‘Just keep walking,’ he says. ‘Right up to the house. Topsy! Lottie!’
‘They’re with me!’ I yell, ‘You’re scaring them too.’
My imagination is running wild. What has he seen? I’m annoyed that he won’t tell me, like I’m some little petal to be cosseted, but I’m not going to stop and argue about it here. I wonder if he’s seen a body or something. It would be really bad to have a second person die in the garden.
As soon as I get back up to the top, I turn to face him.
He’s standing straight and serious, looking all manly and authoritative. ‘Crocodiles,’ he says, before I even have to ask.
‘What?’ I shriek. ‘You saw crocodiles?’
‘No, not as such. But that flattened path, it was part of their slide. I should have realised sooner, with all the grass down in one direction like that.’ A kind of knowing yet faraway look passes over his face. ‘I know crocodile territory when I see it. It’s those years I spent in North Queensland. A man learns these things.’ He pauses, gives a little shake of his head. I can see there’s an element of disappointment, of having let himself down. ‘I should have realised it sooner,’ he admits. ‘It was only when I saw the nest at the end that it hit me.’
I can’t believe we have crocodiles in the garden. I make a mental note not to tell my mother. ‘Were there eggs or anything in the nest?’ I ask.
‘No, no eggs. But there was quite a large flattened area where the crocs turn. They must be pretty big specimens.’
‘I’m surprised the dogs didn’t smell them.’
‘Mmn. It’s probably why we’ve never been able to coax the dogs into the river.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘This close to a residential area? I’ll have to report it to the Department of Parks and Wildlife. I’ll ring them now.’
We hurry inside.
‘This is Ian Russell of Baddow House.’ Ian’s telephone voice is full of authority today, full of know-how.
‘I want to report the presence of a crocodile or crocodiles on our land. Yes … yes, we are close to the river … well no, I didn’t actually see them … but I am familiar with this sort of thing. I spent many years in North Queensland, you know.’
I can hear a note of indignation creep into his voice and I know he has a sceptic on the end of the line.
‘It was quite obviously the slide of a large crocodile. No other animal leaves that sort of track. Very well, very well. Thank you for your time.’
Click.
‘They didn’t believe me,’ he says.
‘They thought it was a crank call?’
‘No. Worse. They humoured me like I was some kind of idiot. They insisted there had been no sightings in this part of the river for a long time. Decades. We’ll just have to keep watch. Take some photos perhaps.’ His face brightens with this thought. I sense his need for action and grow alarmed. ‘You’re not going down there again?’
But he’s already reaching for the camera.
We have photos of squashed grass to study. We talk about it endlessly. When Ian’s son, David, comes up for the weekend, we tell him our news, but swear him to secrecy so that the girls aren’t frightened.
We’re delighted that David has made this trip to Baddow, though none of us mention who has said what about whom, David’s smiling countenance and sunny nature assure me that he’s not harbouring any negative feelings.
With our increased number, we decide to make another reconnaissance trip to our crocodile territory.
We tie the dogs up in the garden. It’s really quite frightening; creeping along, senses alert, poised for flight. But the flattened path doesn’t look quite as flattened this time. Little stems and bits of grass are starting to pop upright again. It’s lost the ominous look of a recently and well used path. We dare to press on to the ‘nest’.
Words fail us when we reach it. There’s a ring of rocks – more of a rectangle really, a few burnt twigs, a pile of dirty magazines and a couple of empty Coke cans. We shuffle around for a while, kicking at a twig here, a Coke can there.
On the path back up to the garden, I strive for something to say, and offer: ‘That rectangle of rocks was a bit weird, almost like it could have been a grave or something.’
‘Oh come on,’ Ian snaps, ‘it was just a kid’s camp and you know it.’
Though Ian’s sense of humour never deserts him for long, I silently vow to be good and not tease him about it. It’s going to be hard. I’m smiling already.
The next day we commence clearing what is now known as ‘Crocodile Patch’.
