Yes,' she says, as though to herself as we pass a signpost at a fork, ‘this is Germantown – I remember. Germantown and Irishtown, funny names in this place … and that shaft well over there, ahead, I remember that, too.'

I cannot think of a single word of conversation to pull her back to me. What interesting facts do I know about mining shafts, wells, bald hills, signposts, marrows … I could possibly write a substantial paper on the perfection of her profile, her hands clasped one over the other in her lap, each ovate fingernail so flawless, a petal, a proof of nature outdoing itself. In every aspect of her. She is so small beside me, impossibly small, but she is the most magnificent being I have ever met. She is the sky. God, I think I love her. I'm sure I do. She moves her hands and the bruise on the back of the right one stares up at me from her lap. It aches; it throbs in me. I'm not sure why I don't believe she had an accident with a door, as she said; perhaps because it looks more like she's been kicked by a horse, rounded edge to it like the top of a shoe. Or more probably, simply because it causes me pain to look at it.

‘What's the name of that shaft well? It was something funny, too.' She leans forward now to ask Buckley as we pass an old mine works, stripped of half its timber and its winders idle but for rusting.

He says: ‘Just In Time, it's called. Dunno why. Someone was thirsty when they got here, I s'pose.'

‘Hm.' She smiles faintly to herself and resumes her study of the western hills above another dogleg of cottages, another signpost for the Mudgee Road, this one rotted and listing. What is she looking at? What is she thinking? Come on, Wilberry, think of something to say. Don't the batteries pound it out around here? Echoing through the valley –
chuck chuck chuck chuck chuck chuck
. Imagine living amidst these crushers every day? Fascinating. Come on, man. What else is there to remark upon? Oh look, we're heading into yellow box wood again now, both sides of the road, as we leave civilisation, such as it is, behind. What can I say about yellow box? These ones are not particularly interesting even to me: uniform and average in height and density. I'm not sure she's much interested in trees of any sort anyway. There's a spectacular avenue of exotics directly to the north of the township, which I saw on my stroll, some remnant of lost grandeur, but they are trees, too. Don't talk about trees. A stand of long-abandoned plums now appears out of the bush, massed with fruit. Bloody trees.

I look into the spiralling weave of the top of her boater instead and see only hemp straw. You can smoke the leaves like tobacco, there's some medical botany for you. Turns you into a proper imbecile, too, as Cos demonstrated to me the Christmas before last, at the Swamp, rolling round the floor with Susan, feeding her slivers of mango, imagining he's Gauguin. I tried it too, at his insistence: thought the top of my head would lift off from coughing before I became distracted by my own imaginary conversation with taxidermied Kevin, which wasn't very interesting either.

No, it appears the best I'm able to do at this time is belt my thigh into Miss Jones's knee as we turn onto a rougher track and stutter something unintelligible at it, followed by something that I hope sounds like: ‘Nice track for a creek bed.'

She says nothing, and still she doesn't turn to me. But is there a smile again on her lips? I don't want to lean around too obviously to see. Instead, I stare far too long and closely at the arc of her cheek, this curve of the world I want to know, as she watches the hills disappear behind the steep side of the valley we enter now.

‘Here y'are, this is where it all took off, the rush of the seventies,' Buckley splits the silence. ‘Golden Gully, called me right cross the country, the finds what they got here. You been this way before, Miss Berylda?'

‘No,' she murmurs, a long, soft sound, and I follow her gaze up to the top of the high ochre wall that now rises above us, first this side of the road and then the other, rock sheared away by water, flood after flood, over millennia, forging through this narrow cleft in the earth – and hollowing out a great arch in it ahead. ‘Oh?' she seems to ask some question of it as we pass under its impossibly fine span; perhaps the same one I am asking: How is it that this overbridge stands at all, comprised as it is of grains of sand held together by a few tufts of millet grass and a lone hickory wattle leaning worriedly out over the abyss?

Yes, if you were to look for treasure, you might begin here, along this channel of cool summer air, swallows darting from wall to wall, the sounds of water trickling somewhere unseen to emerge as blue pools marking our way.

One of the wheels finds one of the creek pools, and the buggy tips to the left, then to the right over a mound of gravelly silt, almost tipping me out, and I have to laugh at the ride. My laughter bounces round these ochre walls, but still Berylda doesn't turn; she doesn't move – she is grasping the rail on her side so tightly, her back impossibly straight. And a terrible wave rushes through me. A terrible want of her gaze. I've only known her a day – a day and a half – but if she doesn't look at me again, and soon, I don't know what I might do to make her.

