Della sighed. ‘Well is it? If Jackson were another Jamie, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. There’s no way CC would be running away with him if he were poor, no matter how good the sex was.’
Christina felt the prickle of angry tears. That Della, her best friend, could reduce her relationship to a financial transaction hurt. Della knew Christina loved Jackson with every fibre of her being, but Della refused to see past the fact that Jackson was married. This blinded her to all the good he had brought into Christina and Bianca’s lives. Until now, though, Christina had never heard Della say the words out loud.
Over the sound of champagne being poured, Mary-Lou said, ‘Doesn’t she deserve her shot at happiness, Della Mac?’
‘I don’t know.’ Della tapped an impatient rhythm on her glass. ‘There is something about that man I just cannot put my finger on. Surely you of all people must see that?’
‘There are plenty of men who leave their wife and kids in the lurch. And plenty of women who cling to a relationship they know is already dead and buried. I’ve learned not to judge unless the evidence is in front of me.’
Christina started as someone turned the door handle and gave a tentative knock. She ran the tap for a moment so they knew the bathroom was occupied. Outside was silence and she thought Della and Mary-Lou must have gone back to the party when Della said, ‘I guess I’m being over-protective. I’ll miss her terribly. And Bee. Every time I think about how far away they’ll be, I get this giant lump in my throat.’
‘Listen, Della, put yourself in Christina’s shoes. She’s already waited seven long years for the man she loves. She probably feels it’s a gamble she has to take. Her options aren’t limitless. The way I see it, she’s got nothing to lose by giving it a go.’
chapter ten
Three Weeks Till Christmas
Christina dumps the mail on the kitchen table and calls for Rosa. The opening bars of ‘It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas’ play on the radio. She snaps it off and calls again. Padding through the house, she hopes to find Rosa resting, but her mother is neither in her bedroom nor the lounge room. Boots back on, she heads through the rose garden to the chook yard. The birds gather, eyeing her off expectantly, even though she’s not carrying a bucket. Shooing them away, she returns to the house, scanning the paddocks and sheds for signs of her mother as she goes, swallowing against the rising alarm. ‘Rosa!’ she calls, cupping hands to make the sound carry. ‘Mama!’ No answer.
The sun is high in its arc, the heat unbearable. Christina climbs the hill above the house towards the stables. To her left is the riding arena Massimo levelled more than thirty years ago. Neglected, the sand is a scarred patch broken by tufts of grass. In her mind’s eye, her father sits on a battered blue milk crate in the centre of the ring, offering quiet words of advice and encouragement as she schooled her charming but capricious Pizzazz.
Christina kicks at the collapsed wall of rubber tyres marking the edge of the arena, sees a cracked ice-cream lid hanging by a thread of baling twine, the faint outline of the letter H still visible. A movement out of the corner of her eye makes her turn. Probably a snake. Christina picks a stalk of paspalum and sucks on the sweet juice waiting to see if it will reappear before following the fence line up to the stable.
She checks the wiring she fixed a few days ago. Now the heifers have discovered there is sweet grass to be found down by the creek, she knows they will attempt another breakout. For now, though, the fence is taut and a scan of the back paddocks reveals nothing of interest. Calling her mother’s name, she follows the wallaby track to the stable.
Ever since the peach tree lost a branch in a storm, its limbs rest on the stable’s corrugated-iron roof, unable to right itself. As a teenager, she’d hide from the world up here, Pizzazz’s head in her lap as they shared a late summer peach – her face scrunched in a mixture of laughter and disgust as he dribbled sweet sticky juice on her. Countless times she’d hid here sobbing into his mane, confiding the latest injustice inflicted upon her by the school clique. Melanie Woods’ words still rang in her ears: ‘You think you’re so pretty. Pretty dumb that’s what you are.’ Pizzazz understood what if felt like to be bullied, marginalised; she could tell by the way he pricked his ears in mute sympathy.
They buried Pizzazz in the bottom paddock in the long shadows of the cypresses. Christina never goes there. She hates remembering how he looked the day he died – his muzzle frozen in a macabre sneer, exposing the soft pink flesh of his gums, his tongue clenched between bared teeth, one eye fixed skyward. She remembers kneeling in the sopping pasture, aeons elapsing before she dared reach out and touch the stiffened fur of his lifeless cheek.
