Maggie followed Iris into the hall and up the stairs, to a room above the kitchen. There was a single bed and a chest of drawers. Tubs of shells sorted into different types and sizes lined the wall, and next to them on sheets of newspaper were the boxes—painted crimson and sky blue and covered in shells forming intricate patterns, just as Maggie remembered them. ‘Oh, Iris, they’re beautiful.’
‘There were lots of us doing it back then, like I said.’
‘And now just you?’
‘That I know of.’
‘Do you sell them? Can I buy one from you?’
‘Take one. A present from me.’
‘Oh no, I wouldn’t do that. I’ll pay you.’
‘Pick one,’ she said.
Maggie leant down and held a box in her hands, and holding it there, recalled that she had her own story about going down to the Loop that day—a story she hadn’t told for as long as she could remember. Suddenly, it felt only right to share it.
‘Do you remember the kids that used to jump off the jetty and catch the coins?’
Iris nodded. ‘Sure I do.’
‘That day we came, after I watched the snake man, I saw the crowd and went over there, to the jetty.’
Right up at the end of the jetty, she told Iris, was a group of Aboriginal children in shorts and nothing else, and with them a tall moustachioed man. He dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out a coin and he threw it high into the air and into the water. As newcomers pushed forwards to get closer to the edge, the biggest boy dived in after the coin. Everyone waited. As the seconds passed, Maggie started counting them. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three . . . The man who threw the coin was leaning out from the jetty trying to get a look and Maggie began to wonder if the boy was ever coming back up. She got all the way to fifty, fifty-one, and like a leaping fish the boy shot out of the water to a gasping crowd and, letting his head sink beneath the surface, he held up two empty hands. It was a show, alright. Once he pulled himself up and stood tall on the jetty, he opened his mouth and there, between his glistening white teeth, was the coin. The crowd burst into applause, and the boy took his bow.
‘And you know what I did?’ Maggie went on. ‘I watched for a while, thinking to myself I could do it just as well as they did. Then I did it. I dived in, dress and all.’
Iris let out a laugh. ‘I bet you’re the only white kid who ever did it.’
‘I could state it for a fact,’ Maggie said, cringing at the next part of the memory. ‘When I came out with my coin, a woman came storming out of the crowd and dragged me off the jetty.’
Iris shook her head, a slow downturn in her lips. ‘She did that, eh? Shame on her for laying a hand on you.’
And more shame, more shame for what she said, Maggie thought, but didn’t go on.
‘And you gone jumped right in yourself! That is beautiful, that is . . . I knew there was a reason I let you into my house, Maggie. And your judge on our street!’ Iris nodded. ‘There are lines between us, you and me.’
And with that came the call from downstairs: ‘Naaanaaa!’
Iris pushed herself up off the floor and walked from the room. Again Maggie followed in her slow steps, down to the bottom of the stairs where the little girl was waiting, holding her arms in the air. Iris scooped her up and kept walking to the front door.
Maggie reached into her bag for her wallet, but Iris shook her head. It was stern. ‘I’ll just get cranky if you do that. Accept it from me. They don’t get much appreciation these days. I’ll pass on your message to young Tyson.’
‘I’d still like to see him,’ Maggie said.
‘Then you’ll have to come back and see me too.’
Iris reached out with her one free arm and enclosed Maggie’s hand in hers. Maggie nodded, having accepted a gift instead of giving one: in part absolved, she thought as she walked down the front steps into the street, and in part more indebted than when she came.
At home, sitting at the desk in her studio, the gift grew heavy in Maggie’s hands, as though it were made not of shell-covered plywood but of solid stone.
