Paper Daisies Page 4

  I go as fast as my legs will carry me, back out into the searing sun on King Street, a madness of cartwheels and hooves and the whistle of a suburban train choofing through to Stanmore, so loud that I almost don’t hear the man leaning on the corner of the Town Hall building spit at my feet: ‘Tart.’ I imagine Mrs Ermington installed him there herself to spit at every female going past. I have no time to think of him. I begin to run, like a tart, up the length of shops that line this road, all the way back to the college. How I love this road: its jumble of colours and sounds and smells. The Italian fruitshop, the discount drapers, the book dealers, the bakeries, sweet little hotels and groceries on every corner, cheap and cheerful Christmas decorations going up all around. Flo is determined to convince some unwitting entrepreneur to get a vegetarian café going somewhere here next year, and I hope she does, not only because she is a terrible cook but to give us an excuse to be here in this street more often. Incredible that I won’t see it for six long weeks.

  I scurry down the narrow lane of Little Queen Street, short cut of flat-faced workmen’s terraces no lady should be seen near, and then I sprint across Carillon Avenue, past the university gatehouse, across the lawn and into the college, where I take the stairs two by two, up to my room. This room I share with Flo. The beds are stripped down to their mattresses, our luggage piled on the floor in between them, and as I catch my breath I close my eyes and I say a little prayer: Please. Please allow me to return here next year.

  And then I grab the book, stuff it into the deep pocket of my skirt and comport myself in a tranquil and well-ordered if moderately speedy fashion out the other side of Women’s, past St Paul’s and right across the campus grounds to the Medical School. Oh dear, I’m puffed by the time I reach it, by the time I see its broad front of lancet windows, all the stately tracery of its Gothic revivalist façade, so lately revived it’s less than a decade old, and it’s so deathly quiet inside, even my heartbeat is too loud, echoing amidst all the cool and so recently hallowed stone. The door to the anatomy room is open as I make my way, and in there, in the gloom, I spy the skeleton standing by the plaster torso of Man and hear the voice of some other phantasm warning me: You’ll never be a surgeon, Berylda. And I don’t listen to him. I find the library door is open too – oh splendid, marvellous luck – and I spy the librarian in there, and he’s in conversation with a man. A large man, taking up all of his attention. I scurry in, shove book on random shelf, and scurry out again, chirruping: ‘Oh dear! Wrong room – silly me. Happy Christmas – hooroo!’

  And that’s that. Resume tranquil and well-ordered comportment, back across the grounds.

  Ben

  What was that? I look behind me and I imagine I see a hat disappearing round the doorway, a woman’s hat, the edge of a skirt. Someone that might not have been there at all had I not distinctly heard a voice. Then again, I’ve been imagining I can hear Mama’s voice at all sorts of odd moments; a glimpse of something, who knows what, at the edge of sight.

  I rub my eyes and look back at the librarian, remember where I was, and I tell him: ‘No. No, I am not looking for pharmaceutical texts – any botanical records, preferably ones that show the plants in illustration. Native plants. I’m looking for a particular plant, a daisy, found in central New South Wales.’

  He looks at me dully, screws up his face in wonder that anyone might want scientific illustrations for anything that can’t be cut up for experimentation or distilled into a drug. I had thought it might be pointless coming here, that’s true, but I do want to see if I can find any record pertaining to Mama’s bloom and its location before I condemn Cos to wandering the hills with me in search of it, and I am annoyed by this librarian’s attitude.

  I must have made that a little bit apparent, as the librarian attempts now to be helpful. ‘Have you asked in at the Science faculty? They’ll have botanical types of things there.’

  Yes, I’m mightily sure they do, but there’s no one there. Of course, that is where I went first: shut up like fortress.

  ‘Not to worry,’ I tell him, and I leave. The books I asked for from the Royal Botanical Gardens should be delivered to the club sometime today. And, hopefully, I’ve a few things to pick up from the New South Wales Wildflower Society chap I spoke to yesterday – an amateur of course, he’s otherwise a Castlereagh Street solicitor, but he seemed confident of finding whatever they might have on indigenous Helichrysum, or any other similar plants, amongst their records.

