She had woken that morning in a fog of uneasiness, those strange few seconds of knowing something wasn’t right before remembering exactly what that not-right thing was. Jason had left early, crept silently out long before dawn so as not to wake her, and then she was alone in bed, the grey morning light filtering into the room, trying to think about what to do, to make sense of what had happened the day before. But ordered thoughts did not come to her, only the notion that she was bound to do what she had agreed to yesterday, which was to return to the hospital, take some kind of responsibility. It felt like a hangover—the hollow head, a vague sense of nausea, the feeling of being held captive to a spur of the moment decision.
At the hospital Lori had found Scott in much the same condition as he had been in the day before. She wasn’t able to see the neurologist until later in the afternoon, so all she could do was to sit with her brother. She’d been advised to talk to him, but she knew nothing about him, about what he liked. (Was he into sport, did he read books, binge watch box sets or Netflix?) About what made him tick. (Was he religious, interested in politics; a lover of art or a science buff?) She had imagined telling him about her kids, but realised she couldn’t, didn’t want to bring them into the picture. Would they ever know him? Did she want them to? Who was he, this man? And then there was the fact of simply being with him, something that gave her stage fright. Sitting beside him and reciting fragmented pieces of her life to him, all in a vacuum. No response, no acknowledgement. Beyond the perfunctory, there was little she could say without self-consciousness disrupting her thoughts, strangling her words.
A nurse had told her he’d had periods of stirring earlier in the morning, but he showed no signs of movement in her presence. She had waited, half hopeful, half dreading, but he had remained still, eyes closed and shut off from the world. Yesterday she had marvelled at him, had seen that it was him, despite the changes of the years. The fact that he existed seemed to be a kind of miracle. Today the connection felt tenuous. It was too much to bear to have no idea of him and who he was. Looking at her brother gave her no new information, only a deep sense of inadequacy and unease. After an interminable ten minutes she had headed out the door.
Soon after she had found herself on Brunswick Street, on automatic, crossing Gertrude, the autumn sun on her back, around her the cacophony of trams and cars and passing conversations. She hadn’t been thinking of Schiller then. Not immediately. Her only thoughts had been to escape, but once outside she had been struck by the fact that she was on familiar territory. Two blocks on she had seen the café, the logo above the front door that she had designed twelve years before. Her first ‘proper’ piece of work. She had stopped in her tracks. It was a funny thing, seeing that. If she was superstitious she might see her own sign as being a sign. God knows she was desperate enough for direction. But there was something else too, a kind of hunger she didn’t realise she had. It had been a long time since she’d seen Schiller and she had felt an odd yearning for his company. For someone to talk to. For an old familiarity that she didn’t have with anyone else.
She sat on her coffee for twenty minutes and was almost at the point of getting up to pay when she saw him, Schiller (or was it Chris?), striding down the street towards the café. He looked the same, she thought—still the flowing Jesus-like hair—but he was somehow different too. Older, she supposed. A little less energy to his stride, his face a little less firm, hair dulled with imperceptible grey strands. As he neared the café he must have felt her eyes upon him because he turned suddenly and stared at her as she sat, perched sideways on her chair. He was wearing sunglasses too, sleek Ray-Bans with dense, dark lenses, so that there were two barriers of darkness between their eyes. Two levels of anonymity. She put her hand up, as though she were summoning the waiter, and he frowned. It wasn’t until she called out his name, his last name, that there was a jolt of recognition.
‘Lori?’ He stepped around a table to where she sat. The lunchtime crowd had thinned now and there was a space next to her. He didn’t bend to hug or kiss her and she didn’t attempt to get up to do the same. ‘Wow. I wasn’t expecting to see you here today.’
‘When are you ever?’
‘Hah! No, never. It’s been a long time. You look great.’
‘You too. Just the same.’
He made a small cynical snort. ‘I’m going to grab a coffee. You want one?’
‘No, I already did.’ She gestured towards her cup. ‘I was just about to leave.’
