‘But if we tell her now, what if she … I don’t know … what if she … reacts badly? I don’t think I could take it, not right now. Maybe later, maybe we could, I don’t know …’ She looked over at Aimee and asked, ‘What have other people done? What do you think?’
Aimee’s mind raced. Theories, research, case studies, people’s stories—they all ran into each other. She looked at them both and felt she was watching something biblical, mythical unfold in front of her; a morality tale, a parable. She thought of Solomon and the contested child. Worlds turn on decisions, lives change at moments like this, in the simple lives of everyday people, trying to decide the right thing to do, struggling to find some measure, some yardstick, by which, upon which, they can build a foundation for living with their choice, with themselves.
Choice: that assumption of agency. We choose. Our responsibility. But based on what information, what understanding, what constraints? She looked at their expectant faces and knew she would support them along the slow and painful journey towards some resolution. But her mind raced and she struggled to concentrate.
Over the next hour she tried to provide useful information and possible options and listen to their fears. Paul and Kerry decided they would tell Amber, in a couple of months, after Christmas, at New Year. First, they wanted to read some books and articles on adoption that she’d offered, to help them work out how to tell. They arranged another visit for a fortnight so they could talk about it some more.
Kerry appeared calmer. She thanked her and, standing up, offered her another cup of tea.
‘No thanks, Mrs Steele, but I’d love a glass of water.’
‘Look, call me Kerry.’
‘And me Paul, enough of the Mr Steele, I feel like my dad.’ Paul laughed and turned to Kerry, ‘I could do with another cuppa, love.’
As Kerry left the room, Paul picked up the Will Kit again.
‘Could you please witness this before Amber gets home? She’ll be here in about ten minutes.’
‘Of course, where do I have to sign?’ she asked, moving over beside him on the sofa.
‘Here, at the bottom, below my signature,’ he said pointing.
As she signed, she noticed the contrast between her own large, round writing and his tiny signature, taking up so little space on this sacrament between them. In a moment of grace, they sat quietly, each holding a corner of the page.
She looked up at him. ‘Can I ask you a difficult question—you may choose not to answer and that’s okay.’
‘Sure, fire away,’ he said, his raised eyebrows belying his cheerfulness.
‘Your illness? You said earlier, you’re on sickness benefits. Will there be compensation, from the mines, you know, is this from working underground?’
‘Well, who knows, eh? I’ve smoked all me life—I started on untipped Capstans when I was nine,’ he laughed, taking the will from her and pushing it down the side of the sofa. ‘I still smoke untipped, moved up to Rothmans. I figure there’s not much point stopping now. It drives Kerry crazy, and Amber, you know what she did the other day—she hid them.’ He turned and tapped the blood-red packet of cigarettes on the occasional table beside the sofa. ‘Actually, I’ve done well, I haven’t had one the whole time you’ve bin here. Do you mind if I have one now?’
‘No, go ahead.’ She watched as he flicked a silver lighter, lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. He coughed and wiped his hand across his mouth.
‘You see, between you and me, you can’t do much about it now. If you wanna keep workin’ underground you gotta have your “ticket”, you know, a clear X-ray. You have ’em regular-like and then the doc gives you the all clear, eh? Understand?’ He looked at her, his mouth set.
She looked at him, trying to understand. ‘You mean, your X-rays were all clear—I thought your lung disease would have shown up, at least in the more recent ones?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t have bin able to keep drillin’ then, would I, if I hadn’t gotten the all clear. You understand? That’s how it is. It’s all I’ve ever known—there’s nowhere else I’d get that kinda money. Anyway, that’s between you and me, eh?’ He sat back and took another drag of his cigarette, shooting the smoke out the side of his mouth, away from her.
‘I don’t understand, isn’t that—’ She stopped as Kerry returned with a glass of water in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. She stood up, took the glass of water and returned to her chair. As she sat back, she heard the loud creak of the front gate, then steps skipping across the verandah.
‘That’s Amber.’ Kerry’s face lit up. She looked over at Paul and noticing the cigarette in his hand said, ‘Quick, love, put that out before Amber comes in.’
