Once Removed

David Francis

Way out the back where the wedding bush grows and mosquitoes breed in the gullies, there’s a weatherboard house with bay windows, the place where my English grandmother died. But it sat on her farm at Moorooduc then, among the bracken and ti-tree, pardelotes nested in the sandy cliffs, when my grandmother slept in the four-poster bed, and I dreamt there were bears in the hall, marauding. Suddenly there was no more snoring and I could sleep. She’d gone to be with her Jesus.

The cottage was moved by my father, in slices on trucks, and patched together in the Tindervick bush, set on a rise facing north. Its bay-window eyes staring out to the Pakenham Hills, as if watching for fires. I was shipped along with it, ostensibly in one piece, back to my parents on the same stretch of land, to this big brick homestead that stands among the whining cypresses, where my mother now lives alone. Where magpies fly down the chimneys, her black and tan dog lying in wait to hunt them down, land them stunned and breathless on the hardwood floor. My mother waits too, giddied by the prospect.

Now I stand at the door with my rolling Hartmann luggage, the rented white Prius in the lantern light behind me like something from another galaxy. I’m back for the first time in years, staring through the stained-glass kitchen door, watching her armed with a broom and a fly swatter, disappearing deep into the dining room, where the walls are four bricks thick and bees swarm in the unused chimneys. Ants invade, my mother slaughters armies of them, showing off piles of the dead to occasional visitors.

Unseen, I open the door to the vague smell of compost, the frantic yelping of the dog. But this time it’s not a bird being hunted. A brushtail possum, terrified, scratches its way along the picture rail. It pisses with fright on the portrait of Aunt Emma Charlotte, over the pastel of me as a boy. My mother doesn’t notice me; she’s mesmerised by the leaping dog and the possum as it plummets down onto a table, smashing plates. It hurtles out past me into the Gippsland evening, the dog a dark blur behind it.

‘Hello,’ my mother says, the broom over her shoulder like a rifle. ‘How was your trip? Did you get yourself an upgrade?’ Her words are eclipsed by a distant barking, but my mother hears nothing, deaf as the sideboard, deaf as the night. I’d give her a hug but her body would stiffen like a bird’s, afraid I was trying to accomplish something unnatural, something American and intimate. So I nod and smile, but don’t answer – her interest is more in her questions and the noises she hears inside her head. I just wonder how she’s heard of upgrades.

I lean my bags against the door as she returns to her kitchen, irrigating ants from a cupboard, wiping them up with an ant-speckled washcloth, as though she’s already forgotten I’ve arrived. Since her stroke, her memory of moments just passed has become more elusive. She refuses to wear her hearing aids. And I’m back in the silence with her, to the place that’s been here all along, the comfort of things unchanged. Just the faint rustle of wood ducks nesting in the chimney, cooing again now that the house is still, the house that coos as if it’s calling out. A place for the shelter of species, provided they stay hidden.

A letter lies on the table already set for tomorrow’s breakfast. The writing, angled and childlike, addressed to Those Whom Are Concerned, signed at the top and the bottom, Sharen W. The tenant in the house out the back: Sharen Wills. My father, Remy’s, tenant. Remy as in Remington, although my mother says it’s short for Remedial. He thinks the house is still his because his little mother died in it. But he lives five miles away now, in a sad-looking cottage in a place called Blind Bight. Stuck there with his girlfriend, Kim, ever since my mother threw him off the farm.

I pick up the letter uninvited and my mother pretends not to watch me read. She guides a trail of golden ant poison along the ledge.

I do not know how much you know but I can only assume you are naive in the field. That is of the situasion of Remy and myself and I will not be harassed by Remy who is bulling me to leave. I pay the same for my horses being here as anyone else but I don’t get the use of the faculties.

I glance up, my mother’s eyes upon me now. ‘She’s illiterate,’ she says, ‘poor little thing.’ Sharen Wills, whose rent provides my mother’s shopping money.

I feel there is a stigma because of me and Remy. Also I have been attacked by those three black Clydesdales in the back paddock. None of this is safe for me here but I will not leave under these provisions. I will get my own solicitor. I will not be railroded.

‘Hell hath no fury.’ My mother trails off as she hands me a dustpan, a load of dead bees and ants, spoils of the sweetness she leaves on the jam jars, as lures.

I head outside and empty the carnage of insects on a lavender bush, stand on the tiled veranda, and watch the purple remains of the evening, the glint on the windows of the distant clapboard house. The house you can see from Station Road on the way into town or from the window of the shearer’s quarters, or from here, out across the lagoon paddock.

