by Joy Dettman
‘If you’d kept in touch with the Clarks, you would have known. You could have written to them, Mum. You didn’t have to tell them you’d had me.’
Sarah shook her head.
‘Did your father have a baby with someone before you were born?’
‘I don’t know.’
They sat up late that night, studying their new street directory, searching for Gramp’s farm that could have been their own, and when Sarah found the general area, Marni plotted a route from their house to that general area, a route crossing many pages.
‘Can you drive that far, if it’s not raining, this weekend?’
‘Too many road, Marni.’
‘They’re long straight roads, and we know this end of Springvale Road.’
‘We looking for carpet this weekend,’ Sarah said.
‘We can look then go.’
‘Maybe,’ Sarah said, her finger circling an area of a map where there were no streets but a road that said Yarra Glen. ‘I know there. I drive Gramp to Eltham on that road.’
*
At one o’clock on Saturday, the floor coverings chosen, ordered and a deposit paid, the sky still looking clear over Melbourne, they headed off on their longest drive yet, up Springvale Road to its end, where they turned left onto Reynolds Road, also straight. It crossed many maps, but they passed a cemetery, which meant they were coming to their right-hand turn into Fitzsimmons Road.
That’s when Marni started wishing she hadn’t nagged. It wasn’t a straight road, and they got stuck at a huge roundabout, cars going every which way, Sarah propping for so long that the driver behind blasted his horn and scared Marni half to death. They got through it with their lives then came on another one.
‘Oh my God, Mum.’
Only God knew how they got through that one, but they did, and as the directory had promised when it had been on their kitchen table, that road led them to Eltham, where they stopped for a coffee.
The last bit was easy, easy for Sarah. She was in home territory now.
‘Every week I driving here, for shopping, bank, something.’
She drove that last stretch confidently, and with less traffic pushing her, drove it slowly.
*
Uncle Fred had said that Gramp’s land had value. Sarah saw why. People wanted to live out here. Much had altered in the nearly thirteen years since she’d walked away from the farm. Houses had sprung up where there’d been no houses. She drove past the turn-off to Gramp’s farm because of a house that shouldn’t have been there and a row of trees concealing Gramp’s cow paddock fence, but the land ahead didn’t look right so she made a careful U-turn and drove back.
‘When I am small, Gramp’s cows on that land and my father and Gramp make that fence.’
The directory at Marni’s feet, the wheels of the car barely creeping, they passed a flat-roofed brown house and a minibus, parked on the side of a too-narrow road. Sarah slowed before the next gate, then nosed the car in close. She knew that gate, but not the padlock and chain locking it.
‘Are we lost?’
‘We here.’
‘It’s bush,’ Marni said, but Sarah was pointing.
‘Honey shed is there,’ and she turned off the motor and was out of the car. Marni was slower to get out and join her at the gate.
‘I learn to drive in that paddock, around and around. Gramp making me drive up and down, on his drive, reverse all the way down.’ Her finger pointing. ‘See that big rock, that tree? There. He teach me parking between them. He is a very careful man. I am a good driver before he will let me go out this gate.’
Still Gramp’s gate but that chain made it look mean. This land had never been mean.
‘Whoever is calling herself your sister doesn’t like visitors,’ Marni said, giving the gate a shake.
‘Uncle Fred say no one is living here.’
‘I wouldn’t either,’ Marni said. ‘I thought it would have cows and look like a farm.’ It was clay and rock and grey scrubby trees and an ugly in-your-face tin garage, and all she could see of a house looked a hundred times worse than Mrs Vaughn’s had ever looked.
‘I’m glad you didn’t inherit it. What if you’d made me live out here, Mum?’
‘Look,’ Sarah said, pointing. ‘Smoke. Someone here.’
‘Want to climb through and walk up?’
‘No.’
‘That tin shed looks new.’
