Because when I saw him, completely closed down, completely locked up, I knew he was further from me than ever, and it still had me. Only now I was just trying to fix it. To make it better. Still knowing that I never would, that he would always be somewhere else. And as I followed him up the path to the road without saying a word, I thought about the strangeness of this day. The fact that he had asked me for something. To help him. That it was, perhaps, the first time this had happened.
When we reached the top he was out of breath and wiping the sweat from his forehead.
His car was a mess and I opened my window wide, trying to find an escape from the stale smell of the overflowing ashtray.
He pushed the street directory towards me and told me where it was we were going.
Can you direct? he asked.
I told him I felt sick if I had to look at a map.
He didn’t reply and I turned to the page he had marked.
It’s miles away, I said.
He turned the key in the ignition. I know. That’s why I didn’t want to be late.
Simon drives a car like he drives a bus. Both hands firmly on the steering wheel, each turn is exaggerated, too large. He drives slowly, sitting firmly in the middle of the lane, always braking in plenty of time, never losing his temper, never taking a risk.
Are you nervous? I asked him and because he did not answer me, I turned to the window, letting the cool breeze rush across my cheeks. It was colder than it had been for months and I wished I had brought a jumper with me.
I turned on the radio and twisted the dial until I found a station without too much static.
What’s happened to the aerial? I asked him.
He told me he had never had one.
Hits and memories. A classic from the seventies. And as I found myself humming in tune to a song that we had once both liked, I looked across at him, but he did not turn towards me.
When he finally told me that he was a bit anxious, I had forgotten my question. It took me a moment to realise that he was responding, and in that moment, it was too late. He had looked away again.
As we pulled up at the traffic lights, he lit another cigarette.
I took one from his pack.
I thought you didn’t smoke, and he looked at me, genuinely perplexed, as he passed me the lighter. It glowed, bright orange, one burning fleck of tobacco stuck to the coils.
I don’t, I lied. Not often, and as I drew back I felt the smoke scratch the back of my throat.
As the news came on the radio, Simon turned it off.
Why did you do that? I asked him.
I don’t like it. I don’t like hearing those things, and he changed down gears, slowly, methodically, leaving plenty of space between us and the truck in front.
It’s just the news. I went to turn it on again, expecting him to lean forward and stop me, but he didn’t.
A young girl had been burnt to death. Doused in kerosene and burnt. The man was in police custody. The truck in front inched forward. There were floods in Poland. Fifteen dead. We also moved forward. Simon kept his eyes on the road.
Did you stay in touch with him? I, too, was staring straight in front. I did not look at my brother but I could see his reflection in the windshield. He knew that I was referring to Mitchell. His name was unspoken but it hung there, between us.
I saw him nod.
I wrote to him.
I looked at his hands on the gearstick. Long, fine fingers. Out of place with the rest of his body. Hands that had belonged to the old Simon, tall, slim and graceful on the steps at Candelo, stretching in the morning sun.
He never wrote back.
I kept my eyes on him, there in the glass, his face washed out, watered-down planes of colour marking cheeks, eyes, nose, mouth.
I even tried to visit him once. In the institution.
His cigarette glowed as he drew back, and for a moment the smoke clouded his face. He wouldn’t see me, and as we swung onto the freeway, away from the sun, his reflection disappeared, wiped out, just the smears on the windscreen left in its place.
I flicked my butt onto the road and watched the sparks fly behind us. There in the rear-vision mirror, dancing orange, flying backwards.
Left at the next lights, I told him and he nodded.
I wound up my window, trying to drown out the wind rushing, the other cars, waiting for Simon to speak again and knowing that if I pushed him, he would stop. So I stayed silent.
He told me he had tried to find Mitchell when he had got out.
How? I asked him, not wanting to look surprised.
We braked slowly and I listened to the slow grind of the truck in front of us.
You know, phone book.
He had tried to find his mother first. He had forgotten she was dead. And as he told me this, I looked across at him wondering whether he remembered how I had refused to believe Mitchell when he had told us this.
He had searched for his sister next.
I remembered Mitchell telling me she managed a shop. I wondered whether he had also told Simon. I wondered how close they had been.
He was in jail again. Simon’s words were slow and hesitant.
Armed robbery. Twenty years.
The trees near the side of the road were swaying in the breeze. Tall palms, bending delicately, arcing through the sky. I watched them as Simon told me how he had tried again. Writing to him, his letters returned unanswered. Driving out to visit him, driving home again.
He had never said. He had never told any of us. For all that time.
Why?
He didn’t answer.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead.
He asked me where the next turn-off was.
I tried to look down at the map, the tangle of roads a blur in front of me, the smell from the ashtray rising in the stillness of the car.
Can you pull over? I asked him, and he looked at me. Just for a moment.
Now?
