This Picture of You

by Sarah Hopkins

  Thank God for Laini. He remembered the night of their first meeting. ‘I’m not really a private sort of person,’ she said after downing her third glass and letting loose with the extraordinary details of her adolescent love life. ‘It is a bit of a scream now when I think of it.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Maggie said. ‘A hoot.’ Only part-snide; the truth was Laini could tell a bloody good story. And later, on the drive home, Maggie had already come around: ‘God, this could work! Who’d have thought Ethan would fall for someone that . . . flamboyant?’

  It was the right word. Her hair that first dinner was the colour of a ripe apricot. By the second it was a plummy purple. (Martin had to look twice to check it was the same girl.) But whatever the colour of her tortured tresses, what was clear to both him and Maggie by the time they were eating dessert was that Ethan—who was not predisposed to happiness—was, indeed, happy.

  ‘Yin and yang,’ Ethan had endeavoured to explain months later after telling his father over a beer at the pub that they were going to be married.

  ‘Ah yes,’ Martin replied. ‘Darkness and light.’

  Ethan smiled. ‘Exactly. Like you and Mum.’

  ‘Oh, come on, matey . . .’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right: you’re more murky than dark.’

  ‘And this is how you speak to your poor old dad?’ For a moment he held the eyes of his son. Of course, he had no real complaint with him. Given the way it had started—the quiet little boy holding out his hand—Martin could only be grateful to be accepted, later loved and now, God forbid, understood. ‘You’ve seen enough now, Ethan. Do it better.’

  As he got out of bed, Martin resolved to apologise if required, in a roundabout sort of way—something about the verbal incontinence of old men. Older men—he was not so old. He didn’t feel it, not now. Sixty-five was the new fifty, didn’t they say? He paused in the mirror to confirm that there was something still to admire, and smoothing his silver-grey hair, he felt energised: fit as a fiddle and ready to eat cake.

  Out in the hall it was dead quiet. The faces of his family lined the walls: a stilted portrait of his parents with their plump sons, Maggie’s mother as a girl standing on a bridge in Budapest, Ethan at every stage of his well-documented life alongside Maggie’s painting of him, aged six, the small face surrounded by fantastical animal avatars and spirit guardians. And Finn, of course, the photo of the two of them on the rock platform, the fish in the boy’s hands, his eyes bursting with pride and wonder. Maggie was always having a new picture framed, moving paintings closer together to make room. If you looked closely you could see the spots of putty in the plaster.

  To the right of the hall was the dining room, straight ahead the living room, and to the left, the kitchen. Martin walked into each of them, and found each empty. In the living room he sat on the couch and thought about the boy’s tears, and afterwards the kitchen conversation. What lay behind his questions was not just a concern that Finny was doing too much. These last weeks he had noticed something, a sadness in the boy’s eyes, just a flash of it before he blinked it away. Maybe it was because he was being made to jump through all of these bloody hoops . . . Maybe, but Martin sensed there was something more. He got up from the couch and went back to the kitchen where the cake sat on the table—Finny’s favourite, cream-cheese icing. He scooped a bit from the side of the plate with his finger.

  Had someone said something about a walk?

  Martin’s plan was to follow his family down to the beach, to make things right. What stopped him was the sight of Ethan’s keys on the ledge at the front door. He picked them up. In the middle of the clinking mass, there was a larger key in a black casing, the car key.

  ‘You are forgetting things,’ she had said. ‘That makes you dangerous, Martin.’ She was crying then, driving him home from the service station, telling him they needed to go to the doctor. In the car he couldn’t find the words, but later he explained: ‘I just got lost. There was nothing dangerous about it.’

  She listed the infringements over the last months: going through a red light, disobeying the no right turn, failing to indicate, enough so almost all his points were gone. ‘You are a judge, Martin. The papers would have a field day if anything went wrong.’

  There it was now, the key in the palm of his hand. As it pressed into his skin, he felt a pulse beating in his wrist—beating as though to remind him there was a reason to get into the car.

