Baardanginy Blue

Our town is called forgotten.

It says so on the road sign welcoming visitors:

Baardanginy Woort Koorl.

Mummy says the name really means ‘running away’, but sometimes words can mean two things. Like when she tells me, be quiet, Saska — what she’s really saying is — it’s too dangerous for you to speak. She tells me this now as she holds the back of my shirt, the sky above the road sign a dark bruise woven with stars.

“What do you want?” Mummy asks the men on the side of the road, her voice trembling with cold. Their faces are pale, and they wear black from head to toe, the same fabric as the night. Even their gun is black, the barrel swallowing moonlight. “I don’t have anything valuable.”

The tall one snatches her car keys, dangling them from his fingers.

“What’s this then?” His face is ugly when he smiles. “I don’t like liars.”

“It’s broken down!” she cries. But the gun still fires. One shot — loud. Louder than the explosions in the mines. I cry and hold my ears as Mummy falls down, down, down.

“You didn’t have to shoot her! What about the kid?” The tall one tries to pick me up and I scream.

“Leave her.” The short man’s voice is mean and smells like peppermints, and I want Mummy, but she doesn’t get up.

I clutch her skirt as they drive away. It’s blue with grey buttons. Maybe if it was made of rainbows, things would be different. But in a forgotten town, it doesn’t matter how brightly you dress if there’s no one there to find you.

When I’m older, I think maybe she knew. She only ever wore blue for important occasions, and death is about as important as occasions get. Perhaps that’s why my aunties worry when I wear it.

“She only ever wears blue.” They whisper behind dry hands, grinding lemon myrtle for their tea. “Maybe we should get her head checked.”

I don’t know why they’re worried. All the best things in our town are blue; the abandoned tin shacks by the ocean; the water where we fish, and the bottom of the mine.

Maybe they’re afraid if I wear it too much, I’ll end up like my Mum. I want to tell them we all end up like her someday, but sometimes I forget how to speak. So I whisper my answer to the trees. Shout it to the coastline:

Nothing is ever truly gone!

But there are problems with forgetting how to speak. Like people not knowing who you are. As I get older, I learn words are important if you want to stay connected. That they bind the town with an invisible thread, keeping those left here tied together. My Aunties are good at weaving thread — and cutting it. Especially the day everything changes.

“You’re moving away?” Auntie Gracie asks the man at the service station with an eyebrow piercing. His shirt is lemon yellow and has a picture of a beetle. “But where will we get our petrol?”

The man shrugs like he’s taking off a coat, despite the sweltering heat and the sad fizzle of the broken air conditioner.

“I’d fill up and get out while you can.” His mouth is a hard line. “Without petrol, you’ll be stuck here. They’re closing the mine at the end of the week. Everyone will be gone.”

One week later Auntie Margaret loads the rusted car with all our belongings, and I sit on the steps of our shack listening to the ceiling creak in the wind.

“I’m not leaving,” I tell her, petting the stray cat that lives under the house. “Who will feed the cat?”

“That’s not your cat.” Aunty Gracie tosses me a bag of my clothes. “Get in the car, Saska.”

I say nothing. Auntie Gracie doesn’t understand that when I say who will feed the cat, what I really mean is, who will be here for the town if we’re gone?

“But the cat,” I say again.

“The cat stays.” Her voice is gravel, and she lights up a cigarette which glows like an orange eye.

When they’re not looking, I tuck the cat into my bag. She snuggles deep into my fraying blue sweater.

I’m here, I tell her in my mind. You won’t be forgotten.

Auntie Margaret smiles as if she knows what I’ve done, and Auntie Gracie slams the boot closed and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand.

“I won’t tell you again.” Auntie Gracie’s voice is old iron. “Now get in the damn car.”

I shake my head, and she throws me over her shoulder. Maybe when I’m bigger, I’ll wonder why I don’t fight her, why I don’t kick and scream and yell at the open sky. But I tell myself sometimes silence can speak too.

Our new home doesn’t know what silence means. The street is loud and mean; the house is old and cold, and I’ve never seen so many buildings or people in one place. Auntie Gracie says our new home means new opportunities, but I don’t believe her. It smells like earthworms and there’s no ocean. No trees, no stars at night. Even the cat doesn’t like it. She refuses to go out, sulking by the window in my room.

“At least we have a room to ourselves now,” I tell her. “It could be worse.”

She just meows.

It helps that my birthday falls two days later, and my aunties buy me paints. They take them off me again when I paint the ocean on my walls, but it’s worth their yelling. When I squint, the smudges of blue paint remind me of the water, and I promise myself that when I’m older, I’ll run back to it. But that’s a long time away, and after a while, men come to the house and tell my Aunties I have to go to school. They ask me if I can read or write, and I tell them I can weave an invisible thread. But only in my mind.

“She can read.” Auntie Gracie leans against the wall, while Auntie Margaret makes the men tea. “She’s just shy and refuses to speak. Doctor says she’ll grow out of it.”

“Either way,” the biggest man says. “She needs to start school or we’ll have to escalate this issue.”

I’m not sure what escalate means, but the next day, I’m dressed in a blue uniform with a striped tie. I hate the feeling of the clothes, but at least they’re blue. I fiddle with my skirt as Auntie Gracie drops me in front of a red brick building where a lady meets me. She’s wearing blue too, and has a smile that reminds me of warm butter. And despite the yelling and the children who make so much noise, she teaches me about my new world. About the people in it, and how to speak in a way that helps me understand them, and them me.

I thank her by leaving a blue thread from my skirt on her desk, even though she’ll never know what it means.

