The Anatomy of Wings E-Book

Karen Foxlee

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 375

Beschreibung

In a dusty Queensland town, something terrible has happened.Amongst broken bottles and cigarette butts at the foot of a water tower, a girl with blonde hair lies as if sleeping. Jennifer Day has lost her sister and her singing voice, and doesn't know how to find either of them. Her father and mother move under a spell, and a dark silence lives in the space that fiery, rebellious Beth has left behind her. To recover her voice, Jennifer must retrace her sister's last steps, weeding out childish mementoes from disturbingly adult memories. As she learns about the last year of her sister's short but eventful life, she slowly begins to cross the threshold from childhood into adolescence - taking flight even as her family slowly falls apart.

Leseprobe

the anatomy of wings

Karen Foxlee was born in Mount Isa, Queensland, in 1971. She has worked for most of her adult life as a registered nurse. She now lives in Gympie, an old mining town in Queensland. The Anatomy of Wings is her first novel.

Copyright

First published in 2007 by University of Queensland Press.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2009 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2010by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Karen Foxlee, 2007

The moral right of Karen Foxlee to be identified as the authorof this work has been asserted by her in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any formor by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recordingor otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyrightowner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, charactersand incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imaginationand not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actualpersons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

First eBook Edition: January 2010

ISBN: 978-1-848-87484-8

For Dad

Contents

Cover

the anatomy of wings

Copyright

Begin reading

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Years later when I go to the dry river everything is less than in my memories. The riverbed is narrower, there are fewer ghost gums. I remember an entire stand behind the sand track or this is how it seemed. They were evenly spaced, each giant with its own territory of solitude. I remember the quiet. How there was only the sound of our footsteps on the fallen leaves, our voices in the stillness.

Now many of the trees are gone, fallen or cut down. There are more paddocks instead, the beginning of a new housing estate.

I walk in circles unable to find the place at first but our tree is still there.

When at last I find it I am surprised at the smallness of the marks we left. I kneel and run my fingers over our carved letters. All this time and the tree has kept them for us. It could have easily healed itself. The cuts were not deep. They were made only with children’s hands.

Certain things were placed in the box. We were not supposed to touch them. No-one said it but we felt it. It was the way our mother held the box to her chest as she walked along the hallway, protectively, as though it were a baby. She hid it from us in clear view.

Angela and I removed it from the top shelf of the linen press. The door creaked. In the weeping house the only sound was our breathing in the silence that followed. Already, in the few weeks, a light layer of dust had settled over its lid.

It was Angela’s idea. She said we needed to look inside to find my singing voice. It would help me to remember exactly when and how it happened that the words lodged in my chest quite close to my heart.

You’ll never get it back unless you know why it went away she said. She was full of ideas.

It was a simple blue cardboard box. I thought it would be heavy. I thought the weight of it would make my arms shake but it was light. The writing on the lid said in flowing white script Carnegie Elegant Glassware. In blue biro in the right-hand corner was one more word. Darling.

My sister Danielle was sleeping when we entered the room. She was facing us with her knees drawn up. In those weeks all anyone did was sleep. Our house was like Sleeping Beauty’s palace after the enchanted spell is cast. People slept on beds and on sofas. They closed their eyes in chairs with cups of sweetened tea in their hands. Mum slept with pills that Aunty Cheryl counted out into her hand and guided to her mouth. Dad slept on the floor between us with one arm slung across his eyes.

Angela and I sat on my bed with the box between us. She looked at Danielle sleeping and then at me, asking me with her eyes if it was alright. I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know what my mother would do if she found us with the box. I didn’t know if she would sense it had been opened and leap from her bed and come running to find us. I didn’t know what it would contain.

When I opened the lid the smell of fifty-cent-sized raindrops hitting dry earth escaped.

Angela opened her mouth into an O.

Up rose the scent of green apple shampoo. Of river stones once the flood has gone. The taste of winter sky laced with sulphur fumes. A kiss beneath a white-hearted tree. A hot still day holding its breath.

We removed the contents one by one.

There were two blue plastic hair combs. A tough girls’ black rubber-band bracelet. A newspaper advertisement for a secretarial school folded in half. A blonde plait wrapped in gladwrap. A silver necklace with a half-a-broken heart pendant. An address, written in a leftward slanting hand, on a scrap of paper. Ballet shoes wrapped in laces.

From the box came the sound of bicycle tyres humming on hot bitumen. Of bare feet running through crackling grass. Of frantic fingers unstitching an embroidered flower. Of paper wings rising on a sudden wind. Of the lake breathing against the shore.

