by Anna Romer
I stood up, suddenly cold. I’d been sitting too long. My joints were stiff, my hands and feet numb.
My failed drawings weighed on me. In them, I saw all my other failings: my fearfulness, my guilt . . . my habit of running away when the going got tough. I longed for security, yet also suffered from a horror of being trapped. No wonder my relationship was on the rocks.
Wedding jitters, Adam had called it back in London. Cold feet. ‘It happens all the time,’ he’d reassured me. ‘Why don’t we take a holiday in Spain, just the two of us, give those frosty little toes a chance to thaw out?’
But it was more than just nerves. A whole lot more.
I agreed with Fineflower, I realised. Giving away your heart was dangerous. I had tried it once, and my heart had ended up broken. The best way forward was not to let it happen again. Ever.
Dad’s voice drifted back to me.
If you could have anything at all, what would it be?
As the morning sun glimmered over the horizon and turned the clouds to gold, a face came to mind, a man’s face with light grey eyes and a quirky half-smile that made my pulse race. It was a face made rugged by time, etched with laughter lines, framed by windswept dark hair. A face I’d known so long, it was almost as familiar to me as my own.
Becoming the custodian of a stray tomcat had thrown out my plans. It was Saturday, which I’d been intending to spend with my grandfather. I had dialled his number countless times in the last week to alert him to my visit, but he wasn’t answering. I was reluctant to show up out of the blue. He was in his nineties and a shock like that could be fatal. I decided to try ringing again in an hour. Meanwhile, there was a skinny, flea-bitten stray in urgent need of a makeover.
In the bathroom, I laid out towels, Betadine, eardrops from a quick visit to the vet, and tar soap. I ran tepid water and when the tub was a quarter full, I broke the bad news to the cat.
Surprisingly, he went into the bath with good grace. He squirmed and tried to make a dash for it when I brought out the soap, but then stood stoically as I lathered away the dirt and grime and blood from his matted fur. When I patted him dry with a fluffy towel, he lifted his luminous green gaze and looked right into my eyes. Then he began to purr.
The tips of his ears were in tatters, his delicate pink nose covered in scars. The fur had rubbed away around his neck, exposing the skin. Not a pretty boy, but my heart went out to him. It would take longer than four weeks to fatten him up and bring the lustre back to his coat, heal his wounds. But a month was all I had. After that, if I failed to find him a home, he would probably end up in a shelter.
I settled him in a patch of sunlight, but he wanted to shake himself and run about. His tail fluffed up, making me laugh, making me think of a fox’s feathery tail.
‘Basil,’ I decided to call him. ‘Basil Brush. What do you think?’
He ran into his cardboard box, but then reappeared a moment later, pink nose twitching. He wound himself around my ankles, tickling my shins with his whiskers.
‘Basil it is,’ I said softly, crouching to smooth my hand over his sleek head. Naming him was probably a bad idea, but under the circumstances, the dignity of a name was the least I could do for him.
Adam would say I was getting attached. He would shake his head and chuckle indulgently. Putty in my hands, an onlooker might think – but beneath his tousle-haired boyishness, Adam was all steel. He had to be, it was part of his job as an advocate for Amnesty. A job he excelled at; he worked tirelessly to raise money for people wrongly imprisoned – artists, writers, political activists. We had met at a charity dinner. Adam joked later that he’d paid the guest sitting next to me £50 to swap seats, and then set out to charm me with his most interesting stories. He needn’t have bothered with the chair swapping or the stories. At first glance, I’d liked him. He had a strong, interesting face and sandy hair that refused to sit straight no matter how much he combed it. When he spoke about injustice, he had a way of punctuating his sentences with a sharp inhalation, almost a gasp, as though the words caused him actual physical pain.
In the two years since we’d met, we’d been mostly happy. The nightmares I’d suffered since childhood ebbed away. Adam’s calm presence soothed my bouts of agitation. I had drifted along on the surface of my life, finally able to ignore the shadow-shapes that swarmed below in the depths. Adam proposed, and soon after that I moved into his Camden Town apartment. London was a beautiful labyrinth, especially with Adam at my side. I drifted through it as though in a dream. The hectic pace dazzled me, the constant stream of restaurants and charity dinners and theatre shows made my head spin. I was giddy with life, and I didn’t want it to stop. It made me believe that my life as a surface dweller was real; it made me hope that, in his quiet way, Adam was my saviour.
