Season of Shadow and Light

by Jenn J. McLeod

  Alice’s eagerness to share her news had been boosted by her first orgasm at the hands of a girl from class 10B. That first taste of a girl’s mouth—soft, sweet and scented, like kissing a perfumed rose petal—and the memory of that initial touch had lingered on Alice’s lips as she spoke the words to her parents over their evening meal. With her declaration of forever love about to bust right out of her, she’d at least had the foresight to prepare her parents with a less than subtle ‘I’ve got something really important to tell you at dinner’ pre-announcement announcement, never imagining they wouldn’t be happy.

  ‘Gay?’ her father repeated, his half-chewed potato and gravy visible from across the table.

  ‘You’re not serious,’ her mother said, followed closely by her father’s, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  The only big announcement Colin and Faye Foster had wanted to hear was that their tomboy daughter was on her way to snaring an equally well off, career-driven mate—a boy obviously. They would have accepted an ‘I’m pregnant’ proclamation at sixteen—albeit reluctantly. With abortion not an option Colin would’ve wielded his virtual shotgun on the poor bloke and insisted on marriage.

  At school, Alice had been picked on for being a spoilt only child, when most of her friends were forced to share their possessions and their parents’ time with siblings. Her best friend at the time, Lily, had been one of six so she’d craved Alice’s solitary home life. But Lily didn’t understand the responsibilities that came with being an only child. The duty weighed heavily on young Alice: only heir to a considerable share portfolio, only child to support aging parents, only person to carry on the family bloodline.

  So, there she was, midway through the main course, hypnotised by the memory of love’s sweet scent and the glow of the new two-thousand dollar chandelier showering the dining room with a million crystal rainbows. In Alice’s mind the vibrant spectrum had been a sign. Pushing her dinner aside, she took a deep breath and said, ‘Mum, Dad, I’m gay’, promptly smashing to smithereens her parents’ hopes, dreams and carefree early retirement.

  ‘It’s not like I killed someone,’ Alice eventually said, trying to squeeze back stinging tears. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t let them see her weak. The weak were what her father gobbled up every day between nine and five.

  ‘Alice, dear . . .’ Her mother’s tone shifted easily from sympathy to sarcasm, ‘you’re going through a phase. You’ve got yourself mixed up with the wrong crowd. Your father and I did wonder about that friend of yours; the one with the nice face. Shame about those boots.’

  ‘They’re her Rossis, Mum.’

  Faye Foster looked confused.

  ‘Rossi boots? Bikers wear them for safety.’

  ‘Oh, well, I feel so much better knowing she’s a bikie. Thank you, Alice.’

  ‘I said bik-er as in motocross, not bik-ie. There is a difference. She rides . . . Aw, forget it.’

  ‘I suggest you do the same thing young lady, and forget this nonsense.’ Her father didn’t look at her, as if she was suddenly some Gorgon that might turn him to stone—or worse, into a poof, as he once so eloquently put it when a particular politician appeared on the TV. The Foster family had no such acquaintances. Abortion, homosexuality and anything else they didn’t understand were all against God’s law.

  ‘I can’t forget it, Dad. It’s who I am.’

  ‘Since when?’ he challenged.

  ‘I dunno. Since forever, I guess. I was born this way. What’s the difference?’

  ‘So you’re saying this is our fault,’ Colin accused, while Faye beseeched, staring at the reddening face of her husband as though Alice wasn’t even in the room.

  ‘What do we tell our friends?’ her mother asked.

  ‘We tell them nothing,’ Colin instructed. ‘It’s nobody’s bloody business.’

  Good on ya, Dad. That’s the spirit. Alice was suddenly hopeful of a modicum of common bloody sense. Hooray! At last!

  Then . . .

  ‘The girl’s obviously sick and needs to see a doctor of some sort, and as one does not discuss medical issues outside the family we say nothing.’

  ‘I’m not sick, Dad, I’m a—’

  ‘Alice, you dare say that word one more time and I will—’

  ‘Lesbian!’ Alice blurted before her father had finished uttering the threat. ‘A lesbian, lesbo, dyke and a—’

  ‘Get out!’ Colin Foster waved a finger in furious confusion, his face beetroot red, his eyes close to popping out of their sockets.

