The Lyrebird’s Bell

I.
LANGUAGE OF NEPTUNE

The woman lay tucked beneath a silvery spray of grass-tree. We were far enough into the forest and too worn to drag her any farther. There were trees enough to shield her from the sun; not much to be done about the snakes, of course — they would do with her as they pleased. The Australian bush was lush with mossy eucalyptus trees and loquat — not like the outback, which outsiders always expected: a dry, ruddy, cindery flatland.

I stepped back from the body, listened for the twig-crackle of footsteps. I heard only my own breaths, my frantic heartbeat, Annabelle’s peculiar whispers to herself. She had told me she would not take a rock to her mother’s head. She would not be vulgar. It would be done cleanly, befitting her mother’s austere taste, though I had not seen how that was possible. Poison went down cleanly enough but made a frothing mess when it came back up.

The sky was deliriously blue, and mint and honey livened the air. I was surprised at the freshness of her mother’s body. As much as I was able, given the circumstances, I had prepared my nerves for a sickening wave of foul odor. But Annabelle must have washed her in that strange, time-dripping hour she had me wait between the chipped-stone columns of her entryway while she and her mother were alone.

Sweat chilled my scalp and keen shivers ran up my arms. I could not take my eyes off Mrs. Chernova’s hair. It floated about her head, tangled with insects and leaves and powdered pink with forest dust. Annabelle and I were only children, unable to carry her properly, and her finely pinned curls had been tugged out of place from us hauling her all the way from her parlour to the old snow gums where we now stood.

“Betsy? Do you think this spot is all right?” Annabelle was deeply flushed as she wiped her brow. The March heat gave her the mottled look of a pink ling fish, causing rosy, swollen patches beneath her freckles. She looked stunned as she stared at her mother. “She’ll be safe here?”

I thought she could not be serious. After everything, did she still not understand what had been done?

“Nobody ever comes this far out.” I swallowed, bile burning my throat. “She won’t be bothered.”

But I was not so sure. The breeze had been dead all morning, and the trees were so still it felt deliberate. Each one posed as stiff yet fluid as an ancient Greek sculpture, waiting to disorient us, to creep and twist behind our backs. My stomach continued the long, miserable drop that had begun the previous month.

Annabelle picked a beetle from her mother’s knotted hair and set it carefully on the grass. She neatened her mother’s dress, with its buttons like little glass bulbs of lemonade, swatted the dust from the scalloped collar, and tipped the black Wedgwood brooch in place. Mrs. Chernova was white enough now to pass for stone, her dress the rich green of the wild. All we had to do was walk away and let the forest have her.

*

My name is Elizabeth, though back then everyone called me Betsy — which I loathed, as nicknames tend to go. If we were going to reduce ourselves to nicknames at all, I was at the very least a Liza, like the genus of mullets from ancient Rome, or a Beth, like the poor March sister with scarlet fever. My mother had tossed the peachy Betsy across the room rather suddenly, years before, and it stuck to me like a rumour.

The first time we met, Annabelle agreed that it did not suit me. It’s far too darling a name for you. She read my prickly temperament, my wily black hair and stern blue eyes. You look like the Queen of the Crows.

Our houses were the bones of Regency decadence, stout villas grown ashy with age. They had originally been built for two sisters exiled by scandal, long dead and buried under the red flowering gum. Annabelle had not lived here long — she and her mother had arrived a couple of years earlier, shortly after the war, in early ’46, while I had never been outside Victoria. During the warmer months, I had an instructor who drove in from one of the little towns in the Shire of Macedon Ranges. Most recently, an uncompromising young woman of whom I drew, and burned, many lurid portraits. But I had not seen her in some time.

In the colder months, I had grown accustomed to seeing no one. I played alone on mossy stones and tangles of woody vines, and stared into the towering rock formations, which rose like a gravestone cavalcade along the Hanging Rock volcano.

Until, unannounced, Annabelle appeared. She strode up to me, holding a bouquet of dirty snapdragons, as naturally as though she had sprouted from the soil. A sheer blue kerchief was knotted around her neck, and a frothy underskirt lapped at her calves. She smiled with a slight, inviting overbite and handed me a snapdragon. With her warm gold hair, I thought she looked like sunlight glinting on the sea.

