The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

Pearl saltbush

Meaning: My hidden worth

Maireana sedifolia | South Australia and Northern Territory

Common in deserts and salty environments, this low shrub creates a fascinating ecosystem of almost hidden treasures: geckoes, fairy wrens, fungi and lichen colonies. Drought-tolerant, with silvery grey evergreen foliage that forms a dense groundcover that is fire-retardant.

Alice hurried down Main Street, her head full of colliding stars and blood-coloured flowers with dark red centres. She checked the name of the cafe she’d written on the back of her hand, along with Merle’s directions. Down Main Street, turn left. Look for plants and mismatched tables. She was fifteen minutes late.

The Bean cafe was in a small alley, an array of colourful chairs paired with knocked-about tables speckled with paint. Between each table was a small jungle of pot plants. It was a lush haven in the desert.

Moss was sitting at a table under a potted umbrella tree, running his fingers along the metal grate of a small pet cage.

‘Morning,’ Alice said, glancing at Moss. He straightened, his face awash in relief. Pip leapt at the grate, wriggling at the sight of her. She was plump, her coat was fluffy and her eyes were clear. A lump swelled in Alice’s throat.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d come,’ he said.

A young girl with dreadlocks arrived in a cloud of patchouli to take their order. ‘Coffee?’

‘Flat white, please,’ Moss said. The waitress nodded and turned to Alice.

‘Same, thanks,’ Alice replied. The girl took their menus and disappeared inside.

‘So,’ Moss said. Alice busied herself fussing over Pip. ‘How have you been?’

She pressed her lips together, nodding like a dashboard toy. ‘Good,’ she said. Pip nibbled at her fingers.

‘No more blackouts?’

She sat back and met his gaze. He looked genuinely concerned. She shook her head. The waitress returned with their flat whites.

Moss smiled and changed tack. ‘So, Pip’s right as rain. I put her on some pretty strong antibiotics.’

Alice nodded. ‘Thank you.’

‘You want to hold her?’ he asked.

‘Yes, please.’ She beamed.

He opened the cage door. Alice squealed as the puppy leapt into her arms, licking the underside of her chin, snuffling at her ears.

‘There’s no way she would have survived if you didn’t pick her up when you did,’ Moss said. ‘Animals’ needs are no different from ours sometimes. TLC can be as powerful as medicine.’

Images rose in Alice’s mind before she could stop them: Candy’s mischievous smile; Twig’s calm, measured gait; June’s shaking hands.

‘This hot, dry air is hell,’ Alice mumbled as she wiped her eyes. She closed them for a moment, imagining herself from an aerial view, an indistinguishable dot overwhelmed by the expanse of desert.

‘Alice?’ Moss leant forward, touching her arm. Alice jumped, clutching Pip to her. She wasn’t weak. She didn’t need help.

‘I don’t need saving,’ she said quietly.

A strange expression flickered across Moss’s face. He looked past her, out to Main Street where markets were being set up under the shade of trees.

‘I didn’t think you did,’ Moss said slowly. ‘I just know what it’s like to turn up here alone.’ He folded his hands on the table. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but there’s a saying around here, Alice. Whitefellas end up in the Red Centre for one of two reasons: they’re either running from the law, or running from themselves. It was certainly true –’

‘I’m not running,’ she cut him off, indignation setting her cheeks aflame. ‘From anything.’ She struggled not to let her chin quiver. She didn’t want him to see her cry. ‘You don’t know me, Moss. I don’t need protecting. I don’t need –’ she stopped herself before she said June’s name. ‘I don’t need help,’ she said.

Moss held his hands up in surrender. ‘I meant no offence.’ His eyes had dulled. Why wasn’t he fighting her? Why wasn’t he arguing? She was ready for a fight.

‘I didn’t ask for help,’ she said, her voice brittle. Pip yelped in her arms; Alice realised how tightly she’d been holding her.

‘I don’t understand what you’re accusing me of, or why you’re so angry. You turned up at my clinic and passed out in the car park, Alice. What kind of person wouldn’t help you?’

Pent-up emotion left Alice’s body in a single sigh. Depleted, she ran a finger along the patterns in the Formica tabletop, following the marbled white through the blue, each rivulet like a wave. A memory: her father, zigzagging on his windsurfer towards the horizon.

Without another word, Moss put a ten-dollar note on the table, and pushed his chair back. Alice didn’t look up as he walked away, but when he was almost at the end of the alley, she couldn’t stop herself from calling out his name. He turned.

‘What was it for you?’ she asked. ‘The law, or yourself?’

