If You Go, page 11
‘I’m sorry,’ I said thickly, sounding robotic. There was more than one thing for me to apologise to Grace for, and she seemed to understand this, giving my leg a squeeze.
‘Reckon you can sit up and eat a bit of this?’
I tried to wave her away, but Grace was having none of it, clucking her tongue and heaving me up to lean back against the wall. When she was settled in the chair with the tray across her knee, she lifted the mug of tea to my lips first so I could swallow the pill she was proffering.
‘For the shock,’ she said. ‘It’ll help you get a bit of sleep.’
Hadn’t I just had more sleep than any human had any right to enjoy? There was such a lot I still needed to understand. But I was feeling so awful – mind, body, soul – that right then if Grace had offered a pill to put me out of my misery for good, I would have shot it straight back dry.
As I ate Grace’s hot porridge, opening my mouth like a baby bird to take the spoon, we made strange, polite conversation like the chat Vivienne had carried out with nurses in hospital as Lorna lay dying. ‘What lovely shoes. Where did you say you got them?’ With my thumb in my mouth, I had watched the exchange from the padded vinyl chair pulled up beside my grandmother’s bed.
‘I can’t believe how fast it goes,’ my grandmother croaked – a lucid moment. I opened my mouth to respond, but Vivienne broke off with the nurses to come bustling over.
‘Shh, Mum. You’re okay.’
Lorna sounded distressed, as if she might start crying. ‘My life went by so fast!’
I saw a panicked look pass between Vivienne and the nurses, but my grandmother’s eyes were already closing, and soon she was quiet. My mother’s conversation picked up where it had left off.
‘They say it might rain later.’
‘Oh, really?’
I was too young to articulate anything about the finality of death, knowing only that Lorna looked terrifying – yellow, thin and leathery – more like the preserved bodies I’d seen in books about Ancient Egypt than like my grandmother.
Thinking, given this, someone should be screaming.
The effects of the pill were taking hold as Grace put my bowl and mug back on the tray. I felt vacant, made of white noise, but I had enough wherewithal to notice that she seemed strained as she tidied my bed up, tucking the sheets in tightly around my limbs. It seemed to me the magnanimous patience she’d had bucket loads of was finally wearing thin.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked mechanically, slowed as if I were a clockwork toy winding down. Unspoken resentment rolled off Grace. Even in my dazed condition, I could see she was unhappy.
‘I’m fine,’ Grace snapped, yanking a clean shirt, identical to the first, down over my head and pulling the covers violently up. Then she seemed to soften, almost against her will. ‘It’s not you, all right? I’m just that tired.’
I didn’t have the energy to press her, muttering my apologies. I knew what it was like to long for someone to say, ‘Here, let me,’ and meet resounding silence.
Despite the drugs, I lay heavy and sleepless when she was gone again, listening to the gentle humming of the facility. Long-haul travel had given me the closest thing to the sensation I was feeling. I recalled the experience of getting off an international flight, so many airborne hours. Traversing the globe, one hemisphere to the other, sealed inside an aeroplane: it had evoked a tangible dissonance. We had coined the phrase jet lag. But what was the lag? Where did it take place? In the body or the world?
After I finished my degree, I flew to London to find Jean-Paul, boarding the plane in sandals and a cotton summer dress. But it was snowing at Heathrow, the sky low and brittle-looking, gone the colour of bone. How could both realities be true? I wondered, shivering. I knew I was on the other side of the planet. Even the quality of the air was strange: thin and icy and petrol-smelling, providing no resistance as I moved through the airport to collect my luggage.
Of course, I eventually acclimatised physically. But for the time I was in London, I was haunted by the spectre of the other place – the ghost life I might have been living in Australia. When I eventually returned home, I told everyone it was because my visa ran out, but it was because I couldn’t cope with the duality that came with being away, the dividedness. I had fun in London, but I couldn’t integrate the sense that I was living a borrowed narrative, that for as long as I was there, my rightful place was somewhere else.
