‘But –’
‘I’ve told you before, it’s not healthy. Spiritually, it’s not healthy. Now are you going to get off at the general store with me, or continue on to the camping ground? I need to buy some milk and sausages for everyone.’
‘Camping ground, please.’ I didn’t want to be hanging out with Mum all the time. Besides, I knew that Jesse would be there, and I wanted to keep an eye on him. Not talk to him, or anything. Not follow him around. Just keep an eye on him.
So when Mum hopped off the bus at the Royal Hotel, I stayed in my seat. Michelle and I rode the bus all the way to the camping ground, where we sat outside our tent and talked about Elizabeth Evans as the shadows grew long, and the air cooler. I was poking at the earth with a stick, and glancing over to where Jesse, Malcolm and Tony were fooling around near the most far-flung barbecue. The two dads were trying to light this barbecue with matches and heat beads and bits of dry bark; I had a horrible feeling that, with the Three Stooges getting in their way, there was bound to be a nasty accident.
‘The thing with Eglantine,’ I said slowly, ‘is that she not only died in our house – she died before she could finish something. Her book. It was really, really important to her. So what’s important enough to keep Granny Evans pacing around the hospital?’
Michelle pondered. ‘Maybe she was fired,’ she said at last. ‘Maybe she didn’t want to leave, so now she’s back.’
‘Who’s back?’ a voice interrupted. We looked around, and saw Peter Cresciani approaching us. He came and sat down beside me, slinging his backpack onto the ground. ‘Are you talking about your mum?’
‘No.’ I peered at the main gate, then at the darkening sky. ‘But speaking of my mum, I wonder where she is? It shouldn’t take this long to buy a carton of milk.’
‘It’s probably that time vortex again,’ Peter observed calmly, rummaging in his bag for a muesli bar. ‘She’s probably fallen through it, and now she’s stuck in the 1870s.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘My mum’s already in a time vortex. She still listens to all this terrible 70s music.’
‘Well, she’d better be back before it gets dark,’ Peter went on, through a mouthful of muesli bar. ‘Because it’s my theory that every night this entire town goes back in time, to the Gold Rush era, and you’re only safe if you’re sitting here, in the triangle made by those three green garbage bins. The ones that look like R2-D2. They’re obviously pieces of technology left here aeons ago by visiting aliens.’
I couldn’t help smiling. ‘Peter,’ I began, ‘you are such a lunatic.’ But before I could say any more, Michelle suddenly raised her hand and pointed.
‘Look!’ she exclaimed. ‘Isn’t that your mum getting out of a car?’
It was. She was getting out of a beat-up old red car. For a moment we could only see her backside, because she had her head in the car and was talking to the driver. Then she straightened up, slammed the front passenger door, and stood with her back to us, waving, as the car drove off.
‘Weird,’ I muttered.
‘Who was that behind the wheel?’ Michelle asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe your mum hitched a lift,’ Peter suggested.
‘From the store?’ It didn’t seem likely. The store was only about ten minutes walk away. ‘Why would she do that? She’s always telling me never to hitchhike.’ I watched her come trotting towards us, her hair bouncing and her earrings jangling. She had a big smile on her face.
‘Allie!’ she cried when we were in earshot. ‘You’ll never guess! That was Samantha Cornish!’
I stared at her blankly.
‘You remember Samantha!’ Her voice was breathless and impatient. ‘She married Hessel Venclovas! He’s an artist and she’s a potter.’
‘You mean they’re friends of Ray’s?’ I hazarded.
‘Oh, come on, Allie, you must remember something about them. We visited them once on the Hawkesbury. They had that house beside the water.’
‘Oh.’ A memory stirred. ‘The one with the oyster-shell wall?’
‘That’s it!’ Mum swung around to address Michelle. ‘We lost track of them a couple of years ago, when their phone was disconnected,’ she explained. ‘But it turns out they live here, now, in Hill End.’ Turning back to me, she added: ‘And they’ve invited us to dinner! Isn’t that great?’
Trust Mum. Wherever we go, no matter how remote, there’s always some old hippy friend of hers who wants to feed us millet and lentil casserole.
I’ve got used to it by now.
CHAPTER # three
As a matter of fact, I was wrong. Samantha and Hessel didn’t serve us millet and lentil casserole for dinner. Instead, we had chicken cacciatore and rice, with a rocket salad and homemade apple pie. But they were still hippies, even so. Only hippies would spend more than one minute in Taylor’s Cottage.
