Awakening: Book 1 The Last Anakim Trilogy

by Janet V Forster

  ‘It’s okay girl,’ I called, hating the thought of her spending the night in the shed and refusing to come in because of me. Even the dog and I were co-dependent.

  Closing the door quietly I returned to sit on my bed. Noodle hopped up and placed her shaggy head in my lap and I stroked her absent-mindedly as Deb and I spoke. Over the weeks, she provided me with photos and reams of information about my biological origins on her side, clarifying anything I asked her to. I realised that she was trying to replace what had been stolen, to provide me with a sense of origin, of identity and belonging.

  I looked nothing like her. My hair defined me. At school I was referred to as ‘the girl with the hair.’ It was auburn and unruly, a heavy mass of thick tight curls tumbling down my back, and threatening to eliminate my face altogether. The only way to manage it somewhat was with litres of de-tangler, and a long-toothed comb used to scrape it back into a tight pony tail. If the eighties’ Sinead O Conner look was in vogue I might have considered something like it. By contrast Deb had long wispy blonde hair and big eyes, more blue than my green, in an oval face. Her skin was a light bronze, not like my pale, freckled complexion.

  And I wasn’t built like her either. She was small, almost fragile. I was a little on the hour-glass side and tall enough to no longer worry that not eating carrots or spinach or whatever it was would stunt my growth. Her sons were also not much like her. I assumed that they took after their father. All three were the ‘strapping lads’ their grandmother had spoken of, handsome in that rugged, farmer kind of way.

  ‘You look a lot like my mother,’ she said. ‘Your dark hair and your face, so serene, calm. Just like her.’

  ‘Really?’ I marvelled, unable to see it, although I could see the resemblance between Deb and her mother who was also delicately built, and her brother, while a touch darker, carried the same elfin features.

  ‘But you’ve got Nick’s eyes, there’s no mistaking that,’ she added. ‘Piercing.’

  I had received a lot of compliments about my eyes. They were unusual. Probably my best feature, when you got to see them through the hair. Mum said that the colour was always changing, depending on the light and what I wore, and my mood. She said that sometimes the green was almost turquoise, but that at other times it darkened to khaki, and the gold surrounding the pupil flared like fire. Eyes like a cat, she told me, hence my nickname, Kit-Kat.

  At age eighteen, pregnant, and with her relationship to my biological father in shreds, Deb had plummeted into an emotional wasteland. She never doubted that giving birth to me was the right thing to do, but hadn’t felt mature enough to raise a child. Her relationship with Nick had imploded even before she could tell him that she was pregnant and her self-confidence hung in tatters.

  ‘It must have been so difficult for you,’ I said on another night, tucked up in bed with Noodle as we spoke on the phone.

  ‘We went to Monaco,’ she said, reflecting on her time in seclusion at a farm in rural Victoria, hours spent creaking to and fro on an old rocking chair on a sunny veranda while swatting flies, ‘Spain and Portugal. We saw Greece, virtually the whole of the Mediterranean. You should have seen my tan.’ I hadn’t seen her tan, but I could hear the sadness in her voice. She tried to hide it, to make a joke, but it only made it clearer.

  Suddenly her voice changed, became lighter. ‘I met Jim there.’

  ‘In Monaco?’

  ‘Yes.’ And now it wasn’t all about regret and that was a relief. ‘He was managing the farm we stayed on.’

  ‘Oh. I guess you got something good out of it, at least,’ I replied.

  Her voice changed again. ‘You were the most beautiful baby. You didn’t ask for any of this.’ She wavered slightly but then continued. ‘Please remember that. It was a moment in time. You weren’t there and then you were. You were the most beautiful thing to come out of it … and I am so sorry I wasn’t there for you.’ She swallowed hard. ‘Don’t forget that, Kate. You were meant to be. You were truly meant to be.’

  I gathered myself. Reassurance seemed the best response. ‘I know, Deb.’

  But she wasn’t satisfied. ‘No, no … You wouldn’t understand, no-one would.’

  ‘Understand what?’ I asked, confused, but curious.

