Lyrebird Hill

by Anna Romer

  ‘I’m pleased you came to see me, Ruby. Don’t leave it so long next time, okay?’

  She pecked my cheek, and we said goodbye. I went along the path, and when I reached the gate I turned to wave, but Mum had already disappeared back inside. I studied her closed door.

  I was under suspicion, as were you.

  The seed of doubt I’d been storing in the back of my mind for the past eighteen years finally slid into fertile soil and began to germinate. My feelings of guilt; my conviction that Mum secretly blamed me; my fear of recall – all of it skirting the real issue of that one forgotten event that, if remembered, would shatter me from the inside and leave me broken forever—

  There was a clatter of glass further along the street as someone emptied their recycling. I squinted into the blinding sunlight, rubbing my temple. I had a sick, sinking feeling, and then the leafy footpath, my mother’s house with its picket fence and landcaped garden, and the sleepy bustle of the Armidale street vanished. I blinked, and there I was instead, a twelve-year-old sitting down to breakfast in the kitchen of my childhood home.

  A single boiled egg sat on my plate, the last of Esmeralda’s. I was planning to scoop it out of its shell and mash it across a piece of wholemeal toast, but I was still deciding how to eat it. Should I scoff hungrily like I usually did, or take my time and savour every bite?

  I was picking up my knife when Jamie’s voice drifted through the open kitchen window.

  ‘I saw them up on the ridge last night,’ she was saying. ‘Ruby . . . and a boy.’

  She must have been standing behind the water tank talking to Mum, who’d gone out to the vegie patch to pick greens for our school sandwiches.

  ‘What boy?’ Mum asked.

  ‘That foster kid staying with Mrs Drake.’

  ‘What were they doing?’

  Jamie’s reply was muffled by birdsong, but something in her tone made me nervous. Picking up my knife, I cut open the egg and scooped it onto my toast.

  Mum came into the kitchen looking flushed, as if she’d spent too long in the sun. She took a colander from its hook on the wall and rinsed the greens under the tap.

  ‘What were you doing with the Mrs Drake’s foster boy last night?’ she asked without looking around. ‘Jamie said she saw the two of you out after dark.’

  I glared at Jamie. She’d followed Mum in and was examining the plate of scones, her eyes all big and innocent. She chose the largest, I noticed, and broke it into bits on her plate.

  Mum shook the colander into the sink. ‘Well, Ruby?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She turned to look at me. ‘What’s got into you lately? You used to be such a quiet girl. Your grades were good, the teachers only ever had praise for you. Now there are notes sent home every week about your attitude. And as for your outburst yesterday – I understand you were upset, but swearing? I think that foster boy is a bad influence.’

  I sat up straight. ‘No, he’s—’

  ‘You’d better stay away from him.’

  I opened my mouth to argue, but a loud clatter cut me off. All eyes went to the far end of the table. Jamie had dropped her butter knife.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said sheepishly, but when Mum turned her attention back to the greens, Jamie pulled a face.

  I glowered back.

  A couple of years ago we’d been best friends. Swimming in the river together, fishing for yabbies. Collecting ferns and yellow-buttons and everlastings to dry in the flower press we’d found in the barn. Jamie had written stories, and I’d drawn pictures to go with them. We’d been a team, thick as thieves, best mates.

  Then Jamie started high school in Armidale. She began experimenting with make-up, and saved up to buy her own clothes. She got in with the cool crowd. All of a sudden, in her eyes I was a baby. Boring. A regular yawn, she’d written in her diary.

  And that wasn’t all she’d written.

  I can’t believe I’ve got a boyfriend. Mum would freak if she knew, so I only ever meet him at our secret place. Yesterday we kissed for the first time . . . sigh, I think I’m in love.

  I looked at Mum. She was frowning at four slices of brown bread arranged on the benchtop. They were slathered in homemade mayonnaise, and Mum began arranging sorrel leaves in rows across the yellow gloop. A mound of grated carrot sat nearby, awaiting its fate as sandwich filling.

  Scraping back my chair, I got to my feet. I was shaking so hard I knocked over my glass, splashing milk across the tablecloth.