I didn’t say anything. I kept very still. Danielle turned on her bed but kept sleeping.

‘Somewhere in here,’ whispered Angela, ‘is the answer.’

On the day of the funeral my nanna had let the cat out of the bag about an angel and caused a great ruckus and then left squealing the tyres on her beige Datsun Sunny. Even before that Kylie went ballistic and punched one of the Townsville twins on the nose. My singing voice disappeared long before then though the words to songs still ached inside my chest. I could feel them in my stomach and taste them in my mouth but they wouldn’t come.

After the funeral the house was full of the rustling of black chiffon and the smell of Cedel’s hairspray holding up stiff French rolls, and already wilting roses dropping petals onto the shag pile. The visitors pressed themselves against the living room walls and tried to drink their tea without clinking their cups and saucers. They used up all the airconditioner coolness and sweated around their necks. Men undid their ties. Women pressed handkerchiefs to their foreheads. They used up all the oxygen. I could feel my lips turning blue.

Our mother was laid out on the sofa as still as a statue and surrounded by aunts. Her only movement was to occasionally blink her see-through blue eyes. Her long eyelashes hit her tear-stained cheeks and caused a faint and momentary breeze.

In the middle of the room the nest of tables had been spread apart from smallest to largest like a set of stairs. On the lowest were jam drops with smooth skin and jelly eyes. The middle contained a round unsliced tea cake. On the top step there was a host of fairy cakes, still-winged, standing on each other’s shoulders.

Nanna sat in Dad’s Jason Recliner. She didn’t have her legs up. She sat on the edge of the vinyl, knees together, legs sweating in her stockings. Dad didn’t have a seat. He stayed in the kitchen with the other men. They tried to remove beers quietly from the esky but every noise they made was magnified in the house, the hushed rumble followed by an avalanche of ice, the exhausted sigh of the pulled ring top.

Nanna made a quiet moaning noise in her throat. Everybody tried to look the other way. She was building up to something and it wasn’t a good idea to encourage her. Uncle Paavo, her brother, sat next to her. His funeral suit was two times too big for him because he only ate when he came to our house for weekend lunches and that was how he became a millionaire. Every now and then he blew his nose very loudly and interrupted the silence.

The Townsville twins were the first cousins to move. Patrick in his powder blue suit reached out, removed a jam drop and sauntered towards the front door. His mother, Aunty Margaret, made a deflating noise. Jonathan followed in his tan suit, running his fingers back through his hair. Outside they rounded the house and found a piece of shade on the back steps and lit up their Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes which were the Passport to International Smoking Pleasure. They were identical apart from the colour of their suits and the fact that Patrick had slightly more sensational hair-flips. They both had small smiles which they executed without opening their mouths and exposing their teeth. Nanna said they had superior attitudes.

Jamie and Samantha were the Brisbane cousins. Sometimes the Townsville twins showed their teeth to them. The Brisbane cousins wore real Sportsgirl espadrilles and jeans. They had long shiny blonde hair and Jamie said she was already a model and one day she’d be in Dolly and that perms were yesterday’s news which made Danielle feel bad because she’d waited her whole life for the one she had on her head.

The Brisbane cousins sat down beside the Townsville twins and took drags on their cigarettes. They waved their hands in front of their faces to keep away the flies. Patrick called our town No-wheres-ville which made the Brisbane cousins laugh and Jonathan tipped back his head and looked down his nose at us with one of his smallest smiles.

Kylie was our cousin who lived in No-wheres-ville with us. She lived two streets away in a house right beside the park and she spent hours lying in her backyard on her trampoline staring into the sky. No matter how much you tried to sneak past she always saw you and asked to come too even if you were just going nowhere in particular. Kylie had brittle bones and bucked teeth and a bad temper. She’d been born prematurely. Kylie got angry or sad very easily.

‘Don’t call it No-wheres-ville,’ she said to Patrick.

We stood at the bottom of the back steps in front of the city cousins like strangers in our own backyard despite being The Most Bereaved.

‘No-wheres-ville,’ said Patrick.

He enunciated the words slowly.

‘Don’t say that,’ Kylie said.

She made two fists with her hands by her side. She was fourteen, only two years younger than them but half their size. Her arms and legs were stick thin but they didn’t know how strong she was. They didn’t know Kylie could perform headlocks and give terrible Chinese burns and horse slaps. She could tear herself away from the restraints of two grown-ups by thrashing her legs in the air. She could spit across whole rooms.

‘Calm down you pipsqueak,’ said Jonathan.

‘Leave her alone,’ said Danielle.

