A Place Near Eden, page 12
Part of me wishes that Sem had been there when Celeste blamed me for his absence, because I believe in that moment I was ready to ask him straight out: What actually happened between us when we were young? He might have looked at me and said, ‘Remember how they fought, your mum and dad? Do you think they would have hesitated to use you against each other?’ And he would have explained to me about leading questions, and custody battles, and divorce. And then maybe I would have understood something that I now think must be closer to the truth—or, if not truth, something that at least would have allowed us all to go on living peacefully.
Or maybe he would have been angry. Maybe he would have finally told me how much I’d hurt him. And perhaps I would have been able to confess that I hadn’t known how serious the impact of my words would be. How I had felt about him, back then, maybe even still, and how I’d been an idiot to try to speak that romance into reality.
If I had only spoken to Sem, I might have begun to understand how it was for him. Living with me out at the coast after everything that had happened. But he wasn’t there, and perhaps that’s just as well. I probably would have only hurt him again.
Chapter Eleven
IT WA S TOWARDS THE END of summer, just before Celeste’s birthday, when the rainstorm struck. For three days it rained continuously, fat droplets that drummed the corrugated roof and made the water of the inlet dark and shimmering. It was this rain that turned our water bad.
There had been some instructions, when we first moved into the house, about general upkeep. Closing the front gate, checking the fruit trees, how to clean the shower drain, things like that. We barely read it and immediately put it out of our minds. But there was, I think, a note about the gutters, which needed to be regularly cleaned. So when it rained at the end of that summer, all the debris that had been accumulating in them was washed into the tank, turning our water brown and cloudy with muck.
We found out one morning when I went to get a glass of water from the kitchen. Celeste had just got back from a doctor’s appointment. I took the cup over to show her.
‘Gross,’ she said, pulling a face.
The water didn’t seem safe to keep drinking. So Celeste went to the fridge and prised a can of beer from its plastic ring.
‘Catch,’ she said, tossing it to me, and I fumbled it and it glanced off a chair leg to roll across the floor, leaving a dent in the corner of the can. When I popped it open the beer fizzed over, cold and sticky on my hands, on my shins, on the floor. The floor was still sticky when I left that house. We were not ones to clean. We just let the heat carry us along. Which is why, when the tank got contaminated, we didn’t immediately rush down to the car and drive to town to buy fresh water. We didn’t get on the phone to find someone to come and take a look at it. Celeste just went in to Rita’s to work the lunchtime shift. And I lay on the sandy couch and drank beer. But when Celeste came home that evening and went to lie down for a nap, I found myself thinking that she should go out and fix the situation. Bring home a proper supply of water. She was pregnant, and that was what a mother should do. I guess, really, I wanted her to take care of me too.
The next morning, I finally suggested that we go into town to find someone to clean the tank. Celeste was in her room, lying across her bed, reading. I asked if she would drive us. But she was too tired.
‘Here.’ She threw me a bottle of water from beside her bed. She’d brought it back from work, I assumed. ‘I’ll take you tomorrow,’ she said. But the way she said it, tomorrow meant sometime in the distant future, nothing so specific as the very next day. She had been this way since Sem had last left, and since she’d told me about the baby. She seemed tired. Not her usual energetic self.
So, I spent the rest of that day and the next lying around in the front room drinking beer after beer, my head thickening, until I stumbled down the corridor and collapsed into bed. Celeste went out to work and came home, but she didn’t bring any water for me. In the middle of the night, I woke with a throbbing headache to hear shuffling and clanking. I came out and found Celeste in the kitchen, boiling a saucepan of water on the stove.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
She carefully poured the boiling water into two mugs and handed one to me.
I must have hesitated because she said, ‘It will be hot, but safe, I think. If you boil water properly, you’re good.’
And so I brought the cup to my lips and drank. The water was hot and tasted like metal. We stayed like that together for a few minutes, drinking.
