Stillwater Creek

Cover

Praise for Stillwater Creek

Title Page

Copyright

Imprint Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Map: JINGERA TOWNSHIP, 1957

1957

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Q&A WITH ALISON BOOTH

READING GROUP QUESTIONS

Sample: THE INDIGO SKY By Alison Booth

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

RANDOM HOUSE

‘
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
'

GRAHAM GREENE,
The Power and the Glory (1940)

J
INGERA
T
OWNSHIP
, 1957

Ilona's first impression was of light. Light glancing off the water, light sluicing the valley, light shaping the folds of the green hills that tumbled down to meet the sea. A golden light, for the sun was sinking fast. Surely the bus must soon arrive at Jingera. She and Zidra were the only passengers left after a sun-dried woman, wearing a floral dress and a miscellany of string bags, had alighted several miles back. Before long it would be dark but not before they saw the cottage, pray God not before then, for Ilona couldn't bear to reach a new place after night had fallen.

There had been too many arrivals after dark. The first was in that cold Latvian winter at the concentration camp near Riga. And after the liberation, a series of displaced persons' camps, and ultimately her arrival in England. Only in Sydney had she disembarked in daylight, this time with her husband Oleksii and small daughter Zidra, the three of them walking down the ship's gangway, in the harsh morning light of a summer's day.

But she would not dwell on the past when today's journey was looking so promising; when the light was streaming down the valley and illuminating Zidra's face, so that her sallow skin
assumed an unusual radiance. Ilona examined her daughter: only nine years old but already she was striking with that combination of upturned nose, short upper lip and disproportionately high forehead. And the pretty dark curls that were just like those of poor dead Oleksii.

‘Look at the sign!' Zidra pointed to a white sign at the side of the road.
Welcome to Wilba Wilba Shire,
and underneath, in smaller letters,
Drive Carefully.
This was ignored by the driver, who swerved the bus into the next bend in the road.

Ilona peered through the front windscreen, at the road snaking down in front of them. There at last was the town of Jingera, a haphazard collection of weatherboard cottages clinging to the hillside. It was smaller than she'd expected, although the McIntyres, her friends in Sydney whose Jingera cottage she had arranged to rent, had warned her that the place was a bit of a backwater. But full of such friendly people, they'd said, who are crying out for a piano teacher.

‘Just look at the sea, Mama!'

Below the town lay the river, widening into a lagoon that seemed to be connected by the thinnest thread of water to the ocean beyond. Ilona put an arm around Zidra's shoulders. Her face was starting to acquire that pinched look it took on when she was tired.

‘Pickin' up the key from the butcher's shop?' The bus driver twisted his head round to look at them and grinned. ‘Not a bad place, luv. Could be worse, there could be more people!' He restored his glance to the road just in time to negotiate another of the hairpin bends. ‘Cadwallader shuts up at five sharp, so it's lucky we're on time, or youse might've bin campin' under ‘is awning!'

Opening the bus window slightly, Ilona inhaled deeply. The air was fresh and salty and she felt her spirits lift. She had left
Sydney behind, she had left Europe behind. Maybe it would be possible to forget the past and start a new life in Jingera, this sanctuary by the sea. Unclasping her handbag, she felt inside it for the reassuring shape of the Latvian–English dictionary. While it hadn't been needed so far today, she did not know what linguistic challenges the evening would bring.

The bus turned sharply off the main road and into Jingera township. Past a white-painted hotel and a corrugated iron hall, around a war memorial in the centre of an open space ringed by buildings, and at last shuddering to a halt in front of a few shops sheltered by wide awnings. On the fascia of the middle shop was the name she was looking for: ‘Cadwallader's Quality Meats'. They had arrived.

Only after alighting from the bus did she notice the middle-aged man standing on the pavement outside Cadwallader's Quality Meats. Above his head, a large black and white cow, painted on the shopfront window, seemed to hover like a cloud over his thinning dark hair. When he stepped forward to shake her hand, she noticed his slight limp and the newspaper-wrapped package he was holding.

