Other Side of the Season

by Jenn J. McLeod

  In spite of a chill in the air, her mother seemed to calm, a slow thawing of a body, the sharp edges melting, softening, and Sid was suddenly hopeful of ending whatever this angry mother—daughter moment was about.

  ‘I’m sorry about your grandfather, Sid, and you can do much better than that Damien,’ she heard her mother say. ‘As for my childhood, there was nothing particularly interesting.’ It wasn’t the answer Sid had hoped to hear, but it was a start. ‘My life began when I met and married your father. I’ve told you that a million times.’

  Sid lifted her face to her mother’s. ‘Your marriage worked, even though you and Dad were so different. Maybe Damien and I were too alike. Here’s me thinking it was about the baby.’

  ‘The baby?’ Natalie said. ‘Sid, darling, never blame the baby for the choices you make.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I was suggesting it wasn’t the baby news at all. Maybe we were never going to work. We were just too busy being business partners to stop and realise.’

  ‘People thought your father and me an odd couple, but I can only say for every brush there’s a stroke and for every painting there’s a frame. I want you to find your perfect match, Sid darling, but you’ll have your hands full when the baby comes.’

  ‘I want to have my hands full. I know that for certain now. I truly believe things happen for a reason. I’m glad Damien didn’t do the right thing and marry me. I can’t imagine living my life with the wrong person, or someone who felt they’d been tricked.’

  ‘Tricked?’

  Sid witnessed a subtle change in her mother’s demeanour, an obscure expression playing on her face.

  ‘I’m fairly certain Damien used that word at one stage in relation to the baby. I needed to get away and having time here to think has been good for me. I needed to pull myself together. Soon enough I’ll be someone’s mum.’ Sid smiled through a sniff and dabbed at the corner of her eyes. ‘I want to be a good one.’

  ‘You will be, Sidney darling.’ Natalie gathered the jacket around her chest and picked up her handbag from the seat. She walked across to where Sid was seated and stroked her hair. ‘And before you know it, the baby who relied on you for everything will have grown up, flown away, and not need you anymore.’

  ‘I do need you, Mum.’

  ‘Darling, I remember you on the first day of school. Every child was clinging to their mother’s legs, except you–too curious about the day ahead.’

  ‘Really? I can’t remember something so long ago. I was only five. I’m surprised you can.’

  ‘Oh, I remember all about being five, Sid, but did you remember to find me a motel room?’

  26

  Braidenfield Home for Girls, Parramatta

  At five years of age, Tilly–as Natalie was known then–knew more than most kids starting school. Tilly had learned to count to five well before that, because five was the number of times her mother would answer the door of their Redfern flat soon after she’d dished up Vegemite toast for dinner and tucked Tilly into the stretcher bed–the one behind the magical curtain that she was told turned little girls silent and invisible. Five was also the number of foster homes Tilly had been shunted to after her mum died, with each new mother finding a reason to return her soon after: too timid, too sooky, too withdrawn.

  Whatever withdrawn meant, Tilly didn’t know.

  Uncontrollable by ten, Tilly was sent to the Braidenfield Home for Girls in Parramatta, a place that quickly put an end to any sooky stuff. Braidenfield was no place for the weak so, within a couple of months, Tilly was being branded too loud, too pushy, too vulgar.

  Whatever vulgar meant, Tilly didn’t know.

  Four years at Braidenfield taught Tilly to survive, to control, to win. Like she won the hearts of Ulf and Hilda Marhkt, a couple from the country who were in need of a daughter. ‘A kind girl,’ they’d said. ‘One in need of domesticating. That’s what we’re looking for.’ Someone young and malleable to be a sibling to their sixteen-year-old foster son and live in the country on a magic hill.

  ‘The highest around,’ Hilda had told Tilly, painted lips smiling down.

  ‘High enough to see the ocean, even?’ Tilly asked.

  ‘All the way to the sea’s horizon.’

  Whatever the sea’s horizon was, Tilly didn’t know.

