The Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie

by Kirsty Murray

  ‘Too right. That’s why Lucy is coming with me on Smoke.’ Then he grinned at Lucy and winked.

  April scowled at him but Tom leapt onto his horse and reached one hand down to Lucy. ‘Swing a leg over, little stranger. We’ll double up for the ride home.’

  In a moment he had lifted Lucy into the air as if she were as light as a feather and then she was settled behind him on Smoke.

  April stomped out of the creek and mounted Banjo.

  ‘If that rat Jimmy Tiger hadn’t stolen my Blue, none of this would have happened,’ she called after them as Tom and Lucy disappeared into the bush.

  Lucy felt shy about putting her arms around Tom. She tried to balance herself on the back of the horse, but when Smoke went from a brisk walk into a canter, he called to her, ‘Hang on, Lucy.’

  Lucy clutched Tom’s shirt, pressed her cheek against his broad back and watched the sunlit bush go flashing past. Then they were galloping up the track to the house on the hill. Lucy glanced over her shoulder and saw that April had managed to coax Banjo into a slow canter.

  By the time Tom had unbridled Smoke and turned her out into a paddock to graze, April and Banjo had caught up with them. April unsaddled Banjo and Tom led the old horse down to the paddock to graze with Smoke, Midnight and Blue. Then the girls and Tom walked up to the house.

  Lucy hesitated on the steps. Being at the old house reminded her that she was out of place here. In the bush it had felt like an exciting adventure, but here at the house, she became aware again of how weird it was to be able to walk through walls.

  ‘Come inside,’ said April. ‘Come and meet my little sister, the other Lucy, and my mum and dad. I have the best family in the whole world. You can even meet that rotten Jimmy Tiger.’

  Lucy followed April and Tom into the hall. It smelled different to the Avendale that Lucy knew. The air was sweet with the scent of baked bread and roast dinners and smoky gumleaf fires.

  There was a tinkle of music coming from the front room, but Tom and April walked straight down to the kitchen. When they passed the dining room Lucy stopped and stared in through the open door. It wasn’t a dining room at all. It was a bedroom. There was a cast-iron bed, a desk cluttered with books and sheet music, and a mantelpiece covered with old-fashioned model aeroplanes. There were no murals of the four seasons, only plain, creamy white paint.

  While April and Tom went ahead, arguing in cheerful voices, Lucy slipped into the room. She walked to the end where, in her world, the wall was painted with Spring. She ran her hand along the smooth plaster and a chill shot through her. What if she really was like Persephone? What if eating those aniseed sweets with April had doomed her to be caught between this world and her own forever? How would Mum and Dad cope when Big told them that she was missing?

  Lucy could hear voices and laughter and someone calling her from the kitchen of the house, but suddenly, more than anything, she needed to get home, back to her world on the other side. She lifted both hands and slapped them against the wall, willing it to open for her.

  She hardly needed to use such force. As if her desire was enough, her hands passed through the plaster and paper, through the lathes and timber, and she could feel the cool, still air of the night in her world. Without hesitating, she stepped forward and passed through the wall.

  On the other side of the painting, Lucy wrapped her arms around herself and shivered as she stood in the darkened dining room. When she looked over her shoulder, all the light had gone out of the mural of spring. She touched it, very gently, with her fingertips and felt the rough painted surface. Then she put both her hands against the plaster and rested them there. The magic had vanished. The wall was closed to her. The outside–inside room was exactly as it always was, but the shadows looked darker and deeper, as if they hid a thousand secrets.

  Lucy hurried back across the hall to her own room and jumped into bed, pulling the rose-pink coverlet up to her chin. She was too confused to sleep. She lay staring into the darkness of her bedroom.

  Lucy thought she would only shut her eyes for a moment, but when she opened them again, patches of sunlight dappled the ceiling. She told herself she’d had a very strange dream. But then she sat up and ran her fingers through her damp hair. Caught in her long blonde hair and scattered across her pillow were tiny flecks of golden wattle.

