Saracen (Saturn's Child Series Book 1)

by R. L. Holmes

  It was such an odd match. Mrs Rennie holds a sense of class, forever immaculately dressed, like those from the 1950’s. Her hair is always pinned back beautifully, and her clothes are without creases and stains. She never wears trousers or sneakers, and speaks with such elegance and grace.

  Potts is the exact opposite; crass, socially inept and has no pride in her appearance whatsoever. It’s such a mystery to me that they should find each other in this world filled with lonely people.

  So far Seth has been pretty grumpy, actually. I’m hoping that as we get to know each other he will be a little nicer, but for now talking to me is an inconvenience, he just tolerates. If he’s going to tell me something it would be amongst his incessant mutterings about the garden, so I have to be on-guard to pick out the important stuff.

  This seems to be his religion, his passion, his everything. He’s the garden’s protector, environmentalist and activist, but I want to look upon him as a good friend, just because I need one. I’m not sure if he likes me at all, he doesn’t say. He does make it very clear if he intensely dislikes something though - one being my cat, Brambles.

  Before Seth revealed himself, I noticed Brambles became suddenly nervous and started urinating inside, even when the back door was open. I found her one day sitting on the fence howling, too afraid to jump down. This was not long after she killed the pair of frogs from the fish pond. I was devastated to discover them sitting next to her food bowl, which is where she used to place all her catches including birds, baby rabbits and mice. She was too terrified to go further than the camellia hedge, which is where Seth dwells most of the time. She spent her days on the kitchen window sill watching intensely in the direction of the hedge. Sometimes she would suddenly bolt into my room and hide under the bed for hours.

  I told Seth to leave my cat alone, yesterday. He replied by spitting on the ground and mumbling something about wanting to kill them all, ‘mass killers’, he said. He is not wrong of course. In her lifetime, Brambles has chewed many insects, punctured the necks of many fledglings and even hooked out a goldfish from the pond. Luckily we found it still alive and threw it back in. Yes, Brambles was a serial killer of the worst kind.

  ¥

  Early September 1998: Stranger

  ¥

  That girl came back again. I am rather curious about her. Her irises have dark circles round them. She does not gaze or simply look at people; she seems to stare as if she can see something the average person cannot. I wonder if Mary knows what she has there. I wonder if she is astute enough to see the immense talent this girl has.

  Her name is Saracen. How strange. But I must say it suits her. Someone told me she was named after a herb. Saracen’s mother is named after a herb too. That’s all a bit flaky if you ask me, but that’s typical of her. Typical Mary - always has her head in the clouds, always trying too damn hard to bring a bit of calmness to the world, or at least to this dreary town.

  Why stay here, Mary? Have you ever had the urge to travel, to experience a world outside of Fenton? Do you not watch documentaries and read travel books on Paris, Milan, New York, Tuscany, Tokyo? Do you not dream of a life different to this one? One with adventure and risk and memories to share with those you meet. Or are you simply content? Content with the life that has been thrust upon you - raising someone else’s child, Laurie’s death - your son’s. Poor Mary.

  But I like this girl. I see potential in her. I see the way she detaches herself from others, as if she feels different. There is a seriousness about her and almost deep sadness. Perhaps she feels isolated and disconnected. I am not surprised with the childhood she has had, rejected by her parents, raised by her grandmother. You have done a good job with her Mary, and I thank you. She will make a good apprentice, I feel.

  Mid September 1998: Saracen

  ¥

  It’s been two weeks after the murder on Richardson’s farm and one week after my birthday. It’s Friday, about 6.30pm, Aerosmith’s, I Don’t Want to Change a Thing is playing in the background and there’s a knock at the door.

  Gran is preparing our usual Friday fare of chunky chips, fresh salad greens and crispy bacon. In my momentary absent mindedness I assume the knocker was Daniel, as he often turns up on a Friday on his way to the pub to play darts. But I’m quickly reminded as I open the door, that Daniel is gone for good and his killer has yet to be found. Both of these dilemmas leave me feeling somewhat numb. I have great difficulty understanding my feelings and when I have moments of overwhelming fear and confusion, I go to my room and sob in my pillow. That tends to lighten my load, at least for a little while.

