by Sue Saliba
she went upstairs then. she leant down to the dog, still sleeping in the nest she had made for her. ‘let’s go,’
esma said. ‘let’s go to the gardens.’
the dog followed her, slowly at first and on unsteady legs, but gradually more quickly and with confidence.
‘let’s just sit for a while,’ she said. ‘let’s sit by the duck pond.’
esma led the dog to the place where rascas had led her that night of the boys’ party, back before winter, back before things could make enough sense to act on. or perhaps, as she sensed rascas had thought, before she believed in her own courage.
her own life force that said, jump.
her own life force that said be alive to curiosity and imperfect beauty. be alive to love.
the dog licked her face. it was the first sign of affection she had shown.
‘what should i do?’ esma said out loud.
she knew, now that kara had discovered where the dog had come from and that it was connected with samantha, kara would want her to go. she knew kara would present it in some pseudo-logical way, like the dog was from the farm where conditions were poor and therefore it probably had contagious diseases or that, simply, the dog was stolen property and had to be returned.
whatever the seemingly persuasive arguments, esma knew they all led to one thing: either the dog would have to go, or she would have to find somewhere else to live.
she was broke, she was always broke. the money book usually calmed her nerves when she wrote her list of weekly expenses and income in it, but that was all it did – created some sense of control, some delusion that in a practical way, financially, she had nothing to worry about. of course, it wasn’t true. she had four dollars and eighty-six cents until next tuesday. how could she possibly afford to move?
and then, she began to think, who would she live with? maybe kara was okay, after all. maybe she’d end up living with someone worse, and then what? her mind moved along a certain path, more and more frantically, dangerously. maybe kara was right, she thought at last. maybe she was untrustworthy and she had abused kara’s goodwill and friendship. and what a loss it would be to leave kara and their home. perhaps, just perhaps, she could apologise, explain, make things all right.
she looked at the dog then. the dog was watching her. esma reached out and touched her ear. so soft. ‘you’ve no one else in the world, have you,’ she said. and she stroked the dog’s throat down and up, down and up. and she felt something awaken in her. something beyond any words. something she knew was love.
‘i’ve thought of a name for her.’ she smiled, suddenly remembering alain. actually somehow he had been with her all morning. since that moment she’d watched him, quiet and alive with the dog in samantha’s lounge room.
and then a third way presented itself to her – something between the dog having to leave and esma being forced to find somewhere else to live. it was more subtle and complex than either of those extremes. and yes, it was inspired by the dog and by alain, but it came from something definite and real inside esma.
she felt the strength now, to go back to the house. she’d speak to kara from that third way.
‘come along, beautiful one,’ she said to the dog.
and as they walked along together, through the green and the branches and the yellow flowers that were coming out everywhere, she saw something from the corner of her eye.
it was white, shifting, attached to a tree trunk.
‘come with me,’ she said.
it wasn’t anything remarkable, just a piece of paper someone had stuck to a tree. but as she got closer she suddenly remembered rascas’s withheld information that night of the party, and she knew it was much much more.
esma, i thought you’d find this note here. after all, i know how much you love the gardens. i couldn’t catch you on the phone, so i came over here to say that i’ve thought of a name, and i think she will like it. and i think you will too: maleena. it’s ancient romanian. it means ‘to be released into freedom by love’.
alain
esma went into number 22 starling street then. kara was there, invisibly present in her room upstairs. the house was heavy with her anger, with her accusations, with her hurt.
esma climbed the stairs. she didn’t hesitate. she walked across the wooden floor to her own room, where she left the dog, and then she continued on to kara’s bedroom. her footsteps were solid, confident. she knocked at kara’s door once, once again, and then she said,
‘kara, i need to talk to you.’
there was silence.
‘kara, i know you’re there, and i’m going to talk to you.’
at last kara opened the door. she stood there, flushed cheeks, eyes red and damp. her mouth was a drawn line. she stared at esma. perhaps she expected to receive an apology.
‘kara, come out here, out of the doorway,’ esma said. and they stood in the little landing between their two bedrooms, at the place where esma had rushed to put flowers all those months before, at kara’s first mention of ‘home’.
‘kara, this is supposed to be a home for all of us,’ esma began.
kara’s eyes narrowed – she waited.
‘and i didn’t consult you, i acknowledge that. you had a right to be consulted before i made the decision to bring the dog here.’
kara nodded.
‘but there’s more. there’s always more because things aren’t black and white. i want to give this dog a home – we have a backyard, we have the gardens opposite. there’s no reason i can’t care for her. there’s no reason i can’t keep her.’ she looked at kara. she knew that kara was thinking, calculating.
and she knew something else:
that, at last, it really didn’t matter what kara said.