That night we agreed that the next day we would drive to the closest town to buy a good supply of water. And while we were there, we would find someone who could come to clean the tank. Celeste said she’d pay for it.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m sure the owners will reimburse me when I explain.’ But our words rang empty as we spoke them, like acquaintances promising to have coffee sometime, or teenagers earnestly declaring their plans to change the world. By morning our words would vanish, leaving only a stain of embarrassment that we’d been so optimistic about ourselves.
Next morning, I woke to the sound of tyres on the gravel outside. It was early, pale light leaching in between the heavy curtains. My head was aching and my body was heavy, from too many beers. I was feeling so unwell that I forgot about the situation with the tank. I got up and went into the bathroom and turned on the tap. I bent my head and put my hands into the flow and started scooping water into my mouth, only to remember the brown muck, and start spitting it back out. And I hardly had time to register the error because already Sem’s boots were coming down the corridor, Celeste’s bedroom door creaking open on its hinges, and I heard him say, ‘Happy Birthday, C.’
I came out into the hallway to see Celeste pulling away from Sem almost angrily.
‘I didn’t think you’d remember,’ she said, walking down the corridor, not looking back at him. ‘It’s been long enough.’
It was her birthday. He’d remembered—and I had somehow managed to forget.
Things were off-kilter all that day. We spent the morning separately, each doing our own thing. Celeste painted on the balcony. Around lunchtime she drove into town and came back with a slab of water.
‘Take it slow,’ she said, as I eagerly twisted off a cap. ‘We want these to last a while.’
Sem slept in Celeste’s room until late afternoon, when we started drinking—at least, Sem and I did. I felt myself getting woozy with alcohol and let the hours slip away until night started to fall, and that was when Sem gave Celeste her gift.
Sem had had the gift made specially for Celeste, by an artist who lived a bit further along the coast. A ceramics artist, Sem explained, who had moved down from the city and built two huge kilns, for firing pottery. Sem had asked the artist to make a bowl, with a mottled green and blue glaze. It really was very beautiful, and I could tell that Celeste was thrilled. She held it in her hands and carefully turned it, admiring it from different angles, and then she went and put it in her bedroom, her face lit up by a huge smile.
It was the present that set the evening back on a good track. Celeste decided that she wanted to go to the pub. She wasn’t drinking, but she wanted to go anyway. Sem drove us in the red car, already drunk, soaring through the trees. He and Celeste seemed so fearless, laughing and chatting, while I sat quietly in the back, still not quite over my embarrassment at having forgotten Celeste’s birthday. She was turning twenty-one.
At the pub, Celeste drank lemonade while Sem and I had beers, and we played pool. I was terrible, my balls rolling sadly across the felt, no satisfying clacks. I drank a lot. I think Sem did too. The pub was a blur of faces, Sem and Celeste coming and going, another beer pressed into my eager hand. Celeste took off her shoes at one point, and danced in bare feet, but Sem wasn’t around. I was worried that he’d gone off with another woman again, and at one point I saw him leaning against the verandah railing, cigarette in hand, talking with the woman with the thick brown hair. I was struck by the coldness of his expression, despite his smile. When I think of Sem now I try to remember him as he was when we lived at Carlisle Road, but often my thoughts return to the night of Celeste’s birthday, Sem strung out, his joints held at angry angles, something bitter, almost spiteful, in the turn of his mouth, standing in the darkness, smoking a cigarette with a stranger. Well, a stranger to me and Celeste.
I’m trying very hard to think clearly, to remember exactly how it happened. But it is difficult, because I was very drunk, and because of the time that’s now passed. It’s difficult also because I have tried so often to remember, so now I can’t be sure if I’m really remembering that night, or if I’m remembering an earlier remembering. But here is what I think is the truth, or something close to it.
I didn’t see the start of the fight. I was inside, at the bar, getting beers. When I came outside, a pint in each hand—one for me and one for Sem—Celeste was already storming away from him and she bumped into me, sloshing beer all over us and on the ground.
‘Of course,’ she said, gesturing furiously at the drinks and her wet bare feet.
