Unbroken Blue

unbroken blue

JAN BORRIE

Pandanus Online Publications, found at the Pandanus Books web site, presents additional material relating to this book. www.pandanusbooks.com.au

Unbroken Blue

Unbroken Blue

JAN BORRIE

PANDANUS BOOKS Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Cover: photograph by Darren Boyd © Jan Borrie 2005 This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Typeset in Garamond and printed by Pirion, Canberra National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Borrie, Jan, 1973– . Unbroken blue. ISBN 1 74076 129 4. I. Title. A823.3

Editorial inquiries please contact Pandanus Books on 02 6125 4910 www.pandanusbooks.com.au Published by Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia A Sullivan’s Creek Publication Pandanus Books are distributed by UNIREPS, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052 Telephone 02 9664 0999 Fax 02 9664 5420 Publisher’s Editor: Julie Stokes Production: Ian Templeman, Duncan Beard, Emily Brissenden

Acknowledgements Thanks to Ian Templeman for encouragement and support, and to Duncan Beard for helpful suggestions.

Jan Borrie

The first wish I ever formed was to wander. — John Nicol

When the winter was over she returned there to find him and her memories filled her with light She remembered the beauty she remembered desires and her memories filled her with light — The Tea Party, ‘Sister Awake’

She is close

Sometimes she seems so close we think we have found her. The flash of her movement at the edge of our vision, impossibly quick, fading before the image has registered. Annabella recognises her in the warm scent of pine needles in the sun. The pines lie beyond the house, but the breeze persuades their perfume inside. Madeline says if she closes her eyes and breathes deeply, she could be beside her. Beside who? Beside Eva. Eva Angelica. (Eva the angel, Madeline says.) Eva Angelica, who tended the garden in the shade of the pine trees, who carried Annabella for nine months, who named her, who placed her beside her aunt in the still-warm sheets and disappeared. ‘Without trace,’ the memory voices say in private — whispers just between us. Annabella has been searching and she knows she is close.

Annabella escapes feet first

Annabella tried to escape from her womb feet first. She waited until the first hours beyond midnight, until the midwinter night outside was at its darkest, coldest point, full of curious watching shadows, held at bay by bright fluorescent light. Eva, her mother, turned pale and flushed red alternately, and groaned and screamed too at the height of her pain. Then she cried and let go of Annabella, too weak to hold on to her. Annabella tried to be born feet first and she did not cry. She remained silent, gasping so quietly for air that, at first, it seemed she was not breathing at all. She arrived silently in a small town struggling to rise out of a fogfilled valley on to the icy sides of the surrounding hills. No one walked out to the metal council signs beside the highway to correct the population figure on her arrival. The signs read the same: ‘Elevation: 780m’ and ‘Population: 1,800’. They recorded neither her birth when she was taken from her mother’s weakened body, nor her passing when she was taken from the town.

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Annabella was born in the foothills of the mountains and they were what she saw the first time she opened her remembering eyes. A junction in the road: one way straight ahead, one way trailing off to the right — both led to the mountains. The mountains were white-topped figures in the distance, beyond rolling hills of grass and intersecting lines of trees. The second time she opened her eyes, they were moving through a narrow valley, sharp ridges of granite on each side, a river of dark still water below them. She closed them again and she was home, in bed in her room listening to the whisper of the evening air through the pine trees and the tired whine of the clothesline spinning empty. She could not see the mountains from her home, from anywhere in the town. The town had views to the ring of hills that surrounded it and to the roads that led out of it. Annabella saw lines of cars come and go and wondered what all the movement was for. From her bedroom window she could see the clothesline, the vegetable garden, the swing set and the forest of pine that bordered her view. If she opened her remembering eyes again, she saw the sunshine like drill-holes of light boring down between the pine trunks, between the liquidamber and the oaks, spotlighting circles of needle mats and the carpet of yellow and red leaves. The sun moved overhead and the pools of light shifted, lengthened, disappeared. At night, strange figures ran between the black trunks of the trees; the flare of car headlights startled them into the shadows.

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Annabella’s father disappeared in a forest of flame. Pine trees and wattles and snow gums hungrily consumed by the monster mouths of fire — orange grinning faces and sharp white fingers ripping the forest apart, shredding the ridges into bleeding wounds of light. It looked beautiful for a moment, from a distance, from the safety of the town. But Annabella’s father, Benecio, was out there in the darkness and he never came home. They brought her mother his hard hat and a letter from the State Premier and people stopped her mother in the street and looked at Annabella and whispered. When Annabella opened her remembering eyes, her father signalled from behind a pine trunk and beckoned her outside. If she closed her eyes, the house was quiet except for the sound of her mother weeping — white noise like the ticking of a clock.

Thoughts keep repeating

Eva was born and her first view, if she could remember it, was a carousel of faces before her under the blinding glare of the bright hospital lights. Eva has been here before. She watches events and feels like nodding, ‘Yes, I knew that would happen.’ Nothing surprises her. She experiences the world and her life within it with the feeling of someone watching a film they haven’t seen for years, fragments forgotten until they are replayed. Eva is a light sleeper. She wakes before the stars have been washed away by the slow melt of the sun. She is always anxious for the day to begin. It seems to race away from her so fast; she wakes every morning and wonders whether she will have time to fit everything in. ‘You must have worms, child,’ Angeline says. But Eva has a clock inside her head, ticking over, marking off the loose minutes in which she has done nothing, and she is afraid of what will happen if she lets too much time pass in this way.

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Eva writes letters to imaginary friends on this topic, but as the words form on the paper, she feels yet again that she has seen them before. No moment is new. Her thoughts keep repeating. Eva has seven sisters, all born before her. They treat her mostly with disinterest or perhaps they have not noticed her at all. She could understand that. Eight girls must be hard to keep track of, so Eva politely stays out of their way. She writes letters, leads discussions with the air of her room or with objects in the garden and, at night, she curls up in bed and retreats into the privacy of her thoughts, where the complaints and teasing of her sisters cannot penetrate. At night the air outside sounds like a factory. Water drips and gurgles in the downpipes and gutters, rusted and leaking, forming a motley chorus like the working of a machine — wheels, pistons and other important mechanisms rolling and shuddering and clanking their incessant rhythms. An industrial music that labours through the night. The military helicopters circle above in the darkness — or, at least, the sound of them circles. It is a difficult noise to find words to describe; not comforting or companionable like the horns and rhythmic rumbling of the trains making their way west, the anguished cries of curlews, the clucking of geckoes or the clatter of palm fronds in the breeze. The helicopters sound invasive, sinister, alien beside the other restless night sounds. But she gets used to them; sometimes she doesn’t notice them at all.

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Sometimes a fighter jet blasts over the town in the early hours of the morning, tearing her from sleep, the windows rattling, the sleeping night wrenched open as the cold, sleek jet rips apart the air. Eva waits for them to fall from the sky. She doesn’t trust flight. She is sure she will die when something falls from a great height and lands on top of her. She likes to watch the yellow moon rise through the damp hazy sky. She suffers lunar pull or moon-strike or something — wants to venture into the night and watch the moon’s progress through the sky, walk through its false daylight, watch the sleeping world coated in its strange silver-blue frosting. She feels unusual when it hovers swollen and bright above the horizon; everything around her looks different. She feels empty when she wakes in the night and the moon has set, returning her room to its normal darkness. She has been left behind, something important has happened and she failed to take a great enough part in it. She experiences this a lot. The world — life — seems to circle her. Conversations, people, events pass by without touching her. Does anyone notice her moving through the crowd? She watches, listens, takes everything in, just in case one day she becomes part of it.

Eva doesn’t belong here

Eva found it much easier to leave home than she imagined it would be when she was gathering the courage to do it. She was not even tempted to pause on the top of the ridge to take a last look back at the city sprawled across the plain between the half-dome of Mount Stuart and the bay. The distance slipped behind her as she travelled south. She felt no regret or homesickness or fear, so she worried that she might not be moving at all. She did not think of what was behind her, concerned only with what lay ahead. She looked at her map of Queensland and saw herself running off the bottom of it. She did not stop long enough to see anything of the towns that for so long had been only names on a map, sunny postcards or tourist brochures. She felt, as usual, that she had seen them before. She pushed forward, anxious to arrive at some unseen destination, sure it lay far to the south of any of these places, surer still she would know in an instant when she had found it.

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She travelled when she should have been resting, and when she rested her stomach knotted, sick with impatience, with the certainty that she was losing time, losing ground, that somehow her destination might disappear if she did not reach it in time. When she did stop, when she took a moment to look around her, she could only wonder if she might have passed through some place better, if her true destination lay on the swallowed road behind her. The longer she stayed, the more beautiful each town she had passed through appeared in her memory, the more idyllic it seemed than the place she was now in. ——— Benecio entered Eva’s view for the first time on a day when the heat from the road and the surrounding summer-seared fields blistered wounds in the air and the sky. Eva was waiting on the roadside under the shade of a line of peppermint gums, drinking iced water and shielding her eyes from the glare. Benecio emerged as a blur, a globule of mercury, an indefinable shadow bouncing weightless in the silvery haze, refusing to take shape until he was almost upon her. Eva could not suppress a short gasp of shock when this spectre suddenly became human. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting.

Benecio is born on the roadside

Benecio was born under the awning of a dairy among the fecund odours of fresh manure, sour milk and rotting grass. Melinda was oblivious to the smell and named the baby Benecio after a character in a foreign film she had once seen but could now barely recall. She remembered the name; however, she didn’t know what it might mean in whatever language it came from or exactly how it should be pronounced. Benecio was determined not to wait the extra half-hour it would have taken Joshua, his father, to drive the rest of the way to the hospital. Joshua found Marshall’s dairy by the roadside with his headlights while Melinda cursed and told him to pull over that very instant before his first-born suffered the indignity of being born into the foot-well of a truck. Melinda later claimed some kind of divine intervention had brought Benecio into the world just at that moment. There was no manger, no wise men; Benecio was born on to a fertiliser bag before Esther Marshall — roused by Melinda’s screaming and the unhealthy idle of the truck’s engine — arrived with a blanket and a half-empty bottle of sherry.

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Benecio was born between two places and never felt completely at home anywhere. He was born on the roadside and the umbilical cord that had held him to his mother was quickly severed and somehow attached instead to the endless roll of road. He would never be happy until he had explored all possibilities, reached every possible destination. Benecio began travelling before he could talk, according to his mother, who frequently had to search for her child in the long grass of the paddocks surrounding the house. He crawled, stumbled, walked, then ran across the fields in search of something never found or even glimpsed, but something that drew him away from whatever was familiar. Melinda tied a cow-bell to the waistband of Benecio’s trousers until he was too old to be kept under constant surveillance. She began to accept that he would not always be present at meals and she dealt patiently with the increasingly frequent letters from his school complaining about his absences. Melinda had very early, and however reluctantly, realised Benecio would not be with her for very long. But when he wandered from the house for the last time, Melinda experienced a shocking pain like a blow to the chest, like a great winding of air from her lungs. Benecio felt nothing: no loss, no sorrow, no excitement. He was drawn by the road pulling at that part of him where once only his mother had kept hold.

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Benecio passed the place of his birth as he left his home and his family behind. The dairy building retained no evidence of his ever having been there — no marks or signs to recall such a momentous event. Only the smell remained the same: that mixture of fresh manure, sour milk and rotting grass — an earthy odour that filled him with an emotion he could not accurately name. Benecio tried to find something to connect him with the narrow rectangle of concrete under the awning of the dairy. This was the exact place where he entered the world and he wanted to see or feel something particular as he passed this way for what he knew would be the last time. But nothing remained. Perhaps his parents’ story of that night was only a fairytale to lull him to sleep or to explain his wandering spirit. So he passed slowly but did not break from his determination to follow wherever that stretch of road led.

The first view

This is what Annabella remembers: a small room, thick red curtains, voices and faces beyond reach, slipping in and out of focus, in and out of view. She remembers the curtains frame green: summer-green lawn; deep glossy green of pine trees, needles humming, murmuring, whispering, sighing on the air, with the air, through the air. Rustling yellow-green of pampas grass. Clothesline, wire strung like cobweb, spinning empty in the wind. The small window also frames a sky of unbroken blue, but there are holes where the memories should be.

The woman with silver hair

Annabella’s second life begins soon after the fire that devoured her father and made her mother disappear. Her second mother has silver hair bundled tightly on her head, stray strands as thin as spider-web float about her face, float — almost invisible until they catch the light — from her brush when she stands before the bathroom mirror each morning. The woman’s head is made of silver and she drops pieces of it about the house. The father has one thumb. One thumb and one thumb missing. Sometimes Annabella doesn’t even notice it, sometimes it seems quite normal. At other times, his hands look lopsided, unfinished. Elizabeth, the woman, says the man lost his thumb at work, in an accident, but she doesn’t say how. Annabella doesn’t understand, but that’s normal. There is a lot Elizabeth won’t explain to her. She watches the man eat. He’s used to it now, holding his fork with his fingers. When he’s not looking, Annabella tries to eat without

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using her thumbs, but she can’t do it. Peas and fragments of mashed potato arc off her plate across the table or on to the floor and then they both look at her, both want to know what she is doing. ‘Eat properly, don’t play with your food.’ ‘What are you doing, Anna?’ ‘Don’t be silly or you’ll go without.’ She is going to be careful with her thumbs, and her fingers, careful not to lose any of them.

Annabella, not Anna

Dear Mother, My name is Annabella but no one calls me this. Anna. They call me Anna and I have to answer to it, but I know it’s not really my name. It’s really Annabella — two names joined together. One day I won’t answer to anything less. Anna, come here. Anna, what are you doing now? Anna, you’re very naughty! Anna, it’s time for bed. Anna, it’s time to get up. Anna, eat your dinner. What do we say, Anna? I’m not Anna. My name is Annabella. There’s more. More names after that, but I don’t remember them. They’re not as important. Annabella

A house on the side of a hill

Annabella doesn’t know the name of the place where she lives but she knows this is not the place where she was born. She lives with the silver-haired woman and the one-thumbed man in a big brick house on the side of a hill. She doesn’t know where this is, but it has a river running through it and two bridges and a road that leads to the sea. Sometimes they go there. The sea is at the bottom of a mountain, along a road with lots of corners and tall trees that let the sunlight through only in dizzying flashes and speckles between shadow. Elizabeth sits on the beach under a red-and-white umbrella while the man takes Annabella into the water. He holds her with his right hand; she suspects he needs his one thumb to keep hold of her when the water swirls around her ankles and he yanks her arm up hard to help her jump over the waves. The water scares her. What’s below and beyond, out in the deeper water, where they don’t go but where sometimes the man swims on his own when she is back on the beach? What stops him from disappearing out there?

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They eat sandwiches at the edge of the sand where the grass is sharp and yellow and, when it’s windy, the sand blows up from the beach and stings Annabella’s legs, already raw with sunburn. Elizabeth changes her clothes, and Annabella’s, in the back seat of the car, which is summer-stuffy and smells of Aerogard and zinc cream. The vinyl seats are burning-hot from the sun and cling to their skin, sticky with sand and salt and sweat. The woman with silver hair is not Annabella’s mother. Annabella doesn’t know where her mother is, but she knows this is not her. Sometimes she cries for her mother. She doesn’t remember exactly what she looks like, but she has a picture of her in her mind and she lies awake at night wishing her mother would walk into her room and take her home. Annabella doesn’t know where home is either, but she knows it’s not here. Her name is Annabella — she knows this for sure, but she doesn’t remember the rest. And she doesn’t know who named her. The man with one thumb goes to work every day and Elizabeth leaves a trail of silver as she works about the house. Annabella follows her, trying to catch the spindly filaments of light floating in the air in her wake, and Elizabeth wants to know what she is doing. Elizabeth kisses her when she tucks her into the too-tight sheets of her bed and closes the door on the too-dark room. She lets Annabella put bubbles in the bath and reads her one story each night. On Saturday nights she cooks chips for dinner and on

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Sunday mornings she holds Annabella’s hand when they walk down the hill to church. Elizabeth talks to strangers. ‘This is my niece, Anna. Say hello, Anna.’ When Elizabeth stands with her back to the sun, it looks like her head is on fire, like she is an angel from the church window. Annabella can’t see her face properly because her hair shines so brightly and casts her face into shadow. ‘This is my niece, Anna.’

