Alice leant over the open box.
‘Go ahead,’ Ruby said.
Riffling through, Alice reeled at the volume of dried flowers people had picked and returned. Envelopes bearing postage stamps from all over the world contained letters begging forgiveness, begging to be free of ‘the curse’. A handwritten one caught her eye. As Alice opened it, a dried and shrivelled desert pea fell into her palm. She read, aloud.
‘“My husband got sick as soon as we left Kililpitjara. When we got home to Italy, we found out he has cancer. A few days later our son was in a bus accident. And then our house flooded. Please accept our deepest apologies for not respecting your beautiful country on our visit. Please free us from any more tragedy. We are so deeply sorry for picking the flowers from the crater and taking what wasn’t ours to take.”’ Alice rocked back on her heels, incredulous. ‘They’re all the same thing? Asking for forgiveness and freedom from “the curse”?’
Ruby nodded. ‘“The curse”, a myth that’s travelled around the world for as long as minga have been coming here.’
‘But it’s … not real?’ Alice asked slowly.
‘No!’ Ruby snorted. ‘It’s not real. It’s just a trick guilt plays on guilty people’s minds.’
Alice’s thoughts drifted to June’s slurred confession the night she left Thornfield. ‘We can’t hide when we’ve done wrong,’ Alice said, ‘even if we try to bury it in the deepest parts of ourselves.’ Aware that Ruby was watching her closely, Alice put the letter back in the box and brushed her hands together. ‘Do you ever write back? Tell them “the curse” is something people have made up and isn’t anything to do with your culture?’
‘Ha!’ Ruby said drily. ‘I’ve got better things to do than run around after minga and do the work for them, teaching what they should have opened their eyes and ears to and learned when it was right in front of them.’
Alice nodded, letting Ruby’s words sink in. ‘I just can’t believe there’s so many,’ she said, going through the envelopes once more.
‘This is why we’re so worried about malukuru becoming endangered. Worse, there’s even more stories in the roof at headquarters. We’ve started having meetings to figure out what to do with them. There’s a couple of university fellas interested in cataloguing all the stories. But they’ll have to be quick. We’re running out of storage.’
A childhood conversation with her mother came to mind. A fire can be like a spell of sorts to transform one thing into another.
‘Maybe you could burn them,’ Alice blurted.
Ruby studied her face appreciatively. ‘Maybe,’ she said.
By the time Alice got home that night she could barely keep her eyes open. She stumbled through her front door, flicked on the air conditioning, and stood under the cold shower watching as the water turned red.
She’d worked with Lulu after lunch. Ruby showed you the sorry flowers? she’d said when they were out in the field together, after Alice described her morning. Alice nodded. Man, you must have done something right, chica. Ruby doesn’t show anyone those flowers unless they’re in her good books.
Standing under the shower, replaying Lulu’s words, Alice flushed with pleasure. She’d done something right.
Later Alice shared with Pip a veggie burger she’d brought home from the cafe, and flopped into bed before the sun set. The warm air carried the rich scent of baked earth and the sweet end of her first day.
Her dreams were filled with visions of June. Every time her grandmother opened her mouth to speak to Alice, a torrent of brown and withered dried flowers gushed out.
Ruby stood on her patio in the setting sun, watching rainbows catch in the spray while she watered her pot plants. The mineral-rich smell of the damp red dirt took her straight to the memory of her mother and aunties, like a song. The sky gathered a palette of pink clay, ochre and grey stone. Ruby’s trio of dogs raced each other along her back fence, their ears flattened in joy. The mellowest part of the day always made them the silliest.
Once she’d hung up the hose she took her axe into the yard and cut down some wanari branches. Wanari was the best for cooking fires; it burned the hottest. She piled the wood in the pit, sucking the blood from her finger when she got a splinter. After she raked together dry desert-oak needles, skinny twigs and sticks, she stuffed them into the gaps between the branches. A few matches later, her fire was roaring.
Ruby sat on a log with her pen and notebook, and relaxed her shoulders. Once she was settled, she closed her eyes. The weight of her missing family settled around her. Ever since she was a child, when she was taken from her mother, the one constant in her life was the present absence of her family. It was a visible kind of invisibility; all Ruby could ever see were those not there with her.
While her dinner cooked on a skillet over the fire and the sky started to darken, Ruby uncapped her pen and opened her notebook.
She watched the flames. She waited.
The stars swirled, the dogs dozed, and the warm desert breeze blew. She waited.
The new poem came down from the stars, looking for her as most of her poems did. It tumbled over the sand dunes and fluttered across her mother’s country, bringing earth, smoke, love and sorrow.
Ruby put her pen down and rubbed her hands. They were shaking, as they always did when her ancestors gave her a poem. After a moment, she picked it up again and wrote Seeds at the top of the page.
She seasoned and turned her malu steak, and slathered more garlic butter on her fried potatoes. Sat back and watched the flames dance. Smoke plumes curled into the sky.
As Ruby served up her dinner her mind wandered back to showing Alice the shelves of sorry flowers. Ruby had seen more people come and go through Kililpitjara than she’d written poems in her notebooks. She could pick those who were lost and aimless from those who were true and searching as easily as she pulled ticks from her dogs. When she’d first noticed Sarah moving Alice in, all shaky and pale-faced, Ruby hadn’t given her a second thought. But after their morning together, Ruby changed her mind. She saw something in Alice Hart, the kind of grit one survivor recognises in another. Ruby didn’t know what Alice was looking for, but it burned in her brightly enough to leave fire in her eyes.
22. Spinifex
Meaning: Dangerous pleasures
Triodia | Central Australia
Tjanpi (Pit.) is a tough, spiky grass dominating much of Australia’s interior red sand country, thriving on the poorest, most arid soils the desert has to offer. Tussock-forming, its roots go deep, often as far down as three metres. Certain types are used by Anangu to make a resin adhesive.
Alice threw herself into her life at Kililpitjara. She continued training with Ruby, studying the stories of the land, and became inseparable from Lulu, working the same roster ten days on and four days off. Alice listened deeply and learned from both women. With a strong voice, she guided tourists into the crater day in and day out, telling them its story and inviting them to help protect the Heart Garden. She got such a thrill when she saw understanding in visitors’ eyes. As the weeks passed, she felt sure no one on any of her walks picked a desert pea.