Psyche's Garden

By Myfanwy Tilley

Nicholas Penn has disappeared. Is he dead, as his wife fears, or has he moved to pastures new, as his mistress suspects?

Psyche’s Garden is a new telling of the Psyche and Cupid myth set in Bell, a small town in South Australia - a town in its last gasp, in the grip of drought and decline, standing in the path of a raging bushfire; a town where something of the presence of the gods and their cruel handiwork can be traced...

The novel begins in the modern day with Deidre, a woman from Sydney, visiting the Bell cemetery. Deidre is ostensibly researching local history, but we soon learn that she is seeking to find the man with whom she had had an affair ten years earlier, the father of her son. Deidre has never before been to Bell, but she discovers that her past is entwined with the history of the town in ways she could not have guessed.

Deidre’s presence in Bell is the catalyst for Grace Gaudron to confront long held suspicions about her missing husband. Almost blind, and more than a little eccentric, Grace spends her days deliberating on rumours that Nicholas was duplicitous and involved in the unsolved disappearance of a teenage girl from Bell. When the two women individually discover the truth about Nicholas, their lives are changed forever.

Psyche's Garden follows two narrative strands - past and present - that interweave the stories of the generations of Bell and, at a measured pace, unlock the town’s unpleasant secrets. As the novel unfolds, so too do the tales of intrigue, rape, murder, bitterness, delusion and madness, and in such a way that the reader can only make sense of the picture being woven once the tapestry is complete. There will be judgement, albeit in the nature of a purging and, as the curse of the gods appears to have run its course, there is, as well, redemption.

Psyche's Garden is both mystical and mysterious, but it is placed within a very solid tale of family, friends, murder and lust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Myfanwy Tilley
• Release date: Sep 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311903730

Myfanwy Tilley

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Book preview

Psyche's Garden

Myfanwy Tilley

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Myfanwy Tilley

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover: Untitled etching by Gwyneth Tilley (c.1983).

For Neil and Aeddan.

"For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand, for this I also believe - that unless I believe, I shall not understand."

Anselm of Canterbury

Introduction

Dear Reader,

The novel you are about to read is inspired by the ancient myth of Psyche and Cupid. Set in the modern day and in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, this ancient myth is not the only tradition referenced in this story, others are explored - but those are for the reader to discover. This summary of the Psyche myth is included at the end of this tale for the reader’s curiosity, but the novel stands on its own. I hope you will enjoy it.

Table of Contents

The myth of Psyche and Cupid

A Short History of Bell: Foreword

2014: 1

2014: 2

A Short History of Bell: Part 1

2014: 3

2014: 4

A Short History of Bell: Part 2

2014: 5

2014: 6

2014: 7

A Short History of Bell: Part 3

2014: 8

2014: 9

2014: 10

2014: 11

2014: 12

A Short History of Bell: Part 4

A Short History of Bell: Part 5

A Short History of Bell: Part 5 continued

2014: 13

2014: 14

2014: 15

A Short History of Bell: A Final Word

Author's note

A Short History of Bell

Foreword

Perhaps you wonder why anyone would bother writing the history of Bell? After all, it’s just a small town within a stone’s throw of a small city and no different to thousands of other such places in this world. I’ll be quite frank with you: I had absolutely no interest in Bell whatsoever, and I would have never gone there but for my son. I followed him to Bell to prevent him from making serious errors of judgement in matters of love.

Bell was once very beautiful, the soil fertile and water was plentiful. It grew from gold and thrived. Then, like so many beautiful things, its brightness faded and everything - the soils, the creek beds and even the gold, turned to clay. But you’ll read all about that in the following pages, so I won’t pre-empt myself. However, I will say that had my son stayed where he belonged, I would not have become so angry and acted as I did (callously, I have been told), meddling with peoples’ lives and with this small town’s prosperity. These chronicles are not a justification of my actions, and nor are they an attempt to purge myself of bad conscience. History must be told, that’s all. Make of it what you will.

