I put my hand to my head. There it was. Proof. Proof I was hurting him. That saying nothing was doing something. Something unkind. I had to think. I couldn’t think.
‘Hey. Hello. What are you up to?’ Basil was standing in front of me on the street. How was he everywhere I was all the time? I looked up at him, trying to focus, trying to see. ‘So what are you doing now –’ started Basil, but I held up my hand as another ping came through on my phone.
I agonised about sending that, by the way. I’ve had it sitting there for a day. I just wanted you to know that.
‘Your boyfriend?’ said Basil.
I didn’t answer. Typing dots were there on the screen – Nassim had more to say. I stared at the phone.
‘I’ll just wait a minute, shall I?’ said Basil, and began turning circles on his heel while he waited for me to look up again. But I kept watching my phone as Nassim’s typing signal kept coming up and then vanishing. More typing signal, then nothing. He was undecided, obviously, struggling with what to say. When I finally looked up, Basil said, ‘So what are you up to now? I’ve got nothing doing. We could hang out.’
‘I can’t Basil, I –’ My phone pinged again.
So do you want to know what I think? Nassim had written, and underneath, again, the typing signal came up and disappeared and came up and disappeared.
Basil said, ‘Because I know a cool spot we could go.’
‘Basil, I’m with Grandma, so I’ve got to –’
My message app sounded and I looked down.
Here’s what I think, Anna. I think you’re trying to break up with me.
‘Fuck.’ My hand flew to my head. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
‘What?’ said Basil. ‘What is it?’
‘Fuck,’ I said. And another message came through from Nassim.
I think you’re trying to break up with me and you don’t know how to do it, and it’s all because of your mum and how weird everything is now. There. I’ve said it. I hope that makes it easier.
‘What’s he saying?’ said Basil.
‘Shut the fuck up, Basil!’ I held my hand up. ‘Just shut up.’ Another ping.
So feel free to take this as our break-up if you like. I don’t want to break up. I guess you know that. I still want to be with you. But you’ve blown me off a few times now and not spoken to me for days, so now it seems kind of obvious that that’s what’s going on, and I can only go so long feeling like a dickhead. Any longer and I’m just going to become more annoying and feel like more of a dickhead, so I think I have to call it now for my own sake. So, please, let me know if I’ve got it wrong, but I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not holding my breath, and I’m prepared to take your silence now as a sayonara.
I sat down on the bench, the same bench as yesterday. I felt sick. I’d made him do all the work. I was horrible. I was a horrible, horrible person. Everything in me wanted to reassure him, to make him feel better, but I couldn’t. Reassurance would be lies. More lies. It would undo everything. Send me backwards. Send me off the rails again. I couldn’t reassure him because he was right. And he was so good that he’d made it easy. I hated myself for it. But he’d done everything for me. And this could be it. I could just not respond, and that would be it. Done. Off the hook. I was off the hook. It felt awful.
Come on, Anna. Be better than this. Do better than this. I felt like I’d failed at everything else here. And now was I going to just opt out by leaving him waiting? Wondering? At the very least I could acknowledge what he’d done for me. Respond so he knew I’d seen it. So he could have some closure.
I put my thumbs on the screen, typed into the message window. Was Nassim watching my typing dots, wondering what was coming? I wrote and erased, and wrote and erased, and in the end, it turned out the only thing to say to him was what I had already said, but this time, in response to everything he had just said, it meant what it was supposed to mean. I wrote it, paused, looked at it, and then pressed send.
I’m sorry Nassim. I’m sorry I wasn’t better. I’m really so sorry.
I watched as Nassim’s typing signal came up for a moment, just a moment, and then it disappeared. And then nothing else. No more words. There was nothing else for us to say.
Tears welled in my eyes. Basil put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You okay?’
I stood and threw his hand off. ‘For fuck’s sake, Basil.’ And I yelled at him right there in the street. ‘Why the fuck are you always everywhere I am? Don’t you have a fucking life?’ And I tried not to see his poor shocked face as I turned and walked back inside the clinic.
