She’d packed a book to read, Helene Young’s Wings of Fear: a smattering of real life and a terrorist plot in the Australian tropical north. Perfect escapism. Trouble was she’d have it read in a couple of days.
Then what?
She was already missing her cigarettes and her life. This morning, feeling a little too trapped and underwhelmed on her island retreat, she was also missing her two best friends—the one that helped her sleep at night, and the one that helped her wake up in the morning. Why hadn’t she packed them? What had made her think she wouldn’t need them, or that giving them up at the same time as the cigarettes was a good idea? Thankfully she’d been realistic enough, or should that be pessimistic enough, to bring the prescriptions in case. Filling them would mean a trip into town. She considered driving into the neighbouring town of Saddleton or even further afield to have them filled.
‘Oh, what the hell,’ she declared, scuffing her way into the kitchen and stopping by Rocky’s tank. ‘What do we care if the local pharmacist gossips about us? They’re all legal drugs and I have a perfectly legitimate reason for taking them. They’re practically a staple for professionals who travel from one side of the world to the other on a regular basis. The best jet lag fix ever.’
After her normal coffee and a breakfast bar masquerading as muesli, Poppy tucked her twist of hair under an old peak cap, snatched up her sunnies and car keys, and set off on the five-kilometre drive into the Calingarry Crossing township. She’d walked, sometimes cycled, that strip of dirt road so many times before, coming out to spend time with Gypsy reading books, newspapers, anything she could get her hands on. Gypsy had loved books almost as much as Poppy, but diabetes, undetected and untreated when she was younger, had slowly destroyed her eyesight. Poppy would read almost anything, drawing the line only at Gypsy’s voluminous tarot and crystal healing books. Such things had never held Poppy’s interest, then or now. Thanks to Johnno, she’d learned cynicism at a young age. Almost everything else involving the written word excited Poppy, especially when she spotted editing mistakes in the newspaper or published works.
‘One day I’ll write great stories and my books will be brilliant,’ Poppy liked announcing, knowing Gypsy would always agree.
There’d been little recognition of her achievements from her family—academic or sporting—no matter how hard she’d tried to impress, or how many trophies lined the bookcase in her bedroom. For most of her teenage years it was just Poppy and her grandfather, but with each birthday the communication gap widened, as though he couldn’t relate to a blossoming female.
Not that she’d blossomed all that much. At sixteen she’d had all the awkwardness of an Amazonian eight-year-old, while those around her got the big boobs and boyfriends. When her grandfather no longer knew what to do with his developing granddaughter, he’d make her sit at the kitchen table and write out words from the dictionary. Poor Grandad. He didn’t realise that to Poppy it wasn’t such a horrid chore. The task fed her competitive streak, leaving no crossword safe or unfinished.
*
Poppy latched the punt’s safety barrier, leaning back against the hatchback for the short but slow cross-river journey.
Putting up barriers seemed to be a Hamilton family trait. Poppy knew her father only as the damaged man who drifted in and out of her life, unable to cope with noise, or music, or sometimes even laughter. Despair switched on and off at random. She never knew what triggered an episode, as her grandad had called them, but the signs of change weren’t hard to see. When the barrier went up, Johnno would withdraw, pushing his daughter away, unknowingly instilling the same behaviour. She would promise to stay quiet and in her room, but it was never enough. Her grandad would pack her off to Gypsy’s house across the river. She was already in the habit of visiting regularly, to read or help Willow with schoolwork—English studies, mostly.
Willow had been a slow and sickly child and she’d missed so many classes that Gypsy had sought permission to home school for a year. By then she was too behind for classes with kids her own age anyway and children could be cruel. Calingarry Crossing was not without its share of school bullies. They picked on her for the leg brace she wore, labelling her the girl with the gammy leg, or the girl from the spooky house with the weird mum. Poppy hadn’t been cruel, but she hadn’t stood up for Willow, either. Nor had she made her visits to the Dandelion House common knowledge around town.
Sara’s friendship with Willow, on the other hand, was known, but the bullies never picked on Sara. Even the meanest kids knew Sara Fraser’s life was tough enough. Coming back to Calingarry Crossing was stirring up Poppy’s shame. She knew it would. What surprised her was just how raw that shame still was after twenty years.
