Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

  She dropped her legs and arms down, and looked at me from where she lay.

  ‘I don’t really know. He was getting angry before he left. And I think he’s started drinking in the mornings again.’

  I supposed Hetty was scared all the time because she wasn’t safe, and that Hetty’s mother and sisters and brothers were all scared all of the time too, and I felt callous for thinking she might not have been, that she was luckier and happier than I was. Her lofty voice and her lightness—that wasn’t all of her. I tried to think of something helpful to say for a long time, and she beat me to it.

  ‘You don’t need to say anything, Nessy. I’m stronger than you think.’ She smiled, and with her thin wrist against the knotted rug patted the space beside her. I lay down and we stretched, then sung ‘Hey Jude’: Hetty beginning with a low sweet drone, and both of us ending the chorus as one.

  I stayed the night in Hetty’s king single bed, listening to her breath become as fluid as silk after we turned the light off. In the morning we cooked the tubers in the oven and ate the small crisp fruits while we waited. They tasted like sugar water and something unripe. The tubers were soft and narrow, and could have been swedes.

  A BILLABONG IS A DEAD RIVER

  Hetty has moved through me like water since Toronto. It’s three years since I last saw her, really saw her, at the Eaton Centre food court, eating that salad with a gnashing mouth and her eyes wild. I know I’ll never stop wishing we had met again, but I tell her what I want to tell her in my dreams.

  Leaving Toronto a few weeks after Hetty died was deceptively easy. I suppose when you board you never know how it will feel at the end of a flight, or in the days before you take a taxi to the airport. I could hear something deep inside me trying to tell me to slow down as I packed up our room at Marjorie and chose which of Hetty’s dresses I would take with me, because I couldn’t leave them all. Despite this, I rushed it. Maybe I couldn’t process another ending after such a brutal one had been forced upon me. Maybe I knew I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye the best way or the right way, that I didn’t have the energy. The only thing I did consciously in those few weeks was let myself float; and I said goodbye to Dill and Minnie near the check-in desk with numb arms and cold cheeks.

  I didn’t sleep at all on the plane, and spent my seven-hour stopover at LAX lying on the floor in a corner of the transit lounge with one of Hetty’s dresses over me and another rolled up under my head for a pillow. I was so sad, but I couldn’t cry anymore. Fabric that had touched Hetty’s skin was comforting, and I hoped I would be unapproachable beneath my soft paisley shield.

  During the second flight I watched the plane move slowly across the world on the tiny TV screen, and when I could see that we were finally flying above Australia I pulled up the arch of the window shade next to me to quickly see something brown and arid, or the floor of red dust I had told myself I had missed so much, but all I could see were cloud beds.

  I imagined the flight attendants were being particularly kind to me because I was so clearly vulnerable, damaged, though they were just doing their job and doing it well. They brought me an extra blanket and a chocolate muffin in silver wrapping as we started to circle the edges of Melbourne, the sun rising and the yellow light warming my face as if it knew me. I could see that brown ground and those parched trees, the ones I wanted. I could feel something in me move: just the smallest amount.

  There was no grand hurrah when I breathed in the Melbourne air after walking out the airport doors. It was as if nothing had happened.

  I kept going, which was unexpected, and yet of course I did. Grief is thick, and I didn’t know this until I was in it, struggling to get to the edge or at least find a way to thin it out, with water or vinegar or air. It was the first proper grief I’d known, and I felt how it stopped all the normal things for longer and shorter than you would expect—I lost ten kilograms because I wasn’t hungry, and then one day, three months after I got back to Melbourne, I ordered fried eggs and bacon and beans and bread at a cafe and ate all of it, with two coffees and a slice of apple cake. I cried many times a day, was soaked in tears, and then a week had gone past and I hadn’t cried at all, though the pain was still as fresh as a knife wound when it came. I didn’t talk about it—when my mum asked me what had actually happened, wanting to understand the tragedy and be with me beside it, I snapped at her, so she didn’t ask me again and then I was telling her everything, it was pouring out of me, and she let me cry all over her chest like I did when I was a toddler and she had fed me milk and put me to bed. I was unpredictable and loose in those first few months, expecting little of myself and nothing of others. Those around me weren’t Hetty and never could be. Hetty was all I wanted.