Our mother said we had to look after Kylie on account of her having very breakable bones and a very small amount of retardedness. Kylie’s teeth hung over her bottom lip. She breathed loudly through her nose. She stared at Patrick, willing him to say it again with her eyes. Danielle’s tight curls bobbed on her head. Jamie and Samantha regarded them with disdain.

‘Bush turkey,’ said Patrick and covered it up with a cough into his hand.

‘What did you say?’ said Kylie.

‘Gobble-gobble-gobble,’ said Jonathan, hardly moving his lips, like a ventriloquist.

‘What did he say?’ Kylie asked Danielle.

‘Leave her alone,’ said Samantha.

‘Why?’ said her sister, genuinely surprised.

‘Because,’ Samantha whispered, ‘she’s slow.’

Our mother said we should never call Kylie slow. I wished if I put my hands over my face everything would disappear; all the cousins, all the rustling sweet-smelling aunts and Nanna banging her head with the Bible. The whole town too, all the pink and green and lemon-coloured houses, the red hills that crouched around them, the whole bright blue day.

Afterwards Dad peeled Kylie off Patrick. She was still kicking her legs and spraying saliva. The damage was assessed. Patrick’s powder blue suit pocket had been torn clear off and lay on our dead lawn. Aunty Margaret held a Kleenex to his nose and tilted his head back. She screamed at the Brisbane cousins to find ice. It made them cry because they were not used to being screamed at. Especially not in a strange town called Memorial. In the middle of nowhere. On a high summer’s day that burnt their faces and hurt their lungs. After the funeral of a cousin they did not know.

Nanna waited until all the visitors had gone and the cousins were reassembled along the floor before she let the cat out of the bag. She was back in the recliner. She put her cup of tea down on the occasional table and folded her hands in her lap. Dad raised his eyes. He’d been begrudgingly given a seat beside Mum on the sofa. He held one of her limp hands in his.

‘You must all listen to me,’ Nanna said.

‘Don’t start, Anna,’ said Dad.

It was strange to hear her real name like that. It sounded like he was talking to a little girl.

‘Don’t say don’t start to me,’ said Nanna.

‘Be quiet,’ said Mum.

Aunty Margaret, Aunty Louise and Aunty Cheryl gathered around Mum, they murmured as they squeezed Dad off the sofa. There was something in the air.

‘Beth spoke with angels,’ said Nanna and everyone shut up.

She looked around the room daring anyone to disagree.

‘Holy shit,’ whispered Patrick who was dabbing at his nose with a tissue and examining the blood.

I’d been placed as a buffer between the away cousins and Kylie. Patrick’s powder blue suit scratched against my arm. His Peter Stuyvesant packet poked into my thigh.

Nanna put her hands across her heart. She looked straight at me. I felt a hot flush on my cheeks. I looked at the shag pile. I pulled at some strands. I imagined what it would be like to be so small that I could get lost in the jungle of white and brown loops.

The away cousins didn’t know Nanna like I did.

‘Beth told me,’ said Nanna.

Her straight grey hair hung in two curtains to her jaw. She stared at me from beneath her flat grey fringe. I refused to meet her eyes.

‘What did she tell you?’ shouted Mum.

Mum rose up from the sofa like a vampire from a coffin. She was wringing her hands.

‘After it happened,’ said Nanna, ‘in the beginning, after the lake.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ shouted Mum. ‘You witch.’

The clutch of aunts moved closer. They stroked her hair and her shoulders and tried to lie her back down. They stared down Nanna from across the room. They tried to look angry but a ripple passed over them. They shivered. They exchanged glances beneath their hair-sprayed fringes. Hands went up to pale pearl-ringed throats.

‘Stop it,’ hissed Aunty Margaret.

She was the eldest daughter. Her voice quivered with excitement.

‘You don’t tell me to stop it,’ said Nanna.

‘Right,’ said Dad, ‘that’s it.’

I thought he was going to make her leave the room but he didn’t. He walked towards her but then veered off at the last minute and staggered down the hallway. He slammed the door to our bedroom. The living room was silent. The door slam toppled the host of fairy cakes from each other’s shoulders. Kylie reached out for one but Aunty Cheryl slapped her hand away.

After Nanna’s words people wilted where they sat. They closed their eyes. They held their heads in their hands. The Brisbane cousins bit their bottom lips and exchanged hidden glances with the Townsville twins. Kylie scratched at a scab on her leg. Uncle Paavo removed the hanky from his pocket and blew his nose. He coughed and then sobbed.

Our water was poisoned. Our air was poisoned.

‘Get out,’ shouted Mum, ‘get out, get out. Don’t ever come back.’

