It is early, but the morning has the lazy feel of late afternoon to it. Annie sits straight-backed on the couch in the kitchen, unsure of what to do.
Outside, Susan is teaching Pip how to thread wild yellow daises into chains. They sit murmuring to each other in the shade of the lemon-scented gum while Annie scrubs the kitchen sink clean. It smells like duck, no matter how much bleach she pours in. Earlier, her mother caught her wrist.
‘The septic, Annie! Don’t do that.’
Annie pulled free, angry beyond reason. She cleared her throat and kept scrubbing, setting the bleach aside. For now. For peace.
Now Annie stares out at her mother and Pip. Her stomach knots. For a moment the world shimmers and changes. It’s like everything suddenly trips back twenty years, thirty. She is suddenly her mother, alone in the kitchen. She is watching herself as a child with Gladys, curled under the trees. How they whisper to each other. The way they look at her, their eyes darkening. Cooling. Like she is lacking. Like she is missing some important thing that they celebrate in each other. How alone she feels, in the kitchen.
It strikes her. Her cruelty. How easy it is to be cruel. To do damage. She wonders if her mother would be different, how this cruelty has shaped her, living like the broken link between two unbroken ones.
* * *
Annie and Pip lie in the truth tent, eating fruit salad cut into tiny pieces. Annie has tethered Luna up to the low branches of the nearby gum, so she can pick at the last of the living grass in its shade. ‘Phillip?’
‘Hmm?’ says Pip, tracing the lyrebirds up Annie’s arms.
‘Well, seeing as we’re in the truth tent and all. Why …’ Annie pauses. ‘Why’s your name Phillip?’
‘Because it’s my name.’
Annie considers this for a moment, staring up at the canvas roof. These moments of careful, breathless parenting. Each word, each limb movement, meaning something. Carrying weight. ‘I was just wondering. Because when you were born, I called you Pippa. And now you’re called Phillip. And I’m wondering how that happened. That’s all.’
Pip looks at her. That searching, sharp look that always makes Annie feel like she’s lacking something that Pip can clearly make out. The absence in her. She thinks it’s the reason she was able to leave Pip with Tom and stay on the mountain. The reason why she is relieved when her mother or Tom or anyone looks after Pip, as much as it makes her deeply anxious.
Pip sighs and settles back down. Annie can smell her. A wilder smell than she had in the city. If sunlight and hot air had a smell, it would be the smell of Pip, curled up against Annie on the pillows beneath the truth tent, with Susan’s flowers in her hair.
‘Phillip’s brave.’
‘So’s Pip.’
Pip violently shakes her head, clocking Annie in the jaw. Annie winces but doesn’t move, staring at the canvas above them.
‘Pip’s not brave, Mum. But Phillip is.’
Annie frowns. ‘Why Phillip, though? Why not Sarah or Jessica or Tamara? Why a boy?’
‘Because boys are brave, Mum.’
Annie swings Pip around to face her. ‘People are brave, Pip. Boys aren’t braver than girls. You know what? The bravest people I know are all girls. And do you know who one of them is?’
‘Who?’
‘You.’ Annie pokes her belly. ‘Pippa Thompson.’
Pip shies away from her and Annie lies back down. She can still feel the faint warmth of Pip, though. The throb of it in the air, between them. She’s never noticed it with a grown-up. As though children have more heat, more light, more life inside them.
Annie is quiet for a moment. She rolls onto her side, facing Pip, and props her head up on her hand. ‘You know what I remember? I remember Pip being the bravest person ever. She got on a horse she’d never ridden and rode through all that scary stuff to safety.’
Pip shakes her head. Harder. ‘No, no, no. Pip’s not brave.’
‘Why?’
Pip blinks at her. ‘Huh?’
‘Why’s Pip not brave? I think Pip’s brave. Why do you think she’s not?’
Annie watches Pip reach out for her arm and start tracing the marks there again.
Pip mutters something and then closes her eyes tightly, her finger pausing on Annie’s skin.
‘I didn’t hear that, P.’
Pip opens her eyes, she’s crying. The tears startle Annie. They’re not a small child’s tears, shallow and fast. They’re fat and slow and Pip blinks at them tiredly. Annie suddenly wonders at Pip’s blotchy face in the morning. How often she’s cried quietly in the night. Annie swallows hard, pressing it away. Struck in two, between wanting to shove Pip away and run somewhere to think, to cry for her daughter’s sadness, and wanting to press the crying little girl to her and keep her safe. Press Pip’s damp hands between her own and smile and coo to her. Like Pip’s still small enough to believe a smile over sadness.
‘Nana asked Pip to give her a kiss goodbye,’ says Pip. ‘But Pip was too scared. Pip didn’t kiss Nana goodbye.’
