Winter (8 page)

‘Except I'm underage.'

‘Oh yeah, I forgot that. Well, in a cafe maybe. There are some good gigs around, if you know where to look. What do you think?'

‘Let's do it!'

‘I was thinking, you should apply for a place at the college. I reckon you'd get into the singing course. You're better than half the kids there even now. Dad gives me a lift most days, or we could get the train in together.'

That did make me think. It made me hopeful. Deep down I knew I shouldn't really have left school. These days it seems like you have to go through school, and beyond that, if you want to get anywhere. I'd never planned to leave altogether, just till I sorted myself out, but I hadn't thought of any solution. All I knew was that if I'd stayed at school any longer I would have killed someone, and that someone might have been myself. The college sounded better than a normal school. I liked the idea of being with creative people all day long.

I attacked the blackberries with new vigour. Jessica was a good worker. She seemed to enjoy it, amazingly enough. And having some company did make time pass faster.

Mr Carruthers arrived just before lunchtime. He brought a whole heap of food: bread rolls, salami, sun-dried tomatoes and capsicums, cheese, mushrooms, plus some cakes. It was a pretty good peace offering, although I did cynically think that if I checked the estate accounts later I'd probably find he'd claimed it under petty cash.

He was in quite a subdued mood. After we'd had a picnic on the lawn beside the old fountain, the ex-fountain, he asked me if we could have a chat. Jess tactfully went for a walk, and I sat there raising my eyebrows at Mr Carruthers, waiting for him to make the first move.

‘Well, I'm glad to find you in good spirits,' he said. ‘I was worrying all night about you. I actually rang a couple of times but you must have been out.'

‘Yeah, I went to the McGills for dinner.'

‘Winter, I've been looking into the management of the property. It's too early to come to any conclusions, but I must say there seems to be evidence of some improper practice. If that proves to be the case, then I can only apologise for not being aware of it earlier. It is very difficult though, with me being in the city, and only able to come out here every three months. And I've never claimed to be an expert on agriculture. Ralph and Sylvia had excellent references, and from what I saw they were doing everything that could have been expected. But the potential for dishonesty was there, and they may well have succumbed to it.'

‘So what happens next?'

‘I suggest we advertise for a new couple to take over. And I think it would be good if you were involved in the selection process. I feel it's very important that we have a couple you can work with. Quite frankly, if Ralph and Sylvia decide to play it hard, we might have to make a substantial pay-out to them, unless we can prove criminal activity. The estate can't afford any more mistakes like this. We have to get it right next time.'

He made it sound like it was my fault that Ralph and Sylvia were crooks.

‘OK,' I said. ‘Let's advertise. There's no harm in doing that. But I don't want anyone here for a little bit. I know I'll need someone eventually, but just for a few weeks I want to be on my own. Well, with Jess maybe. She's offered to move into the homestead.'

‘But what about farming problems? You don't know anything about farming, surely. And Jessica—I can't remember what her father said, but isn't she doing music? That's not necessarily a good recommendation for cattle work.'

‘I know. But I think Mr Kennedy, next door, will help.'

‘Hmm. Well, at least we're agreed on putting the advertisement in, so let's do that for a start. In the meantime I suppose you can always call a consultant, or a vet if there's an urgent problem. Expensive way of doing things though.'

Not as expensive as Ralph and Sylvia, I thought.

I was glad to see him go. I stood waving as the big Toyota turned out of the driveway. I was keen to get back to the blackberries.

B
efore I left Canberra, during the long train journey, and many times since I'd been back, I'd wondered if I'd feel my parents' presence at Warriewood. Would they haunt my footsteps? Would they appear at night? Would they invade my dreams? Maybe they'd be like guardian angels, and warn me if I was in danger. I wondered if they'd be happy at my being there, but for some strange reason I often imagined them as angry, like dark clouds of thunder. I didn't know why they might have been angry.

That first night I spent at the homestead, there was a strong sense of life, and energy, but it wasn't like ghosts. I don't know if there's meant to be a difference between ghosts and spirits, according to the experts, but using the words the way I want to use them, the spirit of my parents was in the homestead but there were no ghosts.

After a couple of weeks I'd stopped thinking about stuff like that much. So it was a shock when I walked towards a paddock I hadn't been in before, and felt a force so strong that it almost winded me. I mean, literally. It was like the air had been punched out of my stomach. Suddenly I was gasping for air, looking around to see if a UFO had landed and was sucking up the atmosphere. I got the most awful sickening feelings. I actually had to retreat. Like, physically.

