Thornwood House by Anna Romer Read Free Book Online

argument was brewing, possibly a tantrum.
    I looked back at the house.
    It hovered in the blazing afternoon light, a pale island in a sea of gently rippling grass, ghostly and silent. It seemed anchored to another time, a solitary remnant of an era that had long ago ceased to exist. Even the insects buzzing in the grass and the crows cawing mournfully overhead seemed to belong to a place that wasn’t quite real.
    If anyone had asked me to put into words what I was feeling at that moment, I’d have been unable to say. I tried to recall another instance when my arms had rippled with tingles, when the same delicious stillness of heart had rendered me incapable of speech . . . but in truth, I’d never before felt such a sense of belonging.
    I wanted to run back along the brick pathway, hurry through the clumps of dandelion and seeding weed-heads, through the bobbing swarms of bees and butterflies, and fling myself back into the old house’s shadowy embrace. I was itching to roll up my sleeves and start clearing cobwebs and dust, spend the afternoon fossicking among the treasures that I knew must be hidden within those forgotten nooks and cubbyholes. I wanted to lose myself in the labyrinth of rooms, get covered in ancient dust, soak up memories that weren’t mine . . . and only surface once my desire to know the place more intimately had been satisfied. I was already fantasising about the renovation: who I’d call, what jobs I could do myself –
    Bronwyn honked the horn again. ‘Hurry up, Mum.’
    My pleasure-glow winked out. Reality crashed back. I had job contacts in Melbourne that I’d spent a decade developing; Bronwyn had school. Not to mention our various networks of friends, and the comfortable monotony of our city environment. Moving to another state, to a remote old house, making a clean break and starting our lives over . . . Well, even the idea of it was intimidating.
    I flopped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Dug the key into the ignition. The motor rumbled, then idled quietly while I sat rock-still, frowning at the windscreen.
    Aunt Morag had always insisted she had restless blood. That was why we never stayed long in any one place. She’d earned a modest living as an artist’s model, which allowed her the freedom to relocate whenever the whim took her . . . which was often. When I was a child, we lived in a never-ending succession of basements, warehouses, ramshackle shacks on the outskirts of dusty suburbs; tiny, musty apartments, or stately old mansions fallen to disrepair and rented for a song. We even spent a year in a sculptor’s studio, bedding down among an assortment of plaster busts and huge blocks of powdery marble, surrounded by treelike flower arrangements and podiums topped with plastic-enshrouded clay. We stayed until Aunty and the sculptor had a falling out, and then we moved on.
    It wasn’t until my teens that I learned the truth about my aunt’s restless blood. After an overheard phone-call, the dots had joined. My mother was a drug addict who pestered Morag for money. Our frequent moves from place to place, it seemed, were less about Aunt Morag’s arty whims, and more about avoiding her sister-in-law’s teary confrontations.
    When Morag died a few weeks shy of my seventeenth birthday, I fell into the only pattern I knew. I began to drift from place to place, making temporary homes in shared houses, squats, dubious one-room rentals. I slept on couches, bunked down on floors and, for several weeks one summer, even camped on a leafy inner city rooftop.
    When I met Tony, all that changed. He took a mortgage on the old bluestone terrace in Albert Park, and then Bronwyn came along. For the first time in my life I had a real anchor, a family; a reason to settle in one place long enough to discover that I liked it. Not just liked it; needed it –
    ‘Mum?’ Bronwyn was peering across at me. Sweat beaded her brow, tendrils of hair clung to her face. ‘We’d