‘Calm down, Celeste,’ Sem called, and Celeste turned back to look at him. He was still over with the brunette, and I remember thinking, Just come away from there, just come over here to Celeste, and maybe I even said it aloud because he looked at me in surprise and did step away from the railing and come over to us. But this only seemed to make Celeste more furious, and when he put his hand on her arm she twisted away from him and I dropped one of the beers and the glass shattered all over the ground, and she was walking through the glass, no shoes on, and Sem was trying to pull her back, shouting, ‘Your feet, your feet,’ and she was yelling back, ‘Fuck my feet,’ and she left a trail of bloody smears as she stalked back through the pub and out the front door.
Suddenly Sem’s face was close to mine, transformed into something inaccessible and ugly. ‘Would it kill you to be a bit less clumsy? She’s fucking pregnant,’ he said. His breath smelled sour. And then he was following Celeste through the bar, and there was nothing left for me to do but follow them out to the car, where I found Celeste in the passenger seat and Sem climbing into the driver’s side.
Sem drove us back through the town, and then through the blur of trees, the headlights lighting up the road as it swiftly disappeared beneath our wheels. Bottles and cans of beer were rolling around the floor at my feet. Sem and Celeste were really arguing now. They were shouting over each other, yelling about the woman in the pub, about the baby and the future, and then Celeste turned and opened the car door, as if she were going to throw herself out onto the road, and Sem leaned across and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her back roughly towards him. For a moment he lost control and the car veered wildly, and I screamed, seeing those tall trees, the dizzying drop to our left suddenly seeming very real. Sem pulled the car back sharply, my head hitting the window, a moment of disorientation in which I could hear myself screaming again, my voice sounding thin and high and airless.
The violent motion of the car and my screams seemed to have interrupted the fight, and we were all quiet now, as Sem drove. Celeste turned in her seat and looked back at me, eyebrows raised, and suddenly we were both laughing. Not Sem, though. His eyes were on the road ahead, his face stony with anger, driving into the dark.
‘You’ll get us all killed,’ he said. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? What a great mum.’
That set them off again, arguing just as intensely as before, as we hurtled up to the house. Sem parked by the water tank and opened his door to get out of the car.
‘Keep driving,’ Celeste said, not moving from her seat. ‘I want to go down to the ocean and look at the stars.’
‘I think it’s time we called it a night,’ Sem said. His voice was cold with anger.
‘It’s my birthday,’ Celeste said. ‘You can’t stop me.’
Sem swore and closed his door. He started driving again, taking us along a track that led to a clearing down near the rocks between the inlet and the beach, where surfers sometimes camped. ‘You’re unbelievable,’ he said.
Celeste had started to cry, and now she turned and tried to smile at me through her tears. ‘Tilly gets me, don’t you?’ she said, reaching back between the seats to hold my hand, our arms stretching across the car, lurching in an uncomfortable dance as the car bumped along the uneven track.
Sem parked in the clearing. I remember the car’s headlights shifting across rocks and trees, everything coming into the light and then falling out of it.
I had taken my shoes off and could feel sticks and leaves in the sand with my feet. The stars were out in crowds. And the air around us was thick. Full of dust the car had thrown up. I can remember the warm beer can in my hand. I remember looking out at the ocean. The sound of the waves crashing against the rocks. It sounded like a powerful animal roaring at us.
I remember Celeste and Sem arguing again, and then the argument dying down. Celeste angrily picking glass out of her feet, sitting on a log by the edge of the clearing, alone, lit up by the car’s headlights.
I remember my hands in the ocean. Salty spray hitting my cheeks. Moonlight on the waves.
I must have blacked out. I couldn’t tell you what my last memory was. It’s more like a slow fade-out. Things becoming less distinct. More fractured. And, eventually, nothing at all.
