Beth

I draw my doona to my chin and sniff the dawn air. Geosmin – that cunning compound which tells us rain is close. I am a chemical being and yet for years I denied it, despite being born on the land. As a kid I knew, as we all do, that scent is a spur to memory and a mapping of the perils of the world. Then the city and forgetting: the discharged carbon of bushfire or the ozone that precedes lightning overridden by other portents. Gas leak. Rival colognes at a crowded party. The mortal stink of exhausts. I prefer this earth-laden smell to which we are highly tuned. Five parts to the trillion! Water is so basic to survival we remember it in every cell and – despite all our efforts to ‘civilise’ ourselves – continue to be as instinctive as tiny organisms in the soil.

We are born and remain terraphiles.

And yet, we are not reconciled. Maybe the problem is grounded in prepositions. We live off not of the land. On not with. A woman could lose her mind over such things. Give her best years. But what greater task? To find a way of reunifying with that from which we draw life.

I roll over onto my back and try to calm my mind. It’s the dawn hour that makes me like this, one day done, the next soon to announce itself. It’s when the boundaries between human and non are most blurred, and the nostalgia for the place of my birth – to where I have returned – becomes stronger than my presence here.

Maybe one more hour of sleep.

But there it is, the first bird, letting the world know it survived until dawn.

Last night I could’ve sworn I heard a bush stone-curlew cry, though it’s been years since one’s been sighted around here. They lay their eggs in the open grasses of the plains, long since uprooted for cash crops, and the foxes have a taste for their progeny, so what was once common is becoming legend. Some say their call is the cry of a woman being murdered or the wail of a child lost in the bush. But both those stories have a long and fraught history in this place, particularly the latter.

Maybe it was the girl.

I sit up and rest my back against the sleigh bedhead, the only piece of furniture I brought back with me from the city. When I moved into the master bedroom, I threw out my parents’ old queen, the stains on its slumped mattress like an antique map – evidence of my father’s inability to control his body towards the end and the unchartered territory he was entering. Over the last five years I’ve got used to waking to an empty house, but this morning another inhabits this place. Between sleep and a fresh start, maybe she’s found her words.

The floorboards are cold in the hallway, the door to my old room still closed. I knock, the space become strangely hers overnight, the only answer the lifting of loose eaves on the western corner of the house. As I enter, there’s a flash of movement, but it’s just the door and my striped bathrobe reflected in the mirror on the dresser. I turn towards the bed. The doona has spilled onto the floor, my old sweatshirt lying beside it, pale blue and bereft of form.

A nub forms at the base of my throat.

The girl’s not here. No sign that she ever was, apart from a dark hair on the pillow and a small dent in the mattress the shape of a knee.

I touch the bottom sheet. It’s already cold.

In the hallway, shadows mock, the bathroom and my studio both empty. Kitchen. Lounge room. Laundry. The girl is nowhere. Not crouching beneath the table, my preferred refuge from the prevailing winds of my parents’ grief.

I snatch the crocheted blanket from the lounge-room couch, wrap it around myself and run outside. The driveway is the same double-rutted track it’s always been. She’s not standing at the open gate, holding up the chain and shaking her head at me. How often as a kid was I drilled about keeping gates closed? But that’s not my way.

I return to the verandah and slump onto the top step. Clinging to a fencepost, a wattlebird raises its beak and squawks at my negligence. Once, in a rare moment of frankness, my mother told me I nurtured plants because I didn’t have it in me to nurture a child. My father was dying by then and she was exhausted, surly from a day of wiping the stink of chemo from his body, so I dismissed the criticism as a fragile bid for grandchildren in the face of death. Maybe she was right, though for the wrong reasons. Any instinct for nurturing I was born with, or had cultivated over the years, had found its focus in plants. Because didn’t this caretaking ensure the possibility of new life – of all children? Not just your own.

Either way, the girl is gone.

I pull the blanket tighter, the holes in the crochet letting in the wind. I’ve grown accustomed to living by myself, even loving the space it allows for attention and the relief it provides from the relentless human desire to fit in. And less and less, with my immersion in the plant world, do I feel alone. But the sudden appearance of the girl has unsettled me. She didn’t speak, yet there were stirrings, reminiscent of the faint creak of a joint still recovering from injury or the murmuring of a tree just before the onset of the wind. Sounds you can’t put a name to. Sounds that hint at better things.

Or maybe it was nothing at all. Merely the imaginings of a mind hyperfocused by isolation.

Behind me, a slow exhale.

I get up quietly. The sound is coming from the old green couch. The girl is curled up like a frond, hands folded under her chin, fast asleep. She’s wearing the clothes she arrived in – man’s shirt, cut-off jeans – as if she meant to leave. And yet, here she is still.

She stirs, a hand shooting out to scratch her nose. Her eyelids flicker, but she doesn’t wake. As I step away, my foot knocks against something and sends it bumping across the greyed boards. I retrieve it, a stone about the size of a softball that sits neatly in my palm. Others lie at the foot of the couch, at least a dozen of them, all a similar dimension. She must’ve gathered them in the night, laid them here while she waited for sleep to come. They seem arranged, though I can’t work out the pattern. Some kind of game.

I place the stone beside the rest.

The girl rolls over, her toes furling against the morning chill. I reach down and lay the blanket over her, tuck it under her bare feet, a nick in the left heel. In sleep, without the intensity of that gaze, she seems more solitary. A creature briefly lent. I go to stroke her cheek but stop my hand before it makes contact.

