The House on the Hill Read online

  ‘I hope that party was worth it,’ I said grimly.

  Her eyes still closed, she said, ‘I wanted a wake while I was still alive. It was such a pity your father was dead for his wake. He would have enjoyed it enormously.’ And there it was. The subplot. My mother couldn’t cope with the thought of missing her own farewell, even if it meant risking her life. It all made sense now. Every wake has music and flowers.

  11

  ON A GREY, DRIZZLY DAY, damp but not cold, Bob and I sat on the verandah nursing our cuppas. Our mood was flat. Out of the blue, Bob suggested a visit to the US to see his son and wanted to know what I thought about tacking on a trip to the Galapagos Islands. Maybe spend a couple of weeks exploring Chile as well.

  Within seconds, sweat was pooling on my upper lip, under my eyes, running down my spine, my thighs and the back of my knees. Anxiety, I have learned, conjoins with menopause and, in my case, had resulted in a strangely altered mental state – a new fear of flying. The prospect of spending long periods folded painfully in the prison of economy while my disobedient head spun horror scenarios that included engine failure, terrorists or, at the very least, deep vein thrombosis, was horrible.

  I dumped my cuppa, pushed back my chair from the table and, mustering every ounce of self-control at my disposal, walked casually to the rail to look out over the soft green water of Lovett Bay. Gathering in the peace and serenity until the snivelling, flaccid menopausal alter ego, who lurked like an evil spirit waiting to pounce in a weak moment, shrank back into her fetid hole. Gave myself a silent pep talk. I was a woman who’d once travelled fearlessly into countries flagged unsafe by foreign affairs. I’d backpacked and hitchhiked and stared down hardship, discomfort and even threat. So when had the certain knowledge of inevitably being ripped off, mugged, sick or hopelessly lost been upgraded from an irritating fact of foreign travel to an insurmountable deterrent? Was it experience that had dulled my appetite for the unknown? Or fear that I may no longer have the physical and mental resources to survive even insignificant hurdles? Or perhaps I’d once felt the unmitigated terror of being handed a life-threatening diagnosis and had no stomach anymore, even for minor physical risk.

  There was another factor. I’d done my share of travelling. Lining up for another round of antiquities, buildings, art works, medieval towns, stuff that at home I wouldn’t give a glance, had the unsettling whiff of time-filling. Without realising it, I’d begun to think of travel as pointless voyeurism, that we tourists were no better than fly-in fly-out workers in remote areas. We come, we see, we conquer and we move on. More bad meals. More language difficulties. More rip-offs. More downtime at train stations, airports or on buses. But all I said was: ‘I’ve always wanted to see the Galapagos.’ Denial? Bravado? Yes, but mostly a morbid fear that once I began admitting defeat I would quickly spiral down into the well looked after zone and never crawl out. ‘I’ll check out flights and accommodation this afternoon.’

  Bob grinned. ‘Get busy then,’ he said, coming over to slip an arm around my waist, visibly energised by the prospect of an adventure. I made a silent vow never to narrow his options for want of a stiff backbone. At the same time, I lamented the hideous inequity in the aging of men and women.

  ‘Do you ever fear flying?’ I asked, genuinely curious.

  He gave me a sideways look, not sure where I was coming from. ‘You mean in a plane?’

  ‘Of course I mean a plane,’ I replied, slightly exasperated.

  ‘Nope.’ He paused. ‘Do you?’

  A slick arrangement of lies sprouted on the tip of my tongue. ‘Yes,’ I admitted instead. He was silent for a while.

  ‘I switch off. Can’t you do that?’ Mental toughness, is what he meant.

  ‘Not anymore,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be right,’ he said. ‘I’ll hold your hand all the way.’

  I smiled: ‘Yeah, that’ll do it.’ Picked up our empty mugs, stacked them in the dishwasher and walked down the long hallway to my office. It was strewn with tribal rugs that once graced the backs of the camels of Iran’s Bakhtiari nomads on their seasonal migrations. What happened, I wondered, to their old women who could no longer make those difficult journeys? Were they left behind to die, as they were in some cultures? Their bones picked over by hawks so that by the time their families returned the following year, there was nothing left to show they’d ever existed?

  Through the window, I watched a small tinny, miniature in the distance, cut a line through dead flat water, scissor sharp. Chippy harrumphed and settled in her basket at my feet. I typed ‘Galapagos’ into the computer.

