The House On Burra Burra Lane (23 page)

He breathed deeply. There was another smell in the room. Not rain. Not wood dust. Not fruity shampoo. Or maybe it
was
in his head.

‘Ethan?’

The crying began. Stifled crying. Pain. He looked at Sammy, tried to focus on her doe eyes in the mayhem of noise in his head.

But she wasn’t crying.

No. He fisted his hand in the pillow. He’d hardly paused in the warmth of his feelings, and fear had stridden in to trample him, warn him. He knew what fear was and he knew how it wedged itself inside a person.

‘What is it, Ethan?’

The smell of fear burned in his nostrils. His skin was ablaze with it. Suffocation had his throat. He heard Sammy’s voice through the call of another. A quick, anxious plea for him to leave, not look back.
‘Go on now, Ethan. Go to bed.’

‘Oh, God, no.’ He ground his back teeth, raised himself, struggled to look at Sammy and banish the sounds. She hadn’t spoken. Her mouth was closed, eyes wide on him.

‘Don’t look, Ethan. Go on, now.’

‘I won’t hurt you,’ he said, ignoring the voice, studying Sammy, his jaw clenched. ‘I won’t let it happen.’

‘Ethan … ’

Sammy’s voice. Pure. Fearful. He struggled to regain the moment. Felt his tongue on the roof of his mouth, felt the dryness. His throat was parched.

The pain of the young child he had been swallowed him. He heard his own footsteps on the tread of the wooden stairs, his bare feet padding quickly up. His feet and hands had been numb as he closed his bedroom door.
This bedroom
. The smooth wood of the door had heated his hands as he pressed them against it, willing it to stay shut and keep out the frightening noise of the man hurting his mother.

He had wanted to do something—to run back downstairs and grab his father and beg him to stop. Hit him. Pull his mother away and be brave enough to take the flailing anger and fury from his father. He hadn’t been that brave. He’d been terrified. A kid of seven, scared to death—not standing a chance against the force and strength of a large drunken man. But he should have tried.

What did it take to stop a man who had destruction on his mind? A man who didn’t know what he was doing, just lashed out as though something wild and ugly inside him needed the release.

‘I can’t do this, Sammy.’

He levered from the bed, left the soft warmth of Sammy and felt the cold air pull at his skin as though it had been scraped from the bone.

She sat, reached for him. ‘What is it?’ she demanded. ‘What’s wrong?’

S
ammy’s heart was pounding. She flinched as he left her, left the bed they had shared. She sat up, the sheet that had partly covered her dropping to her waist. The room was cold … clammy cold.

She shivered. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked again.

The curtains rippled across the hole she’d punched in the window with her hair straighteners. She hadn’t covered the smashed pane properly. Had forgotten. She plucked the rumpled eiderdown from the end of the bed and held it against her nakedness.

He dressed quickly in his jeans and boots, his back to her. He slipped his shirt on, left it undone. His shoulders and arms looked bigger in the shadows. He grabbed his coat and moved to the door.

‘Ethan!’ She pulled herself to her knees, the eiderdown tucked under her arms.

He swung around and stared at her. Even in the dark, she saw torture in his eyes.

‘What is it?’ she whispered.

‘I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, but it’s best this way.’ He spoke quietly, his voice guttural and unlike his own. She didn’t know the man who stood in her bedroom doorway.

Her limbs froze. ‘Why are you leaving?’

‘I can’t do this.’ He seemed to choke the words out.

‘I don’t understand … ’ But the room was empty.

Every room in the house was darkened. If only she could switch off the moon. She didn’t want even that light to seep through the windows. She could stay on the landing forever, sitting in her wicker chair with nothing but distant stars to pierce the darkness and pain. She’d listen to her head from now on. Her heart couldn’t be relied upon.

The house roof creaked as the metal expanded, warming after the cold and ice, settling into its usual place. She hadn’t paid attention before this to how many sounds her house made, cloaked in stillness. The dripping of water in a drainpipe—tap, tap, tap. And the clock in the hall downstairs, keeping time with the hours she had sat on her landing, willing patience to sit within her and calm her.

