The House on the Hill

by Susan Duncan

  I soon discovered Old John patrolled the yard with the stealth and curiosity of a cat at all hours of the day and, if there was a burn on, night. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of brick-making from the days when men pushed those unwieldy barrows and stoked furnaces by hand, gauging temperatures by feel and the time it took until your eyes were peeled by the heat. But he was almost eighty years old. And while he was fitter than many men his age, it didn’t take a genius to work out he had a pathological fear of technology. I got the feeling the most ambitious electronic innovation he’d ever embraced was the shift from one-armed bandits to push-button poker machines at the local RSL Club. We were kindred spirits, in a way. Technology flummoxed me most of the time.

  ‘I helped Dad in the brickworks from the time I was twelve years old,’ he told me. ‘Cleaned the flues. Dirty work. I’m a bit short on education, y’see.’ His knowledge, though, was far-reaching and profound. Hewn from handed-down lore and a lifetime’s experience of good, bad and indifferent seasons, he told me he’d witnessed the local landscape evolve from brush to cattle country, the townscape adopt and drop fashion fads.

  ‘Brush?’ I asked.

  ‘Bush so thick and dark and vast a bloke could go in there and never find his way out. Good soil. Leaf rot, y’know. That’s what does it.’

  He’d felt the visceral thrill of making big money in boom times, but also witnessed small businesses die on the back of a single badly examined risk. ‘Soon as you borrow money, you’re in trouble,’ he said on another day. ‘Tough times sneak up on you. By the time you recognise they’re on your doorstep, you’re buggered. Only way we’ve survived, y’know. Never borrowed money. Not till now. No right-thinking bloke ever puts his future in the hands of a bank.’ He looked into the distance, where a handful of steers he raised for pocket money grazed peacefully, riddled with anxiety.

  In front of us, Fletch, achingly young and willing, expertly cut the lawn on the ancient ride-on mower. Generation five, if there was anything left. It was written on Old John’s face like a scripture. And where would an old man, who is able to smell the moment a batch of bricks was on the brink of being overcooked or pick at a glance the quality (or lack of it) of a truckload of dirt destined for kilns, find a crucial niche in a new regime of electronic panels and knob-controlled thermostats? Seventy years’ experience suddenly rubbish and turfed like a useless, bloated brick. All this written loudly in anxious eyes.

  ‘We won’t have to worry about the economy, Dad, if we’re shut down,’ Michael replied bluntly on another visit on another day in another month, worn out by the yammering that change was a written invitation for disaster to step in and wreak havoc. Old John went silent and shuffled off, shaking his head like a doomsayer.

  It was 9.30. Time for smoko. His wife, Barbara, he told me, had set out an extra cup. He thought she had some shortbread handy, too. I nodded thanks and followed down a laneway made of bricks lying crookedly from the heavy tread of many boots and shifting soil. We passed the kilns, like a row of glowing pizza ovens, to be hit with a knock-you-flat kind of heat pulsing from deep vaults massive enough to roast a whole pig with room to spare. Burners Skip and Dave, wet with sweat and black with soot, wearing nothing but shorts, singlets, long leather gloves and industrial boots, were feeding timber offcuts from the local sawmill into the blaze at a steady rate.

  ‘Hot, eh?’ I said, which barely began to describe the hellish inferno.

  ‘No better spot in winter,’ Dave said, grinning, ‘but summer sucks.’

  Skip, who’s married to Old John’s daughter, Toni, a journalist who manages a group of local newspapers, mumbled he’d rather be catching waves. Old John peered into the fiery depths. On familiar ground and satisfied, he continued towards the house. But fear of the unknown seemed to seep out of him like the dirty brown wisps of smoke escaping through the decrepit brick walls. If it all ended in calamity, how could an eighty-year-old man, no matter how tough, find the strength to begin again? That was engraved in his rounded shoulders.

  ‘Do you ever feed that dog of yours?’ he asked, sliding open the door to the kitchen. Chippy was raiding the dog bowls. Again.

