4 HEATH

4 Heath

Heath closed his fingers around the cool steel barrel of the rifle. With blatant disregard for South Australian law, he kept it against the wall alongside the back door instead of locked in a gun safe, the ammunition and bolt separated from the firearm. What did he care for the law? It hadn’t done right by him, provided neither protection nor justice. The living continued and the innocent were gone.

He almost made himself grin with that one. Sophie would have given him shit about calling her innocent. Sophie. So vibrant and alive. Full of quick wit and caustic replies.

And now, so dead. Because that was life: it was all about death, just one long, downhill slide to a fucking inevitable end that probably felt something like relief when it finally came along. Though Sophie hadn’t looked like she’d greeted death with relief. Hadn’t sounded like she appreciated the liberation from a life that she occasionally complained about.

It should have been him.

Hand around the barrel, he jerked the rifle up, catching the timber stock. He didn’t shoot often and never for fun. But the screaming had to be taken care of. It was doing his head in.

To his surprise, as he stepped outside, he realised the day was drawing to a close: the gloaming, his father called it, apparently happy to swap his Irish ancestry for Scottish when it suited. Where had the hours gone? And did it matter? It was just another day in an endless, joyless, pointless series.

Heath caught himself, shook his head grimly. He knew he was glorifying his marriage, ignoring the fact that Sophie had suggested, only a couple of months before he let her die, that they consider divorce. Not because they hated each other; no, it had never been that. But because their marriage was ordinary. They were ordinary. Over more than twenty years they’d had dreams, fights. Budgeted some years, splurged others. Sworn undying love and been tempted to stray.

But now he was no longer ordinary, he was different, special: a widower, piteous and pitiful. Did embracing that status, never allowing himself to move forward, somehow atone for failing to appreciate what he and Sophie had had, mundane as it had seemed?

‘You taking care of that?’ Sean rounded the corner of the house as Heath stepped from beneath the low verandah into the last of the daylight. He knew his dad loved the house, thought it was something special, but as far as Heath was concerned, the place was fairly standard. The old farmhouse had been remodelled sometime in the 1960s, the raw stonework rendered and painted cream, the window trims a cool olive green, which mirrored the surrounding scrub. The traditional small, double-sash windows—designed to keep summer heat out and winter warmth from the open fireplaces in—had been upgraded, and now large, sliding glass windows looked out on to the farmyard, where Sean would have been pottering, playing at his dream of being a farmer.

Heath hefted the rifle, as though his father hadn’t noticed it. ‘Yep. On it.’

Sean held out his hand. ‘I’ll do it if you want.’

‘It’s okay.’ A sudden impulse seized him—a longing for fresh air. ‘Wouldn’t hurt me to take a walk.’

‘I’ll join you.’

Sean looked unusually grim and Heath scowled. ‘Don’t need to babysit me, Dad. I’m not thinking of topping myself.’

‘Not always about you, son.’

Heath winced. When had he become so self-absorbed? His father’s loss was at least as great as his own. Dad hadn’t lost only his daughter-in-law but, in the cruellest twist of fate, it had been on the seventh anniversary of the death of his second wife, Jill. Yet still grief hadn’t driven Sean back to the bottle, a demon he’d vanquished more than half a decade ago. Heath had momentarily considered suggesting going to the cafe rather than the pub when they’d been in Settlers Bridge a couple of days earlier, but he’d backed off. Dad knew how to handle his own issues, didn’t need Heath mollycoddling him.

Both men grimaced as the scream echoed from the stone buildings. Sean tipped his head toward the paddock beyond the sheds. ‘Better get on it then.’

They strode down the yard, Heath pretending to himself that his limp didn’t make him slower than his seventy-year-old father, then struck out across the rutted ground of a paddock, toward the hazy line of the scrub. A plane buzzed low overhead and Heath realised he’d been dimly aware of it circling. Like so much, it had failed to penetrate the thick fog of grief that greyed his days.

‘That’ll be the doc’s mate,’ Sean said.

‘You deal with him; I’ll take care of this.’

Sean made a dismissive click with his tongue against his teeth. ‘Not sure there’s much point. Saw the vixen out with three cubs the other day. She’s letting the rabbit scream so she can teach her babes how to hunt.’

‘And you didn’t think to get the gun out then?’

‘Like I said, cubs.’

‘Foxes are vermin, though.’ He was trying to persuade himself.

Sean shrugged. ‘Same can be said for rabbits. Maybe they’re just keeping the balance.’

‘Shame no one does that with humans.’

Sean broke stride as they topped a small hill, levelling his gaze on Heath’s rifle. ‘Probably not the best time to say that.’

‘Just talking shit, Dad. I’ll take a quick look through the scrub. If the foxes are smart enough to hear me coming, they’ve earned their reprieve.’

He didn’t bother softening his footfalls as he entered the tree line. He didn’t have the stomach to decide whether something should live or die. Only Sophie had been strong enough to make that choice.

After spending five minutes winding between the scrubby gums, skirting prickly tussocks of grass whose bases were dusted with red sand scraped from countless hollows by what was evidently a flourishing colony of rabbits, he settled on a smooth granite boulder. Propped the rifle beside him. Despite what he’d said to his dad, he had thought about using it more than once. But it wouldn’t be right: Sophie had sacrificed her life to save Charlee, and he didn’t get to negate that gift no matter how determined Charlee seemed to reject it. They owed it to Sophie to carry on. Find their way back to where life had purpose and potential. Or, if he stopped gilding his memories of their past, back to where life had at least been pleasant and nondescript. An existence not riddled with pain, both emotional and physical.

