The Ties That Bind

by Lexi Landsman

  His eyes were wide and full of innocence. ‘I know. Is it like the one where they put the needle in to take blood?’

  ‘No, this one’s different. They give you a needle and it makes you very drowsy. And then while you’re sleeping they do the test so you don’t feel anything. When you wake up, Dad and I will be waiting for you. And you might have a little pain in your hip.’

  ‘Well my hip better not be too sore ’cause I really need to start practising my free kicks.’

  ‘Buddy, you will get to practise, I promise,’ David lied. ‘You just have to be patient and sit tight a bit longer until the test is done.’

  A few hours later Matthew was prepped for the procedure. They put him in a gown and he met the friendly anaesthetist, who made jokes to calm him down while she put a numbing cream on his hand so the needle wouldn’t hurt.

  ‘I’m being brave,’ he whispered to David, even though his lip trembled and his cheeks were red with fear. In the moments before they took him into the treatment room, he looked at his parents for reassurance. David patted Matthew’s forehead.

  They took him through, leaving David standing under the bright lights of the hospital corridor wondering why he was the one in physical pain when it was his son on the operating table.

  15

  JADE’S grandmother always told her that the secret to olive farming was simple: one part mineral-rich soil, one part good irrigation, and one part love. Jade woke at dawn thinking about this and wondered, if you were left with only one third, would it be enough to start over?

  She looked through the window at the dusty sky caught in a shade between night and day. She crawled off the couch and found her grandmother on the deck.

  ‘How did you sleep, agapi mou?’

  ‘Fine,’ Jade lied.

  ‘You sound tired,’ Helena said. ‘You know, if that couch is uncomfortable, you can share my bed. It is big enough for two. I will try not to snore.’

  Jade rolled her eyes playfully. ‘I think I’ll stick to the couch. Where’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s still asleep.’

  ‘For a change,’ Jade mumbled under her breath.

  ‘You must not be like that, my girl. You must be patient with him. It is hard for him. This is the first time Paul has been away from our house.’ She took a breath. ‘He blames himself, you know. He keeps saying he should never have let you stay. He should have forced you into the car. He is riddled with guilt. If something had happened to you, his only girl left …’

  The word hung in the air. ‘What do you mean “left”?’

  ‘That he left you behind,’ Helena said quickly.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Jade snapped. ‘Nothing happened. I don’t know why he does that. Tears himself up about things that happened in the past. I wouldn’t have got in that car, even if he’d forced me to.’

  ‘You are so much like your mother. So defiant,’ she said.

  Jade stood up, feeling the words like a curse. ‘I am nothing like my mother. Nothing,’ she scolded, her voice brittle and biting. She walked into the clearing and ignored her grandmother calling her back.

  ‘I didn’t mean it, agapi mou! Helena yelled. ‘My darling.’

  But Jade walked ahead and didn’t look behind her until she had reached the heavy overgrowth of trees that gave way to black skeletons of the forest.

  She was nothing like her mother.

  One of Jade’s first memories of Asha was at Silver Creek, where the district got its name. She was spending the day at the popular swimming spot with her mother and father.

  Her mother stopped to admire a lavender rose bush. ‘Lavender roses mean enchantment. Love at first sight.’ She took Jade’s hand and looked her in the eyes. ‘Don’t ever fall in love,’ she said. ‘It will undo you.’

  Jade was used to her mother’s confusing meditations and she had learned not to ask questions. She knew just to listen and to nod as if she understood them. Her mother picked a rose for Jade. ‘From a bud, a flower blooms. Like your heart, see?’ She placed her hand on Jade’s heart.

  They walked along the embankment to where the river opened up to a calm swimming spot. By the time they had chosen an area to settle for the day, Jade had absentmindedly pulled the petals off the rose one by one until nothing but the bare stalk remained. ‘Don’t you know how to hold onto anything?’ her mother scolded when she saw the stem in her palm. ‘It’s dead now.’ Jade clasped the bare stalk in her palm, wishing she could make the petals grow back.