Some have told me I’m approaching this account in quite the wrong way; not at all as a learned person would (I think they meant to say ‘should’). I’m told that histories should be reported at arm’s length using a more orderly structure; a strictly chronological ordering of events. I’m not interested in categorising things in this way. It’s a fad of the modern age. Change is all that matters. Without it, time would have no meaning. Change is cause and effect and history is layer upon layer upon layer of changes. It’s enough for me to part some of these layers - a woman of my great age shouldn’t be expected to separate every strand woven into every layer. I simply can’t remember for whom something is ‘now’, but what might be ‘then’ or ‘when’ for another. Let me illuminate this for you by way of an example:

I say I followed my son to Bell because that’s how it happened. But you will read this account and say I was there before my son arrived. Indeed, when all is written down, that is how it might appear. I assure you, I am not attempting to deceive you. Even my worst critics would agree with me on this point. Something a very old acquaintance of mine once said of time is that the past is simply a memory had in the moment - which comes close to explaining it. However, you must accept that for me, the past is as illusory as the moment is fleeting. As for the future, it’s already the ‘now’, and the history of Bell is being woven, folded and unfolded as I write.

And then there is the question of objectivity. I am told that I have made assumptions about what people think and that this has led to a completely biased view of the reasons behind cause and their relation to effect. Well, of course this account is subjective. It’s not the first volume in history to be so, nor will it be the last. I do it this way because I must: everything changes all the time. Nothing simply ‘is’ and, I suppose, that also pertains to all things’ meanings. All the same, I played a part in this town’s prosperity, and I believe my chronicles will portray the essence of Bell’s history quite well. For all of this, the reader will be able to better understand the present.

What of my son’s love? Some might say that my actions arose from jealousy; that I resent young and beautiful women because I am old and my once famous beauty has faded. Well, yes, this girl is beautiful, I suppose, but she’s not one of us. I could never have sanctioned their love. I wanted to prove to my son that she wasn’t good enough for him. She would never transcend the inadequacies of her kind. If he had only listened to me, he would have realised his folly before it was too late. So much destruction, madness, death…

Anyway, I succeeded in separating them, but I wonder if the cost for me has been too great. My son will always live in my heart, but what of her? She will - if I may be permitted to borrow a friend’s words, be trapped in the inescapable net of ruin for her own want of sense. She will not accept that he is gone from this world forever.

I’ve completed several chapters of my chronicles, but it will take some time until I get to the part about my son and that awful girl. I may well lose interest in the whole project if it takes too much more of my time. You should take the trouble to observe what is occurring at present in addition to reading my chronicles - that is, if you wish to know the outcome sooner than later.

2014

-1-

It takes ten minutes by car to reach the Bell cemetery from the township. There are no street signs showing the way and no map has marked it for nearly half a century, even though the dead continue to be buried there. The cemetery waits for newcomers at the end of a dirt track and is nestled at the junction of three valleys. This narrow track has splintered from a potholed bitumen road that ends abruptly at Martins’ Dairy, long since deserted. Martins Road runs off a better maintained country road, though it, too, is potholed and overgrown. Eventually, this quiet rural road links to North Terrace, an ambitious name given to one of the four perimeter roads of Bell.

A crudely hand painted sign with words too weatherworn to read hangs between wooden poles planted on both sides of a gap in the fence: the entrance to the cemetery. Stringybark trees line the northern boundary, but their growth has been stunted by drought - they are too small with too few leaves to offer much shade over the acre or two that is home to seventy-eight of the town’s previous residents. The barbed wire fences built to keep the dead from wandering have acquiesced to time and once tensioned strands of wire now lay sprawled across the ground. In their haste to leave the cemetery, the souls of those who should never have been buried there have strewn the plastic roses that graced the bases of their headstones, dislodged the wooden crosses of the anonymous and scattered the shattered green glass that carpeted a modern, though already forgotten, era of graves. Only the foxes and rabbits are happy to pass the time of day in the Bell cemetery, sheltering from the scorching heat in their lairs and burrows dug deep beneath the headstones of the unvisited.