All sounds carried in the silence, like ghosts blowing through, unseen but surrounding her. Even those from outside. The rustling of branches, leaves blowing. And Ethan’s ute.

Sammy sighed heavily and rose, needing to push herself from the chair. She moved slowly across the landing and down the stairs, her hand on the banister. The emptiness inside her was her composure. It had taken the place of the pain that had chewed and gnawed. She’d known he would come. He wasn’t a man to let animosity blister, or to let the strain of his scalding actions, or whatever it was that had happened to him, go unheeded. He’d want to mend it, put out the fire. She was simply glad for the hours alone before facing this.

His footsteps on the gravel path disturbed the night outside her house.

She unlocked her front door, opened it and looked up at him, framed in the darkness by the moonlight behind him.

There wasn’t a feature on his face she didn’t recognise and love. His mouth was firmed but slightly crooked, in embarrassment maybe. His eyes were narrowed, the blue gaze searching deep into her eyes. She wasn’t going to make this hard for either of them, but if he was looking for something that would make it easier for him, he’d have to look into a bottomless pit. She’d arranged her features and her thoughts to a blank canvas. This would be done and finished as fast as possible. Then, when he’d gone, she had decisions to make.

‘I need to tell … ’ He stopped. ‘I want to tell you something.’

‘I’m not in a good place for conversation just now.’ Her voice sounded quiet but polite, the way she’d expected.

‘Can I come in for a few minutes?’

‘No. I don’t want you inside my house, if you don’t mind.’

The crickets chirruped in the dark, somewhere by the rose bush. He rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand. ‘Will you come outside?’

She paused: had expected to listen, then close the door. If she went outside, she’d be under the blanket of stars with him. Too close to heaven.

He stepped back, looking over his shoulder. ‘Come and sit on the bench, please, Sammy.’ He faced her. ‘It’s not about us.’ He shut his eyes. ‘Not directly.’

Of course it was about them. This was the end of any relationship. Perhaps it was best to hear the additional dialogue, the part that explained, and the apology. Then she could close the emotional door and move on without forever wondering
why.

She unhooked a long scarf from the hall stand, and the fleece jacket. ‘That’s yours. It’s dry now.’

He took it off her and wrung it in his hands.

She followed him down the gravel path to the iron bench by the deep red bricks with the creamy stones. They’d stacked them, working together. Sammy in her too-big-for-her workman’s gloves and Ethan using his bare hands.

She sat. The bench was tarnished. She’d told him she was going to scrape off the rust and make it new again.

‘Is the house alright? Is anything badly damaged?’

She tutted, wrapped the scarf around her. ‘Just say what you want to say, and be grateful I’m listening.’

He didn’t respond, didn’t move, but he drew a long breath, then sat at the end of the bench, draping the fleece jacket over his thigh.

He leaned forwards, elbows on his knees, fingers interlocked, reminding her how friends sat and talked about life, love, hardship and joy while they rested on a park bench and watched the world go by. Her control slipped then. The bench in the park was like the tartan picnic blanket by the river. Both held the hope of her and Ethan. Happy. Together.

She kept her head bowed, although her body was turned slightly towards him. It didn’t feel right to recoil from him completely. She wasn’t used to this emotional distance between them yet. And it must have taken something more than a need to fix it for him to come so soon after he’d left.

‘My older brother and I walked five kilometres each morning to the little school on the outskirts of town,’ he began. ‘On the way home, we’d pick up odd jobs from any of the farmers who would pay us. My mother cleaned other people’s houses, sold bakery goods, took in washing—anything to keep shoes on her boys’ feet.’

Sammy glanced sideways at him, under her eyelashes. He was looking straight ahead.

‘I think my mother married my father hoping for a better chance in life, and maybe looking for love too. But she didn’t find anything close to love with Thomas Granger.’

Sammy hadn’t expected another look into his past. Why was telling her about it now?

He snatched a breath. ‘We were happy kids, Robert and I, mostly, despite the lack of money. We were young and there was always something incredible to look at, poke a stick at, or imagine. Those were the times my father went away. It was very different when he came home.’

She swallowed the moisture gathered in her mouth, as though some anxiety waited for her. Something she hadn’t considered, or thought of.

‘He’d take a stick to me if he didn’t have enough money to spend at the pub.’

