Paper Daisies (3 page)

Berylda

I
wake with the bell for prayer: it's seven forty-five. But I stay in bed, pretend I'm asleep for a little while longer, not that anyone goes to prayers with any regularity, except Margie and Jayne, and they're not here anyway. They've gone home; one to Tamworth, the other to Caboolture, somewhere north of Brisbane, far, far away. And those who haven't gone home yet have all left for the river, at Lane Cove, for the boat races.

All but Flo, who remains here with me. She's not attending the races on protest, because the women's rowing club remains debarred from competing. Darling Flo, I can hear her turning the pages of her newspaper, propped up in bed, sipping her morning cocoa. She remains here because I remain here, I'm sure. Her family only lives a short ferry trip away across the harbour, at Waverton; she resides at college because her parents want her to discover her independence, on her own. Her parents actually
want
her to. Such an incredible, foreign idea to me. Perhaps one that might not have been so odd, had my parents not – Oh God, don't stray there.

I open my eyes and look up at the curtain, at the sun streaming through the muslin, pale gold light, shimmering hot already. I should get up or it'll be a sticky old walk across to Grace Brothers at Broadway, to the bargain table sales: the reason I've given for my hanging about so long after the exams. So that I can buy Greta her Christmas present, something as dear as she is to me; something as sweet as she is, but womanly, too. She is twenty-two; how did she turn twenty-two this past year? In all my delaying, how does anything happen? But it's true enough that I must also wait for the Grace Brothers sale, quite genuinely, because I am running out of my pitiful allowance; I'll have to sell a book or two as it is:
A Study of the Novel
and the biblical
Anthology of English Verse
can sacrifice themselves. And I shall purchase that train ticket today, Greta darling, I really shall. If it's not too hot to walk all the way to the station, at Redfern – perhaps this afternoon.

‘Oi sleepyhead – listen to this,' says Flo from her bed across the room. ‘News from Hill End – that's out your way, isn't it?'

‘Yes, it's not far from Bathurst.' Don't remind me:
Bathurst, Bathurst, Bathurst
, and Hill End is another cloudy dream in itself
.
‘What's news?'

She reads over a yawn: ‘
A Chinese herbalist, by name of Dr Ah Ling, has purportedly cured a man of a malignant tumour. The tumour, in the upper arm, of local miner, George Conroy, was said to have burst from the skin after the application of an herbal poultice, thereafter returning full function to the arm and relieving totally the man's previous agony. The cure was achieved without surgery or any modern therapy for the treatment of such cancerous growths. When asked about his condition, Conroy would only say, “It's a miracle! And he never charged me nothing but what you would pay for a draught of Woods Peppermint or a bottle of beer. Nothing!” Curiously, none who were approached in the town seemed to be able to say precisely where this miracle worker Ah Ling lives, except that it is in a thatched hut on a tobacco plantation, somewhere in the wilderness between the Hill and Tambaroora.
'

‘Sounds interesting,' I say absently. I just don't want to think about getting on that train, of returning to that district at all. Oh bum – I spy on the night stand – I am yet to return
Surgical Anatomy
to the med library, too.

‘Sounds amazing!' Flo scrunches the paper at me. ‘You should try to meet him, over the break – go and ask him all about it. It sounds positively revolutionary!'

‘Yes, Flo.' She has me laughing before I am properly alert. ‘That's precisely what I'll do. Start a medical revolution over the holidays. In Hill End. With a mysterious Chinaman.'

Chinaman
: the word clangs in my ears for a heartbeat before: ‘Oh my!' Flo jumps up, looking at the time, aghast, ringlets flinging. ‘Get up, lazybones – get dressed. We've got to be the first at the bargain tables if we're going to get the best stuff. Hurry up!'

‘I'm hurrying.' I am laughing still more as I rise. ‘What on earth do you want at the bargain tables?' Flo doesn't want for anything.

‘I want the most dreadful stuff imaginable,' she says. ‘A great big splashy hat, specifically, for Federation Day. Something that even Mother will disapprove of.'

