The Good Daughter (16 page)

‘Good, thanks.’

‘Better not get too used to it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t cook you breakfast each morning, not on the bike.’ He smiles at her.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Do you want to come with me?’

‘Yes,’ she answers.

‘Don’t you need to think about it?’

‘No.’

There’s the sound of a door opening and someone coming out into the hall behind them. She watches Aden’s gaze grow guarded. There’s a smell of antiseptic. The floor creaks with someone’s weight. ‘Morning, Aden. Good day for the match.’

‘Teddy,’ Aden says.

‘Hello, Rebecca.’

Rebecca turns around. Teddy Redman. The deep voice would have given him away even if Aden hadn’t said his name. ‘Hi, Mr Redman.’

‘Been meaning to get out to see how you’re going, but with everything that’s happened I haven’t had the chance. I usually manage a bit of radio chatter with your dad, but I haven’t even had the time for that. I’m half expecting to be in trouble with him.’

He doesn’t wait for her response. He leaves through the back door. Rebecca watches him walk down the passage: a bearded man, overweight, one of those Cro-Magnon foreheads, nothing like his son – none of Luke’s clean-cut good looks. He’s in uniform – Rebecca’s gaze is drawn to the crisp, ironed seam of his blue pants, the buffed shine on his black shoes, his holster and the curved butt of his gun. He’s wearing sunglasses and pulling on a pair of leather gloves; he eases them gingerly over his bandaged knuckles.

Rebecca catches sight of Kara in the bedroom folding up the ironing board. A first-aid kit is open on the chair beside the bed.

Aden says, once Teddy’s footsteps have faded, ‘Who’s he been fighting?’

‘Ben,’ Kara answers frankly.

‘Go and wait in my bedroom,’ Aden says, turning to Rebecca. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

26

Zach lifts the rifle and lets off shot after shot into trees and fence posts. He walks and shoots whatever catches his eye. He can’t be forever putting reasons to the things he does – he blasts bits off any fucking thing because he fucking wants to. He fumbles ammunition, feels the copper bullets slip through his shaking fingers. He does it because he can’t think what else to do, because he can’t get his head around the reasons. He does it because he knows his father could reason anything away.

Zach reloads.

He sees the charred and broken stumps as the people they should be. He buries bullets into them, thinks how hitting them makes things better. It’s while reloading that he hears the dogs. He stops, turns and listens.

Free from the yard the dogs yelp excitedly. Up along the ridge they run in a pack, flashing in and out between the trees, wolf-like creatures cutting through the shadows into sunlight and then into shade again, up over rocks and down into washouts. They’re wild for a day. They’re acting instinctively: the thrill of the chase and the frenzy of the kill. Zach can almost feel their excitement. He can certainly envy their freedom.

He lowers the rifle.

He follows a well-worn sheep track through the trees. The track peters out and the bush stops as suddenly as it started. He walks on through open pasture for a while. The Kincaid property is big, but the original title had been massive. It went right up to the edges of town, as far east as the river, the town oval, the restaurant – the entire east suburb was once a part of it. To the west, the boundary skirted the next town. Kincaid ownership sunk deep into the valley and stretched to the base of the ranges. It was only after Zach’s grandfather died that the place was sliced up, subdivided, neatened to a more modest land holding. Zach’s father hadn’t been cashing in – he’d been adjusting, fitting in to modern-day thinking. One man alone should not control so much. A millionaire in the dollars and cents sense is more forgivable than one man sitting on a proverbial goldmine, with the chance of getting exponentially richer. But Zach’s father is right – never forgiving or forgetting is a small-town phenomenon; no-one moves on, no-one re-categorises or re-evaluates. It’s as though the Kincaids still own all the land. Zach stops a moment. To the left lies the shadier side of the property – the gently undulating hectares the sheep prefer to graze in the daytime. He makes his way down through the tussocks and into that.

