‘No, I’m good,’ I said. ‘Maybe bus-sick. Probably hungry. Have only eaten gevulde koeken and drunk too much coffee.’
‘Oh god, Hessel’s really got you having coffee,’ said Basil, giggling with glee. ‘He must rate you. Hey,’ he said, ‘you should come back and have lunch at our house.’
‘I don’t know about that, Basil,’ Leonie said.
‘Why not?’ said Basil.
‘I just don’t reckon Anna wants to deal with people right now.’
‘What people?’
‘The cousins.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said.
‘She doesn’t mind,’ said Basil.
‘She doesn’t know what she doesn’t mind, Basil, so just drop it,’ said Leonie.
‘Not this again, Ma –’
‘Okay now, you two, the pub’s open. Come on, I’ll buy you both a burger and chips and then we’ll run you home, Anna. The buses are totally shit.’
The pub was nice – cheerful and full at lunchtime – and my veggie burger was actually really good, which I’m ashamed to say surprised me. I was also surprised to find that suddenly I couldn’t come at eating egg. Two days ago egg had been delicious, but today my stomach lurched and I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom. A false alarm, it turned out – saliva gathering and then dissipating. Fuck. How soon did morning sickness kick in? I thought I’d have longer.
As I walked back to the table I heard Leonie saying to Basil, ‘Because she doesn’t get to be instantly included in everything, alright? Some of our things aren’t for her. Some are, some aren’t.’
As I sat down my phone buzzed in my pocket. I gave it a quick glance – Nassim calling. I froze – do I hang up, or let it ring out? Which was less alarming for him? I let it go through to voicemail, and then when my phone pinged a new message alert and I still didn’t check it, Basil gave me a quizzical look, but I refused to meet his eye. Instead I set about pulling the egg from my burger and laying it aside.
Days ago I’d never seen this place or met these people. But my mother had – well, Leonie, anyway. They went to the same school, Basil had said. It gave me a strange sort of thrill to know that my mother had actually known this woman when they were kids, when they were teenagers. That this woman had known my mother. All of a sudden I was really curious. I wanted a picture of my mother at my age, how she was: how she was different from me, how she was the same.
‘Did you like my mother?’ I asked Leonie, abruptly.
‘Yes,’ Leonie answered simply.
‘So you were good friends then?’
‘Sort of.’
‘So, did she, I dunno, did she do things that made her feel happy?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘I mean, I guess I just mean, was she driven by something, did she seem like she had something that made her happy?’
Leonie looked up at me quickly. ‘Why, isn’t she happy now?’
‘Sometimes. I guess. Actually no. She doesn’t seem happy a lot of the time.’
Leonie nodded, but she seemed sad. ‘I really hoped she would be happy. She was happy, when we were young. She wasn’t that driven – well, I guess she was a little bit driven, but yeah, she was pretty happy. Those two things don’t always have to go together, you know.’
‘So people tell me.’
‘I’m not driven, and I’m happy,’ said Basil.
‘Yeah, but you could do with being a bit more driven,’ said Leonie.
‘Yeah, but Anna’s driven, and she’s not happy – look,’ said Basil, and he leaned over and used his long fingers to turn down the sides of my mouth. I slapped him away.
‘Thanks very much. I’m alright. Actually I’m pretty happy, I think. I have my hopes and dreams.’
‘So does anyone care if I’m happy?’ said Leonie.
‘Shit, sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you happy, Leonie?’
‘Very happy, thank you very much. I love my job. That helps.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, putting crispy thin fries in my mouth, ‘that’s what I’m talking about. I think it’s the only thing you can really count on.’
‘I don’t know about that –’
‘And what about your lovely son, Mum? Jeez, you’d reckon I was nothing.’
‘My job and my lovely son. A good life.’
‘So what don’t I know that I don’t mind?’ I asked.
‘Ha!’ Leonie said. ‘I didn’t think I was going to get away with that.’
‘It’s about Mum, isn’t it? About why she left?’
‘Yeah, people will ask questions.’
