I am not beautiful.
In the same way bark peels from a ghost gum, so too have the wrinkles carved crevices in my skin. Only there is nothing new underneath.
My daughter tells me that I am. Beautiful. Every day since Patrick left. She says it's to make up for the fact that he's not here, to fill a little of the grave left in his absence. What she doesn't know is that he never called me that, not in those last few years anyway.
I don’t remember him leaving. What I remember is him kneeling beside my armchair and taking my hands in his. Pressing them to his mouth before telling me he couldn’t stay. I remember the salt tears dripping down my chin in desperation, and the dryness in his eyes that told me his emotions had already been cried out. Some other place, some other time. Without me.
“I used to love listening to your stories,” he said. His gaze was averted, fixed on the ground, as though I had nothing to say. I wanted to scream at him, to talk some sense into him, to tell him a story he would not forget even after he left. But the words were growing as distant as he was. They had been every day. And so he placed his words in the space where mine should have been.
“But it’s time to make some of my own.”
I don’t remember much else from that time. But I knew then that something deeper than my memory had changed. I was no longer beautiful to him. And he was the last person to see me that way.
There is nothing I have to say that has not already been said, no stone I could overturn that the archaeologists and family historians have not analysed every crevice of first. I could speak to him, but I can feel it. Every time I open my mouth, the eyes of listeners glaze over, and I can feel myself drifting, rambling, and everything I try to say is lost.
I have nothing to say anymore. Because there is no one left to listen.
The boy finishes setting up the tripod, and asks if I mind him tidying up. I shake my head; he definitely needs it.
The boy's tie is far too loose, and I wonder if he wore it like that to school. Or God forbid, put it on just now. His hair is a mess. It looks just like Patrick's when he wakes up in the mornings. Woke up. I catch myself. Woke up in the mornings.
He runs some gel through his hair, tightens his tie and tucks in his shirt. I guess it's important to look nice for a published interview, though I am not sure if anyone will want to hear it past this soundproof room. I am in my Sunday dress, a nice one that hides my body. But my face is the same, and I have nothing for my hair.
The boy presses some buttons on the camera before settling into his seat. A smile comes to his lips that seems genuine, but perhaps he is thinking of something else.
"Alice. Welcome to the Hills Library podcast. Thank you for being here."
He has a script, I realise. I have none. I have nothing prepared. My heart begins to beat faster, and I imagine the slurry of words that will rush forth and confuse this boy. I imagine him shaking his head and directing me towards the door. As he should have done, when my daughter sent my details.
"Thank you," I manage to say.
"Can you tell us a little about your childhood? What was it like growing up in the Hills?"
And he has asked me about the past. I am not good with the past, in that I remember far too much and can't help but say everything. The last year has passed in a haze, but I remember my childhood as vividly as a roll of film.
The afternoon sun beat down on us as we ran between the rows of carrot leaves. The acreage was a wider playground than we’d need in a lifetime, but somehow we made the most of it every day, running from the house to the orchard and back. My hands were bloody that day, the red sticking to my arms in the summer heat. But my smile was far bigger than the cuts. I remember it gave me a thrill to see the consequences of my labour like this. Like I was validated in detesting the work, and I knew my parents would be guilt-tripped into giving me the next day off. Hard work today meant less tomorrow.
My little sister was afraid of the blood, and she avoided me to run with our cousins instead. She was too young to work, and I did not know if she had realised yet that she too would have to, eventually. We were all headed to the same place we went each day. The creek.
We scrambled down rocks, helping the smallest children down. Dust coated the rocks at the top of the hill, but the further down we went, the richer the foliage became, until we were shin-deep in the remnants of the creek. I placed my forearms in the water - my mother had always said to rinse off your cuts - hoping for the blood to wash away on its own. When it did not, I washed each hand with the other, wincing in pain, while the other children splashed around on either side of me.
I thought some mud must have gotten into the cuts, for when I raised my arms, they stung much worse than before. But it did not matter. My parents would treat the wounds when I got back to the house.