  I set off back towards Broadway, to the city. Perhaps I should return to Cos first – have lunch, if he’s awake yet. I feel sorry I dragged him along with me already. I’d forgotten how much he hates Sydney; but he’s enjoying reminding me, at least.

  Berylda

  ‘How about I try to come and join you in Bathurst – after Old Mac’s had enough of us and gone back to the office. What do you say?’

  Old Mac is what Flo calls her father, with such affection it makes my brain bleed with jealousy. But I am also absorbing her suggestion: that she come to me, in the holidays, come to me and Greta. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather have happen. ‘Do you think you really could?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Towards the end of January, when we’re back from Woy Woy, unless Mother comes up with a compelling objection. I’ll write to you and let you know – all right?’

  ‘All right.’ I smile, and my smile meets hers. Uncle Alec won’t be happy that I have invited a friend to stay, but he won’t be able to say no, either. Not to an illustrious, impeccably well-connected McFee, who has in fact invited herself. I grin.

  And then she embraces me with the full force of her exuberance, here on the crowded railway platform at Redfern. ‘Oh Bryl! It’ll be 1901 when I see you again – a whole new century! When we return to this place, you’ll be at the Medical School and I’ll be taking my first subjects in the Law – Torts and Government Institutions – can’t wait. Who knows what incredible things we might do!’

  She swings me around in her arms now, almost knocking over a porter with the centrifugal force of my boots. He shakes his head at us but he smiles a merry hooroo, too, as he wheels his baggage trolley through the crowd.

  ‘Change is in the air, my fabulous friend, my comrade.’ Flo promises revolution in her laughing green eyes, still yet filled with excitement and optimism at the way things turned out at Newtown this morning: someone called out ‘Will you get off!’ in a most unladylike manner to Mrs Anti-Suffrage Ermington, another joining in: ‘Go home! Go home to your ivory tower – go and be quiet and still in there,’ which prompted a chorus of booing from the gathered, and a slow hand clap that continued until she left the stage. I’m sorry I missed that.

  Flo hugs me to her again. ‘We’re going to get the vote next year, see if we don’t. I can feel it. Just as surely as one day you’re going to be the tiniest physician that ever existed and I’m going to be the first barrister with bangers!’

  I am in hysterics as she holds me out from her again, shaking me by the shoulders: ‘Change is ours!’

  Change. Yes. It surely shimmers and crackles around us in this Christmas heat. Little do they know in this bustling, overbusy city crush that Flo McFee and Berylda Jones are in their midst. Corsetless, young and free, we shall change the world. Or at least be permitted to practise our professions. How could we not?

  But now the whistle blows. The Western Mail is steaming. It’s time for me to board.

  ‘Oh no!’ No. I so dearly do not want to go. I reach for her hand.

  ‘Oh yes!’ Flo gives me a last cheek-smacking kiss before pushing me away up the steps of the carriage. ‘See you soon!’

  She has her train to catch too, in half an hour, on the Northern line for Woy Woy and her parents’ summer retreat on the water there. A train to catch back to her perfect life. She waves now, still dancing on her toes on the platform, and that wave carries me out from the station, all the way out over the jostli
ng tin rooftops of Sydney.

  Out past Parramatta, in the dairy fields that unfold from there, I see a black and white cow leaping about with the gold dust of the late afternoon sun sprinkled along her back, showing off to her sisters, and I laugh out loud for the inexplicable gaiety of it. The desiccated dowager in the seat opposite scores me with a thin-lipped once-over again. I know what she’s thinking: Vulgar girl. And I laugh at her too.

