Almost two weeks have passed since I saw Matts at the farmhouse. Every day, I’ve weighed up the pros and cons. Do I have to face my father in order to protect my mother?
Yesterday I messaged my father, asking him to call.
After morning tea, the children, chattering like pigeons, file into my classroom and sit at their desks. I clap my hands to get their attention.
‘Mary? I think it’s your table’s turn to talk about native flora.’
She flicks her long plaits over her shoulders. ‘Yes, Miss Brown.’
‘Who would like to go first?’
Mary considers the other children at her table: Archie, Benji and Amy. Archie, who has multiple items lined up neatly in front of him, jumps to his feet.
‘Archie,’ she says firmly.
Horseshoe Hill Primary doesn’t have enough students or teachers to separate the year groups, so the children in my Year 2 to 4 class are aged from seven to ten. Mary is nine and, as the youngest of the three Honey girls, she enjoys being the eldest on her table. Archie, Barney’s clever younger brother, is eight. ADHD can make things difficult at school, but he responds well to Mary’s bossiness. He methodically sets up his items on the table at the front of the room and I attach his poster to the whiteboard with magnets. He holds up a large strip of bark.
‘This is from a paperbark tree,’ he says. ‘Who wants to hold it?’ He laughs and spins around excitedly when all the children put up their hands.
‘Thank you, Archie.’ When I extend my hand, he gives me the bark. ‘I’ll pass this around while you talk about the tree you’ve selected.’
Archie has a phenomenal memory. He crosses his arms and recites, ‘The botanical name of the paperbark tree is Melaleuca quinquenervia …’
When it’s time for Benji to talk to the class, he walks nervously from his chair to the front of the room. Benji is the son of the publican, Leon. He’s the youngest in the class and barely said a word at the start of the year, but is quietly growing in confidence. He holds up a small branch tipped with green-centred, feathery white flowers.
‘I got this with Mum near the river,’ he whispers.
‘What type of tree is it from?’
‘The river red gum.’
‘What colour is the bark of that tree?’
He frowns in concentration. ‘Brown.’
‘It’s all different shades of brown, isn’t it, Benji, depending on whether the bark is new or old. Did you notice the colour of the trunk under the bark?’
‘A whitey colour.’
‘Excellent. Can you tell us some more about the flower?’
‘You get seven buds or nine buds …’
At the start of the year, Amy’s parents were concerned when I put her at the table with Archie and the much younger Benji. Since then, they’ve realised that Amy is far happier at this school than she was at her last. She works hard and independently, without the anxiety she used to have that she couldn’t always keep up with the children in her year group. When she reaches the front of the room, she methodically takes six different species of grasses from her bag.
‘What a great idea, Amy.’
She smiles. ‘Dad says these are the ones that grow best at the farm. They have seeds and they spread them by …’
After the lunch bell sounds, the children file out of the classroom. I open my desk drawer and pull out my phone, but there’s no word from my father.
‘Miss Brown?’
Mary stands at the open door, awkwardly holding a sheet of cardboard half as tall as she is, with foliage and flowers stuck all around the edges. I think it’s supposed to be a border, but it obscures most of the writing in the middle. ‘I’m doing wattle,’ she says proudly. ‘Can I put my poster on the whiteboard now?’ Mary wasn’t much more than a toddler when her parents’ marriage disintegrated. Her older sisters, settled at school and mad about horses, wanted to stay with their father, and her mother agreed that would be best for Mary as well. Peter is a great dad, but busy on his farm and not one for helping with homework. All Mary’s work is her own.
I attach the cardboard, heavy with wattle, to the whiteboard with as many magnets as I can find.
‘Do you like it, Miss Brown?’
I lift a thick bunch of slender leaves to find a hand-drawn diagram at the bottom of the cardboard. Straining to see through the smudges, I make out the words.
‘You’ve labelled the anthers and filaments and all the other parts of the flowers,’ I say. ‘I can’t wait to hear your talk after lunch.’
‘I’m the same as you, Miss Brown. I love the flowers best.’
I can’t remember a time when Gran wasn’t making crepe paper flowers. Even before I went to Buenos Aires, she’d taught me how to follow a few simple patterns. After we’d moved back to Canberra, where she lived, I’d take the bus and visit her on the weekends.
