Chapter 5
5
Hamish
His dad’s house smelled stale and sour. Old man smell, Hamish thought. Clothes that weren’t laundered often enough along with sketchy housekeeping practices. When his mother had been alive and with it, the place had been spotless—the few times Hamish had visited. He locked the door and returned the key to its hiding place under the plant pot; the plant was long dead. The mains power was off. What few things that had been left in the fridge had been dumped into the rubbish bin, although he’d missed this week’s collection. The neighbour over the back fence had offered to put the bin away after next week’s pick-up.
What would happen to the house and everything inside would be resolved in due course. And the car. It was back in the garage, behind padlocked doors. Remnants of police tape wrapped around the garage door handles flapped in the breeze. Hamish couldn’t think clearly about any of it yet, he couldn’t bear to. Not thinking was how he’d managed to drive his father’s car all the way home and not abandon it on the side of the road to be stripped and torched. Before she’d left, Nat had refused point blank to discuss any of it: not the car, the house, their parents’ possessions or the suicide note addressed to both of them. All she did say was that the car was worth money and part of the estate. And what a failure Hamish had been as a son and a brother and what a model of virtue she was. If he’d had to spend another day under the same roof with her he couldn’t have been held responsible for his actions.
Hamish loaded his duffel bag onto the dual cab’s back seat. He climbed into the driver’s seat and buckled himself in but couldn’t bring himself to start the engine. The thought of returning to an empty and soulless apartment held about as much appeal as staying here did. No-one other than himself for company. He’d had more real conversation with Theo’s neighbour and Ruth, the woman in the cafe, than he’d ever had with his own neighbours or the baristas at the trendy coffee shops on Melbourne Street. He imagined that, to them, he just looked like an older man attempting to be cool and missing the mark by a mile.
He reached for the ignition. There was nothing to hold him in Cutlers Bay any longer. But that didn’t mean he could casually cast off the conflicted and unsettled feelings tying his gut in a knot. The single-fronted stone cottage with the bull-nosed verandah was his parents’ house, but it no longer housed his parents. They were both dead. He couldn’t look at the garage.
As he reversed out of the driveway, he wondered—and not for the first time—how differently life might have played out if Jonathon hadn’t died.
* * *
When Cutlers Bay was far behind him, the knot in Hamish’s gut loosened slightly. He hadn’t experienced the same inner turmoil when his mother had died. But then, she’d died in her sleep. He’d rushed home for the funeral, and returned the day after to the refuge of the outback and his job, giving himself no time to think and ruminate on how it might have been for his father. Hamish had never had any doubts that his mother had loved him, even as dementia had cruelly eroded away the woman she’d once been; they’d always said whatever it was they’d needed to say to each other. But he had never been sure of his father’s affection. More so after Jonathon’s tragic death at age eleven.
Awash in memories, regrets and remorse, the countryside flew past unnoticed and the outskirts of Adelaide were upon him before he knew it. He’d sped past new and unsightly housing developments as far out as Two Wells. Dwelling after dwelling, tucked in side by side, sprawling across fertile paddocks that had once been market gardens and farmland. Towns that had previously been firmly established in the country were being subsumed by urbanisation. Everything is changing , he thought. Out of control.
He gripped the wheel tightly as he experienced a potent and visceral urge to head for the wide open spaces of the outback, away from this rat race. Similarly out of his control, but in a different way. Out there, he’d learned it was predominantly Mother Nature who pulled the strings and somehow that made the lack of control easier to accept.
He was home by late afternoon, well after school was out, the traffic relatively light. Nat rang when he was loading the washing machine with clothes from his days away.
‘You know Dad wanted to be cremated,’ she said, without so much as a hello. ‘And we can’t do that until the coroner’s sign-off.’
‘I did know that,’ Hamish replied. ‘I was there when Sergeant Cooper explained the process. He didn’t think we’d have to wait too long.’
‘What’s all the noise?’
‘The washing machine.’
‘You’re home then. Have you seen Dad’s will? Did he ever talk to you about it?’
‘No and no,’ he said. Why would he have? Hamish closed his eyes, not in the mood for this conversation. He was tired. Heartsick. Four days they’d been together in Cutlers Bay and when he’d wanted to talk, Natalie hadn’t.
‘Me either. I rang the solicitors. They said probate could take weeks, maybe months.’
‘There’s no rush, is there?’
Nat didn’t answer immediately and that in itself was an answer. When she did speak, she snapped. ‘It’s all right for some. You haven’t struggled financially your whole life, not like we have. A bit of extra cash before Christmas would be a godsend.’
Their father was dead by his own hand and all she could think about was the money. ‘We each made our own choices, Nat,’ he said, as evenly as his rigid jaw allowed. ‘No-one forced you and Pete to have four children.’
‘At least we had children and they all have jobs and pay tax. What’s your contribution?’
Was she for real? Hamish pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Not having this conversation, Natalie. Was there something you wanted?’ Apart from the obvious.
‘One of us will have to go across and check on the house, pay any bills, all that stuff. You know what they say about empty houses. And I still have a job and my own bills to pay.’
‘You realise that whoever pays the bills will be reimbursed when the estate is settled? But don’t worry, given how busy and financially strapped you are, I’ll do it,’ he said.
‘It’s all a bit sad, isn’t it,’ Natalie said and he almost heard the wind whoosh out of her sails. ‘You know, Hamish, we’re orphans now. Feels weird. Like I’m closer to my end now that Mum and Dad have both gone.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Should we have visited him more often? Especially after Mum died.’
‘In case you’ve forgotten, until I retired a year ago, I was working out bush most of the time.’
‘Yeah, well, for the first two or three months after Mum died, I went every couple of weeks, but Dad said he was doing okay so I stopped going as often. Travelling up and down to see him, working, looking after grandkids, along with everything else. And you haven’t been out bush for a year.’
‘And I visited him. And phoned him regularly.’
‘You’ve visited him once since you retired.’
‘What are you trying to say, Nat? That I didn’t do enough? Did you?’
She sucked in a lungful of air and he braced himself for what might be coming.
‘So, Hamish, don’t you feel just a tad responsible for what’s happened? For Dad to do what he did, he must have felt like he had no other options. Had you thought that if either of us had visited more often we might have noticed something was not quite right and we could have stepped in? After all, you can’t tell much just by a phone call.’
‘You read the letter he left, Nat. He was quite clear about not wanting either of us to have to look after him twenty-four seven, and he did not want to go into care and he would have had to—soon, according to the doctor.’
‘But we’ll never know, will we.’ The brittle edge was back in her voice. ‘He should have told us how sick he was. He should have given us the opportunity to at least offer help.’
‘Easy to say in hindsight. But you’re right, we will never know.’
While they’d talked, Hamish had gone into the kitchen and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. He walked through to the living area and sat down; flicked on the TV without the sound. If she wanted to talk he might as well be comfortable.
‘Whatever happened between you and Dad that made you both so stand-offish with each other?’ she said. ‘Mum never would say anything when I asked her.’
‘What makes you think something happened? We were just different. Never that close.’
‘Sure, and I know I was only nine when Jonathon was killed, but I was old enough to notice that Dad changed after that. He sort of closed himself off and I don’t think he was ever the same again. Did he blame you?’
Hamish’s mouth turned sour and his stomach roiled. He carefully put his drink onto the glass-topped coffee table. ‘Why would he blame me?’ he said slowly. He gripped the edge of the sofa, knuckles whitening as he waited for her answer.