The Silent Inheritance Read online

  She loved her garage door. A press of the remote opened it. She drove in, hit the remote again and it closed behind her, locking her in, locking her away from neighbours she had no desire to meet.

  One of them had a dog. She’d heard it barking and when she’d looked out to identify its owners, she’d seen a male pushing a woman in a wheelchair. She hadn’t gone out to complain but had taken note of which house was theirs, the last one on the opposite side, and she’d knock on its door one day soon if they didn’t shut that yapping mongrel up. Hers was the first house on the right, only a fence between it and the street.

  And its garage an airless sauna tonight, she opened the rear door and stepped fast into her laundry. The schoolbag on the dryer told her Danni was home. The heat in the laundry told her the air conditioning hadn’t been turned on.

  Everything in the house was new. They’d furnished it together, she and David, had spent a weekend driving around looking in furniture stores, and as soon as they’d seen the right piece, they’d known at the same time that it was the right one, as if their eyes were wired into the same mind.

  ‘I’ve found my soulmate,’ he’d said to her in Sydney. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to show up for the longest time.’

  She’d been waiting longer. She’d been waiting all of her life. The first day she’d had lunch with him, she’d known that she’d get him. He’d been everything she’d ever dreamed of in a man.

  ‘Danni!’

  No reply. She’d be upstairs, and without the air conditioner the rooms up there would be sweatboxes Barbara preferred not to enter. She reached for the small remote, hit two buttons, then stood waiting to feel that breath of cool.

  The entire house was peach and off-white, the carpet a peachy beige, the drapes in her sitting room a darker shade of peach.

  ‘It’s you,’ David had said the day he’d brought her out here. ‘Peaches and cream.’

  She touched a chair, upholstered in a peach and cream regency striped fabric. When they’d seen it down the bottom end of a furniture store, they’d both made a beeline for it, had both said, ‘That’s perfect.’

  As was he, his looks, manners, the way he dressed, the places he liked to eat, and the bed. He turned her into someone she hadn’t known she could be in bed.

  When she’d told her father she was moving in with him, he’d told her that new love was ninety-five per cent sex and five per cent tolerance, that sex shrank and tolerance didn’t grow. She’d told him that she could no longer tolerate living with a controlling, sweating old pig who needed to take a bath in deodorant.

  There were two upstairs bedrooms. They’d furnished the larger one for Danni and the other as a study. She found Danni there, slouched over her laptop, smiling about something.

  ‘Can’t you answer me when I call?’

  ‘I didn’t hear you,’ Danni said.

  ‘Why didn’t you turn the air conditioner on?’

  ‘It was cool downstairs when I came in.’

  ‘You were too eager to get onto Facebook to know if it was hot or not. That’s the truth of it. And sit up straight. You’ll ruin your spine sitting like that.’

  ‘Yo, boss,’ Danni said.

  Barbara stood in the doorway, watching that kid’s fingers racing over the keyboard. She was pretty when she smiled, which she hadn’t done a lot of since they’d moved. She was halfway between twelve and thirteen and still showing no sign of maturing. At thirteen, Barbara had looked much as she did today. She’d won a modelling contest before she’d turned fourteen. Could have gone to America. Could have made the big time – if her parents had supported her. Her father hadn’t. He’d told her that models were like butterflies, that they only lived for a day, that a good education would stay with her for life.

  ‘David told them today he was making me his payroll/accounts officer,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you were his mistress,’ Danni said.

  ‘I could kill you sometimes—’

  ‘They don’t have manicurists in jail,’ Danni said, and turned back to communicate with her computer.

  ‘It’s stinking hot up here.’

  ‘It’s hotter outside,’ Danni said. ‘Smoky too.’

  ‘Did you get something for dinner?’

  ‘I made a sandwich.’

  ‘You can’t live on bread. You need vegetables,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Lettuce and tomatoes are vegetables.’

  ‘Stop putting on his accent.’

  ‘Stop nagging me as soon as you get home.’

