by Various
Undoubtedly, there was a season when we honoured the boundary of her abandoned, overgrown garden because we associated it with her kindness. After a while, though, we’d have forgotten all about the person she was, enchanted instead by the exotic wilderness her absence had created and the opportunities for exploring it that grew there. Children, for the most part, know instinctively to live in the present rather than dwelling on the past.
Whether there were problems with the will or she died intestate, I don’t know. Perhaps the place was put up for sale but, with the hard economic climate, no-one in the district could afford to buy it, as they couldn’t now even if they wanted to. Except, naturally enough, none of that stuff concerned us and the property sat there falling into disrepair. The garden becoming more and more gloriously entangled with itself.
Of course, when Tad moved into town and we biked round the streets together, ending up at the Rawlings’ place, all he’d have seen was the adventure of an overgrown garden, surrounding an abandoned house. Our boring little town suddenly grew interesting, and Kaz and I discovered some pride in our connection with the cottage. More so for the timber boards and sheets of plywood that had been nailed across the windows, giving it a mysterious, haunted appearance – shut tight like a coffin.
Tad’s family moved into town several months before that last spring of childhood. His dad was the new bank manager and had some clout in the district, but all that concerned Kaz and me was the new kid we could hang around with, who came from somewhere exotically outside of our town and beyond the Western Plains. I vaguely remember him having a younger brother or sister, but don’t ask me what their names were or what they looked like. Sometimes, I think, even Tad’s image would’ve vanished years ago if it wasn’t for the two school photos I’ve got from that time. There’s so much I don’t remember and too much I do.
It was Tad who created a leading role for the old Rawlings’ place in our collection of childhood myths and legends by describing it all too clearly in a story he wrote for school and which was so good the teacher read it to the class: The House on the Hill. Although the entire district is pancake-flat, anyone who lived here would’ve recognised Tad’s description of the abandoned house, even though he chose to tenant it with an evil witch instead of a fairy godmother.
After we’d stopped ribbing him about the praise Miss Jacobs heaped on him and how much she must love him, Kaz said, “But seriously, it was good, Tad. I didn’t know you could write like that.”
Tad kicked the dirt at his feet and grinned. “It should be good. It’s the third time I’ve used that story. Just changed the description a bit to fit in with that old place.”
“The third time? You mean, like at the other schools you’ve been to?”
“Yep. Too right. I can’t help it if the teachers all use the same worksheet or have the same dull imagination, but it’s the third time they’ve given me The House on the Hill as a title so I keep handing up the same story. There was another title that old Jacobs used, which always crops up: The Best Days or something like that.”
“The Best Day of My Life,” said Kaz. “Yeah, that’s what I wrote on. I wrote about my sister leaving home and not having to share my bedroom anymore.”
“Well, there you go. No kidding, if you moved schools as often as I have, you could keep submitting the same work. Just change a few details, that’s all. Too easy.”
“Really?”
“Really. While you suckers were doing homework, I was watching TV.”
“Neat idea,” Kaz said. “I might hold onto mine now instead of chucking it out. It might come in handy.”
“I reckon mine’s good for another two schools yet – if we move again, that is. But I’ll amp it up next time. Have more blood and gore.”
And we’d have encouraged him in that. As friends should.
“A ghost with a chainsaw.”
“Acid pits, blood fountains, cannibals, vampires.”
“I’ve already got the ghost with the chainsaw,” he declared. “She didn’t read that bit.”
“Save something for the year after,” Kaz said. By then, she’d developed what Mum called a dry sense of humour.
The acid pits and chainsaw murderers were as familiar to us as the images of ghosts in white blankets and the universal Bogey Man. We fed our imaginations with them, were always hunting for new, thrilling delicacies. Sometimes they were just plain silly and sometimes we succeeded in secretly scaring ourselves, but for the most part they were as clichéd as that stock image of the house on a hill: a derelict, three-storey mansion, brooding over a graveyard garden, timbers creaking and moaning in an incessant wind, silhouetted against a howling halfmoon or illuminated against a backdrop of gnarled trees by fork lightning and screams.
