The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

Flannel flower

Meaning: What is lost is found

Actinotus helianthi | New South Wales

The stem, branches and leaves of the plant are a pale grey, covered in downy hair, and flannel-like in texture. Pretty, daisy-shaped flower heads bloom in spring, though flowering may be profuse after bushfires.

The first story Alice ever learned began on the edge of darkness, where her newborn screams restarted her mother’s heart.

The night she was born, a subtropical storm had blown in from the east and caused king tides to flood the river banks, cutting off the lane between the Harts’ property and town. Stranded in the laneway with her water broken and a band of fire seemingly cutting her in half, Agnes Hart pushed life and a daughter out of her body on the back seat of her husband’s truck. Clem Hart, consumed by panic as the storm boomed over the cane fields, was at first too frantic swaddling his newborn to notice his wife’s pallor. When he saw her face turn white as sand, her lips the shade of a pipi shell, Clem fell upon her in a frenzy, forgetting their baby. He shook Agnes, to no avail. It wasn’t until her daughter cried that Agnes was jolted to consciousness. On either side of the laneway, rain-soaked bushes burst into a flurry of white flowers. Alice’s first breaths were filled with lightning and the scent of storm lilies in bloom.

You were the true love I needed to wake me from a curse, Bun, her mother would say to finish the story. You’re my fairytale.

When Alice was two years old, Agnes introduced her to books; as she read, she pointed to each word on the page. Down at the beach, she repeated: one cuttlefish, two feathers, three pieces of driftwood, four shells and five shards of sea glass. Around their house, Agnes’s hand-lettered signs: BOOK. CHAIR. WINDOW. DOOR. TABLE. CUP. BATH. BED. By the time Alice started homeschooling when she was five, she was reading by herself. Though her love of books was swift and absolute, Alice always loved her mother’s storytelling more. When they were alone, Agnes spun stories around the two of them. But never in earshot of Alice’s father.

Their ritual was to walk to the sea and lie on the sand staring up at the sky. With her mother’s gentle voice telling the way, they took winter train trips across Europe, through landscapes with mountains so tall you couldn’t see their tops, and ridges so smothered in snow you couldn’t see the line separating the white sky from white earth. They wore velvet coats in the cobblestoned city of a tattooed king, where the harbour buildings were as colourful as a box of paints, and a mermaid sat, cast in bronze, forever awaiting love. Alice often closed her eyes, imagining that every thread in her mother’s stories might spin them into the centre of a chrysalis, from which they could emerge and fly away.

When Alice was six years old, her mother tucked her into her bed one evening, leant forward and whispered in her ear. It’s time, Bun. She sat back smiling as she pulled up the covers. You’re old enough now to help me in my garden. Alice squirmed with excitement; her mother usually left her with a book while she gardened alone. We’ll start tomorrow, Agnes said before she turned out the light. Repeatedly through the night, Alice woke to peer through the dark windows. At last she saw the first thread of light in the sky and threw her sheets back.

Alice’s mother was in the kitchen making Vegemite and cottage cheese on toast and a pot of honeyed tea, which she carried on a tray outside to her garden alongside the house. The air was cool, the early sun was warm. Her mother rested the tray on a mossy tree stump and poured sweet tea into two teacups. They sat chewing and drinking in silence. Alice’s pulse beat loudly in her temples. After Agnes ate the last of her toast and finished her tea, she crouched between her ferns and flowers, murmuring as if she were rousing sleeping children. Alice wasn’t sure what to do. Was this gardening? She mimicked her mother and sat with the plants, watching.

Slowly, the lines of worry in her mother’s face vanished. Her furrowed brow relaxed. She didn’t wring her hands, or fidget. Her eyes were full and clear. She became someone Alice didn’t recognise. Her mother was peaceful. She was calm. The sight filled Alice with the kind of green hope she found at the bottom of rock pools at low tide but never managed to cup in her hands.

The more time she spent with her mother in the garden, the more deeply Alice understood – from the tilt of Agnes’s wrist when she inspected a new bud, to the light that reached her eyes when she lifted her chin, and the thin rings of dirt that encircled her fingers as she coaxed new fern fronds from the soil – the truest parts of her mother bloomed among her plants. Especially when she talked to the flowers. Her eyes glazed over and she mumbled in a secret language, a word here, a phrase there as she snapped flowers off their stems and tucked them into her pockets.

Sorrowful remembrance, she’d say as she plucked a bindweed flower from its vine. Love, returned. The citrusy scent of lemon myrtle would fill the air as she tore it from a branch. Pleasures of memory. Her mother pocketed a scarlet palm of kangaroo paw.