  Hetty’s family held a memorial at a funeral home in Mitcham a few days after I landed. It was a large cold building that smelt like disinfectant, and I arrived early on the morning of the service in Hetty’s only black dress to see the place filled with people I knew and who had known her. Every person who walked in—faces held still and eyes blank, like dead fish—reminded me how connected Hetty and I had been. We had lived the same life differently and had shared everything that could possibly be shared.

  Hetty’s father spoke and he was drunk, and the words slurred and echoed around the great white room. I supposed he was refusing to truly feel the loss of her by numbing himself. He laughed near the end, then held his face with his puffy purple hands and left the podium guided by Hetty’s mum. I couldn’t hate him, even though I knew he’d been the type of parent who can damage a child, and I suspected that he would never stop injuring those around him.

  I had been asked to speak, and I did briefly and with a thick throat. It was difficult and unnerving, as if I was acting out a monologue and making the whole thing about me.

  Afterwards there were oval plum cakes and white-bread mayonnaise sandwiches with no crusts. I imagined someone that morning, solemnly cutting each brown edge off, a pile getting higher in the bin beside them. I stood near one of the tables covered with a white tablecloth and held a teacup full of coffee to pretend I was doing something, watching all the people I knew because of Hetty move slowly around, talking quietly to one another without saying anything.

  Hetty’s parents came to me and looked at me with their pale, hurt eyes, and I felt as if I had killed her. Hetty’s mother, Patricia, was beautiful in her high-necked blouse and trousers. She had her elegant hand on her husband’s shoulder, almost certainly to steady him.

  ‘Vanessa.’

  She had always called me Ness before.

  ‘Patricia. I’m so sorry,’ I said, choked. Nothing could come out that day without a wave of salty tears following just behind. I didn’t even feel sad—just awash with water.

  She flinched slightly at my sorry, and I knew it wasn’t enough or right or helpful, but I didn’t have anything else I could give her. Patricia hadn’t been around much when we were growing up—she worked because Hetty’s father couldn’t. There were too many children and too much hope had gone into creating a family they couldn’t actually hold together properly. So she had worked hard as a school principal in Glen Waverley, and had come home late with piles of things to read and decisions to make that had nothing to do with any of them; would kiss each child absentmindedly on the head and ask after them wearily, fixing a simple dinner with her sensible, clipped-nail fingers.

  I’d never been told how Patricia and Hetty’s father, Vince, had found each other in their beginning, but I appreciated how after they had found each other they had held on to one another for so long. They were so different, in every conceivable way, and it bolstered them somehow. I had decided years ago that their differences were Hetty—what made her so interesting, so near to magical. She was a contradiction, a tricky sum: the best and the worst of everything.

  I watched Patricia’s face as it moved into a half-smile. She didn’t hate me, perhaps, or maybe she was just too tired and sad to be able to know what she felt. It didn’t matter an
yway. Hetty was gone. All there was left was anger and sadness and fatigue. We would never see the other side.

  ‘Thank you.’ She moved a tissue up to her eyes and dabbed at one. They were glistening as if there would always be tears in them, waiting to fall. She stepped towards me, leaving Vince to stand on his own.

  ‘And you mustn’t blame yourself, dear girl. You know that.’

  My heart bulged and pushed against my ribs. I looked at Patricia’s face all over, and then at Vince’s behind her, and all I could see on each of them was grief and resignation. Maybe they knew how much I’d loved Hetty, and how she could slip out of your hands before you had learned how to catch her.

  Vince’s body shuddered a little, like a car starting up after a long time idle, and he moved towards me and took my hands in his warm, swollen ones. I could smell alcohol—bourbon or rum, something like honey—and I saw how red the whites of his eyes were, as if they were bleeding, which I supposed that they were, in a way.

