Later, Pip naps in Susan’s bed. The ground is silty from the rain. There is more thunder in the distance; a deep rumble that sets Luna skidding around her paddock.
Annie shows Susan the carving of Luna and Susan’s eyebrows disappear up under her green hair. ‘This is remarkable. Gosh, glad she didn’t lose any fingers.’
Annie goes outside to try to secure the broken side of the house. She can’t see any places where rain can get in, but it seems to anyway.
She drags Susan out with her.
‘Do you see any gaps?’ Annie asks.
‘No.’ Susan swats at a beetle on her ankle. She’s barefoot. ‘I don’t see anything.’
Annie calls Len when she comes back inside. The landline is fuzzy. It always becomes fuzzy in the rain. When their phone line in the city went fuzzy, Annie would wave it in confusion. ‘It’s not even raining!’
Tom had frowned at her. ‘Ah, what?’
‘Len,’ Annie says when he answers, ‘the broken side of the house is leaking a bit. Any ideas?’
‘Yeah.’ Len yawned. ‘Call the insurance company.’
‘What’re you cranky about?’
He sighs. ‘I just … I thought I would’ve found a lyre by now, you know? Somewhere in the area. Just one.’
‘It’s only been a year. They’ll be back, Len. It’s a big area. They might be back already.’
‘It’s stupid, I know. But I’ve spent so much time looking out for them … I just … it feels like I should’ve kept them safe.’
‘You couldn’t have. They’re wild animals in a forest. It’s not your fault.’
‘I know. I know it’s stupid.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘Anyway. Sorry. I can come over, take a look at the wall if you’re worried.’
‘No,’ says Annie. ‘I’m sure it’s fine. It’s only a little bit of water. And you’re right. Mum needs to call the bloody insurance company.’
Susan yawns and lies down in the bedroom with Pip, both exhausted by the rain. Made dozy by it. Alex has come over. He’s perched on the edge of the verandah, flicking through Susan’s insurance information.
Annie sits down next to him and he looks up, frowning.
‘I can’t tell,’ he says. ‘What coverage it’ll fall under.’
Annie sighs. ‘Forget it – Mum needs to do it. Anyway, we should go look for lyrebirds. Maybe the rain’s brought them out. Or maybe Len’s missing something. You in?’
Alex slowly nods and they pull their shoes on, side by side. Sitting on the step as they did as small children.
‘Do you want to ride?’
Alex shakes his head.
‘Shh!’ Annie brushes Alex’s chest and feels him tighten. Feels his breath catch, a quiver beneath her fingers. The rain is still falling.
There, again. A cockatoo call, followed by the raucous yell of a rainbow lorikeet and the eerie sound of a fire truck siren. They jog towards the tracks. The echoing call sounds again, a whipbird and a magpie. Without a word, Alex moves further off the track, pushing past the surging trees, so small and green and full of energy against the darkness of the forest.
‘There!’ Alex breathes, cocking his head to make room for Annie. They peer through the new green shoots as a male lyrebird, tail flared, calls out in the voice of a galah, then a magpie, then back to the yell of a cockatoo.
‘We’re okay!’ the lyrebird yells. ‘We’re okay!’
And Annie can’t help it, this moment. The lyrebird calling out in Nigel’s voice. Every inflection just right, every creak of his cockatoo vocals. The perfection of it. The magic.
She spins into Alex, up into his arms and he catches her as he caught her when they were teenagers and her skin was eternally thick with the wanting of him. She wraps her legs around his waist and the lyrebird calls out in the voice of a fire engine, the siren’s wail. It makes her shiver, stills her. She presses her forehead to Alex’s. His warm, wet skin. Eyes closed.
It is their slowest kiss. Their saddest one. Tasting of rain and salt and the mossy green of the forest’s deep places.
They breathe like that, listening to the siren call, and she slowly slides down from him. Pulling away from him is so hard. He brushes her cheek with his fingers and she can feel the tremble of them. The ground is giving beneath her feet. She tilts her head up at the rain, the cool mist of it still a shock, despite being soaked. Dripping.
She feels Alex’s hand on her shoulder. Warm, rough. He squeezes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
He brushes the backs of his fingers down her cheek and her neck. ‘Don’t be.’
Water brought the air to life. And it is what Annie feels now. Like air. Thrumming and alive.
* * *
Alex and Annie first kissed when they were fourteen. Their hands in their laps, sitting side by side in the back paddock of his mother’s farm. They were staring out at the strawberry farm. The plastic sleeves rolled down over the fruit.
