bayou plantation mansion than Bellbowrie millionaire’s hideaway.
Dappled sunlight twinkles through the leaves of eight flourishing elm trees that line the long and twisting driveway that splits a vast manicured lawn and eventually ends at a wide set of white polished marble steps.
Caitlyn parks the car at a yellow gravel visitor’s bay left of the marble steps, slips out of the car and pops the car boot.
The sound of birds in the elm trees, a light wind. Nothing else.
‘How am I gonna explain who you are?’ I whisper.
Caitlyn reaches into the boot and presents an old black Canon camera, a long hard grey lens, like one of the cameras our sports photographers use in Lang Park on game days.
‘I’m the snapper,’ she smiles, closing one eye to gaze through the lens.
‘You’re not a photographer.’
‘Puh!’ she sniggers. ‘Point and click.’
‘Where’d you get that camera?’
‘Snuck it out of the repairs cabinet.’
She walks to the towering entry door.
‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘You’re late for your interview.’
*
Ring the doorbell. The doorbell rings in three places within the sprawling house, one ring echoing into another like a small music piece. Heart full of hope. Heart in my throat. Caitlyn grips her camera like it’s a war hammer and she’s leading a group of drunk Scots into battle. No more sound but the birds in the elm trees.
So far from anything here. So far from life and the world. I realise now how much the house doesn’t fit the setting. The white towering columns don’t fit with the native landscape surrounding us. There’s something wrong, something off about this place.
One half of the wide double-door entry swings open. As it swings open I remember to slip my right hand with its missing forefinger inside my deep right coat pocket, slip it out of view.
A short woman in a formal grey work dress, a maid’s uniform I guess. Filipino maybe. Big smile. She opens the door wider to reveal a frail and thin woman in a white dress. Flesh so thin on her face it looks like her cheeks have been painted in oils across her pronounced cheekbones. A warm smile. A face I know.
‘Good afternoon,’ she says, elegantly bowing her head briefly. ‘You folks from the paper?’
Her hair is grey now. It used to be blonde-white. It still hangs straight and long over her shoulders.
‘I’m Hanna Broz,’ she says, placing her right hand to her chest. But the hand is not a hand at all. It’s a plastic fake but like none I’ve ever seen. It looks like one of Mum’s hands, like it’s been tanned and weathered by the sun. It sticks out of the white sleeve of a cardigan she wears over her dress. I look at her left hand by her side and it’s the same. There are freckles on this one. It’s stiff but it looks real, made of some kind of moulded silicone. All for show and not for function.
‘I’m Eli,’ I say. Don’t say your last name. ‘This is my photographer, Caitlyn.’
‘I might just grab a quick headshot if you don’t mind?’ Caitlyn says.
Hanna nods. ‘That should be fine,’ she says, turning away from the door. ‘Come. Dad is in the reading room out back.’
Maybe Hanna Broz is fifty now. Or forty and tired. Or sixty and grateful. What did she do with the past six or so years since I last saw her? She doesn’t recognise me but I recognise her. That was her father’s eightieth birthday party. Mama Pham’s restaurant in Darra. A different time. A different Eli Bell.
*
The house is a museum of collected antiques and gaudy oil paintings the size of the floor space in my bedroom. A medieval suit of armour holding a jousting stick. An African tribal mask fixed to a wall. Sweeping polished wood floors. A set of Papua New Guinean tribal warrior spears in a corner here. A painting of a lion tearing apart a gazelle over there. A long living room with a fireplace and a television wider than my bed is long.
Caitlyn cranes her neck to a bronze chandelier that looks like a steel huntsman spider weaving a web of lightbulbs.
‘Nice place,’ she says.
‘Thank you,’ Hanna says. ‘We didn’t always live like this. My father came to Australia with nothing. His first home in Queensland was a room shared with six other men in the Wacol immigration camp.’
Hanna stops on the spot. She stares at my face.
‘Do you know it?’ she asks.
‘Know what?’
‘The Wacol East Dependants Holding Camp for Displaced Persons?’