The House on the Hill Read online

  After more than a year of hard slog and in the depth of winter, it was time to install the new brick kiln. We rented a basic redbrick house in Killabakh, a blink-and-you-miss-it locality at the tail end of a sealed road and about twenty-five minutes north of Wingham. Tidily arranged on a gentle hill, the house had views across deep green valleys swathed in fog that burned off by mid-morning. Way below in a cold, almost sunless nook, smoke spiralled lazily from a cottage chimney, but I never saw anyone moving about. Every day, like a gift from the gods, great slabs of golden heat poured through the kitchen windows. Free. Renewable. No nasty side effects or far-reaching impacts on the planet. An impossibility at Pittwater, where soaring spotted gums allowed only a tepid dose of light to penetrate, and our heating bills were beginning to prompt outrage and disbelief. Unfurnished except for a mattress on a legless base, a few cooking utensils, a couple of chairs and a foldaway table, it was a perfect camp for three or four weeks while the new kiln was being built and tested.

  I raided the disorderly and musty second-hand shop behind a garage roller-door shopfront in Wingham for a few cheap necessities. Scrounged and bargained my way to a retro, three-legged coffee table, two dodgy lamps and a bedside table by promising to donate them back at the end of our stay. Then blew the budget on a totally impractical set of Grindley art deco side plates and a serving platter. They civilised a simple slice of cake in that spartan environment. That had to count for something.

  Every morning, Bob lit the wood-fired heater in the kitchen, fixed a breakfast of porridge, fruit, yoghurt and milk. Let Chippy out for a run. Showered, dressed then brewed a fresh cuppa to bring me in bed before heading off in the chilly predawn light.

  ‘Watch the tricky bend,’ I’d murmur, the earthy fragrance of tea inducing half-wakefulness. ‘And the speed humps on the bridge.’ Repeated over and over. Afraid if I forgot them just once, fate might seize the opportunity and deal a mortal blow. As if any of us controlled fate.

  At weekends, when the brickworks were closed, Bob and I explored the countryside. Steering clear of suburbanised coastlines, instead following winding dirt roads. On a single journey, the sun might shine, rain pound, wind shift from a breeze to a gale, sleet fall. The bush was never still. It trembled, swayed and swung to a rhythm and song while sunstruck raindrops hung like strings of beads. Everywhere, avenues of tree ferns wafted dreamily like giant, feathery fans. Colours collided. Blue. Yellow. Grey. Every shade of green. Dense. Soaring. Glistening. On high plateaus where the country opened up and the pewter sky seemed within touching distance, piebald cattle, their swollen udders at bursting point, patiently filed towards the dairy for relief.

  Once, lured by the smell of the sea, we surfed the corrugations of Crowdy Bay’s bush tracks and saw a thousand-strong flock of budgerigars take to the sky, turning it green like a lawn. For a second or two, the world was reversed. We laughed, the two of us, for the luck and privilege of being there.

  In a high, cold town called Comboyne, we followed our noses to an honest café where a fire burned cosily and ordered hot chocolate and scones with jam and cream. Real cream. We were in some of the best dairy country in Australia. Patting our stomachs with pleasure and a hint of remorse, we returned to the car where, warm in her bed on the back seat, Chippy slept the agitated sleep of the old. Twitching and whimpering, as though, like my mother, death was tapping her on the shoulder. But we’d made a pact, my old dog and me. She would live to be twenty years or even older. I may not have trusted her to ignore a wallaby or a rabbit, but I trusted her on this.

  ‘Who’s the best little doggie in the whole wide world?’ I said, rubbing her ears. She snuffled her way to wakefulness, looked greedily for a treat. ‘We ate the lot, little doggie. Next time.’ She huffed in disgust, buried her snout in the softness of her bed and closed her eyes once more.

  ‘This landscape,’ I said to Bob. ‘I’d never have guessed at all this. So fertile. Green. Not what you’d expect from a sunburnt country.’

  ‘There’s a waterfall they claim is the second longest drop in the world. Want to take a look?’

  Very early in our stay, Michael and Adele turned up in their ute with two enormous armchairs from the brickworks office.

