Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  ‘Mum, don’t do that,’ I said, looking around for the ward sister. ‘They’ll throw us out.’

  Mum ignored me. ‘When did they say you’d be out?’ she asked Nanna.

  Nanna had her eyes closed but I could see the blue tinge was fading from her limbs. ‘I think they’ll let me out tomorrow,’ Nanna said, reaching her free hand across the bed for me to hold.

  Careful not to alarm her, I held out my non-bandaged hand. Nanna’s hand was cold and bony but her skin was very soft. I hoped she’d understand I was trying to pass the warmth of my hand into hers.

  ‘Tell me what happened yesterday, Mutsi,’ Mum said.

  Nanna spoke, but her words were in Finnish, not in English, and they weren’t meant for me. Even with my limited vocabulary, though, I could pick out the first sentence. Nanna had said, very clearly: ‘This is not for Little Bear.’

  60

  By the time we left the hospital, Nanna’s cheeks were so rosy that the ward sister, when she came to tell us that visiting hours were over, almost didn’t recognise her. Mum had discreetly snuffed the candles and they were placed in the bedside drawer; I guess the idea was for the nightie to absorb the aroma now.

  Even the jaundiced woman looked slightly revived by the time we left. She had fallen asleep during Mum and Nanna’s conversation, and to me it looked like the softest sleep she’d had in some time.

  They’d talked for a good hour and, happy as I was to see Nanna rejuvenated, I’d felt left out and bored and had had to amuse myself watching the sun set and the sky darken through the window.

  I waited until my mother and I were in the car before I brought this up.

  ‘I am almost seventeen, you know,’ I said as we pulled out of the parking bay. ‘You don’t need to exclude me from what you’re talking about – I can stand to hear the truth.’

  Mum fought back a frown. ‘Your nanna has had a very serious accident and if she wants to speak in her own language, please respect that.’

  ‘But you’ve done it since I was a kid!’ I complained, my volume rising. ‘The adults are talking now, let’s talk Finnish. Is that why I didn’t learn the language? So you’d always be able to talk over my head?’

  ‘Not this again,’ said Mum, because I’d brought the language issue up before. ‘You want to find a Finnish school on the south coast of New South Wales, Sophie, you go for it. If you want to know what Nanna told me, you can just give me a chance!’

  I wasn’t expecting this. Mum took a sharp inhalation of breath.

  ‘Your Mummi doesn’t want to worry you,’ Mum said. ‘But you should know, she’s had a real scare from the accident and, even if she comes home tomorrow, she can’t walk around for at least a few weeks. She’s going to need proper care. We’re going back to her house tonight – your father’s already there, he’s got us dinner. You’ll go back home with him tomorrow.’

  What?

  ‘It’s a tough time for this family, Sophie. You want the adult truth in perfect English? I’m going to have to look after your grandmother for a while. She’s been hurt and she’s not safe alone in her house.’

  ‘Does this mean we’re moving back up here again?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s more complicated than that,’ said Mum, making the turn onto the main road that led to Nanna’s house. ‘The work your father’s doing at the golf club – he’s found a problem in the audit. This goes no further, understand? It could be very dangerous for your father if it did.’

  ‘What does “problem with the audit” mean?’

  ‘He thinks someone’s laundering money. They have poker machines there, and he thinks that criminal money is going into the machines and getting paid back out in jackpots that aren’t real. He’s not sure. But he’s been to the police and they’ve told him to keep working there while they prepare an investigation. If we’ve been a bit distracted and sick this week, well, now you know why. I’ve got your dad vulnerable at work, Mum’s in hospital, you in a new school – the threat could be coming from three directions at once and I can’t do anything about it.’

  I didn’t know what to say. My preoccupation earlier in the day about being the subject of school gossip seemed juvenile and self-indulgent. The car turned off the main road into Nanna’s street.

  ‘Will Dad be okay?’ I asked.

  ‘This is why you have to keep it silent,’ Mum said. ‘The police are confident they’ll be able to catch whoever’s involved and no one need ever know Dad had anything to do with it. To keep it that way, we have to stay quiet.’

  ‘I won’t say anything,’ I told her.