And it didn’t matter that there wasn’t a pimple of land in town, let alone half a hill, because at least the Rawlings’ place had boarded windows, a wickedly wild garden and the densest crop of shadows growing from the broad limbs of those old cypress trees.
“The House on the Zit would suit it better,” Kaz said later, when we were leaning on our bikes, outside the Milk Bar. We rolled about laughing, made zit jokes for half an hour, learnt a new irreverence for the town we called home. She used to say lots of things like that, did Kaz. We laughed a lot together, the three of us.
Not long after Tad arrived in town was when we built our den – over there, across in that corner. We ‘borrowed’ a wooden palette from the yard at the back of Western Agricultural Engineering and we carried it all the way here. Hauled it up into that tree – that furthest one, that tall one, I think it was – and lashed it across a couple of branches; then we nailed old fence pickets across it for a platform. Probably thought of ourselves as a gang at the time, the way kids will, revelling in creating a sense of belonging at last, even though there were no rivals to make it really fun: no-one to challenge our territorial rights to this spot or to battle against.
Together, we’d see how far we could get round the property without touching the ground, from one horizontal branch to the next, tree to tree, clambering along the bare and rotting fence rails, getting marooned on hardwood posts. Or we’d set dares for one another. Or sit and out-tell each other’s tallest stories. And once, when my older brother came canoodling round this way with his girlfriend, we kept silent and spied on them a few minutes, but then gave ourselves away by squawking and pretending we were crows.
Tad had a catapult, and we’d take it in turns to scare the feral cats that roamed the block or dozed in the shadows of the building. We’d probably get done for animal cruelty these days, but back then it was just a laugh.
The funniest time was when this big, black and white tom was snoozing next to the old, water tank. A fortnight before, from our hideout forty metres away, Tad had put a stone through one of the rust spots on the tank and we hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry when two thousand litres of water started pissing into the garden. We almost fell off our perch with holding our sides, but kept quiet for the rest of the day, half-expecting to get in trouble from some busybody. Not that anyone else ever seemed to go near the place.
On this particular occasion, it was my turn to have the catapult and I’d collected a pocket-full of small pebbles for ammunition. My attention had been taken up in the opposite direction, shooting at the cowpats in the paddock behind us, aiming to hit a steaming, fresh one. Until Tad nudged me and pointed in the direction of the old house, the water tank, the sleeping cat.
“No,” Kaz said. “Leave the poor thing alone.” But even though she liked cats far more than I did, I could tell she wasn’t serious about stopping me.
In case I needed encouragement, Tad said, “It’s a cat-apult, not a pat-apult. What’s the point of having it if you don’t pult cats? You might as well give it back to me. Here, let me have a go.”
I shook my head, loaded a stone the size of a lemon sherbet and pulled back on the rubber. Closed one eye and aimed at the cat; then shifted my aim about a metr
e higher to the middle of the metal tank. Stretched the rubber further. Thwang – boom! The cat nearly shat itself. Jumped from the ground so fast, I swear it was running on the spot before it took off at a million miles an hour.
Kaz nicknamed that old black and white tom Greased Lightning.
“Fastest cat in the history of fast cats,” Tad acknowledged.
“Probably left scorch marks across the block.”
“And a long streak of cat pooh.”
It was from the crow’s-nest we’d made at the top of our tree that we could see beyond the roofline of two streets of houses to where the main Broughton Road skirts close to the edge of town. Which is how we caught a glimpse, that spring, of the two TV vans heading back to the city – outside broadcast vans, with their channel logo plastered across them. The story had been on the radio and in the local rag a few days by then, about the girl who’d run away from home after an argument with her mum and step-dad, but who the police were now concerned for. But that evening it was on the six o’clock news of both TV channels. She came from Hinchley, thirty kilometres away, where we went to Secondary School, and we thought we were dead special, we did, as if we were famous by association.