  In the end, the entire project hinged on successfully applying for a federal government grant that would contribute to but in no way cover the cost of the new kiln. The forms were filled in and sent off long before the cut-off date. Everyone was anxious to get started, but no one wanted to plunge in before fully understanding the risks. Applying early turned out to be a stroke of luck. A note came back from one of the assessors. ‘While the technical information is detailed enough, I’d suggest a little more history and background when you make your case. You have time to reapply.’ Have another go, in other words.

  ‘You’re the writer,’ Bob said. ‘How do we do this?’

  ‘Keep it simple. Keep it brief. Don’t be afraid to be passionate.’

  He nutted out a new approach. And everyone waited.

  Finally, Michael was contacted. Success. Old John shook his head in dismay but Michael grew taller. All those years slogging away anonymously and here, at last, recognition: bricks were worth investing in. Small brickworks had a future. Family businesses could survive if they kept up with changing times. Sweating over fires on stinking hot summer days, frazzled and dehydrated, almost burned through to the marrow and going home to lie on cold bathroom tiles until the heat seeped out of you, now a horror of the past. A new generation. New rules. The reinforcing power of a positive outside opinion meant validation in the face of Old John’s endless worries.

  When the whooping died down and it was business as usual, Bob disappeared into his study and basically didn’t emerge for a year. At one stage, feeling neglected, I grumbled. He confronted me over morning tea with a hard look: ‘You have to understand, Susan. If I get the calculations wrong, someone could end up dead.’

  4

  A WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS IN 2009, the phone rang. ‘We’ve called an ambulance for your mother. It’s on the way.’ She’d fainted in the reception area of the retirement village on the way to her Friday morning hairdressing appointment. ‘Nothing broken and she’s sitting up having a cup of tea now,’ said the receptionist, ‘but she agreed to call the ambulance. She looks alright, but it’s better to be sure.’

  ‘Of course,’ I agreed. ‘I’m on my way.’

  I didn’t panic. I wasn’t even much concerned. Every year, as traditional as the season, the script played out with only a few variations on the theme. It would be another near-death experience engineered to attract attention or enjoy a short holiday in hospital or deflect from some looming financial calamity that I would ultimately be forced to resolve. Impossible to ignore but also impossible to take too seriously. I felt a stirring of anger. Remembered a few ancient doozies when I’d fallen hook, line and sinker for a con.

  ‘I have breast cancer,’ she told me when I was a cadet reporter on the Melbourne Sun.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked, stunned.

  ‘A payphone in Collins Street. Outside Georges.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’ I was saving to travel the world, as we did in those days, but I took her to lunch, a favoured Duncan response to most calamities. Something about being looked after by waiters, eating fancy food washed down with a soothing glass of wine, reduced shock and fear to everyday ordinary. I blew a third of my budget on lunch and a designer silk scarf from the most expensive store in Melbourne. Expensive gifts were another Duncan family remedy for my mother. I remember I didn’t begrudge a cent. My mother was the centre of my universe. I loved her. Relied on her. Never questioned her judgment. Trusted her with the dangerous naivety of most children and, later, thanked whatever self-protective forces kicked to render me blind to her flaws until I was old enough to flee them. Although she had never raised a hand to me, never shrieked, threatened or even punished me, on some unexplainable level I also feared her, or perhaps feared disappointing her is closer to the truth.

  When I felt she was calm enough to drive hom
e, I went back to work. Banged away at some story I don’t remember, one paragraph per sheet of paper. Plenty of Tipp-Ex for the typos. Struggling to meet the deadline. My mother and her illness crowding my mind.

  At home that evening, she told me there’d been a mistake. ‘Cysts,’ she said happily. Years later, when I began to question her motives in all things, I wondered whether the cancer story was true or whether she was bored or whether she’d seen my dollars mounting in the bank and thought – because I was still living at home and cavalier about paying board – that she was entitled to a few. And why did she call me? Why not her husband, or her son whom she adored? And yet. Despite a history littered with similar events, I have never found the courage or confidence to call her bluffs. Always, in the back of my mind, the awful fear: What if this time it’s all true? What if this time, she’s in serious trouble and perhaps dying?

  So, as I’d done for decades, I collected my handbag, car keys, found Bob in his shed and explained where I was going.

