Heartlines

by Susannah McFarlane

  A few days later I am at Robin’s house for dinner and I concede. ‘Shall we look at some photos?’ I ask.

  Robin needs no further encouragement. She disappears down her hallway and returns with an armful of albums. ‘Which one would you like to start with?’ she asks cheerfully.

  ‘Perhaps around the time I was born?’ I answer, unsure if that is actually what I want to do, but it is at least chronologically sensible.

  And so we sit on the sofa and look at the first album. There are photos of Robin – she’s young, obviously, and beautiful. There are photos of her both before and after my birth and there’s really no difference; you’d never know anything had happened – well, of course not, that was the plan. There are photos of Tim and photos of Tim and Robin, but I gloss over them – it’s all a bit much.

  But there is one photo over which I linger: Robin is sitting outside with a dog in the country somewhere. It was taken a couple of years after my birth. Again, she looks beautiful, quite dreamy yet strong at the same time. I look at it with a pang – she looks nothing like me and she looks completely together and at ease. What did I want? For her to look a little sad, a little damaged? Absolutely. But she doesn’t and once again it’s confirmed that I was as good as dead to her.

  I turn the page and Anna appears.

  ‘See, doesn’t she look just like you?’ says Robin enthusiastically. I have to admit that she does: we share the same jaw-line, the same eye shape if not colour. It’s a bit weird: I have never looked like anyone in my family before.

  And then Matilda appears. Same square face.

  And Tim disappears.

  And Andy appears.

  And then, awfully, Andy disappears, drowned at a beach. I remember it from Robin’s book, but seeing photos of them all on the holiday and even the beach itself makes it more real.

  Robin talks about how messy it was – Tim leaving, Andy dying, her struggle to raise two small daughters – and I begin to get a sense of the ‘chaos and turmoil’ she referred to in one of her earliest letters to me. I can’t help but compare it to the calm, stable childhood I had – parents together in the same house for fifty years – and I feel very grateful to Mum and Dad for it. But I also feel strangely unsettled and a bit jealous and that feeling persists as we look through more albums and I see Robin and the girls change over the years. Oddly, I feel both relieved and left out, simultaneously pleased and sorry not to have been there. I start turning the pages more quickly, wanting to get it over with now, but as I turn one page of a later album I am stopped in my fast-turning tracks as I look at a photo of Anna. She is at some kind of school ball; wearing a black strapless dress, she looks almost exactly like I did at the same age. Indeed, there is a photo of me at a college ball, wearing an almost identical black strapless taffeta dress. I tell Robin and she is delighted. I am a little unsettled.

  Robin

  Although I have been urging Susannah to look through the photo albums, it’s quite a peculiar experience when she does so. It’s hard for me to identify with that young, attractive dark-haired girl. Is it really me? Who was she? I am not the same person now at all. The phases of my life seem like a series of balloons connected by a string of time and memory, extending through the years.

  Susannah and I don’t have that string, that line, connecting us. We have no shared memories of the past yet there is a connection, albeit a mysterious one: something deeper, less linear, that still holds. It’s the one that makes separated parents and children seek each other out – a bloodline, a primary source that is seemingly not easily annulled.

  Susannah and I early sailed away in different directions from each other. Looking at photos and videos of our separate voyages is like postcards from abroad: fascinating; sometimes happy-making; sometimes sad-making – Wish you were here/Wish I was there. But we do have the present and the chance to turn the bloodline into a heartline. I’m not sure how helpful the photo albums are.

  Susannah

  I try to move through the last album quickly but, I hope, without seeming rude. Robin talks a little about when she became a Christian and I try to move that along as well. Whenever she talks about God or her Christianity I feel uncomfortable; it’s as if I’m talking to someone else, not the Robin I am starting and wanting to get to know. It’s clearly very, very important to her and I respect that, but I don’t want to know about it because I feel it distances her from me. Soon, however, and thankfully, it’s time for dinner, which is lovely. The conversation returns to the present and I drive home feeling calmer.

