“You’re down here,” she says, leading me down the hall. There’s a big bed with a grey satin cover on it, but my eyes hardly see it. They’re too busy being dazzled by the pile of orange and pink and red cushions spread all over it.
“Why don’t you put your stuff away and get comfy,” she says. “You can come out when you’re done.”
She closes the door behind her and I sit on the bed, my bag on my knees. The mattress feels softer than mine at home. The room is bigger. Even the air tastes different. I never realised that travel could make even breathing into a new experience.
A chest of drawers stands against the wall on the other side of the room. On it is a dish of large, coloured beads, a small mirror and two little red birds. Paper maché, I think.
Above it is a framed print, all blue and white, with a boat at the top and words underneath. It says: ‘A ship in a harbour is safe. But that is not what ships are built for.’ I raise my eyebrows and shrug. Okaaay.
There’s a view through one of the two windows out to the front. If I stand on my tiptoes I can see down the mountain and out to the coast, with the ocean, all blue and grey and crazy-enormous. I scan the line where the town meets the beach and then I see the tiny harbour, just the size of a pin-prick from here. It’s peaceful. Glorious.
Liam and Gabby would love it.
I rummage in my bag for my phone but when I pull it out and turn it on, error messages come up. No service. I turn it on and then off again, just to check, but there’s nothing. I’m frustrated, trying to figure out if it’s some button I need to press when I hear a voice.
“Are you ready?”
Grandma’s back. Her head is stuck around my door and she’s smiling. Like she’s amused.
“Um,” I say. “I was just…” and I show her my phone.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says. “One of the tiny drawbacks of living up here is no mobile access. I think it’s because we’re so close to the escarpment. We’re just in some kind of dead spot for some reason.”
I look at my phone and then back at her. Disappointed.
“When we go into town you can check your messages,” she says. “That’s what I always do.”
I drop the phone onto the bed. “Okay,” I say. “I just wanted to show my friends the view.”
“You must be hungry,” she says. “I’ve got some lunch.”
We eat salad sandwiches on the verandah in the sun. The munching keeps us silent but I’m glad. Even though Grandma is super-nice, the fact is I’m going to be here for a full two weeks. Which is a pretty long time. Honestly? I’m a bit nervous that we won’t find enough to talk about. Or, worse, that I’m going to say the wrong thing. Do I mention Mum? Will she get upset if I ask about Dad? Maybe I should just stick to gardening. At least that would be safe. And I can think of a zillion questions I could ask her on the topic, mostly about kikuyu grass and good ways to get rid of it.
I swallow my last mouthful and clear my throat but I’m too slow. Grandma gets there first. And she’s jumping right in.
“You know what the elephant in the room is, right?” she says.
I think I may have misheard. “Wait, what?” I say.
“Do you know what the phrase, ‘the elephant in the room’ means?” she asks again. She’s grimacing. Awkwardly.
“Um, I think so,” I say.
“It means, well, the thing that everyone knows you need to talk about, that nobody talks about and everyone just ignores,” she explains.
I nod. Okay.
“So, we probably need to talk about some elephants,” she says. “And then we can just get on with having a good time together. What do you think?”
I have no idea what I think. Do people actually do this? Talk about the big stuff straight up? What if we all get upset or offended? Will I have to go home?
“What do you think?” she asks again. Agh. She actually wants an answer.
I give her one. “Oh, like, okay.”
Grandma takes a deep breath.
“I’m so happy to see you here, Jazmine. I’m so glad your mum rang me. I’m so glad you wanted to come. And I want you to know you can ask me anything. I might not necessarily want to answer it, but I will. And I’ll tell you the truth. Promise.”
I sit for a moment. Overwhelmed. Even though Grandma says everything’s okay, she seems a bit tense. I’m not really sure I can totally trust her. Yet. Of course I have questions. Probably more than she can handle. But I’ll have to go slowly. Test the waters. My voice is small and for some reason I half turn away as I’m speaking.