Paul quickly stubbed out the cigarette in the tin ashtray beside him, as Amber, blonde pigtails whirling, ran across the room and leapt up beside her father, snuggling in against him.
‘Hello, sweetheart. How are you? Did you get a good mark for your project? Your mum’s left you a lamington.’
‘Pooh, Dad, you smell of smoke.’
Aimee looked over at Kerry. They smiled at each other.
Kerry stepped forward. ‘Amber, I have someone I’d like you to meet.’
Amber spun around, and as she leant forward a golden beam from the lowering afternoon sun, a cinematic shaft lighting centre stage, mirrored her eyes and danced dust motes round her head, and Aimee, watching, wondered how this drama would end.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was almost the spring equinox. On top of a hill, Aimee and Lori sat and watched the night sky peel away. From there they had a 360-degree view of the flat land, banded by a full circle of horizon. Looking westward the town sprinkled outward for about a dozen square kilometres, its parallel lines of single-storey buildings crisscrossed with back lanes.
The main street sliced through the middle of town as if in a hurry, like many of its occupants, to get back to the city and the Indian Ocean over 600 kilometres away. You could pick it out by the preponderance of double-storeyed buildings—mostly wooden-verandahed pubs—dominated by a Victorian-era Town Hall, and the post office clock, a grand sandstone edifice to progress built at the turn of the century. Outside the Town Hall stood a bronze statue of Paddy Hannan, one of the discoverers of gold in the region.
Aimee stared out over the town, her back warming from the rising sun. Little had changed in the streetscape since then, Lori told her, only the business names, and a new supermarket on the corner opposite the Town Hall, half a block down from the post office. Certainly not the pubs like The Palace and The Exchange—names known since the turn of the century in London and New York—where fortunes had been gained and lost on speculation, famous hubs of bygone ditties and diggers’ deals, frequented then and now by locals, entrepreneurs and adventurers.
It was Lori who’d suggested Red Hill after Aimee’s visit to the Steeles last month. Arriving back later than expected, Aimee had driven into the vehicle compound as Lori was about to lock the gates. After manoeuvring her car between two dusty, dented four-wheel drive vehicles necessary for negotiating the Sandy Desert, she had been filling in the logbook when Lori opened the passenger door and climbed in. Lori noticed straightaway.
‘Have you been crying, Aimee? Are you okay? Has something happened? I was worried when you hadn’t returned, I knew you were due back by four.’
‘No, I’m all right,’ she’d replied, embarrassed there was evidence she had sat by the roadside crying. She’d pulled over onto the soft verge, the afternoon’s events and revelations overwhelming her, and silently cried. It’s how she usually cried—quietly—well, at least since university.
Lori looked closely at her. ‘Was it difficult meeting Amber?’ she’d asked, placing a hand on her arm.
She’d looked startled. But of course, a small town, Lori probably knew. And she had access to files. She trusted Lori, they had become close these past months but it was inappropriate for her to discuss Amber’s adoption and she certainly wasn’t going to elaborate on her r
easons for crying. She moved her arm away.
‘Yes, it’s much harder seeing children in families cope with a parent’s illness, isn’t it? Sorry to worry you—I was longer than I expected.’ She turned away from Lori’s inquiring gaze and reached for the door handle.
‘What are you doing Sunday, the twenty-first of September?’ Lori had asked. ‘Do you want to come for a walk up Red Hill to see the sunrise? Celebrate the spring equinox! It’s usually around the twenty-second—Aggie was telling me—but close enough. Then I could make us breakfast. I make the best omelettes.’
She had looked at her, uncertain. She loved the laziness of Sundays. Last week she’d languished in bed half the day, with a pungent pot of percolated coffee, warm croissants and a book from the library and the Sunday before she’d slept in till ten before a late lunch at Gerry’s.
She was glad she had come—this view was worth it.
On the eastern side of the hill, running north to south, sprawled the Golden Mile, a sea of mining poppet heads, metal masts shimmering in the early morning light, their golden galleons below, the treasures in their hulls plundered. Less treasured, the lives and bodies lost in them, and Paul Steele’s life is one of them. It’s so wrong, she thought, blinking back tears.