Moss looked down for a moment, his hands deep in his pockets. When he looked up there was a sadness in his face that hit Alice in her chest. He gave her a half-smile and walked away without answering.

Alice stayed where she was, staring at the space he’d left behind. It wasn’t until Pip nibbled her finger that Alice realised Moss hadn’t charged her for Pip’s treatment.

That afternoon, Moss pushed his legs to run faster until his muscles had no more to give. He eased off, slowing to a jog as he pressed on up the trail that scaled the spine of the Bluff.

He had been determined to tell Alice, and honour his promise to Twig. But when Alice had arrived at the cafe, at first so cautious and then so fragile, he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t be like the doctor who walked out to him in the waiting area at the hospital and spoke the words that made Moss’s legs buckle. He couldn’t bring himself to be that person to Alice, the person she’d remember forever as the one who told her that her only blood family was dead.

Twig’s words came back to him. June’s own heart killed her. It was a massive heart attack, after the floods. Although he didn’t know June, the words stung. June and Alice had a troubled relationship, but they were each other’s only family. Twig’s voice had cracked. Is Alice okay? Moss didn’t hesitate to assure Twig that Alice was safe. And yes, given the circumstances, of course he’d tell her to call. Of course he’d tell her that Twig needed her to come home.

Moss came to a stop at the summit, heaving for breath as he surveyed the town. What had he set in motion by calling Thornfield? Why had he involved himself in a stranger’s life?

He leaned forward, trying to breathe through his mouth as the hospital counsellor suggested all those years ago. It was their first family holiday. Lucas sat in his car seat, clutching his bucket and spade. Clara wore a new, bright summer dress. Moss took his eyes off the road for seconds. Mere seconds. The tyres veered onto loose gravel and at the speed he was doing, their four-wheel drive flipped. He got a few stitches and a neck brace. You’re very lucky to be alive, the doctor told him. What about Clara and Patrick? Moss had screamed until he was sedated.

Right or wrong, Moss would not – could not – be the bearer of that kind of news in Alice’s life.

The phone call came two days later.

‘Phone’s for you,’ Merle said, leaning against Alice’s door jamb.

‘Who is it?’ Alice took a step back.

‘Pet, I do most jobs in this place, but personal secretary isn’t one of them.’

‘Right,’ Alice said. ‘Sorry.’ She closed Pip into her room and followed Merle downstairs. ‘Thanks for letting me have Pip here, Merle,’ Alice said as they entered her office.

‘No worries. Moss owes me one,’ Merle said. She nodded towards her desk. Once Merle was gone, Alice went to the desk and picked the phone up.

‘Hello?’ she asked nervously.

‘Alice, Sarah Covington. I got your application for the ranger job. Thanks.’

Alice exhaled, relieved again it wasn’t Thornfield calling.

‘Alice?’

‘Yes, sorry, I’m here.’

‘Good. So, your application was impressive. Running a flower farm is no small feat. Since our vacant role here is a temporary contract we don’t have to go to interview, which means, Alice, I’d like to offer you the job.’

She smiled widely.

‘Hello?’

‘Sorry, sorry, Sarah, I’m nodding. Yes. Thank you! Yes,’ Alice said giddily.

‘Great. When can you start?’

‘What day is it today?’

‘Friday.’

‘Monday?’

‘You sure? You don’t need more time to pack up and get organised?’

‘No.’

‘Monday it is. I’ll meet you at park headquarters when you arrive. I’ll get the Entry Station to radio me when you come through, so I know to expect you.’

‘Entry Station?’

‘It’ll make sense when you get here.’

‘Okay. Entry Station. Park headquarters. Kililpitjara. Monday. See you then.’

‘Looking forward to it, Alice.’

The line went dead. Alice hung up the phone.

For once she didn’t will her heart to slow.

Monday dawned clear and hot. Alice and Pip walked the dry riverbed of the Bluff for the last time. Seizing the chance, Alice pocketed leaves from the bat’s wing coral tree. Cure for heartache, she later wrote from memory into her notebook after she’d taped all but one to the page. She packed her few things into her backpack and, after a cursory glance, left the pub room that had been her home.

‘Will we be seeing you again?’ Merle asked Alice as they waited for her bankcard to clear. She tore the receipt from the machine and handed it and Alice’s card across the counter. Alice took them with a nod of thanks and tucked them into her pocket. She’d never imagined she’d eventually spend the money she’d saved to see the world with Oggi on creating a new life alone in the desert.

‘You never know,’ Alice said as she walked out to the car park, not looking back.

