The House on the Hill

by Susan Duncan

  Later, Bob said, ‘There’s a man in a place called Rollands Plains. Buys trees from all over the country. Mills them on site. It’s not far from the factory and Jarrod said he’d take us there.’

  A week later I gritted my teeth and we set off.

  We drove along a tree-shrouded dirt track in what felt like Deliverance country. Came to a stop at an open wire gate. Ahead of us, cattle, not long weaned, wandered amongst hundreds of stacks of timber, some covered by black plastic, some left out in the open. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

  A junkyard, I thought, full of rotting timber and snakes lurking under every plank. ‘They’re not open,’ I said, hoping it was true. Bob ignored me and we kept going along a rutted clay track. Pulled up somewhere in the middle of the paddock and got out of the car. Bob and Jarrod wandered off. I stepped around steaming piles of cow poo and found – like cakes in a bakery display window – more piles of poo on what might end up as our kitchen bench. To say I was cranky and horrified was an understatement. Then, away in the distance, a man in shorts, T-shirt and a faded baseball cap was hopping into a battered farm vehicle and heading our way. Behind him, a young fella drove a forklift. His son, it turned out.

  ‘Name’s Malcolm,’ he said, holding out a leathery hand. Without messing around too much with a ream of the standard country manners I’d become adjusted to, Jarrod – young and wiry with an easy smile and quick mind – moved on to explain what we were looking for. Malcolm rubbed his stubbly chin thoughtfully and, head bowed, set off. He wore rubber flip-flops as though he was headed for the beach. One strike from a brown snake, I thought, and he’d be history. I rolled my eyes ineffectually and followed the men from one anonymous pile of timber to another.

  ‘This is cedar. See!’ He spat on the wood, rubbed the wet spot with his hand. ‘This is blackbutt. Over there, that’s Queensland maple. Red gum next to it.’ Spit. Rub. He was passionate. Proud. ‘Blue gum here, but don’t be fooled – when it’s dressed it’s deep pink.’

  We tramped from one stack to another for almost an hour. Malcolm and Jarrod lifted great heavy slabs. Insects, exposed to the light, scurried off in fright. Ants spun in circles before bolting. Malcolm brushed away dried cow poo with a bare hand. Cattle ambled past, heads bent to the fodder. His son tidied up in our wake.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a curvaceous slab about two inches thick but way too short for our purpose.

  ‘Mango. Lovely timber, mango. Bit like leopard skin when it’s done up. Don’t see much of it so I grab it when I can.’ Spit. Rub. The timber glowed. Alive. Colour shooting off in ripples, waves, stripes and spots of red, yellow, gold.

  ‘Make a great desktop for your office,’ Bob said, raising his eyebrows. I succumbed instantly. We talked money for a moment … but I was a goner. It was scribbled in the greedy light of my eyes.

  With one deal done, Malcolm returned to the main game: ‘’Bout the only timber I’ve got that’s the right size for your bench is camphor laurel,’ he said.

  ‘Uh, uh,’ Bob responded, wagging his head in the negative. ‘We’re only interested in native timbers.’

  ‘Well, it grew here, mate,’ Malcolm said flatly. He led the way to a weathered grey stack that looked more like firewood to me than kitchen bench material. Spit. Rub. Then a pale blond timber with a strong wavy grain and a heady perfume emerged. Beautiful but marred by an almighty, lightning-bolt split that ran from one end to the centre.

  ‘Not a problem,’ Jarrod said, easily. ‘We’ll laser cut a piece of wood to fit perfectly. Glue it in. Blackbutt would tone nicely.’

  ‘Blond wood has a lovely lightness,’ I said dreamily, running my hand along the rough edges where bark still clung. Bob sighed. ‘Guess that’s it, then,’ he said, cornered by a lack of choice. He had a philosophy for this house that I’d never quite understood until that point. For him, it was an opportunity to illustrate all he was passionate about. Australian timbers, sustainability, practicality – all strengthened by quality craftsmanship and an eye for detail.

  We loaded the timber into the back of the ute, tying it down to hurricane codes, delivered it to Jarrod’s workshop and hit the Pacific Highway. Bob was quiet, his mouth drawn in a thin line.

