*
Finn spent a lot of time at my place in Balmain. Closer to his work. Closer to restaurants and bars. My flatmates, the theatrical couple, had moved out, and I’d taken over the main bedroom and made my old room into a study with a futon couch and desk.
I gave him a key. He began to let himself in and dinner would be waiting when I got home. Mostly pastas. Fettucine boscaiola. Penne puttanesca. Ricotta and parmesan ravioli. He learned the recipes in Italian Cooking for Beginners.
We talked about beauty and truth: whether one really is the other. He told me his grandmother had once been clinically dead for two minutes.
‘Did she see a tunnel of light?’ I asked.
‘No. But she had this wonderful sensation that she was about to know everything. On the verge of understanding it all.’
The CD had just ended. The room was quiet.
‘Knowing everything,’ I said, ‘that seemed like a good thing to your grandmother?’
‘Wonderful. I think she used the word elation.’
‘The truth is a good thing?’
He took both my hands in his. ‘Exactly,’ he said.
*
Matilda arranged for a forensic artist to create an age-progressed image of Robert.
‘He’s been growing up without us,’ Mum whispered, tracing his face.
I thought the artist had rounded his cheeks too much, made him too jowly. This was a stranger, not Robert.
But I posted the age-progressed image on online bulletin boards. If the internet is a legal minefield, it’s also an ocean of buried treasure; you just have to dig in the right place. Nights, Finnegan would find me in the study, clicking on links and comments. ‘Come back to bed,’ he’d say, rubbing his eyes.
*
Chapter 192
This digging and digging for answers.
You uncover something shiny, turn it over on your spade, and your chest hurts with the joy of it, the sun-catch.
You uncover something rusty and mundane, an old chain link, a tin, and it’s a different hurt. The ache of the mundane, of useless, predictable, dirt-encrusted things.
Or you uncover maggots and skulls, bloodstained clothes, and now your chest collapses in your body.
Even when you uncover the shiny, the gem, you cannot be happy because the next turn may be grim. The context sullies the shine, makes it false. An incomplete truth is an untruth and there is no happiness in lies.
Always the shadow of the spade lying diagonal on mud. Can we go downstairs, watch a film, eat salted caramel, knowing that it’s out there, more truth, unturned, unearthed?
*
If you want to convince a jury that events did not unfold the way evidence suggests, you need a compelling alternate narrative.
MS can cause cognitive difficulties, including memory loss. In Robert’s case, it has caused amnesia. Robert is out there somewhere, happy and forgetful.
Robert got hit by a truck. He’s in a coma. In a small country hospital. They don’t have—they don’t have a telephone. (That one needs work.)
His face has been damaged beyond recognition!
But don’t worry. Once we find him, we’ll get him the best plastic surgeon.
MS can also cause difficulty paying attention or making decisions. Robert can’t focus long enough to get home. He can’t make up his mind whether he wants to come home. Once we find him, we’ll fix this with appropriate medication.
Robert is lost in the bush. He is fending for himself.
Robert is trapped in a cave somewhere but has food, water, sunlight and books.
Robert ran away to make his fortune.
To see the world.
He fell in love with a girl in a witness protection program.
He himself is in witness protection.
He got into an underground crime scene. He’s in trouble! When we get him back, we’ll sort that out. He didn’t actually do anything bad. Mostly it was all a misunderstanding. I have friends who are criminal lawyers!
He developed anger management issues. Went into therapy. They wouldn’t let him out! Once we get him back, I’ll talk him through his anger. He’ll calm down.
*
‘And where is your grandmother now?’ I said.
‘Well, she either knows everything,’ Finn replied, ‘or she was wrong.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry. Were you close?’
He shrugged. ‘She used to give me Scotch finger biscuits when I visited.’
I asked if he liked Scotch finger biscuits, and he said yes, the pleasure of breaking them in two, splitting them down the middle.