Our bonfire is the biggest I’ve ever seen. A mountain of leucaena, cats’ claw and other, nameless, weeds towers between the house and the river. Ian and the dogs are really excited. I’m a bit worried about sparks lodging under the eaves of the house and have positioned strategic hoses.
For days we’ve had a Drott, which is like a small bulldozer, ripping up the jungle, and for days Ian has been side by side with the Drott, wielding his chainsaw and machete. He’s looking a bit like a survivor of the Chinese ‘death by a thousand cuts’ torture routine, but I know he’s at his happiest when doing this sort of thing.
There’s a wild gleam in his eye and extra spring in his step as, armed with the necessary fire department permit and a jerry can of fuel, he advances on the ten-metre-high mountain.
I’m backing off, one eye on the mountain, one eye on the quickest route to the hoses when, with a thunderous roar, the pile erupts. Even at my distance the heat is intense, and I retreat further. Ian is up close to the fire, poking at it with huge branches and hurling more debris in. The dogs bark and scuffle with each other.
It burns and burns. And burns and burns and burns. I bring tea and sandwiches down to the site. Between mouthfuls, Ian hurls more debris into the towering inferno. His face is black with what I hope is soot, not singed flesh.
The day wears on. I bring tea and cake down to the site. Ian continues to find debris to feed the roaring mass.
Night approaches and the flames look spectacular against the violet shadows of dusk. The dogs are exhausted, but lie faithfully near Ian, who’s looking blacker than the night sky. I can only spot him by the whites of his eyes.
But the heat is subsiding, the mountain becoming a slumped, glowing mass. We decide it’s safe to go to bed.
It takes a week for the last glowing embers to die. It takes two months for the ground below the surface to cool down enough to support life. We learn this the hard way, with the loss of several young trees planted on the spot.
CHAPTER 22
KITCHEN
THE ORIGINAL KITCHEN AT Baddow was a separate building between the house and the street that had been connected to the main house via a covered walkway. We know it had a cellar, courtesy of the Stewarts, caretakers during the Scouts’ time, and historian Tom Ryan, who was present during an excavation of the kitchen some ten years ago. But the cellar is now no more than four subterranean walls, filled with soil and rocks, that we drive over every day to enter the garage.
After the original kitchen had been pulled down, Mr Hawes, the builder who recognised the significance of Baddow House and halted the planned demolition, built a wooden lean-to against the southern wall to provide a makeshift kitchen. We imagine it was only ever intended to be temporary. This structure not only survived but was used for decades – even enlarged – turning the southern face of the house into a serious eyesore.
The design of this extension is appallingly inappropriate to the original part of the house. The lean-to’s roof is low, flat and expansive enough to kick a football around on. More recent alterations have seen the exterior walls cheaply clad with split logs in a ghastly parody of a settler’s hut. The flyscreens are torn, panes of glass are slipping out of windows and the whole structure leaks like a sieve.
Inside, everything is cracked, stained and depressing. The fibro walls wobble when you touch them and are peppered with holes as though the Karate Kid
has run amok. And it’s dark. A black hole so dingy we need lights on all day, even in our bright Queensland summer. Unfortunately this charming construction stands in the only place a kitchen could go, so we need to demolish it before we can start building a new one. Which means being kitchenless altogether for as long as it takes Mike Johns to build it.
‘How fast can you be?’ we ask Mike.
He kicks at the dirt and looks at the sky. ‘Demolition will only take a week. We’ll have you in your new kitchen within two months.’
We believe his optimism.
I’m not looking forward to being kitchenless but I know we’ll survive. It’s amazing what you can put up with if you know it’s only temporary.
‘There is one problem,’ says Mike.
‘Only one?’ says Ian, all smiley and jokey.
‘Yes, you’ll lose access to your bathroom.’
