Being Here (4 page)

‘I
HAVE DECIDED,' SAID
L
EAH'S
mother. ‘I will not wait. I refuse to wait. Today, I will start my story. Do you remember, my angel? I said I would write a story that would be perfect, about a place where we would want to live forever.'

She washed the breakfast dishes. Energy poured from her. The air shimmered with it.

‘So, I am going to write for three hours every day. Every day. And in the afternoon we will do our chores around the farm and play games. What do you say?'

The girl nodded.

‘But Mummy will need quiet. Mummy will need peace and quiet to build her story. So while I am writing I need you to play by yourself. Do you understand?'

Leah nodded.

A little later, Leah gathered a pile of books and stepped out onto the verandah. Her mother sat at the kitchen table, crouched over a sheet of paper, a pencil in her hand. Her brows knitted as she stared at the expanse of white. She settled herself in the chair.

The girl closed the front door quietly. She sat on the steps and spread her books out. Her brows wrinkled too. Finally, she selected one. She opened it and the familiar picture was before her. Already, she could feel the people and the animals and the world stirring. They were asleep on the page, but her eyes were tickling them to life.

She read to Pagan. He lay in the dust at the foot of the stairs, one ear cocked as if to hear more clearly. The inside of his ear was white and stiff with wiry hairs. It was the story of the girl in the forest and the red house and the small animals that lived there and the threat brooding in the forest that would come when the sun dipped beneath the horizon. And though the girl knew how the story would end, she was never fully sure until she got there. Because she felt change was possible in any story, but the act of reading kept things the same. Her voice ensured everything turned out the way it should.

When she finished, Pagan twitched his ear.

‘I have seen that place,' said Adam. He sat on the railings of the verandah. His legs swung, to and fro.

‘Show me?' said Leah.

The days of summer flickered past. After a while it was difficult to see the joins. Routine smoothed them out.

Every morning after breakfast, Leah took her books outside. Or, if it rained, she took them to her bedroom. She read for three hours. Sometimes, when she tired of reading, she walked among the apple trees. But never far from home. Her mother had made her promise never to go far. She met Adam there. He would be sitting in a tree, or sitting on the grass, splitting blades. She read him stories. And Pagan, whose love was unconditional, was always by her side.

At midday she returned to the house. Her mother folded up her writing materials and placed them carefully in a box which she locked. Then she prepared food. They ate on the verandah and talked.

‘Can you read me your story, Mummy?' the girl often asked, but the response was always the same.

‘Not yet, angel. Not yet. It takes a long time to write a story and even longer to make it perfect.'

After a month, the girl stopped asking.

In the afternoons, they usually did chores together. Housework. Tidying up the orchards. Cleaning out the chicken pens. Sometimes they cleared the kitchen table and took out thin brushes and jars of water and pots of colour and large sheets of creamy paper. The girl liked this the best. It was a form of story. She imagined a world in her head and then brushed it onto paper. Most times, it didn't match the picture in her mind. But she didn't care.

Once a week they walked the three miles to town. It was a bright and busy place. People moved quickly and made a lot of noise. Leah kept close to her mother and held her hand tightly. She watched people from the corner of her vision. Once or twice someone caught her eye and smiled, but she ducked behind her mother's legs.

Part of her was glad when they made the hot and dusty journey home, their arms clutching brown paper bags filled with groceries. Part of her was sad, but she didn't understand why.

And on Sundays they repeated the journey, this time in their best clothes, which always felt damp against the skin when they arrived in town. They sat in the coolness of the church and listened and prayed.

In the evenings, after dinner, they washed the dishes together. Sometimes Leah's mother talked of Leah's father. She told tales of a stranger. A young man who had travelled the world in a soldier's uniform and had returned tired and broken. A man who had seen a pretty young woman sitting bolt upright in a church pew, her eyes sparkling with a life that had shrivelled within him. After the service, he had approached her and introduced himself as the man she would marry. Her mother laughed when she told this part. And then she cried. Afterwards she hugged her daughter, dabbed a foamy sud from the sink on the tip of her nose.

‘Just you and me, now,' she'd say. ‘Just you and me.'

Then Leah watched evening settle over a parched landscape and counted stars as they freckled the night. Sometimes she sat at her mother's side and listened to her read from a thick book. The stories were difficult to understand and she couldn't see the life in them. Then her mother put her in a tub near the fire in the front room, wrapped her in thick towels that smelled of flowers, tucked her into the big bed and read her a fairy story.

After Leah's mother closed the bedroom door, Adam came. Leah lay in the dark and felt him arrive, though she never quite saw the moment he appeared. They talked quietly, though Adam rarely said much. He sat on the end of the bed and listened as the girl wove stories into the dark. She never heard him leave either. But when her mother opened the door later and carried Leah to her own bed, he was always gone.

There was safety in routine. The nights of summer flickered past.

One evening, Leah's mother didn't read her a story at bedtime.

Instead, she lay down next to her. Warm air wrapped itself around them.

‘Leah,' said her mother. ‘I want to tell you about a special book. You have heard stories from it. Every Sunday, when we go to church and sometimes in the evening. It is not a book you've read by yourself yet, because it's too old for you. But you will. It tells wonderful stories. And it teaches us wonderful things.'

