The House on the Hill

by Susan Duncan

  ‘Your grandfather was very proud of his war record, although the gas gave him asthma for the rest of his life. Mind you, he was still strong as an ox. Could lift a hay cart if he had to,’ she said, as though it was still something to boast about.

  A master bedroom the width of the house ran parallel to the living room. The bathroom had a deep, claw-footed tub. It never had more than a couple of inches of water heated by a wood chip burner that went cold very quickly. The dirtiest person leapt in last. When Nan’s hips and knees wore out, Felix splurged on an inside flushing loo. Uncle Frank and Auntie Belle, who lived a short run past the dam and down the hill, had a drop loo a good distance from their house. It froze in winter. Stank in summer when you could hear the drone of flies long before you opened the rickety timber door. It was smart to watch for snakes, too. Red-bellied blacks curled in a corner, waiting for bush rats to make a move. No one ever understood why I steered clear of the fancy loo and took my chances with red-back spiders and snakes. There was a dog, Petey, a wily fox terrier. Dead before my time but a family legend. When the possums bred to infestations in the roof, Petey, was sent up a ladder to chase them out.

  The house always smelled of kerosene lamps. The smell of char, too, from the fire that burned constantly in the kitchen stove, but mostly from the open fire in the sitting room. Especially pungent when the wind blew the wrong way. That black cast-iron stove, chipped and loose-hinged, so you had to lift the door a little to close it tightly, flickered through heatwaves, torrential downpours and gales straight from the South Pole. There was hell to pay if Nan went out for the day and someone let the fire go out. It took a good day or two to heat up again, and about the same time for her to stop rousing on anyone within hearing distance. Nan used to throw damp tea leaves on the dirt floors when she swept. The smell was lovely. Like a good cuppa.

  Esther told me she and the twins shared a one-room shack called the Humpy, a short walk from the house. ‘We had a canvas curtain to divide the room. Me on one side and, when they were old enough, the twins on the other. My bed was pretty grand, I’ll have you know. Wrought iron and brass. Must have cost a fortune. We had horsehair mattresses, which sound awful, but they were warm and comfortable. Mind you, the roof always leaked. Mum put old enamel bowls in a corner. A couple of buckets for the big storms. They filled up quite fast if the rain really came down. You could hear the plops all night.’

  ‘I really loved Auntie Belle,’ I said for no reason except it was true, and she died far too young in a car crash, leaving Uncle Frank a widow for the rest of his life.

  ‘When the twins came along, it was always two against one,’ Esther said with a hint of wistfulness. ‘If I sided with Belle or June in a stoush, they instantly formed ranks and I was back on the outer.’ Once, she said, she leaned down and bit the hand of one of them as she lay in the pram. ‘The baby screamed, of course, and Mum came running. But she was just so beautiful I wanted to eat her. Mum didn’t say a word when I explained. What could she say?’

  By the time my brother and I were born, the Humpy had been more or less abandoned except for family holidays or when stray guests showed up unannounced. Window panes were newspapered over and holey, cracked linoleum covered bare earth, the pattern faded and worn beyond recognition. It still leaked badly and smelled of damp soil and wet wool. Esther’s bed was there, gone to ruin, but Dad, Esther, John and me squeezed into it every time we visited. I remember it as a horrible, dark room, thick with dirt and shaded by a long, dark line of giant cypresses that groaned painfully through winters. Gloomy, sad trees with outspread arms. On stormy nights the Humpy filled with a keening sound. It scared me silly if I was out there on my own while the grown-ups and my older brother stayed up talking in front of the fire. I’d scream blue murder, too frightened to make a run for the house. In the end, Esther would send John to bed so I’d have company until I fell asleep. Mostly, I was terrified Felix would creep in silently while everyone was gathered and distracted in the house.

  There was a rough stable near the Humpy with boxes of bran, oats and chaff, with heavy wooden lids to keep the rats out. Felix used to call me to help feed the horses. When I said no, my mother and Nan thought I was being lazy and sent me after him with a push: ‘Go and help your grandfather.’ The yeasty smell of bran. It still makes me feel nauseated.

  Chooks roamed all over the place by day but roosted near the horses at night. Winters were cold and frosty. Or perhaps felt colder because there was only the open fire, and you were reprimanded firmly if you stood so close in front of it that you hogged all the heat.

