Beneath the Mother Tree Read online

  The flute sound drifted in from the ocean. He pushed his way through the she-oaks, whispering, ‘Thank you for protecting her,’ caressing their rough trunks, drawing courage from their solid presence.

  The beach too appeared empty. He waited in the papery grass that grew where scrub met sand.

  The same melody began to waft out of Mud Rock itself. As Grappa listened, the haunting tune faded away. The demon was playing with him, leading him on into the night, if Grappa were silly enough to follow. ‘Leave her alone. Hear me? You don’t stand a chance. She knows what you are.’ He felt moronic calling to no one.

  For a time, the only sound between waves was the wind through the grass tickling his feet. He looked at the disappearing sun and farted. I too can be musical, he thought.

  If he hurried, he could reach the Nor Folk Tree to ask protection for Ayla before night fell. The Nor folk, according to his Gran, were ‘faeries, nature spirits. Call them what you will.’ Gran had convinced him they lived in the circle of Norfolk pines on the southern end of the island. ‘See lad? See how the old fig grows smack bang in the centre of the pines? That’s no coincidence. That’s a sign. This Moreton Bay fig is easily the oldest tree on the island. Has to be here. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘What has to be here, Gran?’

  ‘The way into their realm. What else would I be talking about?’

  Grappa walked toward Dead Tree Point as fast as his tired heart allowed, dodging sea sponges, faded coral and mangrove seeds washed up after the storm. The sharp whiff of it all caught on the wind. He was breathless when he arrived at the sandbank full of half-buried trees lying on their sides, roots reaching to the sky. The jumble of petrifying limbs pushed over years ago by a cyclonic wind was a graveyard of bones in the ghoulish twilight.

  Grappa detected movement near the cave half way up the cliff. He peered into the dark opening. Something large shifted in the scrub nearby and he almost messed himself.

  ‘Wallaby. Idiot.’ The sound of his own voice was comforting.

  The curve of a swollen yellow moon crept from the ocean. He paused at the sight of it. Gran always said the Fey were at their most potent when the moon was full. The foreboding that had been building all day swamped him. ‘No time to go to the tree – dark soon,’ he mumbled to the ghost crab at his feet before it turned to sand.

  Hurrying back to Little Beaudy, he knew in his coward’s heart, more than anything, he needed a drink.

  Grappa struggled up Mud Rock. Little Beaudy waited in Hibiscus Bay, as did the dinghy, floating now on the incoming tide. No sign of any creature, not even a bird. He listened for the faint sound of a flute.

  ‘Where are you’ – the words poison on his parched tongue – ‘Far Dorocha?’

  2.

  Marlise turned at the flap of wings to see a scraggly bird with a bald patch in the middle of its arched neck peering through the glass, judging her worthiness, giving her the creeps. She slid the door open. ‘Shoo.’ It flew over the endless mass of mangroves out to sea.

  Intoxicated by the view, she stepped onto the verandah. The sun was so low in the sky now, it nestled like an egg in the tops of the trees, yolk dripping into the water. She adored this hour of day, dusk, the swamp mosquitoes’ favourite time, and delighted in their frenzied buzz. She listened for the whine of them in the mangroves, wondering if her brood in the insectary were aware of their surroundings yet, so proud of the way they had travelled, arriving full of life. She had fed them on live pathogens before leaving in case something happened to the liquid nitrogen during transit. Looking into the large room transformed into her laboratory, she almost purred with a sense of accomplishment at the neatness. The portable humidified booth, made to order years ago, had survived the move without a scratch. It hummed as it worked to keep the insectary at eighty percent humidity, just how her darlings liked it. The large canister of liquid nitrogen which preserved her live pathogens – thankfully intact – along with the small cupboard hiding her cage of mice, the jars of petri dishes, incubators and tissue culture flasks, the centrifuge and microscope, were all methodically placed, ready for work.

  The rest of the house lay in disarray, a life packed in boxes.