He eased back on the unforgiving stone pillow and closed his eyes, face turned up to the last soft golden shafts of sunlight. The scrub was peaceful. Not in a silent way, but settling. The trees rubbed together like velvet, birds making small chirrups of contentment as they subsided into nests and hollows. In the far distance, a heavy vehicle lumbered across a paddock, the resonance a comforting vibration. He took a deep breath. Maybe he could find peace within himself; perhaps it was finally time to move on.

Charlee always cranked the music too loud. Heath squeezed his eyes shut as the noise pounded his temples hard enough to crack the bone and seep inside. If he told her to turn it down so she could concentrate on the road, his daughter would flash that perfect grin—the one guaranteed to undermine any attempt at parental discipline—and say she couldn’t do a thing about it: learner drivers weren’t allowed to touch their phones while behind the wheel. She always had an answer for everything.

He’d respond with a half-hearted grumble along the lines of L-platers weren’t supposed to use any of the phone functions, including maps and music, even if the handpiece was safely closed in the centre console.

Charlee would shrug and, in the infallibly reasonable tone that suggested she possessed far greater intellect than either of her parents, point out that letting the playlist run posed less of a danger than the distraction of jabbing at the buttons on the stereo.

Rather than infuriating, Heath found the predictability of the exchange with his daughter comforting.

But something was wrong. They had strayed from that familiar routine. Heath frowned, the movement heavy and impossible, dragging his face down. Charlee should be singing along with whatever she had blaring through the Hyundai’s speakers and, eyes glued to the road, his fists should be clenched on his thighs to prevent him snatching at the steering wheel. It was judgement enough that he almost put his foot through the metal, pressing brakes that weren’t there as she took the winding country roads too fast, coming to a rubber-melting halt at each T-junction. As Sophie said, it was going to take a near-miss to knock some of the cockiness out of their sixteen-year-old. Did that make them bad parents, hoping there’d be a minor prang? Nothing serious, just bad enough to shake Charlee’s belief in her immortality. Or perhaps all parents prayed for that intervention? If Charlee’s prized orange i-30, which she’d worked so hard to buy herself, copped a bit of panel damage, Heath would gladly put up with her tears, as long as it kept his only child safe. In fact, he’d pay the insurance excess himself and consider it fair trade for a lesson he’d not had to impart. Charlee was obstinate; bright, yet impossible to teach. Basically because, at sixteen, she already knew everything. God, it would be good to be that young, invincible and arrogant again.

As though it had to travel a long distance, Heath’s mind reluctantly returned from its meanderings. But dancing around the puzzle of the moment—his aching head, the heaviness in his face—still it refused to focus.

In what he recognised was a bid to appease him, Charlee had made them a joint playlist, throwing in some nineties stuff she knew he’d like. Guns N’ Roses’ ‘November Rain’ wailed from a speaker. Particularly fitting as the rain drifted across his face.

Which made no sense, Heath thought, trying to lift a hand to rub his forehead. Taking full advantage of her authority as the driver, Charlee always had the windows up and heater blasting in winter. In summer she also had the windows up, but the air conditioning on: she wouldn’t risk the wind messing with whatever she’d done to her hair that day.

Yet there was the unmistakable tickle of moisture snaking down the side of his face. Wet and … warm? He groaned, his head thick and stuffed, the conundrum too hard to grapple.

Shock bolted through him, snapping the seatbelt tight as he stiffened. What the hell was he doing, closing his eyes? Sophie had chipped him only last week about letting his attention stray when he was supposed to be instructing—or at the very least, monitoring—Charlee’s driving. Sophie often grumbled that he let Charlee get away with blue bloody murder.

Charlee would laugh and say, ‘Orange murder, Mum. Stick with my fave.’

They had something of an undeclared parenting battle going, him and Sophie. A fight over who was the better driving instructor. It was easy for Sophie to accuse him of letting his mind wander too often: she hadn’t worked since before Charlee’s birth, and the seventeen-year hiatus meant that Sophie was disconnected from the pressures that came with a career. She had forgotten the impossibility of simply switching off thoughts of the latest office politics or tax office ruling that would affect his clients.

In any case, it wasn’t that he allowed his mind to wander, more that he chose his focus. Despite Sophie’s teasing about his limitations as a male, he could multitask well enough to monitor Charlee’s driving—especially out here on the open roads where there was rarely any traffic—while he mentally analysed the investment advice he planned to give a newly retired couple. He’d put in a bit of extra attention once Charlee got around to trying reverse parking, though.

An acrid smell seared his nostrils and he chuckled in comfortable reminiscence; bizarrely, the stench reminded him of a movie he’d watched with Sophie a few months back, one she’d chosen when they’d briefly invested in a ‘mindful dating’ thing, determined to drag their love life back from the humdrum that came with raising a teenager. The film was a period romance and a woman wearing voluminous skirts had been revived from a fainting fit by a burning feather held under her nose. He’d remarked the stink was more likely to make a person pass out. But he’d been wrong: this smell was definitely bringing him round.

Bringing him round? No, that was wrong. He was wide awake. Focused.

He had to be.

Heath shook his head to clear the confusion and a dull pain throbbed at the base of his skull. He really needed Charlee to turn the music down. Another smell impinged. Thick and cloying with the tang of iron, it held a different memory. The day Charlee was born. The day Sophie had almost died, bleeding out in the sterility of the hospital delivery room.

Then, the smell had terrified him.

As it did now.

The scream that ripped the air apart shocked him from his thoughts. His dream. His nightmare.