Annie presses Pip to her tightly. And Pip doesn’t arch away from her. Pip curls against Annie and Annie feels her shuddering. ‘Pip was scared,’ she keeps murmuring, her breath hot on Annie’s damp skin. ‘Pip didn’t realise Nana was going away.’
‘Do you want to know a secret?’ Annie murmurs.
Pip nods against her, her breath rough.
Annie kisses her head. ‘There’s a dream I have all the time. And you know what happens in it?’
‘What?’
‘I dream Nana kisses you on the head and you eat cupcakes together. I dream it all the time, P.’ Annie swallows hard. Feeling so wounded, so raw.
Annie looks down. Pip’s eyes are closed.
‘Pip?’
‘I dream of her too,’ she murmurs. Limp, now. Exhausted in the way that small children are exhausted by feelings. By holding on to things too grown-up for them. Too large for tiny hands.
‘What do you dream?’
‘Just Nana. With me, in my room.’ Pip sighs. ‘That’s all.’
* * *
Annie wonders what Pip will think about, when her daughter reflects on her childhood. How endless these years seem now. But Annie knows that soon they will seem as fleeting as the gap between an inhale and an exhale. A teetering moment of stillness.
Her own childhood memories are caramel-coloured. Eucalypt. Honey. Paint. Ponies. Alex. They are wide paddocks and the feeling of eggs and feathers. The taste of homegrown vegetables and the sound of women’s voices.
She wonders what Pip will think about. Whether she will remember the truth tent, the flowers weaved into her hair. Whether she will remember the world as being green, squinted at through the gauze of her scarf.
Whether it will be a childhood of pining, of missing her grandmother or her father or the people in between. Annie never missed anyone as a child and it makes her sad to think that Pip’s childhood might be tainted in such a way.
She hopes Pip’s childhood is the wide arc of big circles. The scrape of bark on skin, playing with the eggs like dolls. Keeping them as pets. Luna’s soft coat. The gentle call of whipbirds and bellbirds in the morning. She hopes Pip remembers the people who are with her more than the people who are not. That she still finds something warm when she looks back at her childhood. Something comforting enough to be nostalgic about.
* * *
Len comes by in the early afternoon. Annie is lying on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. At the scattering of green stars she’s noticing around the house more and more. Drawn by Gladys and also, she thinks, by Susan, who has started scrawling things on the outside walls.
She can hear her mother humming Christmas carols in the next room. She hears Pip joining in.
‘Maybe the bunyip leaves people presents,’ she hears Pip murmur. Then, ‘Maybe my name should be Nana. Nana’s brave, Gran.’
‘Yes,’ says Susan. ‘Nana’s very brave.’
‘Boys aren’t braver than girls, Gran.’
‘No, they’re certainly not.’
The sound of Giddy’s welcome whine and the guineafowl shrieking. Len’s footsteps on the verandah and the scrape as he pulls off his shoes. She waits for Nigel’s shriek, as she always does, but there is only quiet.
‘Why do you bother taking off your shoes?’ Annie asks.
Len shrugs. ‘Your ma’s orders. Pip still want to spend the arvo with her old uncle?’
‘She does.’ Annie yawns. ‘Where you going, anyway?’
‘To see a foal and a llama and a few other places.’
‘Uncle Len!’ Pip yells and comes running into the kitchen. ‘I’ve had an apple so now I just need shoes. Let’s go!’
Len grins and tousles Annie’s hair. ‘Is your mother’s hair still green?’
‘It is.’
Len’s grin widens and he nudges Pip. ‘Good job, short stuff. C’mon. Let’s go.’
* * *
Trucks roar up from the flatlands. Annie hears them from the house and walks down to the gate to see them. She’s tried to call Alex, but he’s not answering. She’s knocked on Jenny’s door several times, but the house is silent, the garbage bags out the front steadily growing.
She did not take him seriously when he said he had to do it alone. She thinks now that maybe she should have.
The trucks have the television company’s logo on the side. She wonders what they’re transporting. Filming is meant to be starting in the next couple of weeks. She had thought that she and Pip would be back home by then. But now she’s unsure.
Hector has called her a few more times but she’s ignored each one. She crosses her arms as another truck goes past.
She feels naked, watching the trucks rolling in. Helpless. She knows it’s going to be awful. So much worse than these trucks rolling up the mountain, which is just the start of it all. This chaotic, dividing thing.
Len pulls into the driveway and drops Pip off. She and Annie walk back up to the house together
‘We saw a llama and a rabbit, Mum!’
A flock of cockatoos take off from one of the nearby trees and Annie is sad, once more, for Nigel. ‘Ohhhh.’
‘I like Gran and my eggs.’
‘Yeah, I think Gran’s fun too.’
‘I like it here, Mama.’
‘I know.’
‘I like it better than home. I like the eggs and the birds and sometimes Luna. And I like Gran’s cakes and the trees. Except for Daddy.’ She frowns. ‘Home has Daddy.’
