Only We Know (32 page)

Sam looked at the first page, had a cursory flick through the others to humour his father, then folded them back together again. ‘We've been through this before. I'm not moving back to the island to take over Roo's Rest. I live in Adelaide, Dad. I'm a professional firefighter and I have a job and a life there.'

A life? Sometimes he wondered what he'd done with his. Sure, he had a job he loved and was proud of, and a tight-knit group of mates he liked to shoot the shit with every now and then. He kept fit. Found things to fill his time. But in the quiet hours of the evening, when it would have been nice to have someone to go home to, someone to listen, to talk to, there was no one.

‘You think I'm blind? I know all that. You've been telling me the exact same thing for the past twenty bloody years.'

‘I'm not a farmer, Dad. Never was. But I know you love this place. I get it.'

‘Love this place? I'm sick of it. Out here all by myself. I can't even drive to the pub now you and the doctor have taken my bloody car.'

This sudden bout of lucidity left Sam reeling. What the hell was going on?

Out of nowhere, Calla's words repeated over and over in his head, so clear she might as well have been standing next to him whispering them in his ear:
Why don't you try listening to him instead of barking orders?

‘The only reason I've stayed is because of you, son. If something happens to you in Adelaide — you know, if you're in a fire, or another accident — you've got this place. When you can't do that job any more, when your body's too banged up to climb all those bloody ladders, you'll be able to do this one. It's physical enough to keep you from going mad, but with the machines nowadays even a bent-over old fool like me can work the place. I haven't been able to give you much, Sam, but I'm giving you Roo's Rest. It's your insurance policy.'

Sam put his elbows on the table, dropped his head into his hands. He could barely think. Everything he'd believed about his father had been turned on its head. The miserable old bastard he'd come to know and love was hanging on to this place for him.

Not for Andy. Not for the past. For the future.

Sam had spent a fair bit of time himself being a miserable bastard. It had been a regular house fire in a regular suburb, but there'd been nothing regular about the ceiling collapsing on him. The doctors wanted to be sure his back had healed properly before giving him the all clear, so he spent two years training other firefighters, talking to school students about fire safety and doing public building inspections. He'd completed a stint as a fire cause investigator, but pretty much as soon as he was out of rehab he was chewing his own arm off with frustration. He wanted to be back on the trucks. That's what he knew. That's what he was best at.

It had been a tough twenty-four months, made even tougher when Christina pulled the plug on their marriage. She hadn't wanted to hear about the pain he saw on the job — she
really
didn't want to hear about any he experienced for himself. His parents had been worried sick and, when they arrived from the island to stay with him, all he could see in their eyes was Andy's death revisited. It rubbed salt in the wounds of his already fucked up life. Wife out one door, parents in the next. His mother had insisted on cooking him breakfast every morning they stayed, which drove him nuts, and every time they came they brought a leg of lamb from the farm. He'd hated lamb his whole life but had never told them, until one fateful night when he'd lost his rag and stormed out the door. He'd drowned his sorrows for a few too many hours at his local pub; and when he came home, his parents had left. They stayed in a motel before heading back to the island. The next time they came over, there was no leg of lamb in the car.

Sam sighed. He felt like he was right back there, swimming in feelings of guilt. About being injured. About worrying his parents so much. About being the son of a sheep farmer who hated farming, sheep and lamb. And now, Charlie wanted to give him the whole lot to protect him.

‘Well, bugger me, Dad,' he said.

‘Son,' Charlie said.

Sam picked up the will and looked at Charlie. Perhaps for the first time, he saw a man instead of his father. He saw a man who knew his life was in its final stages. A man who'd lost his wife and a son and would soon lose his memory of them. He was a man who'd struggled his whole life to make a decent living and had crutched more sheep than Sam could bear to think about. He was a man who'd known drought and despair and debt.

