Gotland

by Fiona Capp

  But there was a lot he didn’t understand about the people he was dealing with, and the most important thing was that Maeve would never leave Shane. That day when she came to Sven, desperate and in tears, was the last time he saw her. Two days later, after a backyard abortion, she suffered a haemorrhage and collapsed and died in the street.

  Sven stared past me at the window with its diamonds of hand-made glass held together by a web of lead.

  ‘I stayed in Ireland for many years afterwards because I felt I couldn’t desert her. They were lost years. I tried to contact Shane but he didn’t want to know me.’ He stopped. ‘I never meant to say all this.’

  It suddenly hit me. ‘You haven’t told anyone, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  The loneliness of it. Of carrying such pain around with you and never confiding in anyone. And the guilt. What a horrible, horrible weight. It was obvious, now, why he had behaved the way he had at Fridhem, urging me to make the most of what fate had dished up. His attraction to me made him afraid of himself, afraid of the damage that desire could inflict. I wanted to comfort him, but with the table between us, no gesture was adequate.

  I thought of how he had drawn me out of myself since I’d been there, almost as if he’d been waiting all this time for me to come along. Not me in particular, but someone who would do the same for him. Draw him out of himself. As much as he had resisted it, he had wanted it too. Our meeting was not, as the young Sven believed of his love affair with Maeve, meant to be. But it had happened and something good could come of it. Perhaps for us both.

  We looked at each other and silently agreed to say nothing more of it.

  It wasn’t until we had finished our meal that I became conscious I was being stared at. There was a woman at a table across the room who kept darting glances in my direction. When Sven excused himself, the woman watched him go. I sipped my wine and tried to ignore her, but out of the corner of my eye I could see her getting up from her seat and pushing it carefully back in place. And now she was approaching. I looked away, pretending to be absorbed in the view though the window, hoping to give the impression of someone who does not wish to be disturbed. I had a flash of that woman at the supermarket and the journalist with the dazzling smile, and shot a glance at the door.

  Suddenly she was standing beside me, tall and slender, and I had a vague feeling I knew her, but wasn’t sure why.

  ‘Esther, it’s you, isn’t it?’

  The woman had crouched by the table, her face so close I could see the rouge on her cheeks and the pale blue powder on her eyelids. My mind had gone blank. There was something about the elegant way the woman moved her hands and dipped her head as she talked that was familiar, and then I remembered. It was Cassie Boland, who would forever be my high school captain. Dependable, a bit proper and yet kind. I couldn’t believe she remembered me.

  ‘Cassie.’

  The woman smiled and dipped her head again. ‘I thought it was you the moment we came in but I didn’t want to disturb you. How amazing is this? But you’re probably always running into people you know – these days.’

  I felt my smile go wooden. We talked briefly about our lives and I explained what had brought me to Gotland. Cassie, it turned out, had married a Swedish engineering student she’d met at university and had been living in Stockholm ever since. She and her husband visited the island at least once a year and had plans to retire here.

  Cassie glanced back to where Sven was standing by the bar talking to the restaurant owner. ‘I won’t keep you, I just wanted to say hello and good luck with the election and everything. It’s terribly exciting. I better go. It was lovely to see you.’

  I’d forgotten how earnest Cassie could be. I knew she meant it, but her excitement about our meeting left me feeling odd. As if I was an emblem of home, something official. Not simply myself.

  Cassie straightened up and glanced again at Sven, dropping her voice. ‘You never know when you’ll run into someone, do you? Even on the other side of the world.’

  It took a few seconds for the implication of her words to sink in. I told myself I was imagining it – until I saw us through Cassie’s eyes. The intimate dinner. Sven’s hand on mine. The intense conversation. And yet there was no disapproval in Cassie’s voice, no knowing air. Only what seemed to be cautious concern. A gentle warning that I was visible in ways I could no longer control.

