by John Marsden
I walked backwards quite a way, maybe fifty metres, staring at the fence line, thinking: This is where it happened. Well, I didn’t think it, I knew it. Then it went from being a psychic force to being a memory. Like an old photo, on a wall too long, until the sun shining through the window for years has faded large parts. Now all I could see were shadows and pale patches and a few indistinct images. I strained hard in my mind to see more clearly. They were faces, all faces. Old faces. Two in particular. In my memory they looked about eighty, but I guess to a little kid any adult looks really old. They were staring. They seemed horrible. Staring and shouting and being very very angry. Then they broke up again, falling apart, crumbling like biscuits in the rain.
The day was bright and sunny but there was no warmth in the air. Autumn was too far gone. But where I stood the ground appeared shadowed, like a darkness was over it. A dark skin seemed to lie across the grass. I backed away further.
Warriewood had always been beautiful to me. As a little kid I guess I loved it in that accepting way kids have. I don’t imagine I stopped to wonder if my life was different from other kids’.
Before I’d worked out how lucky I was, it was all over. I went to Canberra and spent twelve years dreaming about Warriewood, trying to re-create it in my mind. I was like the guy in some movie I saw, cutting bits out of magazines: eyes, eyebrows, a nose, a chin, desperately trying to put together the face of a woman he’d met once and lost. At least with Warriewood I’d had plenty of photos. Ralph and Sylvia, and Mr Carruthers, had sent me heaps in the first few years, though more recently they’d stopped bothering.
But now it seemed as though Warriewood had turned on me, had shown me another side, dark and threatening. It shook me worse than anything that had happened since I got back. I walked towards the homestead, my arms wrapped around my body, hugging myself, like I did quite often, had always done. I felt that hugs were few and far between in my life. The homestead seemed cold and empty, although it really wasn’t that cold a day. But I didn’t seem able to find a warm place.
In the end I crawled into bed, after piling every heavy piece of clothing I owned on top of me, and curled up in a little ball under the weight. I fell asleep with my thumb in my mouth.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I tried everything I could think of before I went back to Bannockburn, my Great-aunt Rita’s place. I called in at the local paper, the Christie Courier, and searched their archives. There was a long article about my mother’s death—except it was really about her life. Heaps of details about her riding and shooting trophies, about the Border terriers she’d bred, about her work for Meals on Wheels and the Exley Art Show committee and the Christie Pre-school.
She sounded like a bit of a saint. I knew one thing for sure: I’d never live up to her standards.
The Courier said she’d died in a shooting accident, but it didn’t give any details.
At Jessica’s suggestion I tried to track down the cop who’d investigated my mother’s death. There must have been a cop. But I got nowhere with that. The Christie police weren’t interested. The only thing they did was check the personnel records. They said a Sergeant Bruxton was in charge back then, but no-one at the station knew him or had even heard of him.
At Matthew’s suggestion I tried the courthouse in Exley, to see if there were records of a coroner’s inquest. They were quite helpful. A bloke with an accent so Scottish that I had trouble understanding it spent nearly half an hour looking through old files. Eventually he found one paragraph about the inquiry: the date, the name of the coroner, my mother’s name, and the verdict: death by misadventure.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked him.
‘An accident without concomitant crime or negligence,’ he said, without batting an eyelid.
‘A what?’
I got it on the third go, after Jess persuaded him to say it in Australian, and he drawled it out, taking about five minutes to say ‘concomitant’, which was the word I stuck on.
As I gradually met various neighbours, I asked the ones I liked for any details they knew, but I didn’t get any further with them. I know Mr Kennedy asked a few people too, but they all said the same thing: ask Mrs Harrison, ask Mrs Stone.
Then one day Matthew said to me: ‘Why don’t you go see Dr Couples?’
‘Dr who?’
‘No, that’s the name of an old TV show.’
‘Oh very funny. Who’s Dr Couples?’
