Miriam writes stories in and around Melbourne/Naarm. You can read her in places like Aniko Magazine, Island online, swim meet lit mag and FDBNHLLLTTFPLAGIARISM. Her stories have placed in this year’s major prizes, and she is currently working on her debut collection.

A Look of Extreme Festivity
BY MIRIAM WEBSTER

Somewhere in Australia, a wattle is in bloom. Frances has come to rely on her namesake for supplying this florescent certainty, and it is comforting to think that among all life’s inconsistencies, if you do not cross any oceans, no matter where you find yourself there will always be yellow flowers.

In December the golden wattle on the property exchanges its blossoms for the bumpy, distended pods of seeds. Frances enjoys these bean-like capsules and sometimes picks them up to feel, after which she either donates them to the wind or takes them inside to hang on the Christmas tree, she doesn’t know why. On Christmas Eve she places one beneath her pillow and wakes to find the day has brought, along with the usual tidings, a herd of feral goats.

But this all happens later.

First we might look back to a spring morning in September 1988, when her mother was two weeks overdue with twins. Her parents, then living the hippie dream out bush with a small inherited fortune, may have been listening to their favourite Joni Mitchell album and at the precise moment one or both their babies turned in the womb a blue wren landed on a wattle bough, and this confluence of factors led them to name her Frances Blue Acacia O’Shea, a name which should have led her directly from Steiner school to stonerdom but which instead conferred upon her personality a gravity at odds with the haze of marijuana, madcap parties, reggae and constant jamming of her parents and their friends. Her twin brother’s name - Julian Zephyr Wren - was equally damning, but he was cut from their cloth from the instant of his birth. And although in other families not becoming a stoner would have been applauded, Frances’s parents looked at her and were bewildered by the little square they had created, and she always felt the disappointment she inspired by rejecting all their norms.

Skip ahead to when Frances discovered botany at uni, her parents by now divorced, her father living with an English woman in Jamaica and her mother practicing naturopathy up in Byron Bay. The house sitting alone and empty in the valley, waiting for the antechinus to move in. Frances enrolled in first year Law and in between torts and criminology a spare subject introduced her to something vivid and compelling in the old watercolour drawings of buds and banksia in the botanical library, something which impressed her with its intricate, almost mathematical particularity. She was suddenly aware that in her desire to define herself against nature she had never looked at anything properly; it came as a terrible shock.

Looking back she was unhappy. But you never realise you’re unhappy until much later. That was the year Frances felt the loneliness of a big city and Jules got wild for leaving, ringing her only once from a place with bad reception. The reception here is just as bad, but Frances has discovered an ill-mannered pleasure in being uncontactable. This must be how Jules felt, all those missing years.

The house she has returned to sits in a long furrow between mountains. Her mother is still in Byron Bay and her father, back from Jamaica though without his English woman, now lives down in Tassie. Through all these years the house has not been sold. This is Jaitmatang country, in the foothills of Mount Bogong. There are many remarkable things about the landscape – mountains, shadow, sky – but Frances is sick of describing the usual wonders and instead might tell you that in spring the snow melts and overnight the hills are fleeced in white and yellow, cream and gold. The mass flowering of the wattles gives the entire valley a look of extreme festivity, confetti flowers raining in such droves that while driving on the backroads you must employ the wipers to clear portals to the sky.

Frances keeps a memory of their eighteenth birthday, when she and Jules celebrated the end of exams and in the impetuous spirit of those weeks took off down the river for an unseasonal swim, braving the snowmelt to wade through the wash of blossoms which lay thick and pale on the surface, trembling like the foam afloat a pint of lager. The smell was powerful and brought on Jules’s hayfever, always bad that time of year, and she remembers laughing at the way he sneezed and swept the surface clean to douse himself in freezing water. The pale angles of his body mirrored those of her own, and Frances experienced a rare and fleeting twinness she would have trouble holding onto.

The old house has only two bedrooms, the smaller containing an antique ebony wardrobe bearing stickers from when she and Jules were kids. Loony toons, butterflies, a sticker from the CFA on which distressed koalas CRAWL LOW IN SMOKE. Now she shares the room with her partner Leo, who surveys the house and valley with his city eyes and feels nostalgic for something he never had. Frances, on the other hand, resents the monstrous bush mozzies admitted by the ratty flyscreen. Nostalgia makes her sick and she is uneasy being back amongst her childhood things, besides which the house is falling down around them, full of grief and termites.

