Winter Read online

  I’d thought that once I got here it would all be perfect. My problems would be over.

  No such luck. There I was, acting like I was still at the Robinsons’. Within two hours of getting off the train I’d gone straight back into tantrum territory.

  Maybe there was a better way of getting what I wanted. But if there was, I didn’t know about it. No-one had taught me. It was one of those times I felt bitter about not having parents. I felt like I’d grown up without guide posts, without a street directory. How did other people solve their problems, convince others to let them do stuff? The Robinsons didn’t really count. They were so old and they hardly talked to each other, let alone to me. They seemed like they had everything they wanted anyway—for the way they lived. Wasn’t much fun for a kid. But they had their antique furniture and their car and their afternoon teas and the tennis club, and Mrs Robinson loved shopping. They didn’t need ways to solve problems, because for them a big problem was missing garbage night, or having a stain on the upholstery of the Audi.

  When I started my campaign to leave school and come back to Warriewood, they were like, ‘What is happening here? Who is this alien invading our house?’

  The scene with Sylvia had been like the Robinsons revisited.

  ‘I want to sleep in the homestead.’

  ‘You can’t do that. There’s no furniture.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Look, Winter, it’s not possible. There’s no bed even.’

  ‘I’ll sleep on the floor.’

  ‘Well, that’s just ridiculous.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit if it’s ridiculous or not.’

  ‘We’ve got a nice room for you here. The bed’s all made up, and dinner’s nearly ready.’

  ‘I told you, I’m not sleeping here. I’m sleeping in the homestead.’

  ‘You can’t sleep there on your own. Just stay with us for a few days and we’ll see if we can sort something out.’

  At that point I picked up my bag and started for the door.

  ‘Winter, where are you going?’

  ‘Where do you think?’

  ‘No, look, wait a minute. This is just crazy. Honestly, Winter, this is not the way to do things. In the morning I’ll see if Ralph can move a bed in and then perhaps you can camp there for a night, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘I’m staying there tonight and every night. I’m back for good.’

  I opened the door and went out into the cool evening air. It was dark outside. Really dark. I could hear Sylvia’s voice. ‘Ralph, do something. Stop her.’

  I snapped. I stood there in the blackness. I screamed back at them. The one thing I’d promised myself I wouldn’t say. The one thing that was unforgivable.

  ‘This is my property and I’ll do what I want.’

  There was a silence inside. I wondered if I’d made both of them disappear. In that blackness anything was possible.

  Then Ralph came out. He went to take my bag but I wouldn’t let him. I backed off, half a dozen steps.

  ‘I was just going to carry it there for you,’ he said mildly.

  ‘I can carry it myself,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’ll get the ute and bring a bed down.’

  ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

  It was quite a business. We had to fetch the ute from a garage then unlock the barn and go up into the loft and drag out a mattress and four different sections of a bed. We got it into the homestead, into my old bedroom, then Ralph realised he’d forgotten a screwdriver, so it was back to the barn to get that.

  When he said ‘Now how about coming back to the house for a spot of dinner?’ I had another of my attacks of weakness and shame, and said, ‘Yeah, OK, thanks’.

  But it hadn’t been such a good idea, judging by the effect I’d had on Sylvia.

  I left their house, ignoring Ralph as he followed me out the door saying, ‘You don’t have to go to the homestead now. You can stay here and watch TV. Don’t worry about Sylvia, she’s just a bit stressed.’

  It wasn’t as dark as before, because the moon had come up over the hill, behind the orchard. It was dark enough though, and I stumbled a few times as I headed towards the duck dam. At one point I thought I’d lost my way, which had me panicking, but then I saw the silhouette of the homestead, like a lighthouse, and from then on I was OK.

  We hadn’t locked it again after delivering the bed. There was a light on the verandah somewhere but I didn’t know where to find the switch, so I didn’t waste time looking. Instead I opened the door and groped my way into the sunroom.

