The Golden Book

by Kate Ryan

  She thought of the bungalow, his books, the gun. It seemed so long ago but also not. ‘Glad you could come.’ He was heavier than he had been, swarthy still. She saw him glance down at her body, and then he leant in to peck her on the cheek.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured. Had they ever touched before? She pulled back quickly.

  ‘Still teaching?’

  Ali was stiff with the effort of pretending not to notice his dislike. ‘I’m having a break at the moment. I took a redundancy last year.’

  Cal nodded, and she felt his cold focus shift even further away. ‘This is Don, by the way.’ He glanced at her again with his heavy eyes. ‘Don, this is Ali, a good friend of Jessie’s from years ago. Don was Jessie’s godfather.’

  Ali swallowed and felt her face colour. ‘Hi.’ She shook Don’s hand, which was as cool and dry as parchment. She was thrown by his title, though she had a vague memory of her mother mentioning some sort of ceremony for Jessie a few years back, a belated christening.

  ‘Were you at school with Jessie?’ He was upright and neat in pressed pants, a white shirt, and black polished shoes.

  ‘Yes, I was. All through primary school …’ She hesitated, and Cal brutally cut across her and addressed Don as if she were not there. ‘Excuse me, mate. Better check on Aggie.’

  Left alone, Ali smiled, asked Don something about his job — pastoral care — and then he was talking on and on about the congregation. ‘We’re a small community but very supportive. Aggie has had her trials, of course, but we have provided love.’ He smiled with straight, yellow teeth. Ali nodded, saw Cal across the room handing a large glass of red to Aggie and suppressed the urge to laugh. She saw Diane, deep in conversation with a woman about her age. Who was it? She tried to tune into Don again, but all at once Eli was beside her. ‘Excuse me. I’ll borrow Ali if you don’t mind, Don.’

  ‘Of course.’ Don smiled, and Eli ushered her away towards the drinks table.

  ‘Smooth,’ she said.

  ‘Had to rescue you,’ Eli said, smiling. ‘Old coot can go on for hours. Then he’d try and save you.’

  Armed with glasses of wine, they stood in a corner. They talked about Tam, how old she was, what she was like. ‘Pretty feisty actually.’ Ali smiled.

  ‘Like you then.’

  Ali laughed, blushed. ‘What? Hardly.’

  ‘You must have changed then.’ Eli looked at her, and she wondered if he was flirting.

  He had two step-kids, he said, Maisie and Jack. Funny to say that, step. She realised she wasn’t sure how Ed would describe Tam, and that she hadn’t mentioned Patti. Neither of them talked about their respective partners, and they didn’t talk about Jessie either.

  They were silent for a moment, all obvious topics covered. Eli said quietly, more the way she remembered him, ‘A few of us are going to the pub after if you wanna come along.’ He continued in a throwaway manner, ‘Once the god-botherers have cleared.’

  Ali smiled. ‘Yeah, sure. I’ll just take Mum and Dad home and I’ll meet you a bit later. Which pub?’

  It took an age to be able to leave, but finally Ali was following her parents into that ordered house. Diane urged David to get to bed — an early night, she pronounced. Ali hated the indignity of it, as if he were a child, but David himself seemed glad to retreat, offering a mottled cheek to be kissed and shuffling off to the bedroom.

  Then Diane wanted to talk, dissect everyone. ‘Aggie didn’t look too good, did she?’ she said, and Ali had a longing, a thirst for a glass of wine, to be at the pub with Eli, to be anywhere but there.

  ‘I thought she looked okay.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Diane didn’t bother with this bland response. ‘Who would have thought she’d become a Christian. Born again. Still, poor woman needed something to get her through.’ Diane paused, thinking, gathering steam. ‘They say Cal’s developed a bit of a problem. Alcohol. And Eli. Mental health issues. Though he has a nice wife now, I hear, and he’s supposed to be a bit better.’

  Ali registered a visceral reaction in her gut to the word wife. She hoped she wouldn’t be at the pub. There had been no sign of her at the wake, and surely Eli would have said.

  Diane looked at her. Even at her age, she was so attuned to nuance that she knew there was something. ‘Cup of tea, darling?’

  Ali attempted to make her face a mask. ‘No, I won’t, thanks. I said I’d meet a few people. At the pub.’

