by Kim Lock
Elsie tilted her head. ‘I don’t recall.’
Joseph leaned forward, pressed his palms together. Planes of shadow moved across his face. ‘My uncle Stan came over in the late sixties. He was an architect – a good one, too. He was commissioned to work on the Science Centre. He died about twelve months after he got here.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Were you close?’
‘Not really.’ He was twisting a Fantale wrapper in his fingers. ‘I was still in primary school when he died. I don’t remember him much at all. Which is sad, because his death was so tragic it completely overshadowed his life. That’s all I recall of him, now, when I think of Uncle Stan. Not the man or the architect or the uncle. No – I remember him as the man who was thrown off the Semaphore jetty.’
Elsie couldn’t help but gasp. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she repeated. ‘How awful for your family.’ Then she drew back in her seat, her eyes widening. ‘Stanley Baker,’ she said, softly. ‘My goodness, I remember now. It was in the news for some time.’
Joseph nodded. ‘That’s him.’
Elsie searched his face as the details came back to her. ‘They never found who did it?’
He spread his hands. ‘There were rumours . . . police involvement, police cover-ups . . . but no, more than twenty years later it’s still unsolved.’
Elsie pushed her hands across the table and took Joseph Baker’s hands in her own: warm with his heat, calloused from his work outdoors.
Joseph said, ‘He was a gay man.’
She squeezed his hands.
‘It wasn’t long after he died, they changed the laws. So my Uncle Stan – he wouldn’t have been a criminal anymore, just for being who he was. For loving who he did.’
Elsie nodded.
‘You see?’ Joseph said, ‘We all have our skeletons.’
They smiled at each other. The gas lamp rushed; a breeze took up and the boat sighed around them.
She stood up from the table. ‘Good night, Joseph.’
‘Good night, Elsie,’ he said.
*
The bedroom end of the boat was almost entirely dark. The sound of snoring came from Arthur’s room, on the far right. Elsie found the door to her bedroom and pushed it open quietly. When she tiptoed to the bed, she found only one person in it.
Thomas. He rolled over as she sat on the edge of the bed. ‘What time is it?’
‘Close to midnight, I think.’ A weak shaft of moonlight came through the small window and threw dim light on the empty side of the bed. ‘Where’s Aida?’
‘She took the last spare bed.’ He yawned, stretched an arm out to push the blankets down and patted the mattress. ‘Come on, hop in.’
Elsie glanced through the open doorway to the closed door she could see across the narrow corridor. There was that invisible elastic, softly tugging at her from both directions.
Thomas said quietly, ‘It’s up to you, love. Ay and I thought you could take us in turns if you like. Or decide which bed is the most comfortable.’ He groaned and added, ‘Because I don’t think it’s this one. This one’s made of rocks.’
It was her husband’s birthday weekend. She knew he was waiting for her to slip beneath the covers. The boat shifted gently; Thomas yawned again. In her mind, Elsie heard the echoes of her silly, traditional views about Millie and Joseph earlier; she recalled the way Aida’s face had clamped down. And what incomprehensible pain had Joseph Baker’s family suffered at the hands of such narrow-mindedness, such intolerance? Elsie sat on the bed with her husband waiting for her, her lover only a thin wall away, and suddenly she saw open up before her the true depths of her own selfishness. All these years, it had been Elsie’s wanting that they had all twisted themselves into knots to heed: her wanting Aida, on top of her love for Thomas. Her wanting a relationship with Aida, when Aida’s baby had just gone. Her wanting to fill her own arms when so many others were without. The lies she had told her children, the family they had all gradually drifted away from, the extended community of neighbours and friends they had kept themselves perpetually on the outer of – all because of the deep well of Elsie’s wanting.
‘I’ve wanted my cake, and eaten it, too,’ she said aloud.
‘What’s that, love?’
Elsie bent down and kissed him. ‘I’m sorry, love, I need to make things right with Ay.’
He sighed. He tried to cover it when he murmured assent, but she heard the disappointment.