  Again, the faint bark of a dog destroyed her mood. She had moved to the island for solitude. That dog had irritated her all day. Burrawang had been so isolated, Marlise was unaccustomed to sharing her soundscape with anything foreign. She stormed downstairs and trudged up the dirt road toward the barks, fighting an overwhelming fatigue.

  The shadows were long in the uncanny light. Riley should have been back by now. Marlise had yet to ascertain what type of people lived here.

  ‘Could be full of all sorts of weirdos,’ she whispered, arriving at a junction with a bitumen road to the right and a beach to the left. The street sign said Long Street. She was about to walk the beach to search for Riley when the dog barked again.

  In Long Street, two faded fibro cottages sat side by side separated by a chain-link fence. An old cattle dog in the front yard of the first one growled at her.

  She approached, hissing. ‘Shut-up. Stop that barking. It’s got to stop.’

  The pungent doggy odour hit her as she became aware of a thin figure of a man behind the screen door of the house. She forced her friendliest voice, ‘Does it always bark?’ Even though night was falling, the man was wearing dark sunglasses. She could feel him watching her. ‘I’ve heard a dog barking all day. I…I was just wondering if it was this dog?’

  ‘Hardly barks at all.’

  A torn plastic blind in the neighbour’s house moved. Someone was watching. ‘Sorry…my mistake.’ Throwing her hands up in apology, she backed away.

  At the start of the dirt road, she heard Riley approaching from the beach. Once again, she was surprised by the sight of him; her baby boy had grown into a broad-shouldered handsome man so like his father, it took her into buried memories.

  He spotted her and stopped playing, slipping the flute into his back pocket.

  ‘Don’t wander off again until we know what kind of people live here.’

  The look he flashed hushed her. She saw his fists clench. He hated it when she treated him like a child. She wondered, not for the first time, if he would ever hit her. His temper lately had been frightening.

  Falling into step with him, they walked along the dirt road towards their new house. She watched him from the corner of her eye. Poor baby. He was miserable. Maybe she had made a mistake bringing them here to start again. But David had kept reminding her Riley would be twenty-one soon, that it was time for her to let go, that he needed to get out into the world and meet friends his own age. At least here, there was a chance that could happen.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ She made her voice sound bright.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘The island? Did you look around?’

  The old wooden house loomed in front of them, hanging askew over the gloomy swamp. ‘I miss Burrawang.’

  ‘It’s not Burrawang you miss.’

  He looked at her as the words hovered, suspended. Even here on new ground, the unspoken fact that David was dead still saturated each shared moment.

  Unable to hold his accusing gaze, she glanced toward the house, wishing the stink from the mangrove mud wasn’t so invasive. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘Truth is, Mum, I don’t have to.’ He went inside, not bothering to hold the screen door so it slammed in her face.

  Always this threat that he would leave. A hot flush unleashed itself as she leant against the door frame. Surely she was too young for menopause? She heard him thumping up the internal staircase as if climbing to his doom. The harder she tried to hold him, the further he slipped away.

  The urge to jam the sharp wooden flute into her eye-socket terrified Riley. Whenever she made reference to David being dead, he wanted to hurt her. What was happening to him? He had read that a stage of grief was anger, but this was an uncontrollable rage taking hold. He could feel it gaining strength. Th
e only place he found relief was in his music. But at what cost? He had seen proof now that he could touch people through his music. By pouring his pain into his flute playing, the other day he had reduced that old woman in the park to tears, and that drunk had screamed at him to stop. Riley had done it on purpose. The memory that he had played wanting to inflict his pain on others, so all those smiling people idling in the park would feel as bad as he, doused him with shame.

  Riley drooped through the queer house with the slanting walls, depressed at the extent of the unpacking that remained. Even the kitchen was still full of sealed boxes. Typically, his mother’s laboratory had taken precedence, and she had chosen the large front room that opened onto the verandah. He had pleaded with her to make her workspace at the back of the house in a less public location. She had only laughed, ‘What I’m doing is totally legal. I’m a practising entomologist. You’re such a worry wart.’