  It’s not until the train emerges, huffing and creaking, from the steep Lapstone Rat Hole at the foot of the mountains that my mood begins to switch properly for home. A little further on, as we wait halfway at Faulconbridge for the extra engine to take us the rest of the way up, I look out into the first of the pine trees beyond the station here, and as I do, the dread does not so much stir as manifest somehow solidly, as physical presence. It always does at the sight of these pine trees, their cool, dark shapes against the dusk, boughs outstretched like the arms of some pleading, hungry horde, and my dread gathers and gathers with them, all the way to Katoomba. Where home should be. My pulse thumps in time with the straining of the engine here along the ridgetop, every single time. For what my life and my sister Greta’s life would be if home were still here, in these mountains, if our parents were still here; if they were waiting for me at Katoomba Station now. If we didn’t have to live with Uncle Alec.

  Dismiss him from your thoughts; push him away. There’s still three hours before you must see him. Make the most of it.

  In the fading light, I open my copy of the Evening Times, to distract myself with whatever featherheaded silliness might be in it today. How will Womanly Virtue rescue Civilisation this Christmas? Will she ever go in for fish at the festive table? Or is it really best to stick with poultry? On the rural news page, I read a funny story about a farmer from Cootamundra who, when being taught to drive a motor vehicle, kept yelling at the engine to pull left, before smashing the disobedient contraption into a tree at his right. Then I spy the name Hill End again, in a small paragraph below:

  A girl of thirteen was reported missing on Monday, having failed to return home to her family’s orchard outside the township of Hill End the day before. It is presumed she is lost, and all attempts to find the girl have so far come to nothing. A timely reminder, with the holiday season upon us, of the dangers of straying into the bush.

  No name. Just a girl. Lost. I close the paper. As the sun begins to sink, I close my eyes to the twilight and I am thirteen once more. And I am not lost: I am safe at home, with my perfect family. Greta and I are home from school for the holidays, home in Katoomba, our picnic rug spread across the lawn of our garden at Echo Point, at the cliff’s edge. Mother has packed us a basket of jam sandwiches and a flask of lemon cordial: Don’t go beyond the fence, girls. Papa is laughing, clutching at his heart: You’ll fly away one day anyway and leave me to weep forever – don’t go yet! Aunt Libby is visiting from Gulgong with Grandpa Pemberton, ancient and crooked over his cane, and she has left him on the verandah to join our picnic. Good afternoon there, my favourite sisters. She nestles between us, her rosy bergamot scent warm as the sun as she looks up through the pine needles with us, making up stories about the Three Sisters, the three rock pillars down in the misty valley below. Do you fancy they get chilly down there in the night? Shall we make them some woolly hats? We lie there giggling, under the smiling sky.

  I wake at the screech of brakes. And when I open my eyes again the world is black. Downhill, speeding black.

  Ben

  ‘Bloody savage! Get your hands off me!’ Cos bellows, with not the slightest irony, drunk off his head, as I drag him up the steps of the club – to lock him in our room.

  ‘Mr Wilberry.’ The doorman nods to me, unseeing as the doorman of the Sydney Union Club necessarily is. It’s nothing to him that Mr Wilberry is wrestling Mr Thompson up the hall and up the stairs, for this is a gentlemen’s establishment and I’m sure these walls and a long succession of doormen have seen far worse. But it’s no less embarrassing to have this one witness this particular spectacle. It was probably him who received the messenger lad from the pub over at the Rocks, too, and had the butler quietly find me in the library downstairs, to whisper in my ear, Mr Thompson is in need of your urgent assistance at the rear of the Australia Hotel, sir, the discreet means of informing me that I had better rescue Cos from the brothel located there – before he caused any more damage to that establishment, or to himself. He is that drunk. Well, he has been hard at it since lunchtime; didn’t bother to wait for me to get back from making my enquiries at the university before getting stuck right in. He ordered a Bordeaux with his breakfast, apparently, and then took off.

  It took me almost an hour to find him, down a back lane between Cumberland and Gloucester Streets. Although Cos and I spent six long years at school here in Parramatta, I don’t know Sydney very well at all these days and I’ve never known its brothels, but the publican at the Australia was most helpful in directing me to where old matey was corralled in a little terrace down that lane, and when I got to him he was well into picking a fight with the police sergeant holding him there. New South Welshman can’t play cricket, he was slurring and swaying, and giving his best impersonation of Homo idiotus. Fortunately, the police sergeant, who’d been drinking at that same pub, was reasonably schnigged himself, and quite good humoured: I’m sure he’s a fine fella when he’s himself but he’s frightening the ladies – you gotta take him home. Home is precisely where I should have left him, isn’t it, and for good – for one day our names and my relative sobriety will not get us out of trouble.

