Salvation Creek Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Preview of Gone Fishing

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  SALVATION CREEK

  An Unexpected Life

  SUSAN DUNCAN

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Salvation Creek: an unexpected life.

  ePub ISBN 9781864715163

  Kindle ISBN 9781864717808

  Note: Some of the names of people in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

  Original Print Edition

  SALVATION CREEK

  A BANTAM BOOK

  First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2006 by Bantam

  This edition published in Australia and New Zealand in 2007 by Bantam

  Copyright © Susan Duncan, 2006

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Duncan, Susan (Susan Elizabeth).

  Salvation Creek: an unexpected life.

  ISBN: 9781863254748

  1. Duncan, Susan (Susan Elizabeth). I. Title.

  920.72

  Transworld Publishers

  a division of Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway North Sydney, NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  Cover painting ‘Church Point’ by John Lovett

  Chapter openers feature linocuts by Katie Clemson, from the series

  ‘Pittwater Boatsheds’, 2003.

  Cover and text design by Nanette Backhouse/Saso Content and Design

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia

  For my brother, John

  PROLOGUE

  THERE IS A HOUSE on a high, rough hill that overlooks the tawny green waters of Lovett Bay. It is pale yellow, with three chimneys and a red tiled roof splattered with lichen. An elegant verandah, with stately columns and polished wooden floors, stretches from end to end and on a still, summer evening it is quite magical to dine there, watching the light fade and birds fly home.

  The house is reached by a winding stairway that begins at the shore and seems to meander on and on to nowhere. Sometimes, if it is early enough in the morning, or late enough in the afternoon, swamp wallabies pause on the pathway and stare with big, uncertain eyes before suddenly taking fright and thumping off into the bush. In summer, the path is flecked with mint coloured moss, the same shade of green as the blotches on the smooth trunks of the spotted gums that form a towering canopy in front of the sky. It is a mysterious pathway that seems to lead perhaps to the heavens themselves. The climb is steep and yet if you take it slowly and pause to look at Lovett Bay, there is no need to feel tired or breathless.

  Many boats are moored in the bay, some big and immaculately maintained, with tall masts that seagulls or cormorants cling to, scanning the waters for their next feed. Others are the dreams, perhaps broken, of people who have seen beauty in an old wreck and who plan, one day, to restore it to former glory. Many of these wrecks have sat for years and I have never seen anyone go near them. Sometimes, the Water Police do a tour of the bay in one of their orange and white motorboats and from time to time, one or two of the rottenest vessels are towed somewhere else or taken out to sea and sunk.

  It is more than six years now since I first started trekking up these steps and when I reach the fork in the pathway near the top, I still can't decide which way is preferable. The right fork is steep and leads to a vast, spongy lawn which is a stark contrast to the muted, scraggy bush. It isolates the house, like an emerald lake, from the spotted gums that soar like straight-backed, silent sentries.

  There are a few brooding ironbarks too, that are sometimes twisted, like wounded warhorses. The other pathway is a gentle ascent but it veers slightly away from the house. The temptation is to go for the direct route even if it makes calf muscles ache and the blood rush to your head. But the better choice, I think, is the milder access even though it appears to lead to an old, wooden workshed that lacks even a hint of the grandeur of the main house.

  The house is called Tarrangaua which is an Aboriginal word meaning, I am told, high, rough hill. But I cannot find the word in any Aboriginal dictionary. The woman who named the house was a famous Australian poet, Dorothea Mackellar. She died in 1968 so I cannot ask her how the name came about. Perhaps she sat around the dinner table with a group of guests one night in the beautifully proportioned main sitting room and they played a game to invent the best title. The name is certainly grand, and so was she.

  She would arrive at Church Point in a chauffeur driven yellow Rolls Royce where her caretaker would wait for her with the launch. Lovett Bay, you see, is accessible only by boat – unless you want to walk five kilometres along the escarpment then down into the valleys of the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. It is a sensational walk that takes about an hour and a half but it is tough in parts, with steep rocky tracks where you can easily lose your footing. In contrast, the boat trip is five minutes of pure pleasure as you cut past McCarrs Creek, then Elvina Bay and finally swing west into Lovett, with the wind blowing in your face and the snap of salt air in your lungs.

  At the time the house was built for Dorothea Mackellar in 1925, she was wealthy, single, forty years old and already involved in a love affair with the brandy bottle. But I knew nothing of all this when I first made my way past the house and into Lovett Bay.

  I was a messy, jangly forty-eight year old struggling to find a place to belong. I'd watched two of the most important people in my life slide slowly and painfully into death and the horror of it snatched away lightheartedness, stubbed out hope. Blotted out my idea of where I fitted in. I'd been spinning in a career for more years than I cared to remember, where the days had become a blur of office politics and office pressures, where I felt only a rising sense of detachment from one week to the next. I had no idea what I was looking for to give my life new purpose, only that when I found this intangible, wraithlike something, I would be able to still the restlessness. Begin again.