  To celebrate a birthday or Christmas, Felix would steady a log under a graceful old willow tree near the house, catch a chook by the throat and swing an axe to chop off its head. The bird, eyes staring sightlessly from the ground, ran in headless, frantic circles, blood spurting like a fountain, until it finally dropped dead. The smell of death and hot shit and the bird’s squawking hysteria was awful. Felix would stand back and laugh, his barrel chest shaking with mirth.

  To me – a kid already accustomed to electricity, running water, indoor flushing loos and houses that kept out the weather – it was a dirty, bare-bones life, underlaid with fear, shame and helplessness. To this day, though, my greatest shame remains one that I instigated: Felix, who was a clever wood turner, built my cousin Jayne a very tiny chest of drawers where she could store the small treasures of childhood. Rings out of sweet packets, pressed wildflowers, shells, all kinds of worthless but valuable mementoes. On a visit, when I was about nine or ten years old, he held it in front of me like a bribe. ‘I could build you one, too,’ he said. He must have watched the fierce battle between greed and integrity play out plainly on my face. I shook my head for a long time, but in the end, I nodded.

  All these years later, I cannot be sure of the look on his face when I succumbed, but I seem to remember a sheen of victory in his eyes, a grin of inviolable certainty that by accepting I’d given him temporary ownership of a thin sliver of myself. He gave it to me on our next visit. It was a shabby, ill-built little thing tainted indelibly with my own humiliation. I couldn’t bear to look at it and hid it away until everyone had forgotten it existed and I could throw it out. I have mistrusted the motives behind gifts ever since and been immune to the bribes and occasional coercions that routinely cross a journalist’s desk. I can, at least, thank my grandfather for that.

  Uncle Frank, Auntie Belle and Cousin Jayne lived in their modern fibro house down the hill from the dam where we fished for yabbies to boil over a campfire on the bank.

  Uncle Frank grew food for the table. Belle churned her own butter and washed Jayne’s hair over the kitchen sink once a week. She also made the best apple pies I have eaten. Ever. Although I kept a wary eye out for the whole cloves she added to spice the fruit. Jayne was a dark-eyed, very pretty kid, at least a head-and-a-half shorter than me. Thanks to her mother, she knew her way around the bush like a scholar and yelled watch out! if I wasn’t paying attention and was on the verge of trampling a delicate spider orchid.

  My mother looked down on their working-class industriousness. Dad was an educated man in an era when not many kids stayed at school beyond the age of fourteen. We had a cleaner who came once, sometimes twice a week. One of the migrants, a gentle, woolly bear of a man called Nicky, worked the garden. Uncle Frank always said my father spoiled Esther rotten. I think Dad gave in to every demand to make up for the drink, but also for peace. My mother never took no for an answer.

  One day, when I was talking to Esther about her childhood, interviewing her really, because by then I’d decided to write this book, I said, ‘I remember the smell of kero.’

  ‘Do you?’ Esther said, surprised. ‘But you were so little.’

  ‘Oh, I remember. Smells like that get locked inside you. There’s not much I’ve forgotten about those days.’ My tone was grim but she smiled happily, the good times shining through more brightly than lesser ones. One of the greatest blessings of old age, I’m told, is
the ability to reconfigure – or even entirely forget – dark days and even dark eras. But I’m not that old yet, and some memories can’t be spun.

  And so, after a long hiatus, a familiar chorus began thrumming in my head once more: Did you know? Did you not know? Did you know? Did you not know? A cant in the same vein as he loves me, he loves me not. Roiling with a confusing mish-mash of memories and a deeply held conviction that she must have known what was going on. The signs – surely as bright as neon lights – were all there. Does a child really end up with cystitis from spending too long on a seesaw? Does a child run away from her grandfather if she trusts him? Does a child beg to be allowed to stay home with Uncle Bob and Aunt Mary instead of holidaying with Nan and Pa? Does a child finger-paint only in black and white if she is not carrying a secret so dark and damaging it is the only way she can express it?

