Free A Darker Music by Maris Morton Page B

it.’
    ‘Gary and me did a project. Mrs Melrose told us how to find things out from council and that. Gary wants to be an archaeologist. I’ll show you the garden now.’
    She set off again with Mary trailing after and stopped near a group of trees, gnarled and patched with lichen. ‘Those are apricot, mulberry and quince trees.’ She nudged Mary before whispering in her ear, ‘And over here’s the secret garden.’
    Where the land sloped down to the water, someone had marked out a circular bed with evenly matched stones. Within the circle, fighting their way up through the rough grass, were the spears of bulbs — Mary couldn’t tell what they might be — hundreds of them, crowded together. Some woman had made this garden, planted these things, years and years ago, and they’d long outlived her, blooming every year in solitude.
    ‘It’s real pretty when they’re out,’ Gayleen said, perhaps gauging Mary’s feelings. ‘They smell nice.’ She turned away and headed along parallel to the water’s edge, pushing aside branches to clear a path. Fallen melaleuca leaves lay mixed with the soft needles from the casuarinas to form a textured carpet.
    Gayleen stopped. ‘Here. This is the good bit.’ She bent down and picked up a smooth rock, big as a flattened football. There was a hand-sized hollow in the top. ‘It’s for grinding nardoo. That’s a native fern that grows in the water. The Noongahs used to eat it. There’s a few of these and the little ones, too, that they used.’ She rolled her fist over the stone’s hollow to indicate the action of grinding. ‘Mr Melrose says the stones don’t come from here — the Noongahs must have carried them from somewhere else. The coast, most likely.’
    Mary took the stone and almost dropped it. She couldn’t imagine carrying something as heavy as this for any distance without a good reason.
    ‘He says they left the stones here so they could grind the nardoo when they came back every summer. They would’ve feasted on the marron, too, and quandongs … there’s a patch of them over that way.’ She indicated with a tilt of her head.
    Mary had heard of these Aboriginal artefacts but never held one in her hands. It didn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to picture the bush alive with the dark figures of Aborigines, firelight flickering through the trees, the women crouched over their nardoo stones, grinding whatever food the nardoo plants yielded, the men perhaps away hunting kangaroos or goannas, or making a fish trap somewhere in the creek; the children laughing and playing at hunting and gathering.
    A breeze whispered through the casuarinas, and the two ducks took off with a clatter of wings, leaving the egret standing, shining white against the water, its reflection rippling from the ducks’ departure.

8
    C LIO WAS LYING AMONG HER PILLOWS , wide awake. This morning she wasn’t listening to music; instead she was waiting with something near dread for the sound of the Piper’s engine.
    She could remember, with an effort, a time when the sight of Paul would have brought a blush to her cheek and a flutter to her heart.
    Looking back, marrying Paul when they’d spent so little time together had been a risk. Marriage was a gamble at the best of times, but she’d been vulnerable then, rejected by everyone she cared about, or so it had seemed to her. Her mother, the prop and mainstay of her childhood, had died slowly of cancer when she was just sixteen. Of course, that couldn’t fairly be rated as a personal rejection, but at sixteen it had felt that way.
    And then, within a year of her mother’s death, her papa married that woman and brought her to live in her mother’s house. She still hadn’t forgiven him. Knowing he’d been carrying on with her all the time Mum had been slowly dying made forgiveness absolutely impossible. Then Penny married her rich lawyer and went to live in England, and apart from routine Christmas cards there wasn’t any real