Songlines

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

A wide yawn cracked my jaw as I meandered down the crowded school corridor. I’d spent the last few nights cramming my study and then staying up even later to research coal seam gas mining, and so quality sleep was now a forgotten luxury. Kolsom had taken away the bulldozers on advice from their office but I knew the standoff was far from over. My aunt had been to see a solicitor the day after her near-arrest but didn’t seem to have come away with any clear plan as to how to keep the miners away. Late last night I’d heard her in the study, rummaging around the old filing cabinet but had been too tired to get up and ask her what she was looking for, and I’d left for school before she’d returned from the morning feed run. Perhaps when I got home I’d see if there was anything I could do to help.

Pale green walls framed dented lockers all the way along to the main doors. It was Friday afternoon and everyone was clawing their way towards the weekend. As I was pummelled by a multitude of clammy teenagers I tried to pick up my pace a little because as tall as I was, I still felt as though I could trip and be trampled at any moment like a baby lion under a herd of stampeding wildebeest. Something squishy slid under my shoe but I didn’t dare to look down.

Almost within sight of freedom, I was shoved from behind and bounced against a metal locker frame. One of my classmates, Tessa, coughed out the word ‘fruitcake’ as she pushed past me. Her friend giggled at her weak insult, but instead of feeling embarrassed or annoyed, I stumbled to a wonky halt with a sudden vision, almost clear enough to taste, of Tessa standing in front of her bedroom mirror. Tears were streaming down her face because she was upset about the shape of her eyes. What the hell? Her eyes were gorgeous. They had that stunning Asian tilt from her mother’s side of the family that had the rest of us girls wishing we had even a sprinkling of genes from somewhere more exotic than the arse-end of nowhere. I shook my head as the vision cleared, leaving me with the residual after effects of her intense jealousy. Typical. Like all the other girls, she was jealous of something I didn’t even have. Noah was my best friend, and he was dating Claudia, but somehow I knew Tessa still assumed there was more going on. Far more disturbing than that, however, was the sudden fear that what I’d just imagined might not have been just some random daydream. The dream I’d had about my aunt and the bulldozer had been playing in my mind over and over again until I’d chosen to pretend that I had simply made it up somehow. It wasn’t like I really could have seen what was going on, after all. That would be ludicrous. Almost as ludicrous as knowing what Tessa was upset about.

I stared at Tessa’s back, trying to suppress my insanity and find my way back to the much safer world of blatant denial.

Visions? No way. Sleep deprivation and too much study. Much better explanation.

Way ahead of me, I glimpsed Noah’s pale hair just as he disappeared through the main doors, so I broke into a jog to catch up and almost reached daylight when my shoulder was jerked back so hard I nearly fell. Another firm tug on my shoulder strap, and I felt my school bag rapidly become a lot lighter. I spun around just in time to see two pears, three apples and all my books spill out across the hall. Bane was standing right behind me, flicking closed a pocketknife. A knife? At school? That was going way too far. In stunned disbelief, I watched a series of emotions spread across his face. Instead of looking smug, he seemed just as shocked as I was. That was soon replaced with revulsion, and then a look of fury so vicious that my shout of righteous protest was cut off mid-breath. We both froze for a second, staring at each other, invisible sparks of mutual hatred glinting in the dusty air, before he took off back down the corridor at a run.

Most of the other students in the hall had stopped and were staring at me with looks of amused confusion. I had no idea what to think. His pranks were getting increasingly ridiculous—and dangerous. We were in our final year of school for heaven’s sake, why would he slice open my bag halfway down a busy corridor? Trying to steal something? Trying to expose my not-so-secret fruit fetish?

A shrill cry of alarm followed by a loud metallic bang startled us all out of our eerie silence and then the entire school seemed to rush out of the doors like water down a plughole. Snatching up my books, I abandoned the bruised fruit and fought my way out to the car park, clutching my bag together as best I could. Noah was sitting on the kerb with his head between his knees, next to an old white hatchback that had backed into the school fence. Dropping my bag altogether again, I rushed over to see if he was hurt.

‘Missed me by a country mile,’ he said, but his skin looked even paler than usual. ‘What does that even mean? Is a country mile supposed to be longer than a city one? Whoever decided that clearly hasn’t tried driving through Sydney lately.’

I peeled back his eyelids to check for concussion.

‘Lainie, stop,’ he complained, batting my hands away. ‘I didn’t hit my head and I’m perfectly fine.’ At the top of the school steps, Tessa had fainted in a tangle of drama and glossy dark hair, and was being flustered over by her friends like the princess she was. Seriously? Playing the fainting maiden when Noah was the one nearly killed? That was just plain pathetic.

