Ache

DEDICATION

To my Aunty Worth

CONTENTS

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by Eliza Henry Jones

Copyright

ONE

Annie has never been the sort of person to have nightmares. But since the fires on the mountain, her dreams have changed. They have developed a pattern, as though the fire changed the landscape of everything inside her. The ridges and curves.

Her dreams are steady, the same things flickering across each night. Ash and bubbles and dark water that moves like waves.

Since the fires, since leaving her nana on the mountain, Annie has dreamt of ash. She’s dreamt of drowning.

* * *

Her daughter, Pip, isn’t awake yet, but the dog next door is. Barking and whining at their neighbours’ back fence. It’s humid, already in the mid-twenties. Earlier, Annie had thrown open the hallway windows, dozily thinking there might be a storm.

Annie and Tom are in the kitchen, Annie swinging her crossed legs at the kitchen table, staring down at an article she doesn’t have the energy to read; Tom yawning at the kitchen bench and cupping his hands over his ears.

‘How do they not hear it?’ Annie asks.

‘The neighbours?’

‘Do they just block it out?’

‘I don’t know, Annie.’

‘They must.’ She rubs her short hair. After the fires on the mountain she had shaved it off. Nearly a year later and it still startles her, that shortness.

Tom half smiles. He’s dark under the eyes and moves slowly, his shoulders stooped and angled as though he has something heavy slung over one of them. Tom is broad and soft with a tangle of curly dark hair. Annie finds the shape of him comforting. He sets their coffees down and they stare across at the lines of texta on the wall. Annie got up in the night and drew them. Tom watched her shadow from the bedroom, still half asleep himself.

He tilts his head. ‘Do you think it’s a mountain?’

‘No,’ says Annie. ‘It’s blue. I wouldn’t have done a mountain in blue.’

Tom frowns. ‘Water maybe?’

‘Maybe. You sure it was me? Sure it wasn’t Pip?’

‘I saw you. I thought you were awake, you were concentrating that hard.’

Annie groans. ‘Bloody perfect. What if I . . .’

Tom presses a kiss to her lips. He tastes of coffee and toothpaste and smells like thick, lemony detergent from being bent over the sink, doing the dishes.

Annie shrugs away. ‘Seriously. What if I somehow end up at the neighbours’ place? Or defacing a shop?’

Tom shakes his head and picks up a whittling knife she has left on the table. It had belonged to her nana. Her nana loved to whittle wood. One of the most vivid memories Annie has from her childhood is of her nana sitting with her feet up on the coffee table, mismatched socks, snorting with laughter at the radio, her chest covered in wood shavings as she whittled.

‘You need to put these in the high cupboard. You can’t keep leaving them lying around.’

‘I know.’ Annie takes the whittling knife from him and runs her finger across the edge of it. It’s cold and tingling. It makes her shiver.

‘Pip’s six.’

‘Don’t, Tom.’ Annie gets up and puts the knife up in the high cupboard. ‘All fine, see?’

‘You can’t leave your knives and chisels around like that! I mean, even for a normal kid. Let alone one like Pip who’s acting out and –’

‘I am a normal kid!’ Pip yells from the hallway.

Annie picks up her coffee. ‘She hears like a bat.’

Pip marches into the kitchen, her green scarf wrapped around her neck. When she was younger, it was a sock puppet Tom had made her that she dragged around the house. Now it’s the green scarf. She likes to pull it over her head when she’s sleeping and often wears it over her face when they leave the house.

‘And I’m not Pip!’ she says. She’s pale and long-limbed and her mess of dark hair is pulled up into a lopsided ponytail. One sock is half off her foot. ‘I’m Phillip.’

‘Sorry, Phil,’ says Tom, ruffling her hair.

Pip bats at him. ‘Phillip.’

‘Right. Sorry Phillip. I like your scarf – you want some muesli?’

Pip pulls a wounded expression and sits down at the table. ‘I am normal. And I’m Phillip.’

Annie pulls Pip into her lap. ‘We know.’

Pip shrugs away. ‘I’m normal and I’m Phillip.’ She pauses. ‘And can you make me fairy bread for breakfast, Dad?’

* * *

Annie’s uncle and mother still live on the mountain where she grew up. Her uncle lives in a brick house in town and her mother lives in a house that is half destroyed, boxed in with corrugated iron, on the family farm ten minutes out of town.

Annie thinks about them a lot. She traces their names and their faces into the margins of the newspaper she stares at but can never quite read. Sometimes she tries to whittle them into wood, but she’s never been much good at whittling. Not like her nana, who seemed able to mould the wood into shapes just by thinking about it. When Annie tries to whittle or carve, the wood doesn’t fall into a hard shape but wavers until it disappears, becoming a pile of shavings on the couch or the kitchen table.