She put her things into her truck, whistled for Pip to leap in, and followed. From her pocket she took the last coral tree leaf and stuck it to the edge of her rearview mirror. Cure for heartache. As she drove off, Pip sat to attention, barking, causing a thought to nag at Alice. At the next set of lights she turned down the street the vet clinic was on. But when his van came into view, Alice lost her nerve and put her foot down.

The highway shimmered in the morning heat. Behind her Agnes Bluff disappeared in the distance. When the road intersected, Alice drove west, further into the desert. She wound her window down, rested her elbow on the sill, and leant her head back against her seat. Imagined the heat might blanch her memories, much like the central Australian sun had done to cattle carcasses littering the barren land. Leaving nothing but white bones and dust behind.

Alice drove for three hours through empty desert before she came to a roadhouse. She pulled in to fill up and gave Pip a long drink. A menagerie of camper vans, four-wheel drives and tourist buses trundled by. Alice thought back to her conversation with Moss. Whitefellas went into the desert either to outrun the law, or themselves. Alice ushered Pip back into the truck. She’d committed no crime, but was no exception.

Glancing around, she wondered what someone looking in her direction saw. A girl in her truck with her dog, who knew where she was going? She hoped it wasn’t obvious that she didn’t have a clue what she was doing. She hoped no one could tell how hard she was trying to believe she could outrun anything if her desire to leave it behind was strong enough.

As she idled through the families and backpackers and tourist groups, Alice felt a surge of hope for where she was headed. If she could make a life for herself in a place where a grieving heart once hit the earth and grew into flowers, maybe everything she’d left behind could be transformed into something meaningful too.

The rocky red landscape rolled slowly into clean sand dune country. Less than a hundred kilometres to go until she reached Kililpitjara. To distract herself Alice studied the pristine patterns on the dunes. The nearest loomed, an untouched pyramid of fiery red sand, rippled by wind. She wiped the sweat from her face with her T-shirt. Her legs stuck to the vinyl seat. The sun was high, the glare was white-hot. Pip jumped onto the floor and curled in the shade. Alice pressed her foot down on the accelerator.

‘Nearly there, Pip.’

Finally, after she drove over a slight rise in the highway, a purple shadow appeared ahead of her, far away on the horizon. Alice blinked a few times to be sure it wasn’t a mirage. As she got closer, she leaned forward, her thighs peeling from the seat. Behind undulating sand dunes, the tops of buildings appeared. A few white sails. Tour buses. A road that turned off the highway, with matching signs either side: Welcome to Earnshaw Crater Resort. Alice kept driving until the Kililpitjara National Park Entry Station came into view. She pulled up at the gate by the window of a brick and corrugated-iron building, where a woman greeted her in a park uniform like the one Sarah had been wearing.

‘Hi.’ She leant towards the intercom grille below the window. ‘My name’s Alice Hart.’

The woman ran her finger down a clipboard before looking up, smiling.

‘Go right ahead, Alice. Sarah’s waiting for you at HQ.’ Her voice crackled through the intercom as she pressed a button to raise the boom gate.

Alice drove through, mesmerised by the sight of the crater ahead. It was as elaborate as a dream, changing shape and form with every bend the road took. Its beauty was strange and mystifying, rising like a textured ochre and red painting against the blue sky. The sand dunes, dotted with spinifex and clusters of mulga and desert oaks, were seemingly endless, and all-consuming. After weeks in the desert, there was something about feeling small, unfamiliar and out of place that Alice enjoyed. It was as if she could, at any moment, recreate herself entirely, and no one would notice. She could be whomever she chose.

Twenty minutes later, Alice pulled up outside a timber-framed building that blended in with the surrounding trees and bushes, under the towering presence of the crater. She turned the engine off. Listened to it tick and cool. Wiped her face on her T-shirt again. After spotting a tap on the side of the building, Alice clipped Pip’s collar onto her lead and got out of the truck. She knotted Pip’s lead loosely to the tap, turned it on to a drip and left her to slurp, tail wagging. Behind Alice a screen door opened. She turned to see Sarah walk out, smiling.

‘Alice Hart. Welcome.’

‘Thanks,’ she exhaled. Having a dog in a national park suddenly struck her as problematic. ‘Sarah, I didn’t mention this, but I have a dog …’

‘Other rangers have dogs here too. Your yard has a fence.’ Sarah nodded. ‘Come in. Contracts to sign and uniform fittings and so on, then I’ll show you to your house.’

Alice’s step lightened as she followed Sarah inside. Maybe sometimes it really could be as easy as leaving everything behind to begin again.

