Thornwood House (17 page)

Bronwyn wandered off to her room, Harry Potter tucked under her arm. When I checked on her later, she was curled on her bed, hugging her book like a ragdoll, lost to the world.

In the watery moonlight, she might have been a princess from a fairytale – her hair fanned across the pillow, kinked by the heat, and her features were serene as an ice carving. Her eyes moved under their lids, as though following the antics of some astonishing dream-spectacle.

I marvelled over how much she’d changed in the last twelve months. She’d shed her baby-faced plumpness, grown taller and
leaner. There was more of the teenager about her, less of the child. Yet so subtle was her transformation, that if I hadn’t been observing her I’d have missed it.

It seemed I wasn’t the only one taking notice. After what I’d learned today, Tony’s withdrawal from his daughter’s life made sense. For so long I’d feared that he was distancing himself from Bronwyn to punish me. Or worse, that he was pulling away from both of us, letting us fade into the past, just as he’d let his early life fade.

How wrong I’d been.

Tony hadn’t been withdrawing from Bronwyn . . . but from the memory of his dead sister. Bronwyn’s resemblance to Glenda had been there all along, of course, but Tony must have noticed the likeness growing stronger with each passing year, until he’d been unable to bear it. Which made me wonder if there was any truth to what Corey had told me. Had Tony argued with his sister the day she died;
could
he have pushed her? Is that why he’d run away from home – to escape the guilt and horror of what he’d done? Was it also why, twenty years later, he’d found it necessary to withdraw from Bronwyn’s life, unable to endure the sight of her face? It pained me that I’d never know.

Adjusting the sheet across Bron’s narrow shoulders, I kissed the top of her head and then crept back to the kitchen.

This part of the house still smelled pleasantly of onions and tomato, and I found it comfortingly ordinary. As I washed and dried the dishes, stacked them in neat piles in the cupboard and folded our pizza boxes into the recycle bin, I tried to pretend that nothing existed beyond these familiar domestic tasks. For a while it worked. There was just the quiet run of the tap, the clink of dishes, the soft call of a boobook from the dark garden outside.

I had a quick shower to cool down, got into singlet and undies and brushed my teeth. Switching off the lights, I padded
down the hallway to my room, climbed into bed. Then tossed and turned, cursing the infernal heat that glued the sheets to my legs and back. My eyes were gritty from lack of sleep, but whenever I tried to close them they kept snapping open to re-check the bedside clock.

Was it really only midnight?

For the first time since arriving at Thornwood I found myself missing the hum of city traffic, the blare of car horns and sirens, the rattle of trams, and the reassuring blaze of streetlamps. Noise, glare, distraction; was that why people flocked to the city? Not for jobs, not for lifestyle . . . not even for the anonymous crowds to lose themselves among – but for the constant never-ending distraction?

Wrestling the sheet off my legs, I flopped back on the mattress. A heat rash burned on my neck and I felt the urge to scratch until I drew blood. Instead, I tried to meditate . . . only to snap awake minutes later, more impossibly strung-out than before.

Finally the dam broke.

Images poured into my mind – a child’s bathing pool full of sky; four small faces crumpled in laughter; a girl with white-blonde plaits and a skinny dark-haired boy with too-large eyes. A tall woman with a kindly face trapped inside the prison of her own house. Human bones dredged from a dam, and rocks sliding down a deadly precipice. People I’d never met began to murmur their secrets. The dead rose up – pleading, cajoling, calling me to listen to stories that I had no desire to hear.

Only one voice was absent.

‘Samuel,’ I whispered into the darkness. ‘Where are you? Why won’t you talk to me?’

The room was stuffy, the air like a furnace. Despite the cool shower, my blood felt on fire. Rolling out of bed, I groped for my slippers and tiptoed down the hall.

The instant I crossed the threshold to the back bedroom, I felt calmer. The voices in my head fell quiet, the dream-rush of images ebbed away. I told myself it had nothing to do with being near the photo of Samuel Riordan; nothing to do with the way his solid presence soothed me . . . and nothing to do with the lonely ache in my ribcage that made me want to wrap myself around a large warm body and forget, just for a little while, that I was alone.

I fell heavily into the sheets. Sneezed a couple of times, curled in a ball and dragged the pillow over my head. When nothing happened, I threw the pillow on the floor and rolled onto my stomach, burying my face in the mattress. I’d wake up with wrinkles, but I didn’t care. Sleep was what I wanted . . . sleep, and the sweet silence of oblivion.

A splinter of awareness in the back of my brain told me I was dreaming, yet in my drowsy state I could have sworn that the man lying beside me in the bed was real.

At first I thought it was Tony; dreams often resurrect the dead. He was sobbing, which is what made me think of Tony. There had been so many nights broken by his nightmares . . . so many nights pieced back together with calming words, cups of tea, back rubs.

But this wasn’t Tony. Tony had been skinny, bony, disarmingly boyish. The man beside me was a solid weight, fleshy, big-boned. And somehow I understood that he wasn’t anguished because he was waking out of a nightmare, but because he had just fallen into one.

‘Samuel . . . ?’

Wrapping my arms around him, I drew him tight, just as I’d once done with Tony, pressing my lips to the top of his head, murmuring comfort. His hair smelled of sunlight and sweat, his skin felt hot.

A coil of my hair fell across his face. The strand was very long, kinked by soft waves that gleamed in the moonlight. I brushed the lock away, letting my fingers linger on his cheek and trail down the side of his neck into the hollow at the base of his throat.

Samuel shivered. ‘Aylish.’