  ‘Call me if you need me,’ he said without looking up. He knew my mother well.

  I set off, guilt and responsibility, the two knotted tightly from the beginning of memory, flooding through me. Anger, too, if I’m being strictly honest, because she’d always been able to con me royally.

  The sun was hot. Light bounced off the water like knife blades. I mentally scrolled through possibilities, keeping the boat speed low through the moorings. Nothing big, I was sure of it. Neither life-threatening nor horrible. My brother and I didn’t call her Sarah Bernhardt for nothing. She’d probably forgotten to take her blood pressure pills.

  At The Point, where offshorers gathered to collect the mail, catch the ferry or sink a frigidly cold beer at the end of a hard day, I pulled up short. Took a deep breath. She was on the cusp of eighty-nine. Nobody lived forever. I dredged through images of her the week before. We’d driven for our weekly picnic lunch to the beach at Mona Vale. No signs then of anything potentially ruinous. We’d even talked about death. She had no fear of it, she said.

  ‘Hah!’ I retorted, not believing her for a second. Who doesn’t fear death – or the eternal mystery of it – at least on some deeply primal level? And why would anyone put up with the increasing indignities, frailties, involuntary leakages and outright agony of old age unless they dreaded what she would call ‘judgment day’? My mother believed in God. She believed in heaven and hell. She believed in the power of prayer and the certainty of eternal damnation for committing a mortal sin. And she hadn’t led a blameless life. Not that she’d given me anything more than a sanitised version, but I could connect dots, disregard red herrings, sniff out lies as competently as the next person. It still didn’t add up to much by today’s standards. Unless there was something much more sinister buried way back in time.

  That day, the conversation about death continued for a while. ‘John will be pleased to see me. And your father has been waiting a long, long time. He spoiled me rotten, you know. Never realised it. Not till years after he died.’

  Dad was a heavy drinker. Later a functioning alcoholic. When he and my mother owned the pub, he began the day with what he called a ‘heart starter’ – a double brandy. My mother, citing illness at least once or twice a week, reached for a medicinal pony-sized glass of port with a dash of brandy. In her youth, it was a common tonic for upset stomachs so she got away with it. They were hangovers, of course, but I didn’t cotton on for years. By then I’d had enough hangovers of my own to recognise the symptoms in a blink.

  By the time I reached the hospital, I’d convinced myself it was another attention-seeking false alarm. I casually announced myself to the triage nurse in emergency. She checked the screen, clicked a few buttons on the keyboard. ‘Intensive care,’ she said.

  Her heart was failing. The hideous irony. After faking cardiac arrests for decades, this time it was genuine. As I stood beside her bed, she turned her head towards me: ‘I’ve had a heart attack.’ Her voice was surprisingly strong, filled with amazement. Her watery blue eyes wide with disbelief.

  ‘Well, you’re in the right place,’ I responded, matter-of-factly to hide the shock. ‘They’re experts at all that stuff here.’

  ‘They’d better be,’ she said, already on the attack. Not ready to give in or give up, I thought.

  After a while a nurse came in, her shoes squeaking on the shiny clean floor. She was neat in a white shirt, navy trousers. Turquoise spectacles that snapped together on the bridge of the nose hung around her neck. She checked the tubes and wires streaming from Esther’s wrist and chest. Pumped the IV line.

  ‘I used to be a nurse,’ my mother said, slyly.

  ‘Nurse’s aide,’ I muttered under my breath.

  ‘You’re one of us then,’ the nurse said, smiling at her kindly.

  ‘It was during the war,’ my mother said. ‘I was in Darwin when the bombs were dropped.’

  ‘A few days after the bombs were dropped,’ I muttered.

  ‘Must have been pretty scary,’ the nurse said.

  My mother made a limp-wristed gesture: ‘Oh, you just got on with it.’

  The nurse patted my mother’s arm in approval, assembled her glasses and wrote notes on a clipboard hooked at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Great specs,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. Got them in Palm Beach over the counter.’

  ‘Gorgeous. Colour works with your hair. So. What happens next?’