Nanna wouldn’t go at first. My cheeks burnt to look at her.

‘You’ve really done your dash this time,’ said Aunty Margaret through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

The cousins stood up and moved slowly from the room. Nanna picked up her teacup and tried to have a drink. Her hand shook. She picked up her glasses’ case and fumbled with her glasses until they were on her nose. She opened her Bible. Her dentures clicked inside her mouth as she tried to swallow. She closed her Bible. She stood up.

She left a Nanna-shaped bottom imprint on Dad’s recliner.

It slowly vanished.

The bottom imprint reminded me of plaster of Paris. It reminded me of Mrs Bridges-Lamb, my grade-five teacher, who let us make casts of our own footprints. She said now our ten-year-old footprints were immortalised. Nanna took her Bible and a plate of biscuits and let the screen door bang behind her.

She would not come back to our house for a very long time.

She started her Sunny with too much pedal and squealed her tyres. On the mattress between our beds Dad’s closed eyes flickered at the sound of her leaving. He lay on his side with his thongs still on. Danielle lay behind him on her bed. They grieved in formation, breathing softly.

After the words they removed our mother to her bedroom. They unzipped her from her dress. It whispered a sigh as it fell to the floor. Aunty Margaret directed her to lift her feet over the puddle of material. Mum stood in her petticoat facing the wall. They turned her towards the bed.

After she was laid down the aunties removed their own dresses and placed them on coathangers in front of Dad’s side of the cupboard. The black dresses moved in the breeze from the airconditioner. The aunties unzipped suitcases and found suitable after-funeral wear. Aunty Margaret examined herself side-on in the scallop-edged duchess mirror. The glass was distorted in the middle and I could see she didn’t like it. She frowned and pulled her belly in. When she saw me at the door she laughed, a little nervous laugh, and it was a very strange sound among all of the misery. Aunty Louise put her fingers to her lips.

After the words Aunty Cheryl turned her teaspoon slowly in her teacup at the dining room table. The sun hammered at the closed curtains. There was a whole cloudless bright day outside. Kylie sat near her nursing her punching hand.

The house filled up slowly with the sound of nothing. The stillness dripped in, second by second, minute by minute, measured by the Bessemer clock on the kitchen wall. No-one spoke. The aunties’ hands murmured between teacups and pot and bowl. Sugar rained into tea. Napkins were unfolded and folded again. Crumbs drifted slowly from chins.

Nanna believed in miracles. The day of the funeral they were burning very brightly inside her mind. After she left our house she was driving fast and crying hard. She didn’t see the cousins moving slowly through the heat. She didn’t recognise them, her own flesh and blood. They went up through the long grass of the park.

The Merit Students Encyclopedia says a miracle is an event that cannot be explained scientifically and is probably caused by a supernatural power. Miracles are things like the sea parting and walking on water and statues crying blood or milk and the appearances of people like Mary surrounded by heavenly light in unexpected places on ordinary days.

It was Nanna who started everything.

The miracle entry is in Volume Twelve. Our mother bought the set from a one-armed salesman. We couldn’t afford an Australian set even though the salesman said it would be much better for us in the long term.

Volume Twelve also contained the map of the moon. Maria is the plural of Mares which are the moon’s dark seas. And once Beth and I divided up the whole moon between ourselves. I was ruler of the Sea of Rains where there is a Bay of Rainbows and also I was Queen of the Sea of Storms. Beth owned the Sea of Serenity and the Sea of Tranquillity and the Sea of Clouds. Then Danielle came late to the game and wanted her own territory and we gave her a small section which was the Sea of Moisture and she complained. She told Mum and we had to give her more and it ruined everything.

Volume Twelve contained everything you could ever want to know about Minnesota, Mississippi and Missouri but nothing at all about Memorial.

When Jamie and Samantha came home from their walk they were pale-faced and exhausted by the sun. They’d been to the park, it was written all over their faces. They were folded up into the arms of their mother, Aunty Louise. Patrick and Jonathan looked at the floor.

‘It’s too terrible, I know,’ whispered Aunty Louise into Jamie and Samantha’s ears. ‘Try not to think about it.’

It would have been easy for them because there was so much they didn’t know. For instance they didn’t know:

The wilder Beth grew the bluer her eyes became and the bluer her eyes became the wilder she grew.

That she chewed her nails. She chewed them down to the skin until they bled.

That when she laughed she closed her eyes and tilted her head backwards. She put one arm across her stomach.

That she could melt Nanna’s stony heart with one smile. After her heart was melted Nanna always said, ‘What on earth will we do with you?’

That she ran away often and that when she returned we all tried to act as though she had never gone.

