Fall Girl (10 page)

I don't think about national parks, or about camping, or about equipment or even about science. I'm not thinking about Greta, either.

‘Wild horses wouldn't keep her away,' I say.

It isn't until I get to the car, where Beau is waiting, that I start to feel sick.

All the way back to Cumberland Street I don't speak. After suburbs and freeways and intersections of trying to tempt me with questions like: And then what did he say? and What was the look on his face then? and receiving the briefest of answers, Beau gives up and switches on the radio. Beau is a safe driver, as we all are. This is another of my father's rules. We travel just under the speed limit, we always indicate, we check for broken tail lights and worn tyres. There is never any excuse to pull us over.

By the time Beau swings into the driveway I have been staring out the window like it was a competition sport for about twenty-five klicks, and changed my mind back and forth a dozen times.

Wilsons Promontory National Park. The Prom, they call it, like it was a high school dance. I've never been there and neither has any of my family. I've heard of it, of course, and I've seen it on TV. It's been a favourite holiday destination for Melburnians for decades, this wedge of land barely attached to the bottom of Australia's coastline like a comma reluctantly added to a rambling sentence. On travel shows hikers and surfers and fisherfolk rug up against the elements and sleep under the stars enjoying the majesty of the great outdoors. It always makes me wonder why, if this camping business is so entrancing, these people sleep in houses at all. They all have perfectly serviceable backyards. Knock yourselves out, tentophiles. I try to recall everything I've heard about this park and before I know it we're home, at Cumberland Street.

I am barely out of the car when I see something that makes the Prom drop right out of my head. The front door is ajar.

My heart begins to race. Something terrible has happened, to my father, to my family. The front door is never left open. There is a line of deadlocks and chains attached to this door and they are meant to be used. The door is plywood over steel, made to my father's specifications before I was born. In our home there can be no unpleasant surprises.

I look around the side of the house. There are no strange cars parked in the drive, nothing on the street. The house is still, although an army of police or worse could be hiding behind the apple trees and sheds and sunken patios without us noticing. I look at Beau. He shrugs and says nothing. It would be prudent to climb back behind the wheel and drive off. That is the plan we've rehearsed, but it would mean leaving them all behind.

‘Keep the motor running,' I whisper. He nods.

From the drive, the house looks the same as always. It is tall, three storeys plus my attic. It is old. The fireplaces are brick and the rest of the house is timber, whitewashed, some planks running in one direction, some running in the other. On the right hand side I can see the conservatory but there is no movement there and the glass is dirty and streaked. I creep on to the patio, flatten myself against the front wall, dodge the peeling white cane furniture, a variety of faded cushions. Limp plants in painted terracotta, in mosaic, in plastic of all colours. There are cast-iron garden ornaments scattered at random, here a rusted rooster, there a dented lizard. There are no obvious footprints, the door bears no marks of boots or a battering ram. The hinges are intact. I peer down the hall. Along the faded Persian runner are piles of cardboard boxes. As I creep further along I see our livingroom full of picks and shovels, and hessian sacks and ropes and crates and nets.

‘Dad.' I speak quietly at first, but when he doesn't reply I try again, louder.

Finally he appears from the kitchen, tea towel over one shoulder. Ruby is close behind him. ‘Ah. My warrior queen returns,' he says, arms outstretched. ‘Tell me, what did our young Master Metcalf say?'

‘Dad. The front door was open when I got home. Wide open. Anyone could walk in.'

‘Was it? Odd.' He looks especially spiffy today. He is wearing a new silk cravat in blue and green tucked under his white shirt and tweed blazer, and his hair has a brilliantine shine. I think he has even lost a little weight. He walks to the end of the hall and closes the door after Beau comes in. ‘That must have been your brother,' he says. ‘I'll speak with him directly.'

My brother. Sam is sloppy about many things, but not about that. ‘Dad,' I say. ‘The locks.'

‘The locks? Of course.' And only then does he deliberately fasten each of them. ‘No need for that look on your face, young lady. If you saw the door was open you should not have come in. You should have gone directly to the safe house, and taken Beaufort with you. It might have been a drill, to rehearse our movements if we should become compromised. It behooves us to practise now and again.'