I turned back to my friend. ‘You have no blood left in your face. Are you woozy?’

‘Don’t be stupid. I was only stressing because I assumed you were still right behind me. I actually looked for your mangled body under the car. Where did you go?’

‘Bane again is the one to blame,’ I sang with false cheerfulness, trying to pretend I wasn’t shaken up at all, but the world had taken on a pale tinge. If anything had happened to Noah … ‘The car hit pretty hard,’ I noticed, screwing up my nose at the twisted cyclone fence. ‘How’s the driver?’

‘I’m fine—for now,’ said Jake, a thin-faced fellow VCE student with far too much hair product in his long faux-hawk. He was inspecting the damage to the rear bumper. ‘But Mum’s going to kill me.’ He finally turned his attention to Noah. ‘I’m so, so sorry, mate. My dog jumped onto my lap just as I started backing out. I guess he distracted me.’

In the passenger window I could see a sturdy tan Staffy staring at us and fogging up the window with his slobbery dog-breath. There was a look in his black eyes that creeped me out a little, as if he was trying to ask me a silent question and would be cross if I gave the wrong answer.

‘He must have dug under the backyard fence again,’ Jake continued, fiddling with his car keys as Noah stood up. ‘I found him raiding the bin near the oval. I am so dead. Look at Mum’s car! Oh crap, look at that.’

‘Mr Davis is heading over,’ Noah pointed out.

‘Hide me, someone?’ He shoved his pack of cigarettes into the glove box before the principal could see, and then we helped him roll the car back into the parking bay.

‘He pulled a knife on you?’ Noah asked, trying to catch my evasive eyes. The crowd had dispersed and we were heading to his ute, which was parked in the street. His footsteps had become noisier as I’d outlined the incident.

‘Well, sort of. He attacked my school bag, not me. Speaking of which, could you please help me carry this lot? There’s not a lot of actual bag left to do much carrying …’

Noah stopped dead still, staring ahead.

‘What now?’ I groaned, craning my neck to see what he was staring at. Footpath. Street light. Mother trying to reason with a fractious toddler who was flatly refusing to keep his shorts on. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe he was still in shock? I turned back to him and realised that his eyes had glazed over a little, the way they did when he was trying to do quadratic equations, and he was chewing on his tongue. ‘Noah, what is it?’

‘Nothing. It’s nothing. Let’s just go home. This place is crazy and I think it’s about to rain again.’

He grabbed a couple of textbooks from my arms and strode away on his long legs. Trying to get him to explain was pointless; besides, the idea of just getting home to the sanity of pulling stuck lambs out of angry ewes was starting to sound strangely appealing.

When we reached his car, Noah got into the driver’s seat but then just sat there silently, staring at the windscreen. Perhaps he was more shaken up than he wanted to admit. I waited for him to speak and eventually he turned the full force of his charming green eyes on me. It would have been enough to make half our class swoon, but I was immune. More or less. He did look a bit unsure of himself, which was unusual enough to make me pay attention.

‘Lainie …’ He swallowed nervously. ‘There isn’t much of school left, and next year who knows where we’ll be?’ My chest tightened in sudden fear of where this was going as he cleared his throat. ‘What I mean is, graduation is coming up and there’s the dance …’

Ah, now it made sense. Claudia went to the Catholic school, and the dance was only open to Nalong College students. Going with anyone else would have been a bit … inappropriate, so he needed me.

‘And, I know, we’ve more or less just always gone together to things like that automatically,’ he continued, ‘but I just thought it might be nice this time if I formally invited you. You know, ’cos it’s our last one.’ He smiled his best charismatic smile at me, his raffish blond curls framing his face. ‘Lainie Gracewood, would you do me the honour of attending the graduation dance with me?’

My mouth wanted to laugh in his face for being so corny but there was no way I would let him down, no matter how much I would have liked to see Claudia squirm. So instead I took a deep, serious breath. ‘Of course, Noah, I would be honoured to be your date, so long as you understand that I will dump you like a sack of potatoes if anyone prettier comes along and asks me to dance.’

‘But nobody’s prettier than me,’ he said. I punched him on the thigh. Hard. He just grinned and started the engine.

The deafening roar of the rain on the tin roof finally began to ease up enough for us to hear ourselves think. My aunt and I had become thoroughly drenched finishing the evening feeds out in the dark. Not the best part of farming, but the wood heater was starting to do its job so all was beginning to feel right with the world again. I laid my wet socks over the edge of the couch to dry.