Questions scratched at the back of Alice’s throat. Why did her mother’s words only flow when she was telling stories about other places and other worlds? What about their world, right in front of them? Where did she go when her eyes were far away? Why couldn’t Alice go with her?

By her seventh birthday, Alice’s body was heavy from the burden of unanswered questions. They filled her chest. Why did her mother talk to the native flowers in such cryptic ways? How could her father be two different people? What curse did Alice’s first cries save her mother from? Although they weighed on her mind, Alice’s questions remained stuck, lodged in her windpipe as painfully as if she’d swallowed a seedpod. Moments of opportunity came on good days in the garden, when the light fell just so, yet Alice said nothing. In silence, she followed her mother as her pockets filled with flowers.

If Agnes ever noticed Alice’s silence, she never said anything to break it. It was understood time spent in the garden was quiet time. Like a library, her mother once mused as she glided through her maidenhair ferns. Though Alice hadn’t ever been to a library – to see more books in one place than she could imagine, or hear the whispers of collective pages turning – she almost felt she had, through her mother’s stories. From Agnes’s description, Alice imagined a library must be a quiet garden of books, where stories grew like flowers.

Alice hadn’t been anywhere else beyond their property either. Her life was confined to its boundaries: from her mother’s garden to where the cane fields started, to the bay where the sea curled close by. She was forbidden to venture further than those lines, and especially the one that separated their driveway from the lane that led into town. It’s no place for a girl, her father would say, slamming his fist on the dinner table, making the plates and cutlery jump, whenever Alice’s mother suggested sending her to school. She’s safer here, he’d growl, putting an end to the conversation. That’s what her father was most able to do: put an end to everything.

Whether they spent their day in the garden or at the sea, the point always came when a storm bird would call, or a cloud would cross the sun, and Alice’s mother would shake herself awake, as if she’d been sleepwalking through a dream. She became animated, turning on her heel to sprint towards the house, calling over her shoulder at Alice, First one to the kitchen gets fresh cream on her scones. Afternoon tea was a bittersweet time; her father would be home soon. Ten minutes before he was due, her mother would position herself by the front door, her face pulled too tight in a smile, her voice pitched too high, her fingers in knots.

Some days Alice’s mother disappeared from her body altogether. There were no stories or walks to the sea. There was no talking with flowers. Her mother would stay in bed with the curtains drawn against the blanching light, vanished, as if her soul had gone somewhere else entirely.

When that happened, Alice tried to distract herself from the way the air in the house pressed on her body, the awful silence as if no one were home, the sight of her mother crumpled in bed. Those were things that made it difficult to breathe. Alice picked up books she’d read a dozen times already and revisited school worksheets she’d already completed. She fled to the sea to caw with the gulls and chase waves along the shore. She ran alongside the walls of sugar cane, throwing her hair back and swaying like the green stalks in the hot wind. But no matter how she tried, nothing felt good. Alice wished on feathers and dandelions to be a bird and fly far away into the golden seam of the horizon, where the sea was sewn to the sky. Day after shadowy day passed without her mother. Alice paced the edges of her world. It was only a matter of time before she learned she could disappear too.

One morning, after the rumble of her father’s truck faded into the distance, Alice stayed in bed waiting to hear the kettle whistle; the glorious sound would herald the beginning of a good day. When it didn’t come, Alice kicked her sheet off with heavy legs. She tiptoed to her parents’ bedroom door and peered at her mother’s body curled in a ball as lifeless as the blankets around her. A wave of hot and shaky anger swept through Alice. She stomped into the kitchen, slapped together a Vegemite sandwich, filled a jam jar with water, packed them in her backpack, and ran from the house. She wouldn’t take the laneway, there was too high a risk of being seen, but if she went hidden through the sugar cane she’d surely come out someplace on the other side, someplace better than her dark and silent home.

Although her heartbeat was so loud in her ears she almost couldn’t hear the cockatoos screeching overhead, Alice willed herself to run, past her father’s shed and her mother’s rose garden, until she’d crossed the length of the yard. At the boundary where their property met the cane fields, she stopped. A dirt trail ran through the tall green stalks for as far as she could see.

In the end Alice was surprised by how easily she could do something she was always told she should not. She just had to take a step. First one. Then another.