  A few days later, the phone rang.

  ‘A property came on the market yesterday,’ Peter said. ‘It’s not exactly what you’re after, but if you’ve got time you might want to take a look.’

  ‘How far out of town?’ Bob asked.

  ‘About fourteen minutes.’

  ‘What’s the road like?’

  ‘Bitumen with about two kilometres of dirt at the end. But it’s a road, not a track. Kept up by the council.’

  ‘Aspect?’

  ‘North.’

  Bob ended the call. We packed a change of clothes, booked the B & B, scooped up Chippy and, with heightened purpose, hit the cavalcade of trucks and sun-seeking grey nomads escaping the southern winter. We both sensed we were either on the verge of something big – or calling it quits.

  We arrived in Wingham around lunchtime. Peter and another man we’d never met were waiting for us in a bog-standard office with a desk covered with stacks of advertising flyers and two rows of demountable cubicles on either side of a hallway. We’d never stepped beyond reception before. To us, it signalled rising stakes.

  ‘This is Tim,’ Peter said, introducing us to a shorter, rounder version of Michael from the brickworks. Tim held out a hard, tough hand. ‘I’m a dairy farmer in my spare time,’ he said when I mentioned his grip.

  ‘Ah,’ Bob said.

  ‘I specialise in working farm or agricultural land sales,’ Tim added. It was a subtle moment. I missed it completely.

  Tim explained that Peter had mentioned we were looking for a block with a north-facing house site and views. He’d checked his own listings and thought a Wherrol Flat property might tick most of our boxes.

  ‘How about we all go together?’ he suggested.

  ‘We’ve got a dog,’ I said.

  ‘So do I,’ he replied with a shrug.

  I sat next to Peter in the back of his mud-splattered four-wheel drive with Chippy held tightly on my lap. As soon as Tim hit the open road, if he was running true to local form, he’d floor the accelerator. In the front seat, Bob asked detailed questions. I listened with a sinking heart. For a start, instead of five to twenty acres, it was cattle country, currently running a herd of forty Red Polls but capable of supporting up to seventy steers in a bad season, a few more in a good year, and it covered a whopping (to us) two hundred and twenty-eight acres.

  ‘It’s got a new cattle yard,’ Tim said in the warm tone that I soon discovered good cattle yards, decent tractors and reliable log splitters – farming equipment in general – elicit from men who work the land. ‘And the paddocks are clean.’ An even warmer tone this time.

  ‘Clean?’

  ‘Mostly kikuyu and clover. Not many weeds.’

  ‘Flattish country, is it?’ Bob asked.

  ‘Hilly. But there’s a couple of sites – one in particular – that might make a good spot to build a house.’

  I waited for Tim to get lyrical, launch into a hard sell. But he remained silent. Can’t be that great, I thought, failing to understand that smart country real estate agents understand that properties sell themselves when the right buyer comes along. It wasn’t smart to push a sale when you were going to bump into the (possibly unhappy or even irate) buyer in the main street of town at least once a week when he did his shopping.

  I switched out of the conversation. The windscreen wipers batted at the drizzle. The head-clearing scent
of eucalypts seeped inside the car. I was heartened by the sight of green river flats. ‘Hilly’ could mean different things to different people. Up ahead, a sign warned heavy trucks off a one-lane bridge and ordered us to give way to oncoming traffic. There were swerving black skid marks to prove it was wise to heed directions. We began to climb. One hill. Then another. In the distance, a long line of hills loomed high enough to qualify as mountains. I closed my eyes, feeling my anxiety levels rise, a hot flush creeping up from my toes.

  The car slowed. Tim pulled onto a clay dirt driveway, turned to custard from the drizzle that hadn’t let up all the way from Pittwater. Bob jumped out to open the gate. Outside, the sky was low. We drove past the new cattle yards and bumped up a hill, fishtailing in a wet spot.

  ‘Might be a spring there,’ Tim said. ‘There’s plenty in these hills. More when it rains hard for days.’

  There was no hint of even a track for us to follow. He slipped into first gear, engaged four-wheel drive, gave the engine a slight rev. A group of half-grown steers, their damp hides the colour of blood, looked us over curiously. Eyes fanned by long, sexy lashes. A black beast with a blank white face looked at us stupidly.

