The Best Australian Stories 2010 (2 page)

Cate Kennedy

Once Removed

David Francis

Way out the back where the wedding bush grows and mosquitoes breed in the gullies, there's a weatherboard house with bay windows, the place where my English grandmother died. But it sat on her farm at Moorooduc then, among the bracken and ti-tree, pardelotes nested in the sandy cliffs, when my grandmother slept in the four-poster bed, and I dreamt there were bears in the hall, marauding. Suddenly there was no more snoring and I could sleep. She'd gone to be with her Jesus.

The cottage was moved by my father, in slices on trucks, and patched together in the Tindervick bush, set on a rise facing north. Its bay-window eyes staring out to the Pakenham Hills, as if watching for fires. I was shipped along with it, ostensibly in one piece, back to my parents on the same stretch of land, to this big brick homestead that stands among the whining cypresses, where my mother now lives alone. Where magpies fly down the chimneys, her black and tan dog lying in wait to hunt them down, land them stunned and breathless on the hardwood floor. My mother waits too, giddied by the prospect.

Now I stand at the door with my rolling Hartmann luggage, the rented white Prius in the lantern light behind me like something from another galaxy. I'm back for the first time in years, staring through the stained-glass kitchen door, watching her armed with a broom and a fly swatter, disappearing deep into the dining room, where the walls are four bricks thick and bees swarm in the unused chimneys. Ants invade, my mother slaughters armies of them, showing off piles of the dead to occasional visitors.

Unseen, I open the door to the vague smell of compost, the frantic yelping of the dog. But this time it's not a bird being hunted. A brushtail possum, terrified, scratches its way along the picture rail. It pisses with fright on the portrait of Aunt Emma Charlotte, over the pastel of me as a boy. My mother doesn't notice me; she's mesmerised by the leaping dog and the possum as it plummets down onto a table, smashing plates. It hurtles out past me into the Gippsland evening, the dog a dark blur behind it.

‘Hello,' my mother says, the broom over her shoulder like a rifle. ‘How was your trip? Did you get yourself an upgrade?' Her words are eclipsed by a distant barking, but my mother hears nothing, deaf as the sideboard, deaf as the night. I'd give her a hug but her body would stiffen like a bird's, afraid I was trying to accomplish something unnatural, something American and intimate. So I nod and smile, but don't answer – her interest is more in her questions and the noises she hears inside her head. I just wonder how she's heard of upgrades.

I lean my bags against the door as she returns to her kitchen, irrigating ants from a cupboard, wiping them up with an ant-speckled washcloth, as though she's already forgotten I've arrived. Since her stroke, her memory of moments just passed has become more elusive. She refuses to wear her hearing aids. And I'm back in the silence with her, to the place that's been here all along, the comfort of things unchanged. Just the faint rustle of wood ducks nesting in the chimney, cooing again now that the house is still, the house that coos as if it's calling out. A place for the shelter of species, provided they stay hidden.

A letter lies on the table already set for tomorrow's breakfast. The writing, angled and childlike, addressed to
Those Whom Are
Concerned,
signed at the top and the bottom,
Sharen W
. The tenant in the house out the back: Sharen Wills. My father, Remy's, tenant. Remy as in Remington, although my mother says it's short for Remedial. He thinks the house is still his because his little mother died in it. But he lives five miles away now, in a sad-looking cottage in a place called Blind Bight. Stuck there with his girlfriend, Kim, ever since my mother threw him off the farm.

I pick up the letter uninvited and my mother pretends not to watch me read. She guides a trail of golden ant poison along the ledge.

I do not know how much you know but I can only assume you are
naive in the field. That is of the situasion of Remy and myself and I
will not be harassed by Remy who is bulling me to leave. I pay the same
for my horses being here as anyone else but I don't get the use of the
faculties.

I glance up, my mother's eyes upon me now. ‘She's illiterate,' she says, ‘poor little thing.' Sharen Wills, whose rent provides my mother's shopping money.

I feel there is a stigma because of me and Remy. Also I have been
attacked by those three black Clydesdales in the back paddock. None of
this is safe for me here but I will not leave under these provisions. I
will get my own solicitor. I will not be railroded.

