by Thom Conroy
But my father found the notebook, and a small scene ensued.
A hour later, he was walking with Ella and me down the little bush track that runs in a circle around the eight acres of paddocks, caravans, tents, lean-tos and listing baches that once formed a campground. Now, like everything here, the track itself is fading and pocked with pits. More than halfway gone. We tramped up to a sandy lump, something half-dune, half-hillock, and from there, at last, we had a clear view of the sea. A golden endlessness with its white plume of smoke, it lay on the far side of a little coastal prairie of beach grass that went blue and grey as the sun passed through layers of dissipating cloud.
At that place Ella, my father and I settled down. After a while, as if responding to a telepathic command from my father, Ella began wandering over the hillock. Now and again, she turned to hold up some object and my father nodded at her. It was while Ella was on walkabout that my father said I should tear the letter to Harvey out of my notebook and toss it on the fire.
I laughed, but he didn’t.
‘I mean it,’ he said.
I said I wouldn’t think of it. Said I wasn’t about to burn one word in my notebook.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it would be like taking it back,’ I said. ‘And I’ve haven’t put down anything untrue in that notebook, so why should I retract anything?’
‘It wouldn’t be retracting—’
‘Then what would it be?’
My father shrugged, the oversized gesture of a hopeless clown. ‘Clearing space.’
I refused to destroy the note, but I ended up telling him about things in my life. Or, at least, I told him about Lyle and about sharp-hearted Lois and her million-dollar view, about my stomach-curdling encounter with the Wells and the absurd gift of the stolen earrings, about breaking into his office in Palmerston North, about Hamish Lippleton and the Burmese designs on our home, and this made him laugh. But it wasn’t his usual laugh, I saw that. The expected extravagance and note of abandon in my father’s laugh was absent. Or not exactly absent, only, perhaps, faked.
Later we came back here and found Tama sitting in his very same seat, balancing an open tome across a knothole in the picnic table, the look on his face some mix of serene and intense — not intensely serene as much as serenely intense. My father passed on a kindly edited version of my woes, and while Ella and Eugene set off to the communal kitchen to ‘cook spiders’ for tea, Tama and I chatted about the intimate details of my life.
‘You know what I think?’ he said, his book still open in front of him. I didn’t answer, but he told me anyway. ‘You burn that note to your old boyfriend.’
My father hadn’t mentioned to Tama that he’d already given me this advice, and the coincidence brought on a sweaty chill. My shirt exposed the bottom of my back, and I felt the pores there all coming to attention.
I said, meekly, ‘Why burn it?’
He smiled, his face growing darker in the cheeks when he did this. ‘Got no choice. Something like that, suicide like that? Act of aggression, eh? Gotta defend yourself.’
For some reason, Tama’s words were the first that made sense to me all day. Or rather, his version of things brought my father’s advice into focus, and a moment later I was piling up twigs in the fire ring. When my father and Ella returned, I lit the sticks. Tama came round, his book closed on his finger, and stood there beside me while I tried to get it lit. The letter had a hard time catching, and even after it was lit, it wouldn’t burn properly. Took four or five tries, which seemed to make the task all the more urgent.
Before my father took Ella in for bed, I found a spot at the top of the hill behind his caravan where I could get reception, and she talked to her parents. She said goodnight and told them she didn’t even miss them, but there were a few moments of wailing inside anyway, while I sat out here across from Tama, looking up from my own book to watch him reading, until at last my father emerged alone, quietly smiling. He wandered over into the paddock where he still stands, turning some private joy on the heavens.
Across from me Tama’s pages keep turning. A hint of smoke from the smouldering bits of the campfire comes to my nose as I write this. The smell of pine and dirt, too, of old heat lingering around like it wants some place to go; and, when the breeze wafts over the hedges, something metal and unseen groans, a weathervane, loose spouting, an empty swing. Another shattered thing.
There is really nothing at all about this moment I would change.
A BANK OF CLOUDS
After I’d gone to bed last night on the pull-out sofa I’m sharing with Ella, my father crept over and sat beside me. I turned to him, acknowledged his hand on my forehead, passing where it passed so many times before, and yet — I thought of this before his fingertips completed a single swipe — this skin he was touching was all new growth and, therefore, what he touched was not what he had ever felt before.
And my father told me I would be okay. He told me he loved me, which now, this morning, as I write here in the caravan while my father takes Ella to the communal kitchen to rustle up something to eat, seems self-evident. But last night it came as a great relief. Lying there beside him in the dark, I asked about this woman who was sitting thigh to thigh with him on the night I arrived. He told me her name is Reina. I asked him if he still loved my mother and if he thought they would get back together, and I confessed that it was what I hoped for, but he smiled the whole field of questions away, dissolved them with a finger to his lips, then reminded me how much he loved me and asked me in a whisper how long I planned on staying. I didn’t know, I said. I had no idea why I was even there. It involved mum’s friend Lois, I said. And Ella. And Harvey. There was more to it, of course, but I wasn’t about to say a word about Bruce.
