The Last Anniversary (4 page)

‘
D
o you feel you’ve been hard done by in a will?
’

Veronika’s hands freeze in the middle of vigorously kneading ‘extra volume for fine or flat hair’ shampoo into her scalp.

‘
The good news is you could be entitled to contest it
.’

Veronika throws back the shower curtain so hard that plastic rings go pinging across the room. The radio is sitting on the bathroom cabinet. With the shower still running she skids wild and naked across wet tiles to turn the dial up to shouting volume.

‘
AT O’SHEA SOLICITORS WE SPECIALISE IN WILLS AND PROBATE. WE CAN LET YOU KNOW YOUR LEGAL ENTITLEMENTS. CALL US NOW ON
…’

Pen!
she thinks frantically.

In desperation she writes the number with the tip of her finger on the steamed-up bathroom mirror, opens the bathroom door, dripping copiously, and sticks her still foamy head out in search of a passing flatmate. Rivulets of shampoo run into her eyes. ‘Is anyone awake? It’s an emergency! I need a pen!’

There is an anguished cry from down the hallway. ‘Veronika! Do you realise what time it is?’

‘Good morning! It’s six a.m., it’s a beautiful day and I need a pen!’

Veronika pulls open the bathroom cabinet’s drawer, grabs a lipstick and traces the fading numbers in bright fuchsia. She stands there, feeling resourceful and determined.

How could Aunt Connie have been so cruel? Sophie! Of
all
people!

‘T
homas’s Aunt Connie died. It looks like she’s left me something in her will.’

‘Well, how thoughtful of her! Is it something nice?’

‘Yes. Her house.’

‘Oh
no
. Sophie, darling, I’m afraid you’ll have to give it straight back.’

‘Mum, I think she really wanted me to have it.’

‘You mean her house on Scribbly Gum Island? Her actual house?’

‘Yes, her actual house.’

‘Really? It’s extraordinary. It’s exciting! But oh dear. Oh goodness. It doesn’t seem appropriate after Thomas, does it? Look, I’ll call you straight back.
Survivor
is about to start. Did you forget? Do you need me to tape it for you?’

‘No, no. I’m watching it. Call me in the first ad.’

About the Island
The Munro Baby Mystery
Activities
Restaurants
Special Events
Getting Here
Contact Us!

About the Island

Scribbly Gum Island is one of Australia’s most fascinating, favourite tourist attractions. Located north of Sydney on the stunning Hawkesbury River, near Glass Bay, the island gets its name from the beautiful Scribbly Gum trees that can be found there. (The Scribbly Gum is a eucalyptus tree with a creamy pale trunk covered in dark brown lines–as if somebody has taken a pen and scribbled all over it! These scribbles are actually made by the larvae of the tiny scribbly moth.)

Scribbly Gum Island’s two most famous residents were Alice and Jack Munro, who mysteriously vanished from their home during the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s, leaving behind a two-week-old baby. Visitors can take a tour of
Alice and Jack’s home
, exactly as it was when the Doughty sisters, Connie and Rose, found the Munro baby. They can also share Devonshire teas with Baby Enigma (now a grandmother!) and the Doughty sisters.

The
Doughty Family
has owned Scribbly Gum Island since 1882, when a poor blacksmith named Harry Doughty won a bet with its rich owner, Sir Charles McKay. The bet was over the outcome of a test match in England. Australia had never defeated England away from home and appeared unlikely to do so this time. Sir Charles famously said, ‘I’ll bet this island that Australia will not defeat England.’
Guess who lost his island!
Australia narrowly defeated England in a sensational match that was reported as the ‘death of English cricket’ and became the origin of the
‘Ashes’ series
. Sir Charles was forced to hand over his island, much to the jubilation of young Harry Doughty (who, not surprisingly, was a keen cricketer!).

Today, the only full-time residents of the island are Harry Doughty’s granddaughters, Connie and Rose, as well as Baby Enigma and her two daughters (Margaret and Laura) and their families.

Scribbly Gum Island is the perfect location for a day out. There’s just so much to do!

Take the tour of Alice and Jack’s intriguing house and learn more about the Munro Baby Mystery. This is a must! Only $15 for adults, $10 concession.


