The House At Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  'Would you come to lunch one day, and have a look around?' I ask.

  'Why not?' she says. 'I'm really busy next weekend but leave your number and I'll give you a call.'

  'The thing is, you'll have to get in a boat to get to us. Is that ok? We're "water access only", in Lovett Bay.'

  She's smart enough to ask what kind of boat.

  'Stable. Like a tennis court. And it's only about five minutes from shore to shore.'

  'I'll give you a call,' she says. 'It might take a couple of weeks but I will call you.'

  On the way home, Bob is quiet. 'We can never have a garden like that, not where we live.'

  'I like the bush the way it is,' I reply, although it's not entirely true. I just want to ease his mind. Stress slides off him like soapy water.

  ***

  Jeanne Villani does call to make a date for lunch. I'm delighted. Bob is noncommittal.

  'Relax. This isn't really about a garden,' I tell him. 'This is fun. I like her. Don't know why. Didn't spend more than five minutes with her. She's . . . engaging.'

  'You like her because she's the same as you. Likes gardens and cooking.'

  'Yeah. Maybe.'

  I fluff around working out the menu. For once I am restrained. Jeanne, it turns out, is a partner in two restaurants called City Extra, one at Circular Quay, the other in Parramatta. Best to keep it simple. I settle on spatchcocks served with a Thai noodle salad. The spatchcocks have been a favourite since the Melbourne Cup lunch. They're easy cooking. A white chocolate tart for dessert, with raspberry coulis. Make it all ahead. Nothing to begin with. It's lunch. Keep it light.

  About half an hour before Jeanne's due, I have a panic attack. There's not enough food. People will go home hungry. It's the same old same old. I don't know why I'm like this, but if I don't over-cater to a ridiculous extent, I break into a cold, nervous, stomach-churning sweat about running out of food. I had a more than sufficient childhood and the only time I've ever come close to feeling hungry was when I was twenty-one years old and living in London. I earned so little I couldn't afford to pay the rent and eat. But I got a night job as a barmaid in a local pub and the chef took pity on me. Ate well from then on. Sophia, my Buddhist friend, would probably suggest my paranoia stems from memories of a former life. Can't think how to test that theory, though.

  I yank a side of smoked salmon out of the freezer and turn the hairdryer on it to thaw. Dice some tomatoes, cucumbers and red onions. Drizzle oil and vinegar over them, chuck in a few capers. When the phone rings, the salmon is still solid. I whack it in a sunny spot on the bench.

  'I'm at the ferry wharf,' Jeanne says. 'Is it the right place?'

  'Yep. Don't move. I'll come over in the tinny and get you. Be about five minutes, maybe ten. No longer. Hope you're wearing sensible shoes.'

  'The only time I dump my orthotics is to go to the opera,' she says. 'I'll be fine.'

  The tinny starts first go. It's another godzilla of a day. I consider throwing a line off the back to trawl for fish. Decide to skip it. Don't want to keep Jeanne waiting. And if I caught one I wouldn't know what to do with it. Bob does the gory stuff.

  The second year after I moved to Lovett Bay, there were so many fish you could almost lean over the edge of the boat and catch them in your hands. That year, the heavens emptied over and over. Rain, thick and black, banging on the tin roof like rapturous applause. A yell would go out, usually from Jack: 'Get your rods! The fish are on!' We'd rush for our boats and set off trawling. We caught twelve tailor in less than ten minutes one day, elegant silver fish with downturned mouths and sharp teeth. Could have hooked hundreds but what would we have done with them? That night we lit a fire in an old washing machine drum at the bottom of the garden and everyone came around. Cooked fillets in a blackened cast iron frying pan and smoked a few in Stewart's tin smoker that I borrowed and kept forgetting to return. Used brown rice and tea as a base. The fried fish was much better. Simple stuff usually is.

  It was so fecund that year, it was surreal. Gluts make me uneasy, though. They feel like a last gasp, fattening us before the famine. The drought started after that. Slowly at first, with rain here and there so we couldn't guess what lay ahead. Then the fish stopped running. Jack went out over and over, searching for kingfish to slice into slivers of sashimi. Nothing. Bob put out crab pots, trapping one or two blue swimmers at the most, more often none, whereas before he'd get four, five, six and, once, an astonishing eight. It's a cycle, I tell myself, but sometimes it's hard to believe the lean times won't go on forever.

