Girl in a Pink Dress

Six chooks and only two pale eggs in the boxes this morning. And yesterday the same. Something is putting them off laying. A fox maybe. The pests are never far, skulking near the shed in the milky blue dawn, tugging on the chicken wire, sinking their claws into the pulpy mud at the foot of the door.

Or maybe it’s the weird turn in the weather. The bitter cold that’s not due here for months has come early, like an over-eager newborn, all shivery and translucent-skinned, with no fat on the bone yet to keep itself warm. It’s only April but already the mornings arrive blanketed in frost, the barren ground up here on the rocky plateau disguised for a few hours beneath a powdery white deposit that tourists and campers routinely confuse with snow.

I saw a girl write her name in it once. She was staying at the pub with a motorcycle group, before they banned motorcycles and four-wheel drives on the Candle River Track after a section of the narrow dirt road slipped off the mountain in a storm. She had long hair and no shoes on, just a pair of cut-off denim shorts and a too-big leather jacket with silver studs down the arms and coloured badges on the back that must have belonged to one of the men she was riding with.

She annoyed all the roos, who hopped off in a dozen different directions, their grey tails bobbing, a couple of curious joeys peering out from their mothers’ pouches with black eyes like tiny beads, as she ran down Panners Avenue. Past the tall rows of naked maples and bare-branched pines. Past the dilapidated buildings half-slumped to the ground like weary old dogs. A stick in one hand and her dark hair flying out, the main street empty and wide before her, white mist shifting about her legs like smoke. Laughing at who knows what, maybe still drunk from the night before. Maybe that’s why her bare feet were numb to the cold.

Her name was Eva. Or at least I assumed that was her name, because that’s what she wrote there in the frost, each letter carefully etched with the stick into the frozen dew. She wrote it so big I could see it from my front verandah, where I was standing in my pyjamas and grubby sheepskin boots, my arms stacked with kindling to resurrect the fire inside that had dwindled overnight.

It was gone when I came back from the studio in the afternoon, not that I expected to see it still there. I knew any name, even that one, could only last an hour or so, melting imperceptibly till not even the ghost of it remained on the ground.

And it’s never been there any other morning. I know because I often glance over when I step out first thing to bring in the wood and collect the eggs. Just in case.

But any other explanation is not worth thinking about.

It’s a common enough name.