The Wrong Door

by Bunty Avieson

  Clare stared at her mother and sister. The air was charged, like someone had just turned off very loud music, leaving behind a heightened silence. It seemed to grow and swell.

  ‘I killed Charles Dayton,’ repeated Marla. She gripped the back of a kitchen chair, her eyes locked on Clare. ‘I picked up the clawhead hammer from his toolbox, and hit him … here.’ She pointed to her right temple. ‘I killed my father. It’s called parricide, or more specifically patricide. A very rare crime. Usually perpetrated by sons with an oedipal complex. One of the most heinous of crimes you can commit. Our whole culture is based on that biblical command, honour thy father. To kill thy father strikes at the very root of civilisation.’

  Marla’s voice started to rise and her words came out in a clipped staccato. She didn’t sound like herself. It was as if she was repeating something from a textbook that she had read and re-read so many times that she had learned it by heart. ‘In the time of the Romans, the punishment for patricide was to be sewn up in a sack that had a monkey, snake, rooster and dog inside, and then to be thrown in a river.’

  Her eyes were wide with the imagined horror and she trembled.

  ‘The significance of the animals was to torture the perpetrator as he died a slow and agonising death. The snake symbolised evil. The rooster is primarily known for his crowing, and he was to remind the son of his guilt. The dog was to howl, not only to be deafening and frightening, but also to evoke the wrath of the gods. The monkey would mimic the son’s behaviour and re-enact the murder.’

  Peg put a steadying hand on Marla’s arm but she didn’t appear to notice.

  ‘The sack itself was believed to increase tenfold the agony the father suffered. And the son was thrown into the river so that he could feel his father’s panic when he realised that his own son had turned on him. The sack was tied so no matter how much the son struggled, he couldn’t get out. That was to show him …’

  Peg slapped her daughter hard on the left cheek. The sound was like a thunderclap, ricocheting around the kitchen walls. Marla froze mid-sentence, holding her breath for a moment in shock. As she let it out, her whole body slumped.

  ‘These days they just send you to jail,’ finished Peg.

  CHAPTER 19

  The three women sat in silence at the kitchen table, each in their usual position. Peg was at the head of the table, nearest to the stove and the telephone. Marla sat to her right and Clare on her left, where she had a view straight down the garden to the tree where she used to sit with Mr Sanjay. The only sound was the ticking of the stately grandfather clock in the hallway.

  Each of the women tried to absorb the brutality of Marla’s revelations. Marla was shaking with the force of her guilt and shame. She took short sharp breaths to regain her equilibrium. Peg was pale but composed. She gripped her own forearms, pressing her fingers hard into the flesh, as her mind was forced to return to a time and place she had long ago buried. Clare was dumbstruck. She had imagined her father to be a dignified and honourable man. He had been an ambulance driver for God’s sake.

  And his death. Family folklore had it that he died in an accidental fire – a terrible tragedy that had devastated Peg so much she couldn’t bring herself to talk about him. Since she was a child Clare had carried a fantasy of her father. He was the compassionate ambulance driver who liked trains. She imagined him heading off to work each day from this house, leaving each morning at eight o’clock, like the man up the street, to catch the 8.07 train into the city.

  In reality Charles Dayton had been a bully and a thug who beat up his wife and daughter. Peg, her gutsy mother who ran her world from the dining room table, had once been beaten and cowed, living every day in terror.

  And Clare’s beautiful innocent sister, just fifteen and in love for the first time, had picked up a clawhead hammer from his toolbox and hit her father so savagely in the temple that it killed him. The horror and revulsion that Marla had lived with every day since hit Clare like huge waves. Her sister had been right. The truth was ugly.

  Marla continued relating the events of that night. It took every ounce of effort to keep her emotions under control and she sounded dispassionate, almost matter-of-fact, as she spoke in a small squeaky voice.

