If You Go, page 19
Vivienne was harried, face pale, the skin under her eyes punched-looking. She had been very busy for days and days, packing up our house to prepare for her journey. I had long grown used to her saying ‘In a minute,’ and ‘Maybe later,’ bustling around and never sitting. But her pace had escalated in recent weeks, as if we were experiencing incompatible scales of time.
‘Can we leave the roof window open while we’re going, Mummy?’ I said tentatively from the front seat of the car. Vivienne paused a moment to lean her forehead on her arm, peering in at the driver window. A look of tenderness crossed her face, and I felt a jolt of fear – the sense that she might start crying.
Charles came out to welcome us when he heard the hire car up the drive. Orlanda came around the side of the house, pushing the wheelbarrow so fast she sent up an arc of dust as she rounded the corner. The adults raised their hands in greeting as Vivienne slowed to park, as if the gesture were choreographed.
My father and Orlanda had only owned the property a year or two and hadn’t begun any of their more ambitious restoration projects yet – painting the house, digging beds for vegetables and flowers, installing a run for chooks. The land around the old farmhouse looked dry and barren. Alone in a sea of brown paddocks rolling in all directions as far as the eye could see, the weather-beaten homestead looked to me like a boat adrift far from shore – precarious and lonely. The sky loomed overhead, blisteringly blue.
Vivienne manoeuvred the car into the shade of a tall eucalypt, inherited with the house from the previous owners and, before that, from whoever had been there before. Charles told me later it must have been a hundred years old if it were a day. My father was already opening my car door and leaning in to unbuckle the belt across my booster seat.
‘Hello, darling heart,’ he said quietly, with his mouth close to my ear. He smelled not unpleasantly of grass and sweat; I noticed his forearms, thick and tanned, dark with hair. I let my father help me from the car and took his big hand when he offered it. His palm was warm, tough like the leathery pads on the feet of our neighbour’s cat at the flats, a large tabby who prowled the parking lot. Orlanda and Vivienne were standing together at the back of the car, behind the open boot.
‘That’s all there is?’ Orlanda said brightly, lifting out a small blue suitcase while my mother stuffed her belongings back into the vacated space. Later, as I lay in bed long after the adults thought I was sleeping, I would overhear Charles and Orlanda talking, the quiet chink of their teacups on saucers in the living room.
‘Strange choice, a sportscar like that, for moving house,’ Orlanda said, and I couldn’t quite square the words with her tone, which seemed to belong to some other conversation – something deeper and more explicit.
‘Ah,’ Charles said. ‘Well, that’s Vivienne for you.’
Soon we were seated around the kitchen table. There was homemade banana bread with butter, raspberry cordial and coffee for the adults.
‘You sure you don’t need something more substantial?’ Orlanda asked my mother, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘It’s no trouble to make you up a sandwich or something for the drive.’
Vivienne held her mug of coffee in both hands. ‘Oh, no thanks. I’ll eat on the plane.’
‘Eggs and bacon?’ Orlanda tried. ‘We’ve got an amazing butcher in town – free-range pigs.’
A look of disgust or annoyance flicked across my mother’s face. ‘Really, I’m fine.’
Charles and Orlanda exchanged a look; I watched, trying to decode their silent conversation.
‘Thank you,’ Vivienne continued, giving a tight smile. ‘I appreciate it.’
While the adults made polite conversation, I broke my banana bread into smaller and smaller pieces. Silently, Orlanda pushed a fork to me across the table. I understood her meaning but didn’t pick it up. Instead, I slid down off my chair and went to stand beside my mother. It never occurred to me to ask Vivienne not to go; perhaps I hadn’t fully believed she would leave me behind.
‘Your hands are all buttery,’ Vivienne said, but she lifted her arm around my shoulders and drew me in anyway. Her voice sounded strange, tight and painful. In an uncharacteristic move, she lowered her lips to my hair and kissed me on the head. ‘You’re going to be okay, my love,’ she said. She sounded so distressed, with the emotion in her voice only barely restrained, that I dared not dispute her. Instead, I lifted my hand to touch the side of her face, the sharp jut of her cheekbone, her lovely soft skin.