Off the punt and heading towards town, Poppy wondered what people might remember. Would they even know who she was? Being a reporter hardly granted celebrity status, but that didn’t stop the stares and whispers that went with having a media presence. Journalists and reporters, part of an occasional on-camera crowd, tended to pull inquisitive glances from members of the public unsure why a face seemed familiar. So while Poppy was unlikely to be recognised from TV, looking like her father—tall and lean with thick black waves and steely-blue eyes—her presence would no doubt bring sideways glances from old-timers whose memories had not yet failed them, and those locals who remembered that Hamilton family tragedy.
At first she didn’t see the figure walking up ahead, lost in the shadows of the red gums and she-oaks creating dappled shade on the dirt road, the strobe-light effect as she travelled underneath the trees demanding all her attention. Braking slowly, conscious of the dust cloud the car created, Poppy realised the person was Eli, minus the dog. She pulled over, put the car in reverse and pressed the button to lower the passenger-side window.
‘Can I give you a lift into town?’ she asked when Eli’s face peered in through the open window.
‘Won’t say no to a ride from a lovely lady.’
Eli was not so very old, and yet he eased himself into the seat of the hatchback as if his small bones might break. Up close and in the morning light, the hollowed cheekbones and sad, deep-set eyes spoke of a hard life, and his prominent, bony features made his nose appear long and pointy, a good match with his chin.
‘Nice car,’ he said. Poppy felt him taking everything in, taking her in, his gaze stopping on the centre console. ‘This what you’re going into town for?’
‘If you don’t mind!’ Poppy snatched up the prescriptions and flicked them into the furthest corner of the dashboard, out of sight. ‘That’s my business.’
‘Seems to me it’s not right.’
‘Reading another person’s prescriptions? I’d have to agree.’
‘I mean makin’ that stuff legal while marijuana remains a big no-no. S’not right.’
‘Humph!’ Poppy snorted. ‘Sounds like something my father would say. He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with marijuana either.’
‘Nothing wrong with something that lets you forget.’
‘Nor anything that helps you sleep and then get up and get on with living every morning, either.’ She hoped the retort would end the conversation.
‘What does a young thing like you need stuff like that for anyway?’
As annoying as this man was, Poppy sensed something in his enquiry. Was it concern? Why did he care to know about the hole she chose to fill with pills?
‘Well, well, how time flies,’ Poppy announced at the sudden onset of speed zone signage and road markings signalling the start of town. ‘Here already. Where can I drop you?’
‘Anywhere’s fine.’
Poppy slowed to fifty and made for the distant clump of green she knew to be the three big Hillii fig trees she’d climbed as a kid. They’d been thirty or forty years old back then, planted down the centre of the main street by some Legacy ladies for husbands lost in the Second World War. Their branches today sprawled both sides of the main street, looming over shop awnings, and littering the roa
d with little pink berry-like fruits.
Poppy parked the vehicle nose to curb and watched Eli leave the car in the same tentative manner in which he’d entered it.
‘Much appreciated,’ he yelled back and waved, then limped into the produce store a few shops away.
‘Nosey old so-and-so,’ she growled and threw open the car door. ‘Okay, Poppy, grab what you came for and get out.’
The Calingarry Crossing chemist shop was a compact corner within the tightly packed convenience store, delightfully devoid of the glut of beauty products, alternative medicines and specials bins that Poppy was used to seeing in franchise pharmacies in the city. After handing her scripts over to a man in a white business shirt, who advised a ten-minute wait, she hovered between the antiseptics and the corn pads, trying to appear inconspicuous but achieving the opposite. Fingering each boxed, bagged and hygienically sealed package, she amused herself by conjuring up a headline: The Great Pharmaceutical Conspiracy. It was true. Regardless of the place, the day or the time—city, suburb or small town—a chemist shop always had a whispering pharmacist wearing white and always a ten-minute wait.
As if there’s that many prescriptions to fill around here!
At least a whispering pharmacist wouldn’t announce her drugs of choice to the world.