  'Hello!' I yell. Jeanne stands at the end of the ferry wharf. She's in cotton trousers with a lime green shirt over a white T-shirt. Her skin is pale and flawless. Her baby-fine blonde hair stands up in the breeze. She wears sturdy black shoes and lifts an arm in a wave.

  'You'll have to help me climb aboard. I've got a bad hip,' she explains when I get the boat alongside without more than a bump or two. She walks down the yellow steps to water level, looking slightly hesitant. The step into the boat is about eighteen inches.

  'No worries, the boat's stable. You'll be right.' But I have to hold on to the steps to keep the boat from drifting. I can only help her with one hand. I look around. It's the weekend and the wharf is awash with tourists. No-one familiar. No-one to help. Before I can tell her to step straight onto the floor of the boat, she plonks a foot on the gunnel. For a horrible moment she sways precariously. I let go of the wharf and grab her with both hands. She staggers into the boat, dragging her second leg along just in time, clutching the roof for balance.

  'See. Easy,' she says.

  'Right,' I reply. 'Next time, though, you might find it even easier to put your foot into the boat first up. Steadier than the gunnel. Lots of stability.' No need to tell her how close she came to a swim.

  'No, no, it was pretty easy,' Jeanne replies obliviously.

  'Oh. Right then.'

  The tinny idles slowly away from the ferry wharf.

  'That's McCarrs Creek,' I tell her as we pass a flotilla of expensive yachts moored from the mouth of the bay to as far as the eye can see. 'On the southern side, houses have road access. Lot of people prefer that.'

  Outside the eight-knot zone I consider speeding up then change my mind. Yachts under sail glide in a gentle breeze. Resting seagulls float in small groups, bobbing like corks, waiting for a school of baitfish to zoom past. Hills roll like gentle waves. It's too glorious to rush. And the salmon needs time to thaw.

  At lunch, we begin with polite questions. Where are you from? How did you come to be at Bayview? Do you have children? Probing, in a way, to discover enough without prying too deeply. Turns out Jeanne is English. Her father ran a plant nursery at Hastings, in Sussex: Gower's Silverhill Nursery. She helped him after school and at weekends. Learned how to nurture seedlings until they grew strong, how to plan a garden for colour, texture and effect. She migrated to Australia in 1955 when she was twenty-one years old and took a job as a nanny in Goulburn. She was expected to look after the children, take care of a hypochondriac wife and even scratch her employer's head if it was itchy. After a year, she quit and hitchhiked to Surfers Paradise.

  'Got a job working as a nanny for the baby son of a bookmaker and his wife,' Jeanne says. 'When he found her in bed with another man, he flattened them both. I walked away from that job the next day. He couldn't understand why!'

  She laughs. Australians, she'd begun to think, were a strange lot. 'But they knew how to have fun and I loved the freedom, the lack of formality. Anything seemed possible if you were prepared to work hard and take risks.'

  Back in Sydney, she worked nights in a Kings Cross café and days in an advertising agency. Two years later, she met Matt, and they started their own art studio. In 1960 they married and moved into the fast lane. She bought a Porsche, he drove an Alfa Romeo. They entertained lavishly. So we can measure her success, she adds: 'Haven't done my own cleaning since I was twenty-three years old. And I'm nearly seventy!'

  In 198
2, two years after her husband died from a heart attack, Jeanne bought Waterfall Cottage as a weekender. Back then, it was a flimsy fibro cottage with pythons living in the roof. 'Matt's was a lesser life than it could have been,' she says. 'He wanted to be a painter but didn't have the courage to do it full time. I told him I'd take care of the business, that we'd be alright. He didn't believe me.'

  'Maybe he didn't think he was good enough?' I suggest.

  'He wasn't a genius, if that's what you mean. But people loved his paintings. He would have done quite well.'

  'Do you still miss him?'

  She is silent for a long while. 'I wish he'd been happier, that's all. Wish he'd been able to see joy instead of bleakness. I used to love cooking delicious dinners for the two of us or for dinner parties. Food is such a pleasure if you let it be. But he saw it as fodder. "Let's get dinner over and done with," he'd say. Told me my love of cooking came from a desire to show off. Perhaps it did, but what does it matter? As long as it's fun.'