“Do you have any pictures of Dad?”
Grandma’s arms lose their stiffness and she lets go of her breath like she’s relaxing. She stands up and reaches for me to do the same. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
I follow her into her room and watch as she opens the door to her walk-in closet. On a small shelf just in front of her are two photos in frames. She picks up the first one.
“I think this is my favourite photo ever of him.” She holds the frame out to me and I take it tentatively. From behind the glass a very young man, much younger than I remember, with ruffled hair, wearing a crumpled t-shirt beams up at me. I get a shock.
“He looks just like you,” I say, looking up at Grandma. There are the same blue eyes, the same crease of a smile. Even their ear lobes are identical.
“I was going to say he looks like you,” Grandma says. She holds the picture next to my face and points me to the mirror. “Look.”
I look, and I’m astounded. There, in my face, is my dad’s smile, his teeth and his nose. I hold a hand over the top half of my face so I can compare our mouths and chins.
“You see?” says Grandma, grinning. “When you got off the bus today, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I knew you always looked similar to him, but it’s even more now.”
I give a tiny laugh. Who would have known? “I always thought I was way more like Mum,” I say, but then I realise whose name I’ve mentioned. “I mean…”
“It’s okay,” says Grandma. She can see I feel awkward. “You don’t have to worry.”
I pull in my lips and clench them under my teeth. Strange how when someone says you don’t have to worry, you worry anyway.
“Who’s the other picture?” I ask. “In there, I mean.” I wave my hand towards the closet.
Grandma screws up her nose at me and shrugs. “Well,” she says, “You might know her.” She picks up the second photo and passes it to me. “Such a little cutie.”
For a second I don’t realise who the blonde haired baby is staring out of the frame but when I glance back at Grandma’s face, I know. It’s me. Grandma, who hasn’t seen me for four years, keeps my baby photo in her cupboard.
There are no words. I put the picture down and smile at her. She beams back and then she bounces gently on the bed next to me.
“Two weeks, hey?” she says. “Two whole weeks. We’re going to have some adventures.”
Chapter 15
First, we eat.
I’m not sure if Grandma thinks that eating is an adventure but trying things like goat’s cheese and weird paté doesn’t come up much in my normal life. For the first few days we spend a couple of hours of gardening in the morning and then we head out to literally every single different café and restaurant in town.
Grandma orders something different every time.
I’m the person who looks for the same meal on every menu (totally chips, schnitzel and salad) but she’s like, “Oooh, what’s that?” to the waiter and, “Okay, aragula/rocket/other weird herbs and vegetables. Sounds exciting! I’ll have it.”
My mouth tingles and my brain explodes at practically every meal. A few times I attempt to stick to my usual but Grandma gives me a look from across the table.
“Really?” she says. “But have you ever before eaten baked root vegetables in a balsamic dressing, with proscuitto?” And she lifts one eyebrow so high that I have to try not to laugh.
“No,” I say.
“I haven’t.”
“Well, then,” she says. “It just might be the next love of your life. But you’ll never know unless you try it.”
When we get our meals she wants to share hers with me as well as try mine, so I push my plate into the middle of the table and gingerly take a few forkfuls of hers.
“What do you love?” she asks. “On the plate. What do you love?”
The question stops me, every time. I have to think. Definitely not avocado or zucchini. I don’t know why anyone would want to eat them. But I do love a tiny hit of bacon. I’m starting to taste the beauty in tomatoes and there was one home-made mayonnaise we tried that opened my eyes wide and made my mouth water for more.
“What do you love?” I ask her back one day. We’re having a late lunch in an open air café opposite the beach. The sun is golden and the sky is the deepest blue I’ve ever seen. When the waves toss over, the white foamy edges sparkle in the light.
“What do I love?” she says. She laughs. “Honestly? I love it when you try something new. It’s like I’m tasting it for the first time all over again.”
“Yeah, but you still like avocado, though,” I say.
“True,” she says. “But I’m holding out hope that you’ll be convinced yet.”
