It was also the room where they decided to have Amber.
Paul knew she couldn’t have children. After an appendix operation at sixteen, the doctor told her she was born without a uterus. She’d lost her father the year before and the grief seemed to blend, one into the other. She told Paul the day after he was called up for Vietnam so he could choose whether to continue their relationship. He said it was her he loved not whether she could have children and would she wait for him. She did, and they married in ’73, the year after his return.
She looked over at the wedding photo on Paul’s side of the bed. Beside it sat his favourite photo of her, taken on her twenty-first birthday cutting the cake, a moment she could never forget. She’d counted her candles and made a wish that she would give up anything, do anything, if they could have a child in their lives. And it came true. Within the year they had Amber. They’d sat through lengthy interviews with a grey-haired lady at the top of the stairs in the welfare office, then waited. The baby had another name but they’d changed it to Amber, to match her eyes, hazel with flecks of sunlight. Even then, at three months old, they were all mesmerised by the light in her eyes. Her mother, Irene, smothered Amber in kisses and swore she’d cast a spell on them all.
And she had. Until now they’d happily forgotten Amber was adopted. Yes, it had been discussed during the adoption process—when to tell, whether to tell, and on several follow-up visits they’d raised it, but the decision had been left up to them. Paul had wanted to tell Amber on their holidays at Esperance, the summer before she started school. She needs to know, he’d said, watching Amber bodysurf a tiny wave to the shore in front of them. She’d looked up at that little nut-brown, carefree body running towards them, the sunlit sea gleaming off her, and couldn’t do it. Not yet, she’d replied, she’s too young, let’s wait.
She stared out the bedroom window and thought of the article she’d read earlier in the year, in the Women’s Weekly, about children who’d been adopted; a young woman saying she couldn’t forgive her adopted mother for not telling her, that she’d lost trust. The story frightened her and she’d decided to tell Amber before she went to high school next year but other fears were stopping her: fear of losing Amber’s love, fear of Amber finding her birth mother and leaving them, fear of having left it too late already and the harm it might do, fear of … sadness.
Fear of sadness? Too late for that. She slumped forward, head in her hands, the envelope dropping to the floor.
How to tell, how to tell, how to tell?
Her body rocked in time with her thoughts. She didn’t have an answer but it would have to be soon. Before Paul … before Paul …
The thought stole her breath. She gasped and reached for the envelope, cradling it against her chest with both hands. She rocked gently until her breathing slowed then stood up and, counting her steps, returned to Paul.
Aimee looked out the car window as she drove to Williamstown, one of the old mining settlements at the northern edge of the Golden Mile. Bumping over the railway line at the top of the main street she turned onto a narrow bitumen road, wondering how she might be of help to the Steele family. Thirty-eight was young to have lung disease—or ‘dust on the lungs’, ‘miners’ complaint’, other terms she’d heard. Paul Steele had apparently worked in the mines since leaving school and despite compulsory chest X-rays—health clearances to keep drilling, the best paying job in town—he had six months to live, at best.
‘Miners’ complaint’—well, you would, wouldn’t you? she thought, pulling over to check Gerry’s ‘dirt map’ on the seat beside her. He knew she was visiting the Steeles today and had provided her with directions, and some background to the mining industry. Mellow from another Sunday roast dinner, now a standing monthly invitation, and two bottles of Mateus Rosé, the three of them had been arguing state politics, including the current government’s business dealings with controversial entrepreneurs like Alan Bond. Jan thought it was risky, Gerry thought it was innovative. She loved their heated but respectful discussions—it reminded her of her childhood, when her parents and their friends would sit around the kitchen table arguing politics.
But Gerry was more interested in the recent changes in the gold mining industry. ‘There’s a rumour going around that a giant company is trying to buy up all the leases on the Golden Mile and go from sinking shafts to open cut mining—hard to imagine the size of that.’
‘I heard it was Bond,’ Jan interrupted.
Undeterred, he’d leant forward in his chair. ‘Did you know,’ he said, wagging his finger at Aimee, ‘that the Golden Mile is the richest square mile of gold-bearing earth in the world?’
