Paper Daisies (25 page)

‘It's a sly tobacco place,' Buckley explains to him. ‘That Tiger Sam is not a licensed grower – and they have the ope going out of there too. It's not place for a lady to be, in any company.'

I am no lady. I am wretched and desperate. I am condemned to be Alec Howell's wife if I do not succeed in this. My sister is condemned to submit to God knows what new hell – and the devil's child into the bargain if I do not see to it first. If I return to Bellevue with nothing, we return to a life sentence of misery. Or I might just find the strength to plunge a knife into his back and take my last dance at the end of a rope to get away.

I say to these men who presume to decide my path, as I drive the words into the doily under my hand: ‘In the morning, we will visit Dr Ah Ling. It is important that I speak with him myself, to discuss a matter of medicine – unless, of course, anyone else here has a particular interest in cancer, its causes and cures.' And you will not deny me this. I look up at Mrs Wheeler beside me, and only Mrs Wheeler: ‘Now. What were we talking about? Supper. May we have ginger beer with the meal, too, please? I remember having a lovely ginger beer when we were here –'

‘Yes, Miss Berylda – the ginger beer.' Mrs Wheeler is already bustling me past her husband for it. ‘My ginger beer. We are in luck! I made some only on Tuesday – I must have seen you were coming. It will be beautiful tonight!'

She takes me with her back through the saloon and I fix my gaze on hers. ‘I recall it as having been delightfully fizzy, Mrs Wheeler. The best.'

‘Oh! My ginger beer – yes, it's very,
very
fizzy.' She boasts and explains to me how much yeast to lemon is necessary and whatever other things are in it, on and on until I'm closing the bedroom door on her: ‘Thank you, Mrs Wheeler. Thank you so much, you're too kind.'

Once inside I slide the latch behind me, finding Gret just as I left her, curled around herself and looking up at me: ‘Are they going to play the calliope?'

Some wave of pain closes her eyes and I say: ‘No. Mrs Wheeler put the mockers on that idea, I'm afraid. You don't look like you're about to liven up for anything, though. Is it very bad? The pain?'

‘Ooh. Not too bad. Just sore.' She presses her hands into her stomach. ‘And I feel a little bit queasy again. Whoosh, whoosh it goes inside my head and in my belly, all whooshing out of time.'

And that makes no other sense to me but that this must be pregnancy. A scrambling together of all the knowledge I've magpied of female anatomy and function, in this text and that. Something about the settling of the seed, setting off a mystery train of chemical changes, that makes a woman weak and more feeble than usual. And burns a hole in me.

I ask Gret: ‘Please, will you let me feel where it hurts? Let me see?'

In case I am wrong. And it's something else: an infection, a growth. What else is there to make one ill? I don't know enough about anything.

‘All right. You can see,' Gret accedes, moving onto her back, but looking away from me into the wallpaper, looking away from her own shame and humiliation.

I don't know what I am looking for as I lift her skirt and petticoat back and then her drawers, just enough to find her belly. But I find the marks of his fingers impressed into the side of her hip, like a brand. I don't have to be a doctor to know that this is where he has seized her. If he were here now, I would stab him in the face.

But I can see or feel nothing else unusual. She does not tense at my touch; there is no redness, no firmness where none should be. There is no blood. She is well in every other way, for all that I might guess. My darling sister. My poor Gret. Her fingernails still streaked seaweed pink from her joyful painting day, still holding that golden bottlebrush from the gorge.

She curls away from me, and I curl behind her now. I pray to every god there is, please let tomorrow bring the solution, and make steel of my resolution, for this act that no god might ever help me with.

For if the One and Almighty God were truly good, or true at all, he would have pushed the seed from her. He would have shaken it from her along the rough track today.

Perhaps He has.

Please.

Please take this need to kill from me.

Show me a way. If I cannot make Alec Howell gone, then show me how Gret and I might go ourselves. Show me how we might disappear … into these hills …

Show me our life.

Free …

Free of all men. Free of God, too, if that is how it must be for me.

