The car ferry docked at Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island as Callum stood on the foredeck in the scorching heat and scanned the brown hills, looking for his parent’s house. They’d built it on a vacant hillside 40 years ago, to fish and garden in retirement. Now it’s green roof was in the middle of a suburb. He hadn’t been back since his Mum died 30 years ago.

Caitlin booked an expensive holiday house for a week in American River, with 270-degree views of the water. His wife was a north shore Sydney girl. Plenty of time for sightseeing, fishing and drinking beer off the veranda, while scoffing local crayfish. As they drove up the hill, she turned up Brahms on the new Mercedes sound system, telling everyone they were ‘well-to-do’, cultured and wankers.

He pointed out the memorial where Captain Matthew Flinders and his crew roasted a pig with Captain Nicolas Baudin and his crew on the beach in 1802. They were both mapping the coast. France and England were at war but they didn’t know it. The island was like that. Cut off from the main, separated not only by water but time. A backwater where the clocks stopped around 1956. People still said ‘g’day. The locals were insular but friendly. Secrets ran deep. Behind the weathered smile was often debt, heart ache and in some families, something more sinister, especially for the girls.

As they drove out of town, he saw the hospital where his Mum died of cancer. They’d added another ward and a larger outpatients unit. He kept his eyes fixed on the road as they passed the cemetery. He’d never got around to putting a plaque up. Caitlin loved the quant cottages where the battlers lived, which squatted next to the million dollar architectural holiday homes with their dark glass windows and solar panels. The natural beauty, the rolling hills, the lone tree bent by the prevailing south westerly wind in an abandoned paddock, reeked of authenticity. Caitlin was captivated.

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His Mum’s decline started when he was 12. He’d come home from school and she’d have knocked off a bottle of wine and started another. Dinner was always served at 7.00pm on a white table cloth with napkins rolled in silver holders. Depending on how much she’d had to drink, dinner conversation would focus on how uncouth his friends were, his poor grades in physics and the dangers of drugs. His step father ate quietly and as soon as dinner was over, retired to the garage where he’d tinker with the lawnmower. She had remarried well. Peter had money and for the first time in her life, she could relax. Until then, they’d lived just one step ahead of the debt collector.

At Peter’s funeral the same people she’d been avoiding for years turned up and machined gunned her with pity. She flew back to Penneshaw and scattered his ashes on the rocky beach below the house. The momentos of a life they’d built together surrounded her. His binoculars and tide charts. The small tinny filled with fishing rods, tackle and gear, parked in the garage. The banksia bushes and the roses they’d planted. Callum stayed with her for two weeks after the funeral. She only spoke once:

“I’ve never been lucky”

He flew back to Melbourne to teach communication at university while completing a masters degree. His foot was tentatively on first rung of an academic career. He lived by himself in a studio on the top floor of a hotel across the road from the faculty. Every Sunday night, he’d ring her. The phone calls were more successful than the visits. More so if she’d started drinking later in the day. She’d talk about the garden and the weather and how the new housekeeper, ‘Dot’ was a breath of fresh air. A neighbour in her 40s who lived up the street. She had all town gossip. He wrote her letters about teaching and living in Melbourne and how very different it was from Kangaroo Island. She never wrote back.

xxxxxxx

Caitlin packed up the lunch picnic under Admirals Arch as a stiff westerly blew. It confused the senses. It was 34C yet the wind was cold. They drove along the south coast dirt road to Pennington Bay. Callum showed her where he used to surf. White Pointer country. He’d surfed alone there for years and never saw one. Two days before they arrived, a Japanese tourist was taken swimming in less than a metre of water. Callum hummed the Jaws theme and copped a punch on the arm. He pulled up at an infamous bend called the Devil’s Elbow by the locals, where the road turned sharply. If you kept going, the car would fly over a cliff and fall 80 metres on to a wave cut platform. Kids high on magic mushrooms and alcohol would take the corner at 100 kilometres an hour. Sometimes they’d make it, sometimes they didn’t. The dirt roads were covered with tiny balls of tightly packed ferrite soil, like ball bearings. Easy to lose control. Some weathered with sharp edges. The locals carried two spare tyres.

