Magpie Hall (6 page)

I tried to imagine what kind of a man Henry had been, with his tattoos hiding under his Victorian clothes; what his wife had been like and how she had died; and what riches he had collected, then hidden away. I felt a strange connection to him through the hard-earned assemblage of animals and jars I had inherited, and knowing we shared a love of tattooing only made the feeling more acute. Suddenly I had an urge to know more about Henry and Dora, before the house was scrubbed clean of all their memories, along with Grandpa Percy’s. Now, though, I needed to get outside into the light and the air.

I was still wearing the black crepe vintage dress and tights I had slept in. By the kitchen door, I put on a pair of gumboots and a grey tweed riding jacket. I shoved my hands into the pockets, which were thankfully empty. I don’t know how I would have felt to come across the remnants of some departed person — a soiled handkerchief, or a sweet wrapper.

My breath fogged the air and the sound of the loose gumboots drumming on the path enveloped me. The skeletons of the poplar trees lining the front paddock were emerging as the leaves thinned, and a cloud of sparrows rose twittering from them as I passed. Beside them stood the windbreak, a solid wall of macrocarpas. Here the magpies nested, collecting straw and grass to make a home, but also barbed wire and pieces of old glass. Grandpa had showed me one of their nests once and it looked uncomfortable, to say the least.

I stopped to gaze over the paddock towards the river. Grandpa’s old nag Jimmy raised his head and gave a steamy snort, then went back to cropping the grass. Two magpie sentries strutted around him. The dark shape of Blossom the mare moved in the background. There was a time when the horses in this paddock would come running when they saw me, looking for treats and jostling each other, but these two
had no interest. I hoped that someone was looking after them.

I plucked the wire on the fence, but it made no discernible sound, nothing as haunting and musical as the note I had heard the night before and on that morning all those years ago. For a moment I thought I saw another shape in the distance, smaller than the others; but my pony, the animal on which I had learnt to ride as a child, was long dead. Just another ghost I had worked so hard to forget.

I turned towards the walled garden, where my grandmother would spend most of her days, pottering about with a cigarillo hanging from her mouth, her long grey hair immaculately twisted high on her head. She paid more attention to that hair than to anything else, as though her house could gather dust about her so long as she was well presented in her person. She always wore slacks and gumboots when she gardened, with a paisley shirt buttoned to the top and pearls under the collar. When I was little she sometimes let me come and sit with her while she worked, but she never asked me to help, not since I had pulled out half her herb garden, thinking the oregano and thyme were weeds.

Gram carried herself with elegance no matter what her task. I always felt that she thought we were all a bit beneath her somehow, and it showed when she’d had one too many brandies and we felt the sharpness of her tongue. The only time I really saw her soften was when she thought she was alone with Grandpa. I would see a look pass between them, or a tender touch on the wrist, but she seemed determined to keep the rest of the family from seeing that softer side, as if it might be regarded as a sign of weakness on her part.

The garden was overgrown, brown in some places where flowers had died off without being lovingly dead-headed, and in other places a riot of green weeds, strangling everything in sight. Sunflowers that had once stood bright and taller than I was were slumped and
desiccated. Once the B&B was in business, this could all be replanted, but I imagined my aunt and uncle would rather knock down the walls of the garden and turn it into a tennis court or a swimming pool — something easier to maintain and to use as an added attraction for those tourists. I imagined their sweaty bodies pounding the ground where Gram’s dahlias had been. I looked inside myself, poking around for some kind of emotion. But Gram had died more than five years ago, of lung cancer unsurprisingly, and any grieving I had done for her was mostly through watching Grandpa adjust to life alone.

I struggled down the path to the gazebo at the end, where I climbed the stairs and sat down on one of the wooden seats. From the raised vantage point, with the jungle of the garden in front of it, the house looked as though it was being reclaimed by nature. At any moment I expected the earth to rise up with a sigh and drag it underground. The tower jutted up against the grey sky. I used to go up there when I was a child and pretend to be Rapunzel, or some other princess locked up there. From the tower I could keep an eye on everyone and everything — the other kids, Gram in the garden, the horses sheltering under the trees from the sun or the wind or both, Grandpa, wherever he might be. But I had stopped going after the year I turned thirteen.

The long grass shook and a figure burst out from the undergrowth. The world tilted for a moment while I placed myself back in the garden and remembered I was not the only person on earth.

‘Jesus, you scared me!’ I hadn’t seen Sam the farmhand for two years, and then we’d only waved to each other in passing as he rode the back of the ute up the hill to the shearing sheds.

‘Sorry,’ Sam said, and looked at the ground in front of me. ‘I brought you these.’ He held out a blue ice-cream container, but seemed wary of approaching to actually put it in my hands. So I stood
and moved the few steps to him. A clutch of eggs tilted the container — six of them, brown and white, one speckled.

‘Oh, thanks.’ I took them from him.

‘Yeah, I was going to bring you a rabbit, but Josh said you’re a vegetarian.’

‘I am. How’d you get the rabbit?’

‘Got caught in a possum trap. It’s fresh, though. Only happened this morning.’ He narrowed his eyes, suspicious that a vegetarian would be taking an interest in a carcass. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Are you going to eat it?’

‘Nah. I’m not much of a cook. I can skin it all right, but all those bones. Yuck. I’ll give it to the dogs.’

