‘Mama.’ Alice started to cry. She tried wiping the tears and rain from her face. It was no use. Her teeth chattered from fear and emotion. ‘I was worried you weren’t coming back.’
Alice’s mother seemed to look right through her. Her eyes were big and dark, clumps of her eyelashes stuck together. She stayed that way, staring, for a long time. Finally, she blinked, and spoke.
‘I know you were worried. I’m sorry.’ She gently unwrapped her clothes from Alice’s shoulders and pulled them onto her wet skin. ‘C’mon, Bun,’ she said. ‘Let’s go home.’ Agnes took Alice’s hand and together they walked back up the sand in the rain. No matter how hard she shook, Alice made sure not to let go.
A few weeks later, just before the afternoon when she read about the phoenix bird, Alice and her mother were out in the garden among green pea and pumpkin seedlings. Curls of black smoke rose on the horizon.
‘Don’t worry, Bun,’ her mother said, raking new dirt for the veggie patch. ‘It’s a controlled burn at one of the farms.’
‘Controlled burn?’
‘People all over the world use fire to garden,’ her mother explained. Alice sat on her heels where she’d been tugging weeds from the freshly turned dirt and considered what her mother had said, incredulous. ‘Truly.’ Her mother nodded, leaning on her rake. ‘They burn back plants and trees to make way for things to grow. Controlled fires reduce the risk of wildfire too.’
Alice wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘So a little fire can stop a bigger one?’ she asked, thinking of the library book on her desk about spells that turned frogs into princes, girls into birds, and lions into lambs. ‘Like a spell?’
Her mother nestled seedlings into the rows of fresh earth. ‘Yes, I suppose it’s just like that, a spell of sorts to transform one thing into another. Some flowers and seeds even need fire to split open and grow: orchids and desert oaks, those kinds of things.’ She dusted her hands and pushed her hair off her forehead. ‘You clever girl,’ she said. For once her smile reached her eyes. After a moment Alice’s mother returned to her seedlings.
Alice went back to her work too, but all the while, out of the corner of her eye, watched her mother, backlit by afternoon sun, willing new things to grow from nothing. When her mother looked around the property and her face fell at the sight of the shed, Alice understood with swift clarity: she had to find the right spell, the right fire in the right season, to transform her father from one thing into another.
4. Blue pincushion
Meaning: I mourn your absence
Brunonia australis | All states and territories
A perennial found in woodlands, open forest and sand plains. Medium to deep blue flowers usually in spring, in hemispherical clusters on a tall stem. Can be difficult to establish. May die after a few years.
Alice, can you hear me? I’m here.
The voice. Softly.
She drifted in and out of consciousness, only catching moments long enough to sense her surroundings. The sharp smells of antiseptic and disinfectant. The glare of a white-walled room. The sweetness of roses. Scratchy, starched bed sheets. A rhythmic beeping at her side. Squeaky shoes on a squeaky floor. The voice. Softly.
You’re not alone, Alice, I’m here. I’m going to tell you a story.
Her tongue thickened with longing. She strained to answer the voice, to stay close to the smell of roses, but too quickly she sank back into the murky depths, her limbs heavy with the silt of memory.
Thin amber light shot through the nothingness that pressed in on Alice from all directions. She edged towards it. There was a hardening sensation under her feet, as if she’d reached the sandy bottom of the shallows after swimming in the deep. She realised she was on her beach, but something was very wrong. The dunes of silver-green seagrass were burnt and smoking. The sand was soot-black, and the ocean was gone, a tide lower than Alice had ever seen. She kicked her feet through the blackened shells of dead soldier crabs and cracked pipi shells, their pastel colours charred. Cinders drifted like flaky stars, and clumps of salty ash gathered in her eyelashes. Far off in the distance the low tide shimmered, orange embers under a dark sky. The air was hot and smelled foul.
I’m right here, Alice.
Tears burned her cheeks.
Alice, I’m going to tell you a story.
She searched the blackened shoreline. There was an acrid taste in her mouth. She sensed the heat on her skin before she turned towards the sea.
The embers shimmering on the distant horizon exploded into flames. Fiery waves rose, crashed and rose again, a stampede of glowering beasts. It hurt to breathe. An ocean of fire thundered towards her on the black sand.
Heat from the towering waves scorched her face. All she could smell was roses.
Wave after wave curled and crested, gathering strength as it raced towards her. She tried to crawl away, scrambling to get further up the beach, but she couldn’t get traction in the soft sand. Trapped, she turned, helpless as the ocean of fire wheeled over her, a swirling wall of flames. Pressure surged from her gut, but when she took a deep breath, all that tumbled from her lungs was a silent scream of tiny white flowers.
She floated on coral and flaxen flames. What she thought was a sea of fire was not seawater at all; it was an ocean of fiery light. Around her it rippled, constantly changing, a flare of aqua, a splash of violet, a burst of tangerine. She combed her fingers through the colours as her body was immersed.
The room was dark. The scratchy sheets were too tight. The air smelled so sharp it made her nose and eyes fizz. She tried to roll over but was not strong enough; the bands of light transformed into thick and flaming snakes, coiling around her body, burning as they tightened. She coughed violently, crying for breath as her lungs constricted. Fear snuffed out her voice.
Alice, can you hear me? I’m here.
She was outside of herself, watching the fire snakes consume her body.
Just stay with my voice.
Sally finished reading the last page aloud and closed the book in her lap. She sat back in the chair by Alice’s hospital bed, almost unable to bear the sight of her pale skin and bruises. How different she looked, two years older than the young girl Sally first met on that melting-hot summer day when Alice showed up at the library in her nightie, dirty, neglected and vivid as a dream. Now she lay lifeless, with her long hair spilling across her pillow and down the sides of the bed, as if she were a character from the book in Sally’s hands.
‘Can you hear me, Alice?’ she asked again. ‘Alice, I’m here. Just stay with my voice.’ She searched Alice’s face, studying her arms resting on top of the hospital sheets, looking for the smallest movement. There was none, other than the rise and fall of her chest, assisted by the machines beeping and whirring alongside her. Alice’s jaw was slack and there was bruising down the right-hand side of her face. The oxygen tube pushed her mouth into a collapsed O.
Sally wiped a tear away as a thought circled through her mind like a snake eating its taiclass="underline" she should never have let Alice out of her sight that day she walked into the library alone. Or, the quieter, deeper, harder truth: she should have tucked Alice into her car and driven her home to her house where she could have cooked her a hot meal, run her a bath and kept her safe from Clem Hart.