Sara MacDonald - The Hour Before Dawn

I smiled. Fleur was quite brave really, to start again on something new at her age. I will be nice. I will. Jack was right, it was time to move on. After all, I didn’t know when I’d see her again.

I went downstairs and put my hat on against the sun and set off for my jungle trail. We had joined an experiment to cull the possums. They were ripping the trees to pieces and Jack and I had placed poison as small enticements, fixed to the trunks of trees.

I wished they weren’t so cute. I wished they looked like rats and then I wouldn’t feel so bad. But I knew it had to be done, we had more than enough stripped trees that were going to die on our land.

As I walked I felt a sense of achievement; it was an adventure, this life I shared with Jack. There were years ahead of us, preserving and finding new ways of conserving land that could never be tamed, nor would we want it to be. All these acres were becoming familiar, becoming home after years of nomadic existence. I never thought I could settle anywhere.

I hadn’t planned to get pregnant, although I knew time was ticking. There was so much to do and pregnancy had reined me in. Jack’s face was enough, though, when I’d told him. So instead of gardening in the heat I could only walk round checking things, feeding the hens and gently weeding up near the house, planting rows of vegetables that struggled in the poor soil.

As if by some tacit agreement, neither Jack nor I mentioned it to each other, but we both wondered if our time here would have to come to an end with a child. We lived in the middle of nowhere, miles away from a doctor, school or human habitation. Children needed other children and I didn’t want an only child, which is what I had become.

The horror and the loneliness when Saffie disappeared was like losing a limb that went on twitching with the loss of the other half of me.

I feel it, even now.

Fleur woke early on the day of her flight to Singapore. She never drew her curtains and she saw it was the most beautiful day. The leaves of the tree outside were motionless. The day seemed to be holding its breath. A blackbird sang clear into the morning against the growl of cars in the distance as the city woke up. It felt like the first day of spring.

Fleur lay looking round her room, where the sun slanted across the floor highlighting the dust motes which hung and floated in the air. She felt a strange sad-happiness, when to be alive was almost enough in the moment of a bird singing; in the moment of sunlight on your hands; in the small awareness of yourself in a new day.

Since Fergus died she had learnt to be still and treasure these mornings, waking alone and listening, really listening, both to the sounds of a world waking up and to herself. The first moments of the day could reveal feelings she could not articulate or write down, but would sometimes attempt to capture in paint.

A lack of professional technique – for Fleur thought of herself as an apprentice – could not hide the intensity behind her paintings. A fleeting spiritual second could transform a simple painting into a canvas that people stood in front of and gazed at, captivated by the power with which Fleur captured the enormity of loss alongside the budding awareness of something beyond herself that went on moving and growing within her.

The loss of a child ended innocence. To be pre-deceased by your child was the worst that could happen to a parent. It took a lifetime of walking towards a hope of understanding to realise that there was nothing to understand. Sense could never be made of a random wicked and meaningless act. This was the bleak knowledge you carried all your life like a second self, buried, but always with you.

Fleur, triggered by the sudden loss of Fergus, found that she could suddenly translate this knowledge into colour and texture and turn it into something people could relate to. Something they felt in the core of themselves, in the pit of their stomachs, in the ache of their throats as they stood staring at her large, brightly coloured landscapes full of heat and bustle. Their eyes drawn to the one small object or person within the picture that stood quite separate and alone.

Fleur did not know from where her inspiration came. Only that it came from some unexplored source and she painted fast and concentrated, to the exclusion of all else, in the silent nights and into the pale, cold dawn of another day.

As she lay staring at the tree outside her window, she felt as if she had already left this small terraced house and begun her journey of discovery to her daughter and to Hundertwasser’s architecture, all without corners, all without angles, all part of the earth and its constant cycle of rebirth. She was aware of why she was drawn to his philosophy and architecture; it was connected indivisibly to her need for reparation with her daughter.

She felt in those first moments of sunlight that she might not return to this small house that she had shared with Fergus for so many years, or that even if she did, everything would be different, never quite the same again. Unease stirred, but she also had the sensation of moving inexorably towards something dark but necessary; that nebulous feeling that something was going to happen.

She got out of bed and pulled on Fergus’s towelling robe, caught the scent from a vase of freesias the gallery had sent, which stood on her dressing table. All part of this safe life she led. She padded downstairs and drew back the sittingroom curtains. The man next door was wheeling his bicycle down his path, pausing at the gate as he always did to fix his cycle clips. The teacher two doors down was gunning the reluctant engine of her Fiesta. Fleur found she was listening for it to start and thinking, This time tomorrow I will be in Singapore.

Fleur looked down across the glinting wing of the plane onto acres of perfect white cloud the texture of fluffy mashed potato. She remembered as a child the thrill of believing those clouds were solid enough to sit on, that she could have jumped from one floury cushion to another.

The mystery of land mass, ocean and sky from a height never left her. The changing patterns and shape of mountains and desert and the progress of herself encapsulated in tons of moving metal remained a wonder of human engineering.

It was as if, once airborne, between lives and destinations, all normal, taken-for-granted things were rendered, by stress or fatigue, abnormal. As if she was circled by an odd tight silence, worn like a cloak to distance herself, making her progress, a stranger among strangers, infinitely obscure.

Travelling forward through time, arriving thousands of miles into an unfamiliar or distant landscape of tomorrow, imbued Fleur with an almost catatonic immobility and invisibility. She neither moved nor undid her seatbelt but sat and stared out at the wondrous mass of virgin cloud.

An old man on the aisle seat was telling the woman between them how he had built the pipeline down in the vast dry expanse of desert below them in Dubai. For thirteen years he had toiled in the unforgiving sun, taking water to the Bedouins. His skin told the truth of an engineer’s harsh life in the sun. Unmistakable patches of skin cancer marked his hands and face like a badge of office.

Normally Fleur would have been fascinated by his reminiscing, but she wanted to remain in her no-man’s land, devoid of social interaction, the telling of stories, the re-telling of lives. She loved it when the lights went out, when the blinds went down against the night outside and she could lie tiredly listening to the rustle of passengers, the dull plom of the bell as they asked for drinks, the swish of recycled air around the cabin, as inexorably they ploughed through the night sky to Singapore.