Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  ‘Oh Becky, come on, not this again.’ Cathy buried her head. ‘I told you last night, it’s not that bad.’

  ‘But you don’t need anyone else to back up what you say.’ Becky was on her front now too, her face closer to Cathy’s. ‘I’ve asked a policeman, my uncle, and he said that even just one person –’

  ‘Jesus! Becks.’ Cathy lifted her head so she could gesticulate with her hands. ‘You’re being dramatic. Can we just have a nice day?’

  ‘Fine, forget I said anything.’ Becky flopped down on her side, her back to Cathy. ‘I won’t bring it up again.’

  ‘Good.’

  And Cathy knew they were okay again when Becky started humming along to ‘Take a Bow’, the last song on the CD. When it finished Becky sat up and said, ‘Do you want to listen to it on random this time?’

  ‘Sure.’

  And then Becky slapped Cathy’s arm. ‘Hey, look.’

  Cathy looked. On the edge of the pontoon Danny and Leonie were sitting close together, their hands overlapping, faces turned to each other.

  ‘Have they started something?’ Becky said. ‘Finally?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Cathy, starting to smile.

  Becky and Cathy watched them sitting together out on the pontoon. The graze on Danny’s shoulder did look like it should have really hurt, but he seemed to pay it no attention. Becky and Cathy watched as Danny and Leonie leaned their heads towards each other, and the sun sparkling off the water knitted them together with a thousand flecks of rainbow light as they kissed.

  ‘I’d say that’s a yes,’ said Cathy.

  Later, Leonie remembered the way that the twinkling of the sunshine off the water had made it so clear, the way that Danny’s jawline was changing, firming – how strong his features were becoming. The drifting sandy hair of the boy who had been her main go-to on the footy field was turning thick and brown. His arms were still thin, but they were beginning to bulk up, and his body felt strong when he pressed it against hers. The skin of his cheek was rough against her face as he kissed her again, as he had been kissing her since the other night, on his fourteenth birthday, when he had stepped out of the shower at her house, blood still oozing from his shoulder, shocked tears still leaking from his eyes, and finally, after all these years their bodies began to speak to one another in a language independent of their childhood friendship.

  Out there on the pontoon with his dripping arm draped around her, smiling in the sun as caramel-coloured water traced lines across their skin, she just felt joy that this boy who had for so long been her partner in crime, the boy who knew her and laughed at her and with her, the boy who brightened her whole life – that this boy was becoming a man. Her man.

  Danny kissed Leonie and then he kissed her again – a good long one.

  ‘Okay, I can’t watch that,’ said Cathy.

  But Becky clutched her hands together at her chest. ‘Oh my goodness and oh my god, that’s so sweet! They’re the cutest couple I’ve ever known, and that includes Winona and Johnny, may their relationship rest in peace,’ she said, and crossed herself.

  ‘Nah, Leonie’s too good for him.’ Cathy smiled, then flopped back down on her towel and covered her face.

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Becky. ‘Oh shit, shit, shit.’

  ‘What?’ Cathy stayed lying down. With Becky, it was always better to make sure it was a real emergency before exerting any energy.

  ‘Oh fucking shit!’ Becky rarely swore. ‘It’s your fucking dad.’

  ‘What?’ Cathy sat up.

  ‘There on the road.’

  Becky pointed and Cathy saw her father’s car crawling along the road and then picking up speed and driving away. She looked at the pontoon and saw Danny and Leonie in full view, Danny’s arm slung around Leonie, Leonie leaning into him, their lips connected, their fingers entwined on Leonie’s shoulder.

  30

  Hessel said it again. ‘Anna! Where are you, you little bitch?’

  Shock and alarm spread to my fingertips. Hessel was standing at the back porch looking out towards Bromley, and then he turned back into the house and a moment later he was there again with my half-open suitcase. I watched him carry it to the gate and throw it out onto the gravel. Bette came out behind him. She was reaching for him, trying to stop him. He went back inside and came out with my laptop and my backpack.

  I ran out the door and pounded across the yard. ‘Hessel! What are you doing?’

  He threw my things onto the ground, my laptop landing on the backpack and then sliding onto the dirt, and then he turned on me.