Berylda

‘
W
hat are those tunnels?' I ask Buckley, staring into them. Giant rat holes, burrowed into the walls of this sheer-sided valley, round and spewing rubble at their mouths. My voice is flat, dull and clanking metal, not my own, above the ceaseless drumming of my heart.

‘Chinamen's ones, them,' Buckley says. ‘None of that lot mining here now but.'

Gone they might be from these diggings, but my desire flies into their black rat holes, gathering my courage from inside each one. What preposterous courage takes one across the world to dig a tunnel in the side of a mountain at a blind guess? That of my ancestors. And they did it with hatred clawing at their backs. Blind hatred. Let my hatred not be blind but clear and cold as steel. Finer than a scalpel blade. Free of anger. Free of passion. Let it be a lightning strike of justice, for me, for my sister, for all the bent backs lashed by cruelty.

‘Not a stick of wood to prop 'em up inside,' Buckley explains. ‘There's graves amongst 'em for the ones that weren't so clever at it.'

Then I must be more than clever. I must not leave the slightest trace of my intentions here except for a Chinaman's worthless word.

‘It's a superior design, though, I would suppose,' Mr Wilberry adds. ‘The cylinder – far stronger than any stanchioned tunnel might be in this silty rock. A squared structure is always going to be more vulnerable to …'

Pressure. Of course it is, and I would suppose one can work a rat hole alone then. As I must act alone now.

I turn to Mr Wilberry, at last, and reply: ‘Yes, a cylinder would be stronger.' And I wish I could tell him that I am sorry, that the way should be built differently for us, for dear lovely him, but I can only say, in this flat, clanking way: ‘The circle is the strongest of shapes.'

‘I'd bet you know your maths better than me.' He smiles, and his sun-like hopeful face, would break my heart if I had one in any state left to break. I wish I could touch his face, kiss the fine blond stubble along his jaw, somehow let him know all that I might promise him: my sorrow and my refusal to use him in any dreadful way. Make the only vow I may: that I not play him, of all people, in this devil's game.

He says: ‘But I do know the sphere, the orb, is king of structures – eh? Such as an unopened bud – there's nothing much tougher in this life than that.'

As he says this, his leg touches mine again with the swaying of the buggy and lightning of a different kind flashes through me: this now familiar sweep of prickling warmth across my skin, up my neck and down along the tops of my thighs, a tingling that seems to emanate from somewhere in the centre of me, just below the solar plexus. I have never loved before, I have never been touched by a man in this way nor ever wanted to be – Marvell's ‘Coy Mistress' had me running for the med library to try to work out what all the whispering and snickering was about – and yet I know what this sensation is now as if I've known it since the day I was born: my desire for Mr Wilberry.
Then let us tear our pleasures with rough strife thorough the iron gates of life …
It makes sense now: perfect, and terrible. And it must be overcome. It will be. It's only a feeling, isn't it? Like any other. It's just an emotion, just another longing to be put aside.

It would be more useful by far if my fear was as easy to rationalise; control. As the gully opens out again now into forest and we return to what looks more like a road, I stare into the hellish confusion of trunks and limbs either side of us and see only monsters: armies of them, gathering, waiting to move on me. Devour me: perhaps they have already.

‘Oh that's a good one,' Mr Wilberry says beside me, and I follow the gesture of his hand to the right: a cottage almost entirely collapsed to the ground but for a branch that's grown through one corner of the roof. I can't reply; the only thought I have is that I am that house exactly. Consumed but somehow remaining. And almost calm at seeing it: that I am becoming something else.

Until I see a lonely kerosene-drum letterbox a little way further along and I sense that we are at our destination. My chest screams with redoubled alarm for what I must do here. What I must ask, and how I must ask it; I have rehearsed a thousand ways in my mind, but I can hold no firm decision; no clear plan.

‘Whoa, Whiskey.' Buckley slows us to a cautious walk, turning into what appears to be utterly trackless bush. Within a few yards we are inside it, and it is one monster. We are travelling through the spines along its back: trackless bush in every direction, distant and near, a million square miles of it. A dog howls and I might well be instantly petrified where I sit.

