The Silent Inheritance (3 page)

And Crow was looking at Sarah, speaking at her. ‘… your supreme effort during these last disruptive months,’ he said.

Her
supreme effort
?
These last disruptive months
? There were better words to describe what had gone on in this office since December. Sarah had worked back with Bob Webb until ten o’clock, three nights in a row, to get the payroll done – so he wouldn’t have to cancel his New Zealand holiday. And while he was away she’d been acting payroll officer and general workhorse.

Knew every facet of Crow’s office. Her computer gave her access to information she didn’t want to have – like Jackie’s loan, like how every month, half of her wage went to repay the bank, which didn’t leave her enough to live on.

Sarah deducted only superannuation from her own wage. Most months her account at the Commonwealth Bank grew. Had it been larger, she would have walked out. It wasn’t. She couldn’t, or not until she found another job.

Glanced at Bob Webb, who must have known Crow’s decision this morning, if not yesterday. He could have warned her.

He was looking at his shoes. Black lace-ups, rubber soles, well polished.

She couldn’t see Crow’s shoes. She could see Barbara Lane’s. She wore gorgeous shoes, owned a pair to match every outfit.

Cut Bob Webb out of the frame of those windows and Crow and Barbara looked like actors in a daytime soap opera, too perfect to be real. Bob was a poor match, short, with reddish brown hair. And he must have felt her eyes on him. He looked up, caught her eye and swallowed hard – and he looked like a mullet who’d nibbled around the bait for so long he’d ended up with the barbed hook stuck in his throat.

‘Get your application in,’ he’d said before he’d left for his holiday. She’d told him it was no use and why it was no use. She’d told him how Annette had been promoted over her.

‘I’ll push it through for you,’ he’d said.

She’d given up her own holidays for him – or maybe she’d given them up to prove to Crow that she was a team player, and could handle the job.

Could have handled it two years ago, which made today so much worse. She’d trained Annette, a temp brought in to take over her workstation while she’d had a month off. Before she’d returned, the old payroll officer had walked out and the job had been offered to Annette. Crow didn’t have a lot of luck with his payroll officers.

And he was done. Dismissed, Sarah, last in, was the first out, Jackie beside her, Rena, fair, fat and fifty beside Jackie.

‘What the hell is wrong with his head?’ Rena said.

‘It’s in her pants,’ Jackie replied.

Sarah was seated at her workstation, her hands on the keyboard, when she felt the hairy huntsman on her shoulder. She shrugged it off and turned to face Bob.

‘You’re getting a pay rise,’ he said.

‘Is he supplying her with a house too?’ Jackie asked.

‘The company agreed to provide a house before Mrs Lane moved down from the Sydney office,’ Bob said. ‘And like you, Mrs Jefferson, I’m paid to work, not to question my employer’s decisions.’

‘Confucius say, man who stand with foot on both side of barbed-wire fence end up singing soprano,’ Jackie said, and she turned back to her screen.

‘You’ll be working with Mrs Lane from Monday,’ Bob said to Sarah. ‘She’ll be coming in five days a week.’

Then gone, as silently as he’d arrived.

‘Take a week of sickies,’ Jackie advised. ‘Let him train her.’

She could. She had weeks of accumulated sick days, or she could wait until April and get another job. She’d have four weeks in April. She’d find something, and today, cleaning public toilets looked better than this place.

Four thirty before she could get out – and Barbara Lane was waiting at the lifts, texting on her mobile. With no intention of riding down with her, Sarah stilled her feet while searching her bag for her sunglasses. She found them, then through their darkened lens studied Crow’s new senior payroll/accounts officer, who would have looked more at home on a catwalk than behind a computer. Her white-blonde hair was chin length, cut in a straight bob. Always smooth, as was her complexion – botoxed smooth, Jackie said.

The lift doors opened. Still texting, Barbara Lane disappeared and Sarah continued on down the corridor.

She didn’t own a mobile. She paid for a landline which, until two years ago, had provided her with dial-up internet connection for an extra fifteen dollars a month – until Telstra had slowed their dial-up service to such a degree it became unusable and she’d been forced to connect to broadband. She could live without texting but not without the internet.