  ‘What have you been saying to that lady doctor!? Why have the police come to find me at the vet, asking questions about me?’

  ‘What? Nothing! What would I say?’

  Bette was worrying Hessel’s arm, trying to pull him back into the house.

  ‘Where’s Polly?’ I said.

  Hessel yanked his arm free of Bette. He pointed his finger at me. ‘I want you gone!’

  Bette wailed. ‘No, Hessel, no!’

  ‘Polly’s dead!’ he said. ‘Of course she is. They both are!’

  ‘Hessel, I’m so sorr–’

  ‘Get out!’ he screamed at me. ‘You filthy Arab-loving girl. Get out! Now!’ I felt my face go stiff with shock.

  A ute pulled up on the main road and Basil leapt off the back before it kept driving away into town. Basil began sauntering up the drive but when he saw the stand-off between me and Hessel he began to run towards us.

  Hessel turned as he came up. ‘And what have you told her, you piece of shit? Only you and me and Bette. Only family. We were going to keep this to ourselves.’

  Basil held his hands up. ‘Whoa up there, old man. I haven’t told her anything, for your information.’

  ‘You two together. You’re traitorous. Just like your mothers.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Hessel?’ said Basil. ‘I haven’t said anything, and actually, it’s pretty fucking shit of both of you, all of you, to tell her that about him.’ I couldn’t follow.

  ‘You set the police on me!’

  ‘I have no idea why the police would be interested in you,’ said Basil. ‘You tell me why they’d be interested in you. What have you been up to?’

  Hessel leaned his face towards Basil and made a vile sneering noise. ‘I should have known never to trust one of you,’ he said. I was shocked. Who was this person?

  Basil stood up straighter, a steely look in his eye. ‘One of . . . who?’

  Hessel spat on the ground at Basil’s feet. I was horrified and opened my mouth to speak, but Basil just calmly reached out and took my hand.

  ‘We’ll be at the gully until you can calm down, old man.’

  As we walked away Hessel yelled after us, ‘You’re just like him. You’re all useless. All of you!’

  Basil didn’t respond. He held my hand tightly and walked me away towards the fence. I looked back to where Hessel stood watching. Bette was clinging to the gate in the yard. And as Basil and I climbed our way through the wire of the fence, I saw Hessel give my suitcase a kick.

  We stumbled across the uneven ground of the endless square paddock.

  ‘Where are we going, Basil?’

  ‘Just a bit further.’

  The land looked flat, but after ten minutes all of a sudden we were standing in front of a curving line of trees, the trees Basil had pointed towards from the top of the cairn that first day. We were at the edge of a drop of two metres, an eroded wall below which a large flat area of land opened up, mysteriously hidden from anywhere else in the landscape by simple virtue of being below the level of the paddocks. A winding river stood rather than flowed down the middle of it – an unmoving watercourse, a thin snaking lake, the visible trees following the organic line of it. The only curving line in the landscape. The only thing giving the game away.

  ‘Down here,’ Basil said, stepping down the eroded wall to the green flat. I followed him clumsily, the clay-loam bank squishing and crumbling under my feet.
It was an odd place. The water looked as though it was frozen in time and, while red gums had been left to follow the line of the river, the landscape all around it had been planted up with oaks and elms. There was not a winter leaf in sight, only the bare branches of naked English trees. An English gentleman’s park.

  I sat quickly on the grass – I didn’t know where my knees had gone.

  ‘I don’t get any of this. What is going on? Why was Hessel –’ I felt hysterical.

  Basil dropped down beside me. ‘Okay, so about Hessel . . . look, I don’t know. I think, from some little things Mum has told me, that he can do this sometimes, just be a bit of a bastard, just spout some racist shit –’ I thought of Leonie’s words that first day. Is that what you call it? Getting funny?

  ‘So I should probably tell you that I told Mum what you said about Bette’s fingers and the bump on the head,’ Basil was saying, ‘and she went a bit weird, and then I may have mentioned that your mum didn’t actually know you were here, and then she actually totally freaked, and I’m sorry, but I think –’

  ‘I know. She called Mum. And then Mum called me – she was . . . a bit freaked too.’

