It seemed to me that Wilbur was telling us this story because Antony was back. Our missing Antony returned. A miracle!
Afterwards, as we walked slowly to our cars, I said to Niall, ‘My brother went missing when I was sixteen.’
‘For how long?’ he asked.
‘He never came back.’
Niall was distracted, looking into the window of a shop. It was cold. We both wore overcoats, and scuffed dead leaves along the ground as we walked.
‘Never?’ he said suddenly.
We had reached my car. Niall’s brow creased in the darkness. ‘That’s terrible,’ he said. He faced me; moonlight, streetlight, ice-cold wind. He was waiting for me to speak. Trying to figure out: what did it mean, this lost brother? It depended on a lot of things. The age gap between us, how close we’d been, steps I had taken to locate him. He was waiting for me to clarify.
‘Ah, well, things, you know,’ I said.
part
11
1.
I almost blinded a teacher once.
This happened a few months after Robert went missing.
I’d written a novella about a bunch of people drifting around on a life raft. The idea was that these were minor characters from an (imaginary) novel, a fat book set on a cruise ship, who’d been lost overboard, presumed drowned. By writing my novella, I’d saved them, scooped them up onto a life raft. In the twist, one of my characters, a boy, is reeled back in, towed back to the novel, saved!
‘Oh, Abigail,’ Mrs Nicholls, my English teacher, said, handing my novella back to me. I’d asked her to read it. ‘It was so much fun!’
We were in her office. I smiled modestly. I wasn’t sure why she was giving the novella back: she should be binding it, readying it for publication.
‘You were inspired by Stoppard, I assume?’
‘Who?’
‘Tom Stoppard? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? That was an influence here?’
‘No,’ I said.
Mrs Nicholls smiled a warm smile, a wry smile, conspiratorial, glints of her teeth in each. All the smiles meant she didn’t believe me.
‘That was not an influence,’ I clarified. ‘I haven’t read it. They did that in Mr Carson’s class, but I was in Ms Richardson’s. We did Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.’
Mrs Nicholls still had the smile, but it kept sliding away and re-forming. ‘It’s a similar idea though, isn’t it? In Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are lost characters—they’ve wandered out of Shakespeare’s play, you see. Out of Hamlet.’
‘I haven’t even read Hamlet!’ I pounced.
‘There’s this line at the end of Hamlet,’ she continued. ‘This offhand line: that Rosencrantz! and Guildenstern! are dead!’
That’s how she said it. The exclamation marks. They’re not in the original text; I’ve checked.
I was going to slap her across the face, but I stopped myself. I restrained myself. I chose, instead, to wave my novella at her face.
Paper cut to the eye. Corneal abrasion. It’s agony, apparently. Also, it got infected, but I blame her for not going straight to an ophthalmologist and getting antibiotics. In the end, she had to stay in a dark room for a week.
‘A week!’ my mother said. ‘Was that really necessary?’
This was at our meeting in the principal’s office, when I got suspended. The principal frowned at my mother’s question, and the school counsellor looked sad. Mrs Nicholls herself was affronted.
‘It’s true, Abigail, that you are hurting,’ Mrs Nicholls said. ‘I get that. But you know that others suffer too?’
Then she mentioned her recent divorce. My mother and I became very still, communicating with each other through our stillness. Later, when we were driving home from the meeting, Mum said: ‘You’d better write a letter of apology.’
‘How will she read it,’ I said, ‘if she can’t use her eyes?’
‘And what with all her suffering,’ Mum added. ‘Divorce, you know. It’s hard.’
We both laughed. You can be pretty mean from inside your own tragedy.
2.
Mrs Nicholls had killed my novella, a cruelty far greater than a corneal abrasion.
The boy was my brother. That was the truth. I wrote that novella just after Robert got diagnosed with MS. He was floating out there, separate from life, a sick kid in a raft with a bunch of old people. Old people are supposed to get sick, not kids. I was going to tow Robert back, reel him back to the master plot of life. Cure him of MS, or at the very least cure the medical profession of their poppycock idea that he had MS at all.
