interruptions. I knew that no matter how much work we did, the place wasn’t going to be perfect, so I just had to accept that.
Fi brought a lot of flowers with her, because there weren’t too many in our garden compared to when my mother looked after it, so she started putting those in vases all through the house. Homer and Lee got stuck into the machinery shed, tidying it up a bit more, and Bronte and I cleaned away breakfast. Then I did a mow while Bronte cut back the grass around the dog pens. Fi started baking scones, so there’d be a nice smell through the house for the final inspection. Not everyone can cope with our stove but Fi handled it with ease.
Marmie ran around and got in everyone’s way, while I tried to check that she wasn’t doing a dump anywhere.
After Madeleine’s report I was very self-conscious about dogs doing stuff they weren’t meant to. Well, doing it in places they weren’t meant to, anyway.
At least the auction and all the preparations were taking my mind off Gavin. I hadn’t seen him since Thursday and I’d told him I probably wouldn’t be able to visit today, although maybe I’d get there if the sale was over quickly. The cottage he was in didn’t look too bad and he said the other kids were OK, but they were all older than him, and I noticed he didn’t mix with them. He said the food was crap, but Gavin always says that, even about the meals I make sometimes. Which admittedly aren’t always perfect.
We’d already had a couple of open days for buyers to come and have a look, plus Jerry Parsons had been bringing people for private inspections almost every day, so the place wasn’t really too messy. At one-thirty they were allowed to poke around again, so we had to be done by then. It was such a violation, having all these strangers trample around making loud comments on the way you do things, but that’s the way it was and if all went well I wouldn’t have to worry about it again after today.
Mr Parsons was good, he got there at about noon, with his son and daughter, who came along for the ride. They even brought their own lunch. I knew Justin from school. He was a good kid who was into outdoors stuff and wanted to be a farmer. They pitched in and helped too, moving a pile of roofing iron which we hadn’t had time to move ourselves. Don’t know how many snakes they found under it but I reckon there would have been one or two. The crowd started coming in early, about one-fifteen. Jerry Parsons had an assistant at the front gate, and they were in contact by walkie-talkie, but it got to the point where he said he couldn’t hold them much longer, so in they stampeded. It was like an endless convoy coming up the driveway. I didn’t know there were that many people in Wirrawee. But there’s nothing like an auction to get people out and about. Everyone loves an auction, except when it’s your own I guess, cos I wasn’t too much in love with this one.
I was glad Gavin wasn’t there to see it. His bedroom was the neatest it had ever been, thanks to Fi, but he wouldn’t have recognised it. There could have been three hundred people go through it during the afternoon. As Homer said, I wish I’d sold tickets. Homer was great and I stuck close to him. Lee kept a low profile. This kind of thing wasn’t his scene.
I saw people I hadn’t seen in years, along with all the old familiar faces of course. Homer’s parents were there, being potential bidders, not to mention being my guardians. But really, it was like Ms Randall had picked up on, they didn’t often waste too much time with that. There were all the other neighbours: the Youngs, whom I’d grown to love like they were a second family; the Lucases; the Nelsons, who were as bad as Mr Rodd. Mrs Rowntree, from Tara, with her new husband, a horse trainer. They were turning their place into a horse stud. Young Tammie Murdoch, who was as wild as her grandmother, and had inherited the family property just the other day. Jodie Lewis, from Wirrawee, who’d been run over ages ago, and was in hospital for ages, and she still wasn’t right, even though she was walking again. The McPhails and Randall, the big lout, still living at home and sponging off his parents. Col McCann. I felt so guilty about his bull. I wondered if he’d sent it to the abattoir. He’d never mentioned the two dead men to me, but I hadn’t asked either. Mr Roxburgh, from Gowan Brae, one of the best farmers in the district; Mrs Leung, who’d lost her husband in the war; and Mr Jay, who must have been ninety-five but hadn’t aged a day in the last five years and who I was now convinced would live forever. Sal Grinaldi was there, wanting to tell me a joke, and Mr George, and Morrie Cavendish complaining about rainfall, and my good mate Jack Edgecombe. Even the Kings came down from the hills.