‘if it means that much to you i guess the dog can stay.’
but esma didn’t hear kara’s words. she’d already turned and walked away, already closed her bedroom door. she stood and waited. she looked at the dog. she looked at the four walls of her room, the four simple plaster walls. and she smiled. she knelt down to the dog, reached her hand to the dog’s face and said, ‘it’s true, there is something in the world called love.’ and she remembered what she’d felt when she’d first moved into the house. a feeling of love. yes, she had felt that. but she realised now that she had misplaced its source. it hadn’t been in kara or the house, or even simon. it hadn’t been in her connection with kara, but in herself. embryonic, inchoate, waiting to develop. it had flickered suddenly awake when she’d first come to the house and she had felt it – the spark of it – saying, ‘take this path, take this journey, for this is what you need to know, here is how you’ll learn it.’ that was it: 22 starling street was the journey she’d needed to take to awaken that love inside her, to realise it, to let it grow strong.
she stood up and pulled a huge dusty suitcase from the top of her wardrobe. she opened the wardrobe doors and began to pack. she gathered the dog’s things and added those to the case. when she’d nearly finished, she paused. she went to the special place on her desk where she kept the book of sparks.
she opened its pages and there it was. perfect, previously untouched: the brown fur of a ringtail possum, the fur of the baby possum.
she knew that kara was downstairs. she knew the house was still. she walked out into the hallway and into kara’s bedroom. she opened the box where kara kept the peg esma had sent her all that time ago – the peg that had held back esma’s hair on the day of the house interview. it was still there, just as it had been when kara showed her. ‘i rescued it,’ kara had said.
rescue. esma stood and wondered at the word.
to be rescued. to rescue.
that was when she opened the peg and put the baby possum fur inside. she wasn’t sure what she felt at that moment, but if she had been asked she might have used a word new to her vocabulary, new to her life. ‘maleena,’ she might have said.
maleena: to be released into freedom by love.
Winte
r
and as autumn ended everything moved a step closer to its fate. one windy saturday early in june kara wrote her speech to simon which she’d memorise before calling ‘the meeting’. simon pushed and heaved a bookcase into his room downstairs, since with the arrival of winter he was looking forward to buying more novels and snuggling up in bed to read them. and esma, at her bedroom window, noticed the glass covered by ivy and knew that she must tell kara, she must say the plan was impossible to execute.
it wasn’t fair.
it was a matter of ethics,
she told herself, clutching her cold hands
and almost believed the lie.
for it wasn’t really morality that stopped esma from going along with kara’s plan. it wasn’t really that she believed it was wrong to throw simon from the house. well, that was partly it,
but there was something else.
chloe.
chloe must not move in.
don’t be ridiculous, she told herself, trying not to see the dried-out ivy suckers that clung to the glass. it isn’t anything but feeling uncomfortable with things not being the way they should be. that’s it.
and she went to her desk to write it down, so convincing did it sound to her right then, right there in the solitude of her bedroom.
‘i’ll tell kara that’s what it is,’ she said, extending her moment of confidence.
but then she felt reality seep in.
as if kara might be convinced by something so vague,
so nebulous. she’d ask for examples, points, specific and known words
and esma could produce none,
none that might not lead to the truth.
and the truth, she determined, would be left veiled. from kara, and even from the shell of herself.
for now she stared at the ivy soon to cover that entire little square of the world outside, winter settling in, not yet bright with blue skies and sunshine that would mark every winter in the future. a kind of upside-down happiness to say nothing lasts forever. not the rain, or the trees, or the only planet anyone ever born had known.
and esma shivered because it was true, the world wouldn’t stop still, but all the same
she was stuck.
‘i can’t let chloe move in and i can’t speak the passion of why. there has to be a third way – that’s it.’ and then, close to a possible solution, she was interrupted.
a knock at the door.
it should have been kara, completed points in hand and memorised in her head, but instead it was samantha, come up the stairs quiet as a mouse when esma was in one of her incompatible extremes.
‘esma, simon’s been pulling all those boring old novels out of boxes in his room and look what i found. after that great letter you wrote against the puppy farm, i know you’ll love it.’
it was a photograph of simon’s grandfather, moustached, framed, nursing an arctic fox.
‘what’s he doing? where is he?’
‘he’s in the yukon. he went there in the 1920s.’
‘what for? to trap foxes?’
‘no. he didn’t trap them. look, see the bandage on its leg? he saved them from the hunters’ snares, isn’t that wonderful?’
‘he travelled from malta to the yukon to save foxes?’
‘no, no. he went there to find gold, to get rich. and then…’
‘and then?’
‘and then he fell in love, esma. look.’
and esma remembered simon telling her obliquely one night that his grandfather died a pauper and a violent icy death. but she didn’t think of that now. she swallowed the image of him there against the fox, inside the moment of samantha’s hands.
‘i just need to talk to kara,’ she said.
she knocked, opened and closed kara’s bedroom door behind her before kara could rise from her half-lotus position on the purple yoga mat beside the computer.
‘kara, we can’t ask simon to leave.’
‘what did you say?’ kara said, looking up and pulling the foam plugs from her ears but before esma could answer, truth or not, kara remembered that she’d been violated and began:
‘esma, what are you doing barging into my private space like this? i thought we were working towards making this a safe house where everyone’s personal space was respected.’