There was no electricity. The water came out of a tank. The bathroom was a shed made of corrugated iron – even the chimney was made of corrugated iron – and you had to cook on a wood stove. The ceilings were covered with white cloth instead of plaster, and the dunny was out in the backyard. Yet Samantha and Hessel were proud of this awful place. When Mum and I arrived with Michelle, our hosts dragged us all over the house, pointing out the ‘classic split-slab construction’, the original floorboards, the claw-footed bath, the fireplaces, the oil lamps, the meat safe that had ‘come with the house’, the flour bags tacked over one wall.
‘It’s genuine – absolutely genuine,’ Samantha gushed.
‘As stewards, we pay a nominal rent to National Parks and Wildlife, and ensure that the integrity of the structure is maintained,’ said Hessel. ‘No intrusive additions. No aluminium windows or television aerials. We preserve it as it should be preserved.’
‘But – but doesn’t it get cold?’ I stammered, eyeing the gaps between the tin roof of the kitchen and the top of its walls.
‘Oh no!’ Samantha laughed. ‘Not with our wonderful old fireplaces!’ And she started to talk about the quality of the dead wood that she found while roaming through the bush around Hill End. ‘Dry as tinder,’ she said, ‘but so beautifully shaped that I sometimes can’t bring myself to burn it!’
Mum, of course, lapped all this up – even though she couldn’t have endured one night in Taylor’s Cottage. Her blood circulation is too bad. But she understood where Samantha was coming from; they’re two of a kind in some ways. Samantha is small and dark, with brown skin and a dried-up face, while Mum is tall and pale and freckled. But they both like wearing bright silk scarves, and chunky jewellery, and ethnic sandals, and the sort of clothes you buy at markets (homemade stuff covered in splatter-painting or ink-block shapes or Indian embroidery). What’s more, Mum admires Samantha’s pots, which are always a very intense blue or an equally vivid orange, so pure and clean that they almost seem to glow. Hessel, on the other hand, paints splodgy abstract paintings, and Mum doesn’t like them. She says that abstract shapes create an environment in which people find it hard to finish things. That’s why she likes Ray’s work, because Ray paints things that you can recognise.
I don’t think Mum admires anything much about Hessel, to tell you the truth. He’s kind of fat and slobby, with a beard that looks as if it could do with a good mow. He doesn’t talk much, but when he does he seems to think that he’s doing everyone a big favour. And I noticed that he didn’t lift one finger to help Samantha with dinner, except to light the candles. Mum noticed that, too; I could tell. She and Ray always share the cooking.
‘So what brought you here, Sam?’ she asked brightly, when Samantha finally sat down to eat. ‘What brought you to Hill End?’
‘Oh, Judy, it was like coming home,’ Samantha replied. ‘The affinity we have with this place – it’s like we’ve been here before, isn’t it, Hessel?’
A grunt from Hessel.
‘I’ve never seen any other white man’s settlement in this country that’s so at peace with the land it??
?s occupying,’ Samantha went on. ‘The feeling of continuity, of heart’s ease, that’s grown out of exile – it invests everything that I do here.’
‘And the light,’ said Hessel, through a mouthful of chicken.
‘And the light,’ Samantha agreed. ‘And the textures. We had to stay. We didn’t have a choice. Did we, Hessel?’
They raved about their wonderful life in Hill End for hours, while night fell, and Michelle stifled her yawns, and my feet got colder and colder. I’d never wanted to join the grown-ups for dinner in the first place. I’d wanted to eat barbecued sausages with Jesse at the camping ground, and was wondering if I should give Mum a kick or a nudge (it was half past nine, after all), when suddenly Samantha said something that made my heart skip a beat.
‘. . . and of course there’s our ghost,’ she trilled, sounding just the tiniest bit anxious but trying to cover it up. ‘We have a ghost, you know. According to our next-door neighbour.’
Mum and Michelle and I just sat with our mouths open. Another ghost? We couldn’t believe our ears.
‘Oh, yes,’ Samantha continued, with a little laugh. ‘Many’s the time we’ve come home to find a bottle smashed, or a small pile of objects stacked on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. Our neighbour Alf says that it’s the ghost of a former occupant. Little Eustace Harrow, he says.’