  That was the moment Alice knew she’d gone too far, been too strong, too loud—too proud. The chair she pushed away from the table fell backwards as she stood, and with defiance keeping her tears at bay, she stormed towards the archway leading to the kitchen and billiards room.

  ‘Where are you going?’ her father bellowed, snapping Alice to a stop.

  ‘You said get out,’ Alice returned. ‘I’m going to my room.’

  ‘If you want a room in this house, young lady, you’d best get over this nonsense,’ he said, jerking the arm Faye had grabbed to shake his wife away. ‘Otherwise you can find somewhere else.’

  Her mother was whispering and crying all at once, her face paling to grey, then white.

  Her father seemed oblivious to his wife’s distress. ‘You think hard about being the daughter we raised you to be.’

  They were the last words Alice heard. Ten days before her seventeenth birthday she packed her mother’s Caribbean cruise suitcases with as many belongings as she could, pinched money and jewellery and anything else she could carry and sell, and rang a friend.

  Alice Foster today was proof. A child can’t be changed or controlled; only gently and lovingly moulded. Still, she did hope her nurturing of Paige, and now Matilda, would imprint her memory in their hearts and she’d leave a lasting legacy. And if she sometimes came across as too dogmatic, like her parents, it wasn’t about control or expectations. Alice simply cared too much.

  The kitchen where she sat seemed suddenly very quiet. In fact, the house was far too quiet for a place where two lively youngsters and a yappy dog had, what seemed only minutes ago, been skylarking around the veranda.

  ‘Mati?’ How long had it been? A sense of urgency lifted Alice out of her seat with the energy of a much younger woman. ‘Liam? Come here, both of you.’

  Nothing.

  Alice wavered, holding the back of the chair while she gathered her balance, drawing another deep breath and yelling—louder this time. ‘Matilda Nancy Turner!’

  Now on the move, Alice hurried from room to room in the ridiculously rambling house, peering out the windows each time and stopping to listen for the sounds of children.

  Still nothing.

  Outside, not stopping to grab a hat or sunglasses, the late afternoon sun hammered down fiercely on the top of her head, the light breeze letting Alice know a sweat had broken out on her face. She stepped around Toto, asleep and panting in full sun, too exhausted to move. ‘Stupid mutt.’ The bicycles that had been whizzing back and forth also lay where they’d been dropped, on the back portion of the porch.

  Alice scanned the paddocks for some sign of the two children, her ears pulsating on either side of her head from the strain of listening through the squawking of nearby lorikeets. Behind her was a massive flock of yellow-crested cockatoos flapping around pine trees bending in the breeze, and in the distance the sound of a fast-flowing river at the height of flood.

  Alice’s skin tingled, goose bumps prickling her arms and legs as she tried calling again, her voice failing, choking on a lump forming in her throat as she remembered the all-important message Paige had conveyed that first day.

  ‘Keep Matilda away from the river. It’s not safe.’

  18

  What was that?

  Scream or squeal?

  ‘Matilda? Matilda!’ Alice waited, poised on the edge of the veranda, her ears like a wary rabbit’s tuning into the sounds. She chose the overgrown path away from the paddocks.r />
  Sure enough, as she called again, the sound of excited children trying to be quiet increased as Alice neared the larger of the two nearby sheds, each of them draped in a dappled light from expansive tree limbs reaching over the rusty roofs. Only one of the massive doors on the rotting structure remained upright—sort of—with an enormous twisted top hinge. Dust painted the windows on either side of the entrance and a creeper with large purple flowers, the same as the one by the property’s front entrance, had wound its way up and over the gable roof, partially covering the patchwork of corrugated iron visible from Alice’s bedroom window. Inside the shed smelled of metal and chemicals, while disused machinery parts and equipment littered the dirt floor. Corners were piled high with horse feed in massive hessian bags, and miscellaneous bits of bridle, horse blankets and buckets hung on hooks nailed irregularly along one side wall.

  ‘Liam? Matilda?’ Alice used her serious voice. ‘I’ve been calling you. I know you’re in here.’

