This Picture of You

by Sarah Hopkins

  ‘You know,’ Marty said, ‘when I was your exact same age, I did something along those same lines, the difference being—and it is a big difference—that to this day no one ever found me out.’ Then he paused a while before going on: ‘Now that I think of it, maybe you’re lucky, you know . . .’ And when Ethan asked why: ‘Because it left a bad taste with me, what I did. And the truth is, I never really worked out how to get rid of it.’

  Except for ‘dinner is in ten minutes’, that was it. Marty closed the door behind him and with him took the weight of the boy’s crime, at least the best part of it, enough so he could go and sit at the table and look his mother in the eye and see the day as over and done.

  When Martin brought his suitcase home from the flat, he sat down next to Ethan in that same spot on his bedroom floor and told him he’d done some bad things that Ethan was too young to understand, but that he was sorry and his mother had forgiven him. Ethan listened, unconcerned with his father’s wrongdoing. It was nothing that had hurt him. His mum had told him it was a bump in the road, and that now they were on the other side of it, they’d move on like nothing had happened. The only difference he could see was that they didn’t squish up and lie side by side on the couch anymore and for a while they didn’t have dinner parties where the shouting and music kept him awake. Then Maggie won the big prize and Martin spent a whole day hanging one of her paintings in every room of the house.

  It was only much later that Ethan worked out what sort of bump it was, and even then—whatever his faults, whatever his sins—to Ethan, Martin was and remained the father with big shoulders who fell from the sky.

  And his love was in his bones.

  On the floor, the dog with the seagull, the cockatoos . . . Ethan, alone again in the study: again there is the terrible weight in his chest, the fear of losing a father, and in a deeper recess, something heavier still . . .

  ‘The chicken is overcooked,’ Maggie said.

  ‘No, Mum, it’s fine.’

  ‘And the potatoes aren’t crispy.’

  The potatoes were fine too. She was talking again about Martin’s accident, about the dog that got killed; she had offered to buy another dog.

  ‘Ah, good girl,’ Martin said. ‘That was on my list.’

  ‘What list, Dad?’

  ‘My list . . .’ Martin shook his head. ‘Lines with dots.’

  Ethan smiled at his father then turned back to his mother—not to get an answer, but to make a point: ‘And did they want the dog?’

  Of course they didn’t want the dog; they wanted cash, they just hadn’t said it yet; they wanted to bleed her dry. He tried to hold his tongue, but now she had gone back again; now she was calling these people her friends.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum, leave it alone. You don’t owe them anything. Haven’t we got enough going on here without you wandering around La Perouse? I mean, fuck knows who these people are . . .’

  It was then that Martin spoke again. ‘Don’t look so worried,’ he said. ‘We’ll find out who is behind this, you hear me? And we’ll get the names of the people who have drowned, every last one . . .’

  Ethan dropped his head into his hands, then raised it again, a teacher to a wayward pupil: ‘Dad, I am trying to explain something to Mum about the people in La Perouse, not the people on the boat. She doesn’t know them, Dad, so I am just wondering why the hell she is doing this.’ His voice was louder than he meant it to be. ‘I’m sorry. I’m tired. This is hard . . . I am sorry, Mum.’

  At this, his father reached over and took his hand and squeezed it gently. ‘Don’t worry your head, you hear me . . .’ He pushed himself up and walked out into the hall.

  Around the table, the silence remained.

  Ethan knocked on the door to the study.

  ‘You alright?’ he asked.

  The door opened. ‘Never better.’ Marty turned back in. ‘She showed you.’ His voice was absent of concern. He sat down on the floor with his photographs, and when Ethan joined him: ‘This dog is always by itself, never with an owner,’ he said. ‘When I go to pat him, he shivers like he is cold . . . I’m afraid he is used to being kicked.’

  ‘I’m blown away by these, Dad, honestly . . . I don’t get it: why did you stop?’

  Marty shook his head, as though that wasn’t the right question. His eyes flicked across the series of photographs of Maggie swimming. ‘This is why I love it.’ He tapped each image, ending with the outstretched arm touching the edge of the pool. ‘Every second is different . . . Isn’t that an extraordinary thing?’ He looked up then with a sudden clarity, the thought jolting him into the purpose at hand: ‘Where were we up to?’ he asked. He was talking about New York, of course—how far he had gone in telling Ethan the story.

  Ethan stopped to remember. ‘You were at the party,’ he said. ‘You were just leaving.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I wanted to go back to the loft, but she said, no, she wanted to go to the garden. It was two a.m. but that was where she wanted to go, so I . . .’ He stopped mid-sentence, picked up a photograph of Maggie and held it close to his face, then looked at Ethan. ‘They always have a plan for us, isn’t that the truth?’

  In his father’s gaze then there was something conspiratorial, something Ethan had seen in his eyes years ago and had chosen never to bring to mind. Late at night, in a grungy Newtown pub with his college friends, all blind drunk, but not too drunk for Ethan to see his father in a dimly lit booth at the back of the bar, and with him a woman. Ethan wasn’t quick enough to look away. Their eyes locked for just a moment, before they let go and set each other free.