2014

-2-

Deidre Thomas lay on the grass in the broken shadows of the tallest tree in the Bell cemetery. Her long skirt covered her legs and her shirt sleeves were rolled down - the cuffs optimistically left open to catch any stray wisp of air passing from the sun’s glare into the shade. She cradled her head in clasped hands and studied the headstones that stood like a disorderly regiment at the bottom of the slope. A hot wind blew from the northwest and every breath she took coated the inside of her mouth, her throat and her lungs with humus and dust. The land shimmered incandescent and formless as the midday sun chased the last of the morning shadows away, bleaching what subtle hues the thirsty pastures had left to offer. The earth screamed in the heat and Deidre’s body wailed in reply. Had the leaves not rustled as the burning air wafted through the cemetery, she may not have noticed the peace in which she was immersed.

Deidre pondered the names time had left behind. Wealth, connection and influence echoed from the epitaphs of St James, Porteous, Gaudron, de Vries and the like. Yet the smallness of the cemetery and the disorder within made them seem destitute and forgotten. Generations of wealthy families lay buried in clutches, their names and their legacy to the world etched into marble headstones once embroidered with gold leaf. Below the names of the deceased were reliefs of the Christ surrounded by his disciples, or swallows soaring around Gothic crosses. Children who had died in infancy, or otherwise too young, were watched over by stone cherubs or angels peeping around the side of their headstones. Most of the cherubs had lost their heads and the angels’ wings had broken. Bird shit had slid down the face of the headstones and congealed in the cradles of carved letters.

The less wealthy of a century ago had made do with cast-off sandstone blocks, fractured during quarrying. Unsuitable for use in building, they were adequate weights for holding down the dead. Children lay next to their mothers who lay beside their husbands, forever together, and someone - perhaps a family member - had chiselled the deceased’s name and the meaning of their life in less than a dozen words into the crumbling rock, hoping it was deep enough to last forever.

Old wooden crosses with the words Rest in Peace painted across them had long since fallen apart, although there were signs of recent attempts to repair them. They appeared arbitrarily located across the cemetery, some between the clusters of sandstone and marble, while others stood on their own, isolated and half-hidden by the long, dead grass. Few had names on them and whoever lay beneath may have been a mother, father, child or family pet. But most of the crosses were not where they were originally intended to be, Deidre felt sure, and they had been wilfully displaced or broken, as had the plastic flowers and cheap ornaments that had been sentimental gestures of love and memories.

Time and weather spared none of them, rich or poor, Deidre thought, raising her head to look beyond the cemetery and across the adjacent paddocks in the direction of an old dairy. Squinting through the glare of the midday sun, she studied the naked landscape which was interrupted only by a smattering of trees and a dried creek bed with sparse bush on either side. There was no birdsong, no cows or sheep, no cultivated pastures and no people. Nothing gave any hint of life. A gust of wind blew across a paddock throwing dust and dead grass into the air, and the sun’s light reflected on the debris like glitter and streamers in a parade. Except there was no fanfare, just loud emptiness.

Deidre inhaled, unconsciously registered a familiar aroma, and sneezed. I wonder if the land can ever recover from this, she pondered sleepily. Propping herself up onto her elbows, she again gazed over the headstones. Frustration welled inside her, making her feel hotter still. She was certain that had he been buried in this cemetery she would have found his grave by now. She gazed across the cemetery and, looking from left to right to reassure herself no corner had been overlooked, she found herself staring into the eyes of a snake. Anaesthetised by the heat and the musty perfumes of the laden air, she was unable to move but, strangely, she felt unmoved by fear. The snake, no more than an arm’s length away, had raised itself from the ground at the broadest part of its body and appeared equally transfixed by her. Neither of them moved and a pleasant eternity passed between them.

A Short History of Bell

Part 1

Every town has its beginning: an idea, a rock from where a settler surveys a fertile valley, a creek with flowing water, or even the chance discovery of something precious; gold, perhaps. All of these and more shaped Bell, but its real beginnings were in a complaint.

On the second day of April in 1872, a customer of the Bank of Adelaide laid a complaint against a bank employee. The complainant alleged the clerk failed to correctly total a sum of money deposited into his account. He was a valued customer of the bank, married to a relative of William Horn, the director of the London board of the bank and who, therefore, could not possibly have been mistaken.