‘I’m here,’ I whispered. The voice wasn’t my own. Or rather it was, but it sounded raspy, as though much time had passed since I’d used it.

Samuel didn’t appear to hear.

I tightened my stranglehold. The heat of him burned like fever against my breasts, scalding the inside of my arms, my belly, my thighs. Yet he shivered, as though a cold wind swept over him . . . as though my touch was made of ice.

The moon slid down the sky. Cicadas sent up their first tremulous chorus, then fell again to silence. Soon dawn would come and that knowledge filled me with dread.

He was slipping away.

Or perhaps it was me, retreating into the place my mother had called the Alcheringa, the Dreaming. I clung tighter, but my arms felt scrawny around his shoulders, slender vines encircling the trunk of a vast river gum. I held him with more force, sending tendrils of myself around him, drawing him near, binding his flesh to me, twining his heart and soul to mine.

‘Aylish,’ he whispered.

‘I’m here, Samuel. I’m here.’

Yet even as I spoke I felt the substance of my body begin to dissolve, like a night mist melting in the sun. I felt my core respond to the pull of something greater and vastly more eternal than either of us; something I could not – dared not – resist.

I clutched him with sudden desperation, fearful of letting go. Fearful that this moment might be our last. A tremor flew across his big body and with a jerking motion he curled away from me, wrapping his arms around his chest as if to close me
out. I pressed from behind, draping my arms over his shoulders, resting my cheek against his back, but it only seemed to make him shiver all the harder.

Night was escaping.

The moonlight faded and I could hear the scratch of leaves against the window. Birds began to chirp awake, serenading the approach of another piccaninny dawn. I drifted mournfully, no longer able to feel the bed beneath me, or the heat radiating from the body of the man beside me. Soon he would become invisible to me . . . as I already was to him.

I nestled closer, one last attempt to cradle him against the tremors, to ease his sorrow. I thought he must be asleep, but then his voice entered the stillness.

‘What have I done?’ he murmured, his voice coloured by an emotion I didn’t understand. ‘God forgive me, what have I done?’

S
till dark. The night outside, silent. A delicate breeze wafted in the window, cool and delicious with the scent of lilac. I reached across the bed, my palm smoothing over the sheet, seeking but not finding.

The emptiness confused me.

A moment ago he’d been real. Solidly real. Now, the cool expanse of space jarred me, dislodging me from the dream world into the thin atmosphere of actuality. I remembered where I was: the old sleigh bed in the back room. My gaze flew to the wall. Samuel’s photograph was a hazy rectangle trapped within its ghostly frame. I couldn’t see him from where I lay, it was too dark. I could still feel him, though: the sleeping weight of his limbs, the warmth of his skin, the soft fuzz of chest hair, the quiet thump of his heart –

Rolling myself into the quilt, I burrowed deeper in the bed. Sneezed a couple of times, then groped in vain for a hanky. Ridiculous to feel so shaken by a dream. A foolish dream brought on by talk of accidents and murder, by my constant re-reading of Aylish’s letter. Yet it had seemed so real, as though it wasn’t a dream at all – but a memory.

I found my hanky and blew my nose, then flopped onto my back and lay staring at the ceiling.

I’d been sixteen when Aunt Morag died. She’d gone quietly in the night, stealing away without so much as a murmur. I’d
found her the next morning, her body cold and rigid. So small. I’d always thought her a large woman, robust and tall as a man. The morning I found her I saw how mistaken I’d been. It was odd to see her lying there so still, her waxy eyelids resting shut. Her body deflated now that the largeness of her persona had gone elsewhere.

When I was little, her fleshy arms had sheltered me, her stories had chased my nightmares, her cackling laughter had filled the emptiness that always seemed to hang around after my father’s death and my mother’s desertion.

Now, as I lay in the quiet darkness of the back bedroom, the warm lilac-scented air drifting through the window reminded me so much of Aunt Morag that I longed to be a child again, snuggled in her arms, slipping easily, and so eagerly, from the chaos and disappointment of the waking world and into the tranquil haven of my dreams.

My eyelids fluttered half-mast.

A lilting voice entered my darkness. A man’s voice. With it came the scent of wildflowers, of sun-warmed skin and salty sweat. The weight of a warm body nearby, and me unable to stop myself reaching for him, my lips forming the shape of his name . . .

Samuel
.

I struggled upright, gasping. Rolling to the edge of the bed, I stood shakily. When had it become morning? Hazy dawn light trickled through the windows. An orange sun rode the distant hills, burnishing the sky with gold clouds.

I went to the dressing table and peered into the mirror. My face was chalky, except for my cheeks which flamed crimson. I’d bitten my lips so hard they were the deep blood-red of winter roses. My eyes shone in a way that made me uncomfortable. The sensible woman I’d worked so hard to become was gone. In her place, a wild-eyed stranger.

Why was I drawn to this room night after night, like an addict craving her next fix? Was I really that lonely? Had my life
become so vacant that I was clutching at dreams for emotional fulfilment? Or had being in this old house dislodged something within me that was now struggling to get out?

Disjointed sounds drifted along the hallway from the kitchen. Cups clattered, a chair scraped the floorboards. Bronwyn was up and about, she must be wondering where I was. The radio’s muffled chatter worked on my nerves, and I knew the fragile bubble of my dream would not survive long in the harsh light of day.

Already it was receding like an outgoing tide. I tried to draw it back, tried to hold tight to the sweetness, to the memory of the man I’d clung to in sleep, his lilting voice, the intoxicating scent of his skin and hair, his solidly reassuring nearness.

But dreams were no match for the waking world; in the end I had to let it go.