The Silent Inheritance Read online

  Stopping wasn’t good.

  Some images jam in the mind. Close her eyes now and she wasn’t on that train but in a hospital room, standing beside a high white bed, machine lights flashing. Like watching a movie with no subtitles, the actors’ mouths making words that forged no connection to her brain—

  Like those deaf girls’ hands. Very old … Ugly. Other hands asking, What for? And Sarah, aware she’d been staring while her mind wandered, drew her eyes down to her book, or to the hand holding the book, to the small gold watch, her mother’s, to the wedding ring, also her mother’s. She’d worn both since the undertaker had taken them from her mother’s hand. Too big for a twelve year old, she’d worn the ring on her middle finger and the watch halfway to her elbow.

  Not his fault, baby.

  Whose fault then? Sarah’s? Maybe it was. He’d needed his wife but not his deaf and dumb daughter. Maybe his bottles had contained escape juice.

  He’d been drinking the day he’d smashed his car.

  Uncle Bill offered Sarah a home in Brisbane. Her grandparents had wanted her to go to them in Victoria. No school near their farm. She hadn’t wanted to go to any school. Hadn’t wanted to live anywhere. Hadn’t wanted to wake up each morning. Had been like an empty plastic bag, blowing in the wind, hoping each day that the wind would blow her onto a barbed-wire fence and rip her to shreds before another night came.

  Made of non-biodegradable plastic, it floated one day to the battered old case Peter and Lynette Clark had brought from that rented cabin, all they’d brought from it, all Sarah and her mother had managed to hold on to. An old cake tin, an old camera, their old books.

  Little girls liked her old books. Miriam and Mandy, two identical mouths making words, four identical hands, touching her. They’d stopped that plastic bag’s floating – and Lynette Clark had known it.

  ‘If I’m not back by three twenty, can you pick the girls up from school for me?’ she’d said.

  For an hour Sarah had watched the hands of her mother’s watch, willing Lynette’s car to come home, and when it hadn’t, when the watch hands had got to three twenty, she’d had to open the front door and walk outside, walk to the primary school and wait at the gate for the twins to come out. They’d taken her hands to walk home.

  As a mother, she knew she wouldn’t have trusted a deaf twelve-year-old girl raised in a caravan park to walk Marni home from school. Perhaps Lynette had been hiding behind trees watching her girls all the way. That twelve year old had believed she’d been trusted.

  She’d become Lynette’s project that year. The Clarks hadn’t made her go to Brisbane or Victoria. They hadn’t made her go back to the school for the deaf. Lynette had found a private school with a deaf unit, then she’d turned Sarah into a person fit to go to that school. Bought her a new school uniform, new shoes and books, then enrolled her there as Sarah Clark because everyone had known her other name, and her father’s and the names of the three teenagers who had died in the other car.

  For six years Sarah Clark had worn that uniform. For six years she’d walked little sisters to school and home again to that beautiful house she’d been allowed to call home. Learnt about cooking there, about cleaning, about sitting down to eat at a dining room table. Learnt about a different life with the Clarks.

  The train was pulling into Museum Station. Sarah closed her book, dropped it unread into her bag, slung the strap over her shoulder and stood to follow the workers out to the platform and up the stairs.

  Like a swarm of Gramp’s bees leaving the dark of their hive, they split into smaller groups as they hit the sunlight. Sarah walked not with the two deaf girls but close behind them. They were dressed like the other office workers; they looked like the other office workers, carried no cane, no crutch. Their disability was disguised until they spoke.

  The morning she’d found her way to Mrs Vaughn’s house, the old lady hadn’t given her time to speak. She’d unlocked her front door, taken one look at her visitor, then slammed the door hard enough for Sarah to hear.

  She’d advertised her granny flat in exchange for housework, some cooking. Suit single woman, no children. Sarah had applied for the job with Marni in a sling at her breast, an angry Marni, overdue for her ten o’clock feed and not pleased about it.

  Back then, Mrs Vaughn’s overgrown forest had offered privacy, so Sarah had sat on the porch steps and fed Marni, unaware she was being observed until she’d felt the prod of a slipper-clad foot in her backside and turned fast to an angry elderly face.