That day everything tripped forward into something more.
Annie was wearing a dress, it fanned out between her crossed legs. They had filled it with stolen strawberries.
‘Annie.’
His kiss had tasted like salt and strawberries. The sigh of hot hay. His breath, Annie’s. Annie’s tongue, his lips. Even then, still children, it was so hard to pull away.
* * *
Annie runs home. She is unfit, her muscles burn and then shudder, threatening to cramp, to contract in on themselves until she is forced to curl up in the drinking earth and wait for it to pass. Alex stays in the damp forest.
Pip and Susan are still sleeping, both their mouths open, both sets of arms thrown up over their heads. Annie watches them for a moment then jumps onto the couch. She calls Len. ‘Wefoundthelyres!’
‘You what? Is that you, Annie?’
Annie takes a long breath. ‘We found the lyres, Len! Just up on the Ridge Track. Three of them.’ Annie laughs. ‘They were making siren noises. And one called out in Nigel’s voice. It’s how we picked them.’
‘Oh,’ says Len. ‘Oh.’
Annie is quiet and she listens to the sound of Len in tears. His breathing ragged and elated into the phone.
* * *
Annie is thinking about Tom when he pulls into the yard. Not yearning thoughts, but puzzled thoughts. Thinking about what to do with him. With them. But she keeps getting sidetracked. By the wonder of finding the lyres, by Alex. By the rain, which falls from the sky like something make-believe.
Tom arrives in the afternoon, just as Susan is putting potatoes and olives out on the kitchen table. He pulls Annie hard against him and kisses her mouth but she is still in the forest, still thinking of Alex, and she kisses him back only a little. Pip throws herself at him, wrapping her arms around his middle and climbing up him like she climbs the peppermint gum.
‘Umm,’ he says. ‘Her hair.’
Annie shrugs. ‘Mum reckons she’s just expressing herself.’
‘Right.’ Tom kisses Pip’s hair, the lopsided mess of it, until she’s giggling. And Annie loves him for that.
He seems too solid to her, though, after spending so much time with Alex. He seems to move clumsily. She looks away from him.
They eat potatoes and Pip eats so fast she vomits and has to lie down. She leaves her scarf on the table and Tom touches it.
‘She doesn’t take it to bed?’ he says to Annie.
Annie puts down her coffee. She doesn’t like the taste, but she feels warmed by it. It feels right to be drinking it in the rain, which has slowed to a dozing drizzle. She shakes her head. ‘No, she leaves it inside sometimes. More and more. Particularly since the truth tent.’
‘The what?’
‘The truth tent. It was her Christmas present. From Mum and me.’
Tom looks at her with steady eyes. ‘I think we should get her a horse.’
‘A horse?’
‘Yeah.’
‘A horse.’
He shifts in his chair. ‘Yeah. Just the way you talk about Luna …I think it’d be good for her. Don’t you?’
‘We’d have to pay for agistment,’ Annie says, almost like a challenge. Tom just shrugs and doesn’t say anything more about it.
Later, Annie shows him the carving of Luna and he brushes it with his fingers. ‘We’re lucky she didn’t amputate a finger. You need to –’
‘I know.’ Annie snatches the carving back. ‘I need to make sure the whittling knives are out of reach.’
‘But it’s amazing.’
‘I know.’
They go out, the three of them. Pip and Tom and Annie. The rain has stopped. They wander along the main street and into the little café on the corner. Pip slurps happily at a milkshake. She swings her legs under the table.
‘Mum?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Can I go say hi to Max? He’s just there.’ She points towards the milkbar, where Trent is chatting away to someone they went to school with while Max moves pebbles slowly along the footpath.
‘Sure,’ Annie says.
Pip grins and bounds off, her feet bare. Tom shakes his head and finishes off his coffee.
‘What?’
‘She’s like a different kid, Annie.’
‘She is?’ Annie grins. ‘You reckon? I mean, I’ve felt like she’s settled a lot since she’s been up here, but I thought I might be exaggerating it.’
‘She’s … she’s happy. She’s calm. She’s fucking responding to Pip again! She’s not hiding under the mouldy old scarf. It’s like magic, Annie.’
‘I wasn’t sure it’d pay off. Bringing her here.’
‘Well it has,’ Tom says. He reaches for her hand. ‘And I’m so glad you did.’
Trent waves as he puts Max into the car and Pip comes bounding back over. ‘Don’t forget your shoes, Pip,’ Annie says as they head out.
