Xuang gave an unexpectedly poignant speech about how he wished he had met Robert, and he recounted stories my mother had shared with him about Robert and Abigail as children. ‘Such a special bond they had,’ he said, which made me cry with gratitude. ‘They used to have a ceremony on Abi’s birthday each year, toast each other with their parents’ whisky . . .’ Everyone laughed, but Xuang was looking right at me, lowering his voice, raising an imaginary glass and wishing me well on my journey ahead. Through another rush of tears, I saw Robert in a cottage on a lake outside Helsinki, and I understood that he had not brought my mother’s Lagavulin along to keep him warm, as we had hypothesised.
I gave a speech in which I mentioned Robert’s peppermint mood. People in the audience nodded, remembering. ‘I hope he’s in a peppermint mood,’ I said, ‘wherever he is right now.’
Later that night, my mother phoned and informed me: ‘We are designed to recover.’
‘I mean, I know not everybody does,’ she added, ‘but that’s the design.’ And she expressed irritation with the number of people who say you never recover from the loss of a child.
‘Of course, I’ll never stop missing him. Some days I feel like a cake tin, pieces of baking paper stuck in patches to the bottom. Or I’m an ice cube tray that somebody is twisting, and ice is clattering into the sink, and the sink is also my heart.’
‘These are good,’ I said. ‘Unexpected metaphors.’
‘Or I’ll be in bed,’ she continued, ‘thinking: break glass with hammer, and my chest is the glass.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said, understanding.
‘But often I’m happy,’ she said. ‘You can be happy, Abigail. I myself am happy with my new frangipani tree and Xuang.’
‘In that order?’
‘He’s driving me crazy today—he’s got this idea I could make a killing knitting jackets for dogs. I only wanted to knit the one jacket, for Bartholomew, not a production line of jackets! So yes, in that order.’
part
17
1.
Today, I am walking to the Barry Street park with Oscar. For no particular reason, he is dressed as Spiderman.
‘Are you ready to see my shadow?’ he asks, pride and suspense in his voice.
‘Yes,’ I say, and we emerge from the shade of a tree into the sun and there it is, beside me, his shadow. Our two shadows walking side by side, the littleness of his compared to mine, his shoulders pronounced by the padding in his Spiderman suit.
For a moment, I think I have figured it out: you can ask the universe or God or legal texts, you can try the gym or shopping malls, numerology, philosophy, politics, witchcraft, Tantra, tango, the exotic, the erotic, psychotherapy, religion, adages-printed-on-stickers-and-attached-to-scented-candles, Facebook, television, Centres of Spiritual Wellbeing, football, personality tests—you can try any of those, but mostly it comes down to what you do with fears and hopes.
Pass them out to friends and family. Howl them to strangers on street corners. I think he doesn’t love me, I saw my parents fly once, this is all my fault.
Hand them over and, between you, sort them out.
The right sort of people will let you hold on to false hope and impossible dreams (Of course he’s into you! Of course he’s coming back!) until the time is right to gently take them from you. They will dispel your fears and help you see or carry truth.
*
Meanwhile, whatever you do, here comes the future, thundering towards you.
Regardless of the approach you choose, you can take a good guess, from one moment to the next, what will happen.
You can guess, for example, that this small Spiderman will start school in a week. On his step-grandmother’s advice, he will wear two pairs of socks to prevent blisters from his new shoes. You will photograph him waving at the doorway to the classroom, return to your car and cry.
And then, over the days, weeks, months and years to follow, his little boy body will stretch up and up, his chest broadening, his chin growing square.
He’ll get certificates of merit at assembly—walk up to the stage to collect them, his back very straight—and he will read his first chapter book, drink his first soft drink, learn to tie shoelaces, to wobble teeth, blow up balloons, click his fingers, dance, spell and make a paper aeroplane. Karate, hip hop, loom bands, Beyblades, hoverboards, Clash of Clans, Minecraft, bottle-flipping, dabbing, Pokémon Go, fidget spinners—each of these will be a passion, a religion, in his life, before he swings abruptly to disdain—disdain not only for the passion, but for his former self. ‘Be kind,’ you will beg him, ‘to your former self.’