Elsie stood up and crossed the hall, closing Thomas’s door behind her. In Aida’s room, she took off her socks and jeans. She unfastened her bra and pulled it out the sleeve of her t-shirt. Drawing back the covers, she climbed into bed. She pressed her face into the back of Aida’s neck, wrapped her arm over her waist and nestled her knees into the curve of Aida’s.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘About what I said earlier. To Millie, upstairs. I didn’t think before I started on with my silly traditional views. Very self-absorbed.’
Aida mumbled, ‘It’s okay, Else,’ into her pillow, but to Elsie, it wasn’t. She rolled onto her back and addressed the ceiling. ‘I don’t know where it came from; it was like a knee-jerk reaction.’
Aida rolled to face her. ‘Are you cold? You’re trembling.’
‘I’ve been so self-centred.’
‘Are you still talking about Millie?’
‘Yes. And no. All of this, these past . . . what is it now, twenty-six years? I’ve been so selfish, Ay. You and Thomas and the kids – everything that has happened, all the secrecy and the hiding, it’s all because of me. You have all tolerated that – all for me. And what do I do in return? Bitch and moan about the lack of a wedding dress. Christ.’
‘It’s not all because of you. You’ve never exactly held a gun to my head, or Thomas’s. We’ve made our own decisions.’
Elsie chewed her bottom lip.
‘This stuff about Millie living with Joseph?’ Aida went on. ‘It’s her choice.’
‘And what about Arthur?’ Elsie said. ‘Of course we’ve shaped who they are, their views on life and relationships. Why have I been sticking my head in the sand? Have we messed them up?’
‘Probably. What parent doesn’t?’ Aida pulled the blankets to her chin. ‘It only matters that they’ve been loved unconditionally, and that they’re resilient, and wise and kind. You’re a parent. No one gets that right.’
Elsie could hear the whir and wander of Aida’s mind, and she knew in which direction it was leading. She felt the pang of anxious, saddened wondering about that missing piece that never entirely left her. Was Aida’s daughter, wherever she was – was she happy? Did she, like Millie and Arthur, grow up loved?
‘These are the things I don’t know,’ Aida said, in answer to their shared thoughts. Her voice was quiet in the dark. ‘Do you think I’ll ever know?’
‘One day, surely, you must.’
‘I can’t imagine it would be possible. Everything was locked up so tight, records sealed. It’s more than that they didn’t want us to know – it’s that they wanted it to be as though it had never happened in the first place. The mothers . . . We were fallen women. They erased us.’
Elsie said, as she always did, ‘I’m sorry.’ She paused, steeling herself. ‘Maybe you could look into it?’
Silence unfolded, and Elsie held her. The boat creaked as a breeze came up and ruffled the water beneath them. Elsie felt the barely there sway, the peaceful lolling of the big boat on the breath of the river.
Aida was quiet for long a time, then she said, ‘God, I think these beds are made of rocks.’
67
The airport’s international terminal was different to domestic, and if Thomas had to describe it he would struggle to go beyond the abstract suggestion that it had a different energy. Giant and not necessarily friendly, it was a zone where people came and went from vast distances, humans
picked up from one side of the globe and plonked unceremoniously on the other, all foreign language and unfamiliar currency and body clocks out of whack.
Arthur, with his passport and his boarding pass, was the only one who could go through the customs gate so they stood there on one side of the departure lounge with him – all of them: Thomas, Elsie and Aida, Millie and Joseph. They stared around and tried not to stare at Arthur who, in about twenty minutes from now, they wouldn’t see for a year.
Thomas glanced at Elsie and saw she was fighting a lion-hearted battle against another fit of weeping. Aida’s lips were pressed together in a thin line and she rubbed the tops of her arms as she glanced about.
There were people everywhere. People dragging cases, jackets flapping across arms; people hugging and crying and mopping their faces; people strutting purposefully. Groups of people held boarding passes and frowned up at departure screens.
‘Righto,’ Arthur said. He lifted his arms and dropped them again, slapping his legs. ‘I suppose I’d better go through . . .’
‘Yes, yeah, mate,’ Thomas said briskly. ‘You’d better get going.’ He even made a show of looking at his watch, for confirmation of how important it was that they keep this as perfunctory as possible.