The phone rings shrilly and I run back inside, see my mother under her jigsaw lamp, leaning over a Wysocki lighthouse puzzle, the phone going unanswered, a message being left on the machine.

‘Ruthie, it’s Sharen. I need to talk before I do something stupid.’

My mother lifts her head. ‘She grows marijuana out there,’ she says, ‘in tubs in a horse float.’ She returns to sorting pieces of sky.

I stand by the black rotary phone on the desk, the small jug of familiar pens and broken pencils, and I think of the letter, the situasion with Remy, how I don’t want to deal with Sharen Wills, whose number is fifth on a list on the wall, after the fire brigade and the vet, my father and Dr Hopkins. My mother, who dreads the phone and resents others using it, turns the television on so loud it sounds like a plane is landing on the roof. She goes on searching for jigsaw edges.

I pull my rolling suitcase along the carpeted hall, let it rest outside the fancy bathroom. The original Victorian tiles, the bath with its iron-clawed feet. I brush my teeth with the toothbrush that waits for me here in a small pewter goblet, squeeze the remains of my miniature Qantas toothpaste. I look in the mirror, a jetlagged ghost of myself. I need to talk to someone before I do something stupid.

My mother remains in her jigsaw world. On the television screen, the clever blue eyes of the new prime minister, but I’m listening again to the message on the dusty answering machine, wondering what my father’s done to Sharen Wills. Only the dog observes me, from its roost in the cushions along the back of the couch, as I dial the number, a call that rings and rings, goes unanswered. Overcome with an old desire to escape this house, and to know what’s really going on, I steal out into the night and start up the silent Prius. I glide through the shadowy paddocks, scraping along the overgrown track down towards the windmill, rabbits scurrying in the headlights. As I open the lagoon paddock gate, I shoo away dark horses approaching to sniff the soundless car, heavy part-Clydesdales I don’t recognise. The whoop of what might be an owl up above me, mosquitoes drift about my face, the cacophony of crickets. I try to remember why I don’t live here. Is it the noise or all the silence?

I notice the lights from the house out the back, bay windows appearing as beacons through the trees, the house of my first night terrors, where my mother discovered my father in bed with Kim and ordered them both away. The house where my parents’ marriage ended.

A dark hump appears in the headlights, a car abandoned in the field. It hunkers low in the grass on bare axles. An old Mitsubishi sedan with its tyres removed, brimming with trash and what looks like a chair leaned up against the door. Beyond the car, the garden fence, and the yard that was once tidy emerges as a carnival of corrugated iron, engine parts and overgrowth, a rusted clothesline whining. There were once hibiscus, black-eyed peas and black-eyed Susan, a twelve-foot passion-fruit vine.

I park the hybrid under a eucalyptus near the fence and wend my way among rusted fenders and a sunken laundry trough to the sagging carport, and knock on the brown waterlogged door of my childhood. A shout from inside and then footsteps; the door opens a crack. Then the face of a woman with creased smoker’s cheeks and turquoise eyes, her hair in a tangled nest. Nipples pressed through a long Cold Chisel T-shirt stretched down to bare, slender legs.

‘You must be Daniel!’ she says, suspiciously. ‘A chip off the block.’ She is nervous, speaking more with the urgency of speed than the drawl of a stoner. ‘Excuse this dreadful mess,’ she adds. She clasps her shoulders, blames ‘the boys’ for the maze of laundry on the floor, but there are no signs of boys just the smell of cannabis. In a kitchen I barely recognise she offers me coffee. She’s probably only my age but looks like she’s done it harder. I glance away from her angry but curious stare, down at a floor now bereft of linoleum, to a sink where leaning plates and angled saucepans tower precipitously. The kitchen where my grandmother once stood with the sun beaming in on her delicate English face, pouring tea and placing scones on a silver tray, baking her special rice pudding.

Sharen Wills’ arms are tanned and her hands are shaking as she plugs in a kettle. She announces, ‘The Landlord and Tenant Act of Victoria requires twenty-four hours prior notice for a visit from the landlord.’

‘I’m not your landlord,’ I say. ‘Just making sure things are okay.’

She puts the kettle down. ‘I’m having trouble with your father,’ she says. No mention of the letter.

‘We’ve had trouble with him ourselves.’

‘He appears on a horse at the window at all hours and I rarely wear clothes in the house.’ She looks down at herself, the cotton clinging to her narrow body and I wonder if I’m supposed to find it appealing. She offers me a cigarette.

‘He hasn’t ridden for years,’ I say. ‘He can barely walk.’