One rainy day, when he’s six, he’ll run to fill his water bottle in the park, while his new friend Ely trips and lands face first in the mud.
And Wilbur, often around, will stand with his umbrella over Ely and Ely’s mother, while the mother, crouching, says: Okay, it’s okay, her face pale, the child’s mouth bleeding. There will be a quiet distance between Ely’s mother’s panic and our calm, Wilbur and I standing alongside, Oscar staring, the sky heavy with rain, the playground slippery, the boy with the blood in his mouth.
Wilbur will give Ely and his mother a ride to the medical centre, where the doctor will give the boy a single stitch, and send him home.
You can also take a guess that there will be cranky moments, and quiet. Terrible things will happen in the news, and moments of horror will tear into your life. Cars will turn corners, lights will come on and switch off, and alarms will sound. People will play chess and Candy Crush on their computers. They will update their status. Pipes will leak under bathtubs and stain the ceilings of the rooms below. Water will pour from bottles into glasses, washing machines will bleep! when wet towels are caught and unbalanced.
You will be surprised by an invitation to the wedding of Pete and Sasha, and will be seated at a table with Wilbur, Nicole and Antony, plus three pest control guys. These guys will joke about being second-tier pest control friends, and will ask how you know the happy couple. You will glance at each other, and Nicole will shrug and say, ‘Flight school.’
Power outages will darken neighbourhoods and the torch will be missing from the kitchen drawer. You will light scented candles instead. You will soak up leftover soup with bread. You will decide, now and then, to stop eating bread.
Oscar will dream and not dream; he will be afraid of dogs and then beg for a dog. One day he will tell you that he does not like a boy in his class named Reuben, because Reuben does not sing as beautifully as he himself sings. You will wonder whether you should point out that this is not a basis for character judgment, or it’s a teeny bit conceited, or even that Oscar is, in fact, fairly tuneless. You will only say you understand. Oscar, meanwhile, will sit cross-legged on the edge of the water and think his own private thoughts.
After the wedding of Pete and Sasha, you will find yourself meeting your friends from Flight School every month or so. At restaurants, cafés, on Sundays, with the kids, and with Nicole’s shy husband, Marcin, at Balmoral Beach. Nicole’s girls will take charge of Oscar, pushing him on the swing.
‘Oh, Abi,’ Nicole will say on a picnic rug at Centennial Gardens one day. ‘I lied to my dentist. I had a chipped tooth and the dentist said, Just out of interest, what were you eating when you did this? And I said, A nut. But it wasn’t, Abi. I was eating a sweet.’
You will laugh, and love Nicole.
You and Nicole will find yourselves sharing stories of former boyfriends, former sexual experiences, and together sorting through the strangeness of how we blame ourselves when we could have set stronger borders, when you whispered no but you could have shouted it, how you begin to see yourself as a person without substance: the world not within your control. How this shades into every crisis, every loss, how you look for the place where you could have shouted no, and made it stop, you make everything your fault.
Later, you will consider the evolution of sex in your life, from the confusion of it being his choice, his urgency, to play
ing along with his rules, his ideas of foreplay, his ideas of who you are, to the ideas you both have, from movies or magazines, of what sex is meant to be—a flinging about, a yoga class, sweat and breathlessness—to a stripped-back primitive recklessness, to shy simulations of romance, to something that you know you haven’t found yet.
Another day, you will tell Pete Aldridge that there are moths and ants at your home, and his face will light up. He will draw out his business card and place it on the table of the Indian restaurant. Frangipani will snap it back and promise that Pete will take care of your pests free of charge.
‘Will I?’ Pete will say, disgruntled. ‘Why’s that then?’
You will invite your flight class, and old friends from Oscar’s day care, and new friends from Oscar’s school, to your house for drinks, or tea and cake, or wine and cheese, and you will be invited to other people’s houses and parties.
