This Picture of You

by Sarah Hopkins

  When Ethan asked to live in at college (‘You should hear the way the guys talk about it: these are years we’ll never forget!’), Martin had thought Maggie was overstating the dangers of privilege and homogeny—straight from an all-boys private school to an all-boys university dorm: ‘a few postcodes on a luxury liner’. But, of course, Maggie had been right. In any event they’d done their best to browbeat it out of him, and Laini had joined the fight. But still, sometimes, the mindless dregs . . .

  He struggled now to recall what he’d fired back at his son over lunch, but what was clear and what he now wished to forget was the expression on Laini’s face as he spoke, like there was a reason to be frightened of him. It brought back Maggie’s words driving home after a God-awful cocktail party a few years back: she’d laughed and said that all night she’d felt like they were a couple of badly socialised dogs—when the other dogs sniffed around and lingered too long, the polite talk turned inevitably into a sort of teeth-baring, low-pitched growl. If today Ethan had been the mutt in search of a rumble, Martin had surely been the pit bull that ends up in the newspaper with a picture of a bloodied child.

  But for now, the road in front of him, behind him the ground that stored Jack’s ashes. He nodded to his friend in reply as it sounded again, the voice inside his head: Ask yourself the question, Martin: has it begun?

  Had it begun without his knowing? Beneath the layers of his skin, the cells mutating in a wave of silent carnage. Was it already happening?

  Would he feel nothing?

  Back on the main road there was a golf club and a bus depot, the national park and the beach and the bay. Two Asian boys off the bus snapped pictures of the places in their guidebooks, skinny jeans and stripes of blue in their cropped black hair, snapping the park and the birds in the banksias.

  There were things to remember here, bushwalks down to the beach with a small boy on his shoulders: Ethan—no, it was Finn . . . was it? The boy had left his thongs on the beach. He tried to dig it up, more of it, but the rest was forgotten—the place suddenly full of things he had forgotten: the face of the child, the name. Inside his brain, the space closed in. This damn dissolving brain . . .

  Later he would not remember, but that was when it came back to him, the reason why he was driving: it was to find a place that had never left him, where he would not grapple and fail. Last time he had driven, last week (or last month?), that was where he was going: to that same known place, the place that had etched itself in his memory like a scar: the house, her house. Her house. The words jarred in his mind and fell into a hole as he turned the car around the loop at the tip of the bay, and by the time the loop was complete the space was filled with a picture of a tower in the middle of a lawn next to a sandstone building and, behind it, a hill.

  There was a road out.

  He was driving on that road in a car he didn’t know.

  It was not his car. It belonged to someone else. He had borrowed it, or rented it.

  His breath drew short. The road ahead was familiar, but not remembered, this place of whispering shadows and fading faces that sniggered at the dying man.

  Has it begun? Will I feel nothing? The cells mutating, the carnage—mutating, merciful. What was a man with a brain afloat? A man without a mind . . . what place for him? Where should his body go?

  A main road, and a turn-off up the hill.

  Up the hill it would go.

  Chapter 5

  Ethan saw that his car was gone as soon as they crossed onto the footpath from the beach. Without a word he started running and by the time they reached him he had his mobile out, dialling the police.

  Maggie put her hand over his. ‘Not yet.’

  Inside the house she checked the bedroom and the back garden. At the front door Ethan was smiling. ‘He’s taken it. The keys are gone.’

  Even with Finn standing between them she let go of any pretence, cupping her face in her hands and repeating in no particular order: ‘damn it’, ‘Christ!’, ‘the fool’.

  ‘Mum, what is it? What’s he done?’

  ‘I should’ve told you not to leave them there,’ she said. ‘I have a hiding spot for ours.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You hide the keys?’

  And then Finn: ‘Where’s Grandie gone?’

  When she saw the worry in his eyes, she crouched down on her knees and gave him a hug. She took a breath.

  ‘He’s gone for a drive, darling boy. He’ll be back. You help Mum get the cake ready.’ And when they had gone, she began to explain. ‘We agreed he wouldn’t drive for a while. He’s lost a lot of points. He only has one left.’

  ‘Speeding?’

  She shook her head. ‘Red lights and stop signs. The cameras get him.’ It was almost enough to answer his questions, but not quite.

  ‘So you hide the keys?’

  Maggie told him what had happened a couple of weeks ago: Martin had taken the car—afterwards he said he forgot he’d ever agreed he wouldn’t. He was gone a couple of hours, then he called from a service station in Matraville. He couldn’t remember how to get home. He’d left without his wallet or phone. Maggie drove and got him.

  ‘Was he drunk?’

  ‘No, he’d had a couple. Finny, darling . . .’ The boy had crept back in. ‘Go back to Mum.’

  But Finn stood firm. ‘Why are you all worried for?’

  ‘Grandie just didn’t tell us he was going, that’s all,’ Ethan explained. ‘He’ll be home soon, buddy.’

  As soon as the boy left the room again Ethan’s smile dropped. ‘Matraville? That’s only ten minutes away . . . Why don’t you tell me this stuff?’