‘Yes, but rich at whose expense?’ Jan interrupted again, her face red from the wine and the discussion. With her tiny frame tucked into her chair, she looked set for a fight. Her tight black curls seemed to tremble in anticipation.
Gerry grinned and leant back, stretching his long legs under the table, and then it was on to the rights of miners like Paul Steele and how, at the turn of the century, unionists like Jabez Dodd, a union leader and later a politician in the Labor Scaddan government, fought to improve working conditions. It was the Miners Phthisis Act, proclaimed in 1922, Jan told her, that acknowledged phthisis, a form of silicosis—the ‘miners’ complaint’—was caused by the conditions underground miners worked in, and that workers deserved compensation. ‘And they’re still dying,’ she’d said, banging the table for emphasis, as she got up to make them coffee.
Last night, before sleep, Aimee had wondered what her father knew or thought about all this. As a young lawyer he’d worked for community organisations, spouted Alinsky and other American community activists, and became a member of the Labor Party. After she was born, having married a leading unionist’s daughter, he worked for a legal firm until the seventies, before entering politics by winning a safe seat south of Perth, the year after she went to university.
The year before she went to university was not a good year.
Her father had been actively raising his profile in preparation for his electoral ambitions and was rarely home. Her gentle mother was struggling with Aimee’s choice of boyfriend, Shane, a long-haired, blond surfer four years older than her, while she struggled to juggle him and her studies. Her younger brother, Jon, was experimenting with dope and expecting her to cover for him.
And her father kept looking at her differently.
By that final night of that fateful year, she had broken up with Shane. A week earlier, on Christmas Eve, she’d been in bed with Shane at his mate’s place, drunk from the party that was still raging outside the bedroom door, when he told her he wasn’t prepared to wait around while she went to uni. She saw him at the beach on Boxing Day with someone else, and she’d turned around and walked home. At her parents’ New Year’s Eve party she drank too much, smoked one of her brother’s joints, vomited in the pool and somehow—she doesn’t remember how—put herself to bed, just after midnight, still wearing her new bikini. She doesn’t remember hearing the bedroom door open. A wraithlike remainder of her, deep in the mists of alcohol and drugs, had lain very, very still … and decided not to remember …
Realising she’d screwed up Gerry’s dirt map in her clenched fist, she took a deep breath and tried to pat the paper flat on the seat beside her. She checked the time. She was early, which she tended to be, to the amusement of Lori, who always ran late. Invariably, she arrived a quarter of an hour early for a meal together or a swim at the pool—Lori, a quarter of an hour behind. She disliked feeling rushed, that sense of panic. She preferred to think things through, feel calm, slow down.
She hadn’t always needed to. It began the year she went to university, that need to slow life down, enough to manage it, feel less overwhelmed, learn to breathe, breathe deeply and think and decide. It was automatic now. When she felt the rush, the panic, she breathed, shut out feelings and calmly acted. Lee didn’t like it, said the light in her eyes dulled, that she switched off and her actions wer
e cold, that she stopped caring.
Like the night she told Lee she was leaving. Forming relationships at work was easy but she avoided anything more intimate. Lee got too close, noticed too many things and asked too much of her.
‘Is it because of that night in September, in the lounge room?’ Lee had asked, when she said she was leaving. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …’
‘No, no,’ she lied, ‘I just thought it would be good to work somewhere new, challenge myself.’
Lee knew she was lying. ‘Look, about that night …’
‘I’m sorry, Lee, I don’t want to talk about it.’ And they hadn’t. Not about her dancing half naked in the lounge room, drunk, thinking Lee had gone to bed, her memories rising up unbidden. Nor about Lee’s hands on her bare hips, dancing behind her, and staring down at her when she’d turned around, eyes questioning. She’d bolted.
