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A family full of secrets…and one girl who must survive.
Sixteen-year-old Alison Brennan’s mother, Bernadette, is an agoraphobic hoarder, and her father Harry seems to have no past. Struggling every day, Alison seeks the help of a school counsellor.
When an old homeless man is found dead in a Melbourne park, Alison's life changes. Somehow, the man's death is connected to her family and the Polish Home Army.
Fighting for her future, can Alison unravel the mystery of her family and the dead man, and find a way to place her trust in others again?
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
1. Stella Goodall
2. Alison Brennan
3. Leo Brennan
4. Rod Wilding
5. Alison Brennan
6. Colin Brennan
7. Alison Brennan
8. Bernadette Brennan
9. Trent Grierson
10. Colin Brennan
11. Alison Brennan
12. Alison Brennan
13. Leo Brennan
14. Trent Grierson
15. Colin Brennan
16. Jossie Wallachia
17. Trent Grierson
18. Bett Asher
19. Trent Grierson
20. Jossie Wallachia
21. Trent Grierson
22. Alison Brennan
23. Alison Brennan
24. Harry (Henryk Stanley)
25. Trent Grierson
26. Jossie Wallachia
27. Leo Brennan
28. Alison Brennan
29. Colin Brennan
30. Alison Brennan
31. Colin Brennan
32. Alison Brennan
33. Jossie Wallachia
34. Bett
35. Colin Brennan
36. Alison Brennan
37. Stella Goodall
38. Leo Brennan
39. Alison Brennan
40. Colin Brennan
41. The Age
42. Harry (Henryk Stanley)
43. Leo Brennan
44. Alison Brennan
45. Leo Brennan
46. Bernadette Brennan
47. Colin Brennan
48. Leo Brennan
49. Alison Brennan
50. Colin Brennan
51. Colin Brennan
52. Alison Brennan
53. Colin Brennan
54. Leo Brennan
55. Bernadette Brennan
56. Colin Brennan
57. Alison Brennan
58. Colin Brennan
59. Alison Brennan
60. Leo Brennan
61. Jossie Wallachia
62. Trent Grierson
63. Alison Brennan
64. Alison Brennan
65. Alison Brennan
References
About the Author
Copyright (C) 2021 Kath Engebretson
Layout design and Copyright (C) 2021 by Next Chapter
Published 2021 by Next Chapter
Edited by Manuscript Appraisal Agency
Cover art by CoverMint
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.
For Samuel, Reilly, Samara, Rishi, Jesse, Eyla and Lana
She stepped into my office and looked around.
Later I would learn that this was a habit of hers. She took in the details of spaces.
Today was the first day back at school after the summer holidays, and already the sun beat with a headachy glare against the window. I’d drawn the blind, and warmed some drops of sandalwood oil in a burner. The irises I’d bought on the way to work stood stiffly in a vase on my desk. Their pointy sapphire buds would open by the afternoon.
The office was in the original sandstone building at the front of the school, and its north-facing window framed hectares of green playing fields.
In my first week here, I had consigned the dingy school-issue brown chairs and stained yellow rug to a remote storeroom. At the Salvos in Glenferrie Road I found two heavy, seventies style armchairs. They were wide and solid, big enough to curl your legs up, and to support your back and neck. Joe, the caretaker, collected them in his van and wrestled them inside, dabbing at his sweaty face with a big handkerchief. They were now covered in a soft, sky-blue fabric.
From home I brought the faded circular mat from my study. It was thinning in places but it had a lovely traditional design of interlinked flower-like splotches of rich cobalt and mauve. At the same Salvos store I found a kitschy, fake-marble, art-deco coffee table in a wavy rectangular shape. Its blue-grey undertones picked up the blue of the chairs. Against the back wall was my desk, again standard issue, and it held my computer, diary, a telephone and current files. It wasn’t the main character in the room.
Under the window there was a low fridge where I kept cold water, and on top was a jug and some mugs for tea and coffee. There was one framed print — a 1950s watercolour of the curve of the Yarra, east of Princes Bridge, looking towards the city. Just the one print. The boys and girls I saw in this room didn’t need to endure happy snaps of my family.
Alison Brennan.