  A Broken Wing

  The morning was clear and bright. Lucy raced into the outside–inside room and stared at the painted walls. The long dining table shone, and the colours in the murals looked somehow more vivid than even the real sunlit valley outside the window. But none of them were alive as Spring had been during the night. Lucy studied each of the paintings. They were beautiful in a way she hadn’t noticed before. Each painting depicted the valley from a different direction. But in each of them, except for Winter, the river snaked through the painting. If you half-shut your eyes you could imagine you were looking out a window instead of at a wall of old plaster.

  Lucy reached out and gently touched Spring. She’d never noticed the tiny figure of a child in the painting before, but this morning she could clearly see the image of a small girl with long blonde hair, running through the field of flowers. Lucy leaned her head against the wall. Maybe she was going crazy, just like Big. If she stayed here any longer, she’d be as kooky as her old aunt.

  Lucy went in search of Big but there was no one in the long kitchen. Big’s bedroom door was open, the bed roughly made. The French doors that opened onto the verandah looked over the river lying glistening in the morning sun, but there was no sign of Big. The living room was empty, too, and the house was quiet. As Lucy stood listening she became aware of a distant buzz. She stepped out onto the front verandah. Down in the lower field, Big was sitting astride a red ride-on mower, working her way up the hill from the orchard, leaving little heaps of fresh-cut grass in her wake.

  Lucy sat on the verandah steps and watched. She thought about what had happened to her during the night. How could it have been anything but a dream? Or was that other version of Avendale and Broken River as real as this one?

  When Big noticed Lucy sitting on the steps, she stopped the mower and strode up the hill in her gumboots.

  ‘About time you got up and into the day, sleepyhead,’ said Big.

  ‘I had a funny dream last night,’ Lucy began, tentatively. ‘There was a stable with horses in it over there,’ she said, pointing to the place above the creek where Smoke, Banjo and Midnight had been stabled.

  ‘That’s odd,’ said Big. ‘There was a stable there once. It burnt down in ’39. And speaking of fires, Bob Timmins, my CFA man, is coming by to clear up around the house. He’ll be checking and clearing the gutters, cutting back branches and getting the place ready for the fire season. He’ll probably cut back the vine at your bedroom window too, so you’ll need to keep out of his way.’

  ‘What if there was a fire? What would you do?’

  ‘There’ve been fires here before. Plenty of them. The worst when I was a little girl. Black Friday in 1939. Friday the thirteenth. We nearly lost the house. It was a miracle it survived.’

  ‘Did the valley burn? Did you hide in the house?’

  ‘No, we all went down the river by boat.We couldn’t get out any other way. The fires moved so swiftly.’

  ‘Wow, that must have been scary,’ said Lucy.

  ‘It was. There was one moment, I’ll never forget it, when the wind was blowing towards us and we thought we were doomed. We were sailing into an inferno. And then the wind changed. It swirled and roared around the valley and took the fire off westwards, away from us.’

  Lucy realised she’d been leaning forward, every muscle tense as she listened. ‘Phew,’ she said.

  Back in the kitchen, Big put eggs into a pot of water on the stove to boil and popped a slice of bread into the toaster. She made Lucy a plate of soldiers to go with her egg, as if Lucy were a little kid. Secretly, Lucy loved having the long slivers of toast to dip into the gooey golden egg, but she h
oped Big didn’t think she was a baby.

  ‘Thanks heaps for this,’ said Lucy. ‘But you know, I can fix my own breakfast too.’ She’d meant it to sound grown-up and helpful but somehow it came out all wrong.

  Big didn’t comment but slammed the kettle down on the stovetop and lit the gas beneath it.

  ‘I’m going painting on the other side of the river today. Are you coming or not?’ asked Big, her voice cross and prickly again.

  Lucy smashed the top of her second egg and thought about riding up through the bush with April and of April’s pictures inside her cubby under Pulpit Rock.

  ‘Who painted the pictures in the dining room?’ said Lucy.

  ‘Maybe I did,’ Big said, not meeting Lucy’s eye. ‘I painted that picture of the wattle tree that hangs over the mantelpiece in your living room in Sydney too.’

  ‘I love that picture! I always thought great-grandpa painted that. It’s one of my favourites.’

  Big shrugged. ‘His wattle paintings are in the National Gallery. The wattle’s finished blossoming for this year. Mostly comes out in winter and spring. But there’s some grevillea in full bloom further down the river. We’ll go and paint down there today.’

