Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  ‘It’s . . . it’s amazing,’ I said, and I smiled, but I must have looked confused too, or bewildered, because then he said, ‘It is true that it is perhaps taking a bit longer than I thought – age has its effects. Oh I am young at heart, yes, but perhaps just a little bit older in some of the other places, eyes and legs and hands and so on. But we will get there. This,’ he said, gesturing dismissively behind him to the smaller fibro house. ‘This is just temporary. Just a stopgap.’

  I looked at him a bit sideways then. A bit dubious even. He caught the look. ‘Ah, don’t you give me the side-eye, young lady. Just know that I would be unstoppable,’ and he made a show of bending forward in an old-man pose and holding his back and saying in a creaky voice, ‘if only I could get started.’

  I wanted to laugh – at him, with him. But I couldn’t, not with my mind the way it was. He clapped a friendly hand on my shoulder. ‘Oh don’t mind me, Anna. I live in my own little world. But it is okay – they know me here.’

  I smiled as best I could and looked around me uncomfortably. The driveway we were standing on ran between the two houses, through a large open patch of gravel, and finished up at another outbuilding – a tallish wooden shed, inside which two cars were parked side by side. There was a larger unseen section around the other side. ‘The stable,’ Hessel said, following my gaze. ‘You will have to meet my other beautiful girl. But later, later. Now, Elizabeth says you have some trouble with your case. Let us retrieve it.’

  We walked along the crowded path at the side of the little house. The tangle seemed even thicker in the daylight, and if I’d been able to see at all last night I would never have come in that way – the driveway was obviously the only access. I stomped down the grass to flatten it but Hessel pushed through and leaned in past me and lifted my case above his head to keep it clear of the tangle as he walked it to the backyard. He was stronger than he looked.

  ‘I can do that, Grandpa.’

  ‘No, no problem,’ Hessel said, puffing a little.

  He dragged the case across the lino of the kitchen and into the cluttered bedroom. I followed close behind, wondering how it would ever be possible to fit my case in, let alone open it, but Hessel managed to pull it through and deposited it on the desk, right on top of everything else.

  ‘Now you can get dressed for breakfast,’ he said, turning to me, failing to notice that I had slept in my clothes. ‘And don’t worry,’ his eyes twinkled conspiratorially, ‘your beautiful Grandma Elizabeth makes a better breakfast than she keeps house.’

  I thanked him and closed the lean-to door – as much as was possible. Breathed out.

  What now? What do I do now?

  I sat on the bed and zipped Nassim’s hoodie up at the front and hugged it to my chest, and it was almost as if I was being hugged by him.

  Almost. Almost. But never again. I closed my eyes. Never again.

  A buzz came from my phone. Miraculously there were two bars, and then only one, and then none again. An opening of a magic portal just long enough for my phone to receive the messages from Nassim that must have been circling up there all last night, like an uncleared aircraft, waiting to land.

  Hey babe, good day? You did a runner! Lucky I know you so well. Because your laptop had vanished too I assumed that you had both run off together to some study-nerds’ paradise where you were having heaps of fun without me. Correct? I can’t believe you can’t even take a moment to lie around in bed with your red-hot lover, you boring old swot. I stumbled downstairs and found the coffee myself, lucky for you.

  And after a list of missed calls:

  Ignore those calls – if you’re deep in the zone you should stay there. But let me pitch you something: now, I know you didn’t want time off these holidays, but I do think it would be good for you (see what I did there? Good for you?) to see me at least once. So can I drag you away from study one afternoon? If not this week, then next week? I’ll totally make it worth your while . . .

  Anyways, study good.

  See you later gorgeous. Mmmmmmmmmwa!

  7

  It was while I was standing in the queue at the reception counter at Dr Honeycott’s office, only two days earlier, waiting to make an emergency appointment, that I told my first ever lie to Nassim.