I knew from her file that she was sixteen. She was of medium height, slim and athletic. Her long, glossy, brown hair was tied back with the regulation red and white ribbons. She was very pale, obviously nervous. The paleness emphasised the unusual blue, almost navy, of her eyes. Her school dress was freshly pressed, and she wore her white socks and school shoes with the easy grace of someone who didn’t know she was beautiful.
‘Good morning, Alison. Please sit down.’
I brought two glasses of water to the table and pushed one towards her. I noticed her looking at details — the straight, neat irises, the print, the colourful rug. She took the water in both hands but didn’t drink. I wondered if she regretted making the appointment.
‘So, Alison, Year Eleven?’
She nodded.
I knew from her file that she was a good student, a good all-rounder really. Her main strengths were in the humanities, but she kept up in Maths and Science. She was in the middle school girls’ swimming team. There were no prefect or SRC positions listed on her file, but she had never been in trouble — no suspensions, disciplinary meetings or concerned letters to her parents.
Her school fees were paid by her grandfather, Judge Colin Brennan. I knew him by sight from his attendance at the annual Parent Information evenings, at which I was obliged to speak, and I recalled that he was rather formidable.
That was all. In her four years at the school, Alison had never drawn attention to herself.
It was difficult to get past her nervousness. She held the glass of water close, like a shield.
‘How can I help you, Alison?’ I sipped my water and waited until the silence became too heavy. ‘You have two big years ahead. Are you worried about the workload?’ It was a common concern at this time of the year.
‘Yes,’ she said, very softly.
‘What worries you about it? You’ve always done well at school, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, but it’s more important now. I have to get a good ATAR score. I have to get into uni.’
Her vehemence was surprising. At the beginning of Year Eleven, most students didn’t talk about getting into university as if their entire life depended on it. The options were still fluid.
‘But that’s possible; your marks have always been good.’
More silence, then again, ever so softly, she practically whispered, ‘I can’t study at home.’
She looked ashamed, as if she had blurted out something sacrilegious. Her face was red. She stood up suddenly and walked towards the print on the wall, standing with her back to me, examining it.
‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ I remarked.
‘Yes, it’s restful. It looks as if it was a hot day, something like today.’
‘Melbourne before Southbank and the Casino.’ I sounded inane, even to myself. I waited for her to sit down again.
‘Why can’t you study at home? Is it too noisy? Too crowded?’
‘It’s crowded all right,’ she muttered. She stared at the floor.
Again I waited. I knew that she had no brothers or sisters.
Finally she looked up, looked at me directly. She seemed to have decided that she would let me help, but I could see that she had to dredge it out of herself. She’d take my help for now, but if I wasn’t careful she’d close down.
‘You see, Mrs Goodall … um, well … it’s my parents.’
Again she blushed. Was it shame, embarrassment, or something else?
‘They’re not like other people.’
‘Oh?’ I queried, puzzled and eager to learn in what way.
She took a deep breath. ‘Our house is very dirty. More than dirty, it’s filthy. There are fleas, cockroaches and rats. My parents never throw anything away and they never clean. There’s rubbish piled up everywhere, in some places to the ceiling. There’s nowhere to sit, no table to eat at. Everything is covered high with junk. Even my room. They even use my room to store their junk. I have to climb over it to get to my bed.’
She began to cry then, big sobs, as if her resentment, confusion and anger had burst a dam.
I put a box of tissues on the table close to her. ‘They’re hoarders?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I’ve read about it. It’s a mental illness. Not that Mum and Dad understand that. They’re embarrassed about it, but they don’t seem to be able to help themselves. It’s disgusting, and … dangerous.’
‘How long has it been like this?’
‘All of my life, but I hide it. I never have friends at home. I’m too embarrassed. The neighbours talk about us. You can’t see the house for the weeds and junk in the front yard.’
She’d stopped crying now, but her eyes were red and swollen.
I could imagine how hard this was for her. At sixteen, girls were constantly in and out of each other’s homes, sleeping overnight, making snacks in the kitchen, studying, calling friends, watching TV and movies, giggling in front of social media.