‘You call,’ Elsie said, pointing a finger at Arthur. ‘As soon as you land. Find a pay phone. Don’t forget you can reverse the charges. Any time. From anywhere.’
‘I’ve got it, Mum.’ Arthur smiled. He held out his arms and Elsie went to him and clutched him tightly.
Thomas’s throat ached. He looked again at Aida and she gave him a watery smile. Seeing the way Elsie was clinging to Arthur, he felt a recurrent flash of the anger he had first felt, months ago, when Arthur announced he wanted to spend a year in the UK. What the bloody hell for? Elsie had said. Why the bloody hell not? Arthur had said. Millie went away. I need space.
Despite his anger, Thomas understood. Arthur was twenty years old, he had finished school and spent a year working odd jobs here and there, and now he wanted to see some of the world before he enrolled at uni. Make up his own mind about who he was. But he didn’t like how it turned Elsie and Aida to jelly. How they looked at Thomas with demanding expressions and said, Is it something we’ve done wrong? Why so far away?
He fought the urge now, in the middle of this crowded, busy space, to take Aida’s hand as they watched Elsie lose her battle and sob onto their tall, adult son’s chest.
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ Arthur was saying. ‘I’ll be back before you know it. It’s only a year.’
Elsie, shuddering, pulled herself together and stepped back. She smiled at Arthur, wiped her cheeks, turned to Aida and said, ‘Your turn.’
One after the other they hugged Arthur. Even Joseph, who had teased Arthur for weeks about England’s warm beer and cold weather, looked a little wobbly. Millie playfully pushed at the side of his head, called him a loser and demanded a postcard from the Queen’s house. When it was Thomas’s turn, he hugged his son and slapped his back firmly, shook his hand and cleared his throat and discovered an intense interest in the skylights on the ceiling.
They watched Arthur walk towards customs. He turned back and waved, and then he was gone. Thomas put his arm around Elsie and she quaked against him.
‘It’s only a year,’ he consoled her. ‘He’ll be back before you know it.’
*
In England, Arthur met a young woman. He stayed longer than a year.
68
When Thomas’s financial planner retired in late 1995, he politely gave Thomas the option of taking his records and finding another company. Callaghan had then assured Thomas, however, that he wouldn’t find a better financial planner than his replacement at Bridges and Callaghan: Ms Jacqueline March.
Thomas, only in his late fifties, still considered retirement to be at least ten years away, but he’d secured an excellent financial situation over the past three decades, and his retirement funds were solid and steadily appreciating. Callaghan had served him well. Thomas had trusted the man’s advice for thirty years – he wasn’t about to stop now.
So, as Thomas sat in the reception area of Bridges and Callaghan (now minus the Callaghan, but with the addition of two new potted palms), he reminded himself of this trust in order to quell the apprehension he felt at the prospect of meeting this Jacqueline March. In terms of life, ten years was a long time – he had plenty of work left to do. But in terms of finances, how much more could he save in ten years? And how much could he potentially – with the wrong advice – lose? He had a responsibility to his family.
Thomas shifted in the chair, shaking off his unease. Callaghan had endorsed Ms March glowingly. He told himself also that for a Monday, this day had been off to an auspicious beginning.
Before the alarm, he had woken to the blanketed movements and murmurs of Elsie and Aida beside him. In the dark, his eyes still closed, he dived beneath the quilt to seek his wife and found her sleep-warmed skin, her limbs entwined with Aida’s. He kissed the curve of her neck and slipped inside her; she found Aida with her hands and Aida’s leg came up to hook behind his knee and Elsie, their beloved, the heartbeat between them. Fingertips pressed into his thigh. A giggle; a bitten-off gasp. Beneath Aida’s nightdress he replaced Elsie’s hands with his own, and Aida’s fingers slid to where he sank into his wife. Dawn draped a rosy gauze of light across the bed. In his mind’s eye he saw them from above, fitted together, a tangle of limbs and the women’s soft, fragrant hair and as always, he considered himself surely the luckiest bloke on the planet.