This was Finnegan’s paternal grandmother. His maternal grandparents live in Quebec, along with various uncles and cousins. His father met his mother while doing a semester of a medical degree at McGill in Montreal, and lured her back to Melbourne. She hated it, Finn told me.
‘Melbourne?’
‘Australia. All of it. She was always homesick. Still is.’
How could that have been, growing up with a mother who despised your own city, your own home, a part of you?
Finn shrugged, paused mid-shrug, reconsidered. ‘Sometimes I argued with her,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I thought maybe she was right.’
‘Does she go home often?’
‘Never.’
I dropped the remote control. We were watching TV at this point, and I’d just picked it up to change channels.
‘If she ever went back to Canada,’ he continued, ‘she was pretty sure she’d never return. She still owns an apartment in Montreal. She could chuck out the tenants and move in.’
I shook my head at all the memories, the strangeness inside him. ‘Tell me your secrets,’ I said. ‘I want to know all your secrets.’
And he laughed and said, ‘Look, that’s the ad I was telling you about, the one with the disconcerting colour scheme,’ pointing at the TV.
*
Now and then I say to Finn: ‘Tell me one thing about you that you have never told anybody else.’ And he comes up with a commonplace series of events that happened that day, let’s say while he was waiting to cross the road at the traffic lights or had just ordered a sandwich.
‘I swear, I never told a soul that,’ he says, ‘before now.’
At night, I watch him sleep, trying to see into his soul. I lift his fringe and kiss his forehead in case it’s there.
*
The lease on Finn’s place came up for renewal.
He packed his things into boxes and moved into my place.
*
At work, my assistant’s name is Judith. I talk to her on my dictaphone. Please open a new file under the name—This is a letter on—.
I like how everything falls into folders and lists. Terry—Correspondence. Terry—Pleadings.
‘Interesting,’ said Finn, ‘that you’re so drawn to order at work, and yet . . .’ Indicating the apartment. He said, ‘Do you mind if I sort this out? Tidy up a bit?’
‘I do not mind in the slightest.’
*
Chapter 193
Epicurean means chocolate and silk sheets, the wind in your hair in a sports car, but no, it doesn’t.
I just looked it up. According to Epicurus, the key to joy is in three things: friends; freedom; and a moment to think.
Also, something to eat, something to wear and a roof over your head.
Well, that’s cheating, isn’t it? Six things, not three.
Oh, and you need people to chat with. And you can’t have that miserable Sunday night feeling: tomorrow I have to go there. And your friends can’t be talk, talk, talking all the time, making you crazy.
*
‘One thing that really bothers me is strict liability offences,’ I said to Finn.
We were eating his parmigiana di melanzane. I love eggplant.
‘What’s a strict liability offence?’
‘It’s where you get busted even if you didn’t mean to do it. Like speeding, say. You get a ticket even if you didn’t notice you
were going so fast.’
Finn nodded. ‘Strict liability offences bother me too.’
Finn collects speeding fines like a hobby. He listens to ‘loud, bitchin music’ while he drives, and this makes his foot pound on the accelerator. Any more fines, he’ll lose his licence. The other day he got a fine from a camera. I signed a form to say that I was driving. Took the fall for him.
‘They offend my sense of justice,’ I explained.
‘Mine too.’
He poured me another glass of wine and I told him about a conversation I once had with my brother.
*
In the conversation, Robert told me that he was depressed.
‘What do you have to be depressed about?’ I asked. ‘Look!’ I pointed to the sky, which was clear blue. We were in our backyard. Shooting goals. We had a freestanding netball ring, pegged to the grass.
‘Well, I’ve got this disease,’ Robert began.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, you do not. You don’t have it.’
‘But what if I do?’
‘If you do, they’ll find a cure. I’ve told you this before. You can’t be sad about that. It’s ridiculous. Just be happy.’
Robert nodded. We continued playing. I scored considerably more points than he did.
*
Finn listened and chewed on his food. When I got to the part about me scoring more goals, he smiled. ‘That’s my girl,’ he said.