‘i came to say that i think…’
‘esma, i’m sorry. i’m sure you’ve got important issues, but right now i’m in a really difficult space. i can’t hear anything… i just can’t be there for you right now. i’m sorry. i’ve got so much going on with chloe. it’s been such a big year for her. it’s going to be so good for her to get over here and live with us. i’m just digesting the email she sent me today. things are not getting any easier with john accepting her illness.’
‘illness?’
‘yeah. i don’t want to talk about it now. esma, i need time to myself. can we…?’
‘sure, sure. i’m sorry, i didn’t mean to intrude or make things difficult or anything. i just… it’s not important. i’ll deal with it. don’t worry about it.’
‘thanks esma. can you close the door as you go out?’ and she did.
quietly, obediently, differently.
differently from how she’d opened it.
differently from how she’d felt as she looked at that arctic fox, injured, saved and undefeated. somehow living in accord with unseen laws despite, or maybe because of, its damaged self,
at peace.
and she was relieved to see samantha had disappeared down the stairs again, not witness to esma’s own crumpled self. cowered, except not quite because she remembered something from that evening by the pond, in the gardens with rascas, and she went and wrote it down.
the possum black above their heads that had watched them. an odd life amongst the sticks and twigs of a near-winter tree.
‘do you think he can hear us?’ esma had asked rascas, and she imagined the possum leaning down to catch their words. how conceited, perhaps, to think anyone might be curious enough to want to know her mind, but all the same, something about being part of the gardens, about entering the blood and the rhythm of the trees and the bats and the creatures brave at night excited her,
and she let herself believe.
that was the beginning of the book of sparks.
a simple sketch of lines, two eyes, a heart.
and she knew, already, that mysteriously a third way was emerging. and that despite a momentary loss of courage – no, in fact because of that momentary loss of courage there in front of kara, there in the square of kara’s bedroom – she’d glimpsed a different way to be.
‘i tried,’ she said, ‘and i’ll try again.’ and she left the book of sparks open on her desk and knew this wasn’t the last time she’d speak to kara of simon.
by the following morning, she’d found kara’s note and crushed it in her palm.
left under the door sometime in the dark, it read:
dear esma,
i’m sorry i didn’t have time to listen to you today. i had a lot going on but i’m feeling calmer about it now. i emailed chloe last night to let her know she didn’t have to wait until semester two – that she could come here as soon as she wanted. i know you’ll really enjoy living with chloe. you both mean very much to me.
i’m not going to uni today, so feel free to knock on my door anytime and maybe we can have a cup of tea together, or go to lygon street for ice-cream.
i hope things are going okay for you.
love, kara xxx
the note stayed crushed in esma’s palm all the way past maria’s flower shop, past the old lollie shoppe, past ‘house’ with its pretty, shiny kitchen shears. and back again, as she walked along lygon street, alone.
and, yes, an anger inside her wrestled with something else.
why couldn’t it just be anger, hatred, solid rage? then she’d be propelled along one direction without any doubt or hope.
there’d only be confidence, and no gap or staggering.
instead she opened her palm, there, in front of the commonwealth bank. and a little thrill lifted in her chest. the perfect letters, the tone of the note. ‘you both mean very much to me.’
she could almost feel the embrace of kara, the promise of home. and hear a voice that said how silly she was, how ridiculous to go bursting into kara’s room blurting out that simon must stay, that they could not ask him to leave. how wrong of her.
and esma thought then how she would go home, put on her special green skirt and ask kara out for icecream. yes, she could even shout kara. after all, she could go without buying that medication she was due to get next week. it could wait another fortnight. yes. and the note got straightened out. she was ashamed of that too now, crunching it up.
she was suddenly happy, right there on the footpath in front of the commonwealth bank – what a strange place to be happy, amidst all that counting and adding, customers leaving the glass doors with a seriousness for something so imaginable.
but esma’s happiness was real. she felt it lift her entire body. she almost flew. she’d buy kara poppies on her way back. no, that might be too much. she hurried home. she expected to find kara in the house, maybe dressed in her silk dressing gown still.
and, yes, for the time, esma had skipped over that third way, gone from one rare place to another, anger to happiness, resolve to surrender, hatred to an almost unquestioning acceptance.
it didn’t take much to unveil it, something told her. to take away what was obscuring the truth. to reveal what esma had wished could remain hidden, from everyone, especially herself.
and right then, the truth rested in front of her, pure and bold. and for the first time she couldn’t run from it, couldn’t cover it over, couldn’t call it something else. for a moment, it existed there and she faced it:
yes, she was in love deeply,
awfully in love with kara.
and sure enough, that love arose in her when she came down the wooden hall. and there was kara, brewing dandelion tea and cooking toast and looking up at esma from the softness of her dressing gown.
‘esma, would you like some tea? you’re just in time.’
