Paper Daisies Read Online Free

X-ray treatment, to no avail; I had a go at researching this far-fetched cure and that, to no avail. Blaine said it would be a matter of months, or perhaps a year, maybe two; it was never easy to predict, except in its ultimate result. But now that the inevitable is occurring, I am lost to these facts. All facts but one: my mother is my light, and she is leaving me.
    I sit with her and watch her breathe. I hold her little sparrow hand all through the night and into the dawn, until she breathes no more.
    â€˜She is at peace, Ben,’ Blaine says as he checks to find it true. ‘She is with God.’
    She is gone.
    I walk out into the garden. Her garden here at Indooroopilly, in lush, evergreen Brisbane. My mother’s beautiful creation, of poinciana, jacaranda, her melaleucas by the river, and her drifts of Helichrysum there – elatum . A host of small white angels swaying on the warm breeze against the wide green river. In full bloom. They fill the house, they are the stars of all of her arrangements, her beloved paper daisies, her everlastings. They will fill the vases at St Andrew’s too; every summer they do, by her hand, and now they will appear on altar and casket for her.
    No. She cannot be gone.
    She should have been a botanist. Oh but you can’t be a botanist north of the border, wouldn’t matter who you were ,she’d wave away the suggestion. No such silly thing as botany in Queensland, dear, you know that. No such thing as a university in Queensland, either.
    I plunge my hands into the cool of the river as though this might cool my pain, hush the sound that is breaking from me now.
    Another sound belts through it anyway. Pater’s team of four careering up the drive for the stables. The bastard has bothered to come home.

Berylda
    I wake with the bell for prayer: it’s seven forty-five. But I stay in bed, pretend I’m asleep for a little while longer, not that anyone goes to prayers with any regularity, except Margie and Jayne, and they’re not here anyway. They’ve gone home; one to Tamworth, the other to Caboolture, somewhere north of Brisbane, far, far away. And those who haven’t gone home yet have all left for the river, at Lane Cove, for the boat races.
    All but Flo, who remains here with me. She’s not attending the races on protest, because the women’s rowing club remains debarred from competing. Darling Flo, I can hear her turning the pages of her newspaper, propped up in bed, sipping her morning cocoa. She remains here because I remain here, I’m sure. Her family only lives a short ferry trip away across the harbour, at Waverton; she resides at college because her parents want her to discover her independence, on her own. Her parents actually want her to. Such an incredible, foreign idea to me. Perhaps one that might not have been so odd, had my parents not – Oh God, don’t stray there.
    I open my eyes and look up at the curtain, at the sun streaming through the muslin, pale gold light, shimmering hot already. I should get up or it’ll be a sticky old walk across to Grace Brothers at Broadway, to the bargain table sales: the reason I’ve given for my hanging about so long after the exams. So that I can buy Greta her Christmas present, something as dear as she is to me; something as sweet as she is, but womanly, too. She is twenty-two; how did she turn twenty-two this past year? In all my delaying, how does anything happen? But it’s true enough that I must also wait for the Grace Brothers sale, quite genuinely, because I am running out of my pitiful allowance; I’ll have to sell a book or two as it is: A Study of the Novel and the biblical Anthology of English Verse can sacrifice themselves. And I shall purchase that train ticket today, Greta darling, I really shall. If it’s not too hot to walk all the way to the station, at Redfern – perhaps this afternoon.
    â€˜Oi sleepyhead – listen to this,’