‘Do you want to go walk the pipeline?’ Lori interrupted her concerns, pointing down to a silver cylinder running along the western base of the hill. ‘When we were kids we used to walk it from here to the flats and back or ride around the old dumps. I don’t know how we didn’t fall down the shafts—it must have been Nonna’s prayers. And see over there,’ she said, pointing south along the Golden Mile, ‘they’re the slime dumps. We used to climb those and slide down on pieces of cardboard.’
Aimee looked over at the manmade umber mesas. The sun was higher now and bathed them in light and shadow, huge mounds of treated earth, monolithic structures dominating the distant landscape. Deep crevices slit their sides where, she imagined, rare rain and frequent wind found entry; a shimmery haze floated above the closest one, several kilometres away, a wind-built mixture of sunlight and goldless dust. She sat transfixed; it was strangely beautiful, this carving of the earth.
The wings of yesterday fluttered in her heart, seeking the sunlight.
‘Aimee? Do you want to go walk on the pipeline?’
‘Yes, why not. Come on, let’s go.’ She leapt to her feet and ran down the narrow dirt path to the bottom of the hill, sending small pebbles, and her memories, flying away.
Running behind her, Lori laughed, catching her up halfway down, then raced her to the pipeline. They reached it together, collapsing with laughter and puffing, leaning against the large cylinder.
‘The CY O’Connor pipeline, a feat of engineering,’ Lori announced theatrically, as she scrambled on top of it, then, throwing her arms skyward, yelled ‘Ta da!’ before bending down to pull her up to join her.
They wobbled precariously before finding their balance. The pipeline stood several feet above the ground, its circumference wide enough for one person to stand on. Arms out-stretched they started walking it, single file. She suddenly felt childlike. In front of her, Lori squealed as she almost toppled off.
She looked around but there was no one about, the distant russet tin back fences screened the houses and, after all, it was sunrise on a Sunday morning. Her memories slithered up and around her, mesmerising, like the concrete cylinder snaking across the flats, its silver skin shimmering in the distance, its hidden contents the lifeblood of the town, carried over and under hundreds of kilometres of red dirt.
‘Hey, do you want to turn back? I’m getting hungry,’ Lori called over her shoulder, breaking the spell.
They had walked south for several hundred metres, stepping carefully over the large clamps that, at regular intervals, sealed the pieces of pipe together. Aware now of her own hunger, she eagerly agreed and, pirouetting, changed direction and led their return to the bottom of Red Hill, and home.
Aimee leant back on the lazyboy. Choices, she mused, thinking again of the Steeles, their struggle to tell Amber. I guess, at the end of the day, it’s what you can live with and what you tell yourself about the decisions you make. She knew that.
Aimee stretched, squeezing out her thoughts into the warm air. Her legs were already stiffening from the morning’s hike up Red Hill. Waiting for Lori to return with a cold drink, she looked up at the wooden pergola overgrown with lush grapevines. A zephyr wobbled the marble triangles of ebony grapes dangling above her head. She heard the cheerful clinking of glasses and looked up to see Lori elbow open the back door.
‘Sorry I took that long, Nonna was on the phone wanting to know why I wasn’t at church, God love her. Isn’t it a magical day?’ Lori chirped setting down a round blue metal tray holding two long glasses of orange juice and a silver metal ice-cube tray. ‘Here’s to the spring equinox, my favourite time of the year,’ she enthused, handing Aimee one glass, raising a toast with the other. ‘Everything is so fresh, so green in the garden.’ She put down her glass. ‘Would you like some loquats? I’m going down the back to pick some for breakfast. Won’t be long. Help yourself to iceblocks.’
Spring, new beginnings, rebirth … ‘Sorry, what? Lotus?’ Aimee exclaimed, sitting upright. She felt the inexorable advance of triggered memories. But Lori was gone, disappearing behind the screen of trees.
She slumped back hoping for forgetfulness but images, feelings, memories jostled for attention. Lotus … she’d yearned to eat of that legendary fruit, to enter that state of dreamy and contented forgetfulness. Lotus-eaters. Peel Me a Lotus, the novel by Charmian Clift that she’d studied at uni … it had helped her escape … she’d taken it with her to the hospital … Charmian. Charmian. She’d loved that name.