‘I played A-grade netball for years; I was shooter,’ I explained.
‘You never told me that!’
We breathed in the happiness of stories still untold.
I returned to the issue at hand.
‘I should have let Robert be sad,’ I said. ‘I did it wrong. I kept shutting him down!’
‘You thought you were doing the right thing,’ Finn argued.
‘But it was the wrong thing. I did it and he disappeared. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. It’s a strict liability offence.’
Finn listened. He allowed me to be sad.
Then he said, ‘Actually, I think you did exactly the right thing.’
‘Now you’re shutting me down!’ I said. ‘But okay. How?’
‘Here’s how. You were yourself. You didn’t let Robert score more goals than you. You didn’t let him wallow. If you’d been somebody other than you, that would have been wrong. You did the right thing and a wrong thing happened. The two are unrelated.’
*
Chapter 195
Isaac Newton.
Gravity, the apple, the orchard, the moon. Windmills, flux, parabolas, curves. Of course, gravity is not a thing. It’s just a way of describing the fact that things fall.
Everyone was busy in the seventeenth century, not just Isaac. Deposing kings, inventing clocks, pinning down nature and continents, fighting fire and plagues.
Did this make them happy? All this pinning? Oh, I think it made them desperate with excitement.
*
Finn and I were in a café.
‘Complete, complete, complete,’ said a man at a nearby table.
The man’s companion asked: ‘What do you mean by that?’
Finn raised his eyebrows. I raised mine back. We waited.
‘You let it wash over you,’ explained the man. ‘Everything that worries you. That’s how I meditate. Complete, complete, complete.’
Now we raised our eyebrows in a considering way.
I scooped chocolate foam from my cappuccino. Finn had a blueberry friand. Mine was lemon and poppy seed.
‘Even if Robert comes back,’ I said, ‘it won’t be him. He’ll be different. He might even be bald. He might not call himself Robert anymore. He might be Rob. Or Robbie. Or Biscuit-face.’
Finn nodded. ‘Could be.’
‘And we’ll be scared that he’ll do it again. We’d have to tie him down somehow. Lock him up.’
‘Complete, complete, complete,’ Finn confirmed. ‘Listen, how do you feel about marriage proposals?’
‘It’s okay if the woman does it,’ I said. ‘Why does it have to be the man? Unfair to the man, demeaning to the woman. And the balance tips. The guys are like, Wait, is she really the one? And the girls are drumming their fingers, hoping: Will it be on my birthday? Maybe he’ll do it on Valentine’s Day? And when he does it, she has to burst into tears and call her mum.’
‘Huh,’ said Finn.
‘So yeah, never propose to me. I take that responsibility off your shoulders right now. I might propose to you one day. You might get lucky.’
Finn smiled.
‘See that?’ I said. ‘Now I have the power.’
‘How do I indicate to you that I’d like you to use your power?’
‘Like a code? No! That gives you the power back!’
‘But it’s your rule,’ Finn argued. ‘You propose whenever you like. You don’t have to wait for my signal! I’d just like to have a signal. Say I turn a friand upside down? That could be a signal.’
I thought about it. ‘Okay,’ I decided. ‘We can use that. Because we’ll forget.’
Finn turned both our friands upside down.
*
Chapter 196
Any time you try to impose a template on life there will be leaks. Every theory, eventually, is debunked, undermined, turned over with the spade.
Until you understand that things are not connected, until you see there is no universal, why happiness will never be yours.
*
One night, I cut an orange open and saw that it was not, as I’d assumed, a Valencia. It was a blood orange.
The vibrant excess of that red: leaking into the rind, staining my palm.
*
Chapter 19
All we need to know is that beauty is truth, said Keats, and I’m sorry to sound callous, but what he actually needed to know was the cure for his general malaise and for the illness that eventually killed him, aged twenty-five.
*
Finn and I were almost asleep. This was a week ago now.
