Chapter 35
35
Hamish
Melancholy was a frame of mind not foreign to Hamish. He didn’t experience it often, but when he did, he knew to keep busy, distract himself and not dwell on the likely causes of his low mood. That particular Friday, he’d struggled to focus and keep busy and not mope. When Laurie Randall rang at four that afternoon and asked him to do the floor at the cafe for Ruth, he’d jumped at it.
At four thirty, he knocked on the kitchen’s screen door. When there was no answer, he peered through the mesh and tried the handle, only to find the door locked. He knocked again, harder this time, making the whole door rattle on its hinges.
‘Laurie?’ Ruth came from the cafe into the kitchen.
‘No, it’s Hamish. The door’s locked.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ Ruth said. She was frowning. She unlocked the door and he came inside. ‘Where’s Laurie?’
‘Said his knee blew up last night, like a balloon. He’s been to the doc and needs to keep it up for a bit. I’m filling in for him.’
‘Oh, dear. He was limping yesterday and the day before. I told him I’d do the floors, but he insisted. Who does he think did them before he came along? And I don’t expect you to do it in his place.’ She sounded brusque, at the end of her tether.
‘What’s up?’
She threw up her hands. ‘Everything … nothing … Working with Lorna now Allie is gone is driving me crazy. She never stops talking! Now Suzie, the junior who works with me and Mia on Saturdays, is sick. I’ve been trying to find someone to replace her, but it looks like it’ll be Mia and me on our own.’ She closed her eyes and groaned. ‘Saturdays are short but often the busiest day.’
‘I’ll do the floor now,’ Hamish said, at a loss as to what else he could offer. ‘Any problems with the door to the service lane?’
‘No, it’s great. I only locked the screen door because I was in the office. And you haven’t given me your bill, Hamish. I need to pay you so that you can pay Laurie.’
Hamish didn’t want Ruth’s money, for no particular reason other than he’d wanted to do something for her. She worked hard and was always doing stuff for others. He pushed his hand through his hair and, avoiding her eyes, said, ‘Laurie has a few maintenance jobs around his place that he can’t manage anymore and I’ve offered to do them for him, you know, like a trade for his help with the door. And you keep feeding him, so I reckon we’re all square.’
‘Well, I don’t! You spent several days on that job and we agreed that I’d pay you for your time.’
‘I don’t remember agreeing to that. You’ve paid for all the timber, the door, the lock and the paint. Consider my time a gift. Besides, Elliot helped me with the skylight and he’s your brother.’ He raised his eyebrows, daring her to argue. It was the most alive he’d felt all day.
Ruth’s expression made him want to laugh. ‘What’s Elliot being my brother got to do with any of this?’
‘Is he coming up for the weekend?’
‘No. His daughter is flying down from Queensland for a visit. She arrives on Sunday and she’ll be there for the week. He’ll be on his best behaviour.’
‘Are you going to see her?’
‘Next Saturday. I’ll leave as soon as I close the cafe. We’re having a family dinner on Saturday night and I’ll come home Sunday after I’ve taken her to the airport. She’s flying to Melbourne to spend a week with her mum and then home.’
‘Good on her,’ Hamish said. ‘Now, the mop and bucket?’
‘Outside, next to the gas bottles. Detergent and vinegar under the sink. But you don’t have to do it, Hamish.’
‘I know I don’t, Ruth.’
She looked as if she was going to argue but then she huffed out an exhausted thank you. ‘I’ll be in the office. And don’t think for a second I didn’t notice how skilfully you changed the subject. Please tell me how much I owe you for your time, Hamish.’
Hamish chuckled to himself after she’d gone. He had no intention of taking her money.
He’d filled the bucket with hot soapy water and made a start on the floor when she emerged from the office. ‘Any luck?’
She shook her head. ‘I tried George, but he won’t be back at the farm until semester break. He said he’d be happy to work then, if I still needed him. At least I don’t have to worry about Sundays for the time being. If I had to go back to one day off a week it wouldn’t be long before they’d be carting me off in the padded van.’
Hamish smiled. ‘Thanks, Ruth.’
‘For what?’
‘Cheering me up.’
‘Sharing all my problems has cheered you up? Are you okay?’
‘I think so,’ he said and the mop stilled. ‘Just feeling a bit down today. Happens every now and then. Same goes for most people, I’d guess.’
‘Sure, but during the last four or five months you’ve had a huge amount of change and upheaval in your life.’ She propped herself on the edge of a table, careful not to knock a chair onto the floor, and folded her arms. ‘Losing a parent the way you did … Beats me how you’d ever come to grips with something like that. Then you sold up and moved, took a risk buying your parents’ house, alongside the task of clearing out their belongings. What an emotional soup that must have been. Plus dealing with the troubled relationship you have with your sister. Enough to wear the toughest person down. And all on top of you retiring and that not turning out as well as you’d hoped it would. Do you talk to anyone about this stuff?’