That was, until my grandfather’s letter.
I have something for you . . . It will explain everything.
Upstairs in the bedroom, I took out the charm he had tucked inside the envelope with his note. A gold heart the size of my thumbnail, dented on one side, its edges worn smooth. I had recognised it instantly as the charm from the bracelet he had once given my mother. A bracelet I’d fiercely coveted as a child. The same bracelet that Dad insisted went into the sea with her.
I weighed the small heart in my palm. It was as light as a leaf, almost insubstantial – but to me it felt heavy, leaden with guilt. I pushed it back into the envelope.
It will explain everything . . .
Soon after the letter arrived, cracks began to appear in my perfect world. Adam’s presence was no longer quite so soothing; rather, he began to irk me. His long rambles about injustice and political freedom, his late nights on the phone or hunched over his desk drafting petitions and letters of appeal; the way he woke red-eyed in the morning barely able to string his words together until that first coffee.
Slowly, my nightmares trickled back. Cold fingers tugged me from sleep, and I woke drenched in sweat and tears, gagging on the smell of ocean air. Tired all the time, I found fault with Adam, picking arguments over trivial things. The shadow-shapes returned, resuming their gentle bump-bump below the surface. I threw myself into my work, but it didn’t help. My heart felt full of holes, through which seeped all the darkness I’d been suppressing for years.
The doorbell rang, bringing me back to the present. ‘Go away,’ I muttered, sliding the envelope out of sight beside my bedside lamp. ‘I’m busy.’
The bell buzzed again, and then someone hammered. I padded downstairs and yanked open the door.
Morgan stood there. His eyes were hollow and dark-circled, his jaw bristling with stubble.
‘What’s happened?’ I said.
‘Your father’s had a fall. A broken hip, he’s at the hospital.’ He moved nearer and cupped my elbows, as though to steady me. ‘Wilma said she tried to call. There was no answer so she asked me to come over.’
‘A fall? How did he—’ I broke off and frowned. ‘He was drinking, wasn’t he?’
Morgan nodded.
With a muttered curse, I ducked inside to get my wallet and car keys, my jacket from behind the door. After locking up, I pushed past Morgan and went to my van. I saw Morgan’s old Harley propped near the gate, but wasn’t surprised when he climbed into the passenger seat beside me. I started the motor before he’d even buckled up, and a couple of minutes later we were roaring along St Kilda Road towards the hospital.
I kept picturing Dad at the Astor the night before, his cheeks flushed from the cold, pleased about finishing his book. What could have turned his mood around so drastically? A broken hip was bad; that he’d been sozzled enough to fall over and break it was far worse. A memory came to me: Dad reeking of booze a few months after we lost Mum; armed with a baseball bat, he’d run out onto the street in front of our house and started taking swings at passing cars—
‘What would send him over the brink like that?’ I wondered aloud. ‘He’s been dry for fourteen years, not a drop in all that time. What co
uld it be?’
‘No idea, Luce.’ Morgan stared through the windscreen. His face was serious, his eyes burning up the road ahead. ‘But I expect we’re about to find out.’
The city sped past. The chaos of rattling trams and buses and cars, the drifts of rubbish in the gutters and clouds of exhaust, the throngs clustered at pedestrian crossings, all seemed suddenly overwhelming. I clung to the steering wheel, my knuckles white, my arms rigid. Dad had promised. Fourteen years ago, he had made me a promise.
As far as I knew, he had kept it. Until now.
Suddenly the answer came to me. There was only one reason he would go back on his word, one reason he’d fall off the wagon. The same reason he had started drinking in the first place.
A face appeared in my mind’s eye. A thin face, peering from the past. The skin pulled tight over prominent bones, the brow creased in permanent worry. The eyes so dark they seemed black, an animal’s eyes, watching furtively as though a hunter lurked around every corner.