‘But I don’t know why she left.’
‘Yeah, I know you don’t.’
‘Do you know?’
Leonie looked at me across the table. She seemed vulnerable then, like indecision had cracked something open. I repeated my question.
‘Do you know, Leonie?’
Basil was transfixed. ‘Yeah, Mum, do you know?’
‘Sometimes people leave,’ was all Leonie said.
‘But they need her now though,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen that place. You’ve seen Bette. I don’t know how she can neglect them like that. She needs to come back.’
‘Sometimes people can’t come back.’
And with that Leonie got up and went to the bar to pay.
In the car on the way home Leonie told me that the beautiful trees were Eucalyptus tricarpa, ironbarks in the common settler language. That’s what Leonie called English – settler language. The trees were called ‘Yirrip’ in Dja Dja Wurrung. That was the first name humans had ever given them.
‘Was there forest like this everywhere? Did . . . you know, did my ancestors pull it all down?’
‘How would I know?’ said Leonie. ‘I wasn’t there. That’s not what First Nations means, you know.’
‘Of course, sorry,’ I said.
‘Nah, I do know,’ said Leonie, laughing at me. ‘Just messing with you. White people are pretty easy to mess with.’ Leonie leaned across and mock-punched me in the thigh, then put her hand back on the wheel and answered me straight. ‘So down where Bromley Cairn is – down there on the flat – that was never forest. That was grassland. Beautiful country, really productive – yam daisies, other tubers, kangaroos. Managed by mob, no accident, you know? But yeah, it’s a much tougher gig working down there now running sheep. Everybody’s working really hard for not much.’
Right on cue the car descended out of the forest and onto the flat, with square after square of uniform green and brown paddocks taking up the view from the window.
‘I guess setting up in Bromley Cairn has got me thinking – I can’t help trying to imagine what it would have been like when the house was new, and what the land around it would have looked like. It’s hard to imagine.’
‘Yeah, well. If that’s hard to imagine, maybe one day we’ll show you the gully.’
‘The gully? Why, is it pristine down there? All native plants?’
Basil piped up from the back seat. ‘Wait, did you just say you were setting up in Bromley Cairn?’
I sighed. ‘Yes, Basil. I had to. It’s the only place I can study.’
‘I told you not to use the old house.’
‘Oh I see. You told me not to. Well in that case.’
Leonie frowned at Basil in the rear-view mirror. ‘Basil, why are you being so weird about the old house? The girl needs room to study.’
‘Well, Bromley Cairn sucks, is all.’
‘You’d do well to follow her example. He should be more like you, Anna. He really should. I really drew the short straw there.’
‘Mum!’
‘Just saying, Baz. Just talking broadly, you know.’ Leonie smirked into the rear-view mirror, some secret meaning passing between them.
Basil looked away out the window again, smiling to himself too. ‘Fucking hell, Mum,’ he said quietly.
I didn’t bother trying to figure them out. I had drifted away. I was trying not to think about the fact that
I hadn’t made any contact with Nassim. That I still hadn’t let him know. I knew I should call him, should already have called him. But I didn’t want to think about it right then. Because for a moment I felt happy. I felt happy in this car, with these cool and funny people. And I wanted to stay happy. So instead I grabbed onto what Leonie had said, and set my mind chuckling.
Ha. Baz, I thought, and, still laughing to myself, filed the nickname away for later.
19
We pulled up on the gravel patch between the little house and Bromley Cairn and saw that Bette was watching us through the kitchen window as I stepped out of Leonie’s car. Leonie and Basil waved extravagantly at her and I laughed at them. Eventually Bette smiled quietly and lifted a hand to them, and they drove away.
I hovered in indecision for a moment – should I go and climb the cairn and try to get enough reception to get Nassim’s voicemail and call him right now, or should I wait until tomorrow when I could go into the town and get full reception and do it properly?
It was easy. It was just so easy, too easy, to let bad reception make the decision for me. I slid my phone into my pocket and walked to the little house.