But he was also a man who roamed the island as a child. He was a man who'd fallen in love with his wife the first time he laid eyes on her, and had loved her well and long. He'd been lucky enough to work with his hands in a beautiful place. His night-time entertainment was the Milky Way and he'd breathed a lifetime's worth of clean air. He'd enjoyed million-dollar views of the ocean every single day of his life from his humble front veranda.

All those stories, all his life's joys and sadness were there in his craggy, tanned face and in his eyes. The eyes that Calla's brother Jem had captured so skilfully in his painting. The eyes Sam knew he'd inherited.

And now he had another kind of inheritance to deal with. All this would one day be his. He would be the king of a castle comprising an old brick house and some paddocks on a property on the windswept and wet Kangaroo Island. At the end of an unsealed road and a dirt track in the middle of nowhere. He would be the patriarch of precisely nobody.

He smiled, picked up the will. ‘It's all written in here, I take it.'

‘Yep. And I'm staying until I drop, Sam. You can't make me go anywhere.'

‘Okay, Dad.'

Charlie upended his Scotch and slammed his glass down on the table with a laugh. ‘Pour me another one.'

Sam poured the liquor and they swallowed it neat.

The next morning, Sam cooked bacon, eggs and sausages for the two of them. They sat outside on the front veranda, ignoring the cold and taking in the clear view of Antechamber Bay in the distance and lush green paddocks as far as the eye could see.

Charlie tossed a bit of sausage to each of the dogs, which they gulped down in a nanosecond.

Sam sipped his coffee. He had a throbbing head and didn't feel much like talking. They were at peace and it was a strange feeling for Sam. He'd been butting heads with this father for so many years that it feel unfamiliar to be sitting quietly, enjoying the old man's company. They'd come to an understanding the night before. Charlie didn't want to move and Sam had agreed with him. Even after Sam had laid out all his concerns about his father's health, Charlie couldn't be moved. So be it. Sam resolved to ask Ben and his family to keep a closer eye on him and to come over himself at least once a month for a weekend. Charlie reckoned that'd do him. Sam hoped he was right.

‘What happened to that girl?' Charlie chewed his bacon. The dogs sat at his feet, silent and transfixed.

‘She's back in Adelaide.'

‘What you gunna do about her?'

‘You trying to run my love life now?'

‘I liked her. She was a nice lass. Not like your wife.' Charlie had stopped referring to Christina by name when she'd left Sam.

‘No, turns out getting married was a mistake.'

‘You gunna see her when you go home?'

‘Calla? I hope so. I need to thank her. And … maybe apologise.'

‘That makes you just like every other man alive. What did you do?'

‘She told me I should stop bossing you around and listen to what you wanted to do with Roo's Rest.'

Charlie raised his eyebrows. ‘Very smart girl you got there. You should marry her.'

‘Jesus, Dad. I'm not getting married again.'

‘Why not?'

‘Look what happened last time.'

‘You picked the wrong one.'

Sam laughed.

‘I reckon she thinks you're all right, you know.'

‘How can you tell?'

‘I may be old but I remember what it was like to have a girl look at me the way she looks at you. Your mother looked at me like that. Did you know your mother hated that bloody ferry to Adelaide? She was sick as a dog every time we went to see you when you were at university. And, you know, when you were in hospital. After your accident.'

Sam straightened up. ‘I never knew that.'

‘She made me swear not to tell you. But she put up with it because you were her son and she loved you. Did I ever tell you the story of how we met, your mother and me?'

Sam could only describe the glow in his chest as
peace
. ‘I'd love to hear that story, Dad.'

‘It was 1963. I fell in love with your mother the first time I saw her.' Charlie laughed and slapped his knee. ‘Maybe it had something to do with the bloody bikini she was wearing.'

CHAPTER

40

It was Monday morning, early. Calla had one week left before she had to be back in the classroom and she didn't want to waste a minute of it. She bounced out of bed at seven, scoffed down some toast with Vegemite, and hurriedly pulled on her painting clothes.