  Asha turned away from Jade. ‘On summer weekends, we should leave Jade with your mother and set up a tent here,’ she said to Paul as they put the picnic mat down. She rested on her elbows and elongated her neck, tilting her face to the sun.

  ‘I love tents,’ Jade said, trying to edge into their conversation.

  Her father’s eyes were locked on her mother. He stared at her like he was under a spell that Jade couldn’t break.

  ‘You’re only five,’ Asha said, temporarily turning her attention to Jade. ‘You’ve never stayed in a tent.’

  ‘So?’ Jade said. ‘I know what they look like.’

  ‘You can’t love something you don’t know.’

  Jade knew her mother was already somewhere else.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ her mother said again to her father.

  ‘Really, you want to camp out here for the summer weekends?’

  ‘Just imagine it, waking up to this – to the sound of the rippling water and the cicadas, to the smell of eucalyptus and fresh dew and damp leaves, to the shifting light, to the silence and calmness of it all.’

  He smiled. ‘If that’s what you want. I’ll speak to Tom. See if we could borrow his tent.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  He reached for her hand and pulled her towards him. He kissed her on the lips and whispered something that made her head tilt back into a laugh.

  Jade went to the water’s edge and threw a pebble into the water, thinking about how much she wished she had someone to play with. ‘When can I have a sister?’

  Silence cut the air between them and Jade immediately regretted saying anything. It lingered, thick like the moss crusting the sides of the river. Neither of her parents answered. Instead Jade watched her father curl his fingers behind her mother’s neck, and stroke her hair. Her mother closed her eyes. When she opened them she looked past Jade, as if she were transparent. I’m see-through, Jade thought. Invisible.

  Jade paced the five kilometres to the Scarborough Pub brooding over her grandmother’s comment. She walked in to find people asleep on the floor of the pub, so she stepped into one of the back areas and found clothes piled high in boxes, bags and suitcases.

  People obviously wanted to help and the donations must have come from around the country, but three days on from the fire, no system was yet in place to sort through it all. Emergency services were tied up with the remaining fires, finding the missing, and clearing the roads of fallen trees and power poles.

  Jade gaped at the giant mess of fabric and colour, not knowing where to start. She sat down quietly by the clothes and started to sort through them, dividing them up into piles for boys, girls, men and women.

  While she was working through the clutter of clothes, she felt a hand tap her shoulder. ‘Jade?’ She turned to see Pamela Thomas, her high school Geography teacher and the wife of the local firefighting captain. Jade stood up slowly and the woman reached out to hug her. Where once they would nod or smile if they passed each other, now there was a kind of closeness from having experienced a shared tragedy.

  Pamela had coppery-red shoulder-length hair that was usually neatly parted to one side and flicked up at the edges but today was twisted messily into a bun with frizzing ends. ‘It’s such a disaster, isn’t it?’

  Jade looked at the clothes. ‘It is, but we’ll sort through it.’

  ‘Not the clothes,’ Pamela corrected, ‘everything. This whole town’s a mess. I feel like a train wreck. I don’t know what day of the week it is. I�
�ve hardly seen Kevin. And I just worry constantly about him out there with the fires.’ She sighed heavily and then buttoned up her pale cream cardigan and straightened the bottom. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t be burdening you with all this. I’m just exhausted.’

  Pamela was about fifteen years older than Jade, somewhere in her early forties. It was uncomfortable for Jade to hear her former teacher confide in her and see Pamela now falling apart at the seams when she was usually so composed.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Jade said softly. ‘I think we all feel a little lost.’

  Pamela sat down and peered at the bundles of clothes. ‘People have been dropping off the clothes at the fire station and I’ve been bringing them here but, to be honest, I didn’t know where to start. I just can’t think clearly at the moment.’ Jade sat next to Pamela and together they began to sift through the clothes. When others woke up in the pub, they came to join them and soon there were about ten people organising the garments.