Things change on Christmas Eve, when she and Leo put the girls to bed and get a bit drunk laying out the presents. They even have some silly festive sex, and Frances thanks the bracing alpine air for giving them the extra vim. Her body spreads with a glow that cannot just be post-coital; for the first time since being here she feels almost relieved. At some point during the night both children beg admittance to the parental bed and Frances and Leo move to the outer edges of the mattress, after which the family sleeps like a pack of dogs: tangled, breathing together, dreaming the same dreams.

Frances pulls up carrots beneath a smear of dirty sky in hers, but something is not right, the carrots are not ready, and each time she unearths one she finds a feeble twist of roots where the vegetable should be. She understands in the way of dreamers that the sickly taproots evince some awful wrongness and wishes she could stop, but there is urgency to the harvest - so instead she sees her reddish hands with fine green hair of carrots in their grasp, wrenching them up, over and over, until she wakes with the cotton blanket twisted around her legs.

She lies still waiting for the fright to subside and between heartbeats imagines unearthing an entire crop to find it is not ready, a gardener’s nightmare. She thinks of the modest plot near the wattle tree she has cleared of blackberries, the hours spent driving between here and Melbourne to source and plant the best organic seeds. There is a crude kind of magic in pulling your own food from the soil, and the dream has disturbed her for being the inverse of her desire. Surveying the damage in the morning, Frances will feel the dream around her like a premonition. She will place her palm on the wattle tree and have a strange feeling, not quite supernatural, for what she cannot know as she recovers sleep is that the herd is arriving to usurp upon the garden, silver in the moonlight.

Between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning the goats rip up lettuce, unsheathe corn and pluck snow-peas from their stems. They are relatively new to the area and have only in the last ten years joined the dogs and cats and foxes, trophy pelts slung over barbed wire fence. Culling them falls to the same farmers who keep sheep and cows, and Frances has always felt confronted by this ritual for invoking contradictions she is unable to settle. Her parents were not those white people and defined themselves against these farmers, but Frances is from a generation in which divisions of this kind are less straightforward; the pelts make her anxious about her place in the valley, and by extension, the world.

She believes her twin shared this anxiety, even if he did not express it in identical terms. The first time Jules returned from wandering he arrived at Frances’s door in the pale morning, before anyone else was up. She lived in a sharehouse with no heating and remembers the look of him cocooned in a dirty sleeping bag on the fold-out like some frazzled, freezing grub. After a few weeks her housemates got the shits and Frances had to buy her twin a consolatory pho, asking him to leave through the steam rising from their ten dollar bowls. Jules took it badly and vanished, reappearing almost a year later looking oddly tanned. Meanwhile, all his fines arrived at her address.

Over the years he reappeared occasionally and Frances tried to keep track of him on Facebook, but his posts were sporadic and she mostly relied on rumours from the few people with whom he kept in touch. Jules was in WA, Darwin, Aotearoa. He was selling fencing, vitamins, recycled timber flooring and at one point, a litter of staffy pups. She found out from her cousin that he and Jules had made an ad-hoc pill press and for a few months in 2010 pumped out pingers imprinted with the letters D O G. No one knew whether they were meant to spell DOG or GOD, Jules’s idea of a joke. Good pills though: Frances took too many at a party once and spent hours and hours pressing buttons on a remote, trying to send a text message, thinking it was her phone.

The last she heard from Jules was a postcard from Hyderabad in 2012. She had not known he was in India but it somehow fit with Jules’s stoner rhetoric, his pseudo-spiritual leanings. He was probably running from debt or following a woman or chasing good drugs and free living, opportunistic as always, like the goats coming down from the mountains. Suppose this is why they choose Frances’s garden: because, after months of toiling, tilling, seeding and weeding, her patch is fat with abundance.

But Frances is uneasy with abundance. She often thinks the idyllic upbringing she and Jules received spoiled them in some pernicious way; that in teaching them to play guitar and rage against the machine and love self-expression above the world’s upsets and spin, their parents had done them a disservice. There was a Wallace Stevens poem her mother often quoted which began with pink carnations in a brilliant bowl, the poet’s refusal to be satisfied and to cease his restless wandering. What was the line? The imperfect is so hot in us. This was the salient difference between her and Jules; for where he lit the fire beneath his imperfect, Frances strove to cool hers down.

Before imperfection and abundance, before razed gardens and Christmas morning, before Christmas Eve even, before sleep and strange dreaming, before the goats; Frances is still calling it Jules’s place, even though it belongs more to the territorial possums who piss inside the roof. She and Leo have shifted furniture around and rid the house of all its junk, cleaned out the shed and taken e-waste to the tip. Her twin was a hoarder of many things, as their father was before him, including jars and screws and DVD players, and the house seems bigger and smells different, no longer full of all their shit.

