The Sentinels of Eden, Books 1-4

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

There were two types of special trees in the Garden of Eden. One was the Tree of Life, whose leaves were for healing the nations. The other was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God told Adam and Eve that they could eat from any tree in the garden, except from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But the serpent tricked them into eating from it, and so God cast them out of the garden He had planted for them so that they couldn’t eat from the Tree of Life and live forever. Then He stationed Cherubim, and a revolving sword of fire east of it, guarding the path to the Tree of Life.

At approximately 2.30am, Tuesday 2 October, Aunt Lily told me that my mother was a Cherub, and so was our farmhand, Harry Doolan. My mother had gone to live in Eden a year after my father had died, leaving Harry to guard the pathway to it, and leaving my aunt to try to explain to a four year old why her mother was never coming home.

After patiently listening to her garbled explanation and numerous apologies, I kissed my aunt and told her I loved her, then I walked the nine steps down the hallway and slammed my bedroom door shut behind me so hard that the plaster cast of my hand I had made in kindergarten fell off the wall and smashed into thirteen pieces. One piece for every year my mother had not been around. One for every year my aunt had been lying to me. And she still didn’t have the decency to stop with the faerie stories and just tell me the truth.

Noah and I ate our lunches in our usual spot under the tree near the oval, where the peppermint-scented leaves helped to disguise the pervasive smell of hundreds of schoolbags. Noah finished off my second sandwich while I wove daisy chains out of cape weed—anything to keep my hands busy and my mind away from thoughts that I didn’t want. Between exam study, stressing over my aunt’s and Harry’s insanity, and obsessing over the possibility that my mother might still be alive somewhere, I hadn’t had any decent sleep all week. And when I had, the grief-filled music in my dreams left me so wrung out I could barely function. It felt like my mother was singing to me from the grave. It had been four days since I had spoken more than single words to either Aunt Lily or Harry. So long as I got my chores done before I could be asked, it was easy to avoid people on a sheep farm as large as ours.

Noah shifted the bony shoulder I was leaning against.

‘Hey, how’s Nicole doing?’ I mumbled, trying to sound more alert than I really was. I tore up the chain I had made and began to collect more flowers so I could start again.

‘Okay, I guess. Mum apologised to her, believe it or not. She’s been cranky as a constipated cow for the last few weeks, but the other day she actually admitted that her volatile temper might be causing a few of their issues.’

‘Good to hear. I’m glad they sorted it out. We won’t be around for much longer to keep her out of trouble.’

‘Yeah. Not much longer at all.’ Noah watched the kids on the oval playing footy. From the look on his face I could almost hear the music to the montage of memories playing in his head. For a bloke he could be ridiculously nostalgic. So could Aunt Lily, refusing to read Snugglepot to me after my dad had died. And my mother? Had she even thought about me since she’d left?

I was becoming obsessed.

I wanted to ask Noah if he would help me to find her, but maybe I was better off not asking anyone anything. If I didn’t bring it up, I wouldn’t have to try to articulate what I was feeling. But how could I understand what I should feel without talking to someone? I needed my best friend’s advice.

‘Catch 22,’ Noah said.

‘What?’ Had I been thinking out loud?

‘You’re really not listening to me, are you? I said I was hoping to get my tandem hang gliding licence before uni starts next year, but I’m running out of time. It’s going to be hard to fit in enough practice hours. It costs a lot in petrol to drive all the way to the training centre only to find that the weather’s no good. I need money to get my licence, and I need the licence to earn more money.’

‘Tandem licence? They trust you to take some poor sucker up there with you?’ I wove two golden daisies together and tossed them into the air so we could watch them crash-land. Noah gave a half laugh but looked just a little bit offended, so I relented. ‘Perhaps in the holidays I will come gliding with you,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll pay for the petrol if you can get me a deal on a flight.’

He looked a bit uncomfortable. ‘Um, Lainie, it might be better if you don’t.’

‘Good on ya,’ I scoffed. ‘I’m not that unco. If I can ride a horse I can fly a hang glider.’

His blond eyebrows rose. ‘It’s hardly the same thing as riding …’ But then he sighed. ‘That’s not what I meant, anyway. I just don’t think Claudia would be too happy if I took you flying, that’s all.’

My lapful of yellow daisies scattered in a flurry of agitation. ‘Oh, come on! You can’t be serious! Who does she think she is? How dare she try to tell you what you can and can’t do?’

‘Because only you’re allowed to do that?’ he snapped back.

‘When have I ever—’

‘Oh, let’s see. How about yesterday when you told me I should get my Psych homework done instead of taking Claudia to the movies?’