‘You shouldn’t fall in love with Basil, you know,’ Bette said the moment I entered the kitchen.
I took a step back. ‘Um, okay?’ I said. And then, waiting to become less confused, I said, ‘I wasn’t really planning on it.’
Bette nodded to herself and pressed her lips together, and then, perhaps because I didn’t much like being told what to do by anyone, and perhaps because Bette’s meaning and motive seemed cloudy and suspicious to me, I said slyly, ‘But why shouldn’t I? He seems so nice.’
My grandmother turned and looked hard at me and there was such a strange unease in her eyes that I quickly said, ‘Look, it’s fine, Grandma. I’m really not looking to do anything like that – I’m here to study and to get to know you and Grandpa.’
That seemed to ease her mind, and she turned back to her cooking – though I was beginning to think that calling what Bette did ‘cooking’ was a misnomer. Baking sweets seemed to be her thing, her only thing, because dinnertimes were proving that Bette was truly a terrible cook. Dinner that night seemed to be chops with boiled potatoes and rubbery green beans steamed straight from the freezer. But perhaps I had just been spoiled by Nassim.
Hessel hardly spoke during dinner and left quickly to go back to the stables. I helped Bette clear up and then unpacked the mouse traps I had bought, setting two in the kitchen where I had discovered the thickest crust of poo while mopping. In the little bedroom I set two more, and then looked hopelessly around at the clutter before giving up on the idea of tidying up the room tonight. Instead, I sat on the bed with the aim of clawing back some of the study time I’d lost to coffee and the unnecessary trip into town.
I woke up cold and confused, lying in the dark in my clothes on top of the covers. My mouth tasted gross, somewhere between metal and salmon fat. I stood up and walked into the kitchen. The house was quiet. I turned on the kitchen light. The clock said 12.25 am.
I ran the tap into a glass and stood there and drank deeply. The water froze my teeth but it cleared the taste. I felt disoriented. The set-adrift feeling was back, so I refilled the glass and took it out onto the back porch to see if there was enough moon to see Bromley Cairn.
The wind was high and the clouds were scudding across the deep dark blue, and the landscape all around was shifting light, dark, light, dark – but Bromley Cairn stood out in an unmoving patch of moonlight, the two glass windows reflecting the gleam of the moon. My place, my room, gleaming. Waiting for me. The sight of it was a comfort. I breathed in, and held it. And then breathed out. I was looking at the building, my saving grace, standing alone there in the moonlit plain, when the scudding darkness dropped right on it, and I caught my breath. As the cloud-shadow moved across Bromley Cairn, the top window went as dark as the rest, but the bottom window continued to shine. As I watched, it became clear. My window wasn’t gleaming, it was glowing.
I busily sent my mind into replaying the checks I’d done as I left the room that morning, my fingers turning the lamp off at the wall, pulling the door shut behind me. I felt sure I’d turned it off – I’d been nervous about the electricals. But I had to admit that my mind was a little sketchy on the point. The fact was that I just couldn’t be sure. I stared at the glowing window for some time, and then sighed. I would have to head over now and turn it off.
But there was another light in the night, coming from the opposite direction: the stable. I put my glass back in the kitchen, pulled on a hoodie, slid my phone into the pocket and stepped out again into the chill night air.
The inside of the stable was glowing grey-blue in the cool light from the factory lamp above, and the sound of tinny talkback radio rattled off the corrugated iron walls and out into the night. The soft rasp of my approaching footsteps perfectly matched the background static of the radio, so I knew I wouldn’t have been heard as I stood next to the doorway and peered inside.
Polly was there in her blanket, breathing angrily out of her nose and stamping her feet. Hessel was soothing her. ‘There, there, my Pol.’ He dragged his hand firmly down her neck and she bucked her head into him in acknowledgment and then lifted her forequarters up, her front hooves lifting off the ground, with a little sad whinny. ‘I know, I know, Polly,’ said Hessel, resting his forehead against her side. ‘You’ll be alright,’ he said. ‘I promise.’ And he balled his hand into a fist and I saw his forehead crease.
