The Second Cure Read online

  Quite apart from the therapeutic and psychological benefit to her charges, Winnie saw the St Anne’s Gardening Club as a bulwark against the inescapable. The act of growing a plant was a promise that you’d be back, that you would indeed be there next week to witness a new shoot or bud. Promises like that were important when death was in the very walls of the place, no matter how fresh the paint job.

  Two were missing from the club that morning, but Winnie hadn’t been briefed on what had happened. Maybe it was just a hospital stint, or an outing with family. She hoped so. She knew that asking the other residents was futile. The staff was discreet about the reasons for the vanishings – apparently acknowledging that old people died might lower morale. Winnie suspected that for people who’d spent over eighty years on the planet, being treated like infants might have a similar effect.

  Today there was a new face. The only man present, he looked ill at ease and vigilant, frowning at the other gardeners as though fearful of being set upon by a pack of rapacious nonagenarian succubi. Winnie chatted with him as they filled the punnets with seedling mix. She gleaned he’d been in the navy and never married. Not a man used to the society of women. Perhaps the activities officer would be able to cajole some more men to join the gardening group so he wouldn’t feel so outnumbered. With a ratio of one man to every ten women, though, the chances were slim.

  Today they were sowing seeds for a winter crop: Brussels sprouts and broccoli. The residents sprinkled seeds onto punnets and tamped them down, some more successfully than others. Arthritic fingers, palsy, poor eyesight: all contributed to some punnets receiving too many seeds, others missing out entirely. Winnie watched carefully to know which she’d have to redo after the session finished.

  ‘They’ll be lovely when they flower, dear,’ said Audrey, one of the group’s most enthusiastic members. She came every week without fail, part of the routine that was helping assuage her dementia.

  ‘These are vegetables, Audrey. Remember? Broccoli and Brussels sprouts. We’re going to have them for dinner when they’re grown.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ Audrey became agitated, her lower lip trembling. ‘I think these are the fuchsias. I love fuchsias. Little ballet dancers.’

  ‘We can grow some fuchsias, if you like.’

  ‘Yes, fuchsias. Fuchsia seeds.’ Audrey nodded, gesturing at the punnets with her gnarled hand, thumbs joints twisted inwards with arthritis.

  ‘We should use cuttings to grow fuchsias, but we can do that. I’ll bring some along, and maybe they’ll be flowering by next spring.’

  Audrey grasped Winnie’s wrist with clawed fingers, and stared intently at her through rheumy eyes. ‘Oh God bless you, dear. God bless you.’

  God bless me, thought Winnie, dully, and shook off the sudden pang. She put her hand on Audrey’s wasted shoulder and smiled. ‘You leave it to me,’ she said.

  Audrey smiled, gumminess behind pale lips. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, you know,’ she confided. ‘My daughter’s coming to get me. I won’t be staying.’

  Audrey had been saying that for six years.

  ‘Won’t that be lovely for you!’ Winnie always said that too.

  A nurse’s aide came to escort the residents back to the lifts, and Winnie tidied up, sweeping up spilled potting mix and carrying the punnets into the greenhouse. Audrey’s was one that had failed to attract any seeds, so she reached for the Brussels sprout pack and opened it – only to drop the packet and scatter the seeds everywhere.

  ‘Oh no!’ You’re an idiot, Winnie Bayliss, she told herself, as she surveyed the spread across the concrete floor, then crouched down to collect them. Clumsy, clumsy. She wondered if she wasn’t yet completely over the mild ’flu she’d had the week before. Winnie was full of concern about the infirmity of others, but loathed it in herself. If she were still infected, she might pass it on to the residents, which could be catastrophic.

  Her knees were still complaining about the hard nursery floor when she made her way down the white-painted corridor to the exit, passing the open doorways of the residents’ rooms. Glimpses of framed photos of family long dead, the occasional brightly coloured quilt cover on a bed, and a good number of vases with fresh flowers. The sight of the flowers always cheered Winnie because they meant someone – a daughter, a son, a spouse, a friend – cared enough about the resident to come and bring them. Far too many of these old souls had no one from the outside to visit, and it broke Winnie’s heart. Families could be cruel.

