The Stars at Oktober Bend Read online

  the stars at

  oktober bend

  ‘A poetic and mysterious adventure

  into the language of the human spirit

  which stuns the mind and heart.’

  URSULA DUBOSARSKY

  ‘Gentle, powerful, poetic, precise.

  I was totally mesmerised. I don’t

  often love a book this much.’

  DIANA SWEENEY

  ALSO BY

  GLENDA MILLARD

  NOVELS

  A Small Free Kiss in the Dark

  The Novice

  Bringing Reuben Home

  When the Angel’s Came

  THE KINGDOM OF SILK SERIES

  Nell’s Festival of Crisp Winter Glories

  The Tender Moments of Saffron Silk

  Plum Puddings and Paper Moons

  All the Colours of Paradise

  Perry Angel’s Suitcase

  Layla, Queen of Hearts

  The Naming of Tishkin Silk

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2016

  Copyright © Glenda Millard 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 589 7

  eISBN 978 1 74343 333 1

  Cover and text design by Ruth Grüner

  Title lettering by Joe Simmonds

  Cover photos by Getty Images/iStockphoto

  FOR MUM

  01/11/1924 – 18/07/2015

  Special thanks to Sue Flockhart

  for your patience, understanding

  and for letting me fly.

  G.M.

  contents

  1 about forsaking and not

  2 plans a & b and the bee-wing book

  3 feathers for old charlie

  4 alice’s book of flying

  5 communication strategies

  6 house of silence

  7 kith and kin

  8 on birthday number fifteen

  9 Runaway

  10 The First Poem

  11 lamentation – an utterance of grief

  12 the comeuppance of jack faulkner

  13 dove amongst the pie-wrappers

  14 ballerina on a bicycle

  15 french knots and falling down

  16 bargaining with the god of flying things

  17 Finding that Girl who made Snow on the Roof

  18 speaking to the dead

  19 the legend of teddy english

  20 down to the river

  21 The Boy Who Loved Dares

  22 Tilda and the Tarpit

  23 Twelve Thoughts

  24 letting go

  25 Keeping Tilda Safe

  26 between the cracks

  27 The Sound of Anon

  28 things i wrote

  29 things i did not

  30 old charlie’s table

  31 A Fisherman’s Table

  32 my grandmother’s chest

  33 a question of colour

  34 in a field of significant weeds

  35 anthem

  36 heroes and villains

  37 Shame

  38 troubled

  39 forgotten thing

  40 still alice, still

  41 Running to Alice

  42 a decent thing to be

  43 river sonnet

  44 letting manny in

  45 Two Heads One Heart

  46 july

  47 the game

  48 A Little Reminder

  49 mountain climbing

  50 precious

  51 in which manny has come to warn me and joey

  52 the o’leary question

  53 the traffic on tullamarine freeway

  54 Sailing Away

  55 submarines and sirens

  56 shipwrecked

  57 love letters to gram

  after words

  1 ALICE

  about forsaking and not

  i am the girl manny loves. the girl who writes our story in the book of flying. i am alice.

  they sewed me up when i was twelve. mended my broken head with fishbone stitches. tucked my frayed edges in. tucked everything in. things meant to be and things not. do it quick. stem the flow. stop life leaking out of alice. that’s all that they wanted. so gram said.

  broken alice. and forsaken. there was always forsaking in our family. first our father. then our mother, april – and after the stitching, our papa, old charlie, went too. only gram – grandma glorious – and joey stayed. brother joey, who said that love was at the bottom of all that forsaking. wrong love. love that hurt. he was ten when he said it. but older, much older. promised he’d never forsake me. and i believed him.

  joey would have bled us both. nicked our finger-skins with old charlie’s pocket-knife. smudged our blood together like we used to when we were little. when we made promises we thought we could keep. but joey couldn’t cut me when i was number twelve. not even a little bit. not after what happened. he didn’t have the guts to. instead he took tools from the shed. chisel, rasp and hammer. sharp he filed the chisel’s blade. sharp enough to slit a lamb’s throat. for weeks of afternoons he disappeared. chipped and chiselled in secret. showed me what he’d done when it was finished. wrote his promise for all the world to see. scraped it on the red gum that held up the bridge down on oktober bend.

  joey and alice forever

  between him and me he’d scratched a crooked heart.

  then came bear and it was like the beginning of something new. no one ever came before. dear bear, constant companion, maremma, shepherd dog. strong, swift, silent bear. teeth and hearing sharp. wiring perfect. could have torn a man’s throat out in seconds. would have. for me.