Ben

I
want to knock on the door and tell her, yes, as a matter of fact, I do have an interest in cancer, its causes and its cures. I want to tell her about Mama. I want to tell her everything that I might say but –

She shuts the door. It seems to be her way: she'll open it just enough to dazzle me – with a smile, a word, a shower of laughing stars – and then she slams it shut again. She is a closed door.

‘She has her own mind about things, Miss Berylda does,' the old man Buckley says quietly, staring at the door with me. ‘She's not much of one to say no to.'

‘No, I'm gathering that.' She is determined to see this Ah Ling. Who is he? A famous cancer doctor? I've never heard of him, and I made a fair few enquires after Mama's diagnosis, wrote to every advertised medical ‘expert' up and down the eastern seaboard; investigated all sorts of snake oil garbage, too, as Howell termed it himself. I even contemplated the services of a clairvoyant in St Kilda before accepting that there was nothing to be done. But what is behind Berylda's urgency now, her rush to see this Ah Ling? What is it that drives this constant charging, charging, charging? I want to grasp her by the hand. Stop her. Ask her.
Berylda, please.
Open the door.

The word
PRIVATE
on the next door along stares back at me.

‘If she's so set on it, we'll take her out there in the morning,' Buckley says. ‘And don't worry too much about it, Mr Wilberry. I've got a pistol in the buggy. Always carry it.'

Strike me, don't worry? ‘What? Would you expect that kind of trouble?'

‘Not from Ah Ling, no,' the old man says. ‘He's a decent sort by all accounts, and he did fix that feller, too. George Conroy is his name, lives right here at Kitty's Flat, just down the road, at least I think he still does, last I heard. The doc in town was going to saw the arm off, but he's a new feller and not got too good a track record, so George thought he'd try his luck with the Chinaman. And that Ah Ling worked a bit of a miracle on it, so they reckon. It's that Tiger Sam, his brother, who's the doubtful character – gibbering bag of loose change, if ever there was one. Sick in the head from all his ope smoking, liable to turn on you with a meat axe and chase you up the road, that one is.'

‘Oh?' I have to ask: ‘Is there some reason the local constabulary don't go after him instead of chasing larrikin miners round the hills?'

‘Heh.' Buckley enlightens me: ‘Coppers like their cheap tobacco too, don't they. The costs of them growers' licences pushed the price of smokes right up.'

‘Of course.' Everyone's a criminal and we need to get our priorities right. I smile at the double standard, sharing it with Buckley, the gulf between us pinched down to little more than the lines at the corners of his eyes.

He stops smiling and stares at the door again. He says: ‘She's a very good and hardworking young woman, Miss Berylda is. She doesn't mean to be impolite. She's had her troubles.'

‘I'm gathering that too.'

‘Their mum and dad killed in a railway crash, poor mites.' Buckley glances back towards the hearth to see there's no one here but ghosts and an old upright piano, before he tells me through lips that barely move: ‘And the uncle – he's no good. I don't know what he gets up to. But it's something no good.'

‘Hm.' I share this wonder at the uncle with the old man too, and the sympathy: A railway accident? Awful. Devastating. I can't begin to imagine. But I will discover what this uncle does; I will help the Jones sisters be independent of him. I will do all I can.

For Berylda. I want to ease all that troubles her. Perhaps if I wait at her door long enough, one day I will.

Berylda

T
he mermaids drag me deeper, deeper still; the slimy reeds slip through my hands as I grasp for them, desperate for air.

Hurry, Berylda, hurry, your mother and father are waiting at the station.

No, they're not. They're not waiting anywhere. They are dead. Cold and dead as the river pebbles pummelling against my shins, my elbows. My face.

Let me go!

Turn around – look, Berylda. They are here, behind you.

No. I shall drown.

Come down to the caves, Berylda, it isn't far. Libby is waiting too. She is calling out for you. Listen, listen. Don't resist. Be a good girl and come with us …

I let go. I am so very, very tired, I can only let go.

I let them drag me over the ruts of the riverbed and down, down, down, over a gravel of shattered bones, down and down.