One day, redheaded Niall will send you a friend request on Facebook, and you will exchange witty messages. Later that night, you will put on an apple-green dress and remember Niall saying, ‘I was fine with you having Oscar.’ What do you mean, ‘fine’? you will think. My having Oscar was fine?
You will remember Niall lying on the couch, and how you made him dinner, and cleaned up after dinner, and how ‘that was fine’, he accepted that. It will occur to you that he could have offered to bring takeaway, or offered to tidy while you put Oscar to bed, or offered to take you both out. These occurrences will surprise you.
You will be afraid, sometimes, of small sharp chicken bones, the sound of a bath running, rising static; afraid of yourself and who you might become. You will be afraid as you watch small boys on scooters almost colliding, or boys doing backstroke down swimming pool lanes.
You might find yourself afraid of change, or loss, of industries collapsing, American elections, of terrorists, contempt and pedantry; afraid of the noise of heels scratching floorboards; afraid of the dark, other people, phone calls, traffic jams, muffled voices, a spider on the wall. You might be afraid of the lines of age, afraid that you will forget to have Oscar draw a picture and enclose it in a thankyou card for Auntie Gem, who sends him a twenty-dollar note every birthday. You will be afraid that your guests are bored, afraid that you’ve hurt feelings, that you’ve been selfish, or childish, or that you’re missing something perfectly obvious.
Some days you will be afraid that there’s nothing left now, that you are ugly but, out of courtesy, nobody has pointed this out to you. You will fear that love, the possibility of love, will dissipate, that you will become a quiet, smiling person, smiling wryly, disappearing, forming part of nobody’s dreams.
One day, you will receive an email from someone named Cindy Chin, which you will almost delete, thinking it is junk mail, but instead you will open it and read:
Dear Abigail,
I’ve never met you, and I hope you don’t mind me writing to you now. My husband, David, used to hang out with you and Finn, when you two lived in Montreal. I always wanted to come along, but I was so sick with my pregnancy that I could never do it. I was sorry about that. I really wanted to meet you.
Anyway, this is none of my business and you might not want to hear this, and it might not be relevant anymore, because I’m sure you’ve moved on—but I wanted to say that David and I were SO MAD at Finnegan for what he did to you.
David is still good friends with Finn, so he can’t say any of this stuff to you himself, but I can. (I think.) We see Finn and Tia sometimes, and look, Tia’s sort of awful. She’s just very self-satisfied. And what David keeps saying to me is that you were awesome. He loved you! He thought you and Finn were so much fun, and he says that you made Finn the best person he could be, while with Tia he’s half that person.
It’s just really sad.
Anyway, but I hope you are happy! And I hope you don’t mind me writing this! And maybe one day we will meet up after all.
Best wishes,
Cindy Chin
After that, you and Cindy will exchange emails for years.
I can let it go now, you will think with midnight clarity, because it wasn’t a lie, not all of it, Finnegan and I—just as Robert and I were not a lie. Such a special bond they had. Somewhere in the world, people know that.
Eventually, you will find the kindness to forgive your former self for hope, and for mistakes, and the courage to angle the anger in the right direction.
You can take a guess that there will be moments of toxicity, that people will ask favours, that you will stand on chairs to fix blinds, change light globes, reach for things on top of the fridge. That there will be a sticker chart on the fridge, with stars for good behaviour, that the plumber will smile as he says goodbye, that friends will say, Don’t come close, I’ve got a terrible cold.
At Nielsen Park, Wilbur will stand at the water’s edge, his back to you, and raise his hand to his forehead, and you will study the tall man with the wild curls, the muscles in his back and his shoulders, and feel a curious jolt.
Later, you will be chatting to Antony, but half your mind will be listening to Wilbur, telling stories about aeroplanes to the others: ‘You focus on the circle in front of you,’ Wilbur is explaining, ‘four or five things you have to scan—you set up a continual scan—instead of looking out at the big sky.’
You tune back into Antony, who is still sad, but calmly sad now, and beginning to be hopeful, having just met someone new.
‘The first time you put your hand out into the slipstream, you can’t believe how strong it is,’ Wilbur says.
Both you and Antony turn to listen.