  Diane pursed her lips a little, patted her hair and nodded, and Ali felt bad, knowing she was lonely. David was almost gone for her now. ‘Strange that Matty’s the one to emerge so well. Suave, isn’t he?’

  Ali nodded, knowing she should try harder.

  ‘Well, dear, you should go. I’m sure you want to catch up with everyone.’

  Ali felt a rush of tenderness. It was always this way with her mother, these wild shifts of feeling. She thought of Diane getting up and taking her cup to the kitchen, switching on the ABC for company. But she wanted to go, longed to, as if she were sixteen and heading out with Grace, to roam the streets looking for some rare party. Release me. Grace had been the one who never asked but who somehow seemed to know Ali, the one who she could be with, mostly, without pain.

  Once she closed the front door behind her, excitement took over. The strange familiarity of Bega at night as if it were inside her: the quiet, the lights, the spongy couch grass, the acacias and roses in people’s front gardens, the huge oaks and the white gum trees glowing faintly in the park. She took her sandals off and walked barefoot. The warmth of the day was in the bitumen, and she felt a car approaching through her soles. She got off the road, and after it passed, she walked with her eyes closed for a moment. Jessie was dead, but Ali could be sixteen, eighteen, twelve, with Jessie, someone, alone at night. Free.

  She reached the main street. Lights were on in the shops: newsagent, surely only just hanging on, supermarket, the overly ornate clocktower, op-shop, fish and chips, Thai, the few dowdy old-lady clothes shops. The one new-looking boutique appeared marooned, startled, unlikely to survive. A bedraggled mall, new since Ali’s youth, led off into Kmart and the other chain stores.

  The pub was a brick monolith. Ali had spent a lot of her teens lurking outside the bottle shop with Grace, getting someone’s older sister or brother to buy bottles of Bacardi or Bundy, anything syrupy that could be drowned in Coke. Then taking their stash to the park and getting drunk for no reason, except that Diane thought Ali was at Grace’s and there was precisely nothing else to do. Then before all that, when Ali had felt sure everyone was looking at her, in that oppressive town where everyone knew everything about everybody. She would just be walking down the street, eating an ice cream, and some friend of her parents or someone’s mother would glance at her, and she would imagine it. Poor girl, what a thing to happen. Imagining the addendum that filled Ali with helpless rage and shame even now. That Morabito girl was reckless, though, always was. Poor Aggie.

  29

  The thing with Eli ran its course, but it was useful too. There were gestures, Eli’s way of moving his hands when he was explaining something like two birds crossing in flight; Jessie had done this too. The same shaped nose — hers covered in freckles, his skin smooth and clear — but both delicate and straight, with the slightest turned-up end. He had Aggie’s skin, darkening to gold in the sun and never burning. His hair was thick like Jessie’s but a wavy brown. He was taller than Ali, but not tall and thin like Matty and Jessie. He was a diver all through his teenage years. Competitions, even — something that seemed odd coming out of that family, even when she heard about Aggie’s swimming prowess.

  But then he stopped.

  The first time she saw him again after she left Bega for good, she was feeling the excitement of doing well at university, of things finally happening. It was as if she had extricated herself from something, from sludge, from quicksand, a miraculous turn of even
ts that had seemed impossible. She found she loved studying. She was organised, purposeful. She wanted to succeed.

  It was at a party she went to with her friend Amy. Someone she knew, a girl called Vanessa, had invited her. But the main reason they went was for Amy to see someone else — a boy called Rich who shared the house with Vanessa, a boy with an earring and long legs in patched jeans, big belt buckles, a pirate air. That was how their lives went in those days. Big build-ups to events that, though the promise was intoxicating, were nearly always inconsequential or anti-climactic. They had been at a student pub nearby beforehand, a place in Newtown, and had got drunk in preparation, then bought a bottle of cheap champagne to take with them. It was a terrace in Darlinghurst, a balmy night. The front door was wide open, and light from a rice-paper shade cast a red glow. A group of three, two boys and a girl, were in animated conversation around the front door, the Waitresses were blaring out, a sultry ennui.

