If You Go, page 14
She was so jolly, so robust, Grace. She would have made a good primary school teacher, I thought, as she passed me hard oat-like biscuits spread with jam and observed me as I ate – or pretended to eat, crumbling the food but unable to swallow.
I said, ‘I can remember lots of things, but nothing to do with any of this.’ I gestured around the room. ‘How is that even possible?’
‘What’s the last thing you remember?’
‘I don’t know. Just being at home,’ I said. ‘An ordinary day.’ I meant at the new apartment and had the urge to revise the word home. ‘I don’t remember anything… ’ It’s strange, I wanted to say. Terrifying.
‘I really don’t understand it.’ In fact, I did have a sense of something in the back of my mind like a name forgotten or a dream indistinct in its detail on waking – this was a feeling, nothing visual, nothing concrete. Just the maddening sense of there being more, as if I were looking into a darkened room from a doorway, squinting to make out its detail through shadow.
~
Soon we were out in the hallway again. As I limped along past the doors lining the corridor, Grace tried to explain the science. It was like listening to a small child trying to explain astrophysics based on lessons learned on PlaySchool. It wasn’t that her explanations were silly or immature, only that she had been given the information a long time ago. I got the impression she had never had the chance to properly advance her knowledge. I should have asked questions then about her education, but I was still reeling. I had no space in my mind for curiosity about Grace. My thoughts were all strange angles and perspectives – the world as I’d known it distorted. That was hard enough to grapple with; that morning I was fixated only on myself.
Grace said that some animals could cope with the freezing and thawing of their bodies out there in nature. Worms had been trained to recognise certain smells and retained the memory of them after freezing. This seemed a flimsy explanation. For one thing, I couldn’t see how anyone could train a worm, let alone determine whether or not it had memories. But Grace was undeterred by my scepticism, asserting that as long as the correct protocols were followed – bodies properly stored and maintained – it wasn’t all that far-fetched.
‘You’re the proof, aren’t you?’ she said wryly. ‘Pretty bloody irrefutable!’ She sounded certain behind her teasing attitude, but after a moment she slanted her face away as if to hide the wan expression breaking over it, and I had the impression that she was reliving years of gruelling attentiveness, vigilance and care.
‘It all sounds so futuristic.’ I shrugged. ‘Obviously it must work, but…’
‘Nah, it’s ancient history really. Some bloke first thought of it way back in the 1960s. Probably on the cards way before all kinds of things you would have taken for granted. Birth control. The internet!’ Grace must have seen something cross my face – shock, incredulousness – for she put a kindly hand on my arm. ‘It says so in one of the manuals,’ she clarified, ‘about the dates. I pretty much know all the information off by heart by now.’
The 1960s. The idea of freezing bodies had emerged with a desire to put a human on the moon, with the birth of feminism. I thought of my mother, her life and its work. It must have felt as if anything was possible back then. As if the world was experiencing an upswing that would never equalise, let alone decline. Under that assumption, I could make a little clearing within which to understand all of this. My mother’s choices.
‘But why would I agree to something that would take me away from Clare and Wolfie?’ I shuddered. ‘Why would anyone?’
‘People like the idea of a do-over, I guess. All of them’—Grace pointed at the floor—‘paid a packet for the privilege.’ She shuddered. ‘But the company went down some years after you got here, I think.’ I sensed Grace was holding something back from me under the guise of transparency. Given the way things had played out so far, I couldn’t trust that she knew what was best for me – that she wanted me to have the full story. ‘They’d taken on a lot of backers to set everything up. Big bucks, I know that. But they weren’t making the kind of money they needed to make, and eventually it all folded.’
‘But there are so many people here,’ I said, and I was relieved when Grace seemed to understand my meaning, explaining that with the establishment of an operation like this, there needs to be a financial trust so that the patients – she meant the bodies – would be protected even if the whole thing fell over. Later, I would think of Grace’s labour, too. It wasn’t all legacy planning and business acumen; much of the reason that anything had survived was thanks to Grace.