She pushed back at the memory. Instead she recalled Hydra, one of three Greek islands she’d visited on a day cruise as an homage to Clift, an Australian who once lived and wrote there. She’d found it less endearing than Mykonos, where she spent seven transformative days in the arms of a stranger before flying back to London, then on to Perth.
Her parents had paid for her holiday that summer. Her mother had appeared worried, said she looked exhausted from her first year at university, concerned she seemed to be spending most of her time in her bedroom since coming home for the summer break in November. She lied, told her mother she was fine, just reading, trying to get an early start on her new course for next year; she’d transferred from comparative literature to social work. The cheque was her combined Christmas and nineteenth birthday present, they’d said, to be used for an overseas holiday.
She had never felt so lonely or empty, wandering around museums in London and Paris those first two weeks, even after meeting up with uni friends, as arranged. But on Mykonos, before returning home, she’d found part of herself again, mirrored in the anonymous nakedness of another’s body, an unknowing warmth and acceptance, a liquid honey, taken in, poured out, tasted, licked, swallowed.
Another part would stay lost, lost since that first day of the new year of 1974.
On that New Year’s morning, a part of her had awoken, showered, dressed, and eaten breakfast with her family. Another part of her, unable to be known, crawled into a dark place and curled up. The woken her did not bring the night-time with her. That stayed in the darkness until after breakfast, and after her departure the next month for uni. There it curled ever tighter as that first year ripped open new chapters in her life. These were chapters she could never have imagined herself writing, chapters from other women’s lives, other women’s scripts, surely not hers.
Several years later she would find a soft pair of eyes in a women’s centre in the city, an anonymous haven clothed in a flash, new concrete and glass rectangle. Session by session they drew that part of her out into the light. There she unfurled till she wailed, mourning the departures, for by now there were two—the life that had grown inside her and the being that she had been on the verge of becoming, with all of its possibilities.
&n
bsp; The glass wobbled in her hand. She put it down. The urge to scream gripped her throat. Why now, after all this time? she lamented. She just wanted to forget, to move on. She clamped her mouth shut, her jaw clenched.
She had kept her pregnancy hidden till near the end. It was March before her mind could contemplate the possibility, and two visits to doctors in April produced nothing more than admonishment, a pursed-lip reprove of her conduct—one ordered her out of his surgery in disgust when she hinted at the possibility of a termination. Hypothetical conversations with other students led her to purchase Dr Somebody-or-other’s pills which didn’t work, nor did the hot mustard bath which just ended up scalding her. She had sat in a circle of other students in the uni cafeteria, where stories of backyard abortionists were shared, and she considered the possibility but recoiled when one girl, quietening the animated conversation, told of her own experience of an abortionist, a coat hanger and the emergency room at King Edward hospital.
By the time she found the social worker at the university counselling service she was five months pregnant and not showing. Together they found a pathway that led to an ‘unwed mothers’ home’ and later, a career as a social worker. She saw little of her family who were caught up in the rollercoaster that was her father’s ride to election.
A cocooning numbness enveloped her in her family’s presence. She’d longed to curl up in her mother’s loving arms, to feel her soft hand stroking her forehead and telling her everything would be all right. But it wasn’t, and never would be again. And she could never have told her mother. Never. When she left uni in September for Ngala, the unwed mothers’ home, no one but Rena the social worker knew. Her assignments were all completed and her parents thought she was going to study for exams for a few weeks with a new uni friend at a beach shack up north, in Geraldton. She’d get in touch when she returned. That sounds lovely, her mother had said, we’ll miss you, take care.
Aimee struggled against the memories. Her head hurt. They slid around and over her attempts to stay present, in the garden, under the grapevine. Her breath came in small gasps. More and more lately, they’d wriggled up, snaking around her head, peering at her, mesmerising—sung up since … since what? The tea-leaf reading, the soulstealth stare of the kadaitchi man, the Steeles, today? All of them. Lifting the lid, the lid on the box that Aggie saw.
The Secrets We Keep Page 6