  My mother had left for New Zealand in the early hours. I had already decided not to go with her these school holidays; I didn’t fancy cooling my heels in her hotel room for two weeks while she got her corporate on – heels and pantsuits and a take-no-prisoners look in her eye, nonsense words pouring out of her mouth: Synergistic Networking, Microservice Utilisation, Strategic Matrices, Offline Stakeholders. It made me feel angry at the best of times. Oh, she was so high-functioning in the world of work – manically so. I’d also decided not to go to meet Dad in Germany, where he’d be for the next few months, looking after Opa.

  I had panicked about my chances of getting into medicine – I had to achieve an intimidating ATAR score, not to mention the UCAT in a mere few weeks. A nothing-fear had grabbed me by the throat and it already felt unfair that my parents kept expecting me to drop everything and run all over the globe with them. So I was actually genuinely relishing the thought of staying home in my own little room for two weeks solid, running my days how I wanted, parent-free, in total study lockdown, keeping weird hours and, perhaps, allowing the occasional sex-food-and-hanging-out visit from Nassim. Nassim was all worded up on my plan, he knew that he would only have restricted access to me, that I was taking this time to hit the books without distraction and start next term well on top of my game.

  That had been the plan, anyway.

  Even Mum’s performance with Nassim hadn’t necessarily exploded it. I had blocked her last-night-at-home attempts to reinstate mother–daughter communications, and then I’d got up to an empty house, ready to take over, ready to commence Operation UCAT. But from then on the day had unfolded with shock and horror, culminating in peak shock and horror in the public toilet next to the chemist where I had bought the pregnancy test.

  Dr Honeycott’s clinic was always busy. An inner-city doctor’s office, shared with a number of other doctors, there were multilingual posters on the wall, more patients than could be seated comfortably in the tiny waiting room and a pervasive air of hurriedness.

  I stood in line and drafted my message. My lie.

  Won’t be able to hang out today sorry babe. Study avalanche.

  The message sat there unsent. I had never lied to Nassim before. It was one of the things I’d vowed to myself, after that first guy, that I would never do again – lie or keep quiet about what I thought, what I needed, what I wanted. But that was before this day, this morning. Before sitting on the loo in the stinky public toilets and watching those two stripes appear, almost immediately, on the test.

  I sat on that toilet for nearly an hour, slumped right forward, the wind knocked out of me. I was paralysed. I felt hijacked. I couldn’t move. It seemed unbelievable. It seemed unbelievable because it was unbelievable. It was a ridiculous and impossible outcome of an accident that I didn’t even know had happened.

  And then my mind went a bit loopy. I started to think that if I sat there for too long, my belly would swell and grow right then and there as I sat on that toilet – my belly would become heavy, and worse: it would become obvious – and then when I left the cubicle other people would know and have things to say about it – my mother, my father, my school, Nassim, strangers on the street – telling me why I should keep it, or how I had been stupid, how I was unlovable now. At that moment my vow to myself never to lie, never to keep quiet, seemed thin and juvenile and ill-equipped to deal with such a situation.

  And then I began to be more shocked by my own paralysis than by the test, and my body came back to itself and stirred into action. I had to do something, and now. Because if I sat there any longer, then, eventually, there would be a baby. A baby. A consequence beyond comprehension.

  ‘Next please,’ said the receptionist, perhaps not for the
first time, and I looked up apologetically, my thumb still hovering over my phone.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the receptionist repeated. I hesitated and then at the same time as I stepped forward, I dropped my thumb down on the screen and pressed send.

  And it felt like the beginning of something. An unravelling.

  8

  Bette had set out butter and jam and tea and coffee and toast and muesli on one end of the table. And I was hungry. I was starting to feel sick from the hunger. But I didn’t know how I was going to keep anything down that had been prepared in that kitchen. Even if I had been in tip-top physical shape it would have been a challenge, let alone . . . compromised, as I was. But when I steeled myself and sat down at the table, I noticed something I hadn’t before: the tabletop gleamed, despite the chaos around and on it. It had been scrubbed to within an inch of its life, by the looks of it. And the stovetop too. And the sink. Hessel sat with a newspaper and a steaming cup of coffee by his hand. It was bizarre – an island of civilised decorum cleared in the middle of a tip.

  I sat on the chair opposite Hessel, discreetly using my feet to move aside a drift of papers underneath the table. The kitchen was freezing. Bette had the window above the kitchen sink wide open. But despite the cold, the fresh air was very welcome.

