Mariella Read online

  Her mother turned off the flame of gas, and walked towards where Mariella sat, the pan of yellow eggs in her hand. She scraped two portions, one big, one small, onto the waiting pieces of toast. She pushed one plate towards Mariella, and sat down on the other side of the table, smiling her sweet sad smile at her child.

  ‘What will you do today?’ she asked.

  Mariella put her head to one side as she thought about it. There was much still to explore about the world, that she knew. She had spent hours and hours, days and days, with every single tree in their garden; she knew all the birds by name, and their children.

  ‘Can I go to the river? By myself?’

  ‘Well…’ Her mother cocked her head to the side as she thought, unconsciously mimicking her daughter. Then she narrowed her eyes and said, ‘You’re rather a big girl now, aren’t you?’

  Mariella nodded vigorously. She jumped down from the chair and held her hand above her own head to show just how big.

  Her mother laughed. ‘I can see.’ Sophie thought briefly about the long walk through the bush, the patches of strong swift current, and hidden unknown animals along the way. But her child, her small precious child, with her dark hair and bright eyes, seemed to know more about trees and water and animals than she would have thought possible. Was it normal for little girls to act the way she did? Sophie sometimes asked. But the question was left unanswered. There were no other little girls to whom Sophie could compare her, and no one to ask.

  ‘Okay,’ Sophie said eventually. There was no need to tell her to be careful. Mariella had a strength and wisdom about her that sometimes left her mother feeling dazed. She seemed to know what was going to happen before it did.

  ‘Raining,’ she had sometimes said, as a toddler, waddling in from where she had been playing on the grass. Sophie had come to the door and stared at the blue sky. By the time she went back to her canvas, and Mariella had tipped out a puzzle on the floor, the drops had started falling.

  Although the white room had only one very small very high window, there was also a door across from the bed. It was a plain door. Its handle was the only variance in its plane, and it was more an admonishment than a relief. It seemed the door resented itself for the necessity of the handle’s unseemly interruption of its white order. But all this attention on the handle’s deviance meant the barely visible shine on the top half of the door went largely unnoticed. It rippled with a different kind of being than the white walls. It shone like the wetness of an eye membrane.

  Mariella walked through the dense bush, past rocks and trees, following a trail she could not see but she knew was there. She walked quietly, adding only the barest of crunching and snapping of twigs and grass to the soup of summer air. The cicadas droned around her, obnoxiously asserting their tiny presence. Birds called, each with their own song, each a song Mariella knew. There were other bigger animals in the landscape too. Lions and kudus and elephants and warthogs. She could not see them but she knew they were there. They made their own secret sounds. Silent sounds.

  Mariella began to sing. She sang to the bush because it made her happy. The birds she saw shimmered slightly in the air, as liquid as glass. But the trees and grass and flowers were even thinner. They looked like dreams. She knew she could change them if she wanted to. If she thought really hard, her thoughts would stretch out from her head and into the spaces between the dreams.

  Suddenly, there it was, the rushing river, brown and milky like tea in chipped camp mugs. It threw itself over the rocks and frothed at its sides, tickling the grass that bowed over its banks. Mariella crouched by the torrent. Although only five years old, she knew where the water was safe and where it should be left to itself. She knew this river like her own heartbeat.

  She picked up a stick and poked it into the stream, watching the water part around it. Then she moved a little way away, to under the trees. She plaited grass blades together while she sang wordless songs.

  As time passed she stilled, the notes of her song fading to nothing. She watched the clods of weavers’ nests stuck out on their branches, yellow weavers flitting in and out. She watched a heron open its wings as it passed above her head. She watched small ants tickle their touch on her skin. Hours unfolded. Mariella was still and silent. She did not need to move to be happy. To Mariella, there was nothing more natural than to be still with the world wrapped thickly around her. The froth of the water, the hotness of the sun, the birds and insect sounds heavy in the air. In a world so thick there was very little need for movement.

  The sun stretched slowly across the water, sparking white in its noisy rush. When its reach stroked Mariella’s toes, the little girl looked up. Seeing her, the angle of her head, the brightness in her eyes, one might have been reminded of dog on a porch, ears up and nose sniffing at the air.

  Mariella knew something about the river had changed. She moved forward onto her knees and crept slowly through the reeds. At the river’s edge, she stopped and blinked. The sun shone hot and bright above. The air was heavy and quiet with the summer sounds and the river’s exuberance. What had changed? She could not see it yet, but all the same she knew it was there. She blinked once more.

  There it was. Drifting in a quiet eddy, a dead log. Just the tip of it rose from the water’s surface. It was dark and knotted. Only, Mariella knew it was not a log. It did not shimmer like the water and the trees. It was heavier than that. More solid. Not as solid as her or her mother, but somewhere in between, like the birds. After a moment or two, the log opened its mouth and yawned. A little egret fluttered down from the branches above and picked at a morsel in the teeth of the log. Rows of shiny pointed teeth.

  Mariella knew the log-shaped crocodile was dangerous. She knew enough of the world around her to know how animals lived, what animals ate. It was the way things were. It was what made them what they were. A cycle of life feeding in and out, flowing like the river. So although she knew the crocodile was dangerous she was not afraid. It did not make sense to her to fear anything in a world where everything was a part of each other thing, and it all fluctuated from one colour to another, forming a pulsating shimmering whole.