  But then I’d glance at Esther’s face, pale with an underlying tinge of grey. Increasing numbers of five-cent-sized brown blobs on her cheeks, ever deeper channels in her forehead. The outline of her mouth faded into the skin of her face. And I couldn’t bring myself to utter a word.

  Sometimes, on a sleepless night, I imagined the way a conversation between us might unfold.

  Me: ‘Did you ever wonder why I was such a strange kid?’

  Esther: ‘Well, you weren’t beautiful but you always had character.’

  Me: ‘Weren’t you ever curious about the reason I hated holidays at Donvale?’

  Her: ‘You never got over the chook’s head being cut off.’

  Me: ‘There was a much bigger reason.’

  Esther: ‘Don’t tell me this is about which of you three kids was given the last drop of lemonade out of the bottle?’

  Me: ‘No. This is much bigger.’

  Esther: ‘What do you mean?’

  And that’s where it ends. Even in my internal dialogues I could not conceive of going any further. I would ask myself then if closure really mattered at this end of a life that had played out with so much for which to be grateful? But it was the not knowing that ate away and hung between us like a malevolent force. Twisted my relationship with her in dreadful ways. At a time when she needed and deserved compassion, I used the past as an excuse to deal out grudging, high-handed duty as if it was all she had a right to expect. I was not proud of this, but it was beyond me to do any better.

  I’ve spent many years trying to block all memory of Esther’s father but never succeeded. Everyone who knew him said he was painfully good-looking, which may explain my mother’s lifelong obsession with physical beauty. I recall the smell of him. Musky. With overtones of what I now know was rum. The way he sucked his teeth. A sound that, half a century later, still makes my blood freeze and, along with the word Pa, triggers an instinct to bolt. As I sat in my office writing this, I said it out loud. Pa. It was still there. The instant nausea invoked by a two-letter word.

  Outside my window, as always, light played on water. Clean and sparkling. Let it go, I told myself for the umpteenth time. Instead, I called up his army records online and found a blurry sepia photograph of him as a very young man. I stared and stared, enlarged and reduced it, but still I wouldn’t have recognised the man who’d been the axis on which my life had pivoted if he’d been standing right beside me.

  I went on to read that Felix Hampton Parker joined the artillery in World War I and served in Palestine, France (where he was gassed) and Belgium. I remembered stories he told about rubbing shoulders with royalty when he picked up the handkerchief of the King of Belgium (who happened to be passing by).

  According to Esther, her mother, Henrietta Esther Nicol, never quite forgave herself for losing her virginity on the eve of Felix’s departure to fight overseas. In her mind, it meant she was promised to him forever, even if he was killed on the battlefield. She told a young Esther: ‘Marry a man who finds out on your wedding night that you’re not a virgin, and he’ll throw it in your face for the rest of your life.’ Esther repeated those words throughout my youth, building prison walls around my already dreadfully compromised sexuality until it seemed that even to kiss a boy was to destroy what she always referred to as reputation. I realise now that she was terribly afraid that I’d end up pregnant and unmarried, disgraced and ruined. But even more, I suspect she didn’t want me to be forced to carry the lifelong guilt, sadness and regret of abortion. Like her.

  Felix and Henrietta (Pete and Hettie) began their married life running a grocery in Abbotsford. According to Esther, her father was clever and mathematically gifted. ‘That’s where your brother got it from,’ she said. One of her clearest memories of the shop, she confessed, was finding Myrtle, who helped out, on her father’s lap at the back of the fruit shop once or twice. She’d thought it was odd, even though she was too young to understand what it meant. ‘Even odder that she was waiting for us at the new place in Donvale,’ Esther said. ‘Sitting on a log with a silly grin on her face. Never saw her after that, though. Don’t know what happened to her.’

  Esther’s parents were professionally scammed and forced out of the fruit shop in the desperate days of the Great Depression. Felix, a man’s man, by all accounts, charmed his way into a job in Jones Bond Store and remained there until his retirement. ‘He rose quite high in the ranks,’ Esther said, as though it mattered nearly half a century after his death.

  ‘Did you like Felix?’ Even as I asked, my breath got short, my gut clenched.

  ‘I loved Mum. She was a wonderful woman. Always had time to make a batch of scones for the swaggies who turned up at the gate. Sewed new dresses for the twins and me, too, for every Saturday dance. Dad always wanted a son. I tried to be as good as a son for years after the twins were born. But I was always a girl to him.’