‘He’d crawl if he had to,’ she says. ‘He’s at the door at midnight … and when I don’t answer he pulls out my marijuana by the roots.’

I imagine her in tight-fitting, camel-toe jeans. ‘It’s his mother’s house,’ I say. I don’t tell her the whole five hundred acres, houses and all, are now in my mother’s name, after he was sentenced to life with Kim. Now I’ve got two bitches in my soup, he once told me on the sly. I look over at this woman pouring me coffee and wonder if there aren’t now three. A rat gets caught in its own trap, my mother says of him. ‘He wants me out of here,’ says Sharen, hugging a cup of coffee between her breasts. ‘He wants to move back in here; he wants to die in his mother’s house. But I want to die in his mother’s house too,’ she says.

I’m not sure what to say. My father, almost eighty, thinks he’s my age, despite the fact his hips are fusing. I look at the squalor of plates and piles of paper, a place I wouldn’t want to live or die in. My grandmother’s quaint English furniture left in this woman’s hands, and the last time I visited, my father on his death bed in the Dandenong Hospital, pale in one of those paper gowns, pneumonia and congestive heart failure, a shriveling man in a narrow metal cot. But he still thought he was virile, working the nurses, wheezing, flirting, something to live for. Bright young nurses in robin’s egg blue attending, the glint in his wrinkled farmer’s eyes. He offered them trips down here, said he’d take them out riding, as if he could still get on a horse. Half-dead and still handsome.

‘I’ll take him to the tribunal,’ says Sharen. ‘How dare he try to evict me after all I’ve been through?’ She looks over at me, gauging loyalties, more defiant than tearful, angry at these unexpected visits, the skulking, or maybe angry that he skulks no more, that I’m not moving to comfort her. I don’t need to tell her he’s always been a hands-on husband, women pressed against the fridge, my unsuspecting girlfriends bailed up on the hallstand, that Lipman woman emerging with him from the haystack in the middle of the night while my mother slept alone up in the big house, the lantern standing dim above the roses.

Nervously, Sharen lights a second Marlboro. ‘I’ve had him up to here,’ she says, the cigarette in her nail-bitten fingers cutting across her throat.

I wonder where she’s really had him up to. I lean on the ledge and try to summon my lawyerly training – her claim could only be against my mother, since she’s the one who now owns all this, but Sharen Wills has no cause against my mother, except perhaps a bifurcated empathy. Still, I recognise a stake laid out on the grease-stained living room floor. A black oil patch where someone dismantled an engine, take-away food containers adorning my grandmother’s inlaid mosaic table. Furniture from some ancestral home in Norfolk.

‘Are your horses still here?’ I ask. The pair of plump Anglo-Arabs out in the couch grass. Last year one of them foaled unexpectedly and my father went ballistic, ordered them off the place, but they kept reappearing, mare and foal and other stray horses, munching on his precious grass that really belongs to my mother, grown for the cattle he thinks are still his.

Sharen has a hand on her hip, reminding me she pays her rent. I’ve heard how she visits the big house, speaks loud enough so my mother can hear, charms her in front of the Aga stove, brings treats for the dog and drinks Earl Grey tea and partakes of stale Teddy Bear biscuits, laughing. Sharen Wills isn’t stupid. She probably helps with the crossword, places difficult pieces into the blue miasma of a jigsaw sky.

‘I’m working as a psych nurse at Dalkeith.’ She’s trying to impress me. She has an income; she specialises in old people. She will not be railroded.

‘Why didn’t you just tell Dad to piss off?’ I say.

‘How could I?’ she asks. ‘He’s the landlord.’

‘But you tell him to piss off now.’ I’ve heard how she has my father agitated, taunting him in her T-shirts, shouting epithets out these curved bay windows. I’ll have your balls for breakfast.

Nodding, feigning tears, ‘I have no choice here,’ she says.

‘Did he ever touch you?’

‘Not really.’ She’s suddenly defensive, almost shocked. ‘He just chased me around.’ But I’m not sure I believe her. He can barely walk. Maybe he’s touched her in ways she’s not even sure of. Despite the charm he’s predatory, under his guise of playfulness. I watch her and pretend to drink her tepid coffee, thoughts of my buckled-up father before the Tenancy Tribunal, fending off assertions, an old man accused of shuffling around his own mother’s furniture, brandishing his cheeky smile in some fumbling pursuit, then yanking out her marijuana as his only vengeance. A man possessed by lust. It’s not his reputation I care about; that’s long lost and gone. It’s him on the dock of some petty assembly, collapsing, carted away without a chance to limp down the end of this short, dark hallway and climb alone between the sheets of his mother’s four-poster bed.

