The House on the Hill

by Susan Duncan

  ‘Alright,’ she said grudgingly, ‘there’s no need to rub it in.’

  On my return home after a mother day, Bob traditionally made a soothing cuppa and sat down with me while I looked for reassurance that, even though I was far from an ideal daughter, I was not truly as terrible as Esther judged me to be. He called it the Post-Esther Debrief. Said it was a documented fact that children of self-centred, volatile parents were bound more tightly to them than kids from more balanced families, and that there is well-researched evidence that the aged become more self-centred and less inhibited. Something to do with the deterioration of their frontal lobes, which control social awareness and emotion. ‘You might as well get used to it.’

  ‘She’s never been any different,’ I muttered. But I silently wondered if I was rewriting huge slabs of history to suit our current situation. If I was shutting out all but the calumny in order to justify my own gracelessness. This, an awful memory: in the era of posh accents and silk scarves trailing from handbags, of white stockings, beige shoes and fine, pale-blue wool Norma Tullo dresses with innocent white organza collars, when my mother lined up alongside the other mothers on sports day or the school play or speech day, I was ashamed. She tried too hard to hide a lack of what she called ‘class’, although she meant wealth. She was embarrassing. All these years later, that is one of the hardest admissions I’ve ever made. One of the greatest shames of my own.

  ‘I lined the holes in the soles of my shoes with newspaper to pay for your education,’ she told me once. Her meaning was clear: I owed her. It was a rock-solid defence that could never be breached, no matter how often she pushed my brother and me to the limits. And she did push. For her birthday – I can’t remember which one – she told us she had always wanted a crocodile skin handbag. So we scraped together the money – four hundred dollars as I recall, at a time when my weekly salary was less than thirty dollars and John was a law student making ends meet by working as a waiter on weekends. Her power was built on guilt, and she used it unashamedly. Twisting greed to give the appearance of generosity. ‘This handbag will be yours one day,’ she told me. It was an absurd remark, but it took the sting out of the cost, as she knew it would. Everything I do is for you.

  After Stefan became too ill to take her to lunch or visit her, my mother physically and mentally kept reducing her world. It meant a single hour unfolded like an unbearable weight. And the years flew.

  ‘I have lived too long,’ she said on another occasion at the beach. I’d arrived too late for lunch, so we broke tradition and settled for coffees and pastries.

  ‘Are you bored?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not complaining. Everyone loves me. I have no idea why.’

  ‘You’re not a whinger. That helps. And there’s always a good supply of chocolates in your room.’

  ‘Larry brought a python to work the other day. Thought the old ladies would enjoy it. He got reported.’

  ‘By you?’

  ‘Me? Don’t be ridiculous. I thought it was wonderful. Made my day. Those old girls, they need to step outside their bedroom doors more often.’

  ‘Those old girls are younger than you.’

  And in truth, my mother was the one who expected life to knock on the standard metal security entrance to her apartment. Not many – beyond the carer and me – lifted the latch, so her closest relationships were with the nursing staff who showered, dressed and then, at night, slipped her out of her daywear and into a nightie, and – as she described it – tucked her into bed with a kiss on the cheek. ‘Like a child.’ It was clear she adored it.

  In winter, she had a view of a camellia festooned with bright pink, plate-sized blooms. In summer, a few flowers popped up in a bed of annuals. One day, she reported she’d made friends with a frog. After that, a rabbit. I accepted the frog story. Put the rabbit stories down to temporary drug mismanagement (dropping her pills or forgetting to take them).

  Outside the car, seas were so calm surfers in wetsuits bobbed aimlessly on their boards. She stared at the water, the sky. I pointed to a couple of people on horseback but she made no effort to look. ‘Would you like to get out of the car to see them?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘Are you feeling ok?’

  ‘I’m not about to drop off the perch, if that’s what you mean and, even if I were, I’ve told you, death doesn’t scare me.’

  ‘I think it does,’ I batted back, expecting to get a rise out of her.

  ‘What would you know?’ she said dismissively.

  ‘I’ve been hearing you’re at death’s door since you were forty-nine years old, Esther. For a woman who thought she wouldn’t make it to fifty, you’re doing ok.’

