He seems OK with looking across and finding you weeping. He doesn’t try to stop you; he doesn’t say anything about time healing. He doesn’t even offer you tea. So far he is the only person who can stand to simply be with you. You’ve never known, before, what a rare quality this is.
Today you bash along a rough bush track, and as you emerge on the steep side of the enormous caldera and look down at the tilted cone rising from its centre, you’re struck by the deep unfamiliarity of the place. The country of Toby’s death is obscenely fecund; you turn your back for a season in this place and a little shoot of a plant will be towering over your head. You once liked its warmth and fertility. But as fast as this land gives, it takes away again, snatches life back, tramples it, breaks it down, claims it. Anything dead is humus before you can blink.
At lunch you feel dangerous. Perhaps because you’re dangling your legs over the lip of an old volcano, perhaps because your fury at Finn is starting to bubble hot and deep. Chen has brought lunch, as always: rice paper rolls wrapped around chicken and noodles and mint; falafel and hummus in flat bread, expertly made, stowed in a small cooler with an ice brick so they emerge fresh and tasty. You can barely bring yourself to eat anything cooked by Finn, but thanks to Chen’s lunches you’re getting nutrition.
‘How come you’re not married?’ you ask, picking up a pebble and casting it overarm into the valley.
He shrugs. ‘Job plus PhD doesn’t equal much time for anything else. You know that.’
You make a rueful face. ‘Guess I was already married when I started mine, but six years of study was still a big ask for Finn.’
‘I got into the habit of being on my own.’ Chen glances sideways at you. ‘And then – well, the people I like always seem to be committed.’
Flirting with danger feels suddenly stupid and you back off. ‘Well, you’re a great cook.’
He picks up another rice paper roll and asks, more gently than you deserve: ‘Have you told your mother yet?’
*
The nursing-home matron comes out to reception to meet you, her face a picture of compassion, her arm outstretched to pat or grasp or hug. On the phone she’s promised to keep your secret about Toby. Agreed the news would be traumatic – and might have to be repeated to your mother many times.
‘We’re so sorry,’ she begins, and you back away, nodding yes, yes, to head her off.
‘No one’s slipped up, have they? She hasn’t found out?’
‘She doesn’t know a thing. The staff have all been briefed.’
‘Good,’ you say, turning away and setting off down the hallway. You can do this.
‘Bridget,’ she calls after you. ‘She’s drifting today.’
She’s seated by the window in her comfortable armchair, looking out into the garden. You stand for a moment at the door to her room, steeling yourself. You never know how she’ll be from one visit to the next. Never mind that you’re not the same person who came in a couple of weeks ago, simply tired from work and thinking that made for a bad day.
‘Oh hello,’ she says. You focus and find her looking up at you and smiling.
You force yourself to smile back, blinking back tears you weren’t aware of. ‘Hello, Mum.’
‘I’m not your mother, dear,’ she says, with a sympathetic nod. ‘Don’t you know where she is?’
‘No,’ you say slowly. ‘No, I don’t know.’
‘Never mind. Come and sit down and wait for her. I think she was just here.’
‘Thank you.’
You sit next to her and share the view. It’s pretty. This isn’t a bad place, not at all. You were lucky to get her in here.
Unstoppable tears slide down your face.
*
Someone wants to buy your house. Finn blurts it out as you climb the steps to the verandah, talking to fill the silence as you try to absorb his words. Have you even agreed to selling?
‘I know we haven’t talked about the price or anything, but she had someone interested and wanted to bring them around, and it just went from there.’
He tells you their offer. It’s insultingly low: far less than you paid. What kind of person wants to profit from your misery like this?
‘We should take it,’ Finn says. ‘Cut our losses. We could be back home in a month.’
You shake your head, more in disbelief than refusal, and walk past him into the living room, noting its sudden neatness and the absence of flowers. You throw your bag down, kick off your shoes, push into the kitchen and pour a frosty glass of sauvignon blanc.