I would ask her why but I know the answer: yesterday the
Evening News
proclaimed that at present we ladies are far more concerned about procuring charming hats and gowns from Grace Brothers than we are about the ‘birth of the nation' or ‘the women's suffrage question'.

I think I might just have to procure for myself something a little splashy, too.

Ben

‘
C
ut your hair, son – you look like a sheila,' Pater greets me after he's finished conferring with Blaine about the particulars of Mama's death.

Don't argue with your father.
No, I won't; neither will I have my hair cut. I walk away.

Into Mama's sunroom. He doesn't follow me. I sit at her desk and pull out her current notebooks: her calendar of the garden, address book, birthday book, correspondence folders, and her diaries, her pages and pages of observations, day after day:

The honeyeaters seem to have stayed long into the season, well into summer.
Last summer. Lists for Christmas dinner and table settings, and:
Ben looks so very well. A little thinner than he should be perhaps, or perhaps that's a mother's imagination. He's big enough, as always. He seems sad, however. I cannot bear that he should ever be sad. But he's a human being, so there's nothing to be done about that, I suppose. He'll get along all right. They all do, don't they? God, please send him someone to cherish beyond me. A good match. Joyfulness. He was such a joyful child.

Rain remains incessant …

Not a cloud in the sky today. I stare into the sky until I can no longer see.

Time is marked by the opening and closing of the front door. The undertaker and his assistant come and go, taking her away with them. Then comes Reverend Ainsley, the new vicar, whom I don't really know, so I don't move from Mama's desk to greet him. Then a cohort of the Queensland Parliament arrives – the hardest boiled Protectionist cohort. I hear their voices, possibly half-a-dozen of them. ‘John, John, bad luck. So sorry to hear about Ellie, old man. So sorry.' And that dispensed with, the commiserations quickly fall to what will be the certain death of the colony after the first of January, when the newly formed Commonwealth conspiracy of southerners will rob Queensland of its trade tariffs and its Kanaka slave labour force. I can't hear Pater's responses; perhaps that's my imagination. He is never quiet on such issues: he is the Minister of Agriculture, self-proclaimed despot of Central Queensland, and you've never heard hypocrisy until you've heard John Wilberry decrying the injustices of the proposed Immigration Restriction Act. How else do you break a shearers' strike unless you can bring in black slaves?

Their voices rise, the drone of massive, overgrown wasps. ‘What
is
this Australia for?' I hear one above the rest. ‘We will never agree on taxation rates – we can't even agree on a standard railway gauge. The only state that we will become is one which is destroyed. We're still getting back up from the collapse of '93. It is insanity.'

Insanity. Whose fault was the collapse of '93? Melbourne bankers, who have only one goal in mind: to ruin Queensland, by withdrawing capital, provoking all manner of strikes, which only in turn encourage the nuisance that is the Labor Party, and push up the cost of wages. Whereas in God's country, shearers and stockmen and canecutters should work for free, because they are so bloody privileged to be allowed to be Queenslanders at all, and any such thing as a federal bank is satanic. I can't sit here a moment more. I shall go out to the greenhouse; I shall look over Mama's trays of seeds.

‘Ben.' I am stopped halfway across the back verandah. ‘Benjamin, isn't it? Sorry to hear about your mother. The worst.' My eyes are blinded looking back into the shade; I see the shape of the head, bald, and a voice I vaguely recognise, now asking me: ‘Still at the roses and all that?'

‘What?' Roses? For a second I don't understand what he's referring to, as I'm not particularly interested in roses, and then when I do understand him, when I hear the trace of mockery, I walk away, into the greenhouse, and I shut the door behind me.

‘Ben – Ben, old matey.' I hear Cos, my old matey, at the window. Cosmo Thompson. My oldest friend. Bothered to turn up, good on him. But by now I can't speak at all. I am flicking through Mama's packets of seeds: carnations, coreopsis, cornflower … ‘Come round when you're ready,' he says. ‘We'll get nicely schnigged.'

I nod. Yes, I will want to get nicely, arselessly drunk soon. After the funeral.