  She sounded thoughtful. ‘It was such a strange time and of course it was quite a while back now, and so I wonder about my recollections, about just how accurate they are.’

  ‘Uh huh?’ I prompted.

  ‘I had some bizarre experiences in the lead up to your birth.’ She spat it out suddenly, like it was some kind of a confession and then came to an abrupt stop.

  I waited, asking when she didn’t continue. ‘What sort of experiences?’

  ‘It’s hard to put my finger on. It was so long ago.’

  If I’d known her better, I would have called her on her cop-out, but instead I took to grazing on my nails. Across the sea she sensed my dissatisfaction. ‘I think maybe I went just a little bit crazy at the time,’ she admitted.

  ‘Crazy how?’

  She took time to respond. ‘I felt … kind of haunted when I was pregnant with you. There was something other, for want of a better word, with me. A presence.’ She hesitated, but I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘A lot of the time it was just a sensation,’ she said, ‘but I heard it sometimes ... and I saw things too. I had the strangest dreams, so incredibly vivid.’ She coughed. ‘Mind you, although I didn’t have them with the other three, I’ve heard that vivid dreams are common in pregnancy. It’s all the hormones.’ The clock ticked and Noodle twitched as she dealt with her own sleep demons. ‘At first it scared me,’ Deb continued. ‘But later I realised that I wasn’t going to come to any harm and I kind of accepted it. It seemed to be all about protecting you Kate, watching over you for some reason. I was just the vessel carrying you. When you went, it went with you. Vanished immediately.’

  ‘Wow …’ I said, relieved when she continued without waiting.

  ‘When I went back to the farm after you were gone, everything was very different. It was like the magic of the place had left with you.’ Her voice became distant. ‘I used to imagine that otherness following you and watching over you, because you were so special. I could see that at once. You must think I’m crazy.’

  On the surface it did sound a little crazy, but who was I to judge. Who knew what the thought of having to give your baby up could do to a mother. And I had my own weird sleep issues which made the bizarre seem possible sometimes.

  ‘I don’t think you’re crazy, Deb, but I think you were going through a lot at the time. Maybe it was all just too much.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she agreed quickly. ‘And the mind plays tricks with your memory as the years pass.’ Her laugh was short and hollow and I realised that it had been more than tough.

  None of her friends from Three Kings had known about my arrival. My adoption had been arranged by her mother just prior to my birth. Over two days she had vacillated before I was taken away by a nurse, her heart and post-baby body pining for long months as she robotically returned to life. In the months after she had wept over the photos she kept secreted close to her. Eventually my black hair, green eyes and plump mewling warmth remained forever imprinted on her mind, frozen in time and space.

  My desire to make contact with Nick concerned her.

  ‘I wish I could be enthusiastic about you contacting him,’ she said, ‘but I can’t. I’m afraid. I know it’s irrational … because you’re right, I last saw him so long ago.’ Finally she sighed, defeated.

  ‘But in some ways, it feels like yesterday.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘His brother, Daniel, committed suicide. The last time we spoke was not long after he died. I think Nick had some sort of nervous breakdown. He was seriously unwell. It wasn’t pleasant to witness, I promise you.’

  I considered the tragedy of suicide, the impact on those left behind. ‘That sounds awful, Deb, but I don’t think it’s a reason not to contact him no
w.’

  ‘I know,’ she acknowledged, ‘and he came right. I mean Mum spoke to him later and said he seemed fine, so he must have recovered. It’s just my memory. It was a bad time.’

  ‘I’m sorry to bring that all back.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. You deserve your answers. I just don’t want you to get hurt.’

  ‘I’m tough, Deb,’ I lied, knowing my vulnerability and wishing I had more defences available to me.

  ‘When I think back it’s more than just that last interaction with Nick that makes me wary. It was his whole family. They were seriously strange. The feel inside that house …’ I could almost sense her shudder. ‘I can’t tell you what to do, Kate, just prepare yourself.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I mean, I can probably answer a lot of your questions about them,’ she cut in hopefully. ‘I wasn’t in his family’s best books, but I don’t think many were.’ All these years later and I could still hear the fearful edge in her voice as she referred to them. She was a reluctant passenger on this voyage back in time. Back to a dark haunted place, to wreckage, pain and turmoil, love and loss, so entwined, the scars buried deep down. It had hurt her.