  He introduces himself as Constable Lewis. He is tall, handsome and I like him instantly. He asks to speak to my mother, but I tell him that she is swanning around the country with my father. Swanning, is a word I often hear my gran use when she refers to her daughter, and the man she chose to throw her life away with. The policeman nods politely and then peers round the corner into the lounge.

  Our house is an array of colour. My gran loves fabrics of all colours, textures and styles. She is bold with her colour combinations and dresses herself as she dresses the house. Noticing a man at the door, my gran swiftly takes over the conversation and invites him in. He steps in cautiously in heavy black shoes, and searches the house with sky blue eyes. He’s not from Fenton, I can tell. He’s cleaner, smells nicer, and behind his fresh face is a sense of maturity beyond his years.

  He introduces himself to Gran and immediately blushes. Gran was pouring a can of sweetened condensed milk into a bowl to make mayonnaise for our salad, when she too notices his face redden. He clears his throat and makes some small talk about our tea looking delicious.

  Of course I can tell he is not lying, as Gran makes everything look delicious. She even made the old cream couch which harboured several years of cat clawing look edible. She covered it with beautiful flowing Turkish fabrics - turquoise over the seats with cerise throw cushions. The rug on the floor is a deep red and the drab wall paper was covered in paintings, some mystical and some of European sceneries. The largest painting in the lounge is by my grandfather, an artist. The only painting he left before he died. The constable stares thoughtfully at the unusual painting and when he blushes again, I realise he had just uncovered the secret. I spend hours staring at it also; the woman’s face is always the same, but her expressions change.

  ‘It’s called, The Hypocrite,’ Gran says, as he turns his back on the swirling mass of naked ladies with big thighs, in hues of dark blues, purples and reds.

  ‘I love the colours,’ she says. ‘Are you Cancerian?’

  The constable ignores the question and asks to sit down. In the corner of the room, under the front window is a chair that has been left untouched. Its orange fabric is faded and the seams splitting, but its wooden legs and arms are in an immaculate condition. This chair belonged to my grandfather, the artist. After a terrible accident he became depressed, almost lifeless, and would spend his days either in his studio or sitting in this chair, reliving his youth. Sometimes he told stories that were difficult to believe, but most of the time he sat with glazed eyes, his mind a thousand miles away.

  The constable chooses this chair to sit in. A strange choice I think, as the couch is so much more comfortable. Gran is nervous, I can tell as her long fingers are tapping the side of her cheeks. I sit on the couch and wait for him to announce why he is here. He wriggles in the chair, his legs are long and his knees almost nestle up against his chest. He looks awkward, and seems embarrassed by this. He clears his throat and asks to speak to my gran alone. So I am sent away to my room, so they believe.

  I pretend to take offence and storm down the hall and slamming my bedroom door. Then cleverly I creep back up the hall with ears pinned to the wall, to overhear the policeman question Gran about some sort of flammable substance. He’s referring to the ethanol Gran keeps in the shed to make her herbal tinctures.

  They walk out there together and I creep into the kitchen, watchin
g and listening. I’m hoping Seth might be nearby too, so he can tell me what they’re discussing. But I catch sight of him down the back of the yard, drawing symbols in the air near the pittosporum.

  After about ten minutes, Constable Lewis steps out of the shed and nods and smiles sweetly to Gran, and it’s Gran’s turn to blush. It’s at this point I realise that Constable Lewis fancies my gran, and it’s also at this moment that I realise that Gran is an attractive woman.

  The policeman walks down the driveway with Gran. She watches him go for only a few moments, then hugs herself, smiling like a school girl and gracefully tiptoes up the back step.