  They pushed their way down the hall, climbing over people sitting and drinking, legs entangled, backs against the wall. Then into the kitchen where everyone was crammed up against each other around the table, which was crowded with bottles and dips and olives and cigarette butts. Eyes turned towards them, sometimes lingering, sometimes looking away. Amy scanned the room for her friend. ‘She must be outside.’

  They moved through the narrow doorway, and suddenly Amy was embracing a girl with short blonde hair, a sparkly black-and-silver halter top, a tiny red jewel in her nose. ‘Oh, Ness, this is Ali.’ Amy put her arm around her and pulled her in, and Ali smiled and nodded. Then Vanessa and Amy were having an intense conversation about a play Vanessa was in, and Ali was quiet, looking around, happy not to talk.

  The backyard was long and paved with bricks, a few straggling natives swamped by tanbark, small disc-like leaves scattered, lit up by the kitchen light. What made her think of them, of Aggie, just at that second? Something about the party, the feeling in her, the sense that things might, could, change again. And then she saw him. The alcohol had loosened her limbs and the edges of things, so at first she wasn’t sure. She smelt a frangipani’s waxy flowers. A boy was leaning into a candle, lighting a cigarette. His hair was long and dark; a gold earring glinted in one ear. She looked hard, wanting to be sure, and then she thought, at last.

  Eli hadn’t seen her. He took his cigarette and sat down on the bricks edging a garden bed. He didn’t appear to be out there with anyone. He smoked a rollie serenely, gazing ahead at nothing.

  Ali waited a minute and then walked over. ‘Hi.’

  He raised his head. ‘Ali!’ His whole face split into a smile and he stood to hug her. They laughed and pulled apart. Ali felt the familiar feeling, so long since she had it, of walking in Jessie’s gate, of what she would find, of what might happen. ‘How come you’re here?’ Eli was saying.

  Ali gestured towards Amy, still locked in conversation near the open door. ‘My friend Amy knows Vanessa. What about you?’

  ‘Sofia. She’s around somewhere. I know her from uni.’ Something about the way he said the name made her think he was involved with Sofia, whoever she was, and she felt the sting of disappointment. Then Eli smiled again. ‘God, I haven’t seen you in forever. What are you doing now?’

  ‘I’m studying … teaching.’ She hesitated, not wanting to admit that she was happy to be doing the course. Her parents were so well known in Bega, and their jobs were a huge part of it. And there was Aggie’s belated mission to get help from Diane for Jessie. He would have known all that. But he wasn’t much of a judger, not like Cal. With him it would have been the raised eyebrow, the edge. A teacher. What a little swot.

  ‘That’s great,’ Eli said, smiling. ‘I should have known.’

  Ali felt herself blush, but he had already looked away. And when he looked up again his face had changed. He sucked in his cigarette a last time and stubbed it out under his boot. ‘I kept deferring, and now I’ve dropped out again. I don’t know, Arts wasn’t what I thought it’d be. I’m thinking of travelling. India. Maybe Nepal.’ He smiled again and Ali’s stomach contracted. ‘Wanna come?’

  She laughed, ‘Naaah.’ But just for an instant she imagined it. The two of them far away.

  They talked a bit about this and that — their parents, where they were living, Sydney. Carefully they circled things. Then Eli looked up at her directly and said, ‘Aggie sold the house. Did you know?’

  Ali nodded. ‘Yeah, I heard.’ She pressed one fingernail into her palm.

  ‘She’s pretty good, though … surprisingly. Cal’s still in Bega. You know he’s got kids?’

  ‘Yeah, Mum told me. Weird.’

  Eli looked away, and Ali didn’t ask for details about Jessie, all she wanted and dreaded to know. Suddenly she felt the flatness between them. ‘It’s pretty bad. The place she’s in. Just old people. She’s rotting in there, but there’s nowhere else for her to go.’

  Ali smelt the frangipani again, and inside a new song came on. The Pixies, hard and fast and low. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. But the energy of the song was in her too. She wanted to kiss him.

  ‘Yeah.’ Eli scraped the heel of a Blundstone boot on the bricks. ‘What can you do?’

  Ali stayed very still. She felt ashamed suddenly, talking to him with Jessie the way she was. He seemed again to read her mind. ‘Doesn’t matter to her,’ he said, eyes glistening. ‘She’s gone.’

