The House on the Hill

by Susan Duncan

  She looked at me with rabbit-scared eyes when I suggested a retirement village. ‘I know where everything is here, so forget it,’ she said, but changed her mind in a single moment when I walked her through a small white unit set in rainforest gardens with a cheeky water dragon to greet her from the balcony balustrade. Not that she ever sat outside at the table and chairs, put there so she could enjoy the view. She barely moved off the sofa. Her environment may have changed, but ingrained habits were dragged along intact.

  When I packed her home, I was shocked to find piles of the magazine I’d once worked for, stacked inside cupboards. Shocked, because when I’d occasionally ring her to mention a cover story and ask with a little pride (which she always said came right before a fall) if she might like to read it, she was never interested.

  ‘I don’t read that rubbish. Anyway, the magazine is too expensive. People will stop buying it soon.’

  I learned not to alert her. And yet, when I called into the local grocery store, the Greek owner told me, ‘Your mother is proud of you, she … busts with pride!’ I smiled politely, not believing a word – until I found those old magazines. Every cover story I could remember and other less flamboyant assignments had been thumbed through and then hidden from sight like pornography.

  Maybe my mother thought a little praise might go straight to my head and ruin me forever, but she could do no harm by boasting out loud to others. Like her own mother, she’d always been a deeply superstitious woman. Don’t walk under ladders. Never cut your fingernails on a Friday. If a painting falls off the wall someone will die. New shoes on the table bring bad luck. Saying goodbye means you’ll never meet again. Lilies in the house bring death to your door. Don’t tempt the gods by praising those you love or they will take them from you.

  One day, when I visited her in her new home, I tackled her about the stash of magazines. ‘You told me you never bought them because they were too expensive.’

  ‘People insisted on giving them to me,’ she snapped.

  ‘Did you actually read any of my stories?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t remember,’ she said, as if a compliment might kill her. It was the first time I ever wondered whether she might envy instead of cherish (as parents supposedly do) my small achievements. But perhaps more accurately, she failed completely to understand how the ugly, charmless kid, who she was sure was destined to become a withered and bitter old spinster, had somehow succeeded in having the life she’d dreamed of for herself. It puzzles her to this day. And yet, when we discovered I’d somehow lost all the family photo albums in the move, she merely nodded.

  ‘I know you didn’t do it deliberately,’ she said.

  My mother has always been a mass of contradictions. Loving. Brutal. Generous. Mean. Tough. Unstable. Realist. Fantasist. Optimist. Pessimist. Kind. Cruel. No different from most of us, just more extreme, with one overriding impulse: come out on top at any cost. She has only lately begun to admit that her instinct to win meant she was often her own worst enemy in the ups and downs of her life.

  ‘Our relationship could have been so different,’ I said, sad, recalling a thousand small destructions, like piles of burning embers, down long distances of memory.

  ‘You’re all I’ve got now,’ she replied in a rare moment of vulnerability. She brightened, her lip curled in a way that used to make me flinch. ‘So you’ll just have to do!’

  As a child, I believed old people were born old. It was inconceivable to think they’d once been babies or fit young adults. It was more shock than surprise to find, when still very young but old enough to be cognisant, that when I shuffled through my mother’s collection of old shoeboxes stuffed with ancient (so it seemed to me) black-and-white photos taken in the days of the Brownie Box camera, those blurry but nevertheless glamorous-looking young people standing slim-waisted and straight-backed were now plump, arthritic Aunt Mary, bald Uncle Bob and … my mother? That blonde bombshell?

  ‘It was way before I married your father,’ she’d said, in a tone that hinted at blame. ‘People told me I looked like Jean Harlow. Mind you, I never thought she was very attractive. Quite a hard face, don’t you think?’ Even as a child, despite her disclaimers, I could tell she’d been flattered by the comparison.

  There were a few formal hand-tinted studio portraits, too. My father as an army captain. Bizarrely pink-cheeked and ruby-lipped, as though the tinter might have been slightly colour blind or a frustrated Rembrandt. My nan, a dark-haired, smooth-skinned beauty in her wedding portrait. At the time I’d stared in disbelief and wondered: what kind of lackadaisical inattention to personal detail allowed youth and beauty to be gobbled away so effortlessly? It never occurred to me that there was no choice beyond a premature death.

