Lyrebird Hill

by Anna Romer

  17

  Forgiveness is not something you do for others; rather, it is your most powerful gift to yourself.

  – ROB THISTLETON, EMOTIONAL RESCUE

  Ruby, May 2013

  My mother regarded me from the dimness of her hallway, shielding herself behind the front door. She hesitated, then swung the door open to let me in.

  ‘I wish you’d let Jamie rest in peace,’ she said by way of a greeting. ‘You weren’t the only one devastated by her death. Why can’t you simply let it go?’

  ‘I haven’t come to talk about Jamie.’

  Mum looked surprised, then relieved. ‘Good. Then this is a social call?’

  ‘Actually, I was hoping we could talk about Dad.’

  Even in a casual outfit of cropped jeans and rumpled linen shirt, with her dark auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked dazzling. But at the mention of my father, she seemed to fade.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said, resigned, and ushered me along the hall. We bypassed the kitchen and went out to a pergola-covered courtyard at the back of the house. There was no lawn, just concrete pavers and mondo grass edgings, and elegant palm trees in pots. A hedge of compact lemon trees grew along the pergola’s perimeter, filling the courtyard with a citrusy scent. I must have interrupted Mum in the middle of pruning the lemons, because a bucket of leaves and pair of secateurs sat on the pavement nearby.

  ‘Well,’ she said, sitting at the big teak table and motioning me to take the seat opposite. ‘Spit it out.’

  At sixty, she had never looked lovelier. There was hardly a wrinkle on her face and her hair was threaded only lightly with silver. But as she waited for me to speak, she seemed inwardly drawn, smaller, as if battening down her hatches in preparation for bad news.

  I took a breath. ‘Last time I was here, we talked about Brenna’s letters, and how the idea of bad genes had crossed your mind.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘You said how finding the letters made you question yourself and everyone around you, and that all the old guilt had bubbled up over Dad’s death. I guess I’m just trying to fit all the pieces together.’

  Mum stood suddenly and went inside, returning a minute later with two glasses and a decanter. At first I thought it was brandy, but it turned out to be iced tea. She splashed the amber liquid into each glass, then pushed mine towards me and downed her own.

  ‘You were such a bright little girl, Ruby. So curious about everything. Jamie used to love dressing you up like a doll. And you were a doll, with your mop of curly brown hair and big caramel eyes. But after the dog attack, you changed. Became more withdrawn, less certain of yourself. As the months wore on and your wounds began to heal, I realised that my chirpy little daughter had been replaced by a girl who was terribly shy and apprehensive.’

  She fiddled with her empty glass, then finally poured more tea. ‘How much do you remember about what happened?’ she asked carefully. ‘About how your father died?’

  ‘Bits of it.’ Those weeks and months following the dog attack were a jumble of disjointed events, a jigsaw puzzle with most of its pieces still rattling around in the box.

  ‘Maybe I’d better start at the beginning, then. It might help you understand. Not just about your father, but about why I felt compelled to hide your great-grandmother’s letters.’

  She let her gaze roam across the courtyard, and dragged in a deep breath.

  ‘Late one Sunday afternoon I was cleaning up after a barbecue. Your father had been entertaining some of his bikie friends.’ Mum’s voice turned hard with disapproval. ‘They’d been drinking all day, but no one seemed to care about that as they got on their bikes and rode away, least of all your father. He was drunkest of them all. They’d been teasing Boozo—’ Mum looked at me. ‘Henry didn’t believe in chaining dogs, so he kept Boozo in a large enclosure in the backyard, only taking him out to go hunting. Anyway, Henry and I had words. I’d gone off my head about him getting drunk around you children. You see, Ruby, your father changed when he hit the bottle. It made him pigheaded and stupid. That day was no different. He told me to stop nagging, and so I did. I knew better than to cause a row, especially when you girls were playing so happily in the garden. There was no point spoiling the day.’

  Mum got to her feet and collected her secateurs. She began to clip random leaves off the nearest lemon tree, and I saw that her hands were trembling.