Alice walked so far and for so long that she started to wonder if she might walk out of the cane fields to find herself in a different country. Maybe she’d emerge in Europe, and catch one of her mother’s trains through a snowy world. But when she came to the end of the fields, the discovery she made was almost better: she was at a crossroad in the middle of town.

She shielded her eyes from the sun. So much colour and movement, noise and clatter. Cars and farming trucks coming and going through the intersection, horns beeping, farmers with their tanned elbows hanging out of windows, raising tired hands to each other as they drove past. Alice spotted a shop with a wide window full of fresh bread and iced cakes. It was a bakery, she realised, remembering one of her picture books. This one had a beaded curtain over its entrance. Outside, under a striped awning, was a higgledy-piggledy of chairs and tables, with a brightly coloured flower in a vase on top of each checked tablecloth. Alice’s mouth watered. She wished her mother was beside her.

On either side of the bakery, shop windows promised farmers’ wives a whiff of cosmopolitan life: new tea dresses with narrow waists, large floppy hats, tasselled handbags and kitten heels. Alice wriggled her toes in her sandals. She’d never seen her mother wear anything like the clothes on the mannequins in the windows. Her mother only had one outfit for trips to town: a long-sleeved burgundy polyester dress and tan leather flats. The rest of the time her mother wore loose cotton dresses she made herself, and, like Alice, went mostly barefoot.

Alice’s gaze drifted to the intersection ahead of her, where a young woman and girl were waiting to cross at a set of lights. The woman held the girl’s hand, carrying her pink backpack for her. The girl’s shoes were black and shiny, with frilly white socks at her ankles. Her hair was in two neat pigtails with matching ribbons. Alice couldn’t look away. When the light changed they crossed the road and pushed through the beaded curtain into the bakery. A little while later they came out with creamy milkshakes and thick wedges of cake. They sat at the table that Alice would have chosen, the one with the painfully happy yellow gerbera, and they drank from their glasses, smiling milk-moustache smiles at each other.

The sun beat down on Alice. Her eyes hurt in the glare. Just as she was about to give up and spin around to run all the way home, Alice noticed a word on the ornate stone front of a building across the road.

LIBRARY.

She gasped and ran for the traffic lights. Jabbed the button repeatedly as she’d seen the girl do, until the light turned green and the intersection was clear. She sprinted across the road and through the heavy doors of the library.

In the foyer, she doubled over, panting. The cool air settled her hot, sweaty skin. Her pulse slowed in her ears. She pushed the hair away from her sunburnt forehead, and with it the thought of the woman and girl and their happy yellow gerbera. As she went to straighten her dress, Alice realised she wasn’t wearing one; she was still in her nightie. She hadn’t remembered to change before she left home. Unsure of what to do or where to go, Alice stayed where she was, pinching her wrists until the skin turned raw; pain on the outside softened the sharp feelings inside she couldn’t reach. It wasn’t until moving beams of coloured light fell in her eyes that she stopped.

Alice tiptoed through the foyer and entered the main library room, which opened around and above her. Her eyes were drawn upwards by sunlight streaming through stained-glass windows: a girl in a red hood walked through a forest of trees; a girl in a carriage sped away from a lone glass slipper; a little mermaid stared longingly from the sea at a man on shore. Excitement shot through Alice.

‘Can I help you?’

Alice looked down from the windows, in the direction of the question. A young woman with big hair and a wide smile sat at an octagonal desk. Alice tiptoed towards her.

‘Oh, you don’t have to tiptoe,’ the woman said, chuckling. She snorted when she laughed. ‘I wouldn’t last a day here if I had to be that quiet. My name’s Sally. I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.’ Sally’s eyes reminded Alice of the sea on a sunny day. ‘Have I?’ she asked.

Alice shook her head.

‘Oh, well now, how wonderful. A new friend!’ Sally clasped her hands together. Her fingernails were painted seashell pink. There was a pause.

‘And you are?’ Sally asked. Alice peeked at her from under her eyelashes. ‘Oh, don’t be shy. Libraries are friendly places. Everyone’s welcome here.’

‘I’m Alice,’ she mumbled.

‘Alice?’

‘Alice Hart.’

Something strange flickered over Sally’s face. She cleared her throat.

‘Well, Alice Hart,’ she exclaimed. ‘What a magical name! Welcome. It’ll be my pleasure to show you around.’ Her eyes darted to Alice’s nightie then back to her face. ‘Are you here with Mum or Dad today?’

Alice shook her head.

‘I see. Tell me, how old are you, Alice?’

Alice’s cheeks were hot. Eventually, she held up five splayed fingers on one hand and her thumb and index finger on the other.

