The Silent Inheritance (33 page)

They were delivered half-raw. They turned the bread pink, but because it was the bloodiest day of her life and her mother wouldn’t eat anything, Marni ate both, then sat googling, which used up more data than their mobile plan gave them and would make the phone bill expensive.

She googled
Peter Clark, Perth
, and when she found too many Peter Clarks, she tried
Peter Clark, solicitor, Perth, Australia.
There was only one of him, and tomorrow morning she was going to get a taxi to his office and tell him who she was – and tell him she wanted to divorce her mother.

They never fought at home. When they were on the tour, sitting side by side all day on the bus, walking, sleeping side by side, they hadn’t argued, not once.

But how dare she take her out to that place to tell her something that important, then expect it to be all right? It wasn’t all right.

*

She slept. Her mother didn’t look as if she had. She was still sitting on the couch, watching television when Marni woke.

One final breakfast in one final dining room, a different breakfast. Marni refused to speak and as soon as they were done, she walked towards the exit.

‘We packing up now, Marni.’

Didn’t even turn around. Just kept on going.

Her mother came after her. ‘Where you going?’

‘To visit my grandfather.’

‘What?’

‘If what you said about Oliver is true, I’ve got grandparents and I’m going to visit them,’ Marni said and turned her back again, like her mother did, except it didn’t work for her.

‘Why you doing this?’ Sarah asked, and Marni had to turn to reply.

‘Why did you lie to me for nearly thirteen years?’

‘Everything I say about … about your father is true. Name don’t matter.’

‘My name does. I thought I was Marni Carter, and I’m not, and it’s like seeing those millions on a bank receipt one day, then going back the next day and the money is all gone. It’s like you made me be all gone.’

‘I do everything what is best for you. Always, for you.’

‘What’s best for you, more like it. Meeting my grandparents is best for me,’ Marni said.

‘Oliver is Peter Clark son. Not Lynette.’

‘He had a mother somewhere,’ Marni said, and she crossed over a street for no reason other than the lights were green. Her mother didn’t. She’d turned the corner to her left, and lost without her in this city, Marni returned to her side.

*

Sarah knew this area well. She’d said goodbye to Lynette and Peter in this same street and was now retracing her footsteps of that final day.

‘Keep in touch,’ Lynette had said.

For six months Sarah had kept in touch. Ten days after arriving at Gramp’s farm, Lynette had written to tell her that Oliver had died peacefully, that he would be buried at his grandmother’s side.

Mandy and Miriam had written to her and she’d written special letters to them about stealing honey from Gramp’s bees. How many letters? They’d been like a cord, stretching across the vastness, keeping her tied to both ends of Australia.

Then that letter came for Gramp, and the writing on it had made her afraid, and the words she’d read aloud to Gramp she’d had to fight out of her mouth.

Re-hab-il-it-a-shon. It means cured, baby, made better.

Oliver’s baby hadn’t believed that word, and inside her it had protested and her stomach had cramped and she’d gone outside to walk that cramp away and she’d stayed away for too long. Like a bomb, that letter. It had exploded everything. Gran had got out, and when Sarah had gone back, Gramp was outside calling Gran’s name. He couldn’t see well enough to know which way she’d gone.

Sarah had got the car out and they’d driven the road searching for her, but another driver had already found Gran. He’d called the police. Gran’s doctor had known who she was.

Gramp had argued about moving Gran into a nursing home. Sarah hadn’t. She’d given the doctor Uncle John’s address in Dubbo.

That was the last time she’d seen Gran. She’d been lying so quiet and still in a hospital bed. The Gran Sarah had known had never been quiet or still, not the younger roly-poly Gran, or the fighting senile Gran.

She’d driven home that night, made up Gran’s bed for John and his wife, had cleaned the house, the bathroom, done the washing, then on that morning before they’d arrived, she’d written Gramp a note she’d left on the table with his magnifying glass, a brief note. Had lied to him. Told him she was going home to Perth.

A foggy early morning when she’d crept away with her case. Walked a long way before the white kombi van had pulled up beside her.

