Inheritance

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The sun was obscured by the smoke. He could make out a copper glow, but nothing more. He ran along the creek and arrived at the river, choking and gasping. His parents' car was not there. He was frantic. He knew that the car - which his mother had bought off Lenny Sing, with money set aside from her stall - was a bad starter. After a few minutes, he heard tooting and through a band of rolling yellow fog he saw the Morris Oxford overtake him, his parents' shapes inside. He shouted out and even managed to touch the hot bumper, but the car failed to stop - they had not recognised him.

  The last thing he saw before the smoke closed in were the shadowy forms of riders trying in vain to round up a stampeding herd of cattle. Then with a roar and a hiss the fire reached the river. Sparks showered around him, sizzling as they touched the water. To keep his clothes from catching alight, he waded into the middle, submerging himself.

  A pathetic sight met his eyes when he surfaced. The publican's car had been driven into the river as far as it would go. Round about it crouched the publican and his wife and two daughters with a whippet pup, clinging together. And then, in what seemed an age, the smoke cleared - the fire had passed on.

  Makertich staggered to the shore. The horizon lit up by the burning flax stacks as the flames swept invincibly onwards. He searched the faces on the bank, many with wet handkerchieves tied around their noses, but failed to spot his parents.

  He discovered their Morris Oxford abandoned in the river. The river water, usually so clear and sparkling, was black with ash. A tractor took an hour to haul the vehicle out.

  Makertich left the car by the side of the road, dripping onto the scorched grass. His parents must have hitched a ride home. He walked back wearily in the gathering dusk. The stones felt hot under his boots. He trod over the blackened ground, past the vanished allotment. His way lighted by the glare of the still-burning trees and telegraph poles, and hundreds of sheep lying in smoking piles.

  In Furneaux Park, scenes of desolation. The population evacuated. Maddened cattle ran bellowing into the road or stood in quivering shock with blood dripping off their peeled flanks. Men searched for their families. Women huddled in frightened bunches, sitting on piles of possessions outside the smoking remains of their homes. His parents' next-door neighbour, a widow, sat speechlessly in her husband's air-force coat, a sewing machine and a birdcage beside her, while her two small children, very pale but calm, tried to comfort her. She escaped the fire when she lay in a ditch and it had passed over her. Of her bungalow, there was no trace.

  Makertich saw with amazement and relief that his own home was untouched. The fire had come up against the creek and been deflected round the back, leaving it standing.

  His parents were not inside.

  He stood in the main room calling for them. The rotten-egg smell of gas and everything black. His Vespa. His father's rocking chair. The framed picture of Mount Ararat that had belonged to his grandmother. Among very few items not singed were the contents of his plan-chest. Quickly checking his photographs, he pocketed the silver bracelet and the lump of solidified bread that he had kept in the bottom drawer, and then he went outside. He was desperate to find his parents, but did not know how. There was no electric light, no telephone. He had been complacent and now he started to panic.

  Lenny Sing pulled up. He looked awful, dirt and sweat pouring down his face.

  'They went running after you,' he said shakily. He stared at his feet. Only his feet. They dragged him away from Makertich, towards a wooden-armed settee that someone had carried into the street. He lowered himself on it, covering his eyes.

  Makertich sat down beside him and took Lenny's hand away from his face.

  'Where are they?'

  His parents had driven into the river, Lenny said. Not seeing Makertich anywhere, they had assumed that he was trying to catch the ponies.

  'I hear your dad.'

  And saw Makertich's father, arms in the air, waving over his car roof, shouting to Lenny, asking if he had seen his son.

  'He wanted to find you. Your mum, too.'

  Lenny watched as Uncle Dick squeezed himself out of the driver's window and next lifted out his wife and carried her in his arms through the strong current towards the bank. Not till the end of his days, Lenny's widow confirmed, would Lenny be able to expunge the sight of Makertich's parents, water and steam coming off their clothes, stumbling across the paddock towards the oncoming fire, calling for Krikor.