‘We can’t cook in the kitchen because there are cockroaches in the oven, and the stovetop is used as another shelf for junk. I know there’s rotting food in the fridge because I can smell it, but I can’t bear to open it. The hot water service broke down two years ago and my parents are too embarrassed to get someone into fix it, so we don’t have hot water. The bath is full of rubbish like everywhere else, and the shower is blocked. When you flush the toilet it floods on to the junk on the floor. Everything smells. The washing machine is full of mould.’
I had to conceal my horror. I didn’t want to scare her off. ‘How do you eat and keep clean?’
‘I work out at the gym most mornings, and I have a shower there. I get a coffee and toast at the gym, and then I come to school. I buy lunch at school, and for dinner we get takeaway. The litter just gets added to the pile. We haven’t put the bins out for over a year. So yeah, there’s so many rats?’ She was crying again. ‘I’ve even been bitten by rats, and every day I have new fleabites. They’re in the beds and in all the rubbish.’
‘How do you keep your clothes clean?’ I asked. She was immaculate.
‘Once a week I take all my washing to the laundromat. I dry it and press it there. There’s one cupboard up high in my room where I can keep my clothes. It’s the only one in the house that’s not full of rubbish.’
‘Sheets? Towels?’
‘I wash my own once a week.’
‘Sorry for all the questions. It helps if I have some details. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘How did you manage when you were younger? When you couldn’t go to the laundromat or the gym by yourself?’
‘I didn’t manage. But I thought it was normal. I never went to other houses. It wasn’t until Grade Six that I began to realise how different our house was from other peoples’. I must have smelled. I had fleas in my hair.’ She touched her shiny hair, remembering. ‘I had a friend that year, a Vietnamese girl. I went to her house a lot, and I picked up things from her — how to wash my hair, to have a shower every day, how to keep my clothes clean. She never judged me, and never asked questions. Her name was Lo-an. Then she went to a different high school and we lost touch.’
I didn’t know what to say. Now I was the one to stand, to walk about, and look through a chink in the blind to brilliant red and white geraniums in beds along the path that led to the playing fields.
What an effort she has to make, I thought, to come to school clean and fresh, her hair brushed, her clothes pressed, her socks white and her shoes shiny. She has to keep up the charade of a normal life with her classmates and teachers, and now she has the VCE workload to contend with.
With my back to her, I indulged for a second a wild fury with her parents. But my feelings were not the point. I had to help her to find ways to cope in that horrible environment.
‘See what I mean about getting a good ATAR? If I can get into a uni in the country, maybe Gippsland, Bendigo, even Wollongong or Armidale in New South Wales, I can move away and live in student accommodation.’
I sat down again, and faced her. I resisted taking her hands. It was not my job to be motherly.
‘Don’t get the wrong impression, Mrs Goodall. You know, they’re great parents in lots of other ways. They’re kind, and they’re very proud of me. I know they love me. They just don’t cope with life. I don’t know why.’ She hesitated, and then challenged me, clear-eyed. ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’
‘Of course not. We’ll work on this together, Alison.’
I didn’t tell her even half of it.
I didn’t tell her about Grandpa, about how I hadn’t seen him for four years because of the fight he had with Mum last time he came to our house. It was at the end of Grade Six. It was a Saturday, and he turned up without telling them. When he saw the house, he went crazy.
He yelled at Mum. ‘What’s wrong with you, Bernadette? How can you live like this? What about Alison’s safety?’
That was the first time I realised that our house was dangerous, as well as dirty and smelly.
‘One dropped match and it could all go up,’ Grandpa bellowed.
I thought about running away to hide in the high weeds in the backyard, but it was like I was nailed to the floor. Grandpa was very tall and scary.
Mum just stood there, twisting her hands, fiddling with her hair. You could tell she was terrified.
Grandpa seemed really puzzled. ‘I don’t understand it, Bernadette,’ he said more softly. It was like he was talking to a naughty child caught playing in the mud. ‘I can see how it might happen with that useless blighter you live with, but you weren’t brought up like this.’
I didn’t understand it then. All I knew was that Mum and Dad would never let anyone into the house.
But I now knew that they needed help, not yelling. They didn’t know how to be any other way.