  ‘We’ll keep her here for a day or two. See what the specialist decides.’

  ‘When is he due?’

  ‘The heart guy? Tomorrow. Couldn’t tell you whether it will be morning or afternoon, though. He’s a law unto himself.’

  So. Not critically in danger, I thought, relieved. She’d be fine.

  I went back to the slippery vinyl chair next to the bed. Sat heavily. The cushion collapsed with a sound like a final gasp. ‘You landed in Darwin after the bombs and you were a nurse’s aide, not a fully qualified nurse,’ I said. ‘Why do you lie?’

  ‘You get better attention if they think you’re one of them. And anyway, I worked just as hard as the nurses in those days. When there are wards full of wounded men, no one cares if you’ve done the exams or not.’ She closed her eyes. I watched the monitor – steady but you couldn’t call it strong. Could she really be seriously ill? You’re not admitted to intensive care for a headache. And even my mother, a consummate actress, couldn’t be that good.

  The next morning at the hospital I rang the buzzer, gave my name and relationship to the patient, and marched in. Book in hand. My Brother Jack, George Johnston’s classic. I planned to read to her. I’m not sure what I thought I was doing. Filling in the silence, probably. Afraid the accumulated bile of the last couple of decades would come bubbling out when, for all I knew, my mother could be dying. No. Death was unthinkable. She wouldn’t let me off the hook that easily.

  I found her awake and alert but oddly shamefaced. ‘Did a poo,’ she said, sounding furious. ‘In bed.’

  ‘Expect they’re used to that here.’ Fussing about with the chair, the book, my handbag, swallowing compassion and pity and tending only to the business directly at hand. Afraid I’d howl. ‘Right, chapter one.’ I began to read.

  Soon, she interrupted: ‘I wouldn’t mind a kiss.’

  ‘No need. No one’s said you’re dying.’

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt you, you know,’ she said.

  I leaned forward, the book slipping off my lap, and patted her hand. The one without cannulas and tubes inserted into the vein.

  ‘I don’t think I was such a bad mother,’ she whispered.

  And there it was, a golden opening. I took a deep breath, moistened my lips, looked directly at her. I’d expected to see challenge in her eyes. There was only pleading. It was shattering. My father’s words rang in my ears: Never hit a man when he’s down. So all I said was, ‘You weren’t.’ It was all I could bring myself to say. Later, to explain, I added, ‘It’s just … we’ve never been a family of kisse
rs and cuddlers.’

  ‘Weren’t we?’ she said, frowning, trying to remember.

  ‘Can’t change now,’ I said, almost airily.

  And yet, one of the few photographs I have of my mother and me shows us locked in a strong embrace. We both looked happy. It was taken in the late 1980s, after she’d sold her Melbourne home and moved to New South Wales to live a few doors along from me. Within a year or two she was doing her best to break up my marriage. She wasn’t a match for my first husband, though, who years later told me what she’d been up to. I hadn’t had a clue.

  A tall, lean man with a shaggy surfer’s haircut, wearing blue jeans, a crisp cotton shirt and loafers, loomed in the doorway. ‘Your mother needs heart surgery if she’s going to survive,’ he said, loudly enough for her to hear and in a prosecutorial tone directed fair-square between my eyeballs. I hated him in an instant. Anxious to discuss the situation out of earshot, I asked if we could talk elsewhere. He looked me up and down like I was my mother’s assassin and forced me to ask every fraught question as we stood by her bedside. He didn’t trust me. In a way, I didn’t blame him. There was a part of me – not small, either – that wanted to be free of the obligation to look after a dribbling, incoherent wreck, if that’s what the future held for her.

  ‘What is the downside of major surgery for a woman of my mother’s age?’ I asked in a rude voice.

  ‘There are risks.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Big.’

  ‘What does “risk” mean?’

  ‘She could have a stroke in the operating theatre. She may emerge from the anaesthetic with dementia. She may die under the knife.’

  I swallowed. Glanced at my mother. She seemed to enjoy being the centre of attention but oddly dissociated from the fundamental issue – her life or perhaps death. We might have been discussing a stranger. ‘What’s the upshot?’