She finishes the dishes Tom has started while Tom watches Pip brush her teeth. She hears her daughter’s voice. ‘But I want the shiny pink ribbons, Dad!’

‘You need the blue ones for school.’

‘But Dad! The pink ones! Please!’

Later, Annie drops a kiss onto Pip’s head. Her daughter smells like the green scarf, that musty smell Annie can’t remove, no matter how many times she puts it on slow cycle in the washing machine.

Pip frowns and tugs at the blue ribbons in her hair until they fall out and then she stares down at them as though they’re something valuable that she’s broken.

‘C’mon,’ Tom says, putting an arm around her and steering her towards the front door. Pip begins to cry quietly, but she doesn’t struggle away.

Once they’ve gone, Annie pulls out the knife from the top cupboard and goes outside into their tiny, sparse backyard. Most of it is concreted, and the bit that isn’t might as well be. She’s tried to coax a lawn to grow, but the ground stays stubbornly hard and grey. At dusk it’s hard to pick the dirt from the concrete. Annie always pulls the curtains closed early.

Behind the little shed in the corner of their grey yard, Annie settles down on her knees and rummages through the wood stuffed into the narrow gap there. Bits of fencing and legs from furniture cast out for hard rubbish collection. Branches and frames and hardwood flooring. All pieces she has found. She prefers pieces small enough to be stuffed into her oversized handbag, but sometimes she will make an exception. Last week she dragged home a branch longer than she was tall and Pip laughed at her and Tom shook his head. ‘You’re nuts, Annie.’ She wasn’t sure whether he meant it.

She settles down cross-legged with a block of red gum she found in the gutter near the vet clinic where she works. She wants to whittle the shape of a dancing Pip, but the wood feels dead in her fingers.

She remembers wood as being alive. Her nana pressing her hands to the rough face of it. ‘Feel that? It’s living. That’s what’s so wonderful about wood. Particularly eucalypts. They’re a special sort of tree.’

But the eucalypts in the city feel different.

Her nana, Gladys, handled wood like something living, deft and gentle and fluid all at once. The way Annie’s Uncle Len handles animals at his vet practice. The way people handle the things that give them meaning.

Annie stares at the grey fence and then down at the red gum in her fingers and doesn’t feel anything. A breeze picks up, snaking all of the wind chimes along their balcony into song.

They were her Uncle Len’s idea, the wind chimes. She had mentioned how much she hated the traffic sounds, other people’s arguments, the snap of cars being locked and bins put out and the grating music of the ads, repeating themselves over and over again. All carried through that splintering grey fence.

Her Uncle Len hated the wind, after the fires. The wind was all he had been able to hear; the wind fanning the flames. The roar of them. So he started making wind chimes and sent them to Annie, wrapped up in old newspapers. He had five strung up around his house. The stronger the wind, the louder the chime.

He said one day he would drown out the roar of it completely.

* * *

Annie’s meant to leave for work at nine o’clock, but today she can’t summon the energy she needs to shower, to eat, to walk out the door. She messages her boss, telling him that she’s unwell.

The red gum is a lovely piece of wood. She can almost feel the throb of it. The way someone is alive, holding their breath under water.

Recently she has been trying to whittle the shapes of things from the mountain. Her mother and Len, the house, her favourite trees. She has been whittling the mountain’s birds. Into one thick piece of wood, she suspects it came from a coffee table, she has carved the curving shapes of roads. It is one of the only things that has kept its shape; has not wavered into pieces. The roads look like veins and she coloured them green for Pip and Pip ran her fingers along them.

‘But what’s it a map of?’ Pip asked over and over again.

‘Home,’ Annie said, because Tom wasn’t around. If he’d heard the words, his jaw would have tightened. But Pip just nodded. Already she understands.

Tom doesn’t crave the ocean, the salt, the sand, the light of the beachside suburb where he grew up. On these hot days, rattled by northerlies and dust, Tom will yawn and stretch. The closest he gets to the craving Annie feels is: ‘A swim would be nice, eh?’

Annie stretches one leg out, then the other. David, her boss, will be reluctantly covering for her. He will be rolling his eyes at the clients and saying ‘Women!’ and they will be tittering because they just want their pet seen to.

She picks up her whittling knife. She will carve Tom’s face. He will appreciate that; the gesture of it. Tom is big on gestures. When he wants to say sorry, he’ll bend his head to hers until their foreheads touch. It always startles her, makes her tense. The press of a man’s forehead against her own reminds her too vividly of her teenage boyfriend. It reminds her too vividly of Alex.

