‘Come on, Tobes,’ she said hurriedly, reaching for one wooden figure, then another. Mimicking one of the statues, she used her T-shirt as a bowl to carry the smallest figurines she could find. Toby fretted at Alice’s side. Her heart beat powerfully against her ribs. With so many statues in the shed, her father surely wouldn’t notice some of the smallest missing. They would be perfect fuel to practise making fire.
Alice would always remember this day as the one that changed her life irrevocably, even though it would take her the next twenty years to understand: life is lived forward but only understood backward. You can’t see the landscape you’re in while you’re in it.
Pulling into the driveway, Alice’s father gripped the steering wheel in silence. Welts had risen on his wife’s face, which she nursed with one hand. She used the other to hold her stomach as she pressed herself against the passenger door. He’d seen with his own eyes the way she’d touched the doctor’s arm. He’d seen the look on the doctor’s face. He’d seen it. A tic twitched under Alice’s father’s right eye. His wife had been dizzy when she sat up after the scan; he hadn’t wanted to stop for breakfast and risk missing the appointment. She’d tried to steady herself. The doctor had helped her.
Alice’s father flexed his hand. His knuckles were still aching. He glanced over at his wife, curled into herself, creating a canyon between them. He wanted to reach out to her, to explain she just needed to be more mindful of her behaviour so he wouldn’t be provoked. If he spoke to her in flowers, maybe then she would understand. Forked sundew, I die if neglected. Harlequin fuchsia, cure and relief. Wedding bush, constancy. But he’d avoided giving her flowers for years, ever since they left Thornfield.
She hadn’t helped him today. She should have made time to pack breakfast before they left, then she wouldn’t have been dizzy and he wouldn’t have witnessed her pawing the doctor. She knew how he struggled with their town visits, and the medical staff having their hands all over and inside his wife. They’d never been to a scan or check-up during this pregnancy, or with Alice, that was without incident. Was it really his fault that she failed to support him, every single time?
‘We’re home,’ he said, pulling the handbrake and turning the engine off. His wife took her hand away from her face and reached for the door handle. She tugged on it once and waited. His temper flared. Would she say nothing? He unlocked the central locking, expecting her to turn and smile at him gratefully, or maybe even apologetically. But she flew out of the door like a chicken escaping its coop. He tore out of the truck yelling her name, abruptly silenced by the windstorm. Wincing in the stinging gale, he stalked after his wife, determined to make his point. As he approached the house, something caught his eye.
The shed door was open. The lock was undone, hanging from the latch. A flash of his daughter’s red windcheater in the doorway filled his vision.
When her T-shirt couldn’t hold any more carvings, Alice rushed out of the shed into the murky half-light. A clap of thunder shattered the sky. It was so loud that Alice dropped the carvings and hunched against the shed door. Toby cowered, the fur along the ridge of his spine raised. She reached to comfort him and got to her feet, only to be slammed by a gust of wind, making her stagger backwards. Forgetting the carvings, she signalled to Toby and made a run for the house. They’d almost reached the back door when a shard of lightning broke the dark clouds into silver pieces, a downwards arrow. Alice froze. In that white flash, she saw him. Her father stood in the doorway, his arms braced by his sides, hands clenched in fists. She didn’t need better light or closer distance to know the darkness of his eyes.
Alice changed direction and sprinted down the side of the house. She wasn’t sure if her father had seen her. As she ran through the green fronds of her mother’s fern garden, a terrible thought hit her: the kerosene lamp in her father’s shed. His timber shed. She’d forgotten to blow it out.
Alice flung herself through the window, onto her desk, hauling Toby up beside her. They perched together, panting to catch their breaths. Toby licked her face and Alice patted him distractedly. Could she smell smoke? Dread sluiced through her body. She jumped off the desk and gathered her library books, stuffing them into her bag, deep within her cupboard. She shrugged off her windcheater and threw it in too, then pulled her window closed. Someone must have broken into your shed, Dad. I was inside waiting for you to come home.
She didn’t hear her father come into her bedroom. She wasn’t quick enough to dodge him. The last thing Alice saw was Toby baring his teeth, his eyes wild with fear. There was the smell of smoke, earth, and burning feathers. A stinging heat spread down the side of her face, drawing Alice into darkness.
2. Flannel flower
Meaning: What is lost is found
Actinotus helianthi | New South Wales
The stem, branches and leaves of the plant are a pale grey, covered in downy hair, and flannel-like in texture. Pretty, daisy-shaped flower heads bloom in spring, though flowering may be profuse after bushfires.
The first story Alice ever learned began on the edge of darkness, where her newborn screams restarted her mother’s heart.
The night she was born, a subtropical storm had blown in from the east and caused king tides to flood the river banks, cutting off the lane between the Harts’ property and town. Stranded in the laneway with her water broken and a band of fire seemingly cutting her in half, Agnes Hart pushed life and a daughter out of her body on the back seat of her husband’s truck. Clem Hart, consumed by panic as the storm boomed over the cane fields, was at first too frantic swaddling his newborn to notice his wife’s pallor. When he saw her face turn white as sand, her lips the shade of a pipi shell, Clem fell upon her in a frenzy, forgetting their baby. He shook Agnes, to no avail. It wasn’t until her daughter cried that Agnes was jolted to consciousness. On either side of the laneway, rain-soaked bushes burst into a flurry of white flowers. Alice’s first breaths were filled with lightning and the scent of storm lilies in bloom.
You were the true love I needed to wake me from a curse, Bun, her mother would say to finish the story. You’re my fairytale.
When Alice was two years old, Agnes introduced her to books; as she read, she pointed to each word on the page. Down at the beach, she repeated: one cuttlefish, two feathers, three pieces of driftwood, four shells and five shards of sea glass. Around their house, Agnes’s hand-lettered signs: BOOK. CHAIR. WINDOW. DOOR. TABLE. CUP. BATH. BED. By the time Alice started homeschooling when she was five, she was reading by herself. Though her love of books was swift and absolute, Alice always loved her mother’s storytelling more. When they were alone, Agnes spun stories around the two of them. But never in earshot of Alice’s father.
Their ritual was to walk to the sea and lie on the sand staring up at the sky. With her mother’s gentle voice telling the way, they took winter train trips across Europe, through landscapes with mountains so tall you couldn’t see their tops, and ridges so smothered in snow you couldn’t see the line separating the white sky from white earth. They wore velvet coats in the cobblestoned city of a tattooed king, where the harbour buildings were as colourful as a box of paints, and a mermaid sat, cast in bronze, forever awaiting love. Alice often closed her eyes, imagining that every thread in her mother’s stories might spin them into the centre of a chrysalis, from which they could emerge and fly away.