  ‘But I don’t paint pictures. I can’t even draw,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Everyone can draw if they practice,’ said Big.

  ‘It’s not my thing.’

  Big looked at Lucy sharply, ‘Piffle. You haven’t even tried.’

  Lucy felt her cheeks grow hot. ‘I don’t want to try. Claire’s the arty one in our family, not me.’

  Big made a cross, snorting sound as if the mere mention of Claire had upset her. Lucy realised that by speaking her sister’s name she had conjured a vision of Claire lying unconscious in a bed in Paris. They ate the rest of their breakfast in silence, each trapped in their own separate grief.

  Big cleared the dishes from the table and sloshed them in the sink.

  ‘So, are you coming or not?’ asked Big, without turning to look at Lucy.

  ‘I want to stay here, Big. Please.’

  ‘I suppose you’re old enough to take care of yourself for a few hours. I’ll leave some lunch out for you on the table. But make sure you keep out of Bob’s way. He’s got a lot of work to do around here.’

  Twenty minutes later, Big strode out the front door with a small wooden box in one hand, a basket over her arm and a stick-like contraption in the other.

  Lucy watched her stomp down the hill and through the orchard. She turned onto the narrow path that led to the river and loaded her things into a boat moored to a jetty at the water’s edge.

  When Big was out of sight, Lucy raced into her room and checked her mobile phone. At last it was fully charged. Now all she needed to do was find a signal. She had to phone Mum or Dad or one of her friends. Someone who was going to reassure her that she wasn’t losing her mind.

  She dressed quickly, shoving her phone into her pocket. She needed to get somewhere high and open.

  Lucy followed the track that April had taken. On the edge of the bush, she checked her phone again. No signal. She scanned the hillside and then she saw it. Pulpit Rock. Rising high and craggy above the valley. Maybe if she could climb up there, she’d pick up some sort of reception. She hiked up the winding track into the bush, feeling as though April might jump out from behind a tree at any moment.

  It hadn’t looked far to Pulpit Rock but as Lucy bashed her way through the undergrowth, the rocky outcrop seemed to grow further and further away. When she heard a rustling behind her, she wished she was riding Banjo with her feet high above the long grass. Dad had warned her about poisonous brown snakes.

  Lucy turned slowly to see a small grey wallaby watching her with a gentle expression. She stood very still. She could almost reach out and pat it. Then it bounded away into the bush.

  When Lucy finally made it to the glade beneath Pulpit Rock, she was disappointed to find nothing there. Nothing to prove that what had happened last night was anything more than a dream. To her surprise, she felt like crying.

  The glade was overgrown and the stone stairway through the granite rocks seemed narrower. She had to claw her way over rough grey-green granite to reach the peak. She skinned her knee and her heart pounded against her chest. At last she made it to the top and stared across the valley. The paddocks below were neater and there were fewer trees around the house than there had been in her dream.

  Lucy whipped out her phone and held it up to the sky. She squinted at the little signal bars. Nothing. She gave the phone a shake. It was searching, searching but eventually it flicked back to No Service. All that bush-bashing and the long climb up the rocks had been for nothing. Lucy sat down on Pulpit Rock and picked at a tiny piece of silvery lichen.

  The sun was high overhead now and she felt hot and bothered. She hung her head and saw the sunlight seeping into fissures in the rock. Then, for a split second, Lucy saw something flash brightly from deep in a crevice. She lay down on her belly on the rock and stared hard. Something was wedged into the crack. She turned on her mobile phone and shone its light down into the gap. There was something down there, something blue and grey and white with a hint of tarnished silver. She tried to put her finger into the crack and touch the edge of the thing but it was wedged deep.

  She pulled out the Swiss Army knife that Jack had sent her as an early Christmas present and flicked open the blade. Wedging it into the crack, she pried out the object. Whatever it had been, it was broken now. She peered into the crevice but could see nothing else down there. She rubbed the tiny treasure against her cargo pants and laid it on the palm of her hand. It was a tarnished silver and enamel bird’s wing, no more than two centimetres long. The blue was faded and the silver edge was green in places, but the detail of the feathers was still perfect. Even though it was only a fragment, it was beautiful. Not wanting to lose it in the depth of her pocket, Lucy opened her silver locket and placed the tiny wing inside. It fitted perfectly in the empty space opposite Claire’s photo.