Eugene told me something hard to fathom in the soft and warming light of this morning. The sound of the seabirds as I sit here breeds doubt that my father ever spoke such words.
My father shifted his weight, Ella sniffled in her sleep. He bent close to my ear so as not to disturb her, coming close enough that I could smell the wood smoke on him. Leaning in as if he was telling me a bedtime story, my father narrated what he knew of Tama’s life, and it sounded like a film I wouldn’t watch, something I would disdain for being unbelievable. Drugs and drinking starting from when he was about nine, ten. Robberies, assault. In and out of jail and, finally, eight years in prison. Beat his best mate to within an inch of his life. Cracked his skull with a rock. When I asked why, my father put his hand on my back through the thin duvet.
‘I asked him that, too,’ he said.
‘And?’
‘He told me there was no reason. He said the guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Said he could probably never make me understand.’
Sitting here alone, I feel a chill moving across my skin, not from fear but from what I don’t know. How much I simply don’t know. The contour and size of this ignorance settles around me, as immeasurable as a bank of clouds miles overhead.
THE ONTOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD
It was morning and my father had left for the day, my mother was outside hanging the washing or weeding or maybe even tending to the rabbits that lived with us for nine months or so. She was up to some adult task to which I felt indifference — and, looking back, I see just how close this is to contempt.
Breakfast was over, and our little kitchen was streaming with sunlight.
I cannot forget the quality of this light suffusing the room like a liquid. In this brilliance I saw that the bare wooden table was not, in fact, bare. On its surface dozens and dozens of crumbs appeared, pinpricks of shadow arrayed here and there, though the moment before there had been nothing.
The invisible could be seen.
I stood beside that table with its shadowy crumbs. The sight made me feel my life as I was living it, like a crinkle in the lens I could not ignore. Here, I thought, this here, this morning — and right on the cusp of the verb I stopped. Or, I arrived at the limit of my capacity for ref
lection. Here, this morning … this was it, this was all. Childhood seeing itself in the mirror.
FASTER THAN JENNY OR RACHEL OR BOYD
The next day we go to the beach, properly. Towels in hand, a picnic lunch. Tama with a knapsack of books and no shirt so that I see, for the first time, the cartographical arrangement of his muscles, ribs and scars. With us is Reina, tall, tight-skinned, deep bronze in the cheeks. A woman who, like the campground itself, is weathering a decline. But she’s not as far gone, despite the fact that she’s older than my father by a few years. She’s Tama’s half-sister, that’s what my father said this morning, as if in answer to my questions last night. But I want to know exactly what she means to my father, and we will talk about this. I will sit down with the ears and eyes of my mother and worm into his secrets, find out how deep this betrayal — if there is one — lies, but not today. Not now with the sky a pane of empty blue and Ella walking beside me, going on about her exploits as a swimmer.
‘You can count to ten while I’m under water,’ she says. We’re trekking across the prairie of beach grass we saw from the hillock the other day. Ahead is the blistering glitter of the water that blanches my arms and casts a silver glow on Ella’s round cheeks.
‘And I’m faster than Jenny or Rachel or Boyd too. Feel that.’
Ella flexes her thigh, but before I can touch it, Reina does. She’s fast, and a little bit flighty. She rushes up between my dad and me and, laughing, tickles Ella’s leg, but then pulls away before anyone can catch her.
I watch my dad watching her.
‘Hey!’ Ella is momentarily enraged, but then she begins to run after Reina, the anger passing miraculously into a boiling mad joy.
SURINAME
On the night Bruce showed up at my mountain retreat, I was just getting out of the shower. Half-dressed, I stood next to the fire and before the great kitchen windows where I could admire the cold twinkle that was the town on the tableland below. Through terrace upon terrace of bare branches I could see the grid of the little city, its spindly arms of lights tapering out along the highway east and west. I was so entranced by the light show that when I first caught a glimpse of headlights on the long, winding driveway, my impression was that they belonged to the scene below, that somehow a twinkle had been cut free and some fairy light was drifting like Tinker Bell through the shadows of the pine forest that surrounded the decomposing hulk of a mansion.
When I understood that someone was coming unannounced, I knew that it would be for me, and there I was waiting in my undies as the car climbed the last stretch of the hill and the engine shut off. I sprang into action, running for the front door, but then remembering the other door further along the veranda. It was either dress or check the second door. No time for both. I opted for the door.
This door was tricky; sometimes the latch made it seem locked when it wasn’t. I pulled hard to double-check, and it clicked open, spilling the interior light onto the bare boards of the veranda. Which meant, of course, that I was seen. I heard a voice, feet approaching, but I could see nothing as I jammed the door into its frame. I turned the latch but nothing happened. The voice was on the other side of the door, and the door still wasn’t locked.
‘Djuna.’
The blood muffled my hearing so badly I couldn’t make out who it was. It was male, and it wasn’t my father, this was all I knew. And this was plenty. There was no other man I would let through that door. Then I understood.
I knew who it was.
‘Bruce.’ Now, against the unlocked door. ‘Oh, Bruce, go away.’