Couldn’t understand what the driver said but he’d understood her hearing aids, and
Station, train.
He’d understood the bulge of Marni beneath Gran’s old blue coat too and he’d got out of his van and taken the case from her hand, and because she couldn’t lose that case, she’d let him help her in.

A kind man, John Carter the plumber. He’d carried her case into the station where he’d told her to sit down while he bought her a ticket to the city.

Everything she’d done since, she’d done for Marni. She’d found them a safe place to live, a safe name to wear, had worked for her, cooked for her, so she’d grow strong.

She’d grown too strong, and this morning Sarah felt tired and old and weak and sad.

They walked side by side by a wide-windowed office, then Sarah turned to her right. There was a café around the corner, unchanged in fourteen years. Same door, same small tables and chairs, same cakes and pies set out in the same glass-faced counters.

‘We just had breakfast,’ Marni said.

Sarah placed a twenty-dollar note on the counter. ‘Coffee. In a mug. Very strong,’ she said, then, leaving Marni at the counter to order, she walked to a table for two and sat.

Marni came to count the change to the table. She didn’t speak, or not until the woman brought two large mugs of cappuccino and one toasted sandwich.

‘We paid almost twice as much for two coffees and a toasted sandwich at the airport,’ she said.

‘Airport know people don’t come every day. In this place they come every day.’

‘You knew this place was here.’

‘Yes.’ Sarah sipped her coffee and it was good.

‘Peter Clark is my grandfather. I want to see him, Mum.’

‘He don’t know I have got you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because … because Oliver is like my brother. Because he is dying and everyone is sad … because I am too sad … and embarrass and scared and stupid. Many, many thing.’

‘Can I at least see what Peter Clark looks like?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘You look like Oliver.’

‘I look like you and your mother … and … and I feel as if I’m watching some crazy movie where everyone’s lost the plot and it just keeps on getting crazier and more complicated and everyone just wants it to end.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing, Mum! Tell me about Oliver.’

‘He is very beautiful, very clever. He live with us, just weekends and I like weekends very much. He was my friend. After he is getting sick, he is living with us all the time.’

They sat at that table speaking about Oliver until Sarah’s watch told them it was time to pack up their room. They spoke of him while they packed, spoke of the Clarks while waiting to check out, and when Sarah took her card from her purse to pay for the Coke and chips and chocolate bar, the steak sandwiches, that old card Marni had found with the photographs came out with it, but disappeared fast back into Sarah’s purse.

‘Promise you say nothing about Oliver. Promise you will not say how old.’

‘I’ll be almost twelve. I’ll be Marni Carter and my father was a giant … and thank you.’

Their backpacks shouldered once more, they walked back to that corner and this time Marni saw the Clarks’ names on that glass door.

*

The middle-aged receptionist asked if she could help them, but stared at their faces when Marni asked if they could please see Peter Clark, please.

‘Sarah,’ the receptionist said. ‘Oh my gosh.’

‘Pam,’ Sarah said, and Pam picked up a phone and before it was down, a slim, middle-aged woman opened a door.

She didn’t look the type to squeal, but she squealed and enveloped Sarah and her backpack in a bear hug, then Pam came from behind her desk to hug while Marni stood back, watching a show she’d never expected to see.

A knock on a glass door brought Peter Clark out of his office, and Marni saw the shape of her grandfather, his balding head and dark-rimmed glasses. Watched him with greedy eyes as he took both of Sarah’s hands, kissed her cheek then turned to his granddaughter who he wasn’t allowed to know was his granddaughter.

‘Three guesses who you are,’ he said, and he kissed her and Marni knew she was going to howl in a minute.

But he was with a client and he had go. ‘I should be free in fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Don’t go away.’

Lynette wasn’t with a client. They removed their backpacks in her office and sat on her client chairs, and she asked a hundred questions and Sarah replied, and not as she would to a stranger, but as she would to Marni, and she asked her own questions, about Mandy, who had two children, a tiny boy and a girl, and Miriam, who was working in London and still unmarried.

Then Lynette picked up her phone. ‘See if you can delay my eleven thirty, Pam,’ she said. ‘Then try Mandy’s number for me.’

