The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop Page B

another.
    â€œLollies!” yells a girl whose face is laced with the white crust of dried snot.
    â€œHair clips!” calls a skinny child decked out in a pink party dress.
    Charlotte is watching this when a woman comes up to her and holds out a hand. “I’m Carol,” she says. “I’ve seen you before. I think we live on the same street.”
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    The two women walk home by the river. It is windy there and the brown water rushes back and forth in long muscled ridges. The water throbs and the sun is sucked into its depths. They stop at one of the small jetties and peer in. Carol has two small boys who jump and yelp and tackle each other like demented puppies. They climb the wooden railings of the jetty and look down. The color changes as the water deepens: tea gold in the shallows, brown, then greeny black far below. Purple-hued jellyfish hover close to shore, and the sand is littered with their flat, transparent bodies. The women walk along the narrow beach, and Lucie pokes the dead jellyfish with a stick, then crouches to stroke them with the palm of her hand. Charlotte bends down with May and listens to the small waves hissing at the ground.
    Around them the boys run and squeal, leaping from sand to rock to sand until one of them stubs a toe and cries, so Carol hoists him onto her back and carries him. It is quieter then. The women talk a little, of places they’ve visited, the difficulty of gardening in this heat, whether or not there are to be more children. Carol’s husband works in real estate, away often on weekends. All those open houses and auctions. She doesn’t mind, she says. She’s learning the piano and he doesn’t always like to hear her practice.
    â€œDo you play anything else?” Charlotte asks.
    â€œJust the radio,” Carol says. The two women laugh. “But I’m good at that.”
    Charlotte tells Carol about her painting. Or what used to be her painting. She should at least find the paints, get the box out of the shed. They walk further, then stop for the children, walk a little more, then stop again. The path snakes its way through river grass and dips beneath the tall limbs of the gums. Charlotte thought the trees terribly ugly when she arrived, with their asymmetrical branches and scraggly clutches of dull, tough leaves. But she sees now that they are beginning to change—how she sees them is beginning to change. Lucie scratches at the base of their trunks, gathering thin white shells. Charlotte crouches down to help her and sees the trees from below. Their marbled skin circles the trunk and spirals upwards, round and round, higher and higher, moving from the roots out to the tips of the branches as though they were something much more than trees, something much stranger, as though the trees were the final manifestation of a force erupting from deep inside the earth, and the limbs, the branches, all twisted and wrung, mangled in fierce torsion, are the accidental shape taken on by a molten substance when it sprang up into colder air and froze. They seem not trees as she knows them but the residue of something ancient and explosive and long gone. Carol tells her the names of things: river red gum, banksia, swishbush, and swamp paperbark. Charlotte tries to remember so that later she can tell Henry.
    It is heading into afternoon by the time they reach Charlotte’s house, and she invites Carol in for tea. “No,” Carol says, “I’d love to but can’t. I have people coming over for dinner.” Then shesays, quickly, “Would you and Henry like to come? Please do. Please.”
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    Carol lives at the far end of the long street, over the hill and close to the sea. They drive there, the children in the back. A white bungalow, leadlight windows. The front garden full of ­frangipani. Who else is there? Another married couple, Sarah and James. Sarah with the arched, bony nose. James with the jowls. And an old