The employee was Monsieur Pascal de Vries, a twenty-three-year-old, hard-working and honest clerk. Monsieur de Vries, a French immigrant, with impeccable English, possessed a precision and speed in calculation unequalled by any other in the banking industry. However, despite his competence and knowledge of banking affairs, he hadn’t risen above his lowly position in the Bank in four years, whereas younger men of considerably less talent were quickly elevated to senior positions.

The cause of this was rooted in the history of South Australia’s settlement. Seventy years earlier a Frenchman and an Englishman shook hands and exchanged cartographic notes off the coast of South Australia while their fellow countrymen died in battles raging across the English Channel. This chance but congenial meeting between Captain Baudin and Captain Flinders became well known in Australia. Some went so far as to claim it inspired the colonial reformers’ interest in Napoleon’s political and social revolution that, in turn, influenced the planning of the new settlement: the new South Australian colony would not be settled by convicts, and nor would its governance be determined by a landed gentry or by the church.

The influence was short-lived. The British settlers who arrived in Adelaide brought with them pretensions of aristocracy and such religious righteousness that a closed and nationalistic enclave was soon born. Tied to the motherland’s apron strings as they were, generations of these expatriates would never forgive the French for Napoleon, and from this a more insidious, though less bloody, contest involving pride and honour commenced between the English and the French in South Australia.

The antipathy towards the French was compounded in 1872 when a French academic emerged from the basement of a little-known French university grasping a fistful of old letters in one hand and a small volume of diaries in the other. He claimed the discovery of many landmarks of Australia’s southern coast had been wrongly attributed to Flinders.

Captain Baudin charted the South Australian coast some days before Captain Flinders, wrote the French Head of State to the Governor of South Australia and, he insisted, Baudin should be properly credited.

After reading the letter, the Governor (who was related by marriage to William Horn’s wife) screwed up the letter and tossed it over his shoulder into the fireplace. The parchment burst into short-lived red, white and blue incandescence before settling into an orange glow. However, more than one person had already viewed the contents of this letter and the details of it were sent to the Adelaide press. The Editor-in-Chief responded with overwhelming disinterest, disregarding the information as another ‘French fabrication of fact’. Had it not been for a shortage of advertising that week, he may not have consented to publish a short paragraph dismissing France’s claims - but he did consent, and the settlers were overwhelmingly outraged by what they read.

Monsieur de Vries couldn’t have cared less about either of the explorers or, for that matter, Napoleon. His passion was for numbers. Yet, not three days after the Governor received the French Head of State’s letter, Monsieur de Vries was asked to resign his position fourteen days hence and directed to apologise in writing for having caused such upset to the highly-valued customer. Pascal de Vries’ lip curled upwards and he spat in his heavy French accent, In one million, two hundred and nine thousand and ..., he consulted his watch, five hundred and seventy-one seconds from now, I will leave this bank and I will never return. Monsieur de Vries was wrong. He did return to the Bank of Adelaide, but not until sixteen years after he had become a majority shareholder and investment advisor.

Monsieur de Vries resigned from the bank, but he did not apologise to anyone except the proprietress of his city lodgings when he gave notice of his imminent departure. Before he left Adelaide, he took out a prospector’s licence and bought himself a set of pans and dishes so he could both prospect for gold and cook his dinner with them. He travelled eastwards for one day by horse and cart until he reached a small coach inn in the Adelaide Hills. After spending a night there, he headed a few miles in a south-easterly direction to a place where the hills rolled and a creek flowed free of anyone’s expectations.

Acting on a hunch, which amounted to little more than an annoying tingle in his fingers, de Vries obtained a license to prospect an area of land sixteen miles east of Adelaide as the crow flies. He succeeded in finding gold and, upon becoming wealthy, he built a road to his land, soon followed by the construction of a handsome - though modestly proportioned - house set upon a ridge with views extending to the coast thirty-five miles away. He employed a small workforce and invested his profits in stocks and bonds, and by the time the gold in his mines ran out in 1897, de Vries had become wealthy, married and had two sons and two daughters, and founded a new settlement.

