ALL THAT WAS
Once, somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean but on the way to nowhere, there was a district called—oh, let’s call it Inglewell.
Now, of course, it is overlaid by the smooth, sturdy engineering of the mining companies—the towns and their histories have been dug up or made over. A few landmarks remain unchanged: the inevitable memorial to wars long ago and far away, the street names. But almost every town has just such a memorial, and many places have a Spicer Street or a Pinnicke Road. You could never be sure you’d arrived.
But not so long ago it was a cupped palm of country, pinned to time by its three towns: Woodwild, Carter’s Crossing, and Runagate, my own.
RUNAGATE—HEART OF INGLEWELL on its stone welcome sign. Thirteen streets, one remaining pub, never a bank. One grocery store with a comfortable bench outside and air-conditioning sighing through the bright plastic strips curtaining the door. A water tower patterned in white and rust and shade. Three churches, each smaller than a house. The clawing precision of hard-won roses planted in wire-fenced gardens on the buried corpses of roadside kangaroos. Geraniums hot as matches. The spice of pepperina, oleander’s poison-sapped glow, the hallowed death of angel’s trumpets as apricot as sunset. Showgrounds, handsome in dusty cream and pea-green paint; stockyards. A long low school smelling of squashed jam sandwiches, the heady scents of cheap felt-tips and novelty erasers.
Of Inglewell’s three towns, only Runagate still had a pulse. Woodwild was already nearly vanished; Carter’s Crossing had barely been. They held to each other by fraying ribbons of fractured, blue-black bitumen and cords of ribbed dirt, fringed with pale sand or beaded with blood-red pebbles (not stained by massacres, no, nor cursed, whatever people whispered about how the Spicer family first established Runagate Station).
That triangle tangle of roads and tracks held the district of Inglewell: hills and scrub glittered in the powder-white light, fading to chalk blue; sharp grasses fluttered pale in the paddocks, green and burgundy on the verge; grey huts subsided into themselves like memory. Then the plunge into purple shadows, the troll-rattle of an old timber bridge, a secret of dim emerald and the barrier-shriek of cicadas. Then up again, sky-tumbled, grass-fogged.
It was a fragile beauty: too easy to bleach with dust and history, to dehydrate with heat, rend with the retort of a shotgun or the strike of a bullbar, blind with sun on metal. Easy to turn from it, disgusted and afraid. But if you got out of a car to stretch your legs and instead were still, if you crouched down and waited, it would find you, nosing among the grass like the breeze. The light and loveliness would get into your bones, into your veins. It would beat in your blood like drumming under the ground.
Memory seeped and frayed there, where ghosts stood silent by fenceposts. There the bone horse kept pace with night drivers, while high branches shifted continuously even on breathless days and creaked with the passage of megarrities or other creatures unseen, and at midday long shadows whispered under the trees. And what trees!
Bottle and box, paper and iron, thorned and blossomed under the unutterable light (the sky blue as breath, as enamel, or beaten like copper, everything beneath it turned to metal, or else translucent). Trees like lanterns, like candles, ghosts and bones. The fibrous skeletons of moth-slain cactus and beetle-eaten lantern-bush leaned over the opal-veined bulk of petrified limbs spilled in empty creek beds. Trees bled resin like rubies, sprouted goitrous nests, suspended cat’s-cradles of spiderwebs, spinning disks of silk. Trees towered hard as bronze in still sunlight, and stirred like a living hide in the rolling advent of a storm.
If you were born to Runagate with all its fragile propriety, its tidy civilisation, its ring-fence of roads and paddocks, wires and blood, there was nothing else in the world beyond but trees.
CHAPTER ONE
LEMON TREE AND LANTERN-BUSH
My mother—pale, delicate Nerida Scott, who wilted like a garden in the heat of the day—did not like to speak of or even look at the trees beyond Runagate.
Our front garden—the prettiest-kept on Upper Spicer Street, the handsomest street in Runagate—contained nothing native to the ground from which we daily coaxed and tortured it. It was decent, tidy and ornamental, and, like my mother, gracious. Though she always sent me to borrow books for her on homemaking and manners and inspiring true stories, she didn’t need them: Nerida Scott was as naturally elegant as a lily.
I, in contrast, had reached the age of nineteen, graceless and unlovely, despite our best efforts. There was too much of my father in me.
“But you are a good girl, aren’t you?” said my mother, catching my hand with slender fingers when I stood to clear the lunch dishes. Her nails were smooth and petal-pink.
“Yes, Mother,” I assured her. As I washed the plates, I concentrated on scrubbing out a little more, too, of that old childish self—the restless temper, the loose-limbed insolence I had got from my mocking father and unloving brothers, an unflattering pretension to cleverness. Unlearning the habits gained during the useless, featureless years I had spent at Runagate State School, before I had to grow up. Before I chose to. Nothing (she liked to say) is as unattractive as a woman with a little education, is it, Bettina? And I had spent three years resolutely becoming responsible and civilised and winsome. A strong will has its uses.
That day, like nearly every day, was bright. My mother, her eyes already green-shadowed with tiredness, settled to sleep. My mind quiet, I swept the kitchen to the companionable hum of the refrigerator, the midday crooning of red hens scratching beneath the lemons that hung in the backyard: lemons the size of ox hearts, thick-rinded, brilliant and knobby, luminous among the glossy green. They were not, I think, the shapely fruit my mother had expected, but she did not want to replace the tree. The scent wandered through the house. I would have gone and gathered armfuls of fragrant leaves, but my mother, in one of her few deviations from her magazines, considered cut arrangements gauche.
I washed my face and hands, carefully cleaned the dirt from beneath my nails, added the faintest of colours to my cheeks and lips, brushed the thick dull bob of my hair over the thread-thin scar, almost invisible, on my cheek—a childhood injury, forgotten—and straightened my skirt and blouse. My mother might be asleep, might not love her petty, parochial neighbours, but in Runagate she would certainly hear if I went out looking as if I had no one to care for me.
There had been no car at our house since the night my father left. My mother had barred my brothers from repairing their battered ute in the driveway, and in any event Mitch and Chris had soon gone too. But under the pressure of the midday sun, as I wheeled my yellow bicycle to the front gate, opened it and latched it neatly behind me, I almost regretted not being able to drive. Almost, but then a throbbing in my head and neck reminded me of what we had lost with it: the snarl and roar of engines in the garage and on the lawn, boys rioting through the house, light hair feathered white from the sun, shouting like crows, always too much in the open air. Monsters! my mother had called them, rightly: husband, sons, and cars too.
Nowadays our peace was broken only by wings outside the windows, the shifting of lace shadows. “We are pleasant together, aren’t we, Bettina?” my mother would say, and I would answer, “Yes.” We were homemakers; after everything, I chose to stay when restless spirits fled.