The house feels hot and airless. Once upon a time you’d have swum after arriving home on such an evening. Now it’s become normal to act like you don’t have a pool at all, as if across the safety fence is no-man’s-land, mined and impassable. For the want of somewhere to go you head back out to the verandah, passing Finn and walking to the end furthest away, warning him with an upheld hand to keep away. You lower yourself into the creaking wicker armchair and allow a long mouthful of wine to slide down your throat.
Finn gets up and goes inside. You take another, larger, mouthful of wine. You’ve been waiting for it all day, thinking about it in the comfort and risk of working beside Chen for hours, counting koala scats, searching for scratch marks, peering up into trees. You want Chen nearby, and then you’re relieved when the day is over. Relieved until you step into your house and must confront Finn and your barely contained rage, and Jarrah, who seems to stay just out of your reach.
You need to make a decision. You need to think.
If you sell the house, Finn can lead the way back down south. He could find you somewhere to live, get things ready while Jarrah finishes the school year and you keep working until something turns up in Hobart. You and Jarrah could move out of Murwillumbah, take a holiday house at the beach for a month or three, drive into work and school.
But.
What if, once separated from Finn, you don’t want to rejoin him? The distance between you is taut and stretched, quivering. It holds you together, for now. Without that tension, you might collapse. Or escape. Doesn’t he sense the danger of leaving you?
The door bangs and Finn steps out with another beer. He looks at you, eyebrows raised, asking permission. You nod and he lumbers towards you and lowers himself into the adjoining chair like an old man.
You launch right in. ‘We can’t afford it. We’d hardly buy back into Hobart with the money we’d lose.’
He doesn’t answer but tilts his head back and takes a long swig. You know all this without looking at him directly, with your visceral awareness of how his body moves itself near you.
‘What about Jarrah’s school? We can’t take him out now. It’s only the start of term four. He’s got to finish the year at least.’
A parrot lands in the umbrella tree near the verandah. These things are weeds, you’ve learned this week – harmless in cooler climates but rampant attackers in the subtropics, invading the bushland, growing without reason or limit. The birds don’t mind; the noisy miners and lorikeets make the most of the free food bounty. Shyer birds, Chen tells you, are getting rarer as the brilliant extroverts take over.
‘Edmund would be the first to say you can’t bank on making money from your art. My job pays the mortgage, remember?’
His silence is unnerving. You expect him to mount a case, to challenge each of your reasons for not selling, but he says nothing, leaving your arguments to fall flat. Two can play that game. You go back to your wine and your contemplation of the garden. You’ll sit it out.
You’ve both finished your drinks by the time Finn turns to you.
‘I just can’t live here, Bridge.’
Your heart contracts. There’s so much pain in his voice and for a second that’s all you hear – the agony of this man you’ve loved, the father of your children.
‘It might be the only offer we get. I want to take it. I want us to go home.’
How can you argue against what is, clearly, Finn’s bottom line? You wan
t another glass of wine so badly that your throat aches, but you can’t get up. The two of you sit in silence with your empty glasses. More lorikeets land in the umbrella tree and shriek their joy as they slash into the spikes of tall crimson flowers, shredding the petals and letting them fall to the lawn.
‘It must have taken you all day to clean up the house,’ you say.
JARRAH
Time after Toby: fourteen days. He was gone to the land of the monster kings. Did he miss me? Did he want to come home?
They thought I didn’t know, but Dad was sleeping in the studio. He’d sneak over there after I went to bed and sneak back early in the morning so he was in the kitchen drinking coffee when I got up.
Hearing him go at night was my signal. I’d watch from the window, and once he’d shut the studio door behind him, I’d get out of bed. I’d stand by the door and listen to make sure there was no noise from Mum, and then I’d tiptoe down the hallway and open Toby’s door. It used to squeak but I’d found some oil and put it on the hinges and now it was silent.