  That night, however, I sleep badly with the photos of Robin spinning around in my mind like a B-grade horror movie. Then I dream that Robin is sitting opposite me but her form keeps changing: she blurs from Robin 1965 to Robin present to Robin 1980s and back again and then the dream cuts to Longleaf where I am walking up the drive. As I walk up, Tim, also shape-shifting from his 1965 to his present self, is walking down the drive towards me. Neither of us stops but he stares at me as he passes. I wake up and stay up for most of the night thinking the photo albums were not a good idea.

  Clue: having together a mixed garnish (7 letters)

  Susannah

  I am back at Robin’s house and we are sitting in the garden. Robin goes inside and comes back, not, thankfully, with a photo album but with The Age newspaper. ‘Let’s do the cryptic crossword,’ she says. ‘It’s fun.’

  Over the years people have tried to teach me how to do cryptic crosswords and have failed – or I have failed them. I have always wanted to understand them, felt that I should be able to but never got there. So, I don’t leap at Robin’s suggestion.

  ‘I can’t do them,’ I say apologetically. ‘Wanted to but never can.’

  ‘Oh, you just need to learn the clues,’ replies Robin, folding the paper at the crossword page and picking up a pen. Clearly we are going to do the crossword. ‘You just need to do them with someone for a while. Come on, come over here next to me, you have to see it.’

  My heart sings a little at the seating suggestion but also sinks a little that I am about to expose my cryptic thickness.

  ‘Right,’ says Robin, shifting into a definite teaching mode. ‘Let’s find an easy one.’

  ‘Oh, yes, please,’ I think and possibly say.

  And so, Robin slowly introduces me to the clues: words like ‘messed’ or ‘awry’ might tell you it’s an anagram; ‘the old city’ will always be ‘Ur’ and ‘Father’ often ‘pa’; ‘extremes’ might tell you to take the first and last letter of a word; and then, if all else fails, just look for the word spelled out in the clue.

  I nod, I say ‘I see’ a lot, even when I don’t completely, and I wonder how on earth anyone ever remembers all these rules.

  ‘Here,’ says Robin. ‘Try this one.’

  I look, eager to be a good pupil. The clue is ‘Pleasant tumble in gale’. Delighted, I spy the word ‘tumble’. ‘Anagram?’ I ask.

  ‘Good!’ she says.

  I look again. ‘“Genial”? Anagram of “in gale” meaning pleasant?’

  ‘Brilliant!’ she exclaims. ‘You’re brilliant at these. I knew you would be!’

  I lap up the words of encouragement, feeling chuffed.

  ‘Right, this one,’ she says next.

  I look but this time I draw a blank. ‘Um …’

  ‘The same word defines both parts of the clue,’ Robin offers.

  ‘Right,’ I say, looking again. ‘Um, is it …? It’s … No, don’t know, it’s gone.’

  Robin looks across at me and with a kind but knowing smile asks, ‘Was it ever there?’

  Bugger. No, actually, it wasn’t but how did she know that? Any embarrassment at being found out is completely overshadowed at my joy in feeling that Robin somehow gets me, understands me.

  We continue, working our way – well, more Robin than me – through the crossword and she is right, doing the cryptic is fun and doing it with her even more so. Over the weeks it becomes a thing, our thing, something that w
e can do together.

  Robin

  Susannah is, needless to say, a fast learner with the cryptic, hare-like, overtaking her tortoise tutor in expertise in a relatively short space of time. Nevertheless, I retain a couple of tortoise advantages: probably a wider vocabulary (because I am more ancient), and a certain patient, plodding perseverance that does pay off.

  For example, when we get stuck, I systematically go through the alphabet, mentally inserting each letter into the blank space in question. As I laboriously intone A … B … C … I sense the impatience and aggravation of the hare. Also, I will have none of her attitude of, We’ve got the right answer – do we really have to know exactly why?, insisting instead that we proceed no further until we have completely worked it out. Thus I am as an anchor to her kite.

