Thornwood House (6 page)

I looked back at the house.

It hovered in the blazing afternoon light, a pale island in a sea of gently rippling grass, ghostly and silent. It seemed anchored to another time, a solitary remnant of an era that had long ago ceased to exist. Even the insects buzzing in the grass and the crows cawing mournfully overhead seemed to belong to a place that wasn’t quite real.

If anyone had asked me to put into words what I was feeling at that moment, I’d have been unable to say. I tried to recall another instance when my arms had rippled with tingles, when the same delicious stillness of heart had rendered me incapable of speech . . . but in truth, I’d never before felt such a sense of belonging.

I wanted to run back along the brick pathway, hurry through the clumps of dandelion and seeding weed-heads, through the bobbing swarms of bees and butterflies, and fling myself back into the old house’s shadowy embrace. I was itching to roll up my sleeves and start clearing cobwebs and dust, spend the afternoon fossicking among the treasures that I knew must be hidden within those forgotten nooks and cubbyholes. I wanted to lose myself in the labyrinth of rooms, get covered in ancient dust, soak up memories that weren’t mine . . . and only surface once my desire to know the place more intimately had been satisfied. I was already fantasising about the renovation: who I’d call, what jobs I could do myself –

Bronwyn honked the horn again. ‘Hurry up, Mum.’

My pleasure-glow winked out. Reality crashed back. I had job contacts in Melbourne that I’d spent a decade developing; Bronwyn had school. Not to mention our various networks of friends, and the comfortable monotony of our city environment. Moving to another state, to a remote old house, making a clean break and starting our lives over . . . Well, even the idea of it was intimidating.

I flopped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Dug the key into the ignition. The motor rumbled, then idled quietly while I sat rock-still, frowning at the windscreen.

Aunt Morag had always insisted she had restless blood. That was why we never stayed long in any one place. She’d earned a modest living as an artist’s model, which allowed her the freedom to relocate whenever the whim took her . . . which was often. When I was a child, we lived in a never-ending succession of basements, warehouses, ramshackle shacks on the outskirts of dusty suburbs; tiny, musty apartments, or stately old mansions fallen to disrepair and rented for a song. We even spent a year in a sculptor’s studio, bedding down among an assortment of plaster busts and huge blocks of powdery marble, surrounded by treelike flower arrangements and podiums topped with plastic-enshrouded clay. We stayed until Aunty and the sculptor had a falling out, and then we moved on.

It wasn’t until my teens that I learned the truth about my aunt’s restless blood. After an overheard phone-call, the dots had joined. My mother was a drug addict who pestered Morag for money. Our frequent moves from place to place, it seemed, were less about Aunt Morag’s arty whims, and more about avoiding her sister-in-law’s teary confrontations.

When Morag died a few weeks shy of my seventeenth birthday, I fell into the only pattern I knew. I began to drift from place to place, making temporary homes in shared houses, squats, dubious one-room rentals. I slept on couches, bunked down on floors and, for several weeks one summer, even camped on a leafy inner city rooftop.

When I met Tony, all that changed. He took a mortgage on the old bluestone terrace in Albert Park, and then Bronwyn came along. For the first time in my life I had a real anchor, a family; a reason to settle in one place long enough to discover that I liked it. Not just liked it;
needed
it –

‘Mum?’ Bronwyn was peering across at me. Sweat beaded her brow, tendrils of hair clung to her face. ‘We’d better get going.’

I made a show of glancing at my wrist, although my watch was lying at the bottom of my tote with a broken strap. ‘There’s plenty of time,’ I told her. ‘Why the hurry?’

‘I’m not in a hurry. I’m just bored.’

I searched her profile, worried by the wall of resistance she was putting up, wondering how much of it had to do with Tony.

‘You’re allowed to speak about your father,’ I ventured. ‘You know – ask questions, that sort of thing. I won’t mind.’

A sigh from the seat beside me. ‘Mum, I’m all right.’

‘If you ever want to – ’ Talk, I’d been about to say. If you ever want to talk about him, I’m here. But then I noticed her hunched shoulders, her fingers curled into protective fists, the pallor of her face – and decided I’d said enough.

Gravel popped under the tyres as we swung a U-turn and eased down the access road in a cloud of red dust. To our left, the garden receded into a forest of eucalypt saplings. On the right the hill dropped steeply away, plunging into a bowl-like valley where gumtrees cast long shadows across the paddocks. Sheltering in the patchy shade were white specks, probably cattle.