‘Edwin,’ I murmured, and the sound of his name, the sound of my grandfather’s name, sent a chill prickling over my heart.
6
Bitterwood, May 1993
Once, he’d been tall, almost freakishly so. Now, time had bent him, buckled him into an old man who cared only for the company of shadows. He shuffled across his bedroom to the window and gazed out at the moonlight. It was time, he decided. He did not have long now, and it was time to cover his tracks.
Down in the kitchen, he rummaged through the utility drawer, found the matches, and then retrieved a jerry can of kerosene from under the sink. Outside, he went along the brick path, past the rearing house. Once, he had spent hours sweeping leaf litter from around the old barn. He had polished its windows and hung them with curtains, and kept it free of cobwebs and dust. Now, the place was little more than a storehouse for memories, overgrown and unkempt.
He hurried into the shadows of the orchard. The path ran downhill, beneath the cave-like overhang of mulberry trees. Their limbs were mostly bare; just a few stubborn leaves remained, rattling dryly in the night air. At the bottom of the orchard, he emerged into a shady clearing. A high grassy mound overlooked the clearing, shadowed by the remains of an enormous old oak tree. Two decades ago, lightning had struck and killed the tree. Each year since, Edwin had expected it to fall, but it never did. Perhaps it was waiting for him to go first.
He approached the mound and came to an overhang of ivy, which he pushed aside to reveal a heavy wooden door.
The door was three inches thick and reinforced with steel, specially designed to keep the cold in and the heat out. Behind the door, support beams bolstered a series of passageways that led to an underground icehouse.
In the early days, Bitterwood Park had been a thriving resort, attracting wealthy city people. During the summer months, trucks had transported enormous blocks of ice to Bitterwood, delivering them to the cool room inside the icehouse where they would store unmelted for many weeks. Edwin’s mother had given him the job of ice boy. His task was to go along the passageways into the cool heart of the place where the ice slabs were stored. He would chip ice into his bucket and take it back to the house, to keep meat and other perishables chilled during the hot weather.
Jangling the keys from his pocket, he unlocked the door and went inside. Unscrewing the jerry can lid, he splashed kerosene around the support beams and onto some wooden shelving until the reeking fumes sent him back out into the open air. He shut the door behind him, locked it, and then pressed his ear against the wood. He thought he heard a murmur from the other side. It might have been a leaf scratching on the flagstones, stirred by a draft under the door. It might have been a sigh, a soft utterance. But of what? If she could speak to him now, what would she say? And what would he say to her? That he had once killed for love and in light of that, telling one small lie should have been nothing?
He hung his head. Some nights he stood here for an hour or more, perhaps quietly weeping, or just lost in the maze of his thoughts. Anything to prolong returning to the lonely hole of his life. Yet tonight he must not linger. He wanted the sanctuary of his room, where the sound of his heartbeat would echo on the walls. He wanted to hide beneath his pillow while the past caught alight and burned.
He struck a match. It flared brightly in the darkness. The flame seemed alive, eager to leap and spread, impatient to sizzle. He drew it to his lips, savoured the tiny barb of heat against his skin.
The human heart was a dim, unwholesome place. Clarice had taught him that. Like the small flame dancing on its match-head, his passions had led him through the secret unlit chambers of his own heart. There he’d forged a path through darkness that at times seemed impenetrable. He had navigated poorly, for the most part. Let others dictate to him, permitted the gradual erosion of those fragments of himself that had once been decent.
The match went out, so he struck another. This time he didn’t hesitate. He released the match from his trembling fingers, caught his breath as it hit the edge of the kerosene trail he’d splashed under the door. The flame guttered and almost went out, but then whooshed suddenly as the kerosene caught alight.
His pulse hammered unsteadily, his legs turned to water. He went to stumble away, but something kept him. He did not press his ear to the door this time, only bowed his head before it as if in prayer. On the other side, he heard the roar of fire.
‘Forgiveness,’ he whispered. ‘That’s all I ask.’