‘Yes, home has Daddy,’ Annie says, sitting back on the couch.
‘I don’t want to leave Gran,’ Pip says.
‘Where’d this come from, Pip? We’re not going anywhere.’
‘But soon we’ll go home. And I like it here, Mum. I like it here.’
* * *
Annie manages to prop up the blank canvas that Susan gave her for Christmas. She props it at the end of the couch, on the wide arm near her feet.
Rose was over earlier and stared at it and then at Annie.
‘You and bloody Len. Is there anything you won’t do to make that woman happy?’ She shook her head, like a disappointed mother, but clasped Annie’s shoulder on her way out onto the verandah.
Annie has taken to staring at it at night, after she’s written her long emails to Tom, his latest letters fanning in front of her. All of them simple and short. She sits and stares at it with her knees tucked up under her chin until she feels stars in her legs. Gladys’s name for pins and needles. That dreadful slipping back into feeling. How strange, Annie thinks as she drinks green tea and stares at the blank canvas. How Gladys was whimsical in these strange and unsettling ways. I’m feeling stars, Annie.
Sometimes, in the right light, either moon or sun or the dim light from Susan’s bedroom, Annie will see Pip in the whiteness of the canvas. An elbow, a knee. Moving, like she is dancing behind the canvas, in the canvas, her shape weaving through it. Turning there, bending and stretching to something Annie cannot hear. She wonders if that’s what painting is like for Susan, seeing the figures there but then having the power to paint them into something solid.
‘I could paint you,’ Annie murmurs to the sliding, bending Pip, curving quietly in the canvas.
She knows her painting would be like the whittling, though. The canvas Pip becoming still, disappearing completely into the whiteness. That it will be like a handful of curling wood, but worse somehow. That dreadful stillness.
She settles down lower on the couch, the teacup resting between her breasts. Staring at the canvas. The poke of elbows and knees.
She sighs, dragging the duck up onto the couch with her. She quacks once, then quietens. She smells musty, but her feathers are a sweet brush against Annie’s fingertips.
* * *
Annie was madly aroused by Tom after Pip was born, after the initial pain had subsided. Like a second wind, she silently clawed at him in the stretches of night when Pip slept in her bassinet on the other side of their bedroom. Sometimes he would match the shape of his body to hers and she would feel calm; she would feel sated. But mostly he would kiss her cheek, her hands. Her chaste places. ‘We need to sleep,’ he’d whisper. And the world would come hurtling back into the room: the mess in the kitchen, the tangy smell of dirty nappies. The calls and texts and emails Annie hadn’t yet replied to; the notes and hours she needed to catch up at work. She would lie in the dark, immobilised by everything. The weight of it all made it hard to breathe. And she would curl up in a ball and feel a stab of resentment. Towards Tom’s sensibleness. His quietness. The tingles where he had kissed her.
But the need for him faded. And perhaps if she was with someone else, if she was someone else herself, they would still have that connection, bound by more than a child and history and fondness.
But maybe she expects too much; wants too much.
Tom is bound up with milk, with exhaustion so deep it feels like sickness. With asphalt roads and small circles and the ache of her full breasts.
And she is suddenly achingly sad for him. For not being bound up in lyrebirds and horses and the smell of eucalypt in the rain. For not being bound up in everything that Annie has always loved.
* * *
Annie is woken up by the sounds of fire engine sirens, coming up from the forest. In the dark. In the heat and stillness. It’s happened before, over the last few days. The sounds inevitably draw her out onto the verandah where she drinks yesterday’s tea and fingers wood shavings and stares out into the yard, either made thick and dark by clouds or sharp and coloured by a high, bright moon.
This time she calls Rose, who answers blearily at four a.m.
‘Can you see if the engines are out on a call?’ Annie asks. ‘I’m so sorry. But I keep hearing sirens.’
‘You’re as bloody batshit as your mother,’ Rose mutters. ‘And no, they haven’t gone out. The base sirens always wake us and until you called me I was sleeping like a log.’
‘Sorry.’
Rose growls. ‘Fine! Bloody hell. You and fucking Susan …’
Annie listens to her grunts down the phone as she pulls on clothes, shoes. As she stomps downstairs and into the yard. Annie can hear each footfall. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Rose yawns. ‘They’re in. Both of them.’
‘I can hear sirens, though.’
‘You’re nuts,’ Rose says. ‘I’m going back to sleep.’
Rose hangs up and Annie lies on the bench outside. The buzz of insects and the crackle of grass, brought quietly to life by the cool of the very early morning. The sirens, wailing up from the dark trees. Stopping and starting.
Annie’s heart beats, quick and uneven. She tenses, about to grab her shoes, a jumper, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know the rainforest tracks like she did, and not at night. Not all burnt. It would be foolish to go striding off.
She curls back up on her couch, straining to hear the echoing sound of the sirens long after they have fallen silent.