‘One more thing,’ Ruby said, getting up and going inside, returning a moment later with a small, square cotton satchel. ‘Striped mint bush,’ she said, handing it to Alice. ‘Put it in your pillow. It’ll make your spirit better while you’re sleeping.’
‘Thank you.’ Alice held the satchel to her nose. ‘In my family,’ she said, ‘striped mint bush isn’t for healing. It means love forsaken.’
Ruby studied her face for a moment. ‘Forsaken. Healed.’ She shrugged. ‘Fine line, isn’t it?’ She prodded the fire. It crackled in response. Flames rose high into the afternoon sky. They sat together in silence.
‘I’ll tell you something, Pinta-Pinta,’ Ruby said after a while. ‘Trust yourself. Trust your story. All you can do is tell it true.’ She rubbed her hands together in the fire smoke.
Alice fidgeted with her ininti seeds.
‘Palya?’ Ruby asked.
‘Palya,’ Alice answered, meeting her gaze.
Ruby smiled. The fire shone clearly in Alice’s eyes.
Once she’d driven far enough to shrink Kililpitjara to a distant dream on the dusky horizon, Alice pulled over. She got out of her truck and walked on the cooling red sand with Pip by her side, through the clumps of spinifex, raising her hand to brush her palm over heads of long yellow grass.
Alice told herself she just needed a moment to get herself together, but the deeper truth was that despite everything, she still didn’t know if leaving was the right thing to do. Her love for him coloured her every thought. She wiped her cheeks, remembering an afternoon not that long ago, when she and Dylan had been out for a sunset walk.
Let’s say we did go to the west coast one day, he’d said to her, smiling his slow, heart-melting smile. Let’s say we packed up, got in our trucks and just drove. All the way there. What would we do once we got there?
They’d sat together under a tall desert oak, twining their fingers through each other’s.
She smiled, closing her eyes to imagine it. We’d buy a shack, get fat on fresh seafood, grow our own fruit and veggies, and … She hesitated.
What?
Make babies. She exhaled. Wild, chubby-legged, barefoot babies. Raised between red dirt, white sand and the sea. She couldn’t look at him.
He held a finger to her chin, turned her head to face him. His eyes filled with light. Chubby legs. He’d grinned, pulling her close to him.
I’ll love you all of my life, she whispered.
All of our lives, he’d replied. Kissed her as needily as if she were air.
Alice cried out, alone with Pip in the dunes. Should she stay? Fight for her job, and try to work it out with Dylan? Surely it couldn’t be over; like the Japanese artist with her gold-dusted lacquer and all the broken pieces laid out before her, Alice could remake it. Surely she could save him. Their love could save them both. How could she let it go? She could work harder, be exactly what he wanted, what he needed, make him a better man. Right from the beginning, that’s all he’d wanted, to be a better man. Besides, where exactly was she going? She didn’t have a home to go to. Why shouldn’t she stay?
She walked slowly. Up and down the dunes.
The desert played tricks on her mind. Time had no visual meaning. A hundred years ago could have been that morning. The sun painted and repainted the landscape every day, the stars shone, the seasons turned, but signs of time passing didn’t exist. Erosion and creation happened so slowly the only thing to change in a person’s lifetime spent in the desert was their own physicality. It swallowed Alice into insignificance. She roamed the red sand, stopping on a tall dune. Following the road back to the crater with her eyes, she considered its silhouette. Could she go back in time? Could she undo it all and start again?
Pip nudged her. When Alice crouched down to scratch behind her ears, she noticed bruises on the back of her own legs she hadn’t seen before. She didn’t know how she’d got them. It must have been in the workshop with Dylan, but she didn’t remember anything happening to her legs.
Her stomach plummeted; in her mind’s eye she was nine, watching her mother come out of the sea, naked and covered in bruises.
Alice thought of the Japanese fairytale again, this time in an unforgiving light: she wasn’t the artist with her brush, nor was she the gold. She was the broken pieces, mending and shattering, over and over again. Like her mother, who couldn’t grasp life beyond the man repeatedly breaking her. Like the Flowers, who’d come to Thornfield in need of safety. All this time, she’d never allowed herself to see it.
Forsaken. Healed. Ruby had shrugged. Fine line, isn’t it?
Pip fretted around Alice, licking her face. Alice wiped her tears away, thinking how much June would have loved Pip. As much as she’d loved Harry. A memory of June walking through the flower fields with Harry brought a string of others with it. The day June took Alice to school, and how hard they’d giggled together when Harry farted. The night before her tenth birthday, when Alice stirred in her sleep beside Harry and saw June in the dark, bent over her desk, arranging her surprise present. The morning Alice came back from her driving test to see June and Harry waiting in the police car park. Alice’s smile faded as she remembered her last night at Thornfield; Harry was gone and June was a swaying, drunken mess, hopeless and stricken as Alice left. That was Alice’s last memory of June. She’d never see her again.
Alice crumpled to the dirt, overcome by the stark reality that she had nowhere and no one to go to that felt safe. Distressed, Pip started to howl.
‘It’s all right,’ Alice said, smoothing Pip’s flanks. ‘It’s all right.’ She took a few deep and slow breaths, trying to calm down so she could think straight. She needed to figure out where she was going, at least for the night.
As Alice stood up to dust herself off, a memory from the morning Twig and Candy left came hurtling back to her.
When you’re ready, Twig had said, everything you need is in there.
Alice looked down at her truck, realisation sinking in. She took off across the dunes with Pip galloping by her side, and popped open the glove box. Grabbed the envelope and ripped it open. Tugged out a wad of folded papers.
She scanned each page, racing through the words.
She re-read the papers, again and again, shaking her head in disbelief until the words started to become real, started to become true. She ran her fingertip over them. They were definitely there, on the paper.
‘Fuck,’ she whispered. As if in agreeance, Pip yapped.
Alice tucked the envelope back into the glove box. She turned the key in the ignition, put her truck into gear and stepped on the accelerator, driving with the sun behind her.
Maybe sometimes it was possible to go backwards, in order to find the way forwards.
Lulu sat on the dunes, waiting for Aiden to come home from sunset patrol. She sipped her wine and wriggled her toes in the warm red sand, her arms wrapped around her knees.
Although the stars were bright, it wasn’t the night sky Lulu fixed upon. Instead she stared at the rope of luminous fairy lights Alice had left behind.
After Sarah had given Alice immediate dismissal, Lulu took her home to pack up her house. She’d overheard their conversation: Sarah told Alice she was lucky; two incident reports in as many days and, with much negotiation, no pressed charges. As Lulu helped to pack Alice’s life haphazardly into boxes, Alice barely said a word. She tried to give Lulu back the Frida Kahlo print, but when Alice wasn’t looking Lulu packed it in her truck.