There, there, no more tears

Dear Mother, I cry for you a lot, even though I don’t know who you are. I’ll know you when I see you though. And you’ll know me. You’ll call me Annabella, not Anna. You’ll walk into the garden when I’m playing with my doll and I’ll know who you are right away. You’ll buy me lots of dolls and hug me tightly and carry me out of the shade of the garden into the street and away to some other place, to our house. I cry a lot when I think about you and the silver-haired woman says, ‘There, there, no more tears.’ Annabella

The man becomes lost

One day the silver-haired woman begins to cry and she will not stop. Her husband lost his thumb at work and now he has lost his whole self. ‘I’ll help you look for him,’ Annabella says. But Elizabeth says, ‘Don’t be foolish, Anna,’ between tears. She won’t stop crying and Annabella doesn’t understand why the man isn’t coming home. Where has he gone? Why can’t they find him? How can they lose something as big as a man? Elizabeth won’t stop crying but she stops eating, stops tucking Annabella into bed, stops running the bath for her. Unfamiliar people appear in the lounge room, drinking cups of tea, talking softly in words Annabella can’t quite hear, passing Elizabeth tissues and touching her hands and her face. The women look a little like Elizabeth. They look at Annabella and smile. ‘Hello, Anna. Goodness, haven’t you grown?’ This is my niece, Anna — not anymore.

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‘We all think this will be the best for Anna — and for you, Elizabeth.’ ‘Mum agrees, Liz.’ ‘Think of her future, Elizabeth.’ ‘It’s the best thing for Anna.’ The woman with the silver hair kisses Annabella, waves to her from the driveway as the car takes Annabella away. There, there, no more tears.

The woman with the silky voice

These are Annabella’s third parents: the woman with the silky voice and the man with grey hair. They call her Anna. This place is somewhere else again, but it is not far from the town where the silver-haired woman lives. This place is bigger; it has a lake and mountains in the distance and lots of big importantlooking buildings. This house has lots of rooms with furniture arranged in neat patterns collecting dust. It stands among other houses in a flat street and the view contains only houses and gardens. From Elizabeth’s house on the side of the hill, Annabella could see the roofs of the buildings in the town and the road that led to the sea, and sometimes the brown water of the river. ‘Here we are, Anna. Welcome to our house.’ Jade has a silky voice, long brown hair that flies around her head, clothes that hang in folds and tumbles of fabric that ride the air behind her like a cloak as she walks. Her face is soft, with fewer

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creases than Elizabeth’s, and when she smiles her teeth show rounded edges. She smiles a lot. Welcome to our house. She takes Annabella’s case into a big room full of sunlight, with a window looking on to the backyard, the fence, the clothesline and the sky. She sits the case beside a high bed made of white wood, covered in yellow flowers — pillows and quilt like a garden. ‘We can unpack this later, honey.’ She takes Annabella’s hand and leads her down a long hallway, sunlight dripping in through a hole in the ceiling, to her kitchen, which is shady and green from the light coming through a screen of plants outside the windows. She holds Annabella’s hand, lifts her on to one of the high stools beside the benchtop and calls her honey. Her husband has grey hair and skin so smooth it looks like it has been stretched over his face with just enough room to fit. He is tall and has bright-green eyes that squash to half their size when he smiles. He smiles, too, but less often than the woman. Welcome to our house. He follows them, sits at the kitchen table in the soft green light and smiles. ‘What would you like to drink, honey?’ She likes honey better than Anna but she doesn’t say anything. She would like Annabella even more. Two names joined together. Twice as sweet.

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The silky-voiced woman tucks Annabella into the bed of flowers and strokes the hair off her face. ‘We hope you’ll like it here.’ She kisses her forehead and leaves the bedroom door open so the hallway light can shine in. Annabella can hear the television talking in the faraway lounge room and the sound of the woman making tea in the kitchen. The light from the hallway lets her see the ceiling with a round yellow shade over the single globe and the pale walls — plain except for two small prints on opposite sides, splashes of colour in the shape of boats, water and sunlight. Perhaps some of the figures represent people, but she can’t tell from the bed. A wardrobe, white to match the bed and the small dresser beside it, stands against the far wall. Her suitcase, unpacked, sits in the bottom of it; the contents barely fill one shelf. Annabella can hear no sounds coming from outside the house above those inside it. She wonders what the room will look like when she wakes up in the morning, wonders what the house will be like during the day. Although she looks a lot like Elizabeth, Jade’s hair is not made of silver. If she leaves a trail of hair when she walks, Annabella cannot see it. Instead, her clothes float on the air behind her like sheets on a washing line in the wind. The man with grey hair has already disappeared by the time Jade gives Annabella breakfast at the bench in the green kitchen. She smiles and watches her eat and calls her honey.

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‘What would you like to do today, honey?’ ‘What shall we do today, my sweet?’ ‘What are we going to do today, little one?’ The woman with the silky voice twists lumps of wet clay on a spinning wheel in a shed in the backyard. She sings to the radio while she spins, while she coats her hands in a lather of greybrown, while she creates bowls and vases and mugs and pots from heavy square blocks of clay. Annabella sits beside her and watches her hands, watches objects appear out of nothing, watches how her nose twists when she concentrates. She kneads and folds the clay and rolls pieces between her hands, sets it on the wheel and soothes it with her wet fingers while it spins. She pulls up her flyaway sleeves and smudges the cloth with clay. Jade sheds layers of clothes to clean the house, to push the vacuum cleaner across the carpets as thick as lawn, to mop the cold slate tiles in the kitchen, on the bathroom floor. Annabella has a bathroom to herself, away from the parents’. Jade cleans them both wearing bright-blue rubber gloves, using bottles of things that smell sharp and unpleasant. She holds Annabella’s hand and trails veils of fabric when they go to the shops. She smiles at people and sometimes she stops to talk to them. ‘This is our niece, Anna. Say hello, honey.’

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She lets Annabella sit in the front of the trolley, among the groceries — bright colours and shapes, smooth plastic and sharp corners of cardboard — as she rolls them between the aisles of food. ‘What will we have for dinner tonight, sugar?’ She buys Annabella chocolate frogs to eat in the trolley or an icecream running sticky cold trails down her arm as they walk back to the car. Sometimes they eat lunch with other people, among the shoppers, among trolleys full of bulging plastic bags and strollers with sleeping or screaming babies, among the backs and faces of lots of people Annabella cannot keep track of. Sometimes they eat lunch with other people in strange houses, with women who also call her honey — possum, gorgeous, angel, sweetie, pumpkin, treasure — and who stroke her hair and touch her face and hold her hands and play with the clothes the woman has made her. Annabella trails fabric, too, now. Folds of it hang around her like a curtain, like fog-swirls of colour and cloth. Sometimes when she walks, she is scared she will fly away; the wind will catch her wings of clothing and carry her off. The other women nod their approval at her clothes, at the ribbons woven into her hair, at the way she can sit at the table without misbehaving. ‘What an angel, Jade.’

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‘You’re so lucky.’ ‘She’s adorable.’ Annabella watches their faces as they talk, watches the way they eat, breaking bread rolls with long bright nails on delicate fingers; crunching salads, cutting their food noiselessly, without losing any of it over the side, on to the table, on to the floor. Jade cuts Annabella’s food for her, carves it into little portions that she can load on to her fork. ‘Not too much at once, honey.’ ‘Isn’t she divine?’ ‘Look at her!’

Two names joined together

Annabella practises saying her name in front of the mirror in her bedroom. Annabella. Two names joined together. Annabella, like four separate words. An-na-bel-la. No one calls her this, so she has to practise saying it to herself, has to see what it looks like to say, practise hearing it said, so she will be ready to answer to it when her real mother comes for her. Anna: like a breath, soft from the roof of her mouth. Bella: like a small kiss, lips together, then apart, her tongue behind her teeth. Annabella: a sigh and a kiss.

This is your first big day

The woman with the silky voice stands Annabella in front of the hydrangea bush and takes her photo. The fabric of her uniform is new and scratchy and the sleeves and shoulders strangely constricting after the loose folds of material she has become accustomed to wearing. ‘Smile, honey. This is your first big day.’ Jade is more excited than Annabella. She gives Annabella a brightorange case in which to carry all her new things: pencil case, pencils with the points sharpened like arrowheads, lunch box, drink bottle full of bright-red cordial and a small fabric pouch containing three Band-Aids and two tissues. She scrapes Annabella’s hair away from her face into two tight ponytails, ties them with blue ribbons that match the check in the dress, fastens the shiny buckles on her new black leather sandals, stands her in front of the hydrangea and takes her photo. Jade drives Annabella to school — a flat grey building with large windows; the car park full of mothers and other children dressed like Annabella.

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Jade knows lots of people here. She has taken Annabella to some of their houses and Annabella has already played with some of these children. But there are lots more people she doesn’t know. ‘This is Anna. Say hello to Rachel. — to Kelly. — to Michelle. — to Kylie. — to Fiona. — to Damien. — to Mark. — to Stephen.’ Jade leaves Annabella with these names, with strangers, with some people she knows. She kisses her forehead — ‘See you, angel. Have a lovely day’ — and drives away. The classroom is full of noise and sunlight from the open windows. Annabella has her own desk and a green cloth bag on the wall with her name on it in which to store paintings and other work. The white tag on the bag says ‘Annabella’ — she helped to write it herself. Some days she forgets about the silky-voiced woman; she paints or listens to stories or watches the television with the other children without longing for the moment when Jade will come to pick her up. ‘Hello, my sweet. What did you do today?’ She plays tag in the quadrangle without wishing Jade would appear to take her home.

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But on other days Annabella misses sitting in the shed with Jade, watching the clay take shape, watching it spin and grow on the wheel. In the schoolyard, the dry grass and asphalt throw the heat of the sun and glare into Annabella’s eyes as she eats little or big lunch and she would prefer to be sitting in Jade’s shady green kitchen or even with those other women they visited, long nails breaking bread or stroking the stems of tall glasses or her face. What an angel. Annabella’s best friend is Fiona. She has a loud laugh and she uses it a lot. Annabella laughs with her, although she is not always sure what the joke is. Sometimes neither is Fiona. Fiona teaches her to do handstands and cartwheels and in summer the grass is sharp on her hands; in winter, it is damp and blades of it stick to her palms and leave a rotten-earth smell on them, which seems vaguely familiar. Fiona has an orange bag full of marbles and she shows Annabella how to play with them. They grind little holes in the dirt on the edge of the quadrangle with sticks or the heels of their sandals and perfect their technique, competing for the prettiest of the little glass balls. Then the woman with the silky voice scolds her playfully for the black lines of dirt under her fingernails and the grey smudges of grime on her socks and the dusty marks on her uniform. ‘Anna, what have you been doing?!’ ‘Just look at you, Anna. What a mess!’ The woman with the silky voice stands beside her car and talks to other mothers and waves and smiles when she sees Annabella

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emerge from the building. She kisses her forehead and takes her bag. ‘Hello, precious. What did we do today?’ Sometimes she buys Annabella an ice-cream or a chocolate bar on the way home. Then she shows Annabella what new things she has made from clay or what she bought when she went shopping and Annabella wishes they could still do these things together. By the time Annabella gets home from school, it is too hot in the shed for Jade to work and all her chores are done, so Annabella wanders alone in the garden and watches for butterflies or birds or lies in the grass making the shapes of the clouds into pictures. The smell of the damp earth and grass beneath her is comforting.

This is where you have been hiding

Dear Mother, If I sit in the garden long enough, you might pass by and see me. You won’t be able to find me if I stay inside. And, if I am inside, I won’t hear you when you call my name. You will find me one day soon, won’t you? I’ll be sitting in a shady spot with a book or the dolls the woman with the silky voice has bought me and I will know straight away who you are, even though I don’t remember what you look like just now. You’ll call out to me: Annabella. A sigh and a kiss. And you’ll say, so this is where you’ve been hiding all this time. I’ll recognise you straight away and you’ll kiss me and lift me up and carry me to some other place — to your house — and the woman will smile and wave goodbye. Don’t cry, honey. You’ll make me sad, too. Annabella

The man with grey hair

The man with grey hair smiles less often than Jade, but he lets Annabella sit on his knee and asks her to tell him what she has learned at school during the week. They watch television together and Jade makes them cups of thick, sweet Milo or tall glasses of lemonade with slices of lemon floating among the ice cubes. When Annabella is given a stamp or a star at school, the man kisses her forehead and smiles and his eyes screw up to half their size.

Be good, Anna

The woman with the silky voice makes bowls and mugs and plates and pots and vases and sometimes she makes Annabella tiny figures of people with fat limbs and minute rolls of clay for hair. She swirls her shapes with colours and patterns and scratches her name on the bottom of each one with a skewer: Jade W. Then she packs boxes with her pots and bowls and vases, wraps them carefully in old newspapers; her hands become black and smudged with the newsprint. The man with grey hair packs the boxes into her car and she takes them to markets and craft fairs and exhibitions — big metal sheds lined with tables displaying things other people have created or school ovals untidy with people and umbrellas and tablecloths flapping in the wind. Jade sits behind her table and watches people pick up her creations and turn them over and put them back down and smile at her, or ask her questions or mumble to their friends and then say, ‘I’ll take this one, thanks.’ ‘Can I have this one, please?’ ‘How much for these two?’ The woman with the silky voice trails veils of fabric as she walks to her car and drives away. Her car is packed with boxes packed with

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old newspapers and shapes made from clay. Her clothes swirl out behind her and she scoops them up around her as she climbs into the car. Jade kisses Annabella’s cheek and kisses the man on the lips. She waves from the end of the driveway, her arm streaming cloth out the window and she toots the car horn. ‘See you later. Be good!’ ‘Be good.’ ‘There’s a good girl.’ ‘Be a good girl for Uncle Raymond, Anna.’ The man with grey hair draws the curtains on Annabella’s window, closes off the view of nothing in particular and shades the room with lemony patterns of shadow. Annabella’s bed is made of white wood and the wardrobe and the dresser are made of the same wood to match. The walls are pale and plain except for the two small prints on opposite sides: splashes of colour in the shape of boats, water and sunlight. Some of the splashes might be the shapes of people, but Annabella can’t tell from her bed. She looks hard at the pictures but often she can’t even make out the shapes of the boats. But she can see the water. The water is in her eyes and it blurs her view of everything. ‘Be good, Anna.’ The woman with the silky voice sheds layers of clothes to clean the house and Annabella stands behind her while she works. ‘Why don’t you go outside and play, honey? It’s a lovely day out there.’ ‘Why don’t you see what you can find in the garden, sweetie?’

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Jade cleans the bathrooms in bright-blue rubber gloves, dewdrops of sweat form on the top of her lip and across her forehead near her hair, and Annabella stands behind her or sits on the cool tiles and watches. ‘Are you bored, sweetheart?’ When the silky-voiced woman smiles, her teeth show rounded edges. She smiles a lot. But she is not Annabella’s mother. This woman leaves Annabella; packs her car with boxes packed with newspapers packed with pottery. She comes home in the late afternoon as it is starting to cool down and before it gets dark. She toots the horn as she enters the driveway, leaves the empty boxes and the folding table and the closed umbrella in the car and comes inside, trailing her long brown hair, trailing soft tails of fabric. ‘Well, who’s putting the kettle on?’ ‘Hello, honey. What did you get up to today?’

Skin too tight

‘Were you a good girl for Uncle Raymond?’ Annabella’s bedroom has plain empty walls except for the two prints, splashes of colour indistinct like the clothes swirling behind the woman when she walks, streaming behind her when she crosses the drive, swimming beside her in folded, crumpled patterns when she sits in the car. The light in Annabella’s bedroom is yellow, even though the sun can’t reach through the curtains. She can’t see out, can’t see the garden or the sky. She can see the man, the skin on his face stretched taut, the skin on his hands smooth and unwrinkled, his eyes screwed up to half their size when he’s smiling. Jade leaves her but the grey-haired man doesn’t. She drives away but he comes into Annabella’s room, closes the curtains and the door. ‘Be a good girl for Uncle Raymond, Anna.’ ‘Do as I say and it won’t hurt.’

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The woman drives away, disappears, but the man is before her. He stands above her, sits beside her, lies on top of her. He has smooth skin and sharp nails and an extra finger that’s hard and makes her hurt. He covers her mouth to stop her crying, squeezes her neck to make her lie still, pushes her down to get his fingers inside. ‘Don’t tell Auntie Jade, Anna.’ ‘Be a good girl for Uncle Raymond, Anna.’ ‘What did you do today, honey?’ ‘Don’t make me hurt you.’