‘Well, I hope we don't need to make too quick a getaway.' Mr Wilberry inclines his head towards mine and his breath brushes my cheek. ‘I've just spotted a crimson grevillea,' he says, his self-deprecation deliberately jolly, ‘and I should like to have a bit of a look at it on our way back, if that's all right with you, Miss Jones.'

‘Hm, all right.' My voice is duller still, my mouth so parched I don't know how I shall speak to Dr Ah Ling at all.

The cicada hum rises to a roar here in the high sun. A million square miles of piercing threat:
Go away from this place, go away, go away.
Every instinct warns me to run.

‘It will be all right, Miss Jones,' Mr Wilberry's gentle baritone assures. ‘I won't let anything bad happen to you, here or anywhere.'

And all my senses jolt at his words. Only bad things will happen now. As they must. I see Greta as I left her with the hand basin beside her on the bed,
just in case
, her stomach upset again.
Don't worry about me, I'm sure it's nothing, Ryl.
Nothing mentionable; just a
whooshing
in her head. For that alone, Alec Howell must die.

The trees thin now and the tobacco field appears, or what I assume is the tobacco field – I've never seen a crop growing before. Plants as tall as a man, with fat leaves of bright green and gold, harvested bunches of them hanging like sheaves of brown paper bags from a thatch-roofed colonnade along the edge of the field. And, just beyond it now, a line of tin huts.

And a man jumping out of the nearest one to halt our further progress. He is bow-legged and pig-tailed and screaming above the barking dingo at his side: ‘What you want?'

He has a large knife in his belt, it must be a foot long. It is a machete.

‘G'day, Sam,' Buckley says more steadily than seems humanly possible. ‘I've got a Miss Jones here to see your brother, Ah Ling, about a medical matter.'

‘Who you?' The man steps closer, squinting myopically; denim trousers filthy with who knows what muck, face wizened and hollowed by some other, internal purulence.

‘Buckley – Roo Buckley. Old cobber of Wheeler's.'

‘Ah! Yeah, Mick Wheeler, he a good bloke. Yeah, you want Ling? You see him up there. My brother, Ling. Last door up there.' He waves towards the line of huts, the last one set a little way off from the others, towards the far corner of the tobacco field. But he doesn't step out of our path. He squints again and says to Buckley: ‘You want smoke?' That doesn't sound like a question so much as a demand.

‘Wheeler'll have a four-pound sack of stripped, thanks, chum,' says Buckley, as if he's asking for a sack of sugar, and I take in a long, deep breath, as if I might will some of his cool composure into me.

‘Yeah, yeah, good. Ten bob for Mick.' The exchange is as quick as that, Tiger Sam throwing a hessian bag of the stuff at Buckley's feet, and then squinting yet again, at Mr Wilberry now: ‘Who this man?' He might change his mind about us yet; his nostrils flare as if he's trying to discern some plot in Mr Wilberry's scent.

‘He's me mate, Jack Smith,' Buckley replies, and no one might disbelieve him, the lie comes so easily, while Mr Wilberry doesn't blink, his expression remaining mild and pleasant as it ever is.

‘Jack Smith.' The Chinaman laughs at who knows what. Yellow-toothed, utterly repulsive; if this is the devil come for Alec Howell, he could not be more appropriately designed: an evil Oriental cartoon. ‘Yeah, you go, you go.' He waves us away and he and his dingo disappear back into his hut with a jangle of tin as the wire screen whips shut behind them.

Buckley takes us slowly up the cartwheel ruts that run along the front of these crude dwellings. The second hut along is open-fronted, doorless, more like some sort of work shed than a hut for living in, if life is what people have here. As we pass it, inside I can just spy men playing cards, white men, smoking, one asleep on the dirt floor, testament, if one were needed, that opium should never be made available outside a hospital dispensary. The air is languorous, suffocating, the reek of manure from the field mingling with some other sweet, cloying smell. Even the flies are tired and listless here. Yet in between this hut and the next a child plays under a line of washing, a little girl playing peg dollies, as any child might. Her hair shines like black lacquer but she doesn't look up from her game for me to see her face, see if she is a mix, like me, and sorrow stills my fear now as nothing else might. Sorrow for that happy girl I was, with Gret, running through the misted daffodils at Echo Point, pegs clinking in our apron pockets.