Take a break at Connie’s Café. Here you’ll find the most delectable blueberry muffins and Devonshire teas in Australia!


Treat the littlies to an exquisite face-painting by Rose Doughty. Just $10 per little face!


Put some
natural
colour in your cheeks–walk the marked
bush tracks
which criss-cross the island. The most invigorating is the walk up to the top of Kingfisher Lookout. As you walk through the forest in the centre of the island you’ll see so much beautiful plant life, including scribbly gum (of course!), banksia, blueberry ash and dwarf apple. Watch out for white-cheeked honeyeaters, pygmy possums, brush-tailed possums, sacred kingfishers and the red-bellied black snake! When you reach Kingfisher Lookout, catch your breath and enjoy your reward: breathtaking views of the island and the dramatic sandstone cliffs that line the Hawkesbury River, which sparkles like a sapphire in the sunshine.


Enjoy a refreshing swim followed by a picnic lunch at glorious Sultana Rocks on the south side of the island. Prepacked picnic baskets available from Connie’s Café.


Don’t forget to keep an eye out for Alice Munro’s ghost. She is said to haunt the island at twilight, wearing a beautiful green dress. (Don’t worry–she’s friendly!)

Camping is not permitted. All non-residents must leave Scribbly Gum Island by 8 p.m. This rule is strictly enforced.

O
nce, a long time ago, Grace left Callum a love letter in their microwave.

Sometimes she still leaves letters for him in the microwave, but now they consist of just one word written in capitals on a Post-it note:

It is the day after Aunt Connie died and Grace’s first day alone with the baby. Callum had taken two weeks off but today he is due back at work. It is time for their new lives playing Mummy and Daddy to begin.

‘I could extend it,’ Callum offers as they sit down to breakfast. ‘Death in the family.’

‘I’m fine,’ says Grace.

Actually, she has woken up with a headache unlike any other headache she has ever experienced. Her head feels like mashed potato. When she tentatively puts her fingertips to her scalp she is surprised that it still feels hard, not soft and pulpy.

She remembers her horrible dream last night about Aunt Connie. Perhaps the headache is grief, but this seems unlikely considering that when Grace thinks about Connie dying she feels absolutely nothing. Grace loved Aunt Connie. She knows that as if it were a biographical fact about somebody else’s life. It is just that there is no time to feel things any more. Looking after the baby is like taking some sort of terrifying, never-ending practical exam. All she does is respond to what the baby is doing. Feed baby. Change baby. Wash baby. Keep baby alive. Prepare for when baby wakes again.

When will it all be over? When will she have time to think and feel again? Presumably not till the baby is a teenager and can safely fend for himself. Although, of course, teenagers need to be taught to drive and say no to drugs and wear condoms. She wants to say to Callum, What have we done? We must have been mad! We can’t do this!

Except that Callum
can
do it. He holds the baby nonchalantly in the crook of one arm and talks on the phone with the other. When they can’t get the baby to sleep, Callum puts him over one shoulder and waltzes around the room, humming Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 2 to him.

Callum is a high-school music teacher. He tells Grace all about something called the ‘Mozart effect’ and how classical music can develop Jake’s ‘spatial-temporal reasoning’. Whatever
that
is. Grace is pretty sure she lacks it. It is extremely unlikely that her own mother ever hummed Mozart to her.

The first time she ever saw Callum he was dancing. They were at a mutual friend’s wedding and Grace was sitting at a table drinking champagne to take away the taste of the worst crème brûlée she had ever eaten in her life, when she caught sight of a guy walking onto the dance floor. In spite of his perfectly nice suit there was something strangely loutish about him. His shoulders were a bit too big, his arms a bit too long. But oh my word, as her Grandma Enigma would have said, could that man dance! He danced as naturally as if he were walking. There was no self-conscious ‘Yes, yes, we all know I’m the best dancer in the room’ smirk. Grace quickly put down her champagne glass, wondering if she was drunk because she had never felt so instantly attracted to a stranger in her life. That big dancing gorilla made her insides go as soft as butter.

She had been thirty years old and she’d never fallen in love so hard or so fast or, well, at all. She had always thought she just wasn’t the type to fall in love, not in that abandoned way that other people could: she was too uptight, too hard-headed, too tall. Romantic scenes in films made her toes curl; she wanted to avert her eyes from heartfelt looks the way other women looked away when there was too much blood. When men started to get those sappy expressions on their faces she always felt an inexplicable desire to sneeze.