  ‘You think Jamie’s so perfect?’ I yelled at Mum. ‘You think she never does anything wrong? You always blame me for mucking things up, but if you knew the truth about her, you’d get a rude shock.’

  Mum frowned at Jamie, then at me. ‘What are you talking about?’

  I stared at Jamie in triumph. But all of a sudden, her face was pale and her big golden eyes were pleading at me. She was no longer the sophisticated teenager, but a kid just like me; her freckles popped against her creamy skin and she looked about to start blubbering.

  Mum was waiting, her dark hair frayed into wisps around her face. The empty colander dangled from her fingers.

  ‘Well?’

  I opened my mouth, but no words came. I didn’t want to hurt Jamie. Despite her awfulness to me sometimes, I still loved her. And I still secretly hoped that one day we would be friends again, just as we’d been before she started high school.

  So I said nothing.

  Later that night after dinner, I saw her sneak into the yard. The incinerator was still smouldering from when Mum had burned a load of blackberry canes. Jamie stoked the ashes until the fire licked the incinerator rim, then she threw something in. She stayed there a long time, a shadow in the darkness, staring at the blaze, her face painted gold and crimson by the flames.

  When the fire died and Jamie came inside, I went to investigate. At first, I saw only ashes. But when I prodded the ash with a stick, I upturned a blackened blob of metal that, on closer inspection, turned out to be the remains of a tiny padlock.

  My sister had burned her diary.

  The flashback, on top of my conversation with my mother, had left me feeling drained. For the longest time, I stood at the gate outside Mum’s, gazing back, trying to summon the energy to retrace my steps along the pathway and knock on her door.

  In the end, it seemed too hard.

  And too unlikely that Mum would be much bothered by my recollection of a snippet from so long ago; besides, she’d probably already known about Jamie’s one-time boyfriend. I swallowed a lump of disappointment about the diary, too; the book Esther had mentioned was probably just a volume of fairytales after all.

  The sun was high and bright overhead, the air had turned warm. I had promised to meet Pete at the mechanic’s in Marsh Street at 2pm, which meant I had a couple of hours to kill; shopping was the last thing I felt like doing, so instead I walked. Soon I had blisters on my heels, and a little while later they became painful. I found a park bench, and sat for an hour watching a family of magpies pick over drifts of rubbish around the picnic tables.

  Something Mum said about the letters wasn’t adding up.

  Had she really only been trying to protect me from the shock of discovering my great-grandmother was a murderer? Or to prevent the letters being sensationalised by the press? Or was she motivated by reasons of a more private nature?

  The notion of bad genes had crossed my mind.

  Bad genes. Traits passed from one generation to the next. Could Mum really believe that? I was about to discount it as simply too outlandish, when I remembered the title of the painting that had led me to the walnut tree in the first place.

  Inheritance.

  I went hot, and then every molecule of heat drained out of my body and my blood turned ice cold. Slowly, the truth dawned. Mum didn’t just blame me for Jamie’s death; she didn’t simply hold me responsible for not getting help fast enough, or for not remembering important facts that might have helped the police catch Jamie’s killer.


  Mum believed I was Jamie’s killer.

  Sliding my hand down to my instep, I found a blister that had worn tender beneath my sandal strap. When I dug my fingernails into the watery bubble, it burst and leaked fluid. I dug harder, and the slow ooze of blood rose under my nail.

  . . . no trace that anyone other than you and Jamie had been on the rocks that day.

  I peeled off the blistered piece of skin and let it drop in the grass. Was Mum right? How would I ever know for certain? And if I never knew, how could I live with myself?

  The answer to that was simple: I couldn’t.

  By the time I asked directions to the mechanic’s, promptly got lost and asked again, then finally found my way to the motor repair shop, it was well after two o’clock. There was no sign of a woolly-haired man with two kelpies, or his old ute. Just a car yard full of demo vehicles, a garage littered with engine parts, and an office hidden behind smoked glass.

  My phone buzzed. I looked at the display, it was another message from Rob. I deleted it, then typed a reply.

  Leave me alone.

  But when I tried to press send, my fingers fumbled and the message disappeared. Rather than try to retrieve it, I just stood there, hunched over my phone, feeling so suddenly weary that I actually considered curling in a ball and resting my head on the warm concrete.