  ‘She loved you,’ he said, his sweet breath thick around our faces. ‘And you loved her.’ Then he let himself sway, or the swaying overcame him, and he stepped back towards Patricia, who took his arm again.

  I wanted to say thank you, thank you. Thank you for creating such a wonderful creature. Thank you for understanding how much I cared. Instead I nodded, letting the tears collect in my head like rain in a spout full of leaves, and hoped my eyes could tell them.

  As they moved away, after patting my arm and telling me to keep in touch, I could see the loss in each of their backs and in their limbs and their tread, weighing down their shoulders and blocking out most of the sounds around them. I could see how Hetty had lived inside them, and how she always would, but that she was dead everywhere else, and how that made it terrible.

  That night I couldn’t sleep, so I listened to the ABC on the radio in my old bedroom—now my parents’ spare room, for the visitors they never had. My heart ached when I thought of my mother hoping someone would need to come and stay there, with them, and realising as the years went on that no one ever would. My heart ached for my parents, who had probably wanted more than just one miserable child, and certainly hadn’t planned a life filled with sickness and silence. When I pushed away that ache, there was the ache of Hetty behind it, and I tried not to wonder, again, how sad she might have felt as she walked into that lake, as she dived into something so cold and lonely and untamed.

  I made myself a snack in the kitchen at four in the morning—biscuits with sliced cheese and white-fleshed tomatoes and powdered pepper. I pushed the aches away again with crisp and wet.

  It took six months for me to remember that I’d built a sort of existence for myself in Toronto that wasn’t Hetty, and to wonder if maybe I could do that again. It was as if one morning I shook my head and something came loose: something valuable. I bought a phone and joined Facebook and asked for the people I had added as friends to send me their numbers. I went to a party, wearing something nice for the first time since Hetty’s funeral, trying to inhabit the clothes instead of letting them just hang against me, and stood near a wall with a plastic cup of riesling.

  It was the birthday of a friend from a job I had before we left for Toronto, at a delicatessen where old men sat and ate baguettes and drank dark coffee for hours, and no one under the age of forty cared to enter. We had worked there together only for a few months, but had liked each other and been able to tell each other that in a way, and I was glad she still wanted to know me. Her name was Molly, and she had long blond curled hair and big teeth and smelt like oranges.

  That party was insignificant except for the way I moved differently in my velvet dress; but then I was invited to another party where we sat down for a meal together halfway through, and Molly was there with her friend Voula, who was tall and wide and calm, with dark lips and short hair licking the nape of her broad neck. Voula asked me home with her after that dinner, that party where we were butternut-squash soup and sliced pumpernickel, followed by burnt steak with creamed potatoes. We kissed in the taxi on the way, and she led me up the stairs to her flat with one large warm hand. It was months before I told her about Hetty, because I didn’t need to. When I did she pulled me in and kissed my temples.

  I thought about Faith and Hetty at the beginning when I made love to Voula, but only when my eyes were closed and my nose wasn’t near her skin. She was so different to those two—her eyes never looking away, her smell as confident as liquorice. She didn’t hide or apologise for herself, ever. It was scary and exciting, and ultimately what I needed. She held me and held herself as if we were powerful, never broken, worth the time.

  Voula had a family that loved her with words and touch and song and gifts and acts of service: all of the ways. I had decided when I came back to Australia that I would see my parents more, but when I met Voula’s large, passionate mother and her kind, crinkled father, I compared them with mine and felt a familiar disappointment.

  I moved into her small flat and read every small scrap of paper she had tacked to its surfaces. Voula had studied philosophy at university and wanted to hold on to the ideas that had excited her. My favourite was in her handwriting, rounded and sure, on a piece of cream paper ripped along one side and faded, stuck to the top of her bedroom mirror. It read: ALL IS FLUX.

  I told her I liked it and she smiled.

  ‘It’s Heraclitus. He might be my favourite. He said that change is unavoidable. You know that famous quote “This river I step in”?’

  I was back in Toronto, walking with Faith across that bridge with those words arched above it, that viaduct that did not help us over water but rather was our path towards it.