  ‘I’d gone into the house,’ she continued. ‘I forget why. Probably to do the washing up. My hands were wet, because when I heard the scream I rushed to the door to see what was happening, and I clearly recall wiping my hands on my apron. Funny, isn’t it,’ she said looking at me, ‘how you remember the insignificant things, while the more dramatic moments are often a blur.’

  I knew what was coming; my fingers went halfway to my shoulder, but I forced them down.

  ‘Do you want me to stop?’ Mum asked.

  ‘No, I’m okay. Dad let me go into the enclosure, didn’t he?’

  Mum nodded. ‘Bloody idiot that he was. Anyway, the dog must have snarled and startled you, because you let out a scream. You used to love old Boozo, you were always reaching through the wire to pat him on the head or tug his tail, and ordinarily he was tolerant. But that day he was in no mood to be petted.’ She cut a withered branch from the base of the tree, then stared at the wounded trunk.

  ‘By the time I’d reached the enclosure, your father had scooped you up. There was blood everywhere, your poor little shoulder was open to the bone. I took you in my arms while Henry ran inside to call the ambulance. We sat on the verandah. While I staunched the blood flow, I kept telling him to get the rifle and go out to the pen and put Boozo down. I said if he didn’t, then the animal-welfare people would. But he refused point blank.’

  ‘I remember you arguing.’

  ‘We argued for days. All the time you were in hospital.’ Mum shuffled into a gap of sunlight. The secateurs hung loose from her fingers. She was lit from above, frailer and older and more beautiful than I’d ever seen her.

  ‘A week passed,’ she went on. ‘Henry still refused to do anything about Boozo. Finally, I took matters into my own hands. Henry was out in the garage, fixing his Harley. I unlocked the rifle safe, loaded up, and went out to the enclosure. I was a fair shot in those days, thanks to your father’s insistence on giving me lessons. I engaged the lever, took aim at Boozo and was about to pull the trigger when Henry came around the side of the house and rushed at me, yelling. He swung a punch, to throw off my aim, but instead he knocked the rifle upwards and it exploded in his face.’

  Silence wedged itself between us.

  Mum’s skin was ashen, her eyes huge and glassy. I had the urge to go to her, to push beyond the barriers of our mutual mistrust and find the loving mother who I knew must be in there somewhere. But all I could do was sit in the cold stillness, and wait for her to continue.

  When she didn’t, I found myself asking, ‘Did you love him?’

  Mum looked startled. ‘In my way.’

  ‘I always thought you were unhappy because you missed Dad.’

  She turned back to the lemon tree, and pruned off another branch. The tree was taking on a stunted look, bare of foliage now, skeletal.

  ‘I was unhappy because after your father died I understood something about myself. Even though his death was finally ruled by the police as accidental, I was tormented by doubt. You see, later, whenever I thought about him, this dark feeling would bubble up inside me. No matter how I tried, I could never seem to summon up any feelings of remorse. I was sorry for what I’d done, but there were days when I was so very glad for it, too.’

  The courtyard dimmed as the sun went behind a cloud. The scent of lemons sharpened the air.

  Silence tiptoed around us. Mum’s shoulders were shaking; her head dipped forward and she hid her face in her hands. Again I wanted to go to her and pull her into my arms, tell her that everything was all right – or at least that it would be, if we faced it toge
ther . . . whatever ‘it’ was. But another, wary part stayed put. Mum and I had never faced anything together. We were all that was left of our family, the opposite poles of a fragile little unit that had crumbled to dust eighteen years ago. It wasn’t that we were different, because differences could be reconciled; it was simply that we were strangers, shackled together by blood ties.

  Finally she turned to look at me. Her eyes were shadowed and she seemed, suddenly, terrifyingly frail. Strangers we may have been, but she was still my mother.

  ‘Henry didn’t deserve to die.’ Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply, and her next words came out in a rush. ‘He was great with you girls, crazy about you both. He might have been rough around the edges, and weak-willed when it came to the grog, but underneath all the bluster he was a decent man.’

  She slumped, turning her face towards the sun. Washed in the soft green light that filtered through the vine-covered pergola, she was like an apparition from one of the turn-of-the-century paintings she so admired: deathly pale, adrift and helpless, childlike.