  Amid the swirling emotional currents of our reunion and family relationships, the cryptic crossword frequently proves to be a billabong of calm, giving us a breather and bonding us together.

  Solution: SHARING.

  Meeting Matilda

  Susannah

  Despite resisting Robin’s pressure for me to meet her daughters, I Google and check them out on Facebook – it seems only fair as they have all Googled me. And then, taking myself by surprise, I decide to message them. There is something about doing it on my own terms, away from Robin, and a message seems safer than a meeting. And I can still feel that I am trying to deliver on Robin’s vision.

  Anna, the oldest sister, and her family are working in Vanuatu, so I decide to message the next one down, Matilda. They are all, of course, much younger than me, so the closer in age to me, the more I think we might have in common. Matilda is the one who apparently kept a watch out for me on the public transport of Melbourne (not knowing that in looking for a brunette she was doomed to fail even if fate had brought us together on a tram), so she seems a good place to start. But what do I write to a sister I’ve never met? I write this:

  Hi – well, this is weird, but no weirder – and kind of wonderful – than everything else about this path Robin and I seem to be hurtling down. I am hopeless on FB but at least it’s a way for us to make contact – I’d like to. Susannah x

  I wonder about the ‘x’ but leave it there – better to be open and warm than not, I reckon.

  I send it off late one afternoon and wait, wondering when or if she will reply. I don’t have to wait long: Matilda messages back that evening. She sends a long, long message and I send a long, long reply and then we are off, messaging our life stories over the next twenty-four hours – with the same comfort and ease I felt when I was first emailing Robin. The click of connection is instant and just as I am wondering what will happen next, Matilda bursts right through the security bubble of the message and rings my mobile just as Oskar, Emma and I finish dinner.

  ‘Oh, hi Matilda,’ I say looking at Oskar and Emma across the table with a dumbstruck expression. Oskar looks even more gobsmacked than me, but a wide smile breaks over Em’s face.

  ‘That’s so cool!’ she says. ‘Put her on speaker!’

  I decline that invitation and instead move into another room to talk. Disconcertingly, Matilda sounds remarkably like my sister Sophie, which is odd but it colludes in making me feel instantly at home talking with her – and we talk for two hours, including, eventually, a brief session with Emma on speaker phone. There is no getting-to-know-you, polite, warm-up conversation – we hurtle straight to the heart of things. Matilda has, sadly, suffered from illness most of her life and she talks freely about this, as I do about stuff that has happened to me. It is crazy how deep, how honest we go so quickly, and how we use similar expressions and have the same throaty laugh: it is like talking to myself.

  ‘So, when am I going to meet you?’ she asks.

  ‘Um, I don’t know …’ I begin.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ declares Matilda.

  ‘Okay,’ I reply.

  What? I say to myself, but before I can say, ‘Actually, I’m trying not to rush into things’, we have arranged where and when to meet the next day.

  I get off the phone and walk out into the living room.

  ‘I’m meeting Matilda tomorrow,’ I say to Oskar.

  ‘You are? What happened to the go-slow strategy?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I reply.

  Matilda and I have agreed to meet at a park near her place – nice and neutral and easy for Matilda, who doesn’t drive. I buy chicken sandwiches and a bottle of champagne and then think, Gift! I need to buy small gift! But what does one buy a birth sister? I consider many things and settle on a plant. Perfect, I think, something that grows. Yet the purchase and the over-thinking behind it has meant I am now running late so, with small butterflies in my tummy and some calming ABBA playing in the car, I drive off to the other side of town. The butterflies have grown quite large by the time I arrive, park and walk across the playground towards a woman in a red shirt who, brown hair aside, looks a lot like me.

  We exchange nervous smiles but a warm hug and then we sit under a tree and toast ourselves with the champagne. And we talk and talk and laugh. It is lovely and we only stop because I have to get home because Oskar and I are going out. At one point I reply to something she says, ending with ‘Don’t be silly, my friend.’ And there is a pause, an awkward one, and we both know why – because she isn’t my friend. She is my sister.