  I hadn’t wanted Hetty to change, I realised. I hadn’t wanted our relationship to change. Even though I had chosen to go to the other side of the world with her, I hadn’t wanted the backdrop of our story ever to change. When I knew I loved her and didn’t let it out, when I realised we might not want the same things anymore but didn’t talk to her about it, I was trying to stop the flow. But the flow, the current, was unavoidable.

  I told Voula this and she looked at me reassuringly. ‘Oh, yes. We all go through it, Ness. It must take a lifetime to accept that we can’t stop the waves from coming.’

  Time moved on, as it does; as I had forgotten when Hetty died, despite my body propelling me forward. I started to understand that I had been through a lot, that I could only be kind to myself. I can now think of Hetty without crying, though there are still moments when I wail.

  I make sure that those around me know who she was, and I don’t accept any shame in myself for the love I had for her. Voula helps me do this: encourages me to stand by the feelings I had for Hetty. It feels like letting go and holding on.

  Acknowledgments

  First of all, I have to say a very heartfelt thank you to the Text Publishing team. I still can’t really believe that a company I dreamed of working with has published my book, and I feel incredibly lucky to have had such dedicated publishing support. To my editor, David Winter—you have shown me so much more than just how to edit, how to work collaboratively on a manuscript, and how to make a fledgling novel draft a grown, real thing. My time spent working on Cherry with you has finally convinced me that a marathon can be much more satisfying than a sprint. Thank you. To Imogen Stubbs, who designed my special cover—thank you for your tireless efforts in getting this right. You are so talented. To my publicist, Jamila Khodja, and to Nadja Poljo, a former Text publicist, who is the reason I got this chance in the first place—endless thanks.

  To the publishers and editors and readers of the Australian journals that backed my short fiction over the last five years: you do the most important creative work, and I cannot thank you enough for your commitment and devotion to the written word. A special thanks to Daniel Young of the late Tincture Journal and Michele Seminara of Verity La, for being two of the kindest and most passionate people I’ve ever known.

  Thank you to my dear old friends for being my
sticks and rocks, and for entertaining the frivolous pursuit of fiction: Calida, Carly, Annie, Katie, Kav, Isabel, Joel, Karl, Adnan, Alice, Nic and Rachel, and Luke. To the precious pals I have made in writing and online communities across the world, thank you for making life much more interesting, especially Dom and Zoë, who read early chapters of Cherry; André, who has helped with short stories along the way; and Marta, Claire, Anna, Robbie, Lachlan, and Dafna, for cheering me along and letting me do the same for them. Enormous thanks also to the first readers of Cherry, who were generous enough to take on the task: Ellena Savage, Jennifer Down, Laura Elizabeth Woollett, and Emily Bitto.

  To the beautiful counselling team of wise, strong women at PANDA—I am so lucky to have you in my life and to work alongside you every week. My spiritual wellbeing has never been so high!

  Since I was little my mother and father, Carmel and Peter, have shown me that a life lived with your nose in a book can be the most exciting kind of life, and I thank them for this, and for being such softhearted, supportive, spirited, and curious parents and role models. To my brother, Alexander—thanks for putting up with me: I love you! To Petra, Hans, Karl, and Hannah—thank you for welcoming me into your family with such open arms. To my granny and grandpa, Helen and Max, and my nan, Helen, and dearly departed pa, Bob, thank you for everything. And to the grandmother I never met, my mother’s mother, Marjorie—thank you for shining a clear light across and beyond your life. You mean so much to me.

  This book is also dedicated to Otto Henkell, who was by my side, holding my hand and tending to my heart, over the time I spent writing it. Never have I known a more generous, compassionate or thoughtful person, and never has anyone helped me to feel so grounded and free. Thank you for being there. Without you, this book would not exist.

  Laura McPhee-Browne is a writer and social worker living in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land. Her short stories have been published widely in Australia. Laura also volunteers as a fiction editor for the literary magazine Verity La. Cherry Beach is her first novel.