  But he knew from her whispered arguments with David that an aspect of her research was not legal. He suspected it had something to do with the mice she bred for experiments, hidden away in that stinky cupboard. On hot days, he predicted, the pissy rodent smell would permeate the whole house.

  Walking down the uneven hallway, he realised it was the house itself that was oppressive. A heaviness seeped from the unpainted weatherboards.

  He missed the airy tree house he had built with David at Burrawang, missed the moist earthy smells of the rainforest and the customary crack of whipbirds. When David had told him the whipbird’s call was created by two birds, Riley had spent years listening for the lone unanswered whipbird, but it never happened. David was right. There were always two.

  Riley stared into the ugliness of the green-tiled bathroom and remembered how hysterical she had been when he attempted to leave, how she had begged, ‘Please? Things will be better there. You’ll see. All we need is a change.’ But nothing would change. Nothing would bring David back. Nothing would alter the fact that he and his mother were stuck with each other like a pair of strange whipbirds who didn’t belong with other birds. Why on earth had they moved to a small island full of people? The pit of his stomach contracted. Something terrible could happen here if they weren’t careful.

  He stepped into the room he had chosen for himself, the one furthest from the smell of the swamp where the morning light would flood in, and opened a cardboard box containing his flutes. He arranged them on the shelf that ran the length of the space, and came across the first flute he had made, with David’s help, of course. Twirling it in his hands, smiling at its crudity, he missed the man who had been a father to him, who had showed him the possibility of surviving in the world on his own, who had secretly helped him earn money.

  The money. Where was it?

  He scrambled through the box until he found the flute case lying at the bottom. He lifted the lining and counted the stash. Still all there. His mother hadn’t found it.

  Something shattered over the kitchen floor. She was exhausted. Riley felt a pang of guilt for all he had done to her today. She had deserved it though, insisting she leave her car on the mainland. It meant they were forced to ride in the cabin of the removalist truck with those awful men. As a form of punishment, instead of climbing into the front beside her, Riley had asked if he could jump over the back to lie in the sleeping compartment, feigning tiredness.

  ‘Go for it mate, we’ll take care of your mother, won’t we Rick?’

  ‘Too right we will.’ Rick had patted his mother’s leg before driving the big lorry with their life’s possessions onto the barge.

  She would have hated being stuck alone in that small space with those two men who kept ogling her. David had always said she was too beautiful for this world and Riley had noticed the way certain men stared. He shouldn’t have left her alone with them. He couldn’t understand what made him do things to purposely annoy her.

  It was the way she had spoken to him later though, when they were unloading, addressing him like a precious child, causing the men to snigger under their baseball caps, that had embarrassed him so he had stormed off. What angered him most was that she gave him no choice, crowding him until he was forced to escape in order to breathe, in order to not smash his fist into a wall.

  The sound of her sweeping up shards of porcelain caused him to sigh as he stood and readied himself.

  When Riley entered the room, Marlise made an effort not to look up. ‘Don’t fuss. You suffocate him.’ She could still recall David’s intonation.

  He was searching for something to eat.

  ‘There’s a can of baked beans and a loaf of bread. That’s about it. I’ll go across and get groceries in the morning. You eat. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You’re never hungry.’

  True, she seldom had an appetite, but why say it like an insult? She watched him slice the bread and felt a wave of weariness. ‘I need to lie down.’

  ‘Mum?’ He was struggling to find the right words.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  Marlise waited in hope, but the silence became stifling. ‘I miss him too you know.’

  His face softened as he moved to hug her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Such a good boy. She wanted to hold him forever, but he pulled away and resumed buttering his bread. She ran her fingers through his hair – still as soft as the day he was born – before heading for her bedroom.