First Sam was to blame for leaving the door open. Now he has almost convinced himself it was deliberate. I bend down to look in one of the boxes. ‘And what is all this stuff ?' I say.

‘This?' He chuckles in a way that sets my teeth on edge, and takes my shoulders to move me aside. ‘No peeking. Not yet. This is the apex of my career, Della. This is the grandest, most magnificent scheme I have ever devised.'

‘You talk to him,' Ruby says. ‘He won't listen to me.'

I sit on the arm of the couch and rest my elbows on my knees. I'd never noticed before, but the leather is cracking and this part of the frame is coming away from the back. After all these years it might be ready to collapse under our weight. ‘What scheme?'

‘Ah,' he says, folding his arms. ‘That would be telling.'

‘Yes, Dad,' I say. ‘It would be telling. That's why I would be asking.'

‘See?' says Ruby. ‘He's impossible.'

‘No sense being premature about these things. Things must progress to their natural fruition. I just need a little longer to finalise my stratagem,' he says. ‘Beaufort is helping me, aren't you boy?' He winks at Beau, now standing in the hall.

‘Yes, Uncle Laurence,' Beau says, and I can see him stand a little taller and straighter with this knowledge that he has and I haven't. He folds his arms, too, the mirror of my father, and looks at me with something like defiance. I see now I should have answered his questions in the car.

‘That's not how it works,' I say. ‘That's not how you taught us. Every job is raised at the weekly meeting and we all decide whether to proceed. We don't go off by ourselves, you always said. It's not smart and it's not safe. That's one of your rules.'

He avoids my eyes. One of the cardboard boxes is partly open; he bends over and folds closed the flap so I can't see what's inside, then when he straightens again he holds one hand on the small of his back and puffs like he is blowing out candles.

‘Ask him how all this junk got here,' says Ruby.

I don't need to ask him. The look on Ruby's face tells me.

‘Dad. Did you have all this stuff delivered here? To our home address?'

He is fussing around his boxes and for a moment it seems he doesn't hear me. ‘Hmmm? Once in a lifetime opportunity, this is. The normal rules do not apply. Ruby worries for no reason.' He drops his voice to a whisper. ‘It's the change of life. Makes her edgy.'

Ruby throws her hands in the air and stalks back to the kitchen.

Our home address is never used for business, not ever. We have worked from post office boxes and self-storage units and vacant lots and empty houses and shops waiting to be leased, but we never use our home address for a job. We must be untraceable. And we are
so
careful. Uncle Syd is responsible for our props department, and only the most innocuous or easily hidden are allowed to stay here. Uniforms, decals for vans in the names of telecommunications and utility companies, identity tags, spare mobile phones and scanners and printers, paper of all types: these can stay, if they fold flat or have an innocent purpose. But nothing else.

Even in the glory days of the eighties when my father sold pallet upon pallet of slimming tea and we went to Portsea for a holiday with the profits and ate at posh restaurants every night, the tea never came here. It was always stored in a dusty anonymous warehouse where we would sit at trestle tables in a familial production line, one day packing and addressing and stamping boxes to be sent all over the world, the next day processing cheques and money orders and cash. The only slimming tea that made it here to Cumberland Street were the packets that Ruby brought home in her handbag and sipped religiously every night.

None of my father's jobs ever came here. The engine additive that doubled fuel consumption never came here. The insurance company brochures, the investment prospectuses, the deeds and flyers for the land on the Queensland island that was under water at high tide. None of it ever came here.

Nothing bigger than we can carry in our pocket or flush down the toilet, that is the rule. All my life I have followed the rules. And now he says the normal rules do not apply.

He teeters over to where I sit on the couch. My arms are folded. I glare.

‘Don't concern yourself, my dear,' he says, and he tousles my hair the way he did when I was a child. ‘I just need a little more time, and then I shall make a presentation that none of you shall soon forget. There's life in your old man yet.'

