Chapter 8 #2
“Stef!” I exclaim, then I mutter defensively, “Firstly, I didn’t have a crush on him and he certainly didn’t have a crush on me.” I don’t think she’s right about Jack, but she’s definitely right about me and I have no idea why I’m
lying about it. It’s not like there’s any shame in having a crush, especially as a teenager. “Secondly, my marriage just ended.
I’m hardly in a position to—I can’t even think about—I just don’t—”
I look up just in time to see Jack approaching us. Stef laughs softly and adjusts her handbag on her shoulder.
“Let’s catch up soon,” she says, before she hugs me goodbye and makes her way to the door.
“She hasn’t changed one bit, has she?” Jack smiles as he comes to stand beside me.
“Still the same old Stef,” I agree lightly.
This private little corner was perfect for a quick apology to Stef, but it feels way too intimate now that Jack is here. There’s a moment of silence and it must feel a little awkward to Jack too, because suddenly
he says, “Imagine trying to tell seventeen-year-old Jack and Fiona that they’d both wind up back here at fifty.”
I flick a glance towards Patience, who is happily browsing the sci-fi section.
“Seventeen-year-old Fiona would never have believed you,” I tell Jack. “Even if you did convince her she’d immediately get
to work on a plan to prevent such a tragedy befalling her.”
“Seventeen-year-old Jack probably wouldn’t have heard me anyway.
He was too busy swimming laps in the pool, ignoring a nagging pain in his shoulder,” he says dryly.
Jack was the star of our school swimming team, and I know he was in discussions with a scout from the Australian Institute of Sport in our final year of school when he started having trouble with his shoulder.
I remember thinking it was inevitable he’d swim for the national team, maybe that he even had a chance of Olympic gold.
But he tried to swim through the pain and did permanent damage—even after surgery, his swimming career was over.
“Do you regret the way your life panned out?” I ask.
“Well, I can’t change anything, so regret would be a waste of energy.” He shrugs. “It’s too easy to look back and pick out
things that “went wrong.” To chastise ourselves for mistakes we made along the way to now. But isn’t the person we are at
fifty the culmination of everything that happened in the first part of our lives—the good, the bad, the downright ugly? I
reckon I’ve pretty much made peace with that now, especially in these past few years.”
“Will you stay in Forbes?”
“Yeah, I think I will,” he says. “I told you Dad was sick. Not a lot of people know this yet because his deterioration has
been slow, thank goodness, but Dad has dementia. Mum is plenty capable of running the farm with our manager for now but I
don’t think she should have to deal with Dad’s illness on her own.”
“Oh, Jack, I’m sorry.”
“Thanks, Fi. It’s rough, and it’s unfair, but that’s life, isn’t it? I’m glad I’m here with him now, to make the most of the
good days we have with him. How about you? What will you do with Wurimbirra once you’ve renovated it?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I say, and I feel the weight of that unknown as I admit it.
Since before I left Forbes the first time, I had a plan in mind—a clear path of progression to follow for my future.
Undergrad, postgrad, a few years’ consulting, starting my own firm, then marriage and kids.
All of that is behind me now and what’s ahead?
Wurimbirra. A beautiful, slightly spooky old house I longed to return to for decades. Maybe I’m like a dog chasing a car.
I got what I wanted and now I have no idea what to do with it.
“That’s the problem,” I admit to Jack. “I know the building has amazing potential. It could even be a boutique hotel or a function center. I can imagine the space used for
all sorts of things, but there are some real challenges.”
“Like the cemetery in the backyard?”
“Exactly.”
“Can’t you just move the graves?”
“It is possible to move historic graves,” I concede. “It’s done from time to time, mostly at the behest of large developers who can’t make
their desired use of land because of historic burial sites. I’ve spent a lot of time fighting against that kind of thing in
my career. To justify disturbing someone’s final resting place, there must be a uniquely vital reason and absolutely no alternative. It’s incredibly rare—on every project I’ve ever worked on, we’ve
found or created an alternative. It’s so important that graves aren’t disturbed—obviously for moral reasons, but also in terms of
preserving history. In this case, these graves belong right here. There’s a fascinating history behind Wurimbirra and the
cemetery is a key part of it.”
