Yellow butterflies fluttered over the roses. As Alice watched their wings, tiny lemon flames, she remembered how they hovered over the sea in summer, basked in the casuarina trees, and tapped against her bedroom window at night.
‘The mine Dad was working in collapsed. For a while Mum sat on the verandah every day waiting for him to come home. Always with a rose.’
Just like the queen who waited for her love to come home for so long she turned into an orchid. Alice rubbed a shiver from her arms.
‘Are you cold?’ he asked. She shook her head. They both sat looking at the river.
‘That’s why I pick you flowers and leave them in your boots at night,’ Oggi said, quietly.
Alice let her hair fall down over her face.
‘I know how it feels. To be sad and alone.’ Oggi turned a rose petal over in his hands. ‘We were only meant to be here for a little while, until Dad made enough money for us to move on, but since he died we have to stay here now. Mum doesn’t have the papers to do anything else.’
Alice tipped her head to one side.
‘We’re not Australian. I mean, Mum wasn’t born here. So we’re not officially allowed to be here. If we try to leave town or go anywhere else, Mum says we could be arrested and separated; she could get sent home and never be allowed to come back again. Which Mum doesn’t want, because this is — was — Dad’s country. That’s why we keep to ourselves and Mum doesn’t work anywhere too much, and I’m not allowed to have friends at school. Besides, no one wants to be my friend. They call my mum a witch. Like they call all the women at Thornfield.’
Alice’s eyes widened.
‘No, no, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s not true.’
She sighed, relieved.
Oggi picked at a stone in the dirt. ‘Mum dreams about going back to Bulgaria one day, so that’s what I’m going to do when I grow up. Make enough money to take her home to the Valley of the Roses.’
Alice lifted a rose petal to her nose. The fragrance reminded her of dreams of fire.
‘That’s where Mum says I was born. In the Valley of the Roses, back in Bulgaria. Not that it’s a place. Mum says it’s more a feeling. I don’t really know what that means, though. Except kings are buried there, and the roses grow as sweet as they do because there’s gold buried in the ground with their bones.’
Alice raised an eyebrow.
‘Okay, so I made up that last bit about the gold and the bones. But wouldn’t that be cool? If the bones of kings and treasure were buried underneath these magic valleys of roses?’
Footsteps approached.
‘We gotta get going, sweetpea,’ Candy called.
Alice and Oggi stepped outside the rose petal circle and followed Candy to the front of the house where Boryana was waiting for them.
‘Here, Alice. A little something to say welcome.’ Boryana handed her a small glass jar topped with cloth and tied with ribbon. Inside glistened pink jam. ‘It’s made from roses,’ she said. ‘It does magic things to toast.’
‘Bye, Alice,’ Oggi called. ‘See you at school tomorrow.’
Tomorrow. Alice waved back at him as Candy drove towards Main Street. She’d see him tomorrow.
As they headed home, she touched her fingertips to her hot cheeks. Sunbeams, she imagined, were shining out of her face.
12. Cootamundra wattle
Meaning: I wound to heal
Acacia baileyana | New South Wales
Graceful tree with fern-like foliage and bright golden-yellow globe-shaped flower heads. Adaptable, hardy evergreen, easy to grow. Profuse flowering in winter. Heavily fragrant and sweetly scented. Produces abundant pollen, favoured for feeding bees in the production of honey.
June shuffled down the hall in the dark, switching a few lamps on. The grandfather clock struck two in the morning. Come sunup, she had the big drive to the flower markets in the city. But that was a couple of hours away. Just one nip.
For weeks now the nights had stretched on, empty and restless. June’s bed was weighed down with too many ghosts, sitting at her feet, holding boughs of wattle in bloom. Winter was always the hardest season. Flower orders dropped right back. Old stories turned where they lay under early frosts in the earth. And this winter Alice had come home.
Although she wasn’t speaking, Alice was smiling more often. Something at school had awakened her in some way, stirring her from the deep paralysis of grief. She hadn’t wet the bed for weeks. There hadn’t been another panic attack. Twig had eased off on her push for counselling. Alice always had a book open in her lap, with a pressed flower between the pages. Or she was at Candy’s side in the kitchen or the herb garden, helping her concoct a new dish. Or she traipsed around in her little blue boots, following Twig like a second shadow through the workshop.
But no matter how much June tried to keep an eye on her, and even with the temperature cooling every day, Alice still managed to vanish and come home with wet hair sometimes. June knew she’d found the river. And likely, the river gum. Yet, June couldn’t bring herself to tell Alice Thornfield’s stories, of the women from whom she was descended. Once June spoke Ruth’s name, there was only one direction that story could flow: to Wattle, then June, and then straight to Clem, Agnes and the choice June had made.
June stood at the kitchen counter with the open whisky bottle and poured herself another glass. She was tired. Tired of bearing the weight of a past that was too painful to remember. She was tired of flowers that spoke the things people couldn’t bear to say. Of heartbreak, isolation and ghosts. Of being misunderstood. When it came to telling Alice about her family, June struggled with the thought of bearing any more blame for the secrets that grew among Thornfield’s flowers. There had to be another way for the child to heal than to be accosted with the truth about her family, which, despite the morning when Alice seemingly recognised her face, June was fairly sure she didn’t know. Nothing indicated that Alice knew why her father took her mother away from Thornfield, or that June could have changed her mind, surrendered to Clem, and maybe saved Agnes. But she’d let her son go, and he’d taken Alice’s mother with him. Because June would not yield to his rage. Because Agnes loved him more than she knew how to love herself.
She took the whisky into the lounge room, drinking straight from the bottle. On Alice’s first day at Thornfield, when she’d curled into June’s arms and tucked her face into the curve of her neck, June had felt her body fill with a love she hadn’t dared to let herself remember. She couldn’t risk losing that. She couldn’t bear Alice thinking badly of her. Day after day, the stories remained unspoken. She kept moving the mark. When Alice starts school, I will tell her. When Alice smiles, I will tell her. When Alice asks, I will tell her. Be careful, June, Twig warned. The past has a funny way of growing new shoots. If you don’t treat them right, these kinds of stories have a way of seeding themselves.
June sank into the couch, the whisky bottle lolling in her hand, the past gathering around her. Thornfield’s stories were never far from her thoughts.
Jacob Wyld’s murder broke Ruth’s mind. She gave birth to his baby alone by the river, and named their child after the wattle tree that first flowered during the drought. It was all that was left of Ruth’s garden, and all she could give her daughter: a name that might embolden her to survive growing up in a house with Wade Thornton and his abuse. I was determined not to let him do to my mind what he did to my mother’s. Her eyes were as empty as the cicada shells in the dust where her flowers once grew, Junie, Wattle used to say.