Watercolours (9 page)

Because of this, Umberto couldn't leave Morus like the others had. After school he stayed on to help run the farm, expanding
the vegetable plots and the orchard. A few stints in Queensland cutting cane earned him good money and when his father died he faced a decision. His siblings told him to get rid of the place. ‘Start fresh, Umberto! Give yourself a chance,' his sister urged; she was a legal secretary in Lismore now, with four children and little nostalgia for the land. His three brothers had farms of their own but harboured bitter memories of their childhood. ‘You think you owe it to him to stay?' his eldest brother scoffed. ‘All the old man cared about was himself. He drove Mum to the drink and it killed her — don't let it kill you, too. Come and work for me, we always need farmhands.'

But Umberto didn't want to be a farmhand. He had a plan. He would sell the orchard and the remaining land, all except the black mulberry terraces and the vineyard. His brother was dumbfounded when he heard this. ‘
Che cazzo!
What will you do with it?'

‘I'll be a winemaker,' Umberto said.

 

Mira looked over at the sheds, now in full-scale production. She had no doubt her father would have succeeded if the accident hadn't happened. With more time he could have cleared his debts and restored the Cherubini name in a clever adaptation of his father's original vision. His very own transformation trick. Instead, at the age of sixty, he drowned. That was six years ago, in the terrible flood of 1990.

How it happened, nobody knew. Most likely the soft riverbank gave way as he was inspecting the damage to his irrigation system. His poor old body was found days later, snagged on debris on the other side of Morus. The Lewis hit record levels that year and the town was declared a natural
disaster area. A once in a hundred years storm. Many people lost everything. Mira had to remind herself that wasn't the case for her, but on days like today it felt like it.

The rest unfolded like a bad dream. The men appeared on her veranda days after the funeral with solemn faces and sharp eyes; they made their offer knowing she needed a quick sale to settle her father's debts. Gerard Roper, her father's old business partner, brokered the deal. He thought he was doing her a favour, but Mira still hated him for it. Her father had pioneered a boutique liqueur business and his Amaro had sparked interest in the European market; the buyers were well aware of this. They stood in her kitchen, too warm in their woollen suits, speaking gently, politely, and yet unable to hide their eagerness at her misfortune.

Although the sale was inevitable Mira couldn't help feeling winded. She struggled for breath at the kitchen table. Everything her father had worked towards was about to be swallowed up and she felt swallowed up with it, consumed by something vast and ruthless and hollow, something that erased her childhood and left her to rattle alone in a hostile landscape. Gerard, the buyers, she blamed them all. It felt good to blame someone.

The kitchen had been bright with sun that afternoon, the first sun after weeks of rain, and the men hovered at the edges, sweating in silence while she clutched her forehead and sobbed for half an hour. They didn't have to stay but they did, dripping respectfully while she wept her heart out. She couldn't bring herself to offer them so much as a glass of water, not that they cared. It wasn't water they were after.

There was no sign of life at the sheds. Mira retied her ponytail, jumped down from the ute and crossed the lawn. The new people
kept the place looking much as Umberto had: whitewashed brick walls (freshly coated), corrugated-iron roof (gutters now fixed), big double doors painted the colour of mulberries. Quaintness was part of the products' appeal and the new owners understood how to make the most of it:
Made to an old Italian recipe, fed by freshwater springs and infused with nourishing natural ingredients
was how they advertised the Amaro. All true enough. She pictured the dark contents of the vats inside, grapes foaming and crushing, pressing and mingling. As a girl she liked to climb the steel ladder and peer in, entranced by the colour, rich as blood.

She walked slowly down through the trees, gazing tenderly at their weeping boughs. The curved symmetry of their planting satisfied something in her she couldn't explain. Feeling bold, she made her way around the back of the house to the kitchen garden. The plot was still there but it had shrunk somewhat; it obviously received nothing near her father's level of attention. He used to grow all their vegetables, as well as most of the herbs for his Amaro infusion, and Mira had spent hours in the garden as a child, helping to weed and mulch, turning over the compost to see the worms flipping and pulsating in terror, pink and shiny like the rude part of a tomcat. She'd hide among the tall tepees of tangled beans and tomatoes, crunching on them raw, shelling peas to devour the sweet little balls. Carrots took forever to grow and she was always in trouble for pulling them up prematurely, impatient to see their pointed, hairy toes.