I could feel the nausea rising, from my stomach to my throat, my head light, swallowing it back, until Simon came to a halt, and by the side of the road, next to the curb, I hunched forward and vomited.
Dry weeds, cans and cigarette butts.
Each one slowly coming back into focus as Simon moved across to the passenger seat and passed me his handkerchief. It was clean, freshly ironed, and I did not know what to do with it.
He leant forward and wiped my forehead, and the gentleness of his touch surprised me.
It’s okay, and I sat in the gutter while he waited anxiously in the front seat. Just carsick.
He looked at his watch.
We’ve got to get going, and his voice was apologetic.
I stood up slowly, my legs unsteady, and got back in.
I need a drink, I said, and he nodded his head. To get rid of the taste.
He passed me a bottle of Coke, warm and flat, and studied the map.
Sorry, I said. It always happens.
He closed the directory and started the car.
Not far now, and as he pulled out onto the road again, I shut my eyes and tried to understand what it was he had been saying.
thirty-two
Why is it called Candelo? I asked Vi when we first arrived, the name of the town illuminated for just a moment by the headlights of the car.
We were driving down the deserted main street. Two streetlights. Everything closed. Mitchell, Evie and I in the back seat, Simon in the front. Mitchell with the instructions on his lap, directing us to the house.
In the darkness it was difficult to see anything. It was difficult to know where we were. The shadow of the hills on either side of us and to our left the sound of the river rushing.
Through the dust that caked the car window, I could see the name of the town written on the buildings, Candelo General Store, Candelo Pub, Candelo Post Office, faded white paint on what had once been thriving businesses but were now too large, almost ridiculous in their size.
Vi told me that people used to
take this road when they travelled from the north to the south. It was a journey that took days, she said.
This was where they arrived when the sun was setting, when night crept in, purple and soft, over the hills.
They were on horseback, she said. There were no streetlights. They had no torches.
And as they clattered over the bridge, they called out for light. Candel-o, their voices ringing out in the darkness.
Candles to light their way into town, to light their way to warmth, a bed for the night.
Candles to light their way on to the next part of the journey, so that they could see what was out there, so that they could see what was real and what was not.
And what was true and what was false.
Candelo, and I whispered the word to myself as we drove on in the darkness.
I did not know my brother.
I did not know him then, all those years ago at Candelo, and I do not know him now.
It was Bernard who asked me if I had ever considered the possibility that Simon was a little in love with Mitchell. It was Bernard who finally spoke the words out loud.
I was surprised. Not by the suggestion, but by the fact that my father was astute in his observation of his own son’s feelings.
We were sitting in his apartment. It was the day after the funeral. And because I was at a loss as to what to do, I had gone to my father for help. For answers. Normally he would have been the least likely source of assistance, but this time he was the only person to whom I could turn.
From his window overlooking the gardens, I could see that summer was rapidly becoming autumn. Almost overnight. The trees below were losing leaves, some branches already smooth-limbed against the flat sky.
My father lives in an old building. A gracious 1920s apartment block, one of the few in the city. His apartment commands one of the better views, across the sweep of office blocks and parklands and out to the harbour.
Samantha, his girlfriend, was in the process of moving out. There were removalists carrying the last of her possessions across the grand parquetry entrance hall and out to the elevator as we spoke. My father kept his eye on them. Every so often he jumped up mid-sentence and extracted a book or a statuette from an open box as they took it to the door.
She’s shameless, he told me as he placed a dark-red Venetian glass decanter on the dining-room table.
I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe she’s angry.
He looked surprised at the suggestion. She has no reason to be, he said.
I could have explained that people get upset when they are thrown over for another, but there was no point. He is what he is and no doubt he will remain the same until the day he dies.
He settled back in his armchair and looked directly at me. The last box had been carried out the door and he could concentrate.
So, he said, and he rubbed at his chin with the palm of his hand. It seems as though we need to go through this from the beginning.
From out in the lobby, the elevator clanged shut. The front door was still open and Bernard got up to close it.
I had gone there hoping he would be direct with me.
I had gone there hoping he would explain everything.
But I could see that it was not going to be so easy.
Simon told you he tried to stay in touch with Mitchell? and as he crossed his legs, he revealed the Italian silk socks he likes to wear.
I nodded my head.
He wanted to go through it all slowly, methodically. He did not want the torrent of words that had begun as soon as I had arrived, out of breath, telling him about our drive out to the service, speaking too quickly, perhaps even accusingly, until he had stopped me. Until he had made his comment about Simon being in love with Mitchell.
He was right.
Simon was a little in love. I can see that now and I cannot help but wonder whether I had known it then.
We both were. In our own ways.
And as I looked at my father, I wanted to ask him when he had come to that conclusion. When he had realised, and how. But I didn’t.
Unlike Vi, Bernard is a believer in love. An impossible romantic, he says and he throws his hands up in the air and laughs loudly.