Part III
Chapter Twelve
I HAVE BEEN HOLDING OFF talking about Peter’s documentary. It’s been seven or eight months now since it came out, and I think perhaps I haven’t spoken about it yet because I’m not sure if you will ever watch it, and how important it will seem to you. I think part of me hopes that by the time you’re old enough to read this, Peter’s documentary will have been forgotten, and time will show that this story wasn’t the beginning of his illustrious career but just a flash in the pan, disappearing back into the rest of the mud.
When it first came out, the documentary didn’t get very much attention. Peter had produced it with a friend who was starting up a small production company, and they put it together pretty quickly on a tiny budget. It was screened as part of an indie film festival on the South Coast, and I thought that would be the end of it. I had decided I wasn’t going to see it. But when Peter won an award—a prize for emerging filmmakers—there was a special screening in Sydney, Peter invited me and I went along. Still, I thought that would be as far as things went. And, by a few weeks later, the documentary did seem almost forgotten.
But then I was committed to stand trial, and right around the same time Peter managed to get the documentary signed up to a streaming service, and suddenly the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions was involved, moving to suppress the release on the grounds that it might prejudice the jury at my trial. The media picked it up as part of a bigger story about freedom of speech and the tension between justice in the courts and justice in the hands of the community—young people, they argued, were finding new avenues of justice in documentary-making and social media. Suddenly everyone wanted to see it, and even though it was technically banned, of course anyone who was really interested could find it easily enough online.
It got so that every time I left the house, I felt like everyone’s eyes were on me. That’s part of the reason I came out to live at the lakes for a bit. To get away from it all. And even out here I prefer to keep to myself.
It was about six months ago that the injunction was passed. My lawyer, Alison, says that before my trial they will ask each juror if they have seen the documentary and, if they have, they’ll be forbidden to participate. We’ll just have to take their word for it, but Alison says I shouldn’t worry about that because, really, the documentary is more likely to help my case than harm it. You see, in the end, Peter found a way to tell a story that exonerated me. I wonder, sometimes, how he was able to piece it all together in that way. Was it like discovering something, or more like creating it? Was it about finding the truth, or protecting me, or just telling a good story that would kickstart his career?
I often find myself thinking about the documentary and you. When I imagine you, I tend to think of you with Christina. It’s easier that way, because of the uncertainty about what will happen to Celeste. I know you’ll always have Christina. Sometimes I think that she will try to keep the documentary from you. But then I can also imagine that she might want to sit down with you and watch it together. Maybe you won’t be interested. Perhaps it will seem old-fashioned or boring to you. Maybe documentaries will be a thing of the past by then. Maybe this whole story will be all but forgotten, and the documentary quite difficult to find. Or maybe Peter will be famous. Everyone is saying that this documentary is the launching pad for his career. All the controversy has served him very well.
If you don’t ever watch the documentary, or if you read this while you are still making up your mind whether to see it or not, I will tell you the parts of it that you should really know, because it’s important, I think, in terms of understanding how everything went. Essentially, in the documentary, Peter tells three stories of your father, Sem. The first is the story of a lost boy. The second is a story of revenge. And the third, the story that Peter has made prevail in the end, is a story of manipulation.
It must be at least six months now since I saw the documentary myself, but I remember it starts on the ocean beach, at the house near Eden, with surfers on the waves. Music first, and then my voice. When I watched the documentary, I thought that my voice sounded quite hesitant; there were lots of pauses, and sometimes I stopped mid-sentence before going on. I was recalling the day that Liam came and almost drowned in the rip, and how Celeste saved him. I don’t really remember telling Peter about that for the documentary. From the way my voice sounds—so hesitant—I guess the story had some significance, at least in my mind. It wasn’t just something that came up, but something that I thought might be important. I’m clearly taking care to get it right. Perhaps I told Peter about it when he was recording me on the drive up north from Eden into the desert, after we had left the beach house. To my mind, that makes the most sense. Probably, as I told the story, I was thinking of how they’d searched the ocean for Sem’s body. That one possible explanation for his disappearance was that he had gone swimming and been caught in a rip. I think that’s why I’m speaking with such care.