‘Stay there in the cart, Miss Jones,' Buckley says to me as we pull up at the final hut. ‘I'll see this Ah Ling first, and see to it that you won't be alone with him.'

‘No. Please. I must be alone with him,' I insist, with some sort of tortured whine. ‘Along with the general discussion of his cures, I must ask about things I do not want you or any man to hear – things of a feminine nature, and of a personal nature. Please. Please don't make me explain myself further.'

‘Oh. Righto, Miss.' Buckley scrunches the brim of his hat in some shame, and Mr Wilberry clears his throat in agreement. Men, I see, really are astonishingly easy to manipulate in this way, aren't they? Good men, anyway. May Ah Ling be as easy to plead with as these good men are, and as compassionate.
Please.

Please, help me.

Buckley knocks on the timber frame of the wire screen of the hut and I send my plea into the blackness beyond, as Mr Wilberry bends to me again: ‘Nothing you might need to say would ever shock or disturb me – are you sure you must be alone?'

‘Yes, thank you.' I can't meet his eyes. If I did, what truth might rattle out of me? I look at the hut instead: contrary to the newspaper reports, it doesn't in fact have a thatched roof, but it is the sturdiest of the constructions here and the most home-like in appearance. It has a window by the door, and a garden bed of herbs at the front here; beside it a small patch of some other unfamiliar crop and then beside that – oh, I see the poppies. They are paler in colour than the poppies on the Track, their petals fading to mauve and falling in this blinding, blanching sun. One tilts its face to me over the raised edge of the herb garden: its centre is a black heart. A field of black-hearted poppies stretching up to the forest. A lone worker in amongst them, bending to them under his conical coolie hat, harvesting the bud sap, I suppose.

‘When my mother was ill, in her last days, I was privy to much medical discussion that – well, you know, cattleman's son and all that, there's no mystery about the nature of things for me. I –'

‘No. No, please, Mr Wilberry.' I just about scramble from the buggy in my haste to be away from him. He cannot be privy to this.

‘You tell the lady to come, yes.' I hear Ah Ling before I see him, a spry, round-faced man as vivid with health as his brother is sick with living death. He wears a black silk cap and long, frogged shirt: as traditional as his brother is … whatever he has become.

‘Dr Ah Ling?' I hold out my hand to him and my calmness surprises me, now that I am finally here, now that this chance is mine to take, my voice is crisp and bold.

‘I am Ling.' He holds the wire screen open, avoiding my hand. ‘You come in, come in, tell me what happens, I help.'

‘Thank you.' I nod, once more making my silent prayer to whomever or whatever might listen or care. ‘I hope you can help.'

Inside the hut, it takes my eyes some moments to adjust to the dimness; I can barely see the chair Ling directs me to: ‘You sit, sit, lady.'

‘Thank you.' I feel my way, and shelves appear behind his white moon face. Jars and canisters of all kinds, his dispensary, I suppose. There is another screen door on the other side of the room, opposite the one I entered by, and a breeze of that sickly sweet smell pervades through it. What
is
that smell? The poppies? No, they have no scent, I don't think. Perhaps it's the opium.

‘So, you tell me what happens.' Ling sits over the other side of the table, as any doctor might, clasping his hands, waiting to hear what ails.

‘Well,' I begin, as far and as firmly as my rehearsal had taken me, ‘as it happens, I am about to become a student of Medicine, at Sydney University.'

‘Ah, good, good.' He smiles and nods, but not in any way that would suggest he is especially impressed by that one way or another, and somehow I find this encouraging.

‘I am interested in the case you treated,' I continue. ‘The man with the tumour in his arm. It's quite famous. I heard about it from the newspaper, and –'

‘Yes, good, good,' Ling interrupts, smiling and nodding now as if urging me to get to the point, not moved in any way by my attempt to flatter him.

‘I would like to discuss your treatment of the tumour.'

‘Yes.' He nods, but he has ceased smiling. ‘All medicine is different, one case to the next. No person is the same as the next one. What is it I will help you with?'

Right. I see. He is not going to discuss his methods with me. Too bad – it's hardly of great importance to me now. Let's get to the point. I place my hands on the table before him. I close my eyes: I am the blade. I open them and say to him: ‘Yes, I am here on a personal matter. A very personal matter. My sister is pregnant to a man who raped her. I would like advice on aborting the foetus safely, what quantity of pennyroyal or tansy might be used, or perhaps you might have an altern –'