The Silent Inheritance (28 page)

Herod sat, and the woman laughed. ‘I’m Sylvia,’ she said. ‘Sylvia Moon,’ and she offered her hand across the gate.

She was the only moon out tonight. He hadn’t shaved in a week, was wearing a tweed cap, and she was no chicken. With luck, her night sight was failing. He took a step forward and shook her hand.

‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Jack James.’

The dog didn’t like his name or his touching of its owner. It snarled.

‘I wasn’t aware he’d grow so big when my daughter gave him to me. He was such a cute puppy,’ she said. ‘Once he gets to know people, he’s more likely to lick them to death than snarl.’

‘It bailed me up at my back door the other day, and I would thank you to keep the thing in your yard.’

‘That’s easier said than done out here. You’d be very welcome to pop in for a coffee sometime. Once he becomes familiar with your scent—’

‘I’m something of a hermit,’ he said.

‘I thought I was until I moved out here. Solitude can become rather lonely, I’ve found. I lost my husband three months after we started building that house. I blame the stress of selling up and building. He had a heart attack on the golf course.’

‘I noted the delay in construction,’ he said.

‘We shouldn’t have done it. That piece of land looked like our utopia when we bought it. We lived in St Kilda for most of our married life, and after years of fighting the crowd and traffic, we were so looking forward to the silence of this place. It can be deafening – the silence.’

‘My occupation demands solitude,’ he said.

‘What do you do, Jack?’

‘I write,’ he said.

‘Are you published?’

‘Well published in recent years,’ he said.

‘Would I know any of your books?’

‘You won’t find my name on the bestseller list.’

‘I taught art until last Christmas, at a girls’ school. I like to call myself an artist now. I did a painting of your old house a few years ago and named it
Solitude.
It’s all we wanted back then
.’

The dog, bored with the conversation, wanted to go, and was weighty enough to get what it wanted. She laughed, again invited him to pop in for a coffee, then continued on her way.

He stood watching their shapes disappear, disturbed by her, and weary. He hadn’t slept well for a week.

He parked in front of the garage, locked the car and walked across to the house.

She was awake. ‘I dreamed that the police caught you, and were torturing you to make you tell them where I was,’ she said.

He placed two cans, two bottles of water down, and was reaching between the bars, shaking the solidified contents of a can of spaghetti into her bowl, when like a striking snake, she grasped his wrist.

Her action shocked him. His jaw slackened and his teeth released their grip on the torch. For an instant more he had its light, then it hit the bars, bounced to the floor, and the light died.

Locked in with her in this noisome space, in a blacker dark than night, the black crawled up his back to his brain. He broke her grip on his wrist against the bars and turned to the door, his hands feeling, finding foam but not the doorknob. Higher, lower he felt, and no doorknob.

‘Are you lost?’ she asked, and the little bitch chuckled.

‘Die soon,’ he snarled, shaken by Sylvia Moon, by her bastard of a dog, by his week in hell and his disorientation.

And the doorknob was in his hand and he was out, and lost in the dark of his kitchen, but he got his hand against the wall. It guided him to the sink, which guided him to the door, and from the door he found the mantelpiece and his matches.

*

She’d snatched up that can he’d dropped, afraid its beans would spill. It was spaghetti. Most of it was still jammed into the can. She drank its sauce, more thirsty than hungry, then placed it in the bowl and reached for a bottle of water, and drank too much of it because she needed too much. For the last two days she’d been rationing her water, pretending she was lost beneath a desert sun in the middle of Australia, that her water had to last until she got back to civilisation.

He’d come. He always came. She didn’t know why she’d grabbed his wrist. Hadn’t even known she was going to do it until she’d done it. Maybe she’d wanted to prove to herself that he was only a man and not the monster of her dreams. She hadn’t dreamt the police were torturing him. That was her favourite daydream. They ripped his fingernails out, stuck cattle prods on his private parts and he screamed more than she’d ever screamed.

His wrist had felt like a man’s. She hadn’t been able to get her fingers around it. If she had, he wouldn’t have broken her grip as easily. It had given him a fright. She’d heard his breathing change, heard his fumbling for the door.