  She hesitated, trying to stop the tears welling in her eyes. ‘Because I don’t have any answers. He is going to see a doctor.’

  Because I can’t bear to hear myself say the words.

  Ethan started pressing in the number on his phone, but she shook her head, pointed to Martin’s mobile on the kitchen bench.

  ‘He never leaves his phone,’ Ethan said.

  ‘He does now.’

  ‘So where would he go?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ethan. He might have just gone up to the shops.’

  ‘How much wine did he drink today? This is a fucking nightmare. What if something happens? The minute the police get involved . . . Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Ethan, please! You think I haven’t thought of that? You reacting like this doesn’t help.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum. You’re right, you’re right . . .’

  Laini appeared behind them and took hold of Ethan’s arm. ‘Come on, let’s give it some time. I’ll make some tea.’

  In the kitchen Maggie pulled Finn in for a cuddle. ‘Why don’t we have a piece of cake now and then you can watch some TV.’

  But with all the solemnity a seven-year-old could muster, Finn shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We have to wait for Grandie to come home.’

  Chapter 6

  A suburban street: houses of horrid speckled brick. Ionic columns formed arched porticos and matching urns straddled swirly-glass doors.

  But across the intersection and a little further up the hill—a little further, but not so very far away—the street was a different one: pitch-roofed public housing, the buildings small and same and side by side. Card houses, he thought. Finny had built a row of them that went all the way from the couch to the wall.

  On the left was a building with a sign that read COMMUNITY HAVEN—ALL WELCOME, and loitering around it a group of dark-skinned boys with folded arms and hooded tops. Martin drove by them without turning his head and, once a safe distance past, he slowed the car alongside a row of houses differentiated only by the colour of the shutters and the state of repair. There was furniture in the garden of the last one: wooden stools and tables and a blue-striped couch, the cushions muddy and torn.

  That was it; that was the house. Her house.

  Ask yourself the question, Martin.

  ‘Look, Grandie!’ Finn had said. ‘Look at my hou
ses.’ Then he kicked them down and jumped on the cards.

  Why are you here?

  Out the car window he looked down over the trees and clotheslines to the water. Others were scared of this place, these people. They were scared of the overgrown gardens. They were scared because nobody tended them and nature took its course, and boys stole wallets and grew up to carry knives into bottle shops and shake hands with their uncles in prison. Martin wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t scared, but he knew well enough that there was a lay to this land, and that he was sitting in a shiny parked car in a place where he did not belong.

  Standing now on the corner across the street was an Aboriginal man with a ponytail of silver hair and legs poking like sticks from cut-off tracksuit pants. Straight and still, he appeared to be somehow rooted to the earth. Even when he turned his head ever so slightly and gave a single nod, he otherwise remained as he was, but staring now, as if waiting for some sort of assurance—a signal that the man in the car was alright, or that he would bugger off and move on. Not sure which, Martin nodded in reply, and the man gave a second nod, a movement that felt in part like an act of welcome—an act of kindness that, in the circumstances, was not warranted.

  As a lawyer Martin had acted for only a handful of Aboriginal people, all men, and found them by and large to be hopeless criminals and hopelessly unpersuasive liars. Later, as a judge, he had determined their guilt and their sentence. He could comfort himself that as far as penalties went he had done his best to be lenient. There was always a reason to go easy: poverty, abuse, mental illness. And in the back of his mind the sorry beginnings, those too, the dispossession and the stolen children, starting all the way back. There was that fellow he sentenced when he was still sitting in the District Court, the one with the terrible story about his stepfather, things no child should see; his mother gave evidence and had to stop three times to drink water and wipe her eyes. It was no small crime Martin was dealing with, but he’d let the man walk, and it had held on appeal. And there were others. In his own small way, shaving off a year here, a few months there, Martin tried to do his bit, to make amends.

  Maybe after eleven years on the bench he was starting to tire of the same stories, the same hopeless addict spouting the same reasons why it was someone else’s fault; maybe he was tired of reading letters scribbled in prison cells telling him they were sorry for what they’d done to their victims, that this time, next time, would be different. Maggie accused him of losing his empathy with age, but it wasn’t that. Over the years he had seen the evidence, and what he had learnt was that, more often than not, ‘the next time’ turned out to be in all respects the same as this one—that people’s behaviour changed not because of any decision to desist, but because the environment in which it had thrived was transformed in some way, be it randomly or through orchestration.

  ‘I just don’t want to be that person anymore,’ an offender might say. And that was all very well, but what was different now? Tell me, what is it that will allow you to change?

  As to the wider issue, around dinner tables he would agree the government and the nation should be ashamed. Once he had helped to raise money for books for a community in Cape York and then privately wondered whether they would ever be read. Last year, when the third black man for the year hanged himself in a prison cell, a small part of him felt consoled that it might not have been a life worth living—and as for the reason why the life was not worth living, he was saddened by that, the miasma of abuse and neglect. At the end of the day, though, he was a member of the judiciary, and better that it was somebody else’s cause. Maggie took it on, donated paints to artists and money to fund scholarships in private schools; Maggie took it on because as a girl living in a migrant camp she had seen it up close, what it was like to live on the fringe, to look in from the outside. There was always something to volunteer for—a refuge or hostel, the youth centre; Maggie held a poster saying SORRY and marched across the Harbour Bridge. And Martin watched it on TV, secure in the knowledge that things were being done by people making a better job of it than he ever could.