  Again, she failed to take the bait. Instead she said, ‘You have no idea how much my body hurts. Even when I lie still, it feels like rats are gnawing at my bones or pushing needles into them.’

  ‘Your choice,’ I reminded her.

  She brightened: ‘I’m well looked after. Everybody loves me.’ She coughed. A deep phlegmy sound. Impossible to dismiss as fake.

  ‘Are you alright?’ I asked again. She rolled her eyes. I added: ‘When’s your next doctor’s visit?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Ask him to listen to your chest.’

  ‘It’s hay fever. I get it every year.’

  ‘Ok. Your body. Your decision.’

  A couple of weeks later, there was another call from the retirement village. Esther had had a dizzy spell on her way to the hairdresser. An ambulance had taken her to Mona Vale Hospital. I thanked the receptionist for letting me know. Why did it always happen on the way to the hairdresser? Unaccustomed exercise, or was she searching for an audience? I replaced the receiver. Was this to be the routine now? A phone call. An ambulance. A bedside vigil. One increasingly frail step closer to death each time. Doctors keeping her going way beyond her capabilities. She must be petrified, I thought. Feeling her life trickle through her fingers. Powerless to stop old age cashing in the betting slips. I asked myself again whether her heart surgery was a gift or a curse. Suspected that on any given day, for my mother, it was both.

  The cough turned out to be a mild case of pneumonia. Old people’s friend in another century. For three days I delivered a cappuccino and a pastry for morning tea while a cocktail of antibiotics and saline was pumped into her bloodstream. I dutifully sat by her side for as long as I could endure it. Not long, to be honest. I was finding it harder and harder to listen to repetitious monologues riddled with self-praise. ‘Yes,’ I said at one stage, losing patience, ‘everyone loves you. I know.’

  On day four, the nurse told me Esther was well enough to leave. I began to pack her bag. Suddenly, she developed a wheeze. A long hiss on an exhalation from deep in her chest. The nursing staff grew agitated. Changed the linen and guided Esther back to bed. ‘We’ll check it out, love. Make sure you’re good to go.’ Turning to me: ‘She’ll be here another day. Maybe two.’

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them my mother’s nickname was Sarah Bernhardt and that my brother and I had heard that wheeze many times when she was cornered. But I hesitated. She was old. Recovering from pneumonia. There was a slim chance this might be real. I unpacked her nighties and toiletries without comment.

  ‘I won’t see you tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a full day.’

  ‘I know how busy you are.’ Her tone was sharp. Meant to make me feel guilty. As a small child, when my mother reprimanded me I would instantly retort, ‘I didn’t ask to be borned.’ I still felt that way quite often. I made my way down a long and chaotic corridor littered with trolleys, transfusion poles, blood pressure kits, mobile toilet seats, heart monitors, canvas bags stuffed with soiled bed linen. Walls were a collage of rubber glove packs, paper towels and dispensers of antiseptic handwash. A therapeutic arsenal with a backdrop chorus of coughs, groans, cries and, once or twice, mad, unintelligible hysteria from a man out of his mind. Sounds clashing, rising, falling. Organi
sed bedlam. I’d be scratching at the doors to get out.

  Seven days later, Esther was discharged.

  ‘The wheeze?’ I asked.

  ‘Voluntary,’ replied the overworked doctor, a hint of exasperation in his tone. ‘We’ve given her every test, scan and X-ray that exists. There’s nothing unknown.’

  ‘So it’s deliberate,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘voluntary.’

  I settled Esther in the car. ‘That wheeze. The doctors reckon it’s fake,’ I said, getting straight to the point, letting her know we were all on to her.

  ‘I never play-act,’ she snapped straight back. ‘Tempts fate to deal you a backhander.’

  ‘Yeah, right. But. Just so you know, it won’t work with me. Ok?’

  Three days later, the manager of assisted living called and suggested Esther should return to hospital.

  ‘Why?’ I asked through gritted teeth.

  ‘Her wheeze is quite bad. She says they discharged her far too early.’