  She’d get the last word. She always did. Barbara could give up now or in an hour’s time, and it was too hot to stand up there arguing, so she gave up and walked down to the main bedroom, furnished around the print of a woman sitting before an oval gold-framed mirror, a vase of dusty pink and cream roses beside her. A perfect bedroom, it laughed at every other room she’d slept in. Her parents had never updated their furniture, and if she or her mother had dared to suggest tossing out one item, he’d tell them they’d do it over his dead body. Her mother had died of frustration at sixty.

  Like the rest of the house the bathroom was peach and white. It had two walls of mirrors. She stripped before them, unclipped her bra and studied breasts that had never been large, except when she’d been pregnant. She stepped out of her skirt to look at the slight swell of her stomach. Hated what pregnancy had done to her. Her stomach muscles had never been the same and she’d been left with stretch marks.

  *

  Once seated on the bus, Sarah diagnosed her sandals problem and found and applied a bandaid – and caught a youth and his purple-haired girlfriend sniggering. The girl looked fifteen and she had more cutlery on her face and ears than Sarah had in her kitchen drawer.

  They left the bus at the Forest Hill shopping centre, where new faces boarded before the bus moved on.

  Hawthorn Road was Sarah’s closest bus stop, which left her the long school block to walk. Twelve years ago, when she’d started walking that block, there’d been a large bush paddock opposite the school and every time she’d seen it, it had made her homesick for the farm. Not any more. That land was being swallowed up by McMansions, and tonight she wondered if Crow’s company had bought one of them for Barbara. They looked like her, characterless, but posh.

  Mrs Vaughn’s house wasn’t posh. It hid, pink faced and embarrassed, behind a small forest of windblown and bird-sown trees. A wattle tree and a spiky plum fought each other for space beside the letterbox; if you dared to carelessly steal a handful of junk mail a spike got you, and that plum tree didn’t even pay for its space with edible fruit. It grew small red marbles, unfit even for jam. A fig tree, grown huge beside the western fence, grew incredible figs. Twice she and Marni had saved enough from the birds to make jam. Not last year. Every fig they’d reached for had been bird-pecked.

  There were trees Sarah couldn’t name in Mrs Vaughn’s garden, a shiny-leafed thing, a white flowing thing, a eucalypt. She could name the camellias, which must have arrived in pots. Forced into wild company, they’d grown wild, grown tall, as had a huge magnolia tree planted in the centre of a once upon a time lawn. As a seven year old, Marni had named the magnolia the Magic Faraway Tree. It hid the front porch and was reaching out to block the drive, where it dropped a million leaves in autumn. The first winter Sarah had spent here, she’d thought that tree had gone mad when its dead grey branches had become a giant’s bouquet of purple tulips.

  And Mrs Vaughn’s son, Raymond, was here, or his blue Commodore was parked where his mother’s Hyundai spent its life. Sarah had attempted to start it this morning. She’d left her landlady waiting alone for an RACV man. The car needed a new battery. Perhaps Raymond had taken it to have one fitted, though a long drive usually charged it up.

  She sidled between the chimney and the Commodore, parked too close to the twin wooden gates that locked off the backyard. Had to reach across its bonnet to a hand-sized cut-out beneath a BEWARE OF THE DOG sign, a perfectly positioned cut-out for a tre
spasser to lose their reaching hand, had there been a dog to beware of. During the years Sarah had been opening that gate, there’d been no dog.

  She jiggled the rusty slide bolt from its keeper, released the left-side gate, stepped through, locked the gate behind her then walked diagonally across the brown lawn to the granny flat she rented.

  No trees grew in the backyard. A small pink brick garage formed a part of the eastern fence but no car was ever parked in it. There was a large family-sized rotary clothes line in the space between garage and unit, a flat-roofed, two-room prefab, built thirty or forty years ago for Mrs Vaughn’s mother-in-law – and as far away from the house as possible.

  Sarah had her own garden, seven plants in seven plastic pots. They would have been happier in the earth, healthier too, but one day soon, Raymond would move his mother into a nursing home, Sarah and Marni would be forced to find somewhere else to live, and when they moved, their garden would move with them.