  ‘They might look a bit crook but they’re comfy as hell,’ Michael said, sitting down to prove his point. The kettle went on. Cake came out. The Grindley plates shone. The faint cloud of brickworks dust from Michael plonking in the armchair settled quickly.

  ‘Did you hear about the home invasion?’ Adele asked. ‘In Cedar Party Creek. Woman in her eighties, living alone. Had to walk to the main road to wave down a car for help in the middle of the night, poor thing.’

  ‘Awful!’ I responded, settling for a long chat.

  A couple of days later, the Wingham Hotel, known as the Bottom Pub and established in the late 1800s, burned to the ground. The town went into shock. Wingham was a quiet little backwater, they lamented. This sort of stuff happened elsewhere. Soon after, a woman was shot dead by her husband for reasons known only to himself. Wingham? Sleepy?

  After close to two years of intense work – triggered by a phone call from a stranger – a new, low thermal mass kiln, which released just one-third of the maximum particle emissions allowed for this type of business, was up and running. From henceforth, when Lincoln Brickworks did a burn, the wide blue skies of Wingham would remain crystal clear. Despite setbacks, delays and Old John’s fears and stubborn lack of faith, the results, ticked off by an independent tester, went beyond expectations.

  ‘Knew you were a genius,’ I whispered in Bob’s ear.

  ‘Genius? Nah. Like luck, it’s where hard work meets opportunity.’ But he was pleased with the result.

  Old John, who’d prowled the brickyards through long winter nights during test runs, made a confession in a white-flag moment. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘he would’ve gone for this in a flash. Anything new, and he’d have a go. Long as it made sense to him. He was a modern man.’

  Michael walked away, unable to trust himself to speak. Then turned back, managing a smile: ‘By the end of the year, it will have been Dad’s idea all along. How about we order some pizza to celebrate?’

  Ironically, the new technology extended Old John’s working life. As the hard physical yakka of hand-stoking was no longer required, he was easily able to drive the forklift to pick up and deliver timber to the firebox. Before anyone realised what was going on, he’d taken over the graveyard shift between midnight and six and learned the secrets of the flashing red and green lights in the spiffy new control room. Digital read-outs no longer blurred like hieroglyphics. Not that he’d ever entirely trust their accuracy. Once or twice a night, he climbed a ladder, pushed aside a viewing panel and checked the glow. As he’d done since he was a kid.

  On our final morning at Killabakh, the sun shone warmly. Our cosy winter, borne comfortably in a north-facing house, was almost over. We packed the car, finding a safe corner for the carefully wrapped Grindley plates.

  ‘Why don’t we rent a little apartment in Cooktown and spend winters there from now on?’ I said. Winter warmth, I was thinking, was a game changer.

  Bob pulled his head out of the rear of the station wagon. ‘Cooktown?’ he repeated, as though he must have misheard.

  ‘Yeah. Cooktown. We could bypass Lovett Bay winters forever.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Lovett Bay winters?’ he asked, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Nothing. It’s just warmer in Cooktown.’ Still a bare-bones frontier town when we’d last visited, it was civilised enough to be comfortable but not so civilised it had lost its heart or character.

  ‘Cooktown,’ Bob said again, frowning now. He closed the hatch with exaggerated care. ‘Are you serious?’ I nodded. ‘But what would I do there?’

  ‘Go fishing … Remember the huge tuna and snapper you caught? And a mackerel too? Go exploring …’ I continued. ‘Remember the birds in Lakefield National Park? The huge crocodile that waited and waited?’

&nb
sp; We were on our honeymoon and camped on Twelve Mile Lagoon, a muddy expanse of water that was home to courting brolgas, magpie geese and light-footed jacanas. Every afternoon, flocks of whistling kites, wings outspread, elegantly surfed the thermals like newspapers swept up by the wind. On our second day, the old couple from a neighbouring campsite about a kilometre away slid past us in their boat to shout a warning. A big croc, they said, had stalked the previous inhabitants and we should be wary. Two days later, as we put-putted under the power of our puny eight horsepower outboard in our tiny fragile tinny, leaks patched by Bob with glue and gauze from the first aid box, we saw an evil-looking corrugated spine waiting amongst the lily pads in the shallows at the bottom of the old couples’ campsite. ‘Watch out!’ we yelled, pointing. The ridge sank silently, stealthily, scarily, without making a ripple.

