Melbourne’s jagged gunmetal skyline was ringed with silt-filled air. As Kate drove towards the city, she wound up the ute window to block out the smell of car fumes. She checked Nell in the rear-vision mirror. Her cheeks slack with sleep, her delicate dark eyelashes resting on pale skin. A halo of white-blonde curls surrounded her little face. Kate glanced in the mirror at her own dark eyes, the eyes of her Irish ancestors. Unlike Nell, she had tanned olive skin and long black hair with a glossy sheen, like a gypsy. It was good she was no longer wandering. She was going home, taking Nell back to where she belonged.
Kate looked ahead. She was getting close to the slate-grey sea and the ship that would take her home. As she gingerly merged with the stream of traffic onto the ring road, Kate pushed in an Adam Brand cassette. The thudding music helped shut out the aggressiveness of her surroundings. The in-your-face billboards, the grotty industrial sprawl, the roaring B-double trucks flying past in the outside lanes. She turned Adam Brand up. His deep cheeky voice made her feel like she was set apart from the city and all that it stood for. She felt country blood in her veins and the energy of her youth. But at the same time she felt old, so much older than the last time she had hurtled along this freeway in the opposite direction … running away from her family. Turning her back on her island home. Trying to escape herself and the tiny speck of life that was growing within her.
As the ship pulled away from the city, the clouds parted for the late-afternoon sun and the bay sparkled bright. Kate squinted to the horizon as gulls hovered overhead. In front of her, Nell clung to the railing, her small head bowed over the drop below, both fearful and exhilarated to see the chop of white water thrown up from the blue-green and to feel the cold sea air on her face. For Kate, the sea smelt of home, and of comfort.
‘The water here’s not as blue as at Bronty, though. Nowhere near as blue,’ Kate explained to Nell.
She conjured up the white crescent bay that fringed her family farm and buried her face in Nell’s soft neck, breathing in her sweet smell. She pictured the house, a hotchpotch construction of white weatherboard and whitewashed stone. At one end of the house the dark-grey roof rose to an angular point, like a capital A. Within this point sat the square eye of the attic window, which looked out over the paddocks and across to the sea. An old-fashioned rose had rambled on the walls for so many years that the house sat half-cloaked in greenery in the summer. Kate wondered how it was going to be, returning to the house that Annabelle had now claimed.
Kate was still reeling from the sudden introduction of Annabelle into their lives after her mother had died. It had happened without consultation. Without consent. Without warning.
But it was all Kate’s own fault. She was the one who’d suggested, six months after her mother’s death, that she and Will should send their father on a cruise. Kate had searched the Net, ordered the brochures. A sharp white ship rising as high as a casino, floating on sparkling blue seas, cruising to a happy land. Kate wanted her father to sail away to that land, and to come home healed. Instead, he’d found Annabelle.
During her mother’s long illness, Kate had watched her father recede from her like a slow tide. As a child, she had run to him with outstretched arms, knowing she would be lifted high with a smile and spun so that the world blurred to the colour of gum trees and dry grass. He’d squeeze the laughter from her and plant kisses on her cheeks. But when her mother’s illness came, and the more Kate grew into a woman, the more Henry pushed his daughter away. He tried to insist she return to boarding school, even though her mother’s prognosis wasn’t good. Kate refused to go. She was staying for Laney, despite what her father said.
Kate took on the roles of nursemaid and cook, and there were days when she felt older than the hills around her. In between changing saline bags that trailed plastic tubes into her mother’s failing veins and washing her mother’s sunken body, Kate would drift back into the kitchen to her Year 11 schoolbooks.
‘Do you have to clutter up the place in here?’ her father would bark at her, hating the way her long dark hair fell so much like her mother’s over her shoulders. Kate would scowl at him, swiping the books from the table and stalk off to her room. Only Will, with his jovial face and great galumphing humour, could coax her out again.
In the years her mother battled, Kate and her father did the same, fighting different demons, hissing behind clenched teeth at each other so Laney couldn’t hear. Will always trying to placate them both in his gentle, kindly way.
It took Kate three years to pass her HSC and it took her mother three years to die. When Kate finished school, a year later than her former classmates, there was no celebratory dinner, no parties, no boys, only a funeral. And then, not long after, the invasion of Annabelle.
Across the water, Annabelle stood on a chair in the kitchen at Bronty, pulling down faded green-checked curtains. The kitchen window looked out over the roadside paddocks of the farm and away to the bleached stretch of sand beyond the dunes. Beyond that lay the sea. Today it was turquoise melding into a deeper blue. Annabelle squinted against the bright beauty of the beach, looking up to grapple with the wooden curtain hooks.