When they pull back to the farm, Pip drags Tom off to groom Luna and Annie heads inside.
She barges into the kitchen and sees her mother and Malcolm in a mess of clothes and cake batter. She spins back out onto the verandah, but she has been seen. Susan comes out a moment later, shrugging her gauzy top back on, and Malcolm leaves with a sheepish smile and a stride that looks like he wants to dance.
‘The kitchen, Mum? Really?’
‘Oh, don’t be such a fuddy-duddy,’ says Susan.
Annie leans over the railings. ‘Malcolm, though?’
Susan elbows her and Annie shifts away. She thinks of Malcolm, getting thrown off his mechanical bull. Again and again and again. Jenny reeking of Scotch and red wine and her own mother more sweetly of moscato and honey and animal dung. Len, trekking along the silent forest tracks for hours and hours at a time.
‘Malcolm gets onto his mechanical bull and gets thrown off, again and again. Did you know?’
‘Yes,’ says Susan. ‘I know. We all do things to get by.’ She smiles.
Annie pulls a face and goes outside to Tom and Pip, her feet loud on the verandah steps and loud across the gravel.
* * *
The night is cool and windy. A southerly that brings the bite of the ocean with it, although the ocean is so far away. Annie watches Tom with Pip, warmed by how quickly they fall into rhythm with each other.
‘I’m going out,’ she says and neither of them looks up from Pip’s paintings. Annie has always envied that, how easily Tom can appear utterly absorbed by even the most mundane of Pip’s projects.
Susan is outside, staring at the cypress tree, her head cocked in the same way as it is when she surveys canvases yet to be painted.
‘Mum?’
‘Don’t sneak up on an old lady! You’ll give me a heart attack!’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing. Just looking at this bloody tree.’
‘Why?’
Susan blows her green hair out of her face. ‘Because most days I can barely stand it, Annie.’ She runs a hand over the trunk, nearly taller than she is. The crickets call from under the ground and Annie puts her hands against the trunk too. Feels for a pulse that is not there.
‘I swear, if the house ever finally starts falling down, I’m going to burn the whole lot and start again.’
‘If it ever falls down?’ Annie glances over her shoulder. ‘Mum, it’s pretty much gone now.’
‘You know what I mean. If it really goes. Judy’s fellow thinks the stumps will give up soon.’
Annie snorts. ‘You’ll never burn this place down!’
‘I will too.’ Susan points at the fallen tree. ‘See?’
‘What am I looking at?’
Susan grunts and points more closely at holes she’s cut into the trunk. ‘So I can pour oil in. When the time comes. So it all goes up.’
Annie touches the holes. She sees them now. Gouged out by something sharp. It must’ve taken Susan hours and hours.
‘How’d you do them, Mum?’
‘Mum’s whittling knives! You didn’t think you’d gotten all of them, did you?’ Susan grins.
Annie sniffs. ‘They’re not really meant for this sort of gouging.’
‘Oh, Annie!’
Annie keeps touching the holes in the tree. ‘What then, though? You burn it, then what?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Susan says, like not knowing is an adventure, is something wonderful.
‘You’ll really burn it down.’
‘I’ll burn the bloody thing down.’ Susan rests her head against the wood. ‘I don’t think Mum would mind,’ she says, more quietly.
* * *
Annie drives to the Rivers’ place. The wall is sharp and strange, alone in the bare paddock. It’s quieter here.
She stings with regret. She should’ve visited Jenny more, when Jenny was still sharp and restless. Still herself. She should’ve borrowed a horse and ridden with Alex. She could’ve made the most of him, his happiness. The simplicity of everything, before.
But she didn’t. And now the place is gone, reclaimed. Just the wall, with its graffiti. Alex Rivers – MURDERING CUNT. Even in the dusk, the words are sharp. They seem to cut into Annie when she looks at them.
Annie stands near the brick wall. Touching it. Seeking a pulse, like she did on the fallen cypress, like she does to all wood. The rhythm of it. The continual, stumbling disappointment of the wood not answering. And she looks around the property and everything feels ghostly. Holding its breath in the dark. She wonders if Jenny is here, as Gladys is at the broken house. Found in the sighing of the leaves, the creak of branches, the hissing of wind around the wall.
She stares at the ground, puzzling out where she’s standing. The lounge room, she thinks. Perhaps the edge of the kitchen, where the bench was at its widest.