I didn’t know how, but Grandpa had found out that Mum and Dad hadn’t enrolled me in a secondary school. That was why he came over. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that they had to make calls, visit the schools in the area, and make a choice. All the other kids had been talking for months about where they’d go. The parents talked about it all the time too, standing at the school gate, competing with each other.
‘Oh, Melanie’s going to Mc Robb, you know. Yes, she’s so bright; they offered her a place right away.’
Or ‘Christopher is going to Scotch of course; all the boys in the family go there.’
But Mum and Dad never saw any other parents. It was just the three of us, a little human triangle, hidden away in our dirty house.
Grandpa went ballistic when he found out that I wasn’t enrolled anywhere. ‘I’ll have to find her a school, I suppose. It’s far too late for any of the decent Catholic girls schools. We’ll have to take what we can get now.’
That’s how I ended up at this big co-ed college on St Kilda Road. Grandpa knew the Principal. Apparently he was the son of one of the judges Grandpa worked with before he retired.
Anyway, that particular day he took Mum and me to a motel. I didn’t know where Dad was; he disappeared when Grandpa started yelling. Grandpa got cleaners into the house to shovel out the rubbish. He sent a plumber to fix the blocked shower and kitchen sink, and a handyman to put the cupboard doors back on. He got a gardening company to throw out the rubbish in the front and back yards and to cut down the weeds.
On the Monday he enrolled me in school and took me to get my uniform, books and stationery. He hardly said anything during all of this. His face looked really angry, but when he dropped me at home he kissed me and told me to ring him about anything, any time that I wanted. Then he went away without saying goodbye to Mum and Dad, and we hadn’t seen him since.
That was four years ago.
It was good in the house for a month or two, then the rubbish started to pile up again.
During my meeting with Mrs Goodall, she asked me to write a list of places I could go to, to study. And she said that she was going to arrange for me to use the school library at weekends.
Writing the list made me think of Grandpa. He told me I could phone him, but I never had. It would seem like I was taking sides with him against Mum and Dad. But I kept remembering the house at Golden Beach. It was his holiday house, although he lived there now since he retired. I used to go there a lot when I was in primary school. He’d pick me up in his big car and we’d always get hamburgers along the way.
The house was like a huge box on stilts. You climbed steep steps at the back, and when you walked in all you could see was ocean. Grandpa never drew curtains or blinds. The light or the dark just came right in. I used to love standing at the big front window watching the waves march in like soldiers in a battle, and then falling over as if it was all a big joke. Grandpa told me that if I was a bird and flew directly across that ocean I would come to Tasmania. Sometimes at home I would imagine that I was that bird, and that I could fly for days over the ocean to land in a new place, clean and green and sunny.
I hadn’t been to Grandpa’s house since he had that fight with Mum.
Mrs Goodall wanted us to meet once a week. She said we would work out some ‘strategies’ and make sure that there were ‘appropriate’ places for me to study. She used all this counsellor-type language.
She also asked me to talk to Mum and Dad about respecting my ‘private space’ in my bedroom. She said that I would have to be firm with them, but I had a right to have a tidy, neat place where I could study.
She wanted me to tell Mum and Dad that they couldn’t put any more of their stuff in my room, and to ask them for help in moving out the rubbish that was already there. She asked me if I felt comfortable talking to Mum and Dad about it, and I said not really, but I’d do it. I was going to do it before I met her next time.
At the end of our meeting, she asked me how I felt. I could feel that my eyes were puffy from crying, but what I liked about her was that she wasn’t all clammy and motherly, putting her arms around you, and getting too close. She just pushed the box of tissues towards me and listened. That was the best thing — she listened.
How did I feel about telling her?
I said that I was relieved, and that was true, but I didn’t tell her that something inside me was shrivelling up in horror, now that I had told her our family’s worst, deepest secret.
The old man’s a bully.
He terrorised Bernadette, made it obvious that she wasn’t the daughter he’d hoped for. She was always withdrawn; she hid behind our mum. But it was the year I was at Melbourne University, when I was nineteen and she was twenty-one, that the agoraphobia took over.