‘Bring it anyway, if you want. Maybe I’ll stuff it.’

‘Oh, right. Yeah, Josh mentioned that too. Taking after the old man, then? Funny hobby for a girl. Specially a vego one.’

‘Did you want to sit down?’ I gestured to the seat, then sat down myself. Sam stood there, scuffing the toe of his gumboot on the bricks. His hair stood up almost straight on his head, fixed there no doubt by sweat and lanolin from the sheep. His Swanndri was big on him, and came down to his knees, a baggy plaid dress.

‘Nah, I’d better be getting back. You look like something out of an old story book sitting there.’

‘Which one?’

‘Dunno.
The Secret Garden
, maybe? You’re all old-fashioned looking with that haircut. And that dress! Great with the gumboots. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought you were a ghost come to show me another world.’

‘Maybe I am,’ I said.

Sam took out a tobacco pouch and stood silently rolling a cigarette.

‘Thought you had to get back?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ he said lazily, and turned around as he lit the cigarette. ‘See ya.’

‘See ya. Thanks for the eggs.’ I watched his hunched shoulders as he walked away. He glided through the overgrown garden as if he were part of it.

I cradled the container of eggs in one arm and lightly touched them. Still warm.

Bags of food were strewn over the kitchen benches where I had left them the day before. Looking at the eggs reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since I arrived. The room was cold and empty. Mrs Grainger, the housekeeper, would have had a fire going by now, and been moving around as if on wheels, baking this, cooking that, the kettle freshly boiled. She looked after Grandpa well, gave the house a warmth and friendliness that he needed. I wondered sometimes if Mrs G wasn’t more like a wife to Grandpa than Gram was. Certainly after Gram died the housekeeper was a huge comfort. I suspected that towards the end she might have been more to him than that, although the one time I brought it up with my family they had looked horrified. When he became ill, he wouldn’t let her look after him any more than he would let us — that wasn’t what she was paid for, he said. He left her a tidy sum in his will, and she told us she had a fine lot of savings to show for thirty years living in the country with nowhere to spend her money. She had children of her own anyway, to care for her — she was in good hands and I didn’t need to worry about her. I was allowed to miss her, though — the buttery smell of porridge cooking on the stove, served not with brown sugar but with maple syrup.

I put the eggs on the wide bench, suddenly starving. After poaching a couple and eating them with fresh bread because I couldn’t find the toaster, I put away the rest of the groceries and went back up to my room.

My thesis sat on the desk, taunting me. I was terribly behind schedule, what with Grandpa’s illness, and death, and then the realisation that things with Hugh were a mess. I had gathered all my research material and ordered my thoughts, but now the work of putting it on paper had to begin in earnest, beyond the scribblings I had made to date.

I sat at the desk and was going over my notes when I heard a noise downstairs. Instantly I was on my feet, moving towards the staircase, much bolder than I had been in the middle of the night.

‘Hello?’ a male voice called from the kitchen.

‘Coming!’ I wasn’t really frightened, but I decided to lock the door after whoever it was had left.

Sam stood in the middle of the room with a sack in his hand. He looked as though he had no intention of coming any further than that, which I appreciated. He had removed his gumboots at the door and his big toe poked through one of his thick grey socks.

‘Sorry,’ he said, unnecessarily, but again it made me warm to him. ‘I’ve got that rabbit you were after.’ He held out the sack and I took it from him.

‘Thanks.’

We stood looking at each other a moment, before he started to back away and turn.

‘Cool,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it.’

It was my turn to apologise. ‘I’m just doing some work.’ I swung the sack. ‘Thanks, though.’

‘Sure.’ He moved to the door, and turned back to face me. ‘I was
sorry about your granddad. We all were. He was real nice.’

‘Thanks. Yes, he was.’

‘What’s going to happen to the farm? Now that he’s gone?’

‘Don’t you know?’ I was surprised nobody had told him.

‘Know what?’

‘It’s being sold. The family’s selling up. I thought Joshua would have told you.’ But perhaps Joshua didn’t know either and I had really put my foot in it.

Sam just looked at me, and I could see him processing the information. He breathed out through his teeth.

‘Fucking fantastic.’ He picked up his gumboots and walked outside without putting them on, slamming the door behind him.

When I opened the big deep freeze to put the sack inside, it felt as though I was lifting the lid on a coffin. Nobody had emptied the freezer since Grandpa had died. Packages of meat and bags of vegetables were piled inside, along with unlabelled containers of liquid and what looked like stewed fruit. I went to close it again when a couple of items caught my eye — clear plastic bags containing whole animals. It was difficult to see exactly what they were without defrosting them, but they were small and furred — stoats perhaps. A larger, darker mound could have been a possum, although I knew that most of the trapped possums were sent off to my uncle, whose company dealt in possum fur.

As I passed through the hallway I glanced into the living room. There was something missing from the side table — the huia. I looked at the spot where it had been and tried to think whether I had done something with it, but I couldn’t remember. The chair was where I
had left it after retrieving the bird from the high shelf, and when I looked up, there it was, back on its perch.

Someone was playing games with me. Sam? He looked as though he hadn’t ventured any further than the kitchen. But if not Sam, then who? I felt uneasy then, as though someone might be watching me from somewhere in the house.