  Hessel looked at me over the top of his newspaper. ‘Do you coffee, or do you tea, Anna?’ he asked. ‘What is your poison?’

  ‘Would you like an egg, Cathy?’ asked Bette. ‘I’m doing one for Hessel.’

  ‘I’m Anna, Grandma.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You said Cathy?’

  Bette looked confused. ‘Did I? Did I really?’

  In the little alcove off the kitchen, next to two great closed double doors, two armchairs sat side by side in front of a television with a radiation heater on the floor facing them. Crowded. Everything was crowded.

  ‘Um, I guess an egg would be nice, thank you, Grandma. And I prefer tea first thing.’ Coffee was off the menu. My little interloper, the strange little entity, had made its dislike known. How can you be related to Nassim if you don’t like coffee, I’d thought, and then, just as quickly, caught myself. ‘Tea would be lovely, thank you.’

  Hessel clicked his tongue. ‘Ach, Australians,’ he said dismissively as Bette turned to the table, delivering a breakfast of poached eggs to Hessel. ‘Elizabeth, get our Australian girl a tea.’

  Stacked up behind the kitchen chairs, in a small hill, were yellowing, curling paperbacks, and behind them a dusty broken bookshelf and triple towers of what looked like stacked records rising up in a corner, and boxes stacked further on top of them, just waiting to fall on someone and crush them to death. And was that . . .? Was that a dead mouse on the floor? Breathe, Anna.

  Hessel folded his newspaper and laid it to rest neatly beside his plate. He picked up a knife and fork, held them at the ready and considered his breakfast for a moment.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said grandly. ‘Is there anything better?’

  I wasn’t sure what was expected of me. ‘Yes. It looks like a very nice breakfast.’ Hessel nodded approvingly and began to attack it enthusiastically with his utensils.

  ‘Anna dear, I am so sorry to have called you Cathy –’

  ‘Oh Grandma, please, I don’t mind being confused with Mum.’ And then, very glad of a common topic of conversation, I rushed on. ‘Apparently we look similar. Everyone tells us all the time. What do you think, Grandpa?’

  Hessel looked up at me quickly with something that wasn’t exactly a smile, while Bette leaned over my shoulder and poured steaming tea into my delicate cup.

  ‘The spitting image,’ Bette said enthusiastically.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Hessel, and raised his fork again.

  ‘Thanks for the tea, Grandma.’ I surreptitiously sniffed the milk before pouring it in and then sipped carefully from the cup. It seemed fine. Good even. Bette was watching me so closely it was disconcerting, so I waved my hand towards the open kitchen window. ‘What are those? Out there? Those rock piles, boulder-hill thingies in every paddock? I’ve never seen them before.’

  ‘The what?’ Bette bent her head to look out the window as if some new boulder-hill thingies might have landed in the night. ‘Oh them. They’re cairns,’ she said. ‘Now there’s a good old Scottish word for you, straight from my ancestral home.’

  ‘Anna.’ Hessel put down his utensils and pronounced my name like it was a sentence in and of itself. ‘Anna, I am very pleased and proud to meet you, and very happy to extend my hospitality. But I must confess myself to be somewhat confused by your sudden and late-night arrival.’

  ‘Oh, um, well . . .’ I tried not to cough out my tea. It had been easy with Grandma – the author of the letter – but the letter had said not to tell that she had written it and I wasn’t sure who she meant not to tell, so I froze and panicked, but then Bette herself said, ‘It was me.’ And she smiled proudly as Hessel turned to her. ‘I wrote to Anna and invited her to come. Did I forget to tell you?’

  There was a strange moment then. Bette’s busyness and Hessel’s grandiosity evaporated. Their eyes held each other. I heard a blackbird chatter outside. And then Hessel picked up his knife and fork again. ‘Woman, you forget everything now. I’m forever cleaning up your forgetting messes.’ When Hessel spoke, his Dutch accent gave his words a pointed edge and I didn’t quite know how to take him, but Bette blithely went back to cooking my egg and Hessel turned cheerfully to me again and said, ‘Do you want to know the best thing about being old and forgetful, Anna?’