One night she makes me put my best clothes on and takes me out to a restaurant on a pier. It’s all nautical stuff, old wood and waiters in boat uniforms. We eat our dinner. I share my grilled fish with her and she makes me try oysters, which I don’t recommend. Slimy. And then a band comes to the stage and sets up. Two guitarists and one of those huge, standing double bass things.
“I saw these guys at a festival down the coast last year,” says Grandma, leaning over to me so I can hear her better. “I think they’re really good.”
I nod and watch as they get started. I love the way the bass player is just slapping the strings and bobbing with the beat. All the musicians have their eyes shut for different bits as they play. I watch them carefully. I know that feeling, of disappearing into another space, of being overtaken by something else. But I didn’t know you could do it with music too.
Grandma grabs my hand.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s dance.”
Dance? I pull back against her.
“Um, no thanks,” I say, almost squishing my bottom into my chair as if that might create some kind of glue that will stop me ever getting up.
“Why not?” says Grandma. “The music is great!”
I look out at the empty dance floor and shake my head again.
Grandma lets go of me. “Okay,” she says. “But I will.”
She trots out to the dance floor in her orange shoes and turquoise jacket and begins to sway and groove with the music. I scrounge down as low as I can on my chair. Embarrassment, much! I have to cover my eyes and hide my face to stop from seeing the rest of the restaurant looking at her and laughing.
After a couple of minutes my neck is getting a crick in it from hiding away. I have to come up for a stretch. And maybe some fresh air as well. I take a breath and turn my neck from side to side. Some people are still sitting at their tables but others are moving over to the dance floor. It suddenly strikes me.
No-one else thinks Grandma is embarrassing.
The idea is astounding.
So astounding, in fact, that I drop my hands to beside my chair and take a good look around me. Grandma is still dancing. But no one is watching her. No one is judging her. No one is laughing at her. In fact, other people are heading out to dance with her.
I put my hands on the table but no one notices. People keep eating, talking, dancing. I stretch them up over my head and yawn. Loudly.
Nothing.
The waiters deliver meals and drinks and walk on by. I stand up. I even jiggle from side to side. And no one notices. It’s as though I’m invisible but in a totally different way from how I used to be. Before, I made myself small. I took up no space. I looked away from the world. This time I’m looking at it. I’m taking up space. I’m confident.
And it doesn’t matter.
People just don’t think that much about me. But I don’t think it in a sad way. It’s more a feeling of being free. Loose. Exciting.
I take a step away from the table. Just a little one, but it feels huge. Then I take another step and then another and another until finally I’m standing at the edge of the dance floor, just looking at my grandmother, dancing and happy and light. She sees me, stops and smiles. And then she holds out her hand to me, and I take it and step onto the smooth wooden surface and start to move, just a little at first, because I’m shy, but then with bigger and bigger movements until we’re both dancing and smiling at each other with delight, and then losing ourselves in the vibrations of the beat coming up through the floor because it’s there, and we can, and we are both completely alive.
Later, in the car, in the dark, on the way home, Grandma says, “Your dad loved dancing, you know. He was good at it too.”
“I didn’t,” I say, thoughtfully. “Know, that is.”
We sit quietly in our seats as the car flashes past the street lights. The dashboard is lit up in orange, reflecting off Grandma’s big, amber necklace.
“I don’t know much about him,” I say into the dark. “I mean, I do, because he was my dad, but things like dancing, and other stuff he liked, I don’t know that much about.”
Grandma looks ahead into the road. She turns the corner that leads up the mountain and then the street lights peter out and everything is dark. I look out of the window and realise I can see stars. Not just a few; a whole sky of them.
“He loved dancing, sport, surfing,” Grandma says. “Anything where he could move. I could hardly ever get him to sit down when he was a little boy. He drove his teachers crazy at school. I tried to get him to learn the violin when he was eight but he lasted about three weeks before everyone was tearing their hair out.”
I laugh. “That’s funny.”
