When Alice was six years old, her mother tucked her into her bed one evening, leant forward and whispered in her ear. It’s time, Bun. She sat back smiling as she pulled up the covers. You’re old enough now to help me in my garden. Alice squirmed with excitement; her mother usually left her with a book while she gardened alone. We’ll start tomorrow, Agnes said before she turned out the light. Repeatedly through the night, Alice woke to peer through the dark windows. At last she saw the first thread of light in the sky and threw her sheets back.
Alice’s mother was in the kitchen making Vegemite and cottage cheese on toast and a pot of honeyed tea, which she carried on a tray outside to her garden alongside the house. The air was cool, the early sun was warm. Her mother rested the tray on a mossy tree stump and poured sweet tea into two teacups. They sat chewing and drinking in silence. Alice’s pulse beat loudly in her temples. After Agnes ate the last of her toast and finished her tea, she crouched between her ferns and flowers, murmuring as if she were rousing sleeping children. Alice wasn’t sure what to do. Was this gardening? She mimicked her mother and sat with the plants, watching.
Slowly, the lines of worry in her mother’s face vanished. Her furrowed brow relaxed. She didn’t wring her hands, or fidget. Her eyes were full and clear. She became someone Alice didn’t recognise. Her mother was peaceful. She was calm. The sight filled Alice with the kind of green hope she found at the bottom of rock pools at low tide but never managed to cup in her hands.
The more time she spent with her mother in the garden, the more deeply Alice understood — from the tilt of Agnes’s wrist when she inspected a new bud, to the light that reached her eyes when she lifted her chin, and the thin rings of dirt that encircled her fingers as she coaxed new fern fronds from the soil — the truest parts of her mother bloomed among her plants. Especially when she talked to the flowers. Her eyes glazed over and she mumbled in a secret language, a word here, a phrase there as she snapped flowers off their stems and tucked them into her pockets.
Sorrowful remembrance, she’d say as she plucked a bindweed flower from its vine. Love, returned. The citrusy scent of lemon myrtle would fill the air as she tore it from a branch. Pleasures of memory. Her mother pocketed a scarlet palm of kangaroo paw.
Questions scratched at the back of Alice’s throat. Why did her mother’s words only flow when she was telling stories about other places and other worlds? What about their world, right in front of them? Where did she go when her eyes were far away? Why couldn’t Alice go with her?
By her seventh birthday, Alice’s body was heavy from the burden of unanswered questions. They filled her chest. Why did her mother talk to the native flowers in such cryptic ways? How could her father be two different people? What curse did Alice’s first cries save her mother from? Although they weighed on her mind, Alice’s questions remained stuck, lodged in her windpipe as painfully as if she’d swallowed a seedpod. Moments of opportunity came on good days in the garden, when the light fell just so, yet Alice said nothing. In silence, she followed her mother as her pockets filled with flowers.
If Agnes ever noticed Alice’s silence, she never said anything to break it. It was understood time spent in the garden was quiet time. Like a library, her mother once mused as she glided through her maidenhair ferns. Though Alice hadn’t ever been to a library — to see more books in one place than she could imagine, or hear the whispers of collective pages turning — she almost felt she had, through her mother’s stories. From Agnes’s description, Alice imagined a library must be a quiet garden of books, where stories grew like flowers.
Alice hadn’t been anywhere else beyond their property either. Her life was confined to its boundaries: from her mother’s garden to where the cane fields started, to the bay where the sea curled close by. She was forbidden to venture further than those lines, and especially the one that separated their driveway from the lane that led into town. It’s no place for a girl, her father would say, slamming his fist on the dinner table, making the plates and cutlery jump, whenever Alice’s mother suggested sending her to school. She’s safer here, he’d growl, putting an end to the conversation. That’s what her father was most able to do: put an end to everything.
Whether they spent their day in the garden or at the sea, the point always came when a storm bird would call, or a cloud would cross the sun, and Alice’s mother would shake herself awake, as if she’d been sleepwalking through a dream. She became animated, turning on her heel to sprint towards the house, calling over her shoulder at Alice, First one to the kitchen gets fresh cream on her scones. Afternoon tea was a bittersweet time; her father would be home soon. Ten minutes before he was due, her mother would position herself by the front door, her face pulled too tight in a smile, her voice pitched too high, her fingers in knots.
Some days Alice’s mother disappeared from her body altogether. There were no stories or walks to the sea. There was no talking with flowers. Her mother would stay in bed with the curtains drawn against the blanching light, vanished, as if her soul had gone somewhere else entirely.
When that happened, Alice tried to distract herself from the way the air in the house pressed on her body, the awful silence as if no one were home, the sight of her mother crumpled in bed. Those were things that made it difficult to breathe. Alice picked up books she’d read a dozen times already and revisited school worksheets she’d already completed. She fled to the sea to caw with the gulls and chase waves along the shore. She ran alongside the walls of sugar cane, throwing her hair back and swaying like the green stalks in the hot wind. But no matter how she tried, nothing felt good. Alice wished on feathers and dandelions to be a bird and fly far away into the golden seam of the horizon, where the sea was sewn to the sky. Day after shadowy day passed without her mother. Alice paced the edges of her world. It was only a matter of time before she learned she could disappear too.
One morning, after the rumble of her father’s truck faded into the distance, Alice stayed in bed waiting to hear the kettle whistle; the glorious sound would herald the beginning of a good day. When it didn’t come, Alice kicked her sheet off with heavy legs. She tiptoed to her parents’ bedroom door and peered at her mother’s body curled in a ball as lifeless as the blankets around her. A wave of hot and shaky anger swept through Alice. She stomped into the kitchen, slapped together a Vegemite sandwich, filled a jam jar with water, packed them in her backpack, and ran from the house. She wouldn’t take the laneway, there was too high a risk of being seen, but if she went hidden through the sugar cane she’d surely come out someplace on the other side, someplace better than her dark and silent home.
Although her heartbeat was so loud in her ears she almost couldn’t hear the cockatoos screeching overhead, Alice willed herself to run, past her father’s shed and her mother’s rose garden, until she’d crossed the length of the yard. At the boundary where their property met the cane fields, she stopped. A dirt trail ran through the tall green stalks for as far as she could see.