The dark didn’t worry her, not now. Running out of water did. For two days she’d only been allowing herself tiny sips, and she’d only had about ten tiny sips left in the last bottle. It was water though, and, fresh or not, her body needed it. She put the lid on her new bottle and drained the old before shaking the spaghetti into the bowl.

She only ever ate half of what he gave her, then the other half in the morning. Nan Lane had never left food sitting out of the refrigerator overnight but there were bigger problems here than bacteria multiplying, and anyway, anything that multiplied in here was her own, and she was more worried about what he put in her food than her own germs.

He’d put something into the last lot of beans, some sort of sleeping medicine, and it wasn’t the first time either. He’d put her to sleep with something the night he’d taken her school uniform and shoes, but the night of the dog, she’d been yelling at it between mouthfuls, then it just sort of became too much trouble to bother yelling, and the next thing she’d known the grey comet was back and birds were dancing and pecking on the roof and singing. They always sang at around the same time that she saw the first splodge of comet.

Then she’d proved that he was drugging her, because she’d found grapes in her bowl of leftover beans, and her mouth had been watering for one, but by the time she’d finished the beans and licked the bowl clean, she’d forgotten the grapes and gone to sleep again – which had made those grapes last longer.

They’d tasted like paradise, like pockets of sugar and water. She could have eaten the entire bunch, ten times over. He’d given her thirty-eight big fat grapes. She’d counted them, had allowed herself ten that first day, not to scoff but as treats, maybe one per hour, and done the same the next day, and the next, then pigged out on the rest because one of them had started to go rotten.

Grapes were stuffed with kilojoules: about ten big grapes had around three hundred kilojoules in them. Her mother knew how many kilojoules were in everything. She’d only ever allowed herself to eat six grapes in a day.

She used to say that the body only required a certain amount of kilojoules to keep its organs working and that eating more than it required made you fat. She hated fat people. A can of beans contained about sixteen hundred kilojoules. Including the drugged beans, she’d eaten three cans in a week, plus the grapes, which levelled out at around five hundred kilojoules a day, which wasn’t enough, though her stomach had learnt to call it enough. She’d eaten too much the night he’d given her the chicken and chips – and the coleslaw, which had tasted better than paradise.

Her mother would have died if she’d seen her stuffing that chicken in, stuffing that pile of chips while they’d been hot then licking coleslaw from the party plate.

She ate anything he gave her. She’d promised herself she’d do that the first day she’d got her head together, had promised herself too that she wouldn’t waste water crying.

Tears were an admission of defeat, her father said. ‘We’re not defeated, Dano,’ he’d said the last day she’d spoken to him. His court date was 22 April. It must have been April by now. If he didn’t find her soon, he’d have to cancel that court date.

He’d be looking for her. So would Grandpa, who had probably called up the whole Australian army to search. She could almost see him sitting in his Jeep, barking orders.

Die soon
.

She wasn’t going to. She had water, a full stomach of spaghetti, which was also stuffed with kilojoules, and more left for breakfast, and two unopened cans of something.

Wished one of them contained peach halves, or pineapple, apricots, even plums. One might. He’d given her grapes. Probably not. She was lucky he’d put the cans and water down before she’d grabbed his wrist or he mightn’t have given her anything.

Shouldn’t have done it. He had to be some sort of mad to do something like this – and he was still out there. She could see his light seeping beneath the door and hear his footsteps.

She heard every sound now, heard a dozen different sorts of birds at different times of day. She heard trucks too, and that dog. Heard a helicopter one day and convinced herself that it was the police or Grandpa in an army helicopter. It hadn’t landed.

His slamming door sounded like Grandpa’s screen door—

And she heard that door again, and he came in again, with a big torch. He didn’t shine it on her, but on the floorboards, and she could see the shape of him, see his shoes, the bottoms of jeans.

Her eyes feasting on sight, she didn’t immediately name what she saw where that greyish splodge of comet came to tell her that it was morning. She didn’t name it until the torch lit that place again. It was a hole in one of the floorboards, near his foam wall, a longish splintery break.