‘Hell hath no fury.' My mother trails off as she hands me a dustpan, a load of dead bees and ants, spoils of the sweetness she leaves on the jam jars, as lures.

I head outside and empty the carnage of insects on a lavender bush, stand on the tiled veranda, and watch the purple remains of the evening, the glint on the windows of the distant clapboard house. The house you can see from Station Road on the way into town or from the window of the shearer's quarters, or from here, out across the lagoon paddock.

The phone rings shrilly and I run back inside, see my mother under her jigsaw lamp, leaning over a Wysocki lighthouse puzzle, the phone going unanswered, a message being left on the machine.

‘Ruthie, it's Sharen. I need to talk before I do something stupid.'

My mother lifts her head. ‘She grows marijuana out there,' she says, ‘in tubs in a horse float.' She returns to sorting pieces of sky.

I stand by the black rotary phone on the desk, the small jug of familiar pens and broken pencils, and I think of the letter,
the situasion with Remy,
how I don't want to deal with Sharen Wills, whose number is fifth on a list on the wall, after the fire brigade and the vet, my father and Dr Hopkins. My mother, who dreads the phone and resents others using it, turns the television on so loud it sounds like a plane is landing on the roof. She goes on searching for jigsaw edges.

I pull my rolling suitcase along the carpeted hall, let it rest outside the fancy bathroom. The original Victorian tiles, the bath with its iron-clawed feet. I brush my teeth with the toothbrush that waits for me here in a small pewter goblet, squeeze the remains of my miniature Qantas toothpaste. I look in the mirror, a jetlagged ghost of myself.
I need to talk to someone before
I do something stupid.

My mother remains in her jigsaw world. On the television screen, the clever blue eyes of the new prime minister, but I'm listening again to the message on the dusty answering machine, wondering what my father's done to Sharen Wills. Only the dog observes me, from its roost in the cushions along the back of the couch, as I dial the number, a call that rings and rings, goes unanswered. Overcome with an old desire to escape this house, and to know what's really going on, I steal out into the night and start up the silent Prius. I glide through the shadowy paddocks, scraping along the overgrown track down towards the windmill, rabbits scurrying in the headlights. As I open the lagoon paddock gate, I shoo away dark horses approaching to sniff the soundless car, heavy part-Clydesdales I don't recognise. The whoop of what might be an owl up above me, mosquitoes drift about my face, the cacophony of crickets. I try to remember why I don't live here. Is it the noise or all the silence?

I notice the lights from the house out the back, bay windows appearing as beacons through the trees, the house of my first night terrors, where my mother discovered my father in bed with Kim and ordered them both away. The house where my parents' marriage ended.

A dark hump appears in the headlights, a car abandoned in the field. It hunkers low in the grass on bare axles. An old Mitsubishi sedan with its tyres removed, brimming with trash and what looks like a chair leaned up against the door. Beyond the car, the garden fence, and the yard that was once tidy emerges as a carnival of corrugated iron, engine parts and overgrowth, a rusted clothesline whining. There were once hibiscus, black-eyed peas and black-eyed Susan, a twelve-foot passion-fruit vine.

I park the hybrid under a eucalyptus near the fence and wend my way among rusted fenders and a sunken laundry trough to the sagging carport, and knock on the brown waterlogged door of my childhood. A shout from inside and then footsteps; the door opens a crack. Then the face of a woman with creased smoker's cheeks and turquoise eyes, her hair in a tangled nest. Nipples pressed through a long Cold Chisel T-shirt stretched down to bare, slender legs.

‘You must be Daniel!' she says, suspiciously. ‘A chip off the block.' She is nervous, speaking more with the urgency of speed than the drawl of a stoner. ‘Excuse this dreadful mess,' she adds. She clasps her shoulders, blames ‘the boys' for the maze of laundry on the floor, but there are no signs of boys just the smell of cannabis. In a kitchen I barely recognise she offers me coffee. She's probably only my age but looks like she's done it harder. I glance away from her angry but curious stare, down at a floor now bereft of linoleum, to a sink where leaning plates and angled saucepans tower precipitously. The kitchen where my grandmother once stood with the sun beaming in on her delicate English face, pouring tea and placing scones on a silver tray, baking her special rice pudding.

