Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  ‘But I want to thank him –’

  ‘He doesn’t like to be thanked, and if it was to give you this photo, then I’m sure he wouldn’t want to discuss it. He doesn’t like to be reminded of past hurts.’

  I put the photo in my pocket, thinking of Hessel. Thinking how devastated the poor man must have been to lose a son like that. And, in a flash of heat, I got angry. Mum had abandoned them. They had lost a son through tragedy, and then they lost their daughter through outright selfishness.

  No wonder Mum had never told me she’d had a little brother that died. Then she’d have had to explain herself. Explain how she could be so awful to her own grief-stricken parents. I was thinking about a way to express this to Bette – to tell her that I understood how terrible Mum could be, to let her know that Mum had been terrible to me too – but suddenly Bette patted my knee and looked out again into the blooming forest.

  ‘I’ve always loved this time of year,’ she said.

  And the moment was gone.

  21

  Our kitchen had looked like a crime scene – red splatters on white, Nassim nursing his arm, exploded glass everywhere. My hands were still shaking as Nassim drew me out of the house and we sat together in the dark street, on the gutter at the edge of the driveway. The streetlight showered the top of the big wattle tree with light, the bright leaves at the top crowding around it – a little green cluster of daytime while underneath it, in the shade it cast on the house, the night-time found its deepest point. Nassim’s shirt was spattered with wine and his sleeve had a few small streaks of blood. The tree looked the same as it always had, the view from my window every night of my life. But everything felt different.

  ‘Shouldn’t have worn my good shirt,’ Nassim said. And he tried to laugh.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ I said.

  ‘I think I do,’ said Nassim, with the first hint of bitterness I had ever heard in his voice.

  ‘Is she . . . Is my mum a racist?’ I said, but Nassim simply shrugged. We sat in silence for a while longer. ‘This doesn’t change anything for me, you know?’ I said.

  Nassim looked at me, a complicated glance I couldn’t read. ‘I wouldn’t expect it to,’ he said.

  My phone rang in my pocket. ‘It’s my dad,’ I said.

  ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait.’ And he stood and walked a few feet away to the bottom of the driveway. I swiped my phone.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Anna,’ said my dad. ‘I’ve just spoken to Mum.’

  ‘What the hell was that about?’ I said. ‘What is wrong with her?’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘No I’m not okay! Nassim is not okay!’

  Nassim gestured at me – Don’t bring me into this.

  Dad’s voice came at me down the line, soothing. ‘Anna, I’m going to ask you to do something hard. Okay? I’d like you to forgive her.’

  This was always Dad’s mode. This was what he did, he smoothed things over, brokered deals, kept the ripples from reaching the shore. But not this time. Not this bloody time.

  ‘No, Dad!’ My voice rose, high and angry.

  ‘This isn’t her, Anna. You know that,’ he said soothingly. ‘She’s got a bit too much stress right now. I want you to believe me.’

  My voice got higher and angrier the more soothing and dulcet he tried to be. ‘No! No more, Dad. I can’t just leave that – what she did. We can’t just ignore that. It was so bad, Dad. Maybe you don’t understand. It was worse than we’ve ever seen her. She was so explosive.’

  Dad’s voice rushed in. ‘I do understand, Anna. I understand better than you, which is why I’m asking you, please don’t push her. She’s feeling bad, so bad . . . Oh god, I wish I was there . . .’ Dad faded off and I heard the fear in his voice. ‘I think this might be a make-or-break moment, honey –’

  ‘You’ve said that before.’

  ‘No, this is different. This might be it, you know. She is really shocked at herself right now. Really shocked. And wouldn’t it be great, if out of this . . .? But I really don’t want her to jump the wrong way, Anna. We have to leave her to make a change. So, can you please just leave it. Just for now. Can you do that?’ The anger left for a moment and I started to cry again, looking at Nassim standing apart from me in the dark of the driveway. It was unfair. It was all so unfair.

  ‘Where’s Nassim now?’ Dad asked me.

  ‘He’s here, with me. We’re in the street deciding what to do.’

