For the rest of the afternoon, Alice learned how to speak to Harry. She got the hang of it quickly. Clicking her fingers in front of her body directed Harry to stand before her, creating a barrier between Alice and anything else. Clicking her fingers behind her told Harry to position himself there. Clapping her hands told him to enter a room and turn the lights on, so that Alice didn’t have to go into the dark. That was her favourite command. Seeing Harry canter into the lounge room and press the button on the floor to switch on the standing lamp made her laugh.
‘He knows every room in the property, Alice, and where all the light switches are.’ Twig nodded seriously, but her eyes were smiling.
The last command, sweeping her open palm over her head from left to right, cued Harry to enter a space and search for people or intruders, barking if he found anyone. She didn’t like the thought of using that one.
‘Good, Alice. That’s great. You’re a quick learner. If you’re ever alone again and you feel faint, like this morning, remember you can call on Harry.’
By the time the workshop door opened and the sounds of the Flowers finishing up for the day drifted through the windows, Alice had the knack of Harry’s commands. She flopped on the couch, too tired to practise anymore.
‘June will be in soon for dinner,’ Twig said. ‘How about a bath beforehand, then early to bed? It’s been a big day.’
Alice nodded. She didn’t really want a bath, but Twig’s gentle voice made everything she said sound like perfect sense. As she followed Twig down the hallway towards the bathroom, Alice clicked her fingers behind her, though she didn’t need to. Harry was right at her heels.
Twig swung the screen door open and sat on the back verandah steps in the last light of the day. She rolled herself a smoke, lit it and took a deep drag, listening to the crackle of the burning tobacco, feeling the smoke fill her lungs. She blew a plume up to the first stars. Across the flower fields yellow light fell from the workshop windows. June had been in there ever since she’d come home earlier that afternoon. Twig had been doing paperwork in the office, waiting for Alice to return from the river, when June’s weary footsteps came up the front steps. She’d gone to greet her in the hall. June had held her hand up in protest.
‘Twig,’ she’d said, before Twig got the chance to speak. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Harry bounded between them, nearly knocking them over.
‘She’s at the river,’ Twig had said. ‘I’m going to teach her basic cues with him when she gets back.’ Twig patted Harry’s head. ‘She needs something to help her cope when she has another panic attack.’
‘If she has another panic attack.’ June had sighed. ‘I’ve enrolled her in school. She starts next week. I’ll tell her tonight.’
Twig clenched her fists. June wasn’t ever this stubborn raising Candy Baby. Twig knew the difference though: Candy was a blessing. Alice was blood.
‘And enrolment took all morning?’ Twig had looked out the front screen door, at June’s truck. The corner of a hand-carved hazelwood box poked out from under a tarpaulin on the tray. Twig raised an eyebrow. She knew exactly where June had been: digging up old ghosts in her storage shed in town.
‘Easy, Twig. It’s not what you think. It’s been one helluva day.’
‘Yes. Yes, it has been,’ Twig had hissed. ‘For your granddaughter most of all, but hey, who knows about your grandson? Since you cast him aside like some kind of weed.’
The words smashed to splinters at their feet. When she saw June’s face, Twig had wanted to sweep them up and swallow their serrated edges one by one. June had stomped out of the house, into the workshop, and slammed the door behind her. She hadn’t emerged since.
Twig lit another smoke. She was grateful June had the grace not to throw her own pain back in her face. Her anger wasn’t just about June separating Clem’s children. Of course it wasn’t. It was about her own babies. It was about the day thirty years ago when welfare officers pulled up in their shiny Holden and came into her home with a court order accusing her of child neglect. Because she didn’t have a husband. Because she often left Nina and Johnny with Eunice, her sister, while she went out looking for work. Because she was poor. Because the Child Welfare Department decided the only chance her children had of being proper Australians was if they grew up with a proper Australian family. A white Australian family. One of them had held Twig down while the other wrenched Nina and Johnny from her arms. They were screaming. Twig sang, trying to calm them, but they were inconsolable, tearing fistfuls from the daisy bush in the front yard, reaching for anything to hold onto as they were taken away. Twig had crumpled by the torn daisies browning and dying in the sun; the last things her children touched. She was still there, singing in the harsh northwesterly wind, tending the dead flowers as if she might be able to replant them, when Eunice came home after work. Twig had tried to carry on, believing Nina and Johnny would somehow find their way back to her, but after Eunice went missing a few years later, she had fled. Drifted up the coast, and then inland, hitchhiking from town to town. Until one day when, walking along the highway, she was lured down Thornfield’s driveway by curiosity, then the sound of a crying baby.
A peal of laughter from the dorm interrupted her memories. Twig wiped her eyes on her shirt. She’d asked Candy to serve dinner to the Flowers in the dorm; if June was going to explain to Alice that she was going to school, they needed privacy. That was, if June ever planned on coming out of the workshop.
As if on cue, the workshop door opened. Twig hid the lit end of her cigarette and sat perfectly still in the shadows as June made her way towards the front of the house. If she saw Twig, she didn’t let on. The front door opened and closed. The hinge of the crockery cabinet in the dining room squeaked open as June set the table. Further down the hall the bath gurgled as it emptied. The bathroom door opened. Light footsteps travelled down the hall into the kitchen. The sigh of the oven being turned off. The murmur of June’s voice. Chairs dragging on the dining room floorboards as June and Alice sat down. The clink and scrape of steel on china as they ate.
Alice must have been starving for a proper meal after her run to the river and back. Twig knew exactly where she’d been when she came upon Alice in the kitchen earlier that afternoon. Her shirt was buttoned up wrong, her wet hair was full of leaves, and her feet were sandy. But there was a light in her eyes and a colour in her cheeks that kept Twig silent. She knew as well as anyone that Thornfield found all sorts of ways to mend the broken souls that came to call it home. For now, it was the river that would hold Alice together. For Twig, ever since she came to Thornfield, the fix was always June.
Alice lay in bed, her head spinning from the news June had given her at dinner. She was enrolled in the local school. She started class next week.
‘I went and spoke to the principal myself today,’ June had said. ‘He suggested Harry goes to class with you so you have a friend right from the beginning.’
School. She’d read about it. Teachers and classrooms, desks, pencils and books. Children, playgrounds, cut sandwiches, reading, writing and homework. And she could take Harry with her.
Alice rolled onto her side. She turned her thoughts instead to the river. How it sounded below the surface, and the strange feeling she got when the boy put his hand on her back to help her breathe.
A breeze tickled under her chin. Alice sat up. One of the white curtains in her room twirled in the darkness. She didn’t remember opening a window. Alice reached over to switch on the lamp, squinting in the light.