One hour folds into the next until the sun is rising again and I am dragging on a suit. I am not much a part of the day; it's all more of the same, but with Protectionist party wives, and some Labor members of the Legislative Assembly, good on them for bothering. Faces, hats. Shaking hands I barely touch. I have more to say to the
elatum
in the brass vases. I stare at the casket: willow wood and silver plate; she'd have liked the wreath: Mrs Farenall designed it, she and Mama were friends, laughing over teacups and dividing boat orchids for winter. Cos whispers in my ear before I rise to give the eulogy: ‘Doesn't matter what you say. Say whatever you must.'

A handful of words: ‘Eleonora Trenton Wilberry might have been a brilliant botanist, but as it was, in her horticulture and floral artistry she was an inspiration to many, not least to me. A tireless worker for the church and for her community, had time and circumstance allowed her to do more in her own right, only God knows what contribution she would have made to the botanical record. I am certain it would have been an invaluable one. Her garden was the outward reflection of her soul: bright, all-embracing, and ever joyful. She was my mother. Farewell.' At least that's what I meant to say.

Whatever I have said, Pater waits until after the burial to get into me for it. He waits until all are dispersed, heading to their carriages. We are not ten yards from where Mama lies in the ground, when he says: ‘You are a shame to me, son. A bloody embarrassment – you always have been.'

I look at him square on for the first time in I don't know how long. We are very alike in basic construction: large, heavy muscled, bullish. But different in every other way. I might get into him, right here, right now, if it wasn't for Mama, and the more of her that is in me.

‘You are not returning to Melbourne,' he says, and he's been wanting to offload this for the past two days. ‘If you're not going to take an interest in the property, then you will at least do your time with the QMI – and you will do it this coming year. You are leaving in January.'

With the Queensland Mounted Infantry. No, I am not. I am not going to South Africa for this bastard's misguided sense of honour: where to kill, to tame, to press your will is to win, and winning is everything.

‘I'm not making any more excuses for you,' he says, narrowing his eyes at me.

I narrow mine back: he doesn't need to make any excuses for me, it's a volunteer force, even if Queensland treats it like a compulsory sport – like the rugby. Got to be better than the New South Wales Lancers. Got to be the first ones on the troopship to Cape Town – pick me, pick me – that desperate to impress Mother Britannia. I want to tell him that I'm not surprised he's embarrassed. But that's just Queensland, isn't it. Terrified that Federation will rob them of their colonial army, and they'll all have to muck in under the one flag, with all those sheilas from the south, too – Jesus Christ, even Tasmanians. As though this land we're standing on right now wasn't called New South Wales itself forty years ago. As though Pater forged the boundary single-handedly in some bloody battle – one he is still waging in his permanently belligerent mind. I don't say anything: there is too much to say.

‘What's wrong with you?' He does look bewildered now, and old. He is old: he's sixty-two. And I suppose he is lost in his own kind of grief – at my intransigence. ‘You can shoot, you can ride, you can do both at the same time, making daisy fucking chains as you go. You are a Wilberry. You will do your duty. Fuck. You will do as you are bloody well told.'

Except that I am possibly more Wilberry than I will ever care to admit: no man tells me what to do. A strange feeling comes over me, a kind of deflation; perhaps it's pity for him.

He says: ‘If you go back to Melbourne, I'll cut you off. I'll disinherit you.'

I say: ‘Go on then.' And I walk away. He won't disinherit me; he can't anyway: I'll sue him for all he owes Mama, for all that is my legal right to her estate – to every Trenton penny held in trust. If he knows anything about me, he must know I'd do that, on principle.

‘Coward,' he says at my back.

Because he doesn't know me at all.

‘Don't you walk off,' he calls after me. ‘I need you to sort out the staff at the house.'

Sort out which of the servants should stay and which now should go? Today? Wouldn't want to waste a penny there, would you. There is some desperation in his voice, some pain of his own. He can have that all to himself. I keep walking away.

I set off for Cos's place, only a mile from the cemetery, at Woolloongabba, and the weatherboard sprawl of the town through here numbs me again. It's a very pleasant area. Pleasant. Sleepy. Torpid. And my feet know the way, even if my mind doesn't know where it's going. Where am I going? To Cos's, to the Swamp, which is the name of Cos's place, for it sits by a marshy bog, stumbling distance from Brisbane Cricket Ground. He'll be here by now; he didn't come to the burial. And here I am now, too.