I walked backwards quite a way, maybe fifty metres, staring at the fence line, thinking: This is where it happened. Well, I didn't think it, I knew it. Then it went from being a psychic force to being a memory. Like an old photo, on a wall too long, until the sun shining through the window for years has faded large parts. Now all I could see were shadows and pale patches and a few indistinct images. I strained hard in my mind to see more clearly. They were faces, all faces. Old faces. Two in particular. In my memory they looked about eighty, but I guess to a little kid any adult looks really old. They were staring. They seemed horrible. Staring and shouting and being very very angry. Then they broke up again, falling apart, crumbling like biscuits in the rain.

The day was bright and sunny but there was no warmth in the air. Autumn was too far gone. But where I stood the ground appeared shadowed, like a darkness was over it. A dark skin seemed to lie across the grass. I backed away further.

Warriewood had always been beautiful to me. As a little kid I guess I loved it in that accepting way kids have. I don't imagine I stopped to wonder if my life was different from other kids'.

Before I'd worked out how lucky I was, it was all over. I went to Canberra and spent twelve years dreaming about Warriewood, trying to re-create it in my mind. I was like the guy in some movie I saw, cutting bits out of magazines: eyes, eyebrows, a nose, a chin, desperately trying to put together the face of a woman he'd met once and lost. At least with Warriewood I'd had plenty of photos. Ralph and Sylvia, and Mr Carruthers, had sent me heaps in the first few years, though more recently they'd stopped bothering.

But now it seemed as though Warriewood had turned on me, had shown me another side, dark and threatening. It shook me worse than anything that had happened since I got back. I walked towards the homestead, my arms wrapped around my body, hugging myself, like I did quite often, had always done. I felt that hugs were few and far between in my life. The homestead seemed cold and empty, although it really wasn't that cold a day. But I didn't seem able to find a warm place.

In the end I crawled into bed, after piling every heavy piece of clothing I owned on top of me, and curled up in a little ball under the weight. I fell asleep with my thumb in my mouth.

I
tried everything I could think of before I went back to Bannockburn, my Great-aunt Rita's place. I called in at the local paper, the
Christie Courier
, and searched their archives. There was a long article about my mother's death—except it was really about her life. Heaps of details about her riding and shooting trophies, about the Border terriers she'd bred, about her work for Meals on Wheels and the Exley Art Show committee and the Christie Pre-school.

She sounded like a bit of a saint. I knew one thing for sure: I'd never live up to her standards.

The
Courier
said she'd died in a shooting accident, but it didn't give any details.

At Jessica's suggestion I tried to track down the cop who'd investigated my mother's death. There must have been a cop. But I got nowhere with that. The Christie police weren't interested. The only thing they did was check the personnel records. They said a Sergeant Bruxton was in charge back then, but no-one at the station knew him or had even heard of him.

At Matthew's suggestion I tried the courthouse in Exley, to see if there were records of a coroner's inquest. They were quite helpful. A bloke with an accent so Scottish that I had trouble understanding it spent nearly half an hour looking through old files. Eventually he found one paragraph about the inquiry: the date, the name of the coroner, my mother's name, and the verdict: death by misadventure.

‘What does that mean?' I asked him.

‘An accident without concomitant crime or negligence,' he said, without batting an eyelid.

‘A what?'

I got it on the third go, after Jess persuaded him to say it in Australian, and he drawled it out, taking about five minutes to say ‘concomitant', which was the word I stuck on.

As I gradually met various neighbours, I asked the ones I liked for any details they knew, but I didn't get any further with them. I know Mr Kennedy asked a few people too, but they all said the same thing: ask Mrs Harrison, ask Mrs Stone.

Then one day Matthew said to me: ‘Why don't you go see Dr Couples?'

‘Dr who?'

‘No, that's the name of an old TV show.'

‘Oh very funny. Who's Dr Couples?'

‘He was the only doctor in Christie. He's retired now, but he's still very fit, does the odd locum when he's needed. He lives in that big brick place on the edge of town, the last house on the right.'

I thought this was quite a brilliant suggestion. I wanted to call him straight away, but there was a slight problem when I found he had an unlisted number. Mr McGill tracked it down for me, and three days later I was ringing the doctor's doorbell, listening to chimes that sounded like a bad orchestra warming up to rehearse elevator music.

After a while I heard soft feet. The door opened to reveal a tall stooped slim man with thinning white hair.

‘No need to ask who you are,' he said. ‘Come in.'

He had a nice calm voice. I followed him into a big room with one of those gas log fires that seem so real you have to look three times to be sure they are fake. The walls were so covered with family photos you couldn't see much of the brickwork behind them.

Dr Couples sat at a desk and looked at me in that typical doctor way they all seem to have. Even though he was retired, it was like he had slipped straight into his doctor mode. He even put on that interested, concerned, so-how-can-I-help-you-today face.

‘So how can I help you, Winter?' he asked. I nearly cracked up.

