Tumbledown Manor

by Helen Brown

  A pair of red eyes stared down at her. They were joined by a slightly smaller pair of eyes. A bushy tail draped over the guttering. The larger possum scampered away towards the chimney. The smaller one put his head to one side and studied her. The end of his nose was pink as fairy floss. She called out to him but he turned and galloped after his companion.

  Trembling with relief, she waited for her breathing to return to normal. The sky was so dark compared to New York, where it was never more than serge grey. Stars glittered with universal indifference. A terrified woman in her grandfather’s house meant nothing in the life cycles of solar systems. Looking up at the stars, she could almost smell the tang of tobacco in her father’s jacket. He was a man who could turn an ordinary activity, like walking home through the dark, into something magical. She remembered the warmth of his breath as he put his arm around her and pointed out the line of three bright stars that made Orion’s Belt. They were easy to find, but when he tried to show her the ones that made up the rest of the Hunter, she sank into confusion. It was the first time she’d realised a lot of things would never make sense to her. She was destined to spend the rest of her life either bluffing her way through or being exposed as an ignorant fraud.

  She hurried back inside and pulled on a purple beanie left over from a short-lived knitting craze. Like most of her knitting, she never wore it in public. The orange daisy she’d sewn on it flopped like a victim of chronic fatigue. The thermal socks and polar-fleece jacket looked sane by comparison. She lowered the fighting stick onto the floor beside her bed and placed the head torch on the table next to her phone and the dog-eared paperback of Wuthering Heights.

  Tucked in bed with blankets up to her chin, she tried to ignore the loneliness gnawing away at the soft tissue inside her ribcage. She reached for her phone. ‘Guess wot?’ she texted Portia. ‘Ted has g’friend.’

  ‘?????!!!’ the reply was almost instant. Presumably, it was a question.

  ‘Stella. Has he told u?’ Lisa typed.

  ‘No! Howz house?’

  Lisa wondered what level of truth was appropriate. Portia probably didn’t want to know she was frightened, exhilarated and exhausted all at once.

  ‘Gr8’

  A row of XXXs and a smiley face flashed on her screen, signalling the conclusion of the royal audience.

  A sad lump formed in Lisa’s throat. Children have no hope of knowing how much their parents love them until they become parents themselves. Portia had been the most affectionate, easygoing baby. She’d hardly ever cried. In the mornings, she’d cooed in her cot until Lisa opened her bedroom door, her chubby arms raised to be picked up. Her smile was pure sunshine.

  Lisa had delighted in watching her baby daughter devour bowls of custard, and smear the remains over her face. The child had revelled in the textures, flavours and colours of food. Sure, she’d grown perhaps a little chubbier than some of her friends, but Lisa was never concerned. Portia was prettier and cuddlier than all of them put together.

  Portia had never been short of passions besides food. She adored acting and singing, and was always near the top of her class. As her friends’ daughters became spiky adolescents, Lisa took pride in the fact Portia remained soft and open. They’d gone to galleries and concerts together and read the same books. Though they were inseparable, Lisa refused to become one of those women who wore her daughter’s jeans.

  The change had happened so abruptly Lisa was still trying to absorb the shock. The second Portia left home for college, she’d built an impenetrable wall around herself. Lisa was frozen out. She no longer knew what books Portia was reading or who her friends were. Now she grieved for the closeness they’d had.

  Portia’s first vacation break had coincided with the appearance of a pink Care Bear tattoo on her left ankle. Lisa had tried not to express alarm. It was nothing a decent plastic surgeon couldn’t erase in a decade or so.

  The next time they met, a green Care Bear grinned malevolently from Portia’s forearm. Lisa couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. She suggested to Portia that by the time she reached thirty or forty she might wish she’d chosen a more general theme for her body art. Portia erupted. Lisa obviously had no idea that Care Bears were ironic.

  Lisa had retreated into silence. Soon after, a yellow Care Bear beamed defiantly from Portia’s right calf. It was as the army of Care Bears trotted over her limbs that Portia herself started shrinking. Boys fell for her haunted beauty. Portia was understandably flattered.