A moonlit shadow falls next to hers. ‘Annie.’
‘Alex! What are you doing here? Are you okay?’
‘I finished the packing,’ he says. ‘And… Mum …’
Annie sees the box, propped by the wall. Open and empty. ‘You scattered her ashes.’
‘Burn me and scatter me. They were the funeral directives.’
She leans her head against his shoulder. ‘Alex, I’m so sorry.’
Alex shakes his head and takes her hand. ‘This was where I broke my arm,’ he says. ‘Remember? Mum cut down the pittosporum herself afterwards.’
‘Yeah, I remember.’
‘And here –’
‘Alex, you don’t need to say anything.’
They walk quietly around the property, pausing where Alex had passed out from drinking and Trent had drawn rude things along his cheek. Pausing where the arena had been, the ground still sandy underfoot.
They stand where the stable aisle was and walk through the ruins of the hayshed to the back paddock, to the place where they kissed when they were fourteen. The fanning of the dress between Annie’s crossed legs. They stop walking, staring out over a strawberry farm that is no longer there.
‘I love it here,’ he says.
‘What are you going to do?’ Annie asks. For a moment she is wildly hopeful. ‘Now you’ve finished the packing and everything.’
‘I’m going to go.’ He squats down and brushes his finger through the dirt. ‘I have to.’
She wants to touch him. She wants to touch him so badly, but she doesn’t. ‘I wish you didn’t.’
He looks at her. His dark, watchful eyes and scarred throat, ravaged even in the dull slithers of moonlight. ‘I don’t want to go, Annie.’
They are quiet. The wind kicks up and Annie shivers, although it is not cold.
‘What’re you going to do?’ Alex asks quietly.
Annie sits down next to him. She wants to stay here, on this mountain. This place. But she knows Alex has to leave and it makes her desperately sad. ‘I think I’m going to stay.’ She looks out over where the strawberry field had been. She thinks of Pip, of her mother. Of the hum that courses through her life, lived alongside them on this mountain. ‘I think I have to.’
He is quiet for a while. When he speaks, his voice is very soft. ‘Things could’ve been very different, couldn’t they?’
‘Yeah, they could’ve been different.’ Annie’s fingers find his hand, still pressed against the dirt. She squeezes them and he squeezes back and they don’t say anything else.
* * *
Annie drives home slowly. The night smells a little of ash, but mostly it smells of hot eucalyptus leaves and dirt.
When she rounds the corner from the road onto the driveway, it’s to the light of a fire. The flickering warmth of it makes her stall the car. She trips on the gravel as she runs in the dark, her breath caught in her throat so heavily that she feels dizzy.
Susan is standing by a bonfire, her face pink and shiny from the heat. She’s set it in the middle of the yard, right near the pots of her dead flowers.
‘Where’d you pop off to?’ Susan asks.
‘What the hell are you doing? Are you going senile?’ Annie pulls the garden hose out from the veggie patch.
‘Don’t think so,’ says Susan. ‘But I wouldn’t know though, would I?’
Annie’s fingers brush the garden tap. They tighten against the cool metal, but she pauses. The flames shudder and flare in currents of wind that Annie can’t see or feel. Her whole body prickles with sweat, even in the cool. The dark. She lets her hand drop from the tap.
‘I haven’t been near fire since …’
Susan squeezes her arm. ‘Guess what I burnt!’
‘What did you burn, Mum?’
Susan snorts. ‘The doilies. The bloody doilies! I pulled them all down from the broken side of the house.’
‘Why?’
Susan shrugs. ‘Why not?’
Annie feels a sudden flare inside her, like the fire but brighter. Warmer. She spins away from the fire, to the place near the verandah where she’s nestled the wood she brought up from the city.
Tiny circles, around the streets and alleyways. Through the yard-sized parks. She picks up the smaller pieces of wood and throws them onto the fire. The larger pieces, Susan helps her with. Making the fire flare and crackle and brighten. Annie can almost hear it humming.
She goes to her car and pulls the picture of her, Luna and Pip out of the glove box. She stares at the three of them, against the backdrop of the mountain. She holds the photo out over the fire and watches it eddy in the heat. Then she lets go. She watches herself burn.
‘Where were you?’ Susan asks.
‘With Alex.’
Susan speaks quietly. ‘You’ve been spending a lot of time with him.’
Annie wraps her arms around herself. ‘I know.’
‘Do you know what you’re doing, Annie?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Does a pregnancy at fifteen and absolutely no romantic life since give you the expertise to meddle in my relationships?’