At the lavender hedge she plucked a handful of soft leaves and crushed them between her fingers to release their pungent oil. She inhaled deeply. It was one of the herbal notes in the Amaro, warm yet astringent. The digestif was a blend of mulberries, grapes and
herbs originating from the northern Italian countryside, with some spices added for a dash of mystique, aniseed being the most obvious. The whole complicated production process required five infusions, four distillations and several pressings and the result was a dark, syrupy tonic appreciated for its complex flavour and cleansing aftertaste. Her father always served it at the end of a meal in slender glasses, each with a single ice cube.

The mulberry wine, on the other hand, was dreadful stuff, cheap and cheerful — if sweet and sickly amounted to the same thing, Mira always thought. There was nothing at all challenging about it except battling a sugar-induced hangover the next day. She shuddered just thinking of it. Her first drunken binge had been on mulberry wine at the age of sixteen and that one foray had made her so horribly sick she hadn't been able to touch it since. Goosebumps rose on her arms despite the full force of the afternoon sun doing its best to boil her in her own skin. I should go, she thought, it's time for a swim. She would drag Novi away from his drawings and take him down to the swimming hole. Maybe the heat would entice him into the water this time.

Walking back to the ute, she thought it was probably just as well she'd never become heiress to a mulberry-wine empire when she could barely bring herself to smell the stuff. It was bad enough having a shed full of it at home — boxes and boxes of green bottles with lurid purple labels stacked to the rafters. They had arrived as a gift from the new owners once the sale of the business had been settled. Delivered on a truck, the fifty crates of mulberry wine had been unloaded, put away and ignored ever since. Not one bottle opened in six years.

She paused at the top of the hill, turned one last time and gazed back down at the river. Trees hid the bank, but she knew the old
rowboat was still moored there, upside down and covered in leaves. The grey knotted rope still hung from one of the branches over the deep water. Everything was just as it always had been. It simply belonged to someone else now.

She climbed into the ute and drove home.

Before bed, I coax the boat story out of my mother. I lean against the pillows with my pad and pencil ready and Mum sits down on the end of my bed and stretches her toes, frowning for a second at their chipped red polish. Then she begins. ‘Well, your dad always wanted to sail. He caught the fever young. Actually, he was about your age that first summer he went to stay with Uncle Alan at the marina.'

‘Where
is
Uncle Alan?'

‘Borneo, I think, hanging out with the orangutans.'

‘
I
want to hang out with orangutans!'

‘Anyway,' she says, giving me a stern look, ‘your dad always had an interest in boats, but really it was an interest in all things that
went
. Back then he had two passions: Superman and dirt-bikes, because both of these went like mad. Then he spent a week on Uncle Alan's boat, helping to make it seaworthy. And in that week something
powerful
was stirred up inside him; he felt it as soon as he stepped aboard that thirty-footer. Under his feet the boat heaved like an animal on the swell and suddenly he found himself riding something more exciting than a dirt-bike. It was alive and surging and unpredictable —'

‘The sea!'

She nods. ‘He felt that deep, untamed water beneath him, heard the otherworldly lap of waves against the hull, smelled the
fresh varnish drying on the wood and at that moment he had his first epiphany — he would be a sailor one day, he knew it, he felt it in his bones. It breached some sort of dam within him because after that the epiphanies started flowing thick and fast for your dad. Do you remember what an epiphany is?'

I shrug.

‘A revelation. A burst of clarity.' As she explains she pulls her hair over her shoulder to search for split ends. ‘Most people only ever experience one or two and it gives their life new meaning, inspires them to head in a whole different direction. But with your dad they've been striking him like a great big gong all his life. Whenever a good idea hits he just has to follow it. He gets consumed by projects but he also finds it difficult to complete them. It's impossible! Just as the
execution
is underway, the
inspiration
strikes again. And the inspiration is always irresistible.

‘Now, before you were born, he discovered pawpaw. Pawpaw extract, to be precise. He heard it held fantastic healing properties and that they'd been using it in the tropics for centuries to treat all sorts of ailments. It was available here but it suffered from weak concentrations and poor marketing; you could find the odd jar in the health food shop next to the witch hazel and the aluminium-free deodorant, but the only people who bought it were hippies. And this was where your dad's idea took shape. He would create the most powerful pawpaw extract there was, a product that would revolutionise the home medicine cabinets of the west! His vision was to create a product more popular than aspirin and a hundred times more useful.'

I want to ask a question about hippies, but I can see she's on a roll so I keep quiet.

‘His research told him that pawpaw trees thrive in tropical climates and are easy to harvest — all good news. Then he stumbled across something that not many people know about. There is one particular type of pawpaw tree that produces fruit with the most potent healing enzymes and it grows in a remote section of jungle on the Javanese coastline. This was a sign. In order to get to that section of coastline, he would need a boat.