  ‘Micky told me to leave, he would take care of everything. So I did. Dad was lying on the ground with blood pouring from his head. He was moaning and looking grey. I knew he was in a really bad way. I ran home and told Mum what had happened. We should have called an ambulance, I know, but we didn’t. We waited and waited for Micky to appear. But he didn’t come. We waited all night. At about midnight the barn went up in flames. We didn’t dare go and investigate. Shortly after dawn the police came. They told us there had been a fire in the shed and Dad had been trapped inside. It looked like an accident. The cop was Dad’s old mate Steve Parry. He was a drinking buddy. He assumed Dad had been working late on one of his handyman projects when the barn caught fire.

  ‘He asked us if we had smelled the fire and Mum said no, we were both asleep. He didn’t question us further. I don’t know why. I guess it didn’t occur to him that Charles Dayton’s little princess could have been involved.

  ‘It wasn’t until they did the autopsy a few days later that they discovered Dad had died from head wounds inflicted before the fire. Only then did they start asking questions. Mrs Barraclough, whose bathroom window overlooked our laneway, told police that she was getting ready for bed at about 9.30 and had seen Micky go past.

  ‘So the police started to look for him but Micky was nowhere to be found. It made him look very guilty. According to his brother, he didn’t return home that evening. He didn’t come back to get clothes or say goodbye. Nothing. He had gone.’

  ‘You never saw him again?’ asked Clare.

  Marla shook her head. ‘He told me to go home, he would take care of everything and that was the last time I ever saw him. The police had a few sightings of people fitting his description, from all over the country. They couldn’t pin any of them down and they don’t have proof but they believe the most likely scenario was he hitched a lift, probably with any one of the thousands of trucks that would have been travelling the route that night, and was halfway to Sydney by the time Dad’s body was found. But I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

  Clare digested the information slowly. Something Marla had said jarred.

  ‘You mentioned Micky’s brother. Did you know him?’

  ‘Pete, yes, of course.’

  Clare thought of Gwennie. Paranoid, jealous and grief-stricken. Poor, sad woman.

  ‘He was the husband of the woman who came here last night.’

  ‘I guess so,’ said Marla. ‘I never met her. When I knew Pete Darvill he was twenty. I haven’t seen him since Dad’s funeral.’

  ‘Gwennie said Pete didn’t have a brother. She said that he was an only child.’

  Peg and Marla shook their heads in unison.

  ‘They were very, very close,’ said Marla. ‘They lived together in a house on the main street. Their parents had died a year earlier in a car accident and it was just the two of them. They were great mates.’

  ‘Well, according to Gwennie, Pete told her he was an only child. She has a photo of you and Micky. It’s the same as one you have.’ Clare realised what she had said as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

  ‘What photos do I have?’ Marla asked.

  There were no words to placate the look on Marla’s face. Clare put her hands up in supplication.

  Marla’s voice was cold. ‘You mean the photos in the tin in my wardrobe? How do you know about those?’

  ‘I … uh … I was snooping. I’m sorry. I just wanted to know what was so secret.’

  Marla raised an eyebrow, considered it for a moment, then let it pass. It didn’t seem so significant in the wake of the morning’s revelations. She shrugged.

  ‘She has a copy of the same photograph but thinks it’s Pete,’ continued Clare.

  Marla looked confused. ‘That doesn�
�t make sense. How could she not know about Micky?’

  ‘Perhaps Pete was ashamed and didn’t want to let on he had a brother that had been wanted by police for murder,’ said Peg.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Marla. ‘Doesn’t sound like the Pete Darvill I knew. He was terribly protective of Micky. Pete was the responsible one. Being the oldest he assumed the role of parent. If Micky got into trouble, which happened every now and then, it was Pete that would bail him out.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ asked Clare.

  ‘Oh the sort of stuff eighteen-year-old boys get up to. He was caught by the police a couple of times. Nothing serious. Driving before he had a licence. Drunk and disorderly in the main street of Leura at 3 am on a Sunday.’

  Peg sniffed. ‘He was a hothead. Always in trouble.’

  Marla gave her mother a threatening look. ‘Don’t start, Mum,’ she warned.

  ‘He was trouble from the moment you met him.’

  ‘Leave it, Mum. He might have been a bit volatile on occasions but he had had a rough time, losing his parents when he did. He had more guts and integrity than anyone I have ever met.’