  The silence lasted seconds, broken by intermittent giggles, exaggerated hushes and a shuffling of feet overhead. Had she not been so worried about how Matilda had climbed up the steep loft ladder—even more worried about how she would get down—Alice might have been cross. Waiting for the unwary at the bottom of the ladder was a rusty forty-four gallon drum too heavy to move and with shards of jagged metal sticking out in every direction. One slip coming off that ladder would slice a leg open.

  Toto had since woken and tracked them all down to the barn and was sitting in the doorway, whimpering.

  ‘Matilda Nancy Turner,’ Alice warned. ‘Don’t make me come up there. You know I don’t like ladders.’

  Legs trembling, she put one foot after the other on the rungs, stopping as soon as her line of sight had Matilda and Liam safely located in the back corner under the small picture window in the centre of the gable roof.

  ‘What are you both up to?’

  Despite the dusty window filtering the sun’s rays, there was enough light to see Liam’s mischievous expression, the wide-eyed grimace on his tiny face evidence enough that whatever he held in a firm grasp behind his back Alice was not meant to see.

  ‘I asked you a question, Matilda.’ Alice braved two more rungs. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ came the predictable response.

  ‘Then you can come down here and do nothing, can’t you?’ Alice’s curiosity kicked in with the guilty blush flooding her granddaughter’s cheeks. ‘You too, Liam,’ Alice said in her no nonsense voice. ‘And you can bring whatever that is behind your back.’

  Matilda stood, the space enough to accommodate her height, plus a little. As she tiptoed over to the loft’s edge, Alice backed down. Although the child mounted the ladder without hesitation or fear, Alice descended one rung at a time in sync with her granddaughter’s legs, guiding, protecting. Once on solid ground, Alice guided her granddaughter away from the rusty barrel while Liam jumped the last half-dozen rungs, landing with a thud on the shed floor.

  Alice held out a hand and wiggled gimme-gimme fingers in Liam’s direction. ‘Show me?’ she instructed. ‘What are you hiding?’

  Sheepishly, he slid the book from the back of his pants, holding out what appeared to be . . .

  ‘Mills and Boon?’

  Even though she’d never read one, there was no mistaking the attractive couple on the cover, the tender embrace, the trademark rose. While the book was old, worn and buckled, some of the pages stuck together with something pink, it opened easily at one page and Alice scanned the romantic descriptions.

  ‘I’ll hang onto this. Now off. Both of you. And whatever that pink goo is on those fingers of yours, Matilda, wash it off before you touch anything else. Best wash your mouth at the same time.’

  Much mischievous scurrying and giggling ensued as the children left Alice alone to thumb the pages. She was shaking her head when handwriting inside the cover caught her eye and tripped a switch in her heart. With a sudden shaking in her legs, Alice looked for somewhere to rest. The closest thing for her to fall against was a stack of filthy tractor tyres, but decades of dirt was the last thing on Alice’s dizzy mind as she scanned the four handwritten names in four distinctive styles. Each name had been crossed off as having read the book before being passed on to another:

  Marg

  Jean

  Teresa

  And the final name, unmistakable with its little flourishes and a flamboyant tail on the ‘y’ . . .

  She whispered the last name: ‘Nancy.’

  Without thought to her own safety, and despite the tremble weakening her legs, Alice forced herself up the ladder, crawling on her knees to the corner of the loft with its littering of lolly packets, including empty Redskin wrappers. Evidence of Liam’s cubby house was everywhere: a collection of toy trucks and tractors, farm animals, an army of small plastic action figures in a bucket, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex currently gouging its profile into the thinning skin on Alice’s right shin.

  A peak in the roofline provided a small area of standing room and Alice was grateful to be off her knees, although feeling a little unsteady on her feet. Apart from Liam’s cubby house, made from two upside down chairs and an old wooden baby playpen covered with blankets, the area seemed eerily familiar to Alice. Pushed in the corner was a box. Books mostly: more Mills and Boon, recipe books, Vogue magazines. As well, Alice saw several nursery rhyme books and some mouldy pacifiers of the kind a teething baby chews and rattles.