  I see Gran through different eyes now. I had never seen a man show an interest in her before, and it bothers me. Suddenly she is beautiful and young, and attractive to men. I study her closely as her bare feet lightly touch each step and her flowing red dress fabric caresses her hourglass figure. Her face is young, too young to be a Grandmother, her hair golden and untamed and her skin always a healthy glow. She has lines, but not many. She cares for her skin by using apricot and avocado oils after every shower. He’d be younger than her, by about fifteen years. But he obviously does not see a protective, nurturing Grandmother like I do. He sees something else in her.

  ‘What did he want?’ I ask when she floats through the back door.

  Her mind is absent. Her mind is back in the shed with Constable Lewis. I probe a little more to break her out of her dreamy state. She says that he wanted to talk to her about the ethanol she uses in the shed, and whether she has a license to carry a flammable substance.

  ‘And, do you?’ I ask.

  She sighs, and answers yes.

  ‘Why does he need to know that?’ I ask.

  She just shrugs and continues to pour the rest of the sweetened condensed milk into the bowl to make mayonnaise. She’s smiling, her heart’s a flutter. She wipes the drips of sweet milk from the side of the can with her finger, and begins humming.

  I feel nauseous.

  ¥

  This morning, following after the constable’s visit, Gran and I decide to walk to the post office to buy a stamp for my monthly letter to mum, dad and the siblings. The air is cooler and the sky is silver. It has been an unusually warm September; it’s only spring after all and yet we have been having summer temperatures. Some say it’s due to global warming and that we will probably have a terrible summer, followed by a warm winter.

  It was Gran who encouraged me to write these letters, which I don’t mind because I like writing. I thought that I would write a little about Seth this time, and the visit from the policeman. They already know about the murder, as when they saw it on TV mum rang to see if we were okay.

  Gran tried to hide this awful incident from me, but I soon found out about it as the entire town of Fenton is in such uproar over it. Of course the finger has been pointed at those horrible lads who killed Sergei’s cows. They’re out of prison, so it’s possible that they did do it. But I have a feeling that it wasn’t them and the town just needs someone to blame.

  I don’t know where I get these hunches from. It’s like little flashes of light go off in my head or funny feelings in my stomach. As if someone inserts an idea or a picture into my body, some important piece of information that only I have access too. The problem is that most of the time I’m right and convincing adults of this fact can be somewhat difficult.

  As we arrive at the post office, I see ol’ Moley is on. He works every second Saturday morning alternating with Ms Anderson, so there is only one person running the whole place. He’s unusually pleased to see us, somewhat faking his accommodating manner. We get there early to avoid queuing up and walk straight up to the counter. He leans in to my gran and asks how she is today. Gran steps back suspiciously. I analyse Moley’s body language to see if his is similar to the constable’s, luckily it isn’t.

  Something though, is bugging him. He’s all restless and twitchy as if keen to get something off his chest. He coughs and clears his throat. Gran smells a rat and begins wrestling with her purse for money. He wipes the beads of sweat from his forehead, leans in again and says, ‘So I hear you got a visitor yesterday evening.’

  It is 9.30 am on a Saturday morning. An entire fifteen hours has passed from the moment the constable left to this very moment now. And somehow within those fifteen night time hours, Moley has found out about it. How does he do that?

  Gran’s face burns. Moley props his spectacles up on his nose and cracks his neck. Knowing he’s not pleasing Mary in any way, he just can’t help himself by leaning in again and asking, ‘So what did he want to speak to you about?’

  Gran spits an answer, about it being a routine call, and that everyone will get a visit from the police.

  Moley is not satisfied. ‘I haven’t, and neither have many other locals.’

  Mrs Richardson walks in and waits behind us. She’s eager to send a parcel to Sydney where her daughter lives, and is in a hurry. But Moley’s not perturbed.

  ‘He’s from the City, you know,’ he continues.

  ‘Who?’ Gran asks.

  ‘The policeman. They had to bring in extra resources as it’s such a big case and they seem to have absolutely no idea who it is.’