  Martin looked back at the house at the end of the row with the couch in the garden.

  Again he had come this far and in the pit of his stomach the same questions stirred: What were the chances that she would still be here, in her house with the leaking ceiling and the patched door? All these years later, would she even recognise him? And again, sure enough, brick by brick, the wall was built. Martin shook his head. He would turn around.

  In the end, after all, hadn’t she got the better of him?

  Turn the key, Martin; drive away.

  In the end, doesn’t everyone get what they want?

  But this time he didn’t drive.

  The sensation was familiar, welcome—the leaden weight of inertia. He let his eyes close to the warm, rolling light and the memory downloaded without him pressing any buttons. It wasn’t the girl who lived in the street, but Maggie—not as she was now, but as she was the day she arrived in the loft: a girl at his front door with long brown hair and pupils wired with caffeine. The picture was there in the third eye, centre screen. While others faded, she formed and re-formed, and the memory of the day he met her played again, immune to the ravages of time. He had heard himself retelling it, repeating it just as the memory repeated, as though the girl was at his door again, on his kitchen bench, in the garden between the tenements . . .

  Then the sound of a dog barking, and Martin opened his eyes. Just as quickly as he’d left, he now returned. It was the same place but somehow he was lost again.

  Had he slept? No, just closed his eyes, and in the blink of an eye . . . There had been a man on the corner, but he was gone. Martin scanned the street, bothered that there was no sign of him. He turned the key in the ignition, pulled away from the kerb and drove up to the end of the block. On the footpath a dog lay asleep on a pile of newspapers, and inside the front window of the house—the one with the couch in the garden—a curtain hung, tied in a knot. A faint dread crept into his breath, but only faint, blunt. Things look so different in the dark.

  His eyes reached the front door. There at eye level were four timber boards nailed over a broken pane of glass—the pane of glass on the yellow painted door that after all these years had never been repaired.

  Ask yourself the question, Martin . . .

  His foot pressed down on the accelerator, gently so as to be quiet. Better to go back the way he came. The car crawled into a turning circle. Too small for a single turn, he reversed. On the screen on the dashboard the camera caught the rear view: an old woman in her garden wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

  What did I do here?

  The houses all the same: the old mission. When he shifted into drive, he saw another, younger woman sitting on the front step smoking a cigarette, and a child hanging from a broken swing, all staring at the white man in the car staring back at them. Gently, he told himself, quietly. But there was a shout, the old woman cupping her hands over her mouth, shouting across the street to someone behind him. He saw it flash in front of the car, the dog that slept on the newspapers. He hit the brake. Where was the dog? Then the sound of barking, and he saw the animal out his window as it strutted onwards, tail wagging. All was well, if he could just keep moving. He had no place here. It was strange to him, all of it: the dog, the faces, the street, the car. Get out of the car, walk away, a voice told him, but he didn’t know if he was allowed to do that, just to get out and leave. He changed the gears again. Later, he would not be able to say why; there were possibilities but no evidence to support them, no memory and no record, no way to know if he was trying to move backwards, or whether he had mistaken forward and reverse. Later he would ask about it only once before the incident was buried along with so many others.

  The people on the street were staring still, the younger woman getting to her feet, eyes filled with suspicion. And a man came out of a gate, a man with a silver ponytail and a face Martin knew. He walked behind the woman. They were
not smiling. They were hostile. He mustn’t let them reach him, he thought, as he pressed down on the accelerator. But the car did not move forwards. The beep quickened, flatlined. In the middle of the screen on the dashboard he saw a parked car and a boy on a red bike.

  He slammed his foot on the brake.

  But this time, it was too late. This time, there was a bang and the screen went black.

  That was the noise it made on impact, not a siren, but a scream.

  And after that, silence. He watched the screen to see what would happen next but it stayed blank, black. He pushed the gearstick into park but kept his foot on the brake to be sure it wouldn’t move again. Then there was shouting, and a man approaching the passenger window. And he knew he would be trapped, and that he had to get out of the car. He opened the door, emerged. The boy from the bike was on his knees. Still there was shouting. The young woman charged at him like she wasn’t going to stop. He tried to step back but stumbled and fell so that she towered over him, cursing, the inside of her mouth full of red-pink hate.

  Martin clambered to his feet. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see it.’

  At the sound of his voice, the woman froze. Her gaze softened into a question. ‘What are you doing here?’

  She had olive skin and pale lips and for a moment it felt as though they were alone. The man with the ponytail had run into a house and the old woman was on the ground with the boy, and in the cradle of the boy’s arms was the head of the dog. The boy was quiet.

  Martin shook his head in reply to her question because he didn’t know the answer. She spoke but he couldn’t hear her. He turned away . . . The man turned away as the dog with the crushed heart kept one eye open, as if to make sure the last thing he would see was the face of the tender boy who held him.