At the same time, though, there were so many people I didn’t know, most of the crowd in fact, that it made me realise even more forcefully how things were changing. The old days were gone, that was for sure, and after today they’d be a bit more gone.
I don’t know how many people were actually thinking of buying the place. Could have been none. It wouldn’t have surprised me. No, the Linton place was the main tourist attraction in the Wirrawee district this weekend and everyone had turned up for the free entertainment.
The CWA were doing a sausage sizzle so we got our lunch from them. At least they didn’t charge me.
The auction started about ten minutes late, out the front. Jerry Parsons said to wait inside the house but I couldn’t, so I perched on the lowest branch of the old oak tree on the other side of the driveway, the tree I had spent so many hours in as a kid, and, with a hand on Homer’s head below me, tightly watched and listened as Mr Parsons started firing up the crowd.
I can’t remember everything he said, but there was a lot of stuff about this being a famous property, one of the best in the district, ‘lovingly developed and maintained by successive generations of the Linton family’, with improvements including ‘this gracious home behind me, which I’m sure you’ve all had a good chance to look through by now, and the very spacious machinery shed, along with the shearing shed which is one of the oldest in the district and has been recognised by the National Trust as being of historic significance, and most recently a fine new set of cattle yards which have just been completed’. He read a lot of that stuff off the brochure.
But eventually the time came. The knot in my stomach tightened. I really had no idea how many people might be bidding. Jerry Parsons said there were four people who’d had at least three looks at the place, and then of course there were some of the neighbours who would have only needed to see it once, if at all. But Jerry also said that there mightn’t be a single bid. ‘You just never know,’ he said. ‘I always tell people not to get their hopes up.’
A large part of me would have been quite happy to get no bids, and then I could stay on living here, but I knew that wasn’t a good idea. Besides, I’d made my mind up to leave, and I guess that meant I’d said goodbye to the place in my head. And my heart. Once you’ve done that it’s hard to go back.
‘Now it’s time for you to do what you’ve come here today to do,’ Mr Parsons shouted. He was getting good and worked up. ‘And that’s to put your hand up if you want to give yourself a chance of becoming the new owner of this magnificent property. The first new owner in nearly a century. A property like this only comes along about once in a century.’
‘That’s what he says every week,’ whispered Polly Addams, to my right, and a few people laughed. I kept my head down.
‘When you bid, bid good. Don’t be bashful about it.
Stick your hand up where we can see it. And now I’m asking for a bid to get me started. What’ll it be, ladies and gentlemen? How much will you give me for this wonderful property and all its improvements? Who’ll get me started? Come on now, is there a million? Will you say a million? There must be a million, surely?’
The suspense was terrible. Everyone was looking at the ground, except the kids, who were staring in every direction, hoping to see a hand wave. Maybe the adults were afraid to make eye contact with any of the auctioneer’s staff in case it was taken as a bid.
I didn’t see anyone move or hear anyone but then Jerry Parsons suddenly said, ‘Eight hundred is it? All right, I’ll take eight hundred, to get me started. It’s very low but I’ll take it. Now we’re here today to sell, ladies and gentlemen, so don’t be shy. Do I have eight fifty? Yes I do, to my right there.’
‘Nine hundred,’ someone near me yelled and we were away.
‘That was Mr Rodd,’ Homer whispered. My face burned. ‘No way!’ There was no way in the world I would sell the place to Mr Rodd!
But the auction was galloping and bids were coming from left, right and centre, literally. They raced to 1.2 million, then slowed down, until only three people were bidding, it seemed to me. It was very hard to tell what was happening. You must need eyes in the back of your head to be an auctioneer. Then one person dropped out and the bidding suddenly slowed to a dawdle. They started going up by $25,000 at a time, then by tens. ‘You’re going to be a millionaire,’ Homer muttered.
‘The bank takes most of it. Are your parents bidding?’
‘I’ve been watching them. Dad waved his hand a couple of times but they only saw him once, I think. It’s too