To kill time, Poppy wandered over to the monument erected under one of the fig trees. Two floral wreaths sat at the base, one made of red plastic poppies, the other one made from real flowers and looking somewhat wilted now. As she scanned the names engraved in the marble obelisk, one stood out: Private Maurice Hamilton, her uncle, Johnno’s younger brother.
‘Good ol’ Morrie.’ Eli sidled up to Poppy. ‘Good bloke.’
‘You knew my uncle?’
Poppy hadn’t even been born when conscription had snatched her uncle and her father away from their families. John Hamilton came home a stranger, his detachment increasing with every anniversary of Uncle Morrie’s death. Life in general was a misery for Johnno, with more time wasted lamenting over sad anniversaries of the dead than celebrating the happy ones with the living. He’d lost a lot: Uncle Morrie in the war; Poppy’s mum and grandmother; her treasured baby brother, Ben; then, finally and in the end mercifully, her grandfather, a few years after Poppy left for Sydney. So much loss. So much sadness. Was it right to blame Johnno for running away? Probably not.
‘I knew your uncle and I knows your dad.’
Poppy spun on her heels to face Eli, almost toppling over. ‘You mean you knew him, when he lived here.’
‘Nope. I knows him.’
‘You know him? As in present tense know him? I didn’t think anyone knew John Hamilton.’ I don’t, she wanted to tell him. ‘Why wouldn’t you say something to me before now?’
‘Dunno. Didn’t think about it, I guess. I seen him not so long ago too. We went fishin’.’
Poppy knew that her chin had dropped. The image of Rocky the axolotl at feeding time forced it closed again. She gulped, trying to swallow the double-knot tying the words in her throat. ‘My father? He was here not long ago? Fishing?’
‘Likes his fishin’. Says it helps him think.’
Poppy scoffed, gave her head a little shake.
‘That’s crazy. My father wouldn’t come back here. He ran away from this place. He runs away from everything: life, relationships, responsibilities …’
Me!
‘He’s changed. Sees things different, and I think your relationship’s one thing he’d like to fix.’
‘He’s got a funny way of showing it.’
‘His way’s doin’ things bit by bit. Comin’ back here every now ’n’ then is the only bit he can handle right now.’
‘I can’t even get a return Christmas card out of him anymore. You’d think Nimbin was another planet. Nothing gets him away from his pot paradise.’
‘The fishes do when them’s bitin’. Caught a freezer full on his last trip. Down to my last two fillets. I can cook ’em up for us tonight. Whadaya say?’
Poppy’s immediate thought was to tell the nosey old so-and-so off.
Curiosity won over.
‘Okay. Why not. I’ll supply the wine. You want to come up to the main house and use the stove?’
The thought of him cooking in greasy pots and serving up on crusty old plates sent a shiver through Poppy. She had no idea what his place might be like inside; sure wasn’t much from what she’d seen of the outside.
‘I’ll see you around dusk.’
‘Do you want a lift back from town now?’ She had to ask, even though the last thing she wanted was to be stuck trying to make small talk with the old man again, especially as she’d need to find things to talk about over dinner.
‘That’s good of you, but I’m sure you don’t want to be stuck making small talk with an old man like me, considering we’s having dinner tonight.’ He flashed a smile before leaving a speechless Poppy.
Had she just said that aloud?
Of course not.
She dismissed it as coincidence and headed back to the pharmacy. The idea of sharing an isolated property with some mind-reading old man was unthinkable.
It was close to lunchtime, and without a single fast food establishment in town, nor her favourite city coffee joint, she stocked up on muesli bars, jellybeans and mints at the pharmacy point-of-sale stand.
They’ve gotta be healthy if they sell them in a chemist shop, don’t they?
At the same time she picked up some multivitamins. Anything to get her through.
With an energy bar clenched between her teeth, Poppy pulled out of the nose-to-curb parking spot, driving slowly along the main road towards the river. Nothing much had changed in twenty years, except things looked smaller than she remembered. Naturally everything was older, except the new park area where the main street curved to the left to follow the river. No longer was the riverbank a dry bed of weeds and scrubby oaks, but a well-maintained village green with picnic tables, flowerbeds and a children’s playground with rubber grass.
