Paper Daisies Read Online Free Page A

says Flo from her bed across the room. ‘News from Hill End – that’s out your way, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Yes, it’s not far from Bathurst.’ Don’t remind me: Bathurst, Bathurst, Bathurst , and Hill End is another cloudy dream in itself . ‘What’s news?’
    She reads over a yawn: ‘ A Chinese herbalist, by name of Dr Ah Ling, has purportedly cured a man of a malignant tumour. The tumour, in the upper arm, of local miner, George Conroy, was said to have burst from the skin after the application of an herbal poultice, thereafter returning full function to the arm and relieving totally the man’s previous agony. The cure was achieved without surgery or any modern therapy for the treatment of such cancerous growths. When asked about his condition, Conroy would only say, “It’s a miracle! And he never charged me nothing but what you would pay for a draught of Woods Peppermint or a bottle of beer. Nothing!” Curiously, none who were approached in the town seemed to be able to say precisely where this miracle worker Ah Ling lives, except that it is in a thatched hut on a tobacco plantation, somewhere in the wilderness between the Hill and Tambaroora. ’
    â€˜Sounds interesting,’ I say absently. I just don’t want to think about getting on that train, of returning to that district at all. Oh bum – I spy on the night stand – I am yet to return Surgical Anatomy to the med library, too.
    â€˜Sounds amazing!’ Flo scrunches the paper at me. ‘You should try to meet him, over the break – go and ask him all about it. It sounds positively revolutionary!’
    â€˜Yes, Flo.’ She has me laughing before I am properly alert. ‘That’s precisely what I’ll do. Start a medical revolution over the holidays. In Hill End. With a mysterious Chinaman.’
    Chinaman : the word clangs in my ears for a heartbeat before: ‘Oh my!’ Flo jumps up, looking at the time, aghast, ringlets flinging. ‘Get up, lazybones – get dressed. We’ve got to be the first at the bargain tables if we’re going to get the best stuff. Hurry up!’
    â€˜I’m hurrying.’ I am laughing still more as I rise. ‘What on earth do you want at the bargain tables?’ Flo doesn’t want for anything.
    â€˜I want the most dreadful stuff imaginable,’ she says. ‘A great big splashy hat, specifically, for Federation Day. Something that even Mother will disapprove of.’
    I would ask her why but I know the answer: yesterday the Evening News proclaimed that at present we ladies are far more concerned about procuring charming hats and gowns from Grace Brothers than we are about the ‘birth of the nation’ or ‘the women’s suffrage question’.
    I think I might just have to procure for myself something a little splashy, too.

Ben
    â€˜ C ut your hair, son – you look like a sheila,’ Pater greets me after he’s finished conferring with Blaine about the particulars of Mama’s death.
    Don’t argue with your father. No, I won’t; neither will I have my hair cut. I walk away.
    Into Mama’s sunroom. He doesn’t follow me. I sit at her desk and pull out her current notebooks: her calendar of the garden, address book, birthday book, correspondence folders, and her diaries, her pages and pages of observations, day after day:
    The honeyeaters seem to have stayed long into the season, well into summer. Last summer. Lists for Christmas dinner and table settings, and: Ben looks so very well. A little thinner than he should be perhaps, or perhaps that’s a mother’s imagination. He’s big enough, as always. He seems sad, however. I cannot bear that he should ever be sad. But he’s a human being, so there’s nothing to be done about that, I suppose. He’ll get along all right. They all do, don’t they? God, please send him someone to cherish