Bitterwood, June 1993
A storm blew in as I drove back to Bitterwood. Black clouds rumbled across the sky, turning afternoon to night. I barely noticed. Hanley’s account of Orah’s fall had shaken me and I couldn’t settle. For a while I stalked around the house, trying to pull myself together, but as the sky darkened and the storm closed in, the uneasy thump of my heart only grew louder.
After collecting the icehouse keys from their hiding place in the pantry, I took my flashlight and went into the garden. The sky was mottled now, crowded with deadly looking black and purple clouds. Rain began to fall around me, and a freezing wind caught leaf drifts and whipped them into the air, blinding me.
Thunder cracked in the distance, and by the time I reached the hollow beneath the dead oak, I was wet to the skin. I hesitated there on the brink of the orchard, but the wind strengthened at my back, pushing me forward. I took a few reluctant steps, then halted again.
The old oak creaked in the gale. As I watched, one of its upper branches splintered from the trunk and shattered onto the mound below.
Taking a breath, I walked towards the icehouse.
Unlocking the door, I went in. The din of rain faded. As I trod into the cold darkness, shining my torch around, the calm seemed eerie, abrupt after the wildness of the storm outside.
My light fell on broken bottles and the ruined shelving from which they had fallen. I noted blackened concavities at the base of some support beams. Edwin had tried to burn the icehouse, but the damp air and solid constriction had prevented its destruction. I thought of the album, and his attempt to burn that too, and wondered again what tracks he’d been so desperate to erase.
The air smelled sour. Burned wood, ash, stale smoke. A hint of kerosene. I pressed my hand to the wall, touching the cold stone, taking comfort from its solidness.
I reached the steps and trod down.
At the bottom, the air was noticeably colder, damper. I rested my palm on a support beam. It was rough and splintery, and as I lingered, spidery legs darted across my wrist, ticklish on my skin. I gasped, and then huffed out a laugh. A cockroach, a spider. The stuff of nightmares for some, but not for me.
I continued along the passageway. Veils of cobweb loomed in the light. I was staring so hard into the blackness that sparks flashed behind my eyes.
Deeper underground I went. The weight of cold pressed around me. No one had breathed this air for a long time, perhaps decades. The smell of earth and stone, a greasy odour, faintly mouldy, sat heavily in my lungs. I fought the urge to rush back outside into the freshness of the storm and expel it from my body.
At the end of the passageway, I followed the bend around to the right. The ground sloped down, and the low ceiling forced me to stoop. The support beams were closer together, and I wondered how my grandfather, with his impossibly tall frame, had manoeuvred his way through this cramped narrow space.
I paused, shining my light ahead into the dark.
The passageway ended. The cobwebs thickened here, as though I was entering a large subterranean web. Directly above me, muffled by many feet of stone, thunder boomed.
The support beam nearest to where I was standing shuddered. Earth rained down from the ceiling. I stepped out of its way, brushing sandy dirt from my hair, but another deafening crack overhead startled me and I dropped the torch. As I bent to retrieve it, something glittered on the ground. A shard of glass, I thought at first. Kneeling, I looked more closely.
A tiny padlock.
Tarnished, encrusted with dirt, half-buried between the flagstones. I tried to pull it loose with my fingers, but it was stuck fast. I patted my pockets, found Edwin’s keyring, and used the end of the large key to scratch away the solid packed earth. Thunder rumbled overhead, and as I kneeled on the ground intently digging, I became aware of a faint shrieking sound, perhaps the trees outside bending in the wind.
The padlock loosened. It was attached to a chain. I tugged on it gently, scratching around it with the key until finally it came free. Holding it in my palm, I examined it under the torchlight.
The chain was broken, but there was no mistaking it. The delicate links, the padlock clasp. I breathed a shaky sigh, and felt the hairs stand up along my arms. My mother’s bracelet.
‘You were here,’ I whispered.
I shut my eyes and my mother appeared before me. Her fair hair floated out from her face, rippling in the current. Her eyes were open, blue as the water in which she drifted. She was reaching for me, her large freckled fingers so near that all I had to do was lift my hand and grasp them. But something held me back.
It’s not her, my father said from the darkness. That’s not my wife in there . . . You’ve made a mistake.
I shook my head to clear it, and got to my feet. Weighed the broken gold bracelet in my palm, and then slid it into my pocket. I knew she wasn’t down here. I knew that when my father had seen her body that day at the morgue, he had been in denial, his ability to grasp what had happened diminished by grief. The woman whose ashes we had farewelled at the crematorium, really had been hers.
So why did my old fears suddenly feel so real?
I shone my torch to the end of the passageway. Bending low to avoid knocking my head on the overhead beams, I walked towards the cavity in the wall where once my grandfather had stored the ice.