Susan blinks.
‘Too harsh?’
‘A bit. And don’t forget Malcolm.’
‘Sorry Mum.’ Annie feels her eyes sting with sudden tears. ‘It’s not like that. And Alex can’t stay here, even if it was.’
‘No, I don’t suppose he can.’
‘But I want to. Stay here.’
Susan’s face brightens so much that Annie feels the tears start running down her cheeks. She clears her throat. ‘I miss him. Already, I miss him. I haven’t thought about him since I was seventeen and now he’s gone and I’ll notice.’
‘Tom’s pretty special, you know,’ Susan says.
Annie wipes at her face. ‘I know.’
‘He’s good for you. And Pip.’
‘I know! It’s just … Things could’ve been so different, Mum.’
‘They still can be.’
They hear Tom’s laugh from the house and Annie sighs. ‘Not with Alex, though.’
‘No.’ Susan loops her arm around Annie. ‘Not with Alex.’
A bigger gust of wind. Annie shudders, but the fire just gutters and then straightens, almost sighing.
Susan smiles. ‘You know, that first day you came up here? I was so terrified. You asked me to look after Pip and I think most grandparents have this mantra they can chant. I did all right with Annie. But when I went to say that to myself, I couldn’t. Mum was more your mum than I ever was. And I was so scared something would happen to Pip.’ Susan wipes her nose. ‘It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But I just had this horrible feeling that without Mum here I was useless.’
‘You’re not useless, Mum,’ Annie leans her head on Susan’s shoulder. ‘You’re the least useless person I know.’
‘Liar.’
‘It’s true!’
‘And then Pip got that bee sting! And it felt like I’d let everyone down.’
‘Far out, Mum, that was weeks ago. Do you know how often she hurts herself? She split her head open chasing a moth around the garden.’
‘Oh, Annie! So much of who I am is tied up in who I was when Mum was around. And I know your bloody uncle thinks I’ve lost the plot, but I haven’t. I’m just trying to work out who I am now.’
‘I know, Mum.’ Annie frowns. ‘She punished you a lot for having me, didn’t she?’
‘She never really stopped.’ Susan meets Annie’s eye and half smiles. ‘Which is funny really. She should have spent every one of her days thanking me. You were the most wonderful thing in her life, Annie. And she spent three decades punishing me for having you.’
* * *
Later, Pip comes dancing out of the house to check on the fire. ‘Mum?’
‘Where’s your dad?’ Annie asks.
‘He’s sleeping. What’re you doing?’
‘We’re burning things we don’t need any more,’ Susan says. ‘Want to burn something, darling?’
‘Mum, I don’t think –’
‘Something I don’t need?’ Pip says.
Susan nods and Pip runs inside at high speed. Annie groans. ‘It’s too late, Mum.’
Susan makes no sign she’s heard Annie. She’s still throwing the doilies in. One at a time. One after the other, so the ebb and flow of the flames becomes something almost tidal.
Pip comes out with the packet of pull-ups and throws them onto the fire from a run. Annie grabs the collar of her pyjamas and Pip coughs and glares. ‘Mum!’
They step back, watching the fire flare. Pip stares down at her green scarf, tied around her waist.
She unties it and stares at it in her fingers. How stained and warped it’s become, ripped in places and smelling of dirt and rot. Pip throws it in and immediately she gasps and reaches towards it.
‘No, Pip,’ Annie says, too sharply. Pip folds into her and howls.
‘Oh, I know that feeling,’ Susan murmurs from across the fire. She sits down. ‘You let it out, darling. You cry.’
The fire gutters and flares and inside Tom sleeps on, sprawled awkwardly on the couch. Later, Annie goes inside and puts a light blanket on him and runs a finger across his face, his neck.
His eyes flicker open at the sound of Susan and Pip’s voices, raised in the middle of a familiar story about Luna and the bush. He smiles groggily at the sound of Pip’s laughter.
‘She really doesn’t need a grandfather, does she?’ he says, his voice gritty with sleep. His eyes close again and he sleeps on, his mouth slightly open, his eyebrows drawn into a light frown. Annie sits for a moment, watching him, and then goes back outside, to Pip, to Susan. She lies down next to the guttering fire. She has the carving of Luna in her hands. She runs her fingertips over it, marvelling at how alive it feels. How it is alive in the way a swimmer is, holding her breath under water.