‘Welcome to Jingera,' he said. ‘George Cadwallader's the name.' He clasped her long-fingered hand in his own – a butcher's hand. His fingers were scrubbed and clean. ‘Let me take your suitcases. It's just a short walk from here to the McIntyres.' They asked me to show you how the stove works and the fuse box. And this must be your daughter,' he added, smiling at Zidra. ‘I hope you had a good trip. Bus not too bumpy for you?'

‘It was terrible, especially from Burford,' said Zidra, who was rarely at a loss for words. ‘The bus went really fast round all those zigzag bends. Poor Mama was so frightened!'

Cadwallader laughed.

Taking Zidra's hand, Ilona followed the butcher across the open area in front of the row of shops. Past the war memorial they went, an obelisk covered with a surprising number of names and elevated on a square plinth several steps high; past the post office at the lower corner of the square and into an unkerbed street leading down the hill to the lagoon. Zidra had now become quiet and was gripping Ilona's hand tightly.

Weatherboard cottages lined each side of the road, some of them semi-concealed by hedges, others with no gardens at all so that it was possible to see into the front room without even trying. Please make it a house with a hedge, Ilona thought, for privacy.

The butcher stopped when he reached a gate several hundred yards down the hill. On each side of the gate was a dense glossy-leafed hedge and Ilona sighed with relief. The salty air was overlaid with a scent of something unknown, sweet but not sickly, that might have been from the small white flowers growing on the vine entangled in the hedge.

‘Such
delectable
flowers, Mr Cadwallader!' But from his grin, she knew that
delectable
was not quite the word she was looking for. Later, she would look up its precise meaning. Perhaps she should have used that all-purpose word,
nice
.

‘Call me George,' he said. ‘Don't know what those flowers are. They grow like weeds around here.' After struggling for a moment with the gate, he ushered them through the opening.

A brick path led up to the cottage, or what Ilona supposed was the cottage. It looked more like a support for the vines that tumbled over the verandah roof and fell like swags from the guttering; brilliant orange, trumpet-like flowers growing in bunches. Zidra jumped onto the verandah and bounced up and down on the splintered grey boards that squeaked under her weight. George now had the front door unlocked. Inside, the
hallway reeked of stale air and dust and Ilona could hardly bear the smell after the loveliness of the garden.

‘No one's lived here since the end of last summer,' George explained, as if the neglect were his fault. ‘We don't get too many holiday lets this time of the year, even though September's a mild month here.'

The initial reservations she had melted away when Ilona looked up and saw the wooden fretwork forming an arch halfway down the hall, and the carved shelving running along each side at about picture-rail height. The floorboards, though scuffed and in need of polish, were warm red and of some timber that she had never seen before. She knew then that she could make this place into a home.

At the far end of the hall was the kitchen. A fuel stove occupied most of one wall, and an ice chest and pine dresser stood opposite. On the kitchen table, covered in red-and-white checked oilcloth, sat a black bakelite wireless set. She touched it lightly.

Catching sight of the view from the window next to the stove, she held her breath. There was so much space in front of her, so much space. George was saying something about the ice chest but she couldn't speak, she couldn't listen. Beyond the lagoon, now the colour of pewter, lay a strip of olive-green bushland and beyond that again was the dark blue of the ocean smudging into the paler washed-out blue of the late afternoon sky. It was this view of ocean and bush that lent the McIntyres' cottage a sense of openness. Although the cottage wasn't big, it didn't seem cramped; she couldn't abide confined rooms although that's what she'd lived in for years. Even in Homebush, space had felt restricted. And right outside the kitchen door was another little verandah that overlooked a garden that would be perfect for Zidra to play in. Seated in that
rickety-looking cane chair, Ilona would be able to watch the lagoon and the sky, and she and Zidra would be safe.

Collecting herself, she mumbled some response about the ice chest, and tried to concentrate very hard on what George was explaining; the workings of the wood stove in the kitchen and the location of the septic tank, and the fuse box and the kerosene lamp in case of emergencies, and the days on which the ice man came.