  In my late twenties, I remember quite clearly reading an interview with model Cindy Crawford, who told a journalist no one stayed young forever and that she, too, would age like everyone else. I was torn between the anguish of realising that someone so divinely favoured was nevertheless unable to hold back decline and being uncharitably appeased by the knowledge that in the end, favoured or not, the same fate awaited every one of us.

  My father’s parents died before I was old enough to toddle. ‘Cancer,’ my mother said. ‘You and your brother got it from his side of the family. Nothing to do with the Parkers.’ My mother’s mother, my grandmother – kind-hearted Nan who read the Bible for pleasure – was aged 63 when she died suddenly. ‘She ate Bex like lollies. Ruined her kidneys.’ My mother’s father, my grandfather – an amoral, barrel-chested rum drinker – lived another decade. ‘Dodgy heart,’ she said. ‘My side can take the blame there.’

  When I was kindergarten age, my nan embodied comfort, wisdom and patience. She was a stalwart comrade who never failed to take my side against parents who wanted me to go to bed: ‘Five more minutes won’t hurt, Jean. Leave her be for a little.’ If I was solidly in the wrong, though, she stepped aside: ‘No good coming to me for help.’ And for a while I’d feel unloved and betrayed. Nan died when I was thirteen years old.

  After that, when old age was unwrapped from love and came in the form of strangers, I became conscious of details. Particular stale smells, like mouldy bread. Clothes spotted with spills. Tea served in stained cups. Plates gluey with hints of yesterday’s fried egg breakfast. Cobwebs strung like garlands from smoky ceilings. Eyes cloudy with glaucoma or cataracts, or milky-eyed blindness. The clicking of ill-fitting dentures. I was revolted by the whole filthy, decaying shebang. Using as a yardstick, whiskery, almost blind, hobbling Old Mama with her livid hands and blotchy skin, who shaved the whiskers on her chin for special occasions and every Friday lunchtime sat in the kitchen of our country pub for a schooner of beer or two, I once insisted during a silly schoolgirl discussion, ‘I don’t want to live beyond fifty-three.’ Old Mama could look quite glamorous when she was all dressed up, and although from this end of my life I see her as a marvel, in my shallow, young years it was not one I wished to replicate.

  We had an Uncle Edward (Ted) on my father’s side. He visited for a two-week holiday and never left. It was quietly understood in those days that when family members came knocking on the door, you never slammed it in their faces. He was a decent man, an inspired gardener, and every night he did the dishes after dinner. Which endeared him enormously to my brother and me. He also mended our shoes, taught me to play draughts and tried to instil a wide-ranging vocabulary in my lazy young mind. To this day, I remember a mysterious word he revealed like a sorcerer. ‘What has seven letters, no vowels?’ he asked.

  ‘Every word has a vowel.’ I was probably seven or eight years old.

  ‘Not every word.’

  The word was syzygy. It means a constellation of stars. Saying the letters one by one was quite delicious, like a nonsensical rhyme designed to challenge lispers. Over the years that word has tipped the balance from loss to victory in many Scrabble games.

  Uncle was a hoarder, though, and not fond of showering more than once a week. His room sta
nk of many things: old sweat, old leather, old wool, old clothes. Odours I came to call ‘old man smells’. In the end, my mother had a garden entrance to his room built and insisted the interior door remain shut at all times. I was fond of him, even if he did insist on steel tips on my school shoes and maturing blue cheese in the toe of an old boot. The same place he hid his cash.

  Esther told me once that he was besotted with her. When she and my father owned a country pub on the outskirts of Melbourne, he paced up and down outside her bedroom window every night, in case she needed protection. From what or from whom, no one was ever quite sure. ‘I never realised, of course. Had no idea. Can’t remember who told me. One of the boarders, I think, who’d caught him a few times.’ I never thought to ask what the border was doing outside her bedroom window.