Monsieur de Vries claimed the settlement as his own because had it not been for his mines and the housing he provided for his employees, the area would have been nothing but a collection of shanties housing a collection of otherwise unemployable men fighting over worthless claims. He knew, however, that without gold the settlement would disband, leaving nothing for which he would be remembered. Determined the settlement should become a township, he supplied an array of necessary infrastructure including a general store, a bakery and a school. In doing this, the establishment of other businesses would be bound to follow and the future of the settlement would be assured. He could, he thought, fund the Wesleyan missionaries to build a church. The Wesleyans were prolific church builders in the region and they always wanted funds to build more churches. Monsieur de Vries had been born a Catholic and he knew it would be prudent to also make a gift to the Catholic Church, even though it had no interest in expanding its presence anywhere but in the larger, established towns. All the same, he reflected cynically, it would be a foot in each camp.

Pascal de Vries wondered what name should be given to this arcadia and whether it would be unpopular to appropriate the name of a French city. One evening, after a cooling summer shower had been swept aside by a south-westerly breeze, he gazed meditatively over the valleys that gradually dissolved from view under shafts of golden light. He inhaled long and savoured the heady scent of eucalyptus as it escaped through the minute pores of damp but warm leaves and perfumed the air.

"Belle! he exclaimed with great satisfaction. Tres, tres belle."

When Pascal de Vries applied in late 1898 to the Acting Governor and close friend, Sir James Boucaut, to proclaim his settlement a town, he was paid the modest - though not unexpected - compliment of deciding the town’s name. However, as he watched his friend sign the proclamation, he saw the name had been misspelt.

"But it must be B, E, L, L, E, insisted the Frenchman to the clerk after the ceremony, jabbing his work-worn finger on the document. E!"

"Yes, Monsewer," replied the clerk, malevolently. Closing his folder of documents, he turned his back on Pascal de Vries, opened a door at the rear of the Governor’s office and left the room, closing the door behind him.

Over the next one hundred years, Bell’s population grew from eighty-seven residents to almost three hundred across the district. Several wealthy families moved to Bell from the Adelaide plains by the end of the nineteenth century, desperate to escape the heat and dust of the summer and to enjoy real changes of season. It delighted them when, at the end of summer, Bell was enveloped in autumn mists which fell, rather than lifted. It left them feeling sentimental about the motherland they had never visited in person.

In due course, some of de Vries’ employees moved eastward to Victoria where alluvial gold lay on the surface of the dried creek beds. Others went to the Western Australian gold fields where a man could find gold, cash it in and spend it all in twenty-four hours. Some continued to pan and dig for gold around Bell on their own, though they found barely sufficient quantities to build themselves shanties, some of which remain standing today. Many of de Vries’ miners stayed in Bell to work in the quarries he had subsequently opened and, with de Vries financial assistance, they purchased leases of twenty-acre blocks of land from the government. The men cleared the land and planted orchards, ran livestock, or whatever took their fancy, while their wives ran small sidelines in dairy products and home-grown vegetables.

Bell prospered through its agriculture and as transport developed from horse to rail to motor, more and more people migrated to the picturesque district. Meadows full of stringybarks, box and candlebark gums made way for apple and cherry orchards that in turn made way for dairy farming. Successive generations of residents carved new roads through the rolling countryside and planted, in great numbers, all varieties of deciduous trees originating from the Americas and Europe. Buttercups, daisies, roses and cottages covered in ivy sprung up overnight and visitors to Bell remarked to each other how like England it was.

More than one hundred years after Bell's settlement, Simon de Vries perched himself upon the sandstone outcrop overlooking the ruins of the house his grandfather built, remembering what the valley had once looked like. The indigenous inhabitants had left the region a century before he had been born in 1929, but they had left lush meadows full of mature eucalypts bedded in native grasses and corridors of undisturbed bush land where kangaroos, bandicoots, echidnas and possums and snakes could be spotted if you sat still behind a tussock of gahnia. There were hundreds of different birds, too, but now they were mostly gone and only a few species of parrots and finches were left here and there.

