This Picture of You

by Sarah Hopkins

  ‘He looks like you.’ The blond hair, olive skin.

  ‘He doesn’t have my eyes.’ More grey than blue.

  ‘No, you’re right. He doesn’t. They are my father’s eyes.’

  And later, in bed, when it came to that:

  ‘The guy in Paris,’ he said. ‘Why did you tell me that?’

  ‘Come on, you didn’t really believe it.’

  He shrugged. ‘I did. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I did.’

  ‘I said it because you were staying . . . because you were with Linda.’

  There was no denial, of course not, only: ‘But that’s not to say . . .’

  ‘That’s not to say what?’

  He stared at her. ‘Jesus, this is weird. I’m not sure what’s happening here. I mean, Maggie, I want to be a part of this. Do you want me to be?’

  How could she blame him, she thought, when he had to ask the question?

  And so it began, the stops and starts and the stalling in between, the muddled attempts to link arms across an ocean. News came that Dave was sick, in hospital. Linda called him at all hours. They didn’t know what it was; that was what Martin said. He had to go.

  And Maggie told him not to come back. ‘Not until you’re ready,’ she said. ‘Not until it’s finished.’

  When he did come back—at Christmas and the next July—her mother arranged visits with Ethan. Maggie had been picked up by a gallery where her friend Annie was assistant curator, and after a slow opening her first exhibition was a sellout. She went out for six months with her old tutor, and then for three with a banker she met in a library. On Martin’s visit for Ethan’s fourth birthday, he insisted on seeing her, told her that he needed to talk about Ethan.

  They met for a drink.

  When he said the words, there were a million reasons not to believe them, but she did. When he leant over and took her hands in his, she began to cry, and she couldn’t stop. In the car she let him kiss her. She let him move them into his apartment and hang her paintings on the walls; she let it be true, and before the year was out, it more or less was.

  That was the chronology of how a family was formed—perhaps with one addendum. A few weeks after they moved in, they were rehashing an old argument as Maggie set up her workspace: why Martin had stopped taking photographs.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ he said.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘It was easier for you.’

  ‘Sure it was. Mind-numbing job. Art school at night. Raising a baby without a father.’

  ‘Come on, you’ve said it yourself: the perks of being a fringe-dweller. No one expected you to go to law school; no one watched over your shoulder to see if you got into chambers in Martin Place.’

  She put the box down and turned to face him. ‘Are you still playing that one? You’re not where you want to be?’

  And Martin’s retort: ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  She had her father’s temper, Lili always said. So rarely lit, but then decimating . . . Later Martin would use the word ‘launched’ but it was enough to say she stepped towards him, leaving not an arm’s length between them—‘I could feel your spit on my face!’

  ‘I will not be grateful for you being here. This is your choice. We’ve done fine without you, and can do so again. I need you to understand that, Martin.’

  Later, he woke her in the middle of the night. ‘Marry me, Maggie.’

  She sat up. ‘I won’t marry you,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘I don’t want anything to oblige you to stay but for this, for us.’

  He pulled her in close. ‘Listen to me. That day in New York, I didn’t understand it then. You know who you are, Maggie, like no one I’ve ever met. I’m in awe of that. And I’m in love with you. That’s why I’ll stay.’

  Martin was a man with a clinical mind—in a courtroom or around a dinner table, he would slash and discard any matters extraneous and move in to dissect the question at hand. ‘Yes,’ he would say, ‘but what is the gravamen?’ Clinical, even brutal . . . It was only now that Maggie was beginning to see the deterioration in his memory in that same context.

  This mental microscope on a single day, it gave Martin a story to tell and brought the camera back into his hands, yes, but it did something more than that. By shining a light on the day it cast a shadow over what came after.

  By looking to the beginning when he sensed he was nearing the end, a giant step was made over all the days in between.

  Part

  Three

  Chapter 15

  She stood silent at the open door.

  Come, Maggie, she told herself. You’ve made it this far . . .