She opened the door of her spare room and looked at it with a critical eye. It was medium size, a door on one wall, a fireplace on another, and a window facing north, which would mean good light. She hadn't touched anything in there since she bought the house nearly eighteen months before. She'd used her share of her father's estate as a big deposit on the small cottage, and it was somewhere she felt safe and secure. There'd been a healing symmetry in being able to create a happy home out of her inheritance, in spite of her unhappy childhood. She'd painted her bedroom and the rest of the house a neutral off-white before she'd moved in. It was a good base colour on which to showcase her collection of art on almost every wall in the place. It was mostly other people's, pieces from other artists that she'd collected along the way. But this room had remained untouched. She'd always thought of it as her junk room. Its walls were a bright pink she'd always hated: it was time it was banished. Matching curtains on the windows were almost as inspiring and Calla decided they would have to go too. Thankfully, the floorboards were original, shining honey-brown and glossy since she'd had the ancient carpet torn up.

There wasn't much in the room. A sofa bed in case a friend ever needed to crash after a drunken night out. An old wooden desk. A lonely exercise bike that hadn't had exercise of its own in a very long time. A fake Persian rug she'd found on the side of the road when she was a student and had dragged to every house she'd lived in ever since. In the corner, stacked in plastic tubs, were her most precious things. Her paints and brushes and painting supplies. They would be the star of this room once she'd finished with it.

Calla docked her iPod, chose a playlist, and got to work.

She hauled the exercise bike out to the kerb. Someone would take it, most likely Harry the Hoarder in the next street. She piled everything else in the centre of the room, climbed her ladder and removed the curtains, rod and brackets. Light from the northern sky streamed into the room.

Calla loved that painting could transform a room so quickly. She checked the colour of the paint she'd bought. It was the palest of greens, which would offer her no distractions while she created. But first a base coat to hide the strong colour on the walls.

She cranked up the music, dipped her paint roller into the paint tray, and neutralised the room. Soon this would be her studio. Her very own room in which to paint and draw and create. She had the luxury of such a space because she lived alone. There were bonuses to her romantic misfortunes, she decided with a wry smile.

It wasn't just the room that was changing.

She was changing, too. And it was all happening because of Kangaroo Island.

Calla was transformed forever, in the best possible way. By simplifying her life, she had created the space to remember who she really was and what she really wanted to do with it.

Paying the bills was important. She hadn't turned into Pollyanna. But it was time to try again. All the self-doubt and excuses were gone.

Thanks to an island and a firefighter.

The muscles in her upper arms tensed and ached as she reached high to press the roller onto the wall to squeeze every last drop of paint from it. She lowered it, rolled it in the paint again and the wall began to change.

This was her new life. It had taken her so long to get here that she wasn't going to waste another minute.

Sam sat in the small kitchen at the fire station, staring into his cup of coffee. It had just gone eight a.m. and he was about to head home after his fourteen-hour night shift. He was well and truly back in the real world. After his conversation and resolution with Charlie, he'd caught the next boat back to Adelaide and swapped shifts with a mate to get back to work as soon as possible. It had been a busy night. A bad night. Their first job was a house fire. An old man had fallen asleep while smoking in bed. He was alive, but only just. And then an hour later his crew had been called out to a bad car accident. Three joy-riding teenagers had to be cut out of their smashed-beyond-recognition vehicle and were now in intensive care.

He'd come back to the station, debriefed, written up his reports, showered and changed into his blue uniform, the one firies wore when they weren't out on the trucks. Its short sleeves were a relief after the heat and heaviness of his heavy operational gear.

He pulled out his phone, checked for messages. He'd texted Calla an hour before and she still hadn't replied. Not that he was checking.

‘Yo, Crash. You on that dating app again?'

Rowdy. Sam slipped his phone into his top pocket and shot a finger at his best mate. They'd been recruits in the same intake and had been shooting the shit ever since.

‘Fuck you. And before you ask, I am not cooking you breakfast,' Sam said.