Thornwood House

by Anna Romer

  Understanding gripped me with such great force that it caused a split between my inner and outer selves. I felt that time was shifting, changing shape and form. No longer running forward, but back. Back sixty years, when the creek had roared and the bellbirds chimed their calls, and another woman had stood in the shadow of a tall stone and trembled for her life.

  I just knew.

  For whatever deluded reason, Cleve meant to kill me.

  I had a flash of Bronwyn that day in the kitchen, standing by the window, worry creasing her brow. ‘If you died,’ she’d said in a trembly little voice, ‘what would happen to me?’

  Now her words took on a disturbing new meaning. If I died or was otherwise immobilised, Cleve would no longer need her as security. Panic made me shut my eyes; again I saw his finger slicing his throat in silent warning. I clawed the panic away and measured my options.

  I would fight, if I thought I had a chance. Or run, if I knew for certain I could get away. Run up to the settlers’ hut to find my daughter, and then . . . then what? Cleve was in his seventies, but he had the body – and, I guessed, the strength – of a much younger man. He knew the surrounding bushland and he’d soon outflank me. And while I’d never used a knife before in self-defence, it was clear that Cleve had past experience wielding that axe handle. And, I reminded myself, he was armed.

  I recalled something he’d said, and it made me realise what he wanted.

  You only know her side of the story . . . while mine remains untold.

  ‘You said we shared a passion for the past,’ I said, fighting to steady the breathless wobble in my voice. ‘You were talking about Aylish.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You tended her grave. Left roses for her.’

  ‘They were her favourite.’

  ‘What happened to her? I mean . . . what really happened?’

  He stepped nearer. ‘You want to know about the night she died?’

  I nodded.

  His gaze drifted to the tall boulder with its fin-like curve and dots of pale lichen, but I sensed that his awareness of me had grown acute.

  ‘That would’ve been March, 1946,’ he said. ‘Samuel had returned home from the war, thin and gaunt as a scarecrow. Later I learned that he and Aylish had made a bit of a scene in the street that morning, had a row. Samuel was brooding about it, and Dad wanted to cheer him up. So he invited Samuel over to our house for a few beers. Of course, a “few” turned into a few dozen. By eight o’clock that night they were maudlin, singing at the top of their lungs, reminiscing like a couple of old sailors. It was around that time my father called me in. He told me to take a message to Jacob Lutz over at Stump Hill Road. “Tell the unsociable old coot to get himself over here,” my father said, “and make sure he brings a couple of flagons of his best brew.”’

  While Cleve was talking, I surreptitiously scanned the edge of the clearing. The gully was perhaps ten paces away. Along its verge, the soil was unstable. If I could keep Cleve’s attention on the past, I might be able to lure him to the gully rim, to the loose rock shelf with its zigzag fracture and bed of crumbling earth.

  Shifting my weight, I tested my theory by taking a half-step back.

  Cleve moved into the space I’d created, and went on.

  ‘I’d just turned fourteen. In my eyes, Samuel Riordan was a hero. After reading his letters, I felt I knew him and in a strange way felt close to him. I was reluctant to leave the party, but dutifully got on my bike and rode over to Stump Hill Road. I knocked for ages. Finally I gave up, but just as I was turning away Jacob answered the door groggy and dishevelled. The wireless was crackling away somewhere in the house, the static was deafening. Jacob must have fallen asleep, and he was as cross as a bucket of flies. He told me what I could do with my father’s invitation, so I got back on my bike and started towards home.’

  While he spoke, I took another half-step backwards.

  Cleve moved distractedly after me. ‘That’s when I saw Aylish. Little Lulu was with her. They were walking up the track that led across the gully to Thornwood. It was late for Lulu to be out, and something told me Aylish was on her way to see Samuel. They used to meet right here at the gully before he went off to war. But that night, Samuel was drunk at my father’s place . . . and in no fit state to be meeting anyone.’

  ‘So you met her instead,’ I prompted, inching a half-step nearer the gully.

  Cleve remained where he was, absorbed in his story.