  After a few days of roaring winds, the black ash was blown away, leaving the bare, scorched earth. The story persisted of a suspicious rag found at the source of the blaze, though no one had seen it. Soon the paddocks and streets took on a rusty brown appearance. The trees were particularly eerie, naked and charred and making a wailing noise as the wind blew through them.

  5

  A NDY WALKED INTO THE dining room the following evening. Maral was already seated at the table.

  She looked up at him, her eyes odd and juddery. 'Go on, sit down,' in a flat voice. 'All this talk and I have not said a word about Don Flexmore.'

  It was three years since the fire. Makertich had left Perth and gone to live near Sydney, a houseboat on the Hawkesbury - as far from Peppermint Grove as he could travel and be on the same continent.

  The houseboat, a converted Danish cutter, was tethered to a grass bank north of Richmond. From the deck, he could see a scraggy orchard from which the ferryman who lived on the next bend pressed a throat-burning cider. A galah liked to cling to the bow-rail for breadcrumbs, the first thing Makertich looked for when he pushed open the scullery door. He would feed the bird and then continue down a gangplank and through the apple trees to the ferry. It was a fifteen-minute walk from the opposite bank to his shop on Bligh Street.

  In Richmond, he had set up a photography studio that threatened to overwhelm him. It was 1959 and rumours of a new Banking Act had made life precarious for small businesses. All that stood between Makertich and insolvency was the insurance money owed on his parents' house. The pay-out was imminent, but legal wrangles had dragged the process out. To help with the rent, he stuck a notice in the window of his studio advertising a bed in his spare cabin.

  The long-faced young man who stepped off the rickety dock several days later said that his name was Don Flexmore. He was of average height, slim, with yellowish hair that covered his ears and black eyelashes. They were the blackest eyelashes that Makertich had seen and had the effect of making the eyes that looked out at him appear even bluer.

  'Haven't we met?' Flexmore said, with a boyish laugh.

  'Don't think so.'

  'I dunno why, I feel we have.' He had just returned from New Zealand. 'If you're ever in Auckland, let me know. I can get you a room in the best hotel.'

  Makertich said that he would bear it in mind.

  Flexmore's easy manner was almost a relief. He strode up the gangplank with the confident prance of a pony and explained that he needed a place to stay between lodgings. When Makertich showed him the cabin, Flexmore squeezed the sagging mattress and threw his knapsack onto it. 'This'll do nicely.'

  The knapsack had a coat hanger poking from the top.

  Flexmore undid the strap and pulled out a navy-blue suit, in the same motion spilling onto the floor a paperback.

  Makertich picked it up. Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health , by L. Ron Hubbard.

  'You should read it,' Flexmore said, taking it from him.

  Makertich continued with his tour of the houseboat, Flexmore asking questions.

  'What's in there?' of a closed door.

  'My cabin.'

  'Why live on a boat?'

  'Only place I could find.' Not saying that he had deliberately sought out this boat. That ever since a boy he had hankered to live on an ark.

  'What's on those trees?' peering out of a porthole.

  The branches listened.

  'Apples.'

  Flexmore nodded. He looked as though he wanted to bound up the bank and introduce himself.

/>   They went into the scullery and Makertich boiled some tea.

  'Where you from, Chris?' taking off his linen jacket.

  'Perth.'

  He looked at him. 'I was there a while back. Before that, I mean.'

  'Syria.'

  'And before that?' He was looking at his thick black hair.

  'Turkey,' after a while.

  Flexmore smiled. 'Putting a bit of fungicide on the family roots, eh?' He lifted his shirt and started gyrating. 'Your mother one of them belly dancers?'

  'My parents are dead.'

  Flexmore stopped. 'Oh, sorry,' pulling down his shirt. And later, contemplating Makertich over his tea: 'Sometimes there can be nothing better than for a child to lose their father.' He took a loud sip. 'You know when I first saw you, I thought you were an Abo.'

  At first, they got along. Makertich was relieved not to be thinking about himself. On his own too long, he was susceptible to Flexmore's addictive energy, his childlike need to impress.