  She had driven up the hill to find the street and had walked up the front steps of the only house showing signs of life, a few doors back from the cross-street. Now all she had to do was knock. She raised her hand, held it in the air, and let it fall again to her side.

  Inside on the floor were a pile of toys and a blue plastic crate, and, on top of the crate, a bowl of Weet-Bix still soggy with milk. The walls were a mural of crayon cars and butterflies and stick figures with miniature bodies and humungous heads. Maggie looked back, to the swing without a seat and to her car parked outside the house with the couch in the garden. But for a child sitting on a fence in a hooded top, today the street was empty of people: no dogs or boys on bicycles, no accidents waiting to happen. Luck in life, she thought, was so often a matter of timing.

  A child’s cough broke the silence.

  ‘Hello?’ She spoke softly. ‘Is anyone there?’

  Inside there was a noise, a step. It was only then, as she gasped for air, that Maggie became aware of the depth of her fear.

  Come, Maggie, she said to herself. What is the worst it could be?

  ‘Is anyone there?’ she repeated, again in not much more than a whisper.

  As she began to rummage through her bag for a pen to leave a note, there was the sound of footsteps, and Maggie looked up to see a woman standing at the end of the hallway, an Aboriginal woman in a green tracksuit—in her late twenties, maybe a little older, and as thin as a bird, her wild and wiry hair matted into a ponytail at the side of her head. At the sight of Maggie at the door, she flashed her startled, sunken eyes and flew past her like a gust of wind, the smell of cigarette smoke lingering as she raced out the gate and down the street.

  Maggie stood in her wake, found her pen and hurriedly started to scribble her note, leaning the scrap of paper against her handbag. She was interrupted by a voice: ‘You from the department?’ Looking up, she saw another woman shuffling towards her down the hall—a larger, older woman with short white hair and skin the colour of muddy water. She wore an orange Hawaiian shirt, short-sleeved and collared, patterned in sunsets and palm trees, and a long floral skirt in pinks and reds. Her feet were bare.

  Without waiting for an answer, the woman went on, ‘Well, she ain’t here.’

  Behind her now the sound of a child’s voice: ‘Nana!’

  ‘No, I’m not from the department,’ Maggie said, stepping back. ‘My name is Maggie Varga. I’m here about an accident in the street about six weeks ago.’

  ‘I don’t know nothing about any accident, and none of mine know nothing and none of mine done nothing, so you’re best to shove off.’

  Though there was an attraction in following the order, Maggie stood firm. You have come this far . . . ‘Please,’ she said. ‘The dog was killed. My husband was the man in the car. I came to say sorry to the boy.’

  The woman’s neck, until now invisible, extended from the collar of her shirt. ‘You ain’t from the department?’

  Maggie shook her head.

  The woman looked her up and down. Maggie was wearing black woollen trousers with a white shirt and a navy blazer—a little makeup, and no jewellery. ‘You look like you are.’

  So she had got it wrong, after all, Maggie thought. The outfit was a last-minute change out of the jeans and grey cardigan and her favourite silver beaded necklace. Standing in front
of the mirror to check herself before she left, she had suddenly decided: No, that would not do. It was one thing to fit in with the locals, but today surely it was more important to show that an effort had been made. As for the beads, they were buried in the glove box along with her watch. Better not to sparkle, she had thought as she pulled up at the kerb. Martin was right: this was not a street where you went around knocking on doors.

  Maggie stuttered in reply, uncertain how to prove herself. She had seen the boy in the paper, she explained, or tried to explain before the shriek of the child blasted down the hall.

  ‘Naaannnna!’

  And as the woman turned back inside, she called out over her shoulder: ‘People don’t knock much around here. Mostly just barge right on in . . . You might as well do the same.’

  The hall led into a family room and a kitchen where there was an open door to a paved brick courtyard. In the doorway, wearing a pair of purple underpants and a string of matching beads, stood a girl of two or three pointing to a green texta lid lodged in her right nostril. The old woman swooped the child up to the kitchen bench, cradling and admonishing all at once.