If only his face would burst

Dear Mother, I’m trying hard to be good. The man has grey hair and skin stretched over his face so tight it looks like it might burst. I wish it would burst. If I could stick a pin in it, maybe he would pop and explode like a balloon, little pieces of him scattered all over my room. I would put on the woman’s brightblue gloves to clean him up. Put the pieces in a bucket and put them in the kiln. Hello, honey. What did you do today? I made the man disappear. I made something for you, but it’s not made of clay. Annabella

Money for her pocket

The woman with the silky voice packs her boxes with pottery and Annabella asks Jade to take her with her. ‘You’ll be bored, sweetheart.’ ‘Uncle Raymond needs your help in the garden.’ ‘You haven’t finished your homework. Uncle Raymond can help you.’ The top of the dresser in Annabella’s room holds the collection of clay figures the silky-voiced woman has made and collects dust, which Annabella has to wipe away each week. Fifty cents. The wardrobe holds her school shoes, which need to be polished at least once a week. Fifty cents. The quilt on her bed is covered with yellow flowers with tiny green leaves, bed linen like a garden. Each morning Annabella has to straighten the sheets, tuck them under the mattress, fluff the pillow and cover it all with the quilt. One dollar a week. On Sunday afternoons, Annabella has to do the same, but that’s an extra chore that Jade must not know that.

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The shapes in the paintings on her wall move. Sometimes she sees boats sailing on blue water, sometimes she sees people lying against a blue sky, sometimes she sees the woman in a swirl of colourful fabric walking away from her. The walls are empty and blank except for these two paintings, the dresser top is empty except for the little clay family, the house is empty except for the man and her. One day soon her real mother will come for her. ‘Don’t tell Auntie Jade, Anna.’ Two dollars. The woman with the silky voice gives Annabella a new clay figure — an old woman with a walking cane and a long dress swirling around her ankles — and sits on the bed of flowers in the lemon-lit room. ‘You’re getting so big now, Anna. It seems like it was only yesterday that you came to live with us. Are you happy here, honey?’ — Don’t tell Auntie Jade, Anna. ‘Yes.’ ‘Good, I’m glad. You’ve been a bit quiet lately and we were worried you were unhappy. We love you very much, Anna. You know that, don’t you?’ — Do you want me to hurt you? ‘Yes, I know.’

Do as you’re told

‘Just lie still, Anna, and it won’t hurt.’ But it does hurt. ‘Stop crying and lie still.’ He squashes her mouth with the heel of his hand to stop her crying, his fingernails press into her cheek. He pushes her down to force his fingers inside. ‘It hurts.’ She hurts. ‘Please, don’t.’ Please stop. Please let me go. It hurts. Please leave me alone. — Are you happy here, honey? ‘Tell Auntie Jade and you’ll find out what hurts.’

Tell me a secret

Dear Mother, Fiona is my best friend, but I don’t know how to tell her I am missing my mother — not simply longing for her, but missing her. You are misplaced. I have misplaced you. I don’t know what people are supposed to do when they can’t find their mother. I don’t know how to find you. Fiona tells me her secrets and makes me swear not to tell. I have only one secret and when I offered it to her, she ran home without saying goodbye. Annabella

Room like a garden

Jade comes into Annabella’s room and sits on the bed like a garden. ‘Anna, I can never replace your mum, but you know I love you, don’t you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I want you to know you can trust me. You can tell me anything, anything at all.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Tell me, Anna, is something wrong?’ — Tell Auntie Jade and your life won’t be worth living. ‘No.’ ‘Anna, you can tell me the truth. I won’t get angry, but I must know if something’s wrong.’ — Do you want me to hurt you!? ‘No, nothing.’ ‘Please, Anna, if you don’t tell me, I can’t make it better.’ I’m trying hard to be good.

Make the pain stop

Dear Mother, I don’t want to be Anna. Anna hurts. Anna’s skin stings and feels grazed and bruised and hot and cold and sweaty and shivering and aching and tired. Her head hurts, her eyes sting, her mouth is dry, everything hurts, everything is sore, everything aches too much to feel. What’s taking you so long? Why can’t you find me? Don’t you know I need you, am waiting for you, am trying to find you myself? If you don’t come soon, who will make the pain stop? Annabella

Make the man disappear

The man’s skin is stretched so tightly over his face, it looks like his head might burst. (Please burst, please disappear.) The man has smooth fingers, skin stretched tight like his face, but his hands are rough, his fingernails are sharp. (Please, just please, why won’t his head explode? Why can’t I make him disappear?) She closes her eyes but she knows he’s still there. She hears herself crying, hears him telling her to stop. ‘Lie still and it won’t hurt.’ And now something happens that has never happened before: his voice and her sobbing are interrupted by a third voice, no longer silky, but frayed. And when Annabella opens her eyes, the man has released her and Jade is standing by the door. Annabella suddenly feels a new kind of pain: it’s not physical, but she’s not even sure which is worse.

A pain in her head

There are more questions than Annabella wants to think of answers for; there must be more people asking them than she’s ever met before. She does not see the grey-haired man again — perhaps his head did burst after all — and, for a while, Jade does not look at her. She meets yet more women, some in uniforms, some who are obviously doctors, and some Annabella thinks she has seen before. And then she remembers three of them, their faces morphed variations of Jade’s, the same women who took her away from the silver-haired woman, Elizabeth, who resembled them, too. There is a pain in Annabella’s head that makes it difficult to concentrate on so much talking going on around her, to her, about her. In the end, it is easier to just stop listening, to let the women hug her and touch her face and feed her and bathe her, to go where they take her and hope that the pain will stop soon.

The woman with the crooked nose

This is going to be Annabella’s fourth mother, but she is not her real mother either. Suzannah has yellow hair and a crooked nose and she sucks cigarettes as though they are lollies. The man has bright-blue eyes and thick brown hair and he is careful not to come near Annabella when he says hello. He says, ‘Hello, Annabella,’ but she is not sure he really said it or if she imagined it. The crooked-nosed woman says, ‘This is your home now, baby. We’ll take good care of you.’ This is a different place again to the house where the last parents were and a long ride away in the car. This is a long narrow house squashed between lots of other buildings the same. The street outside is noisy with traffic and from the tiny square courtyard at the back of the house Annabella can see lots of tall buildings crowded together at the bottom of the sky. Suzannah takes her up a narrow flight of stairs to a room with a view of these buildings and of the clutter of other houses behind this one. The room is small and crammed with furniture: a highframed bed, a wardrobe, a fat chest of drawers, a bookcase stuffed with thick books and dusty, wrinkled magazines and a writing table

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and chair pushed under the window. Annabella wonders whether there will be enough room for her. ‘This will be your room, Anna. I’ll help you unpack your cases.’ The bedsprings squeak and the bedhead knocks against the wall, where the paint is badly chipped, when the woman puts the two suitcases on the bed and starts to unpack them. The man stands outside the door and watches them but does not come into the room. The pain in Annabella’s head is fading now and the women who brought her here, who looked like Jade and Elizabeth — and also a little like Suzannah — have gone. Annabella knows enough to know that she will not see the grey-haired man or the silky-voiced woman again. They have been replaced just like the woman with silver hair before them, and her mother before that. Now the woman with the crooked nose has more questions, wants to know what Annabella would like for dinner. ‘What’s your favourite, Anna?’ Annabella is tired. She wants to sleep. She wants to know how much longer she has to wait for her real mother to come for her. She must be close now. ‘Never mind. I’m sure we’ll find something you like, won’t we?’ The woman takes her hand and leads her downstairs to the kitchen, which is in shadow with the sun long gone from the back of the house. She sucks on a cigarette, leaving red lipstick on the filter and taps it with long red nails over the ashtray. She offers

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Annabella a bowl of chips and a stool in the corner of the kitchen. The man sits behind them at the dinner table with a newspaper and watches them without speaking. The woman prepares dinner casually, returning to the ashtray regularly to draw on her cigarette; the small room fills with smoke and Annabella’s eyes sting. The man smokes, too, his hand cupped over his cigarette so it is almost invisible, so it looks like his fingers are burning and giving off a faint trail of smoke. Suzannah keeps talking but Annabella doesn’t listen. She is tired and the smoke is making her nauseated. She wants to be somewhere else, but she’s not sure where. Through the bedroom window Annabella can see the lights in the tall buildings, the blinking coloured lights on top of them, streetlights below and the dark square of the courtyard. There are no stars in the sky, just the bruised-orange reflection of so much artificial light. There is a lot of noise, too: traffic and music and unfamiliar voices and sirens and the bed squeaking and knocking the wall when she moves. Suzannah doesn’t wipe away Annabella’s tears or hold her like the silky-voiced woman did. She says, ‘Try not to cry, sweetie. You’re safe now.’ She trails smoke instead of fabric or hair; her voice is hard and scratchy, not silky; her house smells and so does the air outside.

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The woman with the crooked nose fits Annabella into a new uniform, buys her a new school bag, braids her hair so tightly it pulls on her scalp and ties it with red ribbons to match her dress. Then she says, ‘Have a good day, Anna. See you tonight.’ She walks across the courtyard to the garage, reverses her car into the laneway and drives away with her hand out the window, waving, and a cigarette in her mouth. She leaves Annabella with the blue-eyed man, standing in the kitchen doorway, looking at the mossy cobbles of the courtyard, damp from the overnight rain. ‘Come on, finish your breakfast, love.’ The man calls her love, but when she first met him, she is sure he called her Annabella. That’s the name he writes in heavy Texta on the side of her new lunch box. Annabella Harris. Her real name. His name is Neil; he has bright-blue eyes and thick brown hair and a soft voice, and more than enough skin to cover his whole face. Neil jangles keys as he locks the front door and then the security door and then the gate. The air is sickly sweet with the scent of frangipani and exhaust fumes. Annabella lives in a busy street now; the view of buildings and cars crowded by more buildings and cars. The man takes her hand in his. His skin is rough and cracked, the broken skin set hard. ‘Are you nervous, love?’ ‘Yes.’

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‘Don’t worry, the first day’s always the worst. But you’ll make lots of new friends soon enough.’ It’s his hands that scare her. His hands are bigger and harder than the grey-haired man’s; they are going to hurt twice as much, maybe more. The school is only a short walk along car-crowded streets, lined with shops and skinny terrace houses all squashed together. The man holds her hand and pulls gently on her arm when it’s safe to cross the road, and people walk past without looking at either of them. In the office of the new school, the man hands Annabella over to a tall woman in a long blue skirt and says, ‘This is my niece, Annabella Harris.’ The woman smiles and bends down to meet her. ‘Ah, yes. Hello, Annabella. How are you this morning?’ The man smiles, then says, ‘Well, I’ll see you after school. Have a good day, love.’ He walks away, leaves her with the tall woman, who puts her hand on Annabella’s shoulder, whose shoes click loudly on the timber floor of the corridor. Annabella misses Fiona, misses having a friend to talk to, and all she can see through the classroom window is a small rectangle of blank, colourless sky.

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She wants the bell to ring so she can run out and find the silkyvoiced woman waiting for her, so she can go to Fiona’s house to play. She doesn’t want the bell to ever ring because she doesn’t want to go home alone with the blue-eyed man. ‘Annabella, stop daydreaming. Pay attention, please.’

The man with blue eyes

The man with blue eyes stands under a flowering frangipani near the school gate, his hands in the pockets of his navy-blue work trousers, talking to two women waiting for their children. He smiles when he sees Annabella; his eyes are bright and she can see them from a long way away. ‘This is my niece, Annabella.’ ‘Hello, Annabella. This is Rebecca. — This is Jacki. — This is Melissa.’ The man holds her hand again and they walk home past the rows of shops spilling tables and chairs and crates of fruit and books and buckets of flowers and people and conversations on to the footpath; past the rows of skinny houses with drawn curtains and bars across the windows, scrappy trees dropping leaves and flowers on to the broken concrete; past the rows of parked and passing cars. The man stops outside one of the shops. It has a wide, open front and little booths along one wall, one counter full of greasy food and all kinds of salads along the other.

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‘How about an ice-cream, hey?’ In a cabinet at the back of the shop there are metal buckets of icecream in every colour, set so hard the woman behind the counter has to strain the muscles in her arms to scoop out the flavours the man selects. She puts them in tall glasses and drizzles them with chocolate sauce and cream and nuts and they sit in a booth with a view of the street to eat them. The ice-cream is shockingly cold and sweet. The man smiles. ‘That hits the spot, hey?’ The man smells like a car engine, his hands are blackened, lines of grit set into the cracks in his fingers. He looks tired and he sucks his ice-cream off the spoon the way the woman sucks her cigarettes. ‘So, how was your first day, love?’ ‘I don’t know.’ (I don’t want to go back there.) ‘Did you make some friends? Were they nice like I said?’ ‘I suppose.’ (No one talked to me, no one played with me, I was invisible, I don’t want to go back there.) Annabella can feel tears burning her eyes and is unable to stop them, even though she is afraid of what the man will do when he notices. ‘Hey, love. Things will get better.’ His fingers are rough, the edges of broken skin sharp and he smells like a car engine, but he holds her face clumsily and wipes at her eyes with his huge starchy handkerchief. ‘Finish your ice-cream and we’ll go home, okay?’

Annabella in the mirror

Annabella’s new bedroom is small and crammed with furniture. Stuck to the back of the door is a narrow full-length mirror. When she stands in front of it, she can see all of herself, from her feet to her head. She doesn’t remember seeing herself before and, anyway, she must have changed. She doesn’t reach very high in the mirror, just as she doesn’t reach very high against any of the adults who come near her, who tower above her. She has long hair, thick, brown and wavy, and it reaches halfway down her back when the woman hasn’t pulled it into braids or a ponytail.

Annabella is small

Dear Mother, I am small. Everything is small. Small face, small rounded nose, small chin, small mouth, small neat eyebrows, small green eyes. Bright-green eyes, so bright they look bigger than they really are. Small head on small shoulders with small arms and a small body and short, small legs and small pointed feet. Hopefully, not too small for you to find me. I hope I haven’t changed too much for you to remember what I look like. But you will be able to tell when you find me, just by looking, just by saying my name. In the mirror on the back of the door, I am tiny, but Annabella is even smaller, so small you can hardly see her, so tiny only you can see me and no one else can find me, no one else can touch me. Annabella is much smaller, much better than the girl in this mirror. This girl is just a pretend one, to go with these pretend parents. Annabella

Tug of war

The man with blue eyes holds Annabella’s hand and walks her to school every day, and every day he stands under the frangipani tree near the school gate and they walk home again together. Some days they stop for an ice-cream and some days they walk to the swimming pool, but they are careful to be home before Suzannah, before she can get annoyed with them for being too late to help with dinner. Annabella doesn’t like the view from the windows in the classroom. She can’t see far enough, everything is limited by buildings and treetops. There are no hills in the distance, the air smells and it looks and feels dirty. She doesn’t like the view through the window, but she likes to look out of it and pretend she is somewhere else. She likes to pretend she is with Fiona, laughing at jokes no one else understands. She likes to pretend the announcements that occasionally come over the school loudspeaker are for her. Annabella Harris, your mother is here to collect you.

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But only the blue-eyed man ever stands at the gate. Only the blueeyed man waits to collect her, holds her hand tightly, smells of car engines, has lines of black set into the cracks in his skin. His hands are big and rough and Annabella knows they are going to hurt. He stands at the gate every day, with an umbrella when it’s raining, but Annabella likes to pretend that one day her mother will stand there instead. ‘Anna, pay attention please.’ ‘Anna, stop daydreaming.’ ‘Anna, are you listening?’ ‘Anna, would you mind joining us?’ ‘Anna, the rest of us are up to page 13.’ ‘Anna, this is the last time I will ask you.’ She doesn’t like the view through the window but she prefers it to the one inside the classroom. At night Annabella can hear the man and the woman moving through the house and follows them by listening for the creaking floorboards, the squeaking stairs, doors opening and closing, the noise of the television, their voices. She can hear them talking through the wall or the floor — she can’t decipher the individual words but sometimes the tone makes her feel cold, she curls in under the covers and tries to find sleep. Their voices are interrupted here and there by a cough (or was that a sob?) or by the sound of a truck rumbling past on the street.