‘My piano will be arriving tomorrow,' she said, once George had finished his instruction. ‘I shall need to find a piano tuner.'

‘There's one in Burford. He fishes here sometimes. He's a reasonable cove.'

‘I want to give piano lessons. I must advertise somehow.'

‘Cherry Bates might be interested. She said only the other day that she wanted to learn the piano.' He bent down in front of the stove and made a slight adjustment to the kindling.

Ilona wondered who Cherry was. It was an unusual name and she knew of no Latvian equivalent. She was about to ask George about her when he continued, ‘She works in the pub. Married to the publican. You could put a notice in the post office window about the lessons. The town isn't as small as it looks. There are more houses along North Road – that's the road next to the pub – and there are some behind the headland. There are farms too, mainly dairy.' At this point he became quite animated, talking at some length about cows and milking and cheese, and even the local abattoir. It would have been better not to hear about that, although she knew that meat was his job, if not his vocation.

Before leaving, he handed her the newspaper-wrapped parcel. ‘Just a few things you might need tonight. Nothing much really.' As if embarrassed by his kindness, he avoided meeting her eye.

After he'd gone, Ilona opened all the windows of the cottage and unwrapped the parcel. It contained half a loaf of bread, butter, a twist of tea, and half-a-dozen sausages. How considerate he was; she hadn't bought any meat when she purchased a few groceries in Bomaderry and she would cook the sausages for their supper.

Opening the door in the front of the stove, Ilona put a match to the kindling. The flames flared and soon the wood was blazing. Mesmerised by the flickering flames, she forgot for a moment where she was. Four months had passed since she'd last lit a fire. That was in the incinerator at the back of the flats where they'd lived in Sydney and several weeks after poor Oleksii's death. She'd decided to burn the shabbiest of his old clothes, the ones that the opportunity shop wouldn't take. For several days she'd agonised about whether or not she should enlist Zidra's assistance with this. It might help her come to terms with her father's death. She had seemed almost unaffected by it, so much so that Ilona had wondered if the girl might be finding it a relief to be without his oppressive presence in the evenings. She no longer withdrew to her little bedroom, as she used to when Oleksii came home from work, but stayed with Ilona in the kitchen, chattering as much to herself as her mother.

In the end Ilona had decided to burn Oleksii's clothes by herself. Late one evening she'd put them into a cardboard box with some newspapers and crept out to the incinerator, a square brick construction a few feet high. A large red globe of a moon had bobbed up over the roofs of the houses behind the flats. Its jauntiness contrasted with the neglected look of the yard. After crumpling up sheets of newspaper, she'd fed them
into the incinerator and piled the clothes on top. One garment she kept out though, a faded blue-and-white-striped shirt, frayed around the neck and cuffs. Raising it to her face, she sniffed: not even the faintest scent of Oleksii remained.

This was the end and her eyes started to fill with tears. Angrily she'd brushed them away and retrieved the matches from the cardboard box. Her hands trembled so much that striking the match proved difficult and it was only at the fourth attempt that the newspaper ignited. Small blue and orange flames licked and crackled around the edges of the paper, and were soon united in a golden plume of fire of such intensity that Oleksii's clothes also began to burn. Onto the top of the pyre she'd flung the blue-and-white-striped shirt; there was no point in being sentimental over an old rag. The flames leapt up several feet into the air. In ten minutes it was all over and only the smouldering embers remained. Soon even these were reduced to a pile of ashes.

But that was all in the past and here she was in the kitchen of the McIntyres' cottage in Jingera, with Zidra hungry and tired, just as she was herself. Picking up the poker, she prodded the burning wood. Surely the stove would soon be warm enough to cook on. She watched the flames flare up and then shut the stove door. After removing a dead fly from the frying pan, she rinsed it at the sink before starting to fry four sausages and then some tomatoes. The stove top was greasy. The place would require a thorough clean-out in the morning and tonight she should make a list of what to buy at the little general store.