  Tilly didn’t know lots of things. She’d never seen the sea, she’d never had a big brother, and she’d never had a family home. To Tilly and her mother, the word home meant a couch in a stranger’s lounge room, or a spare bit of space on someone’s back porch. When things were at their worst, home for them both was the inner-city streets of Sydney and the back seat of a draughty old station wagon with a busted door lock and broken windows that wound down all on their own. At night, five-year-old Tilly would lie awake listening to angry shouts that sounded far too close, and police sirens that sounded too far away. For hours, or so it seemed, she’d stare wide-eyed at the dark shapes that would slide across the car’s bonnet and roof. Only when they had slipped over the boot and merged with the darkness behind the car would Tilly let out the breath she’d been holding and wish for morning when the shadows would disappear completely and she could try waking her mother.

  Five was also the number of girls an envious Tilly had watched being prepared for visitors to Braidenfield, one morning shy of her fourteenth birthday. That day, five became her lucky number. Lucky because only four of the girls prepared had turned up at the special visitors’ room in time. Poor pretty Penny–the fifth girl–had somehow run into a door, hit her nose and sent blood gushing all over her lovely blue dress with the white bunny rabbit border above the hem. Tilly had rushed to the special room–the one with the comfortable chairs where the visitors always waited. That day she’d found a lady in a red dress, called Hilda, and her husband, Ulf. Tilly had knocked before slipping into the room and blurting the news about Penny’s unfortunate run-in with the door, and how Tilly had found her crying and taken care of her bloody nose before tucking the girl up in bed to recover.

  ‘I told Penny I’d come tell you that she was too sick. I’m so sad for her.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ the lady in the red dress asked.

  ‘Tilly.’

  ‘You seem like a very caring young girl, Tilly. Exactly what we’re looking for,’ the nice man in the corduroy jacket had said. ‘Don’t you reckon, Hilda?’

  There’d been a moment when his wife had peered at Tilly, like a right-into-the-soul type stare. But Tilly had learned the whoever-blinks-first-loses game long ago and she was no loser. So intense her return stare, so determined not to blink first as she waited for the woman in the red dress to answer her husband’s question, Tilly’s eyes had welled up, making her poke at the corners to dab the moisture away.

  ‘Dear, dear, don’t cry. Your friend will be fine,’ the woman softened, pulling her into her bosom. ‘Tilly is perfect, Ulf.’

  ‘I agree, my love.’

  Tilly knew her act had sealed the deal when Hilda added, ‘And such an unusual name. Lovely. Just lovely.’

  She could have told Mrs and Mr Marhkt the truth. That the name Tilly had come about during her mother’s arrest one night. Asked her daughter’s name, the slurred response had sloshed around in her mother’s mouth until, like stockings in a washing machine, the name Natalie came out all limp and tangled to sound more like Tilly. Then her mother puked on the police station floor.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Marhkt.’ Tilly could have added a curtsy for effect. She wondered if that’s what the other four girls had done. But Tilly was smarter than that. Too smart to give her game away with such corny fakery. Hilda would have seen through her act for sure and Tilly wasn’t going to spend another day at Braidenfield. High up on a magical green hill, in the town called Dinghy Bay, with the Marhkts and a big brother to protect her, life was going to be perfect, and Tilly would be the perfect daughter, and the perfect sister to Albie.

  She’d make sure of that.

  • • •
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br />   Tilly had often thought about poor, pretty Penny and if maybe the next visitors had picked her and given her a forever family. Memories of those years at Braidenfield were especially strong at Christmas time when the Marhkts would put a tree up. Tilly had never seen a real tree inside before. And she’d never seen so many wrapped packages with her name on them–maybe even more than those boys next door. The Hill boys were always acting like they were better than everyone else. Albie got on okay with the younger one, David. Tilly liked him too, but his older brother, Matthew, was rude and plain weird–in Tilly’s opinion, anyway.