Zach winds his way up a rocky hillside. Sheep startle and scatter in front of him. He reaches the highest piece of Kincaid land. Up here, once the terrain properly levels out, the first things to draw your attention are the blackberries. Zach’s father keeps on top of his weeds, but up here they’ve been left to grow wild – huge domed clumps, green, lush and thriving. They’ve run rampant. They form a fortress-like barrier on top of the small plateau. There’s a view right down to the homestead and river. Zach stands a moment staring down at the house and land.

There’s a small opening in the blackberries, a track into the heart of the weeds. Zach stops by the narrow passage through the canes. By trying to hide this place, his father has only made it more obvious. Zach crabs sideways through the gap. The long canes catch on his jumper. He stops to peel the branches off. The thorns scratch his face and the backs of his hands.

Inside the thick border of blackberry is a cluster of graves. It’s one of those traditional family plots, from a time when it was a person’s right to be buried on your own land, if you had the space, and the Kincaids had that. Room enough to do whatever they wanted. The graves are from another era, hidden under a carpet of weeds. The headstones are falling over and half sunken into the ground. The ornate iron fences are rusted. Trees creak overhead, although there’s not a breath of wind where Zach stands. He spends a moment looking around for any evidence of freshly turned earth. He eyes each thicket of weeds with suspicion. He picks his way across to the bigger headstone, and pushes away the tall grass to look at the name engraved:
Margareta Lucinda Kincaid
. Zach puts the sole of his boot flat against the gravestone and pushes. It might look as though it could be easily unearthed, but even with all Zach’s weight and might behind it the headstone doesn’t budge.

He steps back. He reads the dates: forty-four when she died.

Margareta Lucinda Kincaid was not cut out for life on the land – she had a
weak constitution
. She was not a good mother, not a good breeder – she only managed to give birth to the one son. The lifestyle killed her. Zach has his own thoughts on why his grandmother’s life ended early, and it has little to do with the style in which she lived and more to do with the style of man she lived with.

Zach walks to a small stone cross – a baby, stillborn. Ten years before his grandmother died. He walks to another small stone cross – a baby, stillborn, five years before his grandmother died. He stops in front of the last small stone cross. He has to clear the weeds to read it – another baby, stillborn, three years before his grandmother died. What is not mentioned on the gravestones, yet what is known within the family, is that all these dead babies were girls. Ben Kincaid, a boy, the last to be born of the eight children, survived and thrived. Funny that.

On a farm you have to come to terms with the harshness of life. The bare bones of living and dying are made real every day. Good and bad, right and wrong; it’s a farmer’s job to make tough decisions – which animal is best to keep, which animal is dog meat. Often the most humane thing to do is destroy a weak lamb. Or if it’s a strong, long-awaited young ram … then it gets to live.

Zach can well imagine his grandfather’s excitement when Ben Kincaid was born. A boy after all those girls. Relief barely tempered by the resulting death of his wife. She was laid to rest respectfully though, buried beside her babies who hadn’t made the cut; the benefit of being lord and master of your land, dishing out death, is that it creates the opportunity to be magnanimous.

Zach doesn’t find it surprising his grandfather’s grave is in the town cemetery. As much as it must have pained the old guy not to be buried on Kincaid land, he would have baulked at the thought of being put into the earth with this lot. So much for his
strong constitution
.

Zach steps out from the thick carpet of weeds. Burrs and grass seeds have stuck to his jumper. He picks at them. By touching his collar he’s put some burrs across his chest. He brushes at them. There’s a whole mess of them on the underside of his sleeve. He steps into the centre of a small clearing, and sees a pile of old shotgun cartridges beside a boulder. Zach goes across and nudges the casings with the toe of his boot. The coloured sides are faded by the sun and rain, but the brass, on the end, is not yet fully tarnished. Zach looks around. In the tall grass are the rusted handle of a billy and the burnt remains of a log. Zach sits on the boulder. Beneath his fingers, on the pale rock, are the brown stains of smeared blood, where someone has wiped their fingers on the porous surface, or maybe laid the carcass of a rabbit down, or accidently brushed the entrails across it. Zach reaches into the undergrowth and pulls up a torn and brittle Twisties packet from the roots of a young gum.

