Wildflowers, page 1
AWARDS AND PRAISE FOR
ISLANDS
Shortlisted, 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award
‘Islands is a riveting and brilliant portrait of a family in crisis.’ The Age
‘Frew has fashioned another heartbreaker … the scattered chronology plays with the tragic inevitability of damaged people hurting others. Just the tip of an iceberg of sadness is glimpsed, and the story is the more powerful for its restraint.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘Frew’s talent for descriptive prose and psychogeography is evident throughout … her experimentation makes Islands stand out, puncturing the narrative at key moments before exploding the notion of the Family Story. Her writing verges on the sublime.’ The Saturday Paper
‘Overwhelming … a deep and meditative piece of literature. As we watch the family unravel, we are all the time hoping that Anna will come back, that this catastrophe can be fixed … utterly engrossing.’ Australian Women’s Weekly
‘In this multi-voiced story, Frew’s outstanding ability to empathise with characters who are unable to empathise with each other shines through … a work of great compassion and insight.’ Books + Publishing
‘A beautiful study of sorrow that describes the disintegration of a family and the ongoing trauma of a disappearance.’ Readings
AWARDS AND PRAISE FOR
HOPE FARM
Winner, 2016 Barbara Jefferis Award
Shortlisted, 2016 Stella Prize
Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Longlisted, 2017 International Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted, 2016 Indie Book Awards
Longlisted, 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards—
Fiction Book of the Year
‘Peggy Frew is an amazing writer and Hope Farm is a great novel that captures the pleasures and difficulties of being both a parent and of being a child. The complex story of Silver and Ishtar and their fraught relationship is beautifully written, acutely observed and, best of all, completely absorbing. I could almost feel the crisp Gippsland mornings, hear the birds warbling and smell the stale dope smoke. Hope Farm is elegant, tender and very wise.’ Chris Womersley, award-winning author of Bereft
‘Elegiac, storied … aligns itself with other novels in which children—out of rashness, anger or even ignorance—act out to terrible consequences. As with Briony in Ian McEwan’s Atonement or Leo in L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, these decisions are usually compounded by circumstance … Frew does not want to pass judgement though. She understands that the sadness of childhood is to grow up in circumstances over which you have little or no control.’ Jessica Au, Sydney Morning Herald
‘Reading [Hope Farm] made me feel as though I’d lived it. So darn clever.’ Clare Bowditch
‘Frew’s deceptively slow-burn tale of a teenage girl—adrift, bewildered, seeking solidity—moves inexorably to its climax, laying bare a certain darkness at the heart of the alternative lifestyle. But it’s the tale of a survivor, too.’ Luke Davies, award-winning author of Candy
‘At this point it could be too early to call it, but I’m thinking this could end up on my top 10 books of the year list … Beautifully written, difficult to put down, hard not to feel the ache.’ Geelong Advertiser
‘In its exploration of maternal, sexual, unrequited and platonic relationships, Hope Farm is a finely calibrated study of love, loss and belonging.’ Thuy On, Sunday Age
‘[An] assured exploration of that awkward moment between childhood and the teenage years [as well as a] devastating critique of the treatment of unwed mothers in the ’70s.’ Margot Lloyd, Adelaide Advertiser
‘Frew is a gifted writer, evidenced here by finely balanced observations and atmospheric description … Silver is poised at the beginning of adult understanding and Frew handles the challenge with deftness. Silver’s insight and compassion are juxtaposed with naivety and the idealistic force of her first crushes.’ Ed Wright, Weekend Australian
‘Absorbing … A beautifully told story of courage and survival, Hope Farm is about growing up, belonging, and long-kept secrets.’ Carys Bray, author of A Song for Issy Bradley
AWARDS AND PRAISE FOR
HOUSE OF STICKS
Winner, 2010 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript
Shortlisted, 2012 UTS Glenda Adams Literary Award for New Writing
‘Frew’s House of Sticks may well be the standout debut Australian novel of 2011.’ Patrick Allington, Adelaide Advertiser
‘A fascinating debut novel.’ AFR Magazine
‘My debut Australian novel of the year is Peggy Frew’s terrific domestic/rock’n’roll tale, House of Sticks.’ Australian Book Review
‘In House of Sticks, Frew creates a penetrating study of the impact of parenthood on a modern couple.’ Big Issue
‘[Frew] shows real talent in her debut novel, which is sophisticated and extremely well written … Readers of all ages will enjoy Frew’s engaging prose.’ ★★★★, Bookseller & Publisher
‘House of Sticks affords an achingly lifelike glimpse into contemporary Australian domesticity. Frew’s style is colloquial, photorealistic, and yet in its knife-edge focus it is able to slip into a darker, hidden world of psychological fissure and urban dread.’ Canberra Times
‘Excellently unnerving … A tantalisingly strong debut.’ Melbourne Review
Peggy Frew’s first novel, House of Sticks, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer, and was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing. Hope Farm, her second novel, won the Barbara Jefferis Award, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her third novel, Islands, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She has been published in New Australian Stories 2, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin and The Big Issue. Peggy is also a member of the critically acclaimed and award-winning Melbourne band Art of Fighting. Wildflowers is her fourth novel.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in 2022
Copyright © Peggy Frew 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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FOR TEGAN BENNETT DAYLIGHT
Contents
I.