‘Can I have some extra money to buy a dress for the graduation dance?’ I called out to the kitchen in half-hopeful expectation. Let the negotiations begin. ‘Noah asked me officially. So I need to officially pretend to be a real girl. That means a dress. And shoes. And maybe a manicure.’ No way would I get all that, but negotiating meant starting high.

Closing the thick green floral curtains against the weather, I made a note to myself to clean out the gutters on the next dry day, then crammed as much wood as I could on the fire and slammed the door shut quickly so it wouldn’t all fall out again. Inara, Aunt Lily’s skinny grey cat, stared ungratefully at me as I brushed a burning ember from her fur with the poker.

‘Sure, no problem.’ Aunt Lily’s voice sounded distracted.

When I finished choking I swung around the corner to see her sitting at the dining table, cradling a mug of tea and peering at large sheet of paper. She tucked her damp hair behind her ears, then looked over at a map held down by the fruit bowl and the pepper grinder.

I came over to the table. ‘What’s up, Aunt Lil?’

‘Oh, nothing, really. I’m just having a bit of trouble interpreting this schematic.’

‘Is this about Kolsom again?’

She nodded. ‘I found the copy of our land title, but I’m struggling to work out where exactly on the map our western boundary is.’

Sliding over the floorboards in my woolly bed socks, I peered over her shoulder. ‘The title doesn’t show where the river goes, is that why it’s tricky?’

‘Yeah, and because there aren’t any proper roads to use as landmarks.’

I pointed to a small rectangle on the northern part of the page. ‘Is this the Ashbrees’s place?’

She looked at it, and then at the map, and then back to the page. ‘Can’t be,’ she said. ‘It’s too small.’

‘Unless you have the scale wrong.’

We both squinted at the tiny writing that showed the measurements. Then I looked at the scale of the map. ‘See this thin squiggly line running down here on the right?’ I pointed to the faint trace and then showed her the corresponding place on the map. It was the river, but it was not where we expected it to be. Which meant the title covered a lot more land than we had assumed.

Aunt Lily turned to me. ‘This farm is four times the size I thought it was!’

I did some quick sums, and pencilled in the borders on the map. What I had previously thought was our farm only took up one small corner, adjoining Noah’s place. My aunt’s broad grin became positively evil and I quietly hoped the lawyer at Kolsom Mining didn’t suffer from a heart condition.

Staring up at the dark green leaves of a manna gum, I watched a kookaburra bash a snail violently against the branch it was sitting on. I was supposed to be cleaning out the pit pump behind the tractor shed, but I didn’t really want to.

The morning was cool but sunny, and beside me the river swirled noisily, fat with last night’s downpour. This used to be the place Noah and I hung out the most, when I could convince my aunt that we would stay out of the water. Even then she only allowed it because it was within shouting distance from the house and the water was slow and shallow for quite a long way here.

Noah and I used to play a game where he would try to launch various things into the river upstream at his place while I would wait at this spot for hours—or so it felt—hoping to catch his boat with its message. Somehow his homemade contraptions never made it this far. Either he was not as good at boat building as his namesake or there was a phenomenon something like the Bermuda Triangle going on somewhere in between. No guesswork as to which option we’d decided to believe. In fact, when I was nine I’d mistakenly referred to it as the Barramundi Triangle and Noah had laughed so hard the name had stuck.

These days, however, instead of building boats we seemed to spend all our time on boring things like memorising the process of turning bauxite to aluminium, and figuring out how mitochondrial DNA could help trace the origins of the human race. Noah had called me at eleven o’clock the night before because he couldn’t read his own handwriting and needed me to read out half the term’s biology notes. I couldn’t wait for exams to be over.

I stretched, yawned, prepared to get up and go back to my chores, and then promptly flopped back down on the rock. It was quite warm in the sun when I focused on nothing but the feel of it on my eyelids. All around me I could hear evidence of the life sustained by the swollen river and deep earth. Magpies warbled in raucous contrast to the delicate sounds of elusive bellbirds. An almost-warm breeze made a stray strand of my hair tickle my lips.

The music lingered just out of reach when I woke with a strangled cry. There were tears streaming down my face and I realised I was sobbing. A heartbreaking sense of loss consumed me as the memory of the dream melted away. Not again. Every night this week I had been having these musical dreams. Tantalising, fading before I had a chance to remember. No wonder I was so tired. Drying my eyes and trying to settle my emotions, I peeled myself off the rock. Not as comfortable as it had seemed a moment ago. A moment? I checked my watch. Crap, Aunt Lily would be back from town any minute and none of my chores had been done.