  Showing off? Is that what I do?

  As we talk, the sun falls lower in the sky. Jeanne cups a hand over one eye.

  'Is it too bright, would you like to go inside?'

  'No! Not at all. I only have one eye and the sun seems to concentrate on it sometimes and makes it hard to see.'

  It takes a minute or two to absorb the words. Then it all makes sense. The eye that never quite turns with the other one. The way she moves to be on a particular side of you. The angle of her head looking at the drop from the wharf to the boat.

  'How did you lose it?'

  'Cancer. Melanoma.' It's hard not to sigh out loud. Cancer. Is it ever anything else?

  'How long ago?'

  She smiles and her face is girlish for a moment. She is a good-looking woman now. She must have been a knockout in her youth. 'Years! Too many to remember.'

  And she begins another story that is full of mystery and leaves us reeling. It began in 1980 as it turned out, the same year Matt died. 'I'd been having trouble seeing out of my left eye,' she explains. 'When the doctors checked it out, they found a tumour. Diagnosed melanoma.' She would lose her eye, they told her. She had no choice. 'One eye, I told myself, wasn't too hard to handle. I could still see.'

  After surgery, with a wadge of bandages over where she'd once had an eye bluer than the sky, she was feeling 'pretty damn fine!'

  'I was bouncing around, happily waiting to go home, when I picked up my chart at the end of the bed,' she continues.

  ' "Metastasised to the liver" ', I read. I'd never heard the word before, wondered what it meant. I casually asked a nurse.

  'It means to spread,' the nurse replied. 'Why?'

  'Just curious,' Jeanne said. She felt so well, though, she still didn't worry. But when the eye specialist swept in for the daily check-up, she asked him about it.

  'You have secondary tumours in your liver,' he replied matter-of-factly. 'When you're through here, I suggest you see a specialist.'

  Two weeks later, one of Sydney's top cancer specialists told her to go home and get her affairs in order. She asked how much time she had to do that.

  'Twelve months. If you're lucky,' he told her.

  'Not much of a bedside manner,' I say.

  'Facts are facts. Doesn't matter how you dress them up.'

  As she left his surgery, she told herself she was pleased she'd led such an interesting life and that no-one escaped death – she was just like everyone else. And that's how she coped.

  'That night I went to a concert at the Opera House. I looked around at the audience and thought, you're all going to die one day. That's what happens. There's nothing different about any of us. Nothing different about you, Jeanne. You are ordinary. We are all ordinary.'

  Another fortnight later, she was racing to meet a deadline with some artwork when she sighed in frustration. 'I'm too busy to die, I thought. I'm just too busy.'

  'Sounds like one of those defining moments,' I suggest, getting up from the table to put on the kettle for coffee.

  'Maybe. But I also thought that if modern medicine had written me off, I'd try something else. What did I have to lose?'

  She'd heard about a faith healer in the Philippines who allegedly performed miracles and she booked an airline ticket to go to see him. 'I needed a miracle. That's what I was told.'

  I bring a tray to the table, pour our coffees. Perhaps I look sceptical, although I don't mean to. Miracles exist, I know they do. I see them outside my window every day.

  Jeanne looks straight into my eyes and smiles. 'It's impossible to explain this to anyone who hasn't seen what a faith healer does,' Jeanne says, 'so I don't expect you either to understand or believe it. Sit down and I'll just tell you what happened.

  'Essentially, this skinny little man wearing nothing but tattered drawstring trousers and a singlet brought his hands together like he was about to pray and blew on his fingertips. His eyes were closed. Then he dived into my stomach with his hands. There was a little blood. No pain. A few minutes later, he ran his hands over my stomach and pulled away from me. He told to me go. It was all over. There wasn't a mark on me. The same thing happened every day for a week. To this day, I can't figure it out.'

  Back at Sydney airport, she bumped into Marcus Blackmore, the vitamin king, who was a friend of a friend. He asked her where she'd been, what she was up to. When she told him, he suggested she see someone he knew who was experimenting with the effects of vitamin C on cancer. 'Within a week,' Jeanne says, 'I was buying one-kilo bags of vitamin C. I now know where the saying "goes through you like a dose of salts" comes from!'