‘And did you listen to me?’

He made a rude, dismissive noise. ‘Of course not! My point still stands, though. And how about all those times you keep telling me to—’

‘Okay, this conversation is going nowhere good,’ I interrupted.

‘You’re jealous.’

‘Why would I be jealous of you? I can’t stand Claudia. Her fingernails are too long and she ties her shoelaces funny.’

Noah’s lips twitched in spite of himself, but then he caught my eye with a challenging stare. ‘What if I’d asked you to come to the movies instead? Would you have still stayed home to study?’

My mouth kept working but all of my words were hiding somewhere behind my uvula. The cowards. I knew the correct response was ‘Yes, unless it was a movie by Peter Jackson or Tim Burton’, but there was a serious glint in his eyes that made me pause. What exactly was he really asking?

When I didn’t answer, he pressed further. ‘You’ve never had a problem with me going out with other people before. Weren’t you the one who “accidentally” let slip to Marko’s mum that he’d failed his maths test, and then faked being sick so Taylor and I ended up at the movies by ourselves?’

I clamped my lips shut so I wouldn’t be tempted to tell him how much Taylor had paid me for that little scheme. Thankfully, just then, a country and western ballad blared across the oval, signalling the end of lunch, so I reached for my bag instead of answering. But he didn’t let it go.

‘Claudia’s my first proper girlfriend,’ he explained, as if I didn’t know. His arms were crossed and his eyebrows had a little furrow between them. ‘I’m not certain about what the rules are.’

Those cowardly words must have been tickling the back of my throat because my laugh came out as more of a splutter. ‘Rules? Hasn’t your mum given you that talk?’

‘I mean with you! I don’t know if it’s okay for you to come gliding with me. I don’t know if I’m allowed to invite you both to watch the Nalong-Chentyn game, or come night fishing at the lake. Or if it’s weird for us all to go to a concert together.’

That hurt. We’d always done everything together.

‘Let me make it easy for you, then, Noah. I’m not going anywhere with you. Not until you work out what you want the rules to be. I won’t tell you what to do, and neither should she!’

As I stomped back to class I knew the stress I was under was probably making me overreact, but that didn’t mean I could stop it. Even if I’d wanted to.

Harry hobbled into the kitchen on Saturday morning looking weary but satisfied. He brought with him two large water drums that weighed him down so much he limped.

‘It’s as much as I could carry, Lily. It should help for a while.’

Aunt Lily looked relieved and helped him lift the containers up onto a spare stretch of bench. Harry changed the caps for ones with taps, turned the drums onto their sides, and then poured out some water into a glass. He took a big gulp then burped noisily. Yeah, supernatural custodian of the Garden of Eden. Sure he was.

‘Thirsty, Lainie?’ he asked.

‘There are bugs floating in your drink, Harry.’

‘You look like you could use the protein, you’re a bit peaky,’ he threw back.

‘I am reluctant to ask, but why are you drinking river water? I thought you believed that all our local water was contaminated by the mining.’

‘That’s why we need it. Let’s just say that this water isn’t exactly local. It comes from a bit farther … upstream,’ he said, rubbing his shoulder to ease the strain.

As in all decent faerie tales, the elves in my aunt’s stories lived at the bottom of the garden. Or, to be more precise, the gateway to Paradise where they lived had always been located somewhere between our farm and the Ashbrees’s. The river had been the source of much magic, because it flowed out from the garden and carried wishes in the springtime. Somehow my six-year-old brain had failed to understand that the river flowed all the way through the Ashbrees’s farm as well, so it couldn’t possibly have its source between the two properties. Nor had I known enough to question how the Garden of Eden could be here when the biblical account placed it somewhere in the region that had flooded around 8,000 years ago to form the Persian Gulf.

Enough was enough. Something had to be said. ‘Are you implying that this water comes from the Garden of Eden?’

‘Yes. Yes I am. Well, as close as I could get without crossing over the boundary.’

‘So those are Eden bugs you’re drinking?’

Harry gagged mid-gulp, spraying water across the kitchen. He threw me a dirty look, but then c****d his head to one side, peering at the water critically. Aunt Lily looked startled.

‘Unlikely,’ he decided. ‘The water passes through a cave system and has plenty of time to pick up our local wildlife before it gets to where I collected it.’

Fine. I was up for a gag. I wanted to see just how far they were going to take it. ‘Are you sure you should be telling me all this? Isn’t this all a big secret? How do you know I won’t start blabbing it all over school?’ I asked with mock sincerity.

