Neme

I make us peppermint tea, let it waft up my nostrils and tingle the hairs. It smells like the gin Beth drinks but won’t let me taste. She’s in the laundry, washing our things, some that belonged to her when she was my size, before she went away and came back and started her experiment. The one about living a different way. She told me all about it. How a possum is good company when the answers keep you awake at night, and a seed is a promise you must always keep.

Maybe that’s why she let me stay.

I take my tea into the studio, the paintings spread on the floor like an unfinished quilt. I love to come in here, listen to the chatter of the desert offerings, and think about all the places Beth’s been. The ones you can visit, the ones you can’t, even if you lie facedown on them. Think about a place where a seed is a possum is a girl.

Tonight we’re going to sleep in the desert, the two of us. I can’t wait. It was Beth’s idea. Too much going on in Gatyekarr, she said, and bit a chunk of skin off her bottom lip and swallowed it, which always makes me shiver.

Down by the letterbox, the squeal of brakes and that rat-tat I know. I run outside. Nate bumps along the driveway into the shadow of the sugar gums, the scraggly ones that grew in mallee form, even though Beth said they usually don’t.

Nate gets out and unloads a rolled-up swag.

‘Hey, Neme,’ he says and waves.

‘Hey,’ I say back.

Nate smiles to himself and comes over, dumps the swag on the verandah, sending up a whirligig of dust. Beth joins us, a wallowa pod carried in her hair.

‘So what happened after we left?’ she asks.

‘It was crazy,’ says Nate. ‘Jake tried to get Jamie to play some music, so they could just get on with the festival, but then people started turning up for the speeches and things got pretty heated. Amy dropped a glass and everyone jumped like a gun had gone off.’

I imagine them, tall men, old men, ladies in costumes, kids wondering why all the adults were being so weird, the white fox with his sharp teeth, broken glass and all the other things about to break and be remade.

Nate picks at a whisker in his chin. He’s talking about the river lady, Maggie, the one who loves a dead poet, how she called what happened the white mallee murders, the coughs and murmurs that followed, and people who walked out. A man who splashed his beer and shouted, They’ll be coming for our land next.

Owen Ryder said the same thing, the words hot on my face like they’d come from deep inside his lungs. From the same place that caused that burn.

I look at the wall to the house. In there is where the possum lives. You can hear him wriggling if you put your cheek against the plaster, searching for a comfortable space even if his night is other people’s day. I could go there now, but Nate’s watching me that way he does – not Lil, but a little bit, like every time you hear a butcherbird you think it’s the same one.

‘Then Maggie said we’d all be better off focusing on what kind of people we want to be remembered as, and just in case anybody missed her point, she grabbed one of the festival flyers and held it up. Jake looked like he’d seen a ghost.’

‘Maybe he thought he had,’ I say, leaning against the possum wall.

Beth and Nate nod in time.

Pearl believed I was a ghost girl, returned from the desert. The girl who survived that terrible day. Pearl had things upside down, like so many stories of this place. When Sal visited here, I heard her telling Beth there are things people don’t want known, and about the hurting. I’ve been thinking about all that. Pearl in that shrinking room. Sal’s face when we put the box of after-facts on her couch. Little Mia asking, What’s inside, Nanna, what’s inside. What Beth said afterwards about violence, against people, against the land. And how this is just one town. One stone in an arrangement not yet solved.

Nate stretches his arms above his head. ‘I need to get back to the pub, but I’ll see you both soon.’

I follow him to his truck, dented as an old can.

‘Look what hitched a ride,’ he says.

He picks some seeds off his shirt and holds them out to me. I stroke their fluffy heads, careful not to damage the bit the wind uses to carry them where they need to go, as I watch Nate drive away.

The desert rushes through my window, honey-myrtle sweet as cake, the freshness of cypress-pine, all the wildflowers gone spring crazy, the wrens carving air paths through the heath. We hit a hole, we jostle, the two of us, the sun landing on our shoulders, on a family of bulokes whispering to each other as their needles sift the breeze.

‘Wind harps of the Wimmera,’ says Beth. ‘They know the music of this land.’

I passed by this place. Not far from here I made a campfire beside ripe muntries, three duck eggs in my tied-up bag. I was sad about the babies who would never get to fly, but that night I didn’t go hungry for once.

‘This is it,’ I tell her.