Half an hour later I was sitting with Bette in the old car in the doctor’s surgery car park. The engine had caught only once, briefly, as I turned the key, and then it had died, not to be revived again. Bette sat and waited, as though it was only a matter of time before I solved the problem for her. I wanted to yell at her, to tell her to stop being so useless and come up with a solution herself, to act, somehow, at something, anything. I was shocked at myself. At the violence inside me. I put my head on the steering wheel and tried to breathe.
There was the sound of a knuckle rapping on the window next to my head. Leonie’s face was there, and when I opened the door she said, ‘Car trouble?’
‘Yes.’ I could see Basil hanging around behind Leonie, holding bags of shopping.
‘Well, I’m heading your way now, but I’ve only got the ute – so I could take Bette. Basil’s bike is in the back. He can ride home later. But you’d have to find your own way. The dreaded bus. Maybe you kids could hang out for a bit.’
Leonie stood and went around to help Bette out of the car. I felt defeated. My voice, when I spoke, sounded weak and thin to my ears. ‘But I have to go and study,’ I said.
Basil leaned his head into my window where Leonie’s had been. ‘Don’t go and study,’ he said softly, and he put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Come on, I’ll cheer you up.’ And he held out his hand to me. ‘I’ll give you a dink,’ he said.
I looked up at him and at the hand he was offering.
And, after a moment, I took it.
26
Amazingly, as we saw Bette and Leonie off I remembered Bette’s letter. I handed it to her through the window and told her it was from yesterday. She looked at it and then at me, and then slotted it into her clasp-top handbag as Leonie hefted their shopping bags into the back of the ute and Basil lifted his bike out of the tray.
As the ute pulled away with Bette and Leonie inside, I said, ‘You guys certainly need a lot of groceries.’
‘What?’ said Basil.
‘Today and yesterday.’
‘Oh, yeah, right. Um, cousins, and such . . .’ he said and petered out. ‘Come on, hop on. I’m going to show you something neat.’ And he patted the wire rack sitting above the rear mudguard. ‘Your bum-breaking chariot awaits.’
Despite everything, I laughed.
The minute we began riding, Basil began talking nonstop, trying to convince me that he was an expert rider. He needed to convince me, because with me on the back he certainly was not. He was heading uphill, riding up the hill on the other side of town, and the force it took for him to pedal meant he was standing up waggling his bum near my head and wobbling from side to side.
‘You sure I shouldn’t just jump off and we can push it up the hill?’ I said. ‘This kind of hurts.’
‘Nope,’ he said in a strained voice. ‘I can totally do this.’
‘If you say so.’
He huffed and my legs flailed out either side of the bike and finally, before we had even reached the top, Basil’s legs stalled and gave in. And when the bike toppled and we both hit the grass at the side of the road and Basil lay on the ground puffing and groaning, and still trying to convince me how good he usually was, I let out a cackle. I couldn’t help it.
‘Glad you’re amused,’ he said. ‘I bet your boyfriend never did anything like that for you.’
And then I stopped laughing and put my head in my hands.
‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ said Basil.
‘Not your fault,’ I said, and began to cry, really cry, staring down at the ground between my feet as the sobs came and the tears dripped off my nose and into the dirt. It was the laughing that had done it. Basil had made me relax, made me laugh, and then it had all come rushing up.
He sat next to me, quietly, but not awkwardly. He didn’t say anything, or pat me, or hug me, or try to cheer me up. It was unexpected. I’d have thought any sign of emotion from me and he’d dance around like a puppy trying to fix it, to fix me. But he didn’t. He sat and waited, and eventually I stopped crying, and he said, ‘What if we just push the bike to the top, if it upsets you so much.’ And then I was laughing again.