  For a while, Lisa had to agree: her daughter’s new looks were startling. Then Portia won a Most Promising Actress award for her portrayal of Daisy in the Venice Beach Players’ production of The Boyfriend. Lisa had been dismayed by how much the flattery went to Portia’s head. She dropped out of college and waitressed between auditioning for bit parts in movies. Portia, it seemed, was yet to understand an acting career was a licence to serve coffee for the rest of her life.

  Lisa had visited whenever she could, which wasn’t often due to Portia’s ‘busy-ness’. She had a terrible shock the night she saw Portia slipping into a flimsy jacket with no warmth in it. Portia’s shoulder blades jutted out like angel’s wings waiting to lift her off the ground and spirit her away.

  Anxiety clawed at Lisa’s stomach. On the few occasions they dined together, Portia eyed the food on her plate as if it was laced with poison. She stopped eating meat, then dairy products. It was only a matter of time before she refused lettuces because of the trauma they experienced being torn out of the ground. At the same time, she’d seen Portia knock back cocktails containing enough alcohol to render a cow senseless.

  Lisa had tried coaxing, then begging Portia to eat, but it only made her daughter distance herself more. When Lisa had the mastectomy, she’d hoped Portia might resurrect their closeness, but her visits were short and dutiful. In darker moments, Lisa wondered if Portia had inherited some of her father’s coldness.

  Lisa’s anxiety had finally exploded over a plate of spaghetti in a diner one day. Portia scraped her chair back and flounced out into the street, leaving the food untouched. The invitations to California dried up after that. Conversations were reduced to interrogative phone calls, which had then been downgraded to texts.

  Was it the child’s reaction to family tensions? Or maybe they’d been too close. Deep down, Lisa had to admit that Portia’s behaviour was beyond the realms of normal rebelliousness. She was stubborn, difficult and far too thin. Just like Emily Brontë.

  Lisa went to the bathroom and riffled through her toiletries bag. The earplugs glowed like plump little friends in their plastic bag next to the moisturiser she hardly ever used. Thank God she’d kept them. She squished them between her fingers and shoved them in her ears.

  Back in her room, she slid between the sheets, pulled the beanie over her ears and flicked the bedside lamp off. Weariness enveloped her, but something was missing from her blocking-out-the-world routine. She rolled over, opened the bedside drawer and felt for the smooth surface of the mouthguard case. Satisfactorily barricaded, she was safe. Not even a ghost could wake her.

  Something roared across the roof above her. The noise was relentless, oppressive, and Lisa’s earplugs did little to stifle it. Half-asleep, she thought she saw a ghost bearing down on her, but after a few moments she realised it was just a draft moving one of the curtains, and the source of the noise wasn’t unworldly. It was rain.

  Lightning flashed blue phantoms across the walls. A burst of thunder shook the roof. Wind wailed down the fireplace. She’d always claimed to enjoy thunderstorms. But this was more primal than anything she’d experienced.

  She burrowed under the sheets and squeezed her eyes shut. She’d sat through dreadful concerts before, and tried to picture herself at the Lincoln Centre, where Kerry had procured free tickets to a discordant orchestral piece by one of those postmodern composers he adored. The percussion section had been in overdrive, flutes and oboes were wildly out of synch and strings whined out of tune.

 
Lying on her back, Lisa waited for it to finish, but a steady pinging sound was an ominous addition. From deep in the percussion section, a triangle was emitting the regular plunk of water dripping on to carpet.

  A gust of freezing air rushed across the bed. She fumbled for the bedside lamp and flicked the switch. It refused to work. Thank god for Ted’s torch. She flicked the switch and it cast a dispassionate beam at the curtains, billowing like towering spectres. She ran across the room and wrestled the French doors shut. Shivering, she hurried back to bed and pulled the mohair rug up to her chin, but it was cold and wet. She shone the torch up at the ceiling. A silver waterfall trickled through a crack down onto her bed.

  She glanced at her phone. 2.07. Maxine would be sound asleep in Camberwell, dreaming of perfect little grandchildren (a brain surgeon here, a start-up computer billionaire there . . .). Ted would be engrossed in an intimate stage of his night with Stella.