  Pamela retrieved a roll of black tape to divide the floor of the room into categories when her mobile rang. ‘Tell them to drop it at the car park at the back of the pub,’ she said, sighing.

  ‘More clothes?’ Jade asked when the call ended.

  ‘No. Hay and fencing. We’ve already received loads of it, which people really need, but I don’t know how to keep track of it all and get it to the right people.’

  ‘Where is it now?’

  Pamela stood and led Jade and Anna, one of the other volunteers, out to the back of the pub to the car park.

  ‘Oh wow,’ Jade said as she saw the amount of material that had been donated. ‘We have to get some sort of system going. How can we keep track of who needs what?’

  Anna, who was in her sixties, spoke in a soft, nervous voice. Jade recognised her as a curator from the history museum, which had been one of the town’s tourist attractions but was now nothing more than rubble. ‘My son works at the radio station. I could see if he could make an announcement asking people to donate feed and fencing materials, and to call us and drop them here.’

  ‘We’ll need two numbers,’ Jade said. ‘One that people call to make the donations and one if they want to register for the service. We also should let people know that they can come here to get some clothes, food and other donated goods. Oh, and we should ask for volunteers to come to help us.’

  A clear plan had formed in Jade’s mind and suddenly, for the first time since the fires, she felt a sense of purpose. ‘How quickly can you get onto your son?’

  ‘I can call him now.’

  Within the hour, they had drafted a notice that Anna asked her son to announce on radio and to also email other media outlets to do the same, along with starting an email chain. A friend of Anna’s made photocopies of the notice to distribute to the local residents at the school hall.

  Moments after the first announcement was made, the phone calls started to stream in from all over the country. Pamela took the donation calls, while Jade fielded those from people in need of the donations or asking for help with fencing.

  Over the next three days, the pub morphed into a relief centre and a constant hive of activity. The upstairs level became the office administration area where they managed incoming calls. Pamela got a large spare map from the fire brigade, which they put up on the wall and used pins to mark the areas where help was needed. Jade and Pamela became the figureheads of the volunteers and were the ones people went to with questions.

  Locals came in their hundreds, eager to help, so Jade left two of the volunteers to field the calls while she set about organising the volunteers into teams to help residents in need.

  It seemed that as soon as they got one system going, another problem would arise, but Jade and Pamela managed to keep everything running as smoothly as possible in the trying circumstances. Even her father got involved, going with one of the strike teams Jade had arranged to help local farmers with the agistment of animals, and she only saw him fleetingly over those strenuous days.

  A church group brought pallets of drinking water for all the volunteers because all the water tanks were contaminated and clean drinking water was so scarce. Her grandmother’s cooking group had taken over the kitchen and the pub bench and now prepared meals for the volunteers as well as the firefighters.

  Although Jade was focused on the tasks at hand, whenever she had a free moment she found herself hoping Adam would be the next person to walk through the pub doors. She kept thinking about the way he had looked at her by the oak tree, how his eyes had softened, and of his insistence that he take her to look through the rubble of her home. She thought of his hands, the roughness of the skin on his palms, and the black grime embedded in his nails. His were hands that knew how to break through walls, how to dig through rubble, how to feel their way in the darkness, how to save a life.

  Jade was so flat-out with everything that needed to be done that she didn’t return to the cabin for the first two nights, and instead slept on the floor of the pub. On the third night, she was so exhausted that she fell asleep in the car park on a bale of hay. She was woken by the silhouette of a small woman.

  ‘It is time for you to take a break, agapi mou.’

  Jade smiled sleepily up at her grandmother.

  ‘Avrio tha xekinisoume pali,’ Helena said. Tomorrow, we will start again.

  As Jade blinked into the evening light, she took in her grandmother’s words. We will start again, Jade repeated to herself.

  Yes, she thought. We will.

  16

  IN COURTNEY’S university days she self-diagnosed herself with atychiphobia – an obscure term for fear of failure. She thought it was quite a feat to have been able to isolate her greatest anxiety. In fact, she was thrilled to put a name it, to bottle it, compartmentalise her life as she did everything else. What she didn’t trust were things that were intangible. Things without a name.