Drag me and drag me until it doesn't hurt any more. Drag me until I drown. Until gravel becomes silk. Velvet. Gold velvet.

And Libby is here, she truly is, brushing the rich fabric against my cheeks, either side, so happy to see me.
Oh, this is the one, Ryl, this gold is perfect for the drawing room, don't you think?

It is the same bright yellow gold of grandmother's fan bracelet. The catch chain glints against the silk, gold on gold.

Where is Mother now? Where is Papa?

Who?

I look up and Libby is gone. I turn around and no one is here. It is dark. I run out into the rear parlour, here at Bellevue, to the windows that look out across the hills, and they are walled up with bricks.

There is no air. I cannot breathe.

Of course, I cannot breathe. For I am drowned.

Let go. Drift. Free.

Is this death? Is
this
freedom?

‘Ryldy?' Greta's arms are around my waist. ‘Ryl? Wake up.'

I am breathing? Yes. And I am rousing. I open my eyes and turn in her arms. ‘What is it?' I ask her through the darkness.

‘You were having a dream, a bad dream, yelping like a puppy.'

‘I know.' Just a dream. The dream of our life. A gold tassel swishing through the black like a fistful of silken keys.

My sister's arms tight around me. We are still here.

‘That noise – listen,' she whispers. ‘What is it?'

I listen. A distant thudding has begun:
bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang …
a metronome set to prestissimo. Where are we precisely? The Hill, yes? Wheeler's Hotel. I can just make out the shape of the ginger beer bottle on the night stand, from our meal. Two sips and we were both blessedly cataleptic – that brew is medicinal strength. Mr Wilberry's golden bottlebrush remains there too, by our glasses. A board creaks; someone coughs softly in the next room: a woman. Some woman.
And I am no longer dreaming. I sit up and open the curtain. Not bricks but sky: the grey before the dawn, the painting out of the stars. I blink up into it, as another metronome begins –
bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang –
syncopated against the first, and closer.

‘Some sort of mine workings?' I suppose.

‘The birds don't like it; they've stopped singing.' Gret pulls me back under the covers. ‘Whatever it is, that noise frightens the birds away.'

‘I'm sure it does.'

We listen to the birdless banging as the dawn creeps up the pane, and my sister begins to weep, silently. She shakes in silence as she weeps. Our dreams as one. She is trapped in the house that has never been our home and he is growing more and more savage the more she weeps, the more she yelps for him to stop.

She whispers: ‘I know it's a terrible sin, but sometimes I don't like waking up. Remembering.'

‘I know.' I hold her now. ‘Sometimes I can't believe I'm awake at all.' She flinches in my arms; I feel her clench down the urge to wail. I ask her: ‘Is the pain still bad?' The pain in her belly, I mean.

‘Not too bad, no,' she whispers. ‘It's much better now.'

She clenches again: she is lying. She doesn't want to ruin our little trip away. She couldn't ruin anything if she tried. But I know that she has guessed there is something wrong with her inside, even if she doesn't know what it might be.

I hold her tight to me and promise her: ‘I'm going to get you something, for this pain. I want you to rest here while I'm gone today. Paint me a postcard of a tumbledown dungaree town from this window and finish that ginger beer, will you? I expect you to be in a ginger beer coma until I return. In fact, I insist.'

She breathes out a laugh that's barely there: ‘You're lovely, Ryldy, honestly you are. What would I do without you?'

That question is too terrible. But I am lovely, yes, if loveliness includes the worst of humanity. I will be the devil's for all time, once I have done what I must do. No better path has come to me in the night, nor will it this new day. There is no other escape for us, just as there is no one who might answer any prayer. God is deaf to justice. Deaf to me. I have no choice but to seek to kill Alec Howell. Say it into my soul, should I even possess one: murder. I shall murder him, as I shall murder his child.

Ben

‘
N
o, I am not getting up.' Cos declines my offer of a stretch and stroll before breakfast. ‘I can't – because I am paralysed.'

‘Come on,' I say. ‘It'll do you good – it'll only get worse if you lie there. Better to get moving.'