I stayed with her permanently after my father took Mum to the clinic that specialised in drug and alcohol abuse. There was nothing wrong with the treatment she received, but in-patient programs rarely work if people with addictions don’t go there voluntarily. Mum hated leaving me and the few friends she still had, but went along with my father’s plan because she couldn’t think what else to do. In the end, she said she didn’t care where she lived, so long as my father allowed her to see me. He thought my refusal to live with him would be a temporary thing, that I’d change my mind and move back home, and then to England when he was posted there. He thought I wouldn’t last five minutes at the local government school. But I was determined to avoid him and live with Gran at her house. It was only a short bus ride to Mum from there.
And Gran, who had liked my mother and didn’t agree with my father’s approach, was happy to have me. We’d sit opposite each other at her laminate kitchen table and, as I cut and shaped and glued, she’d talk about the times when she was young and married to my grandfather.
‘Even then he had his head in the clouds,’ she once said.
I trimmed the lacy petals of a pink and white carnation. ‘Why do you say that, Gran?’
‘He was a classics professor at twenty-nine, and from a good family. His people were hard up, but very well respected. Who’d have thought a Beresford-Brown would want to marry me?’
‘He was no better than you were,’ I told her. ‘You didn’t have the advantages he’d had, that’s all.’
She winked. ‘I was a pretty girl, don’t forget that. It was important to the Beresford-Brown men. Your father was the same, he always liked the pretty girls.’ She leant across the table and patted my hand. ‘You’re not only clever, Sapphie, you’re pretty as well. You can marry whoever you want.’
I’d only been living with Gran for a few months when she started to ask the same questions over and over. She’d lean across the table and touch the petals of whatever flower I was working on. ‘Where is your mother, Sapphie?’
‘She’s still in the clinic. Remember?’
‘That’s right, the clinic.’
Gran was only in her early seventies. No one else had any idea how severe the dementia was or that, on a bad day, her memories came and went like early morning mists. She’d lived in the same house and neighbourhood for the past forty-five years, so was good at finding her way around, and remembering most of the things she needed to know. And what she didn’t know, she made up in a believable way.
Most of the concerns my father had about Gran he attributed to her perceived eccentricities. She’d always cooked, sewed and made things with her hands; she liked watching game shows on TV and reading trashy magazines. He’d looked after her finances for years, ever since Grandfather had died. Uncle James lived on a property in Queensland and deferred to his older brother. It wasn’t in Gran’s interests, or mine, to tell her sons how forgetful she’d become—particularly after Dad hinted that it might be time to think about aged care facilities—so I kept her failing memory to myself.
‘I don’t want to live longer than nature intended,’ Gran used to say. ‘I want to die in my own home.’
I selected school subjects that didn’t challenge me too much academically, which meant I could mostly keep up with my schoolwork, and I took Gran to the doctor when she wasn’t feeling well and made sure she filled her prescriptions. I used to put paper and templates on the table in front of her in the mornings, before I went to school.
‘Lovely, dear.’ She’d pick up pieces of crepe. ‘You have a good day now.’
‘Good luck with the dahlias.’
‘Roses today.’ She’d smooth out the folds of whatever petals I’d carefully made an hour earlier.
I knew that by the time I got home from school, she wouldn’t have progressed with the flowers. Even though she generally remembered things from long ago better than things that had happened only recently, she had little memory of how to cut and shape the petals, let alone how to put them together. She’d make herself cups of tea all day, get out ingredients but never cook anything, and potter in the garden. Then she’d go back to the flowers, fold and refold the paper, and rearrange the templates. She thought she was busy, and that was the main thing. Elderly neighbours often dropped by to have a chat. And once a week, the community bus would take her to and from a local club, where she’d catch up with friends and play bingo. She couldn’t shop alone any more, so I took care of that, or we’d go out together.
The accident happened on my sixteenth birthday. I knew she’d want me to have something special, so I suggested we make hamburgers. For the patties we bought minced rump steak and mixed it with grated carrot, zucchini and onion. Her secret ingredient was homemade tomato paste, with parsley and oregano from the garden.
Before school that morning, I picked and chopped the herbs and assembled everything we’d need to make the hamburgers. The rissoles were rolled into balls on greaseproof paper and stored in the fridge with the salad. The bread was in the pantry.
