A good hot bath was in order. Lisa staggered upstairs, filled the old claw-footed tub and immersed herself in its comforting depths. Her aquatic ballet was interrupted by a thump over her head. Something of considerable size had landed on the roof. She turned the taps off and listened.
The steady beat of the cold tap dripping into the bathwater was all she could hear. Maybe a branch had fallen on the roof. Silly fool, she said aloud to herself. She was bound to be jumpy on her first night. The house was going to have all sorts of noises she’d have to get used to.
Sighing, she reached for the hot tap. Suddenly, every muscle in her body went rigid—footsteps. Someone—or thing—was walking on the slate tiles above her.
She leapt out of the bath and gathered up her clothes. Sprinting down the hall to her study, she flicked on the light. Mercifully, Zack had done a lousy job attaching the Fijian fighting stick to the wall. She pulled it down. She’d seen Fijian warriors wield the things with fearsome vigour, but in her hands it looked as intimidating as a toothpick.
The steady thuds grew louder. Whoever was prowling on the roof wasn’t shy about announcing their presence. She ran to the bedroom and grabbed her phone. Ted would be halfway back to Melbourne. She was about to call 911, but then remembered that the emergency number for Australia was different. Triple 9? That was the UK, surely. She couldn’t remember . . .
Lisa froze with dread. The thumping over her head had been joined by another set of feet. Two assailants! She didn’t stand a chance. They were moving faster now, sprinting towards the front of the house.
Numb with adrenalin, she ran to her bedroom and tugged her nightie out from under her pillow. If she was about to meet her murderers she was going to do it with dignity. She pulled on the nightie and slipped Ted’s torch over her head. Reassured by the powerful white beam, she raised the fighting stick and nudged one of the French doors open a crack.
The neighbours’ window glowed through the gum trees at the end of the drive. It looked like something out of a tale by the brothers Grimm. If she screamed they wouldn’t hear a thing. There was no option but to confront her foes. Heart pulsing in her throat, she clutched the stick and stepped outside. The icy mosaic floor made her bare feet tingle.
There was no one on the balcony. She sensed she was being watched. Whirling the fighting stick over her shoulders, she spun around and looked up at the roof.
A pair of red eyes stared down at her. They were joined by a slightly smaller pair of eyes. A bushy tail draped over the guttering. The larger possum scampered away towards the chimney. The smaller one put his head to one side and studied her. The end of his nose was pink as fairy floss. She called out to him but he turned and galloped after his companion.
Trembling with relief, she waited for her breathing to return to normal. The sky was so dark compared to New York, where it was never more than serge grey. Stars glittered with universal indifference. A terrified woman in her grandfather’s house meant nothing in the life cycles of solar systems. Looking up at the stars, she could almost smell the tang of tobacco in her father’s jacket. He was a man who could turn an ordinary activity, like walking home through the dark, into something magical. She remembered the warmth of his breath as he put his arm around her and pointed out the line of three bright stars that made Orion’s Belt. They were easy to find, but when he tried to show her the ones that made up the rest of the Hunter, she sank into confusion. It was the first time she’d realised a lot of things would never make sense to her. She was destined to spend the rest of her life either bluffing her way through or being exposed as an ignorant fraud.
She hurried back inside and pulled on a purple beanie left over from a short-lived knitting craze. Like most of her knitting, she never wore it in public. The orange daisy she’d sewn on it flopped like a victim of chronic fatigue. The thermal socks and polar-fleece jacket looked sane by comparison. She lowered the fighting stick onto the floor beside her bed and placed the head torch on the table next to her phone and the dog-eared paperback of Wuthering Heights.
Tucked in bed with blankets up to her chin, she tried to ignore the loneliness gnawing away at the soft tissue inside her ribcage. She reached for her phone. ‘Guess wot?’ she texted Portia. ‘Ted has g’friend.’
‘?????!!!’ the reply was almost instant. Presumably, it was a question.
‘Stella. Has he told u?’ Lisa typed.
‘No! Howz house?’
Lisa wondered what level of truth was appropriate. Portia probably didn’t want to know she was frightened, exhilarated and exhausted all at once.
‘Gr8’
A row of XXXs and a smiley face flashed on her screen, signalling the conclusion of the royal audience.
A sad lump formed in Lisa’s throat. Children have no hope of knowing how much their parents love them until they become parents themselves. Portia had been the most affectionate, easygoing baby. She’d hardly ever cried. In the mornings, she’d cooed in her cot until Lisa opened her bedroom door, her chubby arms raised to be picked up. Her smile was pure sunshine.
Lisa had delighted in watching her baby daughter devour bowls of custard, and smear the remains over her face. The child had revelled in the textures, flavours and colours of food. Sure, she’d grown perhaps a little chubbier than some of her friends, but Lisa was never concerned. Portia was prettier and cuddlier than all of them put together.
Portia had never been short of passions besides food. She adored acting and singing, and was always near the top of her class. As her friends’ daughters became spiky adolescents, Lisa took pride in the fact Portia remained soft and open. They’d gone to galleries and concerts together and read the same books. Though they were inseparable, Lisa refused to become one of those women who wore her daughter’s jeans.
The change had happened so abruptly Lisa was still trying to absorb the shock. The second Portia left home for college, she’d built an impenetrable wall around herself. Lisa was frozen out. She no longer knew what books Portia was reading or who her friends were. Now she grieved for the closeness they’d had.