‘Oh.’ His voice had the downward inflection of disappointment. ‘So what brings you here? Not your part of town these days, is it?’
‘I was up the road, at St James. Visiting.’
‘Nothing serious, I hope?’
‘Hard to tell just yet. He’s in intensive care.’
Concern crossed Schiller’s face. He pulled a chair out and sat down opposite her. ‘Shit, that’s no good. Not …’ He hesitated. ‘Not someone close?’
‘My brother.’
‘Your brother?’ He scowled fleetingly. ‘I’m really sorry to hear that.’ He signalled to the young waiter. ‘Sure you don’t want another coffee?’
Lori shook her head and, turning in her chair, she held her hand out towards the front door of the café. ‘You’re still here.’
‘Yeah, I am. My life now. Who would have guessed?’ He shrugged one shoulder in a way that suggested this was as much a surprise to him as anyone. ‘I reckon they’ll have to take me out of here in the proverbial box. Can’t see me branching out into anything else now. But the place is doing pretty well, and I’ve got a manager so I’m not tied here. And I have to say that, thanks to good ol’ Grandad Leo’s real estate foresight, no astronomical rents for me.’
‘I’d forgotten about that. Your grandfather, the slum landlord.’ She twisted her mouth into a sly smile. ‘Lucky for you, given the cost of real estate these days.’
‘Ah yes, very true. I’ve always been pretty lucky with money. Or lucky enough. Something’s always come along at the right time, saved me from penury.’ He looked past her to some point across the street and sighed. ‘Sadly, though, I’ve never had the same kind of luck with love.’
An update or a rebuke? She looked at him for a few seconds, unsure, unable to read his expression, so much lost behind the glasses. He’d always had a deadpan self-deprecating sense of humour. It had been his saving grace, back in the day. ‘So you’re telling me there’s no one special? That truly surprises me. You always did all right. Popular with the ladies.’
‘Well, you know me. Good for a good time, but not for a long time, hey?’ There was a flicker of a smile then. ‘But what about you? You’ve done okay, got your business going. Still married to that guy, right?’
That guy, she thought. It didn’t seem possible that Schiller had forgotten Jason’s name. But maybe. It was a long time ago. A long time for him to keep her and the accessories to her life in his mind. ‘Yeah. Two kids now, a girl and a boy. At school already.’
‘Wow, I’m impressed. I can’t imagine kids. I mean, everyone’s having them. Had them. Shit, we’re all getting old!’ he exclaimed as though the thought had just hit him. ‘But it’s not for me. Hard enough running a café, managing people all day. At least they go home at night. I go home at night. Couldn’t think about dealing with kids twenty-four seven. They being able to tell you to fuck off and you not being able to fire them. Tragedy.’
She laughed. ‘Most of us muddle through. It seems to work well enough. Helps if there’re two of you, I guess. People’ve been doing it for thousands of years. That’s what I told myself when Sophie was born and I had no idea what to do. You’re not the first dummy to do this. Besides, you love them. They love you. It makes it worth it.’
Schiller turned distractedly as the waiter placed a coffee on the table next to him. He reached for a jar and spooned in two sugars and stirred, before looking back at her. ‘I don’t remember you having a brother.’ He paused momentarily. ‘I thought your brother had �
�� had passed away.’
She looked across the street, caught sight of the homeless man again and thought of Scott. Where had he been all these years? What had he been doing? ‘That was my brother Simon,’ she said. ‘Simon who died.’
‘In a car crash? With the family?’
‘Yeah. Well, there were two. I had two brothers. This is … this is the other one. His name is Scott.’
He nodded, contemplative for a moment. ‘So why is it I don’t remember that there were two?’
‘I didn’t see him, Scott, for a long time. I don’t think I talked about him to you. We didn’t get on. You know … my family. It was all weird after everything that happened.’
‘Sure. Every fucked-up family fucked up in their own unique way. I know that one all right. My brother, Max, remember him? He’s a corporate lawyer these days.’