Gran wasn’t good at initiating anything much by then, so I thought I’d arrive home to find her in front of her favourite TV game show with an unread copy of a magazine on her lap. I planned to change out of my uniform, cook the rissoles and set the table. Gran and I would load our hamburgers with cheese, lettuce, beetroot and tomato.
I’d had a milkshake with my friends after school, so I caught the late bus home. As I checked the letterbox, I wondered why the light in the kitchen was so bright. And then I saw the flames. I dropped my school bag onto the path and ran ran ran towards the house. The blind was on fire; flames licked at the glass in the window.
‘Gran!’
I’d left the rissoles in the fridge and the frying pan in the cupboard and the oil in the pantry. Had Gran remembered it was my birthday? It’s not like she didn’t have prompts, because I’d hung a Happy Birthday banner on the living room wall behind the television and my father had sent flowers and a card. Friends from my class had given me a bunch of helium balloons and I’d tied them to the table in the hall.
Or maybe it was nothing to do with that? Maybe Gran had remembered it was my birthday all on her own—even though it had slipped her mind that morning—and she was determined to cook a favourite meal.
She must have known something was missing. Was she waiting for me to come home to tell her what it was? Did she turn on the gas at the stove and add more and more oil to the pan as she waited? By the time I ran into the kitchen, the window was blackened and the blind was incinerated. Gran had already fallen. She was lying near the pantry.
‘Can you help me up, dear?’
The pan of oil was bubbling like a deep-fry basket at a fish and chip shop. Flames licked the cornice and curled to the ceiling. My phone was in my bag but that was on the footpath, so I ran to the living room for the landline. I had the phone in my hand and was talking to emergency services when I noticed the oven mitts on the bench. If I could turn off the gas and take the pan off the heat, the oil would stop burning. I was giving the operator Gran’s address when I lifted the pan and put it into the sink.
I was sixteen—just. I should have known better. There was water in the sink. Oil and water make steam. Boiling oil bounces and splashes.
By the time the fire engine arrived, lights on and sirens blaring, the fire was out. The police officers came next and asked a lot of questions. Gran’s tendency to defer to anyone in uniform took precedence over the pain in her hip, but she couldn’t remember what had happened. When the officers called her local doctor, the doctor gave them my father’s number. He was living in London by then, but promised to book a flight back to Canberra.
‘Your son will be here within the week, Mrs Beresford-Brown,’ the officer said. ‘We’ll save the rest of our questions for then.’
‘It was my fault,’ I told the officer. ‘I was cooking and the fat caught fire.’
‘You were on your own?’
I didn’t feel much pain then, but my uniform was darkened with oil and water. ‘Were you hurt?’
‘No!’ I held my left arm tightly by my side and crossed my right arm over it. ‘My uniform got a bit splattered, that’s all. I’ll go and change.’
I pretended not to hear when he called me back. By the time I’d stripped off my uniform, rolled it up and shoved it under my bed, and dragged a T-shirt over my torn and blistered skin, the officer was outside with the ambulance.
I had second-degree burns from the steam, and third degree burns from the oil, but it was two days later, when the pain made it impossible to sleep and my father was due to arrive, that I went to the emergency department at the hospital. ‘You can’t tell my father about this,’ I reminded the plastic surgeon. ‘I’m sixteen years old, so you won’t, will you?’
The children keep me busy all afternoon, so it’s after three-thirty when I check my phone again. My father sent a text two hours ago.
Sapphire,
I’m on my way to Horseshoe Hill, so we can meet at any time from five (I’ll stay overnight in Dubbo). Please let me know when and where would suit.
Dad
I text back immediately.
I’ll see you where we usually meet in Dubbo, the pub on Elizabeth Street near the park. Is six OK?
I start when I see Mary inside the door, her hands pressed together as she bounces up and down. ‘Did you like my talk?’
‘Very much,’ I say, as I shepherd her out of the classroom. ‘And I’ll tell your dad all about it when we have our parent–teacher interview. He’ll be even more proud of you than he is already.’
She skips into the sunlight, her plaits bouncing merrily. ‘Thanks, Miss Brown!’
Sapphie Brown.
Sapphire Beresford-Brown.
Dubbo is an hour away, and I haven’t driven a car since late last year. How do I get to my father by six? When I dial Pa Hargreaves’s number, he answers straight away.
‘Hello, Sapphie. How are you, love?’