He turns over girlfriends at a rapid rate, but I have little doubt that he loves each of them, passionately, at the time.
Also unlike Vi, he likes to talk about love, about the personal, about each of my involvements; he likes to advise. He is, after all, somewhat of an expert in the affairs of the heart.
So it has always been him I have told whenever I have fallen in love or out of love. Even though I do not speak to him nearly as often as I speak to Vi. Even though I will go months without seeing him. Even though I have far more in common with my mother.
But I had not come to him on that day to talk about love.
He stood up slowly and asked me if I would like a glass of wine. It’s been a long day, he said, indicating the mess that had been left behind by the removalists.
I told him I would.
On his sideboard, Bernard has a photograph of Simon and me. It was taken years ago, when he still lived with us. By a photographer who was unknown but is now famous; the reason, I suspect, for the display.
I picked it up and looked at it, holding it under the light, surprised as I always was at the enormity of the change that had occurred in my brother.
I put it down when I heard my father’s footsteps across the hall.
So, he said, as he placed his grandfather’s silver tray on the table between us. Simon tried to contact him, and he passed a glass across to me, for all those years.
For all those years.
And as my father took his glasses off and wiped them on the bottom of his shirt, I could not help but feel that I was about to hear him deliver a closing address.
Prepared while he was in the kitchen.
Well modulated and reasoned.
I sipped my wine and I waited for him to begin.
thirty-three
Vi is fierce in her condemnation of Bernard’s betrayal of her, and of us.
Never rely on your father for anything, she used to warn us. I have certainly learnt not to.
I have never asked my father why he left. I have always just accepted the version of events that we came to understand from Vi. My father was and is a man who constantly runs off with new women. He is a man of little moral fibre. He is a man who betrays. This is how Vi describes him and this is the filter through which I see him. But it does not mean I do not love him. It does not mean there is no other side.
I am heading up the path on my way out to meet a friend for breakfast and thinking about how Vi would define my betrayal, if I ever told her about it, when I walk straight into a removalist.
He asks me if I am Louise and I tell him I am not. She lives in the upstairs flat at the bottom of the stairs.
Are they moving? I ask.
He tells me they are. In a couple of weeks. He is coming to give a quote. Hell of a job, he says, and he shakes his head as he looks back up to the street and then down to where the stairs are now almost completely overgrown.
Where to? I ask him.
Interstate, he says. Company job. Transfer.
Louise’s work, no doubt. The organisation she works for is a national one.
I watch him make his way down the path, and I wonder what it will be like to live here without them and without Marco, without all the betrayals that linked us together, and all the justifications we invented to prop them up.
It is hard to imagine.
And I am surprised that the relief I feel at their departure is tempered by a sadness.
An unexpected emptiness, that I cannot quite explain.
Simon saw what we had done as a betrayal. But it was, perhaps, Mitchell who had hurt him the most. It was Mitchell to whom he had turned for an explanation, Mitchell who was left to do the talking, while I made my way slowly down the long corridor to the bathroom.
We must be careful with w
ater, Vi had warned us when we arrived. Quick showers, knowing how Simon and I liked to stand under for hours.
The bath was old, the enamel chipped and stained.
The steam rose, cloudy and sweet with Vi’s salts, half the container. Leaves stuck to my stomach, a smear of mud down my thigh, and the beginning of a bruise inside my leg. Mauve, yellow; I traced its outline with the tip of my finger.
And as I lowered myself into the water, I closed my eyes, wanting to block out everything but the sense of being submerged, safe, alone.
In the heat of the afternoon, Evie set up shop. Games, fruit, biscuits, cups and saucers, carried out one by one and displayed along the verandah wall; the prices that Simon had drawn up for her, 5c, 2c, 10c, propped up next to each item.
The clatter of her feet down the hall. Calling out my name: Ursula, Ursula, come to my shop. Come and buy something.
Sinking myself further into the water, trying not to hear.
There at Vi’s door.
My mother looking up from her typewriter and telling Evie she would come out soon. Very soon.
And in the dim of that bathroom, the steam slowly dissipated until I could see the sharp outlines of my knees, my hands, and, not liking what I saw, I turned on the hot, again and again. Letting it run until the water flowed over the edge of the tub, carrying the soap with it, spilling onto the floor, seeping out under the door, until Vi was there, demanding to know what on earth I was doing.
Nothing, I said, not looking at her.
You’re wrinkled like a prune.
And the plumbing groaned as she turned the tap off, and groaned again as I turned it straight back on.
For God’s sake, and she plunged her hand in, pulling out the plug before I could stop her. What is wrong with you?
I told her I didn’t feel well.
She told me not to be so silly.
I shivered as I sat in the now empty tub and she passed me a towel. Get some clothes on and go and dry your hair in the sun.
I heard the door slam shut behind her. I heard the silence. And then I heard the sound of her typewriter.
It was the quiet outside that made me go out there.
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