The valley vanished as the road was engulfed on either side by tall ironbarks and thickets of bottlebrush and acacia and prickly hedges of blackthorn. As the way grew dark, my thoughts returned to Aunt Morag: her pudgy, waxy face framed by a fuzz of henna-red hair, her twinkling hazel eyes that somehow outshone the diamond ring she wore on her small freckled hand. She’d been always on the move, chattering nonstop, rushing through life like a purple-clad tornado.

Aunt Morag had believed that the human heart was a sort of barometer. Only rather than measuring atmospheric pressure, it allowed a person to more easily navigate their life’s convoluted path. ‘You’ll get that ache,’ she used to say, tapping her fingers in the hollow of my bony ten-year-old ribcage, ‘a sort of
tightness in the middle of your chest, just behind your breastbone. Don’t go fobbing it off as indigestion, my girl – it’s your internal barometer warning you that you’re about to make a dingo’s breakfast out of your life.’

I stepped on the brake pedal and killed the ignition. Keeping my eyes on the track ahead, I groped around inside myself. Sure enough, I had the symptoms: An ache in my chest. An edgy throb of foreboding. A shortness of breath as I realised that something special was about to slip through my fingers. My barometer reading was loud and clear: You want this, so go for it. But how could I violate the resolutions I’d made in Melbourne? Rather than consigning Tony to the ancient history basket and moving on with my life, I was seriously considering thrusting myself – and my daughter – into a past that even Tony had fled.

And yet . . .

In my mind I saw the back bedroom with its rosewood dresser and sunken sleigh bed, and the photograph in its dusty silver frame. The man in the picture regarded me from the rose arbour, his expression seductive, his dark eyes commanding, almost hypnotic, as if willing me back to him –

‘I’ve made a decision.’

Bronwyn’s head snapped towards me, a frown puckering her forehead. In that instant she looked uncannily like her father. Of course, she was fair-haired while he was dark, but the high cheekbones, the wide-spaced sapphire eyes, the bony features that made her so striking to look at, were all distinctively his.

I gave a little cough, strangely nervous. ‘What if we were to move here . . . ?’

‘Move here?’ Bronwyn echoed incredulously.

I saw hope flit into her eyes, but it was quickly hidden. I realised she’d been protecting herself, and my heart wrenched. I stole a look in the rear-view mirror. Somewhere behind us, the old homestead slumbered in its timeless sea of grass. I imagined unpacking my boxes in its cavernous lounge room, crowding
the empty spaces with my own belongings. I pictured myself waking in the darkest hour of the night, listening to the old house creak and sigh around me. I remembered the taste of rainwater from the kitchen tap, surprisingly cold and sweet. The giant bathtub, the jasmine poking through the broken window. The sun-drenched rooms with their elegant hand-carved furniture, the stillness that lay over the place like a gently held breath . . . and – dreamlike in its intensity – the image of a dark-haired man smiling from an old black and white photograph.

A powerful yearning gripped me.

I looked at my daughter. ‘The old house might take ages to sell,’ I reasoned. ‘It needs painting and heaps of repairs. If we moved in we could clean it up ourselves, make it exactly how we want. We do need a home, after all . . . and think of all that country air – no more traffic fumes or nosy neighbours, no more peak-hour holdups. We’d have room to breathe here, it’d be like a fresh start, a whole new life . . .’

Bronwyn stared at me wide-eyed. ‘Really, Mum? You want us to live here?’

Tingles went up my spine. I nodded.

Bronwyn let out a shriek of unrestrained joy. Suddenly she was in my arms, all pointy elbows and skinny shoulders and giggles, hugging me tighter than she had in years.

‘You’d have to go to a new school,’ I warned.

She pulled away and buckled back into her seat, laughing happily. ‘Whatever.’

‘You’d be leaving behind all your friends.’

‘I’ll make new ones.’

‘What about netball?’

She gave me a quizzical look. ‘They’ll have netball up here.’

‘What about – ?’

She dazzled me with a two-thousand-watt smile and rapped her knuckles on the dashboard. ‘Come on, Mum. Let’s go. The sooner we’re back in Melbourne packing our things, the sooner we can get back here.’