And it was from this same look-out, at around the same time – maybe even the same day – that we caught sight of the buses transporting rail passengers following the derailment just ten kilometres down the road. From our vantage point, the highway seemed busier than we’d ever imagined, as if everyone in the Western Plains had somewhere to be other than where they’d just come from.
It suggested a need for busyness that I’d recently begun to feel, if not to fully understand. With my thirteenth birthday only three weeks away, I too felt impatient to be somewhere else, impatient for bigger challenges. So when Tad suggested we spend the first Sunday of our fortnight school holiday riding our bikes to where the train had derailed, to see the tangled mess and to watch the engine being lifted back onto the tracks, his idea answered that need.
We must’ve covered a good few kilometres that day in search of the derailment, but all we found was an open gateway where a nest of heavy-duty tyre tracks snaked across the bitumen in one direction and bit a rutted trail across the paddock in the other. The paddock tracks disappeared into the dry distance, crossing a terrain too rough for our bikes and further than we could be bothered walking.
As the three of us stood there, talking down our disappointment at the absence of drama, but still staring hopefully at the horizon, we began planning an adventure that might surpass this one. It was, after all, what the holidays were for. And this is more or less how we hatched our plan to not only meet at our den that evening, but to finally find a way of getting into the old house.
“I can’t believe you’ve never done it before,” Tad said, and he might as well have accused Kaz and me of cowardice or dullness. One would’ve been as bad as the other.
“Well, neither have you, Captain Courageous,” Kaz said, and pushed him so that he almost fell over his bike.
“I haven’t lived here all my life,” he countered.
“It hasn’t always been empty,” I said.
“And it never really seemed interesting or creepy before,” Kaz admitted. “Not until that story you wrote.”
Tad would’ve grinned and recognised that with the compliment came the opportunity to add yet another layer. “That’s because it wasn’t completely made up, you know,” he told us, beginning to wheel his bike forward. “There was some truth in it. The old dear who lived there really was a witch. My Dad heard the real truth about her. And I wouldn’t be surprised if she haunted the place. Witches’ spirits never rest, you know; they can’t.”
“Mrs Rawlings?” Kaz and I said together, following him and laughing.
“She was no witch,” I told him. “She was married to Mr Rawlings. Witches don’t get married. Everyone knows that.”
“That’s why she killed him,” Tad said straightaway. “That’s something else my Dad was told. The police told him. They couldn’t arrest her because they didn’t have any proof, but they reckon she poisoned him or put a spell on him or something.”
We laughed at that too, and then Kaz said, “Don’t be daft.”
“No-one knows how he really died,” he told us. “Do you?”
We had to agree that we didn’t.
“And those toffees she used to offer us... maybe she was trying to poison us.”
“Of course she was,” Tad said. “That’s the oldest trick in the witch book.”
Over the course of that afternoon, as we rode back to town and then hung about on the Memorial Park swings, our story about the Rawlings’ place and old Mrs Rawlings grew until she no longer resembled the dear old lady who’d let us pick apples in autumn. She was transplanted by another character: The Cat Witch. Someone to inhabit the wilder reaches of our imagination.
“In the daytime she takes the shape of a cat, but at night she’s an old woman again and can be seen creeping through the house, prowling through the garden. My brother heard her crying once.”
Kaz stroked her chin. “Actually, now you mention it, a couple of blokes did see her once, not long before you moved here, Tad.”
“The ghost?”
“Well, a ghost. A real ghost. Yep. Not a story-ghost.”
“What happened to them?” The question was obligatory.
Kaz would’ve measured her moment, looked about her, hushed her voice. “One of them was found lying next to his chainsaw. It was half in him and his guts were hanging out. A coil of intestines steaming in the morning air. He had claw marks on his face and the petrol tank was full… of his blood.”