‘You’ll kill him,’ I tell Sharen Wills.

She stares past me, out into the bay-windowed night, as if the pleasure would be all hers.

*

I drive back past the dark, abandoned car, through the milling horses then along the grass track to the big house. The night is clear, the garden lantern turned on for my benefit. When I open the door to the kitchen, my mother doesn’t ask where I’ve been – she’s used to her men disappearing at night. She stands like a twig in pyjamas, heating her wheat bags in the ancient microwave with her mottled sun-spotted hands. ‘Hello, Foozle,’ she says with curious enthusiasm, a nickname I’ve not heard in thirty years. The dog still in its perch among the pillows.

‘Do you have everything you want?’ my mother asks, her blotchy terracotta cheeks, her small bird face with small bird eyes. Eyes that could pierce holes in steel. But she doesn’t wait for an answer. Wheat bags in one hand, she slinks up into the dark hallway with a goodnight wave over her shoulder, heading for her narrow bed. She says the bed spins when she lies down in it. She forgets she suffers from vertigo and what the doctor called left-side neglect, a skewed awareness of one side of her body, the effects of a stroke.

I roll my luggage further up the hall, glimpse Aunt Emma Charlotte’s portrait in the shadowed dining room, her face streaked with possum piss, which gives her a thin damp smile. From behind my mother’s bedroom door, I can already hear her wireless blaring – 3AW talk and oldies, the throaty roll of Burl Ives from her rickety bedside table.

I no longer sleep in the meatsafe, with its hooks in the tongue and groove ceiling and the freezing bluestone floor, or in my old room in the shearer’s quarters, festooned with dusty horse-show ribbons; I sleep in the Senator’s Room, named in honour of a television show once filmed here. The light unveils the familiar ornate moulded roses on the fifteen-foot cobwebbed ceiling, a fresh rent where chunks of plaster have fallen, a dark hole up into the cold slate roof. The room is still decked out as the master suite of the television senator’s house. The familiar blue floral wallpaper, the only wide bed in the place. My parents once had their two single beds parallel parked in here, separate and unequal. In a house where men find it hard to survive.

I heft my bag up onto the re-covered chaise and wonder which came first – was my mother unwilling to share her bed with him because she realised what she’d married, or was it that she didn’t share herself and he went elsewhere, to sleep in the campervan or his mother’s house out in the bush? I imagine my conception here, forty years ago, my mother looking up into the cobwebs, a vague disgust in her eyes, or maybe just wondering what all the fuss was about. The irony of them still strangely in love even now, a love so fraught with disappointment it manifests as acrimony.

On the mantel, a sepia photo of my mother swinging wide at a polo ball, her body clinging like a monkey to the side of a horse at a flat-strap gallop. Her childhood clock on a small, varnished table beside the bed. Its hands dead parallel at 9.15 p.m. Branches scratch the corrugated roof, up where possums gnaw the electrical cables. A vague smell of burning, as if the whole house is quietly smouldering, the slow combustion of oak beams plundered from vessels shipwrecked off the coast.

I undress to the lilt of Burl Ives. Out in the windmill paddock I can hear horses; one begins to canter, followed by the thunder of elderly geldings galloping, pummelling the dark sandy earth. I get into the senator’s bed, the same cream sheets unwashed from last time, the stale smell of my own night sweats, but also the smell of wheat. Against my leg, a wheat bag of my own, heated and carefully placed by my mother. I try to sleep but am wide awake. The spurned look in Sharen Wills’ bright blue-green eyes, a kind of stricken ferocity that’s never quite left my mother’s. Sharen Wills who will not leave under these provisions.

I hold the warm wheat bag against my body and listen to the burr of talkback radio, the groans of the cypresses. I dream I’m clambering up through the hole in the plaster, crawling through attics crammed with rows of wooden coat-hangers, leather handbags hanging from hooks like small curing pigs. Possums, eyes wide with beady judgment. The sound of a distant explosion and I’m wide awake. Two a.m. on the bedside clock. The muffled noise of my mother, her bedroom door shoved open against the carpet, her quick jolty steps out onto the windswept veranda. A sound so loud even she heard it.

I pull the curtain and watch her out there, her nightie blown against her narrow body, her wild night hair pushed back from her face, glaring into the distance. Flames rope up from a fire at the edge of the bush. Within seconds I am joining her in my boxers and T-shirt, our eyes glued on the flicker of orange. ‘Is that the house?’ I ask.

