by Kim Kelly
Darmstadt, she wrote the name at the top of the page, and beneath it the year, 1922; beneath that she wrote: Grandfather – Adam Loest (Löst). Her fingers tingled at the shapes of his name, as if her cells were responding somehow to memories not her own, but his. Tears stung as all the stories, their stories, spun and settled in her heart.
Oh, Dad. Daddy. She wanted to call him again, wanted to run home to him. What would she say, though, if he were right here with her now? She couldn’t say anything. She would never say anything. She would never tell him she knew.
What he had seen. What he so obviously did not want to remember.
How it had wounded him.
How his wounding had wounded her.
She had so much to say. But what? And to whom? She turned the page with all her yearning, burning need and saw at last that here was a place where she could say whatever she wanted to. She stared at it; it stared back at her. And now, finally, she dared to begin:
The first war had been kind to him. Adam had survived. He had also distinguished himself on the battlefield with courage and quick wits enough that he rose through the ranks. Not bad for a lowly saddle-maker’s son. But then, as the war had worn on, there were fewer and fewer courageous and quick-witted young men to choose from.
Addy paused and looked at her pen, wondering how those words had come. They didn’t seem her own. Because they weren’t, not completely. They were Adam’s first, she supposed. They were words that belonged to her family. And not only to her family: she would want these words to belong to any wounded heart. All hearts. These were words that had been brewing through every story she’d ever longed to tell, and through every story she’d ever heard or read. They were fresh-cut words that sprang straight from forever and always.
She wrote out her heart on the page. Pages and pages, one after the other. A view of a Darmstadt street she’d never seen; a sketch of face she’d never met; lines and lines of garbled notes she hoped she’d be able to decipher later. She wrote without stopping, until hunger brought her back into the here and now.
What am I writing? She didn’t know. She looked out her window, which, in this imperfect writing room, she had to bend back a little in her chair to do, set as this window was just above the middle of her bed – the only configuration of furniture that worked, given the size of her wardrobe. She stared a little numbly at the rusted rooftops of Chippendale, as if her brain had been emptied out. Relieved. And yet she fizzed inside with – what was this? The roofs and chimney pots were gold kissed in the —
Oh fuck. Oh frick. Oh fuck. What’s the time?
She looked down at her watch. It was almost half-past five.
It’s all right – I have forty-five minutes. He won’t be here until six-fifteen.
He? Like Dan Ackerman picked her up every Friday evening for club Chinese and a ringside seat to watch her brother punch another man in the face. What? Truth would always be stranger than fiction. And I have to wash my hair – my hair is disgusting. What will I wear? What will I wear? WHAT WILL I WEAR?
She hurled herself into the shower and mentally ran through her wardrobe, with the story of Adam and Anna Loest tugging at the edges of everywhere. She didn’t want to leave them; she even considered catching the bus to Kingsford alone, just so she wouldn’t have to talk with Dan, or anyone – except her grandparents. After all, Dan had said, ‘If you’re not at home tomorrow night, that’s cool,’ hadn’t he?
Stop that thought right there. I will not be standing up Dan Ackerman. I can’t wait to see him – his lovely face. His warm, dark eyes. His smile. His very cool suede boots – I hope he wears them.
God, what a load of superficial observations they are.
What? I’m not supposed to find him attractive?
You pay too much heed to meaningless details. A real writer —
Shut up.
Apart from wanting to discover every detail about him there was to know, she could not possibly no-show him or he might think she thought he was a creep for stealing her note from the piano. That was the most romantic thing that anyone had ever done, as far as she was concerned.
WHAT WILL I WEAR?
It doesn’t matter – you’re going to a leagues club. Just get dressed.
She skittered back to her room, trailing drips all over the cruddy old floorboards as she went, thinking she should sweep up here one day – no one else ever did. She made another mental note to unload the washing machine downstairs and get those clothes on the line before they stank. So much for sending Luke his jumper today – how self-absorbed are you? Please, shut up. She opened her wardrobe doors, and the first frock she saw, of course, was the garden dress, its poppies and cornflowers beckoning: You know you want to. And she wasn’t going to. Apart from being entirely inappropriate for the occasion, she didn’t want it to get wrecked: many of her dresses were marked here and there, scorched by careless cigarettes in crowded bars and parties. She never wore a favourite anywhere like that; in fact, there were at least twenty dresses here that she’d never worn at all, because they were too beautiful.
Once she’d discounted all the purples, reds and oranges as too attention-seeking and all the pale colours as too dangerous an invitation to spill sweet-and-sour pork or curried prawns all over herself, she was left with black, brown or pink.
Wear pink – show him you like him. Be pretty.
Wear black – don’t show off. It’s your brother’s night, not yours.
Fuck off.
So, she compromised, choosing a black dress splotched all over with big pink camellias. It was a nice cut: early 1960s-ish demure, with a high, squared neckline and bell-shaped skirt, full but not too full, not too long, not too short. As for the camellias, they were so pink the New South Wales Amateur Boxing Association could use her as a beacon in a storm should the weather turn bad again. There was no time for further mucking about, though.
My hair is still wet!