  ‘I’ll have no truck with unwed mothers. Get off my porch.’

  That was the moment Mrs Sarah Carter was born, on Mrs Vaughn’s porch steps, Marni suckling at her breast. She’d shown her mother’s wedding ring.

  ‘My husband die,’ she said.

  ‘You’re deaf,’ the old lady accused. ‘What are you called?’

  To this day Sarah didn’t know why she’d chosen to be Mrs Carter, other than that it was easy to say and that name had belonged to a kind man, a plumber who had driven a white kombi van.

  ‘I can clean very well, and cook.’

  ‘There’s nothing of you if you put that brat down,’ the old lady had said, and clearly. Some people knew how to do it. Many didn’t.

  ‘I am very strong. Before, I cleaning very big house, and work on farm – before my baby coming.’

  ‘How did your husband die?’

  ‘He getting brain tumour.’

  ‘You’re on a disabled pension?’

  ‘Not disable. I get for my baby.’

  Mrs Vaughn had gone inside. Marni, disinterested in the outcome, had sucked on, so Sarah had sat on. And the old lady returned, with a cup of tea, two biscuits and more questions.

  ‘How old is it?’

  ‘One month. Her name, Marni Olivia.’

  ‘Bring her in when she’s done, and show me how you can work,’ Mrs Vaughn said.

  An hour could make the Clarks’ house shine. Three hours of hard labour couldn’t make Mrs Vaughn’s rooms shine, but while Marni slept on a spare bed, Sarah had done her best, and made a mutton stew. It, or her cleaning, had been judged good enough, and two days later she’d moved into the granny flat with her case, an inflatable mattress, one pair of sheets, a pillow and quilt. The kitchen table and two wooden chairs had come by night. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. She’d found many treasures since amid the piles of indestructible rubbish left out on nature strips for the council’s hard waste collection. She’d found a near new baby stroller, an electric fan, the pots for her garden, the original jade tree, its roots bursting out of a too-small plastic pot.

  Marni was seven months old the day she’d left her in the care of strangers at a crèche and walked into David and Maureen Crow’s office. She’d worn her best frock to the interview, had bought a pair of new shoes with heels. She’d looked good enough to work in that office but had seen pity in Maureen’s eyes when she’d spoken. Had seen worse than pity in Crow’s – until their manager had sat her down at a computer.

  In her element there, her fingers fast and accurate, her knowledge of computers vast. She’d had the best teacher in the world. Her skill had got her the job, or perhaps her hearing aids. At that time, large companies were being urged to employ the disabled.

  She’d signed Sarah J. Carter on her application form. By then it had been no lie. It had taken months to do it – or months to find out how to change her name by deed poll. Her original birth certificate would always tell the truth, as would Marni’s, but they were sealed into an envelope and buried deep beneath her mother’s treasures in the old cake tin.

  The day she told Mrs Vaughn she’d got a job and would only be able to clean at weekends, she’d been certain the old lady would tell her to pack her bags. She hadn’t.

  ‘How much are they paying you?’ she’d asked.

  ‘They talk not much to me.’

  ‘I worked for fifty years. My first pay was two pound seven and sixpence – and I had to pay boa
rd out of that.’

  ‘I will. And cook dinner. Every night. Weekend I will clean.’

  ‘Too right you will,’ Mrs Vaughn said.

  Her bark had always been worse than her bite. For months she hadn’t asked for rent, and when she had, she’d only asked for fifty dollars a week. Through the years it had been raised to a hundred dollars, but since her old car had died and she’d bought the Hyundai she couldn’t back down her drive, since finding out that Sarah could drive, she hadn’t increased the rent.

  THE GIRL WITH THE FANCY MOBILE

  Marni ate her breakfast with the television news, where the kilometres of traffic banked up on the Hume Freeway seemed more important to the newsreader than the finding of Monica Rowan. Since she’d sat down to her cornflakes, every minute or two the newsreader said that the Ring Road exit to the Hume Freeway was closed to all traffic, but only three times had they interrupted their traffic report to show a cluster of police and police cars.

  They hadn’t mentioned Monica by name, and didn’t need to. As soon as they said freeway, body, garbage bag, everyone in Melbourne would have known who they’d found.