  ‘She’s smiling.’

  ‘How can she be smiling? She’s asleep.’

  ‘She’s smiling. Look.’

  The two men squinted and pushed their faces even closer to the one-way glass of the door. They were standing very close to each other now, much closer than either of them would have felt comfortable with, had they been noticing that. But they did not notice, because both of them were focusing intently on the still form of the girl in the bed.

  ‘She is smiling.’ The second man pulled back with a worried frown on his forehead, and wrote some hurried notes on a clipboard.

  Chapter 5

  The bell rang, shrill and piercing. All around the room the children at the tiny tables began shoving crayons into their boxes.

  ‘Alright, alright. Time to tidy up. Neat and nice. Then you can go out and play.’

  There was a flurry as chairs scraped, crayons hit the floor with a crack and several small bodies tried to get through the doorway at the same time. Soon the squeaking and chatter died away, and Miss Toddy picked up a cloth to wipe the board. Her arm moved in broad circles, each sweep cleaning away the words of their lesson: ‘My Best Friend’.

  It was only when in the silence she noticed a quiet scratching that she turned around. There beneath the window, sat Wellington. He was hunched over the table and where his elbow poked out she could see it was moving furiously over the page.

  ‘Time to go play now Wellington. Put away your things.’ For all of these young children, markers of time had not yet entered their lives. For them there was no Monday or Wednesday, next week or next month. For them there was only the bell, dividing the day into ordered segments. This controlled their world, gave it structure and meaning. If they defied its authority they entered themselves into a struggle that would never end. Time and its Rules must be obeyed.

  ‘
Wellington?’

  The scratching against paper continued. The head of pale brown hair remained still, glossy in the sunlight. Miss Toddy was getting rather cross. It was not the first time Wellington had wholly and wilfully ignored her. She had even had his hearing tested, just last week, seeking some explication of his contrariness. He was not like other children.

  She had come right up behind him now and her foot beat out a rhythm of irritability against the floor. Tap, tap, tap, said orthopedic shoe to the linoleum.

  ‘Wellington!’

  Finally the little head rose, and Wellington leant back in his purple plastic chair. His body was languid and relaxed; his face lit up by a happy smile. He turned its radiance on Miss Toddy.

  Ah, she was upset. It was easy to see. That must be rather sad for her, little Wellington thought. He stood up from his chair and wrapped his arms around her middle, burying his face in her dress. Her folded arms were brushed by his soft hair where it stood up at the crown. ‘I love you Miss Toddy. You be happy.’

  Miss Toddy felt her cheeks grow red. This was just the kind of contrary behaviour typical of Wellington. When he should have been contrite, felt guilt or shame, he poured out affection. It was not so much that he did anything out of the ordinary, but how he felt about what he did.

  ‘That’s enough Wellington.’ She pried him off her, feeling somehow herself ashamed. ‘Put away your things and go outside. I know you heard the bell.’ Miss Toddy smoothed her dress where Wellington had crumpled it, and then turned and walked briskly out the door. It had suddenly become intolerable for her to spend a moment longer with that infuriating child.

  Wellington watched her go, his smooth forehead creased by a tiny frown. She was upset, he could see that much. But nothing in his brain or experience could tell him why. These were the things he had not learnt as he should have. He turned back to the table where his drawing lay. It was not of anything in particular. The pictures of the other children were full of the wobbly circles and stick limbs that made up two dimensional people. Wellington on the other hand had scribbled a plethora of colours emanating from a central point. He had rubbed the crayon against the paper with such joy and passion that the point had worn away to a nub. Every colour in his box had been used and so had almost the entire expanse of paper. Except of course for a thin strip on the right hand side, where he had dragged a brown crayon on its side to make a watery flow. In this ribbon he had rubbed out a smudge of darker brown, would could have been anything, but looked like a floating stick of wood. He smiled at the drawing because it made him happy.

  One by one he replaced his crayons in the box. He placed each colour according to its code of storage. Red inside red, blue inside blue. He was not sure why he did this, but he had learnt others became upset if he did not. How often people become upset, he thought. It jarred his world. He disliked the interruption to his peace but not enough to change as quickly as Miss Toddy would have liked. He picked up the box with both hands and carried it to the back of the room, towards a shelf labelled with a pail and shovel.

  Wellington had a kind of music in his head, although he had never thought to call it that. He had never thought to call it anything. It played as a background to his days, guiding him. It was vibrant, joyful. It sometimes made him burst out suddenly with a laugh or a smile. But as young as he was, he had started to realise that no one else heard his music. Maybe if he had had a mother he would have asked her about it. But his mother had given him only life in this world before leaving it herself. His father had never recovered from such a blow to his plans, and Wellington was shipped out to a sequence of aunts and friends. None of them heard his music, but the strangeness of the boy encouraged them to pass him on quickly.