‘I hope so,’ she says, rubbing her favourite spot below her hairline, pretending to be inured to the sight of fires, how things here start and end in flames – like the time there was a fire in the Station Road paddock and she searched for my father so he could help. She found him out there in bed with his girlfriend, in the house that now seems to be burning, lit like a candle on the horizon. In a wind like this with the trees so dry – I watch my mother hug herself, knowing this could incinerate a thousand acres and the town.

‘Don’t let the bush burn,’ she says, as though it’s up to me. The remnant vegetation, native plants and species, bandicoots and mallee firs, the bush is a place of Aboriginal significance. Not to mention the field where those big dark horses live. I know how horses get panicked by flames, run through barbed-wire fences.

I’m already back in the house, dialing the Country Fire Brigade, the number on the list taped to the wall, above my father’s number at Kim’s, above the vet and Sharen. ‘A fire on Rawson’s place, the end of Hopetoun Road.’ I talk as if I’m not from here, and now I’m pulling on clothes, running cross-country, wondering if the whole place might just combust in the wind, the bush and the houses, cattle and horses trapped in dry carpets of grass, feathery fetlocks catching like torches.

Down at the windmill, fumbling with the latches on gates, I realise it’s not the house that’s gone up, but the car in the field. That’s what exploded. The great shadows of the heavy horses circle it like spectres, a dance of retreats and advances between the bounds of their fear and fascination. I leave the gates wide open and call out with my father’s cry: ‘C’mon, c’mon.’ One of them turns but not for long, back to its wary appraisal, the orange and crack of the flames, the floating of embers to sniff in the air, while the small house on the rise lies dark as the night, feigning innocence. The car wrapped in flames and the fire-engine wail bathing the thick night air.

I race near as I dare to the blue-orange heat and stamp fire that spreads from the vehicle through the midsummer grass. The horses circle behind me, quizzical, mesmerised, nostrils flaring at the smoke, as if daring me closer. But it’s too hot here and the sparks make me wary of another explosion. The sound of the crackling. I pull off my coat to thrash the ground where a flame is causing a new patch to smoulder. Luckily the growth is so short from grazing that it doesn’t just flare up like broom straw. Then, at my feet, a piece of my grandmother’s headboard, an ornate hacked-off corner, and at the base of the flames I see more – a dining room chair, the spindly leg of a bridge table thrown onto the bonnet. An outrage whips through me like the earth quaking. Pieces that survived the passage from England haven’t survived Sharen Wills. I stare at the top of my grandmother’s mirrored armoire, cast out like a demon in flames, but it’s too hot to lunge in and salvage anything. Embers float from my grandmother’s bedhead chopped into sections, from the bed where she died with The Book of Common Shrubs on the now-burning end table, her small round specs on the still-open page. When she was alive and this house was as it should still be.

I turn from the bonfire and make out a shape in the dimly lit bay window, not fifty yards between us. Sharen Wills, gazing at her accomplishment. She who will not be railroded is railroading us. The sight of her makes me want to snatch a burning chair leg and set her alight, but I’m saved from myself by the fire-engine lights turning up into Hopetoun Road, like an ambulance arriving for the already dead. The siren turned off now, just the hissing of vinyl car seats and sparks from lost antiques.

I slap my jacket at another scorched swath of grass as the truck rattles silently over the cattle grid and sweeps its lights across the paddock. The arch-necked horses canter off and I’m left here alone with my face lit by flames and the charcoal smell in my nostrils. Up in the truck cab it’s Bobby Gennaro. We once played tennis as boys, when my mother allowed me to mix with the townies.

‘You know it’s a total-fire-ban day,’ he shouts at me, jumping down from the running board. He seems invigorated by the blaze, and I sense the divide between us. The two young volunteers unwind the canvas hose. No one asks why a car is on fire in the middle of our paddock; they know weird shit happens out here. My tears are caused by the smoke but my anger is gilded with shame. I might have fled eight thousand miles from this place but it’s a feeling as old as the corduroy coat I flail at the grass. Yes, I’m a Rawson. And they haven’t even noticed the furniture yet. But a new hissing sound and a gust of the high-pressure shoots on the windshield and a burning chair goes flying, charcoaled pieces of French-polished wood. Bobby Gennaro aims lower and smiles to himself as if he’s hit the jackpot. He hoses the flames that light up the delight on his face.