  ‘I hurried after her, cutting through the wood yard and up into the trees, following close behind. Then Lulu ran away and Aylish panicked. I found her up here at the clearing – just as I found you tonight, Audrey. She was calling for her child, frantic with worry. I’d never seen her so wild . . . or so beautiful.’ He sighed, and shook his head, shuffling into the gap between us. ‘I only meant to talk to her. I only wanted to tell her that Mum missed little Lulu. We all missed her,’ he added with bitterness. ‘But Aylish refused to hear a word. She got angry, started accusing me of doing all these things. And then she said I’d scared little Lulu and made her run away into the bushes and now she was lost. She said other things too . . . cruel things. Things that deeply hurt me. I suppose that’s when the greyness descended. I’ve no recollection of having moved, nor even that any time had passed between the fading of her shout and the silence that followed. When I finally blinked the sweat and tears from my eyes and looked down, the sight of what I’d done sickened me.’

  Thunder cracked overhead and in the brilliant flash that followed, I clearly saw Cleve’s face. It was twisted into a grotesque mask, streaked with rain or tears, I couldn’t tell.

  ‘I’m not a bad man,’ he said, his words nearly swallowed by the rumbling thunder. ‘I don’t mean any harm. But I’ve been unwell. Even as a kid, I knew I wasn’t quite right. Dad never noticed much, always too preoccupied with work. Mum saw me as a monster, I suppose. And Aylish – I thought she was different. Being an outsider like me, I thought she understood . . . but in the end, she was the same as everyone else.’

  Cleve paused, and there was a part of me that hoped he wouldn’t continue. It disturbed me that Aylish’s story – the story I’d so craved to hear – was being told now, by him. I could already feel the toxic energy of his words seeping into my bloodstream, poisoning me . . . but I had to keep him talking.

  ‘Just now, you said the greyness descended. What did you mean?’

  A ragged sigh. Cleve trod nearer. ‘It’s hard to describe. An unpleasant feeling, as if your brain is swelling. There’s a sickness in there, and it makes everything turn grey. Then . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Once it starts, I’ve no control over it. After that first time with Aylish, I convinced myself it wouldn’t happen again. Years went by, and I felt certain the greyness was gone and that I’d be all right. I was happy, and it kept the sickness at bay.’

  One of Glenda’s diary entries flashed into my mind, that sunny Sunday morning she’d watched Cleve planting onions. Her account had been written with such fondness for the man she believed to be her father that it shot a bolt of pain into my heart.

  ‘The greyness struck again, though, didn’t it?’

  Cleve stared across the moonlit glade towards me, his eyes like holes punched in pale clay. ‘It was bad with Glenda. You can’t imagine how bad. She was my little girl. She loved me, and I . . . well, I worshipped the ground she walked on.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She found the letters.’ A pause. ‘Just like you did, snooping where she shouldn’t. And like you, she took them and read them. Afterwards, she ran away. It was raining that night, so she sheltered in the hollow tree at the edge of Samuel’s garden. I only wanted to talk, but she was confused about what she’d read in the letters. Angry too, I suppose. She said I’d go to jail, that the letters were proof. She said she’d tell Luella and then the whole town would know that it was me and not Samuel who’d killed her grandmother. Of course, we argued bitterly. So many bad words were said. The next thing I knew
she was . . . she . . .’

  As his words sank in I saw, in a blinding flash of hindsight, that the story I’d constructed about Glenda’s death had been fundamentally flawed. I had assumed the letters she’d found were from Hobe Miller to her mother, which had sent me off on a wild goose chase after Hobe – when in fact they were Aylish’s letters, the same ones I’d discovered in the settlers’ hut. Letters which Cleve had stolen from the post office as a boy and kept among his hoardings in the shed . . . then re-stolen in a staged burglary a few years after his apparent death. Letters he’d killed for.

  I slid my hand to my back pocket and touched cold wet fingers to the bundle. Some of the envelopes were blotched with dark stains, stains I had suspected were dried blood. Glenda’s blood, I now knew.

  Cleve palmed the wetness from his face.

  ‘I kept checking for a pulse. Kept thinking I’d found one – then it would melt away beneath my fingertips. I remember running down the hill to Samuel’s house at one stage, thinking I’d get a blanket to wrap her in. I stood down there in the garden for a while, praying that it was all a horrible nightmare, trying to shake myself awake. But when I climbed the hill again, there she was, lying in the dirt where I’d left her. I knelt and touched her face, told her I loved her – and that’s when she spoke. It was nothing, a sigh . . . but my heart leapt. She was alive.