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On Saturday mornings the woman with the crooked nose takes Annabella shopping. She holds her hand, too, and introduces her to strangers. After what seems like hours of walking, Suzannah says, ‘Just a little bit further, baby, and I’ll buy you something special.’ ‘What would Uncle Neil buy you?’ ‘Ice-cream.’ (Or sometimes Greek sweets dripping honey and butter.) ‘Doughnuts are nicer than ice-cream. Here, choose as many as you like.’ Suzannah tells Annabella that she loves her and stares past her at some point beyond her, sucking her cigarette. On Saturday afternoons Suzannah takes her big patchwork bag from the coat-stand, a bottle of wine and some fancy cheese from the fridge. She kisses Annabella on the forehead, kisses Neil on the lips and says, ‘See you later. Be good.’ She reverses her car into the laneway and drives away. The man with blue eyes walks Annabella down a steep hill to the water. They sit on a grassy point held back from the harbour by a wall of jumbled slabs of concrete and rock. The water is grey-blue or sometimes green and is banked on all sides by rock barriers and big ugly buildings and cranes and ramparts of rust-coloured steel. Neil and Annabella sit side-by-side on the rocks and hang fishing lines over the edge. On a good day they catch something Neil can wrap in foil and put in the oven for dinner, but usually they catch nothing at all.

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On these occasions they walk to one of the narrow steam-filled shops near the ice-cream shop and sit in the bright fluorescent light watching television while their hamburgers or fish and chips cook. The men behind the counter are the same each Saturday and they speak with strange accents and tease Annabella and Neil for not catching any fish. They walk home with their hot, greasy paper packages and eat in front of the television in the lounge room, where Suzannah will be unhappy if she comes home and finds a mess. Suzannah brings Annabella treats: bars of chocolate or fancy Chinese sweets or tiny exotic cakes. ‘Look what your Auntie bought you — better than greasy takeaway, hey?’ Suzannah doesn’t like Neil and Annabella to make a mess, to splash soap suds when they are doing the dishes. She doesn’t like it when Annabella spills food on her school uniform or when she gets grass stains on her knees. She doesn’t like it when she doesn’t understand their jokes, when they talk for too long about their adventures together.

This is much better

Suzannah takes Annabella shopping with her on Saturday mornings and buys her clothes and treats and lets her pick out frozen desserts in the supermarket. ‘What would Uncle Neil buy you?’ ‘Ice-cream.’ ‘Here, fudge is better. Have as much as you like.’ ‘What would Uncle Neil buy you?’ ‘Baklava.’ ‘This is real baklava, not that rubbish Uncle Neil buys.’ ‘Would you like this jumper, Anna?’ ‘Isn’t this skirt lovely, Anna?’ ‘Look at this dress, Anna. Isn’t it pretty?’ ‘Uncle Neil doesn’t buy you presents like this.’ ‘You see, Auntie Suzannah does love you.’

Too small to see

Dear Mother, Sometimes the man with blue eyes calls me Annabella, but the woman with the crooked nose doesn’t. She calls me Anna. I want you to come for me so desperately it hurts behind my eyes and in my chest and my throat when I think about you. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without a real mother. How can I find you if you can’t find me? Annabella

Auntie Suzannah loves you

The man with blue eyes knows lots of interesting things to do on weekends. He makes a bucket of papier-mâché and they build things out of it in the courtyard or they play cards or Chinese checkers and he lets Annabella cheat. The woman with the crooked nose takes Annabella shopping and buys her lots of things she doesn’t really want. ‘Auntie Suzannah loves you and I want to buy you something special.’ ‘I want you to have this because you’re my special girl.’ ‘This is because Auntie Suzannah loves you.’ ‘Uncle Neil doesn’t buy you nice things like this.’ ‘You’re my special girl and I love you,’ she says, sucking on a cigarette and staring at some point in the distance. She has short yellow hair and a crooked nose that appears to have been stuck on her face slightly off-centre. She buys Annabella things she doesn’t want instead of the things she does (a new fishing reel, a set of playing cards decorated with

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a rainbow painting of birds in their own carved wooden box, water toys to play with in the swimming pool). She is unhappy when Neil buys Annabella presents. ‘Don’t spoil her, Neil.’ Now she loses patience when Annabella spills ice-cream or gets dirt or grass stains on her school uniform, when she gets splashes of salt water or paper glue or grease on her weekend clothes, when Neil flicks soap suds from the washing-up water at Annabella, when he chases her with a tea towel, when the papier-mâché creations are left in the courtyard for too long. Suzannah is angry with the blue-eyed man a lot now. She scolds him for staying too late at the swimming pool or at the harbour or ‘God knows where the two of you get to!’ She tells him he’s sloppy and dirty and he’s teaching Annabella bad habits. She says, ‘You’re turning her against me. Don’t think I don’t know.’ Annabella can hear Suzannah from her bedroom when she is trying to sleep. She can hear her above the sound of the television, above the street sounds that leak through the window, above the muted sounds of Neil’s quiet but angry replies. ‘Are you listening to me?!’ ‘Are you just going to sit there?’ ‘Would you even notice if I wasn’t here?’ ‘You don’t even notice me when you’re with her.’ ‘You pay more attention to her than you do to me.’ ‘I’m your bloody wife for God’s sake, Neil. What’s more important?’

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‘It’s so obvious what you’re doing.’ ‘It’s pretty bloody clear you’ve turned her against me.’ The man with the blue eyes takes Annabella out whenever he can — even if it’s just to walk up and down the surrounding streets, looking at other people’s houses, imagining who lives there, and how. ‘We need some fresh air, hey love?’ And Annabella is similarly willing and eager to get out of the house.

This is all your fault

When it’s time for Annabella to go to bed, Neil goes out without her, while Suzannah slams doors and drawers in the kitchen and throws things about. Annabella can’t sleep hard enough to block out the noise. She can’t get warm enough in her bed to keep out the chill that prickles her skin.

Someone else’s problem

Dear Mother, The woman slapped my face and said, ‘This is all your fault.’ Her hand stings. I hate her. I want you to come for me now. Some mornings when I get up early the man is asleep on the sofa; some nights the woman goes out late and doesn’t come home until the next day. Some nights the man goes out and leaves me with the woman. I see her drinking from the bottles on the not-for-little-girls shelf. She makes me stay in my room. She says, ‘If I could get rid of you, I would.’ She says, ‘Bloody Eva, leaving her problems for the rest of us to clean up.’ Annabella

Waking up the street

Eventually the woman with the crooked nose stops shouting, stops talking to the man altogether. She goes out before he has a chance to and comes home long after Annabella has gone to bed. Annabella and Neil watch television instead of going for walks, he puts the dishes in the sink to soak instead of asking Annabella to help wash up and then he starts to look past Annabella, at some point beyond her, the way Suzannah does, too. Annabella stays quiet and obedient, hopes to avoid drawing their attention. She is waiting for a new wave of pain, which she knows must come soon.

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The woman with the crooked nose goes out every night and when she comes home, no matter how late it is, she makes enough noise to ‘wake up the street’, which is what Neil says. She comes home clumsy and stumbling and slamming doors that don’t even need to be shut and then she starts shouting again.

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When she is home, she can’t stand the sight of Annabella or Neil and she finds every possible opportunity to get angry, finds any excuse to call Neil horrible names, to slap Annabella’s face.

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Annabella is still hoping her mother will come for her but, failing that, the silver-haired woman or even the woman with the silky voice would do. She finds there is room to hide under her bed, beneath the exhausted springs, where it’s dark and smells of dust and damp wood, which is vaguely reassuring. She finds it is best to spend most of her time there, to stay out of everyone’s way. That’s when the women come again: one of whom she has seen before and another, unfamiliar, but whose features are yet another variation of the others. This new woman is called Madeline and she offers to take Annabella away, ‘On a little holiday,’ she says. And, although Annabella doesn’t want to leave the blue-eyed man, she’d rather do anything than stay. Perhaps Madeline can help her look for her mother; she doesn’t care how far they have to go to find her.

The woman with emerald eyes

The caravan is blue. Not sky-blue, not ocean-blue, another kind of blue Annabella hasn’t found a name for. At night breezes blow through the van and it sounds like someone whispering, someone murmuring softly from another room. The ocean sounds like that, too, from a distance. Constant conversation. It never stops; sometimes other sounds overtake it, but it keeps mumbling underneath all these other things. Madeline has emerald-coloured eyes — like Annabella — and at night she turns out the lights and sits up in her bed smoking. Annabella watches the end of the cigarette glowing — a small orange-red star in the darkness — and listens for the sound of the match striking, flaring, watches as it briefly lights up Madeline’s face, the white cigarette dangling from the edge of her lip. The air outside smells of the sea: salty, sticky, fresh — something like that. At night Annabella eavesdrops on the sea, on the wind through trees, traffic, voices and televisions and music from other vans,

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Madeline snoring or turning in bed, the caravan groaning or rattling with their movement or in the shudder of a strong wind. When the wind is strong, it whips the ocean into a milky-grey froth. That’s what the woman says — whips. ‘Look at that wind whipping up the water.’ The wind whips the water, shakes the caravan in loud shudders, slaps the canvas walls of annexes, has loud arguments with the trees. The caravan is blue and the car is red and Annabella travels in them with the woman with emerald eyes. ‘We’re going to visit your Grandma, my love.’ The woman with the crooked nose is not with them. She has been left behind, like all the others: the silver-haired woman and the one-thumbed man, the silky-voiced woman and the grey-haired man, the blue-eyed man. And her real mother. She still cries for her mother, at night when this woman’s cigarette has stopped glowing and she has started to snore or when the rain or the wind will cover her sobs. She doesn’t want the woman to hear her. She doesn’t want to make people angry if she can help it. It hurts too much when these people become mad. She is tired of people disappearing, even the ones she doesn’t like. And each time she moves, it must make it harder for her mother to find her; that is probably why she has already taken so long.

Another of your sisters

Dear Mother, I am travelling now with another of your sisters. She has eyes of a green so vivid they seem lit from within. Her name is Madeline. Madeline Roseanna. But you must know that already. Did you construct my name from those of your sisters? Elizabeth Rhiannon. Jade Angeline. Alexandra Grace. Rosemary Josephine. Suzannah Emeline. Jacqueline Isabella. Madeline Roseanna. Eva Angelica. What a poem of names. And me. Annabella. Annabella Joy. Is that what you hoped for me? Not all of these women have so far lived up to the sweetness of their names and I have yet to fulfil the promise of mine.

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But Madeline is kind and generous and smiles and laughs often. She has told me more about this family of women than all of the others combined (which wasn’t difficult). I feel I am only now waking from a difficult dream, from a long restless sleep. Annabella Joy

This is the place where you were born

Dear Mother, Tonight we are staying in the city where you were born. Your mother has not lived here for 10 years. Your father has not lived here for a much longer time, but Madeline says you know about that and, anyway, we don’t really talk about it. (She says he ran away and he won’t be coming back.) What was it like living here? What did you think of it? Madeline says it has changed a lot since you were young, but then again it’s much the same. At night I hear helicopters above in the darkness and the shallow breath of the sea. It is hot here, the sky is hazy with smoke and aircraft exhaust fumes. The city stretches across the flat plain, buildings shimmering in a mirage of heat and sun-glare. The bay is calm and flat and shielded by the mountainous blue of the island, other islands blurred in the haze

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in the distance. The plain is contained by the bay and on all sides by sharp mountains, blurred, too, with distance. The main part of the city clusters around a hill of angular rock on the edge of the bay; it interrupts the flat earth like the remnants of a giant’s sand castle, granite the colour of sand worn away by the tide. (Madeline showed me all this from a lookout on top of a mountain that overlooks the city, its summit speared with communication towers and receivers. From the city, the face of the mountain is a grazed wall of granite: grey, blue, pink, yellow, cream, rose, amber, black — depending on the strength of the light.) The view from the beach across the road from this caravan park is limited by the bulk of the island; at dusk the lights from its suburbs twinkle like moonlit jewels embedded in its side. The sand is licked by small waves as warm as bath water and Madeline says to watch where I am walking. We cannot swim here at this time of year, as you will remember, and we must be careful wading because the jellyfish can snag our legs even in the shallows. Madeline says you were fond of the sea, she’s not sure why you moved away from it. Have you? She showed me the street where you lived, but your house is no longer there. Instead there is a low block of salmon-coloured flats. The street is still shady, however, and crowded with the colour and scent of plants in bloom. Madeline named them all: frangipani, jacaranda, poinciana, yellow cassias, rain trees, calliandra. When the wind moves the branches of the trees, the kaleidoscopic face of Mount Stuart peeps through the green.

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Madeline says you used to fish on the banks of the river, below the weir where the water is flushed every day by the tide. She says you rode your bike on the track beside the river above the weir, where the water is deep-blue and cushioned at the edges with lilies and reeds. Once or twice you saw a crocodile sunning itself on the banks. Do you remember any of this? Your mother has moved because she grew tired of the heat and the dry winters (Madeline says you can go months here in winter without seeing a cloud) and the summer threat of cyclones or floods. I would quickly grow tired of the aircraft circling the sky, incessant buzzing like flies, and the dryness of the country that makes me feel thirsty. But I don’t have to live here. We are only staying two nights. Annabella

Coming closer to you

Dear Mother, I was excited as we travelled closer to this place, crossing plains of dry scrub and fields of green cane. I thought, hoped, you might be here, that this is where you have been waiting. I felt I was drawing closer to you — so close I would arrive to find you standing, open-armed, ready to embrace me. My journey would be over for ever. But you are not here and you have not been for years. I can feel it, I can tell just by looking. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel like crying now, if I said I didn’t feel like giving up. Eva Angelica, where are you? Annabella

Sailing waves of green

Annabella arrives on the Tableland dizzy with expectation and from the sudden rise in altitude. She cannot recall ever having seen so much green: endless waves of grass and forest revealed between thin shreds of mist. The air smells fresh and sweet and laden with moisture. She has the inexplicable sensation that she has been here before. Her grandmother, Angeline, looks much younger than she must be: tall, muscular, a long plait of brown hair dusted with silver hanging down her back. She carries something of each of her daughters in her face — rather, they have each taken a piece of her for themselves. ‘Annabella, my dear, it’s been such a long time.’ She embraces Annabella carefully, as if afraid of damaging her somehow, and then Madeline, more firmly, and says, ‘It’s good to see you. Come inside.’ When Angeline smiles, Annabella feels comforted without knowing why. She is afraid yet to put too much trust in this woman, but for the moment, at least, she feels one stage of her journey has ended.

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Annabella is a smaller, more fragile version of Eva. Angeline’s breath fails for an instant when Annabella steps out of the car. Eva has returned? No, it’s an illusion. No, she’s real; I can feel her here in my arms. No, this is a shadow of herself that Eva left behind. You’re the image of your mother. She catches the words before they escape her mouth. Eva, like Albert, should not be mentioned without good reason. These are the rules she made herself. Annabella is hungry for the story of her mother, for pictures, possessions, objects, answers to so many questions.

On the roof of the world

Dear Mother, Your mother lives on the roof of the world, where the clouds and mist part to reveal endless hills in a patchwork of green. Green so bright and clean and vivid it seems, at first, shocking to the eye. This place is a long way from the town where you gave birth to me — further away than I have ever been before. This place is not like any other I have seen, so high in the sky I can feel the pressure in my ears, yet the air is warm and sticky and there is rainforest instead of snow on the peaks in the distance. How can this be? Annabella

She said she was sorry

Dear Mother, This is where your mother lives now: here on the roof of the world, in the clouds, high above everything else. She told me she was sorry, although she didn’t say why. I think she was sorry for her daughters — your sisters — and the way things have turned out. If you had not left me, I would not have had to live with them, none of this would have happened. I don’t mean that. Well, yes I do. I’m sure you didn’t mean any of this to happen, but that doesn’t explain why you left me. I wish you would come back now. I’m not angry — I still want to see you. I want to live with you. I’m waiting here with your mother if you are trying to find me. Annabella

The house in the sky

This is Annabella’s fifth home, although it feels like many more than that. When she looks through the window above her bed she sees morning layers of fog dissolving to reveal hills of green and, along the horizon, a line of blue mountains in a haze of early summer light. She sees this through lines of mango, avocado, orange and lime trees in the orchard next to the house, over the cattle grazing in the long grass of the paddock beyond, across the sandy strip of gravel road that forms the boundary of Angeline’s farm. The house seems very quiet until she begins to listen and then she is confused by sound: a cacophony of birds, the cattle, a breeze in the trees, the drone of a tractor out of sight, the pump drawing water to the house. Annabella already feels better here than in any of the other houses before it. She feels closer to her mother, more certain than ever that she will find her. Angeline does not fit the image of a grandmother that Annabella had always been given. She is tall and strong and walks swiftly and

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with great certainty of step. She has a bundle of thick coffeecoloured hair sprinkled with silver, which she wears in a long plait down her back or in an untidy bun on top of her head. She wears men’s work trousers, plain shirts worn thin with age and use, and heavy boots, which are left at the back doorstep whenever she comes inside. She has left behind the heat and humidity of the coast, the threat of floods and cyclones, and retreated to the cooler climate, the verdant hills, the chocolate-coloured soil of the Tableland. To Annabella, this place is not much cooler than the coast; the sun stings and the air is thick and warm. Cicadas and beetles and bugs and insects scream and hiss and swarm. Strange plants and vines break through any available patch of ground, sprout from the forks of trees, from holes in the branches, cracks in the pavement, gaps in the guttering along the roof. At night, curlews wail like wounded children, lapwings scream something between laughter and scorn, bats flap loudly in the air and rattle the leaves of the palms, bandicoots patter by under her window, and toads and frogs form a rowdy chorus on the edges of the garden. This is some other world than the one Annabella is used to. Cockroaches the size of small mice climb the walls and run out from under objects she nervously picks up. At night, rhinoceros beetles (even larger than the cockroaches — is that possible?) divebomb the windows and light bulbs and concuss themselves into half-hearted fits on the floor; flying ants drop on to the dinner table, leave a litter of wings like fairy confetti; moths of every size and with the most wonderful patterns and disguises crawl along

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the walls and flutter past her ears, fall out of the tea towel, her bath towel and sometimes her clothes. In the garden and the laundry, skinks and geckoes and lizards flash past, disappear into cracks and holes; dried snake skins snag in the grass, borne on the breeze like so much litter. Annabella imagines herself under siege, attacked on all fronts at every stage of the day and the night by creatures that seem more horrible than they should because she doesn’t know what they are.