We hadn’t thought of this. There is only one bathroom in all of Baddow’s vastness. It occupies the top floor of the Keep and is accessed via the main upstairs corridor and a little annexe that is the upper part of the vestibule. The vestibule is the entry to the kitchen and will also have to come down. So our bathroom door will open onto a gaping chasm some seven metres deep and over a metre wide. It is a distance we could jump – and if it was on the ground floor, I’d be happy to jump it. Ian declares he’s happy to jump it anyway. My vertigo-esque tendencies make me sweat just thinking about this. I’ve a horrible feeling Ian means what he says so quickly forbid it.
‘We can put a plank across,’ suggests Mike.
Great. Now we get to walk the plank seven metres from the ground in the pitch dark if we want to go to the loo at night.
Mike sees the look on my face. ‘It will be safe,’ he assures me. ‘It’ll be a plank with walls and it will be anchored.’
‘Like a bridge?’
‘We have the technology.’ This is one of Mike’s favourite sayings. Whenever we ask if something is possible or not, he gives us a calm, confident look and repeats his mantra. Perhaps he watches a lot of sci-fi when he’s not at work. But he’s not looking so calm and confident now. ‘You do realise we will have to disconnect the power?’ he says.
This is nothing. We’ve had plenty of power interruptions already. ‘No problem,’ I say, ‘how long will it be this time?’
‘For the duration of the building.’
It takes a minute to sink in. I must be looking as if my IQ has taken a nosedive, because when Mike goes on to explain, he uses kindergarten terms. ‘Your meter box is on the old kitchen wall,’ he says slowly. ‘Your power will have to be disconnected from the road and the meter box will be removed. You can’t install the new meter box until the new kitchen walls are built.’
I suspect Ian knew this but had chickened out of telling me. ‘They’ll put a temporary powerboard in the garden,’ Ian says to me now, with the Must-Pacify-Anne look he wears when he’s worried I’ll get cross. ‘They’ll have to, because Mike and his men need power for their power tools. We’ll just run extension cords out to their power-board if we need power for anything.’
If we need power?
I regroup. The only way to deal with the chaos of renovating is to accept these nasty surprises with good grace.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘But I can’t live without a fridge.’
‘You can have the fridge,’ they assure me.
‘And the washing machine,’ I quickly add.
I don’t fancy trips to the riverbank to beat clothes on a rock, especially now that I’m clued up on the crocodile and shark situation.
In the end, I’m allowed two extension cords with enough adaptors to give me the fridge, washing machine, kettle, toaster, TV and crockpot. We have no other power whatsoever: no computer, no heaters, no lights. We creep round with torches at night. Thank God we are no longer scared of the ghosts.
It’s March when they begin. I’m starting to count the days till Mother arrives. We still have six months, which seems like loads. Two months till we’re in the new kitchen, that’s May, which gives us four months to tidy up, plant my cottage garden and do all the last-minute touches. Cyril shakes his head and predicts July at the earliest.
The old kitchen is down within a week. Then the ground is prepared by an excavator. Trenches are dug for new plumbing, new sewerage pipes and – thanks to a brainwave of Calvin’s – to bury the power lines from the road to the house. ‘You may as well do it while it’s all dug up,’ he points out. It’s one of those ideas you slap your head over and say Why didn’t we think of that? We’ve despised the looping, drooping overhead power lines since we first saw the house.
Then it pours with rain for two weeks. With our network of trenches, the front garden is looking very much like France in 1916. Ian puts duckboards down for us to walk on. Progress slows. John and Sarah dodge showers and work in ankle-deep water.
However our new kitchen is emerging. We do Besser Block walls, render, then press shallow lines into the render to match those on the original house. These lines give the illusion that the house is built of massive stone blocks, rather than rendered bricks. Whatever Edgar Aldridge did we are determined to follow. A roof skeleton appears one day, trusses are hoisted, batons hammered down and electrical cord threaded through in readiness for the great day when our power will be restored.
But weeks are ticking by, and we begin to fear that Cyril’s prediction of July is somewhat optimistic.
I plunge into a kitchen design frenzy with cabinet maker Brad Weiss. Brad doesn’t say much from behind his thick beard and when he does speak it comes out in reluctant-sounding monosyllables. I’m a bit worried at first, because I have precise and unusual ideas for the kitchen. I want it to look as though it has been there for as long as the rest of the house. I want its proportions and style to match the original architecture.