I’d get into his bed and pull the covers up. I’d take his book out from under the pillow and open it, and I’d read to Toby in the dark, in a whisper. As if, by reading it often enough, I’d remind him to get back in that sailing ship and come home to us.
Until tonight.
Got home from school late. Watched Laura’s drama rehearsal and then her mother collected us and dropped me off out the front. It was dark as I opened the gate. Smelled mown grass. The path was clean, and as I climbed the steps, clomped over the verandah and stopped by the door, everything seemed tidy. Had Dad done it? Thought he was supposed to be working on that stuff for Edmund.
I could hear them from outside. Mum’s voice, raised: ‘How dare you?’
Dad’s voice, lower. ‘They were coming. It had to be ready.’
‘I wasn’t ready!’
‘Look.’ His voice was so low it was hard to hear. ‘The sooner we sell, the sooner we can get out of here. I didn’t want to bother you.’
‘So you let her come in here and—’
I pushed the door hard, making plenty of noise as I stamped inside. They stopped talking.
‘Jarrah,’ Dad said.
‘Hi.’ I dropped my bag on the floor. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
They hadn’t realised I was late, I saw from the stricken look Dad gave me. He’d become hopeless at hiding his feelings.
Mum tried to cover it up, reaching out her arms. ‘You could have texted.’
I gave her a quick hug. ‘Dinner?’
‘Um, yeah,’ Dad said. ‘What d’you feel like?’
I felt like anything except a thawed-out casserole, and I was pretty sure that was all we had in the fridge. Obviously dinner wasn’t a priority.
‘I’ll just have a snack,’ I said. ‘Had something while I was out.’
They sat still and silent while I poured a bowl of cereal and sloshed milk on it, wondering how long I could live on that stuff before I got deficient in something. It wasn’t exactly relaxed in the kitchen. My back prickled between my shoulder blades, like it did when someone was watching me. I didn’t want to know what they were fighting about. I didn’t want to know what Dad’s move to the studio meant. I’d googled the divorce rates for people whose children died and found the usual crap you get when you ask a question like that: somewhere between twenty-five and eighty per cent, which was no help. Anywhere in that range sounded bad.
Finished the cereal, shoved my bowl in the dishwater, slung my schoolbag over my shoulder. ‘See you.’
‘Um, Jarrah,’ Dad said. ‘You know how we talked about selling the house? Someone came at short notice to see it. I had to put a few things away in your room. Sorry. Hope you don’t mind.’
‘Right,’ I said, not looking anywhere in particular.
There was more they wanted to say, I knew, but I didn’t want to hear it. Headed out of the kitchen, up the stairs, into my room and shut the door firmly so no one got any idea of following me.
Dad had done a teenage tidy-up: shoved everything into the cupboard and shut the door. I let it all spill out again and sat down on the bed.
My phone chimed. About as common as a supernova. I dug it out of the bag. Laura. She’d asked for my number a few days earlier, but it was the first time she’d texted.
It wasn’t exactly a question I could answer by text, but it seemed like I shouldn’t just ignore my first text from a girl. I didn’t know any of those abbreviations, but I made sure to turn off the caps and not use commas.
< bus tomorrow?>
It took me a moment, but I worked it out, and actually smiled a little. Maybe my use-by date wasn’t coming as fast as I thought.
I put some clothes away and took the chance to rip down my movie posters and shove them in the bin. They belonged to some kid I once knew; that’s how it felt. What I really wanted was something of Toby’s I could hang on to at night when it got bad. That plush monster he loved, the one that was sitting on his bed. I cracked the door open and listened. The TV was on downstairs; they couldn’t hear me. I tiptoed down the hall and silently twisted Toby’s doorknob. I didn’t need to flick on the light. Could tell from the streetlight coming in the window. His little car-shaped bed, the one he’d only had for three months, was made up with some plain cover I’d never seen before. The books and toys that had scattered the shelves and the floor were gone. There was no plush monster anywhere.