  ‘Can you put him on?’

  I held out the phone to Nassim. Nassim came back up the street and put on his well-behaved-boyfriend voice. ‘Hello, Mr Krause.’

  I could hear Dad’s voice, small and insect-like, down the line.

  Call me Joe, please. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to meet you, I’m looking forward to it.

  ‘Me too, Mr Krause.’

  So, Nassim, this is a really difficult situation. Cathy says you seem really nice and I’m sorry you’re not getting a chance to meet her at her best, but I want to ask you, on her behalf, to forgive her.

  I snatched the phone back. ‘You can’t do that, Dad. You can’t put him in that position.’

  ‘Hey!’ said Nassim, reaching after the phone. ‘I can speak for myself, you know.’

  I moved away from him. Nassim threw his hands up and walked away down the street.

  ‘Hey sweetie,’ my father was saying, ‘I think you should calm down for a moment.’

  ‘But Dad. It was about me. It was important. Doesn’t she care about me? Not even a little bit?’ I had trouble catching my words. Nassim drifted further down the street into the dark, away from me. I dropped my voice and with that the crying came harder. ‘She doesn’t care, Dad, she doesn’t.’

  ‘Oh honey, shh. She does care, I promise.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I do know that, honey.’

  ‘No, you don’t! You’re making it up to protect me. You always lie to protect me.’

  ‘She cares, Anna.’

  ‘Well, I’m starting not to.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Dad, I have to go. I think Nassim might be trying to leave.’

  ‘Okay sweetie. Say goodbye to Nassim, let him go home and process this a bit, and you go back inside and make yourself a cup of tea or something.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s all going to be alright, I promise.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

  For two days me and Mum were two closed bedroom doors facing each other across the hallway. All that night, my mother hid away in her bedroom, sobering up, or passed out, I didn’t know which. The next morning she came into the kitchen where I was eating breakfast among the red wine mess I refused to clean up for her, and she made tea and put a cup on the bench next to me. And then she stood there for a while and finally said, ‘I’m sorry, Anna. I’m so, so sorry.’ I didn’t look up or respond or even pick up the cup. She went on. ‘Things are going to be different,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect you to believe me, but you just watch. Okay? Okay, Anna?’ Still I didn’t look up at her and eventually she went back upstairs to get ready for work, and the tea sat there growing cold until I left for school for the last day of term. Happy holidays indeed.

  When I came home she wasn’t there, and the kitchen was sparkling clean and the cup was in the dishwasher, and later that night when she came home I was already in my room. She knocked quietly but I didn’t answer, so she went into her own room. And when I ventured out later to go to the bathroom, I could hear her fingers on her laptop keyboard, clacking away behind the closed door.

  And from that point on nothing broke the silence. We dosey-doed around each other in the house, neither one meeting the other’s eye, Mum too full of shame, me too full of anger. Pizza arrived that night, and Chinese the next, already paid for. Dad called us each, separately, on our mobiles. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he said. But I wouldn’t budge.

  Mum finally
tried again late on the second night, the night before leaving for New Zealand. She caught my eye in the hallway and said, ‘Anna, I need to tell you something,’ but I closed my bedroom door as quickly as I could and waited for an hour before venturing out to brush my teeth.

  And then on the third morning I got up to find my parents’ bedroom door standing wide open, the room neat and empty, and Mum’s New Zealand itinerary pinned on the fridge. And I had a sudden sense of something passing me by, like a great weight crossing so close to me that I felt the pull of the tide lurching in my blood. But mostly I felt the relief of her being gone, and of two whole weeks stretching out in front of me with nothing in them but studying hard at home and hanging out with Nassim.

  I brewed coffee and while the machine hummed and dribbled brown liquid into a glass, I leaned my elbows on the bench and rested my head in my hands. I heated milk in another cup in the microwave and poured it into the coffee glass and sat at the bench. Again, the strange lurch in my blood, like a weight passing close. The smell of the coffee sat uneasily in my nose, giving me a strange rising sensation in my throat that subsided just as quickly as it had come. I pushed the cup aside – what was this? Anxiety?