Angeline listens in the darkness

In the darkness of her room, Angeline listened to her sisters breathing beside her — three separate heartbeats. The sounds of other bodies moving starched sheets and bedsprings and of contracting galvanised iron drifted on draughts from the hallway. Through the open window came a chorus of crickets and night birds and cattle lowing and the growl of a koala. She heard other sounds — rustling and footfall — and imagined thieves and murderers where there was only a fox or a bandicoot. Angeline marvelled at the lightning that danced on sharp, spindly legs across the paddocks and above the trees around the house, and at delicate beads of frost caught in the webs of invisible spiders strung in the grass beside the road. On a clear day she could see the ocean from the front gate — a flat blue-grey blur at the end of the valley that stretched away to the south. It disappeared on smoky and overcast days, but because she so wanted to see it, to her it was always visible. Behind her the smokestacks at the power stations sent lines of smoke and steam into the sky, smudging the outline of the Great Dividing Range, which rose against the horizon.

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Angeline felt violated, robbed; she watched her childhood, her life, turn to charcoal and cinders as the tongues of fire devoured her home. Her sisters were screaming or crying beside her but she was frozen, dumbstruck, she could not move. The fire burned yellow and white and red and blue and black, forming a misshapen tunnel of light that rose into the emptiness of the sky. The grass under her bare feet was night-damp and cold but the house was feverish, enflamed, disappearing as she stood motionless, unable to stop it. She imagined the smoke rising in the darkness like a plume from one of the smokestacks in the valley. She imagined the smoke would obscure for ever her view of the sea. Later, from the front of the church, Angeline saw the smokestacks in the distance spewing smoke and steam, which could have been the same smoke that consumed her brother and her parents, and all of her history. After the fire Angeline left the valley and the towering smokestacks behind. She boarded a train with her sisters with a small suitcase of borrowed clothes and a few unscorched possessions salvaged from her past. As the train headed north, Angeline felt the last fragments of her childhood slipping away. She imagined the steel wheels on the rails severing the remaining bonds that held her to her family; and, as the familiar landscape dissolved, she felt alone for the first time in her life. Angeline watched the names of the sidings pass as they drew near their destination. Gumlu, Inkerman, Home Hill, Ayr, Brandon,

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Barratta, Giru, Nome. She saw at last a ragged ring of mountains loosely encircling a flat plain, shimmering in a blur of dust, smoke and heat haze. The earth was dry, almost bare, packed hard; a type of gum she had never seen, thin-trunked and stunted-looking with dusty drooping leaves; thickets of tangled vines. Beyond the grand station building, a wall of orange-grey granite cast a shadow on the town. Angeline could smell the mangrove mud exposed to the sun at low tide and perhaps, mixed with it, the sea. A voice came forth from the confusion on the platform and with it a family of bodies, who surrounded the three newly made orphans. ‘Welcome, you poor dears.’ ‘How was your journey?’ ‘What a sad time for you.’ ‘We’re glad to have you here safely with us now.’ Angeline was in a daze, induced by the long days of travel, the sudden stillness after the rhythmic swaying of the train, the suffocating heat, the smell of salt and sweat and rotting wood. Albert carried Angeline’s suitcase and those of her sisters, silently, aware of the trickles of sweat gluing the thin fabric of his shirt to his back, suddenly self-conscious before the beautiful young woman walking beside him. She did not notice him, was only vaguely aware of what was happening around her; pulled along by other people, by the instinct to put one foot in front of the other.

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Albert carried Angeline’s suitcase and took what he imagined would be his last and only look at her, not knowing that in 18 months she would be his wife.

Albert watches the trains

Albert was a small boy and he watched the trains. He watched from the cool shade of the verandah, in the shadowed air under the untidy paper-barks. The heat haze hovered above the field of dry grass and the locomotives emerged as silver-grey shimmering beasts, liquid edges quivering in the molten air. At night the rails shone like moonlit water. They ran in from the darkness, paused in the station of light, continued on into nothingness. But with the cold steel under his bare feet, Albert felt connected. He knew he could follow the rails and he would find some place more important than this anonymous siding, the place to which all this human and actual cargo was headed. He imagined a brilliant city, bustling with the excitement and colour of so many arrivals and departures. He knelt beside the rust-brown steel in the frosty early air. He put his ear to the rail and waited, listening for the hum, the soft whirr, the ever-increasing vibration of the wheels on the track, the great noisy animal approaching. Then he could hear the rumble of the engine, the staccato rhythm of tonnes of steel leaping the joints in the tracks. He felt sick, giddy in the stomach and head, left his

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head and his hands on the freezing rail until the whistle bellowed, until the train was in sight. The trains slowed to pass through the siding and sometimes they stopped. Albert listened for them, watched them pass, followed their passage and the lines of the track with his eyes, waiting for the day he, too, could become a passenger, bound for the unseen destination. Albert’s father had helped blast a tunnel through the mountains so the trains could connect this seemingly insignificant siding with the outside world. He came home from work daily covered in dust, mud and the chalky powder of disintegrated rock, all of it mixed together like a paste on his skin by the trails of his sweat or the dampness of winter fogs — like an inverted sea — or rain. He ate dinner with Albert and his mother and then collapsed in the armchair next to the fire. As if by instinct, Albert’s mother would catch his cigarette with the ashtray when it dropped from his fingers as he slipped into sleep. And then it was morning and he was gone from the house before Albert even opened his eyes. One day, which had at first seemed like any other, Albert’s father walked into the side of the mountain and didn’t return. The blast rocked the town, as did every other, but a certain stillness that filled the next few seconds — as though the day was holding its breath — and then a macabre melody of shouts and whistles and sirens alerted the townsfolk that something was wrong.

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The mountain resented the hole bored through its side and did not give in easily, swallowing three men on that day and two more a month later. The townspeople also refused to surrender, increasingly determined that they should have their link to the world, especially now they had paid for it with men’s lives. Albert imagined for a long time that his father would one day emerge from the mountain, would follow the ever-widening circle of light from the tunnel’s mouth, would return home carrying stories about his walk to the centre of the Earth. When the first locomotive appeared through the tunnel and came wheezing into the town, Albert fully expected to see his father at the wheel, waving triumphantly and blowing kisses to his mother. But his father did not appear that day nor on any that followed, even though Albert refused to give up hope. How could his father be dead when no one had found him? How could his mother go to the cemetery to weep when there had been no body to bury? Albert was convinced his father had followed the tunnel to the far side of the mountain and continued following the rails, always meaning to return, but somehow losing the way home. One day Albert would be a passenger on one of those trains and he would follow the line as far as it went in search of his father.

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Albert was overwhelmed by the city. He rode the trams and the trains and was giddy with anticipation. He stood mesmerised by the elaborate Christmas displays in the windows of a department store until he was distracted by the sound of a tram. He photographed these things and bought postcards and, when the time came to leave, he hid until his desperate mother and stepfather had disappeared. He found his way to the railway station and, with the money he had carefully saved, he bought a ticket for a train heading north and watched the city fade to suburbs and the suburbs fade to black.

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Albert had already found his way north when Angeline boarded a train with her sisters and travelled to live with relatives they had never met — names previously seen only on Christmas and birthday cards. Albert worked for the railway, maintaining the line that stretched out from the city and struggled up the sharp range into the wasteland beyond. The Green Valley line. But no oasis of lush, green rolling hills and shady vales lay beyond the dry eucalypt-clad mountains. The line crawled off the top of the ridge and into a wilderness of parched earth and untidy scrub, volcanoes so old and so long silent they had eroded to mere bumps on the landscape; dry snaky plains that

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became vast muddy lakes in the wet season, a great river that seemed to change course each time it flooded and trickled only the slightest of streams the rest of the year. Albert had seen the stained sepia pictures of the teams of packhorses and dust-caked men blazing the trail for the railway. Blazing, they said. But it took something much slower and sweatier and more painful to create this glorious path to nowhere. Albert watched the trains loaded with supplies labour through the heat mirage towards the ragged mountains; watched them return laden with gold, nickel and tin. He was always more interested in the locomotives than their cargo. He did not envy the men who spent their lives in the darkness and the clammy air under the earth, scraping and blasting at rock on the promise of veins of shining metal. Albert thought it was unnatural for humans to burrow underground. He could not forget his father, was certain the miners would meet a similar fate. The Earth was sure to seek revenge for these violations of her flesh. He expected every day to see a train return loaded with a cargo of human suffering and the bodies of men the mine had claimed. He had more than once to lift a rough-hewn coffin from a wagon to a trolley on the platform, but, by and large, the mining shafts and the railway tunnels remained stable. Still, Albert did not trust them. He knew it was just a matter of time.

The middle of nowhere

Angeline found a job as a governess on a station in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere was a vast flat plain: unfenced paddocks of burnt-yellow grass, orange-red soil, patches of dense dirty-green scrub, sharp broken balls of volcanic rock. Sound and dust and hot air tangled in swirls and spread across the earth; the wind was hot, the sun burned the colour out of everything. Angeline found it difficult to breathe. The vastness, the limitlessness of the landscape was frightening, overwhelming after the view she was used to. She felt claustrophobic, yet there were no visible boundaries to wall her in; only the tangible sense of emptiness, the fear that if she wandered too far from the house, the land would swallow her up. Townsville and her sisters and her cousins, aunts and uncle were lost somewhere behind her at the beginning of the long hot train ride, the even hotter ride in a stuffy truck, miles of dirt road consumed in mouthfuls of dust and heat.

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Angeline schooled the four young children, helped their mother feed them and the half-dozen men who worked the station, and busied herself with housework to try to avoid the view beyond the shady sanctuary of the house. Every three months she endured the rough nauseous drive in the truck and the slow train ride back to Townsville, to visit her sisters, to drink thirstily the colour of the sea and the tropical gardens and the uneven edges of the horizon. Albert carried her suitcase at the station and smiled at her. — Albert carried her suitcase and said hello. — Albert carried her suitcase and asked her name. — Albert carried her suitcase and they stood together in the shade of the platform while Angeline waited for her uncle.

Eva did whatever she pleased

Angeline shows Annabella a picture of Eva, standing beside a dam somewhere, which is covered with duckweed and lilies. The hat she is wearing casts her face in shadow, so it is difficult to tell if it is really her. She holds something in her hand — perhaps a flower — smiles at the photographer, is trapped in the stillness of the photo for a time. ‘Eva wasn’t like the rest of us,’ Madeline says. ‘She threw a sixpence coin in the creek every time Ben — your father — lit a cigarette. She told him on their wedding day she would do it; she wouldn’t abide him smoking.’ Angeline says, ‘I’m sure there was a small fortune embedded in the mud before Ben realised she wasn’t joking.’ In the backyard of the house where Annabella first lived, Eva shook walnuts from the tree by swinging at the branches with the end of a garden hoe. She lined the skirting boards in every room of the house with bottles of jam: quince, plum, apricot, guava and redcurrant jelly, alternating colours for effect.

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In summer she served dinner on an upturned crate on the lawn and sat on an oil tin opposite her husband to eat. ‘Eva did whatever she pleased,’ Madeline says. There are more photos. Two people walking in the snow, a cloudless sky and a range of smooth snow-capped hills in the background. A man and a woman — that much Annabella can identify — but their faces are turned away, the edges blurred by their own movement and by windblown hair. A photo of a bridge: steel trusses, thick pylons, a smooth shallow river and at least half of the frame filled with a beach of sand, rocks and driftwood. At the far end of the rocks a round white blur. Is it a person or just a rock lighter in colour than the rest? Both photos are black and white, but in this one it is impossible to tell if the sun is out or if the sky is a grim sheath of cloud. The river in the second photo has its source in the mountains in the first, but that is as far as the women can connect them. A photo of Eva and Benecio in the Snowy Mountains — somewhere — and a photo of a bridge across the Snowy River — somewhere. Beyond that, the women are not sure. Annabella realises Angeline and Madeline do not expect Eva to return. They talk about her as someone from the past. She is too scared to ask why, in case there is something they have not told her. Eva left home in the wake of a cyclone, headed south and kept travelling. Angeline is not sure how she met Benecio; the details have faded and she cannot be sure she isn’t confusing Eva’s story with that of one of her other daughters.

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Eva and Benecio chose to live in a town far away from their families, a town nestled in the foothills of the mountains in the photos. In time, most of her sisters would follow Eva south, spreading like spilt water across the country until they came to rest in their chosen place. Only Madeline remained with her mother, leaving home for a few months each spring in her blue caravan to visit her sisters. However it was that Eva found Benecio (could it have been on the side of a road somewhere?), Benecio seemed not to mind Eva’s eccentricities and the way she recorded her dreams as proof of the fact that she had lived this life at least once before. Benecio had a restless spirit and, when Angeline met him, she was afraid Eva would not be able to hold on to him. She realised much later that she was also afraid that he might infect Eva with his desire to keep moving. Annabella was born in the middle of winter, on a night when the town was shrouded in fog and Angeline thought she herself might die from the cold. It was clear without knowing and with just one look that Annabella belonged to Eva — there could be no confusion. So alike were they that Angeline wondered if Eva could have conceived without the aid of a father. Benecio died almost two years later; his name made the national news as the sole fatality of what became known as the St Valentine’s Day Fires. The unchecked growth generated by unseasonable spring rains was tinder-dry and ready to explode. One by one,

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hungry mouths of fire opened across the state, greedily consuming all in their path. People on the television news and in the newspapers remarked how extraordinary it was that only one person was killed. Eva did not think it extraordinary at all. She had never wanted Benecio to volunteer to fight fires, however heroic or selfless a gesture it might be. She had an inherent fear of fire, too familiar with the story of how Angeline’s parents were killed in a blaze, an event she told Benecio was nothing if not a bad omen. When two police officers arrived with a man from Benecio’s brigade to tell her she should sit down, they had some terrible news, Eva knew she had lived this moment before, if only in trying to prevent it. She was as angry with Benecio as she was defeated by sorrow. Now she was a widow, after just three years of marriage, left with a baby she didn’t know how she would care for. Her sisters flocked to her side, but she sent them away — only Elizabeth refused to leave. Eva considered killing herself and her child, imagined walking up into the hills to the place where Benecio drew his last smokechoked breath and self-combusting in a roar of flame and ash. She imagined the two police officers and the man from the brigade returning to tell her she should sit down, they had made a terrible mistake, and here is Benecio now standing before her; he’s not dead after all. She imagined lying down to sleep with Annabella in her arms and neither of them ever waking again.

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But none of these things happened. Instead, Eva lay Annabella in the bed beside her sleeping aunt and left the house, leaving little evidence that she had gone, with no reason for anyone to assume that she wasn’t going to return.