The noise of a car approaching echoed across the flats and pushed Lee out of her thoughts. She tried to wind up the window. A ute, with several people bouncing around in the back of it, rattled past. It shoved in a gust of dusty wind that blew her map against the windscreen. She grabbed at it with one hand and checked her watch on the other—two o’clock—time to get moving if she was to be there before two-fifteen. She put the car into gear and drove back onto the bitumen, leaving a cloud of bulldust in her wake.
‘Hello, anybody home?’ she called out as she approached the Steeles’ front door, keeping an eye out for any dogs—most of the people she visited had at least one. Last week a blue heeler had nipped her ankle before his owner came out and apologetically grabbed him.
She stepped onto the verandah but before she could knock, the front door opened. Kerry Steele stood framed against the dark interior. They looked intently at each other, measuring.
‘Hello, Mrs Steele, I’m Aimee McCartney from Community Welfare,’ she said, extending her hand. ‘You may not remember me, we met earlier this year when you came in with your husband for an IPTAAS claim.’
‘No, I do remember,’ Kerry replied, shaking her hand. ‘Please, come in, thanks for comin’. Would you like a cup of tea?’
She stepped into the narrow, dark hallway and followed Kerry into the lounge room. It was a simply furnished but neat room, the tin walls painted a soft blue to match the shiny dark blue of the linoleum-covered floor. The clean smell of floor polish lingered. On one wall, above an open fireplace, hung a large print of an autumn scene. One long window, framed with lace curtains, let in the sunlight.
‘Yes please, black with one,’ she replied.
She took it black now after a recent visit to an ancient prospector at Fimiston, near the Boulder Block on the south-eastern outskirts of town. In his rusty corrugated tin house he eagerly made her tea in a large tin mug with blobs of undissolved Sunshine powdered milk floating on top. She had tried to persuade him to go to hospital to have a cataract removed by assuring him arrangements could be made for his dozen cats to be fed. He didn’t budge. But he did invite her to stay for dinner, rabbit stew—she graciously declined—and to come again, which she accepted, thankful of another opportunity to try and win his trust.
‘You remember my husband Paul, then?’
‘Yes, hello, Mr Steele. I’m Aimee McCartney. How are you?’ she inquired, looking him in the eye as she shook his outstretched hand. Feeling its boniness, she maintained eye contact as she sat beside him on the sofa.
‘Could be better, eh. Thanks for comin’.’ He looked up at his wife. ‘Are you gunna make the tea, love?’
‘Yes, sorry, won’t be a tick,’ Kerry answered, turning into the kitchen.
Aimee heard her fill the kettle and waited. Paul coughed and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, then leant forward.
‘Look, there’s no point beatin’ about the bush, I know you’ve come to help us, well, help Kerry—she’s not copin’ too good, been worryin’ about everything, and what to tell Amber, that’s our daughter. She’ll be knockin’ off school in a little while and we wanna talk about things before she gets here, if you don’t mind.’ He sat back in his seat, puffing.
She noticed his thinness, how his thick, dark hair seemed too big for his head, his eyes too big for his face. She saw sweat on his upper lip and the hands on his knees trembling. She noticed his heart in his eyes, his feelings exposed, and she wanted to cry. Breathing in, she calmed herself. The clatter of cups clamoured into the quietness, the kettle whistled.
‘Okay, Mr Steele, we can do that.’
‘I wanna know that Kerry will have someone she can get help from, I mean, her mum’s a great help, she is, but Kerry doesn’t like worryin’ her, you know, ever since her dad died and all that.’
‘Well, that’s what I’m here for today, to find out what you do need. Your doctor’s referral explained the situation with your illness, Mr Steele, and that your wife has been distressed. I can understand …’
‘Yes, yes, but there are other things that …’ He looked at her imploringly. Kerry’s arrival with a tray of teacups and cakes interrupted them.
‘Okay, who’s for a lamington?’ Kerry said brightly. ‘Can’t say I baked them myself, though I do usually. My mum dropped these off this morning.’ She placed the tray on a small glass-topped wooden table in front of them and handed Aimee a cup and saucer, searching her face.
Aimee held her gaze.
Kerry blinked quickly. ‘Please, help yourself to sugar,’ she said, and looked away.