That she felt keenly the pain of insects and then the pain of people.

That she gave up dancing aged thirteen.

That parts of her kept disappearing. Small pieces that she gave away.

That sometimes she drank metho with her wine, just a dash.

That she wanted to save everything but couldn’t even save herself.

We put the box away before Danielle woke up. Angela stayed sitting on my bed memorising the contents while I went through the bottom of the cupboard looking for a blue-lined exercise book. I found an old grade-five book that was only partly used. It contained mostly information about Greek and Roman history which was Mrs Bridges-Lamb’s favourite topic, especially the Spartans, which made her glasses fog up. Mostly the pages were filled up with towering roman numerals. Angela ripped them out to make a clue book into how I lost my voice.

The ripping woke Danielle and she scowled at us when she opened her eyes. Mum said Danielle was an expert at scowling and she could win a medal for it. I held my breath, Angela held the exercise book in her hand. Danielle sat up ramrod straight in her Milwaukee back brace. I thought she knew about the box from the way she looked at us. She scowled more and looked suspicious. But then she took the sketchbook from the desk so she could draw a picture of the end of the world and went away. Her Milwaukee back brace clunked as she left the room. The quietness in the house settled again like dust, it rained from the roof onto our faces, it clung to our eyelashes.

Angela took the exercise book and a pencil. I took the cricket bat and tennis ball from under my bed. We went out through the still house. The washing was piled up in the laundry. Ashtrays had filled and overflowed. All the roses and lilies had thrown back their heads over the edges of vases and died. They had cast their petals on the floor. The living room smelt of dead water-logged greenery. Even though Christmas had been and gone the calendar stayed on November 1982.

We passed my mother sleeping on the sofa. We moved quietly so she wouldn’t wake. When she was awake she moved from room to room like she was lost. She opened doors and peered inside with one eye. She wept suddenly and wildly, when we least expected it. At night great storms of tears came and went and woke me from my sleep and made me rise up in bed.

‘Lie back down, chickadee,’ Dad said each time.

And he got up slowly from the mattress between our beds to go to her.

But none of this was visible from the outside. From the road I was surprised to find our house looked no different to the others in Dardanelles Court. It stood brave-faced. It stared with its front sliding glass windows straight ahead. It kept its screen door mouth shut tight. Its little porch chin upright. I looked at our house from the footpath and Angela, chewing on the end of one of her golden plaits, waited for me.

The five houses in Dardanelles Court faced each other across the cul-de-sac which is French for dead end. They were all identical, rectangular, metal clad and mint green. They were exactly the same as every other company house in Memorial South. The poincianas reached out to each other across the bitumen and dropped their red flowers. It was very quiet except for the droning of the outdoor airconditioner units.

There was no Mr O’Malley singing about the sea. No Mrs O’Malley nodding from her patio to me. No Miss Schmidt peeping through her venetian blinds. No Irwin girls sitting on their front steps dreaming of escape. There was no Marshall Murray standing beneath the fountain of his yellow cassia tree. The five houses faced each other, as though nothing remarkable had ever happened.

We walked out of Dardanelles Court onto Memorial Drive. We passed the entrances to all the other courts which had the same houses huddled in circles. We didn’t talk.

In Memorial Park I had to squint my eyes after spending weeks in the weeping house. I was unsteady on my feet. The park tilted towards the sky. The calf-high yellow grass shone. The sunlight rested its hands on my shoulders and burnt a crown on my head. Angela bowled to me and I cracked the tennis ball into the sky. It was only when we had exhausted ourselves that we lay down in the grass and Angela opened up the book.

‘Let’s begin at the beginning,’ she said. ‘What do you remember?’

She had her pencil ready to write down what I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘About what was in the box.’

‘The plait,’ I said.

Angela wrote THE PLAIT.

‘The hair combs. The piece of newspaper.’

‘How do you spell combs?’

‘C-O-M-B-S.’

THE PIECE OF NEWSPAPER.

‘The black band,’ said Angela writing slowly, ‘the ballet shoes.’

‘Why are you asking me if you remember already?’

‘Because,’ said Angela when she had finished writing.

‘This is stupid,’ I said.

‘No it isn’t.’

She showed me the cover where she had printed in her messy handwriting The Book of Clues.

‘All we have to do is go backwards,’ she said.

Angela Popovitch was my best friend. She’d been my best friend since grade one. She had two sisters like me but none of hers had died. She had never lied to me.

She watched me, her brown eyes and freckled nose screwed up against the sun.

‘Trust me. We can find your singing voice,’ she said. ‘It’s simple.’