  She stopped outside the door of the chapel where organ music accompanied a wavering chorus of elderly voices in a hymn.

  Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale,

  Yet will I fear no ill:

  For Thou art with me, and Thy rod

  And staff me comfort still …

  Had it been empty, she might have gone in for a moment’s contemplation. Perhaps the humble but serene space would have afforded her the closeness to God that had eluded her of late. But the place was not serene. It was alive with song.

  Goodness and mercy all my life

  Shall surely follow me;

  And in God’s house forevermore

  My dwelling-place shall be …

  It was Tricia Townsend playing. An idea sparked and Winnie moved quietly into the back of the chapel and waited. Tricia was just the person, and it was worth the price of a conversation to ask. Her fuchsias were famous, collected from growers all around the country, and she’d even won local council awards for her garden. Tricia sat with perfect posture as she played, singing along with her charges. Her gunmetal hair, rigid with spray, didn’t budge as she conducted with her chin, her head vigorously nodding the beat.

  Tricia told the singers there was time for only one more, and launched into ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’. ‘Take it to the Lord in prayer,’ she bellowed to them with gusto. After the ‘Amen’, the residents reclaimed their walking frames and left with frail alacrity.

  Winnie approached Tricia, who was tidying up the sheet music and putting it back into the piano stool, and told her what she had in mind. She found herself going into unnecessary detail as she felt Tricia’s eyes – so intense! – examining her face. Why was she going over her conversation with Audrey? Just ask the question.

  Tricia’s habitually benign smile dropped from her face and she raised a stark eyebrow. ‘You want my fuchsias?’

  ‘Just a few cuttings …’ Winnie felt the fluster redden her throat.

  ‘Why don’t you just go down to the nursery and buy some?’

  ‘Well, I thought, you have so many, and –’ Why oh why had she thought this was a good idea? Tricia, of all people.

  ‘Winnie, my fuchsias are collectors’ items. I’ve spent years sourcing them. I can’t just give them away to anyone.’

  ‘Not anyone. The Gardening Club. Audrey.’ A headache had started to crawl up from her neck.

  ‘And they’ll grow my cuttings, and then someone will take cuttings from those, and who knows where it will end? The whole point of them is that they’re rare, you realise that?’

  ‘I just thought you might like to help,’ Winnie said weakly, regretting the entire episode.

  ‘I help.’ Tricia’s tone rose to mezzo-soprano. ‘The good Lord knows how I much help, Winnie. What was I just doing?’ She gestured towards the organ. ‘And there’re the church committees, the potlucks, the soup kitchen, the flower arranging – do you know how many blooms I donate to the church? And only last week, didn’t I tell you I’d help you out with scripture at the primary school?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Trish. I am grateful, we all are –’

  ‘Not that I do it for gratitude, of course,’ Trisha told her stiffly. ‘I do it because it’s my duty. But there are limits to how much one can give.’

  Winnie attempted a few more pacifying comments before she felt she could extricate herself from Trish’s ire, adding a feeble farewell. Somehow she always managed to push Tricia’s buttons. Winnie darted into the staff toilets, loc
ked herself in a cubicle, and took a shaky breath.

  Her growing lack of patience with Tricia was distressing. She felt constantly on the verge of telling her exactly what she thought, and that would be disastrous, both socially and in terms of their working together. There was no way she could afford to alienate Tricia, not with so many scripture volunteers dropping out. And in the shrinking social world of the church that they inhabited, with parishioners departing with grim regularity, the loss of a friend – and she admitted that, despite everything, Tricia was indeed her friend – was unthinkable. Shoving her distress into a far corner where it couldn’t touch her, she turned her focus onto what she needed to buy for Friday’s dinner. No time for moping. Her son Richard and his Charlie were coming, and that rarest of visitors, her daughter, was making the trek down from Brisbane.

