Gotland

by Fiona Capp

  ‘You’ve probably heard by now, but for those of you who haven’t, I am proud to announce we have, as of yesterday, a prime minister-to-be in the school family!’

  There were whoops and cheers and clapping. Everyone looked in my direction. I smiled vaguely across the room and then let my gaze settle on the kookaburras and kangaroos and eucalypts in the stained-glass windows set high in the east-facing wall of the old school hall, aglow with the morning sun. Women my age complain of being invisible, say that no one sees them any more, whether they are waiting to be served in a shop or simply walking along the street. As if they’ve slipped into a grey zone, a no-woman’s land where people, especially men, look straight through them. Too often, it seems to me, we overlook the benefits of not being noticed. Of being free to quietly do what we please. The liberating anonymity. Now that I was the object of everyone’s attention, I was missing it already. And it was only going to get worse.

  I remember the school band setting up on the stage, a motley group of sixth graders with ragged, asymmetrical haircuts and layers of brightly coloured clothes whom I had taught in prep. A girl called Ellie grasped the microphone, her fingers emerging from what appeared to be a cut-off sock. She glanced sideways at the lead guitarist, nodded, and the band launched into a halting version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

  The muscles in my shoulders relaxed. At least no one was watching me any more. But the occasional quaver in Ellie’s girlish voice and the nervous flickering of her eyes were reminders. The difference with Ellie, though, was that for all her nerves, she craved the attention. She was young. She fed off it: being seen, being admired. You can have it Ellie, I thought. It’s all yours.

  As soon as assembly was over, I went straight to my classroom. Even after I had closed the door, parents and staff kept waving at the window, offering congratulations. The children were hyped up and I knew it would take much longer than usual to settle them.

  We began with the morning yoga and breathing exercises. The children parked their shoes under their desks and found a space in the open area at the front of the room. Once they were ready, I stretched my arms out and slowly lifted them towards the ceiling, raising my heels from the ground so that I was balancing on my toes. Then I breathed out as I lowered my arms. The children followed.

  Next I placed my feet further apart and turned out my toes. I breathed in again and bent my knees.

  ‘I squat like a …’

  ‘Duck!’ the children chorused, holding the pose until I straightened up.

  After a few repetitions, I stood on one leg, bent the other leg and pressed that foot to my inner thigh. My arms reached up, palms meeting above my head.

  ‘I grow like a …’

  ‘Tree!’ they cried, most expertly poised on one foot, a few wobbling from side to side.

  By the time we had run through some more animal poses – dog, cat, cobra, lion – and the children were stretched out on their mats floating like clouds, the strain of the past twenty-four hours had melted away. I breathed in the distinctive classroom smell: paint, glue, dust, texta and children’s socks. This was my domain, my refuge. A small and yet infinite space – like the enchanted realm of the fairytale – where the children could encounter their fears without danger; where they could go on quests or shape-shift or slay giants; where they could discover the power of their minds. And where, if I was doing my job, they learned to revel in this power. The challenge, as always, was to get the right balance between fostering a magical sense that anything was possible, that everything would turn out right in the end, and a realistic understanding of the world we lived in. Whenever I read fairytales to the children, we would look at several versions to see how each one spoke of the era and the society it was from, even as it conjured up a landscape that seemed timeless and unchanging. And now, with David cast in the role of king-in-waiting and our lives in the grip of a strange kind of spell, it felt more urgent than ever to remember that these tales were mutable; constantly being rewritten. They were not eternal truths set in stone.

  A fragile contentment settled over me as I lay staring at a damp patch on the ceiling, listening to the shuffles and sighs. It was tempting to keep on drifting like a cloud but I knew the children would get restless.

  When they were seated back at their desks, I went to my spot in front of the whiteboard. The funny thing was that I didn’t mind being the centre of attention there. I was a different person with my class. My voice never trembled, I was confident, and I knew when to listen and when to act. When to comfort and when to exhort. Above all, I knew I was doing something that mattered. Am I glossing these memories, being nostalgic because of the way things are now? I don’t think so. All I want is to feel how I did back then. At ease with myself. Happy to be who I was.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the office manager passing in the courtyard, waving madly and doing a thumbs-up. I forced a smile and turned quickly back to the class.