  Later the argument had been repeated, this time with Maggie shouting. She didn’t shout very much. She’d walked out of the house into the dark and come back feeling better and he’d promised he wouldn’t drive again. He’d promised, but still she’d hid the keys like he was a child who couldn’t be trusted; it had made him angry because he had promised. A promise was enough. And anyway, she had been wrong. He could remember; he could remember things she had forgotten. He could remember the word list his grandson learnt last week. He could remember the day they met; he could remember her kneeling in the horse manure and what she had said to Mrs Bess. And once he was there it was clearer than yesterday, clearer than today.

  The problem of late, he told himself, must be the wine. He didn’t have the stomach for it anymore, or the head. It was slowing him down, clouding the days. Perhaps he’d have to give it up. He cringed at the thought.

  When he walked outside he did not turn right and head towards the beach to find his family, but left, to the place his son had parked his car. If she hadn’t hidden the keys in the first place . . . Go back to the rules of fair play—his promise was no longer good. All bets were off, and so forth.

  He was fine. Fit as a fiddle. Ready to go.

  Inside, the smell was new car, just unwrapped. It was a shiny black European sports sedan with an oversized engine. The indicator was on the wrong side, and the parking brake was a small flick of a switch near the automatic gears. When he started to reverse a picture of the car parked behind him came up on a small TV screen in the centre of the dash, and as he drew closer to it, there was a beep that quickened.

  ‘I can see that, thank you,’ Martin replied to the beep, edging further back until it flatlined, not unlike an ECG when the heart stops, though in this instance, mercifully, the sound was a prelude only, last chance; there were still a good few inches in it. He wondered if there was a different sound for impact. A siren perhaps.

  He shoved the gear into drive and pulled out a little too fast—in a rush to silence the beep, and to avoid being spotted behind the wheel of his son’s car . . . Yes, alright. Tut-tut, bad Martin.

  The brakes were jerky too. All that money and the car bucked like a bull.

  ‘Come on, baby,’ he whispered, trying to smooth the ride with a lighter foot. That is what car people called their cars—baby—but out of his mouth it didn’t sound bona fide. He wasn’t a car man like his son, no point in pretending. He had listened to Ethan talk about cars over the years, curious (as one is in the face of anything a child has learnt in the parent’s absence) that he had accrued and stored both the knowledge and funds to support his interest; as for the subject itself, he was an A to B man, and what took him there was an eight-year-old Nissan. Sometimes he liked to get his speed up on the freeway so he could feel free the way he was meant to—but his rejection of the material world in the seventies had left its mark in a disdain for expensive machines (all except watches; since the Rolex from chambers when he took silk, for watches he’d made an exception). Ethan laughed at his driving, said he was the only Supreme Court judge in the country driving a car you couldn’t sell for ten grand. Ethan called him Mr Magoo. (Try as he might, Martin couldn’t bring himself to find that funny.)

  What lay in front of him now, as he reached the main intersection, was a closed-down internet cafe on the corner, and in the centre of the road a line of palm trees. He flicked the windscreen wipers on and off, and, without indicating, turned left, gently, gently. Not bad, though perhaps a little slow.

  A car pulled up alongside him.

&nb
sp; ‘Yes, yes,’ Martin said, waving a hand to the driver, who now held his speed and leaning forward, chest to steering wheel, jerked his head in a sideways scowl. Martin could see he was a bald man in a black T-shirt, and out of the corner of his eye—for all the while he kept a steadfast gaze on the road ahead—Martin could see the open-mouthed, pumped-up prick stab his furious middle finger into the air.

  All that was left was to watch him tear away in triumph and disappear into the distance, during which time Martin endeavoured to smother his own flicker of rage and focus on what the man would have done had Martin returned in kind the scowl and the finger, eye for an eye. He knew the type; they were the ones who got out of their cars at traffic lights and pulled tyre levers from their boots to smash heads or windscreens, and on it went, depending on the particular type of personality disorder—the particular type of scum. Only an idiot would take them on; that was an irrefutable fact, but just as irrefutable was that this man was now foot to the metal on a different road, feeling stronger for what had just happened, fuelled by each act of intimidation, each finger stabbed into the air, because on the street, outside a courtroom, there was nothing to stop him . . . nothing to stop him but another angry man.

