Gotland

by Fiona Capp

  The ferry was edging into a small harbour enclosed by a rocky breakwater. Beyond the waterfront cafés, there were remnants of a medieval stone wall, and on the hill behind it, tiers of neat stuccoed yellow and pink houses with orange roofs. A large grey church right at the top towered over it all.

  We stood outside the terminal in the late-afternoon sun waiting for Sven. The other passengers had disappeared by taxi or on foot into the old town. The sun was surprisingly hot – something I hadn’t expected this far north – and I hadn’t brought a hat. I looked around for some shade.

  ‘Perhaps he’s forgotten.’

  ‘He’ll come. Something’s held him up.’

  I wondered what made her so certain, then I remembered that Sven had been keen on Ros when they first met. She said he wasn’t her type, which probably meant he was reliable and trustworthy.

  Just then, a flat-bed truck shot out from a narrow street and came hurtling towards us. A man with a smiling, weathered face and silvery-blond hair to his shoulders stuck his head out the driver’s window, grinning apologetically as he pulled up.

  I noticed him wince as he stepped out. He said he’d had a minor accident while working on a sculpture. The chisel had slipped, puncturing his thigh. It was only superficial but it had taken him a while to find a bandage.

  We both looked at his leg with concern, which made him laugh. He was tall and sinewy, a body so honed by physical work that he too might have been carved from rock. He gave Ros a long, tender hug, but said nothing about her hair or how she looked – as most people, including me, had felt compelled to do.

  Then he turned to me and said simply, ‘You finally made it.’

  I wasn’t sure if he meant that I’d arrived after a long journey or that after years of saying she’d bring me, Ros finally had. Either way, he seemed genuinely pleased that I’d come. I could see why Ros had spoken of him so fondly.

  Sven glanced from me to Ros and back again. ‘So similar and yet so different.’

  Ros groaned theatrically. ‘He’s speaking in koans.’

  Ignoring her jibe, he leaned towards me and said conspiratorially, ‘Perhaps you can fill me in on a few things about your sister.’ He shot Ros a playful glance.

  I assumed he was having a dig at her for being so tight-lipped about herself. Funny how we hear what we want to hear. How we make the things people say fit our needs.

  Ros told him to come off it, then added with a mock German accent, ‘She knows nothing.’

  Sven picked up our cases as if they were empty boxes and threw them onto the tray of the truck. We squeezed into the front seat. As he drove, he pointed things out for my benefit. The cathedral up on the hill, the town square, the ruined churches. I noticed that his muscular brown arms guiding the steering wheel were dusted with something powdery and white.

  At the top of the hill we turned into a street that ran just below the old ramparts at the rear of the old town and passed a gate with sturdy, crenellated towers on either side. Beyond the portal I could see what looked like a modern shopping mall. But here, inside the walls, it was another world, a tidy blend of centuries past. The streets were cobbled and there were marigolds and pansies in pots out the front of low-roofed cottages of dark, tarred wood.

  Sven gestured towards a double-storey, white stucco house up ahead with a roof that made me think of a barn. That was his house, he said. Then he stopped out the front of a small hotel further down the street and helped us take in our bags. Ros had made the hotel bookings. Normally she stayed with Sven, but since her last visit he’d expanded his studio and space was tight.

  It was only when the receptionist handed over the key that I realised what Ros had done. Booked us into a twin room. When we were young she couldn’t wait to get her own bedroom. When she eventually moved into the old dining room, I felt abandoned and somehow the feeling had stayed with me. And now I would see her without her wig. Perhaps things had changed more than I’d thought.

  When Ros noticed my surprise, she said, ‘This is okay with you? If you want separate rooms –’

  ‘No, no, it’s great.’ I wandered over to the windows to hide how moved I was. There would be the possibility of talking to each other in the dark. Perhaps I wouldn’t just get little parcels of her after all.

  Our room faced directly on to the cathedral with a view over the town itself to the sea. Terracotta rooftops, chalky skeletons of ruined churches, bursts of deep greenery and the royal blue of the harbour. It was almost too perfect: the crisp colours, the soft light, the centuries of human habitation against the immensity of sea and sky.

  Sven put our bags down just inside the door. ‘I’ve made fish soup for dinner,’ he said. ‘Any time you’re ready.’

  5

  MELBOURNE

  July 2010

  The sheets were icy when I finally slipped into bed at home that night. David had to stay on in Canberra. If I could help it, I never stayed there overnight. I liked my own bed too much. Even now, after having lived in the capital for two years, I still don’t feel at home there, much as I love the dreamy dazzle of the lake and the National Library sitting like a marble treasure box on its banks and the shadowy calligraphy of the mountains in the distance.

  Being with David in Canberra always threw me. It was not my world and never would be. All the fuss surrounding the announcement of his election as leader of the opposition only made it worse. The pace at which everything was unfolding felt deeply wrong. Whenever I look back on the beginning of it all, what I remember most painfully is that frightening speed, and the sense of things spiralling out of control.