She went out less and less, and eventually refused to go anywhere unless Mum went with her. She hid in her room, in that big, cold house. She read, wrote in her diary, watched soap operas on television, shuffled around doing chores, and collected junk. She seemed to have decided that that was going to be her life, and for years she clung to Mum as a stranded sailor might cling to an upturned boat. Then Mum died and Harry rescued her, or so it must have seemed to Bernie.
By fourteen years of age, I knew that I was gay, but nothing coerced me to reveal that to ‘the Judge’ — our dad. It was strange that I couldn’t admit such a basic fact about myself, but back then it was still a stigma, and in a Catholic family like mine, it was considered a serious sin. It would have been hard for anyone who didn’t grow up in that house to understand how deeply Catholic it was. Even my name, Leo, came from the Judge’s favourite Pope, Leo XIII, champion of workers’ rights and unions, but also defender of the right to private property and free enterprise. Old Leo was the Judge’s hero.
I couldn’t talk about being gay at school either. It was a bastion of Catholic conservatism, and the priests and other boys had names for boys like me. So I played football and cricket, and I laughed at fag jokes. Sometimes at lunchtime, I escaped into the art studio and took down the heavy books of paintings from their high shelf. I pored over the colours and shapes, lost myself in the harsh landscapes, the gentle watercolours, the dreamlike impressionists. I was mesmerised by the greens, greys and blues of outback Australia, and the swirling shapes and colours of the abstracts. Recalling those magical paintings helped me to sleep at night.
Art was considered fine until the end of Year Ten, when the Judge decreed that I was to study serious subjects that would help me to get into Law. It was an article of faith that I would follow him into Melbourne University, and not go to one of those modern, ‘lefty newcomers’ that he scorned. I wanted to be a good son. Bernie had disappointed him, so he focused his authority on me. I let him; indeed I craved his approval. The smallest nod of his head in recognition of some achievement could keep me going for days.
I separated myself from Mum. I couldn’t admit how much I wanted and needed her. She brought hot chocolate to my room every night and always hesitated to leave, wanting to talk, but I brushed her off.
‘Everything alright, darling?’
‘Yes, Mum, everything’s fine.’
Then she’d kiss me. She’d tell me that she loved me, and despite the wall I’d built between us, I waited nightly for her declaration.
So I excelled academically, captained the senior football team in my final year, pretended I was interested in girls, and late at night drifted to sleep to dreams of soft-limbed boys from school.
I went to Melbourne University, intent on taking a path through the city’s best law firms, and securing a seat on the bench, replicating my father’s life. I was too caught up in it all to see that it couldn’t last.
One day, stepping into the shower, preparing to put on my armour for another day, I was hit by a tidal wave of darkness and futility. My defences crumbled in an instant. I couldn’t turn on the tap, couldn’t do anything except fall against the wall and slide to the floor.
I curled into a foetal position, reduced to helplessness. I sobbed quietly at first, and then I lost my cultivated control. The sobbing became a howl, and the howl became a scream. I banged my head on the floor, didn’t care what happened, how much noise I made. I didn’t know if I was there for hours or minutes. All I knew was that I was looking into a fathomless darkness that I couldn’t escape. In a perverse way, I wanted it to reach up its slimy tentacles and suck me in.
I was in hell.
The cleaner found me. She was a Filipina, much coveted for her skills by the matrons of Toorak, and given to expletive-laden scorn at their condescension. She covered my nakedness, cradled my head on her lap, and rocked me with lullaby words.
Summoned from one of her committees, Mum called an ambulance, and a Crisis Assessment Team took me to the Melbourne Clinic. I spent five months there, numb among other sedated shadows. I was cared for by a white-haired psychiatrist, a death camp tattoo just visible on his forearm. With infinite compassion he took my psyche apart, as one might disassemble a child’s toy, and put it back into something recognisable and authentic.
The Judge visited me periodically in the clinic, but always had to leave quickly; he was very uncomfortable while there. Mum came often. We would sit in the sun, or in the corner of the library, not always talking. Towards the end, when I was almost ready to leave, we would go to Victoria Street for a bowl of noodles.
That was when we found each other again.
One day, over a pot of tea in a tiny Vietnamese restaurant, I finally told her that I was gay. I watched her eyes. No change.