By the time World War II was declared over, the bushland highways had disappeared, leaving a few ragged pockets of virgin bush. But the oak trees planted by de Vries in 1897 along the main street of Bell had grown to an incredible forty metres in height. They shaded the town’s parklands in summer but permitted the sun’s warm rays to filter through in winter. What foresight, the residents declared.

Farmers shot rabbits and ‘roos alike to prevent their lands from being reclaimed and, as a proud declaration of ownership, they left broken tractors and unused roles of fencing wire to rust in the bottom paddocks. Swamplands were drained and watercourses were dammed and, when the creeks dried-up, bores were sunk to suck ancient waters from deep within the ground up to the here and now. Soon all-season creeks became winter creeks, though only if there had been good rains. The poplars planted along Bell’s creek started losing their leaves well before autumn arrived as they prematurely entered dormancy, and the few remaining candlebark gums died, their trunks stood white and erect like skeletons with limbs outstretched to the sky pronouncing Judgement Day was nigh.

The land lost its sheen, the farmers moved out and the life-stylers moved in. Large holdings were dissected, shaved and severed forever from their cradle. By the mid-1980’s, vineyards had marched in formation across the land, displacing cows wherever they went; garrisons that would defend the retirement dreams of Adelaide’s burgeoning white collar tribe.

Then the drought came. One dry season followed another and each year winter came later and grew shorter and felt milder. The weather forecasters warned this was a permanent change in the weather, but no one believed them because - as one local said to another - weather reports were never right. Instead, the public put their faith in economic forecasters who reassured them the drought would soon end and that increased investment was the benevolent spirit that would moisten their lips once more. But the drought didn’t end and Bell’s grapes withered on their thirsty vines that had been planted on what were once the most fecund soils in the State.

By the end of the twentieth century, a freeway had been built that passed within ten kilometres of Bell and was the only connection left between the people and the land. Tourism, declared Simon de Vries during his 1996 campaign speech for the presidency of the Bell Progress Association, will be Bell’s economic salvation. The assembly of seventeen elderly members applauded him vigorously and he was elected unopposed. What foresight, they exclaimed, for the second time in over fifty years.

Simon de Vries proposed Bell host a jazz, food and wine festival similar to those being held in other regions, but the Bell Progress Association voted against this, insisting drunken interlopers wandering the town was not good for the town’s image. His suggestions to host an annual fireworks night, monthly market days and occasional ‘Opera on the Oval’ were met with equal apprehension of the rabble that would descend on Bell. There would be vandalism of their public buildings and war memorial and demands for epicurean delights that could not be provided and, worst of all, the treatment of the locals as provincial. Bell, argued the Association’s members, had one general store, a post office, a dilapidated school and an oval with one male and one female toilet. It could not cater for crowds without great expense and inconvenience. The financial risk, they said, was too great. The Association did, however, sanction one proposal made by Simon de Vries and, after preparing numerous submissions to the Golden District Council, the construction of a civic board was commissioned.

After extensive consultation with Bell’s residents, Simon submitted a design for the civic map to the Golden District Council. The map would be a masterpiece of artistry and mapping, colourfully illustrating historic points of interest. Several tourist drives were colour coded according to the visitor’s interest in mining, agriculture or wine, in case a tourist somehow managed to arrive on Bell’s doorstep. However, without consulting anyone, Simon de Vries submitted the plans with the town’s name spelled as his grandfather had stipulated. But upon the unveiling of the civic map by the Golden mayor in 2000, he saw that ‘Bell’ had persisted and he silently vowed he would rectify this anachronism of history.