  Mrs Richardson scowls holes in Moley’s forehead making him nervous. ‘How do you know?’ she asks suddenly.

  He falls to silence to tear a stamp out of the book and hands it to Gran.

  Mrs Richardson clears her throat again. ‘They might already know who it is, but don’t have enough evidence to arrest them.’

  Moley’s words circle in my mind over and over. “They seem to have absolutely no idea who it is.” No idea who it is? Fear strikes me down. Up until this point it had not crossed my mind that a killer is on the loose in a small town like ours. This shakes me. My imagination bites into this information and it completely engulfs me. Thoughts immediately enter my mind of a balaclava clad man, smashing my bedroom window, climbing inside to kidnap me, pouring ethanol all over the house and setting it on fire, while Gran lies fast asleep in bed.

  I wonder if anyone would notice us gone, and would anyone really care? It has been made obvious to me that I’m not overly popular, but Gran is. The townsfolk enjoy her flair for colour and are accepting of her unusual profession. She is frequently visited either for her homemade medicine or for her warm company, and she’s very accommodating with herbal teas or coffee, which is always on the brew.

  The down-side to Mary’s, my gran’s, kind and receptive nature is a talent for attracting those who are socially inept or feel misunderstood, and visit often without an appointment, to talk incessantly about their dreary obsessions. I think our yellow house contains a mysterious magnet that pulls all the worlds lonely, depressed and self-obsessed our way to offload their fears, doubts and exaggerations.

  The first room to your left when you walk in the front door is Gran’s clinic room. This is where she looks over people and decides what herbs they need. This room contains a purple painted bookcase with several rows of bottled tinctures, and books on herbal medicine and the planets. The walls are covered with framed pressed herbs that she mostly did herself.

  There is a two seater, fraying cane couch with cream cushions, and the chair she sits in which is covered in its original soft beige fabric. The rug on the floor is red and her desk is also painted the same purple as the bookcase. The room always smells of alcohol, just like the shed, and is always cold.

  A consultation with my gran consists of her asking loads of questions, while her eyes wander all over the patient searching for anything that seems out of balance. She analyses the colour and condition of their skin and hair, their posture, how they hold themselves and the way they speak.

  She said once, “You can always tell when someone loathes themselves, it’s like they wear thick heavy chains around their necks, and long to be beaten because that’s all they know.”

  People who hate themselves often find their way into Gran’s consultation room for stress,
depression and anxiety. Most of the herbs she has plenty of stocks of - are mostly mood elevators, anti-anxieties and sedatives. She also dispenses herbs for the liver amply too, as drinking is a big part of the culture and, “A buggered liver often resulted in a chronically grumpy mood.” She treats various types of hepatitis, cirrhosis of the liver and digestive problems, ranging from excess flatulence and bloating to constipation and diarrhoea.

  We leave the post office and walk home in silence - Gran wearing a flowing black dress with pink roses on it, and me in my hand-made blue cardigan and camel trousers. I notice she is wearing floral perfume, it suits her dress. I suspect she’s on the look-out for Constable Lewis, as this dress is only worn on special occasions, like when we go out for tea at Cobb’n’Co in the City.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Gran says, as if she knows what awful things are accumulating in my mind. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’s just a gossip, just a bloody, nosey gossip.’

  Finally, we arrive back home to find Sergei’s silver utility truck is parked out the front and his tall lean frame bent over patting Brambles. His wife’s leg is playing up, so she just stays in the car. He’s here to tell us they finally got an offer on the farm, and he also needs some more medicine for his lungs.

  He isn’t looking well, his skin a grey colour, and he’s having trouble breathing. He had been unwell since some of his animals were tortured and killed by those horrid lads, and just wanted to see the back of this place. He sunk into a bit of a “downer” and feels tired and flat, and unmotivated. His irritating smoker’s cough has developed into bronchitis, and he’s just feeling like “crap”. He says in his dramatic Russian way that his “heart is broken and he wanted no more of this place.”