Free Paper Daisies by Kim Kelly Page B

smiles again at me over her shoulder as she steps towards the window. ‘You are lovely, Ryldy.’
    I rage inwardly at every terror my sister has endured and every terror yet to come. I pray this silent scream might shoot into him and through him and shatter all his bones.
    â€˜Oh – is that him?’ She points out the window, to the edge of the orchard, where the dam meets the fence. ‘The man there. He’s making a bouquet – look.’
    I stand beside her and see the strange man is in fact cutting himself a bunch of those daisies. Drab things; no perfume to them. Natives of some sort. Buckley would get rid of them but that ducklings hide in amongst the stems each spring. The flowers look like wet feathers to me – flung around the plant as if the fox has had some fun in there. I say to Gret: ‘He’s an odd one.’
    â€˜He looks strong enough to carry us away, doesn’t he?’ she says, as if she might actually be calculating the matter. ‘And look at Prince sitting by him – he loves that man.’
    I slip my arm around her waist. ‘Yes, he seems to, doesn’t he.’ The dog loves the man. Love. If I were one to shed tears, I would surely shed them now, for all that most basic of commodities is denied us.
    She turns to me: ‘Invite him to dinner. Can’t we?’
    Just like that.
    â€˜Gret.’ I don’t say no, but my tone says D on’t be dense . There is fantasy and there is foolishness. Uncle Alec wouldn’t even hear the question – invite a vagabond to dinner? – never mind such a sudden alteration to his plans. The table is full, and it is his table. I say: ‘Look at the time,’ not looking at it at all. ‘I should fix your hair.’
    She sits down at my dressing table, but she continues to watch the stranger past the mirror, wishing onwards. ‘Wouldn’t it be good to gad about that way? Go wherever you want to – into the hills and far away?’
    â€˜Hm.’ I take up her hair and begin to brush it: black, lustrous. Chinese hair, we whisper it between ourselves, and if you look closely, you can see. Our thick dark hair and our noses barely there. We are our grandmother: we are Chinese. But Gret is a whisper more so than me. Her hair a little shinier, straighter; her almond eyes as brown as mine are blue. You are an unusual thing. Where did you get your loveliness from? Our beauty is noted regularly, but the question never answered. Uncle Alec knows precisely who we are and where we come from, though. Another of his special barbs for Gret: Choo Choo Chong, go back to Hong Kong , muttered privately, of course, as every insult is. You wouldn’t want anyone to know you were harbouring dirty Orientals under your roof. I am sure he brings his worst upon Greta because she is this fraction too Chinese. A certain breed, we are, and not so rare in these parts: littered across the Gold Country like black poppies.
    And it’s as deep in my blood as it is in hers, urging me now to go and visit that Dr Ah Ling, that Chinese herbalist out at Hill End, not for his miracle cures, but for a poison, a fatal opiate to slip into Uncle Alec’s tea. Damn that I didn’t choose Organic Chemistry over Biology this past year, or I might have learned something useful about herbal potions myself; but I was only allowed to choose the two scientific subjects, and I’ll do the chemistry subjects next year anyway. If I’m allowed. Ah Ling. Uncle Alec knows of him. When I arrived home from university, he’d only got back here himself the day before, from Hill End. He’d had to go out to the little hospital there to trephine a broken skull, drain the blood, some fellow who’d come off a horse. Alec Howell described the performance of his surgical miracle to me in every self-congratulatory detail, and added, Can’t do that with herbs or snake oil, can you – although there’s a