  She’d done too much moving. Didn’t want to do it again, ever. Comfortable or not, rooms become homes if you live in them long enough, and that granny flat was home – and close to Marni’s school – and they paid next to nothing in rent.

  She hung her bag over an arm of the clothes line and turned on the hose. The water in it hot enough to make tea, she sprayed her roof and walls until it cooled sufficiently to ease her garden’s thirst.

  Her lavender and two well-grown jade trees lived in pots and always looked healthy. She had a mean spiky cactus, which only bloomed for a day or two, but when it did, it made dodging its spikes all year worthwhile. She had a sickly daphne she’d been pleading with for two years not to die. She’d grown it from a flower brought home one day by Marni. For six months they’d kept it alive under a glass jar, daring to hope it was making roots. It had, but had been threatening to die since.

  Marni caught her pleading with it again. ‘Did he tell you about the job, Mum?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah said, and she turned the hose off. ‘He tell everyone. Together. He gave to Barbara Lane.’

  ‘Mum!’ An elongated ‘mum’, it stretched into three syllables. ‘He can’t do that to you again.’

  ‘He can,’ Sarah said. She reached for her bag and went indoors to kick off her sandals.

  ‘Did you say anything to him?’

  Sarah shook her head, loving her girl for caring, but knowing that to care was useless.

  ‘You should go to the anti-discrimination people. It’s pure discrimination.’

  ‘Nothing got worse,’ Sarah said, and walked barefoot through the kitchen to their bedroom and their shoe box bathroom which should have been called a shower room. It had no space for a bath, had barely sufficient space for a small shower cubicle, a toilet, a tiny handbasin. She stripped in the bedroom, her hearing aids first. Always wore them. Had forever. They allowed her to hear fire sirens, big trucks and thunder, but no speech – and, as Marni knew, as Sarah knew, those aids were the reason she hadn’t got the accounts officer job. She couldn’t hear telephones. She could feel their ring. Couldn’t hear who was calling, or reply to them.

  She has a severe hearing loss, her mother used to say. Sometimes she’d say, She has a profound hearing loss. She’d never said, She’s deaf. Her father had. The kid’s deaf and dumb, he used to say.

  Barbara Lane had said deaf and dumb today. She was easy to lip-read. Bob Webb had been explaining the importance of speaking directly to Sarah.

  ‘I’ve never had anything to do with deaf and dumb people,’ she’d said, and every word of it clear.

  To Sarah, dumb meant stupid – and Barbara Lane was a dumb blonde.

  *

  Bob Webb may not say it out loud, but he agreed, and tonight he was seriously considering taking off to Peru with his backpack. He eased his new Mazda into an elderly garage beside his mother’s older Mazda, locked it, closed the garage door and walked across to the house.

  Like the bloke who sang ‘I’ve Been Everywhere, Man’, since his twenty-first-birthday gift, a seven-day trip to Bali, Bob had been everywhere, briefly.

  Home was where it had always been, a street away from the East Burwood Kmart, in a vintage sixties red-brick house, well insulated commercially, insulated further by greenery and outdoor blinds, and being chilled today by a large split-system air conditioner. He required no key to enter, the back door was ever guarded by Footrot, their elderly Kelpie, who considered that doormat his place. He stood, woofed his welcome, received his pat, then stepped back and allowed the screen door to open, to close, before returning to his mat to snooze on.

  Smell of dinner wafting into the rear passage, a greeting from the kitchen.

  ‘You’re late tonight.’

  ‘I was late getting away then we got detoured off the freeway at Burke Road. There must have been another smash.’

  ‘It will be on the news,’ his mother said. ‘What a day to be stuck on that freeway.’

  ‘It’s like a furnace out there. Did you hear what the temperature got to?’

  ‘It was forty-four at two o’clock,’ she said. ‘There’s fires ringing Melbourne and a bad one in some forest out near Kangaroo Ground, and they say tomorrow is going to be worse.’

  ‘It can do what it likes tomorrow. It’s Saturday.’

  Four pots on the stove, four hotplates heating up the kitchen. He didn’t need to lift a lid to know what he’d be eating. After thirty-five years of his mother’s cooking, his nose could identify most meals.