  It brought to mind the carjacking matter, the next of the judgments to be written. That was where it had started, the exact same place: a man sitting at traffic lights and minding his own business.

  Martin was lagging behind, of course, with writing up these last judgments. He never used to keep anyone waiting, knowing that once you did that, the talk would begin, the whispers. Ever since old Bruce Jones copped twenty-three complaints and faced the judicial firing squad: it isn’t that we want to eat our own, but aren’t we always just a little bit peckish? Already (only a month after the hearing), Stephens had asked about the carjacking judgment (a month, six weeks . . . )—how he was ‘travelling with it’—and it was not in the nature of a passing question, more a pointed reminder. Perhaps a little missive from above; perhaps there was talk, whispers.

  At two in the morning last Wednesday (the same day as Stephens’ quip), he had sat down at his own computer and found reasons to dismiss the appeal. The facts were these: a man and his daughter waiting at traffic lights on their way to a movie, the car doors opened on both sides by two strange men, one of whom waved a knife at the daughter and ordered them from the car. The trial judge had refused to exclude evidence of identification in circumstances where the victim had only a ‘few seconds’ to observe his attacker—for the most part having kept his eyes on the knife that had been held at the ten-year-old’s throat. Later that day, in the police station, he had identified one of the offenders from a series of photographs. The arguments on both sides were ones Martin had heard many times before. The victim had claimed certainty, ‘a hundred and ten per cent’; the defence had tripped him up on the colour of the attacker’s T-shirt and framed a ten-point argument that his honest but mistaken belief would unfairly sway the jury. As Martin reread the transcripts, he couldn’t help but wonder if maybe the father had got it wrong. It was, as they said, lineball. The jury listened to him tell his story about the sound of the banging on the doors, his daughter’s screams, the way the blade touched her skin. (This was not a case of the scowling pricks or lever-wielding scumbags. This was not maladaption, but premeditation.) The man who opened his daughter’s door was the man in the photograph with the number nine in the bottom left-hand corner; he was certain of it, would indeed bet his daughter’s life on it—that was the term he’d used. The next morning, then, the judge warned the jury about relying on the evidence, all the reasons why the witness might be wrong—his state of fear, the fact he had seen the man for only a matter of seconds. Of course there was some force in the argument that no words could counter the power of the evidence of a frightened father, as much as the defence had tried: ‘Think of the mistakes we make every day—we think we see some fellow but it turns out it was someone else,’ the barrister had submitted, citing studies on the fallibility of the human memory. But the jury trusted its victim. They wanted to trust him. He was one of them and they didn’t want to let him down. True enough. Depending on the twelve you got, that was what you were up against. Their loyalty lay not with the law, but with each other.

  But those, of course, were Martin’s private musings. He was a judge and, as the Crown argued, the system provided for warnings. There was other circumstantial evidence. The verdict was safe and satisfactory. To find otherwise would likely land the matter in the High Court, where the gods would put his judgment under a microscope and pick at his bones. Why leave himself open to that?

  ‘How are you travelling with it?’ Stephens had asked.

  What had his answer been? Something vague but reassuring, nothing to let on what was happening at home at night when he sat at his computer, the mental fatigue. Where once it slowly crept, now it pounced from nowhere, decimating whole formations of thought and leaving a flattened landscape, a post-apocalyptic silence.

  ‘Just finalising it now.’ Or words to that effect.

  And then for ninety minutes at two in the morning Martin found reasons to dismiss the appeal. They appeared on his page in a cogent and logical sequence. A final edit and the judgment would be complete, his pile smaller by one, and Stephens could shut the hell up. Getting back into bed, Martin tried to content himself with that, and with the thought it was only a matter of time before he would wake to hear it again: the whispered tune, the delicate machinations of a functioning legal mind. Still, floating into the fog of sleep, it already felt like a long-lost love.

  Eighty in a sixty zone.