  Martin didn’t wait for a response from him now, but continued, and as he did, Ethan leant back against the wall and smothered the memory, gratified that this would be the end to the day: his father narrating the story of how he met his mother, a day spent together and a parting of ways, not fumbling for words or for meaning but telling it with humour and intimacy and a mastery of detail. Gratified, because his father spoke as a man with a mind at the height of its powers, and beyond that—what was so extraordinary to Ethan—as a man who could trace his path and, within it, find some truth.

  Later, when Laini was asleep, Ethan sat down again in the dark at his computer.

  At the bottom of the blog page he clicked on the archived file date and scrolled down to his comment. This was the third time he had checked for her reply, and now there it was:

  ‘Maybe the two things are somehow simpatico, as you say, FaithlessJohn: maybe you are a better husband because you sleep with other women. It doesn’t feel wrong to you, I get that. I am just wondering if it would be worth checking on her definition of a better husband. I suppose my question is: who gets to decide these things?’

  He read it again, irked by the tone of the reply. Staring at the computer for a number of minutes, the domestic bloggess began then to take on in his mind an independent virtual persona, to the extent that he even caught himself thinking: What would she know about my wife’s definitions? Though he immediately recognised the gaffe (almost immediately, not quite), the words turned over in his head. What would she know? And like a torch knocked off a table, they shone a light on the question of knowledge from an entirely different angle.

  ‘My wife holds the view that everything matters,’ he began. ‘I hold a different view, and over the years, in the context of our marriage, I believe I have been proven to be right. Truth be told, even though she’s never said it, I think she is coming across.’

  And with the words still flowing in this newfound light, he penned the next sentence: ‘I think there is a possibility that at some level she knows what I am doing and that her silence constitutes a form of tacit consent.’

  Ethan was, of course, having this thought for the very first time. To date it had never even crossed his mind. But there it was, pristine and full of potential: the possibility of an unspoken agreement . . . As he climbed into bed next to his sleeping wife, her naked body covered only to the waist by a
sheet, it began to take root: If she knows me so well, she knows this too . . . He leant over to kiss the closest breast before putting his head down on the pillow.

  It was enough to take him into his first half-decent sleep in weeks.

  Chapter 24

  This is what I thought happened, as it was happening.

  From a tenement window a dim corridor of light falls across the garden.

  ‘Jesus,’ she says. ‘My head is swimming.’

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I love it.’ She stretches her arms to the sky. They walk the circle of paths to the centre of the garden where the air is mint and lime.

  He sees the flag.

  ‘Wait here,’ he says, and he climbs onto the rubble and drags the mattress onto the outer path, then comes back into the centre, pulls the flag off its pole and throws it over the mattress.

  There are lines he’d normally use now but words scramble, senseless (weed on speed). So he just faces her, she him. They step closer, not close enough for their bodies to touch but close enough to see in her flickering eyes that like him, mind and body, she is surging towards whatever is about to happen.

  ‘Lie down,’ he says. The words come out stilted, clunky, like a boy playing doctor, but the response is on song: she closes her eyes and lets herself fall flat against the mattress . . .

  Only mid-air he remembers the broken springs.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ she shouts as she slaps one with the back of her hand. ‘What was that?’ Then she is laughing, a laugh that is raucous and reckless and it releases them, both of them, as the stripes on the flag wriggle into zigzag and the mud-stained stars disappear under her body.

  He drops to his knees. The white shirt in moonlight, he begins to untie it. As he gets to the buttons she wonders without a trace of concern if they can be seen from the windows. And she laughs again. She looks young when she laughs, maybe too young.

  ‘I’m straightening up,’ he says.

  ‘Is that a good thing?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I just remembered who you are.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s lovely!’

  ‘You know what I mean. Not the girl I spent the day with. Maggie Varga, all the way from home . . . How old are you again?’

  She sits up, an arch in her spine, behind her the broken rubble. ‘Almost twenty-two.’

  When he looks at her now he has the same feeling he had earlier, that she is in the lead and he is somehow part of her plan, but there she is, her shirt open on just one side and he is already imagining the dark nipple between his teeth. What does it matter? She is who he wants her to be. The girl at his door . . . He pushes the other side of the shirt across.

  ‘Fuck, you are beautiful.’ It isn’t a line; it is just what he is seeing.

  She rises up enough to kiss him and the day reads as fourteen hours of foreplay. His hand slides down between her legs and he thinks of other lips over the past months, other girls, other bodies, blurring . . . Then bang, there is a clamp around his wrist. She pulls away, brings him back. Like she’s in his thoughts, she smiles. She knows.

  ‘Start again,’ she says, and when he does, her naked body feels fragile in his hands, like something he needs to take care with. As he moves around it piece by piece, it isn’t strange to him; he recognises it like something he remembers—the freckle on her shoulder, the scar on her hip—something remembered, or something projected over years to come.

  He holds her in his hands. She is not fragile.