  I had taken a Valium and was waiting for it to kick in. On the bedside table, the phosphorescent numbers on my old alarm clock glowed in the dark. There was a saying of Churchill’s that David occasionally quoted when he wanted to mock another politician’s self-importance. I know we are all just worms but I do believe that I am a glow worm. Ros reckoned David harboured the same regard for himself, but she had never really got to know him. Especially not the old David, the way he was when we were students.

  I was in my second year at university when David and I met. It was lunchtime and I had just bought a coffee in the Agora and was looking for a table when someone said hello. It was a girl from my psychology tutorial inviting me to join her group. I wasn’t in the mood for a bunch of strangers but they had already shifted to make room for me. I sat down reluctantly and found myself opposite David: eyes the colour of coal, wild, shoulder-length hair, a neat cleft in his chin. Everything about him written in bold. Next to him, the others seemed to fade into the background, become blurry and insubstantial, while he loomed before me.

  They were talking about dreams, the common ones, such as flying or losing teeth.

  ‘What about finding yourself naked in public?’ David asked me, with a slow fuse of a smile.

  Everyone went quiet, waiting.

  ‘You’re walking down the street or at a party and everything seems utterly normal,’ he went on. ‘Then you look down and realise you’re starkers. And you’re the only one.’

  I glanced away, embarrassed by my thoughts. I wasn’t in the habit of stripping men with my eyes. But he’d all but invited me to and I was happy to comply. Besides, I knew about that kind of dream. I had it all the time.

  A bearish young man on my right roared with laughter. Had it occurred to David why he was having these dreams? Pulling a mock-sorrowful face, he answered for him: it was obviously a case of the anarchist’s new clothes.

  All eyes turned to David again. I watched him shaking his head and gathering himself to reply, deliberately drawing things out. I couldn’t help smiling at the staginess, the way these two were playing up to the crowd. Raising his eyebrows in a manner that would become deeply familiar to me, David warned comrade Duncan not to be so sure of himself. Fashions came and went. Even the Chinese would weary of their little grey jackets. One day, he, too, might find himself having such a dream.

  I looked from one to th
e other, trying to keep up. I’d seen Duncan before, and it came to me where – on posters all round the campus. He was the Maoist running for the student union.

  The two boys continued trading friendly insults, Duncan accusing David of clinging to noble defeat; David taunting Duncan about the people’s dictatorship. Others occasionally chipped in here and there, but it was David and Duncan who held the floor. For all his apparent absorption in the sparring and smart talk, David kept turning to me. Although flattered, I thought he must have been the type who has to win over everyone they meet, charm them into submission; that it was a kind of compulsion.

  When things started to get heated, he laughed and stood up. ‘Listen, comrades. Listen and learn.’ With that, he picked up a megaphone that was lying on the ground next to him and walked off towards the grassy centre of the Agora.

  The Agora was packed with students sitting at outdoor cafés or lounging on the grass in the sunshine, and everyone seemed to have their eyes on him. I’d been at university for a year and thought I’d arrived too late to witness any real political action, but clearly there was still life on the campus. Still people with convictions and quick minds who believed in making things happen. I took in the other students at my table. Perhaps I had finally found my kind of people – just when I’d almost given up looking. I couldn’t do their edgy talk and could never, in my wildest dreams, address a crowd as David was about to do. But to be around them, to share in the energy that crackled between them, that would be something.

  He lifted the megaphone to his mouth and threw our group a glance, smiling, so it seemed, straight at me. His eyes lingered and for a terrifying moment I thought he was about to address me, to do something reckless like invite me out in front of them all. But his gaze swept on as he slowly took in his audience. The campus clock began to chime and I remembered I was due to give a paper in a history tutorial. As I wove my way through the crowded square and back towards the moat that encircled the university, David’s amplified yet strangely intimate voice followed me across the campus. ‘I know what you think when you hear the word anarchism – bombs, fanatics and chaos …’

  I could still hear his voice as I lay in the darkness. If anarchy was about self-government then bring it on. I still believed that. Funny how it meant the opposite of what most people thought. I threw off the doona and cursed my body. One minute the bed was too cold and the next, there was a furnace inside me. My friends had told me about these sweats, these unstoppable waves of heat, but I had stupidly imagined it wouldn’t happen to me.

  I suppose it has always been the way. Had David and I and all our friends at university ever imagined we’d become who we were now? It was lucky you didn’t know, and yet we thought we did. Beneath all the sparring and in-fighting, we were so convinced we knew what shape the future would take, and that we were making it happen. We would never become like everyone else. We would stay different. Live differently.

  Most people, we thought, had no idea of the forces working upon them; how they were cogs in a giant wheel. They needed to be woken up, made truly alive to their potential, to the kingdom of the free on earth. What a child’s game it seemed – like dress-ups – compared with the world of politics David inhabited. And how remote it all seems now that the kingdom has come, and the King wears a smartly cut suit and the Queen has thrown away her jeans.