‘Now, despite your dad's tendency to get sidetracked, he still had a deep devotion to sailing and he set about building the boat in such a frenzy that he finished the frame in just two months. It looked like we'd be setting sail for Indonesia within the year …'

The dry state of my mother's hair distracts her for a minute. I nudge her with my foot. ‘Then what?'

She looks up, flicks back her hair and gives me a smile. ‘Well! Building a boat is a major project! It can take a long time. But when it's done we'll be off like a shot. We'll stock it up and pack our bags and sail off into the sunset.'

‘What about Varmint?'

‘She's coming. Every boat needs a cat, to keep away the rats.'

I love hearing this story, even though my mother doesn't always have the strength to tell it. Afterwards I lie in bed drawing albatrosses and pirates, tsunamis and giant squids and the cicadas in my chest all shiver at once.

Dad has had other plans, all of them the Big One destined to Crack the Jackpot and Make a Killing. For a while my parents grew miniature vegetables for fancy restaurants in the city because in Sydney people will kill for a carrot the size of a pinkie finger or a zucchini you can eat in one bite without getting olive oil on your lips. Another time they planned to set up a health retreat
where my mother could teach yoga and they'd grow organic food and cook healthy vegetarian meals. They almost bought the old Sinclair's Produce shed when the business moved next to the Roper Centre — they were going to polish up the floorboards and add on a big dormitory. They said I could help paint the inside a soothing colour. For a while, Hughie and I rode our bikes over to the empty shed on weekends to sneak in through one of the unlocked windows. It was spooky in there, all dark and cobwebby. Hughie reckoned the room was a secret alien landing pad, because of all the weird black circles on the floorboards. I could tell that they were only marks where someone had painted over lots of drums or something, without putting newspaper down first. Still, there were hundreds of them and I had to admit they looked suspicious.

My parents didn't end up buying the old Sinclair's place. After hundreds of attempts at cooking tofu — all tested on me, unfortunately — they gave up on that one because not even my mother could make it taste any good. No matter how hard she tried to like it, tofu made her gag; it was the texture, she said. The time she served us scrambled tofu for breakfast, my father and I tried to smile as we put it on our forks, but just as we decided it actually wasn't too bad she grabbed our plates, threw them out the window and retched into the sink. After that she stopped teaching yoga and got the job at the fruit shop.

Miniature vegetables and health retreats didn't seem to have much to do with sailing, but I knew Dad hadn't forgotten the boat. Sometimes he spent all weekend in the shed, sanding and planing and clamping things together. I liked to think of the boat as an old bear hibernating in a cave, almost dead but
not quite
, its heart beating slowly and its lungs taking an occasional silent
breath. My father's tinkering was like massaging the limbs of a coma patient, helping to keep the circulation going for when the body wakes up again. Because I knew for certain, I knew it
in my bones
, that one day the boat would come to life.

Then, at the end of last year, my father discovered wild yams. It was the sign of life I'd been waiting for. Our new plan is this: when the boat is finished we are going to sail to New Guinea to get on board the yam trade and make a fortune. There's an untapped gold mine in wild yams that grow in the remote highland villages and can be boiled down to make a kind of medicine for women and their menopause. My mother says menopause is when women's bodies stop sending down eggs from their ovaries, which means they can't have any more babies, and their bodies can't decide if they're happy or sad about it. She says wild yams are brilliant because they're natural and balance you right out. Since the Yam Plan, Dad has started taking stock of all the bits of timber and old windows and things he's collected over the years and stored behind the shed. Before dinner he's been bringing out the old boat plans and adding ideas at the kitchen table. Mum wants the inside to look like a gypsy caravan, with dark polished wood and velvet cushions and drapey curtains. She also wants a long window box to grow fresh herbs because she can't stand the dried stuff. Even a long trip at sea, she says, is no excuse for dried basil.

I want a porthole in the bottom. I want to lie down and look through it and watch the sharks and giant gropers and stingrays below. I like the idea of looking right down deep. Right down to the ocean floor.

 

Often the cicadas won't let me sleep at night, even when the ones outside have fallen still. I lie awake in the dark feeling them
twitch and creep around in my chest while I watch the shadow patterns in the trees outside my window. When the moon is bright I see the river in the trees, the way it moves, the leaves lapping and gulping, trying to decide if they are hungry or full. The Lewis is like that. It swallows its secrets but every now and then it offers them up, too. That's why I have to pay attention.