  ‘I know you won’t,’ said Mum as she parked the car outside the gated courtyard of the villas where Nanna lived. She pulled on the hand-brake, but she didn’t get out of the car. ‘Sophie, I’m telling you this before we go into Nanna’s because I’m asking you to stay in Yarrindi, stay out of trouble and look after your dad. He’s facing terrible pressure with this business and without me there he may not cope.’ Mum turned to me in the dark. I’d never seen her look so vulnerable.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, matching her seriousness.

  ‘I hope you don’t think I’m abandoning either of you,’ she said, staring at the empty road. ‘This thing with Mum, it’s tearing me in half. We can’t lose her. Not now. Not yet.’

  ‘We’ll share the load,’ I said. ‘You patrol the cities, I’ll take care of the coastal towns.’

  Mum gave a shallow laugh.

  ‘Come on, let’s see if your dad’s got the food on.’

  Mum took a set of keys out of her handbag and hurried towards the security fence to the villa courtyard, juggling the keys in her hand to find the right one.

  I followed slowly, overwhelmed, and without the energy to match her. The street was sleepy and suburban. Although it wasn’t yet nine o’clock, most of the houses had their lights off. There were lots of cars parked on the street, but there was no traffic at all. The only movement to be seen was my mother sorting through her keys, and the blue light of a plasma television flickering through the window of a house further down the street.

  As I walked, though, I noticed something else was moving. A black shape hovered in the gutter outside Nanna’s villa, a few metres from my mother. From the jerky way it moved, I could tell it was an animal, and from its size I gathered it was a large cat.

  Only when I was about a metre away and it made a sudden fluttering sound did I realise what the animal was.

  A crow. As large as a cat.

  61

  When I was little, Nanna lived in the same house my grandfather had built when they’d first emigrated and where my mother had grown up. It was a rambling single-storey fibro house, full of rooms that were stuffed with old furniture and boxes of unidentifiable objects and unreadable Finnish books. It had a garden that grew so many things every walk in it was an adventure. One day you’d find a bunch of chillies growing, but the next time you looked for them, they’d be gone, replaced with fat eggplants, or a pumpkin, or a red rhododendron.

  She’d moved to the villa, around the corner from the old house, when I was thirteen. My grandfather died when I was eight, and in the intervening years the garden grew too chaotic, the house too full of sad memories, for Nanna to stay there. The villa was a bright, modern two-storey place, not far from the water. The unreadable Finnish books were kept here in ordered wall units. The boxes of objects were stored in the garage. Nanna still had a garden, of course, but this one was restricted to a small, well-ordered vegetable patch and potted herbs and flowers on an outdoor patio. As an indulgent nod to her Finnishness, Nanna had had part of her garage converted to a sauna.

  When Mum and I walked into the house, Dad joked about turning it on. ‘You’ll get a bit of use out of that, at least, Tiki,’ he said while he laid out plates of reheated pizza on Nanna’s dining table.

  Sitting at Nanna’s chairs at Nanna’s table in Nanna’s house was a very weird sensation without Nanna. And I kept thinking about the crow outside. For a mom
ent I imagined I heard the flutter of a wing close by.

  My stomach clenched. I dropped the tough pizza crust on my plate.

  ‘You all right, Soph?’ asked Dad, turning to me.

  ‘Outside,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ asked my mother.

  ‘There was an enormous crow. In the gutter.’

  ‘You sure it was a crow?’ asked Dad.

  ‘I thought it was a cat. It looked too big to be a bird.’

  My mother looked as though she was trying to suppress alarm.

  ‘Do you want me to have a look outside for you?’ asked Dad.

  ‘I thought I heard it,’ I said, afraid.

  ‘When?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Then,’ I said.

  ‘Back of the house or front of the house?’ asked Dad, getting up.

  I thought, Maybe I didn’t hear anything, but my mouth said, ‘Out the front.’

  Dad said, ‘Let’s check it out then,’ in a cheerful way, but I saw him and Mum exchanging worried looks.

  He walked to the front door and closed it behind him.

  ‘Feeling better?’ Mum asked, a little too quickly. ‘Dad’s checking it out.’

  ‘Do you think it’s the bird that got Nanna?’ I asked.