Steering the car into a U-turn around the end of the floral median strip, she headed back down the main road, her pulse pushing up a notch. She knew she could choose to turn left at the intersection and go back to the Dandelion House. Turning right would lead her to Sugar Mill Road.
She turned left.
Once beyond the fifty-kilometre speed limit she put her foot down and turned up the radio.
She was still singing as she dumped her knapsack on the kitchen table, grabbed a carob and coconut bar, took a couple of cushions from the kitchen chairs, and went outside to soak up the ambience of the old property from the swing seat on the veranda.
She’d come a long way from the young girl who’d wanted to be a writer.
‘I’m going to be rich and famous,’ she’d told her father at the breakfast table one morning. The day before, her teacher had asked Poppy to read her homework aloud to the class. ‘I can read it to you and Grandad tonight if you like. Or now,’ she added, feeling like ‘tonight’ was suddenly too far away.
No reaction.
Nothing.
Her father stared across the table, his gaze fixed as usual on some distant speck, his mind on something other than his daughter.
Nothing Poppy ever did seemed to impress him, not even being the first girl picked to play wing in the Calingarry Crossing Intra-state soccer team. She’d excelled at softball too. If Johnno Hamilton noticed, he never said a word.
A lack of female role models and her determination to be the son her father missed had turned Poppy into a bossy tomboy. Her closest friend, Caitlin Wynter, wasn’t exactly girlie either. She was pretty enough, but serious, studious and more concerned with grades than glamour. Caitlin had been her confidante once. They’d left Calingarry Crossing for Sydney Uni around the same time, seeing each other on campus occasionally, even sharing a flat for a short time. But being around Caitlin only reminded Poppy of that muck-up day, so the girls drifted apart, Poppy deciding she was better off wi
thout friends. She didn’t need anyone to witness her crying herself to sleep at night.
By closing her eyes, Poppy hoped to shut out the memories of that muck-up day, and for a while all she saw was black, the slowing motion of the swing seat rocking her to sleep.
*
‘Stop swinging into me, Poppy,’ Amber complained from the adjacent tyre-swing tied to one of the playground’s coral trees. ‘You’re doing that on purpose and it’s making me feel sick.’
‘Well, your constant whining’s making me feel sick,’ Poppy mimicked. ‘You worried I’ll mess up your pretty dress?’
Poppy’s leaving class had declared the 1989 muck-up event a mufti day for the entire school, which meant students got to wear their everyday clothes. Well, most of them wore everyday clothes. A busty Amber Bailey always looked like she’d just stepped off a Dolly magazine cover, while Sara chose her Sunday best. Yes, Sara had a Sunday best outfit, and Poppy knew she wore it hoping the frills and lace in the skirt and top would snare the attention of hunky Will Travelli. You wouldn’t know it was a mufti day to look at Caitlin. She looked like … well, she looked like Caitlin. She blended in; she always did, no accoutrements required except the headscarves she favoured: a triangle tied around her head, or flowing from the end of her ponytail, or braided into a single plait like Gypsy. Caitlin’s beauty was not something you saw as much as you felt. She was the perfect mix of intellect and emotion. A true Libran, whose favourite thing to wear was her heart on her sleeve.
Poppy tugged at the legs of her own shorts and looked down at her flat chest. She’d chosen her favourite T-shirt, the one she’d bought while on a school excursion to Alice Springs the year before. The cartoon graphic on the front featured a big orange camel and a rider, with the words I got humped in Alice Springs stamped across her chest. The choice hadn’t impressed her teachers at the time, but that was the point.
‘Come on you two, stop arguing. Poppy, this is the last day of school,’ Caitlin said. ‘It’s mufti day. You should be happy. No more uniforms, no more rules.’
With Amber and Sara the other half to Poppy and Caitlin’s playground clique, but two years younger and still in Year 10, the pressure was on Poppy to come up with a muck-up day job for the pair that wouldn’t require manual labour. Amber’s idea of hard work was manipulating her dad into paying for her mail-order makeup, and God forbid Poppy should cause her to break a nail or break into a sweat.
House for All Seasons Page 18