  On the other side of the room a thick pile of newspapers was bundled up in the recycling, ready for me to put out during the week, and there, near the bottom, pushed right in between the pages of the thickest wad, I saw the corner of an envelope poking out. I got to my feet and pulled it out. It was the letter my mother had been holding that night. I sat at the kitchen bench and opened it.

  My Cathy

  I caught my breath. Your loving mother, Bette.

  My grandmother. It was shocking to see her name there, written in her own hand, a shaky script. Bette. It was my Grandma Bette. Bette was almost a mythical creature. I’d forgotten that she even existed. Bette and my grandfather Hessel. Cathy never mentioned them, it was Dad who had told me their names.

  ‘We’re just not that kind of family,’ my mother had said once, early on, when I had asked why we never saw them.

  How could Mum, after reading this letter, have ignored it? Because she’s Mum, I thought. That’s what she does – she doesn’t care about the people she should. She only cares about herself and her ambition. She had read this letter and she had ignored it and stepped on a plane to New Zealand anyway. How could she have done that? The thought filled me with a kind of horror that she could have just separated herself from her family like that. She was an only daughter, like me, and she had chosen to wander off unattached into the universe, to leave the two people who would have knitted her to the earth, to community, to the world – to just lose them.

  Bring my granddaughter. I’d like to meet her before I die.

  I had already decided. I would contact my grandma, even if Mum wouldn’t. The back of the envelope had a return address only, no phone number or email address. That was okay, I would write. The old-fashioned way. It would be fun. We would be pen-pals.

  One line was troubling though. Please don’t tell that I wrote. Don’t tell who?

  All of a sudden I felt like my stomach was dropping inside me. The sensation broadened and I had to leap off the chair to get my face over the bin in time as my body gave an unexpected retch, producing nothing but a line of perspiration on my forehead and then gone as soon as it came.

  What the hell? I thought, slumping on the floor, wiping sweat from my brow. What the hell was that?

  And then came a sudden new idea – more than that, a realisation. I’d been having strange twinges, wandering nausea, unusual fatigue . . .

  Oh hell, I thought. Oh fuck, oh shit, oh no no no.

  22

  In the waiting room at the doctor’s I installed Bette into a chair near the door and took my phone into the toilet. There was nothing from Nassim. No contact. What did that mean? What was he thinking? Was he just being a good study-boyfriend and giving me space? Or was he hurt I hadn’t messaged or called him? It had been two days.

  I read another happy email from Dad, talking about his brothers. I missed them and their bearish love. It was what Mum and I both loved so much about all the Krause men, being swept up in their big lovable manliness. It made me heart-sore to read about them.

  And then this line at the bottom:

  Called the home number a couple of times. Check in, please. Have you spoken to your mother yet? Did you know she hasn’t had a drink since the other night?

  I rushed to respond.

  All good here, I wrote. Studying hard. Sorry I didn’t pick up the landline. You know I study with my headphones in – try the mobile, you dinosaur. Photos look great! How’s Opa?:(

  It would frustrate him, my not answering his questions about Mum. Bad luck. I sent the message quickly and returned to the waiting room, where the receptionist told us that Dr Geraldine had been called up to the hospital and would be a little while, and that Bette and I should go and get ourselves a cup of coffee. Bette smiled and said she’d happily wait where she was, but that I should go if I wanted. So I took my opportunity.

  I bought maxipads from the chemist next to the doctor’s surgery, and then went to the post office. The man behind the counter took my code, located my package, got me to sign for it, and handed over a plain box covered with unmarked brown paper. And then I was holding it in my hand: an end to it all.

  ‘Oh, and this too,’ said the man. He held out a small envelope with Bette’s name and address typed on the front. I hesitated. He said, ‘You are Hessel’s grandkid, right?’ I nodded. How did people know these things? ‘Take that home for Bette then, eh? Save her a trip.’