‘You,’ he said. ‘And Jeff, the mate with the Harley. He’s a bit younger than me but both his parents are dead. We’ve had a couple of chats about parents dying, that sort of thing.’
‘Is it enough? There are professional people you can talk to.’
‘I know there are but, so far, what I do has been enough. I’m going to take my clubs out tomorrow and have a round of golf. Haven’t had a hit since before Christmas. Do you play?’
Ruth sputtered with laughter. ‘Not lately,’ she said. ‘I’m not what you’d call a sporty type, in case you hadn’t already noticed. Swimming, the odd game of tennis, that’s about my limit, and I haven’t done any of either in the past five years. Out of the three of us, Robert was the fit one, the sportsman, and he died first. How fair was that?’
‘Not fair at all,’ Hamish said. He dunked the mop into the bucket of water. ‘I’d better get on with this before the water goes cold.’
‘And I’d better get on with the hundred and one things I have to do. Buy you a drink later? I’ve got beer in the fridge, and wine. And there’s always food, plenty of pizza slice left over. Unless you’d rather go to the pub?’
‘Not unless you do.’
‘I’d have to shower and change and I really haven’t got the energy.’
‘We could always go for a walk afterwards. If you felt like it.’
‘Are you serious? I can hardly drag my feet around now.’
‘Out in the fresh air, taking in the sights. We had a decent walk that day on the beach. I enjoyed it.’
‘You are serious? Okay, we’ll walk, but only after I’ve sat down for a while. And we’ll head in a different direction this time. There’s a clifftop walk, I’ve been out there several times. And at the end of Clifftop Drive there’s this amazing old Queenslander. It looks as if it’s just been plonked there, out in the middle of nowhere. Fabulous garden.’
‘Done,’ he said.
* * *
Hamish woke in the early hours of Saturday morning, mouth dry and pulse racing and with a vague memory of a dream he hadn’t had for a long time. It involved his brother Jonathon and it had never made any sense, not now nor any of the other times he’d woken with his heart pounding. While he lay there waiting for it to settle, what Ruth had said the afternoon before came to mind. The bit about professional people being available if he needed to talk. His brother’s death was a subject he’d never really discussed with anyone except his mother, and that had been before he left home as a teenager. Nat’s niggling at him from time to time about it was just that, her trying to rankle and get a rise out of him. They’d never actually talked about what had happened to Jonathon. How did she manage the memories? Did she miss him? After all, Nat was closer in age to Jonathon than Hamish had been. He’d know these things if they’d ever talked about it. If not for the few dog-eared photos of his brother he’d found in an old and dusty album on the bookshelf in his parents’ lounge room, it would have been as if Jonathon had never existed.
In the early days of his marriage to Andrea, they’d visited his parents and afterwards he’d attempted to explain to her why his relationship with his father was the way it was. The more he’d laboured over the explanation, the more disinterested she’d become, so he’d stopped and never mentioned it again—and she’d never asked. It was a tragic event in his childhood. As an individual, the experience had played a part shaping him into the man he’d become. As a family, they’d all been affected and changed by Jonathon’s death, they’d just never talked about any of it. And if they didn’t discuss it, they could pretend it hadn’t happened. That pretence had been no panacea at all. Furthermore, if it had never happened, why had Theo never stopped blaming him? The older and wiser Hamish had become, the more convinced he was that his father had given up blaming him for the actual accident, because how could he not? It had been an accident. What he’d continued to blame Hamish for was being alive when Jonathon wasn’t.
Wide awake now, Hamish threw back the bedclothes and padded barefoot to the kitchen for a glass of water. Moonlight streamed in through the window and the skylight, making electric light redundant. He stood at the window, gazing out into the night past the rainwater tank and towards the neighbour’s fence. Hamish knew his mother had never stopped grieving for the son snatched away so cruelly. When he’d visited his parents, on what turned out to be the last time he saw his mother alive, Theo had left the two of them and gone for a walk. By then her dementia had progressed to such a stage that all his mother ever did while she sat in her special chair was stare, not at him but through him, her lips moving and her arthritis-ridden fingers fidgeting with the towelling bib around her neck. Hamish remembered feeling compelled to talk about Jonathon, so he had. His mother’s fingers had stilled, her lips had stopped moving. For the whole half-hour his father was gone he’d talked about his brother, as many memories as he could cram in before he heard his father let himself in the front door.
At the sound of Theo’s voice, his mother had started fidgeting again and picking up the silent conversation she was having with whoever. Hamish had wondered then—as he wondered now—if suppressing all that grief and the memories of Jonathon was what had pushed her towards dementia in the first place. Who would ever know?
He went back to bed but it was a while before he dropped off to sleep again.