Lyrebird Hill Read Free Page B

I’d once shared with Jamie, with its cabinet of spooky antique dolls and light-filled window shedding sunbeams onto a pair of neat single beds.
    Ghostly fragments of memory wafted back to me, formless and elusive. Two little girls running through the long grass. Sunshine warming bare arms and legs. The sweet, spicy scent ofstringybark blossoms. My sister’s voice, whispering with heartbreaking clarity in the back of my mind.
    Hey Ruby, you wanna collect wildflowers? I found some rock orchids near the river; we could press them and make a card for Mum. Bring your togs, we’ll go for a dip while we’re there . . .
    Best friends. Doting sisters. Thick as thieves, Mum had called us.
    I dug under my hair, rubbing the sudden knot of tension. Jamie had died a long time ago, I reminded myself. Eighteen years. I should have put her behind me by now, made peace with her death, and moved on – but she haunted me even now, and probably always would.
    The next painting was Mum’s old sewing machine, the one she’d been so eager to show Rob. It was smaller than the other canvases, more intensely colourful. The antique Singer sat on its cabinet in a narrow room, the window above it aglow with afternoon sun. The black curves of the machine’s body were chipped and scarred by age, its flywheel worn shiny by the touch of countless fingers. The decorative scrollwork was picked out in gold leaf, which glimmered softly under the lights.
    I went closer, drinking in the gummy faintness of oil paint, the sharp tang of turpentine. Closer still, until the sewing room was no longer merely a painted image, but breathtakingly real.
    Mum had used that old Singer to make our clothes. Floral tank tops and hippy pants, dresses in crazy patterns. Pink for Jamie, green for me. We’d teamed everything with boots and thick socks, even the dresses. It was an unusual fashion combo, but Mum had always insisted we dress sensibly in case of snakes.
    You girls tread carefully in the long grass , she routinely warned. But Jamie and I always raced off, never listening. Down to the river, picking flowers and weaving hats from lomandra leaves. Ignoring Mum’s calls that dinner was on the table going cold. We’d hide beneath the gnarly casuarina that grew on the bank, bluebells and purple-pea trampled beneath our feet, gigglingmadly with our heads together concocting wild stories, or belting out outlandish made-up songs.
    The tension at the back of my head returned, and I rubbed it absently. According to the doctors, my amnesia was the result of the head injury I’d sustained the day of Jamie’s accident. The injury had earned me eleven stitches and three weeks in hospital, and a god-awful headache that lasted months. Afterwards, my brain had gone into lock-down, burying my recall of that year in an unyielding vault.
    But now, as I drifted through the landscape of memories my mother had created, I felt the contents of that vault begin to stir.
    The next painting was eerie, as beautiful as a dream. It was a garden panorama observed through the open kitchen window. Curtains billowed in the breeze, framing a perfectly manicured landscape. The garden had never been that well tended in my day; its beds were always choked with weeds and drifts of gum leaves and fallen banksia pods.
    Here in the painting it resembled a picture postcard: roses frothed around the base of a nodding purple butterfly bush, and nearby a clump of spider dahlias bristled in the heat. On an elevated bank overlooking the vegetable garden grew a walnut tree, its bare branches festooned with last season’s pods. At the foot of the trunk was a small mound of earth, like a new grave.
    It was a lyrical painting, magical – a summer song rendered in pigment and light – but the wintry tree with its blackened pods and grave-like mound infused it with a sinister element.
    ‘She’s certainly got talent, hasn’t she?’
    An elderly woman had sidled up beside me. She was tiny, possibly in her