Of the moments in life that form us, be careful not to blink too long: that was what her father had once warned. ‘Pay attention, Magda. They don’t put their hand up and tell you what they are.’ More than half a century later, she understood something of how it worked. As it occurs, the event furls and twists its way around the organs—an invisible cord, a silent asp—around the stomach, the lungs, the heart, so that later when a button is pressed and the synapse is triggered, it tugs, causing a contraction. For the response is surely physiological—nausea or shortness of breath, even pain in the chest. As there it was now, sitting at her desk as she opened the box and ran the tip of her finger over the varnished inlay: the tug, the trigger, and when Maggie caught her breath she was still that girl, the dripping girl being dragged from the jetty . . . There are those events, and this was one.
What she remembered of it now was what happened after that first boy retrieved his coin. As Maggie tried to make her way to the front of the crowd to get a better look, another man pushed through right to the edge of the jetty and, muttering something under his breath, he gestured to the next boy waiting, then raised his arm and threw a coin as far as he could out into the water. As it disappeared in the distance, the boy shook his head, and the man laughed, a laugh as big as his button-bursting belly.
Maggie remembered watching the laughing man, and thinking of the poster that hung on the wall of the migrant reception centre, and what her mother had said. Waiting in the queue, Lili had wondered out loud why they couldn’t have filled in all the forms sometime during the thirty days they had been at sea, and tried to distract Maggie with the picture on the posters that said the same thing as the leaflet on the bunk on the boat: that they had arrived in the land of tomorrow. The picture was of a house on a farm with a pink roof.
‘You know your colours, Magda,’ Lili had said.
‘Yes, Mama.’
‘Rózsasín, Magda. Pink.’
In green fields around the house, sheep grazed and a man laughed on a spotted horse.
‘Zöld, Magda. Green.’
Behind the house was a purple mountain with patches of yellow flowers and, atop, a blue windmill.
‘Green,’ Maggie said.
But arriving the next morning at the migrant camp, it was not green or yellow or blue. Once an army barracks, it was a place of corrugated sheds and sun-dried earth, the shrubs that Maggie pointed to drained of colour. The only resemblance that life in this place had to the picture on the wall was the laughing man. Men in this country were quick to laugh. Too quick, Lili thought. ‘They are laughing at us,’ she said to Frederick, but he shook his head. Humour across cultures, he explained, is just difficult to translate.
‘What is absurd, it is different here,’ he said, ‘just like the hour of the day. It is upside down.’
Standing on the jetty and listening to the man laughing at his irretrievable coin, Maggie had cocked her head as far as she could to one side, though could find no angle that would help her understand what the man found so funny. Eventually, he was gone and more coins were thrown, a handful at a time, the smaller children jumping into the water all at once.
Then it came to her turn.
When she climbed back onto the jetty she didn’t hear anyone clap. The only one to pay her any attention at all was this one lady, with a face frilled up like one of the snake man’s lizards, who pushed through what was left of the crowd and started sucking in breaths like there wasn’t enough air. Dripping in her dress, Maggie tried to look somewhere else but the woman grabbed her by the arm and began to drag her off the jetty. Maggie yanked back but not before the woman said what she wanted to say. It was hard to understand because she was talking so fast and she started and finished every sentence with: ‘You hear me!’ At first it sounded like she was worried Maggie might drown. ‘You have to be more careful,’ she was saying. But then her words made it plain. She wasn�
�t worried about drowning.
‘You hear me! You don’t swim in that same water, you hear me . . .’
She slowed down for that bit so Maggie didn’t have any trouble hearing. Then she took hold of Maggie’s arm and started pulling her down the jetty, telling her to find her parents, who’d give her a flogging if they were any kind of decent God-fearing people. ‘What would they say if they’d seen you swimming in that filthy water?’
There wasn’t anything wrong with the water, but Maggie couldn’t find the words to say that. The only thing she could do was jump down on the woman’s foot as hard as she could, and run.