So when Callum came to pick her up to take her to the movies on their third date, and she opened her front door and her heart fluttered and her legs trembled, it was such a foreign sensation that she genuinely thought, Oh dear, I must be coming down with the flu. When it finally dawned on her that the reason love songs on the radio were starting to sound so poignant was because she was in love herself, it was like discovering a hidden talent, like waking up one day and finding you could sing. So she wasn’t a Cold Unfeeling Frigid Bitch after all (the last words of an ex-boyfriend before he slammed down the phone). She was a real, red-blooded woman in love with a high-school music teacher who looked like a labourer but played the cello with his eyes closed, a man with size twelve feet and a secret stash of ballroom-dancing trophies, a man who ate spaghetti straight out of the can while listening to symphonies, a man who seemed fascinated by her every thought and feeling and memory, a man who never kissed her hello or goodbye without whirling her around in a waltz or making her go all weak and giggly with a dramatic cheek-to-cheek tango. He never actually danced
with
her because she couldn’t. ‘Wouldn’t,’ Callum said. ‘
Move
, woman!’ But then he’d dip her to the floor and kiss her and she’d think,
Oh God, I’m so happy it’s embarrassing
.

Of course, now, four years later, it turns out they are just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill married couple. She is fine with that. She is
so
fine with that. After all, she’s a realist. Callum doesn’t dance her around the room quite so often, but that is to be expected after all this time. You have to expect the passion to wane. You have to expect these hot flares of irritation, like lit matches.

They are having one of those flares now, at the breakfast table.

‘Are you sure you’re OK for me to go back to work?’ Callum asks. He is eating Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and his spoon clinks against his teeth with each mouthful. When Grace watches television she apparently jiggles her knee up and down. He clinks, she jiggles. One annoying habit cancels out the other.

‘I
said
I was sure.’

‘OK. I’m just asking.’

‘What, do you think I’ll drop him without you here to monitor me?’ Grace’s terror that she will do exactly that makes her voice sound its meanest and most sarcastic.

Callum once asked her why she sometimes spoke to him as if she hated him. ‘I do not!’ she’d said, surprised and guilty.

‘I do not think you’ll drop him,’ he says now, in a resigned, I’ll-be-the-mature-one voice. ‘I do think you’re looking a bit pale.’

‘Thank you, but I’m fine.’ She doesn’t tell him about her headache. She wants him to go back to work. Maybe it will be easier without him there. She can stop worrying that he might notice she is all wrong as a mother. Perhaps the problem is just that she feels self-conscious.

‘I’ll make sure I can get the afternoon off for the funeral,’ says Callum.

‘Good,’ says Grace vaguely. She watches him stand up, stretch and go to leave the room, with his breakfast bowl still sitting on the table.

‘I’d better get dressed for work.’

‘Do you think you could put your plate in the sink?’

‘Sorry.’ He turns around and puts the bowl in the sink and conscientiously fills it with water.

She is still eating her toast. He puts one hand on her shoulder and she tilts her head and presses her cheek against his hand.

Jab, jab, truce! This, it seems, is marriage–or their marriage, anyway.

She has regained the high ground with the cereal bowl. He’d felt guilty, she can tell. He has been making a huge effort since the baby was born.

‘I’m Callum Tidyman,’ he had told her at the wedding, much later in the night, when they were all waiting outside the reception place for the bride and groom to hurry up and leave on their honeymoon. They just happened to be standing next to each other, thanks to some careful shuffling on Grace’s part. He was sweaty and messy from his dancing, his shirt coming out the back of his trousers.

He continued, ‘And I’m not.’

‘A tidy man?’

‘That’s right. I’m a slob. I’ve rebelled against my name.’

‘Yes, well that’s nothing to be proud of,’ she said sternly and flirtatiously, already noticing with interest that she was behaving differently than she did with other men.

Back then, she would never have believed it possible that they would one day have an operatic fight over a wet towel left on the bed, or that the sight of a breakfast bowl with a concrete-hard ring of leftover cereal could make her want to bash her head against a wall. Now, when she hears Callum perform his ‘tidy man’ joke for other people, her smile is a stiff grimace. Oh, ha, ha.