Mr Graukroger helped Papa dig the hole with the backhoe, then together they manhandled Pizzazz’s rigid carcass into the grave. Christina watched on. When Massimo handed her the rough wooden cross he had made, she sank into the giving earth, sobbing until her ribs ached. Her mother had no words of comfort – she stepped around the hole in Christina’s life, believing she would get over her loss in time. Then, she was right.
‘Mama!’ Christina shouts.
‘Si?’ Rosa creeps along the far wall of the stables, the roughened timbers guiding her back to the shade of the peach tree.
‘What are you doing, Mama? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
‘No way are the bloody birds getting all these peaches, Tina. Look at them! All over the ground going to waste. Help me pick ’em up.’ Rosa clutches her floral apron up to her breasts. It sags with the burden of fruit.
Christina wonders how Mama can tell where the peaches are. Is it her imagination or does Rosa’s sight seem to come and go as it pleases? Perhaps she’s being unkind. ‘Where’s your basket, Mama?’
Rosa shakes her head in irritation. ‘I dunno. It’s round here somewhere.’
The basket lies buried in the long grass next to the trunk of the peach tree, hard even for Christina to see. There is too much fruit for one basket so she braves the feed shed, banging about to warn off the snakes and rats, and finds an old feed tin and a hessian sack. They load the less damaged windblown fruit onto the sack and take the best of the ripe fruit from the tree, leaving the rest for the bats and birds.
‘We can’t possibly eat all these, Mama,’ Christina says as she carts the feed tin into the shade. Considers whether she might be wise to fetch the ute.
Rosa clicks her tongue. ‘Peach chutney for Christmas, huh? It’s nice with a baked ham. Maybe some jam too. The church, they always have a stall for Christmas.’
‘The church?’ Christina shields her eyes from the sun, checking to see whether Rosa is joking.
Although born and raised Catholic, Rosa and religion parted company long before Christina was even a wish. It is incomprehensible to Christina that her mother would consider donating jars of chutney to the church’s Christmas fair. When Massimo died, Rosa refused to talk to Father O’Leary, let alone step foot inside his place of ministry.
Christina remembers sitting in the rose garden, fighting over the funeral arrangements.
‘No good-for-nothing Catholic priest, no church,’ Rosa said, cutting the air with her hand. ‘We go to the crematorium and we bring Massimo home. Here is where he belongs.’
So soon after the trial, Christina did not have the energy for this fight. She understood her mother’s fierce loyalty to Massimo, but her refusal to honour the man she loved in the accepted manner was as aggravating as it was unfathomable.
Drawing breath, Christina approached Rosa from another angle. ‘People like to pay their respects. What about Mr Pucciarelli? Or Papa’s card buddies?’
‘No!’
‘Mama! People will call us sfaciade. You can’t lose face like this.’
‘I said no. Massimo never liked fuss. Just family.’
Christina raised her hands in helpless supplication. ‘Family? What family? You, me
and Bee. That’s it. There is no one else.’
Rosa sucked in her lips. ‘We came to this country to get away from the church. Never again will I step foot inside one. Your papa, he felt the same.’
‘Mama, this is ridiculous! Everyone loved Papa. It’s important to have a funeral so people can say a proper goodbye and show you, us, they care. Why are you being so stubborn?’
‘Because the church is full of people who fear God on Sundays but live their lives as heathens.’
And now it seems Rosa has had an epiphany and metamorphosed into a cake-baking, jam-bottling fully fledged member of the Friends of St Faith’s.
Rosa fusses with the hessian sack, making sure none of the soft fruit rolls away. ‘Si. The church. All the ladies make jams and cakes, why not me?’