My mother stroked my fingers over her cheek. ‘I’m going to ring you all the time, you know, and you can tell me all about the exciting things you’re getting up to here.’ She lifted her eyes to the window; her gaze rolled across the modest room. ‘Kids love being in the country.’
‘Why don’t you show Esther what we’ve done to her bedroom while we finish up here?’ Charles suggested to Orlanda, leaning across awkwardly to touch his wife’s hand.
Orlanda and I made wary eye contact across the table from our stations beside my parents. Perhaps it was my stiffness – the way I stood clutching a wedge of Vivienne’s shirt in my fist as if paralysed, or the fact that I was so little, but her face quickly softened into a smile.
‘You like Lego?’ she said. ‘Your dad told me.’
I followed my stepmother obediently down the hall, away from the kitchen. In the little white room that was to be mine, someone had left a collection of new plastic horses on the rag rug for me, and I kneeled to examine their lovely painted coats and faces. I wasn’t sure how long I was down on the floor, but later I thought it must have been too long – that my mother got sick of waiting for me to re-emerge – because I heard the engine start, the sound of tyres on the dirt track. An unholy sound came out of me – or maybe it only sounded in my head.
‘Oh, sweetie,’ Orlanda said, alarmed and anxious. ‘It will be okay!’
But I couldn’t answer, not wanting to vocalise the terror and panic of my mother’s leaving. I rushed to the window to see the tail-lights of the sportscar turn onto the road and disappear.
‘Why didn’t you say goodbye when you left?’ I asked decades later, when she came to see the children and me at the mountain house. I was old enough then to have grown into the question, as if it were a pair of shoes, a garment purpose-made for an advanced stage of life.
Vivienne tutted. ‘I said goodbye!’ What had she been looking for out there in London, that she couldn’t find with Charles, or with me? I wondered but was too inhibited to ask. Vivienne busied her hands with the knotted sleeves of the cashmere sweater hanging down her back. ‘You were so young – you must have the memory wrong.’ Then, muttering to herself: ‘As if I would leave without saying goodbye.’
But she had left. She delivered me to my new life – a family – and slipped quietly away, as if leaving a party whose hosts she didn’t want to disappoint with an early departure.
I could only grip the splintery windowsill with one hand, and the new plastic horse with the other. I stood braced against the sudden vacuum made by my mother’s leaving, not knowing if it was in the room or inside me.
~
Now the truth was out, Grace seemed shy and uncertain, but there was a new energy coming off her as well, a hopeful openness. In the darkened storeroom, I fumbled around, helping Grace collect more buckets, mops and cloths by torchlight. I felt ancient and exhausted, but I was determined not to show any weakness to Grace. It was a gift this time, rather than a bid for power. Masking was an undertaking, but it was nothing compared to what she had done for me.
We were both relieved that the rain had eased off, stopping almost as abruptly as it had started. Though it had left a big mess for us to clean up downstairs in its wake, Grace reminded me with considerable optimism that it could have been worse.
But as we went down the stairs to the vault, Grace’s Pollyanna outlook fell away.
‘This is actually the worst flood I’ve seen,’ she said. ‘Reckon there’s a new leak somewhere. We have to see if we can get the water to drain away, pronto.’
‘If you can show me the generator, I’ll see what I can do there,’ I said, gripping the handle of a small toolbox, picked up in the storeroom at the last minute. In my other hand, I held on to the chilly metal of the banister, following the disc of light from my torch down into the dripping basement of the building. Was I nervous about the potential for there to be a current in the water? I have to say that it didn’t occur to me, though Orlanda would have been horrified to hear me say so, after all she’d done to school me right. In my defence, I was zonked after the time I’d had. I staggered downstairs like someone battling glandular fever. I wasn’t thinking straight.
Grace was saying, ‘The problem is that it’s all interconnected with the main computer system, which I don’t have much of an idea about. There’s meant to be a backup system of some sort for when things go down, or offline, or whatever. But I reckon that’s what we’ve been running on for a while, since before you woke up even.’ She turned the white triangle of her face up from below. This sent the beam of her headlamp flashing into my eyes, so that I was blind to her expression.