  Like now – the feeling of breathlessness that came with waiting for the results. Instead of letting fear rise up in her, she pushed it aside and gave it a label: precautionary. That’s all the tests were and nothing more.

  When Matthew came to after the anaesthetic, he felt pain in his left hip. The doctor said it was normal and that it would be tender for a few days. He spent another night in hospital and then they were allowed to go home while they waited for the biopsy results. Somehow being in a hospital felt like being enclosed in a city that wasn’t measured by time of day or seasons but by the shifting of the guard – the nurses’ changeover.

  ‘It’s good to be home, isn’t it?’ Courtney said to Matthew as he propped himself onto the couch, rubbing his hip.

  ‘My hip is still sore,’ Matthew said, his face sunken. ‘How am I going to play my best with it still aching? Why couldn’t they have done it after the game, or not at all.’

  Courtney sat next to Matthew. David had gone to work – he had opened his clinic on a Sunday to see a backlog of clients and he would be there until 1 pm, at which time Courtney would go to the gallery and do some much needed catching up. The opening day of Gabriela’s exhibition was the coming Saturday, which was also Matthew’s big game. So, after Courtney cut the red ribbon and gave the opening speech she would sneak out to catch the second half of Matthew’s match, only to return to the exhibition immediately after.

  ‘Sweetheart, they wouldn’t let you go home until they did it. It’s just their policy,’ Courtney lied.

  Matthew flicked his hair back and sank lower into the couch. ‘Well, I don’t see why they get to decide.’

  ‘We’ll just tell the coach and he’ll understand if you don’t play your best.’

  Matthew sat up straighter, his face ashen. This was clearly the wrong suggestion. ‘No, you can’t do that. You can’t tell him! He might tell the scout from the academy and then he won’t come to watch me. Promise me, Mom, you can’t say a word.’

  ‘Of course, little man, if that’s what you’d prefer.’

  She tilted his chin up to her with one finger and kissed
him on the nose. ‘Now, as an almost-professional player yourself come Saturday, you’d know that soccer players injure themselves almost every game. It’s par for the course. Do you think one of them wouldn’t play if they had a bit of pain somewhere?’ Courtney said, against her motherly instincts. What she really wanted to say was, You need to rest and miss the game on Saturday.

  Matthew looked up at her, wiping away any trace of tears. ‘They would play,’ he said, ‘no matter what.’

  ‘Exactly, so you just need to rest as much as you can and when you feel up to it, you can practise in the garden. You still have six days until the game and by then the pain will be gone. Plus, we made sure it was your left hip.’

  ‘I guess you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I am,’ Courtney said messing his hair. ‘Mothers are always right.’

  Matthew turned the television on to the sports channel just as the doorbell rang.

  ‘Dad,’ Courtney said, relieved to see her father on the doorstep after the last two days of torture. She felt so overcome seeing his face that tears welled in her eyes. ‘It’s so good to see you.’

  He had takeaway coffee and a hot chocolate in a boxed tray in one hand, and a paper bag smelling of fresh bagels in the other. ‘Well, you’re home now and it’s all over. What you need is a soy cappuccino, one sugar for you,’ he said, handing it over. ‘And where is my soccer champion?’

  Matthew looked up over the couch. ‘I’m here!’ He lightened at the sound of his grandfather’s voice.

  ‘A hot chocolate with a marshmallow for my favourite grandson,’ he said. Courtney could see him look Matthew over carefully, trying to hide any sense of worry with an extra punch in his voice.

  ‘Your only grandson,’ Matthew corrected. It was their ongoing joke.

  ‘He’s still my favourite one,’ Frank winked. ‘And for you both, two salmon bagels, extra cream cheese, no capers.’

  Matthew left his on the side table, and Courtney saw her father register this. ‘They made him eat at the hospital or they wouldn’t let him go home,’ she said, as much to reassure herself as her father.