  As I bumped across the water in a leaky tin dinghy to see a property for sale in Lovett Bay, I did not know that the journey had begun. That Tarrangaua, the pale yellow house with the corridor of columns and the long verandah on the high, rough hill, would hold the ke
y to it all.

  1

  ONE MORNING, FOR NO reason at all, I cannot find the strength to get out of bed. It's mid-winter in Melbourne. Trees are naked under a dirty brown sky. A few dead leaves skitter joylessly in an irritable wind. The alarm clock went off an hour ago. The dog hasn't been walked. I haven't showered, dressed or left for the office. The thought of throwing back the covers and putting my feet on the floor fills me with terror. I lie there, squeezing my eyes shut. Descending slowly into a deep, dark hole that I welcome. I want oblivion so badly I can think of nothing else.

  When I look at the clock again, two hours have evaporated. I reach for the phone and call the doctor.

  'I can't make the decision to get out of bed.'

  'Stay there, then. Stay there for as long as you want. You're ill.'

  I put the phone back in its cradle, look around an anonymous mustard bedroom in my rented house. Mirrored closet doors reflect a haggard old woman. I turn away and face the window, counting on my fingers. Eighteen. Eighteen months since my brother, John, and my husband, Paul, died. For a second only, I squint into the future. The vacant spaces are unbearable.

  The crying starts in silence. Tears wetting the pillow, dampening the collar of my pyjamas. Through the day it builds, until swollen eyes reduce the world to a narrow slit and my dog, Sweetie, climbs on the bed for the first time in her life to press her warm, black body close. When the maelstrom ends two days later, nothing has changed. My brother is still dead. And so is my husband.

  My brother battled cancer for five years. They say a heart attack killed him. But it was exhaustion. I sat, the night before he died, on a white chair on white carpet in his white bedroom. He lay on a white bed under white sheets, so thin, frail and white himself, he barely existed. He breathed in quick little sips, the tumours in his lungs wider than his arms. They squeaked like an old flywire door when you rubbed them. As I'd done in the past to relieve a smidgin of his pain. On this night, he moved a finger. No rub. Thank you. One eye open, the other closed. Already nearly dead.

  'Shall I hold your hand?'

  The finger again. No.

  My brother never showed fear. A lifetime on the racetrack taught him to disguise his emotions. Win? Lose? He never changed. Perhaps a deeper tinge of pink in his cheeks if the win was big, a white band around his mouth if the loss hit hard. The only time I saw a hint of dread was the day we watched the races on television – he in bed, me propped against pillows alongside. I knew he'd had a big bet and nerves got the better of me.

  'I'll just go and make a cup of tea,' I said, getting up.

  'Not yet,' he said. 'Don't leave the room yet.'

  So I sat, truly frightened for the first time. As stupid as I know this is,my brother had been ill for so long I thought he would just stay ill. I refused to accept that he would die. Not the handsome, blonde, blue-eyed big brother who built a billycart so his irritating little sister could be dragged along behind when he went out double-dink riding with his friend. Not the brother who got his girlfriends to make his sister's clothes because he thought her mother had lousy ideas about what suited her. Not the brother she had loved without question all her life. Larrikin, gambler, beautiful dresser, generous spirit, comfort and support. Not her big, invincible brother.

  As a child, John was wise and compassionate. Almost five years older than me, he steadied the impact of rocky episodes in my parents' marriage, dragged me along in his older life. Sometimes, at the height of my parents' disappointment with each other, they would turn to us children standing white-faced and trembling and demand we choose between them.

  'Choose no-one,'my brother would whisper in my ear, his arm protectively around my shoulders.

  'But I want Mummy.'

  'Choose no-one and they will have to stay together.'

  My brother recognised early the power of emotion. He quickly learned the power of money. When he was barely ten years old, he set up a soft drink counter at the local tennis club. On days thick with bush flies and corrugated heat, profits soared. When frost crunched underfoot and our hands turned blue waiting for the school bus, he kept profits flowing by scrounging empty bottles from the local tip. Worth threepence each, he filled the billycart he towed behind his horse over and over until the tip was cleared. He amassed enough cash to buy a big, boxy blonde stereo on tiny, tapered legs that seemed to glow and throb in our sombre sitting room where we played South Pacific on wet winter nights until the record wore out.

  Once, my mother hit him. I can still smell that cold, damp morning when my father's belt came out and she wrapped it around John's legs as he marched barefoot down the path in front of the hydrangeas. He was about eight years old, blue-eyed, hair so white we nicknamed him Snow. Tall for his age but all bones.

  'You are not going to school without your shoes!' she snapped.

  'I told you. I can't find them!'

  'Get back inside and have another look!'

  'No!'

  Whip. A red streak on white legs. My mother sitting abruptly on the concrete pathway. Crying with shock and remorse. She had never raised a hand to either of us before.