I open my mouth to lecture him, tell him that the rules are for him too but then I stop. For the first time I notice that his eyes are wet with fluid that looks thicker than tears and the bottom lid is puckered away from the eyeball. Rheumy eyes. Old-man eyes.

Tonight will be an extraordinary family meeting. I will present my revised plans for this increased offer from the Metcalf Trust. It is not too late to back out. It will be a long night and I should be relaxing. If we vote in favour of proceeding I'll barely have time to breathe for a week. I feel too restless to walk, too edgy to drive to the pool for a swim. I have already visited the library and my floor is covered with every book on evolutionary biology and camping that I could borrow. I try to read but until I know for certain that we will vote in favour of my plan, my attention wanders. Every so often I pace. I fluff my pillows, idly dust the window ledge with a tissue. I sit here in my bedroom, sketching plans and ideas.

I have spent my whole life in this room. It is still painted pale pink with bluebell wallpaper along the cornices. Almost everything was bought from Timothy's father—smart buying for furniture and clothes and other sensible things. Not so smart for electricals: one of the apple sheds is full of thirty years of broken toasters and laptops and stereos that bear the manufacturer's serial number, which is traceable. We can't take them for repair.

Here are my computer, printer and scanner. The shredder is in the corner. There is no rubbish bin. As soon as something is shredded, regardless of the inconvenience or the weather, it is walked to the compost heap and stirred among the vegetable peelings and rotten fruit. The wardrobe is cheap veneer with sticky-tape marks from the posters of pop stars I stuck to it in my teens. Inside it are business suits for when I'm a banker, furs for when I'm a millionaire, shabby peasant skirts for when I am a hippy who owns priceless oceanfront land down the coast and isn't worldly enough to know what to do with it but just requires a wealthy ‘friend' to pay a bribe to a planning official, usually played by Beau. He's a brilliant planning official. The bed is single for a little girl, country-style American oak with worn spots where it hinges to the bed head; the dresser is white reclaimed timber that was once merely distressed but is now hysterical. The bedside table is faded antique Queen Anne. The gold curtains clash with the teal carpet. The real crystal chandelier sparkles on the fake cane chair with cheesecloth cushion, on which sits a pile of teddy bears from my childhood.

Now I think how old this house is; that everything in it is old too. All the furniture is wearing and splitting and the curtains are thinning and the wallpaper is lifting and the carpet is a palette of mysterious stains. My father has a short attention span for household effects. We might have a painting for some months that he declares he loves, then suddenly it will vanish.
That old thing? Bored with it,
my dear, bored with it.
Once we had a dinner service handed down, if not through generations of our family, then certainly through generations of somebody's. Hand-painted Japanese ladies waving fans on bridges, porcelain so thin the light shone through. Ruby loved it. She would sip tea from a fragile cup and rest a biscuit on the matching saucer. She loved that dinner service, but it just vanished overnight.
Can't stand it another minute
, my father said.
Either it goes or I do.

I have lived in this house for so long I have not noticed it decaying around me. I am wearing, too. Slipping in and out of different names and lives grates away at my skin. I think about Daniel Metcalf, who is the one person all the time. How simple things must be for him. Like everything in this house, like everything in this room, nothing in my life matches.

‘I don't like it,' says Sam. He leans back in his chair and scratches his stomach.

‘I've met him. It's legit,' says Greta. She gives me a wan smile. She is supporting me in any way she can, after our little altercation earlier in the kitchen. At first she tried to defend her behaviour this morning with lame explanations about his money and the way he looked. I had calmed down by then. No threats were involved. I just carefully explained that if Daniel's attentions wander we will all get nothing and we will all miss out and everyone will know who is responsible. This is business. It is not personal.

And it is a wonderful business. We have taken from many of his kind over the years, a small way towards balancing the score of inherited privilege. I have only met Daniel Metcalf twice but I know him well, or as well as I need to. I have met many of his type: idle, with a sense of entitlement that seeps from their pores. No direction. So bored that spending a weekend in the forest with a bunch of scientists seems like a harmless lark.