“Juicy,” Tad drooled. “What about the other bloke?”
“He went mad,” I said. “You remember, Kaz, don’t you, about the Malleroo guy and the chooks?” And my appeal would’ve had a ring to it because this part was a well-known story around town. “He was the one who worked on the Malleroo property. You know, the one who clubbed the chooks to death with a cricket bat one night, then shot himself. Stark naked, he was. Mr Bailey found him in the chook run – well, most of him. Chunks of brain were snagged in the chicken wire. It’s a well-known fact.”
It didn’t matter who said what. Not really. The stories grew from us, found strength in the details we might add.
“Gruesome,” Tad said, and I could see him storing all this for his next version of The House on the Hill.
“Worse than gruesome,” Kaz said, turning to me. “Especially for you. You shouldn’t have shot at that cat the other week. Poor old Greased Lightning.”
“I didn’t aim at the cat. I aimed at the water tank. Missed the cat by a mile.”
“But scared it shitless all the same,” Tad laughed.
“Scared it into the middle of next week,” Kaz said. “What if it ran in front of a truck because of what you did? It’ll come back to haunt you. And if Greased Lightning doesn’t, the Cat Woman will.”
“Ooooh,” groaned Tad, clawing close to my face with outstretched fingers. “Meooow.”
“The Cat Woman’s gonna get you.”
“Not a chance,” I said.
“Well, we’ll have to see about that tonight, won’t we? If you’re not too chicken, that is. See if she wants your blood.”
“I wouldn’t mention chickens, if I were you,” Kaz said.
I wasn’t scared. In fact, I was the first to turn up. I dumped my bike in the ditch and then skirted the trees on the paddock-side, before hauling myself up onto the first branch and then into our den.
I have, at times, incorrectly remembered the sequence of events, which followed. Deliberately so, I suspect. Memories, I’ve discovered, can be broken apart and cast in a new mould to suit what we think we believe or want to believe or need to believe. What begins as a self-preserving lie takes the shape of an established truth. For years, I half-convinced myself that we scarpered at the first sight of torchlight – grabbed our bikes and fled – without ever looking back or hearing a
sound, but that’s not true. I don’t think there was any torchlight because I can now accept that it wasn’t dark. To be able to lie to yourself like this isn’t as absurd or as difficult as it sounds.
For a while, I used to dream that we were actually in the house, downstairs, when we suddenly discovered we weren’t alone. In my dream, I could always feel someone breathing down the nape of my neck, although I haven’t had that dream in a while now.
What actually happened was that we pretended we were commandoes, sneaking for cover, as we dropped silently from our den and crawled through part of the old orchard, before inching our way towards the water tank near the back door. We were all whispers and belly-crawls and hand signals, and we were happy to take our time and make an even bigger game of it because we were mustering our bravado, trying to decide if we were really going to do this thing or not. Was it ‘Breaking & Entering’ or ‘Trespass’, or both? What would Mum and Dad say if I got caught? How long would they ground me for? Would it spoil my birthday?
But it was then, just as we were making elaborate signals about which window we’d crawl to – which boards looked the easiest to prise off – that all hell broke loose inside.
Even now, I’m not sure about the order because it was a tangle of noises, impressions, all mixed up, coming too fast, too unexpectedly.
Footsteps on floorboards, running; pounding down the house. One pair? Two pairs?
Rumble and clatter, smashing and banging – a chair or cupboard knocked into, knocked over. A crash. Loud.
Footsteps on floorboards, running.
Breaking glass. A fight? A fall?
We’re frozen in waiting. Staring at a blank door.
A shout, a yell – several shouts – surprised, alarmed, angry. A man’s voice, swearing and cursing – no words, no word, no names, no name.
Groaning and crying. The same voice; I’m sure. I’m sure. A tone and pitch I can’t forget – not ever – that voice.
And pain and hurt and anger and fury. One pained and furious shouting.
The Cat Woman got him. Whoever him was.