  John squatted beside her and pulled her head to his chicken chest. Holding her until she calmed. 'Please, Mum. Don't hit me again. It upsets you too much.' He'd always been unbeatable.

  My husband's illness, like my brother's, came out of nowhere. His sneezing woke me at about 2 am.

  'Get a tissue, for heaven's sake.'

  The sneezing continued. Seriously cranky, I turned on the light. His eyes were open but unseeing. Please, God, please. Not both my boys. Please. I promised a God I thought I didn't believe in obeisance forever in return for Paul's life.

  He was still breathing when they lifted him into the ambulance, the seizures settling into a steady pattern. I climbed into the seat beside the driver, a calm young woman with an open face.

  'This is going to sound bizarre,' I babbled, talking fast and intimately to try to hold back panic.

  'Tell me anyway.'

  'Two Sundays ago, Paul dreamed his friend,Terry, who is dead, landed in a plane and tried to convince Paul to join him on a trip. Exactly a week later, Paul dreamed his mother, who died before Terry, was combing his hair and asking him to follow her.'

  The driver said nothing as she eased the ambulance through the empty streets in the last hour before dawn.

  'So I guess what I want to know . . . want to ask . . . Is my husband dying back there?'

  'It doesn't look good,' she said, gently.

  She was brave in many ways, that smiley young driver, but especially courageous to tell me the truth. She could have lied. It would have been so much easier on her.

  A few hours later, when the drugs kicked in and the seizures finally abated, when life and understanding filled Paul's eyes again, one of the doctors asked him a question: 'Who is the Queen of Australia?'

  'I suppose you mean that bloody Elizabeth,' he grumbled.

  I laughed with relief. This was the Paul I knew so well. Irreverent. Pig-headed. Caustic. Unswervingly true to his Irish political heritage despite never having set foot on the velvety green land of his ancestors. Thank you, God. I owe you.

  Days later, after tests and then more tests, the tidy, cleanly shaven neurosurgeon with thinning hair pulled the flimsy curtain around Paul's hospital bed. 'There's a tumour at the front of your brain. It's the size of a small apple.'

  Paul smiled. As though he'd known all along. He looked almost uncaring, dissociated. But I thought I might faint. For a moment the room lurched. Then settled. I felt the blood drain from my face as though a plug had been pulled.

  Paul kept smiling to himself, withdrawn into his own space. So I did all the talking. 'You can operate, can't you?' I asked.

  'We'll have to. The tumour is putting pressure on the brain.'

  'Well, it could be all right, couldn't it?'

  'We won't know until we've done a biopsy.'

  'Can you guess?'

  'Why don't we wait and see?'r />
  Three days later the worst possible news. Glioblastoma. A quick growing, aggressive son-of-a-bitch that could not be stopped. A death sentence. I didn't owe God at all.

  When my brother first became ill, I'd traipsed the dusty roads of Mexico after hearing about a miracle clinic. On the way through poverty stricken villages, along a road more potholed than whole, my cab broke down. The driver, too drunk on tequila to be able to even lift the bonnet, sank to the ground on the shady side of the car and told me to keep walking. I'd get there eventually. An hour later I staggered into a clinic set in a flaking 1950s motel with blood red carpet, vinyl chairs and saggy wooden beds. People queued at a box-office window that used to be the motel reception desk, squandering their last few dollars on hope.

  One man, tall, thin and dark with desperation, argued with the nurse on the other side of the glass partition: 'The money will come through. I've arranged to mortgage the house. Give me the medication. Please.'

  He didn't get his pills that day, that young Englishman who would probably die in Mexico. But I took my brother there anyway.Try anything. That's how I saw it. There was nothing to lose. John walked away.

  I made other calls to obscure clinics in Europe and America, some in Australia, and felt surges of hope when friendly voices asked for medical details but then, quick as a flash, came back with fantastic fees for treatment. I'm not sure exactly when I understood it was all a sales pitch, selling guilt to the healthy, hope to those without hope. Maybe it was when a clinic in California asked for a list of financial assets to be faxed before it asked what disease needed to be treated. I decided, quickly, that I would not go down that path with Paul.

  The tumour gobbled everything. His brilliant intellect. Laconic humour. Razor sharp wit. Once a voracious reader, he would lie in bed, book in hand, giving the impression his mind still kicked over. But he seldom turned the page. I stopped by the hospice every morning on my way to work as the editor of a national women's magazine. On my way home, I called in to see my brother, then drove another two suburbs to visit Paul again. To sit alongside his bed until he drifted into sleep. Which meant getting home late. Wondering when to fit in a load of washing. When to clean the house. Whether it was selfish and irresponsible to steal an hour for a hot bath. Whether I could find enough strength and energy for the day ahead. It was like being on a hurdy-gurdy. Not enough time. Ever. Nothing done properly.