The shade of the fence is creeping away from her and she scoots along with it until her back is pressed up hard against the rough wood and there’s nowhere else for her to go.

* * *

When Annie thinks of her childhood, she thinks of trees and wood and the hum of bees out behind the shed. Her mother’s hives. The thick smell of honey. She thinks of throwing dried cowpats at her best friends, Alex and Rose, and collecting lavender from the garden to leave in jars on her nana’s and mother’s bedside tables.

She thinks of her Uncle Len, trudging the muddy tracks of the forest, monitoring the movements of the lyrebirds that live in amongst the arced shape of slender tree ferns, with their curled and prickled fronds; and the towering mountain ash. She thinks of mist and the red sap of the mountain ash, so living. So like blood. She thinks of rain and the smell of wood smoke.

She thinks of all those times she and Alex snuck into the forest, just the two of them. First as children, hunting lyrebirds with her Uncle Len, or hunting for monsters, and later as teenagers, hunting for something Annie isn’t sure that they ever quite found.

She thinks of the paint under her mother’s fingernails, of how the colours would dry and then wash off in the shower, leaving puddles of blue and green. She would beg her mother to paint on her skin. Her face, her back, her arms. She loved the cool feeling of it. How it slowly dried. She thinks of her nana drawing stars on the walls, in the little nooks next to cupboards and the edges of doorframes. And now here she is, waking up in the night to draw long, curving blue lines on the walls of her little terrace house.

These days, in the city, she watches Pip out in the concrete garden, swinging on the swings at the park, after Annie has checked for broken glass and fits. She watches Pip on Tom’s laptop and iPad. She watches Pip move in small circles: the rooms, the terrace, the garden, the narrow streets. Around and around, over and over. And she wishes her daughter knew the feeling of a cowpat in the face and mud between the toes. Annie always felt that the mountain was safe. That wide circling is safer than small. But since the fires she doesn’t feel safe anywhere and the new wariness is like something heavy, hung unevenly from her neck.

* * *

At pick-up time Annie sits in the car just outside the school’s front gate, listening to the radio. She’s been here for an hour. She’s learnt that you have to be committed if you want a park this close to the school. Most of the families live within walking distance, but none of them walk. It’s not that cars are easier, it’s that they have become a habit.

Sometimes Annie will mill with the other mothers. Some of them she’s known for years, Pip having gone through playgroup and kindergarten with their children before starting prep this year. But since the photos came out, things have been different. As though Annie has cheated and won something that she hadn’t known she was competing for. It was the headlines, she thinks, more than the photos. MOTHER OF THE YEAR. HERO MOTHER. WOMAN SAVES DAUGHTER. RIDE OF A LIFETIME.

The photo of her and Pip riding her old horse, Luna, out of the fires. Pip’s head buried in Annie’s arm. Luna’s burnt legs, her flared nostrils, the blood from being scratched by long-fingered branches as they galloped out of the smoke and the dark and the noise. That photo. It changed everything with Tom too. In ways Annie doesn’t understand; can’t fully see. Their relationship has been shifted by so many things that it’s become impossible to untangle them.

But sometimes she catches Tom looking at her with an expression that makes her certain he wonders, as she does, with a sort of dread, how long they’ll keep going. How long they’ll be able to stay together.

Annie keeps a copy of the picture in the glove box of the car. She can’t quite bring herself to take it inside the house; yet can’t bring herself to throw it out, either. She leaves it there, tucked away in the dark. And when she pulls it out, the shape of it makes her nauseous.

Annie closes her eyes as the bell rings. Earlier that afternoon, impulsively, she rang David, her boss. She told him she needed some time off work, that she wouldn’t be back at the practice until after the new year.

She’s not looking forward to telling Tom.

Pip comes running out of the school gates, her green scarf tied around her neck. She runs everywhere. Into the toilet. Out of the toilet. Into the kitchen for a spoon, out of the kitchen with a spoon. To the front door, waiting for Tom, and to the back fence to yell stories over the fence at the neighbours’ dog.

Pip climbs into the car and shuts the door. ‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He had to work late.’

‘Oh.’ Pip looks out the window. She’s been saying that a lot lately. And it always makes Annie’s palms sweat. ‘You guys weren’t at assembly.’

Annie leans back to buckle Pip in. It’s easier if she gets out of the car and opens Pip’s door, but the idea of it, of leaving the car, is suddenly overwhelming. ‘What assembly?’

‘The end of year assembly.’

‘Oh, sh– shoot. Shoot, Pip. I’m sorry.’

Pip pulls her green scarf down over her face and crosses her arms. ‘Phillip. I’m Phillip.’