They made small talk over their tea ceremony until they settled in with each other, Aimee moving intentionally towards the place where they could start; start their story, take the risk, trust a stranger (for she was one) and dare to hope—for a solution, a resolution. She kept her voice soft, prompting them when they stalled, which they did, often, as their sadness surfaced, a ship atop a wave of sorrow, sailing into treacherous waters. They started with practicalities: what support was available for Paul to remain at home so Kerry could keep working? Kerry had cut back to two days but they really needed the money. What were they eligible for? And how often should she visit?
When Kerry left to wash up the afternoon tea dishes Paul pulled a fawn-coloured envelope from under the sofa.
‘I was wonderin’ if you’d mind doin’ something for us. I need someone to witness, um, to witness …’
She watched as he swallowed several times, and waited.
‘I need someone to witness … I …’
She reached over and laid her hand on Paul’s arm.
He began to sob. Quietly. He reached down the side of the sofa and pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘It’s Amber, how are we going to tell Amber?’
She turned towards him, aware that Amber knew her father was ill. ‘You mean, how serious your illness is?’
‘No, no, we’ve told her about that. Amber knows I’m not goin’ to get better. No, no, about, about …’ He stopped and looked up.
She turned to see Kerry, framed in the doorway, marmoreal. It reminded her of the statues at the Acropolis Museum that she saw when she visited Greece, that summer after her first year at university. Although parts of the statues were missing you sensed them whole and beautiful. They existed, incomplete.
As she herself did.
She looked back at Paul.
His glance leapt anxiously between the two of them, before settling on Kerry.
‘Love, we need to talk about it, before she gets home.’
And like a statue cracking, Kerry fell to the floor.
Paul struggled to rise from the sofa and sank back as Aimee moved across the room.
‘I can’t do this. I can’t, I can’t,’ Kerry cried out, sitting upright on the wooden floor, her hands clasped under her chin, eyes closed, face turned up towards the old pressed tin ceiling. She began rocking, gently, murmuring indistinctly.
Aimee dropped to the floor beside her. ‘It’s all right, Kerry, it’s all right,’ she whispered.
Kerry opened her eyes and slowly focused on her. ‘Do
you have children?’ she asked, her face stony.
Aimee hesitated a moment. ‘No, Kerry, I don’t.’
‘So how can she know, Paul?’ Kerry cried, looking over at him.
‘I dunno, love, I thought we should get some help with it. I’m sorry, I was just tryin’ to do the right thing, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I …’
Kerry’s face crumpled. ‘Amber is adopted and we haven’t told her,’ she blurted out, covering her mouth with her hand. She began to cry.
‘Come here, love, c’mon,’ Paul cried out, his arms outstretched.
Kerry jumped up from the floor and fell into Paul’s arms, curling her legs beneath her on the sofa, and burying her face in his shoulder.
Struggling to absorb this new information, Aimee carefully edged into a nearby chair. She watched as Paul stroked his wife’s hair, kissed the top of her head, and she saw it—adoration—a lived expression of the two dimensional world of glorious art she had wondered through in awe, in French museums, the summer she turned nineteen, the summer of forgetting—captured here, present, in this little room.
Kerry lifted her head and looked up at Paul. They kissed, and wiping her eyes, Kerry sat upright and faced her.
‘I’m sorry about all this. I haven’t known what to do. Still don’t really. It all seems too much for Amber to cope with, I mean she’s not twelve yet. I don’t want to hurt her, not now, not …’ She looked at Paul.
He took a deep breath, ‘But love, maybe it’s better she knows the truth.’
‘What, that you’re not her real father, I’m not her real mother? You think that’s what she needs to hear right now? Do you really think that, do you really think she needs to know?’
‘I dunno, Kerry, I just want what’s best for Amber. We always said we’d tell her one day.’
‘Yeh, but that was before you got sick.’
‘Kerry, what if I … if I … if something happens to me, before we tell her, and she sees me as having lied to her?’
The Secrets We Keep Page 5