  ‘Hoisting her into my arms, I ran towards home. Luella was training as a nurse, I reasoned that she’d know what to do. I’d tell her Glenda had fallen, that there’d been a rockslide. Maybe Glenda would get amnesia and forget what I’d done, and we’d go back to being happy again.

  ‘Of course,’ he rasped, ‘it wasn’t to be. When I reached the gully I noticed something was missing. There was a stillness that hadn’t been there before, a shadow where moments ago there’d been light. Her heart, you see. Her poor heart had stopped beating.’

  For a moment there was just the rain and the hiss of windblown leaves. I was blinking back tears – tears of fright and rage and sorrow – and trying to grasp how a loving father could turn on his daughter with such devastating cruelty. Was love really so fickle? Or did Cleve use the word to describe some other emotion that had, in the end, only resembled love?

  Cleve edged nearer. ‘When I returned home, the house was empty. I went to the shed. Retrieved my old hunting rifle from its drawer and loaded up. Sat on a chair and rested my forehead on the muzzle. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to slide my finger past the trigger guard, put an end to the pain I was feeling . . . I can’t recall how long I sat there, only that a noise alerted me – a nightjar calling through the darkness to its mate. Hours must have passed. I’d grown cold, my body ached. But my mind had cleared. I didn’t want to die, so I’d just have to endure the horror of what I’d done. I unloaded the rifle and re-stowed it, then went about cleaning myself up.

  ‘I’d only just begun to peel off my clothes when the shed door burst open. It was Tony. I told him to piss off . . . then saw he was armed. He had this old Winchester, lever action, .22 calibre. Christ knows where he got it. I remember thinking, Good thing the idiot boy has no idea about loading a firearm. Then I ate my words. Tony raised the rifle, aimed the bloody thing right at my face. “You hurt Glenda,” he said. That’s all. “You hurt Glenda.” And then he pulled the trigger.’

  Thunder clapped overhead, making me flinch. Cleve looked at the sky, then back at me. He frowned, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

  ‘Little bastard,’ he said quietly, wiping the rain out of his eyes. ‘It took me twenty years, but I got him in the end.’

  But he hadn’t gotten Tony in the end. He’d gotten him much earlier, when Tony was a boy of fourteen. Cleve’s violence had crippled Tony’s spirit and condemned him to a life of nightmares, uncertainty and fear. Worse, Tony’s own actions in the shed that night must have convinced him he’d inherited Cleve’s violent nature. Was that why, all those years later when Bronwyn came along, Tony had withdrawn from her? Not because she resembled his dead sister . . . but because he feared what he might do to her?

  ‘Tony was a good man,’ I said, my heart starting to hammer as I inched nearer the gully edge. ‘It’s just a pity he didn’t take better aim that night.’

  Cleve nodded, shuffling after me. ‘I’ve often thought the same thing. But the will to survive is a strong instinct, Audrey. No matter how miserable life gets, it’s not always easy to give it up.’

  ‘He found you at the hut, didn’t he? You killed him to protect yourself – there was no greyness, no blanking out. You knew Tony would turn you in, and so you killed him in cold blood.’

  ‘He took me by surprise,’ Cleve said. ‘I had no choice.’

  Another fragment fell into place, one that had been niggling for a while. ‘That rifle, the Winchester. It was the same gun Tony used on you twenty years ago, wasn’t it? You went back to the Holden and retrieved it.’

  ‘It was a shit of a thing, too,’ Cleve snarled, ‘always jamming up on account of having been submerged underwater for so long. You’re right, I retrieved it, cleaned it up and kept it all those years – but I never planned to use it on Tony. I never thought about revenge. I just wanted to be left alone.’

  My muscles were rigid, my body slick with rain and sweat. I felt grubby, dirty. I didn’t want to hear any more of Cleve’s sick rave, but we were only a couple of paces from the gully edge.

  ‘I’d been out hunting,’ Cleve went on. ‘I’d just laid my catch on the chopping bench, when my old dog started barking. I whipped around in time to see Tony come around the side of the hut. He recognised me straight away despite the beard and rags I wore. He started backing away and I knew he meant to run, so I grabbed the rifle and went for him, managed to knock him out with the stock. In his pocket I found car keys and a wallet – and a Polaroid of him with a pretty little girl. I kept the photo, but put everything else back and went looking for his car, which I found at the William Road turnoff. I dragged him all the way, heavy bastard he was, too. I propped him in the driver’s seat with his old friend the Winchester. And then I said goodbye.’