Sharen Wills' arms are tanned and her hands are shaking as she plugs in a kettle. She announces, ‘The Landlord and Tenant Act of Victoria requires twenty-four hours prior notice for a visit from the landlord.'

‘I'm not your landlord,' I say. ‘Just making sure things are okay.'

She puts the kettle down. ‘I'm having trouble with your father,' she says. No mention of the letter.

‘We've had trouble with him ourselves.'

‘He appears on a horse at the window at all hours and I rarely wear clothes in the house.' She looks down at herself, the cotton clinging to her narrow body and I wonder if I'm supposed to find it appealing. She offers me a cigarette.

‘He hasn't ridden for years,' I say. ‘He can barely walk.'

‘He'd crawl if he had to,' she says. ‘He's at the door at midnight … and when I don't answer he pulls out my marijuana by the roots.'

I imagine her in tight-fitting, camel-toe jeans. ‘It's his mother's house,' I say. I don't tell her the whole five hundred acres, houses and all, are now in my mother's name, after he was sentenced to life with Kim.
Now I've got two bitches in my soup
, he once told me on the sly. I look over at this woman pouring me coffee and wonder if there aren't now three.
A rat gets caught in its own trap
, my mother says of him. ‘He wants me out of here,' says Sharen, hugging a cup of coffee between her breasts. ‘He wants to move back in here; he wants to die in his mother's house. But I want to die in his mother's house too,' she says.

I'm not sure what to say. My father, almost eighty, thinks he's my age, despite the fact his hips are fusing. I look at the squalor of plates and piles of paper, a place I wouldn't want to live or die in. My grandmother's quaint English furniture left in this woman's hands, and the last time I visited, my father on his death bed in the Dandenong Hospital, pale in one of those paper gowns, pneumonia and congestive heart failure, a shriveling man in a narrow metal cot. But he still thought he was virile, working the nurses, wheezing, flirting, something to live for. Bright young nurses in robin's egg blue attending, the glint in his wrinkled farmer's eyes. He offered them trips down here, said he'd take them out riding, as if he could still get on a horse. Half-dead and still handsome.

‘I'll take him to the tribunal,' says Sharen. ‘How dare he try to evict me after all I've been through?' She looks over at me, gauging loyalties, more defiant than tearful, angry at these unexpected visits, the skulking, or maybe angry that he skulks no more, that I'm not moving to comfort her. I don't need to tell her he's always been a hands-on husband, women pressed against the fridge, my unsuspecting girlfriends bailed up on the hallstand, that Lipman woman emerging with him from the haystack in the middle of the night while my mother slept alone up in the big house, the lantern standing dim above the roses.

Nervously, Sharen lights a second Marlboro. ‘I've had him up to here,' she says, the cigarette in her nail-bitten fingers cutting across her throat.

I wonder where she's really had him up to. I lean on the ledge and try to summon my lawyerly training – her claim could only be against my mother, since she's the one who now owns all this, but Sharen Wills has no cause against my mother, except perhaps a bifurcated empathy. Still, I recognise a stake laid out on the grease-stained living room floor. A black oil patch where someone dismantled an engine, take-away food containers adorning my grandmother's inlaid mosaic table. Furniture from some ancestral home in Norfolk.

‘Are your horses still here?' I ask. The pair of plump Anglo-Arabs out in the couch grass. Last year one of them foaled unexpectedly and my father went ballistic, ordered them off the place, but they kept reappearing, mare and foal and other stray horses, munching on his precious grass that really belongs to my mother, grown for the cattle he thinks are still his.

Sharen has a hand on her hip, reminding me she pays her rent. I've heard how she visits the big house, speaks loud enough so my mother can hear, charms her in front of the Aga stove, brings treats for the dog and drinks Earl Grey tea and partakes of stale Teddy Bear biscuits, laughing. Sharen Wills isn't stupid. She probably helps with the crossword, places difficult pieces into the blue miasma of a jigsaw sky.