At the basketball court, they shot hoops with neighborhood kids. After half an hour Ronnie dragged, barely able to jog around the court after the ball, but the nine-year-old still giggled and jumped, doing cartwheels, begging her over and over to take her camping, and she couldn’t say no.
At bedtime they loaded camping gear into her dented F-150 and drove out into the bush. No streetlights out here. Upsend Downs was dark except for a floodlight on each of the barns. In low gear they rolled up the hill, around Stone House—one light on in Nev’s bedroom—then down the hill again to Lazy Creek.
She parked under black trees. Rotten Davidson’s plums littered the ground. The passenger door slamming interrupted water gargling over mossy stones. In the plum trees, a kookaburra laughed, ‘ooo-ooo-aaa-aah!’ and an Eastern Whipbird call cut through the twilight like a blaster pistol in a space opera.
Rainbow gasped. “Cool!”
Ronnie smiled and drew a deep breath, filling her lungs with unpolluted air. She would sleep like a baby here. They set up camp in the clearing next to Lazy Creek as they had dozens of times. She didn’t mind the lack of light—they could set up camp just as easily in the dark.
In the Outback, she and her mum had often spent nights staked out with sniper rifles in treetops, hunting feral pigs. Those nights had been sleepless, but not dreamless. She had had the wildest dreams in trees, dreams that ran on and on when she recalled them the following day, one improbable fantasy blurring into the next like the snake that swallowed its own tail.
Her mother had taught her how to take a sniper rifle apart, clean it, and put it back together in the dark. Good fun at the time, but didn’t age well. In hindsight, letting a child clean your guns was probably illegal. Ronnie would never take Rainbow hunting at night, when you could only see the world in black cutout shapes, shadow puppets across the horizon. Her mum had taught her to hunt by sound alone, but that wouldn’t fly here in the real world.
Rainbow helped snap the tent ribs open and raise the nylon tent. While Ronnie hammered in the pegs, Rainbow carried their packs inside and unrolled the sleeping bags.
The tent lit up from within like a blue lantern.
Something in Ronnie relaxed. She drew a deep breath and let it out, before joining her daughter inside.
Rainbow had laid the sleeping bags together on one side of the tent, which made Ronnie feel a certain way. “You’re so sweet, babe. Thanks for setting this up.” They brushed their teeth. Snuggled up close at her daughter’s side under the battery-powered lantern, she opened the library book that she and Rainbow were reading together. She read slowly, pausing after every other word, deciphering her handwritten sticky notes. When she pronounced a word wrong the nine-year-old corrected her.
“The Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area is a national treasure. Covering an area of 300,000 km2 on Australia’s continental shelf, the Great Barrier Reef is home to vast amounts of biodiversity. However, sediment and nutrient runoff is damaging the reef, causing coral bleaching and increasing invasive predation, both of which pose serious threats to the future of the Reef.”
She wondered if her daughter chose difficult books to challenge her as an act of preteen rebellion. Some nights Rainbow made fun of her for pausing and being slow. When thathappened, reading became infinitely harder. Tonight, Rainbow didn’t comment. Smart girl.
Rainbow read five perfect pages aloud in a fraction the time, turned off the battery-powered lantern and went to sleep.
The nine-year-old made it look like breathing air.
Ronnie lay awake in the dark. How come her daughter was a genius? The girl hadn’t inherited that trait from her. Maybe schools were better at teaching now. Ronnie hadn’t been reading advanced shit like this in year three in Lionheart. She had gotten as far as the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books before her mum decided her days of mainstream education were over.
Rainbow was light years ahead of where Ronnie had been at that age. Either Rainbow was performing above grade level or Ronnie must have been under-performing before her mother pulled her out of school and into the Outback.
Something to chew on.
Her mum was out there in the bush now.
The thing about people like that who said they wanted to ‘connect to the land’ was that land was everywhere. You were always on land. What those people actually meant but didn’t say, was that they wanted to get away from other people.
5
ABOUT MAUDE
Rainbow had begged her all weekend to try out the new board she got for Christmas, so here they were, Monday afternoon, at the crowded skate park, taking turns. Skateboarding, Ronnie quickly decided, was a form of exercise for teenagers who loved throwing themselves in the air to see what would happen. Most of the time when the teens at the skate park attempted a flip, they didn’t stick the landing. When one of them managed to do it, the others cheered.
She was not a teenager anymore. She felt twice as tall as these kids and twice as heavy.
After she worked up a sweat, she started to enjoy the airborne thrill of it, the cool breeze on her face, limbs warm and loose, before a hard crash landing hurt worse than usual. Wipeout.
She picked herself up, retrieved the upside-down board and went over to sit on the bench. She had sprained a wrist before. This felt like that, but her hand didn’t want to open or close.
“Are you okay?” Rainbow asked, concerned. She looked so cute in her little helmet and pads.
“Nah, yeah, no biggie.” Ronnie had more broken bones than she could count, but never a wrist before. Getting home might be tricky.
Half an hour later, Rainbow looked tired and it was time to return her, so with one hand Ronnie drove her an hour north-east down out of the mountains and parked in front of the faded white house in Gordonvale. Inside and outside lights were on, and two cars sat parked in the drive—Maude’s custom pink Silverado and an ancient Toyota Corolla. Her heart sank. Maude’s mother didn’t like Ronnie. Her stomach hurt, which she wished she could change, but unfortunately nerves were out of her control.
Her left wrist had swollen and stiffened during the drive, but she hugged Rainbow with the other arm, then kissed her on both eyelids and both cheeks. “Be good. You are strong.”