  ‘We’re going to talk about the drawings you did of special places.’

  The more easily diverted children were still craning their necks to see who I’d been smiling at.

  ‘Milly, Stavros, Mahmoud. The action is in here, not out there. I’m going to give you a few moments to look at your pictures and think about what you might say.’

  The children opened their desks and pulled out now crumpled sheets of butcher’s paper. With everything that had happened in the past weeks, I’d let the Special Places project slide. I’d taken days off to go to Canberra after Gerald’s death and then another day for Gerald’s funeral as well as yesterday for the leadership announcement. And because the project was connected in my mind with news of Gerald’s death, I hadn’t wanted to think of it.

  One by one, the children came to the front of the room and held up their pictures. There were, as I’d expected, drawings of the seaside, of gardens with flowers, of forests with red and white toadstools, of tree houses and cubbies, of figures sitting on clouds and in castles. Others, like Ashley, who didn’t speak and whose father was known to be violent, produced less predictable and more revealing work. When Ashley came up the front, he simply held his drawing up, letting it speak for itself. He had drawn himself crouched in a dark space under a house with his dog beside him. There were spider webs and bugs on the floor and, spooky though it was, there was something comforting about it too. The boy had an old-fashioned kerosene lantern and he and the dog sat in the pool of its light.

  I could tell the children had questions but they knew there was no point asking.

  Ashley stood there mutely with his picture and even when I told him he could go and sit down, he didn’t move. He’s finally going to say something, I thought. The drawing had unlocked him somehow. We all waited, the children as hopeful as I was, all of us willing him to open his mouth and let the words out.

  As if it was that simple. I, of all people, ought to have known better. If he was going to speak, it wouldn’t be in front of a crowd. One day, perhaps, he would turn to me and softly remark upon something, as if picking up on a conversation we’d been having all along. But not today. His eyes bulged as he looked out over the class. And we stared back at him, wondering what to do. Finally, I went up to him and gave his shoulders a quick squeeze – we weren’t supposed to hug the children any more – and directed him back to his seat.

  When they had all presented their work, a small hand flashed into the air. It was June, whose family had arrived from Malaysia only a few weeks before the school year began. She grinned shyly, exposing a gap where a baby front tooth had been. ‘Ms Chatwin, do you have a special place?’

  For the first time that morning I had the children’s undivided attention. I thought about my grandparents’ garden, and how much I missed it. Looking back, I couldn’t help feeling it was something every child should have had. It gave me a sudden pang to think that Kate had never known a place like that. Pretty as it was, our garden was tiny. As for grandparents, Kate had barely known them or their gardens. My mothe
r was dead by the time Kate was born and my father living in a bedsit. David’s parents had moved to a high-rise apartment on the Gold Coast.

  I thought, too, how Kate had never gone off on the kind of adventures Ros and I had taken for granted. A gang of friends catching tadpoles at the local creek and then keeping them alive in buckets and watching them sprout arms and legs. Playing detectives in the park, finding mysteries to solve. All very Enid Blyton. Kate was a thoroughly urban girl who loved the inner city and had happily made it her own. She’d had other adventures and plenty of them, haunting the streets with her friends; they just weren’t the Famous Five kind. And yet, I wondered, had she missed out on something fundamental to childhood? Had I somehow failed her?

  I looked at the small, intent faces watching me. My grandparents’ garden was long gone. There was that block in Gippsland with the ocean view, but I knew it wouldn’t happen now. If David won the election, most of our time would be spent in Canberra. A city that had descended, fully formed in all its suburban emptiness, from outer space.

  I smiled at the class. ‘I did once.’

