Fall Girl (27 page)

I never imagined I would end up fighting with my family this way. And all because of this slip of paper I keep in its plain white envelope under my pillow when I sleep, and folded inside my bra when I work on the farm. This is not for sentimental reasons. There is nothing of his handwriting on the front, only the inside. It does not bear my name at all. I have opened it a number of times, and closed it again, and lifted the flap little by little so it doesn't tear, then resealed it.

I am happy that Ruby at least will see me. When I go back to Melbourne to meet her on Friday I will bring the envelope with me, but not for sentimental reasons. Just because I cannot bear to let it out of my sight.

If Ruby didn't know I was coming she would not recognise me. My jeans are impossibly stained and worn to shredded holes above one knee. Mrs Jervis found this old flannel shirt and singlet in her rag bag and before handing them to me she checked over every inch. She was looking for any marks that might be used to trace the clothes back to the farm if I was captured. I'm almost tempted to go into town and have her name and address tattooed on my skin, just to see the look on her face.

I sent away for these boots weeks ago, charged to the Jervises' account, because I had no shoes at all when I arrived. The emerald dress I arrived in has long since vanished. I cannot believe anyone would throw out something so beautiful, but the pictures of their daughter on the mantel show a woman twice my size so it cannot have gone to her. Somehow I cannot mourn for this one dress among everything I have lost. The Jervises have given me fifty dollars for my trip today. Very generous, considering they have had my labour for weeks now and paid me nothing. They are hoping I do not come back.

On the walk from the train station, I realise I have never travelled down Cumberland Street on foot before. The houses are very close together and surprisingly small, but neat. There can't be room for more than two or three people in each one. When I get to where our house should be, I stop. I've made a mistake. Lost my way, surely. This can't be where I've spent my entire life.

The real estate agent's board on the front looks out of place and is almost as big as the whole bunkroom back at the farm, but it isn't that. The sign shows a large picture, not of the house itself or any of the rooms inside. Instead it's a drawing of the block with the dimensions written in large type.
Calling all developers!
it says.
Once
in a lifetime subdivision opportunity!
Again the repercussions of my decision are here in front of my face, in real estate agent-speak, in bold. Not just our family, but our entire house is to be destroyed without my lifting a finger to save it.

I walk down the drive. Everything is deserted, the house locked up, the windows tiny and dirty. The bars on them are so thick; I had never noticed. It was dark inside the house, I realise now. We always had the lights on even in the middle of the day. The paint is peeling. There are spiders' webs under the eaves and in the back corner the guttering has come away from the house. There is a dull stain where water from the roof has run down the timber.

Down the slope to the backyard I see the sheds half falling down. It looks like a tip and everywhere is the sweet decaying smell of rotten apples.

It is just two o'clock. I take the key from the small box hidden at the base of the third tree. The cellar door at the back of the house creaks as I pull it open. It is dark inside and dusty, but I find my way along the passage past my father's office. I touch the doorknob but know I could not bear to go inside, so instead I go up through the trapdoor. The curtains are all drawn and flecks of dust float through the air in the chinks of sunlight. These rooms are where I was born and raised and learned my craft. This is where all my memories live. I want to touch every surface, pick up every object and hold it in my hand. Each vase and trinket and cushion.

I think of the smallest things: the Chokitos that Uncle Syd would bring home for me when I was small. The way Ava would make my salad with mayonnaise instead of the vinaigrette everyone else preferred. Even Greta. Now I can only think of the games we played with our dolls, the way we would make cubbies by throwing a sheet over the dining chairs. I would climb the trees in the backyard with Anders and Beau and we would race to see who could reach the highest. The memories of Julius and Sam and Ruby and my father are more intense. I know that if I begin to think of them I will never stop. I will stand forever right here in the hall, covered in dust, unable to move.