  2 ALICE

  plans a & b and the bee-wing book

  plan a: joey would take me to school. to high school with him when i was mended. but there was too much noise and my electrics went haywire. there was no plan b. so i went home. was sent home. stayed home.

  i remembered words, struggled to speak them. forgot how to arrange them. how to join them on a page. to begin with i wrote short things. lists and notes to self. some lines finished with a word that reminded me of what i wanted to say next.

  school is loud too

  many people

  joey brings me

  books teaches

  me things looks

  after me.

  before manny came, before i saw his face or knew his name, before i touched his skin, i spent my days indoors. then bear beguiled me. waved her feathered tail and smiled and led me down sunlit paths. through our paradise garden. i tried to write about the things i saw. simple things.

  ghost dog

  sage spears

  rosemary blue and new-minted

  green

  leaves

  then gram thought of plan b. joey took me to the bus and i went to day centr
e. for two weeks i went. it was like school but worse and i came home. again.

  we had books at home. quiet books that did not short-circuit my electricals. our dictionary lived on the mantelpiece. squeezed between the chimney bricks and canisters, tea-leaves, rice and sugar. gram’s bible hid in her underwear drawer, holy pages thin as bee-wings. joey said the little-lettered stories on them were only make-believe. like make-believe didn’t count. but i loved gram’s holy book for its gold-edged pages, strange words and mysteries. when joey forgot to bring proper books home from the library, i read the dictionary. or sometimes stole gram’s bible from its tangled nest of petticoats and underpants. sneaked under the house with it and read aloud to bear.

  once-upon-a-time there were two kings. one called david, the other solomon. the kings wrote poems. they were poet kings and the poems they wrote were called psalms.

  their poems were recorded on the bee-wing pages. i used them to remind me of how to arrange my own words together. the poet kings wrote of wars and sheep and goats, lovers with nice teeth and red cheeks and someone called the lord. i wrote mostly about joey and bear. strange, old fashioned poems like this:

  joey leads me beside the river

  lets* me lie down in green paddocks and

  brings library books home for me.

  though i walk through charlotte’s pass

  i will fear no evil

  for bear is with me

  papa’s gun is in the wash-house to protect me.

  joey and bear will stay beside me

  and we will live at oktober bend forever.

  * note: the poet kings might have used ‘makes’ instead of ‘lets’. but some words happen my heart to thunder in my chest. my electrics to hiss and fizz like wetted sherbet in my head. ‘makes’ is one of them. ‘makes’ and ‘make’ and ‘made’. they remind me of when someone forces you to do something. in green paddocks or under the stars at oktober bend. or anywhere else. ‘lets’ gives you a choice.

  3 ALICE

  feathers for old charlie

  joey’s skinned knuckles gnarled over. his hammered fingernails purpled and peeled. new ones grew pale as scalded almonds. other sores didn’t heal. joey wouldn’t let them. picked at the scabs. kept them raw so he wouldn’t forget. scars to remind him like the message on the bridge.

  my scars hid under hair grown long and curly as old mattress springs. strangers looked at my wild red locks and weed-green eyes. stared at my colours and curves. didn’t know about invisible stitches or crazy circuits. didn’t understand that my slow, unjoined speech began as perfect thoughts. hadn’t heard of the curse cast upon me. the spell of twelveness.

  only nearest and dearest knew that. it was family business. like the calm pills that snuffed out joy and sadness equally. balanced moods. made life flat. gram and joey saw the sideways shift of stranger’s eyes when i spoke. watched blood rush to their cheeks when they figured out i was not what they expected. i didn’t care what strangers thought. but i cared about gram and joey. so me and bear stayed mostly home.

  when i grew braver, bear walked me to the river. under the swing bridge at charlotte’s pass we went. out over the small bald hills through the black ironbark forest to places only me and bear, joey and old charlie knew about.

  there i gathered the wild

  flowers bright

  billy buttons

  bread and butter bush and

  creeping purple

  sarsaparilla

  arranged them into jam jar posies for the sill above the sink.

  but mostly i took feathers home. surprising gifts from the birds, floating, falling, free. i learnt the art of fly tying from papa charlie. while i searched for feathers, wool and other ingredients that i needed, i wore papa’s canvas bag across my shoulder. striped orange, brown and white with moss green underneath. offcuts from gram’s deck-chair.

  the deck-chair satchel bulged with papa’s tools:

  a capstan ready-rubbed tobacco tin filled

  with bright, sharp hooks

  fine-pointed scissors

  heavy-pointed scissors

  clippers and a

  dubbing needle a

  sharpening stone and a book

  the book was titled fly tying: the definitive guide to hand tying flies for trout.

  in a pocket on the outside of the deck-chair bag was my book of flying. i kept the two books apart. it seemed wrong for them to touch. there were pictures inside papa’s book i did not like. especially the one on page 44. i glued it to page 45 with flour-and-water paste. that way i could not see the picture by mistake if i was looking for how to tie a silver doctor or a muddle minnow. or reminding myself of the difference between a hair-wing coachman and a hair-wing royal coachman.

  since then i have discovered the story of how the royal coachman came to be. a man named john hailey once made a coachman. but he added a little band of silk around the middle and a tail of wood duck feathers. someone, when they saw it said,

  ‘here is a fly intended to be a coachman; but it is not the true coachman, what can you call it?’