I tell the boy all of this. Each detail passes my lips like the winding threads of a tapestry; to cut any parts would be to lose it all. At least it would, to me. I look for signs of diverted attention, the pursed lips, the hard stare, the fidgeting. But there is none. This boy is nothing like my Patrick, and nothing like my daughter, who would have excused herself for some chore with a ‘go on, I’m listening.’ This boy is a very good actor indeed.
I realise that I have not asked his name.
“It’s Lucas, remember? Lucas Chu. Now Alice, one key topic everyone is wondering about is how farming practices in the Hills have changed since your day. Could you tell us a little about that?”
I do not know how they have changed. I can only tell how it was. And I cannot cut the thread there, or I will lose it all.
At the creek, once the blood had washed away, my sister asked how I had gotten the cuts.
I stood up on the smooth pebbles and held out my arms for her to see. Cautiously, she leaned closer.
“It was a Yowie,” I whispered. “A big one, with claws like knives.” I remember her small, round face watching in awe as she traced the lines of the now-clean cuts.
“I got him though,” I said. “I got him really good.”
And her eyes widened, and she looked up at me with something close to awe. “No,” she said, concentrating. “Mummy said they weren’t real.”
“Mummy didn’t want to scare you.”
I told her about how he had run through the trees with a vendetta. How I had angered him one day collecting the grass to make the flower chains, and how he had ripped my arms to teach me a lesson I would never forget. How I had fought back using the nearest stick, my stance sure and my gaze determined. How I had scratched at his coat until he ran away in defeat.
My sister was never afraid of my cuts after that. Even when that same Yowie came back for me and bit my big toe clean off, or when the Hoop Snake cut my eyebrow in two. And with each rendition of ‘you should have seen the other guy,’ I felt stronger. More capable. Because even when I could not escape my surroundings, I could always control the story.
And so I weaved a tapestry.
It is now the boy who stares at me, his fingers interlocked in front of his mouth, in what I must be misinterpreting as something close to awe.
He reminds me of my sister, back in those days. Small and chubby-cheeked with a smile that said ‘Two cookies!’ or ‘Woah’ or a whispered, ‘I can’t believe you did that.’ She believed anything you told her, especially if it involved magic.
Except he is a good deal older than she was. And there is something behind that smile, some unsaid truth being kept tactfully to himself. A truth that hides behind the curtains of his teeth and lips, a sentence that would change something in my story. And perhaps change something in me.
The way he is leaning forward, the way he can see exactly what I am not disclosing and why, the way he is interested in not just the players I have placed on stage to act out my tale but the process backstage… he reminds me of Patrick. He reminds me of Patrick sitting at the edge of our daughter’s bed, head in hands and gazing directly at me. When our daughter was five, and learning to read, she requested a bedtime story every single night. I always wondered how he could be so engrossed, when nothing I said was real and he knew it. He had even tried to hide it at first, his obsession with a children’s tale, but every night when I tucked Nora in, he would be there too; not a child who believed in magic but an adult in awe of the dexterity behind the act. A person in awe of the stories he knew me through.
It has been a while since someone has focussed on what I have to say.
This time, the boy does not read off the script. It lies to the side, far out of his line of focus.
“Child labour laws were not as strict then as they are now,” he says carefully. So this is what he has been getting at. I may be losing my memory, but my people-reading skills are as strong as they ever were. I correct him before he can do any more damage, particularly on record.
“Oh no, it was never anything like that-”
But like a true journalist, he cuts me off and looks me straight in the eyes. “Alice. I’m really sorry about what happened to you.”
I stare back in surprise. “Nothing happened to me,” I say softly. There is nothing he could understand apart from what I have already told him. No one could, and I have already tried my best to make them.
The boy’s brow furrows, and he holds out his hand for me to hold.
I hesitate before reaching out. And as though his open palm was the key to open all these drawers of film in my mind, I let the cameras roll with the tears.
Because even though maybe another five people beyond this room will ever hear this, even though this boy is far too young to truly understand the nuances of my story and even though the person I really want to hear this is Patrick, perhaps the person who most needs to hear it is me. And if this boy is willing to listen, perhaps I owe myself at least that much.
You are your stories, they say, but I don’t think you are how you tell them. You are how you see them, for how you see them is how you see yourself.
And if my stories are beautiful, perhaps I am too.