‘These things are so dusty!’ she said to Henry, who stood patiently, holding the chair. He was trying to catch snatches of the stock report that muttered from a radio on the kitchen dresser.
He looked through the half-fallen curtains to the two gnarled old pines that flanked the gateway. Even though he knew Kate was on the boat tonight, he half-expected to see her driving through them any minute. The thought made Henry anxious. And now, knowing he would soon glimpse his granddaughter for the very first time, Henry was feeling even more unsettled. He stared out at the pines, which had been planted by Kate and Will’s great-grandfather, pressed ceremoniously into the earth on the day his first son was born. Their thick, old-man limbs shaded a rusted sign that read Bronty. It was the second generation, Henry’s father, who had hung the sign there, all new and painted white. He’d hung it on the day he brought his bride home. Two years later, their only son arrived in a howling gale so fierce the sign blew down.
‘The first job you did on this place, son,’ Henry’s father used to say, ‘was to re-hang that sign. Your mother said you were too young to go out in the wind, but you were all right tucked up in your pram. Just a couple of days old you were. Out there working with me.’
Henry wondered if he should ask Annabelle to cancel her order for a new sign. He liked the old one. Still, he thought, it was good she was sprucing the place up with new things and new projects. Time never stood still with Annabelle. He couldn’t dwell on the past with her in the house.
Henry, who’d never been on a cruise in his life, first met Annabelle in the long empty corridor of the ship Kate had booked for him. He was searching for his cabin when he saw her. Annabelle had a glossy perfection to her that only city women could achieve. Her long pink nails had tapped the cabin number printed on his boarding ticket, and then she’d extended her delicate finger to indicate the sign on the wall. Her wrists tinkled with tiny sparkling gold charms and pale blue eyeshadow highlighted her large, innocent eyes. She smiled warmly, with pretty painted lips, and the neckline of her soft white shirt revealed a hint of white lace beneath. He’d never met a woman so polished. Her perfume lingered long after she had gone. When Henry had unpacked his things and stepped from his cabin again, he didn’t go out on deck in search of sea air. He went searching for Annabelle, intrigued.
Annabelle looked down at him now from where she stood, barefoot, on the chair and shook her head.
‘I don’t know where Kate thinks we’ll find room for them in this house.’
‘We’ll have to make do. Besides, I think it’s only temporary,’ Henry said soothingly. ‘She told Will she’s thinking of renting office space in town. Though he suggested Kate could eventually set up an office in the attic.’
‘The attic! Oh, Henry, he can’t be serious.’
Henry had been just as unimpressed with the suggestion. He hadn’t visited the loft since before Laney died. There was no way he wanted to stir up his memories again.
He could just hear on the radio that cattle prices were rising and it was getting dry. Perhaps he should sell the steers. Lighten the load before winter. Annabelle tugged at the curtains and cursed. Henry glanced up at her.
He remembered Laney sewing the curtains in this very same kitchen. Her head bent, her long dark hair falling away to expose her pale, smooth-skinned neck. He had touched her there and she’d looked at him and smiled.
Henry watched as Annabelle tossed the curtains to the ground. Then she reached for the ready-to-hang lace curtains that she had just ripped from a plastic packet. She shook them out and they fell like froth.
‘Amy has exams soon and she must study, so she can’t move out of Kate’s old room. And now with Aden home between jobs, we’ll be bursting at the seams!’
Henry, his head inclined to one side to indicate his interest, nodded and frowned. The long-range weather forecast would be on next and Will would be in for lunch soon. He’d make a decision about selling the steers then. They’d have to have a talk about what they should do with the extra people in the house … Kate and her child. Annabelle was right. They couldn’t all pile in on top of each other like this for more than a few nights. Part of him felt an uneasy warmth in knowing he would see his daughter again; another part just felt that old bitterness. A simmering fury that had kept him distant from her these past few years. It was a fury stoked to hide the guilt within him. It was easier for him to block Kate out with simple justifications that he played in his head like a tape on loop. She didn’t want him in her life. She was a grown woman. She’d chosen to go away. She’d deliberately kept the child from him.
Annabelle waved the lace curtain in his direction.
‘And it’s not as if this house is childproof. How am I supposed to provide for a three-year-old? I shouldn’t be expected to look after other people’s children! I’ve done my child rearing.’
‘I’m sure she won’t expect you to look after the child,’ Henry said.
Annabelle forged on. ‘What if she doesn’t find a place to rent in town? William already sprawls his papers all over the place! Oh, Henry! It seems to be endless … trying to get this house in order.’
Henry noticed her voice winding up – like a plane engine about to take off. He reached over and turned off the radio. Then he ran his hand up her slim, tanned leg that was encased in apricot Capri pants, taking in her painted pink toenails.