  ‘Just prepare yourself,’ she repeated, her tone strained. ‘It’s going to be a massive shock to him. I don’t have a clue how he’ll react. Be ready for anything. Then it won’t be as hard if it doesn’t go well.’

  ‘I will,’ I answered and then added, ‘Deb … he’s not your responsibility. I’ll cope, please don’t worry about me.’

  ‘I know you will Kate, it’s just that I brought you into this world, and I looked into your eyes when I said goodbye all those years ago. I knew that I had failed you then. I don’t want to fail you now.’

  She was afraid. For herself and for me. I was the child she’d let go of too early. I was the child she could not forbid, even if that was the right thing to do.

  ‘You won’t say too much about me to him, will you? Don’t give him my phone number. I just don’t know how I feel about it. There are difficulties for me – family stuff, you know.’ I wondered about this man, about the contributor of fifty per cent of my DNA, about the second stranger I was potentially inviting into my life, about whether or not it was all better off left alone.

  ‘Of course, Deb.’

  ‘Three Kings wasn’t a good place for us.’ Her words came out as a sudden addendum. ‘We shouldn’t have gone back. My folks split up the day we arrived.’ She laughed, but there was a bitterness to the sound. ‘Mum was miserable for ages, we scraped by. It was so gloomy at home.’

  Taking a breath she slowed herself. ‘The magical moments I spent with Nick in the beginning offered me hope. Sometimes you wish things could remain frozen in time. But time passes and everything changes. Nothing stays the same. That was the way it was with us.’

  4

  DEB AND NICK

  It should have been a paradise. Instead it was a place of loss, of suffering even. When we first drove over the hill and saw the shimmering ocean, the electric blue like sapphires on fire against the fine, dazzling sand, and the three huge silver-grey rocks wearing their charcoal crowns, standing to the right of the wide bay, we still believed. In paradise, in second chances, in love.

  But within the day my parents had gone their separate ways; my father to his lover, my mother, George and I remaining in the small house we had rented, and that was only the beginning.

  Three Kings, a small, cliquey community of a few thousand on the east coast of Australia, where sunshine, surfers, sunscreen and a good pair of thongs were never in short supply and the temperature rarely dropped below twenty-five degrees, even in winter. On rare occasions when the sun was diluted by the dark billowing clouds which swept rudely across the sky and the rain fell in big heavy drops, it remained warm, steam rising from the roads and the musty smell of damp earth in the air.

  It had been around for a while. The three rock kings had been eager for company, tired of their solemn vigil and of the endless blue horizon and the consort of the gulls whose white spatter robbed them of their dignity. They had beckoned silently from their lofty frozen perches to the earliest visitors, ignoring the birds who circled noisily with shrieking caws. ‘Beware, Beware!’

  It had begun as a tiny community which sprang up around a leaning jetty for the timber industry in the 1860s. The nearby stands of magnificent red cedar, bunya, kauri pines, beech, tallow-wood and bloodwood cowered as the echoing hammer of the axe resounded. Thick sawdust covered everything and the smell of cedar hung in the air. Sap leaked like blood, sticking underfoot in clumps of gum, and staining the ground. And the possums and parrots, owls and bats and nightjars fled the violent men whose mammoth shadows made day night and who robbed them of the shelter which had been theirs for hundreds of years, the trees which had been worlds within worlds, a near eternal presence, but which were no more.

  But eventually the persistent clunk had stopped and the men and their horses and carts departed with whinnies and shouting and everything was silent again. Vast tracts of open fields lay where once there had been forest. Slowly vegetation regenerated and the maniacal shriek of the Kookaburra haunted the landscape once more.

  Gold was discovered nearby and infrastructure improved, including rail. Around 1900 a small centre had developed to support the fruit industry, mostly sugar cane and pineapples, which had replaced the timber industry of earlier.