Portia’s first vacation break had coincided with the appearance of a pink Care Bear tattoo on her left ankle. Lisa had tried not to express alarm. It was nothing a decent plastic surgeon couldn’t erase in a decade or so.
The next time they met, a green Care Bear grinned malevolently from Portia’s forearm. Lisa couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. She suggested to Portia that by the time she reached thirty or forty she might wish she’d chosen a more general theme for her body art. Portia erupted. Lisa obviously had no idea that Care Bears were ironic.
Lisa had retreated into silence. Soon after, a yellow Care Bear beamed defiantly from Portia’s right calf. It was as the army of Care Bears trotted over her limbs that Portia herself started shrinking. Boys fell for her haunted beauty. Portia was understandably flattered.
For a while, Lisa had to agree: her daughter’s new looks were startling. Then Portia won a Most Promising Actress award for her portrayal of Daisy in the Venice Beach Players’ production of The Boyfriend. Lisa had been dismayed by how much the flattery went to Portia’s head. She dropped out of college and waitressed between auditioning for bit parts in movies. Portia, it seemed, was yet to understand an acting career was a licence to serve coffee for the rest of her life.
Lisa had visited whenever she could, which wasn’t often due to Portia’s ‘busy-ness’. She had a terrible shock the night she saw Portia slipping into a flimsy jacket with no warmth in it. Portia’s shoulder blades jutted out like angel’s wings waiting to lift her off the ground and spirit her away.
Anxiety clawed at Lisa’s stomach. On the few occasions they dined together, Portia eyed the food on her plate as if it was laced with poison. She stopped eating meat, then dairy products. It was only a matter of time before she refused lettuces because of the trauma they experienced being torn out of the ground. At the same time, she’d seen Portia knock back cocktails containing enough alcohol to render a cow senseless.
Lisa had tried coaxing, then begging Portia to eat, but it only made her daughter distance herself more. When Lisa had the mastectomy, she’d hoped Portia might resurrect their closeness, but her visits were short and dutiful. In darker moments, Lisa wondered if Portia had inherited some of her father’s coldness.
Lisa’s anxiety had finally exploded over a plate of spaghetti in a diner one day. Portia scraped her chair back and flounced out into the street, leaving the food untouched. The invitations to California dried up after that. Conversations were reduced to interrogative phone calls, which had then been downgraded to texts.
Was it the child’s reaction to family tensions? Or maybe they’d been too close. Deep down, Lisa had to admit that Portia’s behaviour was beyond the realms of normal rebelliousness. She was stubborn, difficult and far too thin. Just like Emily Brontë.
Lisa went to the bathroom and riffled through her toiletries bag. The earplugs glowed like plump little friends in their plastic bag next to the moisturiser she hardly ever used. Thank God she’d kept them. She squished them between her fingers and shoved them in her ears.
Back in her room, she slid between the sheets, pulled the beanie over her ears and flicked the bedside lamp off. Weariness enveloped her, but something was missing from her blocking-out-the-world routine. She rolled over, opened the bedside drawer and felt for the smooth surface of the mouthguard case. Satisfactorily barricaded, she was safe. Not even a ghost could wake her.
Something roared across the roof above her. The noise was relentless, oppressive, and Lisa’s earplugs did little to stifle it. Half-asleep, she thought she saw a ghost bearing down on her, but after a few moments she realised it was just a draft moving one of the curtains, and the source of the noise wasn’t unworldly. It was rain.
Lightning flashed blue phantoms across the walls. A burst of thunder shook the roof. Wind wailed down the fireplace. She’d always claimed to enjoy thunderstorms. But this was more primal than anything she’d experienced.
She burrowed under the sheets and squeezed her eyes shut. She’d sat through dreadful concerts before, and tried to picture herself at the Lincoln Centre, where Kerry had procured free tickets to a discordant orchestral piece by one of those postmodern composers he adored. The percussion section had been in overdrive, flutes and oboes were wildly out of synch and strings whined out of tune.
Lying on her back, Lisa waited for it to finish, but a steady pinging sound was an ominous addition. From deep in the percussion section, a triangle was emitting the regular plunk of water dripping on to carpet.
A gust of freezing air rushed across the bed. She fumbled for the bedside lamp and flicked the switch. It refused to work. Thank god for Ted’s torch. She flicked the switch and it cast a dispassionate beam at the curtains, billowing like towering spectres. She ran across the room and wrestled the French doors shut. Shivering, she hurried back to bed and pulled the mohair rug up to her chin, but it was cold and wet. She shone the torch up at the ceiling. A silver waterfall trickled through a crack down onto her bed.
She glanced at her phone. 2.07. Maxine would be sound asleep in Camberwell, dreaming of perfect little grandchildren (a brain surgeon here, a start-up computer billionaire there . . .). Ted would be engrossed in an intimate stage of his night with Stella.
Lightning again flashed across the room. She tried to think of what her father would say: ‘It’s only Nature doing her thing, Panda Bear. It’ll blow over. Make yourself a cup of tea.’
The only thing worse than almost drowning on her first night would be owning up to it. In the flick of a false eyelash, Maxine would be in her Golf and flying down the motorway. Lisa could see her bursting through the front door in a flurry of orange and green, demanding she return to the suburbs.
She took two Panadol and willed herself back to sleep. Just before dawn, she dreamt of a hooded ghost chasing her across the roof and trying to push her off. As she fell, she managed to grab the ghost’s hood and reveal its face. It was Aunt Caroline, cackling at her. ‘Why on earth would you want to buy Trumperton Manor?’