  No silly prick could tell him he was too slow.

  ‘Come on, baby.’ It sounded better this time. Leaning back in his seat, the voice belonged in the world on the other side of the windscreen, high definition and picture perfect: luminous white paint on black tar, Hollywood palms and neglected shopfronts against a silver sky. A woman in a pale blue hijab waited at a bus stop outside the fish and tackle shop, staring up the street at a cemetery of angels and tilting headstones. And the beast had power in her, alright; Ethan wasn’t wrong about that. This one, this baby, she was a bit of a beast—hadn’t his son said that? He talked about them like girls, big ones, fast ones . . .

  At the red light, he slowed to a stop and asked himself, What comes next? How to keep it moving . . .

  There it was, an empty left lane.

  Swerve in, Martin. Creep up nice and slow, and when the cross-street light turns orange, the second it does . . . Martin took off out of the gate rodeo-style, ahead of the rest into a clear stretch, two lanes free of traffic, free from obstruction. Nudging ninety-five, this engine could roar. The power surged like a demon through the black A-grade leather seat into his legs and his lungs.

  ‘Hah!’ Out here with the beast and the white sky.

  He cranked the volume and got a squealing pop star. Where was the dial? No dial, just buttons; he pushed one and the pop star stopped. He pushed again; still no music. He pushed other buttons, tried to decipher the little symbols, then wondered what it was he was trying to find.

  And what happened to the trees? He had been following the line of trees but now there were none ahead, and none in his rear view. Suddenly there was a haze around what came before and where to next. A street up ahead on the right, that would do it. He knew this road. Big gates into a chapel and a cemetery and a crematorium—he had been here to see off a couple of friends, to be present for their burning. The last was Jack, Annie’s husband. Annie was Maggie’s oldest friend; she and Jack had bought the gallery that first showed Maggie’s work. Over the years Jack and Martin had formed a bond over fishing and single malt. When it came to funeral plans (the doctors had been blunt), Jack had told them all over a dinner at which he drank too much and barely ate a bite that he didn’t want any fuss, directing Annie to get it all done in the one place, no moving about. She relayed the story in the eulogy: he had dismissed her suggestion that they scatter the ashes at
sea, saying he didn’t want the fish to get the last laugh. It was good funeral humour, Martin thought. And Jack was right, it ran like clockwork, to schedule—a well-managed business, like the colour-coded crates in the industrial site next to it: everything got moved, labelled, stacked, in place and on time—the way it should, none of this bloody lagging, nothing misplaced or forgotten, nothing slipping through the cracks.

  The tumour in Jack’s descending colon ended up being a secondary. The primary was in his brain. They said six months but he only lasted five.

  ‘I always thought there’d be a little voice in my head,’ Jack said on Martin’s last visit. ‘You know, a voice telling me it had started. But all these years . . . well, bliss and ignorance and all that; I suppose I should be grateful.’

  The road ended at wire gates. There were just trucks now looking to offload, no place for Martin and the baby beast. His U-turn edged a little wide and the tyre mounted the footpath with a scrape of rubber on concrete, a jolt, but nothing to worry his head about—his head, his brain. But he was worried. If the brain were going then so should he. Crate on crate: shut down, pack up—all tidy and on schedule . . . Pills, he had always thought; pills would be easy, gentle. Gentle, not jerky . . .

  Tomorrow he was back in court to hear more of the man who smuggled people in his boat—Kids in leaking boats . . . This isn’t the time to go soft. He was suddenly weary at the thought of it. Ethan was only voicing what so many thought. But this was his son, his only son . . . And there, like the trees out the window flashing past, a bolt of memory: Ethan in the living room with his university friends after graduation, snippets of their conversation floating into Martin’s study—some harmless stuff about a girl from the women’s college (nothing worse than Friday drinks in his early years: how much better so-and-so would look without the wig and gown); then one of the boys started telling a story about the mardi gras, something about ‘a truckload of fudge-packers’. Martin waited for his son to object, but there was just the sound of laughter—at best acquiescent, at worst conspiratorial.