  It was just so dark. The air felt stale. The faintest wisp of cobweb drifted across my face and caught on my eyebrows. For a few moments, as I spread my hands across the wall trying to find the switch, I felt sick. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I didn’t know what would become of me. I didn’t know where to find the bloody switch.

  It was such a relief to feel it under my fingers. Things got a bit easier after that. Using the light from the sunroom I turned the kitchen lights on, and worked my way through the house flicking every switch I could find. Only then did I feel a bit safer.

  Ralph and I had already set up the bed in my bedroom, using Ralph’s trusty screwdriver. But I’ve never seen anything so lonely as that little bed sitting in the bare cold room. I brought in my bag and started unpacking. That helped a little, to see my familiar belongings. The worst thing was that there was no bedding. I’d planned to get some from Sylvia, but with all the tension at teatime I hadn’t got around to it, and no way in the world was I going back for it now.

  I didn’t even have a pillow, but I rolled up my PJs and used them. Then I went through the house turning the lights out again. Back in my bedroom I got a parka and my tracky-daks, and put those on over my clothes, then stretched out on the mattress.

  It wasn’t very comfortable. I got the feeling I’d be pretty cold by morning. I’d brought a book with me, The Butcher Boy, and I’d read half of it on the train, but I couldn’t be bothered reading any more now. And I had my Discman, but I’d flattened the batteries on the train playing Lena Horne over and over.

  I didn’t really want to play any more CDs though. I wanted to feel . . . something. Whatever was waiting for me in the homestead, whatever was waiting to be felt. I wanted to experience that. I got up again and turned off the last light, and groped my way back to bed.

  It was kind of early but I didn’t care. There was nothing else to do. And I was pretty tired from the train journey.

  Most of all though, I was hoping something powerful would happen, in the dark of my own room, back in my own home for the first time in twelve years.

  I lay there trembling with emotion and exhaustion. I guess only two or three minutes passed. I was still calming down, getting my head together, getting my head back in touch with my body.

  From out of the night came a loud knocking. It thundered through the empty house. It was like a bolt of lightning running down my back. I felt like my spine had fused, and I wouldn’t be able to move. Even when I heard the voice it took a few moments to realise who it was.

  ‘Winter! Are you there?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, hang on.’

  I got the light on again and padded to the door on cold feet.

  Ralph was standing there with a pile of bedding. ‘I thought you might need these.’

  ‘Oh, thanks. Thanks heaps.’ I think he wanted to bring them in but I took them from him. ‘That’s really nice of you,’ I said, glad he had given me a chance to show that I wasn’t always the super-bitch from hell.

  ‘Oh well. Can’t have you sleeping on a bare mattress. Now that the nights are getting a bit cooler.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got about three layers of clothes on. But these’ll be much better.’

  Neither of us knew where to go from there.

  ‘Well,’ Ralph finally said. ‘We’ll have a chat in the morning maybe. Sort things out a bit.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Sounds good.’

 
‘And just come up for breakfast any time you feel like it.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, OK.’

  It was a relief to spread the sheets and doona out, to have a proper pillow, to be able to snuggle under the covers and feel the warmth gradually smother me.

  I closed my eyes. As I did I felt the familiar prickling in the corner of each eye. How many times had I gone to sleep like this? How many times had I cried myself to sleep at the Robinsons’? At least this time I wasn’t crying from frustration. This time was different. I just felt exhausted. It was like I’d come to the end of a long journey. I’d gone through so much to be here. I’m sure the Robinsons would think it was a pretty bad joke to hear me say that. ‘We’re the ones who’ve been through the hard time. That little miss has made our lives hell.’

  But they never knew about those nights I went to sleep with my pillow damp from the silent tears. They never knew about the misery of feeling so far from home, alone among strangers. They never knew how I hungered to be back at Warriewood.

  And now I was home. I knew this wasn’t the end of my struggles, the end of my search, but here at least there was a chance of reaching it. Living at the Robinsons’, I might as well have been on the moon for all the hope I had of finding the answers I wanted.