  Suddenly I felt like I was trespassing. What was I doing here? Hessel was waiting for an answer. I smiled apologetically and shrugged.

  ‘You can hide your own Easter eggs!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, straight away, to him and to Bette, accidentally cutting across his punchline. ‘I know I should have double-checked if I could come and stay, but I didn’t have your number. But it’s actually all okay, because I should probably go back to the city later today, and I have somewhere to stay there –’ I was surprised to find myself suddenly out of breath with the lie. It sounded as though I was about to cry, but it was just that all the oxygen seemed to have been sucked out of me for a moment. Pregnancy was weird, so weird.

  Hessel frowned at my seeming distress. ‘Poor girl,’ he said. ‘Not your fault. But of course you are to stay here. We have everything the city has. I didn’t mean to chase you away with my gruff manner. Stay as long as you like.’ I was trying to get together a polite sentence formulation, some unassailable but civil way to explain that I really was about to pack up my things and leave, when Hessel turned again to Bette.

  ‘So what did you say in this letter? Just “Hello hello” and “Come and stay”?’

  Bette didn’t turn from the stove. ‘Yes, something very much like that.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Hessel dabbed his mouth with a white serviette and turned to me. ‘Anna? Is this right?’

  ‘Um . . .’

  ‘That’s all it said, Hessel,’ said Bette, turning now. ‘And look! Here she is!’

  ‘Is the letter here? May I see it?’ Hessel directed this question at me, and Bette looked at me with suddenly large eyes.

  ‘I . . . I left it in Sydney I think,’ I said, trying not to think of where it sat stashed in my coat pocket in the bedroom behind Hessel.

  Hessel nodded. ‘Okay, Anna. Okay.’ He scooped up his second egg, and chewed it slowly and thoughtfully. Once he had swallowed it, he laid down his fork. ‘I do not know why it is that you put her in this room just here, Elizabeth? The other front room has nothing in it. Nothing at all.’ Bette grew still, but Hessel kept on. ‘But it is no matter. Anna, you are welcome,’ he pronounced. ‘You are most welcome. It is all okay. You can stay as long as you would like. You will like it here.’ He smiled beneficently at me, and then stood from the table, turned to Bette, and raised his arms.

  ‘Elizabeth, a delightful breakfast. A beautiful meal from a beau
tiful woman.’ And for a moment he was so like Opa. I missed this so much, this old-world charm and character, the heavy European-ness, reaching back and back and back. The warm overt displays of character. My heritage.

  As he left the table Hessel stood briefly behind Bette at the stove and rested his hands on her shoulders, and she turned and they shared a polite kiss. It was very sweet. He was sweet – obviously a bit of an attention-seeker: he clearly didn’t mind having me here as some new audience around the place, but he seemed like a bit of a sweetie, this Hessel van Leeuwen. My new grandpa.

  Hessel lifted a coat off a hook by the door and his expression changed quickly – he slumped into almost a parody of sadness. ‘But I am so terribly sorry, Anna, for now, I must go. You have been a beautiful distraction for me in a very sad time. My horse is very sick, you see. I must go and tend to her.’

  I would have laughed then, at the sudden change in him, but clearly his pain was genuine. ‘Oh, Grandpa, I’m so sorry to hear that –’

  ‘“Hessel” will do just fine,’ he said, and suddenly I felt as though I’d been slapped, but when he turned back to me he was wearing a smile. ‘“Grandpa” really does sound like a very old man, don’t you think? It does not suit me.’

  He must have seen I was a little taken aback. He came and gently took my hand and stood me up, then took a good look at me. He turned me from side to side.

  ‘Catharina was taller,’ he said finally, with the ‘th’ again pronounced with the hard Dutch ‘t’, and it took a moment for me to realise he was talking about Mum. ‘Yes, Catharina was taller, but apart from that, you are very like. Okay. You are a van Leeuwen. You are one of us. And I am very happy to meet you.’ He put both hands formally at the sides of my head and kissed me on top of my hair. And then he walked out into the yard.