The unstitching of an embroidered flower.

The unravelling of moments.

The unspooling thread of things.

This is the story of Elizabeth Day. I have pieced it together with my own two hands. I have made it from things I saw and things I did not see but later knew. It is made from the tatters of terrible things and the remnants of wonderful things. I have sewn it together before it fades.

My nanna said everything began at the lake. The day Beth fainted and afterwards saw the whole world with a golden glow.

‘You can take it or leave it,’ she said, ‘but I know it, something happened that day and nothing was ever the same again.’

We had begged for that day. Dad hadn’t wanted to go. He didn’t want to take the car out on a dirt road. It was Saturday. The races were on. He was feeling lucky and the radio wouldn’t work out there. The corrugations would wreck his wheels. We’d all get duck lice. The place was full of weeds.

‘You promised us,’ said Beth. ‘First you said after I turned thirteen, then you said when school finished.’

‘School finished a week ago,’ said Danielle. ‘Beth’s been thirteen forever.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Dad. ‘All right then.’

I cheered and clapped my hands.

‘What are you so happy about?’ he asked.

‘You always say you’re going to do things but then you don’t and this time you are,’ I said.

Mum told me not to be rude. She smiled her I-told-you-so smile at him from the bathroom door.

Dad combed his hair back slowly so it met in a duck’s tail at the back. He had sea-green eyes and a tear-drop shaped birthmark on his cheek that made him look sad. He shaved his face slowly with the razor. He shaved close to where the tear-drop birthmark sat beneath his left eye. Sometimes when Dad held Mum around the waist and kissed her in the kitchen and they thought we weren’t watching, Mum put her finger up to the tear-drop birth mark as though she was going to wipe it away. After he finished shaving he coughed into the sink. He always coughed into the sink in the morning and the night. It was a perfectly ordinary day.

Dad packed his beers along the bottom of the esky in the ice. Mum made us sandwiches. She asked Dad would the ice melt? Would the sandwiches get wet?

‘Of course it’ll bloody melt,’ he said. ‘It’s forty-five-frigging-degrees outside.’

Mum wrapped the sandwiches in gladwrap. Twice. She got out the durex and taped the gladwrap edges down when Dad had left the room. I could tell she was panicking. She put some of the sandwiches in my lunch box and some in Danielle’s and then because the lid wouldn’t shut properly she sticky-taped the lids down.

When we left we each took our turn to hug her. When she hugged me some of her worry about the sandwiches rubbed off onto me. When it was Danielle’s turn she got tears in her eyes.

‘Give me strength,’ Dad said.

The station wagon had no air-conditioning. We drove with the windows down. The road was long and dusty and dead straight. No bends. It headed straight for the horizon. Long flat-bottomed boat clouds sailed low across the sky. My job was to open the esky and pass the beer to Dad. When I took the beer out I looked down at our lunch boxes. They were entombed in the ice. I tried to rearrange things a bit by bringing them to the surface but Dad heard me rummaging.

‘Shut the lid, Jenny,’ he said. ‘Everything will melt before we get there.’

I tried not to worry about the sandwiches swimming in the melting ice. I sang some Slim Dusty songs and everyone joined in, even Danielle, who usually told me to shut up when I sang.

It usually takes a long time to get to somewhere you really want to go. For instance it takes a whole day to travel through the desert to the sea. A long day. The parched plains with their bleached grass and white bones try to exhaust you with their emptiness. The flat-top hills in the distance call out, we are all there is. They want you to wander off towards them. The land pretends to contain nothing. You have to concentrate on where you are going. That makes it take a long time to get there.

Beth, sitting in the front, moved the blue plastic combs through her long blonde hair.

When I asked her how long till we got there she said soon.

And then the landscape started to change.

The long straight road to nowhere started to bend. Hills sprang up with mangy coats of spinifex and yellow grass. They were speckled by trees with wild lady hair. Sheer rock faces, almost pink, almost orange. We hit a cattle grid and the road became bitumen. A little unmanned ticket box stood beside an open boom gate. We rounded the last corner and there the blue water lay, the white dam wall shining in the sun.

The last time we’d been to the lake our mother had been with us. We had been smaller, she hadn’t let us wander around by ourselves. She said stay where I can see you, so many children have drowned in this lake, the weed holds onto their legs and drags them down. They are never seen again. This is what happens to little children she said.

But Dad gave Beth a five-dollar note.

‘Go and buy yourselves some ice-creams or something,’ he said.

It was very hot, even beside the water, which was too bright after the desert. Stars danced on its surface. We had to walk with our eyes half-closed. There were canoes out on the water and people everywhere cooking barbecues and there were pelicans wandering between the tables. The sunlight flared around their open wings. The hot grass crackled beneath our feet.