  30

  When she pushed open the pub door she felt a pause — the small-town interest in anything, anyone new. But most people turned back to their conversations; a few nodded or waved. Groups of people were clustered around the bar, and in the adjoining lounge Ali saw Eli with half a dozen people she didn’t know. Then she noticed Cal propped up at the bar ordering a drink, and she felt like walking out again. There was no way to avoid him. She saw the greying, curly-headed man standing with him, and realised it was Marco. He nodded in her direction and Cal turned, seemed to murmur something, to which Marco smiled. Cal’s olive skin looked ruddy, and she knew immediately he was drunk. ‘Aah, if it isn’t the lovely Alison.’

  Marco chuckled. Ali’s back stiffened as she moved past. ‘Hi, Cal. Marco.’ She picked her way through clusters of people to Eli’s table. She smiled at him and he raised a hand to her, but he was talking intently to someone, a man with clipped white hair and glasses. Everyone seemed to lurk within the shadow of who they had been, but she didn’t recognise him. There was no room next to Eli, so she pulled a chair from an adjoining table and smiled at a woman. ‘Hi, I’m Ali.’

  ‘Trudy.’ The woman held out a firm, plump hand with purple-painted nails and a Celtic ring. ‘You a friend of the family?’

  ‘Yeah, of Jessie’s really. From primary school.’

  ‘I didn’t know her, but I’ve worked with Eli a long time, so I wanted to come. It’s so sad, isn’t it? What a waste.’

  Ali nodded and looked over at Eli, who turned to her. ‘Drink, Ali?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks. A red would be great.’

  She wanted to go with him, but she was stuck with Trudy, trying to listen. She and Eli were in game design, she said. ‘He came to it late, but he’s a real whiz. It’s a weird business … Very creative, but the irony is I only let my kids on screens for half an hour a day — supposedly — and I wouldn’t let them play most of what we design.’ She laughed. ‘Not sure why I ended up there.’

  Ali smiled and found herself murmuring about the futile, never-ending battle of kids and screen time, a conversation, in variation, that she’d had so often she could have had it in her sleep. She thought of Tam, felt the pang, for the first time since she arrived, of missing her.

  Trudy nodded. She talked about her kids, twelve and ten. ‘We bought the house because of the garden, and they hardly ever play outside.’

  Ali nodded, and then they were chatting about inconsequential things: Bega, the south coast, house prices. Eli came back with
the wine, and as she sipped, she felt herself relaxing, the alcohol softening her. Maybe, as Aggie said, it really was a relief. She had a powerful urge to sleep, as if she could lie on the fuggy carpet and feel it embedded in her cheek.

  Someone on the other side of Ali stood up, and Eli pulled his chair over to sit next to her. ‘Hi,’ he said, ‘how’s it going?’

  Ali was saying okay and smiling, so glad he was there after everything. But then she caught sight of Cal looking at her, at them. There was no warmth in his expression, of course, though he might have been saying anything. And Eli didn’t seem to notice. Ali tried to quiet the feeling rising up in her. She thought of Tam and Bettany standing in front of her by the river, waiting: their uncertainty, their slightly desperate insouciance. She remembered their expressions growing more anxious, how even Tam, so attuned to her, could not possibly have understood the swirling undercurrents of adult emotion. She looked into Trudy’s eyes, which were large and milky blue, cast in black mascara. She was still talking — something about an overseas holiday and the weather again, snow. Ali nodded. She felt tired of feigning interest, incapable of a sensible response.

  Trudy was saying something to Ali about Eli, what a great guy he was and how good at his job, and he was shaking his head in mock modesty. ‘Trude here is the bedrock of the business. Wouldn’t have a business if not for her.’

  Ali looked up and Cal was still staring at her, murmuring to Marco. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. She stood up, walked towards him.

  Suddenly she wanted to say something. She felt oblivious to them all — the clustering drinkers, the barman, Marco, Trudy, Eli. The desire for action came on her like the wind turning. She saw nothing but Cal’s heavy face, flesh falling away from his reddened cheekbones, his barrel chest, his dark eyes. She made her way between the tables. He had paused to pick up his beer, and she stood in front of him. His hate, his pain, was still there, she knew that. It was hard and bright, kept alight all these years. ‘What?’ he said. Marco was silent, sensing the swirl and distillation of something.