  ‘oh that’s easy enough, call it the royal coachman for it is so finely dressed,’ was the answer.*

  * marbury. mary orvis favourite flies and their histories 1892.

  old charlie knew the lures all by heart. learnt them from his father when he was number eight. but they did not let my papa charlie have scissors, hooks or dubbing needles in that little room without stars. in case he used them to rip the veins out of his wrists or damage his keepers. gram said that no allowances were made for an old man who committed a crime of passion.

  i missed papa. missed all the things we did together. especially making flies.

  joey said there was no reason why i should not make them. no reason why i shouldn’t sell them to jack faulkner like our grandfather did.

  i told myself all the reasons why i should.

  to pay the debt

  i owed old charlie and

  because they were beautiful and because

  i could and

  then i told myself not to think

  about page 44

  and the two rainbow trout

  bloodied red

  gills and mouths kissing the air and

  the shut-eyed man holding them

  as though he cannot bear to look

  at the terrible thing he has done.

  told myself that if

  that picture should spring

  to mind like a hook

  in my throat then

  i must imagine the ghosts

  of the fish

  coming out of their mouths

  and going back into the river

  where they belong.

  4 ALICE

  alice’s book of f lying

  begun by chance

  by happy accident

  on stolen pages

  is less about

  feathers or flies

  or wings and more

  about words

  how they caught me

  by surprise

  raised me

  in their rushing

  updraft

  lifted me

  from pen and page

  into the clear midair

  gave me a bird’s

  eye view.

  it was begun that one brave day when i emptied out my mediocre-making medicine.

  flushed my calm pills away with toilet-water. then filled myself with fright that i had poisoned oceans and rivers. imagined fish, belly-up like capsized smiles. no more shimmering, swimming or cool blue dives. flushing was a risk i could not take again. from then i kept my pills in a cadbury’s roses tin that smelled of a christmas past.

  tinned pills set my thoughts loose. some pressed heavy on me. unspeakable questions of what did or did not happen when i was number twelve. unanswerable wonderings of what eternal twelveness meant and what might or might not happen in the ever after.

  other thoughts lit like wings upon my shoulders. and bec
ause of them i one day wished aloud. said words for what i wanted. pens and inks, and clean white pages. joey brought them in the morning. jars tumbled from his emptied pockets down the blankety hills. lay there like jewels in the soft valley between my thighs while i stared jumble-headed in the earliness.

  ‘pinched them from the newsagent.’ joey’s warm brother-breath curled like feathers in the cold air. ‘made a speedy getaway.’ he said and i, still dream-eyed, saw him on his bicycle, paper-stuffed shirt. jars clinking, legs pumping with fright and daring.

  he sat beside me while i held the stolen colours up to the new morning light. one by one. the violet, the blue and the black. a book of empty pages lay open on my lap. a journey to be taken. was this what love looked like? stolen inks and empty pages? was it good love? in the quiet of the afterwards i wrote down a thing i thought. a small and simple thing. a gift for joey.

  if it’s not love that makes you stay

  i set you free

  i did not show the words to him. not then. not ever. on a stolen page i wrote them. a small step on a long path to learn the power of words. even my words. i named my book for what words gave me. alice’s book of flying.

  5 ALICE

  communication strategies

  oh patient book of flying! at first the words i put on paper came slow. not like the quick, careless voicewords i heard other people use. in my separateness i searched for fresh words and old forgotten ones. looked for them in the bee-wing book, the dictionary and in library books joey brought home for me. others i collected from the yarns gram spun. book of flying had no ears to judge me. what i wrote there was a conversation with myself.

  but even i knew words are made for sharing. sometimes i wrote mine on scraps of paper and took them to the railway waiting room. offered them to passengers and passers-by. no one ever stopped, no one ever took a poem. i guessed they’d heard the stories of my madness and what had made me the way i am. or maybe it was old charlie they’d heard about.

  ‘most people don’t understand giving that’s for free,’ joey said. ‘they probably think you want money or you’re a religious freak or something.’

  that’s the way it was in the world outside oktober bend, he said, and i believed him. i couldn’t remember what it was like before.