‘I’m going to swim for hours,’ said Beth.

Then we had a normal conversation about lollies; candy fags, cobbers, musk sticks, milkos and redskins.

If we had known everything would change we would have turned back. But we didn’t know. That’s how things happen. Especially sunny days hide dark moments in their pockets.

At the kiosk counter Beth had the five-dollar note in her outstretched hand. I thought it was weird the way she was holding it, as though it was a golden cup or a flame.

‘Come on, love,’ said the kiosk lady, ‘we haven’t got all day.’

Beth was going to speak, her mouth opened. Her pupils expanded inside her blue eyes. She fell backwards, gracefully, perfectly straight, the way a tree falls. Her head hit the ground with a thud. Her mouth made a clunking noise like Nanna’s false teeth. She expelled a small noise. It could have been no. Her eyes rolled back into her head.

The kiosk lady didn’t open the kiosk door but jumped straight over the counter. She bent down beside Beth and then called out help so loudly that I had to cover my ears. People looked up from their picnic tables and came running from the shore. Danielle shook Beth’s shoulder but she wouldn’t wake up.

‘Find Dad,’ she shouted at me.

While I ran I mostly thought about what would happen if Beth died, for instance that Mum would get a shock especially since her main concern was the state of our sandwiches. And at the back of my mind was Beth’s face as it looked after she hit the grass and her eyes had closed; luminous.

‘Beth’s fallen down and she won’t wake up,’ I said when I finally found Dad untangling a fishing line beside the wall. I wiped the snot from my nose with the back of my hand.

A large crowd had gathered. We had to push our way through the damp bodies that smelt of the lake and suntan lotion. Beth had opened her eyes but she seemed dazed, she kept looking past all the faces bent over her towards the sky. Her lips moved. A very faint smile crossed her mouth. The crowd was very quiet. Other than the craning of necks, no-one moved. Someone brought lemonade. Dad lifted Beth’s head and Danielle put the tin against her lips. Some of the sparkling liquid rolled down her chin.

‘What is she saying?’ said the kiosk lady.

‘Shush,’ said Dad.

He bent his head closer, bringing his ear to her lips but she stopped her whispering then and woke up. Her eyes found Dad’s face and recognised him. When she saw she was on the ground she started to cry.

The crowd shivered and moved backwards in a single motion. Dad picked Beth up. He lifted his arm to move the crowd aside but it had already parted in two waves. A corridor was opened up. Dad carried her through it. Danielle and I followed in the strange parade.

‘You’d want to get her checked out,’ said the kiosk lady who walked beside us.

On the way home Beth lay on the back seat with the blanket rolled up for a pillow. Danielle and I sat in the luggage compartment behind her. The kiosk lady had given us bags of lollies and we ate them while we watched her. I lit a candy fag with my imaginary lighter and passed it down to her and she held it between her pale lips.

‘I’m sorry,’ was all she had to say.

Mum sat Danielle and I down at the kitchen table and grilled us over what had happened. What had we seen? What were the series of events? When did it start? When did it finish? Nanna screeched into the driveway with her smelling salts. She yelled at Dad. She said we should have eaten our sandwiches as soon as we got there. She took the wet sandwiches out of the esky and waved them in front of him as evidence. Dad told her to keep her big nose out of it. Beth, on the sofa, called out for them to be quiet.

‘What happened?’ Mum pleaded in a soft voice.

‘She fainted,’ Dad pleaded back.

Nanna made a clicking noise with her tongue.

‘Her face was shining,’ I said.

‘What?’ shouted Mum.

‘Ping off,’ said Dad.

‘What’s she talking about?’ asked Nanna.

‘She wouldn’t bloody know,’ said Dad.

But I did know. I knew a lot more things than him. He didn’t know, for instance, that sparrows were passerines which meant they could sing and that some swifts built their nests out of saliva and that Sirius was the next closest star to the sun. That was just for starters.

I knew a butterfly wing couldn’t repair itself once it was torn.

This was a very important fact. A butterfly wing is built of veins and covered in scales made from a substance like dust.

All through their sleeping stages butterflies dream of flying but when they first open their wings they need to wait. They must be patient. The wings are wet and they need time to dry. Butterfly wings are easily broken.

There is no hope for a butterfly once this has happened.

If you find a butterfly in a spider web with a broken wing there is no point in removing it however sad it might seem. If you remove it, it will only struggle on the ground and die some other kind of death. It will be carried away on the backs of bull ants to a bull ant feast and eaten alive.