  Some of the Christmas presents the Marhkts had given Tilly she’d kept, shoving under her bed, out of Albie’s sight. The art of hiding things, including feelings, was a lesson she’d learned at Braidenfield, and one not easily forgotten. The gifts she didn’t want she sold for a few dollars, hiding the money away in a tin kept in the hollow stump of a dead tree at the farthest point of the property. When the Marhkts asked about the gifts, she’d confessed to giving them away to the Aboriginal kids who lived out of town.

  ‘The ones who aren’t as lucky as me and Albie,’ she’d explain to Hilda.

  ‘Didn’t I say so that first day, Hil?’ Ulf would tell his wife. ‘Tilly’s a very caring girl. A very, very special girl indeed.’

  Tilly had easily won Ulf over. Hilda not so much. She ran the household like a dormitory supervisor, ripping the bedroom curtains aside each morning to roust Tilly from her sleep, the noise frightening her awake.

  Tilly had hated mornings ever since.

  27

  Coffs Harbour, 2015

  The clatter of wooden curtain rings startled Natalie as her daughter closed the motel room’s drapes. If only gaudy fabric had the power to mute the constant drone of passing traffic on the street outside the matchbox-sized room that was to be her accommodation for the night.

  ‘Can I get you anything before I go back to Jake, Mum?’ Sidney asked.

  ‘Some peace and quiet would be nice,’ Natalie said as she inspected the bathroom with its mouldy shower curtain. ‘But I fear not terribly likely with the Pacific Highway outside my door.’

  ‘At least you have somewhere to freshen up and spend the night. The bed sure looks more comfy than the chair in Jake’s hospital room. I’ll see if I can get this air conditioner working properly.’

  They’d been fortunate to secure a hotel room in town at all. As of tomorrow, they’d discovered, every room in Coffs Harbour–from motel to caravan park cabin–would be booked out, with some sort of international car rally bringing thousands of tourists to the Coffs coast.

  Not bothering to unpack a bag, or even change out of her travel clothes, Natalie lay down and closed her eyes, wishing she had more of those tiny pink pills to send her off to sleep. Simply being back in this town had managed to haul all kinds of uncomfortable memories to the surface. Natalie didn’t want to be reminded of the past–not when she’d spent the last thirty-five years trying to forget Braidenfield and her time on the mountain with the Marhkts, before her marriage to Matthew, and before she’d made the worst mistake of her young life.

  • • •

  One day, somewhere short of celebrating a year in business with Tash–part-owner of their trendy Sydney gallery–the man behind that mistake came back into Natalie’s life. His voice was the last thing she’d expected, or wanted, to hear on the other end of the telephone that morning.

  ‘Hello, Tilly.’

  ‘Albie? Is that you?’

  ‘I see you in the newspaper going by the name Natalie these days.’

  She glanced over at the single gallery customer and then spoke warily, her voice low. ‘Where are you calling from, Albie?’

  ‘I’m in town and it’s been a long time. I wondered if you’d meet with me. A meal or a coffee?’

  Natalie swallowed hard. ‘Today?’ She looked over her shoulder to the back office and glimpsed her daughter through the gap in the partially-open door. Sidney, sick and unable to attend school, slept on a makeshift bed on the floor. Even with pimply cheeks ruddy with temperature, and greasy hair in need of a wash, her daughter was beautiful. The sight triggered an urge in Natalie to be by her side, to stroke her hair, to tell her everything would be all right. But would it? Knowing Albie was so close made her heart thump in her chest. ‘Albie, I–’

  ‘Today, tomorrow, whenever,’ he said.

  She bit her lip, trying to think, wondering how he’d found her, and why. She could ask him outright. Now! Ask him. Get it over with, Natalie. Then she could tell him, ever so briefly, about the pact she’d made with Matthew–to never look back and never think about the past, or mention certain names again. Maybe she could imply that Matthew’s jealousy would make it impossible for them to meet. Or she could tell him if they were to meet, Matthew would be there as well.

  Would that be good or not? She couldn’t think straight, not about any of that. The gallery customer had stopped in front of a Richard Claremont oil-on-canvas. Claremont was a young, up-and-coming artist whose impulsive brushwork and vibrant palette always drew lots of interest from gallery visitors. The customer obviously had good taste, and he looked well-off. Perhaps he was even ready to buy. Natalie offered a smile and turned her back, cupping a hand around her mouth and the receiver.