And it is not just this house, and it is not just these people. I have suspected for some time and now it is certain: we are like the Tasmanian tiger itself. We are extinct. Those grand days of my father's are gone. Con artists are no longer glamorous and persuasive, with charming personalities and wits like lightning, travelling the world, courting trust. We were once beautiful, gracious. We made castles in the air, using nothing but our imaginations. Now we have been succeeded by spotty teenagers and organised crime lackeys, hacking or stealing identities or sending emails so unbelievable that it is only by dint of sheer volume that anyone is taken in at all. There is surely no skill in it. It is right that we should fade away. People will always strive to give away their money but the world has no room for us anymore.

All at once I see in a darkened corner my father's favourite chair. There is a shadow in it. Someone is sitting there. My knees almost fail beneath me: it is like the ghost of my father is here, watching me. I blink and take a step closer. It is not my father. It is Daniel.

My first thought when I see him is to run, like I did before. The front doors are locked from the outside but I could make it back down the trapdoor and perhaps through the trees, over the back fence. I am fitter than the last time. Wirier. These clothes are better suited for flight. But my arms feel heavy and my eyes feel wet and I just cannot run, not anymore. Last time I managed to escape, yet I still dream of him every night so what is the use? I cannot get away. It is pointless to try. I lean back against the wall and shut my eyes.

‘Hello Della,' he says.

I shake my head. This is just as impossible as if it were my father's ghost, sitting there talking to me. I was so careful. I was always so careful.

‘How did you find me?'

‘“Hello Daniel”,' he says. ‘“It's been too long. What have you been up to, since I locked you in your bedroom and ran out of your house in the middle of the night?”'

His body. Every cell, every hair. If I took half a dozen steps forward and stretched out my arms, I could touch him.

‘I have your shoes in my car around the corner, and your underwear. If you're in a Cinderella kind of mood.'

He is resting his elbows on the armrests with his fingertips together, relaxed, but then he leans forward. ‘God, you're so thin. I imagined seeing you a hundred times a day but in my mind you didn't look like this.'

I look down at my hands, my jeans. Work boots, for heaven's sake. He is imagining a woman in a green dress with black heels, another person from a long time ago. I sit opposite him, sink into the couch, cover my forehead with my hands.

‘You can't have this address. No one has ever found us. There's no way you could have traced anything back here. I don't understand.'

‘Details, I see. You want to talk about details,' he says. ‘Fair enough. It was the forms. At the national park. The camping permit. I drove back down there. The rangers were very helpful when I explained who I was and what I wanted. They let me look at their records.'

‘No.' I swallow, blink my eyes, try to stop shaking. ‘I remember signing those forms. I used fake details. That's not a mistake I would make.'

‘You didn't make a mistake. You used fake details all right,' he says. ‘But Timmy didn't.'

‘Timothy.'

‘He used his real name, his real address. I went to his house. We had a long talk. Narrowly escaped buying a watch. Greta says hi, by the way, and if she ever sees you again she's going to make you sorry you were ever born. That's her name, isn't it? Your cousin. Greta, not Glenda.'

My neck feels weak. I'm not sure it will continue to support my head. Timothy. I can almost see him now, in the cramped ranger's office, scribbling his real details on that form in regulation block letters, tongue between his teeth. All my effort, all my hard work. All unravelled by Timothy.

‘No sign of Julius, but I expect he had his laptop set up somewhere else. Flat out, probably.' Daniel crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. He has won. I have lost. ‘If he's ever interested in becoming a scientist, the Zoology Department would be happy to have him. You tell him that.'

‘You'll have to tell him yourself.' I pull the envelope out of my back pocket, smooth it between my fingers. ‘Here. This is what you want. Take it.'

I reach out one arm and hand it to him. He shakes it, holds it to his ear like it might explode then he rips one end off the envelope and tips it upside down. Out tumbles a wave of confetti: the cheque is shredded into tiny pieces of paper as small as my fingers could tear. They drift onto his lap and the chair and the floor and make a white mosaic against the rug.

‘That's not what I want.' He looks up. ‘That's not why I tracked you down.'