  ‘It will be lovely,’ I said, thinking he was disappointed.

  ‘Do you want drawers or open shelving?’ he asked.

  He’d already moved on.

  Almost inevitably, the building budget exploded. Every day, I saw the white utes speeding up the hill, like a line of beetles in the distance, and swallowed a gut-churning mix of fear and resentment. Told myself the buck stopped fairly and squarely with us. We’d been seduced by the architect’s vision, we’d agreed to nearly every creative detail, and we could blame no one but ourselves in the final analysis.

  At one stage, when I looked over Bob’s shoulder to read a column of figures, I said, ‘Should we call a halt? Delay. Rethink the strategy.’

  He shook his head: ‘When you’re in this deep all you can do is see it through.’

  In the last financially fraught few weeks of the project, Bob handed me a glass of wine at the end of a particularly frustrating day. The door fittings, usually simple devices, had been a nightmare to install. Taking time. Time was expensive. But he was pragmatic: ‘Might as well bite the bullet and finish properly. No shortcuts. What do you think?’

  Wine eased the pain, I thought, but it never eliminated the problem. But all I said was: ‘Oh well, we’re not saving for our old age – we’re in it. And there’s no point in stressing the long-term ramifications of major decisions. There aren’t any.’ But it was a line that was wearing thin, becoming ludicrous. Every project had to have limits.

  ‘Stock market’s starting to quiver with a bit of life,’ Bob said, ‘world’s struggling out of the doldrums. Benny’s Boys and a few others are ready to be sold, too. Prices aren’t great but we’ll make a profit. We’ll be right.’ I felt a lurch of regret. Molière, Flaubert, Camus and Sartre, as well as MacDonald and MacDougall. No old age for them. Everything that is born must die, as the Buddhists – unarguably – say, but the process had a much bleaker tone when it was your hand that gave the execution order.

  ‘Might stay in the house when you send them off, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Bob quickly agreed.

  26

  EACH TIME WE RETURNED TO PITTWATER, my mother seemed less well. Her feet, ankles and wrists were badly swollen, flesh oozed over the rings on her fingers, her watch, the frame of her shoes. The grey outline around her mouth now stretched across the bridge of her nose, like a mask. Even a fool could see that death was stalking her, could pounce at any moment. But her frailty was physical. Her mind was razor-sharp. The quick, sometimes cruel, often sarcastic one-liners still came hard and fast, but I wasn’t easily felled by them anymore. Once or twice I even tried for intimacy, only to have her reduce it to safe banality. So I wasn’t prepared for the day the lid blew off our relationship once and for all.

  We were eating a picnic lunch in the car because the weather was too foul to attempt what had become a painfully slow and agonising climb in and out of the car followed by a stop-start passage to the restaurant. In an unguarded moment, she said, ‘I wasn’t that bad. As a mother.’

  And so, after a lifetime of tiptoeing around the cracks and fissures in our relationship, she’d swung open the door as wide as it would go. Outside, the sky was black. Rain pelted. Lightning zigzagged like the first signs of migraine. Green mountains of surf crashed onto a blood-red beach while a gale forced an avenue of pines and dune grass into submission. All it would take was a severed branch, rogue wave or a lightning strike and we’d both be dead, I thought. So I told her then that I couldn’t bear to hug her hello or kiss her goodbye or even pat her on the back when we parted, because I could never forgive her. I told her I found it hard to listen to her version of my childhood; every time she rosied up old memories I wanted to scream.

  ‘So here it is,’ I said. I
n a clipped, angry voice, I told her what her father did to me in the chook shed, the Humpy, on the nights he offered to babysit while everyone else went off yabbying by the light of a full moon. The holidays when he forced me to walk beside him on the beach, my hand in his pocket. How I hated him and feared him. How he distorted my understanding of love and sex forever.

  ‘You must have known,’ I said, staring straight ahead, unable to look at her. ‘You must have known and you failed to protect me.’ I waited for an unseen force to scoop up the small car in which we sat and hurl it into space. Punishment for giving life to a deeply hidden canker that had defined much of my life, if not all of it. Instead, for a few seconds the roaring apocalypse seemed to quieten.