  ‘I have customers,’ she told Albie. ‘Maybe leave me your number and I can call back. Hold on. Let me write it down.’ Her hand shook as she scrawled the number on a Post-it note and then stuck it in her diary, out of sight. ‘I have to go right now, Albie. I’ll call you. Okay?’

  Natalie hung up and slumped into the office chair, only then remembering about the customer, but he’d already slipped out the door.

  Damn!

  Over the next few days, Natalie’s thoughts kept returning to the phone number in her diary. She didn’t like that Albie had found her, or the way the conversation had made her feel. Married to a good man, mother to two wonderful children and with a house in the suburbs with all the mod cons, surely she had no need for regrets, no cause to dwell on the past, but certainly no desire to invite the past into their lives. Not that she was a bad person. Natalie had done what she had to back then because she’d had no other choice. She’d been so young, so desperate, so afraid. She’d needed a way off that mountain and she knew it couldn’t have been with Albie. So she’d written a brief note to the Marhkts that basically said thanks, explaining she needed to make a new life for herself.

  Matthew had taken very little convincing. Someone or something had been responsible for David’s accident and it was Matthew who bore the brunt of his father’s anger and grief in the days that had followed. Had Rose been there she might have intervened, but she was keeping a vigil by her youngest son’s hospital bed in Sydney until he no longer needed her–until the hardest job a mother can face had been done with devotion and dignity.

  Sitting on the breakwall that day they decided to leave the mountain together, Matthew had told Tilly he wanted to wait at Greenhill until Rose returned so he could say a proper goodbye. At one point he insisted he had to see David and say goodbye too. That had made Tilly anxious. What if, in the meantime, he changed his mind about leaving with her at all? She had to make him want her more.

  She’d had no real plans, and no idea where they would live once they reached Sydney. Tilly would always be okay about winging it, as she worked better without constraints and preconceived ideas. Not poor Matthew. He struggled with spur-of-the-moment decisions. He needed time to contemplate his choices and weigh up the pros and cons, including the merits of doing nothing at all. Tilly had to work hard to convince him she knew best.

  ‘Matthew,’ she’d said. ‘You don’t want to see David in hospital if it means remembering him that way. I know this because I sat with my mother for days, begging her to wake up–to please wake up. I grew hungrier and more scared with every sunset, until the lady next door broke a window and called the police.’ Tilly realised then she’d been stroking her palm, imagining the
dying bird from Hilda’s porch that she’d so desperately wanted to live. ‘Matthew, Hilda once told me some things are not in our power to save. Death is a horrible memory that never leaves you. Is that the last thing you want to see of your brother? Lifeless? Cold?’

  ‘But, Tilly–’

  ‘Your mum’s there with him, the way it should be. You can’t do anything. You won’t have any say in their decisions, so you need to start making your own. Look at me, Matthew.’ Tilly clasped his chin between her fingers. She needed him to look at her. She needed to see his eyes. ‘I know you’re hurting, but you still want to be with me, don’t you?’

  He looked at her gravely. ‘Yes, but do we have to leave?’

  ‘If your mum and dad are angry now, imagine how things will be after . . . you know . . . It will only get worse. We need to go. Watching your father tearing you to pieces is breaking my heart.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘That’s not what fathers do, is it, Matthew?’ Tilly answered his question with one of her own. ‘Family should be forever. Let me be your family. There’s nothing we can do for David now.’

  Matthew had nodded again, but Tilly decided a little more persuasion wouldn’t hurt.

  • • •

  That night, after sneaking into Matthew’s room, she slipped into his bed.

  ‘Tilly, what are you doing?’ Matthew stared wide-mouthed and blinking in the bright light of a full moon. ‘What do you want?’

  She pressed a finger to Matthew’s mouth. ‘Stop talking. Take me. Now.’

  ‘But I am taking you,’ Matthew replied matter-of-factly. ‘I said I would. But do you really want to go in the middle of the night?’