The wattlebird takes off from the fencepost and flies to the edge of the verandah. It fixes me with its round-eyed gaze and I wonder, not for the first time, if birds might read emotions as they do Earth’s magnetic field. I go to promise it things I’m not sure I can deliver. Then a question crystallises, surprises me, lover of solitude that I am. One repeated by every child who ever found a stray.

‘Can I keep her?’ I ask the wattlebird.

The girl wipes dust from the corners of her eyes. The table is as laden as I can manage, given I haven’t been to town for a while. Lucky Nate said he’d drop some supplies off before starting work this morning. I do the talking, check her face for a flicker of a response. She picks up a knife, which she turns over and scrutinises before using it to cut off a thick slab of butter that she slathers on a slice of toast.

‘My father wasn’t much of a talker,’ I say, serving myself a fried egg. ‘Nothing wrong with silence, depending on its cause. A lot of the world’s great thinkers have given it a go. Allows everything else in. The Desert Mothers rarely spoke. Maybe you’ve heard about them. They lived in the Egyptian desert a long time ago, in small communities or as hermits in caves. Did things their own way, without need of men.’

The girl pauses before biting into the toast. A dollop of butter drops onto her shirt. ‘They sometimes dressed as men so they wouldn’t be mistaken for demons out to tempt the monks. Didn’t always end well, though. Some were martyred, as in murdered …’

The irony of babbling on such a topic shuts me up. That, and the ease with which I slipped into dark territory, given what she might’ve been through. I toy with the egg, the eeriness of her silence dampening my appetite. When my brother died, my parents chose silence in response to grief. Maybe they found the Wimmera sky too expansive to risk any show of mourning out in the open. I followed their lead on that, but also found other ways. Most nights I’d sit under the dining table, comforted by its measurable space. And, from there, I’d watch the police procedurals my father enjoyed after a hard day’s work, notching each television fatality into the dark wood of one of the table legs with my penknife – vertical for accidental death, horizontal for foul play. I run my hand down the closest leg, but find nothing. Those notches must still be here somewhere. A testament to my childhood instinct – archiving as a way to mitigate loss.

I look up to see her studying me, her shoulders tracking my every movement as if she must ready her body for the unexpected. Instinctively, I reach across the table to reassure her and my fingers connect with hers. She pulls back, her elbow knocking the cup of green tea I poured for her, its arc slow and somehow graceful before it crashes onto the wooden floor. The girl leaps away from the table. Trembling, she stares at the broken pieces.

I hold up my hands. ‘No harm done. It’s only an old cup.’

She falls to her knees and begins to gather the pieces, sweeping the sharp fragments with the side of her hand.

‘Careful, now,’ I say, but don’t try to stop her. She crossed the desert barefoot.

I grab some old newspaper from the box by the fireplace and spread it under her hands. She drops the pieces onto it, her hair smelling of lanolin, of ready-to-be-shorn sheep. She looks up. A shard has embedded itself in the heel of her palm.

‘That must hurt.’

I reach out more slowly this time. She doesn’t flinch as I take hold of her hand, its smallness disconcerting, her breath precise. I pinch the offending sliver of porcelain between my nails and draw it out, blood oozing from the narrow cut. She pulls her hand away and licks it, her tongue bright pink though a little swollen, probably from dehydration. She pinches the ruptured skin, her eyes flicking between the wound and me. Feels like some form of communication is setting itself in place.

As I get up, the box of seed sachets on the table gives me an idea.

I go to the bookshelf at the far end of the lounge room and rifle through the books for the one I need. It must be here somewhere, among my father’s Zane Greys and my mother’s historical novels, and all the old favourites I brought back from the city or purchased in my teenage years with earnings from my first job at the Gachie milk bar. I find what I’m looking for on the bottom shelf, mixed in with the picture books my brother and I had as kids. Emu Stew. On the front cover, a magpie in a bowler hat announces in a speech bubble, An illustrated collection of stories and poems for children.

As I flick through the pages to the right one, drawings I know by heart come to life. What I always loved about this book is that it spoke of grass plains and upside-down rivers, of bunyips and bushfires and marsupials, and the wind as thief: all the life and land I’d grown up with and the depths I imagined they contained. There were even stories about Aboriginal people, the only ones in any of the books we owned, though my mother skipped them when she read to us because they included words she struggled to pronounce.

I carry it over to the table, my finger marking the page.

‘This was a favourite of mine when I was about your age,’ I say to the girl.

I sit beside her and tilt the book so she can see the illustration of a rock-strewn plain. Faces are drawn onto the stalks and leaves of the few plants that have sprouted from cracks, some of them still emerging headfirst, like babies from a womb. On the left side of the page is a poem, the desert blurred behind it.

‘It’s called “Song of the Seeds”.’ I run my finger under each word as I read it to her, like my mother used to. ‘For years we lie under hot-white sky / When the waterholes are dry / Under the sheltering sand till / Rain shall cry.’

She moves closer in the tiniest of increments. She responds equally to the sentences as to the drawings, as if the words are pictorial, like they are in languages where a character is a mountain or a river or love.

‘Come from the desert you …’ My finger pauses on the line. I’d forgotten how the last sentence ends. The girl turns her face towards me, expectant. ‘Who are too strong to die.’

She places a hand on the page and presses down on it. Her nails are ragged around the edges, from digging, or from clawing away at something.

‘Desert,’ I say, the only possible refrain.

She nods and looks towards the kitchen window, in the direction from where she arrived, clouds moving as a single body across the morning sky.

So we begin to understand each other.

This is all we need.