Eva as an apparition

Eva did meet Benecio on the side of the road and decided almost immediately, with the aid of her daily premonitions, that this was the man she must marry. Benecio, although by no means superstitious nor a believer in fate, thought it too much of a coincidence to ignore. He had travelled for years without ever meeting anyone who made such an impression on him, who made his stomach knot in pain the way Eva did. Benecio wrote to Melinda, his mother, for the first time in seven years to tell her he was going to be married. Not wanting to retrace any of the ground he had already covered, especially to the place he had been so desperate to leave, he told his parents he would not be bringing his fiancée home to meet them, but they were welcome to come to the wedding. Melinda and Joshua ventured away from their farm for the first time in 28 years, but Melinda would later recall that her lasting impression was not of the wonder of all the country she had never laid eyes on, but the way her daughter-in-law’s hair lit up like a halo when she turned her back to the sun.

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Eva looked slightly unreal on her wedding day. Dressed in white, the same colour as the snow on the ground, she stood out from it only because of the celestial glow she emitted from somewhere within. Melinda wondered if her son’s bride was completely of this Earth. She recalled the biblical portent of the circumstances of Benecio’s birth at the dairy and felt sure this was another sign from above. Adding to the suspicions Melinda would carry for the rest of her life — that Eva was but a temporary visitation from beyond — was the fact that Melinda never saw her again. By the time the griefstricken parents responded to the news of Benecio’s death in the fire, Eva had already vanished without trace.

Elizabeth dreams of fire

Elizabeth woke from a dream of orange and red fireworks to find her niece sleeping soundly beside her and the house strangely quiet. She was not sure if she breathed or just imagined the lingering smoke from the fires that had ringed the town for so many days, leaving the edges scorched and scarred. She looked through the house for her sister, but Eva was nowhere to be found. Elizabeth made breakfast for herself and the baby and ate slowly, waiting, hoping for a quick resolution. But the morning passed without event, and a cold lump formed in Elizabeth’s gut. She bundled Annabella into the stroller and walked to the cemetery, to the mound of fresh earth and wilted flowers that was Benecio’s grave. Eva was not there. She was not anywhere in the house or the town where Elizabeth could find her. No one had seen her or heard from her. There were no clothes missing from her wardrobe, no gaps on the shelves to suggest she had packed for a trip. No note. No message.

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Eva’s face appeared on posters around the town, in the newspapers, on the television news. A young mother, a new widow, possibly separated from her senses by her grief. But no one had seen or heard anything beyond false sightings and rumour, and Elizabeth suspected Eva, like their father before her, did not want to be found.

Albert was hypnotised

Albert, Eva’s father, was hypnotised by the road. When the Green Valley line closed, he found a new job as a travelling salesman and he did to Angeline and his daughters what he had done so long ago to his mother and stepfather. He sent a postcard to Angeline, told her he was amazed, astounded, in love, seduced by the vastness and emptiness of the view. He said, ‘If I had known all this empty space was out here, I would never have endured the city for so long.’ Angeline had never known Albert to be so eloquent; she wondered if the card was really from him. But no amount of eloquence could compensate for the lack of any further explanation when he signed off by telling her he would not be coming home. Much later, she burnt the card with a match over the rubbish tin. She removed his clothes and books, cut up photos and emptied shelves to remove any evidence of his stay — for that is all it ever was, she decided. She let a hardness settle over her, and she told her daughters, ‘We will not mention him again.’

Pictures of you

Dear Mother, There are pictures of you in my room, in silver and wooden frames on the dresser and on the walls. You look young, you smile, you ride a horse, a bike, you pose with a birthday cake. You watch me from around the room; you could be my face in the mirror. I turn out the light so I don’t have to look at you while I’m trying to sleep, but the light from the hallway comes in to throw shadows on the places from where I know you are watching me. I hold a photo of you up to the mirror, put it beside the reflection of my face. We look alike: we are identical. But I don’t know you, don’t really know anything about you, despite these women’s stories. No one can tell me what you smell like, what your voice sounds like, what it feels like to be touched by you. I can’t even pretend to know what it would feel like to have you hold me.

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I have lost you, and you me. You gave birth to me, gave me away and then left me behind. I don’t know why, I don’t know what I could have done to make you stay. I miss you. Without you I am incomplete; I cannot ever be whole. I want to know when I will be able to think about you without hurting so much. Annabella

A long way from anywhere

Annabella wakes every morning watched over by her mother. She watches from the walls, from the framed prints on the dresser. She is black-and-white and colour images frozen in time, unmoving, unchanging, but Annabella feels her gaze, feels her eyes moving about the room with her. If only she were real. If only she were here. This is not the house where Eva and her seven sisters grew up, but Annabella imagines her mother living here as a child, imagines Eva in her own movements. She walks in the orchard and surveys the unfamiliar tropical fruits; she brushes through the long grass in the paddocks and takes in the sweep of the Tableland to the south and west, the borders of mountains; she dips her feet in the cool water of the creek and becomes aware of the heavy form of Mount Bartle Frere against the eastern horizon. She does all this trying to think and feel and see as Eva, as the young Eva would have taken it all in. This place seems to be a long way from anywhere. Annabella can sense how far they are above the coastal plain and how far behind her all the other homes are.

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The colours of this world are loud after those she is used to: chocolate-red soil, shocking green vegetation, luminous flashes of butterflies, insects, birds — azure, saffron, scarlet, orange, purple, shiny black, emerald — splashes of crimson and hot-pink hibiscus, flame-red African tulips, purple jacaranda, blood-red poinciana, aureate day lilies, ember-orange Watsonia, marmalade bush, flame trees and everywhere pink, red, orange and white balsam. The colours are amplified by the sunshine and fill the house with light. Annabella watches Angeline and Madeline tend these colours in the garden, coax them into neater, healthier forms, rip fists of weeds from the yielding soil, tear off and clear away the dead and dying fronds of tree ferns, seed husks fallen from the palms, small dead branches dislodged by the wind or by possums or flying foxes. The grass grows almost visibly by the hour and needs cutting frequently, the noisy smoke-blowing mower dislodging waves of insects, skinks and cane toads before it. Madeline lets loose with a victory cry when she runs over a toad with the blades, but one day she stops the mower and carefully relocates a python to the safety of a nearby tree before continuing. Madeline heads daily into the paddocks on the tractor, disappearing and then reappearing in the gullies and ridges between the ice-cream-scoop shaped hills. Small pockets of remnant rainforest dot the farm and a larger tract forms the eastern boundary. The cattle stand out as black fly spots on the clean green cloth of the fields.

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Annabella is sure Eva would have been happy growing up here — she would have understood the order of things. Unlike Annabella, she would not have felt nervous and vulnerable wandering any distance from the house. When Annabella returns to her room at night to meet her mother’s gaze, she removes Eva from the anonymous backdrops of the photographs and places her before the scenes of untamed colour and life she has witnessed during the day.

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Annabella has never seen photographs of her father until Angeline searches through boxes in the sewing-room cupboards to find them: paper packets of prints beginning to curl at the edges and lose their colour from the damp, smelling of mould and something fainter and more curious — stale grass. Annabella doesn’t know quite what to expect, quite what to do. She sees Benecio’s round face, his dark hair, his strong limbs, his curious smile, his faraway eyes, and recognises someone familiar and yet completely unknown. How is this possible? He embraces Eva, stands beside her, takes in a view with her, smiles at the camera. In other shots he is alone, seeming to look at something in the distance, or caught unaware with his eyes hidden from view. Then there are photographs of Eva and Benecio holding a baby, proudly presenting it to the camera, playing with it, lying beside it

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on the lounge-room floor or on the grass. ‘That’s you, Anna.’ That was me. That is me. Annabella feels light, insubstantial, weightless, almost dizzy. This is her in the photographs, even though she doesn’t remember being there. This is her mother holding her, touching her, smiling at her, smiling because of her, but she cannot remember or imagine what that must have felt like. Their faces are familiar, but in a way that is difficult to connect with. There is Benecio holding her, at rest in a red armchair. Annabella remembers thick red curtains framing the sky. There is Eva lying on a blanket with Annabella on a pillow beside her; there are Benecio’s feet in the background. Annabella remembers shadows and sunlight misting the trunks of pine trees, the sigh of their needles in the breeze. There are Eva and Benecio on the same blanket, embracing each other and Annabella. Annabella remembers an empty clothesline outside the window, strung like cobweb, spinning slowly in the wind. Annabella has never really thought about her father; she has never had the same longing or sense of loss for him that she has for her mother. She traces Benecio’s face in the photographs, then Eva’s, then her own in the mirror. She lost both of them within days of each other, but it is Eva who has possessed her. She suspects it is because Benecio is definitely dead; there is no possibility of him returning.

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Annabella now has photographs of her family. Of the family that was. They look like her and she like them, but she cannot remember their voices, their touch, anything substantial about them. She must always have known Eva left because of Benecio, because of her grief for him, but she has not considered it until this moment. Nor has she considered what it meant to have a father and to lose him. She has not acknowledged until now that Eva’s love for Benecio must have been greater than her love for Annabella. Now she sees Benecio in a different light. She compares his face with hers. She wants to see why Eva could not bear to be left without him, yet she could leave Annabella behind.

The divisions of love

Dear Mother, Why did you leave me behind? Was your grief for my father greater than your love for me? Grandma has given me the photographs from your collection, photos of you and Dad and of you and me. Of me and Dad, and of all of us together. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember you, but I still want you. I would like to know why my father was more important than me. I’m your daughter. I didn’t die. Please come and get me. I need you. I need my mother. Annabella

How to live without Eva

Angeline says, ‘Anna, we all miss your mum, but we have to face the possibility she might never come back …’ Angeline pauses and exchanges with Madeline a glance that is almost a sigh. ‘It’s been a long time — more than 10 years. Your mum has had plenty of time to contact us. It’s possible, we must accept, that perhaps she isn’t going to.’ ‘But she has to!’ This is what Annabella has been waiting for all this time. Eva must be looking for her, must be coming to get her, must want to be reunited. It was a mistake, an accident, she didn’t mean to leave Annabella behind. How could she not be trying to find her own baby, her only daughter? ‘Annabella, it’s very hard, I know.’ Angeline says she wishes she could make things easier for Annabella. She says Annabella must try to get on with her life and make a place for herself. ‘You must accept the possibility that she won’t ever be coming back.’ But she’s my mother, she has to. I need her.

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Angeline says, ‘I know it’s difficult, but you have to consider that maybe your mum can’t come back.’ Annabella feels the familiar sharp pain behind her eyes, hot and constricting at the back of her throat, tight in her chest. Eva cannot possibly be dead, as Angeline is suggesting; she must be coming for her. There can be no existence without her, without the promise of her imminent return. Annabella cannot picture a future without Eva. She has never considered it. She can picture their reunion, Eva reaching out to embrace her. So this is where you’ve been hiding. I’ve found you at last. Annabella feels even more alone now it seems that Angeline and Madeline have abandoned her, too.

Remembering a dream

Annabella tries to remember a time when she hasn’t felt pain. She remembers the first things. A junction in a road: one way straight ahead, one way beckoning to the right — both leading to the mountains. She remembers the mountains were white-topped shapes in the distance, beyond rolling hills of grass and lines of grey-green trees. She remembers a narrow valley, sharp ridges of granite, a river of dark still water. She remembers a window and through it a clothesline, swing set, pine forest, spotlights of sunshine cutting through shadows. These images come with the sensation of moving slowly through a pleasant, foggy dream. They are moving, she is moving, the scenery passes without really changing; she feels suspended, weightless, floating on light. She doesn’t feel pain. There is a woman in her dreams sometimes but she can’t see her face; it is always blurred in the glare from the window or masked by the shadows of evening. She feels safe, she feels like a laugh sounds. She doesn’t feel pain.

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But everything else she remembers is tarnished, however slightly, by pinpricks or stab wounds of pain. Loneliness, sorrow, desperation, isolation, confusion, helplessness. Is this perhaps how everyone feels? Or, as she suspects, will the aching be eased when Eva returns?

I am still waiting

Dear Mother, The others have given up waiting, but I haven’t. I won’t. Please come soon. Annabella

Black and white and colour

Eva watches Annabella from the walls of her room, but her eyes are receding, retreating to the black-and-white and colour paper of the photographs, pressed flat against the glass, some buckling from damp and age. Eva is becoming what she has always been, but what Annabella did not see until now: a remote image, powerless, unseen and unseeing, a one-dimensional series of coloured ink dots. Nothing more. Annabella is losing her and still trying to keep hold, at the same time as she tries to cast her off. Madeline says, ‘I loved your mum but I never understood her, and I don’t know if I should still love her so much.’ She says she can’t understand or explain or excuse her, but neither can she feel any anger. This is the explanation Madeline clings to: ‘She must have had her reasons.’ Madeline has plenty of theories, but she has no answer for Annabella, who wants to know why.

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Madeline says she does know that Eva loved Annabella. She was extraordinary. And something extraordinary must have happened to make her act the way she did. Annabella doubts. And asks questions. But Madeline will not retreat from her stance.

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There are photographs of Eva and Madeline together and of all the sisters in various combinations. So many different faces, yet all essentially a variation of one: Angeline. Annabella is the spitting image of Eva, but she is also an image of Madeline, although a little distorted. In the same way, she is an image of Elizabeth, Jade, Suzannah, Jacqueline, Alexandra and Rosemary. And also of Angeline. The likeness of the women is obvious, but any other links they possess are less easy to perceive. Madeline adores Eva. She adores everything in her memory of her, except what she did to Annabella. Madeline was intrigued, seduced, by Eva, by something within her none of her other sisters showed. Eva was the youngest, but Madeline always thought she must be much older, that she must have been alive a lot longer than any of them.

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Eva was the youngest, but she was the first to leave home. She sat huddled with them in the bathroom during the cyclone and suddenly announced she was leaving. Madeline was shocked but also impressed. She knew Eva was charmed, could do anything she wanted and would not be caught out because nothing surprised her. Annabella recognises this feeling although it is hard to describe.

Please contact your daughter

Annabella watches the rain leach out of the heavy fog in indifferent drizzles, listens to the soft patter on the roof. Angeline and Madeline are outside in the work shed and Annabella has managed to hide a page of the classified notices from the day’s newspaper in her room, will think of an excuse later if they happen to notice. She reads again, just to be sure:

MISSING: EVA ANGELICA HARRIS (NEE WINTERBOURNE) Daughter of Angeline and Albert (whereabouts also unknown) Winterbourne, originally of Townsville, now of Sapphire Creek, Queensland. Younger sister to Elizabeth, Madeline, Suzannah, Jade, Alexandra, Jacqueline and Rosemary.

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MOTHER of Annabella Joy Harris. Wife of Benecio James Harris (deceased). Please make contact with your daughter at the address listed below or at least supply information of wellbeing …

She doesn’t know what Angeline would say, how she would react if she discovered Annabella’s advertisement, so it is safer to try to keep them from seeing it. If only Eva would contact her, none of this would matter.

Particular faces

Particular faces in the classroom, in the playground, groups of girls in the town, at the lake, wandering the markets, remind Annabella of Fiona, of the time when she was living with the silky-voiced mother and had her own group of friends. She has not had any since then. Some of the other students talk to her at school, recognise her in the street, at the lake, at the markets, but that’s all. She has never been to their houses and they have never been to hers. She has never had a conversation with them of the sort she and Fiona used to share. She is frightened of them; she can’t quite remember how she became friends with Fiona and the others; she’s not sure how to do it again. She has seen other girls get hurt by making mistakes. She watches to try to establish the rules of belonging; what it is these particular girls do or say wrong, the kinds of punishment or revenge enacted on them; what they have to do to re-enter the fold; what happens to those who can’t make it back in.

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Annabella thinks it’s much safer to stay out of the way and observe. She is small and quiet and new here and, most of the time, no one notices her — and perhaps it’s better to keep it that way. Fiona’s image is disappearing; there are blurred, unclear spots when Annabella tries to recall what she looked like, what her voice was like. She does remember the way she laughed. She loved to hear Fiona laugh, it felt so good to share a joke and laugh together. That was when Annabella felt that she was a part of something good. Now she just feels like an intruder, a stranger, a visitor, who might not even be staying very long. Angeline and Madeline tell Annabella she will make friends here, she just needs time to settle in and be accepted. ‘People are always a little uncertain of new faces, that’s all.’ But Annabella knows better, she has been through this before. Through the newsagent, she orders copies of the newspapers she sent her advertisement to. She keeps the cuttings in an envelope in the back of her wardrobe and waits. She swore to herself that she had done enough waiting but she just needs something, some word, some small snippet of information, the slightest indication that Eva is alive. She has spent so long waiting, it won’t hurt to continue a little longer — just until she receives a reply.