‘Eustace Harrow?’ I couldn’t resist pressing her. ‘Who was he?’
‘Well, according to Alf, he was the son of the woman who used to live here. The woman who died. Evie Harrow. She lived here for eighty-three years, would you believe it? Born and died in this very house.’
I shuddered. Eighty-three years in this place! Michelle and I exchanged horrified looks.
‘Evie was married and had two kids,’ Samantha informed us, ‘but the youngest died when he was only three years old. Eustace, his name was. Alf maintains that his ghost has been haunting the place ever since he died here.’
‘Oh,’ said Mum. She cast a troubled glance around the gloomy, draughty kitchen, with its rusty old biscuit tins and dangling copper pots and brooding meat safe. ‘He died right here, did he?’
‘That’s what Alf says,’ Samantha confirmed. ‘Anyone for coffee?’
‘Coffee,’ Hessel barked.
‘Oh – thanks, Sam. Coffee would be nice,’ said Mum.
‘And what about you girls? Coffee? Tea? I have herbal tea.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Are you sure? What about cocoa? I think I have some cocoa somewhere . . .’
‘No, thanks,’ I repeated. ‘Um – what else did Alf tell you? About this ghost?’
Samantha looked slightly surprised that I should be pursuing the subject. But she got up and began to potter about, running water into a kettle (the pipes made a noise like someone driving a truck full of kitchenware repeatedly into a metal street-lamp) and noisily rearranging logs in the stove.
‘Well, he hasn’t told us much,’ she said, raising her voice. ‘He’s a real country character – a man of few words. Isn’t that right, Hessel?’
Another grunt from Hessel.
‘But we were asking him about this odd little pile of coins and keys and pebbles we’d found in one of the old kitchen cabinets – oh, yes, we had those cabinets torn out, they were from the 1960s, they weren’t in character – and he told us that Eustace was always one for collecting funny little oddments, and stacking them in out-of-the-way places,’ Samantha went on. ‘Used to do it when he was alive, apparently. That’s why Evie knew that he was still around, after he died – because she kept on finding these piles of buttons and hairpins and peanut shells. That kind of thing.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Mum. ‘How sad. How awful.’ Her eyes filled with tears, and Samantha looked at her in surprise.
‘Well – I suppose so,’ she conceded. ‘Though Evie seemed to find it a comfort. At least Alf says she did.’
‘And that’s what you’ve been finding?’ I queried. ‘Little piles of . . . things?’
‘With no logic to them,’ Samantha agreed. ‘We use powdered milk here, Judy, since there’s no refrigerator. Is that all right with you?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘It’s amazing what you can do without, if you put your mind to it,’ Samantha burbled on. ‘I’ve found a marvellous way of keeping cheese fresh for days and days – I got it out of an old book of household management –’
‘But what kinds of things have you found?’ I interrupted, impatient to hear the rest of the story. ‘Bones? Rocks? Feathers?’
‘Oh, just things from around the house. A paperclip, maybe, and a pair of tweezers. A book of stamps. A salt cellar. A piece of string. All jumbled together.’
‘That’s what Allie used to do, when she was little,’ Mum suddenly remarked, her voice full of awe. ‘Leave little caches of toys around the house. I’d always be finding plastic animals in the bread bin. Or doll’s house furniture under the sink.’
‘And there was a trail of throat lozenges left on the kitchen floor, once,’ Samantha added. ‘Plus we’ve had some mysterious breakages.’
‘We had those, too, but they weren’t so mysterious,’ Mum said. ‘They were Bethan’s fault.’
‘It is a bit annoying,’ Samantha confessed, again with a laugh. She put a tray on the table, and passed around the hot drinks. Then she settled herself down with a mug of tea clasped between her hands, which had dry clay trapped in all their cracks and creases. ‘I’m always losing things, though they turn up eventually, hidden away in the dresser or behind the couch. And the breakages are a pest. Two lamps, three beautiful antique dishes and a piece of Stuart crystal. Tragic losses, really.’
Mum cleared her throat.
‘Do you – um – want to get rid of it?’ she inquired, ignoring my scowl.
‘The ghost, you mean?’ Samantha couldn’t seem to touch on the subject without breaking into that careless little laugh. ‘Well, I don’t see how. I use heaps of garlic in my cooking, don’t I, Hessel? And if garlic drives vampires away, it should drive away ghosts, don’t you think?’ Laugh, laugh. ‘And I can’t exactly set a trap. Besides, Eustace is part of the house. We’re supposed to be preserving the house. And he might be quite a drawcard, if we decide to open a Bed and Breakfast.’