  ‘All I remember about Cooktown is Chippy scurrying off to the caravan park with the other two Jack Russells from the B & B and returning stinking of bacon every morning. Her stomach hard as a bullet. Thought she was going to explode,’ Bob said.

  ‘Cooktown was great!’ I insisted.

  ‘And?’ Bob asked.

  ‘It’s the shed, isn’t it? You’d miss your shed. Yeah, bad idea. Let’s forget it.’

  We locked the door, delivered our goods for recycling to the second-hand shop and drove past the brickworks where the decommissioned furnaces, already growing frail with disuse, were sheathed in moss and sprouting tufts of grass. How quickly, I thought, the present turned into a barely remembered or recognisable past.

  We’d said our goodbyes earlier. Michael, grinning, commented, ‘You weren’t here long but you sure stirred things up. There was the home invasion in Cedar Party Creek, the Bottom Pub burned down, and a bloke shot his missus. If you’d stayed any longer, we were going to pass around the hat to send you on your way. No offence, mate, but Wingham hasn’t been this volatile since the war. The first one, that is.’

  The local volatility, as it turned out, was only the beginning of a much more widespread descent into madness. A bunch of greed heads on Wall Street and from the international banking industry – unable to do the most basic arithmetic despite their chosen professions – had criminally placed the world financial system in such jeopardy it was on the point of collapse. The building industry screamed to a halt, orders for bricks dried up. The tough times Old John recalled were back. Only tougher.

  A few months later, on a follow-up visit to check the kiln, the brickworks cat, an effective and much-valued mouser and ratter, was found dead in the garden. ‘Snake got her, that’s what we think,’ Old John said in the matter-of-fact way country people discuss death. ‘Grey cats. They’re good cats. Shame.’ As it happened, there was a burn on and the firebox was roaring. With a mumbled, ‘See ya later, Kitty Kat,’ she was swung into the flames.

  ‘Ashes to ashes, eh?’ Michael remarked.

  ‘Well,’ Old John responded, rocking back on his heels, hands in his overall pockets, ‘there might be a new business opportunity here.’ Michael, Bob, Skip, Dave and I looked at him blankly. ‘Pet cremations,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘The vet reckons it’s a growth industry. It’s got me buggered, though, how you’d pick ’em apart when you cleaned out the box.’

  ‘Same as people, Dad, probably,’ Michael said. ‘Never been able to figure that one out, either.’ Old John sloped off, dogs at his heels. ‘Least he didn’t say I told you so. Might look into pet cremations. You never know … Nah. Steady on. Just kidding. As you were …’

  Vale Kitty Kat. What a send-off.

  6

  BACK AT PITTWATER, I began organising my mother’s transition from independent to assisted living. It involved unravelling the mind-bogglingly complicated legal minutiae of the conditions of the lease on her old unit and negotiating a price for her new home. After the entrance fee and an annual accrued interest fee of two-and-a-half per cent on her investment, which was also part of the deal with her independent unit, there was a flat monthly fee, four times the amount she’d been paying. Additional services, such as help with bathing, pill giving, laundry and meals delivered to her room instead of eaten in the dining room were extra costs. Worth every cent. Retirement villages provided a service that took the worst of the load off families, although it paid to read the fine print very carefully.

  At the last minute, Bob noticed a subtle detail even our lawyer failed to pick up. Essentially, it meant she’d be paying an annual interest of two-and-a-half per cent on the cost of her entry into the independent unit, even though her new unit entry cost was less than half that amount.

  I explained the arrangements to Esther. She shrugged, as if dealing with the dirty business of money was beneath her.

  ‘I want you to understand,’ I said, frustrated. ‘You need to know what this entails.’

  ‘How’s Bob?’

  ‘Don’t try to change the subject. We’re discussing your future here and how to plan so that all the bases are covered.’

  ‘Pish tush,’ she said, reaching for the television remote control.

  A nurse knocked and came in with the new regime of pills rattling in a thimble-sized plastic cup. ‘Medication time,’ she sang. Esther opened her mouth like a hungry baby bird. A look of complete submission in her eyes.