The dreams start as my uniform grows tighter and the seasons pass like brush strokes. By the time my aunties are grey, they’re so vivid I feel like I’m walking through them. The dreams of home, the one I left behind. In them the ocean is louder, the shrill call of the birds stronger. Even the trees in my dreams are taller, whispering the way trees do in the wind. With each one, the longing gets stronger, thicker — until a hole grows in my chest and my lungs are so choked I can’t breathe. Only, when I ask my aunties to go back, they always tell me the same thing.

“There’s nothing left in that town but bones,” Auntie Gracie says.

Auntie Margaret just shakes her head. “Some places are better in our memories.”

Sometimes I dream of the road sign on the outskirts of town. The black of the gun. The night I finish school, Aunty Gracie tells me the truth of that night.

“Her car broke down — she was walking home.” These days her voice is as rough as sandpaper. “The bastards saw her car and took the opportunity for some cash. Must’ve been desperate, the mine closing and all.”

But even that doesn’t stop the dreams.

The wanting.

The call for home.

So I work shifts at the cafe beneath our building. I study until my eyes are sore. And I paint. I paint until I can capture the world I left behind and the cake tin under my bed is flush with cash.

But that all goes away the day my cat dies, and we find out Auntie Gracie is going to die too.

“Stage four cancer.” She tells me as she coughs up a lung. I long ago gave up telling her to quit smoking, and now it’s got her like a rat with its tail in a trap. “They think two months at most.”

It’s three months, in the end. We all stand around her hospital bed, including a doctor with kind eyes who watches me like he likes the way I look. And when we tell her goodbye, she fades into the pale blue bed sheets.

“It’s a good omen,” I tell the doctor whose head falls to the side like I’m a secret he wants to figure out. “The blue sheets.”

But when night falls and we go back to his place, his sheets are grey. I don’t tell him that’s a bad omen, because it’s not. Not really. Instead, he helps me forget the empty cake tin under my bed. The ache from the hole in my chest, and my longing for a time when everything was simpler, and the future was brighter. If only for a night.

But one night is all it takes to weave a thread that can’t be broken.

Nine months later I see that doctor again, but this time he doesn’t like the way I look. The new shape of my body, its curves and edges. My stomach is swollen, my ankles are twice their normal size, and I feel like I’m going to burn out of my skin.

And I do.

The pain is like nothing else. It’s so blinding I clutch the hospital sheets in my hands, wishing the clinical smell of the room was a gentle wash of wildflowers. But when my daughter is born, none of that matters. Because she looks like me. Her nose is round and high, and her eyes are blue.

“She’s the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen,” Aunty Margaret says, holding my hand with stiff fingers. “What will you name her?”

But we both already know.

On her birth certificate, I write my mother’s name.

My daughter likes to paint. We sit outside in the humid jasmine evenings and drink iced tea, singing Paul Dempsey songs on the terrace while we make a mess with colour. Galleries buy my work now, enough that we can afford this place with high ceilings, and I get to stay home with Kirra as she grows bigger.

And taller.

And smarter.

For a moment, time slows to a crawl, suspending us like flies caught in a web. I still dream of home, but it’s fainter now. Further away, like I’m squinting at it through frosted glass.

One day I’ll return. I tell myself. One day.

Most nights Auntie Margaret joins us painting on the terrace, especially when the weather is nice. She tells us stories of her wife while she crochets clothes with tired fingers.

Until one night she doesn’t.

When the nurses call to tell me she’s gone, the hole behind my chest swallows me alive. I live inside it until the lawyer arrives with a letter leaving us the shack in Baardanginy.

Only then does a thread of colour return like the one tying us together long ago.

As we drive down the coast, my senses come to life as if they’ve been dead. Or sleeping. I wind down the window at the oncoming rush of scenery, the salt on the wind and the wild eucalyptus of the trees. It clouds my lungs and fills the long open crater in my chest.

“Why are you crying, Mummy?” Kirra asks as we pull up to the sign outside the town, beaten and worn down by time.

Baardanginy Woort Koorl, it says in faded white letters.

I stop the car, cut the ignition, and help Kirra out onto the side of the road.

“Because we’re home,” I tell my daughter, and she looks at me with those blue eyes. Tucks her head against my shoulder, and together we spread Auntie Margaret’s ashes into the wind.

Two weeks later, we sell the house with the high ceilings.

Two days after that, we move into the miners’ shack. The one I grew up in with the creaky ceiling. It looks smaller now, somehow shrunken. So we bring it back to life. We paint the walls, repair the rot in the roof — and I tell Kirra stories of its past and the people who are never truly gone.

“Do you think one day they’ll come back?” She asks the first winter, a bundle of wool at her feet where she’s learning to crochet. But she’s not talking about the past, she’s asking about the future.

“They’re reopening the petrol station,” I tell her with a smile.

And when they do, the town softens like soil after rain, and so too do I. It starts in my lungs. Melts into my bones with the air and salt of the sea. Then it moves into my limbs, bleeding through my fingers onto canvas.

They fill the mine with water and turn it into a lake. A school opens, and one morning we even hear scratching at the door. When Kirra opens it, a ruddy cat sits on the doorstep. We call him Whisper, and he looks like the cat I had as a child.

These days they come in the thousands. The newcomers. Each year more and more. Some move for the surf, others for the freedom of the open skies. And Kirra helps me capture it.

All of it.

Beneath the sagging willows of the main street, now flowing with life, we paint together from sunrise until sunset. Until our hands are worn and our backs scream at us to stop. Until we’ve brought it to life, the mural at the heart of town. There for the world to see, the painting of my mother, my aunts and the story of our home woven together with blue thread.

Baardanginy Woort Koorl, I sign, and beneath Kirra signs:

Home.

“See?” She tells me, leaning her head against my shoulder. “Nothing is ever truly gone.” I look up as the blue ribbon holding her hair flies away onto the wind.