The knock on the fly screen door rattled down the corridor of my old rental house like a small stone in a tin can. As I opened the front door, an orange corona appeared around the frizzy henna-head of a woman in her early 60s, as the sun set behind her. The woman had graduated top of her class in Earth Mother. She wore a white gypsy skirt, a white cotton top and a red shawl. Two small, fat hairy brown legs stood on worn sandals. Her smile fell as my neighbour repeatedly yanked the chord on a flooded lawn mower, ‘Fuck’n fing, fuck’n fing’. A ring-encrusted hand appeared from beneath the shawl and shook mine.

“I’m Miranda.”

My wife of three years had just left me. She said she didn’t want to hitch her star to a man in his late 20s, who set sail on weekend benders of such epic proportion, that recovery took three days. She said – and I don’t think she’ll mind me quoting her verbatim – that when I hit the ‘glug glug’, she wanted to, ‘run a rusty cut throat razor across your neck and watch you die amongst the empties.’

“Do you mind if I come in? It’s rather personal”

Miranda sat on my wife’s ‘good lounge’. It still had the plastic protective cover on. I thought of offering tea but she looked like an escapee from an esoteric bookshop.

“I’ll come straight to the point. I’m your half-sister. My dad is your dad. You’re my brother from another mother”

Mum never said I had a half-sister but then again, she never told me my Godfather was gay or that the six years I’d spent in boarding school was paid for by Aunty Polly, who ran a successful brothel. Mum, Polly and my Dad died many years ago. They belonged to a generation that buried the past deep.

“You lived on a farm north of Adelaide. I was there when you were born,” Miranda said. “When your parents split up, your Mum took you to live with your grandparents. Your Dad wasn’t easy to live with. My Mum left him too. He used to hit her when the rages took him. It runs in the men. Know what I mean?”

From 15 years of age, I’d become a walking Krakatoa. I’d explode for scant reason, sending people fleeing. My Dad’s father had killed a man with an axe and buried the body on the property, so people said. Miranda was searching my face like a cryptic crossword.

“Most people blow their tops,” I said. “I’m no different”

She folded her hands in her lap and smiled at me. Mum used to do that when she’d caught me in a lie. Those smiling eyes said it all. Judge and jury. I brewed two strong cups of tea … fucking hell.

“How did you find me?”

“I asked your Mum – a long time ago. She thought at the time it would be best if I didn’t just ‘pop out of the box’ when you were having problems”

‘Popping out of the box’, was one of Mum’s euphemisms for ‘don’t upset young Callum.’ When I was 17, I spent two months in my bedroom reading Camus and Sartre. I took an overdose and spent three months in a psychiatric hospital. The therapy was useless. I replaced the therapy and the existential writers with bottles of scotch.

“I’m flying home to Byron Bay tonight. Amazing, isn’t it?” she said. “Instant family! In the old days, people didn’t let the skeletons out of the closet. Here’s my phone number. Come and stay with me over Christmas and we’ll make those skeletons dance”

As I held the door open for her, she pulled a black and white photo from her velvet shoulder bag.

“I thought you might like this. It’s me and our Dad sitting on the verandah of the farm. I’m 17 and 20 kilograms lighter. That’s you in the basinet under the grape trellis. It’s the only picture I have of us. My face is a bit shadowy but that’s me”

She opened the front gate, smiled, waved and walked across the hotel carpark to the city.

I put the photo on my bedside table. My wife’s old clothes were in green garbage bags at the foot of the bed. I took a deep breath and wept like a child.

xxxxxx

I caught a bus to Byron Bay. Liberation ran through me like childish laughter. We drove in her old Mazda to a house by the railway line and close to the beach. It was covered in palms and bromeliads. An old caravan covered in vines was my new home.

Miranda liked telling stories and the stories she liked telling the best were the ones about herself.

“I was 19 and poor as a church mouse. A social worker came to see me and asked a whole lot of personal questions about me and Dad. By then, my Mum had died of lung cancer. I had to do things to get money. I wasn’t always proud of that”

“You hawked the fork?”

“I entertained high class men at parties. The more money men have, the more they want you to piss on them. Anyway, the next thing I know, I’m hauled off to the loony bin. They put Thorazine in the food. I still can’t eat porridge without tasting it. I ended up working as a psychiatric nurse for a few years but I identified with the patients too much. I’m with Laing. Society is bonkers”

We walked through the forest to the beach and lay in the shallows. Tiny crabs raced to the water’s edge as gulls swooped on them.