Letters from Eva

After much thought, Madeline gives Annabella a box from the back of the cupboard in her room — a collection of musty, crinkled paper and neatly clipped, yellowing newspaper cuttings. She says, ‘Grandma wasn’t sure whether I should let you see these. She thought it might only upset you.’

February 10 Dear Maddy, Three days ‘on the road’ already — it seems to have rushed by. I miss all of you but I’m so excited and impatient to keep going! It was hard seeing Mum cry when I left — but I hope she understands how much this means to me. I can’t explain how important this trip feels. Love, Eva

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February 14 Dear Maddy, Brisbane is very nice — but very big. Jenny has a lovely house and their garden is gorgeous. She’s showing me all the sights, which is great, but I am also impatient to get moving again. Sometimes it feels like I’ve come a really long way and sometimes it feels like I’ve hardly moved at all. Even so, I’m loving every minute — it feels so good to have no set routine. Love, Eva

February 19 Dear Maddy, I’ve just officially crossed into New South Wales — not that it looks any different from Queensland so far. I can’t believe how far I’ve travelled — how far away home is. Hope everything’s going well up there. Love, Eva

March 11 Dear Maddy, OK, so now I really am a long way from home! Sydney is very BIG — much bigger than anything I imagined. It’s also very crowded and very hectic — and no one makes eye contact in the street. It’s

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certainly not as warm here as at home and I miss being able to gauge the time of day by the way the light is on Castle Hill. In fact, I’m getting a bit homesick — especially at night.

Love, Eva

March 16 Dear Maddy, It’s one month and nine days since I left home, which seems hard to believe. I caught a train up here for a few days. It’s a lot cooler up here than in Sydney, but a lot quieter. Where I’m staying is a bit like a bigger version of Paluma — including the fogs. The name comes from the fact that the oil vapour in the eucalyptus trees makes the mountains appear blue — or something like that. Miss you. Love, Eva

March 22 Dear Maddy, What am I doing? It seems so long since I left and also it seems just like yesterday that I said goodbye to you all. I’ve been really homesick — don’t let on to the others, OK? — and I’m not sure now what I thought this was going to achieve. I mean, it’s been great travelling and seeing all these fantastic places, but I meant this to be much more than just a holiday. At least, I had hoped it would be. Love, Eva

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March 24 Dear Maddy, I hope the last postcard wasn’t too glib. I am glad I decided to do this trip, it’s just hard not to get a little lonely. And some days I do feel a bit down and I wish I wasn’t so far away from you all. Then I think I should make the most of this incredible opportunity — and not waste time feeling sorry for myself. So I guess I’d better stop writing and go sightseeing! Love, Eva

April 1 Dear Maddy, Arrived here yesterday and followed Mum’s mudmap up to Myrtlewood to see where she grew up, but it doesn’t look anything like she described it. Still, I’m glad I came. I wish I could have asked her how to get to Coldstone, so I could see where Dad came from — I mean, I know how to get to the town, but not anything else. It would have been good to retrace both sides of the family, you know? Love, Eva

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April 3 Dear Maddy, I have no idea what I’m doing so far from home — and on my own. I think I was hoping to find something, to have some kind of revelation by coming away that would help me decide what to do with my life. I don’t really want to be doing this anymore — it’s hard always having to decide what to do and where to go every day. It would be nice sometimes not to have to make all these decisions on my own. But I also don’t want to come home just yet — that would feel a little like defeat. Does this make sense? Love, Eva

April 5 Dear Maddy, Sorry that you keep getting these miserable letters when everyone else gets the happy-traveller postcards. I can’t explain but I would feel like I’d failed if Mum and the others knew how I felt. I was feeling so brave and clever and independent by going off on this adventure on my own. Now I just feel really stupid that I thought I wouldn’t get lonely. Miss you heaps. Love, Eva

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April 8 Dear Maddy, I have to tell you this. I was waiting for a bus yesterday — at this stop way out of town on the highway in the middle of nowhere — and this guy came walking along. Yes, yes, he was really goodlooking and it was the last place I expected any talent to turn up(!!), but it was also just really, really weird. I felt like I already knew him — even before he said hello. I guess that sounds like some awful line from a movie, but I don’t mean it like that. We’ve been through all the people and places we know and there’s no way we could have met before, but I feel sure I know him and I can’t work out why. Love, Eva

April 10 Dear Maddy, OK, so about this guy from the bus stop. His name is Ben Harris, he’s three days older than me and he’s also from North Queensland (from Mount Walker)! He’s been walking and hitching round the country — he goes fruit-picking and labouring to pay his way — and is GORGEOUS — in every respect. He decided to catch the bus with me to Melbourne and we’ve been touring the sights together. I still feel I know him from somewhere, but I can’t explain it and he’s sure he’s never met me. Anyway, Madds, I think we’ll be getting to know each other a lot better from now on!! Love, Eva

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May 1 Dear Maddy, Mum sounded OK on the phone when I told her about Ben — I hope she really was. I forgot to ask you, please, please don’t let her know Ben and I have been sharing a room — she’d have kittens if she found out, I know. I gave her a story about him staying NEAR me, but not even in the same hostel, so I hope you haven’t and don’t say anything to get me into trouble. I don’t want her to have any excuse not to like Ben — because I think this is going to get pretty serious (and I do mean happily ever after …). Love, Eva

HARRIS (NEE WINTERBOURNE): To Benecio James and Eva Angelica a beautiful baby girl, Annabella Joy, born July 10 at 1:15am, 6lb 2oz. Mother and baby both well.

HARRIS (NEE WINTERBOURNE): Congratulations Benecio and Eva on the birth of your darling Annabella, July 10. Best wishes from Mum, Elizabeth and David, Jade and Raymond, Alexandra, Rosemary, Suzannah and Neil, Jacqueline and Adam, and Madeline.

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HARRIS (NEE WINTERBOURNE): Congratulations and best wishes to Benecio and Eva on the birth of your first child, Annabella Joy, from Mum and Dad, Alex, Joanne and Stephanie.

HARRIS Benecio (Ben) James Killed tragically February 14. Adored husband of Eva, much loved father of Annabella, beloved son of Melinda and Joshua, much loved brother of Alexander, Joanne and Stephanie. Much loved son-in-law of Angeline, brother-inlaw of Elizabeth and David, Jade and Raymond, Alexandra and Yvonne, Rosemary, Suzannah and Neil, Jacqueline and Ian, and Madeline. Greatly missed.

HARRIS, Benecio (Ben) James Killed tragically February 14, providing service to the community. A great mate and tireless hero, greatly missed and fondly remembered by members and friends of Western Ridge and Brush Creek Volunteer Bush Fire Brigades and Blacklynd SES Corps.

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HARRIS, Ben The residents of Blacklynd, Snowy Plains, Adely and Brush Creek wish to extend heartfelt sympathy to the family and friends of Ben Harris, who was taken tragically while defending these areas from wildfire. A debt of gratitude we now cannot repay to a selfless hero.

These are the events that shaped and became part of Annabella’s life; this is her story. She pictures Eva and her father in the faceless news clippings, tries to imagine Eva composing the letters to Madeline. There are still so many gaps in the story, so much more that she wants to know, but this is a start, this is much more than she has ever been told before.

The poem of names

Dear Mother, First — Small room, thick red curtains, woman stands above me framed in light from the window. Is it you? Thick red curtains frame a window of blue-sky light, dark outline of pines, fragile frame of clothesline spinning in the wind. Is this home? The woman stands above me, a blurred outline in front of the brightness of the glass. Now — Names flutter on the clothesline, names pegged to hold them tight against the wind. A poem of names: Elizabeth, Jade, Suzannah, Madeline, Jacqueline, Alexandra, Rosemary. Eva. A poem dripping colours as the rain runs through them, as the wind whips them against the dark sky, against the darker line of trees. Thick red curtains frame the window, frame the view, bleed red and blue and purple and green and orange and yellow, strips of liquefying paper and a confused poem of names.

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A soft voice: Annabella. Who is it? A softer voice, hard to hear: Eva? Where are you going? The clothesline spins like a top and spirals up and off above the pine trees in the wind, colours trail and bleed across the sky. I want to go home. Annabella

A wedding in the snow

On the day Eva married Benecio, there was snow on the ground the same colour as her dress. They had chosen the location for their wedding and their new life almost at random and because the town was unlike anywhere either of them had been before. The town lay in a hollow surrounded by hills, bordered on one side by mountains and on the other by a rolling treeless plain that had the appearance of a desert in the half-light of dawn or dusk. In summer the town was a shady oasis amid the glare-burnt shimmer of the treeless paddocks; the same ground frost-scorched and dryfrozen hard in the long winters that pushed a lid of fog and muted light over the bowl of the town, sealing it into its own isolation. Eva and Benecio were charmed because it was so unfamiliar, because it was so unlike anything they were used to. Eva told Madeline that her wedding day was the first day she could remember that seemed new, that didn’t feel like a familiar scene repeated. Madeline tells Annabella that Eva looked beautiful, but also different somehow, someone not quite familiar. And when she

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stood in the double glare of the sun-fired snow-shine, her features were corroded by the light, her face disappeared. Eva sent Madeline letters describing her new life in that town, telling her how happy she was, how in love. She described the small wooden house on the edge of the town, the pine forest beyond the backyard, which framed her view of the sunsets. She described the ancient walnut tree against the fence, the modest orchard which she nurtured back to health to yield redcurrants and plums, apples and quinces, guavas and apricots, from which she made endless batches of jellies and jams. She lined the walls of the house with the jam jars, a delicious hem of orange and red, yellow and purple-black, a candy trail along the skirting boards, catching the light and crystallising it into lozenges of sugary colour against the paleness of the walls. Eva and Benecio dined outside in the summer garden, eating off tin camping plates, perched on oil tins or an upturned crate. They quenched a midnight appetite with spoonfuls of jam from a jar plucked from along their bedroom wall and, on nights of sharp moonlight, they walked among the pine trees, startling summerdry twigs with the nakedness of their feet. Eva’s letters describe all this and more, but Annabella doesn’t feel any closer to understanding or to recognising the voice of the writer or the feelings she describes, not even when the letters announce Eva’s pregnancy and her own arrival in the world. It cannot be Annabella making Eva crave walnuts out of season or the mangoes of her childhood, the buttery taste of barramundi that

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Albert sometimes brought home, the fresh squares of coconut eaten in the ocean glare of a winter picnic on The Strand. It cannot be Annabella whom Eva describes as a butterfly flicker in her belly, a slight tugging on her ribcage, a stone-like weight pulling at her lower back, stretching the skin on her stomach balloon-plastic taut. But the newly born baby in the letters has her name, in the pictures it has a birthmark on its shin the same as the one still imprinted on Annabella’s skin, so it must be her Eva is describing, it must be her in the photos, even though she cannot recall any of it, not even prompted by the pictures as proof.

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Annabella dreams of a row of unfocused faces and a view of blue. She sees a window framed with red on a room that is empty but full of light. A woman stands above her but she cannot see her face, sunlight blurs her features. Annabella’s eyes water, she can’t see who the woman is. She dreams of a night-shrouded pine forest, car headlights drilling out shadows, playing across trunks of black bark and the nothing spaces in between. A man signals to her from the nothingness but she can’t move in time to follow, the beam of headlights strobes back again and she can no longer see where he had been.

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Thick red curtains frame a window blurred with yellow-white light, which distorts the outline of a woman who touches Annabella, who has soft hands and smooth skin and a mouth that smiles with her eyes, lips that move but make no sound. The room is small and empty and very quiet and beyond the window a clothesline spins off into the pine trees, trees themselves framing a sky of unbroken blue.

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Eva wrote: Dear Maddy, Bella is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen — I can’t believe Ben and I created her, I can’t believe she is real. She wrote, I wish I could describe to you what it feels like to have grown something — to have grown a person — inside me and then watch her moving and breathing and being alive, when a year ago she didn’t exist. She says, It’s so strange, Maddy, I feel like I’m in a dream.

————

Annabella stares hard at the photos of the tiny baby — tufts of brown hair, tiny new-grass-coloured eyes, tiny hands, tiny everything — and tries to believe she is looking at herself.

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But she doesn’t remember lying on that coarse checked blanket in the sun, with clover flowers near her head and a man’s arm propping her up for the camera. She doesn’t recall the shine of the floorboards scattered with toys and the lines of jam jars kaleidoscopic against the wall in the background. Somewhere in her memory she should be able to find snatches of these moments, a glimpse of colour, the touch of the polished floor on her skin, some scent or echo of words spoken, but, except for the blurred faces in her dreams, there is nothing to convince her that she is connected to any of this at all.

Too many memories

Dear Madeline, I have been inundated with flowers, cards, letters, even gifts for Annabella from people all over the place. Didn’t know Ben knew or helped so many people. Liz has insisted on staying, even though I have asked her not to. I feel I must explain why I didn’t want you or any of the others to stay. I’m not doing at all well and I just want to deal with this on my own. As you know, I adored Ben, he was the love of my life, and I never felt more complete and content than when I was with him. I was not prepared to lose him this way, or so soon. I am really angry about the way it happened — I tried to stop him volunteering for the brigade, but you know what he was like — had to help everyone. I guess my motivations were selfish but I feel now I was right to try to stop him — I have lost my dear man and dear Bella is without a father. I realise he was doing a great thing for the people out there, but they stood to lose only their houses — material things — while I have lost one-half of my life.

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Again, I suppose this is selfish but at the moment I can’t see it any other way. Those people have been able to return to their houses, everything intact, and I am left with nothing. Thank you for helping to convince Mum to stay up there — as I said, I don’t want anyone around, especially not her. She would only worry herself to exhaustion anyway. I am still trying to convince Liz that I don’t need her anymore and she can go home — have even tried to get David onside to help — but I must admit she is a big help with the baby. Poor Bella — at least she is too young to understand what has happened, although she seems to have worked out that something’s wrong. Ben adored her and she him, and I can’t think of the hole that’s going to make in her life. I’m sorry to burden you with all this, Maddy, but I needed to tell someone and you are the only one who really listens to what I’m saying and hears me properly. I really thought everything had come together in my life; it seems so unfair to have lost it all so suddenly and so soon after finding it. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I think I will try to get us out of here — move somewhere else and make a new start — too many sad memories here. Perhaps I will come up and see you lot for a while — let Mum pamper Bella and you spoil me. Must go. Thanks for listening, sweet Maddy, Lots of love for ever, Eva

————

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This is the last word from Eva — but it’s not by any means the end of the story. Annabella wants to read what happened next, she wants to find the next letter in Eva’s handwriting, which explains the only part of the story she really wants to know.

Pieces chipped away

Dear Mother, I am Annabella. Two names joined together. A verse from the poem of your sisters’ names. A sigh and a kiss. Like saying goodbye when you don’t want to leave, when you don’t want to be left. Some of your sisters chipped away at my name. But I am Annabella, nothing less. Some of the false parents also chipped away at me, broke pieces of me off, damaged things inside me, under my skin. But in the mirror I am whole. In the mirror I am a reflection of you, of Angeline, of Elizabeth, Jade, Alexandra, Rosemary, Suzannah, Jacqueline, Madeline. And Benecio. Annabella Joy. Elizabeth Rhiannon. Jade Angeline. Alexandra Grace. Rosemary Josephine. Suzannah Emeline. Jacqueline Isabella. Madeline Roseanna. Eva Angelica. I am part of the poem of names. I have taken possession of a small piece of each of these women and they of me, all originally given or stolen from Angeline, and a sliver of Benecio in the movement of my eye, the shape of my hands, the tiny birthmark on my shin identical to his.

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Not all of these women are as sweet as their names and the rhythm of the poem has been broken. But I am Annabella Joy. Not quite. A sigh and a kiss. A painful goodbye. Or Bella, no sigh, just a single, sweet, sugary kiss.

Time takes up space

In the evenings the sea mist rises and is caught by the mountain before falling on to the eastern edge of the Tableland, cushioning the sky and the muted air with thick fog. The view is reduced to the end of the garden and all but the closest of noises become inaudible. Annabella feels somehow safe, protected, by the blanket of mist. It tucks her into a quiet restful night like being tucked into a warm cosy bed. When did she become aware of time? Of her life passing? It can only have been recently; she can’t remember acknowledging it before. She was always aware of growing up and out and all the physical changes, but not the passing of time, the years she has been without her mother (and her father) and the years she has spent waiting for Eva and for something new to begin. This time is something different to just days and weeks, her age at her birthday. It is a measure more difficult to grasp and the waiting seems to have taken up a much greater space than the living within it.