  Peg shook her head but stayed quiet.

  The undercurrent of tension was familiar and for the first time Clare felt she was starting to understand. ‘So why did you change your names? Marlene to Marla. Dayton to Dalton?’

  ‘That was Mum’s idea,’ said Marla. ‘To protect me.’

  ‘I thought it would be better for Marla if we started a new life with new identities,’ said Peg.

  Clare frowned. ‘Well, moving to the city would have done that. Why go to the trouble of changing your names?’

  ‘Because Mum was scared Micky would come after us,’ said Marla quietly.

  ‘He knows what happened in the barn that night. He is the only other person, apart from Mum and I, who knows who is really to blame. I ruined his life. I let the police blame him for Dad’s death. I was a coward. He must hate me. Wherever he is, he must hate me for what I took from him. Mum always worried that one day he would come after me. He would realise how much he had lost and would want revenge. So we changed our name, moved here and have lived a discreet life ever since.’

  There was more than a hint of bitterness in Marla’s words.

  Peg appeared drained by the revelations. It was clear she felt she had endured enough and wanted to end the discussion. ‘I’m going to have my shower now,’ she said wearily.

  Marla put a hand on her arm to stop her. ‘There’s more,’ she said, looking at Clare. Her gaze was strong and direct.

  ‘Don’t do this, Marla,’ said Peg.

  ‘Why not, Mum? Because of what the neighbours might say? Bugger them.’

  Peg sighed and sat back down. ‘We have eaten a lot of meals here, the three of us. Clare, you ate your first solid food sitting in your highchair right there, at the end of this table. You were just six months old and the noisiest little baby. It was carrot, if I remember rightly.’ She sounded wistful.

  ‘Actually it was mashed pumpkin,’ Marla corrected. ‘She always loved her pumpkin.’

  Peg looked away. She wasn’t going to argue. There was a strange sort of energy in the room. Marla seemed to have assumed a supremacy Clare had not seen before and Peg was giving in to her, allowing her that authority. The dynamics of their relationship had shifted. It was subtle but disconcerting.

  ‘What do you mean there’s more, Marla?’ asked Clare.

  Marla started to fidget. She smiled awkwardly. It seemed she was having trouble finding just the right words.

  ‘We moved to this house a few months after Dad died. And then a few months after that you were born.’

  Marla stopped and waited. The conspiratorial way she was looking made Clare feel uncomfortable. She looked from Marla to her mother. Peg was sitting, half turned away, her mouth a grim line. There was something about the defensiveness, the feeling that she had given up, that struck a note of fear in Clare.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  Marla stared at Clare in a knowing kind of way while Peg refused to meet her gaze.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘You were my baby,’ said Marla quietly. ‘You’re my daughter.’

  Clare stared at her sister in horror. That couldn’t be so. She looked from one to the other in disbelief.

  ‘You say you are my mother? My mother?’

  She turned to Peg. ‘What is she talking about?’

  Peg nodded, her eyes heavy and sad.

  Clare shook her head vigorously, unaware she was doing so. ‘What are you saying?’ she shouted.

  Peg opened her mouth to speak but Clare rounded on her before she got a word out. ‘And you are my grandmother?’

  The shock gave way to disgust then anger. It was as if with Marla’s words, the last remaining vestige of Clare’s identity was ripped from her. She felt precarious, like she was in freefall. She wasn’t who she thought she was. In fact, the galling truth was she never had been.

  ‘You lied to me. All these years. About something so … so … fundamental.’ Clare was incredulous. ‘Why? How could you do that? What kind of sick, twisted people are you?’

  ‘Oh Clare, honey, it was the best thing,’ said Peg. ‘Your sister was just fifteen. She couldn’t take charge of you then. Nor could she be seen to have a baby. She was just a kid herself. And what do you think Micky would have done if he had found out? I couldn’t risk it.’

  ‘Micky? Oh my God. No. Is he … my … my …?’ Clare couldn’t finish the sentence.