  ‘Do you have to carry on the way you do?’ I mutter to him pointlessly as I shove him in the door of our room. Couldn’t stuff a pipe, let alone walk, though he’s attempting both at the same time.

  He falls onto the bed, my bed, spilling his tobacco pouch across it and moaning, ‘I’m bored, Wilby. You leave me alone all day. In Sydney. It stinks here.’

  ‘What, unlike you?’ I shouldn’t speak to him at all when he’s in this state.

  ‘I want to go home,’ he moans some more. ‘There are no women in this room. Where’s Susie? I hate this place. I hate clubs. Savages!’

  ‘Shut up, Cos. Please,’ I ask him, as pointlessly. And promise him: ‘I’ll book you a passage home tomorrow – first thing.’

  ‘No! I’m not going back on that ship, God’s bollocks, no, I am not,’ he says, and before I can say I’ll see about booking you onto a saga of trains then, he gives me his best old matey look, full of sincerity; pathos. ‘I won’t leave you alone, Wilber. I don’t want you to be lonely and sad. I love you.’

  And I’m glad he does. When he’s sober, I am glad he is here. Grateful. I don’t know how I’d be faring without him.

  ‘Can you get me drink?’ he asks, trying to prop himself up on an elbow; failing. ‘Just one more?’

  ‘No.’ Prudent to leave him now; he’ll talk himself to sleep. Eventually. He won’t be so bad as this when we’re on the road. Out of Sydney. When we head west after Christmas. Out into the fresh air. Countryside. Greater distance between pubs. Our train out to Bathurst can’t come too soon; perhaps I’d better get us out of here quicker, though, find somewhere to stop in the mountains on the way through: restorative climate, and coral ferns, scribbly gums …

  ‘Please?’

  I lock the door.

  He shouts for the entire club to hear: ‘But I love you, Wilby!’

  Someone chuckles from behind another closed door, calling out, ‘Half your luck!’ and I return downstairs to the library, to the books and papers spread in disarray across the desk there, just as I left them – the records I’ve borrowed from the Wildflower Society, and the unexpected abundance of material from the elderly but enthusiastic curator at the Botanic Gardens. I should tidy it all up now, in consideration of the other guests.

  I pick up the old and faded Wildflower Society illustration of Xeranthemum coronoria that I wa
s looking at before I was interrupted. Stare at it under the lamp as though it might show me something different from the last time I looked at it. It’s not what I am looking for; it’s not what Mama described. The bloom is possibly the right shape and formation, and its location is near enough, recorded as Canowindra-Cowra, somewhere in the central western districts of this colony, but its stipes are fleshy, its foliage glabrous, smooth and strappy, and it’s the wrong colour – yellow and cream, and distinctly bicolour. It’s definitely not red. It’s been incorrectly named, too – it’s not coronoria. It’s most probably bracteatum. I could write a small narrative for it in the margin: ‘this specimen was discovered by an amateur botanist-solicitor, and fancifully sketched by his mistress one stolen week away in the woods’. Half the botanical record wouldn’t be with us if not for enthusiasts such as them. But I doubt this one is even indigenous. It looks most like a European strawflower, or a cultivar escaped from someone’s garden bed. Or it doesn’t exist at all.

  Like red native daisies, perhaps: I’ve never heard of such a thing, apart from bracteatum cultivars, and even they are more orange than red. But then I’ve not seen much of central New South Wales, have I. Only Bathurst really, and only once, during school, rugby against St Stanislaus, midwinter, didn’t know where I was …

  Ben, go to bed yourself, I hear Mama say, and with her voice comes that disorienting rush of grief.

  I pour myself a port instead, my vision blurs, and I look into the bloom I’m not looking for again. Astounded that she is gone.

  New Year’s Eve

  This world is the will to power—and nothing besides!