Still, there are some things she clings to, like the old decorations they have used to beautify the Christmas tree. The tinsel has been sticky-taped in sections and some of the lights are broken, but her daughters are impressed by the gilded cicada shells and pinecones she and Jules found when they were little, and, with a merry air of industry, spray painted gold and silver.

Frances watches her daughters arrange the auric pinecones around the base of the tree. She marvels at their seriousness, the way they discuss the placement of ornaments in relation to angles, aesthetics, light. They seem to communicate in preternatural ways, the telepathy of sisters, and it pains her to think that she and Jules might once have been similar. At three and five her girls are completely attached to their mother but in these moments they can be strangely mature and officious, growing distant as she watches. One day they will leave her and, as with most departures, she will feel a mixture of longing and relief.

Further back again it is still November, and Frances and Leo sublet their house in the city, pack their dogs and kids into the car and drive up the Hume to a different life. She insists they are only trying it out, so they fill the fridge and put their conditioner in the shower, open mail and consult the council website to see which night the bins go out; but they do not hang their clothes in the cupboard, partially to sustain this fantasy of impermanence, and also because her brother’s clothes take up most of the room.

The clothing, thinks Frances, is the hardest to get rid of. One afternoon Leo takes the girls into town to buy groceries and while they are out Frances slips into one of Jules’s jackets, the mangy linen one he wore as a kind of dressing gown. It smells of his body, of Nag champa incense and listless hospital food. The thought of her own clothes hanging next to it is abject and somehow unbearable.

Instead they live like they are camping: walking down the river each afternoon to swim, leaving half their stuff in the car and the other half in disarray, towels and bathers on the line, dirty knickers in the bathroom, thongs flung off by the door. Leo wants to make it permanent but Frances maintains they will return to the city once the summer takes her leave. It is her garden which contests this and betrays the opposite intention, for although the veggies are seasonal the plot itself speaks to permanence, to home, to their presence here sustained.

They have also put in a rainwater tank and gotten rid of the clapped out pump which used to drag water up to the house, the river being mildly polluted now with agricultural runoff, fine for swimming in but no good for brushing teeth. You don’t want too much of it in your mouth, this water full of shit and pesticides and whatever chemicals the neighbours use to worm their cows. Some guy they meet who lives past Mongan’s Bridge thinks he even got giardia from the water; Leo gets weird about this and worries perhaps they shouldn’t swim, and Frances teases him, who’s afraid of a little parasite? She feels like her brother, pretending not to be afraid of anything.

On hot days she comes in from the garden to wash her body clean of dirt and sweat. The water smells like tannins and the mineral feel of it lingers after on her skin. There’s a faint whiff of possum shit too, which you get with tank water. Frances rocks back and forth beneath the streaming showerhead and thinks about getting the call like a bullet through the years, Jules telling her he had lung cancer, stage four, though he was only 35. How had she not known that he was back from overseas and living in the valley? It was true she’d been avoiding the place since her parents vacated it, and Frances would have no idea who or what was living in that house.

Listening to Jules describe, in a dull voice, his plans for dying, Frances felt overwhelmed by a certain stinginess. Her heart had closed against him and it would take a massive effort to coax it back open. She saw then a vision of a giant clam, sealed tight against the ocean. Frances had seen a real one, once, while snorkelling up near Cairns. A plash of anger jolted through her. Unlike suicide or recklessness, which would have made more fitting ends, cancer meant that Jules’s death would just be long and painful, boring and sad. After that call she went to Jules suspecting it was too late for reconciliation, but at least she could give him her witness, which she meant to do until the end.

Then there were the dying weeks, Jules looking unlike himself in the palliative care unit in town while Frances stayed at the house with the girlfriend she had never seen, who turned out to be married to him, some horse girl from the valley next door. Horse Girl showed Frances pictures of the wedding day: Jules looking weirdly benign in some camp cowboy getup and the girlfriend trailing a veil over the homely arse of a big bay mare.

When was this? she asked the horse-girl cum wife.

Oh, years ago now, she said. Three, four years.

Had he been back that long? The wife was a practical woman with the generous thighs of equestrian types everywhere, and as she watched her put the kettle on and the wedding photos away, Frances realised they had nothing else to talk about. The wife fled to the paddocks with her mares, and from the kitchen window Frances watched them chasing clouds of gnats across the long wet grasses. Her grief turned to impatience and she began to wish her brother would hurry up and die. When it actually came it was just a long, wet gasp, and Frances and the wife sat across from each other listening to the shudder and the stop.

Afterward she thought: I have seen death. It has recognised me, and I will never be the same. And of course the morning of the funeral the pump fucked out, so there would be no cleansing shower, and Frances and the wife had to speak their elegies with hair full of sleep and horses, and a wild sort of relief.

