Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER
11
As I’m not riding Phoenix and there’s plenty of grass in the paddock, he needs little hard feed, so there’s not much to drag from the shed to his trough in the evenings. But changing my horse’s rugs, like doing my hair, is still difficult. I hold back a yawn.
‘I hope I sleep better tonight,’ I tell the thoroughbred, as he snuffles in the trough for the last of his pellets. Five days have passed since I saw the Viking. It wasn’t his fault I thumped my arm under the house, but it’s him that I curse when my shoulder aches at night. I haven’t looked through Dad’s containers yet, but I will. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Maybe the day after that.
Phoenix’s head shoots up as a gang of motorbikes cruise over the bridge. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. The growl of the engines turns to a buzz. Then silence. Phoenix looks at me curiously before going back to his feed. I take deep even breaths in the way my mother’s hypnotist, a middle-aged man with dreadlocks, showed me when I was a child.
Push the images away. Think of something else.
Chloe said the Viking was close to his family. Do his two younger brothers ride bikes? Do they care that he does? What about his parents? His mother was injured in a skiing accident. Is that why he’s particularly risk-averse? Except when it comes to climbing mountains, negotiating crevasses in Antarctica and riding motorcycles …
Dad was careful. Mostly he was careful. But not on the day that he died. I was fourteen and was having trouble at school because I’d fallen behind in maths and English. Grandpa knew my hay fever wasn’t a cold, but he hated to see me upset and often let me stay home. It must have been a chilly autumn day for Grandpa to have lit the fire in the workroom. Did Dad know I was in there while Grandpa was out on the verandah? I don’t think he did. Because much as he hated my mother, he rarely criticised her in my hearing.
I was snuggled up under a blanket reading a book—only getting up to throw a log on the fire every once in a while—when Dad, a ripped envelope and a piece of paper in his hand, stormed past.
‘Fuck her!’ he said.
Grandpa would usually have told off Dad for his cursing so, like Dad, he must have forgotten I was there. He spoke quietly.
‘What’s the trouble, son?’
‘She’s lodged a fucking appeal!’
It was only a few weeks beforehand that Dad and Grandpa had driven four hours to collect me from Sydney, and we’d driven all the way back to Summerfield. We went straight to the lounge at the pub. Beers for Dad and Grandpa. A jug of lemonade for me. Because Mum had taken me to Thailand without permission, Dad’s application for custody had been approved and my mother only had access at times that suited me. ‘It’s never going to suit me,’ I said under my breath when Dad’s lawyer read out the judge’s decision.
Sitting silently in the armchair in front of the fire, I waited for Dad to elaborate about the appeal. At first, he didn’t have words, and it sounded like he was having an asthma attack. I knew about asthma because Grandpa occasionally got wheezy in winter, and I remember thinking since when did Dad have asthma? But then (it was like a slipknot pulling tight across my heart) I worked out Dad was crying. Hiccupping and sniffing. Sobbing. Fighting for breath.
Back then, I cried at the drop of a hat, so I started to cry too. But something stopped me from going onto the verandah. Something stopped me from telling Dad it was past time the court gave me what I wanted—to live with my father who’d fought to be part of my life since before I was born, and my grandfather who’d never done wrong in his life.
‘I can’t pay another lawyer,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve got nothing left.’
‘I’ll get a second mortgage on the saddlery,’ Grandpa said. ‘That’ll raise the cash.’
‘The bank won’t give you more.’
If I’d shouted out, if I’d run to Dad and thrown myself into his arms and told him how much I loved him, there’s no way he would have left the saddlery until he’d calmed me down and wiped my tears and told me it’d all work out. He would have reassured me like he’d done ever since I could remember that there’s no way he’d let me go after all the bloody trouble he’d gone to to keep me.
‘Don’t you go swearing in front of the child,’ Grandpa would have said.
Dad would have forced a smile. ‘Your grandpa’s right as usual,’ he’d have replied. ‘Forget everything you heard, Mary Mackenzie. You belong here with us and we’ll prove it.’
The trouble was, I didn’t shout out. I didn’t run to Dad. And what stopped me from doing that was the thought, Why do I have to put up with court all over again? And, in those precious seconds while
I was feeling sorry for myself, Dad, his voice thick with tears, said something else.
‘I’ve got something I have to do.’
‘Now?’ Grandpa said. ‘What’s so urgent? Can’t you put it off?’
‘Not any more,’ Dad said.
Dad mustn’t have wanted to answer any more of Grandpa’s questions because he ignored them and ran down the steps to his bike.
No helmet.
No leathers.
Within an hour he was dead.