II.
III.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I.
WHEN THE PHONE CALLS STARTED Nina was surprised and wary. Then came dread, and not long after that a flattened and feeble anger. Nina stopped answering the calls, which were from her sister Amber, her other sister Meg, and from her mother, Gwen. She stopped answering the calls and she began to make a series of changes to herself, her life. She did not do this with any sort of control or intent. She did it like someone in a dream.
The first thing she did was put an end to the affairs. Such an old-fashioned word, affairs: a word for her parents’ generation. But they had been old-fashioned, with all the trappings, all the clichés—flowers, champagne, hotel rooms, lingerie. You could, in 2014, still find men who were into that sort of thing. Steep little hills they were, affairs; when you lined them up end to end, as Nina had over the years, what you got was rhythm and structure. There had been one disruption to this pattern—Luke was his name—but that too was over.
The truth was that they had already been tapering off. Nina was getting older and men didn’t look at her as often, or proposition her. She was only thirty-seven, but she’d always relied on a wispy kind of prettiness that, just in the past couple of years, seemed to have abandoned her, and while she understood that there were several things she might do about this, she had kept hoping she wouldn’t have to. She wasn’t sure if she was morally opposed to things like botox and fillers—even dyeing her hair, getting her eyelashes tinted—or just lazy. Either way, there was a resistance, and somehow it had all gradually slithered from something that she might consider one day to something that it was probably too late for.
There was also the matter of meeting men. In the past it had always just happened—they’d found her. There were things that she could do about this as well. She could figure out the right places to take herself—t
And then the calls had begun, and the messages left on her phone. Amber’s: formal, solemn, solicitous, upsetting. Gwen’s: tremulous, hope-filled, pitiful, infuriating. And Meg’s: brisk, demanding, persistent, annoying.
Nina hadn’t called any of them back. She’d had a man on the go at that time, one of the few that was still limping in every now and again, catching her eye, gamely offering his worn rag of a pick-up line. (Nina hated how cynical she’d become, but all the same it was hard not to be—twenty years and so many men and, honestly, there had been only one in all that time who had at any point surprised her, and that was Luke, and look where that ended up. An unkind word came to mind when she thought of these stragglers, these late limpers. It was dregs. But she supposed this, in all fairness, could also be applied to her.) One afternoon, this latest man had sent a text—Tonight?—and Nina had deleted it without replying, and blocked him, and that was that.
She’d taken to lying on the couch in the front room late in the evening. She lay there and looked out the window at the street. The light wasn’t on; nobody could see in. Not that Nina would care. Not caring was the most interesting part of this time of change, this dreamlike time. She had receded into some very quiet, very still inner zone, and from there she was watching herself no longer caring.
This was, strangely, accompanied by a sense of panic. It was the dreadful silent squirming kind—very familiar to Nina. The panic was there in her inner sanctum, the place she was looking out from. But she had come to realise that it was like a very small hurricane—almost ornamental—and if she kept still and did nothing, it just whirled away there beside her quite harmlessly.
Across the road was a huge vacant block surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Every now and then someone came and mowed it, but in between mowings the grass got long and sometimes sprays of little flowers appeared, pink, yellow, white—were they wildflowers, Nina wondered, or just flowering weeds? She wasn’t sure what the difference was. Somehow people managed to dump things in the grass: broken bikes, prams, children’s car seats. Nina didn’t know how the people got these things over the fence. She didn’t know why they bothered getting them over the fence; why not just dump them on the street? It seemed an odd distinction to make. Why was it any more polite, any less irresponsible, to chuck your rubbish into a fenced vacant block than to just leave it on the nature strip?