“Why don’t you ever talk about your Mum?,” Caitlin said as they looked at the surf.

What was there to say? She was an uneducated working class country girl, who was kind yet moody. As she grew older, she couldn’t slay the depression and hit the piss, which made it worse. She was a depressive blackhole with a gravity that threatened to suck him in. In his teenage years he despised her weakness. He called her a weirdo, weak, a hypochondriac and the gulf widened. Deep down he reserved a hatred for Dot, who he suspected played his mother against him. There was no evidence. She’d just lost her husband and was rattling around the house by herself, playing Rachmaninov loud on the old stereo, with the surf beating on the rocks below. Then she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Dot came to the rescue. He was 1000 kilometres away.

He met Dot once. He’d come over for three weeks at Christmas. His Mum was using a nebuliser to breathe. The blow flies banged in to the screens and millipedes died in piles by the back door. Dot had a face that had seen a lot of sun. She was 5’4” in the old scale and thin as a rake. A smoker with a passing resemblance to Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock’s film Rebecca. Two grey shadows hung under her eyes. Maybe insomnia, a poor diet or an arsehole for a husband. She said in a sandpaper voice, how strong Mum was living alone; how resilient. Mum wouldn’t sell the house and move back to Adelaide.

“Peter died here and if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me,” she said.

Dot finished her wine, popped a cube of cheese in her mouth and said she had one more house to clean. She gave Mum a kiss on the cheek and was out the door with a ‘toodle loo’. Later that night as he lay in bed, he realised her eyes were close together, like a rodents.

xxxxxxx

His Mum took a turn for the worse. The nurse on the phone get the plane quick smart. He got the last plane to Adelaide but it landed too late to connect with the Kangaroo Island flight. That night in the airport motel, he dreamt he was riding a camel through a desert with The Strangler’s ‘Golden Brown’ playing in his head.

The small plane bounced a couple of times as it landed on the dirt runway the next morning, swerved around a sheep and came to rest by the minibus. It dropped him at the hospital and he was told to sit in the waiting room with his rucksack. A young nurse appeared a couple of minutes later and sat down next to him. She wore an engagement ring and had green eyes and a small, button nose.

“I’m sorry”, she said, “your Mum passed away last night”

His stomach rolled and he wanted to cry but nothing would come.

“I got here as soon as I could”

“Of course you did. There was nothing you could have done. The cancer was advanced and she died peacefully in her sleep. Your housekeeper was here. She wasn’t alone”

The nurse showed him Mum’s body and left the room. Her body was cold. Her skin had a waxen sheen. This was the woman who raised him, who played ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ on his arm. He took her hand and sat next to her. The great thoughts and deeds, the wanting, the needing, the miracle of consciousness eliminated by the big sleep. And at once, he was seven again, playing in the backyard and she was chasing him and he was laughing under the dappled shade of the giant poplar tree. Then a hand fell on his shoulder and a nurse said there were papers to sign, if he was ready.

One of the nurses drove him home. The house was unlocked. He sat on the couch where he always sat and stared out to sea. How curious. The world went on just the same. No acknowledgement of this little death. There was no shuffling of her slippers; no sound of cheese and cabana being prepared for lunch. No opening of the fridge door for wine. He was alone and wept.

Dot knocked. She wouldn’t come in as she had things to do. She was very sorry about his Mum.

“You know what the problem was?” she said looking in to his eyes.

“Mum had plenty of problems, the pills, the alcohol, the loneliness. I was glad you were with her”

Dot sifted her weight from one foot to the other.

“She said something unusual to me just before she died. She looked at me and I’ll always remember the tone in which she said it.

“What do you mean?”

“She said you were an indifferent son”

He closed the door quietly on her and poured himself a double Jamesons on ice and sat on the verandah and stared at the sea.

They were his Mum’s last words, uttered not to him but to a stranger, delivered to his door the morning after her death. His heart bled in to his chest for an hour as he sank another two Jamesons. He thought of wrapping his hands around Dot’s turkey neck and throttling her. But the alcohol and the sound of the sea washed over him as he stared and the impression his Mum’s bony bum made in the cushion of her favourite Queen Anne chair.

xxxxxxx

Caitlin had lowered two bottles of Sauvignon Blanc the night before and had danced around the verandah to old UK Squeeze songs. The morning sun blasted in to the bedroom. He got up, took two Panadols and made himself breakfast. They had two more days left. He thought a BBQ on Pennington Beach and a swim.