At the gate of the Swamp the callistemon
are suddenly magnificent – ordinary
viminalis
but their screaming scarlet bottlebrushes are blooming as though they are also insane. They love this swamp. They are so prolific they almost conceal the house, consume it, except for the roof. What a sight they make. As does the house: a Brisbane original, built by his grandfather when there was nothing much else around and the old man was just a spud farmer looking for a brave woman and a more suitable crop. This is a place that Mama has never seen, though; I would never have brought her here, as much as she always found Cosmo entertaining. I wonder if she sees me now.

‘Wilber, is that you?' Susan's face appears by one of the verandah poles at the front door; she wipes her hands on her apron and beckons me in. ‘Cossie's out back – he said you might come.' Her large dark eyes are full of compassion but she says nothing more, only leads me through the door and down the hall, not quite his wife, not quite his housekeeper, not quite black, not quite white, not quite his at all, but always his muse.

He is in the studio, the back room of the house, stuffing his pipe. He looks up at me from amidst the mess of his life: two easels on the go, a riverscape and a Susan, papers and books everywhere, paint splatters on the walls, the floor, the windowsills, his taxidermied native cat, Kevin, by him on the sideboard, standing guard over his brushes. Good old Kevin, curator of hanging offences here at the Swamp. And I feel my face smile for the first time since I got home. I breathe out. And in again: this house smells of the river; it's part of the river. I look through the row of windows at the back wall, to the mess of lilli pillies and black wattle and birdsnest fern that make no attempt to be a garden all the way down to the massive bunya pine, where the bog becomes a creek.

Cos presses a rum into my hand. ‘Get that into you.'

I toss it down my throat, don't even taste it, and I reach for another.

The sound of small children is coming from the kitchen: Tildy and Ted, it must be, the twins, banging pots and pans: one of them runs in half-naked and giggling, and wearing a pot as a hat. They were babies in a basket the last time I saw them; the first time. ‘Come back here, scallywag!' Susan calls and the little brown bottom wobbles back out.

I say to Cos: ‘They've grown.'

He rolls his eyes. ‘Not fast enough.' He scratches his beard and says: ‘So. What do you want to do, apart from drink? What can I do for you, my old Wilb?'

‘Not a lot,' I say, but there is something I must do and fairly quickly; all I want to do. ‘I'm leaving in the morning,' I tell him, and then I ask him: ‘You don't feel like coming on an expedition with me, do you? Bit of a ramble? I wouldn't mind having an artist along.'

‘Where to?' He regards me warily, chewing on his pipe.

‘New South Wales – out to Mama's old property, past Bathurst somewhere. Looking for a plant.
Helichrysum
. Possibly. A daisy, of some kind.'

He makes a face of disgust. Brisbane Cricket Ground is a long way to go for Cos these days, and I can see its telegraph wires from here. I shouldn't ask him to come with me; can't go anywhere with Cos without him making a mess of some kind. But I don't think I want to be alone on this ramble; and I've got to go. It's not only the promise I have made to Mama; I've got to get away from here. And he is my best old matey, and the very best botanical illustrator I know, when he can be bothered doing something for me.

‘Hm.' He stares at me for a moment, over his pipe, before replying: ‘Why not, hm? Embrace fate.
Amori fati.
Say yes?' He turns to Kevin on the sideboard: ‘Say
yes
, hm?' And I've not got the slightest idea what he's talking about. ‘We only go round the wheel once, don't we?' He turns back to me. ‘Once and eternally: might as well make it interesting, and stop you from doing anything ridiculous. Keep you from harm.' He scratches his beard again, suspicion and sympathy in his squint: ‘You all right, old chum?'

‘No. No, not really,' I must admit.

He gives me a nod now and he asks: ‘Read any Nietzsche yet?'

And I laugh, and I tell him: ‘God, no.'

In my mind, I'm already back on the waves, on the steamer south. Where are we going? Sydney first, we'll stay at the club, at the Union. See where I am, where we are, from there.