“You think prostitution and the loony bin is bad,” I said. “I did six years in an all-boys private school. I went in when I was six and came out when I was 12”

“Give me the boy before he’s seven,” Miranda said.

None of her friends dropped by. She was a lone wolf like me.

On New Year’s Eve, the hippy community built a six-metre high strawman of the Hindu God, Shiva on the beach. They stuffed his sari and arms with firecrackers and used Catherine wheels as ears. We arrived just before midnight as the crowd jumped to Indian rock music.

Miranda washed her ecstasy tablet down with a bottle of tequila. Two large men dressed as Sannyasins, carrying flaming torches, walked through the crowd to the giant straw god. People started pogoing and shaking their heads as one of the Sannyasins lit the straw and counted down: “ten, nine, eight …”

A woman in her 30s who looked like a young Scarlett Johansson, was guzzling Krug champagne and smiling at me.

“Five, four, three”

I looked at Miranda and thought, ‘this woman is a complete stranger to me’, then it passed, like summer lightening. I walked over to Scarlett, who saw me coming, and pulled the lips of her ferret-faced boyfriend down on to hers.

Sky rockets whistled across the night sky and exploded over the ocean, as Shiva burst in to flames. His ears spun fire like mad Ferris wheels. I walked to the water’s edge and watched as the heaving mass of people exchanged saliva and later, other bodily fluids.

xxxxxxx

Eartha Kitt howled in the kitchen. Miranda knocked on the caravan door, walked in and sat on my bunk.

“About that girl,” she said.

“Which girl?” I said bleary eyed.

“The one you were eyeing-off at the beach last night”

“Eyeing-off might be too strong. Her boyfriend was standing next to her”

She folded her hands in her lap and took a deep breath.

“She’s trouble. I know one of the doctors at the sexual diseases clinic and she’s a regular. The real trouble is her boyfriend who calls me names like ‘fatty-fat-fat’. I’m a little over weight – Rubenesque I’d say – but of late, he’s got nasty”

“Nastier than calling you ‘fatty-fat-fat?”

“I’m an older woman and an easy target”

“I’ll have a chat with Ferret-face”

My morning run took me towards the rich houses on the headland. I was running back in to town when Ferret-face walked by. His dreadlocks tied on top of his skull.

“Excuse me mate, have you got a second?”

Ferret-face pulled an earphone from one ear and sized me up.

“What do you want?”

I wasn’t expecting attitude so early in the morning. He was 5’10’ and about 35. His face pocked with teenage acne.

“My sister, Miranda, you know, the one you’ve been hassling, would like you to stop it. It’s not very PC. She’s a burnt-out old hippy and deserves to live the last years of her life singing along to dead black musicians”

“She owes me $300 for a bag of dope I sold her months ago”

He was probably telling the truth but he made one fatal mistake. He took a step back and flexed his shoulders, as if getting ready to throw a punch. I’d done it a dozen times before. I held up both hands in front of my face, palms out if saying, ‘I don’t want any trouble’ and then I quickly stepped forward and drove my left fist in to his nose. His head snapped back with the shock and his eyes teared up. I then drove my right fist in to his stomach.

“Let’s call the debt paid in full. If you hassle her again, I will be most displeased. Say hullo to Scarlett”

I didn’t like hurting people. But I had a new family – a half-sister. Miranda savoured the details of the fight but I felt sorry for Ferret-face. All he wanted was his money.

I returned home, wearing a new silver bracelet Miranda gave me with the word ‘shanti’ engraved on the inside.

Twelve months past and we talked on the phone daily. It was good to have someone to tell my troubles to. Miranda told me about the films she’d seen and recommended books to read.

“I might be able to help you with some cash,” she said. “I’ve had a run-in with a local counsellor who wants to ban me from subletting the caravan. He called me an ‘old boiler’ and gave me the finger”

“Is this a rerun of Ferret-face?”

“Nothing like that. Can you called him up and convince him otherwise. I need that money to supplement my sickness benefits. A girl has to eat”

Miranda had rorted the government for years with a forged doctor’s letter which said she was a victim of domestic violence and suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress.

“How much were you thinking of?”

“How about $500.00? That’s all your poor old sister can afford”

She gave me his telephone number and address. I spent a week building a package in my back shed and posted it to the counsellor.

David Cressy had been a Greens Councillor for 20 years. He was popular and had a strong sense of social justice. Miranda had helped him get elected but she wanted favours in return. After 10 years, the favours and the friendship had run dry.