Afterwards, when her parents saw her wet clothes, she told them she’d swum off the jetty with the other children. She didn’t tell them about the coins, or about the lady. She was in trouble, but mostly because she had lost her hat and Lili was so terrified of the Australian sun (‘These idiots who lie down to worship it!’). And though on the tram on the way home she was still shaken, there was a strange comfort in the feeling that she was beginning to understand how it worked; she was beginning to see an order to things. The people in the camp, the ones who’d just got here, they were right down at the bottom. Once you got out of there and lived somewhere with just you and your family, like they did now that they’d moved to their flat in Bondi, you stepped up a rung and felt sorry for the ones stuck back in the camp—not because it was that bad, just because it was rock bottom. Sitting on the tram leaving the Loop behind her that day, it came to her, how the rest of the order worked. No one had come to help as she was dragged off the jetty by a stranger, no one had told the woman to stop. The water wasn’t filthy; it was clear and blue. There was another rung that she never knew about. Inside her something stirred—part shame, part relief. Even when she’d been back at the camp, she wasn’t at the bottom after all.
Later, when her mother talked to her friend Sandra at the library about coming to Australia and life in the camp, Sandra shook her head from side to side then up and down, like she was making a cross, and said she couldn’t imagine what it was like. ‘It must have been so very hard for you.’
Maggie listened to her mother telling stories about the camp, about the sand and the dirt and the shacks made of tin. At first Maggie wanted to speak up because it sounded like a year of nothing good. She had her own bad feelings, but it wasn’t about the dirt or the shacks. She wanted to tell Sandra about the friends she’d made and the toys in the dinner room, about Kristina, who brought them the floury apples, or Eva’s mum, who fed her most days after school, but after a while of listening she heard Sandra say that it was all safely behind them, safely behind them, and it felt good to hear that. The woman on the jetty was still dragging herself up in Maggie’s dreams. Maggie hadn’t known what to do to stop it; she hadn’t known how to make her go away. And here was Sandra making it sound so easy. ‘You move on,’ that was what she said. Maggie pondered that a long time, the appeal of a future unmuddied by the past, and then made the mistake that children so often make—in believing the word of an adult.
Now she placed the shell-covered box on the small rosewood table next to the desk in her studio. The table was cluttered with old family photographs and trinkets that had been given to her as a child by her father. This was a table of treasured keepsakes—the silver-framed images, the little statues of Hindu gods her father had bought in Colombo and hidden in the palm of his hand . . . The box, like the statues and the photos, was there on the table to hold a piece of history. It sat next to a photo of her mother and father, Frederick and Lili, and between them Levi, the grandfather she’d never met. The photograph was taken at a train station in Budapest before she was born, in a time and a place she had always considered to be the beginning of her story: not her arrival in Australia or her birth on a kitchen floor in Lisbon, but a farewell at a train station, because a story begins with its reason for being, her father had said, and for that he told her she should look always to this day, to this time and this place.
The day in La Perouse: after her father’s death she’d wished she had told him what had happened, what the lady had said about the filthy water, how she had shouted and dragged her from the jetty. Though she’d told herself that in her heart she believed the woman was wrong, why was she so careful at home in her bath to scrub herself clean?
In the photograph her grandfather was wearing a dark grey suit and a hat. He was smiling, but not Frederick. Levi was not as tall as his son, but seemed to be the one holding them up. So many times she had stared into their eyes, wondering what was said between them and what was not.
She had stood in her dripping clothes looking up at her father. ‘And you think they will let you on the tram like that?’ That had been his question, but his voice had been soft.
‘I went back today, to La Perouse,’ she said now, looking at the picture. ‘And I met a woman who I think you would have liked.’
Chapter 16
Ethan’s secretary buzzed. ‘Max will see you in five. His office.’
Max was the managing partner, and he was calling the meeting early. That wasn’t like him, not his style; most times Max just strolled in your door around meeting time. As Ethan started to wonder what was up, his mobile phone rang. It was Laini.
‘Hey, babe, how’s things?’
‘Okay.’ Silence. ‘Not okay. I don’t know . . . What am I doing?’
