The Silent Inheritance

by Joy Dettman

  She’d lied about having no photograph of Marni’s father. She had one, but justified that lie by telling herself he hadn’t been her father when the photograph was taken.

  Should have told her the truth.

  For an hour she stood outside, wasting Mrs Vaughn’s water, but the old lady wasn’t watching, and that dead lawn was growing green again, and Sarah wanted it to stay green.

  Marni came to the door. ‘There’s a movie starting. We haven’t seen it.’

  It wasn’t worth seeing. Marni went to bed. Sarah sat staring at the screen while her mind roamed to Maureen Crow, who was no Barbara Lane. Show her something once and she had it. She’d known that office well ten years ago. She was rusty but her rust brushed off easily.

  David Crow hadn’t been back.

  The show ended at ten forty when Sarah crept into the bedroom to stand beside Marni’s bed, looking down at the length of her. She’d grown fast this year. Thirteen was the year of change. She’d mature soon. Sarah could remember the day she’d bled, could remember Lynette Clark telling her that it was her new beginning, that she’d become a woman, and would one day be a mother.

  Had become a mother by accident, and too soon.

  Should have told Marni the first time she’d asked if she had a daddy, but she’d been so tiny, and there had been so much time, and she’d thought she’d forget about him and they could truly become Sarah and Marni Carter, just one more mother and daughter lost in a city of millions – as they had for such a long time.

  She opened the built-in robe, or the left-side door of the robe, did it slowly, one eye on Marni, who didn’t move. Quickly then, from the top shelf, from amongst her old books, her old sweaters, she removed her mother’s cake tin.

  It was a battered round tin that had never stored cake. It stored war medals, important papers, photographs of the many roads it had travelled and of the places it had called home for a little while.

  For six years it had lived in a drawer at the Clarks’ house. For two days it had travelled east across the Nullarbor in a brand new case. It spent six months zipped into that case beneath Gramp’s spare bed, then seven lonely days in a cheap hotel before it went to live beneath a narrow bed in a women’s refuge. It had gone to hospital when Marni came, then returned to the refuge, until Sarah brought it out here.

  She hadn’t opened it in five or six years. Remembered it well, remembered the battered, dented blonde on the lid she’d lifted too often before Marni.

  It had been all she had, a cake tin, full up with helpless, hopeless memories.

  Her birth certificate was in it, Marni’s too, and Sarah’s parents’ marriage certificate. Her mother had believed it important enough to keep, so Sarah had kept it. Kept the old war medals, the two bulky Kodak envelopes stuffed with photographs her mother had taken with an old camera she’d loaded with rolls of film, and when all of the film had been used, her mother would rewind it, remove it and take the roll to a Kmart to be turned into the miracle of trapped moments and people.

  Remembered standing in one street looking at herself and Gramp her panda bear cardigan, remembered her mother buying a little frame for that one. Still had it.

  Sarah carried the tin into the other room and sat at the table, sifting through old photographs, finding one of long wiry old Gramp in his working clothes, a laughing roly-poly Gran at his side. She found Uncle Bill, a chubby, soft little man. He’d had four children, her cousins. Somewhere out there, they’d grown, as she’d grown. Somewhere out there, they’d have children Marni’s age. She would enjoy visiting them in Brisbane.

  Her mother had only kept the best of her photographs. She’d ripped up the rest and tossed them out of the car window. Used to say she was leaving a trail behind them, like Hansel and Gretel, so they could find their way back. He’d never gone back, just forward, always forward, getting to no place—

  Until Perth. Until her mother had got that job with the Clarks—

  I can’t just walk out. They depend on me, Joey.

  Shook that memory away and opened the small brown cardboard box containing her maternal grandfather’s war medals. She hadn’t known her mother’s parents.

  My daddy was a war hero, baby.

  Learnt about wars and men with guns that day—

  Put them away. Opened an envelope and removed Marni’s original birth certificate. She could give it to her in the morning then let her ask her questions.

  Marni Olivia. Date of birth July eleven, 2000.