  She stared at the pile of leaves at her feet. ‘I used to wonder where those dark feelings of mine came from. Which is why discovering that my grandmother was a murderer scared me so much.’

  ‘So that’s what you meant by “bad genes”?’

  ‘Yes.’ She crouched and gathered the lemon twigs and leaves and placed them in the bucket. There were dots of red on her palms and knuckles and wrists, bloody smears where the thorns had scratched her.

  I got to my feet too quickly, overturning my chair. ‘But Mum, it doesn’t make sense. You inherit things like hair and eye colour, maybe even the tendency to develop similar sorts of disease . . . but murder. That doesn’t get passed along.’

  ‘Did I ever tell you why your Grampy James had all those medals? He was decorated in both wars, but not for saving lives. As it turned out, my father never coped too well in peace time, but give him a rifle and a war and a licence to kill, and he was in his element.’

  ‘Mum, this is doing my head in.’

  ‘I believe that a tendency to violence can be passed on, Ruby.’

  ‘So, what are you saying?’

  ‘Just . . . be careful.’

  I stared at her, flashing back to how she’d been after Jamie died. Unwashed hair and dirt under her fingernails. Eyes darkened by grief, and a mouth perpetually downturned. Her garden had gone to weeds, and the house always smelled like burned toast. Even when another summer rolled around, it still felt like winter.

  ‘You think I killed her, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  I thought I saw fear surface in her eyes, a slight enlarging of the pupils, a like a shadow crossing the sun. She hid it well, but once seen, something like that couldn’t be unseen.

  I told Mum I had to be somewhere, and she walked me to the door. We stood awkwardly, me lingering on the doorstep eager to be gone, Mum looking shell-shocked after her disclosure about Dad, stray wisps of dark hair drifted around her face. I pushed through the screen door, but Mum touched my arm.

  ‘Ruby?’

  ‘What, Mum?’

  ‘I read Rob’s book. I think he’s got it right. Don’t let the past drag you down. Put it behind you, and do your best to move on.’

  Without really knowing why, I kissed her gently on the cheek.

  ‘Goodbye, Mum.’

  Before she could reply, I hurried along the path, carrying with me the burden of her confession, and the lingering odour of lemons.

  That afternoon I walked along the riverbank towards the granite formation we had explored as kids.

  It was on the edge of the national park adjoining Lyrebird Hill, a cluster of mammoth boulders that flanked a stretch of river, squeezing the fast-flowing water into a narrow channel. Several metres downstream, the riverbed abruptly dropped away, creating a surge of waterfall that thundered into a deep pool far below. We’d been warned as children about playing here. It was well known as a dangerous place; I’d heard of inexperienced canoeists being killed after their canoes jettisoned over the falls. Bushwalkers, too, had slipped on the rocks and gone into the deadly rapids, their bodies washing up on riverbanks kilometres away in the park’s dense heartland.

  For the most part we’d stayed away, but from time to time we would be drawn back here like bees to the hive. Then, as mysteriously as it had arisen, our obsession would ebb and we would forget again, almost as though the rocks had taken from us what they needed and then returned to their primordial realm.

  Hopping from rock to rock, I made my way up to the big flat outcrop where eighteen years ago my mother had found my sister’s body. My only memories of this place were happy ones: picnicking with Jamie in the early days when we were friends, and sometimes Mum had come with us, supervising our explorations in the stony caves that honeycombed this stretch of the embankment.

  These ancient stones had fascinated us. The huge granite formations congregated closely together, their smooth surfaces mottled with bright green moss and black or yellow lichen. Deep crevices carved between the stones where they banked shoulder to shoulder, creating gaps that seemed to vanish into black nothingness below. Mum had warned us about these gaps. The rocks were slippery when wet – drenched either by river spray or rain – and she’d heard of people breaking bones when they fell.

  I made my way along a flat shelf of granite until I came to an assemblage of tall stones pushing skywards. I was tempted to sit at the base of one, to rest back against it and watch the sunset, but being here made me uneasy.