I backed away into the shadows again. The exchange felt private. I moved quietly away across the yard and through the dark, and as I retreated, the light that spilled from the stable and the tinny radio sound faded in tandem.
The lamplight shone from Bromley – yellow as opposed to the stable’s blue. It flickered once as I headed towards it. I hoped it was just a moth passing over it, not dodgy electricals. It was lucky that I’d woken up to notice it and turn it off, otherwise the room would have been full of insects in the morning, or worse still, I might have burned the whole place down.
It was cold in Bromley Cairn, but not as cold as outside. I closed the door behind me with a loud thump, wincing as the noise echoed up and through the house. Crossing the floor of my room I stopped short.
My memento mori was hung. It no longer stood leaning against the far wall where I had left it, but was hanging there, the centrepiece of the expanse of wall above the old fireplace. Pride of place. It looked magnificent. It looked majestic. It was how it was meant to be, this glorious illustration of the wonder of life and the inevitability of death, hanging central in a room characterised by grandeur and decay. A great big wall dedicated to mortality.
I stared at it for a moment. And then I smiled. After all his superiority about art and culture, after all that, Hessel had understood how important the memento mori was to me. I was genuinely touched that he would go to the effort of coming here in the middle of the night to figure out how to hang it, especially with only the low half-light of the lamp to guide him, especially when Polly was so sick. It was very sweet of him, the cranky old man. I got out my phone and took a snap of it there in the lamplight. It was beautiful.
And then my eyes fell on something. There was something on the mantelpiece beneath the picture. A piece of card or paper, lying flat. It was entirely possible it had been there all along and I hadn’t noticed it until my memento mori was hung. Or perhaps Hessel had left it for me. I crossed the room and picked it up.
It was an old colour photograph. A photograph of a family: a young Hessel and Bette, Hessel posing proudly in front of a new motorbike, and Bette with big late-eighties hair standing off to the side with a young Cathy beside her, a super-blonde girl of six or seven in shorts and T-shirt. And in Cathy’s arms, held up awkwardly towards the camera, a gangly little boy of four or five, leaning forward, smiling out from under a crop of sandy blond hair.
I studied it for a while then put the photo in my pocket along
with my phone and then, looking around, turned off the lamp and walked quickly through the dark past the bottom of the stairs and out the door.
Back in bed, in my pyjamas with the fan heater on, trying to warm up deep under the covers, I looked at the picture. It was a puzzle I couldn’t figure out. Maybe a neighbourhood boy? But the way Mum was holding him . . .
I leaned out of bed and put the picture away in my jeans pocket, then got out my phone and brought up the picture I had taken of my memento mori hung on the wall.
At the start of the year I’d become a little bit obsessed with the anatomy and development of the human skull. It was, in my opinion, the most incredible bone in the human body – it had to start small enough to fit through a vagina while safely housing the most complicated object we knew of – the brain – and then it needed to grow. It managed this by actually being twenty-two bones that fused together in squiggly sutures, and by reserving most of the growth for the face part of the skull, the ‘visceral cranium’. A skull was incredible. It reminded me that the thing inside my head was actually a precious object – unparalleled in the known universe. It was so precious it had developed its own ingenious armour, an evolved protection that was incredibly effective against most natural knocks and scrapes. I’d banged on about this so much to Nassim that when he’d seen the memento mori portrait he’d just had to buy it for me.
On my phone the skulls in my memento mori gazed back at me, their squiggly sutures running from front to back and side to side across their breadth. Their smiles were broad, and only menacing if you chose to interpret them that way.
And the thought struck me: skulls are such amazing armour, but where the armour failed was when it came up against the brain’s own thoughts and emotions. Most serious brain injuries were sustained during traffic accidents or violent trauma – damage caused by human error or cruelty. Emotion or thought either excessive or lacking. It seemed so devastatingly human to me at that moment, that the strange and fallible idiosyncrasies of the human brain were responsible for the downfall of the very bone designed to protect it.
Where We Begin Page 12