His light moved to where he put her cans and water bottles, then his hand reached down, and she thought he was going to take her water.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

But he’d picked up the narrow-beamed torch he’d dropped when she’d grabbed his wrist. It was just a tiny one, not much fatter than a biro. It had rolled between the end of the cage and the wall, and she could have reached it. Should have looked for it. Could have shined its light in his face the next time he came in and seen what he looked like.

A lot of good that would do. If she knew what he looked like, he’d never let her go.

He wouldn’t anyway.

Die soon
, he’d said.

When he picked up her empty bottles, she held her breath, scared stiff he’d take the full ones. Cowards fed on fear. He was a coward or he wouldn’t pick on kids, so she did what she always did when she was scared stiff.

‘If people can’t get out in the sun they need vitamin D,’ she said. ‘It’s in fish. Tuna and sardines come in cans with ring-pull tops – and fruit.’

He didn’t reply. His light showed him the doorknob and he was gone, and really gone this time, because she heard the key turn in the lock, then that screen door slam, which meant that he was leaving.

Sat listening for his car to start. She always heard it. Always heard it coming before it got here too, and listened now for the motor to fade away into the distance.

The straw rustled when she moved, but she got to her knees, then stilled again, straining to hear what wasn’t out there. Didn’t know what was out there.

She heard the dog. Not close though. He’d been right beneath her the day of the grapes, so close she’d felt its bark coming up through the boards, and the more she’d yelled, the more it had barked. She’d learnt something from that day; she was in a house that had space beneath it.

Where there was one house, there were others. Where there was a dog, there was an owner – unless it was a wild dog. Australia had wild dogs. It didn’t belong to him, which had been pretty obvious. He’d yelled and banged things like a crazy man.

That dog could have come from anywhere. They had acute hearing, and could smell things from a mile away. If he’d got his nose to that comet hole, he would have smelt her. She couldn’t smell much now – except when she took the lid off her bucket, which he never emptied.

She’d secreted the lid of a baked beans can beneath the straw so she could cut her hair. It hadn’t been any good for that, but was effective at cutting his foam rubber walls. She’d got a skinny bit of it off and was working on a decent-sized pillow now, which, if she ever got it cut, she should be able to drag between two of the bars. It was pliable.

Prisoners in the old days had survived in dark dungeons with rats chewing on their toes and nesting in their hair. People captured by terrorists survived, and she would too, unless he drugged her and drowned her. She had to distrust everything he gave her, test a bit before she ate the lot, and if she started feeling like she wanted to sleep, stop eating.

The first time he’d put his sleeping stuff in her food, she’d felt herself being pulled away and she hadn’t even cared. She’d cared when she’d woken up and her shoes and dress were gone. She’d panicked, thought paedophile, and naked photographs on the internet. The second time, he hadn’t taken her clothes off, or if he had, he hadn’t changed them. Maybe he’d just wanted to stop her yelling.

Wished her father would find her before 22 April and get her out and take her home to America. Wished they’d never left, that Nan and Pop Lane were still alive over there. Wished …

Nan Lane used to say that wishing for the moon wouldn’t make it fall into your lap. ‘If you want the moon, get out there and lasso it, Dano,’ she’d said.

She’d got herself a pillow with that baked beans lid, and now she wanted a bigger one so she was cutting a bigger one. It was something to do.

There were six bars on the short sides, strong bars, wider then her thumb with about twelve or fifteen centimetres between each. The long sides had nine bars. They were her calendar. She’d counted off the days on one short, one long side and was around the bottom corner now. Didn’t know how many days she’d lost in screaming herself hoarse but should probably add three more bars which probably meant that she had about two more weeks before 22 April.

Prisoners did exercises to fill their days. She couldn’t do much, but she conjured up Michelle from
The Biggest Loser
most days and did lift-ups on the top bars, and push-ups. She’d never been able to do proper push-ups, but could now.

She’d watched television the first Friday they’d spent at Forest Hill, only because her mother had gone to bed with The Crow, like, a wall away, and because she’d wanted to annoy them. She’d turned the volume up and sat until after one o’clock watching a film about a prisoner who’d spent his life escaping, being caught and being brought back to a worse cell. He’d been in one with bars for a roof once, and had been half-starved, too, but he’d exercised.