So, of course, when he went missing, it was right there in my novella, the structure that I needed. I’d require a longer rope, of course, but I could still reel him in, back from wherever he was, back to his life, his story and mine.
But here comes Mrs Nicholls, smirking and insisting that the novella wasn’t mine, that the idea, the conceit, was stolen, and that Rosencrantz! and Guildenstern! were dead!
3.
Is it Hawker?
Yes.
part
12
1.
In Sensory Flight, we did sight and talked about the electromagnetic spectrum, and the fact that bees and dragonflies see ultraviolet light, while pit vipers, rattlesnakes, pythons see infrared. To develop our sense of colour, Wilbur spread a drop cloth on the floor, opened tins of paint, and encouraged us to paint pictures on his wall.
‘Are you sure?’ Pete Aldridge demanded, and Niall looked quizzically from the paint tins to Wilbur and back again.
Wilbur nodded.
However: ‘I’m beginning to regret this,’ he said reflectively, looking at the splatters on his furniture, the garish mess on his wall, once we were done.
Pete Aldridge offered to repaint but Wilbur said, ‘No, no, I’ll do it.’ He ran his hand through his dark curls, streaking paint along his forehead. He glanced at his hand then and he chuckled, realising, I suppose, what he’d just done.
2.
Niall and I chatted about our days, items in the news, Flight School and the people in our class. Sometimes, we asked each other questions.
I asked about Rhami, whether he kept in contact, if he missed her.
‘Thirteen years is a long time,’ he said, shrugging. ‘You fall into patterns, you know? It can be good to break them.’
‘I think,’ I said, ‘that you’re a lot wiser and more grown-up than I am.’
‘Me? You’re practically an owl, you’re so wise.’
Which I found both flattering and distressing. If I had to be a bird, maybe a flamingo?
Niall asked whether I’d dated at all, since my marriage broke up.
‘Too busy,’ I said. ‘I’d have liked to meet somebody, but the baby, the café.’
I’d have liked to meet somebody. I had a curious urge to be with somebody big. Someone big enough for the mountains of sadness, mountains of happiness, the strangeness of me, the inconsistencies. When I thought back to Finnegan, I saw that all along he’d been small. He’d seemed plenty big, but he was just a skinny kid, playing make-believe.
I wanted a man who would tell me his darkest secrets, break down and cry while I held him. I wanted a man who would do the same for me.
Niall asked about what it was like coming back to Sydney after the marriage broke up.
‘That must have been hell,’ he said.
‘The rental market was hell,’ I said. ‘I saw about fifteen places before I found this one.’
At every open house, there were crowds of couples, beckoning each other: ‘Come see this bathroom,’ or ‘Not much storage space.’
I could not bear light or noise. Everything about me was too bruised.
‘And did you have people to talk to,’ Niall asked next, ‘when you got back?’
‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Some.’
Some friends were great. Shocked, sad, angry with Finnegan.
Others were trickier. ‘Sounds like you dodged a
bullet there,’ one friend said, so that I stared at her, the gunshot wound a ragged hole—but she meant not having a child with Finnegan.
Another friend was happy because she had never liked Finnegan. ‘I couldn’t say it before, but I always hated him! Pretentious prat!’ and I was dismal, protective of my lovely Finnegan, another bullet shooting through five years of my life.
A third was philosophical: ‘I guess Tia was his soul mate after all, and that’s something. He’s with his soul mate?’
Her, I wanted to shoot myself. I only smiled, non-committal.
Natalia was bright-eyed, cautious, walking the fine line between support—how could Tia have done this? She, Natalia, hadn’t known a thing! She’s thunderstruck!—and loyalty to her sister. I tried to be adult, objective, to separate Natalia from Tia, but when I saw her approach, I saw contained within her all the knowledge she must now have about Finnegan and Tia, and I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her, shouting: ‘END THINGS WITH YOUR SISTER! NEVER SPEAK TO HER AGAIN!’