‘He was the only doctor in Christie. He’s retired now, but he’s still very fit, does the odd locum when he’s needed. He lives in that big brick place on the edge of town, the last house on the right.’
I thought this was quite a brilliant suggestion. I wanted to call him straight away, but there was a slight problem when I found he had an unlisted number. Mr McGill tracked it down for me, and three days later I was ringing the doctor’s doorbell, listening to chimes that sounded like a bad orchestra warming up to rehearse elevator music.
After a while I heard soft feet. The door opened to reveal a tall stooped slim man with thinning white hair.
‘No need to ask who you are,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
He had a nice calm voice. I followed him into a big room with one of those gas log fires that seem so real you have to look three times to be sure they are fake. The walls were so covered with family photos you couldn’t see much of the brickwork behind them.
Dr Couples sat at a desk and looked at me in that typical doctor way they all seem to have. Even though he was retired, it was like he had slipped straight into his doctor mode. He even put on that interested, concerned, so-how-can-I-help-you-today face.
‘So how can I help you, Winter?’ he asked. I nearly cracked up.
He added: ‘I must say it’s nice that you’re back here. The last time I saw you was such a terrible occasion, and I felt very much for you.’
‘That’s what I wanted to ask you about,’ I began. ‘About my mother dying like that. I didn’t know till I came back to Warriewood that she’d died in a shooting accident. And it’s been really bugging me. It doesn’t seem right. I thought maybe you’d know more about it than anyone.’
‘What about it doesn’t seem right?’ he asked.
‘Well, the whole thing. It’s just too dumb to be true. How can someone with her experience, her knowledge, have an accident like that?’
‘People do it all the time,’ he said, with a tired little smile.
‘I guess. It just doesn’t match up with the picture I have of her. I imagine the people who get shot accidentally are either pissed—sorry, drunk—or stupid, or not very experienced with guns.’
‘Not always,’ Dr Couples said. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Suddenly he did look old.
‘Was she . . . ’ I felt the familiar trembling sensation again, as though I could feel myself going white through my whole body, not just the outside but the inside as well. ‘Was she terribly upset about my father’s death?’
‘Oh yes. They had a remarkable relationship. The only way I can describe it is to say it was a true love affair. You don’t see many in real life, you know. Only in movies or on TV. But they were genuinely devoted to each other. She actually got more upset about Phillip’s loss as time went on.’
‘How depressed was she?’
‘That depends on how you use the word “depressed”. Of course, laymen sometimes use it very differently from the way the medical profession uses it. Phyllis wasn’t clinically depressed, in my judgement, but she was feeling deep grief, and great sadness. Entirely natural, but there’s no short-term solution to that kind of thing.’
‘Do you think she was so depressed she . . . she might have given up?’
‘Oh no. No. That wasn’t Phyllis’s way. Not at all. Surely not.’
I didn’t say any more. I’d worked out just a couple of days earlier, in one of those stupid chains of thought you have while pulling out blackberries, that people often use silence to get other people to talk. I mean, if
you ask a question, someone gives an answer; but if you don’t say any more, they eventually always add something. I suppose I noticed it while listening to the radio. I often had it on when I was doing blackberries, and I think I’d been listening to a programme on Triple J where the interviewer had done exactly that.
So now I thought I’d see if it worked for me.
Sure enough, to my delight, after a minute Dr Couples kept talking. ‘It was a terrible tragedy, coming so soon after your father’s death. Just terrible. Everyone was devastated. I admit though, I did wonder if she had been less attentive because of your father’s death. I can imagine that maybe she wasn’t concentrating the way she normally would.’
‘But could it have been something more than that?’ I asked, leaning forward, watching him anxiously. ‘Do you think she was depressed enough . . . to do that?’
I expected him to look shocked, but maybe you can’t shock doctors.