  As the years passed the place defied outside influence, remaining small and old-fashioned even as the rest of the east coast mushroomed and prospered. Bigger towns shrivelled and died, lacking the sustenance to charge the life-blood which was their community, but Three Kings managed, money coming from a mysterious source somewhere other than the tourism so many of the coastal towns depended on. There was little expansion and few approvals for building permits but the population, a fiercely protective bunch, seemed gladdened rather than disheartened by this. New families arrived, but only to replace those who drifted away.

  Even the main roads seemed to direct traffic away from Three Kings with dull ambiguous signage which was easily ignored. Most tourists headed to the next stop, not bothering to turn their heads at the dilapidated signboard and the fly-off which seemed more like a slump in the ground than a formal road. But those who travelled along the winding pot-holed roads and over the rise into the town were well rewarded.

  Abruptly the road improved, like you had driven through a looking glass and were suddenly riding the back of a dark slippery eel as you crested the final rise and slipped down towards the ocean. A real surprise. A strangely beautiful place, with bays and beaches and bluffs and the houses nestled together in strips down the hill to the beach while out to sea the three formidable rock monoliths cast long shadows across the water. Inland across the wide expanse of the bluff lay a vast plateau surrounded by rugged ranges of volcanic peaks, which towered like the walls of a fortress over eucalypt forests and fruit farms and open fields.

  After Victoria, place of wintery charm, even in the middle of summer, when the famous south wind blew straight from the South Pole bringing iciness to even the sunniest day, it was appealing. Small and old-fashioned, yes, but the weather was warm and the beach made up for a lot.

  We barely noticed the curiosity of the residents as we drove into the village and up to our house. George and I, eyes gleaming, noses to the window, gazed right through them, transfixed by the ocean. We escaped as soon as we could that afternoon. We had to. Usually it was the kids getting under parents’ feet, but in our case it was the other way round. Mum and Dad had been arguing incessantly and we were so tired. Tired of trying not to say anything, of trying to keep calm, to breathe and let it go, of wanting to scream, ‘Let me out, I’d rather walk.’ I think it was worse than usual, but maybe it was just a long trip and we were all together for a long time.

  ‘We’re going down to the beach,’ George called out. I was surprised they heard him at all. There was a moment of silence before the arguing started up again. George r
aised his eyebrows and sighed, kicking the door shut as we left.

  The house was a cramped three-bedroomed, white-painted weatherboard with a green tiled roof. An uninteresting rectangle, but someone had loved it once. Carefully laid brick pavers peeked out from under a jumble of untrimmed colour and an old concrete bird-bath lay on its side, a lizard on the sideways rim spellbound by the sun. A neglected fig tree too big for the garden shook and rustled as we passed, the group of brightly coloured Lorikeets who fed voraciously on its fruit squawking raucously after us.

  ‘I hope they bloody shut up when the sun goes down Deb,’ George quipped, lobbing a rotten fig in their direction and only further inflaming the commotion. A sweet, slightly rancid, odour stained the air but was overcome by saltiness as we reached the gate.

  The road to the beach was abnormally straight and sloped gently downwards. A ten-pin bowling ace could potentially roll his ball all the way into the ocean, taking out the seagulls who loitered outside the fish and chip shop on the way. Pretty weatherboard houses, many with corrugated roofs and wide verandas, some fronted by picket fences, almost all better tended than ours, stood perpendicular to the road, their faces to the water, most of the way down to the elongated gravel car-park at the end.

  ‘Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,’ I yelled to George as we reached the beach. I hopped awkwardly across the sand, surprised at how hot it was.

  ‘Stop being such a girl,’ he replied unsympathetically, not even glancing back at me as he dropped his things unceremoniously and rushed out towards the water, surfboard tucked under his arm.

  ‘I won’t be too long,’ he shouted into the wind, dwindling as he bounced across the beach, striking straight out as he launched himself into the water. Soon he was just another dot, indistinguishable from the other surfers.

  George was almost eighteen, just over a year older than I was. He’d become increasingly long and lanky over the past year, meaning that I now had to yell even louder to get his attention because I was short, only a whisper over the height of a four-drawer filing cabinet without any goodies on top. There was almost no-one over the age of ten that I could look down on and even my mother, who I had thought I’d easily top, was still at least an inch taller than me.