I squinted and said, ‘Does that mean that everyone’s’—I didn’t want to say the word, but it came out anyway—‘thawing?’
‘Let’s hope not,’ Grace said, but there was a strange quality to her voice, a little chime. A counterpoint to offset the meaning of her words.
The water was ankle deep in the vault, flowing out into the stairwell as Grace pulled back the door. It was still very cold. My breath rose like smoke through the light of my headlamp. Our hands were full, so we had only the small blades of light from our foreheads with which to break up the dark. As we stepped forwards into the blackness, the amorphous proportions of the room were revealed in slices and strobes. Straight away the thin cotton sneakers I had on were soaked, curling my toes with cold. Grace was quiet, splashing ahead. I followed dumbly behind, training the torch on her back, illogically fearful of somehow getting lost in the vast, lightless cavern.
When Grace stopped, I stopped too. The room smelled tinny with frost, like iron. Blood. I watched the torch on Grace’s head rotate like the light on a lighthouse tower as she swivelled her head. She was quiet for a time, then she spoke in a weary, worn-out voice.
‘I actually don’t know where the fuck to start with all this.’
‘Um,’ I said. The room was pitch black and silent without the faint, familiar humming of equipment. Standing in the black water, I felt shivery and panicked. It all felt wrong to me – unsafe. I wanted to drop the toolbox but it felt insensitive to plonk it down on the lid of a dewar. ‘Is there a… sink down here? A… drain?’
Grace started laughing. ‘A sink? Nah. Not down here. There’s one upstairs, of course, in the room where they prepped the bodies. But the last thing they wanted was water getting in down here with all this equipment. I don’t think anyone had the idea for drainage.’ She splashed forwards, then turned comically and splashed back, striking her feet through the water as if tap-dancing.
She was really chortling now; she was hooting, rocking back and forth on the spot. ‘I’m sorry to bring you down here like this. I dunno what I was thinking!’ Grace could barely get the words out she was laughing that much.
I watched mutely. I was at a loss, white knuckles on the handles of the toolbox.
‘I’m worried about the electricity,’ I said urgently, the danger coming to me with the words. ‘And the water.’ I saw how idiotic we had been to venture down like this.
Grace was still talking, wiping tears from her face as she gasped for breath through her laughter. Then two things happened almost at once – they felt simultaneous to me, as if Grace and I, and the bodies, and the place, were all somehow connected. The lights flickered on – just dimly. On all the inhabited dewars, buttons started to glow. Even faintly illuminated as it was, the room was returned to itself, no longer amorphous, but solid in its dimensions, and I exhaled a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. But the flicker of light reflecting off the water ran fear through me just as fast. I turned on my heel.
‘We need to get out of here,’ I said, moving as if through clay. ‘It isn’t safe.’
Grace wasn’t paying attention to me or to the light. Her laughter was turning. Her hands were on her knees. I caught a hitch in her guffaw. She was crying. Bent double, Grace sobbed. Her crying sounded exhausted, bare and worn and heaving, though it had only just begun.
I turned back to her and pushed through the murk. ‘Grace, come on!’ I grabbed her elbow. I got one arm around her waist. With a splash, the toolbox went down into the water. Grace let me drag her back towards the door.
‘Trying to clean all this up would be like trying to sweep sand up on a beach,’ she was saying through her tears. She spoke as if imploring a jury. ‘There’s just so much water.’
~
Jean-Paul gave me one of Bassie’s paintings for our fifth wedding anniversary. I had offered it back to him for his apartment as we packed up the mountain house, knowing how strongly he had connected with his brother’s rendering of the uninhabited stretch of Tasmanian coastline where Bassie owned a fishing shack. The image had been made in very pale pastel paints applied thinly, with a lightness of touch that brought to mind landscape reflected on the surface of a lake. Bassie had used a blue for the ocean so pale it was almost white. It was as if the whole vista were being viewed through a near-impenetrable mist.
‘I really wish you would take Bassie’s painting,’ I said wearily.