  From initial exchanges, Makertich formed the impression of a loner like himself who had lived until the age of seventeen with his widowed mother in Gundagai.

  'Do you know Gundagai, Chris?' watching him spread the Vegemite.

  'No,' meeting his gaze. Not for the first time did the blue of those eyes remind Makertich of the tongues of the lizards that crept about under the trees.

  'They say in Gundagai everyone has the right to shoot one man.' He laughed quite easily.

  The story of Flexmore's life emerged gradually. He had failed to join the police force and so worked for a while as a nightwatchman, before attending acting school in Tasmania. He loved to impersonate the posh-voiced English announcers on the ABC. Gregory Peck and Buddy Holly were also prominent in his repertoire. On his first night, he stood up and thumped the sides of the boat, singing in a surprisingly good voice 'Oh Boy'. He was mad for Buddy Holly; otherwise, he joked, the only music he liked was when people had to be spaded into the ground.

  Suddenly bored of singing, he rolled a cigarette and lit the end with a match, inhaling. He watched the match blacken until it reached his fingers, and then he shook it like a thermometer and stretched back on the faded red cushions, expelling a sweet-scented smoke. What Makertich smelled was not his grandmother's French tobacco or his father's Champion Ruby; it was marijuana - the first time he had heard the word. Flexmore bought it from a Chinese herb doctor in Richmond and wanted Makertich to smoke it with him, but Makertich refused.

  What he liked most about his new lodger was that he was an ardent washer-upper. Next morning, Makertich came into the scullery to find Flexmore on his hands and knees, scrubbing. 'These baseboards have never been cleaned, Chris.' Disorder, he confessed, made him itchy. 'You need a room-mate like me.'

  Makertich, amused, asked whether he had seen the Vegemite.

  Flexmore said: 'Check the cupboard above the sink. Third shelf up on the left between the half-filled Milo and Worcestershire Sauce - and a bloody strange place to put it, too.'

  And registering Makertich's surprise: 'I have a photographic memory.'

  It was a photographic memory of a particular and astonishing kind. Flexmore could draw on a strip of paper all the boats on the Hawkesbury after staring at the river for a few seconds. Or the configuration of the stars on a particular night. Or the basketwork of shadows cast by the trees on the bank. But it was a memory like a deformity in which certain elements were missing.

  The following Sunday - an exceptionally hot afternoon - they were out on deck. It was already Flexmore's habit, while Makertich fished for yabbies, to lie with his legs stretched out, smoking one of his sweet-smelling cigarettes and listlessly rereading Dianetics .

  Suddenly, he looked up from his book.

  Makertich, standing at the rail, had also heard the grating sound. For several days after their conversation, he would remember the water around the boat, how it lapped with orange-bellied flies with wings the size of Cheryl's earrings.

  'Cicadas,' he said. 'This hot weather must have brought them out.'

  And with a spasm of generosity repeated what his neighbour Barry Cotton had told him: How, after the young cicadas dropped to the ground, they burrowed into the soil and fed on the sap of the tree roots, and there they stayed, shedding their skin as they grew larger and larger, five years, seven years, always primal numbers, anything up to nineteen years, silent, motionless, until their final moult, which took place at night. Then, a combination of their biological clock and what they were able to perceive from down there caused them to wriggle their way forth above the ground into a nuptial flight during which they turned into adult cicadas, living just a few days until they had found a mate.

  'You sound like my bloody biology teacher.'

  Makertich was not through. 'And once they've mated, one more thing - that's to lay their eggs, after which they're good for nothing but blue-tongue tucker and flotsam.'

  'Well, they sure kick up a serious noise,' Flexmore said, relaxing enough to pick his nose. 'As one would after nineteen years keeping mum.'

  'I reckon that's fair impossible for you.'

  Flexmore smiled at the ribbing.

  Makertich reeled in the crayfish trap that he had bent out of a milk-powder tin. 'Barry says the species that calls around the Hawkesbury is one of the loudest insects in the world.'