  Lightning again flashed across the room. She tried to think of what her father would say: ‘It’s only Nature doing her thing, Panda Bear. It’ll blow over. Make yourself a cup of tea.’

  The only thing worse than almost drowning on her first night would be owning up to it. In the flick of a false eyelash, Maxine would be in her Golf and flying down the motorway. Lisa could see her bursting through the front door in a flurry of orange and green, demanding she return to the suburbs.

  She took two Panadol and willed herself back to sleep. Just before dawn, she dreamt of a hooded ghost chasing her across the roof and trying to push her off. As she fell, she managed to grab the ghost’s hood and reveal its face. It was Aunt Caroline, cackling at her. ‘Why on earth would you want to buy Trumperton Manor?’

  Chapter 13

  Charlotte Brontë was eight years old when her father sent her to the world’s worst boarding school. Charlotte later exacted revenge by recording, in the early chapters of Jane Eyre, the cruelties she and her sisters suffered. As well as starvation and physical punishment, the Brontë girls had been expected to survive on very little sleep.

  Now, having woken painfully just after dawn, Lisa wondered how long a person could stay awake without going insane. She couldn’t have dozed off for more than twenty minutes through the night.

  The air was still and silent. She pulled out her earplugs. The rain must’ve stopped. She wandered through the quagmire that was her bedroom in the direction of the French doors. Stepping onto the balcony, she was startled by the scene before her. Overnight, the valley had become a vast, serene lake. Trees admired their reflections in the water. A mob of kangaroos preened themselves on a hillock as galahs squawked across a pale-blue sky. This unpredictable country with its outlandish animals hardly belonged to humans.

  Lisa straightened her beanie, zipped her polar fleece over her nightie and went downstairs to the kitchen. She stepped through the doorway and was ankle deep in water. The table, where she and the kids had sat so happily yesterday, resembled Noah’s Ark, floating in a brown sea.

  A weight settled in her stomach. She tried to think what a Brontë heroine would do. A minor flood would be nothing compared to their deprivations. They would dig into their reserves and deal with it. Emboldened, she strode down the entrance hall and grabbed a broom. When she returned, she was astonished to see a pair of muscular brown legs wading towards her.

  The legs rose into a pair of khaki shorts, above which was the sort of rustic jacket favoured by Portia’s hipster friends. Except this particular jacket wasn’t an ironic nod in the direction of classic masculinity. Lisa could tell from the shape of the shoulders, the large sun-bronzed hands, that this was the genuine article. Some kind of outdoor god had wandered into her kitchen. She raised the broom.

  ‘Welcome to the district,’ the bronzed deity said, raising his hands in mock surrender.

  Lisa was suddenly aware that she was dressed like an escapee from a home for the bewildered. ‘How’d you get in?’ she snapped. Her words came out thick and clunky. She’d developed a lisp. Blushing, she turned her head, spat the mouthguard into her hand and buried it in her pocket.

  ‘Back door,’ the man said with a twinkle of amusement. ‘It was jammed.’

  She flicked the broom. His eyes widened. Either he was telling the truth or he was one of those insane outback killers movies are made of.

  ‘It was locked!’

  ‘Oh, was it?’ He seemed apologetic. ‘I didn’t realise . . . I gave it a shove. Get your husband to take a look at the lock.’ He seemed genuinely upset by her alarm. Serial killers probably did the same with their victims—cajoled them into a state of trust. With his height and strength, there was no doubt who’d win if she tried to force him out.

  ‘You can put your teeth back in if you like,’ he said, eager to be helpful.

  ‘It’s not my teeth!’ She excavated the mouthguard and flashed it at him.

  ‘Oh. A sportswoman. I used to wear one of those when I played footie.’

  His age was difficult to assess—somewhere between thirty-five and fifty. Probably older than the average testosterone-crazed sex criminal, though Lisa realised she was flattering herself to imagine her beanie–nightie ensemble could inflame anyone. On the other hand, he could have escaped prison after years of deprivation . . . His dark hair was cropped, but not convict-short. Boots of sideburns dug their heels into the day or two’s growth shadowing his jaw. A scar meandered over his left eyebrow. One of his eye teeth was crooked. He had the air of an action hero who’d yet to develop full confidence in his jet pack. Yet behind the boyish grin was a kind of sadness. She couldn’t work out if it was resignation, disappointment or something more complicated. Whatever, the man had no right to be there.