  ‘Didn’t he have an affair with the cook for years?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but he was insanely jealous if anyone came near me. Once, I hugged a mixed doubles partner after we’d won a tournament. Uncle tried to punch the poor man. It was entirely innocent, of course. The hug. Not the punch.’

  Still, when dementia overtook him, he must have forgotten his passion. He hid behind his bedroom door with an iron bar raised above his head and tried to kill her when she stepped in with his breakfast tray.

  Dad found a nursing home to take Uncle in. We kids never visited. Not once. He just silently melted into oblivion, eventually becoming another Duncan to reside in the Brunswick cemetery. Mostly, I felt glad the sad, shambolic, deeply repugnant and useless tragedy his life had become was over. We all did. Once his room was cleaned out, his treasures consigned to the tip (who nailed steel tips to heels and toes of shoes anymore?), the dreadful years quickly faded from memory. I wonder sometimes if that’s where I learned a horror of the impossible demands made by old age when it turns rotten.

  ‘If I reach the stage where I’m a filthy old crone leaking from both ends and there’s no hope, turn off the switch,’ I once said to Bob. He grinned. I immediately back-pedalled. ‘But get a second opinion, ok?’

  I always thought my mother would abhor the idea of being reduced by the embarrassments and indignities of a failing body. That vanity, her long-time soulmate, would win out. As I watched her slide further into dependence and helplessness, I often asked myself what choices I would make in her circumstances. It’s an open-ended question. Walk the walk first, as they say. Either way, to see a parent reduced in painful increments to little more than babyhood skews the natural order. Even worse, it gives you time to mull and dissect the past. Chase down history, nail down blame. And live forever with the consequences. As I eventually did.

  3

  THE SPOTTED GUMS HAD SHED THEIR BARK and another summer was on the wane when Michael Baker next phoned.

  ‘He’s in Sydney,’ Bob said casually. ‘Agreed to meet him at The Point for a quick chat on his way back to Wingham. Keep it simple.’

  ‘No, no. Bring him here. I’ll make scones. There’s not enough time to bake a cake.’

  ‘He’s with his wife and son.’

  ‘Even more of a reason to send them off with full bellies.’

  An hour later we were sitting on the verandah with steaming mugs and a plate of rather flat, sad-looking scones. I’d added sultanas in the hope it would give them a lift. Turned out Michael didn’t eat dried fruit so they were wasted on him. Michael’s son, Fletcher, about nine years old with just enough meat on his bones to stitch his wrists and knobbly knees to the rest of him, had the energy of a rocket and took his cues from his dad. He gave the scones a miss, too. Adele, Michael’s wife, reached for one and politely complimented them. She had a lovely, no-nonsense face, curly blonde hair and a warm smile.

  ‘They’re pretty awful,’ I said. She burst out laughing. ‘Well, I’ve had better but they’re ok.’ To prove her point she reached for another.

  ‘No need to be kind,’ I said, pushing my chair back from the table. ‘Leave that awful scone and let me show you around. Fletch! Come and see the chickens.’

  We women strolled the perimeter of the house under blue skies while the men talked business. Fletch darted into the scratchy bush, burst into the chook pen, ran along the track into the National Park, flushed out a brush turkey, giving them both a fright. But his speech was slow and deliberate, at odds with his body. Close your eyes and it could have been an old-timer rabbiting on in ancient slang about hard-learned wisdoms. ‘Picked it up from the old fishermen he hangs out with when we go on holidays,’ Adele explained. ‘Seems to have stuck.’

  She told their story simply. In the background, a hail of hard little seed heads shaped like bonnets fell from the spotted gums, making tapping sounds on the tin roof of Bob’s shed. A few tinnies roared past. A yacht glided gracefully under sail. ‘If we don’t make changes at the brickworks,’ she said, ‘we’ll be lucky to have a future. Five generations of Bakers in the business and nothing left to show for it.’ The bottom line was survival.

  We returned to the verandah and said our goodbyes. Fletch bolted down the steps to the pontoon, eager to be gone. Despite his bond with the old fishermen, his family ties to the brickworks, according to his mother, cattle were his greatest love.