With a pile of green ranger uniforms beside her, Alice followed Sarah out of the headquarters car park and onto a ring road that encircled the crater. The enormity of the outer wall was deceiving, as if it were the side of a mountain range; a line of peaks rather than a circular rock formation. Something about it made Alice shiver: its size, its age, what the impact must have been when the meteor hit the earth. How long ago that was. Pip yawned on the seat beside Alice.

‘Quite right, Pip,’ Alice mumbled. Her mind was too tired. The day was too hot. She was in no shape to be contemplating celestial geology.

Sarah turned off the ring road and onto a smaller, unmarked track that curved between mulga trees. Alice peered through them, spotting a few buildings and a dusty oval. They came to a roundabout that forked in three directions, and took the first turn, driving slowly past a fenced work yard, inside which was a large aluminium shed, petrol bowsers, and lockable cage garages full of machinery and vehicles that bore the park logo. As Alice drove by she caught sight of two rangers inside. One was wearing a slouchy hat and sunglasses, talking over the roof of his ute to another. Though she couldn’t see his eyes, his head turned to follow her truck as she drove past.

They went over a dune and around a bend to the edge of the cluster of staff houses, where they stopped in front of a squat, brick house painted white, with a cage garage and padlocked fence. Alice wondered what all the security and fencing was for, what or who there could be to lock out. Sarah got out of her ute and gestured for Alice to pull into the empty garage.

‘Is this all you’ve got?’ she asked, carrying Alice’s backpack and box of notebooks. Pip leapt out to explore.

‘My new bedding and kitchen stuff is in the back. I went shopping before I left the Bluff.’

Sarah took a key off the ring clipped to her work belt and unlocked the front door. Pip ran in ahead of them.

The house smelled freshly disinfected and was full of light. Alice set her belongings on the dining table, distracted by the view through the rear sliding glass door. The backyard was full of wild acacia, spinifex and thryptomene bushes.

‘There’s a kettle and tea on the counter, and long-life milk in the fridge,’ Sarah said. ‘Main thing to know is where the air con switch and your power box are.’ Sarah pointed at the switch by the front door and flicked it on. A low noise hummed through the house as air gushed from the ceiling vents. ‘You’ve got a swampy system, so it’s water cooled, which means it’s never going to get lower than around twenty-five, but it does the job.’

Alice nodded.

‘Your power box is out the back by the water tank, so if anything shorts, that’s where you’ll reset it. And that’s where your power card goes. There’s five dollars’ worth in there to get you started. You can top up at the Parksville store.’

‘Parksville?’

‘Where we are,’ Sarah chuckled. ‘Staff housing and community.’ She gestured around them. ‘On this side of the dune,’ she pointed to the red sand dune rising behind Alice’s back fence, ‘is where park staff live. On the other side of the dune is a small general store, oval, hall and visitor housing. Twenty clicks away is the resort, where all the tourists stay. That’s where you’ll find the supermarket, post office, bank, petrol station, and a couple of pubs and restaurants.’

Alice nodded again.

Sarah’s face filled with compassion. ‘One step at a time, mate. Soon it’ll be second nature. I’ve arranged for one of the rangers to come by this arv and give you a tour.’

‘Thanks,’ Alice said.

‘I’ll leave you to get settled. See you bright and early tomorrow.’

‘Thanks,’ Alice repeated. ‘For everything.’

As Sarah’s ute faded into the distance, Alice pressed her back against the door and closed her eyes. The house filled with a silence that made her temples pound. I’m here. She breathed in. And out. I’m here.

Pip licked her ankle. Alice opened one eye and peeked at the puppy. Pip cocked her head to one side. Alice nodded. She faced her new home.

Against the wall stood a tall wooden bookshelf. Beside it, a bulky grey desk and chair. Alice sat and splayed her hands on the desk, thinking of her flower notebooks. She looked into the backyard, taking comfort from the wild native plants. This is where she would write, she decided. Memories of writing at her desk as a girl gathered in her fingertips: the cool, creamy wood, the smell of crayons, pencil shavings, paper. The velveteen green ferns in her mother’s garden. Alice shook her head, refocusing on the desk in front of her and the view ahead. Red dirt, green bushes, and a wire fence that sectioned off the yard from the surrounding dunes, all under a jewel-blue sky.

Next to the desk was an archway that led into the main bedroom. Alice left her new desk and went to make her new bed.

Afterwards she stood at the bedroom window. In the distance the red rock wall of the crater shimmered in the heat like a fiery dream.