  ‘What, you’re too ill even to lift a couple of pills to your mouth,’ I said, ashamed of her. The nurse dropped the pills on her tongue and handed her a glass of water.

  Esther swallowed and pointed dismissively in my direction: ‘Meet my accountant,’ she said. I shook my head. Disgusted. The nurse laughed, let the screen door slam behind her.

  ‘I’ll be packing up your unit in the next couple of days,’ I said, giving up.

  Discussions about money with my mother had sometimes ended in blood – mine. Her lifelong trick, when all else failed, was simple: ‘I’ll kill myself,’ she’d say. ‘That’ll fix everything.’ And my brother and I, and certainly my father, would buckle immediately.

  ‘Think about what you want to keep,’ I added, fighting hard to remain pleasant. ‘There’s not much space here. Most of your stuff will have to go.’

  Immediately, a suspicious, accusing look crept into her eyes. Since Esther had turned pilferer, she’d begun to suspect everyone of the same crime. Once, in complete frustration and fury, I pointed out that it was hardly likely I would steal from her when I’d been silently picking up bills for her for years – medical insurance (decades), groceries (intermittently), clothing (at the start of every season), birthday parties (decades), car repairs (decades).

  ‘I always paid for all that myself,’ she hissed furiously.

  ‘Whatever,’ I said, giving her a hard look. We both knew the facts. She backed off.

  ‘Everything I have will be yours when I’m dead, anyway,’ she said.

  I took a deep breath. I knew what came next. She’d launch into a well-honed script about how much money she planned to leave me. How everything she ever did was for my benefit. How all she ever wanted out of life was to see me happy. As always, I would nod, playing the game. As if I couldn’t see through the self-interested carrot-and-stick routine. As if I didn’t understand that she’d trample over me to save herself from a speeding bus. That when she ran out of money – as she had when my father’s careful financial planning blew up in a way my brother and I could never quite understand, when the money from the sale of her Melbourne house was frittered away on clothes, costume jewellery and god knows what, when the small amount of money remaining ran out – I’d be expected to step in with an open cheque book. It was a lifelong pattern. It sent my father into desperation. ‘One hundred pounds for a dress?’ he’d shout, red-faced with fury and disbelief. ‘Sixty pounds for a pair of shoes? Another sixty pounds for a second pair of shoes?’ It was a fortune in those days, the equivalent of thousands of dollars. He always sorted the problem, though, found the money somewhere, sidestepping debtors’ prison by the skin of his teeth. As my mother knew he would.

  A
t one stage, on what could have been a whim, my mother went job hunting. She said it was to boost family income. I suspect it was to escape the house. To everyone’s surprise, she got a job catering for a local council, using the pub days as proof of her experience (my mother helped in the kitchen when she was needed, but we had cooks for the hard slog). Turned out she was good at it. For big functions, she reeled in as waitresses a few women from her tennis team who were as bored with their predictable suburban lives as she was. My father said her job drained his bank account. My mother said he refused to acknowledge all the bills she paid. My father’s version is probably correct. When he died, my mother didn’t have a clue what to do with the household accounts. Years later, she still relied on the women at the post office to do the paperwork for her. When she moved to the retirement village, I organised her bill-paying.

  It was a grey, drizzly day when I knocked on the door of her temporary room in respite care to begin shifting her belongings into her own freshly painted room in assisted care.

  ‘Come in if you’re good-looking,’ she called gaily, over the top of the clamour of the television.

  ‘Heading up to your old unit to pack things,’ I said.

  She patted the bed. ‘Sit down. Talk to me.’

  My heart sank. It was a routine precursor to a bout of emotional blackmail. I remained standing, reached for the remote and hit the mute button. ‘On a mission. Can’t hang around. Too much to do. I’ll call in to say goodbye when I’m done for the day.’

  Out of the blue, she swung her legs to the floor and reached for her walker. ‘I’m coming with you,’ she said with a hint of her old feistiness.

  I held up a hand: ‘Stay where you are. You’ll get wet, catch pneumonia and die.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks,’ she retorted, rocking back and forth on the bed, gathering momentum for lift-off.