She raced back to the bathroom, flapping and crashing a hand through the contents of the cupboard below the sink – to find no hair dryer there. She raced then into Roz’s room, hoping to find it on her dressing table, which was where it usually otherwise lived, since Roz had the most hair of anyone Addy knew – and there it was among her empty paint tubes and rolls of film, wedged between her camera and a black lacy bra. As the dryer was already plugged in, she turned it on and got to it, trying not to worry about how boring her hair was. There was no internal argument to be had about this: it was a simple fact. Her hair was mouse brown and dead straight; it didn’t even glint in the sun; once, during the school holidays at the end of Year Eleven, she’d tried to streak it blonde with peroxide, like all the other girls did, and hers went green – and not even an interesting green, but kind of a sickly, phlegmy green. It doesn’t matter, she reminded herself: she’d ponytail it, pin it up and forget it was there.
‘Urghhhh …’ Something groaned behind her on Roz’s queen-size, unmade bed – and it wasn’t Roz, who would still have been out wenching it at Fancy That. It wasn’t the abstract nude on the easel by the balcony doors, either. Two king-size feet were sticking out the end of the giant heap of quilt, almost invisible among its explosion of wine-red batik lotuses, only seen now Addy was looking – and they belonged to Drummer Boy Kendall, she could only suppose, going for a world championship medal in sleeping all day. Addy would have envied his effort, if she hadn’t been standing there in her undies.
‘Oops.’ And she raced back out again with her half-dried hair.
It was now almost ten minutes to six.
Breathe.
What are you panicking for?
I don’t know – everything.
You are crazy.
She tried to stop her brain racing, tried to focus on the only important thing – getting ready – and she was almost there, having chosen her jacket, a cropped black gabardine, understated, neither cool nor uncool, and her shoes, ballet flats so she wouldn’t have to worry about snagging a heel or falling
over, and her lipstick, not too pink, not too showy, and she was just applying a little mascara when there was a knock on the front door. At which she just about poked out her left eye with the brush.
‘F—ouch!’ she couldn’t help shouting out, as the door creaked open downstairs, HRH drawling breathily: ‘Oh! Dolly, hello.’
Dolly – like she knows him – fuck, my eye. Is it bleeding? Why are you early? You’re ten minutes early! Fuck, my eye. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
‘Are you looking for Kendall?’ Harriet was asking him.
‘Ah, um. No,’ Dan replied, his voice sliding up the bannister and through Addy’s ribs to fizz there with every other strange excitement of this day. ‘I’ve come to pick up Addy.’
Addy – that’s me. She forgot all about her weeping eye.
‘Oh?’ Harriet sounded surprised. ‘Adrianna, it’s for you,’ she called up the stairs, and Addy caught what she imagined might be a note of sadness in it, one that stilled the giddiness. She didn’t have to like Harriet to feel sympathy for her: rejection wasn’t any fun, even for stuck-up cows.
Don’t look too happy, she schooled herself, looking in the mirror of her wardrobe door again. Don’t rub it in. She checked the mascara damage: it hadn’t smudged too badly; she never wore enough for it to make too terrible a mess, anyway. She was as ready as she’d ever be.
‘Coming!’
She closed her notebook and quickly stashed it back in the desk drawer; she checked her purse for money and keys and down she went, not too fast, not too slow.
Breathe.
He was leaning against the piano when she saw him; he looked up and said: ‘Wow.’
Wow. He’d had a haircut, just a normal, tidy haircut; he didn’t look like a frayed-denim Elizabethan poet now: he was wearing a tan corduroy sports coat with a plain grey, collared shirt, absolutely appropriate for an evening at a blue-collar leagues club, where you didn’t want to make any particular statement, raise any eyebrows, cause any trouble, get kicked out; he was also wearing those suede boots, those delicious boots. Whatever, he looked just – Wow.
She said: ‘Hello. You’re a bit early.’ Why did I say that?
But he laughed, ‘Yeah,’ offering no explanation. ‘Do you want to go?’
‘Okay.’ She thought her ribcage might burst open with the flutter of a thousand startled birds as they stepped down the hall and out onto the street, into the night.
Parked under the light near the end of the terrace row, his car was old and small, aquamarine faded by the sun, and as he held out the door for her, for a moment, she couldn’t make sense of the scene: no one had ever held open a car door for her before; chivalry was dead and gone; boys didn’t do that sort of thing anymore, certainly not boys where she was from, certainly not boys in bands, either, not even Luke Neilson, with all his North Shore niceness, and most girls didn’t want that kind of patriarchally charged attention in any case – not educated girls, at least. It felt awkward, and she put her hand on the top of the door as though she didn’t know what to do next – Just get in the stupid car. She did and, thankfully, he left her to it, going around to the driver’s side.
He got in and pulled his door closed with a wheezy thud; long legs hinged up under the steering wheel, he paused there for a moment before he turned to her and said: ‘You probably think I’m stoned, don’t you?’
She shook her head. Her excruciating self-consciousness had not allowed for any such wonder about him, and most of her mind was now consumed with how she was going to avoid looking like an idiot putting on her seatbelt, it being of an unfamiliar, old-fashioned style.