  Lucy snapped the locket shut. The wing wasn’t a sign that what she’d dreamt was true, but at least she knew someone had been up on Pulpit Rock before her. Maybe she wasn’t completely crazy. At least not yet.

  Cooee!

  After the long, sweaty walk down the hill, Lucy was glad to be back at Avendale. She wandered into the cool of the hallway and for a moment, coming from the light to the dimness of the interior, she couldn’t see. The house felt hollowed out and abandoned.

  In the kitchen, Big had set the table for Lucy’s lunch. There were tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off covered with plastic wrap, and a glass with a tin of Milo beside it.

  Lucy poured some cold milk from the fridge into the glass and stirred until the chocolate swirled. She picked at the sandwiches and sighed, resting her chin in her hand. She had no idea what she was going to do for the rest of the day.

  ‘I’m bored,’ she said aloud to the lonely house. She wondered if anyone had ever died of boredom. The house was quieter than a tomb. She wrapped her hand around her locket and wished, more than anything, that Claire could be here with her. Claire always knew how to make a dull day fun.

  Faintly, a memory came to her of playing with Claire and Jack in the front room during her last, long-ago visit to Avendale. As if following a scent, she walked down the hall and pushed open the living-room door. There were long bookshelves from floor to ceiling on either side of the fireplace as well as a whole wall of books running the length of the room. A shaft of rose-coloured light fell from a high leadlight window. Lucy wandered along the bookshelf, dragging her index finger across the dusty spines.

  In a corner of the room she found a radio, but it only picked up one station. Beside the radio sat an old-fashioned record player and a stack of vinyl records. Lucy knelt down in front of the ancient stereo console and fiddled with the knobs. She flipped through the records but didn’t recognise any of the singers on the covers, except one by the Beatles called Abbey Road.

&
nbsp; The Avendale in her dream had been so alive, full of children and their possessions, but this Avendale felt as if there’d never been a child here, ever. Then Lucy remembered something else from her last visit. It took her a few minutes to find it. The pale-blue suitcase with a silver latch was hiding under the couch. She pulled it out. It was covered in dust and had two thick leather straps around it. Lucy felt a flicker of excitement. The case had seemed magical when she was small.

  She unbuckled the case and opened it up but it was only full of wooden blocks and a small black and white cloth bag that had two old baby dolls inside. They had spiky black eyelashes and shiny glass eyes. The baby dolls said ‘Maaaaa’ when she rocked them, and wore funny old hand-knitted clothing.

  Lucy remembered Claire and Jack building giant towers of blocks to entertain her and then Jack making the baby dolls growl like frightening zombies. He had chased Lucy around the room and Claire had swept her up and cuddled her, scolding Jack for scaring their baby sister. Lucy’s eyes brimmed with tears at the thought of Jack and Claire. Especially Claire. She shut her eyes and hugged the baby dolls to her chest.

  ‘Pathetic, Lucy. You’re nearly a teenager,’ she said to herself, tossing the dolls back into the suitcase and slamming the lid shut. ‘Grow up.’

  When she heard the roar of a chainsaw outside, she was relieved to know there was someone else in the valley. She stepped out onto the verandah. After cutting a few branches from one of the trees near the house, the man climbed down from his ladder, turned his chainsaw off and waved.

  Lucy waved back. ‘Are you Bob Timmins?’ she called.

  The man nodded. He came up to the porch and handed Lucy a folder with some brochures inside.

  ‘You must be Big’s little niece,’ he said. ‘She told me you were coming to stay. S’pose the old lady’s out painting. Can you give her these when she comes in? You might want to have a look yourself. It’s the latest exciting news from our local CFA branch.’ He winked at Lucy and pulled a ladder out of the back of his ute. ‘Plenty to do around here getting the old place ready for summer. We were lucky that the 2009 and the 1983 fires didn’t come near this region. But it’s amazing that this place survived the 1939 fires.’