  With a careless wave, she flicked aside a revelation that would break most mothers: ‘It probably made a better woman of you,’ she said dismissively, as though we’d been discussing whether to buy pork or lamb chops for dinner. And, just like that, a fifty-year-old suppurating sore dried up. And we were both still breathing.

  She finished her oysters. I ate the last of my meat pie. The gloom lifted. The wind and rain eased. The lightning shifted out to sea, no more than a flashing white light on a black horizon. I gathered the detritus of our picnic and stepped outside the car to dispose of the rubbish.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she called. Here it comes, I thought. But what? An apology? A disclaimer? Denial? I bent to see and hear her better.

  ‘Yes?’ I asked, warily.

  She fastidiously wiped her fingers, each one heavy with those awful rings, then handed me the soiled paper napkin. ‘It’ll save you an extra trip.’ I laughed then. My mother has never known the meaning of retreat, and she clearly wasn’t about to start learning.

  I drove her back to the Village and helped her out of the car. She shuffled off, a stubborn, mulish expression on her face. Her lips drawn in a thin red line. I roared away before she reached the front door, hit the steering wheel with the palm of my hand. After years of silence and secret shame, why today? She’d been no more acerbic than usual when I collected her. She’d behaved no differently at lunch. Our conversation, stilted and mostly one-sided, was a well-worn script that rarely changed.

  Was it the grey tinge around her mouth? The swollen ankles and wrists? The wheezy breaths? Death-in-waiting. The signs were loud and clear. Say it now or I might never know the truth? Or was it the assemblies of courageous childhood victims, many damaged beyond repair, who’d publicly stepped forward with their awful stories? Determined to take on and hold to account the most powerful institutions in the land after decades of secrecy. Distanced enough, now, from the pain and anguish to be able to blow the sanctimonious lids off the most sacrosanct establishments. Healing along the way. I had applauded from deep in my comfortable armchair. Feeling my own shame for remaining mute – how can it ever end if none of us speaks out?

  All my life I’d wondered: Did my mother know her father was a degenerate of the most heinous kind? And if she knew, why didn’t she keep me out of harm’s way? It wasn’t until much later that I understood I still didn’t have a clear answer.

  ‘She takes no hostages, does she?’ Bob said when I told him what had happened.

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I replied.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

  ‘Lighter,’ I told him. ‘Like I’ve emptied myself of a poison I’ve been carrying around forever.’

  ‘Good!’ He said nothing else. Held my hand for a long while. Then went off to make a cup of tea.

  I picked Esther up the following week on our scheduled day. She waited with rabbit-scared eyes in the reception area. Hoping, no doubt, that we’d perform the traditional Duncan feint-and-parry in the face of battle and let the whole hideous topic slide into a dark recess, never to be resurrected. But as soon as we were on our way, she said, ‘I never knew. I swear I never knew. If I’d known I would have killed him.’

  I said nothing. The silence stretched out.

  ‘He did it to me, too, you know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know it was wrong.’

  A while later, as we pulled into the restaurant: ‘I thought I was helping Mum.’

  Once we were seated: ‘It made me feel special.’

  Inside the restaurant, I went through the motions. Ordered food. Drinks. Paid. Took a seat on the other side of the table from her. ‘If you knew what he was capable of,’ I said carefully, ‘then you are guilty, as charged, of failing to protect a child.’

  ‘I never thought he’d do anything to you.’

  ‘Why? Because I was a gangly, freckle-faced kid without an ounce of charm? Not a pretty blonde little tease like you? How could you not understand what was going on?’ Anger. Swirling. Cyclonic. Blinding.

  She was silent. Fiddled with the tab on a can of bourbon and cola. I took it from her, opened it. Poured.

  ‘Even now, more than fifty years later,’ I said, ‘I cannot see a man – any man – with a child in his care, without wondering if that child is safe. Why do you think I never had children? I was terrified something terrible might happen on my watch and I would never, ever, forgive myself.’