B
y early December, we’d wound up our life in Melbourne: cancelled subscriptions and utilities, packed a cargo of boxes and organised the removals, filled out Bronwyn’s emancipation papers from one school and enrolled her in another for the new year, attended our going-away parties, and eaten farewell lunches in all our favourite cafes.

I’d expected to be overwhelmed with regret over leaving Albert Park, but as we crammed the last of our belongings into the old Celica and backed out of the drive, all I felt was relief . . . and a thrill of anticipation that rivalled my daughter’s.

For three days we drove. The Newell Highway ran mostly straight, like a tattered black ribbon with no beginning and no end. Summer heat billowed through the windows; the atmosphere seemed ablaze, but we barely noticed. As we sped northwards, the landscape morphed from lush farms and sparse bushland to desiccated flat wastelands, and then to rolling haze-blue hills and thickly treed eucalypt forests. We navigated through dusty towns, bunking down at night in caravan park cabins, then setting out again at dawn.

When we finally crossed the Queensland border, Bronwyn let out a whoop of joy. At Goondiwindi we joined the Cunningham Highway and veered north-east across the Great Dividing Range. Soon we were surrounded by thick forests where tropical
palm trees swayed among the red gums and ironbarks, and huge bracken ferns ran amok in the understorey. The road climbed one dizzying hairpin bend after another. When we passed through the Main Range National Park we wound down the windows, delighting in the chiming song of a million bellbirds.

We arrived at Thornwood hot and dusty and wilted, but the sight of our new home was like a blood transfusion. We screamed, we danced, we cavorted through the airy rooms like a pair of mad things. It was simply too good to be true. After a lifetime of squats and rentals and wishful daydreaming, we were finally home.

We spent the following weeks restoring the old house to its former glory, vacuuming dust, swirling up cobwebs, washing the floorboards, scouring bathroom tiles, buffing the lovely old brass taps back to a golden shine, and polishing the windows with vinegar and newsprint until they sparkled. Once our belongings arrived from Melbourne, we set about unpacking. I couldn’t decide what to do with the existing furniture – it was far too beautiful to sell or give away – so I simply crammed my own art deco pieces in around it.

We celebrated a traditionally Aunt Morag-style Christmas – presents in the morning, then a huge lunch. Crispy baked potatoes, honey-glazed onions and carrots, roast chicken with herb seasoning, beer gravy, green salad . . . Followed by plum pudding complete with embedded sixpence, and lashings of vanilla ice-cream topped with cream. Afterwards we blobbed out on the lounge, reading magazines and nibbling chocolates, then later enjoyed a leisurely walk through the garden.

We barely noticed the new year drift in. Bronwyn was counting the days of freedom left to her before school began – twenty-one – while I had started putting my feelers out for freelance photographic work. We were happy to float along, clearing away the empty packing cartons, picnicking on the lawn, and finding perfect places for our eclectic treasures.
The final effect was – for us, at least – dazzling. The tribal masks Aunt Morag had acquired during her childhood in New Guinea hung on the walls beside Bronwyn’s exuberant butterfly paintings. Her miscellany of birds’ nests, shells, crystal geodes, and tall Vacola jars crammed with deceased beetles were all somehow jostled among my rainbow-hued art-glass vases, brightly woven dilly-bags, historic teacups, and antique camera paraphernalia. Vintage patchwork cushions brightened the deep leather armchairs, and I replaced the moth-eaten floor rug with a vibrant kilim. By the first weekend in January, the sad old house was transformed into a home; our home.

There was only one small fly in the ointment of my otherwise considerable pleasure: since arriving at Thornwood four weeks ago, sleep had eluded me. Each night, while my daughter slumbered peacefully in her bed, I stalked the house like a poltergeist – opening drawers, peering into cupboards, digging through dusty cartons as if searching for something – what, exactly, I had no idea.

As my state of weariness grew, I became forgetful, absentminded. Clumsy, too – knocking into furniture until my arms and legs were blotched with bruises. I fumbled constantly, causing accidental breakages, and – weirdest of all – I began to catch glimpses of strange shadows from the corner of my eye. Birds, lizards. And once, a willowy dark-haired girl. In the larger scheme of things, this was no big deal; probably just a stress-response to the upheaval of the move. So I pumped my system full of caffeine to get through the day, and tried to convince myself it would pass.