  Felix routinely returned home with jars of whisky, rum and gin. ‘He acquired them legally.’ Esther paused, smiled ruefully. ‘Sort of. Said they were gifts from Customs and Excise. Mum didn’t approve of alcohol before lunch unless it was a special occasion, so he stashed the grog in a hidey-hole in a big gum tree in the bottom paddock. On weekends, as soon as the men announced they were off to chop firewood, I knew they were headed for Dad’s Bar. That’s what we kids called it. The men returned for Sunday lunch with a sheen in their eyes, sloppy smiles, and the wives were cranky right up to bedtime. There wasn’t much wood chopped, either.’

  Out of the blue one day, my mother confessed she’d always dreamed of travelling the world. ‘Not sure where that ambition came from. The King family, perhaps, who were neighbours. They were from …’ She paused, struggling to remember. ‘Lobatse! In South Africa. That was it. Not a bad memory for an old duck, eh, kid? I used to listen to their stories until I was dragged away. I always meant to write a book about them. I was on a train in Africa, when I went to visit you. Remember? The train stopped in the night and, just by chance, I looked out the window. And there it was. Lobatse. Strange, don’t you think?’

  ‘Write a book, eh?’

  ‘Don’t laugh. You’re not the only writer in the family. I wrote three books.’ Her words brought a quick end to lunch. We’d been down this route many times. When I’d quizzed her for details, she went all wafty and vague. A few scribbles on a page, perhaps, but never any books. I was sure of it. It was a cocktail of fact and fantasy.

  Even as young children, my brother and I guessed she led a life of lies, half-lies and forgotten lies. Once, when Aunty Belle visited us at Bonegilla, she was shocked to hear everyone calling Esther Sister Duncan. Cousin Jayne said, ‘Your mother reinvented herself after the war when there wasn’t anyone left who knew the truth.’ But Esther’s confabulations were always combined with a truly funny, quick-witted bravado that hauled her out of whatever new pit she’d dug for herself. She’d give an airy, dismissive wave if someone pulled her up on a fact: ‘Oh, I can’t remember the details.’ And to be honest, sometimes it suited us to go along with the fantasies. They were so much brighter and cheerier than the reality.

  ‘I wrote a story for New Idea,�
� Esther added, realising I hadn’t fallen for the three-book claim. ‘About trying to make a sponge cake in the tropics. It was published, too. And not bad, even if I do say so myself. I was paid quite well for it.’ She gave a nod. So there!

  19

  WHEN THE BENBULLA LANDSCAPE was swathed in a golden, autumnal luminosity and the evening sky filled with clouds the colour of strawberries, temperatures regularly dropped under ten degrees after dark. I’d topped our sleeping bags with feather doonas, insisted on saving enough billy water for a hot water bottle every night and taken control of a leopard-print dressing gown I’d originally bought for Esther. Although it was thick fleece and extremely warm, it wasn’t very practical for a little old woman. She’d caught the wide sleeves on the electric jug and narrowly escaped serious burns. She’d tripped over the hem and narrowly escaped a broken wrist. She’d caught the belt in the washing machine and narrowly escaped being flung around at eight hundred spins per minute. An exaggeration worthy of my mother, but you get the picture. In the end, even though she loved the lurid garment passionately, I removed it before it killed her.

  So in the chill and vibrant light of late afternoon, I slipped it over my clothes like a coat and strolled around the campsite until bedtime like a large wild animal on the loose. The only benefit beyond feeling very toasty – and admittedly difficult to prove – was the disappearance of rampaging packs of wild dogs, whose bloodcurdling yowls by the light of the moon made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. To this day, even though I know an extensive baiting program was under way, I believe Esther’s dressing gown scared them off. The best little doggie in the whole wide world, with her grey snout, arthritic knees, deafness and increasing blindness, was safe. But she, too, was feeling the cold.

  One day she nudged so close to the fire drum that Norm looked up from his tuna and dry biscuit lunch (another diet) and said, ‘If you don’t want your little doggie to burst into flames, you might want to move her.’ I looked down. Her fur was singed brown and smoking. I snatched her away.