  ‘Corned beef.’

  ‘So I’ll have cold meat for the weekend,’ she said. ‘We’ve got the kids staying over tomorrow night.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Joanne’s. She called today. She’s having another one,’ his mother said.

  ‘Hasn’t she got enough?’

  ‘They want a girl.’

  ‘I’ll give you five to one it’s another boy.’

  ‘Don’t you dare say that to her, Bob!’

  He had four sisters, was an uncle to eight boys and two girls. Had his father made old bones, Bob may have married and had a few kids of his own. He’d been fourteen and the eldest, and when his mother had told him he’d have to be the man of the house, he’d taken her literally.

  Had she found herself another man, Bob would have moved on with his life. She’d got herself a job at Kmart, still worked there part-time, and had never looked at another man.

  ‘Did you remember to tape Hot Seat?’

  ‘I always tape it if I’m here. There’s this huge woman on it tonight—’

  ‘Don’t tell me about it,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t watch it! I saw her when I was putting the tape in.’ His mother still used the old video tapes. She’d be lost when her old recorder died.

  He emptied his pockets into a bowl on the kitchen bench, car keys, wallet and small change; he poured a glass of chilled water then told her that Crow had given the job to his new blonde.

  ‘He did not, Bob!’

  ‘The smarmy bastard did, and I’ve had him, Mum. I’m chucking it in and going to Peru for six months.’

  ‘Who’d want to spend six months in that place?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘You were dead certain Sarah would get it.’

  ‘She had it until yesterday. He had an appointment with his solicitor last night, and the bastard came in this morning and told me that Mrs Lane had transferred down from Sydney to fill the vacancy. She doesn’t know her arse from her elbow.’

  ‘I’ll bet he does,’ his mother said. ‘I’ll bet it’s got something to do with his wife finding out about him buying that house, too.’

  ‘It’s got everything to do with it. Maureen is threatening to split the company and sell her half. She’s a decent woman, and he’s a cheating bastard, and I need to wash him and his bloody office off me. Have I got time for a shower?’

  ‘Make it fast. I’m hungry.’

  THE WOLF

  In the beginnings, he was an eager youth in pursuit of a new love. Love grew stale
fast – or they grew stale. In their endings, in those slow, twisting fragments of time between their life and death, he was old, cold, clinical – and careful. The party over, he was left to clean up the mess and drop off the refuse before he brought his next guest home.

  He’d started a trend with the dropping off of the second of them, had become newsworthy. Unable now to disappoint his readers, he couldn’t deviate. The last delivery had its elements of danger, but this one had gone wrong. Forced to detour around an accident, he’d followed a loaded truck through unfamiliar backstreets because its driver appeared to know where he was going. He had, if he’d been on his way to Sydney or Geelong. They were now heading vaguely south on the Western Ring Road.

  A relatively new freeway, or new to him, it circled the western outskirts of the city, feeding traffic out to the Hume Freeway, to Tullamarine Airport and Geelong, and was carrying too much traffic tonight for his comfort.

  He’d done the other drop-offs on Sunday nights, during the dark hours before dawn, and rarely struck a lot of traffic. Truckies drove by night and they liked this freeway. There was one in front, one behind. He eased back on the accelerator, eased back a little more before the truck passed. A sedan took its place.

  The hunters could have been out patrolling the freeways, and no doubt in unmarked vehicles. That sedan now tailgating him could have been one.

  He glanced at the speedo needle then eased it back until it was brushing fifty-five miles an hour, which translated roughly to ninety k’s. Not fast enough for the sedan. It left him for dead. On its way to Sydney?

  The road had many lanes. He was relieved when he saw a sign directing him to the Hume Freeway exit. He was familiar with that freeway though not with this exit, and for a moment, his concentration and both hands were required on the wheel. The old wagon didn’t have the same road-holding ability as a modern car.

  And if this was the Hume Freeway it wasn’t the one he’d known. They fancied them up these days with tall noise barriers. Not an ideal place for his purpose, but all things pass, as did the noise barriers to his left.