And when the call was put through, Lynette said to the phone, ‘Guess who just popped in with her beautiful daughter… Miriam? She’d better not! It’s Sarah. Yes … Yes … Yes … Don’t you worry about that. She’ll be here if we have to tie her to a chair.’

And the phone down, she turned back to her visitors. ‘She’ll be here in twenty minutes.’

‘She will bring her babies.’

‘They’re at crèche,’ Lynette said. ‘Mandy is a working mum.’

They waited twenty minutes for Peter Clark to join them, then ten minutes more for Mandy, who came in like a hurricane, howling Sarah’s name and hugging her so hard she knocked one of her hearing aids out. They laughed about that.

Marni didn’t laugh. She ached at the stupidity of her mother’s lie. She ached because these strangers were not her mother’s people, only her foster people, but they were Marni’s own, or Mandy and Peter were, and she wanted to howl for the loss of not being able to tell them.

And what if Oliver hadn’t died? What if he’d fought the long battle bravely and won it and he’d married her mother and Marni had grown up over here with a father and these people?

What if?

Always Marni had known about his brain tumour. She’d been six the first time her mother had explained how her daddy had got a bad infection inside his head that the doctors couldn’t make better with medicine. She might have been nine the first time her mother had said brain tumour. She’d always known he’d died in Perth – and hadn’t known his name.

Oliver John Clark.

Lynette’s appointment moved to one o’clock, she suggested an early lunch, and together they walked to that same café around the corner, Marni at her grandfather’s side, her step-grandmother and half-aunt a metre ahead, on either side of Sarah, holding her hands so she couldn’t get away. There wasn’t a lot that could silence Marni. Being with these people had, and breathing air to talk hurt her lungs anyway.

It was an out-of-body experience walking beside her grandfather, and when he asked what year she was in at school, she said year seven, which she hadn’t been when she’d been going on for twelve. Should have said year six.

She sat between her grandfather and aunty at the café, and five people crowded around a little circular table hard pushed to seat four meant they were brushing elbows. She liked it when their elbows brushed, liked it more when her grandfather found space for his arm behind her chair. She took a selfie and got half of him in it, and his arm around her.

Sarah told them about her job, her licence test, her landlady. Mandy said she missed Miriam like crazy.

‘She got boyfriend over there?’

‘Not that we know of,’ Lynette said. ‘Peter and I flew over last year. We looked for signs of a male but found none. She rents a one-bedroom unit on the fourth floor of an old building—’

‘No lifts,’ Peter said, and he spoke about the forty-nine steps he had to climb every time they went out.

His speech might have been difficult to lip-read, but Lynette and Mandy snatched his sentences, trimmed them down to basics, then with word and sign relayed shortened versions. Marni watched enthralled, not by their conversation but by the way they communicated with her mother.

These people worked in a big office. They made enough money to pay a receptionist and a secretary, they had their own daughters and grandchildren, but they loved her mother. It was so obvious. And she’d dumped them. For fourteen years they hadn’t heard a word from her – and wouldn’t have today if Marni hadn’t nagged – and not one word out of them about why she’d disappeared off the face of the planet. They were like the father in that old Bible story about the prodigal son’s return. The Clarks didn’t kill the fatted calf, but they paid for lunch.

Just wait until Marni told Samantha about today—

Couldn’t. Samantha was on Facebook and she put anything on it. She’d put a photo of their granny flat on it and labelled it
Captain Carter’s cottage –
because Marni had been made captain of the netball team and Samantha had expected to be made the new captain – which was the only reason Marni had wanted to come to Perth, because Samantha had written worse than
Captain Carter’s cottage.
She’d put up lies about Marni having thirty brothers and sisters splattered around the world because her mother had ordered a bottle of sperm from America.

She could have a photograph for herself, and if anyone asked, well they were her mother’s foster parents.

‘Would anyone mind if I took a few photos?’ she asked.

‘Go for your life,’ her grandfather said.

She got a perfect smiling close-up of him, then two of him, Lynette and Sarah. She took one of Sarah and Mandy, their faces side by side, like foster sisters, then Mandy took the mobile and got a beauty of Marni standing behind her mother and grandfather, her hands on the backs of their chairs.