She picked up my hand from the plastic tablecloth and kissed it. That was all. She knew and she didn’t care.
The Judge offered me money to convalesce in Europe. He thought that once I was over my foolish breakdown, I would resume my destined path — as if I could pick it up like a suitcase I had put down for an hour or so. But there was no going back. I took a quarter of the money he offered and lost myself in India, another displaced white man in cheap drawstring pants, ragged T-shirt and dirty sandals.
I merged into India’s scurrying, surging masses. I lived in hovels, or in a corner of someone’s room, and I ate rice and dhal from street stalls. When Mum sent money for my birthday, I bought my first real camera, strapping it to my body when I slept and when I pushed through the streaming crowds. The camera was my passport to a longed for life of the imagination.
From Mumbai, I travelled north by train and photographed sari-clad women emerging with radiant faces from the sacred waters of the Ganges. During the mad exuberance of the Holi festival, I filled my viewfinder with images of joyous Hindus covered in multi-coloured powders. At the Golden Temple Pond in Amritsar, my camera captured the moment that the morning sun turned the holy waters bronze, as a turbaned Sikh bathed lost in meditation. As my guru and guide, I adopted Krishna the god of youth, music, courage and love and had his child-like image tattooed on my chest.
I learnt to take photographs by watching and waiting — waiting for the exact play of light on water, for the very moment a smile broke across a child’s face, for the instant the setting sun dropped behind a mountain. In a mosque in Mumbai at the end of Ramadan, I photographed rows of Muslim men bent over in prayer. Their straight lines of reverence, their discipline, and their indifference to distractions, filled me with wonder. I had never experienced such enthrallment with the entity I had been taught to call God.
With each photograph my happiness grew, and little by little I became visible to myself again.
Eventually, I was ready to go home. I wanted to see Mum and to tell my story, my real story, to the Judge. I didn’t return to the Toorak mansion, but lived in a shabbily comfortable share house in Camberwell while I found my life. I began my photography business tentatively, doing favours for relatives of friends, taking snaps of chocolate-stained little faces at children’s birthday parties. Whenever I could, I roamed city streets with my camera, documenting graffiti before it disappeared, trying to expose the beauty of grungy lanes and the juxtaposition of skyscrapers with bluestone cobbles. I would go to the beach or into the bush to practise with my camera, mastering the art of watching and waiting.
When one of my photos — red and gold autumn leaves in the Dandenong hills — won a prize at a local gallery, I began to call myself a photographer.
Trent and I fell in love by accident. He was the bulky, bearded best man at a friend’s wedding and I was the fidgety photographer, bothering everyone for a spontaneous shot. We thought we were as different as two people could be, but long after the bridal pair had left to a round of tipsy cheers, we talked, as waiters cleared around us.
Our love was a comfortable, ordinary thing. We rode our bikes by the Yarra, hiked in the country, me lugging my camera, argued about football, and ate at small, local restaurants. We knitted out lives together like two sleeves of one of those thick, warm jumpers you threw on against the Melbourne nights.
When we knew that we wanted to be together forever, and we moved into our rented cottage in Port Melbourne, the cottage we eventually bought, I knew it was time to put some organisation into my business. My website said it all.
LB Photography: Every imaginable celebration: weddings, divorces, christenings, birthdays, bar and bat mitzvahs, anniversaries, graduations; I cover them all, anywhere, at any time. I will help you to make your occasion joyous and memorable.
At the Esplanade market on St Kilda’s foreshore, I sold my other photographs, those I took in the bush, or in the city streets, or trudging across sand dunes to the beach. I was always sending my photos to outback and travel magazines, hoping for a commission that would take me away into the Australian landscape, where my camera could record its colours and moods, and where I could again feel the freedom I felt in India.
I knew I was like the Judge. I was tall like him, and I had the thick, blond hair that he had when he was younger. I talked like him, with the same vocal timbre and inflections, and used the same kind of vocabulary. But I hoped I was kinder and less hasty to judge others, just as Mum was.
I rang the Judge every Sunday to check on him. I was going to insist on my existence. I visited Bernie, dragged myself into that stinking house and tried to make her talk to me.