  She left the cubicle and washed her hands, looking at herself in the mirror. She tried on a smile in anticipation, forcing herself to contemplate something cheerier. At least, she hoped it would be cheerier, and determined in that moment that it would. Through sheer will, she would make something good happen in her life soon. Surely it was her turn.

  4.

  It was early evening when Charlie left the train at Cowan Station and walked the kilometre home, cutting down Chandler Avenue and through the park to their corner of the village. The worst of the day’s heat had passed with the lowering sun, and the westerly wind with its dust and desiccating air from inland was finally easing.

  She found it calming to be back in the bush after a day like that. A day of talking, of meetings and lectures, of preparing for the media onslaught once their latest research was made public. Everyone was clamouring for answers, devastated by the loss of their pets, frightened by the effects on people, and the internet was thick with rumour and conspiracy. As soon as the press releases went out, Charlie and her collaborators would be the focus of the frenzy. Even when life was calm, spending time with people drained her energy and she needed silence and solitude to replenish her. She entered the park and gazed up at the enormous eucalypts, backlit and stark against the pure blue sky, and felt soothed.

  Among the sounds of the late afternoon, insects and the distant calls of children playing, Charlie could hear a young bird bleating for food. She spotted a peewee – a magpie lark, feeding its baby in the lomandras. But no: not its baby. The fledgling was more than twice the size of the peewee adult. It was an eastern koel, a cuckoo. The birds spent their summers there, laying eggs in the nests of hosts like this poor peewee. It was doomed to work overtime to fill the endless maw of the usurper that had killed its own eggs and chicks. Charlie realised she was thinking in moral terms, but of course it wasn’t the fault of the brood parasite. This fledgling had no more intended to kill its nest rivals than they had intended to be killed. Objectively, it was an elegant solution to the problem of expending resources on reproducing one’s genes, a triumph of evolution. She left the pair undisturbed and moved back to the path, passing a favourite casuarina, which whistled softly in the breeze.

  It was there on her walk that Charlie always felt a slight thrill, the delight of returning to the home that she and Richard now shared. So different from her previous urban life in the inner-west of the city. Trucks replaced by wallabies, car horns replaced by frog song, the smells of a hundred cuisines and densely packed humans replaced by the scent of the bush and the earth. And loneliness replaced by Richard.

  He’d have finished his work for the day, whether it was music or painting, and would be in the kitchen. He cooked to relax and to think, and the results were uniformly delicious. She wondered what dinner would be and grew hungry at the thought.

  Their home was in the remotest part of Cowan, with bush on three boundaries. The only windows from which signs of humanity were visible were those at the front. Richard said he would have planted dense foliage in the front garden when he and his sister inherited the place from their grandfather so he could pretend there were no other people in his world, but given the bushfire risk the house needed a buffer of cleared land around it. They consequently spent most of their time out the back, overlooking the valley.

  The sole house that could be seen from the front of their property belonged to Lenny Borghezio, a retired plumber, recently widowed. As was his habit just before dusk, he was leaf-blowing the street. Why anyone so averse to leaves would choose to live right next to a few thousand hectares of bushland defied Charlie’s imagination.

  As she crossed the road, Lenny spotted her and approached, turning off his noise machine. He wore a terry-towelling hat, shorts and a blue singlet, black rings of sweat haloing his armpits.

  Lenny only ever spoke to them to voice a complaint and apparently today was to be no different. ‘Hear that?’

  All Charlie could hear was the welcome absence of his leaf-blower.

  ‘The music?’ he persisted. ‘If you can call it that.’ He gestured with his contraption at their house, at the top floor. Now Charlie could hear it. Richard was playing music. Pretty loudly, she had to admit, but it was a bit rich for leaf-phobic Lenny to complain given his daily cacophony. She wished she’d been a different sort of person, one who’d tell him so.