  Robin

  Even I am amazed at the whirlwind connection that has sprung up between Susannah and Matilda. Although I am a little stunned by the breakneck speed of it all, I am happy at any sign of family integration. However, their relationship does prove to be rather a runaway cart, crashing through fences of restraint and discretion.

  Susannah

  Matilda and I speak and see each other often over the next two weeks. I am happy whenever I see her name come up on the phone, as it does one afternoon while I am driving to a meeting.

  ‘Susannah, don’t be angry at me!’

  ‘Why would I be?’

  ‘Because I’ve just told Dad, Tim, about you. It just kind of came out.’

  ‘Matilda! You what?’ I shout as I pull the car over to the side of the road.

  Timidity

  Robin

  I had been apprehensive about telling Tim of Susannah’s reappearance. I think I feared it might stress him out. However, the choice is taken away from me when I learn that Matilda has let the cat out of the bag by mistake. So, I ring him.

  ‘Tim – hi! It’s Robin. So, I hear Matilda told you about Susannah? Unbelievable, that girl! Of course I was going to tell you – I was just waiting for the right moment. I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about it. How do you feel?’

  ‘I’m delighted!’

  ‘Really? That’s great. It’s certainly pretty amazing …’

  I share more; I tell him that we have met, whom I think she looks like, that she is a well-known author of children’s books.

  Tim’s last words before he hangs up are: ‘I’m going to Google my daughter.’

  Armed with this happy information, I enthusiastically launch into stage two of Operation All In Together and begin to harass Susannah over the issue of Tim.

  ‘You know, Tim is so happy that you have reappeared. He would love to meet you anytime you feel ready – no pressure, though.’

  Susannah

  Perhaps oddly, I haven’t really thought much about my birth father – either over the years or now. No one ever asks me, ‘Do you want to find your birth father?’ It is always about my mother. And so it seems to be now.

  Of course, once Robin tells me his name I Google him as well and, because he is an actor, he is easy to find. And it is just as easy to see that I have his eyes and his hair, just as Robin has said. That piques my interest, or something else I have been denying, but I still don’t want to meet him. Don’t want to or am afraid to? Maybe, probably, both, but either way it isn’t happening, however hard Robin pushes. And push she does …

  Robin

  I think I have found the perfe
ct way to spark Susannah’s interest in Tim. I am sure she will appreciate his wit because she has such a good sense of humour herself. I happen to have a copy of a piece he wrote about his stint as a department-store Santa last Christmas, which I find very funny. So, one day, as we are sitting out in my garden again, I try my new tactic.

  ‘By the way, I have a copy of this piece Tim wrote about when he got a job as Santa in a department store last Christmas. Do you want to read it? I think it’s hilarious.’

  Susannah

  Robin is standing in front of me holding out pieces of paper, an article Tim wrote about a job as a department-store Santa. She wants me to read it. She really wants me to read it. Robin cannot praise it enough: it is, it seems, possibly the funniest thing ever written and I will just love it. She is so enthusiastic that it is impossible for me to say no. It’s not that I don’t want to read it – who doesn’t want to read something funny? It’s more that I’m not sure I want to meet Tim, on the page or in person. I haven’t worked out how I feel about him and I don’t know how he feels about me – after all, he never came looking for me. And, I realise, I am having enough problems digesting meeting Robin and Matilda without adding Tim and the rest of Robin’s family to my plate. For one of the few times in my life I seem to be advocating a take-it-slowly approach. However, it is clear that this is not a genetic disposition. But, for now, how can reading the piece hurt?

  So, I read it and it is funny, very funny, but I don’t say that. I’m not sure I’m ready to concede anything – to myself or to Robin – about Tim. And I am mindful that Robin is watching me read it and that she might take any show of enthusiasm as a green light to talk about meeting Tim. I really can’t let her lead me into that.