  ‘They extended her stay for seven extra days and couldn’t find anything wrong. The wheeze is voluntary.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  One day, when Esther was late for our lunch date, I chatted to the receptionist, who had the patience of Job. ‘You’re amazing,’ I said, when the last internee had departed after making a series of complaints.

  ‘Old people are cranky because they’re in pain,’ she replied. ‘I would be, too.’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe.’ I wasn’t convinced. Not enough to do, I thought. Throwing their weight around to prove to themselves they are still alive and relevant.

  ‘Esther keeps talking about a rabbit,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘Is it real?’

  ‘It is to her.’

  One day, lured to her room by a long list of chores, I stood at the kitchen sink doing the dishes with my jaw hanging open. ‘Your rabbit,’ I said, with surprise, ‘it’s real!’ A fat, fluffy, brown-and-white bunny with long whiskers and a twitchy nose was tapping at her garden door.

  My mother gave me a smug look, put her thumb to the tip of her nose and wiggled it. ‘Get him a biscuit. He’s rather fond of Scotch Fingers,’ she said.

  I had planned to tell her about our new property, but in the end all I said was that Bob and I were going away for a few days. I didn’t feel strong enough to handle any questions about our future plans when, in truth, I didn’t know the answers myself. I knew, too, that she would worry and obsess about what might become of her.

  ‘Have I ever abandoned you?’ I once asked after Bob and I returned from an outback camping trip and her eyes filled with tears of relief at the sight of us.

  ‘Your postcards. They stopped coming. I thought you were dead,’ she said.

  ‘Not many postboxes in Arnhem Land,’ I replied. I sat beside her that day, put an arm around her shoulders, and asked again: ‘Have I ever abandoned you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But you might!’

  13

  IN THE SPECKLED SHADE OF A COPSE OF GUM TREES we sat in our camp chairs sipping spine-building billy tea. It was late afternoon at the beginning of a rampant summer. Four years had passed since that first phone call from Michael Baker, asking Bob if he could build a new kiln. As a child, four years had seemed a lifetime. As a woman on the verge of oldness, when the sameness of rituals – no matter how cherished – caused years, seasons, days to seep anonymously and politely into each other, it felt like a blink.

  A fire hissed and murmured in the drum. Our clothes reeked of wood smoke. Staring into flames bleached by daylight, I thought of my mother confined to her small, white, boxy room with only diminishment to look forward to. Grateful I’d sidestepped the trap of complacency and committed to grabbing a potent future instead of being rolled over by it. With Bob, as always, the catalyst.

  It was our second camp on the property and we’d been roughing it for three days straight. Despite thorough goings-over with a wet flannel and a bar of soap, the unruly aromas of the countryside seeped into hair, skin, even our bedding. To put it mildly, we stank. But we were past noticing or caring, seduced once again by the physical world. Blood-red sunrises over valleys carpeted with fog. Roaring, cloud-filled sunsets of gold and peach. Paddocks and hills of green and blue. Above them, a silver moon rising out of a shell-pink sky. Magpies sounding their melodious liquid notes at dawn. The pure, clear flute of bellbirds spooling through eucalypts in the late afternoon. Cattle grazing in the distance. It was primal and primal instincts felt reawakened. I knew this feeling well. It swelled and resonated with the first sight of red spinifex plains in the wide open spaces of the outback. Arose again, when I gazed at a setting sun through the spiny branches of a thorn tree in the vastness of the African veldt. Or wandered outside a tent high in the Andes to see a glacier shining electric blue in moonlight.

  ‘What if it’s the open spaces we love? Feeling part of the bush? At one with the land? What if building a house spoils the magic? What if we’re coming at this from the wrong angle? What if we just need a bigger tent on a permanent platform? Same as those safari tents where we stayed in Botswana? The ones with king-size beds, soft pillows and large bathrooms?’ Bob raised his eyebrows. I sighed. Escalating desires. A human affliction. ‘Ok, ok, so where do you think we should site the house?’

  We’d narrowed down the options to three: the easy-access but uninspiring Bottom Hill favoured by the real estate agents. The Great Hill, favoured by me. The Back Paddock Hill, a late entry into the field. Sheltered from cold southerlies and burning hot westerlies, it was a soft, practical option but also dull.