I stepped inside, shut the door behind me. Crept to a drawer and opened it. Empty. They were all empty. Everything that had belonged to Toby was gone. Like a kid’s room would look if no kid lived in there. Like something in IKEA.
I wedged myself into the space between the bed and the chest of drawers. Drew my knees up to my chest and made myself small in the dark.
He was gone. He was gone and he was never coming back, not sailing over the sea from the magic island, not on the shoulders of one of those monsters, not even in my dreams, where he never appeared.
Shivered, though it wasn’t cold. Thought I’d already lost everything, but that wasn’t true. There was always something else to lose. Toby was gone and my memory of him was being taken away bit by bit. Soon the house would be gone. By the looks of it, Mum and Dad wouldn’t last long either. I put my head down on my knees and pressed my eyeballs into my kneecaps until they hurt and I saw horrible spirals and blurs of light and dark on the back of my eyelids. Would I live with Mum, or with Dad? Would they both go back to Tasmania or would they end up in different places? It didn’t seem real. But I knew how things that didn’t seem real could suddenly get that way.
Toby must have held us together. Without him, we were like the particles after the Big Bang, flying apart, spreading at the speed of light to different points in the universe.
FINN
Finn knew he should be grateful. After a discussion that dragged on all evening Bridget had eventually agreed, but demanded he ask Angela to try for a higher offer. He’d hated risking the loss of the sale, but he made the call.
Angela got back to him the next morning. ‘They’ve come up fifteen grand,’ she said. ‘But they want the front of the house patched and repainted so you can’t see where the mechanism used to be.’
The words wouldn’t quite come clear in his mind and Finn felt stupid. ‘What?’
Angela paused. ‘Look, it stinks. I’m sorry. It’s the best I can do. Tom can start straight away on the repair and painting if you want to proceed.’
‘We want to proceed. Christ, we don’t want to lose it. How soon will they exchange?’
‘Within the week, or maybe two. But I can’t push too hard, or I’ll scare them off. It wouldn’t take much. Trust me, OK? I’ll send Tom around shortly.’
Finn hung up and went outside to stand on the verandah of the crazy purple house with its red trim, the house that had promised
so much and seemed like their friend. Maybe, away from this place that had betrayed them, and back in Hobart, he’d be able to work again.
It wasn’t hard to hide his lack of progress from Bridget. She never came into the pool area or the studio, and she never asked about the sculptures. Edmund was so careful not to make demands on him that fobbing him off hadn’t been too hard either. But the truth was, he couldn’t work. He had no idea what Bridget’s working days were like, but his were agony.
He wanted to rage back at her; of course he did, he was human. But if he allowed himself, then he might accuse her, and he knew they could never have that conversation. He had to put it out of his mind. And so he walked the house during the empty days. He raked the lawn and pulled weeds, he went to the shops. Sometimes he went out for coffee, dark glasses on, hat brim low, newspaper held high so he wouldn’t be recognised. He cleaned the studio and fitted his tools into their places. He used the computer to scroll through real-estate sites, looking for houses in Hobart. It seemed much more expensive than he remembered, and those sessions would send him back to the studio to fiddle with pieces of metal, rearranging them uselessly. He avoided Toby’s neat bedroom, and he didn’t ask Bridget where she was keeping Toby’s ashes.
Tom arrived within an hour of Angela’s call. He methodically laid a drop sheet the length of the verandah and taped the edges. Set out paint tin, brushes, tray, roller, clean rags, stirrer. He had the correct tool for levering the lid off the tin of paint and he placed the lid, wet side up, where it wouldn’t get in the way.
‘Did Mum tell you they want it painted a different colour?’ he asked.
Finn looked down at the tin of pale paint, then up at the vivid purple wall. ‘No.’
‘They’ll repaint the whole house once they buy it, so they’ve asked for the front to be done in Clotted Cream. I’ll have to undercoat it first.’
‘You’re in charge.’
Sixty Seconds Page 10