  ‘The bird didn’t get Nanna,’ said Mum with a fake smile. ‘And it was a myna bird or something, not a crow. It was just a little bird that came in the house by mistake and got frightened.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a crow bigger than a cat?’

  ‘Sophie, it’s your imagination playing tricks on you. Eat your pizza. Dad’s got it sorted.’ For emphasis, she lifted a slice from the pizza tray and bit into it.

  I didn’t move. Mum chewed the crunchy crust of the pizza. A clock ticked on the wall. The silence of the rest of the house was frightening. There was no sound from outside.

  Then there was a noise at the lock of the front door. My heart thumped in fright and my mother was instantly out of her seat, bumping the dining room table. Her unused knife and fork rattled against the side of her plate.

  I heard her exhale as Dad let himself in. She sat back down but did not relax as he closed the front door.

  ‘Was it the Hound of the Baskervilles?’ Mum asked, taking a glass of water from the table and gulping it down.

  ‘Nothing so exciting,’ Dad said. ‘Though it is a big bird.’

  ‘You saw it?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s just an old crow ambling around in the gutter. I think there’s something wrong with his wing. If he’s still there tomorrow, we’ll call the wildlife people. I’d say he’s probably a bit past it and he’s flown into something. Nothing to worry about.’ He sat down. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he repeated.

  My heart was still thumping.

  ‘You had enough to eat, Soph?’ asked Mum, stacking my plate on hers before I had a chance to answer. ‘You must be worn out. And we should put a clean bandage on your hand. Dad can deal with the plates – you come upstairs with me and we’ll see if Nanna’s got some dressings.’

  Dad was already taking plates to the kitchen by the time I was standing. Mum, at the base of the stairs, flicked on the stairwell light. As I followed her, I saw several sheets of newspaper taped over the wall to my right.

  ‘That’s where she fell,’ Mum said. ‘She’s a tough Finnish cookie, your nan. We’ll have to do something about that hole tomorrow – the newspapers are not a good look.’ She cantered a few steps ahead of me on the stairs. Again, I followed.

  In the bathroom, Mum found the inevitable bottle of lavender oil in the vanity cupboard. Finding a spare bandage in a medicine kit and some cotton wool balls in a drawer, she carefully removed my bandages and dabbed away the remaining crust of yellow spray with that strange expertise of hers. Wipe after wipe, I inhaled more deeply of the lavender, until I began to feel sleepy. My eyelids grew lazy.

  ‘I think you’re off to dreamland,’ she said, walking me into Nan’s study, where Dad had made up a fold-out bed. From the cupboard in the room, Mum took out a nightgown and said, ‘This mightn’t be glamorous but it’ll do.’ With heavy limbs, I shed my uniform and put on the nightgown, then crawled between the camp bed’s covers. Mum stood in the doorway of the room while I snuggled into the pillow.

  ‘Goodnight, princess,’ she said.

  Downstairs, I could hear doors being opened and closed in the kitchen. I heard footsteps march through the house and I heard the front door open and slam shut.

  ‘What’s Dad doing now?’ I asked, but I was sound asleep before I could hear Mum’s answer.

  62

  A lazy morning was not in progress when I woke up. Peeling myself out of the unexpectedly comfortable fold-out bed, I padded downstairs to find Mum and Dad already showered and changed, and Mum clearing the remains of their breakfast from the table.

  ‘Good sleep?’ She pointed to some newly ironed articles of clothing folded over the back of a chair. ‘Those are clean and they’re good enough for the car.’

  I was confused. ‘Why aren’t we staying the weekend?’

  Mum and Dad exchanged a look. ‘There’s an event at the club tonight I might have to go to,’ Dad explained. ‘And your mum doesn’t need us in the way while she’s trying to make the house comfortable for Nanna.’

  ‘I’ve packed you a breakfast for the car,’ Mum said, handing me the ironed clothes. I climbed back up the stairs.

  Fifteen minutes later, after a brisk shower, I was standing next to the passenger door of Dad’s black Ford, my schoolbag over my shoulder and a sandwich sack containing snacks and bottled water in my hand. Mum didn’t look in the mood for sentimental goodbyes as Dad cleared a carton of wine bottles from the front seat and put it in the back of the car. ‘Just look after him, okay?’ was all she said before giving me a hug.