  I don’t know how long I stayed awake. It was strange. The house, empty of people and furniture and life, felt more alive than any other house I’d been in. More alive than the Robinsons’. More alive than Ralph and Sylvia’s. More alive than my Adelaide grandparents’.

  I wondered as I lay there if maybe this house would only feel alive to me. Maybe to anyone else it would be more like a museum. A graveyard. Maybe this house came awake for only one person on earth. Maybe it had been waiting for me all this time.

  Gradually the feelings got more specific. At first I’d been looking at a painting from a distance. Now I was close to it, seeing the brightly coloured people, the warm petunias in a blue vase, the flames of the fire. I could hear the little sounds people make as they go from room to room. The shush of clothes against a door. The scrape of a foot on the floor. The push of air as someone moves along the corridor. Then the murmur of voices. A cough, a rustle of newspaper, the clink of a coffee cup.

  The voices were the most tantalising. I couldn’t quite hear what they were saying. I couldn’t distinguish a single word. It sounded like adults, the kind of conversation between people who’ve known each other a long time. A comfortable, easy conversation. A couple of comments, then silence for a while, then a few more sentences. I wanted to get up and join them. But I knew what would happen if I did. Suddenly I knew, with the certainty of memory. A great tingle ran through my body as my mind and my ears played out the scene.

  Dad would say, ‘Hello, young lady. I thought you were meant to be in bed.’

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not very original,’ Mum said. ‘Stay there, Phillip. I’ll get it. Now, Winter, one little drink of water and then straight back to bed, OK?’

  All those times I’d cried myself to sleep at the Robinsons’, it had been a kind of stifled sobbing. I never wanted to be caught. So the tears had seeped out like they were from a tap turned off hard, but still leaking slowly, reluctantly.

  Now I cried in a new way. I cried without restraint. I wept like a four-year-old, for the parents I’d lost, for the years I’d been without them, for the parents I’d never see again. My life stretched in front of me, and it looked lonely.

  Yet at the same time I knew there was nowhere else on earth I wanted to be. Here at Warriewood was as much comfort as I could hope for. To be in this house, in my own bed, in my own bedroom, to hear those sounds and to feel the live presence of my family from years ago, was like being held close in my mother’s arms. That could never happen again in my lifetime, but to have this hint of it, this reminder, seemed to take me back to a time that for twelve years had been beyond the edge of my consciousness, beyond the territory in which I had been living.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lucky it was a beautiful morning when I woke up. Otherwise I might have been a bit discouraged by the bare walls and dusty floors of the house. But I pushed the hair out of my eyes and went to the bathroom to check for hot water. I could have saved myself a walk. It was stone motherless cold.

  The time was around 6.45. I pulled on some old army trousers and a sweatshirt that we printed for the boarding-house revue at the end of last year. Then I went through the front door and down the hill, across the drive I’d come up last night with Ralph. The old fountain was still there but I thought there’d been a statue of a lady on it, a lady with an umbrella. She’d gone now, maybe folded her umbrella and snuck away to a new home, with a kid who would splash around her feet and look for tadpoles between her legs.

  The creek was lined with ferns but most of them were smothered by blackberries. There were so many blackberries I couldn’t get close to the water, the babbling burbling gurgling frothing water. But I found a path on the other side and followed that. It was overgrown too, but I picked my way around the fallen logs and bushes of weeds.

  The whole time I had music playing for me: the soft yodelling of the creek. Gradually I felt that this was my real welcome home. The creek was saying, ‘It’s good you’re back, Winter. We’ve missed you. This is where you belong.’

  After maybe a kilometre the little walking track seemed to peter out. A long section had been washed away and then it seemed to get lost among more blackberries. Only a few metres to the left though was a vehicle track, a narrow dirt road running parallel to the creek. So I got onto that and kept walking, thinking: ‘Guess I should go back pretty soon’.