Christina swallows a smile. ‘No reason, Mama. I just didn’t know that you had –’ she pauses, the words had a conversion on the road to Damascus on the tip of her tongue. Rosa had never searched for friendships amongst the women in town. The Pucciarellis didn’t count since they were business acquaintances and the only other Italians in a mostly Anglo district. But now Christina thinks of all the jars of jams and bottled fruits Rosa has made over the years. Always more than the three of them could consume in a lifetime, all because she couldn’t bear waste. What a delicious proposition to think Rosa has been donating excess supplies to the church jumble sale. She restrains herself, saying, ‘– were interested in charitable endeavours.’
Rosa bats the comment away. ‘I always done it.’
And Christina thought she knew her mother. Such a dark horse, she thinks as they pick their way down the hill. Christina carries the feed tin and two corners of the sack, Rosa holds the other two corners. Christina will make a second trip to collect the basket of peaches.
She can’t let it alone though. Her mother’s secretive charity has tickled her fancy. ‘But even if you make a ton of chutney and jam, there is still too much good fruit to waste.’
Rosa doesn’t miss a beat. ‘I’ll ring Matthias.’
Christina stops dead. ‘Mr Graukroger?’
Rosa urges her forward. ‘Si. Invite him over for afternoon tea. I need to make biscotti anyway. I can make a peach crostato too.’
In the end, Mr Graukroger was the only other person who came to farewell Massimo at the crematorium. The old Dutchman often made a fourth at cards with her father. All the old men sitting outside the town hall until they died or seized up so much they couldn’t fan the cards in their palms any more.
Curiosity gets the better of her. ‘I’ve been back here nearly a year, Mama. If you’re such good friends, how come he’s never been to tea?’
Rosa shrugs her free shoulder. ‘We chat on the phone. He pops over sometimes when you’re out. We’re old, I don’t need to see him to be thinking of him.’
Christina can’t believe it. As children, all the town kids had been terrified of Mr Graukroger. Like Massimo, he towered over them, but where her father was as likely to find sweets in his pockets or a butterfly wing to draw the children in, Matthias Graukroger erred on the side of hellfire and brimstone. If he caught kids roaming the fences of his property or riding their dirt bikes up and down the lane he shared with the Clementes, he was liable to pull a verse or two from the Bible and hurl it at the reprobates with all the menace he could muster. He’d scowl as they laughed at him, but even the bravest boys waited until they were at a safe distance before offering the old man the one-fingered salute.
His wife Traude had died of cancer after Christina moved to Sydney. Now she thought about it, Traude was the one famous across the district for her jams and baking, especially her Christmas puddings. After she died, Matthias Graukroger sank in on himself and none of the local kids could bring themselves to be frightened of him again. In an unspoken mark of respect, they stopped riding their dirt bikes up and down the road outside his house. Instead, they took themselves up the unsealed track through the old growth forest near the common. When the breeze blew the right way, Christina could hear the growl of their bikes.
It would never have occurred to her that this sunken God-fearing old man and her feisty anti-Church mother could have formed any kind of alliance, let alone a friendship.
It is obvious, though, as soon as Matthias Graukroger removes his boots, hangs his hat and coat on the peg and shuffles inside, that the house is familiar to him. He greets Christina by sandwiching her hand in his. Rosa he kisses on both cheeks before producing a paper bag crammed with small green nectarines from his jacket pockets and placing it on the kitchen table. He picks the chair with the crocheted cushion on it, placing the cushion behind the small of his back. Meanwhile Rosa brews tea from a packet Christina has never noticed before and the kitchen fills with the aroma of liquorice. There is no conversation. The ritual unfolds, the long-formed habit of two old companions.
Matthias picks up the Rural Advocate from amongst this morning’s mail and flicks through the pages as he waits for Rosa to bring his tea. Stabbing at a page, he says to Christina, ‘Isn’t that your old joint?’
She leans over his shoulder and catches her breath. A picture of Bartholomews Run fills half the page. It’s the photo she had planned to use for the website after the Heritage Council accepted the house for listing. She can’t understand the next photo at all. This is a picture of a house with soot-blackened windows and half the roof caved in. Round it is a perfect ring of scorched earth. Unfolding the paper, Christina reads, Historic Gem Lost in Blaze.
‘Sit down, love.’ Mr Graukroger pulls out a chair and presses on her arm. Rosa slides across a mug of tea and a large slice of the peach crostata.