‘I got there before the ambulance, you know. The Christie ambulance was miles away, over near Exley I think. We’d been agitating for years to get a second ambulance but the Minister showed no interest at all. We’ve got three now of course. Well, when I arrived—it would have been around four o’clock in the afternoon—she was lying beside the fence. Mrs Harrison was there. She’d tried some first aid, but to no effect. When she realised Phyllis was dead, she and the housekeeper lifted her onto the back of the ute and put a handkerchief over her face.’
‘I thought you weren’t meant to do that,’ I said. ‘I thought you were supposed to leave everything alone, so the police could investigate.’
‘Well, that’s true, of course, but in the heat of the moment people frequently do things they’re not meant to.’
‘I guess.’
‘But as for what you’re suggesting, well, there was no evidence one way or the other. I didn’t think it necessary to conduct a thorough examination. It all seemed clear enough. I checked for vital signs, but she had been killed instantly. I suppose, looking back, and being as honest as you can be only after you’ve retired, I would say the last thing I wanted to do was to play the TV super-medic and comb through the grass for clues. I’ve given my life to the people of this district. They’re very important to me. I would never cause them unnecessary grief.’
I wondered if he was telling me in a roundabout way that he’d thought at the time she might have committed suicide, but he had deliberately closed his mind to the possibility.
‘Was I actually there?’ I asked.
‘No, apparently you were at the homestead with Mrs Stone. I didn’t see you at all. I asked if I should, if you were upset or distressed, but Mrs Harrison assured me you were all right, that you didn’t know yet, and she’d explain it to you gently. I think she’d called Mrs Stone as soon as it happened, but when they realised nothing could be done, Mrs Stone went back to the house to look after you.’
I tried my silence tactic again, but this time it didn’t work. Maybe he had told me everything he knew. After a minute of us sitting looking at each other I realised there wasn’t much more I could ask.
I got up.
‘Thanks a lot for seeing me,’ I said. ‘And for telling me all that.’
‘It’s a pleasure to see you back at Warriewood,’ he said. ‘And grown into such a fine young woman. Let me know if I can help you in any way.’
He said it without much meaning though, like he was tired of helping people. He’d had enough.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I was at a barbecue with Matthew Kennedy, trying to work out something I could dislike about him. I mean, I’m not a complete jerk, I don’t go around trying to find horrible things about people, but I was a bit worried by how perfect he seemed.
The barbecue was at Matthew’s mum’s. She lived in a little house surrounded by a high hedge, about ten k’s from Warriewood. I didn’t know anyone there—I’d gone with Matthew, but just, you know, definitely not a date—and the first thing I realised was that everyone knew me.
Most of them were a lot older than Matthew and me. They were friends of Mrs Kennedy, but there were two boys about our age, and a girl called Astrid, who lived next door. It was a hot day, totally wrong for autumn, and the barbecue was around the pool, although no-one was tempted to go in. We hung around one end of the pool while the adults stayed up the other end. Mostly. It was kind of obvious the adults were checking me out. They all found reasons to drop in and have a chat, and for every one question aimed at the others I got ten.
I didn’t say much though. I don’t know whether they thought I was rude, but I don’t like feeling I’m on display, in a zoo, even an open-range one.
One of the boys, a guy named Tim Glass, seemed like fun, so I talked to him a fair bit. We were at one of those little tables with an umbrella over it. Matt sat on the edge of the pool stirring the water with a walking stick and chatting up Astrid. Tim was heavily into Lord of the Rings, which I’d read a couple of years back, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I’d never read, and Stephen King, who I’m quite into. He had just finished The Green Mile, a book I’d bought in Canberra but still hadn’t read. So we talked about books for a while, then Canberra.
‘We went to Canberra for our grade-six excursion,’ he said.
‘Yeah? You and every other kid in Australia. Let me guess, Parliament House, the War Memorial, the art gallery and that science place?’
‘That’s about right. We met the Prime Minister, I remember that. If you can call it meeting. He stopped for four seconds, got his photo taken, and hurried off to do something more important.’
‘He’d probably figured that by the time you were old enough to vote, he would have retired.’