  Dad came back to the front of the car and pulled out something I did not expect. It was a plastic crown, like something you’d find in a cheap fancy dress shop: shiny gold, with cubes of plastic inset to look like jewels.

  ‘What have you been up to with that, Dad?’ I asked with one eyebrow raised.

  ‘It was for a promotion at the club,’ said Dad. ‘You can have it if you like.’ He put it on my head.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked, turning to Mum.

  ‘Remember what I told you.’ She hugged me again, ignoring my question. ‘Get in the car,’ she said. I did.

  I kept the crown on. To see what it looked like, I pulled down the shade above my seat to check myself in the makeup mirror.

  Trying the crown straight, then on a tilt, I giggled as I looked at myself. Then I stared as I saw in the mirror what was going on behind me.

  For the first time in my entire life I saw my parents engaged in a passionate kiss.

  63

  I kept the crown on my head the whole drive back to Yarrindi. I was trying not to think about what I’d seen Mum and Dad do in the street outside Nanna’s villa. Even more than that, I was trying not to think of Nanna lying blue in a hospital bed, Dad being shot by money-launderers, or the huge, black bird in the gutter last night.

  So instead I thought about Michelle, Brody Meine and Belinda’s party that night. By the time we were half an hour from Yarrindi, I’d gone from a grey to a very black mood.

  ‘You look stormy,’ said Dad as we took the curves past the dairy cows. ‘Got any plans for tonight?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Thought you might want to go to a friend’s or something.’

  ‘If we’re going up to Sydney next weekend, can I stay with Lauren?’ I asked him.

  ‘That somewhat defeats the point of going up to see your mother and Nanna,’ he said.

  ‘I can do both,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said, and kept driving.

  In the silence my dark thoughts flickered from Nanna to the situation with the girls. Last night had been a Friday; no doubt there were places that everyone from school went to, places where people would pass gossip on like a greeting. Ther
e was a cinema in town; Friday night it would have been packed with kids I knew. Maybe Kylie and Steve saw Belinda and Garth at the ticket counter and casually said over some popcorn, ‘Oh, Michelle told Fran that Sophie Morgan’s in love with Brody Meine.’ Maybe Belinda crowded into Tea’sers after the movie and, when she saw Dan and Fran pashing in the corner, screamed out, ‘So! I hear the desperate slag’s in love with Brody Meine!’ And maybe Tracy Taylor’s best friend heard the news, and skipped down the corner to the ice-creamery and said to the green-eyed boy with the scoop (who everyone wanted, but everyone was afraid of), ‘I heard, right, I heard, right, right, that that ugly girl is in love with you.’

  And what would he say?

  Would he serve her a double scoop of chocolate cherry with a wink and say, ‘Baby, aren’t they all?’ Would he slice through the cookies and cream, carving up chunks for a sundae, and dream of me? Or would he stand there, his face going red, and say, ‘Oh no! She’s such a dog!’

  It was too awful to think about – and yet I gradually even forgot I was wearing a plastic crown, because I couldn’t make myself think about anything else.

  When we arrived home, it was early afternoon. Dad told me he was going to do some work. Still in the clothes I had borrowed from Nan’s, I went into my room and half-heartedly pulled an old magazine from my bookshelf. My eyes skimmed the pages, but nothing was going in.

  I noticed an unread message from this morning on my mobile. I thought it might be Lauren, checking in. It wasn’t.

  Hey, Lady! Hope your Nan’s okay. R U back? Kylie and I are hitting the beach. Please come! Can lend swimmers/wetsuit! XXX Mish.

  I thought for a second before I wrote: Nan OK. We’re staying in Sydney. I stared at the lie on the screen and added: Have fun.

  Stupidly, I hit ‘Send’, realising only then that this unthinking act of my thumb would effectively confine me to the house for the rest of the day. Yarrindi would be crawling with people from school; the likelihood of my presence being reported to Michelle and Kylie was so high as to be inevitable. I was in enough social trouble not to want to run the risk of being called a liar – or worse, face the accusation that I’d lied rather than reject an invitation.