On still nights I hear the river whispering. After a while the whisper drags me out of bed. I leave Varmint asleep in a warm ball and make my way through the dark house. It's late, but like the cicadas the house doesn't really sleep. Each floorboard creaks hello. The walls crack and breathe. On the roof I hear twigs drop and the scratch of tiny clawed feet. Night time is when the carpet snake hunts for rats in the rafters and it sounds thick and heavy as it moves around up there. Sometimes I hear squeaks as it catches its prey. Dad says the snake has been living in our house longer than we have, but it's been years since any of us have seen it. It's harmless — unless you're a rat. All of these sounds are familiar and make the darkness less scary. When I get to the kitchen I switch on the light and pour myself a glass of orange juice from the fridge. Then I sit down at the table and draw.

My night pictures are always the clearest. When it's quiet I can explore the river for hours, fixing myself in different places and studying what's around me. Everywhere my mother's stories rise like mist, stories of before I was born, of settlers and silk and wine, stories of my grandfather and his father, too.

I was five when the river murdered Nonno. I was only in kindergarten but I remember him. He looked after me in the afternoons when my mother was working and my father had a boat to help with or a house to paint. My memories of him are all summery, little golden scraps that fall apart under my fingers. At
night I make a collection of my memories on paper. I want to do this before they fall to bits completely and there is nothing left of Nonno and me.

I remember going on walks past the back garden, holding onto his hand. His hands were as huge as bear paws, with silvery hairs sprouting from the brown leathery skin. I have a clear picture of that in my mind, my grandfather's big hands.

On our walks he showed me that the river has secrets. He showed me water dragons and turtles sunbaking on the bank, rats rustling in the bamboo thicket, squiggly patterns left in eucalyptus bark from insects, fish gasping at the surface of the water when the river was low. Once we hunted for tadpoles in the billabong; we were going to put them in a bucket and watch them grow legs and turn into frogs but we couldn't find any. I remember Nonno looking around the billabong, frowning and stroking his moustache, wondering where all the frogs had gone.

Afterwards, back at home, I made pictures with the pencils and paper Nonno gave me. He told me how Morus had changed since he was a kid. He said I should draw everything I saw around me because it might not be there forever. Like the frogs, I suppose. Like Nonno.

With Nonno I could get away with almost anything but there was one thing he would never let me do. He wouldn't let me swim in the river, even on the hottest day, no matter how much I begged. He couldn't save me if I got into trouble, he said. Instead we walked, trying to spot the koel. It called from the top of the highest trees, always hidden among the leaves. Nonno would lift me onto his shoulders but I never saw it, even though it was close by, whooping loudly in our ears. I wish I was a koel. It has the best view over the river, perched so high. No wonder it
whoops so much, it sees everything from up there. It must have a lot to report on.

Once on our walk we came across hundreds of silver-bellied fish washed up on the riverbank. I remember running up to them, I couldn't believe our luck! I wanted to take one home to cook for dinner but Nonno wouldn't let me. He wouldn't let me pick one up or touch one or even poke one with a stick. I started crying then, but not because of the fish. It was the look on my grandfather's face as he stared at the river. The fear in his eyes made me feel frightened, too.

There is another memory like this one. It's a hot day and I'm thirsty. There is nothing to drink at the river. I am walking behind Nonno, taking giant steps to reach my feet into his footprints, when the koel begins to call very close and I look up. Suddenly my foot slips. Everything cartwheels as I tumble into the water. But before I feel the splash I find myself swinging from my wrist in a bear grip. My grandfather's whole body is leaning out over the water, holding me tight.
Be careful!
he shouts and I am terrified. Sparks seem to fly from the ends of his grey moustache and his eyes are wide, boring into me. All the while the koel is whooping madly.
Be careful of the river,
he says again, shaking me now.
Promise me, Novi!
My wrist is hurting but I manage to nod and he pulls me close. Then he begins to sob. Big gulps shake his body and I shake with him, pressed into his chest.

This is the last memory I have of Nonno before he died.

Ever since then I've wondered what it is about the river that made Nonno so afraid, a man with bear paws and shoulders you could sit on and reach up into the trees, a man whose sobs crushed me like I was a curl of bark. I have to look more closely. There must be some clue I'm missing.

Each year at the beginning of summer the koel starts up and I think of Nonno. It's as if the bird is my grandfather, wanting to know if I've found the evidence yet, making sure I don't forget what happened to him. Over the months the call changes, a secret bird-language for me to unscramble. I draw the koel along the river, trying to see what it sees. I chase it all over Morus and through the stories my mother has told me but I can't figure it out. By the end of summer the koel is frantic with its message and I am frantic to make sense of it. It is frustratingly hard. I try picture after picture.