  Cassie gave a final restrained smile and walked back to her table and her Swedish husband. I went over to Sven, who was paying the bill. The air was too close. I told myself I would feel better once I was outside. Then the owner came and opened the door and released us into the night.

  19

  MELBOURNE

  August 2010

  I was starting to wonder if it would ever stop raining. All week the children had been on a wet-day timetable and now they were cranky and fed up. The only place they could play indoors was the small school hall, but with ball games and running games banned, there wasn’t much else to do. Even when the rain let up, there was nowhere to play: the oval had become a swamp and the wonky asphalt had given rise to shallow lakes.

  I could feel the children’s pent-up tension after lunch. Instead of being dreamy and tired, they couldn’t keep still. I got them to run up and down on the spot next to their desks: slow, then fast, then slow. Over and over again until they started complaining. Then I told them to squat ten times with their hands held out in front of them. Finally, they had to reach for the ceiling, to stretch as high as they could and then sweep their arms forward and tickle the carpet with their fingers.

  ‘Go all floppy now, as if you haven’t got any bones.’

  Giggling and groaning, the children sank to the floor.

  I glanced over the rows of heaped bodies and then turned to the wall where an old wooden clock was hanging. It was a genuine Swiss cuckoo that had once hung in my grandparents’ lounge room and cuckooed every half-hour. I had brought it to school as an aid for teaching the time because it never failed to get the children’s attention. Usually, I left it unwound so as not to interrupt the class. Whenever they were learning the time or whenever they were being difficult I would wind up the clock and wait for the cuckoo to work its magic.

  The children began crying out, ‘Look! Look! Miss Chatwin is going to wake up the cuckoo.’

  I smiled at them over my shoulder. ‘Only if you all sit down. Now.’

  With one finger, I gently spun the delicate minute arm, watching the hour arm follow, and found myself thinking about the tyranny of the clock and the school bell and how regimented it all was. I liked the way memories floated free of chronology, the way that night on the moat, or the morning of Kate’s birth, felt more immediate, more indelible than what happened last week. What did happen last week? Hardly surprising I’d buried the thought: Canberra, Rex and Miles, Kate’s painting.

  There was a squeal and I swung around to see Ashley’s arm outstretched, his hand like a claw reaching for the stunned face of Tran, who was sitting next to him. I yelled for him to stop but it made no difference. In the time it took me to lurch my way around the desks, Ashley had dragged his fingernails down the other boy’s face, leaving a trail of bloody stripes.

  For a moment, Tran was too shocked to respond. Then the pain kicked in and he began to howl, his tears stinging his wounds and making him cry even louder. Deaf to Tran’s howls, Ashley seemed mesmerised by his offending hand, staring at the blood under his nails as if he had no idea how it got there.

  I grabbed him by the wrists. It was all I could do not to whack him.

  Apart from Nikos’s framed Diploma of Education and Bachelor of Arts, the office walls were bare. There was a potted palm-like plant in one corner and a grey filing cabinet in another and between the two was his equally bare desk upon which sat a closed laptop computer and nothing else.

  Nikos remained sitting behind his desk and gestured to me to take the seat on the other side.

  I looked around at the freshly painte
d room. ‘This is not even minimalist, Nikos.’

  The principal grinned as he leaned back in his seat. ‘Some people start hoarding as they get older. I’m going the other way. Slightest clutter drives me bonkers.’

  The lingering odour of paint reminded me of the craving for blankness, for empty spaces, that came over me after my mother died. I painted the third bedroom iceberg white and removed all the furniture except for a cream-coloured couch on which I would lie for hours, as if in a white womb, staring at the walls and the ceiling. All that whiteness. It had soothed me in a way that nothing else could.

  Nikos straightened up, suddenly businesslike. ‘I’ve spoken to Tran’s parents and they understand there was nothing you could have done. You can’t watch them every second. And I’ve urged Ashley’s mother to get him to a counsellor, but it’s the father who needs his head shrunk. Until he changes, I can’t see Ashley managing his anger. He’s one tough cookie, that boy, and I’m well aware this makes it hard for you. Especially with everything else that’s been going on.’