  ‘Ruby?’

  Pete had emerged from the office and was walking towards me. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘are you okay?’

  ‘Not really. My boyfriend – that is, my ex-boyfriend – cheated on me. Now he wants to talk. And Mum thinks . . . she thinks I—’ My words choked off. All I could do was stare into Pete’s impossibly blue eyes and fight back the tears.

  Taking the phone from my fingers, Pete slid it into my bag and grasped my hand. Then, gently, he led me around the side of the building where his ute was waiting. Bardo and Old Boy were on the back tray. They’d been sitting quietly, but the moment they saw me they sprang to their feet and began to whine excitedly, straining their chains. Bardo’s tail wagged with such vigour that her entire back end twisted to and fro.

  Pete opened the passenger door and I got in. A moment later he was settling into the driver’s seat, buckling up. He looked at me, his big freckled hands loosely grasping the wheel, his dark hair raked into wild tufts, his blue eyes shadowed with concern. He was clearly curious about what had shaken me loose, but had the restraint not to ask. Instead he reached for my hand. His fingers were warm and calloused, and the way they curled cautiously around mine made me feel marginally better.

  After a moment, he withdrew and started up the car.

  ‘What is it about you and those dogs?’ he marvelled. ‘You ignore them, avoid them, and generally act as if they’re not there – which from a dog’s perspective is somewhat upsetting. And yet they hero-worship you.’

  I shrugged, and ventured a small smile.

  But as we drove up Marsh Street and then hooked right at Rusden, I caught myself turning my head ever so slightly. The cab window was directly behind me, but if I peeked from the corner of my eye I could just see two pointed, furry faces with ears pricked and tongues lolling and lips pulled into sloppy grins. Their moist noses were pressed near the glass, and both dogs were watching me, their golden eyes brimming with happy fascination.

  ‘You’re bleeding.’

  Dusk was falling, and one by one the stars were coming out. I shifted on the log bench, sliding one foot behind the other, out of sight. ‘It’s nothing. Just a blister.’

  ‘Blister, my arse.’ Pete removed the tea towel he’d tucked into his jeans as a makeshift apron, and kneeled at my feet. With surprising gentleness, he cupped his fingers around my ankle and stretched out my leg, bending nearer to examine my instep. ‘It looks more like you’ve been gored by a wild boar. I’m afraid I’m going to have to operate.’

  ‘What about dinner?’ I asked, looking hopefully over at the barbecue. Tonight we were having roasted garlic salmon with vegetables and salad, and the aroma wafting from the cast-iron bush oven was driving me to distraction.

  ‘Food will have to wait,’ Pete said. ‘Don’t move, I’ll be back in a flash.’

  He ducked into the house and was back a moment later with a large first aid kid. He took out gauze bandage, nursing scissors and a tiny bottle of Betadine.

  ‘I’m just going to give it a squirt with this,’ he explained, unscrewing the Betadine. ‘It might sting, so don’t say you weren’t warned.’

  I shut my eyes.

  You’re bleeding.

  The antiseptic liquid burned my raw skin. I shifted focus: the warm rough squeeze of Pete’s fingers on my ankle as he applied a strip of gauze; the tickle of his hair against my bare leg when he bent to retrieve the scissors; the rhythm of his touch as he wound the bandage gently, smoothly, and with infinite care, around my injured foot.

  The murmur of wind in the casuarinas reached me, and my attention wandered. All of a sudden I was twelve again, racing along the river’s edge and up the hill, into the dark shadows of the pine forest.

  ‘Hey, Roo. You’re bleeding.’

  The Wolf pointed at my T-shirt sleeve. ‘Did you cut yourself?’

  We were sitting in the patchy shade of a black cypress pine that grew at the base of the Spine. The ground beneath us was carpeted brown with needles and dotted with hard little pinecones.

  I examined the splodge of blood on my sleeve. ‘It’s nothing.’

  The Wolf frowned and leaned closer, bumping his bony shoulder against mine. ‘You’d better let me have a look,’ he said. ‘You might need stitches.’

  I shoved him away, and the words popped out before I could stop them. ‘I’ve just scratched my scar.’