I was halfway up the hill when I heard the argument. The words were indistinguishable but it sounded like Noah’s mum. She only ever complained to Harry when Aunt Lily had given us permission for something she didn’t approve of, so feeling only pea-sized guilt, I crept up to Harry’s cottage. The old fibro unit was nestled behind a small hill farther along the driveway than our house. Mrs Ashbree’s white Pajero was parked in front of it.

‘I don’t care how close Kolsom are getting, you need to go, Harry,’ came her voice from inside. She was crying. Maybe not loudly, maybe not out loud at all, or with physical tears, but I knew. Somehow, I always knew.

I crept past the window and then plastered myself against the wall to hear more.

‘It can wait,’ Harry replied.

‘Do you think I can just ignore it? Let me try again.’ She was speaking through her teeth, biting each word.

‘Enough, Sarah. It isn’t working. Just let it go.’ Harry sounded even more tired than I was. ‘Besides, Lainie’s just outside and I need to talk to her.’

Damn. No matter how quietly I moved I never seemed to be able to sneak up on anyone. I walked up to the front door trying to think of a reason to be there. Noah’s mum opened it just before I could knock. My brain scrambled for an excuse she might believe, but she beat me to it.

‘Oh. Hi, Lainie. I just stopped by to ask Harry’s advice.’ She looked annoyed. ‘I was hoping he could tell me the best brand of pocket-knife to buy for David for Christmas.’

What?

Behind her, Harry’s face went blank, as if he’d been hurt by her comment. What was that all about?

Without waiting for me to respond, she pushed past me and strode back to her car. Not even a goodbye.

Harry and I stood silently until she drove away, and then he beckoned me inside and put the kettle on.

‘I, er, was wondering whether Aunt Lily told you what she found out about our land title.’ It was the best excuse I could come up with. At least I hoped it sounded better than Mrs Ashbree’s weak one.

‘No, but I can guess. I know exactly how big this farm is, and where its borders lie.’

‘It’s over three hundred hectares, Harry.’

‘Three hundred and twenty-eight. And the back of it runs north as far as the Chentyn road. It’s a bit of an odd shape.’

I fished a couple of tea bags out of the ceramic jar by the stove. ‘Do you think showing someone the title will be enough to stop the miners?’

Harry peered at me. ‘I hope so. Can I ask you a question?’

I shrugged.

‘How did you know to come out to the bush the other day?’

‘We saw Sergeant Loxwood fly past,’ I said, far too quickly.

He made a ‘hmph’ sort of a noise, and stirred sugar into his tea. Then he handed me my mug and led the way out to his back porch. We sat down on the step and watched the river sparkle through the trees at the bottom of the hill. I was itching to ask him what Mrs Ashbree had really been doing there, but it was none of my business. I also guessed that there was something he wanted to know from me, but there was no way I was going to tell him I’d been having visions and weird daydreams.

‘I have to go away for a while,’ Harry said eventually. ‘Possibly for a few weeks, but I’ll wait until after your exams so you won’t have to cover for me while you’re trying to study.’

He might as well have announced that he was moving to Antarctica. The longest I had ever known him to go away for were his four-day fishing trips with his friend Stumpy Johnson.

‘I need to make sure you know some things before I go.’

‘Like how to bail Aunt Lily out of prison?’

He smiled. ‘Actually, I just need to know if you remember any of the stories she used to tell you when you were little. The ones about the Garden of Eden.’

My blank stare felt a bit rude, but I couldn’t seem to find a better reaction. I remembered the stories, of course. We used to always make up tales of what it would be like to live in Paradise, and they were probably what had ignited my love of fantasy novels—I’d had to be careful not to make references to our made-up stories in my English essay by accident. But I had grown out of my aunt’s bedtime stories at about the same time as I’d discovered that Santa was really Harry climbing across the roof on Christmas Eve. What did they have to do with Harry leaving?

‘I’m serious, Lainie, do you remember?’

‘I remember her telling me that my mother was living with the elves in Paradise. She made it sound so nice that I used to ask if I could go too. I argued that the elves would miss me if I didn’t visit. I even had names for some of them. Then when I was six, we went to Dayna and Tom’s wedding, and after the service Noah and I played in the cemetery behind the church. I found my parents’ graves and cried for hours. What’s your point, Harry?’

His deep brown eyes were full of the sort of sympathy that you couldn’t brush aside. It opened up a hurt that I thought had been long since dealt with. But his next words hurt even more.

‘Your mother’s grave is a lie. I’m thinking of going to Eden to find her and see if she can help me with something I have to do.’