‘Not new. Gramp getting it build for his honey, but inside is too hot. White elephant, he said. Eyesore.’ She pointed to the right of the tin garage, to a second, more distant rusty roof lost behind trees. ‘He have got his whizzing machine, for spinning honey from honeycomb, in there. When you walk near, you smell honey,’ she said, then shook the gate until the chain rattled. ‘We don’t lock this. We don’t close when I am here before you.’
‘I was expecting crops and stuff,’ Marni said.
‘Before, in that bit where we see the new house, is better land. He selling that to get money – before I come here – before you when Gran was very sick and he can’t see, can’t work. He will never sell the house bit.’
The sky was darkening to the west. Rain had been forecast for this weekend, so they returned to the car.
The minibus was leaving. They gave way to it, and Marni saw a woman removing a bunch of balloons she’d tied to the gatepost. At Forest Hill, a bunch of balloons spelled garage sale, and, wanting some reward for their journey, she wound down her window and called to the woman.
‘Are we too late to have a look?’
‘Not at all,’ the woman replied.
‘Rain is coming,’ Sarah warned.
‘Five minutes. She might have something we need.’
They needed everything. They had a two-door linen press and six towels and a change of sheets each to put in it. They had wardrobes in three bedrooms, cupboards in the laundry and their kitchen was all cupboards and drawers.
The woman, who was clad in a psychedelic poncho, black tights and high-heeled boots, stood waiting to greet them. Her dog didn’t wait. He came out to bark at the car.
‘Herod,’ the woman commanded. He looked at her, didn’t want to obey, but did, and Marni got out to eye that monster and wonder if she’d lose a leg to it when it approached to sniff at her jeans.
‘He’s a big pussycat,’ the woman said. ‘Offer him your closed fist, dear.’
He was big, and no pussycat, but he had a silly puppy face, and when Marni offered him her fist, he sniffed, licked, but didn’t eat it. He turned to Sarah then to check her out before allowing her on his land.
No shed, no evidence of a garage sale, only a small purple/blue car parked beside a semi-enclosed garden. The woman led them through the garden and into a gallery hung with paintings.
‘The prices are on them. If you see anything you like, give me a call,’ she said, then disappeared through a doorway to their right.
‘Let’s go,’ Marni mouthed.
‘Bad manners,’ Sarah replied in like manner.
There must have been more than two dozen framed paintings on the walls. Drawn by its heat or its size, Sarah walked towards a bushfire scene where a burning tree in the foreground looked too hot to touch – as was the price sticker on its frame. Marni saw the price, not the painting.
‘Let’s go, Mum!’
It had eight hundred and seventy-five dollars on it, and even the smaller paintings didn’t wear small price tags.
‘You want have a look, so look!’ Sarah mouthed. ‘We say before we want pictures.’
‘They’re paintings,’ Marni mouthed. ‘Dimmey’s have got framed prints for twenty-five dollars.’
‘You make me come in here, so we will buy something.’
‘You tell me not to waste money.’
They argued with mouth, not with voice. They didn’t need voice, never used it if a listener was close by. They wandered, lip-talking, until the poncho lady returned and told them to help themselves to tea and biscuits, then to hit a ligh
t switch which turned on many small spotlights. One lit up over a white tree standing alone against a pink and lilac dawn, and that light made the sky glow as if the sun was about to burst free.
‘Who’s the artist?’ Marni asked.
‘My name is on them,’ the woman said, and Marni stepped in close enough to read the artist’s signature on that lilac dawn, Sylvia Moon, and if she wasn’t famous, she should have been. There was nothing much in that painting, but what was there was incredible – as was its price.
Sarah had found an old man sitting on a log, an old house behind him, and another incredible tree.
‘I want that one,’ she mouthed.
‘We’re going, Mum.’
‘That one Gramp and his house.’ He had a white beard like Gramp, a cigarette he was about to put into his mouth, a dog at his feet – and the dog and cigarette looked as alive as the man.
‘I want that one, please,’ Sarah said aloud.