‘Fucking Sharen from the house,’ I shout, as though it has little to do with me, ‘she’s pissed off at my father.’ But my voice feels like kindling in the wind. They know Sharen, surely, the way she shows her tits and midriff, and they must talk about my father, the Eccentric Millionaire from Tindervick, despite the fact he now owns nothing. And despite the fierce sprays of precious water, sparks still fly from Sharen’s old burning car and his burning heirlooms, sprung from the house he rented to her regardless, when my mother called him a loon for leaving it furnished. My mother who knew Kim wouldn’t be enough, that he’d keep a keen eye on his dead mother’s stuff and his hands on his slender new tenant. My frail mother, still out on that far dark veranda, smelling the wind for embers, hosing the remains of her garden or hosing down the cypresses in case this gets away and rips through the rye grass towards her. And I’m out here with the nearly doused fire, water sizzling on the white hot metal of the car, attempting to contain these inherited feelings, and ignore Bobby’s stifled amusement. They’ll dine out on this, wake their wives as they walk in their doors in the early morning: ‘You shoulda seen what that Sharen Wills did to old Remy Rawson.’

A remnant of my grandmother’s English bedspread blows against my leg, brittle and disintegrating, the bobbles singed and loose on the fringe. A bed that should have been mine. The dividends of my father’s charm: my grandmother’s inlaid vanity attached to the trunk like a cancer and the sight of Sharen Wills watching through the smoke from the quaint bay window, taunting me while my father sleeps elsewhere. The busted-up mosaic table.

I glance back at Sharen Wills with my watery eyes but turn away in disgust, drawn back to the smouldering aftermath, the last sprays of high-pressure water on the rusted black chassis, a blistered piano stool lodged deep in the back window, its legs reaching out like the haunches of a deer, the shapes of these snickering, adrenalised men in the beams of their truck lights. In the steam and ashes, the remains of the small, incinerated rocking horse. The silver mane and real leather bridle. My grandmother rode it as a child in the Cotswolds, and then rocked me on it in this strange country she called the Frightful Antipodes. The rocking horse is blackened, the painted wood sooty and blistered in the rubble. I move in to retrieve at least something, kneel down to the memories of her pretty English face, ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross. But the remains of the plaything are sodden and the wet, disintegrating feel has me moving away through the smoke.

With charcoaled hands, I tread through the dark towards the house, past a wheelbarrow, to the figure now gone from the window. I am deliberate, climbing the chicken wire. My father, who cares less for belongings than for the chance at a woman like this, and I, who’ve been striving so hard to divorce myself from this ridiculous history. But it’s me who is pounding the green-panelled door. I don’t shout her name, just beat on the wood, unsure what I’ll do if she answers, or if she doesn’t. Then I realise it’s not even locked and I burst in, and there she is in her washed-out glory, through the frosted glass doors in the sitting room. The stale smell of her pot and adulterating rubbish now mixed with the remains of fresh-split mahogany. She’s had a busy night.

Sharen in bra and panties slouches in a modern rocker-recliner in a room bereft of my grandmother’s things. The axe that’s done the job leans against the wall like a casual assistant. Despite me, she watches out the bay window, as if it’s all on television, the young fire fighters and their brightly lit truck, all framed with a bottlebrush foreground. Staring out like I’m not even in this entry hall. Her arms are tanned and slender, wrists I could snap in my hands; her fingers loose on a cigarette, legs crossed to support the ashtray in her brazen lap. I want to snatch her up from her tacky recliner, drag her outside by a fistful of stringy chestnut hair, across the hardwood floor, her bare heels furrowing through the chips from my grandmother’s dining-room table.

‘How dare you,’ I say.

She turns, recalcitrant. I move into the naked room, bear down on her.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she says, fending me off with her cigarette, stabbing wildly at the air, her expression still snide but strangely playful.

As I grab the cigarette, it burns into my palm. I let out a yelp that surprises us both, stamp the fag end into the floor and I can see her suppressing a smile.

‘I don’t want to touch you, believe me,’ I say. She leans forward in her small dark bra, shows me what worked for my father, but her ashtray falls to the floor. ‘You’re not that appealing,’ I say.

‘Ridden hard and put away wet?’ Her laugh is brittle and mocking but I stand over her with a desire to hurt that unnerves me, to give her what she wants.

‘They were my grandmother’s antiques,’ I say. ‘Shipped from England in the twenties.’

‘Don’t talk to me about your family’s history,’ she says.

It’s all I can do not to strike her. ‘I’m not my father,’ I say. ‘And I don’t want to go where he’s been.’

She looks up at me with something stubborn and primal in her bloodshot eyes. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she says.

