Chapter 2 #3
I still love this room and I love the house more than ever, but I grudgingly admit that sitting here alone, in the cool light
of this icy afternoon, that maybe there’s a kernel of truth to my mother’s accusations about my rose-colored glasses.
I wander through every room and it’s the same story everywhere I look—ever more dust, sometimes with alarming claw marks across
it, sometimes tracks, as if some creatures have walked the same path so many times they’ve worn the dust away. Silvery rodent
droppings and cobwebs are everywhere, but in the pantry, they are mixed with the spoils from old boxes of oats and flour and
God only knows what else that mess used to be.
It’s not the end of the world. I’ll eventually replace lots of the cabinetry anyway, and I can’t see any recent droppings,
so I’m hopeful that whatever was here is now gone.
Some rooms, like Tad’s bathroom, look just as they probably did when he died—cluttered, a little chaotic. There’s a cardboard
toilet paper tube on the dispenser on the wall, but there’s a half-used roll sitting on the floor beside the sink. That kind
of detail makes it feel as if the house has been frozen in time.
Wurimbirra is still every bit as beautiful and grand as it is in my memories, but unlike my beloved uncle, I’m a tidy person and I’m keen to start getting this place in order.
As soon as I run out of rooms to survey, I head out to the water main, which is buried beneath a tangle of weeds and grass at the front of the block.
Most houses out here rely on rain water but the town supply line happens to run straight past Wurimbirra so we’ve long enjoyed the luxury of treated water.
I wince at the spiders around the cement lid on the main and gingerly pry it open to turn the tap back on.
I’ve been nervous about this, just like the power.
Over ten years anything could have happened to the plumbing; pipes could have burst or been damaged.
But when I walk back inside to run the taps in the kitchen and the laundry, brown water sputters for a while as the pipes
flush, but the water soon runs clear and the pressure is good. I run every tap in the house for a while to clean them out.
I’ll get myself a filter for the kitchen tap because most of this plumbing is very old—but for now, it seems water access won’t be a problem I have to deal with.
The kitchen runs the entire western edge of the house—a long, narrow space incorporating an informal dining room, and just
off that area, a tiny door that leads to what was once my favorite place in this whole house.
I can’t remember how old I was when I went through my obsession with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was certainly young—maybe five or six. I would sit with Tad in the parlour while he read me “just one more chapter,” as
Mum nagged at us to stop so I could go to bed. In my mind’s eye that house in the English countryside looked just like Wurimbirra,
and by the time we finished the book, I was convinced there was a magical land hidden somewhere in our house too. I checked
every single closet just about every day for a while in case the portal had appeared overnight. It was driving Mum and Tad
batty that I kept making a mess in the bedrooms, then inevitably crying in disappointment yet again.
One day I came home from school and Uncle Tad was waiting at the door, a battery-operated lantern in his hand.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, wide-eyed. “I found the magical portal.”
I ran behind him through the house into the kitchen to find that little door was open for the very first time. Up until that
moment all I’d known about the door was that it was strictly off-limits to me and Jon. Now I could see that the door itself
was a full foot thick, with a steeped edge and a matching steeped edge on the inner wall. Later I’d learn that tiny room had
to seal precisely, and that heavy door and the walls around it were all stuffed with compressed sawdust for insulation. It
was a built-in ice chest—groundbreaking technology when the house was built in 1886.
All I knew that day though was that Uncle Tad had discovered a tiny room with shelves on one side and a floor covered with
brightly colored cushions.
“See,” he whispered conspiratorially. “Children have used this very portal to escape to other worlds in the years gone by.”
“How does it work?” I whispered back.
“See that door up there?”
He helped me inside, then lifted me up by the hips and I saw that at the top of the room was a tiny external door leading
to the outside of the house beside the laundry. And now that he’d shown it to me, I could remember seeing it on the outside
of the house—a metal door with a silver handle, beside a long-broken contraption with a pulley wheel at the top.
“What’s that for?”
“It’s for the fairies, obviously. It’s where they drop their magic off to make this room special. Now, Fiona, you must understand
that they are fast, so you probably won’t spot them, but the fairy magic in the air in here will help you move into other
worlds.”
“Really?”
“Really. If you sit here long enough, you’ll understand, but you have to be very patient and—Oh! What’s this?”
I had already clambered down onto the pillows and immediately noticed the baskets on the lower shelves. As I pulled one out,
a little jar of hard lollies came into view, and so did several dozen books.
“What if I get locked in here?” I asked him, feeling suddenly unsure as I looked at the heavy door.
“Let me show you something,” he said, and then we shuffled around, and I climbed out and Uncle Tad climbed in, and then I
climbed back in, but this time to curl up on his lap. We pulled the door shut and suddenly we were in that tiny, dark space,
illuminated only by the lantern. “Now. Push the door.” I pushed it gently with my foot and it swung open easily; the hinges
didn’t so much as squeak. “Don’t worry, love. There’s no latch now and I greased the hinges so it’s very easy to open and
close. You are perfectly safe in here—in fact, if that magic works the way I think it will, it’ll be the safest place you
ever go.”
For years, that cabinet was my absolute favorite place to sit and read. I think I still went in occasionally in my early teens.