At the top of this hill, on a little turnout, looking back out over the town behind us, was a white gazebo-style monument – a tower at the top and a hexagon of shaded seating at the bottom. Concrete steps led up from the road, and black iron lettering against the old white-rendered concrete of the gazebo read Pioneers’ Memorial, and in a little presentation box on the side of the memorial there were printed leaflets – the original 1933 brochure for the opening of the monument. I pulled one out and flipped it open.
This town, in common with other places, owes much to its pioneers, and that their efforts in giving birth to the town should gain recognition is only fitting.
‘Yeah, some old history buffs like to take it upon themselves to leave that up here. Educate us all about the good old days,’ said Basil, taking the pamphlet and tracing his fingers down the page. ‘Here, I’ll show you my favourite bit.’ He read out loud in the voice of an old Englishman:
‘“In a space of three-quarters of a century much has passed; old customs have changed; life generally has taken on a new perspective, and, above all, out of chaos there has been evolved a decent civilisation.”’
Basil laughed and shook his head. ‘Decent civilisation. Out of chaos. What the hell did they think we were already doing here? It’s pretty fucked up.’ He handed the pamphlet back to me. ‘Anyhow, it’s a pretty cool view,’ he said, standing. ‘Come on up.’ He started up the stairs of the tower and I climbed up after him. He was right, it was a beautiful view. The sun had begun to dip behind us, only a few hours of winter sunlight left, and the town was bathed in softness, the old 1880s buildings nestling against their backdrop like chickens against a hen.
‘Not that way,’ Basil said. ‘This way.’
I turned and looked away from the town, further to the west, where the sun was beginning to head to the horizon. A spread of forest lay between us and it.
‘That there,’ said Basil. ‘Look at that.’
I caught my breath. The sun was hitting every one of the millions of perpendicular ironbark leaves at a particular angle, sending each one shimmering back at me, and with a very light breeze gently undulating through the canopy it looked and sounded as though I was standing on the shore of a huge and glittering ocean.
‘That’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.’
‘Chaos, apparently. Anyway,’ Basil said, ‘this memorial’s bullshit, it was only the view I wanted to show you.’
‘Hey, Basil,’ I said, suddenly. ‘Did you know my mother had a little brother who died and my mum never told me?’
‘Wait, what?’
‘Bette told me they had a little boy once.’
‘Bette told you about Danny?’
‘You know about Danny?’
‘Yeah, I know about him.’ Basil was frowning at me.
‘Bette seemed pretty reluctant to talk about it. Though I guess you would be, when you had a son you loved who died . . .’
Basil was frowning a lot. Eventually he sat back, and breathed hard out of his nose and shook his head. He seemed angry. And then he stood abruptly. ‘Okay. Come on. There’s something else I need to show you. And then we need to talk.’ And he disappeared down the stairs.
Back at the bike he said, ‘Are you ready? We’re gonna do this again, and if you could bloody well sit still this time . . .’ I gave him a look. ‘What?’ he said. ‘How else were you planning on getting home?’
‘Public transport?’
‘Don’t be dull. Come on, it’s all downhill from here. If we go south it’s still on the way home, kind of, and we’ll miss the big hill. It’s totally worth your while. We’ll bunch up my jumper, you can sit on that.’ He opened his hands and his smile towards me. ‘And you had so much fun last time, remember?’ I rolled my eyes at him, but I climbed on and fed my arms around his midriff and he kicked off.
We sailed together down the hill, the eucalyptus smell rising with the late afternoon air, until we hit the town again and it was replaced by the aromas of dust and stone and concrete and oil. Basil got his legs going hard on the pedals, and the faces, all the white faces of the town whooshed and blurred past, and then receded behind us as we passed through to the other side where, instead of sticking to the highway that would take us over the forested hill between here and home, Basil turned onto a road that followed the line of a creek down to the flat. The clouds in the too-near sky scudded low over our heads as Basil cycled the straight roads out of town, cycled and cycled like someone possessed, like he was bent on escape. And then, after we passed the last few sad houses crumbling on the outskirts of town, we were out again in the open paddocks of the flat plateau. Basil seemed to relax. He set up an upright and effortless rhythm, riding further and further south and, by my calculations, well out of our way and away from Bromley.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘Can’t talk,’ he said. ‘Pedalling.’