  8

  GOTLAND

  September 2010

  Narrow roads lined with silver birch. The sudden, thrilling darkness of pine and fir. Undergrowth soft with moss and wild mushrooms. These were the forests I first met in fairytales and in my grandparents’ back garden. Forests that bore no resemblance to the skeletal, loose-limbed eucalypts of the Australian bush. And yet Ros was right. Being here was like returning to somewhere achingly familiar, to a place buried deep in the psyche, half forgotten and overgrown.

  We walked down a dirt path, a long way into the moist gloom, until the trees began to thin. As if shipwrecked from an earlier time when water still covered the island, a large stone boat lay in a clearing. It rose from the ground, pointed prow and elevated gunwale suggesting movement even as the weathered stones anchored it to the earth. Forever frozen in that moment of launching into the afterlife. There were hundreds of them all over the island, Sven said. Longship graves where Viking chiefs were buried.

  This was one of Ros’s favourite places on the island and she’d wanted me to see it. I watched her circling the grave, lost in thought. She was wearing a lightweight, floral-print skirt and peasant blouse – nothing like the tailored outfits she wore in court – and when she moved through patches of sunlight it was as if she was being x-rayed. The silhouette of her body looked elfin, not of this world.

  Sven and I stared at her, and then at each other.

  ‘If I was to believe in an afterlife,’ Ros announced, oblivious, ‘it would be one that you could sail into, just over the edge of the horizon. Always there, even if it was out of the reach of the living. Think of Mum. She’s still with us. At least that’s how it feels to me.’

  ‘And Dad?’

  She snorted. ‘Dad was never quite here in the first place.’

  Ros couldn’t forgive him. For deceiving us, for making life hard for Mum, for his neglect. It took Mum’s death to snap him out of his self-pity, to shatter his conviction that he’d been destined for greater things than life had dished up. The irony was that Mum had fostered this delusion. If only she’d confronted him, told him to shape up or ship out. She must have known where the money was going.

  I sat on a grassy mound. ‘Do you think she should’ve left him?’

  Ros leaned against the trunk of a fir. She flashed a wicked grin. ‘I wish she’d taken a lover. I like to imagine it, that she had this other life.’

  Sven was keeping his distance, not wanting to disturb us. I saw him smile to himself. He seemed to enjoy watching Ros have fun.

  Dad had no idea how lucky he was. Not until it was too late. But he did try to make up for it, in his way. He doted on Kate when she was little. All her memories of him were glowing. I used to love seeing them playing and talking together. The magic tricks he showed her, the silly jokes he told. The way he gave himself over to her rhythms, her child’s time. Time he’d never had for us.

  Wherever you looked on this island, there was a sawtooth skyline of pines and firs in the distance. After a short drive we came to a scraggly-looking field where rocks were piled on rocks to form towering pyramids. Dotted among the cairns and stone-clad graves stood the deep green lollipops of solitary juniper trees.

  Sven pointed to some nearby standing stones. ‘Bronze Age,’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t they something to do with sun worship?’ Ros glanced up at the sun. ‘Makes more sense than any other form of worship I can think of. Nothing is more powerful. Weird to think about it, really. The way its energy flows through every cell in your body.’ Then she laughed at herself. ‘I’m becoming quite a hippy.’

  I thought of her sitting in the sun the day after her chemo finished, how its warmth brought her back to life.

  Sven smiled dubiously and I couldn’t blame him. Ros the hippy was hard to credit. She was one of the most tough-minded people I knew. An occupational hazard, I supposed. As a criminal lawyer she had to be. I often wondered how she did it, year after year, delving into the murk of the underworld, defending people who might well be guilty, and whether it deformed her vision of things. Made her too conscious of the dark side. Ros would sometimes talk of the cases she’d won or lost, the technicalities, what went right or wrong. But she wouldn’t say how it affected her. In fact, she insisted that it didn’t. You learned to detach yourself, she said, like a doctor. Not get emotionally involved. And now, here she was talking about sun worship.

  ‘We don’t even realise that we still do it,’ Ros went on. ‘Take oil and coal. Packaged sunlight from millennia ago. We’re addicted to it. But we never give a second thought to what it means. This flow of energy from everyday matter, how it connects everything, living and dead.’