  Our food arrived. We plastered on our public faces. Good Duncan soldiers till the end. Smiling. Polite. Consigning our dirty linen to a basket and snapping shut the lid. I poured her more drink. She asked for a straw and I went to the front counter to get her one.

  But later, when I crawled out of my anger: Her, too, I thought, overwhelmed by sadness and the beginnings of understanding of the forces that had moulded my mother. What chance did she have?

  Everything between us changed in ways I could never have foreseen. I raised one more question: ‘Do you think Nan knew what was going on?’ From this end of my life it seemed impossible to believe she’d been blind to the depravities of the man she’d married.

  ‘I always thought she was wonderful. If she knew, then she wasn’t. I can’t believe she knew. I’m sure she didn’t. We were very careful.’ The implications of the word careful didn’t occur to me until much later.

  I remind myself to consider the timeframe. Esther was born nearly a century ago, her mother at the end of the 1800s. It was an era when women without the support of men often perished. He might have – must have, if she knew – seemed the lesser of two evils. Life is life. I had my answers. The sky didn’t come crashing down on our heads. And my mother and I were bound for eternity by blood and history.

  The following week we drove along Pittwater Road, past yachts, dinghies, well-tended houses. People carrying plastic bags, wearing lycra shorts and stretch-fabric shirts walking their dogs along the foreshore at a hectic pace. Arms swinging, jerked backwards every so often by a pooch lifting a leg against a politically correct border of Australian natives: coastal rosemary, grevilleas, unfriendly lomandra with its spiky foliage and flowers. I waited for the status quo to resume, and it kicked in right on cue as we rounded the final corner.

  ‘I’m well looked after,’ she said. ‘The staff is going to pot, though. The head honchos are cutting workers and cutting hours. I’m lucky to get my unit cleaned once a week.’

  ‘So is there anything you’d like me to take up with management? Any problems?’

  ‘Have you ever heard me complain? Do I ever complain? They treat me quite differently to the others. They love me. I don’t know why.’ It was said with a funny laugh, as though she knew exactly why and the joke was on everyone else.

  ‘How’s Stefan these days?’ I asked, to change the subject.

  ‘He died.’

  I twisted my head to look at her, frowning. ‘He died? When? Was there a funeral?’

  ‘I was too ill to go to it.’

  ‘But I would have taken you! He was your friend!’

  ‘You weren’t around and anyway, I told you, I was ill.’

  I pulled into the five-minute drop-off zone outside the restaurant at the Church Point ferry wharf. Unloaded the walker. Opened the door, reaching across her ample chest to release her seatbelt.
r />   ‘Oooh,’ she said flirtatiously, ‘I didn’t know you cared.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Hah. I know you love me. So did your brother. I did my best.’ Her eyes got a wary look. As if afraid she’d opened the door to more questions. A moment later she clutched her chest. Breathed in short puffy gulps.

  ‘Are you alright?’ I asked, not convinced she was ill for a second.

  ‘A pain. It will go away.’

  ‘Want me to take you back to the Village?’ I asked slyly.

  ‘No! I can do anything.’ She placed one foot on the ground, but the other refused to follow, as though it was hooked up to a separate electric current and the switch was off. Not an act – not this time. ‘Giddy-up, giddy-up,’ she ordered in a sing-song voice, making tongue-clicking sounds every so often.

  I reached inside and lifted her foot out. Placed an arm under hers to help her upright. Standing, with her hands on her walker, she regained her confidence. But she shuffled along painfully, as though the very act of putting one foot in front of the other was a task too great.

  ‘Do you want to sit at a table next to the water or inside?’ I asked.

  ‘Inside. I wouldn’t want to catch a chill.’

  The restaurant was filling with bright young women in skimpy clothing, even though a chill southerly had pushed back summer for the day. Long shiny hair. Perfectly even, beauty-parlour tans. Sandals. Feet with toenails painted blue or mulberry. They sat outside on the deck under red umbrellas, looking festive. I asked for the gas heater to be turned on and settled Esther at a table so close to it that I expected to find her skin toasted brown when I returned from parking the car.