  Every happy daydream that she had indulged about her childhood came crashing down in an instant.

  ‘Micky is your father,’ confirmed Marla.

  Clare felt the overwhelming urge to flee. Being in the same room as these women was suffocating. She flung back her chair and walked upstairs. Marla stood to follow her but Peg held her back. She shook her head silently.

  Clare went to her sister’s wardrobe, pulled over a chair and took down the hat box. She knew what she was after. As she rifled through the contents she avoided touching the bundle of letters tied together with the lace ribbon. She found the sleeve of photos and took them out, tossing the box onto the floor where the rest of its contents spilled out. Clare stepped over the mess and walked out the door.

  Peg and Marla were standing together at the foot of the stairs as she came down. They both looked concerned and questioning. Clare swept past them without a word or a glance.

  ‘Oh God, what have you done?’ said Peg.

  ‘What have we done, Mum, what have we done?’ said Marla.

  CHAPTER 20

  Clare sat in the car outside Susan’s apartment sobbing. How dare she not be home? How dare she have her mobile phone switched off? If she had ever needed her best friend’s cheery face, it was now, as her world disintegrated around her. Clare felt her own sense of self splintering. Susan had known her since she was five years old and Clare had a desperate need to see her friend, talk to her, reminisce with her. She was the only person who could reaffirm who she was.

  She felt she had been robbed of her identity. Who am I? The question went round and round inside her head as she drove to a nearby café and bought breakfast. Her thoughts were insistent and maddening as she huddled at a corner table tearing off pieces of croissant and stuffing them into her mouth. She took the photo packet from her handbag and stared at the laughing faces. Marla at fifteen. Her mother. Micky Darvill. Her father.

  *

  Clare rang the doorbell at the Neutral Bay house and waited. The Saab was in the driveway, exactly where Clare had parked it the night before. She rang the bell again. No response. There didn’t appear to be any movement inside. She walked around the house peering in the windows. I know you’re home goddamn it. She stopped outside one window – the master bedroom. Gwennie was lying on the bed with her back to her. It seemed strange to Clare she should be asleep at this time of the day. She rapped with her car keys on the glass so hard she feared it would break.
>
  Gwennie slowly rolled over. She lay there looking at Clare, making no move to sit up or acknowledge her. Clare rapped again. Come on. What’s wrong with you? Get up.

  With great effort Gwennie pulled herself to a sitting position, then swung her legs over the side. Clare walked back around to the front and waited.

  Gwennie opened the door but made it clear she wasn’t inviting Clare inside. ‘Yes?’ she said politely, as if the two had never met and Clare was an unwelcome stranger on her doorstep.

  ‘Can I come in?’ said Clare.

  ‘Why?’

  Clare felt exasperated. She could think of a hundred reasons.

  ‘To tell you about Pete’s brother Micky.’

  There was a glimmer of interest. Gwennie hesitated, then stood aside and held open the door. The house was dark, despite the bright sunshine outside, and quiet, as if all the windows and doors had been sealed. Clare followed Gwennie into a sitting room. As soon as they were seated Clare produced the sleeve of photos from her handbag and spread the half-dozen images across the glass coffee table.

  Gwennie seemed distracted as Clare began but with every word she could sense her interest growing. ‘This is Micky Darvill,’ said Clare. ‘Pete’s younger brother. And Marla. My sister. She was fifteen and he was eighteen when these were taken.’

  Clare couldn’t bring herself to describe Marla as her mother and the word ‘sister’ stuck in her throat. She rubbed her hand across her mouth as she said it. Any psychologist would immediately have known she was hiding something but Gwennie was more interested in what she was saying than how she was saying it.

  Gwennie ran her eyes along the line of photos and back, picking them up one by one and putting them down again. She went into the study and returned with her photo. Same clothes, same background and same mood. Clearly it belonged to the series. She placed it at the end.

  ‘Pete was a few years older than Micky,’ continued Clare. ‘Their parents died in a car accident leaving the two of them to look after each other. They were very close. Micky was a bit wild while Pete, being older, was the responsible one. They shared a house together in the Blue Mountains.’