‘I didn't cash it.'

‘And I didn't cancel it,' he says. ‘So why all the little pieces?'

I pull at the flannel of my sleeve, try to smile. ‘I've been on a farm. Wearing these. I thought I might weaken and make an emergency visit to a day spa or a dress shop. Call it insurance against future bad judgment.'

He scoops some of the little cheque pieces up in one hand and sprinkles them to the other. ‘The whole point of this operation was to get this cheque, wasn't it? And now you don't want it?'

My legs won't be still now so I stand and walk over to the fireplace. The mantel is dusty. I trace my fingers along it.

‘I thought you were fair game,' I say. ‘I didn't realise you were pretending as well.'

He laughs, then. ‘I'm glad I gave you that impression. That room was no end of trouble to set up.'

His words seem to drift on the still air of the room, floating like the dust motes. It takes a while for them to reach my consciousness. ‘Set up? What do you mean “set up”?'

‘You think you're the only one who can pretend? It's some bylaw? Della Gilmore is allowed to make things up, but the rest of us have to tell the truth?' He is sitting there in my father's chair like he has been busting to tell me all this. Like it's the greatest joke ever and he can barely keep from laughing. He's grinning now, like a kid, like a child who's jumped out from behind a door and yelled boo.

‘You should have seen your face when I got back to the diningroom.'

Set up.
‘How did you know I'd go up there?'

‘I didn't. But I thought if I gave you the opportunity, you wouldn't be able to resist having a look around. You got me out of the way just before I disappeared on a long phone call.'

I shut my eyes, summon my memories, everything he said early that morning, everything I did. ‘But what about the tooth? You said I made a mistake. That I should have picked up the tooth, the one I found in the park, wearing gloves. To preserve the DNA. How did you know about that?'

‘I saw it on
CSI
.' He's still smiling. Dimples I had never noticed before appear in his cheeks. He stands, walks over to me near the fireplace and leans on it with one elbow. Mirror behaviour, like I was the mark and he was the artist. ‘Don't think it was easy. I had to work fast. Those books were hell to round up in one day. Five or six separate shipments, by taxi from every store I could get on the phone. There was dust everywhere. The cleaners only left ten minutes before you arrived.'

I shake my head. ‘No. You went to Harvard. I saw your degrees.'

‘That was the easiest bit. I hired a freelance designer, but in retrospect I could have managed myself. Next time, maybe.'

I close my mouth, shake my head. I feel like my father loading shovels onto a truck.

‘I had to rent that copy of
Origin of Species
. It was exorbitant, let me tell you. From friends of the family, but that didn't help. I had to wear white gloves the whole time and sign away my first born if it was damaged. For a while I didn't think they'd take the risk.'

I took a deep breath. ‘But you convinced them.'

‘Ah. Yes. You see, I had an argument no one can resist. I told them it was an affair of the heart.'

The single bed in my attic room is small for two people. Often Daniel's feet hang over the end and once I hit my head on the wall. We make love slowly, languid but relentless, without the desperate urgency of the first time. Like we have time for all things now. After a while, we sneak down to the kitchen and find the preserves in the pantry, big jars of peaches and apricots laid down by Ruby and Ava. I open one; the lid gives way with squelch. We sit on the kitchen bench, me in my dressing gown, him in his shirt and undies. We eat peach halves with our fingers and drip the juices in the sink. I tell him stories about the house, show him this and that. If I tell him, there will be someone else who remembers it. Even when the house is gone. Mostly I talk and he listens, but there is still one thing I need to know.

‘Did you really see a Tasmanian tiger when you were a boy?'

He kisses the palm of my hand. ‘I thought you must have known about that.'

‘Well did you?'

‘Does it matter?'

‘Tell me what happened,' I say. ‘Tell me the truth.'

He talks for a long time, as if to show me he has nothing left to hide. After a while the sun goes down and I light a dozen candles in holders and we move to the sittingroom floor so the light can't be seen from outside. I don't interrupt.