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said quietly to her. ‘There’s always the old whalers’ cottages. We could fix one of them up for Kate. Get a stonemason in for a quote.’
Annabelle’s cheeks flushed red. ‘They’ve had hay in them for the past thirty years, Henry! You told me that when I suggested them for B&B’s. Besides, I thought renovating here was a priority.’
His daughter had done it again, Henry thought. Turned everything upside down. Upset Annabelle. And she hadn’t even arrived back home yet.
‘Things will sort themselves out,’ he said. ‘We’ll get used to having them about, I’m sure. It’ll just take a bit of time,’ he said, wrapping his arms about her legs and lifting her into the air. ‘Now stop waggling that peachy backside in my face or I’ll have to bite it.’
Annabelle laughed. ‘Stop it, Henry!’
He set her down on the floor and looked at her, forced good-humour crinkling the corners of his eyes.
‘I’d sell a paddock off for you … just so you can have your extensions, and we can fit us all in.’
She reached up and kissed him on his clean-shaven cheek.
‘I know you would. My handsome man from the land.’
As Henry stooped to kiss her, Will sauntered in and cleared his throat. Henry let Annabelle go. Will reached for the kettle and shuffled past them, glancing only briefly at the newly hung curtains.
‘How’s things looking over the back?’ Henry asked.
Will shook his head.
‘Bloody dry. Have to shift the cows in a day or so, start feeding them.’
‘You could get Kate to help,’ Annabelle said.
‘I was thinking Aden could do it. Kate and I will have our work cut out for us here getting the attic sorted out for her office. If we fit it out properly there may even be room for them both to sleep up there.’
‘A three-year-old negotiating that ladder? I don’t think so,’ said Annabelle.
Will looked down to the floor and momentarily shut his eyes. When he looked up, he was smiling broadly at her.
‘This is Kate’s home too. We’ll find a way, won’t we?’ His question was delivered in the lightest of voices, and with the cheeriest of faces. Yet his words sat heavily between them. He saw his dad prickle. Will knew that guilt was eating away inside his dad. Guilt for not helping his daughter when she had most needed it. Shame for sticking his head in the sand over her pregnancy and not going over to the mainland to bring her and the baby home. Will knew his father held all those things within him, yet the truth of them would never be uttered.
‘Who’s for a cuppa?’ he said, reaching for mugs that hung from silver hooks beneath the cupboard. As he did, Amy stalked into the room. Two cords trailed from her ears and into her pocket. The iPod’s silver discs beat out tinny music. She looked sullenly from behind her black square-framed glasses at the drying sandwiches on the table. A burst of late-afternoon sunlight lit up her short spiky hair, tinged with crimson and orange streaks.
‘Hello, darling,’ said Annabelle. ‘How’s the study going?’
Amy pulled a ‘so-so’ face.
‘Hot drink, Amy?’ Will said, waving a cup in her direction.
She shook her head, grabbed an apple and retreated from the kitchen. Will watched her go, then tossed coffee into a cup.
‘Might need a hand later, Dad,’ he said. ‘Need to shift some of the heavier things about in the attic.’
‘Trolley’s in the shed. You could use that,’ Henry said.
‘Fine,’ Will said. Cup in hand, he sat heavily at the kitchen table, and stirred his coffee for some time. He couldn’t wait to walk the coastal paddocks with Kate again and talk about their plans for the place. Plans that had once been talked about by his mother and father, until Laney got sick. Blueprints for a future that were now frozen in time in the attic. Will had just come down from there. The attic ran the entire length of the original section of the homestead and seemed to have a personality all its own. It grumbled its moods when the sun shone too hot, or cracked angrily when frost stung the tin roof. Sometimes, in windy weather, the attic was a loud and boisterous place. On other days it had a stillness, as if it were contemplating the possibility of what it contained – the seeds of their mother’s dreams.
Laney had often taken Kate and Will to play up there, and to share her farming visions with them. She wanted them to learn the family past that was catalogued and contained there. The past that could show them the way ahead. Sometimes Laney would simply take them up on rainy days to listen to the thrashing wetness on the roof, and she would tell them the rain sounded like God was hurling nails down from heaven. They’d lie on the old Persian rug and look up to the naked bulb that dangled from a plastic-coated wire and barely be able to hear their own laughter above the din. The three of them relishing the warm dry attic as the rain teemed down outside, laughing at the most mundane things, like Will’s wiggling socked feet. Above the stacks of clutter was a small window made up of squares of thick uneven glass that blurred the view to the sea. The heavy wooden seed cabinets, their faces labelled in their great-grandmother’s neat hand, watched and seemed to smile at them. These were memories Will carried with him always. He wanted Kate back to share those memories, and to build the future at Bronty. He swigged down his coffee and went outside in search of the trolley.