Beth was always rescuing winged insects from spider webs. She stood on chairs and rescued moths and climbed trees to save cicadas.

‘Here,’ she said to them, ‘let me help you.’

She used pencils and scissors and her own fingers to release the trapped things. She held them in her hand or on her fingertip until they flew away. Sometimes, if they couldn’t, because they had stopped struggling and given up or the spider had already started wrapping them up for later, it made her very sad. Even if you said to her, don’t worry, it probably didn’t feel a thing.

It couldn’t be explained to her that at the very same moment a butterfly is struggling in a web all over the world there are insects eating insects, hundreds of millions of spiders eating butterflies, lions eating gazelles, crocodiles eating cows and countless worms turning inside of perfectly normal looking fruit.

Dad shooed me away with his hand.

‘Go play outside,’ said Mum. ‘We’re discussing something important.’

After the lake everywhere Beth looked there was light. Dad, face bent over her, wore a halo. A tree was on fire with white cockatoos. The dam wall shone like a bride’s skirt. The star-covered lake moved inside her. In the car our faces glowed. The sky pressed its bright face to the window.

At home our mother noticed the stain on her shorts and in the toilet even the blood on her underpants shone.

‘Do not be afraid,’ whispered Nanna at the toilet door.

She said the prayer for young girls who are menstruating.

‘I’m not afraid,’ said Beth.

The door lock shone like new silver. Light beams rained from the toilet doll’s upraised arms.

‘It is a normal thing,’ whispered Nanna. ‘All girls must have it happen.’

‘Leave her alone for God’s sake,’ said Mum from the hallway. ‘Give her some space.’

‘I’m alright,’ said Beth.

On our bedroom floor I sang ‘Speed Bonny Boat’ because it was a song about having to leave everything behind and saying goodbye to everything you know and because I was definitely going to run away as soon as possible. I had never wanted to break anything before but when Dad told me to ping off because I didn’t know what I was talking about, I felt like breaking something for the first time. I took out the box of Barbie dolls and the first thing I broke was Ken’s legs. They weren’t easy to break. I broke one off where the join was. It took a long time. First I did it with my bare hands and then I used scissors. I felt better but only for about ten minutes. Then I felt bad and I went out to the Drawer of Everything in the kitchen and found some sticky tape and Mum saw me and said I thought I told you to go outside?

‘I’m busy,’ I said.

Nanna clicked her tongue and followed me down the hallway and I only had time to throw Ken back in the box and push him under the bed and didn’t get to tape up his legs till later after she had gone.

‘What did you mean she was shining?’ she asked when she came into my room.

‘You shouldn’t say she,’ I said. ‘She’s the cat’s mother.’

‘Be quiet,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you meant.’

Nanna told me to get off the floor and sit beside her on the bed, she could be very nasty if she didn’t get her own way. Nanna had blue-grey eyes that bulged slightly and she leant in close with them and I could see the very old black heads on her crooked nose.

Nanna grabbed my hands and held them between her own. This was called the Hand Press. It was very important to keep our hands in our pockets if we did not want to tell her the truth. When Nanna held our hands between her own there wasn’t enough air. All we could do was answer the questions.

‘She was just shining,’ I said.

‘What do you mean shining? I don’t understand this talk. Was the sun shining on her face?’

‘Yes, the sun was there but she was shining too. She was looking past us at the sky.’

Nanna took a long deep breath in.

‘Holy Virgin of Virgins, Virgin most Wise, pray for us,’ she said.

She released my hands for a moment, crossed herself, and then placed them in the press again.

‘I couldn’t see what she was looking at,’ I said.

‘Shush, shush,’ said Nanna.

‘Dad shouldn’t say I don’t know anything,’ I said. It was the thing that hurt me the most.

‘I know, I know,’ she said and she released my hands before I could say anything else. ‘Don’t think about it now. Everything will be alright. I know these things.’

Before everything happened, that year Angela and I were ten, my second greatest love was collecting facts. Danielle said it was an unusual love and why couldn’t I just collect cereal packet Crater Critters like everyone else or ceramic dogs and Virgin Mary statuettes like Nanna or have a hobby like Hobbytex which was our mother’s number one passion.

Some of my fact collecting rubbed off on Angela but sometimes she didn’t understand that you can’t just say something is a fact because you believe in it strongly. Facts are found in fact books or in encyclopaedias and if they aren’t there you have to do research, for example, by asking someone who knows a lot about stuff. For example, Mr Willow would be the man to ask about the history of macramé because he taught it in grade seven.

My mother liked to use the word fact a lot. Her favourite