  ‘Now don’t ya move,’ she said, as she pulled a pair of tweezers from the top drawer and with expert hand pincered the lid from the nostril. The child slipped down from the bench and ran outside to a low plastic table where she picked up a texta and continued with her picture.

  ‘I can’t tell ya how many times lately these things have come in handy,’ the woman said, dropping the lid into the bin and the tweezers in the sink. While around them the floor was covered in books and toys, the kitchen itself was immaculate. Even so, the woman picked up a tea towel and rubbed in circles as she spoke. ‘Sorry, so let me get this: your bloke is the judge who ended up in the ambulance?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And how did it turn out for him?’

  Maggie told her that Martin had had a stroke and was now at home recovering.

  ‘Well, that is good to know. We thought we had ourselves two corpses in the street until that ambulance came. Then we saw it in the paper he was in the coma. Didn’t hear anything since then. I’m glad to hear he’s on the mend.’

  On the mend . . . It was a soft-sounding, simple phrase; if only it were apt, Maggie thought, noticing then the woman peering back at her as though she was trying to add something up.

  ‘I didn’t recognise him,’ she finally said. ‘Only Kayla did, me son’s missus.’

  Maggie started. ‘Sorry, you say she recognised him?’

  ‘She sure did.’

  ‘You mean she’d seen him in the papers before?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so. There was that murder case a few years back when he copped the flak, but it wasn’t for that she recognised him—and it wasn’t for that I remembered him once I’d seen the name in the paper. Your judge was my son’s first decent lawyer. That’s what he was to me.’ And when she saw the bafflement spring to Maggie’s face: ‘That’d be news to you, is it? Well, ya wouldn’t figure it, for sure. Here he is, the man that represented my boy all those years back, collapsing in front of me on my street.’

  Maggie hesitated, as one on the precipice of discovery. The questions began to form: why Martin had come, the reasons to keep it secret . . . ‘So he was here to see you?’

  But the woman shook her head. ‘Lord, no, I don’t say that. What on earth would he come see me for? He hit the dog, that’s all, so this was the place he stopped.’

  ‘And you’re sure that Martin represented your son?’

  ‘Same one, no word of a lie: your judge—before he was a judge, of course. I met him in the flesh, at the courthouse down in Redfern. It was a hell of a business, Roddy’s first lagging. A bunch of ’em held up a sports store, syringes and knives and what have you, bloody mugs all hooked on that filthy shit. Your judge was a fancy QC and got him bail and a plea deal and he done alright, got a couple of years but he could’ve got more. It’s a long time ago now, no reason he’d remember us . . . But I can say he was a decent fella, so I’m glad to hear he’s back home with you, you tell him that from us. He’s doing alright then?’

  ‘Yes, he is, but his memory . . . He can’t remember the day,’ Maggie said. ‘He can’t remember why he was driving up here.’ Their eyes locked, Maggie in search of an answer, the older woman understanding now there was another reason why Maggie was here, like she was expecting it all along.

  ‘I can’t help you there, love. We hadn’t laid eyes on him in that long. And Rodney’s back inside, been there since Christmas. Plenty of people pass through this street. There’s the community centre and the clinic around the corner, it gets a lot of visitors, and people like to drive up the hill to get a look down at the bay. Maybe he got himself lost. It seemed that way, by the look of him. I don’t think he knew where he was.’

  Maggie nodded, back to the beginning. The woman had offered up an answer, and for now, Maggie would accept it, in part relieved the subject was exhausted and that the only reason she had left to be here was the stated one, the better one—to apologise to the boy.

  The old woman smiled and ripples appeared across her broad forehead. Her eyes were deep-set and dark against her silver-white eyebrows, which she raised now as she asked her visitor: ‘You wanna cuppa?’ There was a chink in the spine of her nose and a thick, furrowed midline across its flattened bridge. Though her chin was short, the jut was stubborn. There was barely a face that went by in a given day that Maggie didn’t think of drawing, but a face like this was a rare find—a face some would say carried in it the motto of the soul.

  Maggie agreed and took a seat at the bench. ‘My name is Maggie,’ she said.