As further distraction he told himself that it was only a matter of weeks and he would become a grandfather.
Grandfather. Granddad. He broke into a sudden grin; his briefcase bounced on his knees. Poppy. Pa. Grandpa. Across the room the receptionist glanced up, and thinking his smile was for her, returned it briefly.
None of them knew why Millie had insisted on leaving it so late to start a family – she was almost thirty-two – but she and Joseph (although they still weren’t married) were finally having a baby.
The door to what had been Callaghan’s office cracked open.
‘Mr Mullet?’
Flash of a vivid pink blouse; thick, straight black hair cropped blunt at her eyebrows and chin. A bright, sincere smile.
Thomas stood and crossed the room. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Ms March,’ he said. Thrusting out his hand, in a habit as ingrained as walking, he then wavered. For a long second he didn’t quite know what to do. Then he recovered, smiled, and entered her office.
69
Aida and Millie went for a walk to the cemetery.
The headstone had slunk dangerously far to one side, slanted at such an angle that it seemed as though invisible wires held it up. The lines Here he lies / Fear not, dry your tears ran downhill as though the inscription might slip from the stone and trickle into the earth.
‘I can’t believe it’s still standing,’ Millie said, propping one hand on her lower back. Her belly had grown so large it floated in front of her, a planet with its own gravity. ‘Do you really think it’s that guy – that anti-conscriptionist, or whatever?’ she added, tilting her head to match the lean of the stone. ‘Surely he’d have family or friends. I can’t believe no one has come forward to fix it up.’
Aida dug her thumbnail beneath a flake of lichen, lifting it from the headstone. She balanced it on the side of her thumb. ‘That’s the thing with wanting to be anonymous. No one knows where you end up.’ She blew on the piece of lichen and it fluttered to the ground.
‘If no one liked him, why “dry your tears”?’
‘Maybe he was being ironic.’
Millie was dressed in a white t-shirt beneath denim overalls, stretched tight over her middle. Recently she had cut her dark blonde hair into the short, choppy layers around her head that everyone was calling ‘The Rachel Cut’.
‘I shoul
d make a donation to the cemetery,’ Aida told her. ‘To have the headstone fixed.’
Millie linked her arm through Aida’s and they continued through the cemetery, into the grassy piece of land where the fig tree still stood. Now, up ahead, a row of houses had replaced the eucalyptus trees that once bordered the space.
Aida held the lower branches back for Millie as they clambered through. Millie’s gaze ran up the tree, into its highest branches.
‘You’re not really going to climb up, are you?’
Aida unbuttoned the cuffs of her blouse and rolled her sleeves to her elbows. ‘Of course I am.’ She slipped out of her shoes.
‘Figs aren’t going to bring this baby on. You have concocted your own old wives’ tale there, old wife.’
‘You want to be pregnant for another few weeks? Stop calling me old.’
Millie laughed and leaned against a lower bough. Uncomfortably, she shifted, groaning when she found a position that eased the weight on her spine.
Aida said, ‘Your mother always went over her time.’
‘Come on.’ Millie gestured up the tree. ‘Up you get. You promised ice cream.’
Aida took firm hold of a branch above her head and swung her feet from the ground. At fifty-three, she wasn’t as nimble and light as she used to be. The decades had layered the flesh about her hips and rump like her body was storing energy for some kind of long hibernation. But she was still strong and fit – years of gardening, hiking, good food – and her breath only came a little heavier as she heaved herself through the limbs. The bark was smooth beneath her hands; leaves brushed her face and twigs tugged at her hair.
Of course figs weren’t going to bring on Millie’s baby. Nothing would – not the pineapple that had given her heartburn, not the castor oil that had set her cramping with diarrhoea all afternoon. Not even Elsie’s bunny-hopping in the car up a dirt road had persuaded Millie’s baby to make an appearance. In the same way that Elsie had watched her due-dates come and then pass as she had waited for Millie and then Arthur, nothing would work now for Elsie’s daughter except time. But a walk in the sunshine, a comedy video to watch, and baked figs and ice cream for afternoon tea would help take Millie’s mind off her discomfort.