  But it was such a nice morning. After a while I started singing a song I’d just learned from my old singing teacher, Mrs Scanelli.

  Been travelling for miles, I’m lonely,

  Looking ahead all the time,

  I don’t have a map but I’m only

  Afraid of looking behind.

  And I know that around the next corner,

  Somewhere quite close in my life,

  In the dark, my future lies waiting,

  If I’ve got a strong enough light.

  When I sing I feel like nothing else exists. Just the words and the music and my voice and me. It was like that, walking along the track, helped by the fact that I didn’t have to watch where I put my feet, as the road got wider and smoother.

  I was singing ‘Travelling’ a second time and had just started the second verse when I got rudely interrupted. I suppose above the murmur of the creek and the sound of my own voice it would have been hard to hear anything, and the way the track zigzagged through thick scrub helped muffle other noises.

  Anyway, whatever the reason, I didn’t know anyone was coming towards me until the last second. And I mean literally the last second. It was seriously dangerous. Suddenly there was a major assault on my senses. A clatter of hoofs, a snorting of horse’s breath, the sight of a huge animal and rider looming over me, even the horse smell filling my nostrils.

  I dived off the track to the right, doing a kind of clumsy sprawl down the bank towards the creek, and lay there for a moment on my stomach, face half buried in mud, trying to get my breath.

  When I did get it back I was angry. Like, furious. I struggled to my feet and climbed the bank again, onto the track. The rider had managed to pull the horse up and was now swinging him round in a little clearing thirty or forty metres away. He was coming back towards me. I waited with my heart pounding and anger rising like mercury in a melting thermometer. This thermometer knew no maximum. It had gone through two hundred and was still rising when he stopped his horse right in front of me.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I yelled. ‘Don’t you know this is private property?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘So by what God-given right do you think you can come galloping through here like a bloody lunatic on some out-of-control old nag?’

  ‘O
ld nag’s a bit harsh,’ he said.

  He was lucky I didn’t have a branch handy, or a large rock. Or a missile launcher.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, coldly as I could, ‘get yourself and your horse off this property and don’t ever come back.’

  He stared at me then, his mouth opening a little and his face flushing. He was a good-looking guy, not much older than me, black hair and dark eyes, and a strong chin. The horse wasn’t bad either. It was true, ‘old nag’ had been harsh. He was a beautifully groomed chestnut, about eighteen hands, but with wild eyes. The boy must be a pretty good rider, I thought reluctantly, to handle a horse who looked just a little like a natural born killer.

  ‘I bet I know who you are,’ he said slowly. ‘You’re Winter. Winter De Salis.’

  ‘You got that right,’ I answered, even more coldly. ‘Now get off my land.’

  The horse snorted and danced a little, tossing his head. ‘Hey, Hutch, settle down,’ the boy said. To me he said: ‘I heard you were wanting to come back. Are you here for good?’

  I couldn’t believe the way he was acting. He wasn’t taking the slightest notice of what I said, like he owned the place.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I don’t care what permission you might have from Ralph or anyone else, but I’m telling you now, all deals are off. Don’t come on this place again. I won’t have people galloping their horses through here any time they feel like it.’

  He waved back over his shoulder. ‘Do you remember passing a bridge across the creek, back there a couple of hundred metres?’ he asked.

  I had noticed a narrow wooden bridge, where the track forked, but I’d come this way, thinking it looked more attractive.

  ‘So?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s your boundary,’ he said. ‘There’s a fence up to the left but you can’t see it from the track. So it is a bit hard to tell. You’re on our land here. But you’re welcome. Enjoy your walk.’

  He clucked at the horse, who was all too keen to get moving, especially now he was facing home again. I had to get out of their way for the second time. I stood there with my face red hot. Any hotter and it would have spontaneously combusted. I watched them, the horse cantering briskly, the boy well balanced on his back, till they were out of sight.