He added: ‘I must say it's nice that you're back here. The last time I saw you was such a terrible occasion, and I felt very much for you.'

‘That's what I wanted to ask you about,' I began. ‘About my mother dying like that. I didn't know till I came back to Warriewood that she'd died in a shooting accident. And it's been really bugging me. It doesn't seem right. I thought maybe you'd know more about it than anyone.'

‘What about it doesn't seem right?' he asked.

‘Well, the whole thing. It's just too dumb to be true. How can someone with her experience, her knowledge, have an accident like that?'

‘People do it all the time,' he said, with a tired little smile.

‘I guess. It just doesn't match up with the picture I have of her. I imagine the people who get shot accidentally are either pissed—sorry, drunk—or stupid, or not very experienced with guns.'

‘Not always,' Dr Couples said. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Suddenly he did look old.

‘Was she . . . ' I felt the familiar trembling sensation again, as though I could feel myself going white through my whole body, not just the outside but the inside as well. ‘Was she terribly upset about my father's death?'

‘Oh yes. They had a remarkable relationship. The only way I can describe it is to say it was a true love affair. You don't see many in real life, you know. Only in movies or on TV. But they were genuinely devoted to each other. She actually got more upset about Phillip's loss as time went on.'

‘How depressed was she?'

‘That depends on how you use the word “depressed”. Of course, laymen sometimes use it very differently from the way the medical profession uses it. Phyllis wasn't clinically depressed, in my judgement, but she was feeling deep grief, and great sadness. Entirely natural, but there's no short-term solution to that kind of thing.'

‘Do you think she was so depressed she . . . she might have given up?'

‘Oh no. No. That wasn't Phyllis's way. Not at all. Surely not.'

I didn't say any more. I'd worked out just a couple of days earlier, in one of those stupid chains of thought you have while pulling out blackberries, that people often use silence to get other people to talk. I mean, if you ask a question, someone gives an answer; but if you don't say any more, they eventually always add something. I suppose I noticed it while listening to the radio. I often had it on when I was doing blackberries, and I think I'd been listening to a programme on Triple J where the interviewer had done exactly that.

So now I thought I'd see if it worked for me.

Sure enough, to my delight, after a minute Dr Couples kept talking. ‘It was a terrible tragedy, coming so soon after your father's death. Just terrible. Everyone was devastated. I admit though, I did wonder if she had been less attentive because of your father's death. I can imagine that maybe she wasn't concentrating the way she normally would.'

‘But could it have been something more than that?' I asked, leaning forward, watching him anxiously. ‘Do you think she was depressed enough . . . to do that?'

I expected him to look shocked, but maybe you can't shock doctors.

‘I got there before the ambulance, you know. The Christie ambulance was miles away, over near Exley I think. We'd been agitating for years to get a second ambulance but the Minister showed no interest at all. We've got three now of course. Well, when I arrived—it would have been around four o'clock in the afternoon—she was lying beside the fence. Mrs Harrison was there. She'd tried some first aid, but to no effect. When she realised Phyllis was dead, she and the housekeeper lifted her onto the back of the ute and put a handkerchief over her face.'

‘I thought you weren't meant to do that,' I said. ‘I thought you were supposed to leave everything alone, so the police could investigate.'

‘Well, that's true, of course, but in the heat of the moment people frequently do things they're not meant to.'

‘I guess.'

‘But as for what you're suggesting, well, there was no evidence one way or the other. I didn't think it necessary to conduct a thorough examination. It all seemed clear enough. I checked for vital signs, but she had been killed instantly. I suppose, looking back, and being as honest as you can be only after you've retired, I would say the last thing I wanted to do was to play the TV super-medic and comb through the grass for clues. I've given my life to the people of this district. They're very important to me. I would never cause them unnecessary grief.'

I wondered if he was telling me in a roundabout way that he'd thought at the time she might have committed suicide, but he had deliberately closed his mind to the possibility.

‘Was I actually there?' I asked.

‘No, apparently you were at the homestead with Mrs Stone. I didn't see you at all. I asked if I should, if you were upset or distressed, but Mrs Harrison assured me you were all right, that you didn't know yet, and she'd explain it to you gently. I think she'd called Mrs Stone as soon as it happened, but when they realised nothing could be done, Mrs Stone went back to the house to look after you.'

I tried my silence tactic again, but this time it didn't work. Maybe he had told me everything he knew. After a minute of us sitting looking at each other I realised there wasn't much more I could ask.

I got up.

‘Thanks a lot for seeing me,' I said. ‘And for telling me all that.'

‘It's a pleasure to see you back at Warriewood,' he said. ‘And grown into such a fine young woman. Let me know if I can help you in any way.'

He said it without much meaning though, like he was tired of helping people. He'd had enough.