Her mother felt underneath the covers and took her hand.

‘This book is about love. And one of the things it teaches us is this: I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.'

The girl liked the music in the words. But they didn't make sense in her head.

‘Love never ends,' her mother continued. ‘Prophecies will pass away, tongues will cease, and as for knowledge, it will pass away. Now faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.'

The girl didn't know what to say, so she said nothing.

‘You love me, don't you, my angel?'

She knew the answer to this.

‘Yes, Mummy,' she said.

‘And I love you too. More than I can say.'

Silence gathered. A swollen moon dusted the room with silver. The girl thought her mother had fallen asleep, but it seemed her voice was only resting.

‘Just a little more from this book. It says love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. What this means is that if you love someone you must never tell them lies. Do you understand? I will never lie to you and you must never lie to me. Only then can our love last for always. Do you promise? Do you promise never to lie to me?'

‘I promise, Mummy.'

‘And I promise, too. We will love each other always. We will not lie.'

Leah's mind circled the world of sleep. She felt its warmth stealing her thoughts. There was something lurking in her mother's words. A danger, like the shadowy evil in a fairytale forest, but she couldn't pin it down. She recognised the language of fear, though. It filled her mother's voice and made it thick. But she knew she could make it go away. Words were power.

‘Yes, Mummy,' she said.

It was easy.

‘Sounds like you were happy as a kid,' says the girl.

Once again, I've almost forgotten she is here. My mind freezes around the burning image in my head. A small girl cocooned in love and darkness and stories. I press the pause button of my memories, and it is now, only now with time stilled and mind lucid, that the thought explodes like a soft and soundless bomb. That far away night was the last moment I'd experienced happiness like that.

All those years. All those long and dusty years.

Yes, the worm was in the apple even then. I knew it. But I had hidden the knowledge from myself.

I attempt to focus on the girl's words. They appear to float, insubstantial. Or do I detect an edge of irony?

‘I was happy,' I reply. ‘We were happy.'

‘That farm you lived on,' says the girl. ‘You said there were apple trees. But you must've grown other stuff. Or kept animals. How tough was it, way back then, being a farmer?'

She has not turned off her machine. The red light stares at me, unblinking. This is one of my good days. On other occasions I might not have noticed it. Or noticed how this child is using words designed to nudge me from my course. She is pleased with her linguistic trick. But I am not fooled.

The girl deserves an answer. Or perhaps she doesn't. I give one anyway. This, I know, is the ritual of human interaction. You give. You take. None of it makes much difference.

‘The farm was large when my father died. Thereafter, it shrank steadily. Inexorably, looking back on it.'

‘So what did you grow?'

‘Apples,' I say, and my hands remember their cool hardness. ‘After my father died. Just apples.' For a moment, the room fills with the sharp sweetness of their smell. Then it fades and a ghost-odour of disinfectant and fear lingers.

‘Were you able to live off just apples?'

‘No, which is why the farm shrank. Mother sold off parts of it, year by year. Not much during the Depression, but after. When neighbouring farmers eyed our paddocks, were eager to expand and had the money to do so.' I smile, but keep my lips together. I hate the toothless grins of the old. They make us fools. Or reptiles. ‘Mother shaved our land like cheese. A slice here. A slice there. I didn't know when I was a child, but the world was shrinking towards me. The stories I read led me to believe in worlds expanding to infinity. All the time, mine was becoming smaller, circling down onto a patch of apple trees and a girl.'

‘Sounds tough.'

I study the girl. We have spent time together and it is courteous to pay attention. She wears denim shorts and sits with her legs crossed under her on the chair. I wonder briefly where the confidence of youth goes. Does it wither with time or flee abruptly one hope-forsaken morning? She wears make-up that is inexpertly applied. Allied with that blue gash in her hair, it gives her a brazen look. She twists the curious metal bar in her eyebrow from time to time. It is a nervous gesture and I feel certain she is unaware of doing it. The tic sits uneasily with her veneer of assurance, hints at complexities beneath the surface. I think she struggles with something.

Every person is a mystery. Most days I accept this. But today, for reasons I cannot fathom, I want to visit the inside of another head, if only briefly. There are stories locked away there and I am lonely.

‘Tell me about yourself, Carla,' I say.

She twists her eyebrow stud and smiles, though that twists too.

‘It's Carly,' she says. ‘And there's nothing to tell. Sixteen. Student. What can I say?' She waits, but I let the silence work. Most people can't live in silence. They have to fill it, even if their filler-words rarely stick.

‘What?' She smiles and spreads her arms in appeal.

‘Tell me about your family,' I say.

‘Oh, them.' Her mouth bows downwards. ‘Well, that won't take long. Older brother who is mega smart. Doing medicine at uni. In his third year. Going to specialise in cancer.' She bites her bottom lip. ‘Dad is dad. Makes heaps of money from property. He calls himself a developer, but he doesn't actually
build
anything. Just buys and sells. With other people's money. Mum teaches kindy. That's it.'