  Monica Rowan would have started high school this year. She would have had a thirteenth birthday party in July. Marni was having a small party this year, at McDonalds because they couldn’t have it at the flat. Even if they’d had enough space and chairs for more than two people, Mrs Vaughn wouldn’t have allowed it. She didn’t like strangers in her backyard. She didn’t like strangers setting one foot on her land.

  There wasn’t much she did like. She’d stuck a sign on her letterbox, POST NO JUNK MAIL, and her sign was the easiest part of it to see. The junk mail man deserved a medal for dodging the spiky plum to get his junk into her letterbox.

  She had a sign on her front door, SALESMEN DO NOT KNOCK, and her BEWARE OF THE DOG sign on the gate, and if she’d ever had a dog to beware of, it had been dead for longer than Marni had been alive – and God help it if there’d ever been one because Mrs Vaughn hated dogs.

  She liked pills and smoking and funerals and probably her doctor who gave her the scripts for her pills. She visited him every month. Never missed a funeral – if it was close to home. She didn’t like the Chinese milk bar man but she bought cigarettes from him in an emergency.

  She was hypo-allergic to mops, brooms and cooking. As far as Marni could tell, all she did all day was smoke and hammer on her window if anyone dared to use her driveway, even to turn their car around.

  Marni and her mother cleaned her house on Sundays, did her washing and cooked her boring soups and stews, big ones they froze in empty margarine containers in her freezer. She had a big modern freezer. They didn’t. They had a microwave and she didn’t, so they had to thaw what they’d frozen, then serve it to her with their own vegetables.

  She never thanked them – except with cheap rent and free electricity and water. Their phone bill wasn’t free. It came addressed to her, but they paid it, because of their broadband.

  Marni lived three separate lives. In one, she was Mrs Vaughn’s servant and she never talked back. At school she was just another kid. At home she felt about eighteen. She was allowed to drink coffee and watch adult television, and if she had to go to the shops or milk bar she took her mother’s purse that had everything in it, and her mother trusted her to turn the power board off before she left for school, because the television, laptop and fan were all plugged into it.

  There was a second power board on the bench, for their jug, toaster, microwave and fridge, which they couldn’t turn off because of the fridge. It had individual switches you could turn off. She turned off the toaster and the jug.

  The fridge was antique. It had been in here when her mother moved in, as had the old stove. The fridge still worked. The stove’s oven hadn’t turned on for at least a year and a while ago another one of its hotplates died and Mrs Vaughn refused to pay anyone to fix them.

  Marni took an apple from the fridge and the sandwich her mother always made for her when she made her own. She put them into her schoolbag, slung the bag over her shoulder, removed a packet of cigarettes from a carton that lived on top of the fridge and let herself out. The door locked itself if you slammed it.

  Their granny flat had two windows. The one in their bedroom looked east at the clothes line, the kitchen’s faced north. It had a good view of the back fence. Their door spent its days staring at Mrs Vaughn’s laundry and toilet windows.

  They’d worn a diagonal track across the back lawn, a track which branched into two near Mrs Vaughn’s back door. Every school morning, Marni hammered on that door until the old lady came, and how fast she came depended on how desperate she was for a cigarette. Not very desperate this morning, so Marni hammered again, then listened.

  A year ago when that door hadn’t opened, she’d heard her yelling from inside. She phoned Raymond, and when he hadn’t picked up, she’d had to climb in through the bathroom window. Mrs Vaughn had been on her bedroom floor, all bloody from a hole in her head – and as mad as hell when Marni phoned for an ambulance.

  Another thing their landlady didn’t like was hospitals. She’d signed herself out after two days, and came home in a taxi with about ten stitches in her head, which you could see because they’d cut her hair off around the gash and she hadn’t had much to start with.

  That fall achieved something. That night, she’d shown them where she kept an emergency key to her front door, which Marni wasn’t going to need this morning. She could hear movement, old lady slow movement. She was about five years away from turning a hundred.

  The door eventually opened wide enough for a scrawny old hand to reach through for its daily ration, which she pocketed, then from the same pocket took a handful of change which she took her time counting coin by coin into Marni’s hand, her mouth slapping, raising saliva enough for her morning accusation.