‘Yes you are.’ I’m behind her now, at the back of the recliner, pinning her narrow hands to the arms of the chair, hefting it up with her in it, moving over the room as she yells about lawyers and the rights of tenants and how I don’t want to do this, but I’m already out in the entry hall and it feels like this is the right thing to do. I think of my grandmother’s rocking horse as I hiss with exertion in the doorway and step into the chill of the night, Sharen screeching and spitting. She bites the arm of my coat as I use her as ballast to thrust her outside; she tries to square her legs against the door jamb but they don’t quite spread that wide.

‘I don’t care what you did with my father.’ I rip my sleeve from her teeth, empty her out of the chair and down the bluestone steps. Sharen Wills ends up splayed in a scant-clad heap with her own broken chair on the path of my childhood. She looks back at me like a victim of some horrible crime.

‘You are like your father.’

Firemen run through the darkness, the fastest one almost hurdles the fence.

‘You wish,’ I say.

The breathless young firemen are already there. One kneels at her side and she’s sobbing. It’s a volunteer’s dream, this on top of everything else.

‘Take her with you,’ I say. ‘Get her off the place.’

‘I’ll tell them what Remy did.’ She curls her lip at me as she’s helped to her feet.

‘Tell them what you like,’ I say. Inside, I close my grandmother’s door behind me and lean my back against it. Just don’t tell me.

In the sitting room echoing with what has just been, I shake with a rage that wants to trash what’s left but there’s nothing – a Women’s Weekly and an empty Tindervick Pizza box on the floor, a wicker laundry basket draped with socks. I punt it clean across the room at a wall bereft of pictures. The Munnings print, thoroughbreds with dust rugs over their loins, is gone. A feeling wells up inside me I’ve not felt since I was seventeen and pummelled my father, bloodied his angular face and then left this farm for the first time. My stupid fucking father. And now I’m back here, back in time, in this sad little house, ridding us all of Sharen Wills. The sting of her cigarette welt in my palm, her teeth marks on my forearm, and out the same bay window, her narrow shoulders draped with a blanket, escorted by firemen across the paddock to the truck. Their shadows like tribespeople travelling through.

No sign of the black horses, just the silhouetted figures climbing into the cab of the fire engine – then, at the edge of the spray of truck lights, a frail shape in the dark. My mother in her cream nightgown like a sheet in the wind above the grass. A skeletal woman out after midnight, hugging herself in the smoky air now dissipating in the breeze. I walk toward her, past the remains of the broken recliner, climb the fence and move through the paddock. She’s moored to the earth by my father’s oversized boots, monitoring the fire engine as it bumps off through the night, her shiny button eyes tracking the taillights down Hopetoun Road.

‘That’s something accomplished,’ she says. Her face shines with a translucent pleasure, as if a lost territory has been retaken.

In the dark, the burned-out vehicle appears like the carcass of a gutted beast, smoking and sizzling, my mother shivering with victory, her nightie blowing against her ribcage. We watch the red lights recede towards town.

‘She’ll be screaming bloody murder,’ I say.

‘I doubt you hurt her,’ my mother says, quietly phosphorescent, like she’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, betrayed but undaunted. ‘I was your witness,’ she says. Her hearing seems strangely acute in the smoke-scented breeze.

‘How much did you see?’ I ask.

‘You poured her out like a load of wood,’ she says proudly. The smile. ‘But you didn’t hit her, did you?’ She neither looks at me nor waits for an answer. ‘Remember that time with your father, after he threw the hammer at you?’

‘I didn’t hit her,’ I say. I had my father pinned against the fridge and punched him until his Roman nose was broken and his cheeks were scraped with blood, and I pinned Sharen Wills’ narrow hands to the arms of that now-busted chair and she disappeared, cradled between men in a truck. I wrap my mother in my jacket and place an arm about her bony shoulders, an unlikely liberty. We move to inspect the steaming remains, the dregs barely visible in the unlit night, just a dark hump and the faint sibilant hiss of water dripping on hot metal. It’s too dark to be reminded of the rocking horse.

‘She burned all of Granny’s furniture,’ I say.

My mother exhales dismissively. ‘That spindly little English stuff, you could barely use it anyway.’ She always despised my grandmother’s gentility, the fact that she was so spoiled and pretty, not to mention religious, that she pledged her modest fortune to American evangelists. A malady equated with madness.

We turn away from the carnage and trudge through the paddocks, back up to the main house. ‘And the Munnings was gone from the wall,’ I say.

She looks up, squinting. She loved that painting, the fine shapes of well-bred horses. She’d always had her sights on it, but my father insisted it stay on my grandmother’s wall. ‘Your father is a sloven and a slut,’ my mother says, then stares ahead as I wonder at her unlikely choice of epithets.