  ‘Scott Green,’ he said, sloshing towards her with a dazzling smile. ‘Scottie to you. Creek’s up. Been a fair bit of flooding overnight. Just checking up on the neighbourhood.’

  The name was familiar. ‘The gardener with special rates for pensioners?’ she asked.

  ‘Why, you up for a senior’s concession? Matter of fact I’m a landscape designer. But I do pretty much anything these days. What part of the States are you from?’

  Damn. The accent again.

  ‘I was born in Melbourne.’

  ‘So what possessed you to buy Tumbledown Manor?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Trumperton Manor, actually.’

  The intruder grinned. She couldn’t tell if he was teasing.

  ‘My grandfather lived in this house,’ she added defensively. ‘I’m Lisa Trumperton.’

  Scott seemed to look at her for the first time. He ran an amused eye over her beanie, polar fleece and nightie. She felt ridiculous. ‘So you’re an Aussie after all?’

  They stared at each other across the shallow ocean at their feet.

  ‘I’ve got another one of those things in the ute,’ he said, nodding at her broom. ‘Want a hand?’

  Lisa wanted to weep with gratitude. Instead, she waded across the pond and flung open the back door with its now broken lock. Side by side, they worked with broad even strokes, sloshing the torrent out of the kitchen and down the back steps. Scott moved with animal ease, achieving more in a single swoop than Lisa could with three.

  He assured her she was better off than her neighbours, who were thigh-deep in water. He’d had to lend them his pump. ‘Lucky the sky’s cleared,’ he said, opening the windows. ‘It might pong in here for a couple of days. The forecast’s good, though. Should dry out pretty fast.’ His optimism was impressive.

  After tossing the broom in the back of his ute, he asked if there was anything else she needed. She told him about the power cut. He reached for a toolbox and assailed the fuse box in the back porch. Ten minutes later the lights flickered and the fridge grumbled back to life.

  Scott achieved so much with so little apparent effort she wanted to hug him. But it wasn’t proper behaviour for a woman in a nightie and a beanie. Instead, she went to find her purse. He shook his head, embarrassed. Instant coffee with milk and three sugars was all the
payment he wanted.

  ‘How’s the roof?’ he asked, slurping from his mug.

  ‘Are you psychic?’

  ‘No.’ He chuckled. ‘I’ve known this house since I was a kid. Those slates have always been fun and games.’

  She took him upstairs to inspect the bedroom.

  He stared glumly at the saturated bedding. ‘So there’s no Mr Trumperton?’

  Lisa flushed with annoyance. He was a nosey creep. She should never have let him upstairs.

  ‘The slates’ll need shifting around,’ he said, diverting his attention away from her bed. ‘You’ll need someone to fix the shutters and windows, too.’

  ‘Actually, I have an adult son,’ she said, sounding snooty.

  ‘You do?’ he said with a disarming smile. ‘Maybe he could give you a hand.’

  She bit her lip. Ted and his friends were wonderful, but they were up to their necks in their city lives. She was clearly going to need more help than the odd weekend visit.

  ‘Or you could get hold of the Grey Army,’ he added. ‘Real craftsmen. Ron wouldn’t rip you off. I’ll text you his number.’

  As he pressed her digits into his machine, she could hear Maxine wailing: ‘You gave your phone number to a strange man?! Why don’t you just go ahead and offer your services in the sex offenders’ wing?’

  He helped her heave the bed onto the balcony. She spread the blankets over the balcony rails while he laid the mattress in a patch of sun.

  ‘Should be dry by this afternoon,’ he said, gazing across the valley. ‘Water’s down already.’

  The lake did seem to be shrinking. She’d never known a landscape that could change so quickly.

  She sent him downstairs so she could change into jeans and a sweatshirt. While she was at it she flung on some foundation and neutral lipstick.

  When she returned, Scott was crouching on the floor, investigating the place where James had unearthed flagstones. She offered him a slice of cold pizza. He devoured it in seconds. She placed two more slices on a plate and watched them meet the same fate.