I tried to reconcile what Grace had told me. One hundred years had slipped by while I slept underground. ‘One hundred years.’ I whispered the phrase out loud, an incantation. I needed to draw what had happened out of the realm of stories – Sleeping Beauty, Rip Van Winkle, vampire narratives – and into reality. It sounded crazy: I had been sent through time. But time only flowed in one direction. Temporal physics hadn’t been messed with; only I had been removed from the natural flow of seconds and minutes and hours, days and weeks and years, my body put into stasis by science, and then dropped back into things upriver, far out of reach of anything that had once made my life worth living. Why? I felt drained. Flat. Hopeless. If what Grace said was true, there was nothing left for me, no reason to get out of bed, to try to go home, to do anything. As I sank into unconsciousness, I learned that hopelessness isn’t a huge surging emotion like despair, but suspended animation.
~
When I looked over the photos of the children’s early years, I could barely stand to observe myself, which was just as well as I hardly appeared in any of the images. My laptop was rammed with photo after photo taken by me of the children, a handful of selfies snapped for the record, and many of Jean-Paul cradling babies, giving the impression that he had been their main caregiver and playmate. There were no photos taken by Jean-Paul of me at all in our shared drives.
If he were here to defend himself, he would say that photography simply didn’t occur to him – that this was no indictment on his feelings for me. I will try to be a fair narrator, and I want to be; every one of my complaints about him can be matched. We never hated one another. You don’t go through all those years with a person and want to run from them. I didn’t necessarily understand why I had done what I did to break things up, and I still don’t. That’s what grief is, I think – a set of irreconcilable conditions – and I stayed trapped in it. In any case, at the time, I interpreted the absence of Jean-Paul’s desire to capture my image as evidence of the physical hideousness I already felt.
Vivienne had left for London when I was six, but the bookshelves in Charles and Orlanda’s living room were stuffed with albums full of the black-and-white film photographs Charles had taken of her with me as a baby. They weren’t art prints, just family photos, though skilfully framed and shot by Charles, as you can imagine. My mother’s Farrah Fawcett sexiness made all images of her feel inevitable, even as she aged. Their sheer number in Charles’s photo albums, and the fact that they were displayed in Orlanda’s house, implied that it would have been unnatural for Charles not to immortalise Vivienne’s every waking moment. Small and blocky like my father, I did not resemble my mother, a sorrow I accepted early on. In the absence of any photos taken by Jean-Paul, perhaps the fact that he was not my father, who I had ignorantly assumed was a template for fathers everywhere, was harder for me to accept.
As I grew, Charles photographed me as well. He had always wanted to show his images, but the ongoing workload of the farm – and, I suppose, of looking after me – meant he didn’t pull a proper show together until after I left home for university. Once he got started, he showed regularly, making a modest name for himself in critical circles, but no reliable income to speak of. The Australian government was obsessed with propping up landlords and miners, not artists, Charles reckoned. We weren’t much better; Orlanda and I used to tease Charles a little for his obsession with photography, which we considered a slightly dinky hobby. Thinking about it now, I admired the quiet determination with which my father went about his craft, his vocation, observing the world and attempting to capture it without any promise of public recognition. He never indicated to me that he found his lot frustrating: to have had his own freedoms curtailed by Vivienne’s absence, which redoubled my presence in his life. He got through each day, then went out to his studio quietly after I was put to bed.
Esther waits for rain, taken when I was fifteen, turned out to be one of my father’s most iconic images. Of course, I remembered when it was shot, the ropes of the swing Orlanda had rigged up in the garden digging into the flesh of my bare shoulders.
I hid the cover of my mother’s book from my father as he parked his white van in the yard and got out. The wail of sirens, shrill and haunting, rose over the valley. Acrid, faintly antiseptic, the air was infused with the scent of eucalypts burning. I’d tried to read Vivienne’s books before. Each one had been sent direct from the publisher to the farm in a padded envelope addressed to me. Charles filed the volumes away on the communal bookshelves in the living room where the record player was housed – thinking, perhaps, that it would be odd for a little girl to have a shelf of feminist manifestos stacked beside her bed.