‘Do you need me to drive for a bit?’
‘Shh.’
The sun seemed to be going down quickly now – a combination of winter daylight hours and life on a high plateau where the sky had a shorter course for the sun to travel. ‘Shouldn’t we be heading home?’ Basil just shook his head and pedalled on. ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Basil!’
He ignored me and kept pedalling. I wiggled backwards and hop-skipped off the back of the bike, which shot forward suddenly with the reduction of weight, and as I ran myself to a stop, Basil skidded and then dropped the bike between his legs and leapt out of the way of its tumble.
‘What the fuck?’ he said.
‘Basil, it’s really not cool to take a girl somewhere without telling her what the hell you are doing.’
‘I told you, I want to show you something.’
‘What? What are you going to show me? What are you going to show me that is so far away from everything I know and not tell me what you’re doing?’
‘What’s your great emergency? Why do you have to know everything? Can’t you just enjoy a surprise – someone doing something nice for you?’
‘No. I need to get back and study.’
‘Really?’ said Basil. ‘Is that all you think about?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘There are other things, you know. Other important things.’
‘Not for me. Not right now there aren’t.’ The truth of the statement landed heavily. I couldn’t fail. I had to achieve this, and I had to achieve it now. ‘I don’t expect you to understand, but there really is nothing as important to me right now.’
‘Is that why your life has run so far off into the ditch?’
‘What the fuck would you know about that?’
Basil shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Some crazy hunch. You were not such a happy chappy up the hill just before.’
‘Man, you just really push my buttons, you know that?’
‘I aim to please,’ said Basil with a bow and a flourish. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘this was where we were getting off anyway. It’s just through there. We need to walk.’ And he tossed the bike over the dug-in furrow at the side of the road, left it in the wild long grass and ducked through a fence leading into a paddock.
‘I’m not coming unless you tell me what it is,’ I said.
‘Well you can�
�t see it from there,’ he said, and kept walking across the paddock. ‘And I don’t know about you, but I don’t reckon this road is much to look at.’
‘Fucking hell,’ I said, then stepped through the long grass beside the bike and climbed the fence too. ‘All I seem to do here is walk around in paddocks with you.’
‘Welcome to Central Victoria,’ said Basil and waggled his hands in the air without turning around.
I ran to catch up, stumbling on the clodded earth. Ahead of us was a group of trees, and just above the leaf-level poked the roof of a small silo. In the distance over to our right was an old homestead, not at all like Bromley Cairn, but easily as old, maybe even older. It was low and hunkered down, a single storey of red brick with a verandah along one L-shaped side, with long stables at the back and five incongruous palm trees standing like sentinels around it. Twice as tall as anything around them, the palm trees’ over-long trunks bent slightly away from the prevailing winds, their straggly frond-tops waving like bedraggled pom-poms over the river red gums growing beneath.
‘Are we walking on those people’s land?’ I said, pointing to the house.
‘No,’ said Basil. ‘They built their house on mine.’
Basil was keeping up a pace, which made me think that maybe he wasn’t quite so cavalier as he sounded about walking around on someone’s property. We struck across the expanse towards the cluster of trees a few hundred metres north of the homestead. I felt hopelessly exposed to anyone watching. But it seemed that no-one was watching. The landscape felt empty.
‘This used to be a wetland,’ said Basil about the rubbly cropped land beneath our feet. ‘See how it’s low here, next to the creek? It doesn’t flood here now, though. Water course has been changed to protect the house, channels at the end to drain it.’
‘Okay.’ I was a bit over the lecturing tone. ‘Thanks for the hydrology lesson.’
Basil didn’t say anything, but led me into the copse of trees: shadowy peppercorns mixed with sugar gums. We were at the back of the small silo. We walked around it and into the last of the sunlight.
Where We Begin Page 18