‘But I didn’t have any money.’ That was an understatement. I struggled after we moved to the new apartment. I was juggling a couple of casual jobs, teaching creative writing at the local TAFE, calling in favours from my former lecturers – whoever I could ask. I’d been out of the workforce a long time because of the children, the mountain house, my commitment to my writing. The work I got wasn’t enough, and things got worse as the cost of living rose in response to forces I didn’t really care about or understand. I took a communications job for a local brewery, writing copy for their social media accounts. That was nothing to be ashamed of – it wasn’t like I was ‘slaving down a coal mine’, as Zoey pointed out – but I found myself obscuring the truth of my situation from Jean-Paul, my parents, friends.
Sitting up late at the kitchen table with my laptop open and the lights low so as not to wake the children, I was able to see that from within our nuclear family, my ability to imagine this next chapter of my life had ended with packing up the mountain house. But imagining a life was not the same as being able to pull it off. Jean-Paul – with his proper, grownup job and his diligence and reliability – had kept me safe. Within the warm glow of that safety, I hadn’t realised how precarious I would be without him.
Was that a reason to stay married? Vivienne would have said it wasn’t. While frying eggs for the children’s dinner, I realised I had been foolish to believe that marriage as an institution had moved on from being a business arrangement. Love might come into it, but it wasn’t the point. Marriage was a kind of fortress, an empire. I had mistaken the security mine had offered me for an intrinsic condition. Wrong. The stress of my circumstances kept me awake in the new apartment. From the app on my phone, I watched my savings tick down like the timer on a bomb.
I assembled the children’s bunkbeds in their new room, and made them up again with clean linen still smelling of the cold wind whipped down the mountain. The reality of my situation was dawning on me – too late. I unfolded the sheets across the beds, touching the indents in the fabric, little oblong impressions made by the wooden pegs I had left behind for the new owners of the mountain house. I lifted each newspaper-wrapped object from the cardboard boxes marked fragile in my own handwriting. They and the boxes and the writing seemed to belong to another era, as if I were unpacking heirlooms handed down through previous generations, though I had only just got done taping the boxes up the day before, in time for the trucks to arrive.
~
On our first afternoon together in the new apartment, the children played happily for a while, then they turned on one another. I interpreted this anxiously as a response to the family situation. But their moodiness fell away as soon as we went downstairs to the carpark below our building. I rolled up the garage door. Mounting their scooters, Clare and Wolfie went gliding, whooping and calling out onto the street. Their sweet voices carried up and between apartment blocks. I followed, pulling my long coat tight under the clear sky. The children weaved around me and each other with the bright, leaping quality of the light refracted through the crystals hanging in the windows of my father’s studio on the farm.
I guided the children over the road and set them loose on the bike path running along the creek, where in some stretches trees overhung the path and the rushing water of the falls drowned out the sound of traffic. It was possible there to believe we had not moved to the inner city. I let the children go ahead with the wind whipping their jackets, aware of the dissonance created by the presence of the coppery water, the trees, the sky. The world was still here, still going on, even while everything else was changing.
When I caught up to the children, they had abandoned their scooters to run up the treed embankment along the path.
I called, ‘Let’s make a cubby! There are lots of branches down.’ This will be something to remember, I thought. The kind of childhood activity they will be grateful later for having been gifted, wholesome and outdoorsy. Wolfie didn’t respond, but Clare – ever worried about other people’s feelings – shot me a look that was part compliance, part pity.
‘Okay, Mum,’ she said half-heartedly, dutifully scrambling towards me. The ground was moist. I drew in the cool, earthen scent of leaf litter, feeling the urge to lie down in it: a form of communion that might wipe away my sins.
‘I’ll get the big branches, if you want to collect the smaller ones to make the walls?’
Clare smiled and nodded, wandering away to stand over Wolfie, where he was squatting in the cold, dim privacy of the foliage, digging in the dirt.