‘Wow,’ she said, remembering the nerdy law student who used to hang out with them sometimes, who talked about changing the system and volunteered at legal aid. ‘That’s really fucked up.’
Schiller laughed, threw her a bashful look. ‘Sorry.’
She waved a hand at him dismissively. ‘I always liked Max.’
‘Me too. He’s still all right. Just moved a little closer to the tree than I expected.’
‘Yeah, well. We all do that,’ she said. ‘In one way or another.’
‘So, I guess it’s just you responsible for your bro?’ he said. ‘Given that your parents aren’t … around.’
‘Yeah.’ She let out a long sigh. ‘I’ve been struggling with that. What do you owe someone you haven’t seen for twenty years? Blood ties. Family. What do they mean?’
‘Hard.’ He paused. ‘He doesn’t have a partner? Or friends? Kids?’
‘I really don’t know. Isn’t it crazy? I don’t know a thing about him. I seemed to be the only contact the police could find. I don’t know what that means.’
Schiller stretched his legs out in front of him and looked down at his boots. ‘I can’t imagine being responsible for my brother. Although, the way things are, chances are he’ll be the one responsible for me. But this is different—he’s a stranger, essentially. That’s tough. So what does your husband say about all this?’
She was silent for a moment. ‘We’re just taking it day by day.’
‘Yeah, guess you can’t do much else. Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?’
She pushed her coffee cup away and it made a sharp scraping noise on the metal table. The waiter hadn’t bothered to pick the cup up when he’d delivered Schiller’s coffee and she wondered how long he’d last here. Not that she’d know what kind of a boss Schiller was, whether he’d care much. He was only beginning on that journey when she saw him last, a funny sideways diversion she’d thought at the time. ‘Do you miss the old days?’ she asked.
She saw his eyebrows rise above his glasses. ‘Old days? Which old days are those?’
‘Oh, you know. The squat. Here. Kerr Street. Collingwood. Those old days. Do you keep in touch with anyone?’
‘Those days when we were young. All that time ago. Huh! Well, I guess the beauty of owning a café in the heart of sunny Melbourne is that people drop in occasionally. A lot have drifted. Coupled up, had kids, moved interstate, overseas. Got fucking Arts Council grants. Carl, Perry, Rosie. I see them sometimes. Rosie’s living with a woman called Bette. She’s blond now, well, actually they both are. Platinum as. They run a bar in Northcote. Always a good sort, Rosie.’
‘Yeah, she was.’ There was a note of wistfulness in her voice.
Schiller cocked his head thoughtfully. ‘Don’t tell me that you’re feeling nostalgic, my friend? I mean, it never struck me that you were particularly happy a lot of the time back then. You had the weight of the world.’
‘What do you mean?’
He looked suddenly serious. ‘You’re kidding me, aren’t you?’
Weight of the world. She didn’t remember that, but then she wasn’t particularly good at remembering. She’d cultivated the art of forgetting so well that her past was like a piece of Swiss cheese. There were moments though. Many moments, really, if she was being honest (not remembering being quite a different thing from having no memory). Fragments, whole scenes, chunks lifted out from the fabric of what had gone before that acted like a rough guide to the past. Some of these came to her crystal clear, even now. Like the morning she got off the bus at Spencer Street Station and walked out onto the pavement with her bag and looked up and down the street and felt an incredible rush that somehow managed to blend loss and exhilaration into one sensation. Freedom, the possibility of a limitless, unfettered and pain-free future. It was this feeling she remembered more than the weather conditions, the traffic, who she’d sat next to on the bus.
She’d caught the tram that day to Darren’s place where she’d stayed for several weeks in a tiny spare room with a window that was painted shut and felt suffocatingly hot and stuffy in the late summer warmth. Darren was working for the same big accounting firm that Simon was going to work for—would have been working for already by then—and he shared the house with two students. They all came and went like ghosts. No one cooked or cleaned. Darren had been a good friend of Simon’s—not to mention the only person she really knew in Melbourne—and she thought she’d find it comforting to stay with him, but instead it was an unwanted reminder. For them both. He avoided her, she avoided him. She found a job selling t-shirts in a shop in Fitzroy frequented by goths. The job itself wasn’t particularly exciting and she didn’t last there long, but she did meet Rosie.
