The Styx. Patricia Holland

      Chapter 4

      Rememory 20

      Winter turns to summer without a thought for spring.

      The jasmine mocked my father for at least nine months every year, twelve in a good season. My mother planted three different jasmine varieties all over the place, everywhere, in the 1980s as soon as she moved in, and even now when she’s not here, bodily at least, he has no option but to remember her.

      She taught me the proper names for each variety. Some aren’t real jasmines, but they smell the same-ish. Jasminium polyanthum, or Pink Jasmine, flowers in winter. It wraps itself tightly through the lattice on every verandah on all four sides right around the house.

      Then, when it has a rest, Trachelospermum jasminoides—she called it Starry Starry Night and Day Jasmine—takes over for the hotter times. Until it flowers, you don’t realise it’s there. It’s just a general green, cooling the house, day in, day out, intertwined with the Pink Jasmine, but is much more steadfast, refusing to die down even if my father turns off the sprinkler system. Mum set it up so that in the hotter months, every hour, the sprinklers around under the eaves mist for three minutes, air-conditioning the entire homestead.

      Then there’s the third jasmine variety, Cestrum nocturnum. It’s not a real jasmine, but Mum and me, we adopted it as part of the jasmine family because we loved it so. Virtually every night after the worst cold weather, and in high summer, and lots of other times of the year, Cestrum nocturnum, or—Mum’s name for it—Nighty-Night Jasmine, visits on dusk to wish me goodnight, flooding the house and garden, insisting on acknowledgement.

      It must choke him, to breathe her in, in every breeze wafting through the house. He must gag on her scent hitting the back of his throat when the air is heavy and still. For me, Cestrum smells like the end of cold nights. Even in summer, it smells like the sweetest spring.

      At the end of October—it was after Mum had left, and just after I turned six—Mrs Stephens rang my father regarding my starting school in Term One, the next year.

      “If we start Sophie on the first day with all the others, she will feel much more a part of her class,” Mrs Stephens said.

      It was simple. I was one of her students now, so I now needed to attend school. And she wasn’t leaving it to chance that my father was on task. She’s a bit like my mother. There is no stopping her when she’s on a mission, and she even sent the local priest, Father Ryan, out to congratulate my father on supporting me so strongly in my education.

      “You are a credit to your grandfather,” Father Ryan told my father.

      “When our gift from God, Mrs Stephens, told me you were sending Sophie to school next January, I literally fell to my knees and cried,” Father Ryan said.

      “Though the mills of God grind slowly,

      they grind for one and all;

      With such patience He stands waiting,

      with your actions you stand tall.”

      That’s almost sort of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Father Ryan’s ability to misquote was legendary. He would never let the real words, or even the real sentiment, stand in his way.

      “And I have uniforms for her,” he went on without a breath, “courtesy of Mrs Stephens of course.” Father Ryan would be a good didgeridoo player. He can breathe in with his nose, as his words are tumbling out of his mouth.

      At that stage I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to go to school. The unknown sours our thoughts, but with any whiff that my father was being “managed” by Father Ryan, my mood couldn’t help but freshen. You have to admit it was a cute tactic, and for me it made me feel so very much less alone.

      Rememory 21

      The sea is still, the sky invisible—opaque, but invisible.

      My school exercise books were all covered in poo-brown paper. My father’s latest “friend” covered them all in one crinkled batch with her stinkin’ horrible son’s stinkin’ school books. I am sooooooo glad he doesn’t go to Mango Downs State School. He used to pinch me or flick up my skirt when my father wasn’t looking. I swear his mother saw him do it, and did nothing. Her son is never ever at fault. I taunted him, she’d say. Or maybe she thinks I should feel grateful for his attention.

      I didn’t want poo-brown paper. I wanted the flying-unicorn contact covering and all the other school stuff my mother bought for me. I wanted the poppy pink pencil case with the letters S O P H I E in plastic slots. I wanted my cat, dog and bird exercise book labels. My father’s latest “friend” knew I had this stuff.

      “Ridiculous,” she said to my father when he gave her Mum’s bag of school stuff, to “help” me get ready.

      “What is she going to do with that?” my father’s latest “friend” said. “Contact covering is messy fiddly stuff. I had brown paper on my books at school. It’s much easier to cover them with. That’s all we ever use. Ridiculous nonsense turning books into a circus, and what’s she going to use them for anyway? Rose always overdid everything. Never knew when to stop.”

      My father’s latest “friend” had been my mother’s closest friend. Or so my mother thought.

      Rememory 22

      Now I’m going to school, every school morning, Mum’s jasmine screams at me, “Get up, get up!”

      The bus leaves at seven fifteen am sharp from our boundary cattle grid, a few kilometres down and along the main road, and I hate being late. My father is always late. Sharon, “the nanny”, was government-funded during school time as my full-time aide, but I may not talk about her much, as it makes me angry and she is irrelevant. I have to have an aide because of all my one-on-one contact needs: sitting on a chair, wiping of the nose, feeding of the food, getting on and off the school bus, the carting up and down the stairs, and all the unmentionable “toileting” aspects. But anything else, and it’s not her job, she reckons. The rest of the time—admittedly there isn’t too much of that—she sits around looking bored. She hasn’t even got a driver’s licence!

      To get things rolling every weekday morning (except school holidays and days he was too hungover to make sure “the nanny” got up), I would march up and down the verandah—half a metre at a get-up-fall-down time—tottering from foot to foot, lurching from wall to chair, hanging on by leaning, desperately flappin’ at anything, until everything dissolved, and I thumped on the floor, to start all over again. I’d scream until he got his act together to drive us to the bus stop. He’d tell people in a sweetly amazed voice, “It’s amazing, she seems to know when it’s time to go.”

      Derrrrr. There’s a frickin’ clock in the kitchen—you spastic.

      My cousins—my father’s brother’s kids—were always at the bus stop on time. I spent a lot of time at their place over the years. They lived ten kilometres down the road—it was a dirt road back then—on the opposite side, on the rubbish-country side, my father called it. Their property was twenty thousand acres of undeveloped bush. It was a nightmare to muster, but carried a fair few head of cattle, a few thousand at least. Their house smelt of cats’ piss and rats. Just about every day after school at the bus stop, their mother, Aunty Zeb, would bring little treats for them—Kinder Surprises, lollipops, gingerbread girls—but not for me, even though she knew she was picking me up too. She always, at least slightly, resented me—lots really. I was a non-person, and I think she didn’t want to waste her money. I’m still not sure what hold he had over them. He probably paid them to have me after school, so he wasn’t tied to the bus run. That’s the only thing that makes sense.

      I overheard Aunty Zeb once, talking to someone on the phone.

      “It’s a pain in the arse having to have her with us all the time,”