‘Is that what you really want?’
I must have sensed in his voice that he would go through with it, and so I stepped away from the door, knowing, when I did, everything that would happen that night: exactly what had happened the last time we’d spent the night together a few weeks before.
Only I was wrong. Bruce did spend the night, but for the first time there was no sex. It was worse than that. What happened is that I finished dressing and made him tea. We sat on the dusty armchairs in the cavernous lounge and drank our tea and, for the first time, we talked. We talked as if there was an us. Of course, we also said that we knew it would need to end. We talked about Harvey, about his dry sense of humour and his feigned indifference. We talked about his voracious reading and the eclectic range of his musical tastes. We talked about how Harvey had been as a kid, too. His kindness and comedy, but also his temper and sullenness. There had been no medical intervention regarding his childhood bouts of depression, and Irene and Gary never spoke of it, not exactly, but they knew. They had always known.
It was later that Bruce, in bed beside me, told me about the embezzling. Why he mentioned it I don’t know. We were talking about my journals, my habit of writing about my parents. I had been telling him about my pet theory regarding all the bits and pieces, written and unwritten, about how they formed a kind of never-viewed whole, a quilt that you could only ever view one patch at a time. We had been lying there a moment, with the space heater purring away in the corner of the room, when he simply told me.
‘I’ve been embezzling money.’
I started to laugh, but this dried right up. ‘You’re serious.’
‘Four years now,’ he said. ‘I keep the money in a work account, but it’s my personal account. Otherwise, Joanne would know.’
‘Jesus, why are you doing that? What the fuck are you thinking?’
I felt Bruce’s shoulders move in the dark. There was a silence then that called to mind Harvey, a kind of indifference I recognised.
‘You’ll get caught.’
‘I know.’ He turned to me.
‘You’ve got to return it. Every penny.’
There was silence again for a long time, and at last Bruce spoke. It was a whisper. A plea.
‘I’ve looked into it, Djuna. There are places we could go and not be caught, not be extradited.’
I moved his hand from my hair and drew up my knees in front of me, a gesture of self-defence.
‘Suriname. Belize. St Lucia. Lots of places in Africa. Tajikistan.’
‘Tajikistan?’
‘It’s almost six hundred thousand dollars, Djuna.’
I got out of bed then, went for more tea. When I came back, Bruce was asleep. He was turned on his side, curled up foetal style and looking so harmless that I began to doubt that we’d had a conversation anything like the one I recalled. At the same time, before I returned to bed, I looked up Suriname on my computer and spent a few minutes gawking at the palm trees and waterfalls. Just before I shut it off, I found a picture of a cottage sitting like a white jewel amid the emerald of a rainforest.
In the morning, I made Bruce breakfast, kissing him over the maple syrup as if he’d never confessed a thing to me. And that was how I preferred it. Anyway, we also agreed that we had to stop seeing each other. Soon. Very soon. Maybe not just then, but very soon.
Bruce was off to Wellington for a meeting that morning, and I remember standing in the warmth of the kitchen, knotting his tie, or at least trying to knot it. He took one look at the knot in the window glass and undid my handiwork. I crossed my arms as he re-tied it in front of me, and for that moment nothing seemed like I knew it was. I thought, We’re married. We’re married and he’s off to work. Later I’ll wake Ella for school. Some part of this thought must still have been in my head as I watched him wending his way through the pine forest, my breath forming on the kitchen glass as I said the word Suriname aloud.
TIME, RETREATING
Once the proper beach-going gets started, our little group falls into a routine. Or, no, not even a routine. Routine implies knowledge, a plan, some conscious choice. Tonight, as I write this, it occurs to me that what we’ve fallen into is a rich nothingness.
A repetition of sun and salt water and campfires at night.
Time has receded all on its own, like a sort of small boat that keeps sailing closer to the horizon without quite vanishing. I think it’s next week that Joanne
said Ella’s school starts, but then Joanne told me on the phone the other day that nothing really happens in the first week and this break from her daughter was helping her to rediscover herself, and so the fact is I have no idea when Ella should return. Or even, truth be told, if she should at all. I’ve known plenty of homeschoolers and they always seem to get along just fine. And it’s been days now since Ella’s cried at night. When she speaks to her parents she’s short with them, eager to run off, always rushing towards the obligatory declaration of love which means she can go.
Now and then I find myself looking at my phone during the day, but today, as we were crossing the beach grass prairie, it occurred to me that I did not have my phone with me. Neither did my father, who has taken to accompanying us in the late mornings, or early afternoons or whatever time it is when we get down here.
I still have not talked to my father about Reina, or much of anything else, for that matter. He’s told me he’s planning on staying here a while, and I’ve questioned this. Said we should both leave together. He smiled that away, too. Told me he’d be there until the end of February. Maybe longer. Said it depended.
‘On what?’ I said.
But just then Ella had come running up to us with some question or complaint or insight, and so my father was spared. And then, as we arrived back at my father’s caravan earlier today, my phone was ringing. It was Bruce.