  Curiosity lit the Wolf’s eyes. ‘You have a scar? Let’s see.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Come on. I’ll show you mine.’

  ‘Yeah, right. As if you’d have anything this ugly.’

  The Wolf wiggled his eyebrows. ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘And you’d be grossed out.’

  The Wolf hitched up his jeans leg to reveal a shiny coin-sized patch below his knee, pink against the tanned skin. ‘Snakebite,’ he said proudly.

  My breath got stuck in my throat. ‘How come you didn’t die?’

  ‘I cut across the bite with my penknife and sucked out the venom.’

  I couldn’t stop staring. ‘Mum says you shouldn’t cut a snakebite. She says you have to bandage up the limb and wait for help.’

  The Wolf pulled a face. ‘Hard to wait for help when you’re deep in the scrub and no one knows where you are. Anyway, check this one out.’

  He slid down his sock to expose his ankle, revealing a zigzag like a red lightning bolt. ‘Croc attack,’ he boasted. ‘A real monster of a thing, too. Dragged me right under, had me in the deathroll. I only survived on account of being a champion swimmer.’

  A glimmer of disbelief made me scrunch up my face. ‘Really?’

  The Wolf flashed his canines in a devious smile. ‘Would I lie to you, Roo?’

  ‘Yes!’ I rolled my eyes, but secretly I was impressed. I looked hopefully back at his leg. ‘Any more?’

  Rolling up his T-shirt, he displayed a tanned stomach where a pink line hooked around his right hip. ‘This one nearly finished me,’ he said seriously. ‘Fifteen stitches. I was in hospital for yonks.’

  ‘What happened?’

  He waggled his eyebrows again. ‘It’ll cost you.’

  I had twigged by now that he might – just might – be pulling my leg about how he got all those scars. But it didn’t matter; he had scars. None as bad as mine, but it was a relief to know he wasn’t perfect.

  ‘All right, I’ll show you.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Cross my heart and spit in your eye.’ I nodded at the pink line on his hip. ‘So, how’d you get it?’

  ‘Wild boar.’

  My mouth fell open. ‘Get away!’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘What
happened?’

  ‘We were pig hunting. My brother’s dog flushed some piglets from a hollow, and the sow went wild. Me and my brother ran like buggery, but just when I thought I was safe, the sow charged out from behind a tree and went for me.’

  My brows shot up. ‘You have a brother?’

  The Wolf picked up a pinecone and snapped off a spur. ‘Sure. He’s twenty-five. I haven’t seen him in yonks. He’s in jail for armed robbery.’

  I stared. ‘What about your mum and dad?’

  ‘Mum died. I still see Dad sometimes.’

  ‘Why don’t you live with him, instead of with Mrs Drake?’

  ‘He’s mad.’

  I stared at the Wolf in amazement. A million questions were suddenly hammering my brain, but the Wolf had gone very still, apparently fascinated by his pinecone. A weird sort of silence spun around us. I felt uncomfortable – not because of what the Wolf had told me about his family, but because of the deep frown carved into his normally cheerful face.

  The silence between us grew. Currawongs burbled in the branches of a nearby tumbledown gum, and from the distance came the quiet roar of the rapids.

  ‘I like Mrs Drake,’ the Wolf said suddenly. ‘She bought me these jeans. I’ve never had new jeans before.’

  ‘They’re cool.’

  ‘She gave me all this other stuff, too. Gear that Bobby grew out of, football jumpers, T-shirts, that sort of thing. I’ve even got my own room.’

  Mrs Drake lived on the other side of the Hillard farm, and mostly kept to herself. Her husband had died a long time ago, before Mum and Jamie and I came here to live.

  ‘What’s Bobby like?’ I asked.

  The Wolf shook his head. ‘Up himself.’

  ‘How do you stand living there, then?’

  ‘Most of the time it’s just me and Mrs Drake. Bobby’s hardly ever home, he’s too caught up at uni. Anyway, I’d much rather be there than at the home.’

  That was the first time I’d ever heard the Wolf mention the boys’ home in Newcastle. I waited for him to give details, but he was staring pointedly at the sleeve of my T-shirt.

  ‘Come on, Roo,’ he reminded me. ‘I showed you mine.’