Maybe he thought I was uninterested in my mother’s writing, given that I was always mute and impartial when the packages arrived. No one asked me how I felt about the parcels, so I never had to attempt to verbalise a state of being that was sarcophagus-like. I could have told Orlanda that when Charles put the letter opener under the flap of the envelopes from London and took out the books, I felt myself receding inside my body, as if falling backwards through water. When I looked at each cover emblazoned with my mother’s name, I could easily bear the experience, tiny and distant behind the frozen escarpment of my face.
But sometimes when my father and Orlanda were outside wrestling with ladders and corrugated iron for the roof, I would creep through the cool, shadowy stillness of the midday house to take the books down from the shelf and look at them, touching the covers gingerly, reverentially, the way I might touch a shed snakeskin still imbued with the violence of its inhabitant.
For a long time, I was too young to understand what my mother had written – her big words and concepts – but I pored over the pages anyway, feeling sure that if I looked carefully enough there would be a cluster of words somewhere in the books’ pages that would explain why Vivienne had gone. Eventually, I would turn to the author photo on the back cover – a different shot for each book, her face incrementally ageing, different haircuts and poses – searching her expressions for clues. It seemed an unsatisfying transaction to me, a kind of horror story. Like a changeling, my flesh-and-blood mother had disappeared from my life and been replaced by these intermittent packages – her ideas.
Charles grinned when he caught sight of me across the yard. There was something pure and guileless in his enthusiasm, reminding me of a small child. My father was nothing if not warm. But I could read the tension in his face, the way his body seemed hitched in the direction of the fires even while his gaze came to rest on me.
‘Whatcha reading?’ He lifted his unfashionable sunglasses off the bridge of his nose and appraised me over the sagging fence he was always talking about needing to rewire.
I toed the dirt with canvas sneakers gone grey with wear. I didn’t want to have this conversation with my father, feeling that by showing an interest in Vivienne’s work I was somehow criticising him. But in that split second I could think of no deflection, and meekly turned over the book so that he could read the title for himself.
‘Ah,’ Charles said, cocking his head. ‘What’s your verdict?’
I frowned. ‘It’s all right.’
‘It’s been a while since I read it myself,’ my father said, putting his hands into his pockets.
The truth was that I was confused by the voice in my mother’s work, her first-person I, which didn’t sound much like her speaking voice at all. It was similar enough to be familiar, but too odd to comfort me with her presence. I’d gone back to the beginning of her oeuvre, reasoning that if there was to be anything of use to me in the texts, surely the book she’d written with me in the house would be the most illuminating. But so far, all I was getting was a sense of my mother’s rage. It seemed to me that Vivienne was conflicted about how women should be and what they should do about being women, aggressively arguing that because they were not men, they shouldn’t be required to behave like men in the world to have power. So far so good, but I knew from listening to Charles and Orlanda talk that the book had caused enormous controversy, shunting my mother into fame but also making her a target. This made me feel anxious and sad. I wanted to protect my mother, to go to her the way that, years later, Wolfie would crawl through the rubble of blocks and toys on the floor and lay a chubby little hand over my mouth to silence me when I said that it was bedtime.
I expected my father to ask more questions. Perhaps I had hoped he might try to draw me out, so we could get to a place in the conversation where he could explain the books to me – explain my mother. But I could see his attention had already sharpened away from the topic. He was looking at me strangely, and I knew that look; I had shifted from being a person he was interested in talking to to the subject of a scene.
‘There’s a strange light coming through the leaves,’ my father said. ‘You look almost…’ He was backing away from me towards the ute, opening the door by feel, and scrabbling around in the glove box for his camera with his gaze trained on me. ‘You look almost gilded.’