Marni glanced at the artist, busy unplugging an urn. ‘It’s got six hundred and eighty dollars on it,’ Marni mouthed. ‘Come on, or you’ll have to drive through those roundabouts in the rain.’
Then the woman turned. ‘This one,’ Sarah said, and the poncho lady smiled and joined them, pleased she’d made a sale. Marni couldn’t watch her mother spend so much money, so she went back the way she’d come and the monster dog was out there, waiting to eat – or greet her.
He yipped at her, maybe inviting her to walk with him around to the back of a very strange-looking house, and when she refused his invitation and tried to go back, he nudged her, danced in front of her, blocking her way.
‘What do you want?’ she asked his silly pup face. His eyes told her he wanted company, so she followed him. She’d never owned a dog, and if she ever did, it wouldn’t be man-eater size, but she let him lead her into the bush behind the house where wind was now tossing the high branches.
Herod didn’t linger there. He led the way to a fence of posts with strands of wire stretched between them, the top wire barbed. There was no chain or padlock warning them to stay out. Maybe the ‘sister’ considered barbed wire warning enough. The lower wires weren’t barbed. Herod stuck his head between two, then scrabbled the rest of him through to the other side, and was gone, into the scrub.
She yelled his name, looked towards the artist’s house, which was well away from the shed. Knew she should go back and tell her where her dog was, but maybe he was allowed, and the artist was busy selling a painting for six hundred and eighty dollars, so probably wouldn’t care.
‘Herod!’ she yelled again, then followed him between the wires.
All of her life she’d heard stories about Gramp’s farm and his honey shed. She’d come all the way out to Kangaroo Ground to see Gramp’s farm, which wasn’t a farm but rugged old Australian bush with barbed-wire fences, but she was out here so may as well have a look at land that might have been her mother’s.
Like the dog she made her own path around clumps of scrub towards the roof of a shed that smelled of honey. It was all uphill. The artist had built her house on flat land, close to the road. Gramp, or his father, had built his house halfway up a hill.
And that lunatic dog was barking his brains out at someone, and that someone was yelling at him.
Marni dodged a low branch and ran to the wall of the honey shed, an old grey wall with half of its boards falling off. She sniffed at one gap. It didn’t smell of honey, and whoever lived here parked his car in there, a white car.
‘Get, you yellow bastard,’ a man yelled.
Herod took no notice, so Marni, two fingers in her mouth, let loose a piercing whistle. Herod stopped barking, so she did it again.
And she saw who lived here, just a glimpse of a grey man. He was standing out the front of the metal garage and he had a long-handled rake in his hand and was swinging it at the dog, who must have known how long the rake handle was, because he kept his distance from its sharp end.
‘Herod,’ she yelled again.
‘Get off my land and take your mongrel with you,’ the man roared.
Herod wasn’t her mongrel. Marni got off his land, making the downhill run faster than she’d made it uphill, and that fool of a dog passed her before she was back at the fence, and he was on the other side before her, and laughing at her mad scramble to get through.
‘He’ll get the dog catcher next time and put you in doggy jail. You’re not allowed to disturb your neighbours’ peaceful enjoyment of their properties,’ she told him.
Mrs Vaughn had spent a lot of her life yelling that at a neighbour with a barking dog, before she’d started ringing the council and driving them mad. She shut the dog up or the neighbour got rid of it – and Marni had stopped wishing she’d been born deaf. Her mother hadn’t heard it – and she was going to be hopping mad about Marni’s disappearing trick.
Saw her on the road near the car, and ran down the drive, Herod at her side.
Sylvia Moon was there, probably trying to convince her buyer that her dog hadn’t eaten her daughter.
‘Sorry,’ Marni said, and got into the car. That painting was on the back seat, bubble-wrapped.
Sarah got in. ‘Where you been?’
‘I had a look at your honey shed. Her dog took off and I had to follow him.’
‘I think you get kidnapped.’
‘I saw who lives on your farm.’
‘Jack James,’ Sarah said.