  I listened to the trams trundling along a nearby street. How could thirty-five years disappear so easily? If someone had told David, back then, that he would become leader of the party, he would have laughed uproariously. There is a purity to anarchism – perhaps because it has never really been put to the test – that held him in its sway for much longer than most of his friends held to communism. He had written his doctorate on its brief flowering during the Spanish Civil War: the legend of those guerrillero Quixotes from all over the world. The idealism, the heroism, the sacrifice. Side by side with the brutality. Only very slowly, as he became entrenched in academia, had he started to focus on less radical ideologies and political figures, finally concluding that anarchism was admirable but hopeless. By the time he had been made professor, he had written biographies of John Curtin and Ben Chifley, and consigned anarchism to the days of his youth.

  And what of me? What happened to my beliefs? These days, I am careful to keep my political views to myself. In my heart, I’m still a believer in the idea of it all. A system that rewards altruism rather than self-interest. The romance of the self-governing cooperative: the perfect family. No pecking order or competition. No need to covet or possess. I like to think that each of us, in our own small way, can help rewrite the rules we live by, and that change begins with the stirrings of the collective unconscious, stirrings often so intimate and alien to our waking selves that we fail to recognise them – until they reach a critical mass and we suddenly see them for what they are and realise, this is what I believe.

  Each day I watch David trying to reconcile what we once believed in with the way power grinds on, and I see him becoming hardened and impatient with those still free to dream. And then I ask myself, if anarchism could be applied here and now, how would I like it? I hate committees and meetings of any kind, not to mention the tedium of everyone having their say. I just want to get on with running the classroom and my life as I see fit – which makes me sound dangerously like the individualist liberals we used to despise. All I am really sure of is that I’m the kind of person who is happiest at the edge of things, watching and dreaming. You can see more clearly from there.

  Cold again, I clawed back the doona but couldn’t get comfortable. My nightgown clung to my skin. The arch of my left foot was itchy. I lay on one side for a while, then turned over and found myself facing the books stacked on the bedside table. Before David went into politics, we always kept up with each other’s reading, swapping favourites and sharing our thoughts. When he was writing his biographies and reading the biographies of other well-known political figures of the period, like Churchill and Roosevelt, I read them too. But it was the wives I was drawn to. Life behind the scenes, behind the smiles. The strain of it. Clementine’s anxiety. Eleanor’s shyness. Both of them thrown into the full glare of the public stage – the official openings, the prize-givings, the charity functions. And yet they made themselves do it. I liked the way they were more radical than their husbands. I still think about them. What it means to be trapped in a role like this. Somehow Eleanor transformed herself, found the confidence to speak her mind. To stay true to herself. But I don’t have her front; to speak out is not my way. And so I do what I can out of sight.

  I thought back over the events of the day in Canberra. It had been one of the most gruelling days of my life. Although I managed to get through it, I could feel the cracks opening up again. On the plane back I worked on a strategy. If the panic attacks returned, I would think of the wild south coast of Gippsland, three hours’ drive from the city, where David and I planned to buy a block of land and build a holiday shack with views over the tea-tree scrub to the Southern Ocean. A place so far from everything it would surely do the trick. Dr Schapiro’s advice had worked in the past. I would make it work again.

  As soon as I’d got home that evening, I made a dash for the supermarket to get something easy for dinner. I was in the fruit and vegetable section searching for a ripe avocado when I got an uneasy feeling. There was a woman who kept hovering nearby. I wondered if she’d seen me with David on the six o’clock news. The next thing I knew, she was coming at me, her face screwed up and intense. Something was on her mind and she was going to give me a piece of it. And then it started happening. The tingling in my fingertips. The drone in my head. I couldn’t breathe. I was sucking in air but there wasn’t enough oxygen in it. As hard as I tried to summon up that wild coast and the scrubby tea-tree block with the view of the sea, it didn’t work. I had no real connection with it. It stubbornly remained a useless idea.

  I was hyperventilating now, this suffocating pressure in my chest. You can tell yourself
all you like that you’re not having a heart attack but it’s impossible to believe at the time, the dread is so overwhelming. All I knew was that I had to get out of there. I ran for the car park and it wasn’t until I was inside the car that I managed to stop gulping. There was no way I could drive, so I dropped my forehead on the steering wheel, concentrating on long, slow breaths.

  Odd things catch your attention at moments like that. Staring into the darkness of the footwell, I noticed a bald patch in the carpet next to the accelerator and it struck me that my feet had done that. Your feet and hands make all these movements when you drive that you never give a second thought to: finely tuned movements like pressing down the clutch while changing gears, or braking at the right moment. Movements that could save your life. Why was it that my body did these things with such ease but when it came to talking to a stranger, I fell apart?

  6

  GOTLAND

  September 2010

  I could see Ros wilting as we walked down the road to Sven’s house. She was being bright and cheery, saying how good it was to be here and wasn’t it all so magical. We were on holiday! We were going to have a great time! We had been looking forward to this for years! But her brittleness betrayed her.