27

Rebecca visits the grave of her half-sister first. It might be the anniversary of her mother’s death, but children should always steal the limelight. Rebecca crouches down beside the small grave. It’s a full monument, but the child-size dimensions are easily seen. The thick slab is made of pink-flecked polished granite with white angels on every corner, the headstone is low and square. Etched into the headstone is the outline of an open book, and on the pages Cindy’s name is embossed in gold, with the relevant dates, five years apart. Not much else is written. No words can quite explain.

Rebecca puts a single rose in the grated space provided at the base of the headstone. The same niggling thought she always has returns to her – if only it wasn’t such a solid grave, Cindy Toyer might get to stretch her legs, wriggle her toes, grow a little, a few centimetres maybe … enough to fit a school dress. Rebecca can’t say exactly why she thinks this way – the dead don’t stretch and wriggle, they don’t grow, and they don’t get to do the things that they missed out on. It would be mighty creepy if they did. But the thought plays out each time she comes here. It’s unsettling to think of her sister as stuck. She has to remind herself that below the hard lines and strict edges of the granite is a plain wooden coffin. She soothes her mind with this, applies it like a balm over what must be a mild case of claustrophobia. She takes a breath and believes Cindy is free once the sides of her coffin begin to decompose.

There’s the sound of Aden walking up behind her. He stands one step back. He’s in his cricket whites, ready for the match. Rebecca walks with him to her mother’s grave.

‘It’s her ashes that are buried,’ she says as they draw nearer. She stands at the foot of the grave. ‘But she didn’t want to be scattered anywhere, or to be sat on a mantelpiece or put away in a cupboard. She wanted a headstone. She wanted people to read the dates and say,
How tragic – only thirty-four
. It’s so stupid. The whole funeral was meant to be exaggerated. She had these over-the-top quotes picked out, these crazy songs. She had time to plan it. She wanted her friend, Sharon Lambert, to get up and go on like her death was the biggest tragedy ever to the whole of mankind. So people would be sitting there thinking,
She wasn’t that great, was she? She didn’t do that? Are you kidding me?
You know –
Joni Toyer had a dream … Joni Toyer worked tirelessly for world peace …
The thing she wanted most, she said, was for someone to get up and walk out.’

Aden laughs. It’s a real laugh. Rebecca looks over her shoulder at him. His eyes shine with amusement. ‘Would have been good,’ he says.

‘We couldn’t do it though. We didn’t have the guts. Sharon Lambert said all the usual stuff. I don’t even know what she said. Dad really lost it when we got home.’

‘Do you think he planned to be away for the anniversary?’

‘I think so.’

They fall silent. There’s the sound of organ music coming from inside the church nearby. Girls in dresses and patent-leather shoes balance along the top of the post-and-rail fence close to the front doors. A group of boys stand huddled together out in the car park. Aden goes off to read other headstones, to give Rebecca some space. And Rebecca asks, under her breath, looking down at the grave, ‘So, Mum, do you like him?’

On the way home from the cemetery they stop by Nigel’s house. Aden says he has to pick up something before the game. He cuts the bike engine, kicks out the stand. The street is unusually quiet after the noise of the bike. There’s a ginger cat sunning itself on the path leading up to the front door. It flicks and snakes its tail in what looks to be annoyance at their loud arrival. Aden carries his bike helmet inside. Rebecca follows.

For a bachelor pad it’s a big modern home. It’s brick, with floor-to-ceiling windows. Inside it’s not furnished though, and that’s the difference, that’s what makes it feel less than what it is. Without pictures or photographs the walls are cold and austere. The plaster arches seem wasted on a bunch of local boys. The floorboards have a fine coating of dust except in the high-traffic areas, where they have a dull shine, interspersed with the tread of shoes and the sticky prints of bare feet. It’s as though no-one lives there, people simply walk around inside, walk through, stand in the kitchen, cross its empty rooms, and sit on the long orange-coloured couch, or on one of the camp chairs by the gas heater. Aden takes her helmet and puts it beside his on top of the fridge.