Marni wanted a mobile. Last year when she’d been at primary school, half of her classmates had owned their own phones. Since starting high school, she claimed to be the second-last person in the world between the ages of eight and eighty who didn’t own one, and that her mother was the last person.

Number two lift opened. Sarah rode it down, and was glad of her sunglasses when hit by the full force of the day; it was like walking from a refrigerator into a blast furnace, and that was mystical Melbourne, not shimmering in the clouds, but held to the earth by dazzling white cement and melting black bitumen.

She walked with the sweating swarm towards Museum Station, telling herself that there were worse things that could happen to people than being passed over for a job – twice. Breast cancer, for one. Annette had breast cancer. She’d had a breast removed and was now having chemo, and she had three little kids and a husband.

Sarah shook her left foot. Her sandal, irritating her instep since midday, was now hurting.

‘It’s not fair, Mum,’ Marni would say when she told her about the job. Twelve year olds still believed in a world that was fair, then they turned thirteen.

The queue was long at the newsagency where each Friday Sarah bought a ticket in Saturday’s TattsLotto. She queued for her turn to waste a little money in the hope of winning a million, and shouldn’t have bothered. She’d been buying those same numbers from this same shop since her first payday, and knew that the first week she failed to buy them, her numbers would come tumbling out.

A middle-aged Indian man took her money. He’d been taking it for two or three years. Maybe he recognised her. She always handed him the correct money with her registration card. He always said, ‘Good luck.’ She always said, ‘Thank you.’

Limped on then, to Museum Station, counted the steps down, her mind sifting the contents of her fridge for something for dinner. She and Marni shopped on Saturday mornings and by the end of the week their too-small fridge was bare.

A parking space wasn’t a part of Barbara’s package. She was at the station, now talking on her mobile.

The train stopped with its door conveniently placed for the new senior payroll/accounts officer, which of course it would. Old men of ninety would spring to their feet to give her a seat. Sarah limped down to the next carriage, where she clung to what she could until Richmond.

Train stopping at all stations, a slower train than the morning 7.40 express. She watched for Barbara to step down to a platform. Didn’t see her. Wondered where Crow had bought that company house. Shane, who could ferret information out of a wooden chair, hadn’t found out yet.

The train stopped at Box Hill. Still no sign of Barbara, nor at Laburnum. Then Blackburn, Sarah’s station. She was stepping down to the platform when she saw that perfect blonde hair above the crowd.

Tailed it through the tunnel, at a good distance. Tailed it out to South Parade, where she watched that hair swing on its way towards the car park. There was free all-day parking near the station – if you got there early enough. Sarah had been planning to park there, had she bought that car.

Barbara drove by in a little red hatchback which must have been red hot. She’d wound down its windows and the wind was daring to disturb her perfect hair.

B
arbara wasn’t thinking about Sarah Carter. She was cursing Maureen Crow, who was being difficult about the divorce. Twelve months ago, David had told her he’d started divorce proceedings. It didn’t take twelve months to get a divorce.

The splitting of marital assets could take years. She’d paid a solicitor for two before he’d got her not what she’d wanted but enough, and full custody of Danni.

If her mother had still been alive, she may not have moved to Melbourne, or at least not until she’d had a ring on her finger, but with her dead, there’d been no reason to stay, and she’d been fed up with getting herself out to the airport and flying south every second weekend, and fed up with her father’s complaints about her flying south.

She hadn’t expected to work five days a week, or to undergo training, which was all about appeasing Maureen. He was ‘appeasing’ her this weekend by taking her kids down to a beach house – and maybe taking her too, because Barbara had told him how Danni was bored to tears and how she loved the beach, and what a good opportunity it would be for her and Danni to meet his kids.

‘It’s too soon, my pet,’ he’d said. ‘Let’s wait until everything is settled.’

He’d bought that townhouse for appearance’s sake. He owned a gorgeous unit at Docklands, overlooking the water but right in the heart of Melbourne. They could have lived there. It had two bedrooms and there must have been a high school somewhere for Danni. Barbara had expected to be living with him but he’d stuck her out in the suburbs, in an enclave of identical townhouses, built wall to wall with their neighbour. They might have been a two-minute walk from the high school but they were over fifteen kilometres from the city.