  ‘I’ve been distracted, I know.’

  ‘These are exciting times, Esther. Anybody would be distracted.’

  I was walking towards the school gate when a thought swam into my head like some microscopic parasite that eats you up from the inside: this would be my final term at the school and possibly the last year in my teaching life. I wouldn’t be around to keep an eye on Ashley or have a word with his grade-one teacher. Sure, he was troubled, but he was also sensitive and bright and hungry to learn, if only given the chance. There wasn’t much you could do about what happened at home. What you could do was help the children trust their instincts, help them find the resources within themselves. Above all, you could make the classroom itself a refuge, a special place where risks could be taken without danger. If I had another year of teaching, I’d have advised Ashley’s parents to let him repeat. He was younger than most of the other children. All I needed was one more year with him. And I was sure that by the end of that year, he would be talking. He would be a different boy.

  It didn’t take long before my boots were wet through. The drum roll on the umbrella beat faster until it became a kind of white noise. Passing cars sent little tsunamis up from the gutter as the rain flooded the road.

  I stopped in the doorway of a shop, waiting for the downpour to ease, and glanced at the wedding dresses on display in the window. The shop had only opened the week before – an odd place for such a shop, sandwiched between grungy cafés, cheap Thai restaurants and bars. The two dresses in the window were white satin. One was slinky and cut to hug the body, the other was more traditional-looking with a flaring skirt and long train covered in lace. God, weddings. The whole damn fairytale. The irony, I couldn’t help thinking, was that fairytales were about the dark stuff, the primal struggles and all the dangers out there in the world. Fairytales weren’t about what happened in the ever-after. No one would read them if they were. The story of the Prince and Princess after their marriage was about the grind of duty, the price you paid for being royalty, the pitiless glare of public life.

  And the truth of it, how things felt from inside the relationship, would always remain opaque to the world. That was the way it was. The constant grappling with tensions other people didn’t see and would never understand. And yet the promise of that happy-ever-after was so ingrained you could find yourself living in denial for years. Refusing to see how things really were. Refusing to let go of the story you had always told yourself about your life and your love. If the facts no longer fitted the story, you did your best to ignore them.

  The rain had almost stopped. I was about to step out when a woman emerged from the chemist on the next corner, the mother of one of my pupils; a woman who liked a chat. Tilting my umbrella to hide my face, I ducked into a side-street. A circuitous route took me through the back streets of the suburb to a network of bluestone laneways, past corrugated-iron fences and the creeper-covered brick walls of converted stables, until I found myself at the base of the shot tower.

  According to Kate, it was the tallest tower of its kind in the world. The first of the skyscrapers. An elegant, brick-enclosed stairway to heaven, inescapably phallic and yet somehow isolated and exposed.

  I kept my eye on the footpath, skirting the puddles and overflowing gutters, until a gust of wind blew my umbrella inside out. I was wrestling it back into shape when I caught sight of the top of the tower. Something large had been hung from the tiny arched window near its apex. It was a rectangular white banner made from what looked like old bed linen stretched taut between the top window and the one below. Although the wind was jerking it about, the message – in large black capitals – was plain enough.

  YOU DO NOT DO, YOU DO NOT DO

  DADDY, DADDY, YOU BASTARD I’M THROUGH

  The dog rushed down the sideway, barking madly as I unlocked the front door. It was obvious Kate had come home – the biscuit barrel abandoned on the sink, the lid left off, and the milk carton sitting on the bench – but whether she was still around was uncertain. I thought I heard the occasional noise coming from her room, but didn’t feel ready to find out.

