After work, as the days began to cool, Alice and Lulu took to walking the fire trails, or lounging on each other’s patios, drinking strong coffee and eating Lulu’s homemade chilli chocolate. Under gemstone skies, Lulu told Alice stories about her grandmother, a woman with turquoise rings on every finger and hair so thick she snapped combs in half trying to tame it. What about you, Alice? Tell me about your family. Alice was too scared to tell her the truth. Stories rolled freely off her tongue, about her mother and father, her seven brothers, the games they played growing up, the adventures they had together, their happy home by the sea. The stories came so easily they didn’t feel like lies. They were as real as real could be to Alice; they were the worlds she’d grown up in, from the pages of her books.
Late at night, when she was alone, Alice worked on her notebooks of flowers. They had become her solace and salve, her pressed and sketched flowers; her stories. Of childhood memories; loneliness and confusion; the life she’d lived without her mother; resentment, grief, fear and guilt. Her unfulfilled dreams. Her penance. Her yearning to be consumed by love.
After a few months, Alice no longer felt so glaringly incompetent. She knew everyone at the park by name, and had the vital information memorised: which days the food deliveries came in by road train and how many return trips from Parksville to the tourist resort she could make before her truck’s fuel light flicked on. Kililpitjara became a place where Alice felt safe. There was no past there. No one knew about her life among the sugar cane or her life among flowers. In the desert, she could just be. Her job left her with aching muscles, blistered knuckles and a sense of bodily exhaustion so great that she no longer dreamed of fire. She was fascinated by the desert: its colours, its vast space, the staggering and strange beauty of it. When she wasn’t on sunrise patrol, Alice spent her mornings with Pip hiking up to the viewing platform. Tears always sprang to her eyes at the sight of the desert peas; she relied on them to keep her centred, to keep her whole. Although Alice taught Pip some of Harry’s old assistance commands, she had no reason to use them. She didn’t have another blackout. The only time her heart raced was when she was near Dylan Rivers.
One afternoon, at the end of their ten-day roster, Alice and Lulu were in the work yard washing their work utes. They had music playing loudly and were dreaming up plans for their four days off together when Dylan drove through the security gate. Alice slid her sunglasses down over her eyes.
‘Kungkas,’ Dylan said as he drove up beside them, winding down his window. ‘How’s it going?’
Alice nodded. A small smile. She couldn’t speak. Lulu glanced at her and then at Dylan. ‘We’re on day ten, so all good,’ she said to him coolly.
‘Jealous,’ he said. ‘I’m only halfway.’ He didn’t take his eyes off Alice. His blatancy made her uncomfortable; she felt he could see right through to her heart and what it was made of: salt, native flowers, stories, and a hopeless yearning for him. When Lulu had told her he had a girlfriend, Julie, a tour guide based out of town, Alice was sick with envy.
‘Up to anything on your days off?’ he asked.
She could smell his skin, the cologne he wore, fresh and sweet, reminding her of unfurling green leaves. She wanted to run, to get into his ute with him and just go, through as many sunrises and sunsets as it took to get to the west coast, where they could tumble from the red dust onto the white sand and start over by the turquoise sea. She was good at beginning again.
‘Aren’t we, Alice?’ Lulu’s pointed question interrupted her reverie. Having no idea what she was talking about, Alice nodded and smiled vacantly.
‘Cool. Well, I’m off. Have a good one.’ As Dylan drove away he raised his hand in a slow wave. Silver rings on his fingers and strands of leather tied around his wrist.
‘Don’t do that,’ Lulu said, her voice low and serious. ‘That’s messy. There’s nothing but pain there. Don’t do it.’
Alice turned her face away. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Dylan’s profile as he drove out of the work yard. The tail lights of his ute pierced the fading light.
‘He’s great as a mate, chica,’ Lulu warned. ‘But anything more than that? You’re no safer than the girl in the fairytale who wanders into a dark wood.’
Alice was grateful for the low light, hoping it hid her face. Lulu dipped her sponge in the suds bucket and began scrubbing the windscreen.
‘You’ve slept with him, haven’t you?’ Alice asked quietly.
Lulu glanced at her. Cast her eyes away. ‘I just don’t want you to get hurt.’
Alice’s head was spinning. She couldn’t bear the thought of them together, of him being with anyone but her.
Lulu wiped the windscreen down and dunked the sponge back in the bucket, sighing. ‘I don’t know what you’ve left behind but I know you’ve come here to put yourself back together,’ she said. ‘So do it, chica. You keep banging on about how much you love my place and would love yours to be like it, but you keep living like you’re a nun. Decorate. Embellish. Use your weekends for adventures, go exploring. There’s so much more around here than just the crater, like, there’s a gorge not far from here that you have to see at sunset to believe. So, grow. Please. Grow your life here.’ Lulu pointed to her heart. ‘Don’t give everything you’ve got to someone who isn’t worth it.’
Alice fidgeted. She hadn’t talked to anyone about what she’d left behind and yet Lulu had figured her out.
After they’d packed up they drove home together under a dusky watercolour sky. ‘Wanna come over for dinner?’ Lulu said too brightly. ‘I’m making cheesy enchiladas. With extra guacamole.’
Alice snorted. ‘No. I do not. Not at all.’
As they pulled into Lulu’s driveway, their earlier conversation niggled at Alice. She nodded and laughed along with Lulu’s jokes throughout the evening but couldn’t stop wondering: had Lulu and Dylan slept together? Why wouldn’t she answer directly?
Later, getting ready for bed, Alice told herself to just let it go. As Lulu had reminded her, she hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about her life before the desert. Alice knew as well as anyone that some stories were best left untold.
Alice tried her hardest to heed Lulu’s words. Went into the resort village on truck delivery day, and filled a trolley with pot plants, a hammock, a box of fairy lights, and some solar-powered garden lamps. From the park workshop she scavenged a stack of crates and leftover paint. She painted the crates green, turned them upside down, and used them as pot plant stands; hammered the garden lamps deep into the red dirt in her backyard, strung up her hammock, and wound her rope of fairy lights around the beams of her back patio. She gathered treasures like a bower bird and told herself it was all for her own wellbeing. It was all to nurture her sense of self.
She spent hours internet shopping. Bought new bed sheets with a butterfly-print doona cover, a butterfly-print shower curtain, and a tablecloth patterned in monarch butterflies. She found an aromatherapy website and bought a burner, a year’s supply of tea light candles, and a blend of essential oils. After staring at her bookshelf one night, empty but for her notebooks from Agnes Bluff, Alice found an online bookshop and ordered whatever her pay cheque allowed. When the boxes came, she unpacked them and placed each book on the shelf, as gently as if they were seedlings. Especially the stories about selkies.