The package arrived on David’s doorstep and he took it inside. He was 75, spry and still helped at the local surf club. He cut the paper away and there sat a wooden box the size of a bread tin, with a latch on the top. He flipped the latch and a one metre jack in the box exploded towards the ceiling, sending blood-red confetti high in to the air. David took two steps back as a pain shot across his chest. The jack-in-the-box arm’s flung out a large banner which read: ‘YOU’RE DEAD!’

He fell to his knees by the refrigerator. That’s where two members of the lifesaving club found him that afternoon. Dead as a doornail. The police investigation turned up nothing.

Two days later, Miranda called me with the news. It was the talk of Byron Bay.

“That was genius”

“It was meant to scare him, not kill him!”

“Your secret is safe with me”

The following week, five $100 notes arrived in the post.

Spring arrived with a bang as thunder rolled over the house. I was clearing out old books for a garage sale when I picked up the picture of me, Dad and Miranda, taken all of those years ago. There I was, a babe under the grape vine.

I looked at the back of the picture and saw a faint pencil mark, ‘12/17’ and the word ‘copy’. I thought nothing of it and lugged a box of books to the corridor. Something nagged. I walked back to the study, picked up the photo again. Miranda wore a small digital watch. Digital watches hadn’t been invented then. It had been photo-shopped.

My ex-wife’s cousin worked in Births, Deaths and Marriages. I needed a favour. In my inbox the next morning, was a scanned PDF of the births and deaths of Lawrence’s children by his marriage to Jean and Mum. There was also a news clipping. My Mum had two children. One died at 7 months – which I didn’t know – and there I was, Callum Patrick McDonald. Jean had no children. The newspaper clip said she died in a house fire, cause unknown. Then who was Miranda?

Miranda had met Mum all those years ago. She was a psychiatric nurse and visited her at the time of my breakdown. I didn’t remember her. The past would have come gushing out of Mum in a torrent of relief. At last, someone to talk to. And Miranda or whoever she was, would have listened. She would have made notes and stolen the photo.

It wouldn’t have taken much detective work to realise that my family was shored up by lies. After Mum’s death – and with infinite patience – Miranda concocted a story which no one could deny, least of all me.

She simply sought what I sought. A family. A brother and sisterhood clubbed together against lonely nights. If I said nothing about the doctored photo and the birth certificates, what harm would that do? What solace is the truth, if the truth meant being solitary? But if she lied to me about who she was, what else had she lied to me about? She had used me with Ferret-face and the old bugger. The media was calling it the ‘Jack-in-the-Box’ murder.

Now she had a secret over me. If I didn’t toe the line, she’d shop me to the cops. But that meant destroying her fantasy and incriminating herself. She wouldn’t do that. She’d know better than anyone, there would be ‘unpleasantness.’

The season turned and the pollen pods on the plane trees outside my house burst, sending me in to fits of sneezing. I placed the takeaway Indian food on the kitchen table as the phone rang. Miranda was breathless. Her words were locomotive.

“You won’t-believe-it, Cal. You have a half-brother! I was just talking to him on the phone. His name is Tyler. I should have told you before. He wants to meet you”

I walked in to the study, followed by the scent of Vindaloo. I would play along. This woman was building a family of strangers. What was wrong with that? She was an Earth Mother, leading lost sheep on to her imaginary ark.

“Name the time and place and I’ll be there”

“First, I need a favour. Many years ago, I had a fling with a trumpet player. He’s still hanging around me. He played ‘Moon River’ for two hours outside my bedroom window last night and the cops came. They’re the last people we want to see”

“Sorry Miranda, you’ll have to sort it yourself. By the way, what do you mean by we?”

The phone fell dead for a few seconds.

“I went to a lot of trouble to find you. I opened my heart and home to you,” she said. “I treated you with love and light. Just have a little chat with this bloke and send him packing. Once he’s gone, I’ll introduce you to Tyler. We have to stick together. We’re a family”

I wasn’t going to destroy our fortress against loneliness. Neither was I going to monster her old trumpet playing boyfriend.

“Sorry,” I said as I walked back in to the kitchen, “tell Miles Davis that love don’t live there anymore”

“There’s a $50,000 reward for information on the Jack-in-the-Box murder,” Miranda said. “Did I tell you?”

That was a mistake and Miranda knew it. The red and orange vindaloo sauce spilled on the kitchen floor. My ex-wife’s voice in my head said, “you’re going to clean that up, aren’t you?” I hung up and walked outside.

I walked in to the shed, picked up the new axe I’d bought for splitting firewood and placed it in the boot of the car. If I drove through the night, I’d arrive in Byron Bay the next evening.