One evening, a few days after the unveiling of the civic map, Simon de Vries slipped into his black tracksuit, got in his car and drove three kilometres from his house to the Bell township. He parked his car on a side street, opened the boot and removed a paint brush, a small tin of black paint and a stencil of the letter ‘E’ and then walked furtively down the hill towards the main street, careful to slip into the shadows whenever a car passed. As he passed the town oval, he was vaguely aware of a noise that sounded like sporadic rounds of machinegun fire. He had heard the sound many times before, but in his current state of nervous excitement, he was insufficiently possessed of his mental faculties to comprehend it. After pausing briefly, he continued his journey towards the new civic board, hastening his step. Crossing the bridge over the creek lined by dead candelbarks, the gunfire sounded again but closer to him this time. The noise penetrated Simon’s consciousness and now recognising the sound, adrenalin washed over him like a tidal wave. His feet fastened to the path with fear and he turned his terrified face upwards as a bough weighing more than his car dropped from ten metres directly above him. As the bough crashed to the ground, a paint brush jettisoned into the darkness and a tin of black paint rolled off the bridge into the creek. A gentle breeze welled as Simon de Vries’ soul renounced his body and an itinerant zephyr wrestled the stencil from Simon’s half-closed hand and swirled it high up into the air, tossing it this way and that.

The Bell civic board, once bolted high on two metal poles, now lies face down and corroded on the ground. Once upon a time, picturesque vineyards, historic mines and Friesian cows grazing verdant pastures were proudly pledged by the map to those arriving in Bell on their Sunday drive through the Hills. It was a lie, of course, and Nature would not allow anyone be deceived: the meagre winter rains seeped through the fine cracks of the paintwork, splintering colourful flakes of paint until they fluttered and spread in the breeze, daubing the ground with delicate and diminutive acrylic flowers that nobody would ever notice. Boltholes, carelessly drilled too large, rusted until the board submitted to the cold southerly wind and fell with a single thud that resonated through the valley. The hot and dry of the December sun bleached and shrivelled the grass that had sprung up in the blink of an eye between the only distinct seasons that now visited Bell, autumn and summer. Each stem of grass fell under the weight of its seed head, burying the fallen board with dust and debris until no one remembered the empty promise of a bucolic paradise.

2014

-3-

Mum! Mum! Where are you?

Deidre blinked and the snake lowered its body, dissolving with a sigh into the long grass. For several moments she stared into space, wondering whether she had imagined it. She couldn't bring to mind what the snake looked like in any detail, having only been aware of its yellow-green eyes, but she perceived its size must have been enormous, for its eyes seemed as round and as wide apart as her son’s. She’d never in her life chanced upon a snake in nature, yet, surprisingly, its appearance at her side had not immediately frightened her as she supposed a reptile of such colossal proportions should.

"Warnings, and portents and evils imminent…, Deidre mused, feeling adrenalin engulf her. When Eve met the snake, she fell into sin, and yet the ancient Greeks believed that to dream of a snake foretold an improvement in wellbeing. Deidre spoke aloud in the hope that redirecting her thoughts might help her regain control of her trembling body. A bead of sweat trickled down her back into the curve of her waist and she arched her back as though in doing so she would be able to shirk it. Better off dreaming than being awake, sometimes."

She watched her son who had returned from exploring and was now wandering amongst the headstones in search of her. She sat thirty metres away from him, yet he couldn’t see her. He was nine years old, tall for his age, scatty and, predictably, myopic. Always happy and always moving, Deidre sighed.

I’m here, sweetheart, Deidre called, scanning the ground as she climbed to her feet. Be careful, though, I just saw a snake.

Cool! What’d it look like? Ethan said and began running up the slope towards her.

Like a bloody snake! she snapped. Just watch where you’re going, Ethan! She brushed the grass from her skirt and readjusted the combs that held her dark brown hair in a tight bun. The exhilaration caused by the adrenalin rush was slowly beginning to pass and the pulsing in her ears dulled to a distant march as her heartbeat slowed again. Tiredness came in its wake and she swayed as though in a stupor, untimely woken from a deep sleep.

It may have been a red-bellied black snake, she yawned. I saw flashes of reddish-bronze, but I’m not certain. It was really big, though. Did you know, she continued contemplatively, that the serpent in Aboriginal dreaming made the mountains and rivers and the sun, fire and colours. Deidre squeezed her eyes closed as sudden gusts hurled grit at her. This place could do with a bit of a touch up, she muttered, wiping dust from her eyes.