The two old friends looked at each other seriously. ‘What exactly would you say, and to whom?’ asked Aunt Lily, sliding onto one of the kitchen chairs.

‘What if I confided in the school counsellor that I thought you were both turning into crazy bush hermits?’ Yet even as I said it, I felt a twisting heaviness in the pit of my stomach. An overwhelming feeling of shame. I felt sick with it, and I hadn’t even done anything. I honestly didn’t think I could ever get the words out of my mouth to talk about Eden. It was a relief just to stop thinking about telling someone. The feeling was completely disproportionate to the circumstances.

‘I don’t think Scott Henry would see anything unusual there.’ Harry grinned. ‘Scotty used to call me the Nargun of Nalong back when we played footy together. He once came out of a bad tackle and said I was half human and half rock.’

The Nargun was a legendary rock monster that kidnapped children who came too close to its cave. At least that was what the Aboriginal parents in eastern Victoria used to tell their kids in order to keep them away from the genuine sacred site where it lived. How many more folktales could they find to throw at me?

He poured me a glass of river water. It actually looked pretty clear—no visible swimmers. I’d been drinking from the river all my life and it didn’t bother me. It was all the other implications that made me uncomfortable. Accepting his challenge, I took a swig. It tasted amazing. Like home.

Many restless hours later I swallowed my prickly pride and went to find the enigmatic farmer. The sun was just thinking about drifting towards the horizon and a mob of kangaroos were busy making the most of the crepuscular grazing time at the top of the hill. Harry had just put the tractor away and was bringing a mug of coffee out to his porch to enjoy the view. I quietly joined him. It was time I found out what he really believed.

We sat comfortably for a few minutes, as we had done hundreds of times over the years, but this time my mind was spinning with awkward questions. His kind eyes held a perception that felt so ancient I had to remind myself we had only celebrated his fortieth birthday a few months earlier, but on the other hand, his athletic frame and smooth dark complexion had often caused people to mistake him for someone much younger. According to some of the gossip in the pub, he was still one of Nalong’s most eligible bachelors. Weird town.

I fiddled with a loose strand of my hair. I had a lot on my mind, but didn’t have the foggiest idea where to start. Harry, as usual, knew exactly what I needed.

He cleared his throat. ‘Your aunt told me about the photo,’ he said. ‘And that she told you about me.’ His patient voice was irritating. ‘You want to know three things. Firstly, am I immortal?’

My shoulders slumped. He did believe it.

‘Secondly, do I have any superpowers? And thirdly, am I the only one?’

Actually, I had a lot more than three questions, but I wasn’t remotely ready for even those three. Hearing him come right out and talk about it like he expected me to believe him was so disturbing that I just sat there in a sort of dazed silence, picking at the hole in my jeans.

‘No, I’m not immortal. I’m not entirely human, but I am supposed to be able to pass as one, so physically at least I am more or less human, and have been since the day I was born. I doubt any medical tests would be able to tell the difference, although at the rate medicine is advancing, who knows what they might uncover? Doctors have always made me … uncomfortable.’ The way he rubbed absently at his still aching shoulder made me wonder how often he had avoided getting medical attention over the years. Farm work wasn’t always kind on your body, no matter how fit you were.

He peered at me as if assessing how I was doing so far, so I nodded. I was not going to lose my temper again. Or argue, if I could avoid it. I was going to sit quietly and listen to him try to explain how it was all supposed to work.

He took a long swig from his coffee mug before continuing. ‘The only “superpower” I really know anything about is being able to feel when people are getting too close to the cave system. It makes me uncomfortable, and sometimes I kind of have … well, visions. I can sense where people are. It’s a kind of warning system that even wakes me if I’m asleep. I also have some occasional insights into people’s lives. Nothing very obvious or specific, just hunches. I think it helps me to persuade people to change their course of action if they get too close to finding out things they shouldn’t. Usually just changing the topic of conversation at the right time is enough.’ He leant forward in his chair. ‘There are more … back up skills available to me if I need them, but luckily I haven’t had a lot of experience with those.’ A slight shudder went through him. Whatever experience he’d apparently had, it was obviously not something he wanted to talk about because he sat back again and looked away.

Frankly, that was a bit disappointing. He should have at least been able to fly.

‘You look somewhat unimpressed,’ he said observantly.

‘Well, honestly, I’d hardly class those as superpowers. I mean, can’t everyone kind of do most of those things from time to time?’

He shook his head, looking almost reluctant to continue. ‘No, Lainie,’ he admitted finally, swirling the dregs of his coffee. ‘Most people can’t do what you and I can. They are Cherubic traits, not human ones.’