He hadn’t expected a reply, of course. So when a branch creaked in the old dead oak above him, he flinched. Probably an owl or nightjar alighting on a bough, but when it hooted suddenly – a soft and eerie sound that pricked gooseflesh across his naked skull – he would have sworn on his mother’s Bible that somewhere in the darkness behind him, a woman was quietly sobbing.
7
Victorian coast, 1929
Laughter invaded her dreams. Strange, harsh laughter. The sound rose in a squawking frenzy, crested to a high note, and then dropped away to a lazy haw-haw, as if the joke had finally worn thin.
Orah burrowed back into sleep. The ground began to pitch beneath her. The wind lashed the waves into frothy peaks. Cries shattered the night as the great ship swung onto the rocks and its underbelly tore away. The water was so terribly cold. Mam’s face was pale and bleeding, her eyes big pools of fear. When the black water took her, she cried out—
Orah . . . Orah!
Orah lurched upright. She lay in a small shelter made of branches and sticks, covered by a thin blanket. Beyond the shelter was a clearing surrounded by thick bushes and ferns. She could still hear the ocean, but its roar seemed distant, as though muffled by the densely growing trees.
A few feet away, a fire crackled. Plumes of smoke drifted on the air. A breeze brought the smell of roasting meat unlike anything Orah had known before, rich and dark, strange. Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t had a bite to eat in what felt like days. Bread and mutton, and sweet tea from tin cups that Mam had begged from the galley—
Mam.
Desolation washed over her. She had the urge to smash her hands on her legs and bruise the skin, to claw her neck and draw blood. Her eyes streamed and stung, and when she dashed her hands to her face, a swirling giddiness overtook her. Rolling onto her side, she retched. A trickle of seawater puddled on the dirt.
Oh, Mam. No.
She couldn’t be gone. Orah needed her. Needed her so badly that her brain and body ached. She balled her fists to strike herself, this time for certain, but something stopped her.
Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps the ocean hadn’t swallowed Mam after all. Someone might have rescued her, just as the boy had rescued Orah; or perhaps the current had washed Mam ashore. Perhaps Mam was sitting, at this very minute, safe and dry in her own rough shelter, wondering what had become of her daughter.
Orah wiped her face on the blanket, drew her knees to her chest. It was easier to think of Mam that way. Sitting on the beach beneath a shady tree, gazing along t
he sand, pondering her lucky escape. It was easier to picture her alive, her fair hair drying in the sun, curling at the tips as she wrung out the salt water and raked the strands with her fingers. Waiting patiently for help to find her. Waiting for her girl.
Orah let out a breath. Once she found Pa, she would tell him about that beach. They’d return there and find Mam. Mam would catch sight of them and wave happily. She would run up and sweep Orah into her arms, weeping for joy. They would take her back to Pa’s house in Melbourne, and feed her cake and cups of sweet tea. They would celebrate Christmas together, the three of them reunited at last. They would be a family again, just as Orah had always dreamed.
Rubbing her eyes, she looked beyond her shelter. The sun was high. Birds whistled and chirped. The sound of laughter came again, but it was distant, as if the merrymakers had drifted away. Orah was glad. Laughter was supposed to be a happy sound, but something about that noise hollowed her out, made her afraid.
Near the campfire sat a tent-like construction of sticks over which her sodden dress and petticoats hung to dry. She realised she wore only her undergarments, still clinging damply to her body.
The boy approached with an armload of wood.
Orah watched him, her eyes growing large. He had saved her from the water, risked his life for her; he had walked beside her for miles, never letting go of her hand . . . but now she saw him as though for the first time. He was beautiful, brown-skinned with wind-shocked hair and liquid dark eyes. He wore shorts and a grey shirt. His feet were bare. When he looked at her, Orah felt her heart beat a little faster.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
She nodded.
He threw down his bundle and crouched to tend the fire. ‘Sleep a bit more. Later, we’ll eat.’
Orah opened her mouth to tell him about her plan to find Pa, and about Mam waiting back at the beach. She wanted to ask him to bring her dress and petticoats, even though they were still damp. It occurred to her, as her stomach growled again, to enquire about the delicious smell drifting on the air, but forming the words seemed too much effort. The fire blazed, warming her. Her eyelids grew heavy.