  ‘Started first thing this morning,’ he told her. Not too first thing, thought Charlie, who had left for work at eight when Richard was still in the shower. ‘It’s been going on ever since, same bit of music over and over and over. Your dog’s been howling, too. I even went over and hammered on the door this arvo, thinking maybe there’d been an accident. No answer. I didn’t know if I should call the cops or what. Bit of a worry, you know …’

  Charlie didn’t have time to chastise herself for having thought the worst of Lenny’s motives. Now all she felt was a white rush of fear.

  ‘Thanks, Lenny. I’ll see what’s going on. Thanks,’ she said again, hurrying to the house.

  Inside, the music was much louder, blaring. Goblin shot out the front door as soon as it was opened. Charlie ran to the stairs and slipped, her backpack upsetting her balance, and she landed hard on her hands and knees. The floorboards were sticky with the dog’s evaporating urine. She scrambled back to her feet and lunged up the stairs to the first floor, and then up the spiral staircase to Richard’s attic studio.

  At first she thought it was blood, splattered across the canvases, the walls, the floors. The breath she’d been gasping for caught in her throat. Then she saw the other colours.

  Paint. Almost every empty surface had paint on it.

  ‘Richard?’ she yelled. He was crouched in a corner over an expanse of drip sheet and was using a roller of acrylic to paint long arcs of yellow on a vast canvas. His hair was matted with sweat and he was covered in flecks of paint. He hadn’t heard her. She ran to the sound system and hit the off button, frantic for a response.

  ‘No!’ he screamed, twisting around to face her as the silence hit.

  ‘Richard, what’s happening?’

  His eyes were manic and darting, his body tense. ‘The music …’ he muttered. ‘The shapes … the music.’ He started trembling and he sagged back onto his buttocks, then crumpled forwards, his head falling between his knees. His shoulders were shuddering and Charlie realised he was sobbing. She pulled off her backpack and went to him, fell to her knees, and wrapped her arm over him.

  ‘Shh, shh, it’s okay, it’s okay …’ But it wasn’t. She knew that. What the hell was happening to him? They sat like that for long minutes as her mind whirred, interrogating itself about what could be wrong. She stroked his damp hair, loosening the black curls from his scalp. Gradually, she felt his muscles relax and his breathing slow.

  The room was beginning to darken, but she could still see the paint he’d been strewing. Contrary to her initial impression of it being haphazard and out of control, she could see a sense in it. Raw, certainly, emotional and passionate, but not random. It was speaking to her in a way his other paintings rarely did. She would confess it to no one other than herself, but she generally found his canvase
s rather cool and aloof. These were alive. Something had changed.

  Charlie’s leg was beginning to cramp, her stomach was gurgling and she needed the loo. She was reluctant to move, reluctant to disturb him. She was fearful of what might happen next. She needed to know what was wrong, but dreaded learning it. But just as her calf muscle’s spasm was becoming unbearable, she felt his body shift.

  Slowly, Richard disentangled himself from her arms, and she sat back on her buttocks and stretched her ankle. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  He let out a shuddering breath and nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I am.’

  Through the gloom, she watched him arch his back and his shoulders. ‘What happened, Richard?’

  He stood and walked over to the lamp, flicking the switch. The light that filled the studio was harsh and she blinked her eyes against it.

  ‘I don’t know. Well, I do. This happened,’ he said, gesturing across the room at the paint. So much paint.

  He turned to her. ‘Can I show you what went on? What it means?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, confused.

  ‘It’s the “Rite of Spring”, Stravinsky. Do you know it?’

  Charlie shook her head, bewildered.

  ‘It’s one of the greatest pieces ever composed, a ballet, from back at the beginning of last century.’ He turned the sound system back on and brought the volume down from its earlier deafening setting. ‘This is in the second part. I’ll start with the Mystical Circles of the Young Maidens, the section before the Chosen One is selected to die in the sacrifice …’ He found the point on the CD he wanted, and the room filled with plucked strings played low and a lilting, discordant violin line above.

  ‘Here, the blues and the greens, flowing …’ Richard moved to a canvas below the attic windows. ‘They repeat, moving on like a current …’ A woodwind of some sort took over from the strings. ‘And here, these golden squares, the pizzicato becoming stronger …’