It was me who told the Judge that they hadn’t enrolled Alison in a secondary school. Someone had to. Bernie wouldn’t leave the house, and poor dull Harry didn’t know what to do.
I thought about Alison all the time; I adored her. Whenever I could, I extricated her from that frightful house and brought her here for one of Trent’s pastas or roasts. We talked about everything — except her parents. She was intensely loyal.
It was probably time that we drove down to see the Judge, although he was rude to Trent last time we went. He mellowed when he saw the bottle of merlot Trent had brought. The old hypocrite! Chester dug up one of his tomato plants.
‘Get that bloody dog out of my garden,’ he bellowed.
Chester was a Jack Russell. They had to dig — it was a moral obligation.
So we planned to go there at Easter, even knowing that the Judge wouldn’t be happy to see us.
I thought I’d seen everything.
I had worked for local councils in Melbourne for twenty years, but I only started with the Yarra Council a few months ago, so I didn’t know the house. This summer was a scorcher — one of the hottest on record for the state — so we were doing spot checks for fire risk areas, overgrown yards, rubbish lying around. The last thing we wanted was a fire in this densely populated suburb.
The call came from a neighbour who said he’d made complaints about this particular dwelling before. He was especially worried now, he said, because he’d seen one of the inhabitants smoking and discarding butts in long, dry grass in front of the house.
So I went there with the council literature on fire prevention and safety. If necessary, we’d get machinery in to slash the long grass and trim tree branches away from the electrical cables.
But this house was one out of the box.
Overgrown trees obscured the windows of the house. A wooden picket fence had fallen in on itself, so you had to scramble over it, and the tinder dry weeds in front of the house were waist-high in places. Fire would rip through it.
I made my way to the front door through piles of rubbish. Broken bicycles, an old TV, furniture blasted by heat and rain, the body of a rusted car stripped of its parts, an upended child’s swing, piles of smelly household rubbish buzzing with flies.
I felt sick at what I might find, even though I’d been through this kind of thing before. I was a believing man, and at times like these my impulse was to send out a prayer. ‘Please God, don’t let there be kids here.’
The door wasn’t locked because the handle had come off, but something behind the door prevented me from pushing it inwards. I knocked. No response. I knocked again. Then there was a shuffling behind the door, a sliding, falling noise, like things being pushed out of the way. I then heard a female voice.
‘Who is it? We’re not interested in what you’re selling.’
‘I’m not selling anything, Ma’am. It’s Rod Wilding from the Yarra Council. I’m here to advise you on fire prevention. If you’ll open the door I can show you my ID.’
‘No, go away, we’re alright with fire prevention.’
‘Well, no Ma’am, I’m afraid you’re not. Your front yard is a fire hazard. You’ll need to clear it right away. If you’ll open the door and talk to me, I can show you what needs to be done.’
‘Go away.’
‘Is anyone else in the house with you, Ma’am?’
I heard a male voice say, ‘What’s going on?’ And then the door was dragged halfway open. He was tall, broad and unsmiling. Suspicious.
The woman hid behind him. I got the impression of someone short and plump, and despite the heat, she was wearing a long-sleeved cardigan. The smell from the house rushed at me. It was a mixture of rotting food, mould, all kinds of thing I couldn’t name.
I held up my ID. ‘Rod Wilding from the council.’
‘What do you want?’
‘You’re going to need to clear around your house, Sir. This is the worst fire season in years. We’re encouraging all residents to do everything they can to reduce risk. Here are some council pamphlets that will inform you about the fire safety by-laws.’
He made no move to take them, but stepped across to shield the inside of the house from view. Before he did I caught a glimpse of high piles of paper and litter, and similar jumbles of rubbish as in the front yard.
He wanted to get rid of me.
‘Yeah, mate, I know it needs doing. Been putting it off. I’ll get on to it. Thanks for the reminder. By the end of the week, it will be done.’
I didn’t believe him, but I’d done what I had to do. ‘How many people live here, Sir?’
‘Only me and the missus.’
‘Good. I’ll give you a few days then come back.’ I turned back towards the street and stumbled again over the broken fence. Just as I was about to start my car, someone else went in the way I’d come out, into that firetrap of a house.