  Other girls, other bodies—he doesn’t close his eyes like he does with them. He doesn’t close his eyes to imagine someone else, to imagine Linda. He doesn’t close his eyes at all because Maggie Varga doesn’t let him. Like a demon . . . Maggie Varga, made of flesh, of air and fire, a freckle and a scar.

  Maggie Varga will not disappear.

  ‘Do you still feel like a visitor?’ she asks, passing back his cigarette.

  They are lying on the mattress, naked and spent, clothes scattered in the garden around them. The truth is he doesn’t feel anything but post-coital oblivion. What just happened was far and away the best fuck he’s had since he came to New York—one of those sessions when the planets align. In answer to her question, if he feels anything it is a sense of achievement. In that way he owns the moment: less visitor, more lord. But at the back of his mind is the knowledge that if he overthinks it, it will be gone. That is how all the good things slip away. Roll with it, Martin; don’t start asking what it is. So he bounces it back: ‘Do you?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Yeah, I sense that. How did you get to be so fucking sure of yourself?’

  ‘You say it like it’s an insult.’

  She’s right; it sounded nasty. But the question was genuine. And though his standard move about this time is to roll over and slip out a stranger’s door, he has the unexpected and overwhelming desire to understand her, at least some small part of her. He wonders if after all that he could still be a little stoned.

  ‘I don’t mean it like that,’ he says, reaching over to stroke her thigh. ‘I just don’t get it.’

  When his hand reaches her buttock he gets distracted, but she pushes it back up then slides in close again, her head against his shoulder, whispers, ‘What don’t you get?’

  ‘Okay.’ He will play. Why not? ‘Like the painting thing for you—you don’t have much to back it up, but you want something, and you’re not afraid to say you want it. I’d like to know how that feels.’

  She squints, trying to get a look at his eyes. ‘Your photos . . .’

  ‘I’m fooling around. I just got the idea in my head. But you . . . let me guess, you’ve known what you want to do since you were eight years old. Tell me I’m wrong.’

  She falls back on the mattress. ‘Nah, that’s pretty much right.’

  ‘So how the hell does that work?’

  ‘You want to know?’

  He does, and he knows this is entering a zone into which he rarely goes. Personal history on top of physical intimacy screams the beginning of something, and at least an in-principle commitment to explore the possibilities, but he proceeds with a safety net: tomorrow this girl is travelling back to the other side of the world.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘I’ll give you the story I told to get into art school: I was seven. We were living in a camp for migrants—I was telling you about that. It was a bit of a tip—a bunch of tin shacks. The grass used to grow through the floorboards, and on the insides of the walls there were sheets of cardboard. Insulation, I guess. Anyhow, I drew pictures on them, on the cardboard. At first I got in trouble, but then my parents had to go to work and sometimes there was no one around to look after me. We never had any paper, so they told me that when I came home after school I could draw on the walls. My father bought me a box of coloured chalk, and when I was good he’d give me a new piece. It was like a treat, a reward. Then he started bringing newspaper home and I would use that, draw over the writing and find the bits of blank space.’

  ‘And that got you into art school?’

  She smiled. ‘Nothing like a tough-luck story.’

  ‘Okay, I get it. You’re hardwired.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Like a dog.’

  She laughs. ‘And let me guess: you were off leash. Roaming around your mansion.’

  ‘Come off it, it wasn’t a mansion. Don’t start . . . I get enough of it from Linda.’

  ‘Enough of what?’

  ‘Silver spoon and all that.’

  ‘Okay, your turn. What about the drugs?’ she asks. ‘Is that a typical night out?’

  ‘Sort of, not really. For them it is. She is pretty crazy, in case you didn’t notice.’

  ‘I like her.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘And you do too.’

  He shrugs it off, lights another cigarette. ‘She drives me nuts.’

  ‘Yep. I bet,’ she says, then laughs when she feels him harden against her thigh. ‘Is that for me or for Lin
da?’

  He takes hold of her hands against the mattress.

  ‘You lie,’ she whispers. ‘You know what you want.’ And she rolls her body over and up, back on top.

  Later, as the first bird tolls the beginning of the day and the end of theirs, she says she has to go, but before she does, she has one more thing she has to say.

  It was broken by the clatter of plates from the kitchen.

  Maggie had overcooked the chicken but everyone said it tasted fine. Then there was more talk, but he didn’t hear it. More often than not it was just a matter of watching mouths move.

  But now it was only Martin and Ethan left at the table, and Ethan drew his chair closer.

  ‘You know, Dad, I want to hear the rest of it.’

  Martin looked towards the kitchen.

  ‘They’ll be a while,’ Ethan said. ‘Come on: you went to the garden, you had this wild night, then you just said goodbye?’

  Martin leant forward and shook his head. ‘I thought that was what we were doing, saying goodbye. I thought that was all there was left to do, but she had something to tell me . . . There was more to it all along, you see,’ he said, almost a whisper. ‘I lived the day, but I wasn’t the one to say what it meant.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What did she say?’