Charles hadn’t been standing that far away from me across the dusty yard when he took the black-and-white image, but he managed to shoot a wide angle, capturing the darkening sky over the horizon, rising smoke. There I was on the swing with Vivienne’s book open across my knee. I looked very young but also on the cusp of womanhood: newly long-limbed but also scabby kneed in my grubby singlet top and cargo shorts. It was the pensive expression on my face that the public responded to, I think. I’m laying a wounded look on the camera, mature and otherworldly. My brow is deeply furrowed. Imbued with the dust and the light from the fires, mine is the face of a woman from a tougher, much less hopeful era.
Someone bought the original print of Esther waits for rain when it was first shown. I didn’t see the image again until years later, in a house tour for an interior design blog, where a huge print, blown up and framed in black, hung above the couch of some rich person’s waterfront joint in Sydney. That was a strange feeling, to know that something so intimate was on display as decoration. I wanted to email the owners of the house and the couch to explain that the photograph wasn’t just art, but a moment from my childhood. Not an image of my childhood – static, disembodied – but an event through which I had actually passed as a flesh-and-blood person. It was hard to explain what the experience of being Charles’s child, Vivienne’s child, had been like, though I would try in my own work.
Esther waits for rain conveyed something, but I wasn’t even sure it was a real moment or the truth. I had been there under that tree, with the book and the fires, the ropes of the swing leaving red marks on the fronts of my shoulders, but the image captured something other than the scene as I remembered it, because the photograph showed only my father’s perspective.
I saw the image one more time, in a glossy coffee-table book of contemporary Australian photographs released in the same year as Vivienne’s box set, published soon after I met Jean-Paul. Thereafter, the texts were occasionally mentioned together, as if they had been in conversation at the time or were being forced into one retrospectively. Vivienne had already written about marriage and motherhood and was writing by then about menopause and ageing. But the few writers who chose to look at my parents’ work together seemed happy to whizz over this fact so they could more keenly draw conclusions about how both Vivienne and Charles had referenced their lives in their work.
One said that Esther waits for rain was inappropriate, even abusive: that showing one’s children in a public sphere without their consent was immoral. There was something abject and disturbing in my face, the critic pointed out – too adult for the innocence of the swing. Charles shrugged off such criticisms.
‘They’ve been saying that about Sally Mann for years,’ he said.
‘Well, she’s a woman,’ Orlanda countered quietly. ‘She’s a mum making that work about her kids.’
Charles shifted uncomfortably on his chair. ‘Point being?’
Orlanda lowered the vegetable peeler. ‘I guess it depends on whether you believe that we live in a world where…’ She broke off, steadying herself against the kitchen counter. Orlanda was a doing type, not a giver of speeches. She took a deep breath. ‘It depends on whether you reckon the different roles we have been assigned mean something in this world… or you don’t.’
~
That night, while Grace slept on in her room across the hall, it occurred to me that what I was feeling now had a template. I had felt despair before, after leaving Jean-Paul. My intimacy with the condition only made me panicked by its return. I had come to know the void, as I dubbed it in those months and years, when some inner loneliness in me ramified unbearably against the external conditions of isolation brought by being single.
The void. I remembered reading Annie Ernaux’s diaries in The Paris Review, alone in the new apartment, when time took on an expansive quality that should have felt liberating and luxurious but in fact terrified me. Ernaux claimed that the void could be filled by writing. I had more time to myself after the separation than I’d had in years – maybe ever. But my new-found solitude didn’t make me happy, as I had hoped it would, fantasising about it from the mountain house as if it were a long-distance lover. My unhappiness came with me into my new life because it was made of the material of the void, like my own cells and skin.
Janet Malcolm, too, evoked the void when she talked about Sylvia Plath. I read and heard of voids everywhere once I was attuned to the idea of them. On podcasts. In books and films. I wasn’t the only one who had a mineshaft inside them, a nothingness. I wondered how many works of literature I had yet to read also referred to the void. Was it a particular condition of writers and poets? Was it uniquely French? I thought of Jean-Paul. What if the void had been the one thing we had unequivocally in common, and I had failed to recognise it in time – in him, or in myself?