“I might have a little lie-in,” Caitlin said. “You go for a drive, give me an hour or two and I’ll be right as rain.”

He drove the car slowly towards the South Coast. He knew every road, every farm house. As a teenager, he had walked across Flinders Chase and camped at the base of the Cape De Coudic lighthouse. He headed towards Pennington Beach with Mozart playing quietly on Bluetooth. It was the emotion attached to the memory which struck him most. The rocky limestone paddocks. The barrenness of the place. The sadness he felt in his late 20s, when he visited her. He’d made a mental note back then, not to depend too much on one person. If Caitlin walked out of his life, he’d cope. He always kept a part of himself in reserve.

An old grey Datsun sedan had stopped by the Pennington cliff. It’s boot open and an old woman was crouched next to the rear tyre, trying to work the jack. He parked behind her. A light northerly blew and the temperature was rising. Perfect for a lunchtime BBQ. He might throw a line in. See if any whiting were biting.

The old woman squinted up at him as his shadow fell on her. She was a local. Could tell by the stickers on the back windscreen. Dot had aged and was almost unrecognisable except for those rodent eyes. She wore a yellow cardigan over a floral dress and crocs.

“It’s the bloody stones,” she said. “They’re as sharp as three-corner jacks”

She didn’t recognise him.

“Let me help you,” as he repositioned the jack under the cross frame and started winding.

“Just as well it happened 100 metres back and not as I was going around Devil’s Elbow here. Might have been a bit hairy. You on holidays?”

It was 9.15am. No one around. The cliff was 30 metres away.

“Yes, we’ve been here almost a week now. I used to…”

He stopped himself mid sentence. He didn’t want her putting two and two together. Didn’t want her digging through wind-blown memories and remember the young man she’d visited all those years ago. Dot’s fingernails were split and chipped. A hair grew from a black mole on her cheek. How easy it would be to rid the world of this crone. He’d put the spare tyre on, tightened the wheel nuts, put the punctured tyre in the boot, close it and then grab her by the neck and hurl her over the cliff. The cops would be no wiser. She’d wandered too close to the edge. She wouldn’t be the first. Spectacular view and all that.

“Well you’ve come to the right place. Us locals love tourists, ” she said “We might grumble a bit behind your back but you people are the life blood of the economy. Is your wife with you?”

She’d seen his wedding ring.

“She’s back at the house, having a lie-in. One of the luxuries of being on holiday”

“I’ve never been one for sleeping in. The best part of the day is the morning but each to their own. Don’t over tighten the wheel nuts as my hubby ain’t that strong anymore”

He lowered the wheel jack and put the flat tyre in the boot.

Who’d miss this old hag? If he grabbed her by the cardigan it could easily slip off and then he’d have to chase her. The collar on her dress looked big enough to clench with one fist and she wore a thin leather belt. He could grab that with the other hand and carry her along like a carcass. The surprise of it would baffle her for a second or two. Enough time before she realised he was not a samaritan. It would be quick for her, unlike his 3.00am wakings, which turned on a pin between crying and grinding his teeth in hatred.

“You look familiar,” she said as she moved her weight from one foot to the other. “Have we met before? I’m not much good with names”

He didn’t answer. He took off his puffer jacket and rolled up the sleeves. There were no rocks or bushes between where they stood and the cliff’s edge.

“Well, a kindness repaid is a kindness remembered,” she said. “I’m ill and I could never have changed that by myself”

“Ill?”

“Cancer of the Pancreas. No cure. I’ve had it for seven years now. Seven years of hell. You’ve no idea. The pain’s worse at night. Comes in waves and the morphine makes me vomit and my poor husband, who’s senile – doesn’t even know who I am – has to hold me”

He put his puffer jacket back on and looked at Dot. She with a quizzical look on her face, as if trying to remember something far in the past, something which wouldn’t come right away. Something she’d recall past the midnight hour.

He got in to the car and drove back along the dirt road. Caitlin’s hangover should have abated and it was time for a swim.