‘Let’s head on home then, Alice,’ June said. She put the truck into gear. ‘We’ve got a long drive.’
They pulled out of the car park. Exhaustion tugged on Alice’s eyelids. Everything hurt. A few times Harry tried to nose her leg but she pushed his face away, turned her back to both of her companions and kept her eyes closed to shut out her new world.
Brooke jabbed the elevator down button and rummaged through her handbag until her fingertips grazed her emergency packet of smokes. She gripped them in her fist. When the elevator pinged, Brooke walked in and punched the button for the car park harder than she meant to. Again she recalled the happiness on Alice’s face at the sight of that box of books; the light that filled her eyes made the lie Brooke had told about where they’d come from worth it. Alice was with her grandmother now. Her family, Brooke reminded herself, was what Alice was going to need most.
In her whole life, Brooke had never witnessed anything like the aftermath of what had happened at the Hart property. Police were calling it a perfect storm: dry lightning, a child left alone with matches, and a family trapped in the cycle of a man’s violence against his wife and daughter. Brooke hovered nearby when the police approached June to explain: Clem had beaten his child unconscious in her bedroom then, realising there was a fire, dragged her outside before going back in to rescue Agnes. But by the time the fire brigade and ambulance arrived, Agnes couldn’t be resuscitated, and Clem died at the scene shortly after from smoke inhalation. At that point June was such a sickly colour that Brooke had intervened and suggested a break.
The elevator reached the car park with another nauseatingly cheery ping. Brooke took deep lungfuls of fresh air, holding off from lighting her smoke. That poor woman, Agnes. Only twenty-six years old, and in such fear of her husband that she’d made a will for guardianship of her children, one of whom would never know her. Brooke pressed a hand to her stomach at the thought of him, the baby boy, pulled from Agnes’s dying, beaten body. She swallowed a rising wave of bile. How could a husband do that to his pregnant wife, to his young daughter, to his unborn son? What would become of Alice, the daughter who survived fire?
Images of Alice unconscious, beaten and inhaling smoke overwhelmed Brooke. She threw her smokes and lighter into a bin, got into her car and left the hospital in a squeal of tyres on concrete, desperate to put as much distance as she could between herself and Alice’s empty room.
The summer dusk was thick and balmy. Along the seafront the Norfolk Island pines teemed with parrots screeching drunkenly, singing their sunset song. Brooke pulled over and wound down the windows to inhale the heavy fragrance of salt, seaweed and frangipani. Alice had mumbled incessantly about flowers when she was in the grip of her night terrors. Flowers, phoenix birds and fire.
‘C’mon,’ Brooke muttered to herself. ‘Get your shit together.’
She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and turned the key in the ignition. Speeding away from the sea, she cut the corners of the empty streets in her neighbourhood, pulling hard into her driveway. Once she was inside, Brooke went straight to the phone, lifted the receiver and began to make the call she’d been dreading all day. She willed herself to press the last digit of Sally’s phone number, which she’d known since she was twelve.
Blood pulsed in her ears as the dial tone turned to a ring.
6. Striped mintbush
And her light
stretches over salt sea
equally and flowerdeep fields.
Meaning: Love forsaken
Prostanthera striatiflora | Central Australia
Found in rocky gorges and near outcrops. Very strongly mint-scented. Narrow leathery leaves. The white flower is bell-shaped with purple stripes inside the bloom and yellow spots in the throat. Should not be ingested, as it can cause difficulty in sleeping. Vivid dreams are also symptomatic.
The drive was long, hot and filled with yellow dust. There was no hint of the sea on the breeze. The air from the truck’s vents was hot on Alice’s face, like Toby’s panting breath. At the thought of his face, his drooling, wolfish smile, she sucked on her bottom lip, staring hard out the window at the strange and unfamiliar surroundings. No silver seagrass or salt pans, no soldier crabs or sea tides to read, no seaweed necklaces to wear, and no skies filled with ghostly wisps of virga, warning of storms out at sea.
On either side of the flat highway the land was thirsty, dry as a cracked tongue. Somehow, though, the strange landscape teemed with life. It hummed in Alice’s ears, the clicking buzz of cicadas, the occasional wild cackle of kookaburras. There was the occasional blur of colour where wildflowers grew at the base of gum trees. Some had trunks as white as fairytale snow while others were an ochre colour, as glossy as if covered in a slick of wet paint.
Alice squeezed her eyes shut. Her mother. Her unborn brother or sister. All her books. The garden. Her desk. Toby. Her father. She rubbed the heel of her palm over the left side of her chest. Opened her eyes. In her peripheral vision June reached a hand out towards her but, seeming unsure of where to rest it, let it hover before eventually putting it back on the steering wheel. Alice pretended not to have seen. That seemed as good a way as any to manage the situation. She angled herself away from June, turning more directly towards her window. Stretching an arm behind her seat, she reached into her bag for her books, choosing to ignore that they’d come from June and focusing instead on them belonging to her. Alice tugged from the bag the first one her fingertips touched and almost smiled at the sight of it. A perfect comfort. Clutching it, Alice took solace from its solid, sturdy shape, its reliably straight edges, its papery smell, its beckoning story, and its hard cover bearing an image she’d spent countless hours studying, of a girl with her name, who fell into a strange and wonderful land but still found her way home.
June kept her eyes on the road and both hands firmly on the steering wheel for fear of what would happen if she glanced away or slackened her grip. She couldn’t stop the tremors in her limbs. Only a nip of whisky from the flask in her side pocket would do that. But she didn’t dare. Not today. Not with the child in the truck, sitting so close June could have reached out and touched her. Alice. Her granddaughter, who she’d never laid eyes on. Until today. In sidelong glances June observed the girl pressing her book to her chest like it was the very thing keeping her heart beating. She’d agreed to go along with the nurse’s suggestion that they tell Alice the box of books came from her grandmother. Apparently Alice loved them so much, it seemed the simplest way to establish a connection between them. The most important thing right now is that Alice is protected from any further stress, the nurse had said.
Looking across at Alice, June felt ridiculous for believing any untruth might help to alleviate the situation. She chided herself for her stupidity. She should have just bloody well sat down and talked no nonsense with the child. Hello, Alice, I’m June, your grandmother. Your father is — June shook her head — was my son, who I hadn’t seen for many, many years. I’m going to take you home, where you’ll never feel unsafe again. June blinked her tears away. Maybe it only would have taken a few words. I’m so sorry, Alice. I should have been a better mother. I’m so, so sorry.