‘Fancy that, Alice. Seven just happens to be the right age for you to have your own library card.’

Alice snapped her head up.

‘Ah, look at that. Sunbeams are coming out of your face.’ Sally winked. Alice touched her fingertips to her hot cheeks. Sunbeams.

‘Let me get you a form and we’ll fill it out together.’ Sally reached over and squeezed Alice’s arm. ‘Do you have any questions first?’

Alice thought about it then nodded.

‘Yes. Can you please show me the garden where the books grow?’ Alice smiled with relief; her voice had found its way around the seedpod.

Sally studied Alice’s face for a moment before erupting in hushed giggles. ‘Alice! You crack me up. We’re going to get along like a house on fire, you and me.’

In her confusion, Alice just smiled.

For the next half-hour Sally took Alice on a tour of the library, explaining that books lived on shelves, not in a garden. Row upon row of stories called to Alice. So many books. After a while Sally left Alice to herself to sit in a big, cushiony chair by one of the shelves.

‘Browse about and pick out some books you like. I’m just over there if you need anything.’ Sally pointed in the direction of her desk. Alice, already with a book in her lap, nodded.

Sally’s hands trembled as she picked up the phone. While she dialled the station, she leant forward to make sure Alice hadn’t followed her, but she was still sitting on the chair, the worn soles of her sandals poking out from under the grimy hem of her nightie. Sally fiddled with Alice’s library form, gasping when the paper sliced into her fingertip. Her eyes filled as she sucked the blood from her finger. Alice was Clem Hart’s daughter. She pushed his name out of her mind and pressed the phone hard against her ear. Pick up. Pick up. Pick up. Finally, her husband answered.

‘John? It’s me. No, I’m not, not really. No, listen, Clem Hart’s girl is here. Something’s wrong. She’s in her nightie, John.’ Sally struggled to keep her composure. ‘It’s filthy.’ She gulped. ‘And John, her little arms are bruised to buggery.’

Sally nodded along with her husband’s steadying voice and wiped the tears from her eyes.

‘Yes, I think she’s walked on her own all the way from their property so, what’s that, about four kilometres?’ She sniffled as she tugged her hanky from her sleeve. ‘Okay. Yes. Yes, I’ll keep her here.’

The phone receiver slipped in Sally’s sweaty palm as she hung up.

Alice added another book to the semi-circular tower she had built around her.

‘Alice?’

‘I’d like to take all these home, please, Sally,’ Alice said earnestly with a sweep of her arm.

Sally helped her to deconstruct her tower of books, return the dozens to their shelves, and explained twice how borrowing library books worked. Alice was dumbfounded by her limited choice. Sally checked her watch. The bright light falling through the story windows had softened to pastel shadows.

‘Shall I help you pick?’

Alice nodded gratefully. She wanted to read books about fire but didn’t feel brave enough to say so.

Sally crouched to Alice’s eye level and asked her some questions – name one of her favourite places to go – the sea – and choose a favourite story window at the library – the mermaid – then with a knowing nod, she touched her index finger to a slim book with a hard cover and bronze lettering on the spine, and slid it off the shelf.

‘I think you’ll love this one. It’s about selkies.’

‘Selkies,’ Alice repeated.

‘You’ll see,’ Sally said. ‘Women from the sea who can shed their skins to become someone and something else entirely.’ Goosebumps covered Alice’s body. She clutched the book to her chest.

‘Reading makes me hungry,’ Sally said abruptly. ‘Are you hungry, Alice? I’ve got some scones with jam, and how about a cup of tea?’

At the mention of scones, Alice thought of her mother. She was consumed by an immediate desire to be home, but it seemed that Sally expected her to stay.

‘Can I go to the toilet?’

‘Of course,’ Sally said. ‘The ladies’ is just down the hall there, on the right. Shall I come with you?’

‘No, thank you.’ Alice smiled sweetly.

‘I’ll be right here when you get back. We’ll have scones, okay?’

Alice skipped down the hallway. She pushed open the door to the bathroom. Waited a moment, then stuck her head back out to peek at Sally’s desk. It was empty. The clink of cutlery and china came from further down the hall. Alice scurried for the exit.

As she ran home through the cane fields, she felt the shape of her library card in her nightie pocket, like one of her mother’s flowers. The selkie book jostled up and down in her backpack; sunbeams bounced around inside her belly. Alice was so busy imagining how much her mother would love her library book, she didn’t realise that by the time she got home her father would be back from work.