  The sun was sinking behind the trees, and pink clouds gathering on the horizon. Below, the water pounded the rocks as it gathered momentum towards the cascade. Behind me, higher up the embankment, shadows congregated among the trees. It was May, and while the days were still warm, night-time brought an iciness that heralded the approaching winter.

  I went over to the water. Looking down, I watched the rapids swirl and froth between the half-submerged stones. Jamie used to say that the river was magic and sometimes, if you listened hard, the rush of water sounded like a woman singing.

  I listened now. Curiously, it wasn’t singing I heard, but my sister’s distinctive musical laughter . . .

  There was a noisy splash, and squealing. Another splash, and Jamie laughing some more.

  I inched along the bank, determined to see what she was doing. Climbing up on a wedge of granite, I peeked over the top. The river was washed in golden light, with sunny speckles dancing on the water, and half-submerged boulders pushing through the surface. Along the bank grew maidenhair ferns and soft lemon-green grass.

  I saw them lying in the shade of a gnarly old casuarina. Jamie had her arms wrapped around the neck of an older boy, one I didn’t recognise. They were kissing. Not just pecking away, but really going for it. Yuck.

  Jamie sat up suddenly and scrambled to her feet. ‘Hey, Bobby,’ she called, ‘look what I found.’ She flung up her arm, and something bright and glittery dangled from her fingers.

  Bobby, I wondered. There was only one Bobby I knew of, and that was Bobby Drake. I shifted, trying to get a better look at him, but the sun was in my eyes.

  ‘Hey, give that back,’ Bobby said, springing after Jamie.

  ‘You’ll have to catch me first,’ she teased.

  Bobby charged, but Jamie leaped with Tinkerbell-like grace up onto a high shelf of stone, where she taunted Bobby with her trinket, swinging it to and fro as though trying to hypnotise him.

  ‘You little thief,’ Bobby accused, half-laughing. ‘Give it back, or I’ll have you transported back to Newcastle.’

  I frowned. What was he talking about, transported back to Newcastle? A grimy feeling came over me and I shifted uncomfortably in my hiding place, trying to get a better look at him. He was tall and thickly built, and his hair might have been fair but it was hard to see in the dazzling brightness.

  Bobby climbed the rock and made a lunge for Jamie, but she only trilled and sprang away. Of cours
e, Jamie had done four years of ballet, and if Bobby Drake thought he could catch her so easily, he was in for a surprise. Which he was anyway, because Jamie scrambled nimbly to higher ground, nearly to the top of the tall boulder that jutted out over the river. The rapids gushed beneath her, sending up rainbow sprays of mist.

  Out went Jamie’s arm, the silvery trinket dangling from her outstretched fingers.

  ‘Dare me to throw it in?’ she said in her teasing voice.

  ‘You wouldn’t have the guts.’

  Bobby turned, but with the sun behind him he was still just a shadow. He climbed the rock and ran towards Jamie. She laughed as he caught her and pinned her against him, trying to grapple the trinket out of her hand. The chain winked in the sunlight and the pendant gleamed like a silver raindrop. Where would she have got something like that?

  Jamie shrieked, and I shifted position the better to see. Bobby’s back was blocking my view of Jamie, but I caught a sharp little motion as Jamie elbowed Bobby in the ribs and twisted out of his grasp.

  ‘Oh, really?’ she said, sounding annoyed.

  She whirled, a funky sort of pirouette on her nimble fairy-feet, and somehow landed on an even higher ledge of stone. Her hand shot out and her fingers splayed and then there was a splash in the water below.

  ‘What’d you do that for?’ Bobby yelled.

  Jamie lifted her shoulders and looked down her nose at him. ‘I just did you a favour. Sooner or later your mum would have found it, and then she’d know it wasn’t that weirdo brat who took it, but her own darling Bobby-boy.’ She laughed and gestured at the water. ‘This way, there’s no proof.’

  ‘Hell, Jamie. Mum loved that locket!’

  Jamie pouted. ‘More than you love me?’

  Bobby went over and glared into the river. Then he slumped on the sun-warmed stone and dropped his face into his hands. ‘Aw, crap. I’m stuffed if she finds out it was me who took it.’