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I have done nothing but wait. She has experienced pain and loss and loneliness and the displacement of living with so many different parents, but nothing important has happened, she has achieved nothing significant. She has done nothing but wait. She has only waited. And she is still waiting. For what? Where is the woman who should be coming to claim her? What sort of woman — what sort of mother — abandons her daughter? Perhaps it is possible that Annabella is waiting for something, for someone, who is not coming.

Words that say nothing

Eva’s words lie on the pages in the box Madeline has given her. So many words, which, in the end, seem to say nothing. There is no letter that says: — Dear Maddy, what have I done? — Dear Maddy, I can’t live without Bella. I’m coming to get her. There is nothing in the letters to explain how Eva could love Annabella one minute but not the next.

The first seeds of doubt

Dear Mother, Perhaps Grandma is right — you may not be coming back. I don’t think you are dead — I’m sure you’re not — but there is no reason why you could not have found me by now. If you were looking. I don’t think you are. Perhaps you never were. I don’t understand why you left me, but I know that you chose to — it was your decision. So it must also be your decision not to come for me. I would give anything just to know why. I wish I still felt like I used to — like I always did before — sure that you are on your way and you will find me soon and take me home. It hurts not to believe that, but that’s what is happening. I am beginning to doubt. Annabella

Déjà vu

Sometimes when Annabella wakes from a dream it is difficult to separate its images from the reality of the previous day. As a day unfolds, images return to her and she cannot remember if they really happened, if that conversation really took place, or whether these things belong only to sleep. Then there is the sensation she encounters frequently, not unlike déjà vu. She sees a face, hears a voice, takes a step forward and is sure she has seen this, heard this, been here before — even when she can be sure she has not. Or has she? It is difficult to tell. Where could she find proof? She has only her own memories — and can they be trusted? — and the fragments of stories given to her by Angeline and Madeline and some of the other parents. Not all of them can be trusted. It is important to know, to be able to find out, what is real. She has to build her own history herself and, whenever she doubts the one she has created, she begins to doubt also the story of her mother. It doesn’t make sense that Eva, as she has been so lovingly described to Annabella, could leave her daughter and disappear without a word to anyone. Could it be that the story isn’t true?

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Annabella sees the woman standing above her in the dream, the red curtains on the window, the clothesline and the backyard — she has always associated these things with ‘home’. With Eva and Benecio. But are these simply images that have been provided by a sympathetic teller or are they an invention of her own? It feels real, but there is no way to be sure.

————

Angeline watches Annabella sleeping and sees Eva in the soft thick hair swirled on the pillow, the troubled closed face, the small form of her body. She sees Eva sleeping. She sees Elizabeth, Jade, Alexandra, Rosemary, Suzannah, Jacqueline, Madeline. Her daughters; women she thought she knew because she created and helped to shape them. But she feels betrayed, let down — tricked perhaps. She doesn’t know these women at all. She sees not Annabella in the darkened room, but Eva, Elizabeth, Jade and Suzannah. All of them, in turn, failed Annabella. And betrayed Angeline. What moments, what methods of her mothering could have allowed such characteristics to take form?

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Angeline scours her memory, tries to relive each day of her motherhood in an attempt to find some thought, word or incident that could have led some of her daughters down this reprehensible path. But it could have been anything or nothing.

So much waiting

Annabella makes a decision and almost as quickly her resolve falters. She doesn’t want to stop waiting for her mother, doesn’t want to face the prospect of a life without her, but something has changed and she is finding it hard to believe. Now whenever she thinks of Eva, she feels something different, almost hostile. She even feels angry with herself for all the time she has devoted to waiting and hoping for something that seems so unlikely to happen when she considers the evidence. She feels impatient and restless. Perhaps this is the same feeling that led Eva away, and Benecio and Albert before her. Annabella must surely have in her blood the same desire to wander, to avoid taking root, that brought her parents together in the first place. But if Eva had simply wanted to move on, why couldn’t she have taken Annabella with her? Why couldn’t they have been travelling companions? Annabella knows she has more questions than she will ever find answers for. Her desire to know eats away at her, combines with

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her restlessness and her want of a place to regard as home, to lead her gaze during the day to the horizon and at night to places remembered or imagined in her dreams. But if she leaves Angeline and Madeline, even if she tells them she is going, doesn’t that make her the same as Eva? Doesn’t that mean she is somehow defeated?

How else to explain this?

Somewhere, sometime, something must have come unstuck. Something not planned for must have happened. Something must have caught those involved completely unaware. How else to explain this? Annabella wonders — she has had this thought many times before — if it was something she did wrong, or something she failed to do. There must be something wrong with me. She can’t recall at any point having any say in what has happened to her, but perhaps she wasn’t paying attention, perhaps she misbehaved and lost her chance. Perhaps she is to blame. This is what she gets for being so weak, so cowardly, so small. She has only ever followed, submitted, obeyed. Led from one house and one set of false parents to the next. She has never protested, complained, asked for anything more. She has wished and hoped for her mother to appear and provide her with something better, but she has never voiced her desires. She has never spoken in defence of herself.

This is no answer

The sun is high and bright above Annabella, stripes and flickers of shadows and light fall through the trees around her, on to the surface of the creek — alternating swirls of deep-emerald and crystalline water. She feels the weight of the water around her ankles, the weight of the mountain looming to the east, rising to the sky, the weight of all the stories and voices, her grandmother and aunt in the house on the hill behind her. The letter is in her hand. It is addressed to her. Madeline gave it to her when she returned from the weekly shopping trip to town, seemed surprised that Annabella should be receiving mail. Even though the address has been typed on a computer, this is the letter. She knows it; this is the reply. But now she’s not sure whether she wants to open it.

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Dear Annabella, I didn’t think you would be interested in contacting me, in having anything to do with me, but your notice in the paper found its way to me and I realise you do at least deserve a reply. Yes, I am alive and in good health but I cannot tell you where I am. So much time has passed and there is no way to account for all of it. I am not ready to see you, Bella, and it may be a long time yet before I can prepare myself for that. I hope you understand. I also hope you are well and growing into a beautiful young woman, as I knew you would. Love, Your mother Mum Eva

————

This is a reply. It is not an answer. This is not even part of the story. What does this resolve, what does it tell her? This is Eva’s handwriting — it matches her writing in the letters from a long time ago. She is alive and she is well. She knows Annabella exists and now she knows she wants to see her. But Eva doesn’t want to see her. She is not yearning to see her own daughter, her only daughter. Or is this now untrue? Has she made another family, does she have other children, another husband, investments more important than a reunion with Annabella?

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Eva has not been looking for her, has not been trying to find her to collect her and take her home. She meant to discard her and she hasn’t been thinking of coming back. Not ready. Not ready. What does that mean? I am not ready to see you, Bella. Bella. I am not Bella. I am Annabella, two names joined together, a sigh and a kiss. I have been waiting and now searching, and I have never given up. They have chipped pieces of me away but I have always remained. Annabella Joy. Daughter of Eva Angelica. A part of the poem of names — a verse of it — not to be discarded.

Newly emptied space

Annabella feels gutted, a skin and bone shell around a hollow of blackness, a nothingness, newly emptied space. This is her mother’s handwriting, the hand is signed Eva, but this is not the same woman Annabella has been waiting for. This cannot be the same woman who told Madeline that Annabella was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. She cannot be the same woman who holds Annabella in photographs as if she’s presenting a treasure or unveiling a secret she can’t wait to share. If this woman was ever planning to come for Annabella, she’s not now and she’s asking Annabella to understand something that cannot possibly make sense. She offers no answers, no clues, no explanation. And she has given Annabella no chance to reply. I need to see you. There are things she needs to ask. And, perhaps more importantly now, there are things I need to tell you. Annabella can feel the dry dusty space within her filling up with a sharpness like tears that squeezes the breath from her lungs and

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drags a hot knife-edge from the back of her throat to some place low in her spine. She can feel her limbs charged with a vicious electricity, sparking and tingling, burning prickles under her skin, a flush of heat and a buzzing in her head. She closes her eyes and sees shapeless flashes of colour on her eyelids, the visible form of the static electricity that crackles from the very core of her skull. She needs to say, You shouldn’t have left me. You should have come back. She needs to say, You are my mother, my real mother. There’s no excuse. She doesn’t just need to ask questions, she needs also to say everything she has always been meaning to say but has never found a voice for. She needs to tell Eva about all the false parents who chipped away at her name and her body and who made her feel small and invisible or filled with the crushed glass of pain when they should have been helping or protecting her. And all that time Eva should have been looking for her, should have been retracing her steps, undoing her mistakes, coming to claim her own flesh and blood. She wants to say, This is no sort of reply. I deserve an answer. She needs to tell Eva how much it hurts not to have a mother — or worse, to have one but to have been discarded by her. She needs to tell Eva that not all of her sisters are as sweet as the sound of their names and that, no matter what Madeline says, Eva is not an angel. You’re not even close.

You can’t walk away

Dear Eva, You can’t make a life and then walk away from it. You can’t undo the fact of being a mother — of being my mother — even if you want to. Annabella

Why didn’t you wait?

Annabella dreams her father is beckoning to her from between the charcoal-black trunks of the pine trees, his face illuminated by the strobe of a car’s headlights. The lights flicker through foliage and sweep on and, in the afterglow soon sucked back into shadow, she catches sight of other movement and not one, but two figures retreating. She has thrown back her bed covers and is climbing out her bedroom window, but when she looks again, Benecio is gone. It wasn’t her he was beckoning to, not at all. Another set of headlights extends fingers of yellow-white into the forest, chasing at the heels of those two. It’s Eva, barefoot, in her night-dress, her hand in Benecio’s, their feet making no sound and barely stirring the cushion-soft carpet of pine needles that is the forest floor. Neither of them looks back. Neither of them responds to Annabella’s calls. Why didn’t you wait for me?

Another way of seeing

Annabella reviews the photos from Angeline’s collection. These pictures are proof of nothing other than the fact that the three of them were together for a time: Eva, Benecio and Annabella. But — and she should have realised this a long time ago — they say nothing of the truth because, after all, anyone can smile for the camera. No doubt the faraway look in Benecio’s eyes is closer to the truth; the way, in some photos, he seems to be looking at something in the distance, out of shot. There is Eva, smiling broadly, facing the camera — but she is posed, ready for the picture, not caught unprepared. Annabella looks again. Isn’t Eva leaning ever so slightly away? Isn’t there something just a little too forced about her smile? And doesn’t she have in her eyes some of the same distance — and detachment — that Annabella noticed previously only in Benecio’s gaze? Eva presents baby Annabella to the camera as something precious or fragile, but maybe there are other ways to interpret her stance,

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her careful hold on the child, the look on her face of seeming glee, that she has some wonderful secret or treasure to share. What if it’s not a question of sharing, but of relinquishing, not an expression of pride but of relief? Eva sitting on a blanket in the backyard, on the floor in the jam-jar-lined living room, in front of a scenic view, holding Annabella firmly to face the camera and smiling with expectation: Here, take her from me. Here, I don’t want her anymore. Eva wrote to Madeline that Benecio’s death had robbed her of onehalf of her life. Not one-third? ‘I am left with nothing.’ The fire claimed Benecio, her husband, but not Annabella, her daughter. Am I nothing? Eva also wrote ‘poor Bella’. She said Benecio adored Annabella and ‘I can’t think of the hole that’s going to make in her life’. Benecio adored Annabella but, it’s quite clear now, Eva did not. She was prepared to make that one hole even bigger. Poor Bella. Now that Benecio’s gone, who will love her? The fire claimed the life of her father, but was she motherless already, from a long time before? Dear Eva, why ‘poor Bella’? Have I had my eyes closed all this time?

The bonds of a poem

Dear Eva, The names of your sisters, and your names and mine, form a poem. They sound like chocolate or caramel tastes, they sound like the look of the first sun on raindrops left behind on green leaves. In photographs, the faces of your sisters look alike — they look like each other, like you, like your mother, and like me. (There are differences, but only by degrees.) But I have already discovered that not all of your sisters are as sweet as their names and, when it comes down to it, perhaps none of them are really alike. What connects you and your sisters beyond the similarity of your faces and the poetry of your names? Surely a family needs ties more substantial than that? Eva, my father died and yours ran away. Your mother was left with eight daughters and not all of them turned out as she expected. You had one daughter and you left me, and I have always believed my life would be better if you had stayed.

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Angeline’s love did not prevent flaws, did not make all the verses of this poem sound the same, it did not smooth out all irregularities in its rhythm. Eva, it’s no longer just a question of doubt. Or perhaps it is. I know, with you, my life would have been different, but now I wonder whether it would have been any better. Annabella

There is no excuse

Dear Mother, We look identical and our names form the poem, but we are nothing alike. You can’t create a life that is dependent on you and then walk away. Madeline says you must have had your reasons, but I don’t care what they were. There is no excuse. I have always been smaller than everyone else and quiet and I’ve always done whatever I was told. I always thought I was weak and afraid, and that this pain was all my fault. But I don’t think I have ever betrayed anyone, not even the people I hate, not even the people who hurt me. I might lack strength and courage, but I have never hurt anyone — that must count for something. That must be a good thing, some kind of achievement. For every moment that I can remember I have been hurting — for you.

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You have hurt me every day since the one when you left me with Auntie Elizabeth and went away. You also hurt her and Madeline and your mother and all of the others. Perhaps I can understand why you say you’re not ready to see us — that’s a lot of pain to try to explain. And, no matter what Madeline says, I don’t think any explanation now would be more than an excuse, but I know we deserve one. I have been waiting for you ever since that day; I have never once given up. You can’t create a life and then walk away. I won’t let you. I will not be discarded. Mother, I will not let you forget me. Annabella

Verses break free

The sun is high and bright above Annabella, the necklace of sparkling, gurgling water is a long way below. Leaves — all shapes, all sizes — flutter, clatter lightly, whisper, murmur, sigh in the wind. Leaves of different colours — green, red, apricot, cream, yellow, burnt-purple, dried-black — delicate garments pegged to the clothesline of branches. The names circle in her head, voices call them between, as a part of, the chatter in the trees. Madeline, Angelica, Emeline, Roseanna, Rhiannon, Josephine, Angeline, Alexandra, Isabella, Jade, Elizabeth, Jacqueline, Rosemary, Suzannah, Grace. Eva. Joy. Annabella. Joy. Annabella Joy. Verses of the poem of names fluttering, circling in the wind. The poem hung to dry among the leaves; leaves and then names plucked from the branches, caught up and carried away on quivers of breeze. The names, the words, verses of the poem, pieces of the story spiral and swirl and dance in chasms and on plateaux of air, twist and tumble and rise again, higher, through the trees, above them, on to and into the river of wind.

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Names, verses, chapters, relinquish their hold on the branches, the trunk, the roots clasping crimson soil, and take to the space above Annabella, to the great sea of sky stretching above her. The rhythm is broken; verses break free. Annabella’s reflection in the water is blurred by a halo of bright sunlight; it shifts and contorts on the ripples of current, dissolves among smooth orange pebbles and fine grains of sand. I am Annabella. Annabella Joy. A sigh and a kiss and a smile. Annabella Joy circles in the air, across the water, into the sky; no longer pegged to the trees with the other names and verses, with the other faces and voices she has been borrowed by, has borrowed from. The air is warm, a welcome embrace; the water is cool, a soothing balm. The shadows conceal and reveal alternating snatches of colour and light and shape; leaves play through the kaleidoscope as they drift to the ground, as they rise to take flight. Annabella lies back on the mattress of grass. The sky she can see is an unbroken blue.

PANDANUS BOOKS Pandanus Books was established in 2001 within the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) at The Australian National University. Concentrating on Asia and the Pacific, Pandanus Books embraces a variety of genres and has particular strength in the areas of biography, memoir, fiction and poetry. As a result of Pandanus’ position within the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the list includes high-quality scholarly texts, several of which are aimed at a general readership. Since its inception, Pandanus Books has developed into an editorially independent publishing enterprise with an imaginative list of titles and high-quality production values.

THE SULLIVAN’S CREEK SERIES The Sullivan’s Creek Series is a developing initiative of Pandanus Books. Extending the boundaries of the Pandanus Books’ list, the Sullivan’s Creek Series seeks to explore Australia through the work of new writers, with particular encouragement to authors from Canberra and the region. Publishing history, biography, memoir, scholarly texts, fiction and poetry, the imprint complements the Asia and Pacific focus of Pandanus Books and aims to make a lively contribution to scholarship and cultural knowledge.