The car’s air conditioner finally blowing cold, Barbara wound up her window and braked at yet another traffic light. She’d had it with traffic lights, with Melbourne’s weather – and Melbourne.

Made a right-hand turn into Mahoneys Road, a narrow road that fed traffic into a three-level shopping centre, a huge school, and a rehabilitation hospital. In Sydney, it would have been a one-way street. Not down here. It had speed humps, was a bus route, and she got stuck behind one at the roundabout.

She loved her garage door. A press of the remote opened it. She drove in, hit the remote again and it closed behind her, locking her in, locking her away from neighbours she had no desire to meet.

One of them had a dog. She’d heard it barking and when she’d looked out to identify its owners, she’d seen a male pushing a woman in a wheelchair. She hadn’t gone out to complain but had taken note of which house was theirs, the last one on the opposite side, and she’d knock on its door one day soon if they didn’t shut that yapping mongrel up. Hers was the first house on the right, only a fence between it and the street.

And its garage an airless sauna tonight, she opened the rear door and stepped fast into her laundry. The schoolbag on the dryer told her Danni was home. The heat in the laundry told her the air conditioning hadn’t been turned on.

Everything in the house was new. They’d furnished it together, she and David, had spent a weekend driving around looking in furniture stores, and as soon as they’d seen the right piece, they’d known at the same time that it was the right one, as if their eyes were wired into the same mind.

‘I’ve found my soulmate,’ he’d said to her in Sydney. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to show up for the longest time.’

She’d been waiting longer. She’d been waiting all of her life. The first day she’d had lunch with him, she’d known that she’d get him. He’d been everything she’d ever dreamed of in a man.

‘Danni!’

No reply. She’d be upstairs, and without the air conditioner the rooms up there would be sweatboxes Barbara preferred not to enter. She reached for the small remote, hit two buttons, then stood waiting to feel that breath of cool.

The entire house was peach and off-white, the carpet a peachy beige, the drapes in her sitting room a darker shade of peach.

‘It’s you,’ David had said the day he’d brought her out here. ‘Peaches and cream.’

She touched a chair, upholstered in a peach and cream regency striped fabric. When they’d seen it down the bottom end of a furniture store, they’d both made a beeline for it, had both said, ‘That’s perfect.’

As was he, his looks, manners, the way he dressed, the places he liked to eat, and the bed. He turned her into someone she hadn’t known she could be in bed.

When she’d told her father she was moving in with him, he’d told her that new love was ninety-five per cent sex and five per cent tolerance, that sex shrank and tolerance didn’t grow. She’d told him that she could no longer tolerate living with a controlling, sweating old pig who needed to take a bath in deodorant.

There were two upstairs bedrooms. They’d furnished the larger one for Danni and the other as a study. She found Danni there, slouched over her laptop, smiling about something.

‘Can’t you answer me when I call?’

‘I didn’t hear you,’ Danni said.

‘Why didn’t you turn the air conditioner on?’

‘It was cool downstairs when I came in.’

‘You were too eager to get onto Facebook to know if it was hot or not. That’s the truth of it. And sit up straight. You’ll ruin your spine sitting like that.’

‘Yo, boss,’ Danni said.

Barbara stood in the doorway, watching that kid’s fingers racing over the keyboard. She was pretty when she smiled, which she hadn’t done a lot of since they’d moved. She was halfway between twelve and thirteen and still showing no sign of maturing. At thirteen, Barbara had looked much as she did today. She’d won a modelling contest before she’d turned fourteen. Could have gone to America. Could have made the big time – if her parents had supported her. Her father hadn’t. He’d told her that models were like butterflies, that they only lived for a day, that a good education would stay with her for life.

‘David told them today he was making me his payroll/accounts officer,’ she said.

‘I thought you were his mistress,’ Danni said.

‘I could kill you sometimes—’

‘They don’t have manicurists in jail,’ Danni said, and turned back to communicate with her computer.