That was over a year ago; horse girl has moved back to Mitta and Frances has moved in. Along with her brother’s clothes there are other memories to sort through, mysterious articles in a wooden box. There is a photograph of an Indian woman smoking a joint with a quirky smile, her arms heavy with a huge ginger cat. There is an orange pierced with fragrant cloves, an obscure book of poetry with leaded marginalia, and a little gauze bag containing two baby teeth. Who is that woman, whose are those teeth? What does the marginalia mean? It is disturbing to think her twin’s secret life is shouting at her through these objects, though she has no way of deciphering their import. She lays them on the workbench and looks at them for a long time, explanations fluttering at the periphery. But she cannot catch them, and after a while puts the articles back in their box.

On Christmas Eve she puts the girls to bed and before she and Leo get drunk with the preparations sits with a beer before the Christmas tree. She has felt unsettled since opening the box of Jules’s things and the feeling persists as she watches two Bogong Moths flap madly at the glass, drawn to the unyielding vista by the flashing Christmas lights. The moths are big and tawny, with hard fleshy bodies and an eye on each wing. Something chilly goes through her, not dissimilar to feeling she gets looking at the pelts slung over farmers’ fences. How these moths agitate her, like all these uncertain thoughts of belonging and grief, and being at home in this place of loss. As a child she was afraid of the grey-brown dust the moths shed on everything they touched and the surprise of one drowning in the toilet when she got up for a wee, and the lightshades full of wings on summer nights. A moth is a reminder, and she recalls dimly the festival in town which used to celebrate their significance to the Jaithmatang and GunaiKurnai ancestors of the high plains, superseded sometime in the early 2000s by a country music muster, which smacked of past erasures. Unlike country music Frances would wish to appreciate these massive insects; but she still shudders, involuntarily, when they thump up on the glass.

In someone else’s mythology moths are harbingers of death. There was one in the hospital in Jules’s final week, flattened on the floor of the visitor’s room. Or was it in the hall after the memorial, she cannot remember now. On the twins’ birthday last September Frances and the wife finally got around to Jules’s ashes, and when she opened the container she saw moth dust, heaps of it, fine and brownish grey.

Unexpected: how it skittered over the green river, borne by a sudden wind. And the wattle the wife threw in after, how Jules would have hated it, it would have made him sneeze. It turned and turned on the water, fluffy gold, and Frances wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the thing.

A wave of affection for Horse Girl broke over her.

Now Christmas day is blush behind the mountains, but morning arrives slowly in the valley and the shadows are still thick and formless. Sick of the garden feral goats advance like demented reindeer to eat the carrots Frances’s girls have tied to the verandah; the sound of hooves is eventually what wakes her, sometime around five. She goes to the sliding door and looks out at the grey beyond, which admits nothing unusual to her notice, until she flicks on the lights and the herd instantly appears. The goats look back at her, mildly concerned, as if she has interrupted them mid-conversation.

Frances is joined at the door by Leo and the dogs, who try a bit of half-hearted herding though they’re city mutts and no good for the work. Leo is rushing around shooing goats and between the barks and bleating, waves of hilarity rush Frances’s extremities, fizzing in her fingertips and nipples, turning to static in her hair, though she is too bewildered to laugh. Leo asks if it’s normal for goats to arrive like relatives keen for Christmas Day’s libations and Frances shakes her head, surprised as he, for she has never seen anything like it.

But there will be time for rumination later; now the kids are up and wanting to know if Santa has been and whether Donna Dancer Prancer Rudolf Blitzen et al have eaten the carrots they tied to the verandah. Upon seeing the goats they fall silent and survey the herd with eyes like saucers: they are mostly black and tan but there is one goat taller than the rest, matted fleece a whitish yellow. The girls think it looks like Santa’s beard and the goat is made their mascot. She lets out an officious bleat, udder swaying, and turns her head to watch them with the freaky blunt pupils which mark her as prey, daring the little girls to respond. When they don’t the goat hops jauntily from the verandah, sure of the claim she has made on the day.

By now the kids are becoming impatient, so Frances and her family go inside for presents just as morning spills into the valley, leaving the herd to decimate what remains of their abundance. Frances throws a last glance behind her taking in the ravished garden, the sinewy buck now humping one of its comrades against a backdrop of angled blue mountains, the pink dawn light. A quick morning zephyr blows wattle seeds and goat smell through the open door; it is all extremely festive, and it occurs she might know someone who can help with these interlopers, a practical woman from the next valley whose wedding gown once trailed over the arse-end of a bay mare. And Frances will resolve to call her, if she can find her number.