It was a relief that we weren’t talking about Warriewood or my parents.
‘The main thing I remember about that trip was the teachers threatening to send us home, when we got caught on the roof of the girls’ showers.’
‘You little perv. They should have sent you home.’
‘Bit hard, isn’t it? Like, how do they send you home from Canberra?’
‘Mmm, it is a long walk.’
He went into a long spiel about a school trip to Nouméa they’d done last year, and how he’d nearly been sent home from that too, because they suspected him of smoking dope, but they couldn’t prove it.
I suddenly started getting a bit sick of him. He reminded me of a comic strip I’d seen once where a guy is talking to a girl and he’s saying ‘I, I, I, I, I . . . ’ for about ten minutes, then she says ‘I’ once and he promptly falls asleep on the table.
I poured him another drink and glanced across at Matthew. He was flicking water with the stick and listening to Astrid. I’d never seen him listen to someone for so long before. It was the opposite to the guy in the comic strip. Beside me Tim was saying, ‘So do you want to?’
I realised I’d completely missed something. From the look on his face it seemed like it was important. He was leaning closer. I started to get a pretty good idea of what he’d said.
‘Uh, sorry?’ I asked, embarrassed that I hadn’t even heard.
‘Forget it,’ he said, leaning back again. ‘I can see who you belong to.’
‘Belong to?’ I said, swinging around so I was side-on to him. ‘Belong to?’
He stood up and slouched away, to the other end of the pool. I was furious. I decided I’d been completely wrong about him being a nice guy. I slumped in my chair, folded my arms, crossed my feet at the ankles and thought, Yes, I really do have a special way with guys.
Matthew left Astrid and came towards me, like he was on his way into the house. He stopped and looked down at me. Squinting into the sun, I was impressed by how tall he was.
‘Do you want anything?’ he asked. ‘I’m just getting some block-out for Astrid.’
‘Yeah, I wouldn’t mind a squirt of it too,’ I said, thinking that I wouldn’t mind Matthew rubbing some into me. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’
Inside the house everythi
ng was neat and pretty. A bit too pretty I thought, but I remembered my manners and didn’t say so. I watched from the bathroom door as Matthew rummaged through the cupboard.
‘So you like Tim, huh?’ he asked, pulling out a couple of tubes, but not looking at me.
I was about to say ‘No thanks’, but then thought better of it and said, ‘Yeah, he’s pretty cute.’
The back of Matthew’s neck did seem to go a little red. Or was I imagining that?
When he didn’t say anything, I added: ‘Astrid seems nice.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, standing up. ‘Yeah, I’ve known Astrid since we jumped off the garage roof together, about twelve years ago. Kind of brings you closer to someone, doing that.’
‘Why did you jump off the garage roof?’
‘We’d been watching Mary Poppins, so we armed ourselves with umbrellas and took off, holding hands.’
He was standing very close to me now, waiting to get out of the bathroom, except I was in his way.
‘Did you hurt yourselves? Or is that a dumb question?’
He held his left arm up to my face. A long white scar ran along the inside of it, nearly all the way from his wrist to his shoulder.
‘Wow. That’s some scar.’
‘You want to kiss it better?’ He moved his arm a little closer, and he leaned towards me, like it was really his mouth that wanted kissing better.
For a moment I hesitated. I was tempted. I sure was. Then I shook my head slowly.
‘I’ve got a few things to sort out.’
I fled outside, at a dignified fast walk.
That’s why I thought I’d better find some stuff to not like about Matthew. If I didn’t I might do something really dumb, like fall in love with him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
And so the time came when I was forced to face the fact that my last hope was Great-aunt Rita at Bannockburn. Great-aunt Rita and Mrs Stone, the housekeeper. I had put the moment off as long as I could. I was so nervous of meeting her that I even wondered if there was something from the past preying on my mind. Some unhappy memory of her, some cruelty from my childhood, that lay beneath the surface, like a giant sleeping squid.