One day, in passing, you will tell Wilbur that Finnegan said you were needy. This will be the first time you ever told anybody this.
‘Wait,’ Wilbur will say. ‘Wait, I thought that was your interpretation. That you thought you talked too much about your brother. I didn’t know Finnegan said it himself.’
And then he will rage at Finnegan, an unexpected rage. He will not take it with him, inside of him, curling it up to consider later—perhaps Abigail was needy?—he will rage. His rage will take the last of your doubt; you will watch it drift, a soap bubble, and fade against a tree.
Oscar will turn seven and you will sit with him in a café while he drinks a milkshake, and gaze at him, drink in his sweet voice, the bones in his cheeks, his long, bony legs swinging underneath the table, his humour, his stories, his own unique turn of mind.
Another day, you will watch as he tries to force a broken piece back into a toy, his fierceness, his whole body shaking with the effort, and there, for a moment, is Robert, the same exact fierceness, the trembling when he tried to fix a broken Rubik’s Cube.
Another day, Wilbur will tell you a story about that ex-girlfriend, the turquoise girl, and how she did not know how to swim. He tried to teach her once and it was the funniest thing. She was doing everything right, listening to every word he said, her arms are going, her legs are kicking (Wilbur here demonstrating), but no matter what she did, she would sink. Sink to the bottom of the water. God (Wilbur will say), I never laughed so hard.
And you will feel, at that moment, enormously sad.
Later you will decide that this is sadness for women who sink despite doing all they can. Then you will realise that your sadness is for Wilbur, because his eyes shone with gentle affection as he spoke. Some time later you will see exactly what the sadness means.
One night, Oscar’s eyes, golden-green, will follow a glass of water as it drifts along the slant of the coffee table. Wilbur, visiting, will point to the tree shadow in the front door glass, and say, ‘It looks like a person leaning in to peer through the glass, one hand raised to his forehead.’ You and Oscar will say, ‘Yes! It does!’ and Wilbur will open the front door suddenly, to catch it out, the tree, all three of you breathless for a moment, but the tree will be back where it belongs.
Another day, I will buy a kitchen clock, and Wilbur will crouch beside Oscar, explaining how to tell the time. Oscar will gro
w fretful, confused, until Wilbur says, ‘Tell you what, we’ll start on the small hills in the snow.’
And into that moment will slide another moment—my brother Robert on a family ski trip, flying down a slope in the reckless way he skied, wobbling side-to-side at speed, face snow-burnt and vivid with glee, scarf flying, jacket flying—and as Wilbur draws circles on paper, taking Oscar back to the basics of time, back to how numbers fit together, you will glimpse how it all fits together, the small hills, the snow, flight.
Some days you will feel like a silver fish, a flying fish. You will wake in the morning and think, What a dream, what a dream, and walking to the café, you will think, I must write that dream down, but the dream will already be gone, sliding down the window glass, gone.
Wilbur will walk into the café that same day, and you will recall that the dream was about him. He will see you remember, your eyes will exchange dreams.
He will cross the room and say, ‘Abigail.’
You will find out what Tantric sex is like, with a tall man with wild curls who knows how to look you in the eye.
Or not Tantric sex, but something more than that, more humour, more passion, his palm running slow down your inner thigh, more about Wilbur and Abigail, and all the truths coiled within them.
Later, at home, a flying fox will soar over palm trees into the magenta light.
Later still, you will telephone Wilbur to tell him that Oscar chose the butterfly gingerbread at My Little Cupcake today. But when the woman reached her tongs into the jar, the butterfly wings snapped away. ‘You can have the broken one for free,’ the woman said, reaching her tongs into the jar again. But the next one also broke, and the next, and you and Oscar walked home from the shop with a bag full of butterfly wings.
‘There are tiny gold coins in the cracks between my floorboards,’ you will say to Wilbur, ‘spilled from Oscar’s pirate ship. A handful of glow-in-the-dark stars are caught in the lint compartment of the dryer. And dragon eggs in the kitchen sink.’
Gravity Is the Thing Page 37