Also, when I explained the pregnancy, there was so much in her expression, relief and judgment, conclusions drawn: you can’t have cared that much for Finn, you cheated too, it’s cancelled out. She folded this away at once: ‘Of course! You were heartbroken! You didn’t know what you were doing!’ But there it was, her sister excused.
Eventually, I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as Natalia; there was too much of a disconnection between the words in my head and our actual dialogue. Plus, her face, a simulacrum of Tia’s, sent scalding water running down my spine.
I wanted to tell my friends that Finn had called me needy. I wanted them to protest, to recoil in shock as I had. I never did. They would wonder to themselves, Is it true? Was she needy? Even as they denied it, a small part of their mind would clunk into place with this new truth: Huh, she was needy. So that explains it.
‘And your marriage was good, you thought?’
‘Yeah. I guess, well, yeah.’
Because, listen, I don’t think I was needy.
I paid my own way. Never clamoured for attention. Never pouted: ‘I need a massage.’ (That is not to say I didn’t appreciate massages.) I was excited to be in Montreal. I could be cranky, tired, disconsolate. I could be weary, hopeless and fatigued. I could sit on the window ledge, feel sorry for myself, I could look for my lost brother, and not look. I could be uneasy. I could become addicted to roast vegetables: butternut pumpkin, tomatoes, eggplant, onion, garlic with olive oil and capsicum, blackened at the edges. I could watch a horror movie again for the first time in years. I could be a good sport, easygoing, I could be happy beyond reason.
But I don’t think I was needy.
Once, when a man in my café said to his friend, ‘It’s always fifty-fifty, the fault, when a relationship breaks up,’ my rage snapped open like a dragon’s mouth.
‘So, it was just a straight-out shock, your husband telling you about this other woman?’
‘Yeah. Because it was good. We had a good marriage, I thought.’
I spent five years with Finn, but not with Finn.
‘You think you know a guy,’ people said, shaking their heads.
Also: ‘He wasn’t who you thought he was, was he?’
He was though. He was exactly who I thought he was, just a whole lot more.
I thought a lot, when I got back, about the men who did not exist, the missing people in my life, and when the baby first started shifting about, the fluttering, like light rain drumming, here I was creating another absence. My child had a missing father.
I tried not to be too melodramatic about this. I could go back to that nightclub. Once the child was born, I could walk the streets of Montreal. Put notices up: DID YOU HAVE A ONE-NIGHT STAND WITH ME? DOES THIS CHILD RESEMBLE YOU?
I was pretty good at looking, if not, so far, at finding.
‘Well, you’re amazing, to get through all that. These things that happened to you.’
But, in fact, my brother, my husband, my baby—it’s my fault. It has always been my fault.
3.
We practised techniques for taking off and landing. For the latter, we jumped from the couches to the floor and flung out our arms like gymnasts.
Pete Aldridge refused to take part in the landing exercises, on account of his recovering shoulder. We all worried about what would happen to him when he flew. How would he get down from the sky?
‘You’ll just have to stay up there forever,’ we said, clambering back onto the couch so we could jump again.
Eventually, somebody in the apartment below pounded on their ceiling. With a broom, we thought. Nicole got down on her knees, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted to the floorboards, ‘We need to learn to land.’
4.
One night, I dreamed that Niall gave me a plate of scented soap. I was so grateful! Such a sweet array of shell shapes, each a fizzy sherbet colour: lemon, lime, pistachio, apricot. However, before I got to eat any of it (this was a dream), a young man approached, explained that he was Niall’s personal assistant, and took my plate of scented soap away.
I woke up knowing that Niall had lost interest.
I sent him a text: Do you have a personal assistant?
I wish, he replied.
