He uses the word love. Not in any kind of declaration, just speaks it in conversation. But it hangs like the moon above her in the sky. She catches glimpses of it in the rear-view mirror as they drive.
It’s late, and they’ve turned off the heating in the car to stay awake. She can sense her father’s tiredness. She notices the way the tone of his voice has altered between day and night. From time to time, feeling drowsy, he opens the driver’s side window and the car fills with peppermint-scent and the tang of wattle sap.
Tucking her feet beneath her on the seat, she tries to resist the tug of sleep, noting and remembering the sound of the engine and the rhythm of her father’s laugh. In the three years since she has seen him the stubble on his jaw has grown flecked with grey; his skin has darkened in the West Australian sun. While his eyes stay focused on the road ahead, she flickers her gaze across his face, observing the movement of his lined brown hands, the right gripping the leather of the wheel, the left resting lightly on the handbrake between them. In the light of the moon she thinks he looks almost ghost-like, her father, like someone that was, or is yet to be.
As they drive, the same moon shines down on the limbs of the old trees gathered by the roadside. It’s Karri forest. She knows this from the visitor’s centre brochures they’ve read along the way, and the paleness of the white-gold trunks. Light-catching eucalypts of smooth, clean bark. Their high, slender branches are silhouetted against the sky.
That evening, they’d had dinner at a Thai restaurant in a southern-forests town, housed in a lime-washed, colonial cottage, wedged between two of the vast, white trees. It was Easter Sunday, and the place was packed. They drank thin soup, bitter with lemongrass. The waiters told stories of thylacines.
At a fork in the highway the headlights frame a pair of wedge-tailed eagles feeding on the carcass of a red kangaroo. Each bend reveals some subtle shift in the shapes of the branches or the colour of the light.
‘Forests are full of secrets.’ Her father glides his thumb over the tiger on the label of the quince jam they’d bought, and laughs a low, quiet laugh quickened by the free caffeine of a driver-reviver stand where they’d stopped for a break on the outskirts of town. ‘And a place is entitled to its stories. But it’s easier to believe there are still tigers somewhere like the Tarkine, back in Tassie, than here in the West...’
She takes two small, silver Easter eggs from the glove-box beside her and warms them in her hands. A grey owl lifts from a eucalypt stump.
‘But they were here,’ she says. In the darkness he smiles at the gravity of her eleven-year old voice, and he thinks of all the precious things he’s missed out on since he left. ‘I’ve always imagined I’ll see one in our forest,’ she continues. ‘I’ll be walking with my own daughter, close to a stream. She’ll bend down over a garden of lichen and moss, and unable to call her without scaring it away, I’ll watch as a thylacine passes in silence across the curve of the track ahead.’
They have been driving too long. Looking for a place to camp in the trees, they pull down each darkened gravel track away from the fences of private land. They find a clearing on the bank of a slow-moving river, beyond a handful of campervans surrounded by kayaks, mountain bikes and the embers of a fire, still visible under ash.
He longs to say to her: ‘I remember you.’
In the tent, she falls asleep as he reads her the names of the places they’ll pass through the following day.
Susie Greenhill's short fiction has appeared in Australian publications including Island, Etchings, Review of Australian Fiction, Transportation: Islands and Cities and the ebook Women's Work by Overland. She is currently completing a phd in creative writing and environmental literature at Edith Cowan University.