  ‘I could hear your television blaring again last night.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Marni said, knowing their landlady hadn’t heard their television because it had been turned off and they’d been in bed reading by ten o’clock. ‘Are you all right for milk?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I’m not. Bolt that gate behind you.’

  ‘I always do,’ Marni said, and went on her way, counting the dollars and smaller coins, knowing she’d made almost sixty cents on the cigarette deal. Mrs Vaughn didn’t know they bought them by the carton at the supermarket, which made them heaps cheaper than the milk bar man’s. They didn’t overcharge her to cheat her, just to stop her calling the milk bar man a thief the next time she went there to buy an emergency packet. With crotchety old people, you always had to think two steps ahead. Like not giving her the whole carton of cigarettes because she’d just smoke twice as many.

  She could afford to. She’d written a cheque for twenty-two thousand dollars to pay for her Hyundai, then the first time she’d tried to back it out, she’d run into the fence and knocked down two metres of it as well as raking paint off the driver-side doors of a brand new car, which she hadn’t even bothered to get fixed. The neighbours got the fence fixed and had to threaten her with a lawyer’s letter before she’d write a cheque for her half of what it had cost, and she’d been the one who’d broken it.

  Her son had fights with her about moving into a nursing home, which she would have been expelled from on her first day. He’d booked her into one once and sent Marni and her mother an email telling them they had thirty days to find alternative accommodation. Told them before he’d told his mother. The entire street heard her the day he told her.

  She looked like an Egyptian mummy, preserved in nicotine – and smelled like one because she’d only allow the district nurse to come once a week to shower her.

  Marni sighed, dropped the coins into her schoolbag and walked on towards the pipeline, her short cut to school. Until she’d turned twelve, her mother who had made her go to the before-school care ladies, used to walk her there early before she caught her bus. Other kids with working mothers had
grandparents or aunties or neighbours to look after them. Marni only had her mother.

  Mrs Vaughn used to have two sisters. She had five grandchildren in Ireland who she’d never seen, and Raymond had sons she hadn’t seen in years. He had a wife too. She never visited. If she had, Mrs Vaughn might not have been so crotchety. If she’d been less crotchety her daughter-in-law might have visited her, which was a case of what came first, the chicken or the egg?

  No one in Marni’s family had lived long enough to grow old. Her mum’s parents had died in a car accident and her mother had to live with a foster family in Perth. She’d got married there when she was eighteen, then he’d died, before Marni was born, so her mother had gone to live with her grandparents, Marni’s great-grandparents, then they’d died too.

  They had a framed photograph of Gramp and her mother when she’d been about six. They had one of her mother’s mother as a bride. Marni would have preferred one of her father, but they didn’t have one single photograph of him, which was crazy.

  She used to ask why. She used to ask heaps of stuff about him. He was a plumber, had driven a white kombi van and died of a brain tumour, and that’s all she knew. Maybe when you loved someone enough to marry them at eighteen, and then they died a horrible death when you were pregnant, it hurt too much to talk about them – anyway, having a father who’d died before you were born was probably better than having one who’d run off with a girlfriend when you were old enough to remember, like Samantha Smith’s father, who was alive somewhere but she hadn’t seen him since her seventh birthday party.

  ‘I was born posthumously,’ Marni said if anyone asked where her father was. That’s what newsreaders said when a baby was born to the wife of a soldier killed in Afghanistan.

  Maria from school had brothers, sisters, cousins, a grandmother, and dozens of uncles and aunties. At weekends, her house was like a Greek party, everyone talking Greek. They had to because of Maria’s grandmother, who’d been in Australia for almost forty years but could barely speak English. Marni used to think it was because Nona wished she’d never left Greece, but Maria said it was because she’d been too old to learn when she’d immigrated, which sort of explained a bit why deaf people who had cochlear implants as adults never learned to understand spoken English, but implanted deaf babies learned to speak like everyone else. It had something to do with brains needing to learn how to process speech before they got filled up with all the junk of living, like the difference between having a new sheet of paper to write on and one already covered with print.