They were moving, the black of the sky following them to Eltham, where they were stopped by traffic lights.
‘He writing books. A grumpy old hermit.’
‘See, because I wasn’t there, you had to talk to her.’
‘She talking,’ Sarah said. ‘She got three daughters and five grandchildren. Teach art for school and when she retire last Christmas, her husband die playing golf. Heart attack.’
‘Did you tell her you could have owned the land her house is on?’
‘No. I ask when she making that painting of Gramp. She said she got photograph before, when she buys Gramp’s land,’ Sarah said. ‘When I want to pay her with my chequebook, she want my licence. The first time, I have got one. She put my number on the receipt.’
Marni told her that the honey shed didn’t smell of honey, that there was a car parked in it.
‘What he look like?’
‘Grey hair, grey beard. Herod didn’t like him.’
‘What?’
‘The artist’s dog barked at him and the writer tried to hit him with an old metal rake.’
The lights changed and Sarah drove on. The first roundabout, their bogeyman, was a monster at four fifty, but they got through, and through the next before heavy rain began thrashing their windscreen. It chased them all the way back to Springvale Road, where they weren’t keeping up with the speed limit and a big black four-wheel drive sat on their bumper bar, urging them to go faster. It tailgated them to Maroondah Highway, where the driver blasted the horn and sprayed them with so much water they were too busy attempting to see the road between swipes of their wiper blades to worry about why he’d blasted his horn.
They passed him again at Canterbury Road where he was in a long queue, waiting to make a right-hand turn. Marni waved to him, and wondered if the kids in the back of his posh van were his hostages. He and his van looked evil.
They missed the green arrow at Hawthorn Road and Sarah spoke again. ‘After her husband die, she is going to sell her house when it is finished, but her daughter buy that dog, and say, “Get on with your dream”.’
‘I like her daughter,’ Marni said, and the lights changed.
They made their turn, and five minutes later were home, still alive, but exhausted by their day. They ate fried cheese sandwiches with a mug of tomato soup, and Marni said, ‘If Mrs Vaughn was still alive, we’d be cooking her dinner. If you had a husband, I suppose it would be the same, wouldn’t it, like every night, peeling potatoes, heating stew, then washing his clothes on Sunday.’
Their rooms were cold toni
ght. They had a gas heater in Mrs Vaughn’s house – in their house. The utilities had been transferred to Sarah’s name. They could have taken their soup and sandwich in there and been warm.
‘When are we moving, Mum?’
‘After carpet, curtains.’
They had little to move, only the microwave and television, their magic frying pan and clothing. Their laptop couldn’t move, or not until they had a new lead for their broadband connection.
‘Turn these rooms into our study. Get a desk and chair.’
‘Maybe get a man to pull it down then grow things.’
The news was on. Kevin Rudd was on it again. He’d been Australia’s Prime Minister until his parliament friends got rid of him – except they hadn’t. He was always on the news, and Julia, or Tony.
It was like the television ran the county, not the government, like each channel decided who they wanted to be Prime Minister and pushed their choice every chance they got, so the voters would think it was no use voting any other way.
None of the channels mentioned Danni, or the reward. That was old news. They’d be interested again when they found her.
A football player was having scans on his leg – was that headline news? Maybe to some people. Football was important in Melbourne.
Dave and Pop liked it. Marni would miss coming home to them when they were finished.
The floor-covering people would be here next week to rip up the last of Mrs Vaughn, to roll her up in her old carpet and vinyl and replace it with new. The drapes would be delivered and hung before the school holidays. Sarah was taking the last week of the holidays off to organise Marni’s birthday party.
They’d argued about the date. Sarah wanted to have it on Sunday the fourteenth, at lunchtime. Marni wanted it on Saturday night, on the thirteenth, which was a perfect date for a thirteenth birthday party.
‘How many you want to invite?’
‘Heaps.’
‘Not heaps, Marni.’
‘We’ll get a caterer.’
‘What?’
‘A caterer, to make and serve the food.’