  ‘Sorry, I . . .’ The sun was bright and white. Below the level of the landscape I suddenly felt removed enough from everything else that was going on to realise that something wasn’t right in my body.

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ I said, just as a skewering feeling moved from my abdomen to my head in a sudden spear of pain.

  ‘Yeah, you don’t look well.’

  The headache was quick and immense; I couldn’t remember a headache like it. I put both hands around my skull, feeling as though I had to hold it together. I was shivering a little. The ground beneath me was cold. My skin prickled and I felt weirdly like I had wet myself.

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You really don’t look well. You’ve gone a funny colour.’

  ‘Big pain in my head and –’

  ‘Holy shit, is that blood?’

  I looked down, shocked to see a small wet patch in the crotch of my jeans.

  ‘Fuck.’ I tried to stand, but a cramp moved through my pelvis, feeling like it had disabled my hips. I crouched over. ‘Ouch. Fuck. Ouch.’

  ‘Um, shit, okay,’ Basil said. I saw panic in his eyes.

  ‘Mum. I’ll get Mum,’ he said. ‘You’ve taken the pills, then.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t take them. I haven’t taken them yet. I don’t have the pads and painkillers with me.’

  ‘Okay. Right. So Mum’s gone to town to get some more dressings for Bette, but I’ll go and climb a tree for reception and call her.’ Basil took off his fleece-lined jacket and laid it over me. ‘These pads and painkillers, where are they?’

  ‘Bromley. On my desk. Will she be able to find us?’

  ‘This is the gully. Mum knows the gully. We all know the gully.’

  Basil left, the son of a nurse, with a nurse’s efficiency, and I lay curled on my side on the grass. My head still pounded where it lay, and beneath my nose the earth smelled like all the colours of the world had now rotted to brown.

  And then, suddenly, I felt better. I felt the strangely physical sensation of the pain lifting as quickly as it had descended. Slowly, testingly, I sat up a little. The sudden absence of any pain was a mystery but also an absolute relief. I breathed in the earthy air – I could smell the silt in the water and the clamour of a bird in the reeds filled my ears – and when I breathed out I didn’t feel any more blood moving into my underpants.

  I looked at this place – the gully. In among the red gums I recognised willows over the water, bare now in the winter, and much further along, a row of pine trees – a solid block of deep bottle green that seemed so out of place, such a strange replacement for whatever other smoke-coloured dapply native trees would have stood there first. All about on the flat were the scattered remnants of burnt logs and sticks and old beer bottles, testament to recent and ancient bonfires and yobbo invasions.

  Clouds moved across the sky. The bare branches of the trees stood out like dark skeletons against new steel, and I looked through them at the perfect shapes of the high-up ravens as they floated like ash through the air, drifting and dipping, barely flapping.

  I draped Basil’s fleecy coat over myself and watched the stray flurries of wind ruffle the surface of the green-grey water until finally footsteps crunched in the paddock above and Basil dropped down beside me, followed closely by Leonie.

  ‘She was already nearly here to see Bette,’ Basil said. ‘So I told her. About everything – I’m sorry, I hope that was alright.’

  I nodded.

  ‘So Hessel kicked you out, huh?’ Leonie said, crouching in front of me.

  Basil answered for me. ‘Yep – she’s one of us now!’

  Leonie turned to him. ‘The gully, Basil?’

  ‘It seemed right,’ Basil said defensively and brought out my water bottle and the bag of supplies I had bought from the chemist. ‘You also had a pair of very fetching trackie-daks in there by your desk,’ he said. He pulled out the teal velvet pants I had left there in case I needed extra warmth. ‘Um, and I also grabbed these . . .’ Basil trailed off, and I looked up.

  I laughed.

  ‘They were on the clothes line,’ he said. ‘I snuck around the side of the house. It was all very quiet in there.’

  Bette’s underpants looked ridiculous in Basil’s hands – wide and beige, with uncomfortable elastic around the top and the leg holes. I shook my head at him.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘I did my best.’

  I laughed, and then felt like crying. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s amazing.’