‘Would he have insured it?’ I ask. ‘Any of it?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she says. ‘And don’t worry, you’ll end up with all this.’ She stares across the spread extending flat and black as bitumen before us, shrouding me in an old unholy alliance, me the lucky one. Schooled as a boy not to care for my father, her disillusionment placed like a bounty at my feet, advising quietly how his side of the family may have been pretty but they weren’t that bright, letting me know on the QT that his parents were actually cousins. ‘That’s why they left England.’

My father, the only surviving son of runaways, charming, square-jawed. I could beat him at Scrabble before I was ten, or I would have if I’d bothered to play him. I was too busy doing crosswords with my mother, measuring up to her vocabulary, while he was already out chasing skirt. My mother too tough for him to compete with, on a horse, at cricket or cards. A polo player, she rode jumping horses in England at the Royal Windsor Show, studied agricultural science at Melbourne University, played tennis like Margaret Court, came second in the Australia-wide bridge pairs with Gill the cook. My father who’d begged my mother to marry him until she gave in. ‘He wouldn’t leave me alone,’ she once told me, ‘so eventually I said “yes” just to make him stop.’ My mother proceeded to split me – prodigal son and surrogate husband. My father sought his approval elsewhere. He knew there was no competing here.

The creak of the windmill above us where the three gates meet, and again the hoot of that unseen owl, the weight of this old conspiracy, my arm around the matriarch – part-parent, part-child, her confidant. I glance back in the direction of the newly emptied house and feel the onslaught of misgivings.

‘Bobby Gennaro was amused,’ I say.

My mother allows another huff. ‘You scared them all off,’ she says. She treads carefully through the longer grass, past the concrete trough in the centre paddock. ‘I’m just glad that woman’s gone,’ she says. ‘Good boy.’ But I wonder if that woman will be back.

‘We’ll get Al to clean up the mess,’ my mother says, forgetting that Al’s as old as the Empire. He’s worked here so long he can barely cut wood to keep her in logs for the stove. He could no more clean up that burned-out wreck or the squalor in Sharen Wills’ kitchen than run for government.

I imagine Sharen at the fire station telling her woes to the boys over a smoke and a beer.

‘I should call the police,’ I say.

My mother laughs. The laugh she uses when she hasn’t heard, in case what I said is supposed to be funny. In lieu of a response she motions at the dark billowed shapes of the heavy horses in the distance, grazing in their fresh paddock. ‘We should just change the locks on the cottage,’ she says and I realise she’s heard all along. She’s reminding me she doesn’t approve of involving outsiders; she’d have preferred we fought the fire ourselves.

‘We also need to keep your father out of that house,’ she says. ‘Once he gets wind of all this he’ll want to move in there with bloody Kim.’ My mother seems to be gaining momentum. No longer a wavering stick in white cotton, she steps through the grass erratically, plotting like old times. She must have her hearing aid in. ‘Next thing you know he’ll be dead and we’ll be left with her.’ She holds course for the lantern in her garden on the distant hill, where her dog is shut inside and barking.

We head along the old tractor path and she hitches up her nightie and starts telling me stories. ‘Remember at Monomeith we had those Dutch people.’ She talks as if I were alive then, on the farm where she grew up. ‘They used our chairs as firewood. Too lazy to go out and chop their own.’ This is why we were taught to hate the Dutch.

My mother pulls free from my arm at the stile by the chicken coop and climbs unassisted. If she falls we both know she’ll shatter a hip. Balancing on top in the night breeze she looks down at me.

‘When I was a kid,’ she says, ‘we used to ride our ponies bareback and help spot bushfires from up on Two Bays Road.’ She shields her eyes as if we’re in broad daylight. ‘The firemen gave us canvas knapsacks of water and we’d spray the remains.’ She goes to step over but stops. ‘I was good at firefighting,’ she says.

I feel a strange desire to defend the dignity of this old woman, who stands resilient up in the dark like something immortal. ‘No sign of fires from up here,’ she says, the recent one perhaps already shot from her memory while its implications adhere to me like the soot on my fingers, a charred rocking horse and a lost Munnings, my mother up there as if she might just float away. I love the life that’s returned to her eyes. ‘You’re the reason I stay alive,’ she says, then boldly steps down to the ground.

She walks on ahead through the wood chips by the chopping stump, leaving me this side of the fence, split in pieces of my own – the part that yearns to be here with her, to stay like this forever, and the part that needs to disappear into a city far away.

Harvard Review