“I’d love to see the place again. To hear about some of that history. Maybe I could call in one day and you could show me
around?”
I’m conscious of my heart pounding against the wall of my chest. And also conscious that this is an innocent request from
someone who really is just being friendly.
And yet it’s still Jack, and I’m right back in that same spot I was thirty-five years ago—affected by him, and terrified of that.
Back then, I’d have refused a request like this.
I’d have shut him down before he got friendly with me.
I’d hear my mother’s aloofness in my voice when I did so, and I’d be confused by it, but feel powerless to make any other choice.
But isn’t this the upside to a future that is suddenly, unexpectedly unknown?
Maybe this time I can make my destiny my own. Leap out of the plane and trust my parachute to work. Let myself feel those
butterflies instead of avoiding them.
“Of course,” I say. “Anytime.”
I had a great time at the reader’s group and was feeling refreshed by the time Jack dropped me back to Wurimbirra. I climbed
into bed with The Midnight Estate and was very tempted to keep reading, but after only a page of the next chapter, my eyelids were so heavy I thought I might
fall asleep sitting up. I sat the book face down on my nightstand and promised myself I would have a good night’s sleep at
last and do some more reading in the morning.
Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a thump from Uncle Tad’s office, then the sound of small objects scattering across
the floor. It’s like the second the house goes dark, whatever is taunting me gets to work. Just like the previous night I got out of bed, intending to investigate, but I knew what I’d
find if I went in there—a room now still, items inexplicably knocked from high places onto the floor. So I flopped back into
bed and put a pillow over my head, determined to ignore the sounds. I tossed and turned most of the night, unsure of which noises were in my fitful dreams and which were in the house.
When I finally gave up on sleep around 5:00 a.m., I went into Tad’s study and found that a cup of pens had been knocked from
the desk.
I’m not sure I’ve had any deep sleep at all in the past two nights and it is entirely possible I am simply losing my mind.
It’s windy and cold outside, and my eyes sting and water as I force myself to take my walk.
It’s not much warmer inside the house when I return, but at least I get a reprieve from the wind.
I down a few cups of coffee, then carry a dining chair upstairs, placing it in Tad’s storage room so I can sit as I work.
I’m going to read through the boxes of his correspondence with his author friends today, since I’m far too tired to do anything else physical.
Mum was right—there’s not as many boxes of letters from other authors . . . only eight in total. They are sorted by surname, and once again copies of the
letters Tad received and carbon copies of his replies are clustered with still more paper clips. There must be thousands of
paper clips in this room.
The window beside me rattles in its frame as the wind outside buffets the house, but I’m wearing enough layers that I can
pretend I’m cozy there in the storage room, engrossed in Tad’s correspondence. I’m interrupted briefly when the firewood truck
arrives—but I stop my work long enough only to run downstairs to pay the man, and to instruct him to unload the wood around
the corner, under a little shelter Tad had built in the ’60s. Then I’m right back upstairs, and I spend the next few hours
engrossed in the reading. I smile to myself as I read through Tad’s fond exchanges with Ruth Park and Thomas Kenneally, his
polite correspondence with Toni Morrison and Flannery O’Connor, his extended back-and-forths with Patrick White and Kurt Vonnegut.
But my favorite letters are from the correspondence he shared with Patricia Highsmith. Tad so loved to talk about his feud with her. I’m sure I heard dozens of versions of that tale over the years, each one more dramatic than
the last, so it’s been a strangely nostalgic experience to read the reality of it at last. He was a fan of her work and wrote
her to compliment her on Strangers on a Train.
She had read his first two novels and apparently found them to be “derivative and trite.” Their correspondence descended into a slow-motion argument over international mail but it continued for decades, and as I read, I see a hint from each of them that they were rather enjoying the sparring.
As amusing as all of this is, I can’t find any mention of Charity Wilkie in the first few boxes, and eventually I start to
feel a little guilty about sitting here reading letters when there’s so much to do in this house. I set the stack of letters from Patricia Highsmith down, intending to do some cleaning. Maybe I’ll
return to this later in the day, once I’ve been productive.
I’m feeling jittery from too much caffeine and it feels like my soul just about leaves my body when a strong gust of air blows
through the storage room, sending yellowed paper flying everywhere and forcing the door to slam closed. For a moment I’m so