From the couch she couldn’t see the grass or the piles of rubbish. She could just see the top of the fence and beyond that, in the distance, the lights of the city skyscrapers, and above it all the sky, which on this particular night was overcast, orangey grey. It was chilly and she pulled the blanket down and tried to throw it over herself without sitting up. She used her feet to grab the end and get it into place, undulating like a seal on a rocky beach. This was not in keeping with the tidiness of the room, its order, its tone, but who cared? There was no one to see her. Who cared even if someone was? The blanket was one her mother had given her, pale and darker blues in a chevron pattern. Gwen had got it at a sale. It was pilled now, but it looked all right folded over the back of the couch. The couch had cost a lot of money, and all Nina used it for was to lie on at night sometimes, by herself. She supposed that at least this meant the couch was still in very good condition. She could sell it. Perhaps she would.
She could rent this room out to someone. A housemate. Would that be a good idea? She wasn’t sure. Probably not. She had lived alone for such a long time and had grown accustomed to certain freedoms, certain privacies.
What was it for, this room? This was one of the things she thought about on these nights. She didn’t use it. When she brought men to the house she didn’t bring them into this room. She should say ‘used to bring’—when she used to bring men to the house.
It was like a sort of display, with the nice couch and the sideboard and the pictures on the wall. A showroom or a set, carefully curated to indicate—what? That this was a house. A home. Where—okay—where a family might live. A family with Nina plus another adult in it, and children, or at least pets.
But Nina was thirty-seven and she lived by herself. That hadn’t happened for her—a family, a home. And it hadn’t happened for them either, Amber and Meg, Nina’s sisters. They didn’t even have their own family anymore. A year and a half ago their father had died, and their mother had either turned into or been revealed to be a strange, faraway woman who didn’t look anyone in the eye. And anyway, even before that, the three of them, Nina and her sisters … well, you could hardly call it a family.
It must be late. She didn’t want to sleep here. She didn’t want to fall into that habit; the couch would get worn out and also she didn’t want the room to become too familiar. She liked the way it made her think, when she visited it. She liked the ideas it provided—selling the couch, getting a housemate; ideas that, even with their slightly narcotic edge of self-delusion, brought a stirring, a sense of direction, possibility.
Above the mantel was one of her father’s paintings from the nineties. Aggressive slabs of puce and lurid yellow on a ground the colour of bandaids. Like most of his abstract work it made Nina think of infections, skin problems, inflammation, pus. Still, she was very fond of it. She would keep the painting, whatever else she did—or imagined doing—with the room.
She got up and walked down the hallway, which was getting harder to walk down because of all the boxes. In the kitchen she fried an egg and ate it from the pan, off the spatula, standing at the stove. She threw the empty eggshell out the window.
When she had washed the pan and spatula and put them back in the draining rack where she kept them (what was the point in drying them and putting them away in the cupboard and the drawer if she was just going to get them out again the next night?), she went into the backyard and picked a handful of rocket leaves from the row of dirt-filled polystyrene boxes that her landlady, Viv, had given her. The rocket took care of itself. Two years ago Nina had planted one punnet of seedlings from Bunnings (three dollars and ninety-five cents), which in no time gangled crazily out of control, breaking into starry white flowers. ‘Bolted to seed,’ Viv said. Nina thought she’d wasted her money, but once those plants died off new ones grew and they just kept on seeding and sowing themselves and there were always leaves to pick.
She ate the leaves—which were very peppery; they seemed to be getting more so with each crop—standing in the tiny concrete yard under the dirty and faintly luminous orange city clouds, and then she went back inside and brushed her teeth and went to her bedroom and got into the bed.
‘What’s going on here?’ Sidney had said when she dropped over the week before, squeezing past the boxes in the hall. ‘More boxes? You’re not moving are you? You can’t—you’ll never find rent this cheap anywhere else. You’d have to go out to Reservoir.’ ‘I’m not moving,’ Nina said. ‘I just don’t want all this stuff.’ Sidney peered into the bedroom. ‘Wow,’ she said, ‘even the curtains.’ Her voice echoed.
They sat in the kitchen. Sidney had brought a bottle of wine so Nina gave her the glass and drank from the coffee cup.
‘Do you have any food?’ Sidney said, and Nina fried her an egg.
Sidney watched as Nina disposed of the shell. Then she reopened the window and stuck her head out, leaning over the sink. ‘That’s quite a pile of eggshells you’ve got,’ she said. ‘Out there on the concrete.’
‘I’ll deal with them later.’
Sidney sat down. ‘You could put them in the bin.’ She looked around. ‘Where is your bin?’
Nina was taking a plate and a fork from one of the boxes. ‘I put it away.’ She set the plate with the egg on it in front of Sidney. ‘If you want greens there’s rocket in the backyard.’