  A new-millennium baby. A life-changing baby. She’d made Sarah become what she’d become. Everything she’d done, she’d done for Marni. And telling her about Perth would only make her want to go there more, so she slid the truth back into the envelope, back into the cake tin, and she buried it beneath the war medals.

  Television still playing. She felt its noise. Harvey Norman’s advertisement vibrated. If Marni had been out here, she would have hit the mute button. Muted or not, it made little difference to Sarah. Most of the ads had subtitles.

  As did the newsflash. If not for the subtitles, Sarah wouldn’t have recognised Barbara Lane being shepherded towards the passenger-side door of a dark green four-wheel drive, then assisted up to the seat by a giant of a man who’d need that four-wheel drive to hold him.

  That woman didn’t look like Barbara Lane. Her perfect hair hung limp, her face was clean of makeup. She looked broken – which was of no concern to the cameraman, who had to dodge the four-wheel drive when the giant man backed out.

  Barbara Lane was released from hospital this afternoon. A spokesman for the family said today that they hold little hope that the police will find Danni alive, a female reporter said.

  Have you got a daughter, Sarah asked that woman silently. If you had a daughter you couldn’t speak like that.

  Again they showed the policeman, or the part of the interview where he’d mentioned Hannibal Lecter, then the news cut to something about tattoo parlours and Sarah turned back to her photographs, sorting through them as she might through a pack of cards, selecting a few she placed on the table.

  She was in most of them, from babyhood to twelve years old, twelve and a half. She found the last photograph her mother had taken: Sarah, standing with the Clark children, in her bathers, beside their swimming pool.

  Her mother had been dead for two months before that film was rewound and taken to the Kmart. Sarah hadn’t ripped up any of those last precious twelve. She’d needed to hold on to what little she’d had after the funeral.

  Glanced up at that woman who had no daughter, back on the screen now and speaking about Michael Swan.

  … convicted of the manslaughter of toddler Cory Martin, was today granted an appeal.

  And Marni came out and caught her. ‘They’re going to try him again! What for?’

  ‘Appeal,’ Sarah said. ‘Not trial. You can hear that when you sleeping?’

  ‘It’s loud enough for Mrs Vaughn to hear, Mum, and if you’d get an implant, you’d hear it,’ Marni said. She turned the volume down as Sarah slid photographs back into their packet. Not fast enough. Marni swooped on the one of Sarah and the Clark children. ‘I didn’t know you had these.’

  ‘You see them many time before.’

  ‘Not since I can remember, I haven’t. Who are they?’

  ‘Clarks.’

  ‘You’re thinking about Perth!’

  ‘You make me think about Perth – only think, Marni.’

  ‘Show me the rest.’

  Sarah passed her a packet and watched them spread, on the table, on the computer, on a Brisbane brochure and the printouts of Perth.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘My father,’ Sarah said.

  ‘And you, as a baby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was he driving the car when it crashed?’

  ‘My mother can’t drive.’

  ‘How come you don’t want to visit their graves?’

  ‘Grave don’t have people. Grave is only stones with names. Pe
ople who die stay in here,’ she said, tapping her head.

  ‘It must be awful to lose your parents when you’re a kid. Is that why you won’t go to Perth, because everyone you loved is in a cemetery?’

  ‘Gramp and Gran get put on their farm.’

  ‘You can’t bury people on farms, can you?’

  ‘They getting cremate. Gramp wrote … in his will.’

  ‘Cre-may-ted,’ Marni corrected.

  ‘Cremated,’ Sarah said. ‘They will have both ashes put around a beautiful tree, pink bark. He show me his tree. Gum, with red flower that smell like honey. It is very beautiful.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Marni asked.

  It was an old bank card Sarah hadn’t seen in twelve years and couldn’t remember putting in with the photographs. She took it from Marni’s hand, glanced at it, then tucked it into the cup of her bra.

  ‘It’s not even your name on it.’

  ‘From before. Long time before. Go to bed.’