  Flexmore contemplated the apple trees, relishing this sprig of good feeling between them. He was thinking something over. 'What about you, Chris? Yeah, I reckon you could. I reckon you could keep mum for longer than that.'

  He waited for Makertich to respond. And when he did not: 'Well, I'm going to tell you something I've told no one before,' and lowered his voice, even though the river was deserted and the nearest person who could overhear was Barry, who anyway was probably already three-quarters pissed on cider. 'I mean that, Chris, no one. Not a soul.'

  The cicadas were making their tinnitus noise.

  Still, Makertich reeled in their dinner. He would cook them just enough to turn the colour and he never tired of the taste.

  'I ask you not to repeat what I'm about to tell you,' said Flexmore putting down his book, and in an excited voice started to unravel a strategy he had for 'a real-estate related business' that he was involved in.

  Gundagai was too small for the scope of Flexmore's ambition. Ditto Australia. Hubbard was right. 'If you want to make money, start a religion. Or plant a tree.'

  Conventional wisdom was a foolish way to invest. His scheme was to plant eucalypts everywhere. The trees grew to a cultivable height in five years and lived for as long as four hundred. He was in the process of setting up plantations on the properties of rich folk in New Zealand, Uruguay and Britain. He intended to sell 'shares' in these plantations to other people. Let nature do the work.

  'Well, what do you think?' Flexmore said.

  Makertich could feel the lizards shifting behind the eyes, pushing their heads through and looking around.

  He gave it some thought. 'It might work.'

  Flexmore watched him haul up the trap and roll it on the deck and thrust his hand in. 'The thing is, Chris, I'm in a bit of a bind. I can't make the first move.'

  Makertich stood up, a dripping, writhing yabbie in each hand.

  'I wonder if you might be interested in helping me out,' in a reasonable voice.

  The night before, Makertich had divulged to him that he was waiting for a payout on his parents' house. He had received a letter from the insurance company. It promised a resolution within days.

  Flexmore removed the remains of the cigarette from his lips and dropped it on the deck.

  'You'll get it back with plenty of interest.' He had a dark blue mark on his left shoulder that he scratched. 'It's only to tide me over, mate.'

  Makertich reminded him that he needed the money to stop his photography business going bust. But there might be some left over, he thought.

  Flexmore had the expression of someone who was looking at him from another angle.

&
nbsp; 'Is that a pledge?'

  'Sure. Why not?'

  For the next few days, Flexmore came and went; never up when Makertich departed for work and returning late at night, more often than not with an unsteady gleam in his eye, and invariably as Makertich was about to turn in. Whenever they bumped into each other, he was eager to strike up a conversation.

  One night, Makertich lay on his bed and Flexmore stumbled in without knocking, banging himself on the low doorframe. He looked around, rubbing his head, bewildered.

  'You take these?'

  'I did.'

  'Thought you had,' and peered thoughtfully at the photos that Makertich had tacked to the walls of his cabin, even to the ceiling.

  Makertich watched his eyes slither from image to image.

  'Not my type,' Flexmore said eventually, but went on looking at the blonde woman, all these pictures of her, a gleam of curiosity in his flicking eyes. 'Ain't seen you with a camera.'

  'I don't bring my work home.'

  'When was the last time you saw this sheila?'

  'Three years ago.'

  The fidelity of Makertich's allegiance was mystifying.

  'You got it bad, mate,' his smile bent and wrinkled like the joint he produced from his back pocket.

  Flexmore lit his joint and took a drag and brought his face up close to a photograph of Cheryl taken on the bank of the Swan.

  'Look at those breasts!' his tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth and his eyes darker than black ice. 'That's someone who's not going to break her nose if she falls over, though she might hurt the back of her head if she bounces back.'

  Makertich said nothing. The thought of Cheryl still rotted his sleep. Flexmore must have suspected that this was the reason for his behaviour. This fair-headed girl, this dangerous horse of Makertich's memory, whose lazy smile and shapely body covered his sad cabin like a shrine.