  ‘What breed is that?’ I asked, but not genuinely interested.

  ‘That’s a baldy,’ Tim said. He came to a stop in a lovely copse of gum trees where cattle had recently camped. There was cow shit ankle-deep to prove it. I shut Chippy in the car and stepped around the dung into the spongy softness of lush pasture. It was a pretty enough spot on a flat-topped hill at the base of much steeper hill. But nothing special.

  ‘Water connected?’ Bob asked. Peter shook his head.

  ‘Power?’ Another head shake. Given the dodgy access and the fact that we’d have to build a road to a house site, it was fast becoming yet another no-go in a long list of them.

  ‘What’s the view like from up there?’ I asked, pointing towards the top of the big hill shrouded in dark clouds, misted by light rain.

  Peter shrugged. ‘There’s no way to get there by car,’ he said, as if that was the end of it.

  ‘How about a walk?’ Bob asked me.

  We both felt it at the same time – an indefinable headiness, a lightness of spirit, rising hope. Peter and Tim, perhaps sensing a shift in the atmosphere, tagged along. We worked our way upwards along a wide swathe of grass not long slashed. On either side the vegetation was knee-high and dripping wet. There were bright spots of little yellow flowers.

  ‘So pretty,’ I said, ‘like tiny daisies.’

  ‘A weed,’ Tim said disapprovingly.

  I stooped to uproot a few plants without understanding I’d already begun to assume ownership. ‘At least it’s easy to pull out,’ I said, ‘not like that hideous lantana.’

  ‘’Round here it can take over a paddock overnight, so farmers slash it,’ Tim said.

  ‘Of course.’

  We brushed the rain off our shoulders and kept going. At the halfway point, we paused, breathless.

  ‘How good’s the fencing?’ Bob asked. His face had the flat, closed-off look he gets when his mind is racing.

  ‘Most of it’s new. Where it’s old, you’d need to do some work,’ Tim said. We set off, quiet again, until we reached the summit. The real estate agents wandered off to leave us alone. Or perhaps they were anxious to get back to the dry warmth of the car.

  ‘Wish I’d brought the camera,’ Bob said, in a whisper, as if to speak loudly might shatter the splendour.

  ‘All this? It’s too … too big for a camera,’ I said, my voice as soft as his. Valleys were draped in white mist from which emerald hilltops rose as islands. Flat against a big sky, mountain ranges flowed like oceans of blue. Towards the east, a storm played out. Sheets of lightning flashed. Fork lightning, white-hot, seemed nearer to where we stood. In the north, heavy rain fell in thick grey curtains. In the south and west, black cauliflower clouds rumbled softly. A wedge-tailed eagle soared elegantly above us. Bob slipped his hand into mine and we stayed there, statue-still, unwilling to break the spell, for a long time.

  Hills are so deceptive, I thought. From a distance, they look like they come to a point, but they plateau, worn to flatness by the wind and weather. If we built a glass shack, here, we could lie in bed and count stars, watching the moon come and go, and in the morning observe the sun thundering up from the horizon until the valleys shone. But: two hundred and twenty-eight acres? We’d have to be mad. And a house on a great hill where the winds must rage? Insanity.

  Just then, way off to the north, a blade of sunlight broke through bruised clouds. Shafts of gold fell out of the sky. One rainbow. Then two. Then a third. The hills and valleys around us were pulsing with light, colour, life. And we were goners.

  ‘How much?’ I asked Bob, as rainbows faded and the first fat drops of rain landed wetly on our faces.

  ‘On a clear day,’ he replied, ‘do you think we’d see the sea from here?’

  Later, I likened it to setting off to buy an oriental carpet, knowing exactly what size, colour and design you were looking for, and walking out of the shop with a completely unsuitable, impractical piece because it was so glorious you knew it would give you pleasure for the rest of your life and damn practicality.

  ‘Offer half the asking price,’ I said, trying to claw my way back to the real world. ‘There’s never been a better time to find a bargain.’ Bob’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Business is business,’ I snapped. I had the grace to blush.

  On the brink of transferring a poofteenth less than the asking price for two hundred and twenty-eight acres of steep hills and deep gullies, my stomach roiled with a mix of nerves and nausea. My father’s words spun in my head. ‘You need to be comfortably off when you’re old,’ he’d say while rearranging the stack of bills on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, where he kept them until they were all paid at the end of the month. ‘It’s the only weapon you’ve got left.’ Then he’d read the obituaries with particular interest in public figures, skipping the plaudits to get straight to the value of the bloke’s estate. He had admiration only for those who left a serious amount. ‘A life well lived,’ he’d say. Or in the case of a few politicians: ‘A life on the take.’