“It was. Well. Kind of. It ended up that every weekend I’d have to take him on a huge bushwalk or go to the beach. Something really energetic to do together just so he wouldn’t tear the place apart.” There’s a smile in Grandma’s voice. “And in the end I loved it as much as he did.”
“Did he love gardening?” I say. I’m nervous about the answer. For some reason I want it to be ‘yes’.
“Definitely not.” Grandma laughs. “I’m afraid the gardening thing skipped him over. You’ve got it from me, not from him. Waiting for flowers to grow was just too slow for Matt.”
Matt. The name jars in my ears. I called him Dad.
“It’s so funny to think that we both knew him, but in such different ways,” I say. “And Mum too.”
There’s a silence. The stars seem to grow bigger; the darkness blacker. I think of elephants sitting in the back seat and I take a deep breath and ask one of the questions I’ve wanted to ask since I arrived.
“Do you miss him?” I say, all in one flurry, and then I freeze, with my breath all huddled up in my chest.
In the reflection of the dash lights I see something small creep onto Grandma’s cheek. It’s shiny and orange and bright. And then I realise. It’s a tear.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” I say, hurriedly. “I shouldn’t have asked that. I don’t want to make you upset. Sorry, sorry.”
Grandma says nothing for a few seconds and the small fear inside me turns into a much bigger one. Finally, she nods, almost to herself, and then pulls the car over onto the shoulder of the road. The engine is still running but we’re not moving. She turns to me and I can see not just one tear, but a line of them from eye to nose to the top of her mouth.
“Don’t apologise, Jaz,” she says. “Yes. I miss him. I miss him so much.” Her shoulders shake and her voice disappears for a second. She bends her head down and a small pool of wet appears on the gear stick, glimmering in the moonlight.
“When your baby dies…” Her voice chokes and she stops talking. She wipes her nose on her
sleeve. “Ugh. Pretend you didn’t see that, okay?”
She takes a deep breath, straightens her shoulders and looks forward into the road. “You can’t get over your child dying,” she says. She sounds strong. “A child should never die before their mother. I almost think it’s easier for a wife to lose a husband, and, don’t take this wrong, for a child to lose a parent—sometimes. But a mother to lose her baby is, well, it’s hell.” She spits the last word out.
A car rushes past, its lights catching the canopy of trees above us, then dying away, red and small in the distance. The aftershock of its energy shudders through our seats.
Grandma shakes her head and turns back to me, her hand on the gear stick.
“Never apologise for asking questions,” she says. “I’m glad you asked me. Not many people do. Most people want to avoid the topic. They get scared when someone cries.”
I’m not sure what to say, so I twist my hands together. “Oh.”
“I’m okay,” she says. “Mostly. I went from crying every day for months back then to now having just a couple of days a year when I’m not okay. The rest of the time, I choose to do the things that remind me that I’m still alive. Matt would have liked that.”
I want to ask more. I want to talk about Mum. Find out why they haven’t spoken since it all happened. But for some reason I can’t do it. Something is holding me back. Maybe it’s the fact that Grandma hasn’t actually said Mum’s name the whole time I’ve been here. It’s not a big thing. But it’s enough to let me know that things are delicate. Touchy. I push the elephant back into its seat and click the seatbelt.
Not now.
Grandma puts her indicator on and we pull out onto the road again. The trees close in above us, shielding the sky and making a tunnel.
“I love this bit,” Grandma says. She speeds the car up a little. “It feels like we’re driving into a fairytale.”
I nod. It’s weird. Even a little spooky with the trees blocking out the sky. But then it’s over as we turn a corner and then I gasp because down below us, at the bottom of the mountain, are lights. It is a fairytale, twinkling and dazzling at our feet. Grandma turns into her driveway and we sit in the car, looking out at the lights below and the stars above. The moon leaves a silver track on the water and, way out to the horizon, tiny ships twinkle orange beacons.
Invincible (Invisible 2) Page 9