  The words ‘living and dead’ hung in the air. It was hard to know what to say. I walked over to the cairns. It would be dark and cold inside, and the weight of those stones would be crushing. For some reason they brought to mind the stacked skulls in the Paris catacombs, row upon mossy row. And the silent babble that went with them. Thinking about the long dead was strangely uplifting but the recent dead were another story. I had a flash of Gerald’s funeral: the crematorium, the coffin disappearing behind those doors. I couldn’t bear to think of him as ashes or pure matter or energy or recycled atoms. I wanted to remember the man I knew. Witty, generous, incorrigible. Occasionally ponderous.

  One evening last summer, we’d been walking along the beach together. Gerald had fallen in beside me, hands clutched, as usual, behind his back. I could tell something was bothering him. ‘I know what you think of the whole business, Esther. Especially David being away so often. And that you’ll probably never forgive me –’ I started to protest but he held up his hand. ‘Let me finish. I think time will prove me right. David will make a difference. One day I hope you’ll realise that, hard as it might be for you, I did the right thing. You’ll be proud of him, Esther. We all will.’

  It was the holidays and I wasn’t in the mood. This infuriating talk of posterity and the sacrifices that had to be made. Why couldn’t Gerald and David forget about Canberra for once and just enjoy being at the beach? Enjoy doing nothing. Enjoy just being. This moment, here and now, was more real, more important, surely, than any vague and grandiose future that politicians were always looking to as their vindication, their raison d’être.

  Then Kate had come bounding up, asking if we would come for a swim with her and Max and Abbie. I said not now, I was talking to Gerald. But Gerald insisted he’d said all he wanted to say. He patted my arm in his fatherly way and urged me to go. I cast my eyes over the glassy surf. I’d been cooped up indoors most of the day, and the idea of plunging into the sea and shedding all thoughts of our conversation was irresistible.

  I could easily have said something to put his mind at rest. It would have cost me nothing. Instead, I turned and waved as I ran down the wet sand, while Gerald stood there in his baggy swimming trunks, the foam swirling
about his ankles and surging up his skinny white legs.

  Laughing with relief, I threw myself into the sea.

  That afternoon, Ros and I went for a wander around the town. We had nowhere particular in mind – or at least I didn’t. We took the flight of steep stone stairs that led down past the neat gardens around the cathedral and I was about to head into the knot of cobblestone streets when Ros said, ‘You might as well have a look.’

  Although it loomed large outside our bedroom window and its bells woke us in the morning, I hadn’t been inside the cathedral. I pushed open the heavy wooden doors and stepped into the chilly foyer. The first thing I laid eyes on was a counter with a glass cabinet containing small wooden icons, bookmarks and commemorative coins. On top of it was a sign in English: ‘WANT TO SHOP?’ I stared at it and laughed.

  When Ros saw it, her face fell. She glanced through the glass partition into the gloomy interior of the church, all heavy stone pillars and arches. ‘Fuck this, I’m going.’ Her voice was loud in the hushed space. I looked around, hoping no one had heard her. I couldn’t understand why she was so angry. It was a silly sign but nothing to get bothered about.

  Ros marched out and I followed her into the warm morning sun, experiencing an immediate sense of release. It was the same feeling I used to get when leaving church with my mother as a child: the weight of obligation and guilt lifting from my body. The feeling of being back in the world again.

  ‘The bigger the church, the emptier they are,’ I said. The only time I set foot in a church these days was for weddings or funerals. When we were growing up, we spent half our lives in the church next door to our house. Playing in the grounds or doing ballet in the hall or going to Sunday school. As our mother’s disappointment in her marriage grew, so did her involvement in the church. Our father never went, not even on Christmas Day. I was still at Sunday school when Ros fell under the sway of a charismatic youth-group teacher with Pentecostal leanings. One evening, the teacher took the group to a revivalist meeting where Ros had a full-body baptism and emerged from the water speaking in tongues. When she got home her face was luminous, an ecstatic look in her eyes. It became another to reason to envy her.