‘Finn?’
‘Mm.’
‘I just want to say something.’
‘Okay.’
‘I think I’ve got the balance right. It’s like, he’ll always be missing, but I have to keep living, and maybe we don’t need the truth?’
‘Mm,’ Finn said into his pillow.
‘Maybe truth is not beauty. Maybe there’s beauty in ambiguity. It’s a form of imagination, ambiguity. It is truth. Half-truth is truth. As long as there’s mystery, there’s possibility. Imagination is beauty is truth.’
Finn opened his eyes and smiled at me. We faced each other across the gap.
‘I’m through my crisis,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I talk about Robert so much.’
‘Talk about your brother whenever you like,’ Finn said. ‘I like hearing about your brother. More interesting than my complaints about Tia.’
Finn finds Tia—the sister of my friend, Natalia—something of a princess at work.
‘I like hearing tales of Tia. I’m the impartial adjudicator; I determine which of you is being unreasonable.’
‘Her. Always her. What about when I talk about font sizes and Pantone colour numbers?’
‘You do talk about Pantone colour numbers,’ I conceded.
‘Too much?’
‘No. I like it,’ I said. ‘Expertise is sexy. Go back to sleep.’
He closed his eyes. I closed my eyes.
I lay beside Finn and my mind roved over defamatory hyperlinks.
Messages in bottles, I thought. What are you saying, what is wrapped up in your words and in your orange rind?
You sit by the road and point to a sign. You didn’t write the sign. You didn’t hang it there. You don’t say a word. You simply point.
I drifted towards sleep.
There was Carly Grimshaw, opposite me. Telling me how Robert would creep into her room late at night, leaving early the next morning.
I took the lunch with Carly and folded it, ready
to store in the archives. Pushed it to the back of a shelf, calm folding over me. Complete, complete, complete, all the little pieces of that conversation, Carly and her plait, and her sister, and her flute, Carly and her four-poster bed, Carly and her hilarious passport story, Carly’s forehead pressed against the window glass, waiting for my brother to come visit—tie it off, tie it off—
I opened my eyes and sat up.
*
Carly and her hilarious story.
Her brother’s passport had been missing the day he was due to fly to Japan.
My brother used to borrow her brother’s ID. My brother resembled Andrew Grimshaw. My brother had been secretly spending time in Carly’s house.
I phoned Matilda the next morning. ‘What if Robert had a passport?’ I asked. ‘An adult passport under another name?’
In the last week, here is what Matilda has uncovered: three days before we realised Robert was missing, the morning after he visited Carly for the last time, a passenger named Andrew Grimshaw flew to London.
We had never imagined before that Robert could have left Australia; he was a child without a passport. Back then, he and I had never left the country. Our family holidays were always to Queensland or the snow.
But he flew to London. We have cracked open the world.
part
8
1.
Niall and I agreed to have a drink on Friday night.
I made an appointment with Jennie at Hair to the Throne for a cut and style on Friday afternoon.
I arranged a babysitter—my regular, Radhi, was busy, and I didn’t like to ask Dad and Lynette now they had Oscar on Tuesdays, but then I remembered Rhianna, who used to babysit but had gone overseas for a year. A year had passed!
That meant I had to text with a preamble about how I thought she’d be back, apologies if not, and I hoped she’d had a wonderful trip. But it was worth it: she responded to say that she’d love to babysit.
I made a pot of bolognaise, ready for Oscar and Rhianna’s dinner.
Thursday night, I ran my hand along the clothes in my wardrobe, assessing. Tried on a few outfits, but there was no soundtrack, no zippy friend shaking her head no, or exclaiming: yes! Only Oscar in his Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas saying, ‘Mummy? Mummy? Look!’ and doing somersaults across my bed. Now and then he’d fall off the edge and then there’d be a delay while I scooped him up, comforted him, agreed that the bed was ‘stupid’ and so on. Then he’d start the somersaults again.
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