Jacaranda Blue Read Free Page A

to the surface of consciousness gasping for air while her heart threatened to explode.
    â€˜God. God, help me. Help me.’
    At 2 a.m., she switched on her bedside light, but the light was too bright. She closed her eyes against it, and sleep came at her with grappling hands.
    Evil, corrupt hands. Hurtful, prying fingers.
    â€˜God, help me. Don’t let me think of it.’
    Eyes wide then, she stared at the ceiling, stared at the whorls and roses of the patterned plaster cornice, her eyes burning, screaming out for their own rest. She attempted to pray, to seek comfort in the old chanted words, but she couldn’t remember the words.
    â€˜We close our eyes when we pray. We know that God will hear everything we say.’ Childish words, they were all that remained with her. A child’s prayer. All others fled her mind like small grey mice, scattering in all directions when their hiding place in the shed was exposed.
    â€˜Foolish little words. Foolish little mice,’ she whispered.
    As the night wore away she grew colder, until in the hour before dawn she turned off the light and crawled from her bed to stand before the open window. It looked out on the jacaranda trees. She watched them turn from black, to grey, to green as she swayed before the window.
    â€˜ Keep your mouth shut, Stell ,’ he’d said.
    â€˜Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t let me think,’ she murmured. ‘Our Father which . . . who . . . Our Father . . . who . . . ’
    Who are you? What form of God are you, that you would dare to allow this . . . this thing to happen to me? I have done all that has been asked of me – and more. I have asked for nothing. I have put my parents and their needs, the church’s needs, the community’s needs, before my own. Now this. Now this. How dare you? How dare you?
    â€˜Keep your mouth shut, Stell.’
    Her mouth was dry, her lips sealed by dried saliva. Her eyes were sandpaper against her lids as she stared at the dew green haze, and at two early birds perched on a jacaranda bough.
    Everything in nature has a pair. Except me, she thought. Bonny has Len. Marilyn has Ron. Even Father had –
    â€˜The animals went in two by two, hurrah, hurrah, the animals went in two by two, the ants and the lions, the kangaroos. Oh, we’ll all be saved but we’ve got to get out of this rain,’ she whispered. Then her hand went to her mouth, cupped her mouth, the second hand rising to cup the first, to hold insanity inside her.
    God help me. I have lost my mind.
    But what am I supposed to do but lose my mind? I can’t live with this. How do I live with this?
    Pretend it didn’t happen. Push it away as a nightmare – away with the other bad dreams. You tripped over the pots in the shed, and . . . and . . .
    Her eyes, blurred with their staring, began to follow a fluttering of blue. Unaware of what she was seeing, she tracked its odd flight down to the corrugated iron of the shed roof, then swept up by the breeze it circled, landed in front of the shed. She continued staring until the world slipped into negative and the blue became red. Blood red. Blood in the shed. And she cried out, but quickly gagged her mouth with her hand.
    Where were her briefs?
    Still in the shed.
    â€˜I can’t let Father – oh, God. Dear God, let me be dead now. Take me,’ she whispered. Please God, don’t make me see myself in the morning. Don’t make me face Father. I can’t. I can’t ever face him or this town again.’
    Her nightgown, a calf-length floral thing, left her arms exposed. She shivered. For hours she’d been shivering, her core deathly cold. If I could weep, raise tears, they would warm me and wash my eyes, but there are no tears left in me.
    â€˜Mother,’ she whispered. ‘Mother.’
    She waited for the voice she had forgotten. There was no reply, no remembered words