‘I would if I could.' He reaches for his pipe, looking at me as if I am the one who might be a bit detestable.

Look at him, here in his most natural state: lying down. I'm sure he really is suffering from yesterday's ride; so am I. But he hasn't moved since we arrived just before six p.m. last night. A gut-scrubbing two and a third bottles of Californian angelico went into him, because he'd decided he craved only dessert from the extensive cellar of the world's worst wines on offer here, and a whole piss pot's worth has come out of him, the full-bodied aroma of which fills this room from where it sits beside his bed, on the floor between us. While
Zarathustra
has not moved from where it lies either – open on his chest – and from which he sermonised me into oblivion at some time during the night on the evils of sentimentality and the inherently manipulative nature of love. Thanks for that.

I say: ‘Righteo.' And turn to leave him to it.

But he says, lighting up: ‘As much as it pains me to miss out on watching you follow that girl around like some starving stray begging scraps from her high table. You can have that pleasure all to yourself today.'

‘That
girl
? Just who
are
you to judge her? There's more to her story, you know –'

‘I have no doubt,' he cuts me off. ‘And whatever it is, you'd be well advised to remain in ignorance of it, Wilb. Trust me.'

The dashed-off scribble of a portrait he sketched of her yesterday by the river lies between us, too, propped against the empty bottles on the night stand: her face stark, all her fine features made almost invisible by the ferocity of the eyes that stare out of the page. That is not her. That is not what I see.
What's she looking at?
he slobbered at me last night in the midst of his lecture on the perils of affection.
Not you, old matey. Not you or me. Something wicked in the hills …

Go to bloody sleep, for Christ's sake
, I said to him then; I say to him now: ‘Why would I ever trust you with advice on women?' I am past fed up with him today already, and I let him have it: ‘All you know about is faithless, indiscriminate rogering – you're a joke. And Susan knows it, too.'

He stares at me for a moment. Eyes hooded with some threat, before he picks up his book and waves me away: ‘Don't listen to me then. I don't know anything about women. I don't know anything about life. There is no more to
my
story, is there. I don't know what it is to have a difficult time of it loving someone I'm not supposed to have – one that I can't even step out with into the street, for if I did my family would have me cut off, and unlike you, I would have no recourse. I would be on the street. And so would Susan and the children. Do you know what it's like to pretend that your children are not your own? I don't know what it is to suffer at all. I don't know what it's like to work at ideas and at art that no one – not one single arsehole in this entire continent of a shitter – is interested in. So run along, Wilby Wilber. Run along and have a wonderful frolic of a day with your freakish little kitty cat sweetheart. I'll be here when you return. I always am. So off you go.'

And so I bloody well shall. Get into the day, and get away from him. If only he could hear his own hypocrisy and idiocy, his head would explode off his shoulders. But he won't; can't: why would you when you can spend the day in bed, indulging yourself with the fictional ramblings of a mad, dead German, imagining that you might be Nietzsche's own Super Man – an elaborate excuse for all that is indolent and selfish feathered up today as twentieth century enlightenment, as though I'd know anything more about it than the scathing review in the
Age
. But I
do
know that you can't possibly know anything about anything without living it,
being
in it. Not truly. Nietzsche probably observed that too – from an apartment window. If Cos loved Susan truly, he'd bloody well take her to Berlin, wouldn't he? Take her to Rio de Janeiro. Take her as well as himself and the twins from this shitter. He'd find a way. He'd do something about it. Get a job – make some actual attempt to sell a painting to someone who might be interested. Let's be frank, he hasn't mentioned his children by name the entire time we've been away: because Tildy and Ted are little more than inconveniences to him. They get in the way of Susan's undivided attention. They are possibly at least part of the reason he's here with me now, if we're going to be especially frank.

‘Work at ideas?' I mutter at him. ‘Art? Suffering? You're just lazy.'

‘Arsehole,' he mutters back.

And despite the note of genuine disappointment and hurt in his voice, I retort: ‘Super arsehole.'

‘Mirror.' He raises his palm to me. He snorts and I leave.