  ‘Lord, there am I too busy trying to push you out the door . . . Pleased to meet you, Maggie. I’m Iris.’

  As Iris passed the tea, Maggie asked if she knew the boy who owned the dog. A look of pride flashed across the woman’s face. ‘He’s me grandson, Tyson. That’s Roddy’s boy.’

  ‘Does he live here?’

  ‘Sometimes he does. He goes between me and his mother in Redfern. Right now that’s where you’ll find him, on the Block down there . . . You might want me to pass him the message. I’ll let him know you came by, I’ll do that, but listen, Maggie: I saw the paper and I’ll tell you now—it wasn’t really Tyson’s dog. It was the street dog. We all fed him when he needed a feed and he hung about. All the kids played with him, Tyson especially. He loved the dog, he was the one that pulled them ticks out—with all this bush around the dog got plenty of ’em—but it wasn’t his or nothing. You don’t owe Tyson anything. And like I said, your judge was decent to us. He kept on his feet and arguing in that courtroom for my Rodney, and afterwards he came to me and asked if there was any message that he could take down to him in the cells. He showed us a respect I ain’t seen from any lawyer since. I can tell Tyson you were here, Maggie, that you came to say sorry, and that’d be plenty.’

  Maggie offered no argument, sipped her tea and asked about the little girl.

  ‘She’s my niece’s daughter from Dubbo,’ Iris said, ‘but my niece is doing it tough—seems that’s the way with the whole mob out there right now.’

  And with the kitchen bench between them the old woman proceeded to tell Maggie all the ways in which the Dubbo mob had done it tough—the girl Lana’s baby ‘launched stillborn’ a day before her cousin Buddy went inside, leaving her niece Shayleen to look after the kids ‘when she can’t brush her own teeth’.

  ‘So I’ve got this one a while,’ she said. ‘Just until things turn around. Good times are due in Dubbo, there isn’t any doubt there.’

  The talk moved to places, towns, where other cousins lived. ‘I’ve been living here on this hill all my life,’ Iris said. ‘Some days I feel like I’m turning into one of them rocks looking down over the ocean.’

  The little girl tottered into the room with her finished picture of a pink and purple sun. She held it up to Maggie for praise and ran out to do another one for her to
take home.

  ‘You know, I remember I came here to La Perouse as a child,’ Maggie said. ‘We went down to the Loop to see the snake man. We caught the tram.’

  ‘You did? Well, that must have been in my time—me and my mother used to sell the boxes with the shells on ’em, all different shapes . . .’

  ‘I remember them! The Harbour Bridges!’

  ‘Well there you go. Mighta been me selling ’em.’

  Maggie looked at the woman perched across the bench with the cup of tea in her hand, and remembered the day she and her parents caught the tram to the tip of the Loop at La Perouse to see the man in the pit who let a snake bite his ear. There were some lizards too (their necks frilled up if you poked them with a stick), and things for sale, stalls of boomerangs and artworks set up by the Aborigines from the reserve up on the hill. Maggie held her mother’s hand looking down at the cross-legged, brown-skinned girls with nothing but a cotton dress between them and the hot, tarred road. Lined up there in front of them were shell-covered boxes in the shape of hearts and flowers and, best of all, big Harbour Bridges with the bases painted red so they looked to Maggie like upside down smiles, the shells like little white teeth.

  ‘There was a bunch of us back then,’ Iris went on. ‘We used to do all different ones, different shapes, and sell ’em to the tourists. The bridges, and the little baby boots.’

  ‘God, I must have been nine or ten. I remember the boxes, the treasure boxes. I begged my mother to buy one!’

  The smile that settled on the woman’s face was the smile of someone you’d known all your life; it made Maggie want to reach across the table and take her hand. ‘I still make ’em, the boxes,’ Iris continued. ‘I’m the only one who still does. The kids get the shells for me down on the beach and bring ’em up here.’

  She put her mug down on the bench, stood up from her stool and started walking out of the kitchen, turning around only when she reached the doorway. ‘You want to see?’