He checked his watch. ‘Come on, babe, we’ve done this . . . You should do some more work on the blog, think about the book thing.’
‘I already posted today,’ she said. ‘What time will you be home?’
‘Early. We’ve got Mum and Dad’s, yeah?’
‘I’ll be packed and ready. I pretty much already am.’
‘Okay, so maybe the gym or something, yeah? I really gotta go.’
‘So go.’
‘You okay?’
‘Yep.’
‘Love ya.’
‘Yep.’ And then a click.
He held the receiver in his hand for a moment before putting it down. It was something she’d only just started doing, hanging up before a goodbye, and like the other times, it left a build-up of phlegm at the back of this throat. It wasn’t like Laini to take out her problems on him. If anything, when things weren’t going great for her she would throw more at their relationship—buy him little gifts, spend hours on best-ever dishes, hit the lingerie stores . . . She was right: she had too much time to overthink, find fault, and that didn’t suit her. Ethan was starting to wonder where the old Laini had gone; the old Laini would never hang up like that. She was on his side; she knew what he needed, what he liked. She wasn’t one of those skin-and-bone women who messed with your head. She was the kind with the big heart, safe hands.
Meeting Laini had been a game-changer, no question. Over the years his school friends had scattered and had never really been replaced, and most of the friends he made at college were better left behind. They were the guys for whom money was a fix for everything: whatever the nature of the problem (a parent’s smashed-up boat, a ten-thousand-word contracts assignment due in three days), a price could always be worked out. They were the guys who at high school had their birthday parties in Aspen and now spent summers heli-skiing in Canada. For some reason Ethan had made it into their sanctum, and sure, it was a blast—the time of their lives and all that—but the truth was too many uni days were spent trying to forget what he’d done the night before: what cocktail of drugs and drink, what prank gone too far, which girl, which girls . . . trying to forget, and hoping that nothing would come back to bite. It culminated in a night before graduation, in Ben Parker’s room, the lights off, a girl; she didn’t say no, but she didn’t say much at all. The biggest lesson Ethan learnt at university was how to separate himself from nights like that, how to purge himself of guilt, which left him at the end of five years as pretty much an empty vessel. And then this place, the firm. He had been dating Laini less than a month when he realised he needed her more than anything he’d ever n
eeded before. Laini let him like himself again. She let him play grunge up loud and check out caryards on weekends (the one thing from college that had stuck: driving around in his mates’ cars made it hard to go back from there).
Laini was life-giving. He was the centre of her world, end of story. Even having Finnegan didn’t change things. Sure, she stopped with the hair colours and their world became a chemical-free zone, and she threw herself into parenthood, of course, they both did, but none of it ever meant he got neglected. He heard how it worked in other families—about those women who went all crazy-mama once they had a kid—but that wasn’t the way Laini ticked. Big heart, safe hands . . .
So what the fuck was going on with her now?
Maybe it had something to do with the argument a few weeks back. That was a possibility . . . She was upset because the first she had heard about his work issues was at lunch with his parents the day of his dad’s stroke. It dredged up an old wound.
‘This isn’t even about keeping secrets; that’s not what’s happening here. It’s that you can’t be bothered to tell me, like you don’t see any point in it. And it isn’t because what you’ve got to say isn’t important, it’s that I’m not worth it. I’m not worth telling.’
‘What are you talking about? My father’s just had a fucking stroke! What do you want from me?’
As she’d considered the last question, her gaze held, then dropped to the floor when either she couldn’t think of an answer, or didn’t like the one she found.
Okay, so he knew what she was talking about. Old wounds. What he was starting to understand was that if you let them fester too long you risked metamorphosis. You risked a whole new problem, a whole new life-sucking beast.
It went back to the day of the lunch at his parents’ after Finn was born. Martin and Maggie took the baby and left them alone at the table for Ethan to explain the story of his early years.
This Picture of You Page 14