  ‘The view from the Great Hill is magnificent. I’m sure I can see a thin blue line of ocean. That’s got to be where we build,’ I said, pushing my case and refusing to acknowledge the pitfalls – and expense (shades of my mother?) – of bulldozing a switchback track up a gut-busting slope to a house that would have to be erected on stilts to half-guarantee an even keel when you stood at the kitchen bench.

  Bob’s eyebrows tangoed. He took a quick series of shallow breaths. The silence spun out.

  ‘So. You’re having second thoughts about that location,’ I said flatly.

  ‘Won’t be easy,’ he said. I braced to argue. But after more than a decade together, my face, like his, reads as simply as the alphabet. He held up a hand. ‘But it’s worth a go.’

  I pulled a hat lower over my eyes to hide the victory in them. A wedge-tailed eagle appeared high in the sky. Another followed. I scooped Chippy onto my lap. ‘Majestic,’ Bob said, watching their aeronautics through narrowed eyes. ‘You needn’t worry about the dog. She’s too heavy for them.’

  ‘No point in taking risks. God, they’re elegant. Not like the noisy infestations of clumsy white cockatoos at Pittwater.’ We watched the great raptors in silence for a while, neither of us tempted to stir although the sun had travelled and beat hotly on us now.

  ‘Remember when we married? No one could decide where we should live – your house or mine.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bob said, chucking the dregs of his tea on the fire. ‘I heard it was the talk of the bays for about a minute.’ He kicked the fire drum with a booted foot. Red-hot coals collapsed into a heap. Levered himself out of his saggy camp chair to get another log from a tidy pile he’d chainsawed earlier. Swinging the splitter with such accuracy I asked him where he’d learned the art.

  ‘Every country kid of my generation chopped the wood,’ he said, as though it was a no-brainer. He chucked on a gnarly lump, like an elbow joint, building the fire-bed to cook dinner. ‘And those cockatoos, they’re tantrum-throwers but they make you laugh. So,’ he said, sinking back into his chair, ‘what was the collective opinion about where we should live after tying the knot?’

  ‘We should sell both houses and build one together. You could carry me over the threshold, they said. Mind you, I was much thinner then.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Took us a while to get around to it but the community knows best, eh?’

 
‘Well, the community always has an opinion whether you’re after one or not. And I was thinner then, too. What’s for dinner?’ he asked.

  ‘A slab of rump steak. Three inches thick. We’ll carve it London broil style, have the leftovers in sandwiches for lunch tomorrow.’ As I spoke, the forty-strong herd of agisted steers came into sight. They ambled towards us in a slow shuffle, making soft ripping noises as they cropped. ‘Sorry boys, too much information. Close your ears,’ I murmured.

  I got up and put Chippy on the chair. She sighed without waking. I moved down the hill to shoo them off. Childhood memories kicked in: Never let a steer get you in a corner. Never spook a herd. Never turn your back on an animal. Never try to outrun it. Step aside if it charges you. ‘Get back,’ I shouted, waving my arms about. ‘Get back.’ The rear-guard obediently spun and headed off at a trot. The baldy held his ground. About a dozen others, emboldened now, backed him up. The bolters slowed and stopped. Turned to see what their mates were doing. Regrouped. The herd came towards me. I lost my nerve in an instant. Walked backwards. Where was Bob? The cattle lowered their heads and kept grazing, shuffling forwards at a surprising pace. My stomach lurched. Cattle are so bloody big. I ran the last few metres to the ute.

  In a few more minutes, the herd would amble or crash through the middle of our campsite. I started the engine and kangaroo-jumped forward, my hand holding down the horn. ‘Get back, you bastards,’ I shouted out the window. The herd spooked and turned. Only the baldy, with his stupid, stubborn, blank white face, held his ground. I kept hiccupping down the slope until the bumper bar was within a couple of inches of his nose. Hit the horn in short sharp blasts. We were smack in the throes of a Mexican stand-off. I held the horn down. He gave me a long, cold look then raised his boofy head, threw back his shoulders, and galloped off. From behind, his black flanks gleaming muscles rippling, he looked magnificent. Where was Bob?