‘A Bed and Breakfast?’ Mum echoed. Michelle blinked, and I nearly fell out of my chair. A Bed and Breakfast? In this house? I couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to stay with Samantha and Hessel.
But Samantha began to talk about eco-tourism, and how people were becoming more and more open to the idea of hiring cabins in the bush, where they could commune with nature and get away from the pressures of modern life. Why not, in that case, cater for people who were looking for a truly authentic, historical experience? Without electricity? Without a telephone? Without anything that would spoil the nineteenth-century atmosphere of Taylor’s Cottage?
‘You don’t have a phone?’ asked Mum.
‘No. It’s quite wonderful,’ Samantha replied. ‘We get so much work done, don’t we, Hessel?’
‘Because I was thinking that, if you wanted me to, I could ring some friends of ours,’ said Mum, for all the world as if I wasn’t kicking her under the table. ‘Richard Boyer and Delora Starburn. They helped us to get rid of the ghost in our house.’
‘What?’ Samantha gasped. Even Hessel shifted in his seat. ‘What do you mean, Jude? You’re not serious.’
‘Yes! Absolutely! I know it sounds ridiculous, but there was no other explanation. Our house was haunted, wasn’t it, Allie?’
I rolled my eyes. But it was no good – I couldn’t stop her. Within minutes she had described the whole Eglantine business, to the obvious delight of Samantha, who kept yelping and gasping. ‘But this is incredible!’ she would shriek. ‘Judy, you poor thing!’ They finally fell to discussing purification rituals and negative energy flows, until Hessel said sharply that he wanted another cup of coffee.
‘Maybe we could call
these friends of yours,’ Samantha exclaimed in eager tones, as she leapt up to fetch Hessel his coffee. ‘Do you think they’d like to stay in the spare room? It’s the one we’ve been hoping to use if we open a B & B – it’s got that lovely old iron bedstead in it.’
‘We could always ask them,’ said Mum, no less eagerly. ‘I’m sure they’d love to help. They’re always looking for manifestations.’
‘We could call them tomorrow, maybe. From the phone at the store.’
‘Or I could call them now,’ Mum suggested, groping around for her bag. ‘I’ve got a mobile, you know.’
‘A mobile!’ Samantha threw up her hands. ‘Judy, how can you? The radiation!’
‘I know, I know.’ Mum sounded ashamed. ‘But with the kids and everything . . .’
‘The kids are the ones you should be looking out for!’
‘Excuse me, but no one’s proved that mobile phones are bad for you,’ I pointed out flatly. Then I turned to Mum. ‘You can’t call Richard, now,’ I said, ‘it’s nearly ten.’
‘Oh, he’ll be up. He’s a night owl.’
‘But, Mum –’
‘Shh!’ She put a finger to her lips, and the phone to her ear. ‘It’s ringing!’
What is it about adults when they drink alcohol? Mum never lets me call people at ten p.m. But there Mum was, giggling into her mobile as she spoke to poor Richard, who was probably standing by the phone in his pyjamas, with his mouth full of toothpaste.
‘It’s made for you, this place, it’s crawling with ghosts,’ Mum enthused. ‘Yes . . . yes . . . oh, well you might have heard of the one in the hospital. Granny Evans? The old matron? No? Well, there’s that one and there’s this one. A little boy, apparently. Son of the former owner. Yes. No, he leaves things in piles. Smashes things. What? I don’t know. I don’t know if you’d call him a poltergeist. They haven’t actually seen him, but he’s made his presence felt. Oh, it’s the most wonderful house.’ (I didn’t dare look at Michelle when Mum said this.) ‘An absolutely authentic miner’s cottage. Oil lamps and everything. Yes. Yes. Oh, the weather’s perfect. Couldn’t be better.’ A long pause. Bright-eyed, Mum nodded furiously at Samantha, and made thumbs-up signals. ‘You will? Really? Both of you? Oh, that’s fantastic. You’ll love it. No, don’t worry. Just stop at the store opposite the Royal Hotel, and ask the way to Taylor’s Cottage. Everyone knows everyone around here. The Royal Hotel? Oh, you can’t miss it. Honestly. It’s the only one in town.’