Good, I texted back.
I drafted a long follow-up explaining about the dream, but decided this would be needy, or might prompt him to confront his lack of interest—he might not yet have noticed it—and deleted it.
5.
I was puzzling out the concept of love. How did you pin it down?
I started watching sitcoms and movies, and reading romance novels, in search of guidance. I read both male and female authors so I could get a broad spectrum. Of course, if women write about love, it’s chick lit or, at most, domestic drama. Novels about love by men, on the other hand, are just plain novels, or possibly masterpieces. This is because their love takes place in the course of road trips, drug-addled, or while cheating on their wives during savage existential crises.
Anyway, none of the films or books was helpful. The characters just got on with things. In the literary novels, they always ended up alone, presumably because romantic love is a cheap/female concept. Also, in the books by men, the relationships were deeply dysfunctional.
6.
‘Listen,’ Wilbur said, leaning forward. ‘Some people are supertasters. This means their sense of taste is vastly superior. Supertasters, or hyper-tasters, recognise the bitterness of phenylthiocarbamide whereas most of us would find it tasteless.’
‘We already did taste,’ Frangipani informed him.
Wilbur ignored her. ‘With every sense,’ he said, ‘there are extremes. Variations. Synaesthetes merge senses, tasting sounds, seeing the colours of numbers. Children and dogs hear sounds at a higher pitch; seals communicate by infrasound, which is lower than the human ear can hear.’
‘So do volcanoes,’ Antony said.
‘What?’
‘Communicate by infrasound.’
‘I mean,’ Wilbur said, arching an eyebrow in Antony’s direction, ‘the boundaries around senses are not clear, bold lines. Your senses can be stretched just as your body can be changed, moulded, improved. Records are consistently broken in swimming, running, high jump. We move faster, lift heavier objects, leap further. Do you see what I’m saying?’
We were all thoughtful, seeing or not seeing. I don’t know. I was lost in thought about love and where its borders are.
7.
In the bath, Oscar told me the Mandarin words for red and white. They sounded cool to me: his accent struck me as exceptional. Of course, I had no basis for this assessment.
‘What about hello?’ I asked. ‘And goodbye?’
But he couldn’t remember those.
‘Can’t remember,’ he said, and I realised that somebody had taught him to say remember, rather than me-member, or that he’d figured it out himself. Either way, I felt sad.
8.
Plato’s
Symposium is a discussion of love but I found it most compelling on cures for hiccups.
Socrates once came upon a group of people who were discussing love.
‘Right,’ said Socrates at once. ‘Tell me what you’ve been saying to your lover and I’ll decide if it’s appropriate.’
‘Socrates strikes me as insufferable,’ I told Oscar, who agreed with a quick, sharp nod.
‘Whereas you, I love so, so much,’ I continued.
‘Yes, and I love my birthday,’ he said. ‘I love turning five.’ So we enjoyed musing on what he might get for his birthday: a pirate sword, a pirate knife, a pirate ship. After that we discussed his imaginary friend, Jessie, and her birthday party.
‘What will I go as?’ he wondered, before answering his own question: ‘As Santa Claus.’
‘Makes sense. What about me?’
‘What are those things on reindeers’ heads?’ he asked.
‘Antlers?’
‘Yes, you can go as antlers.’
9.
At Flight School, we discussed electrical wires and how to avoid them, the wind and how to use it, the dangers of frostbite and of flying too high.
Wilbur told stories about the effect of oxygen deprivation on pilots.
Early on in balloon flight, two men took a journey: they rose so high, so fast, that both men collapsed from lack of oxygen. One regained consciousness but his hands were so frostbitten he could not release the gas valve line. Eventually, he did so with his teeth. They landed safely.
‘Before you fall unconscious,’ Wilbur said, ‘your mood changes. Some people get angry, some laugh. Some become giddy, like they’re drunk.’
Gravity Is the Thing Page 29