Soon I had collected three large branches, heaving them down the hill to a flat place near the path. I knew how to make a cubby out of sticks. Charles had taught me. I could hear him in my head now, narrating the task. Is that what parents become? Our inner voices?
You want to find sticks with forks in them, so that they can lock together to hold one another up. See?
‘Your father is the only person I’ve ever met with rules for how to make a cup of tea properly,’ Vivienne had been fond of saying as a means of shorthanding the many reasons for their separation. ‘So many steps. Right ways and wrong ways. It used to drive me crazy. Just fucking boil the water and whack a teabag in, Charles! You’re not replicating a degustation menu! You’re literally just organising a cup of hot water with some leaves in it.’
But my father hadn’t seen a cup of tea as a conduit to conversation, to self-care. A prop for sitting with at a table, companion piece for a book. Charles had understood the making of tea as an act of worth and beauty in and of itself.
When I had triangulated the branches, I stood back, gratified, my breath in the air like netting. I wanted to draw the children’s attention. For them to be impressed. But before I could secure their focus, Clare called out.
‘Mum! Come and look at this.’
‘What have you found?’
Squatting together, they were suddenly so alike. I dropped my sticks and went to them.
‘Treasure,’ Clare breathed. She offered her palm to show me a fragment of broken ceramic. I recognised the pattern. Its familiar willow pattern matched the blue and white plates from the set we had used in my childhood on the farm. I exclaimed with genuine interest, taking the piece and rubbing it clean on the thigh of my jeans.
‘And look at this,’ Wolfie said, brandishing a piece of green and white.
‘What wonderful treasure,’ I said. ‘Shall we collect some more and bring it home to wash?’ The children leaped up joyfully, scouring the earth. I saw what they had identified on their own: that the soil was veined with broken ceramics. Soon I was as absorbed as they were, looking for the coloured pieces, the patterned pieces, the pieces of pure white. Then, just as I was starting to really enjoy myself, filling my own pockets as Wolfie and Clare had filled theirs, the activity was over.
‘I’m hungry,’ Wolfie grizzled, gazing up from where he had come to stand on the path below us, looking small and forlorn, his nose running and his pants hanging low on his hips from the weight of his collection.
‘Don’t you want to keep looking, though?’ I said hopefully. The smashed ceramics touched me in much the same way that the children’s baby teeth had touched me, making me wobbly, sorrowful and nostalgic for something I couldn’t name. Everything precious was painfully impermanent. I held pieces of broken plate in my hands, groping about silently for something to say to stall the children, to keep us happily centred in the vanished, blissful moment. I didn’t want to return to our cold apartment. I wanted to stop time.
Wolfie looked away, avoiding my eye.
‘I’m hungry too,’ Clare said, sliding down to stand by her brother with a finality I was at a loss to resist. ‘Let’s go home. Can we have movie night, Mum?’
‘It’s not even lunchtime!’ I said automatically. Then, seeing their crestfallen expressions, ‘Let’s see how we go, shall we?’
The children had already snatched up their silver scooters and were rearing them up and smacking them down like impatient brumbies. I intuited the oncoming danger of their shifting mood, like an atmospheric drop, a change in pressure before rain. Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to abandon the moment.
‘Shall we look at what we collected first?’ I said with strained gaiety. ‘We could wash the treasure here, in the river!’
When neither child gave a response, I surrendered and came tramping down the slope to the path where they were waiting. I felt too annoyed – with the children, with myself – to make conversation on the way home. I thought instead about why this section of earth along the river was marbled with so many smashed dinner services. It was as if someone had endured a furious domestic argument there and tried to obscure the crime with soil.
~
Two years later, we met Zoey, Lulu and Halima in the same place. This time, the kids were making little boats to race along the rapids. It was summer, and Zoey and I watched on, drinking the beers she had brought.
