ANNETTE MARNER A New Name for the Colour Blue: extract
This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Annette Marner’s beautiful and powerful debut novel A New Name for the Colour Blue, winner of the Adelaide Festival Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and now published by Wakefield Press. Annette Marner writes with an obvious love for the landscape of South Australia as she explores memory, art and the repercussions of violence.
Her protagonist, Cassandra Noble, grew up on the family farm beside the Ippinitchie River, beyond the Flinders Ranges. She escaped to the city to be an artist, but when the novel opens, some years later, she no is longer painting.
In this extract, Cassie is only just beginning to recover after escaping an abusive relationship with the saxophonist Stephen, when she is summoned home to the farm to look after her dying father.
Home holds complex memories for Cassie – of her mother, who died when she was still a child; of her brothers shooting the birds that threatened the almond crop; of her best friend Tania Pepper, who mysteriously disappeared one day and was never seen again.
Extract courtesy of Wakefield Press
From Chapter Three: The Pioneer
I drive north through the frayed edges of the city, past the broken glasshouses and the 1970s homes of cream brick with their stocky fences and unkempt gardens. Beyond, the low-cut stubble in the open paddocks holds the ground against the pull of the end-of-summer northerlies. I am following the eastern coast of Gulf St Vincent and then Spencer Gulf, which stretches to Port Augusta, the remnant sea of the European dream of a great south land with a heart of water. This is the place where dreams turn to salt. The colonists’ and mine.
Hope Gap Road. Dark mirages – sometimes a mirror, sometimes a sheet of silver, sometimes serpentine – slip across the road. I am at Lake View. To the north is my first sight of the Southern Flinders, where they rise up from the plain like scar tissue on the body of the earth.
If I could drive at the speed of light, I could escape into a future time where Stephen could never reach me. Can I, at the speed I’m travelling, still find a way to leave him in my past? I pass a dead galah in the middle of the road. One wing is still moving. But I know it’s not alive. It is the afternoon south-westerly lifting the headsail of its feathers, the bone of the wing like a broken mast.
I don’t want to enter into this ground.
I turn off the highway and head east through Beetaloo. Beyond the line of crops, the hilltops and gullies are darkened by peppermint box and she-oaks. There are many endings here. I am driving through the southernmost reach of the Flinders Ranges, where the quartzite and shale mountains 400 kilometres long divide like a strike of blue lightning, arcing into filaments then disappearing into the air. The great mountain forests end here, as they reach like dark tendrils into the steep gullies and high ridges of sugar gums, acacias, she-oaks and native pine.
The road bends like a river and the shadows of the she-oaks fall across my path. To the east and west, there are stands of blue gums in the right angles of the fences and in the steep gullies where the plough cannot reach. There is a waver on a hill. The one tree left. And there, a final stand of red gums on the river flat. I feel a surge of rage as I look across the paddocks bared of trees and grass. Did we really have to take so much? Where the hill begins to rise, a gutter cuts into the ground, pink and deep. Next to an old truck cabin, two rainwater tanks, crumpled and rusted, lie on their sides like discarded soft drink cans.
Before my people came, the giant sugar gums tilted their sparkling leaves away from the sun. They still slept at night holding their silent breaths until the light of dawn fell across the forest. The quail still laid her eggs in the kangaroo grass by the river. And the cries of the black cockatoo still tore in two the crackling summer sky.
My people came with their axes and their cross-cut saws, their grubbing chains and bullocks. Scarlet. Frosty. Darky. Lucky. They looked for the finest of the trees. With their shining arms and panting saws, they felled them all.
‘Whoa back, Scarlet,’ my great-grandfather called across the tracks as they carried the forest away.
I remember the photograph of his bullock team in the forest. Behind the bullocks were towering sugar gums, their trunks as wide as roads. I dreamed I could see them beyond the frame of the photograph where their crests were shedding gold.
I said, ‘Where are they, Dad?’
‘We cut them down, girl, in ’38.’
As I drive along this road, I still feel their absence in these paddocks. And the quail. And the black cockatoo. Long ago, I used to look for them on my way to Sarah’s Garden, still hoping. Perhaps that shadow in the grass … is it them? My ancestors crossed the songlines they could not hear.
I play Ella Fitzgerald in the car. All the songs without saxophone. Jazz was never part of my life here. But what was? Does surviving count as a life?
*
I don’t know him. The body is too small. His eyes are closed. His skin is like paper pulled across his cheeks. The details of his face have gone.
‘Dad? It’s me.’
He opens his eyes. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ He does not say this smiling. He says it with disappointment.
I try to be cheerful. ‘How are you?’
‘How the hell am I meant to answer that? Couldn’t the boys come?’
‘Mickey’s in America. Brendan’s in Sydney.’
He looks at the ceiling, thinking.
‘We’re ready to take you home,’ I say.
‘Who’s we?’ His voice is a rasp.
‘The ambulance men and me.’
‘Where’s the nurse? There’s meant to be a nurse.’
‘She had an accident, a prang. Swerved to miss a roo and smashed the front end. Sister said she’s okay, but she won’t get here until tomorrow.’
‘What’s it now?’
‘Sunday.’
‘Who’ve I got till then?’
I shrink until I am a quarter of my size. The years of my adult life melt away as if I’d not lived them, as if I had no experience to offer the present. I feel like I am five years old again. I say this single word:
‘Me.’
He grunts and looks back at the ceiling.