‘Looks like a good spot.’

Beth parks us under a red mallee, bark like bandages hung out to dry. I kick off my sneakers, my feet remembering the friendship of sand. It’s darker underneath the mallee, the light grabbed by the leaves because the day is almost finished and everything needs to eat. Beth unloads food from the ute, potatoes in foil, marshmallows, while I arrange the swags around coals from an old fire. No dead branches above, only a honeyeater more trusting than the rest.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ I tell her.

Beth opens her mouth, closes it. She’s still careful around me, protective, like the husk of a seed.

‘I won’t go far.’

‘Sure. I’ll get dinner ready while you’re gone,’ she says and hugs the pillow in her arms.

I run through scratchy branches and shadows till I reach a clearing, far enough that I can’t hear her, close enough that we keep our promise. Here the ground is covered in tiny sundews, their sticky hairs ready to trap insects and turn them to mush. I step over them, no need to damage, find some sticky sword-sedge in a chunk of light.

With both hands, I tug on one of the clumps. It comes out and I fall back on the sand, sink into it, feel its warmth through my T-shirt and along my back. Beth told me a story once about a lunette. It’s a place she went when she was little, out the back of the old machinery shed. She’d lie down in it and snuggle into the warm sand. To know that she wasn’t alone. To feel held.

I suck the sweet end of the sedge leaves. Feel the breeze on my face. My small share of sun. All the hums and crunches and swishes. Seeds opening. Pollen released. Sometimes I miss my time in the desert. Never what made me run.

I remember that day so clearly. Before I walked out. Before Beth. Before the red-rumped parrots led me to water, and the papa emu with his chicks.

I’m running, my bag clutched in my fist. Running as fast as my bare feet will carry me, so many points and spikes biting into my skin. My breath is coming in bursts, from the pain in my lungs and what I’ve left behind. Not once do I look back. Running so fast I don’t see the yellow-gum root hidden in the grass. I trip over it and fly through the air, land so hard my shoulder will have a nasty bruise for days after that. But I’m up again, moving faster now, cheered on by the wind and a butcherbird. They’ve seen it all before.

Running, water streaming from my eyes, water I know I can’t afford to lose. In my bag are the things I collected when I knew this day would come. A pop-top bottle of water. My favourite knife. Resin for glue. The map I copied. The box of matches still full. I know the desert, but it’s a tough friend. The butcherbird stays with me till the end of his territory. Gasping, I go to thank him, but my words are no longer there.

Where did they go? Will I have any use for them from now on?

Running, running, sure that I’m done with humans, too cruel, too cruel. That I’ll need to make a new home in the desert with the wind and the birds and all the plants.

Running, into the warm grasp of the descending sun.

I bring back dead grasses, so dry it seems the light will set them on fire when I hold them up to the last rays. Beth humming, as she does in the potting shed, when all the new plants lean into her.

‘I’ll make the fire,’ I tell her.

‘I bet you will.’

She laughs, the sound like a bird hurtling into the sky.

The horizon swallows the sun. Beth comes over and joins me on the ground.

And we listen.

To the wind strumming the tops of the trees. To the birds as they settle for the night. Soon they’ll be replaced by the next shift, then morning and the rowdy chorus. Once I heard the curlew at dawn. It sounded like an injured child. The sky was a soothing pink but still my chest ached a little, for me, for the bird.

I strike the match against the box, the flame a hunger in Beth’s eyes. Dry grass flares. The stringybark lets go of its oils. It all sounds like talking, like memories. Spat. Hissed. Sighed. She doesn’t ask, not out loud, but I speak the words she’s been waiting to hear.

‘I’m ready, Beth.’

‘Ready for what? Oh, I see.’ She pushes back her hair, always messy with seeds. ‘I’m here, Neme. Whatever you need.’

We gather, unharmed by the fire. And I tell her the story, the one of my small life. Things that were done to me, things that sound wrong as I speak them, happening to someone else. Why I ran that day with only my tied-up bag. What it was like to enter the desert alone, even though I knew it, and then to leave it behind. And that there are questions I still have no answers for. Why silence both protects and hurts. How a person can love and destroy the same thing.

And the birds tell their version, while the sun slices itself on the leaves and turns them to glass. I could’ve shattered, putting words to my story, but now I won’t, because we are like a tree when it grows in mallee form.

Many trunks instead of one.