*

One afternoon in February, Annabelle and I were studying among the wildflowers and silver-boned trees of her garden. I had taken up a disciplined home-schooling schedule. If she could be bribed with cheap candy bars, Annabelle would join and let me instruct her. Today was my Botanical Arts and Sciences class. It covered everything from floriography — particularly the daintily coded language of flowers once popular in my father’s native London — to the morphology of sea spinach.

“They look innocent as anything,” Annabelle said. She was reading a book on identifying toxic plants. Pulling up her knees, she rested the book on her lap. “Look at this one.”

“If ingested,” I read, “one could suffer slowed heart rate, fever, and death.” I leaned over and took a bite out of her candy bar. “That’s good to know.”

She slumped against my shoulder. “Read the book to me like a story.”

The air was itchy with mayflies, the breeze dirty with heat. I wrapped an arm around her. “Hydathodes,” I began, sun sleepy as I trailed my finger down the index. “That can be the hero. Nectaries can be the nymph he murders —”

From the forest came the sudden ringing of a bell. We both straightened.

“Is there a bell tower nearby?” Annabelle asked.

“There’s nothing nearby,” I said.

We each tilted an ear toward the sky to catch the sound.

“Maybe a lyrebird being mischievous,” Annabelle said.

I made a faint sound of agreement but continued listening. Nothing was only mischief in the bush. The closest townships lived as neighbours to the old-growth trees, and the wind carried both a primal, mystifying pulse and the sleepy hysteria found in any small community.

I looked up at the hazy light breaking through the leaves. The toll of the bell drifted over us, an adornment of passing time like a windblown pall. Such a cast-iron sound was misplaced out here in the true wild bush, more remote even than the local ghost towns and suffering goldfields.

“It’s a dead bell warding off evil spirits,” I said, running my fingertips up Annabelle’s spine to make her jump. “There must be something wicked lurking in the woods.”

She shivered, then laughed. “I almost believe you, this place is so odd. Did you know there are orchids here that grow only after a fire? They wait until everything else is dead and the smoke calls them out of the earth.”

I pictured the smoke that covers graveyards in Bela Lugosi films.

“You’re an orchid,” I said, “whiling away until I come calling.”

“I was born under the sign of the fish, so I’d be a water lily. My babulya told me so. She said I speak the language of Neptune and intuition.”

Annabelle read the stars like tea leaves, charting her fortune with a tarot deck. She always asked to read mine; I told her no, it was pseudo-science, but that was not the reason. In truth, pseudo-science or not, I resented the unsolvable nature of its mystery, as though some beautiful, loving, empyrean secret meant to shove me away and leave me clawing at darkness in the scrubby bush that I had never left in all my life.

As she looked me over, I savoured the sugary tingle of her eyes on me. “I’m not sure what language you speak,” she said.

One of smoky whispers. The cold breath carrying a wolf howl to the moon.

I said nothing and she groaned, grabbing my face in both hands. “One of these days I’m going to peel open your brain like a tangerine.”

I poked her side, all in fun, and it was then that I felt her ribs. Her expression snapped and she stood, fretting clumsily with her dress and muttering at me not to play so rough.

“Why are you getting so thin?” I asked.

“Don’t ask rude questions, Betsy,” she said. “You’re the one whose mother keeps forgetting to feed her.”

I hitched up my shorts. They had faded from plum purple to minty violet and seemed to get bigger the older I grew. “Well, your mother’s supposed to be home-schooling you, but you can’t do basic maths.”

“Maybe your mother will take a trip to the Americas and get sucked into the Bermuda Triangle,” she said.

“Maybe your mother will spontaneously combust in her bed, and an orchid will grow out of the silhouette burned into the sheets.”

She brushed a crumb of chocolate from her lip. “I can only hope.”

We resumed our studies, but I could not help worrying. Was Annabelle not eating? I had heard of girls on diets, but we were only twelve. And besides, for whom would she be dieting? We had no playmates, hardly any family. My mother was always off in Melbourne, at some urban villa retreat or slenderizing salon, and my father was long gone. As far as I could tell, other than Annabelle’s mother, we were all alone.