  ‘You know we won’t get tickets to fly anywhere soon.’

  ‘Places all the same. Town, city, tree, road.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’ve seen them and I haven’t,’ Marni said and she returned to bed.

  DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN

  He’d underestimated his hunters’ imagination. Their mock-up portraits hadn’t overly concerned him. The shot of Nelly and her loaded trolley exiting the public toilets concerned him.

  He was making mistakes, and get two of them side by side and like mice they bred. He’d bred up a plague with this one, and he’d known it. He’d intended buying Nelly a new outfit, just hadn’t got around to it.

  He had to finish this. He had to get rid of her and the Kingswood, then get out of this place and keep his head down.

  He checked his watch as he unlocked the gate. Plenty of time. He drove through, got out, closed and locked it, and cursed the neighbour who’d caused him to lock it. That padlock was a mistake. It advertised ownership. The newness of it advertised recent occupation. He cursed the hunters for forcing his hand with this one. He’d made his own rules with the others, had decided when the time was right. The time wasn’t right. It was necessary.

  The Herald Sun had printed a photograph of a Kingswood, cleaner, in better condition than his, but otherwise identical, and every man and his dog in Victoria would recognise it if they passed it on the road. He’d sprayed cars before. Yesterday he’d bought a dozen spray packs of black enamel from half a dozen two-dollar shops. That paint dried in fifteen or twenty minutes. It could be done. Given time every problem was surmountable.

  He’d bought petrol, twenty litres of it in plastic containers. He’d be making no stops for fuel tonight.

  Made a mistake in buying his little Yank a sweater at a small womenswear shop. It was pink and it had beading on the front, and he’d wanted it for this one. The woman who’d served him was probably phoning Crime Stoppers this morning. He’d gone through the self-service at Kmart when he’d bought the sneakers – and was probably on one of their cameras.

  The note was done and folded ready in his wallet. He’d taken its wording near verbatim from the Bible, and as he pushed his loaded barrow across to the house, he mouthed the words silently.

  ‘Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but my deeds shall not pass away. Watch ye therefore and pray always that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that come to pass.’

  It was a good note to end on.

  About to drop the first bag of firewood onto the hearth, he noticed a pool of water there and looked up. The roof leaked over the sitting room, but to date the rest of the house had been dry. The kitchen ceiling looked dry.

  He lifted a carton of kindling and newspapers away from the pool. The carton lifted. Its saturated base dropped its load, and he kicked it, cursed it, then noticed the trickle escaping from beneath the firebox. That treacherous bastard of a stove had sprung a leak in its boiler tank, or in the pipes feeding in and out.

  The tank fed water via gravity to the house. There should be a stop tap on its pipes. If he could turn it off, he’d stop that leak, and with that thought in mind, he returned to the shed for a stepladder.

  He found the stop tap, had to hit it with the heel of his hand to move it, bruised his hand before it moved, but it turned and he ran inside to watch that trickle slow, then stop.

  Lack of water to that boiler wouldn’t affect the stove’s function. No hot water tonight could affect him.

  ‘Phone a plumber,’ he sneered. ‘Or put a match to the bloody place and burn it to the ground. Plenty of petrol and those aerosol cans would go off like bombs.’ And he could no more bring the fire department racing out here than he could a plumber.

  He stood staring at the stove, knowing a plumber would find a way to repair it – or replace the boiler or pipes – or would have done fifty years ago, back when household items had been reparable. Nothing was repaired these days. A three-year-old video player was a throw-away item.

  He lifted the large hotplate and peered in, opened the firebox, got his penlight torch and guided its beam around the internal surfaces. The sodden ash towards the front suggested the leak’s likely position, suggested it may not be the pipes. They’d be on the far side. He swung the beam around that maw, which he’d never considered more than a wood-guzzling space, then, placing the torch down, he removed the two small hotplates and the twin metal plates supporting them. A noisy, filthy occupation, but with the wider area exposed, he could see the boiler tank and he fetched a knife to scrape off the build-up of carbon.