Christina ignores them and smooths the paper flat. The story spreads over two pages. There are more alarming shots with captions such as Remains of the studio/barn, and underneath a photo of tumbled-down bricks it says, The original stables built in 1885. The words come at her in snatched phrases but it is clear that days before the house was due to go to auction, fire destroyed Bartholomews Run. At the end of the article is a lone sentence. The journalist mentions that the property’s owner is surfwear pioneer Jackson Plummer who is currently appealing wrongful conviction.
The article is attributed to the paper’s editor, Gordon Wakefield. He’s one of Jackson’s local cronies, along with Michael Spalding, the licensees of the pub, Dave and Sharon Martin, and Mrs Pryde who sold them their horses. Jackson loyalists, one and all. At the sentencing hearing, Mrs Pryde had blocked Christina’s exit from the courtroom, hissing that she ought to be ashamed of herself allowing an innocent man to be gaoled. Christina can’t remember how she replied; in all likelihood she said nothing. It still shocks her that some people truly believe Christina used Bianca to punish Jackson. Christina stares at the blackened house. It’s quite probable Jackson paid to have the house destroyed. She supposes it is just as likely that Jackson paid Wakefield to have the paper run a double-page spread. Then again, the house is infamous; so is Jackson, at least in those parts.
‘“On the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction,”’ Matthias interrupts Christina’s thoughts.
‘Pardon?’
He slurps his tea, letting out a small gasp when he is done. ‘The Book of Daniel. Daniel prophesised the desecration of the Holy Temple in an apocalyptic vision, calling it “the abomination of the desolation”.’
Christina stares at the old man, back at the photos. ‘What do you mean?’
‘An abomination is a perversion of a holy thing. When the Roman emperors put a statue of one of their gods in the Holy Temple, the Jews considered it a desecration, a perversion. First the Babylonians destroyed the Holy Temple, then the Romans. The Bible predicts that a third temple will be built on the same site by the Antichrist.’
‘You mean the devil?’
Matthias nods, cups his hands around his mug. ‘The Antichrist is the ultim
ate false prophet. He is the abomination that causes desolation for all who follow him.’
Christina stares at the photos of the scarred remains of the house. Thinks of the years she spent nurturing it back to life, her battle with the Heritage Council to have it recognised as a property of significance. All that effort, all that history, incinerated. She traces the outline of the photo of the studio where Bartholomew Rivers painted the pictures that now hung in galleries and private collections. The revival of interest in his work was supposed to be her reward for bringing an important Australian artist back into the public eye. Jackson’s encouragement motivated not by philanthropy but by the need to distract her, for her to be so consumed that she would not see what was happening under her own nose.
Rosa cuts Matthias a second slice of the peach crostata and passes it to him. ‘You mean that fire was no accident.’
Matthias nods.
Christina folds the paper in half to hide the story. Bartholomews Run haunts her. She poured her heart and soul into turning that crumbling wreck of a house into a showcase property. Pouring all that love and energy into a house instead of her daughter. What a fool she was.
She’d always assumed Jackson would sell the house. After all, he is in no position to live there, and thanks to Christina’s efforts he had made a substantial financial gain. Then she thinks of Matthias’ words, ‘the desecration of the temple’, and realises Jackson never intended to sell Bartholomews Run. He would never allow the smears of his occupancy to become part of its fabric. Far better to destroy Bartholomews Run and all its secrets, to ensure nothing survived.
chapter eleven
On the first morning of their new lives, Christina awoke as the sun slid over the hilltops and bathed the room in golden light. She slipped on a pair of jeans and carried her boots so as not to disturb Bianca who lay sprawled on the mattress, Bluey Baa-Baa clutched in an outstretched hand. The heavy scent of jasmine filled the air and mist curled up out of the valley and wrapped itself around a mob of kangaroos grazing in the far paddock. A flock of shrill lorikeets descended on the giant scribbly gum in the gully below and side-winded along the tree’s smooth limbs before dangling upside down to drink nectar from the creamy blossoms. This was heaven.
The Making of Christina Page 11