* * *

The day of the fires, after Tom met them at the base of the mountain to take them home, Pip fell asleep curled up against Tom on the couch. They’d eaten canned tuna for dinner, despite the Tupperware containers and hampers from Christmas a few weeks before. The food that people had left tasted like grief and Annie couldn’t stomach it.

She sat cross-legged on the floor and watched Pip. Five years of keeping her safe, keeping her happy. And now Pip had gone through something that Annie couldn’t fathom herself as an adult. Annie thought about Gladys. She thought about Luna and how calm, how brave her old horse had been, ridden hard down the mountain, through the smoke and the flames. She thought she’d never leave Pip alone, after that.

But it was only after one night of being in the city that Annie decided to go back up the mountain. She told herself that she was going so she could keep an eye on her mother, Susan. That she was going back up there to help Len. But she knew it was about Pip. Neither she nor Tom had expected her anger, her tantrums, her rigidity. They had expected her to fracture, to need gentling, when it seemed that the fires had somehow made her harder. Stronger. She was more like an adult and pushed them away when they gentled her. That was the hardest thing. How she pushed them away.

Annie knows it was part of the reason why she decided to go back up the mountain. Why she spent those long days walking around the district with Len, rifle over her shoulder, tending to the animals still alive when they shouldn’t have been. To save herself from the pain of their damaged little girl when she was so damaged herself. To instead leave Pip with Tom. Who didn’t want Annie to go, but didn’t stop her either.

* * *

Tom is an accountant for a commercial business that has its office high in a glass-fronted building in Collins Street. He says he spends all day counting.

Even when he’s forced to bring work home with him, to sit slumped over it until it’s long past midnight, he seems calmed by the work. Annie watches him, the methodical way he goes through graphs and data and types things into his calculator and spreadsheet, possessed, but not in a way that troubles Annie. She finds it comforting, the way he can disappear for hours into work without wondering or worrying about her, without asking for things.

Sometimes, particularly in the days before Pip, they would have dinner out and talk about their day. Tom producing graphs and plans and an endless rolling of numbers. Annie castrating cats and squeezing anal glands and giving vaccinations and antibiotic shots.

Tom is kind to animals without understanding them. More than once Annie has sensed his bewilderment over her job. His confusion, never stated outright, over why someone would choose to deal with vomit and blood and pus and fur all day when there were plenty of neat, tidy office jobs available.

Alex had loved animals the same way she did. Consuming and simple. So much of their childhood was spent seeking animals out or playing with them. Horses mostly, but anything with fur or scales had them entranced.

Now, in the city, she has a grumpy old cat called Boogey who was on the kill list at the local shelter. He doesn’t like being touched, but follows her around the house. He’s always nestled at her feet, purring to himself, stopping abruptly if she strokes his back or scratches under his chin. He likes to lie outside on the concrete. Annie was worried about him wandering, about him catching birds, but he has never caught anything and seems content to curl up in the tight square of their backyard.

Tom tolerates Boogey. She has spent years talking to Tom about having more animals in their terrace house. Before Pip, Annie brought home kittens that needed six feeds a day, and occasionally a bird or mouse or rabbit.

She hoped Tom would soften towards them, but he never did.

Tom always gave in to her, in every other way. But with animals he held firm.

* * *

Later that night Pip has finally settled in front of the television after two hours of demanding things from Annie. To colour together. To have her hair brushed out. To play totem tennis, although their backyard is too sticky and hot. To bounce her basketball backwards and forwards between them on the concrete until the sound of it hitting the ground was enough to make Annie want to cry.

Annie sits outside, staring at the splintery fence, listening to all the loud noises of the city, her nails pressed painfully against her palms.

There is the sound of the front door slamming, Tom’s heavy footsteps as he walks through the house. He’s crinkled and lopsided. He dumps his suitcase on the concrete balcony step and sits down next to her.

He sighs, like he’s tired. He rubs his hands through his hair.

‘I’ve decided I’m going to take the rest of the year off work,’ Annie says.

‘What?’ He’s unsettled, spoiling for something. Hard edges and unhappy words. He’s like this all the time now and he never used to be. He glances between Annie and the red gum.

‘It’s of you. See?’ Annie brushes her finger against the bulge of wood that makes up his nose.

He breathes out and takes it from her. They sit together on the cement step, listening to Pip singing along to a laundry detergent commercial. Touch your forehead to mine, Annie thinks. It is a yearning. Sudden and intense. Touch my forehead and we might be okay.

Tom scratches his head. ‘You’re stopping work? Why?’

‘I don’t know why. I keep going over and over it and it’s like I’ve run out of energy. There was just no way I was going to get