  He found a leak, a bead of water at the front top corner where a joint must have given way, or rusted away from within.

  There were products available these days guaranteed to repair metal. He’d seen them advertised in junk mail. You could buy anything if you knew the right place to go. A few days ago, he’d bought himself a computer power supply adapter from a place in Ringwood. It plugged into the cigarette lighter of his car and charged the computer battery – so they claimed. He hadn’t tested it yet.

  ‘Bunnings,’ he said, and went to the sink to wash his hands, turned on a tap, and when it failed to give up its water, he cursed it and took his bar of soap out to the tank to wash.

  Lost too much of that morning. Everything took time. The opening and closing of the gate, the finding of an epoxy adhesive at Bunnings, a two-phase product guaranteed resistant to alkalis, solvents, acids and heat – and not cheap – nor was the bottle of heavy-duty hand-cleaning liquid he found there. He bought a hose that was cheap. If his stove repair failed, he couldn’t see himself bucketing water from tank to bathroom – and cold water wasn’t an option anyway.

  Wasted fifty minutes with his shopping. Lost another twenty in scraping fifty years of built-up carbon from the boiler’s corner and wherever else he could reach with his kitchen knife. He lost ten more minutes in wiping the boiler tank clean, but the instructions on the epoxy packet demanded a clean surface, free of grease.

  Remove caps. Pierce seals with rear of caps.

  He pierced both.

  Squeeze equal amounts of resin and hardener onto clean disposable surface and mix thoroughly.

  He emptied both tubes onto a party plate, mixed them well with his kitchen knife, then, with the same knife, plastered that paste heavily around the front top corner of the boiler where he’d seen that bead of water, then anywhere else his knife would reach. By the time he was done, he’d lost most of his morning, but the epoxy left on the plate and knife was setting. It might work.

  According to the manufacturer, it took an hour to cure and twelve more to reach full strength. He didn’t have twelve hours, but could find something to do for an hour. Keys in his hand, newspapers under his arm, masking tape worn like a bracelet on his wrist, he went out to the garage and unlocked the side door to make a start on masking the Kingswood for its paint job.

  He’d once loved the silence, the perfect peace of this land. No perfect peace today. The arty one’s dog was barking, and he
kept it up for the hour it took to cover the windows, to fiddle newspaper around the chromed bumper bars, around the van’s grille.

  His back killing him, he walked across to the house to stretch it and to check his repair.

  It wasn’t pretty, and a touch with his finger told him it was barely touch dry. He’d plastered it too heavily around that corner, and he cursed his plastering and the hands of his watch, and no boiling water for a coffee as he returned to the Kingswood.

  He was easing a length of masking tape along the chrome door strips when the light entering in through the side door altered and he stopped what he was doing to turn.

  That big yellow mongrel was filling the narrow doorway.

  ‘Get!’ he warned, standing, his eyes seeking a weapon. Spray cans close by, scissors, masking tape. He chose a spray can. ‘Get, you ugly bastard,’ he roared and belted with the can on the galvanised wall.

  It backed off. He continued yelling and belting that wall until the mongrel turned tail and loped towards the house. He’d left the doors open for light, had left the screen door propped open.

  He picked up a second can, got both lids off, then, his fingers on the triggers, he followed the dog.

  And she was screaming and if the arty one had followed her dog, he was a dead man. He ran to his back door, and her scream was loud and the dog’s bark louder. Unaware if it was inside or out, he stayed out, but hammered on the wall, on the window with a can, and it scrabbled out from beneath the house to face him, and the bastard was showing his teeth. It appeared to be a labrador-boxer crossbreed, with something larger in its genealogy.

  ‘Get, you ugly bastard,’ he bellowed, and shot a spray of black mist towards it.

  It didn’t like that. It shook its head, licked its nose, backed up, so he gave it a second dose, stepping back while that can sprayed, kicking the barrow out of his way. He got inside and closed the screen door, his eyes never leaving that mongrel, who was too big to tangle with. His guest now hammering on the floor, that bloody dog went back beneath the house.