usually unflappable aunt was flapping so hard that curiosity got the better of her and she rolled out from beneath the ferns, snatching up her lunch things. The day had darkened; clouds covered the blue sky and the gorge was now in shadow.
With a wistful glance over her shoulder at the creek, a promise to come back as soon as she could, she started for home.
Aunt Ada was sitting on the back stairs, head in hands, when Vivien emerged from the bush. Some sixth sense must’ve told her she had company because she glanced sideways, blinking at Vivien with the same perplexed expression she might have worn had a bush sprite appeared on the lawn before her.
‘Come here, child,’ she said finally, beckoning with one hand as she pushed herself to standing.
Vivien walked slowly. There was a strange swooping sensation in her stomach for which she had no name, but would one day come to recognise as dread. Aunt Ada’s cheeks were bright red and there was something uncontrolled about her; she looked as if she were about to shout or to clip Vivien across the ears, but she did neither, bursting into scalding tears instead and saying, ‘For God’s sake, get indoors and wash that muck off your face. What would your poor mother think?’
Vivien was Indoors again. There’d been a lot of Indoors since it happened. The first black week when the wooden boxes, or caskets, as Aunt Ada called them, were laid out in the sitting room; the long nights during which her bedroom walls retreated into the darkness; the stale muggy days as grown-ups whispered, and clicked their tongues at the suddenness of it all, and sweated into clothes already damp from the rain that bore down outside the steamy windows.
She’d made a nest against the wall, tucked herself between the sideboard and the back of Dad’s armchair, and that’s where she stayed. Words and phrases buzzed like mosquitoes in the fug above—the Lizzie Ford … right over the edge … incinerated … hardly recog- nisable—but Vivien blocked her ears and thought instead about the tunnel in the pond and the great engine room at its centre from which the world was spun.
For five days she’d refused to leave the spot, and the adults had humoured her and brought plates of food and shaken their heads with kindly pity, until finally, with no obvious sign or warning, the invisible line of leniency was reeled in and she was dragged back into the world.
The wet season had set in well and truly by then, but there’d been one day when the sun had shone and she’d felt the faint stirrings of her old self, sneaking out into the glare of the back yard and finding Old Mac in the shed. He’d said very little, laying a big gnarled hand on her shoulder and squeezing hard, and then he’d handed her a hammer so she could help with the fencing. As the day wore on, she’d thought about visiting the creek, but she hadn’t, and then the rain came back and Aunt Ada arrived with boxes, and the house was packed away. Her sister’s favourite shoes, the satin ones that had sat all week on the rug, same spot she’d kicked them after Mum said they were too good for the picnic, were tossed into a box with Dad’s handkerchiefs and his old belt. Next thing Vivien knew there was a ‘For Sale’ sign on the front lawn and she was sleeping on a strange floor as her cousins blinked curiously at her from their own beds.
Aunt Ada’s house was different from her own. The wall paint wasn’t flaking, there were no ants wandering the bench tops, cascades of garden flowers did not spill from vases. It was a house where spilling of any kind was not tolerated. A place for everything and everything in its place, Aunt Ada was fond of saying, in a voice that shrilled like a fiddle string wound too tight.
While the rain continued outside, Vivien had taken to lying under the sofa in the good room, pressed against the skirting board. There was a droop of hessian lining, invisible from the door, and to squeeze beyond it was to become invisible herself. It was comforting, that torn sofa base, it reminded her of her own house, her family, their happy tattered clutter. It brought her as close as she ever came to crying. Most times, though, she concentrated only on breathing, taking in