  There were so many last-minute things I had to get done, including packing my bags – or was there any point? Since Canberra, I’d been telling myself that Kate and David’s time together while I was away would somehow turn everything around. That they would have a chance to talk and do things they hadn’t done for years – playing Five Hundred or Monopoly, having a hit at tennis or going for a Sunday drive. I had this silly fantasy that Kate would take David for a tour of her street art – and maybe even to the Emptyshow if the building was still standing – and that he would begin to understand what it meant to her and why I’d allowed her to do it, and that the dismay he still nursed over the whole affair would magically evaporate. And somehow, despite everything, we would be back to our old selves.

  The idea was laughable now.

  I made a coffee and sat down at the table. Instead of picking me up, the caffeine seemed to fuel a great surge of weariness. I thought I would just put my head down for a moment and before I knew it I’d dozed off. Suddenly Kate was standing next to me. All I wanted was to slump down again and close my eyes. Then I remembered.

  ‘I saw it, Kate. The shot tower.’

  A nervous smile played on her lips as she leaned back into the kitchen bench and heaved herself up. She sat with her legs dangling against the cupboard doors.

  ‘You could have been killed! How did you get it up there?’

  ‘It wasn’t dangerous at all. Pretz helped me get in and we just walked up the spiral staircase. I tied the top strings of the banner to the railing, dropped it out the window and let Pretz secure the bottom from the window below. Simple as that. No one’s going to know it was me. I had to do it, that’s all.’ Kate grinned slyly. ‘It’s poetry Mum. Sylvia –’

  ‘I know that! Did it occur to you to tell Dad how you were feeling?’

  ‘He wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘And you think he will now?’ Even if David didn’t notice the banner hanging from the shot tower, a photo of it would be sure to end up on YouTube.

  Kate shrank into her bulky knitted jacket. ‘I don’t care any more,’ she said flatly. The sheen of youth that normally glowed in her face was gone, leaving her looking pasty and tired. She was taller than me these days and yet she had started to hunch her shoulders, as if she didn’t want to be noticed. Or perhaps at some unconscious level, she wanted to be small again. I remembered how, even when Kate was too big for me to pick up, I would say to her, ‘One, two, three, up!’ and she would jump into my arms and wrap her legs around me and we would stagger around the kitchen and laugh. And then the day came when Kate was too heavy, when I buckled under her weight.

  I told her I was going to cancel my trip.

  She jumped off the bench, alarmed. ‘No, Mum, don’t. Please! That wasn’t what I wanted. I’ll make it up with Dad.’

  ‘But you’re not really so
rry.’

  ‘And why should I be? I’m glad I did it. And it helped. I’m not as angry any more.’

  ‘I can go another time.’

  ‘You have to go now, Mum. What would be achieved by staying? And besides, how can you pull out on Ros? She needs you and you need to see her.’

  This was true. But why did it feel indulgent, as if I was running away?

  Kate brought her face close to mine. ‘There won’t be another time. Can’t you see that?’ She grinned as she watched my mind ticking over.

  ‘All right, I will go,’ I said slowly. ‘But only if you get your friends to take that thing down. And promise you’ll behave while I’m away.’

  I put my arms around her. Both our hearts were beating in time, as if synchronised. I thought of the sheet flapping in the wind and the words written on it and couldn’t help smiling.

  20

  GOTLAND

  September 2010

  Every chime of the cathedral bell, on the hour and half-hour, from eleven-thirty until three in the morning. I heard them all. How did the locals bear it? Surely you must grow deaf to them, like the monthly siren. It was a drill for a nuclear attack, a hangover from the Cold War. Every district in the country had a shelter. Sven’s local shelter was a cellar in a nearby house. Although it wasn’t necessary any more, it had become a habit no one was prepared to break. In the days when Swedish air-force jets used to regularly fly over the island, Sven would have dreams that the Russians were invading. ‘You’ve got to remember,’ he said, ‘what part of the world you are in.’

  I couldn’t help laughing. ‘What is it about the Russians?’ I thought of something I’d learned at school. During the time of the Crimean War, a fort had been built at the mouth of the bay near Melbourne because it was feared that the Russians were coming. ‘It doesn’t seem to matter where you are.’