Mum, I’m thirsty. Can we go now?

Her son’s face glowed vermillion and the perspiration that rolled down his cheeks cut creek lines through the dust that coated his face. Deidre grimaced at the sight of the discoloured droplets of sweat that rolled along his jaw-line and dripped from his chin. Pretty boy, she reflected wiping his chin with a tissue. The angelic features of infancy hadn’t deserted him yet, whereas his physique had matured beyond his years. His shoulders were broadening and he already stood at shoulder height next to her.

There’s water in the car. Where’s your hat, by the way?

It’s down in the gully. There’s an old building down there. I built a fort with the rocks. He was frequently mistaken for being older because of his size, but once he spoke, his immaturity was evident. Deidre, herself, often overlooked how few years had passed since Ethan was born. Nine years could seem like an eternity.

"You did what? That’s someone’s property, Deidre berated him. You can’t go in and dismantle people’s buildings. And what if it’s ready to fall over? You could... She stopped abruptly and sniffed the air. The musty aroma had deepened in intensity. There must be a fire somewhere."

Deidre turned around to survey the countryside and saw a pale, thin wisp of smoke curling and twisting its way upwards into the sky some distance to the north. The smoke momentarily darkened before vanishing completely. She peered at the horizon long after the smoke had gone, thinking how everything about the cemetery struck her as slightly illusory: its absence from the map, the complete disarray of the graves, the wastelands surrounding it, snakes and fires appearing then disappearing, as though temporarily displaced from another realm.

Okay, go and get your hat, she said finally, straightening her blouse and buttoning the cuffs. We’d better go back to the city. The adjustment and readjustment of her clothing and hair was a ritual Deidre performed several times daily: before leaving for work, in the privacy of the staff toilets or her office at school and before leaving school to go home. She was always conscious of her appearance; always concerned that she appeared presentable and well-groomed.

Her self-consciousness began in childhood, in the days when her mother sewed her clothes. Had they been well-made, Deidre may not have minded their originality, but her clothes were more a parody of fashion than a statement of love or quality - made as they were by the fumbling hands of an alcoholic. Shirt sleeves were always uneven lengths and button holes were irregularly spaced, all of her skirts had elastic waistbands, but her trousers had none - only zips at the side that stopped short of the top and they unzipped themselves whenever Deidre bent over. Her clothes never lost the rancid smell of cigarette smoke and booze her mother had infused into the fabric as she wheezed over the sewing machine, and Deidre - already mocked for her appearance - stole deodorant from the supermarket to mask the stench of her hardship. She dreamed of the day when she could afford fashionable clothes, but when that time arrived, she could bring herself to buy only the plainest clothes in nondescript colours, unable to stomach the thought of drawing attention to her appearance. Fearing the smell of her mother had also saturated her skin, she habitually doused herself in cheap deodorant or cologne, whether she was going to work, the gym or swimming.

Can we buy a drink from that shop in Bell?

"It’ll be expensive there. You can make do with

Reviews for Psyche's Garden

[wadnangga · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Psyche’s Garden is mythic fiction of a sophisticated literary variety, and mythology enthusiasts should be excited by this novel. Myfanwy Tilley successfully conveys the metaphysical elements of the ancient Psyche and Cupid myth into a contemporary Australian social and environmental landscape. This novel can indeed be read at many levels, but I particularly enjoyed the treatment of (Neo-) Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies (and several of their ‘philosophical descendants’), along which lines the story proceeds and the characters play their part, as well as illuminating ways of how we understand our world. But this novel delves deeper than purely a western cultural understanding of the world. There is reference - although never explicit - to Australian indigenous religion, reminding the reader that ways of viewing the world are culturally determined. The beginning of the novel is whimsical at times, but the reader is gradually drawn into a very sombre world filled with delusion, madness and violence. However, there is redemption, and the novel ends happily enough and with a promise of renewal. There are a few proofing errors, but editing one's own work - especially a volume of this size - is always difficult. The author’s descriptions are evocative. The prose is often beautiful and, at other times, exquisitely poetic. This is a book I would very much like to have on my bookshelf.