*
I follow the ambulance in my car from the hospital. This is the last journey home. I don’t mean home. I mean back. Not just for Dad. For me. The tail-lights of the ambulance are red quartz. I watch them as if they are eyes I cannot trust.
I don’t know how to do this. ‘This’ is an infinity of words: how do I change his sheets, give him medication, be in that house again, remember, cook for him, empty his bedpan, control him, be stronger than him, and watch him die? How am I supposed to do these things and not hate him? Not love him?
The dirt road rises from the tyres of my car and hovers and spreads like a jet trail in the air behind me. I drive up the hill slowly, past the old fig tree by the gate, the car rocking as I manoeuvre over the sandstone reef. The same rocky threshold I remember, only a little rounder, a little higher, a little more exposed by the years of seasons. It’s early evening and I see the house astride the hill, cool and grey like an unlit lamp. I want to put off going in. I stop the car behind the ambulance. Later I’ll park it under the box tree where it will be shaded from tomorrow’s sun.
I turn on the outside light so the ambulance men can see. The garden is washed in grey-green light. The single yellow bud of a peace rose gleams in the darkness against the fence. The ambulance men carry him inside. I wait on the verandah until they are ready for me. A wattlebird rises in a loop like cursive. She is a creature of flowers. In winter, she will disappear. Two wagtails flit above the wild oats along the fence line. There is a tuft of cattle hair on the barb of the wire. I cannot see the herd, but I can hear the sad bellow of them carried on the night wind from across the hills.
Annette Marner
Photo: Kaz Eaton
Behind me the almond trees are darkening. A pair of galahs fly west, home towards the ranges, their cries like a finger rubbed on wet glass. I let their calls ring through me.
The range is a wave, dark and distant, below the stag-heads of the river gums along the Ippinitchie. The old reds are showing their age. The lifeblood no longer rises above the green clouds of them. They cut back. Cut off. The highest branches first, anything to keep the heart of them alive.
At my feet the shadow of the wisteria is a dark web, trembling on the grass. So this is the place I once called home. This absence. Something made me hope I would be welcomed. I don’t know what it was.
An ambulance man comes outside to speak to me.
‘He’s pretty well dosed up for the night. He’s a tough man, Jack. Wanting to come home. Is there anything you need to know?’
‘Probably not at this stage,’ I say. This is not the truth.
‘Don’t be afraid to hit him with morphine if he’s in any pain. And call the hospital if you need to know anything.’
*
For a hundred years my family has walked along this path to the front of the house. The doorstep is a red gum slab hollowed out by their passing feet. Inside, Dad is already asleep. I turn off the light.
A little wooden cross Aunty Nell gave me for my First Communion hangs on my bedroom door. It was a reminder to bless myself every night before saying an Our Father and a decade of the rosary. Below the cross is the gold doorknob I learned to hate. Every Christmas and Easter Mum handed me a rag soaked in Brasso and said, ‘Polish it until you can see your face in it.’ When I leaned forward to look, I saw my reflection: my nose, flat and broad as if it had been squashed against my face, and my eyes like cracks, tiny and dark. My mouth was grotesque like the gutter in the high paddock, pink and deep like a cut. I didn’t know that light can bend, that surfaces can distort. I thought reflections revealed the truth. Just like now.
I open the door. On the wall by my right elbow is a white Jesus on his white cross with the font for holy water at his feet. There is dust and a dead moth where the water used to be. Jesus was once at the height of my shoulder. Now, he’s at my waist. I unpack my bag and put my picture of Tania Pepper on the mantelpiece. It’s safe now. No one is here anymore who can take it away from me. I eat chocolate until it tastes like petrol.
I have forgotten what darkness is. Once the light cord snaps, I can only see black. No outlines, no shape. I know my hand is just above my eyes, but I can’t see it. Do I exist or do I have to wait for the sun to return to bring me back to life?
*
I wake early to the songs of magpies, the light of the morning rolling around in their throats. The kitchen is cold with the blinds down. I pull them, and they fly upwards in a rush like startled birds. I walk along the west verandah. The old whitewashed walls are still free of cracks even after a century. The paint on the wooden verandah post is chipped, exposing the dark of the red gum underneath. Is this where I once sat and dreamed about the light, and drew outlines of flowers on the cement with my fingers? Was it here I chased the Father Christmas seeds as they floated white in the wind against the blue blaze of sky until my eyes hurt from the sun? Until I ran out of wishes?
I make espresso coffee. It takes longer to brew on the electric stove than at Tower Court, but then it rushes through with a roar. I think it will wake Dad. It doesn’t. I am slow this morning. I look at Dad’s electric clock on the wall. To get this far has taken me thirty-five minutes.
‘What’s keeping you so long?’ Stephen would yell at the door.
‘Won’t be long.’
‘Every fucking time, the same fucking thing,’ he’d say. Sometimes I’d say it back, but so he couldn’t hear, while I washed his dirty dishes trying not to splash my clothes. All the time, I could sense him there, a dark figure against the light of the security door, leaning over his saxophone case, his body arched and taut as a loaded bow.
The clouds are shape-shifting across the mountains, now a thumb print, now a pair of white lungs. I knock quietly on Dad’s door, but there’s no answer. I go in. He is breathing deeply, his mouth against the pillow. I am relieved. I want time without him. I want to open things.
From Annette Marner A New Name for the Colour Blue Wakefield Press 2020 PB 228pp $24.95
Like to keep reading? You can buy A New Name for the Colour Blue from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