  Sitting on the bare mattress, she reached for the closest box, wondering what memories lurked inside waiting to be exposed. The packing had been rushed, done by the removalist company. Marlise had barked orders to throw everything into boxes, deciding to sort through their lives when she arrived at the other end. At Burrawang, the imperative had been to escape David. He was everywhere there. Even when she opened the fridge, he was there in the contents, in the worn embroidery on his favourite chair where he had sat every morning to read, the smell of him on the sheets which she had washed and washed, and thrown out in the end.

  She ripped the packing tape off the box, then paused, looking around the room. Something important was missing. The beat of her blood intensified. Her old metal chest.

  Marlise stood too quickly, legs almost buckling. She had instructed the removalists to carry it in here. Had they mistakenly placed it in Riley’s room? Her stomach rolled over as she darted across the hallway.

  No sign of it.

  She switched on the living room light and saw the chest sitting benign against the wall, as if it didn’t contain anything that could harden Riley’s heart against her, as if it didn’t contain a lifetime of lies. She tried to lift it. It was too heavy. She tried to pull it along the floor towards her room. It wouldn’t budge. To move it, she would need to unpack it. Curse those removalist men with their leering smiles. The latch was rusted together and had folded in on itself where the lid of the chest had buckled during transit. To open it, she would need a file that could cut through metal.

  Why would Riley bother? It was of no interest to him. She allowed herself to breathe again, calling out, ‘leave the unpacking, we’ll tackle it tomorrow.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ he managed through a mouth full of food.

  Marlise returned to her room. This was what frightened her most about moving. It meant disturbing layers of dust and memories, exposing artefacts hidden away safely for years. With the need to rearrange their lives, the risk of unwanted discoveries surfaced.

  Her priority in the morning would be to buy a file. Then she could rid that chest of what was lying buried at the bottom. If Riley unearthed it, the web of deceit she had carefully woven around him, cocooning him from the truth, would be torn apart, ripping his heart open, too wide for forgiveness.

  The cardboard box beside her bed was full of clothes she hadn’t worn in a decade. Burrawang had been so private and humid, Marlise had spent twelve years lolling around in sarongs. She pulled out a skimpy crocheted swimsuit and laughed.

  Probably too old for that now.

  At the side of the box, h
er hand slithered into something cool and silky. The black halter-neck dress David had bought her the weekend he had taken them to Port Douglas. A replica of the famous white garment lifted by the wind when Marilyn Monroe stood over a subway grate. Marlise remembered the way David looked at her when she put it on. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t go to dinner.’ He had joked. ‘Stay here and order room service instead, in case some young buck tries to steal you away.’

  She pressed the dress into her eyes. It hadn’t mattered that David had been fifteen years older. His desire for her had been immeasurable. Such a generous lover, she hadn’t felt the need to stray. Why had he never been convinced of this? She was sure that was why he agreed for them to live so alone and cut off, even though he worried about the effects such isolation would have on Riley. She ran the satin material down her throat, pretending it was David touching her. Her loving David who had embraced her son, becoming the father Riley needed. Their life together had been ideal. Until the end. She could never forgive him for supporting Riley in his increasing desire to venture out and explore the world, undermining her authority, continually taking the boy’s side, making her feel left out, or worse, like the big bad mother.

  Her knuckles had turned white from clutching the dress so hard. Best not to think of David, too much pain lurked there ready to knock her sideways.

  She dropped the dress and opened the large window to stare into the endless twist and turn of the mangroves, their pale lichen-covered trunks rising from the black mud alive with things breathing, bubbling, popping. The sharp putrid tang of it cleared her head. She could feel the pull on her weary body of a full moon rising, somewhere.

  The sky was bleeding pink. ‘Like watered down blood,’ she murmured and wondered at the beauty of the world as mosquitoes swarmed toward the window. They could smell her. She pressed her face against the screen. ‘Starving. You poor darlings.’

  In the distance, a dog barked again.

  3.