  Alice was finding it hard to breathe; the hand she’d had pressed over her gaping mouth all this time was not helping. She shifted the hand to her throbbing forehead and tried controlled breathing to slow her heart rate. Without a shadow of a doubt, this was the place where Nancy and Teresa had met up, a safe place where they were free to be themselves, to dream up names for the perfect patisserie—all part of the plan. Nancy had told Alice about their dream food business, where chic city people would come for coffee and cake. On the window ledge sat a glass kerosene lamp, a box of melted candles covered in dust, and half a dozen Redhead matchboxes.

  Sharni needed to know about the hazards lurking in her son’s hiding place, didn’t she? Yet it seemed to Alice that to surrender Nancy’s safe place would be a kind of betrayal. At the very least, she could make a point of removing the dangers. This dusty wooden loft with hay, matches and a seven-year-old bundle of mischief hiding out had all the makings of a fire: accelerant, oxygen, ignition.

  Alice saw the dangers everywhere. They were mounting and the more she looked, the more she realised she was now surrounded. The notion of being so close to the secret she’d starved of oxygen all this time hit her unexpectedly with the force of a firestorm. A whimper flared from deep inside as the muscles in her legs, burning from the climb up, fused, forcing Alice to brace against the wall with both hands, or else fold in a heap to the loft floor.

  ‘Oh, Nancy,’ Alice whispered the name as if it was sacred. And it was. ‘I know about your secret hideaway, Nancy. You told me about the loft—the place you and Teresa met by day to dream, to read books together, to play out your own version of each story and fantasise about glamorous and exciting lives away from the farm. Nancy, oh Nancy.’

  Her next thought overwhelmed Alice. ‘Of all the places, why did you have to bring me here . . . to Teresa’s house . . . to the loft where at night, while your families slept, she’d light the lamp? That is the signal you told me about, isn’t it, Nancy? The one you’d wait up for in the dark, the one you could see from your bedroom. Should I peer out this window at the next property, would I see your house on the far side of those paddocks? Would I be right to picture you waiting, hanging back in the shadows, lingering there until you saw the shining light, the sign all was safe and that Teresa waited here impatiently?’

  Alice dared look, the flat of her hand swiping a clear arc across the dusty glass pane, only to squint through eyes blurred by tears. Through the limbs of a tree—so much taller than it would have been back then—was a distant sin
gle-story homestead, its huge spreading tin roof wide and flaring in the final rays of afternoon sun. A sudden flash of light reflected off the distant homestead’s roof, blinding her momentarily. At the same time a thought struck Alice. Nancy’s house had been two storeys, not a single level homestead, and yet . . .

  The Bean book Matilda had shown Alice, the one found in a box in the little cottage with the stained glass window that had reminded Alice of . . .

  ‘A tiny chapel,’ Alice mumbled in shock and disbelief, the distant property no longer the focus of her thoughts. Her eyes closed, squeezing tears so they flowed freely over both cheeks. Was it the same chapel Alice had heard about from Nancy?

  ‘Did you lie to me, Nancy? Is this house where you lived? Is this loft your loft? Was it you lighting the lamp and luring Teresa?’

  The image of Nancy manifested itself before Alice, so clear and so real she had to steel herself to stop reaching out a hand. Nancy would’ve laughed at the idea of being an apparition. Religion had played no part in her life with Alice; Nancy’s husband, with his evangelistic version of faith, had knocked that out of her. Later, as she’d grown more unwell, alternative medicines and philosophies drew Nancy to believe in everything other than God. Never really convinced, but desperate to support the woman she loved, Alice Foster’s belief in such things had lasted only as long as her lover’s remaining days.

  ‘If only I could believe you’re trying to tell me something now, Nancy. If only I could.’

  Facts and science ruled Alice these days. Facts and science and the basic need—as basic and as natural as breathing—to protect her family. Like a light had switched on, Alice only needed to look around this property to see the facts were everywhere and that somehow she was going to have to start protecting herself.

  The late afternoon discovery had Alice’s mind abuzz as she lay on her bed listening in the dark for the familiar hum of the Audi’s engine; there would be no sleeping until her daughter was home safe and sound. Just as she was wishing she’d agreed to attend the function to keep an eye on Paige, the distinctive sound of tyres on gravel had Alice moving swiftly from her bed to the window.