Of course, this whole tidiness issue has got out of hand since they moved into her mother’s house–her childhood home–on Scribbly Gum Island.

Even though her mother Laura is thousands of miles away, on a meticulously planned world trip, Grace can feel her presence in every domestic move that she makes. She finds herself holding glasses up to the light, squintily inspecting them for streaks. Every third day she pulls on long, yellow rubber gloves and gets down on her hands and knees to violently scrub the kitchen floor. ‘Feet,’ she says sharply to Callum whenever he walks in the door, and then waits for him to kick off his shoes with a bemused expression.

‘Do you think she’ll ground you if we leave a mark on the place?’ he asked her once, before the baby was born.

‘Oh, we’re leaving marks,’ said Grace. ‘I’ll be hearing about them for years to come.’

He said, ‘We don’t have to live here, you know. If it makes you unhappy.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Grace made herself laugh. ‘It would be stupid to pay rent when this place is sitting here.’

Grace and Callum are building their dream home in the Blue Mountains. ‘Building your dream home is a fast-track to divorce,’ one friend helpfully told them, just after they’d signed all the contracts. When Laura had offered her home on the island while she was away for a year it had been too good an offer to refuse. Grace was pregnant and she and Callum had been spending a lot of time at the kitchen table with a calculator, calculating how far they were in over their heads. It would have been madness to turn down Laura’s offer. It was such a normal, everyday thing for a mother to offer and a daughter to accept.

‘Fantastic,’ Callum had said.

‘Scribbly Gum isn’t the most convenient place to live,’ offered Grace.

‘Yes, but
free
,’ he’d said cheerfully. Things to do with family are simple and straightforward to Callum. There are no murky depths of unexplained feeling.

Grace can’t even explain to herself her resistance to accepting favours from her mother. After all, they are perfectly civil with each other these days. Sometimes they even
laugh
together, just for a few seconds, and then there is always an awkward silence–but still. In fact, they’d become so close to normal that at the airport seeing her off, Grace had almost said, ‘I’ll miss you’, but then she had a disconcerting memory of her mother’s face looking right through her, smiling slightly, humming a tune while thirteen-year-old Grace beat the insides of her wrists on the edge of the dining-room table and begged, ‘Please, Mum, can we please, please stop it now?’ So Grace hadn’t said, ‘I’ll miss you’, and her mother hadn’t said it either.

Callum, of course, had thought that living on Scribbly Gum Island would be a wonderful adventure, but then Callum thinks that anything new is a wonderful adventure, from trying a new brand of tomato sauce to having a baby.

‘Sleeping like a baby,’ he reports now when he comes back into the kitchen, looking unfamiliar and grown up, wearing a shirt and tie for the first time in two weeks. ‘You won’t hear from him for another two hours at least, I’d say.’

Watching him, Grace realises that Callum will actually miss the baby while he is at work. All his Daddy instincts have clicked so neatly into place, unlike her missing Mummy instincts.

‘Are you taking Vic?’ she asks.

‘You bet. It’s the only fun part of going back to work.’

When they first moved onto the island, Grace had shown Callum Laura’s little outboard motor boat.

‘What’s she called?’ he’d asked.

‘It’s just called the tinny,’ said Grace. ‘It’s not like a sailing boat.’

Callum had replied, ‘You can’t just call her the tinny, like she’s a can of beer. At least call her Victoria Bitter, after the world’s best beer. Vic for short.’

So now the old tinny was called Vic, and Grace feels an obscure sense of failure that she’d never thought to give it a name. It looks perkier now it has a name.

‘Get the ferry back if it’s raining,’ she tells him.

‘It’ll be fun in the rain.’

‘I can assure you it won’t.’

‘OK, Island Girl.’ He kisses her goodbye. ‘I’ll be home early.’

‘It’s OK,’ says Grace. ‘I’ve got lots to do.’

The first thing she does is spend an hour and a half staring at a milk carton.

It isn’t her intention to spend an hour and a half staring at a milk carton. It is an accident. After Callum leaves, it is as though a leaden blanket of silence shrouds the house. The silence is like a sound: a hollow, shrieking sound.