  ‘Stop chatting and take those,’ Leonie said, pointing at the painkillers from my supply bag and wrapping a blood-pressure band around my arm.

  ‘I feel okay now,’ I said. Actually, I felt foolish as hell, but she knew what I meant.

  ‘Still . . .’ she said.

  ‘Is it, you know, a miscarriage?’

  ‘Not sure,’ she said. ‘Not necessarily,’ she added. ‘Pregnancy can do weird and freakish things to a body, not just miscarry.’

  ‘Ouch,’ I said again, doubling over. Not as bad as before, but not out of the woods.

  ‘Take the drugs, girl,’ Leonie said. ‘Any more blood?’

  ‘I’m not sure, I don’t think so . . .’ I washed the pills down with water from my water bottle.

  ‘Get changed and we’ll have a look how much there is.’

  ‘I’ll go over here, while you . . .’ Basil gestured at the underpants and the pads he’d brought, then went down by the water and sat looking at the surface. Leonie turned the other way as I took off my pants and my underpants and put them in one of the plastic bags. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, but even so I put a pad in Bette’s enormous underpants and pulled them on. They came all the way up to the underwire of my bra, but they were sturdy and supportive and held the pad right where it needed to be, and the teal trackie-daks were comfortingly warm. ‘Done,’ I said.

  Leonie turned back and I waved her to the plastic bag with my underpants and jeans, and she gave them a quick inspection. ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘That’s not too much actually.’

  Basil had been sitting staring intently at the water. Suddenly he stood, strode towards a draping willow and grabbed a branch with both hands, then swung himself out over the water and back repeatedly while Leonie pressed her fingers to my wrist and counted by her watch and then stuck a digital thermometer in my ear.

  ‘Does he have an off switch?’ I asked, watching Basil.

  Leonie laughed. ‘If you find it, let me know.’ She sat back on her heels.

  ‘So how pregnant, honey?’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That’s tricky. A bit confused.’

  ‘When was your last period?’

  ‘Um, probably only four or so weeks ago. Most likely then.’

  ‘So only four weeks pregnant?’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe eight.’

 
; Leonie raised her eyebrows at me. ‘You been throwing up?’

  ‘A little bit.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘Okay. So if it is a miscarriage, I want you to know that it’s nothing you did. One in four pregnancies end like that, probably heaps more women don’t even know, they just think they’re having a late period –’

  ‘Look, it doesn’t really matter.’ I said it, but I didn’t really know how I felt. ‘But, y’know, yeah, could have just thought it was a late period if I hadn’t taken that test . . .’ Leonie pressed her lips together in an expression I couldn’t quite read.

  As she was putting her thermometer away in her bag I said, ‘So you called my mum.’

  Leonie nodded, unapologetic. ‘I did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why did you tell me she knew you were here?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘She doesn’t know about this either, does she?’ Leonie asked.

  ‘No. Not about this,’ I said. ‘So why is Mum freaking out about my being here? Why did you freak out about it when Basil told you she didn’t know? I’m seventeen, you know.’

  ‘Honey, you and your mum need to talk. She’ll be here soon. I’m going to let her tell you all the things she needs to tell you.’

  She folded away the blood pressure cuff and began putting everything back in her bag. ‘I don’t think there’s anything too terrible going on with you, but I do think we need to get you to a doctor as soon as possible. Probably a good reason to get you away from here pretty quickly too. Do you think you can get yourself up out of here?’

  I looked at the eroded gully wall. For moments at a time I felt absolutely fine, but then the cramps came and stopped me in my tracks. The drugs were kicking in, which was good, but they were making me feel a bit dopey.

  Leonie was looking at me. ‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘Up you come,’ and she gave my arms a haul and twisted herself underneath me so before I knew it I was being piggybacked.

  ‘Ah, I remember this,’ she said. ‘Parenting is mostly about lugging people around – even more than nursing.’

  I felt like a fool, but there was also something about being carried like a little kid . . . I leaned into it and let her carry me up and out of the gully. When we were standing on the edge, looking back in, waiting for Basil to come back to shore from swinging on the willow, I said, ‘Why did you say Basil shouldn’t have brought me here?’