But I soon discover that Brad is tuned in to my way of thinking. We understand each other totally and design cupboard doors that resemble those on an antique dresser. We find huge stone tiles that look as close to old flagstones as you could hope to find. We paint the cupboard doors terracotta, then add a coat of spearmint green, thin enough to see hints of the red beneath.
More weeks tick by. Every night I cook in the crockpot in the office. We grow unutterably sick of sloppy food. Dirty dishes are dealt with in a bucket. After dinner each night I carry a glowing fluoro tube and my bucket of dishes outside to the old scullery. The glowing tube sits on top of the fridge we’ve crammed into one corner, and I wash up by its pale, translucent light. It’s winter now, and I’m lashed by a cold, southerly that whips through the old iron louvres. There are no panes of glass in the scullery and when it rains, the wind slings freezing raindrops through the gaps in the louvres and into my face as I work.
We do at least have hot water, thanks to some nifty work by Calvin, so can luxuriate in hot showers at the end of each day. This is a real bonus, because at one stage we were told that hot water would not be possible until the power was reconnected. At the time, we bravely vowed to bear cold showers, but that was before we knew it would all take so long and stretch well into winter.
Extension cords snake everywhere. It’s impossible to clean the floors properly. The fridge in the old scullery is for food, the booze fridge is on the verandah. One morning we discover the latter has been emptied overnight. The guard dogs slink shamefully past at breakfast. The thief returns the following night, but Ian and I are not completely stupid, and have not restocked the booze fridge. The thief makes off with a lone can of Coke.
Once a week we get pizza delivered. Never in my life have pizzas been so welcome, though the delivery boys seem a bit nervous about delivering to the Ghost House, especially as said house is always plunged in complete blackness every time they come. Afraid they will start refusing to deliver, I tip heavily.
Our weak, battery-run fluoro lantern gives out a pathetic pallid glow that can’t be seen at all from the front, so each week I look out for the delivery car’s headli
ghts and stand ready at the door, money in my hand, trying to look wholesome and normal, not at all like a crone from the Dark Ages with outstretched hand, luring the unsuspecting into her vile lair. Some of the delivery boys are braver than others. One lad doesn’t get out of his car until I walk out to the road with my lantern.
Pizza and cash are exchanged with a smile and thanks from me, but with a grabbing of money and hasty retreat from the delivery boy. A spinning of tyres. A burning of rubber. ‘Till next week!’ I call out.
Ian and I devour our pizza by weak lantern light. Not quite manna from heaven, but as far as my stomach is concerned it’s the highlight of the week.
There’s a spooky incident a couple of months after we lose our power. It’s midday. Broad daylight. Ian and I are sitting in the office going over the usual; re-examining kitchen plans, fretting about money, lamenting the slowness of the building, when our computer printer starts making its grinding-into-a-switched-on-state noises.
We stop talking and stare at the printer. It goes quiet.
‘Did you hear that?’ I ask Ian.
‘Mmn.’
‘Not my imagination then?’
‘No.’
There is no power connected to the house at all. Our only source is the builders’ temporary power-board in the garden. The computer cords lie inert on the floor under the desk. They might as well be a million miles from the power-board outside.
A thread of memory surfaces. Was it the Christiansens? I can’t remember. But someone at some stage in our time here has told me that our office is one of the ‘haunted spots’ of the house. And it was while sitting before this very computer, after all, that Andrew thought he’d seen his ghost.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says Ian, swift to take on the role of sceptic. I regret voicing my thoughts. It’s a good place to be, secure beneath the mantle of scepticism. I dive under with him.
But, secretly, the office commands new respect from me. From now on, I enter with all senses alert. What am I expecting? A powerless computer flickering into life, voices from the long dead hammering their message across the screen? And if so, what would they say to us? Welcome … kindred spirits … welcome … or maybe get out … this is my house … GET … OUT … !!
A Grand Passion Page 21