‘Can you look after this, Mum?’ Clare asked, handing me a bracelet, a white shell on a strap of leather. ‘I don’t want it to get wet.’
‘Sure,’ I said. I thought I put it in the pocket of my jeans, but back in the apartment it was gone.
‘I’m sorry, love. I thought it was there!’
Clare’s face fell. A beat, and then her body folded in on itself and she went sliding to the floor. Her response was so extreme that even Wolfie came around the table to lay a hand on her shoulder.
It took minutes before she could speak, nose dripping snot, eyes red and wet. ‘That bracelet was irreplaceable.’
‘Oh, love. We should never have taken it to the river, then.’ I said we, but I meant you.
Clare shook her head as if trying to clear it. ‘Dad bought me that bracelet in Byron Bay.’
Wolfie caught my eye across Clare’s head, and I understood then what Clare was trying to convey. For the first time, I realised that both my children had grappled with responses to the separation I hadn’t known they were capable of at the time. I had never believed they would come out of it unscathed, but I had hoped – as all parents hope to nurture and support rather than diminish and compromise their children – that we would be able to navigate the shift so as not to wound them too much.
‘It was my favourite,’ Clare said, and I knew she wasn’t evoking only the bracelet. ‘And we lost it.’
~
Vivienne agreed to come back to Australia for a spell when I was already in my late teens and able to see, if not yet take, the path out of there and into my own adult life, away from all those parents. Vivienne would return only to go back again with the restlessness of an orphan searching for her birth parents, though I believed at the time that she was home to stay.
It had been two years since I’d last seen my mother in the flesh. I went to meet her a few times at the hotel in the city where she was staying until her furniture arrived from England. We survived a few awkward dinners together. Whoever had lured Vivienne away from Australia in the first place had long been dispensed with, disappearing into the deep sediment of my mother’s historic love life. The string of lovers who followed – men and women both – were a matter of public record. Sometimes a kid at school had brought their own mother’s trashy magazines to show everyone paparazzi images of Vivienne.
There she was, my mother: in her stylish tan trench coat on street corners in the rain; sitting in the booths of flash new restaurants; crossing expensive hotel lobbies; and climbing out of taxis on the way to galas, awards ceremonies, keynote speeches, events. Sometimes my mother was caught candidly on vacation, lounging on sailboats in impossibly blue water, in bikinis, holding drinks. And sometimes she was there on the pages of the magazine in an interview about her work, the accompanying images shot professionally with her hair and makeup done, her smile studied, looking intelligent, powerful and sophisticated, as if poised to deploy an army or detonate a bomb.
‘Esther’s mum’s a lezzo!’ Chris Young got the whole class to chant when I was in grade five and a picture of Vivienne walking arm in arm with a young model appeared in Women’s Weekly. I realise now that it was a chaste image, but the response of my classmates, and the two women’s striking appearances, made it seem somehow pornographic. I couldn’t look at the magazine Chris was flapping in my face as I stood with my back against the rough cold brick of the school building, wind whipping across the asphalt at lunchtime from the plains beyond our town. The chanting of my classmates rose around me until I was trapped in the eye of a storm made of their horrible, vindictive voices. I burst into tears, thinking but not saying every horrible thing I could think about their mothers: their identical cheap tracksuits from Best & Less, their box hair-dye and fluffy slippers. Every single one of those mothers seemed to have a perpetually snotty toddler clamped to their hip for the sole purpose of having someone to grumble at.
‘You’re just jealous,’ I wanted to say to the other kids but couldn’t, not quite believing it myself, given that their mothers stood at the school gate, clumped gracelessly every afternoon, while mine, glamorous and special as she was, existed only as a fantasy.
Even at ten, I knew that the kids in my class had nothing to be ashamed of: their mothers were not dazzling, living exciting lives overseas, but nor were they off doing those things while their children sat languishing day after day in a school with fifty kids and a printer that jammed whenever anyone tried to print out more than one page.