That meeting was a stand-out vignette too. Rosie sported pink hair and a nose ring and lived in a squat nearby.
‘Come stay at mine,’ Rosie had said the second day they worked together. ‘We’re looking for people. There’s heaps of room. It’s cheap.’
‘But you don’t know me,’ Lori replied, trying to disguise her shock that Rosie, five years her senior, so hip, so worldly, had even deigned to speak to her let alone was offering her a place in her home.
Rosie laughed. Lori still remembered Rosie’s laugh and her endless enthusiasm for life, a sense that nothing could ever affect her. It was something Lori hadn’t even realised she envied until she came face to face with it. ‘Come and meet the others, but I know you’ll all be cool.’ She gave a little half shrug that told Lori there was nothing to consider in this decision.
The next day Lori had stood outside the old terrace and experienced something like a homecoming. The metre-deep garden at the front was a tangle of weeds and spindly neglected shrubs. The front verandah was home to an old couch, multiple bicycles, a pile of wood and some pieces of machinery that had long lost any connection to their origins. It was Perry, dread-locked hair tied on top of his head, who opened the door and led her through the house, showing her each room off the hallway, remarking on the period features like a seasoned real estate agent. In the kitchen Rosie was cooking a chickpea stew on the stove. Kaz was making a salad at the old wooden kitchen table. Two other people were living there at the time as well, but she’d forgotten their names now, what they looked like. Faint blurs at the periphery. She didn’t think they’d stayed long.
A troupe of people went through that house over the years. Towards the end of her time there, Schiller was one of them. At first he was just the guy that Rosie and Perry bought their drugs from. (‘Nothing hard,’ he’d declare, hands up in the air as though he’d just had a gun pulled on him. ‘Mostly weed and ecstasy. I like people to be happy.’) Later he was the housemate who wasn’t a housemate. He never moved in, but he often stayed, usually in someone’s room, frequently Rosie’s. Lori hadn’t thought about sleeping with him. After all, who could take someone who’d slept with almost every other woman who’d stayed in the house, and sold drugs, seriously?
It was a few years later, after she’d moved to Kerr Street and he’d moved into a flat in Brunswick Street, a place that she only found out later was owned by his family, that she did just that—took him seriou
sly (enough) and slept with him. She remembered that first night as a moment too. She and he hanging out at his place, slumped on sagging 1950s chairs, surrounded by beer cans and ashtrays overflowing with butts, watching the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. Laughing at the Australiana themes, the lawnmowers, the flora and fauna, the potted history of the wide brown land. They had bonded in a way that surprised her. She stayed over. It became something of a habit.
Weight of the world. Had it been like that? Those memories she had were enough to situate her, but didn’t tell her anything about how she’d been perceived, how she’d fitted in. She never thought about what Schiller had seen all those years ago. Even what he was seeing as he looked at her now. He put up a palm. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound harsh. What I did mean is, well, that you must have found some stability.’
A sensation went through her, something akin to shame. She sat back a little in her chair. ‘Are you saying you thought I was unstable?’
‘No, not unstable, Lore. I’m not meaning you so much but your situation. What happened. You were troubled. I knew things had been bad for you, but I was young and stupid and I never knew what to say. And you never wanted to talk. I mean, losing your family and … you know. It was obviously huge for you. Traumatic.’
Her heart was pounding. She hadn’t envisaged this kind of conversation with Schiller. If anything, she’d thought it would be a comfort, a quick rave about old times, something that would anchor her in the past, not mire her in it. ‘Funny, I really don’t remember things being that bad. I remember being wild, that’s absolutely true. Running amok. Like I’d finally found my freedom.’ She looked down at the table, ran a finger around its edge. ‘Frankly there are a lot of things I’m not so clear on anymore. Blocked out the shit, apparently.’
Life Before Page 7