  I am intrigued, though, by the faith healer. Blood but no wounds? Hands disappearing into flesh but no pain? 'So the faith healer dived in metaphorically?' I ask.

  Jeanne smiles, like I'm an innocent child. 'No,' she replies. 'The only way I can explain what he did is to tell you another story.' She looks around. 'I'm not boring you, am I?'

  'No way,' we chorus.

  'Good.' She takes a breath and continues. 'A while after I returned, I was talking to my neighbour about his holiday in India. He told me about seeing an exquisite statue in a street parade. He told his Indian companion that he was overwhelmed by its beauty. "Would you like a statue of your own?" his friend asked.

  'My neighbour was embarrassed by the offer and didn't know what to say. Finally, not wanting to be rude, he said "Yes, that would be wonderful." He expected his friend would go to a market and buy a small replica. But instead, he stepped into a park filled with roses, and plucked one. He peeled back the petals to reveal a perfect miniature of the statue. My neighbour couldn't figure it out. He asked his friend to do it again and again. Everytime he peeled back the petals, the statue appeared like magic.'

  Jeanne continues, 'A few weeks later, I was telling a group of friends about the faith healer and the statue and the rose. Everyone was amazed, except one couple. "Dematerialisation," they said, as though it was no big deal. They travelled to India often, it turned out, and had seen it happen over and over. For the first time, though, I felt I could make sense of what the faith healer did for me,' Jeanne says. 'But I don't know if any of that makes sense to you . . .'

  I watch Bob's face as Jeanne tells her story. It's rubbery with disbelief and he wriggles in his chair uncomfortably. He's an engineer who deals in science – facts and figures, or don't go there. And Barbara died from secondary cancer in her liver. No miracles for her, just an irrevocable fact.

  'So you were cured? You went back to the doctor and had a check-up and the tumours were gone?' I ask.

  'No, nothing like that! About eight years later, when I was thinking it was taking a long time to die, I was at a dinner party in Newtown. Just before we sat down at the table, I got the most excruciating stomach pains. To this day, I have never felt as ill as I did then. I drove myself to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, abandoned my car in the driveway and insisted on being admitted. I cannot tell you how terrible I felt. They took my medical history and I was put on a
drip. About six hours later, I felt much better. I thought I'd had food poisoning and was about to be discharged when the doctor on duty marched in and ordered me to get back into bed. I had a history of cancer, she told me, and she wanted more tests done.'

  Jeanne pauses, sips her coffee. She smiles a little, as though only she understands the joke, before continuing: 'When my liver was checked, there wasn't a tumour anywhere. It was perfectly healthy.'

  We're silent. No-one knows what to say.

  'And here I am, more than twenty years later!' She adds: 'I really don't care how weird all that sounds. I've just told you what happened.'

  It's late afternoon when we rise from the table. Lovett Bay is deep grey, blistered with pools of pale blue light. Soon it will turn pink. Or maybe gold. Impossible to guess. We wander around the property, showing her the land. Jeanne looks behind the house towards the laundry.

  'I'd get rid of the clothesline before I did anything else to the garden,' she advises.

  Bob and I look at each other, aghast. 'I love the clothesline, Jeanne. It's a Hills Hoist and a truly Australian statement. Nearly every backyard had one when I was a kid. Most of them still do. It's got to stay.'

  She looks at me as though I'm mad.

  'You're English,' I say. 'It's impossible to explain.'

  She is thoughtful for a moment. 'Well then, plant something big and bushy to hide it.'

  We walk on, following the front lawn along the verandah. A kookaburra sits on the back gate. Roguish. Head tilted cheekily, eyes bold and challenging. He flies to his favourite broken bough on the spotted gum and his light-throated chuckle crescendoes into maniacal laughter. A private joke.

  'We've kind of rethought trying to build a garden,' I begin when the song ends and we're walking back to the house.

  Jeanne stops suddenly, as though she's been whacked on the chest. 'Why?'

  I shrug, trying to find the right words . . . 'Too many wallabies, bandicoots, brush turkeys and lyrebirds. To garden formally would mean going to war with them, and we sort of like it the way it is. Although I did think spathiphyllums would look lovely along the walls of the house.'