* * *
Annie wakes to a mild, early morning sky and thinks for a moment that she’s sleepwalked. Then she remembers that her drawings are maps and feels Pip curled hard into her side. Susan is as serene in sleep across the other side of the steaming fire as she would be in a comfortable bed.
Trent pulls up and Annie pushes herself up into sitting, her legs scaled with mosquito bites and soot.
‘What’s up?’ she says as Trent wrestles Max out of his car seat and sets him loose. Pip, woken by the sound of tyres on gravel, runs over to him and whispers things into his ear that make him shriek with giggles.
Trent sits down next to her. ‘Alex is gone.’
‘Are you surprised, though? Really? You want a cuppa?’
Trent sits down on the verandah, watching Max, while Annie fills the kettle and sets it to boil. ‘He scattered his mum last night. I went out there. He said he was leaving, Trent.’
‘But he didn’t say where or anything?’
Annie shrugs. ‘I’m too old to sleep outside.’
‘Your mum looks comfy enough.’
‘Yes, but she’s Mum.’ Annie bats at her legs. ‘Hang on, I just need some Stingose.’
In the kitchen, Annie sprays her legs and sighs. Tom blinks awake on the couch. He smiles at Annie and stretches.
‘How’d you sleep?’ Annie asks.
‘Okay. What about you?’
‘Fine, fine.’
Tom stands up and sees Trent out on the verandah. ‘I’m Tom! You must be Alex.’ Tom holds his hand out. Trent frowns and shakes it. ‘I’m Trent. We’re not sure where Alex is, actually.’
Annie sighs. ‘He’s gone, Trent! He’s okay.’
Trent just shakes his head.
* * *
Annie takes Luna out onto the trails and Trent leaves Max with Susan and Tom, driving slowly down the roads where others may not have thought to look.
Annie does it for Trent. The looking. She supposes she would have wanted to look, too, if she hadn’t seen him last night. Annie rides slowly, but she knows it’s pointless. The shrubbery is so thick that she could ride right past him without noticing, if he didn’t want to be seen.
They meet back at the house. Susan has her reading glasses on and is sorting through paperwork, the phone by her hand.
‘Mum?’ Annie says. ‘Watcha doing?’
‘Just sorting out a few things.’
‘What things?’
Susan frowns. ‘Just things! The insurance and things.’
‘You called the insurance company?’
‘Why are you looking at me like that? I’ve known it has to be done! I’ve just been busy! I’m a busy woman! Stop looking at me like that!’
Annie turns her head to hide her grin.
Trent paces the verandah while Max plays with Pip. He rubs his mouth with his hand. ‘I don’t know what to do for him, Annie,’ he says, barely whispering.
Annie leans her head on his shoulder. ‘We’ve got to let him go,’ she says.
* * *
Later, on dusk, Annie sits down on the edge of the dam. The mosquitoes are out but she doesn’t care. Tom sits down next to her and grabs her hand. She wants to squeeze his fingers, how solid they feel. But all she can think of is holding Alex’s hand, walking through the dark ruins of his home.
Alex is gone, though. She has let him go. And she squeezes Tom’s fingers with her own and he squeezes back.
She waits and he is quiet and it’s like they’re pretending to be asleep, sitting by the dam, staring at the trees.
Tom clears his throat. ‘I’m so sorry, Annie.’
She turns to look at him, his clenched jaw, the fanning of smile lines around his eyes. He is kind, even now. And she squeezes his fingers, harder this time.
She wants things to be the same, but they’re not.
She wonders whether Alex will go back to the city, or whether he will grab what he needs and run. Until he is somewhere where the sun is different. Softer, maybe. Where there are no bushfires. Floods, maybe. Earthquakes. Annie has learnt that there is always something.
But Alex is gone. And Tom is here. Tom is here. His warmth, the gentleness of him. The slow, methodical letter-writing when he’s upset. His self-possession. He’s here. Touching her.
‘I want to stay here,’ Annie says. ‘And … I just wanted you to know. ’
Tom’s face flickers. It hardens. ‘Okay.’
‘Tom?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I want you here with us.’
‘You do?’
‘I do.’
He doesn’t say anything. He presses his lips hard against hers. His hands, across her face, her throat, her back. She draws Tom hard against her. They are hidden from the house, on the dry bank of the dam. And she pulls at him urgently. She gasps. It’s fast and sharp and her fingers dig into the caked earth. How much she has missed this.
Then Tom catches his breath and presses his lips to her forehead. ‘I love you, Annie.’