‘As I said,’ Jean-Paul enunciated with dangerous precision, ‘no, thank you.’ He turned again to the bookshelves to recommence packing, but then seemed to think better of it and swivelled again to face me.
‘It’s life or death for some of the people I work with,’ he said like he was responding to something we were already talking about. ‘I know you don’t understand the pressure I’m under – that somehow, even after all this time you think I’m making it all up, or just… inflating the importance of what I do.’ He pulled the T-shirt from his waistband and mashed it across his face. I felt then how angry he was, rage coming off him like a vapour. I should have gone to him, put a hand on his arm, told him I understood. But I was arrogant and felt myself corralled. Instead of trying to repair the rift between us, I drew myself up.
‘I do understand,’ I spat. My voice was loose with emotion. I wanted him to know that my whole life was devoted to decoding his behaviour – that the compass of my experience was forever aimed at what was going on for him.
‘Oh yes?’ With visible effort to keep from raising his voice, Jean-Paul flapped his T-shirt open and worked it down over his head, knuckles blotched red and white against the fabric. His ribs pulled apart and fell together like the pleats of an accordion as he rolled the garment down. ‘You’ve had plenty to say about what I do,’ he said in a tight voice, ‘but I’ve never, ever said anything about your…’ He trailed off, as if unable to bring himself to say the word. His eyes slid in the direction of the back garden, where my slanty little weatherboard office hunched, cold and dark.
I stood and groped for the back of the couch to lean on, bracing for Jean-Paul to drop the guillotine. But he shut his mouth hard, picked up the packing tape, and took it screeching across the top of the nearest cardboard box. Though I was sure the box wasn’t full, I stayed silent, scalded by Jean-Paul’s unfinished accusation about my ambitions, suddenly so transparently futile and embarrassing under his judgement.
I had confided in Jean-Paul about my desire to be a poet in the gleeful way other wives confided affairs even while witnessing the impact of the news on their spouse. Giddy with the possibility of some other future. Blinded by lust.
When we’d attended Bassie’s exhibition opening in a prominent gallery in Fitzroy, I had enjoyed the whole body of work, but I stood longest before the seashore painting, resisting the urge to clasp my hands, to kneel. The painting was titled Like Breathed-on Glass, a line I recognised from the Larkin poem my father had especially loved. Every year Charles had roared Larkin’s lines in his best sermon-giving voice as we embarked on school holidays. Now I watched my father across the crowd leaning on Orlanda as they took in the work, and I wondered if he remembered reciting the poem, aware that the elements of my childhood that were most vivid to me were most often lost on my parents, as if we hadn’t been in the same rooms of the same lives all these years, but were only just meeting for the first time now.
‘Why were you always so late to collect me from kinder?’ I had asked my mother recently – not meaning to sound accusatory but wanting to share in the humour of the scene recollected. In fact, it was the keen detail of my memory that struck me most – the playdough scent of the room, the eternal feeling of the hot afternoon as a small child, when ten minutes felt like a lifetime – rather than my mother’s specific absence. ‘The teachers used to make me sit on the front step so they could sweep the floors while we waited for you to arrive.’
But Vivienne hadn’t found the story funny. She wrinkled her nose in annoyance. ‘I wasn’t late – goodness, I was constantly packing up what I was doing to get to where I had to be. Everything is always left half done when you’re a mother.’
Now I watched Vivienne squeeze through the crowd to talk to Charles. They were all there – Vivienne, Charles and Orlanda; Liv and Brett and Caitlyn; Zoey and Arlo – the most important people in my life, apart from my children, jammed together in the sticky closeness of the room, with Bassie’s paintings circling as if they were there to observe us, and not the other way around.
I was drawn to Like Breathe-on Glass not only for its artistry, its seemingly simple aesthetic appeal, but because there was something about it that reminded me of Jean-Paul. The painting possessed a coolly beautiful and moody quality that set off a sad little gong of recognition in my gut. I had the urge to rush at the canvas with one of the children’s bright yellow Textas, to scribble a radiant sun in one corner to break the unbearable melancholy of the work.