  But despite every argument against instigating huge changes at this unpredictable and vulnerable stage of our lives, here we were, Bob and me, acting like a couple of starry-eyed newlyweds and throwing everything at a dream. Or more likely, a folly. At best, we might last ten years before our bodies gave out and our rolling green pastures deteriorated into barren, weed-infested plots.

  ‘Are we mad?’ I asked Bob.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, grinning confidently.

  ‘Ah. What the hell. Go on.’ I pointed at the keyboard. ‘Hit the send button.’

  In an instant, we’d crossed into a parallel universe so un-resemblant to Pittwater, it was like zipping on a new skin. We were landowners, now, in country where cattle was a religion and boats were about as useful as a bull in a herd of steers. No house, no water, no power – not even a sludgy track to a good campsite. Boom or bust. Shades of my mother. Never far from the surface.

  Soon after, we agreed to agist about forty steers for the former owner for three months at a rate of three dollars per head per week. Even at full carrying capacity, if we were vaguely contemplating a return on our investment, we were living in la-la-land.

  Towards the end of spring, 2011, we loaded the tinny with a tent, grass cutter, fire drum and camping equipment. Shipped it across the water to pack in our newly acquired ute. No more B & Bs. No more restaurant dinners. We were serious landowners and it was time to walk the boundary, explore the gullies, ascend the hilltops and pace the plateaus. Study the sky. Learn rain patterns and the prevailing winds. Sit in country, as a wonderful Indigenous poet, Ali Cobby Eckermann, once said to me.

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘Feel the land,’ she replied. ‘Listen to what it says.’

  Friends and neighbours on Pittwater no doubt watch
ed our departure shaking their heads and wondering what kind of idiots quit a magical seaside paradise for a scruffy bush block. We laughed when anyone questioned us. ‘This place is as beautiful as Pittwater, but in a different way. And wait until we bring you fruit from our trees, vegetables from our gardens,’ we told them, smugly. ‘You’ll understand.’ We stopped for coffee and pastries at St Ives, a ritual by then, and hit the highway, slapping our knees with excitement.

  ‘We’re off! Bring it on! Onwards and upwards!’ In the back seat and deaf to our shouts, Chippy didn’t stir.

  They say it is normal for both buyers and sellers to feel remorse when the deal is done. As I walked the paddocks for the first time, it felt like waking up from a fool’s dream. Everywhere I looked, I saw work. Not the kind I was used to – sitting at a computer, cup of tea handy, and writing – but hard, physical yakka. Mending fences. Grubbing out weeds. Controlling lantana in ankle-breaking gullies. Cleaning dams. Clearing paddocks of bushfire fuel. The kind of work that couldn’t be postponed. That left you stiff, sore and mute with tiredness. The kind that never ended. Remorse didn’t quite cover it. Naked horror was closer to the truth.

  And yet, despite the awful anxiety that we were at the wrong end of our lives for this kind of challenge, beauty overwhelmed. Wide land opened to the sky. Light poured down in great warm slabs. Wind skated across hilltops until trees sang in furious symphony. Fifteen years of living on the tree-shrouded tidal shores of Lovett Bay quickly felt slightly claustrophobic. It was like letting a cool, fresh wind pulse through heart, head, mind and soul. Brushing away the cobwebs, as my mother would say, to allow in the light.

  We picked a mostly level campsite at what turned out to be the halfway point between the front gate and the tip of the Great Hill. Bob shovelled enough cow manure to fertilise an orchard, slashed the long grass, and in the shade of a few old gum trees, we pitched the khaki canvas tent in which we’d once honeymooned. I made up two camp stretchers with clean sheets, pillows and doonas, found a spot for Chippy’s bed, and placed our pyjamas under feather pillows. The stale smell of the tent matched the pungent, earthy aroma of cow dung, but we had a clean and cosy shelter to sleep protected from whatever the weather gods chose to throw at us. Bob set out two folding chairs around the fire drum and we wandered off to collect wood. There was enough to set a fire to cook for five hundred within a few paces.