  He was different, Wellington, a little behind the rest. He would not absorb the Rules as thoughtlessly as the others. But eventually he would learn. The little boy zipped up his satchel and turned to walk towards the sunshine and the birds and the grass. Already he was learning to quieten the music. He let it play softly in his own ears, just enough to make himself smile. He was already starting to understand himself as a nuisance.

  Chapter 6

  Mariella sat by the window. She was watching a small bird perched on an aloe, its flower like an orange pagoda stretching to the sky. The bird shone green all over, a green so bright he seemed to have a light inside his feathers. The tips of his wings and tail were dipped in black ink.

  Come closer, thought Mariella. You’re so pretty, let me look at you.

  The little bird made a tiny swallow, a golden drop of nectar slipping into its green belly, and then fluttered to the window. He tapped against the glass with his beak. It was slender and curved like a stamen.

  Sophie walked out of the bedroom she and Mariella shared. She saw her daughter sitting at the table by the window, her chin cupped in her hand. She was sitting perfectly still, as she was wont to do. For all Sophie knew, she could have been sitting there for hours.

  Pausing in the doorway, Sophie contemplated her child. Sunlight spilled from the window and over her face, her long wild hair surrounding it like a darkening halo. Beneath the light cotton of a shirt Sophie herself had made, Mariella’s breasts were beginning to bloom in tender mounds. It made Sophie’s heart ache to see them. It brought fear and joy to her, the kind of fear she had tried hard to leave behind, the kind of joy she did not know how to have without fear.

  ‘Who’s coming?’ Mariella had asked her once, many years ago. She had been sucking her thumb as she watched the trees on the edge of the garden from the top step.

  ‘What do you mean, darling? No one’s coming.’

  ‘Who’s coming?’ she had said again.

  Without knowing why, Sophie had gathered her inside, pulled across the curtains and locked the door. A few minutes later, she had heard the rumbling, and a blue truck had pulled into view. Two men got out and looked around. Sophie had never done anything to the outside of the house, left it with its peeling walls and rusted roof, its rotten doorframes and broken windows. She had watched the two men from a crack in the curtain, relieved that the house had made the right impression. After taking a soil sample a few metres from what they had thought an abandoned house, they had left. Once they had gone, Sophie had looked down at the child in her arms in amazement. Had she made her this way? Was it this life, away from anything Sophie had known as normal, that made her so…different?

  The little creature, a malachite sunbird, was tapping against the window. The corners that lifted at Mariella’s mouth calmed her mother. She felt a gentle joy wash from her daughter to her. She walked over to her and kissed her on top of the head.

  ‘I’m going out now.’

  Mariella looked up at her with her deep eyes, eyes whose bottoms could not be seen. ‘Shall I come?’

  Sophie gathered her bag from a table, rummaged around for the car keys. She did not look at Mariella as she replied, ‘No, not today. Soon though, soon you’ll be old enough. For now it’s better if I go on my own.’

  Mariella did not argue. She merely turned her gaze back to the window. The sunbird cocked its head at her, looking for all the world as if it were listening, then stretched out its delicate wings and flew away.

  Sophie bumped down the hill, letting the car run down a little faster than was safe. The window was open and air streamed in. She was off to the Black Market, to sell her paintings and clothes. She would be able to get them a few supplies then, enough to last the month. The journey there took a few hours. It was not very far away, but there existed only the barest of roads, more of an impression among the trees, memories of journeys past. Sophie loved going to the Black Market, and not only for the music, books, art and poems she would see there, all the things banned by the Anonym. This passage through the bush, this segment of day in which she was sunken in trees and grass and sky and animals, was precious. There was no one but her and the nature around her.

  The vehicle reached the quiet green snake at the base of the valley. The river
was gentle here, drifting absentmindedly forward to its faster flowing friends. Sophie drove slowly as she crossed the bridge, her arm outstretched, her fingers feeling the breeze. The trees walked right up to the water. Its surface was covered in weeds, spreading, choking, conquering. But they looked soft and green, like a carpet. As beautiful as they were, Sophie knew these weeds were a sign of humanity, an invasion into this world of balance and harmony. Even here the Anonym has stretched out its influence, moulding, manipulating. Do they know what they do? she wondered.

  Almost immediately, Sophie’s mind skipped on. It did not like to dwell on the slipperiness of power and consequences. Instead she focused on the silence. On the chirruping, the calls, the water. The bush does not ask me why I am and how I am, she thought. It does not ask me if I have worked enough or if I deserve this beauty. It is silent, and it is. It gives you all that it is for nothing.

  Sophie’s mind meandered through a collection of memories. The embrace of the trees often made her think of when she had arrived, with Mariella growing inside her. When she had run away from the Regulators and their Rules, Adrian had taken her in for a bit. He had listened to the same music. She could speak to him of her desperation and yearning. But his was a rebellion in name only. At the rub, he had not been brave enough to defy what they had all known. He had given her the car, dropping the keys in her hand with shame. She could hardly remember the weeks that followed, as her belly swelled. She did remember driving this road with tears in her eyes. The engine had groaned with displeasure as they moved up the slope. She had seen little other than a mist of green. She wished she could go back to the comforts that kept her ignorant, knowing that she never could. As Sophie grieved for the broken parts of herself, the car seemed to drive itself.