  A bright thread of anger unfurled in me. I remembered the look on Bronwyn’s face the day I sat her down and told her about her father’s death, how she’d crumpled up and hidden behind her hands, tears leaking between her fingers, her thin shoulders shaking. For all his failings, Tony had been a decent man and a great dad, devoted to Bronwyn . . . until guilt and fear had finally driven him out of her life.

  Cleve Jarman had a lot to answer for.

  ‘How do you live with yourself,’ I said, ‘when you’ve caused so much devastation?’

  Cleve made a sound in his throat. ‘I never meant any harm. I told you, they provoked me. Aylish and Glenda – the things they said, horrible things. Threats and accusations. I felt betrayed. I loved them . . . but I came to hate them, too.’

  His last few words were growled rather than spoken. I shivered. He was near enough for me to see the whitish threads of scar tissue on his craggy cheeks, and the glassy light in his eyes. I wondered how close he was to the greyness, to rage. To losing control.

  I was a pace away from the gully edge. Near enough to the rock shelf and its loose bed of earth to see, from the corner of my eye, the dark zigzag of its deadly fault line. My palms were hot and moist, and an erratic beat throbbed in my temple as I backed towards it.

  Cleve’s face shone wet as he approached, the unwashed scent of him rank in the damp air. The arm he’d been holding by his side swung forward and the shank of wood – the axe handle – gleamed wetly in the moonlight. He put out his free hand.

  ‘My letters now, Audrey.’

  The rain had stopped. The moon had emerged from behind its barricade of clouds and drenched the clearing in yellow light.

  ‘That wasn’t the deal,’ I said, my voice sharpened by fear. I’d known it would come to this, but my gut churned, I wasn’t ready. ‘You’ll get them after I see my daughter.’

  ‘There was n
o deal, Audrey. You were never in any position to bargain.’

  He came at me without warning, the axe handle sweeping an arc as he lunged. I leapt backwards, intending to clear the eroded rock shelf and land on the solid section further along – but the weapon glanced off my shoulder. I stumbled, twisting away from the gully’s crumbling edge, landing on my knees in the dirt. Cleve swung again, but I rolled sideways and the axe handle fell wide of its mark.

  I got to my feet, panting in fear. I’d seen a glimmer, a moonlit shard lying a few feet away in the shadows. My knife. I dived for it, raking thought the dirt and clumps of grass, finally touching steel, and closed my fingers around it.

  I saw the next blow coming but moved too slowly.

  The club thudded against my ribs and the impact sent me reeling, the knife lost. Cleve lunged again. I cried out as the heavy wood connected with my hip. Pain shot up my spine, and my legs collapsed. As I rolled sideways, I felt the hardness of the knife under my back. Wriggling aside, I grabbed it and began to crawl, trying to gain a respite from Cleve’s relentless blows. Somehow I got to my feet and about-faced just as he attacked.

  My knife swept in a clumsy arc, but again fear slowed my reflexes.

  Cleve circled just beyond my reach, easily evading the blade. Then he came back from a different angle. I tried to dodge, but stumbled and nearly fell, flinging out my arm at the last moment to fend off the blow. The club hit my forearm, the knife jolted from my fingers, and a tide of nauseating blackness rose up. My legs went to jelly, and I felt myself slide earthwards.

  Cleve rushed at me again, this time swinging sideways. The long handle thudded into my thigh. I cried out, crumpling to my knees, throwing up my hands to protect my head. Another blow struck my shoulders and I buckled under the weight of pain. Cleve grunted and again the wood slammed into my ribs. The breath rushed out of me, and I hung suspended in an airless void. Curling into a ball, stunned by the ferocity of the pain, I was more terrified than I’d ever been before. My daughter was out there alone, defenceless in the night, and I was powerless to help her. I was going to die, and it was going to be very bad and this jagged nightmare place I now cowered in was only the beginning. I quaked with the horrible knowledge that history had got the better of me after all, that time had twisted back on itself, that I’d been here before . . .