  On the street outside the post office I filed Bette’s envelope in my pocket then sat down on a bench and looked at my package. The brown paper was folded with hospital corners around the edges. Its neatness was comforting. I wouldn’t open it yet. I wouldn’t reduce it to disordered torn paper and bent cardboard. I wouldn’t do any of that until the right time, after dinner, when I could be alone in the little bedroom and then go straight to bed and curl up.

  I looked up to see Basil crossing the street. He was waving wildly at the traffic to stay where it was while he dodged the small trickle, his other hand full of shopping bags. He hadn’t seen me. I peered out and watched him duck back and forth, waving an overly theatrical g’day to everyone who had to slow down for him. He was already making an impression on the world, this long and lanky fifteen-year-old wannabe-actor, starting with every single driver on this street.

  Basil was great. The thought popped into my mind unbidden, but it was true. He was great. He was brilliant and funny and bold and gorgeous . . .

  Basil arrived on the footpath in front of me, puffing, cars honking and revving behind him, drivers either laughing or cursing. Someone leaned out a car window and yelled, ‘Onya Basil,’ as they drove away.

  ‘You do like to make an entrance,’ I said.

  Basil jumped. ‘Oh, hey,’ he said, and he stepped back on one foot and moved the bags around a little behind him. Then he gestured at the packages in my lap. ‘What you got there?’ he said, and I put my head to the side and looked from the chemist bag and the brown paper package in my lap back up to Basil.

  ‘From how weird you’re being about those bags, it seems like I should be asking you the same thing.’

  Basil held up his shopping bags. ‘What, all this?’ he said. ‘Shopping. I am a reconstructed man, don’t you know? I’m an absolute gun at groceries. No shame here. Okay, your turn.’

  ‘Well, Basil, are you talking about my new postal-order dictionary of medical terminology,’ I said, lifting the brown paper package, feigning heaviness. ‘Or the maxipads?’ And I held them up and waggled them right in front of his face.

  ‘You can’t shock me,’ he said. ‘It won’t work. I’m the son of a nurse. Made of tough stuff.’

  We smiled at each other, but after a moment it seemed we had run out of things to say. ‘Well, I’d better . . .’ I said, jerking my thumb back at the doctor’s office.
‘We’re waiting to see Geraldine.’

  ‘Oh great. Geraldine’s great,’ he said. ‘The best.’ And as I turned away to stow my packages in my bag, he added, ‘So you’ve still been studying in the old house?’

  I straightened up. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And it’s going alright?’

  ‘Yes. Everything’s fine. Not a single ghost or delinquent.’

  ‘Okay. Okay. Fair enough. No stairs though, right?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? Have you seen those stairs? I don’t have a death wish.’

  ‘Cool. Okay, cool.’

  ‘You and my grandparents and those bloody stairs . . .’

  He turned to leave and then turned half back. ‘So, I guess . . . I guess we’ll see each other around soon then.’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah. I guess we will.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  I blinked. ‘Oh. Okay. Yeah. I mean, me too.’

  Basil walked off up the street, and I watched him go. He pirouetted out of the way of a passerby, curtsied to a little girl who curtsied back to him, stopped to chat to a couple of guys his own age sitting on a bench smoking, and then disappeared around the corner with his bags.

  I returned to the doctor’s office to find Bette snoozing in the waiting room chair with her head back, and the receptionist waving me over. Dr Geraldine had rung to say she had to stay up at the hospital but that she could reschedule all her clinic appointments for the next day.

  ‘Oh. Okay,’ I said. ‘I guess I can just bring Bette back tomorrow.’

  ‘That would be perfect if you could? That would be great. Okay then,’ said the receptionist, clacking away at her keyboard. ‘So. You’re all set for the same time tomorrow. See you then.’ And she beamed at me.

  Tomorrow. The package was in my bag. The maxipads were stuffed in on top of it.

  What would tomorrow even look like?

  *

  Bette seemed rejuvenated by her nap in the doctor’s office. By the time I returned to the house after two good hours of study in Bromley Cairn, I found her in the kitchen with various ingredients assembled on the table in front of her – chicken, onion, garlic, curry powder, flour, cream, apples and sultanas.