She nearly choked, but held herself still.

‘I was young enough to heal quickly, physically. I don’t think he touched Robert at that stage. Robert was five years older than me, and perhaps too much of a challenge. But he hurt my mother. Probably more emotionally than from the beatings. It’s harder to get over an emotional torrent of abuse than a physical one, it lingers for years.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘I need you to hear it, so you have the chance to understand.’ He hung his head. His trauma seemed to throw itself at the mercy of the night. ‘But mainly so that I feel better about what I did this afternoon.’

She locked her hands on her lap so they wouldn’t reach for him.

‘Well.’ He dragged his feet closer to the bench when she didn’t answer. ‘We lived, we got through it. I was used to people looking at my mother, pointing invisible fingers, talking about us behind our backs. When I was eight my father left for good. My mother told me he’d died, and I was safe. I waited every day for him to come back and ruin it.’ He swallowed hard.

‘And?’ she asked, pushing him on.

He looked out at the moonlit kitchen garden. ‘I’ll get this done as quickly as I can. You won’t have to sit and listen to me much longer.’

He thought she was irritated? It was wrong of him to take that meaning. To suppose she didn’t care. She was here, wasn’t she? She was listening, she’d even spoken.

She tamped the annoyance down, tried to find the emptiness that had calmed her, and tried not to listen to her heart which wanted to swallow up the story and make everything better for the little boys who had grown up in such a cruel way.

‘My brother started to show all the traits of an abusive man when he was in his early teens. He was cruel, but carefully so. No-one saw. He was mean behind people’s backs, not in front of them.’

A coward. Sammy pictured him; perhaps not as tough and strongly built as Ethan. Certainly a young man without Ethan’s ethics and morals, and heart.

‘He left town … ’

‘This town?’ she asked.

He swung his gaze to her, and back to the ground. ‘This town.’

So he lived in his hometown, amongst the talk that was the everyday existence of the townspeople, and between those who might remember his family scandals. That must be hard.

‘I was kicked out of town when I was sixteen for being an idiot. I followed my brother to the city. He’d left two years earlier and I wanted to do whatever he was doing. I had no sense. It took me a while to find him and I got … distracted.’

The picture in her head now was of his wife. A young girl who looked like Julia Morelly.

‘I lived on the streets, had nothing, no job, until some guy found me, offered me a casual position on a building site. That was the first decent move I made.’ He looked at her, met her gaze. ‘I was a rough kid, Sammy. I hadn’t realised that, I thought myself a brave young man. I suppose I was in some ways, I’d skipped school for more reasons than truancy and brought in extra money for my mother. Some of the farmers didn’t care back then that I was supposed to be in high school. They gave me work, needing the labour. I did anything from woodwork to tending animals so we could keep our small farm going. But I was a fool.’

Sammy’s mind wandered through the map of Swallow’s Fall. Which farm?

‘I left town when I was asked to. I was happy to go. When I was on the streets I hung around with a gang who took what they wanted, no thought for others or of the consequences. I never stole, but I was part of them, so I got into trouble with the law too.’ There was a deeper look of concentration on his face now, as though he was thinking ahead to the next part of his story, and dreading putting it into words. ‘My boss bailed me out, made me take up a proper apprenticeship with a carpenter. Told me I had two choices. Stick with what I was doing, or drag myself out of it.’ He grunted a laugh. ‘I’d wanted out of the small town atmosphere and the invasive nosiness. I wanted the freedom.’ He sighed, sat up straight. ‘The gang I hung around with didn’t work, they thought me a bit odd because I preferred to buy what I needed. But I was bigger, tougher. I could fight anyone who wanted it, and did. Then I found Robert.’

‘Had you been looking for him all that time?’

He nodded. ‘He was a mean bastard, just like our father— physically and in spirit. He’d got a girl pregnant. Carla. She was younger than him, more my age. I tried to persuade them to come home with me.’

‘Back to Swallow’s Fall?’

‘Yes. My mother was waiting for us, hoping I’d bring Robert home.’

‘What happened?’ she prompted, not wanting his pauses.

‘Robert left Carla. She was six months pregnant, and I couldn’t get her to … ’