He said: ‘Well, I’m not. I promise you. I’m just, um …’ He smiled and bit his bottom lip; and he winced, scrunching up his nose – Unbe-fricken-lievably lovely – before he confessed: ‘I’m just a bit nervous.’
And that was the moment, right there, that Addy Loest stopped falling in love. This was the moment those bonds of gold set like solid steel between them – not that she quite knew it yet. There was too much, far too much, going on in her head.
She wanted to say, I’m probably more nervous than you are, but the thought remained trapped, with several others, including: I need a drink, and, How the hell does this seatbelt flap-doodle thing work? It was one of those across-the-lap seatbelts with a levered catch, and the last time she remembered seeing one she was about seven years old and her father had put it on for her. She said to Dan now, scrambling for something pleasant and non-idiotic: ‘Your car is very cool.’
‘You think so?’ He grinned; she’d said the right thing. He told her: ‘It’s an Imp, 1965 – she’s tiny but she’s tough.’
I’m tiny and made in 1965, but I’m not tough, just minuscule, and I don’t believe there’s any such car called an Imp. Seriously – am I even here? Addy looked back down at the seatbelt catch and asked the easier question: ‘How does this work?’
Dan said: ‘It’s just the same as on a plane. Just lift up the …’
She didn’t hear what he was saying; she’d never been on a plane; and the side of his hand now brushed the top of her thigh as he clicked the catch closed.
‘Yeah, go on, pull the belt this way …’ He was obviously repeating whatever it was he’d just said.
The noise inside her head was relentless, almost painful. She stared into the pink camellias splashed across her knees.
He leaned on the steering wheel and asked her: ‘Addy? Are you all right?’
The question snapped her back with the usual shame of not being all right, as well as the new shame of not being all right in light of everything she’d learned about her grandparents this morning. She said to Dan Ackerman: ‘I’m fine. Sorry – had a long day, um, writing. I’m a bit mad.’
‘An essay?’ He seemed to buy that well enough; he put the key in the ignition.
‘Yeah,’ she lied. Why did I just lie? ‘American Lit – Gatsby.’
As he drove, heading south with the bumper-to-bumper stream of evening office escapees, they exchanged some rote small talk about the literature they’d studied at school. As he was two years older and the texts alternated every other year, it turned out they’d been set the exact same ones for their final exams: King Lear, Pride and Prejudice, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath. But could Addy remember a single interesting thing about any one of them? No. And so she shifted the subject, asking him: ‘Where did you go to school?’
He pointed out the window; by no spectacular coincidence they were passing his alma mater right that second: ‘There – Sydney Boys.’
Of course you did, she shrank again, and just as baselessly. Sydney Boys was a huge public school, here on the edge of the city, and was academically selective in a way that made it, and the girls school next door, the kind of school you sent your children to if you were a bit posh but didn’t want your kids to be prats. Sydney Boys was where all the cool boys went, and tribes of them continued through to Sydney Uni, generations of them. Addy had been the only student from her whole class at Wollongong High to go to Sydney Uni at all. Everyone else who’d gone on to further study went to the universities of Wollongong or New South Wales. Her father had wanted his children to go to the best and most prestigious – if it was free, then why not? Sydney Uni was a ticket that would take you through many more doors; while Wollongong Uni was, to Peter Loest, hardly much of a step up from the technical college where he’d earned his certificate in metallurgy; it was an institution feeding graduates to the steel industry – not one that would see his children reclaim their rightful place in the world. She felt her mind drifting away again – loose balloon, so Roz had called her, and that’s precisely what she was. But as she drifted, her heart began to pound, not with any happy sort of excitement; only lead-dread fear, a thousand nameless fears.
Please, not here. Not now.
She fought it; she fought it harder than she ever had, changing the subject again: ‘What’s your favourite Chinese?’
‘Mmm …’ He turned right, following wide white a
rrows marked on the road. ‘I eat anything that’s not nailed down, but at Souths Juniors, the honey chicken is pretty amazing. It’s a good restaurant.’ He glanced at her with that smile, and she forced herself to keep her focus on it, on his sweetness. She was safe with him; safe here; even if her lips tingled with the panic and her mouth had gone so dry she was sure he could hear her swallow.
I’m all right. I’m all right.
She touched and grasped the string of that loose balloon, re-found the conversation and asked him: ‘You’ve been to Souths Juniors before?’
‘Heaps,’ he said, accelerating as the traffic began to clear a little. ‘My folks come here all the time. Well, when Mum has a night off the tools, which isn’t all that often. Dad’s almost always on call, with the hospital, so he doesn’t like to be too far away or be at any place where he can’t just take off.’
‘What sort of a doctor is he?’ Listen to the answer. This is interesting – be interested.
‘He’s a general surgeon,’ Dan told her, frowning at the road, changing lanes. ‘He’s one of the guys that gets to have the first look at accidents and emergencies that come in, to assess the damage, stop the bleeding, prevent imminent death and all that.’
‘Wow. Action man,’ Addy tried for a joke, and joked to herself at the same time: If I do have a heart attack, then I’m in good hands, aren’t I?