  ‘Would you like to see him running the brickworks one day?’ I asked.

  Adele shrugged, non-committal. ‘If that’s what he wants. Ready and waiting for him.’

  ‘If we can save it,’ Michael added, his voice rich with a father’s love and pride. Bob ferried them back onshore. The water was mirror smooth. Autumn seemed a long way off.

  In the early evening I stood at the kitchen bench chopping onions, ginger, chilli and garlic, making the base for a chicken curry. Through a window festooned with webs, the air, trees and water stilled, settling for the night. The yellow glow of lights shone across the bay in long gold streaks. Bob poured a glass of wine and handed it to me.

  ‘So … are you going to take it on?’ I asked, taking a quick sip, the strong smell of onions on my hands clashing with the wine.

  Bob shrugged. ‘Family business. Family politics. No money. A dream they might be able to get some funding from somewhere. All adds up to a nightmare.’

  ‘They’re good people. Work hard. Don’t expect much. Just want to keep going. Maybe pass it all on to Fletcher one day. Five generations. Imagine that!’

  ‘What they’re after has never been done before. It’s risky. Very risky.’

  ‘But. Could you make a difference if you had a go?’

  Bob sighed. Added another slosh of wine to his glass. ‘Two women together. Lethal,’ he said. And he walked off to find his notebook. Humming.

  It was all in the timing, of course. Most of the choices we’d once blithely taken for granted would be emphatically ruled out forever when we took that step from middle to old age. By then, even replacing our old dog with a new puppy would require a large degree of optimism, blind faith or flat-out denial. And while each day on Pittwater unfurled with the comfort of certainty and security – as much as there ever is – a few gentle jolts out of our comfort zone might lend inspiration to the long, cold winter nights ahead.

  After the August winds had hammered the bay and spring was shaping up to be as temperamental and frisky as ever, Bob said, ‘Time to do a site visit. Want to come along?’

  ‘You bet!’

  Around a final bend on the lumpy Wingham Road, Lincoln Brickworks sprawled haphazardly. Wonky old brick kilns. Rusted corrugated iron roofs. Three tall, redbrick chimneys, each one slightly off-kilter and belching black smoke, foretold a limited future under increasing government pressure to reduce pollution. All jammed between paddocks of fat cattle grazing on knee-high pasture. Up the neat driveway and past a carefully tended garden of roses, camellias and crepe myrtles, a scabby old petrol pump with a sun-faded Mobil sign was a relic of a more profligate, energy-rich era.

  Michael met us at the car, flanked by two tail-wagging border collies and an overweight, flirtatious corgi he introduced as Hyacinth (known forever af
ter as Miss Flirty Girl). In what I came to learn was standard country style, he enquired about our trip, our health, family life in general and remained happily unconcerned while Chippy fell ravenously on whatever was left in the dog bowls. Eventually, at a leisurely pace, he led the way inside a ramshackle collection of shed-like corridors housing forklifts, conveyor belts, mixing tanks, a chaotic array of clay-dusted machinery and masses of miscellaneous but essential tackle that looked like a mangled scene out of a Mad Max car crash. After a short while I left them to it and wandered off on my own.

  ‘See?’ said a lanky, white-haired bloke who’d silently popped up beside me. He pointed to a platform above the staff lunchroom where a couple of ancient timber barrows with battered wheels had been chucked amongst anonymous mechanical detritus, no doubt to be cannibalised – in the way I remembered of frugal country men – for a quick fix-it sometime.

  ‘Once upon a time, we used them to ferry bricks up narrow ramps to stack the top of the kilns. You had to push hard, I’ll tell you that. Then we’d bring ’em down when the bricks were cooked, holding tight so you didn’t lose a load overboard. I’m Old John, Michael’s father. How do you do.’ Dressed in what I came to learn was his weekday uniform – faded blue bib and brace overalls (over T-shirts in summer and checked flannel shirts in winter) and heavy work boots – he withdrew a work-reddened hand from a pocket and held it out. The calluses were like steel bolts.