Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  ‘It’s fine, Grandma,’ I managed to say. ‘You weren’t expecting guests.’

  The woman was just staring at me and I was just staring at the room. The urge to run was strong, but when I met her eyes again, I saw that she was smiling at me.

  ‘Can you just stand there?’ she said. ‘Don’t move. I’m going to get my glasses.’ She shuffled out of the room and disappeared somewhere towards the back of the house and then returned with an old pair of glasses, taped up in the corner, and perched them on her nose. Her eyes became enormous; she was like a skinny owl. And then she stood and looked at me with such a steady gaze, so full of disbelief, and almost of adoration – love, even – that I couldn’t help giggling nervously a little bit. I felt shy, like a little kid, and the warmth began to creep back into my feet and legs and hands.

  ‘It is such a delight to see you,’ she said. ‘It does my old eyes so much good.’ And she hugged me again, this time without the insistent tugging, and even though she still felt thin, too thin, there was a softness to her skin as I leaned down into her embrace and we brushed cheeks.

  ‘Is Grandpa . . .’

  ‘Asleep. Now, are you staying?’ she asked, letting me go to look at me again. I hesitated, trying not to look around. ‘Of course you’re staying.’ She manoeuvred me towards a little door off the kitchen. ‘And of course you’ll want to stay in here. This was your mother’s room.’

  She opened the door onto a great big wall of jumbled stuff. It looked more like a disorganised storage closet than a room. All of the surfaces, including the floor, were taken up with piles of newspapers, odd collections of empty jars, small wooden planks, unmarried shoes. There was a cupboard in the corner but the doors stood ajar, unable to close on the piled contents within but also unable to open fully without launching an avalanche. Empty and full cassette cases and a bucket of bottle tops hid the top of a desk. Half the curtain rail was hung with dresses, florals and plaids and slips of lace, while even more dresses, un-hung, created a small hill behind the door. But the air was better in there. Stale, but not rancid. I surreptitiously took great gulps of it while I looked around.

  ‘There’s a bed over there,’ Bette said, pointing, but all I could make out was a mound of boxes and coats. ‘It’s a really good one,’ she said. ‘We paid a pretty penny for it. It was never anything but the best for your mother, she was always such a fussy creature.’

  I tried to laugh.

  By the light of the undressed bulb Bette began excavating and revealed a squeaky sprung bed under the detritus against the far wall. ‘Sheets,’ she said, and as she moved to disappear again, now more like a busy mole than an owl, I said, ‘Thank you, Grandma. I am really very sorry to have caused you this bother, to turn up so late unannounced like this. I . . . I needed somewhere to go and I didn’t have a phone number for you, or an email, or anything –’

  ‘Of course this was the only way!’ Bette turned suddenly. She sounded almost angry. ‘She’s kept us apart for so long, too long, but you’ve set that right, bless you.’

  I was taken aback by the fierceness of her words, but then she dropped it down again as she said, ‘I won’t wake your grandfather up now – he’s like a bear with a sore head if he doesn’t get his eight hours – but won’t we have a magnificent surprise for him in the morning!’ She clapped her hands together like a kid. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘have you eaten? I could make you something.’

  Bette seemed excited at the prospect, but what I had seen in the kitchen evaporated any appetite I might have had. ‘No Grandma, it’s alright, I ate on the train.’

  ‘Okay then, I’ll just go and find you a nice tracksuit to sleep in.’

  ‘I can get my suitcase from outside, all my clothes are in it – my pyjamas.’

  Grandma looked towards the dark window. ‘Perhaps it’s best if we get it for you in the morning.’

  ‘But it’s just right there. If I had some light –’

  ‘There’ll be something you can wear tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and find it.’ And she disappeared again up the hallway.

  I stood in the overflowing room, breathing through my mouth and wondering where on earth I had landed.

  Bette finally appeared again holding a faded blue crocheted bedspread, a pair of tube socks, and something aqua-coloured and velveteen. She fumbled the bedspread over the doona but slapped my hand away when I tried to help. ‘This was your mother’s too, very fine,’ she said proudly. I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Finally the shaking old fingers smoothed the last wrinkles from the bed. ‘Maybe you will call your mother tomorrow,’ she said as she straightened up. ‘Get her to come too.’

  I looked at my phone. Still no reception. I hadn’t really believed that places without reception still existed.

  ‘My phone is –’

  ‘I’m sure your grandfather would let you use the phone in the good room. You could call her from there and get her to come,’ Bette said.

  I hadn’t factored that in, that Bette might actually be intent on seeing Mum. I should have – she had written the letter to Mum, after all, not me, even if I was explicitly mentioned.

  ‘Um, she’s away at the moment,’ I said. ‘High-flying. Not back for a week or maybe more. So . . .’ This was true. All true.

  ‘Maybe you will call her then, in that case. In a week? You will stay at least a week? Yes? Maybe longer?’

  ‘Oh, um. Maybe,’ I said. But Bette clearly needed more. ‘Um, probably a week.’

  Bette seemed satisfied. She pressed her palms together. ‘Now, pillowcases!’ she said, and turned and ambled out of the room and down the dark hallway in search of more fine comforts for her long-lost granddaughter.

  Once Bette had finally arranged the bed to her liking, and shown me where the toilet was – a tiny room by the back door with only a laundry sink and a showerhead over a cheap plastic shower base, and that I hoped wasn’t all the house had by way of a bathroom – she shuffled off to bed again, saying ‘Goodnight dearest girl’ as she went.

  I closed the bedroom door behind her as best I could with all the stuff in the way, and sat down on the bed. Awful. This place was awful. It was horrifying, in fact. How could they live like this?

  Torn and faded posters covered the walls, various faces peering out from behind junk and cupboards: mostly Madonna, another woman called Sheryl Crow if the jagged writing across it was anything to go by, a small picture of a young George Clooney in a white jacket with a stethoscope slung around his neck.

  Under the squalid surface, this was a typical teenage girl’s room. It had belonged to a girl who’d listened to music, who’d had crushes and favourite television programs. It seemed almost unbelievable that that girl was my mother. My teenage mother. My mother at seventeen, the same age I was now.

  I retrieved my memento mori from where I had put it out of harm’s way on top of the cupboard. The picture was an art print as well as a medical illustration. Nassim had shown a talent for finding arty things that I actually really liked, and this one was sciencey but also very funky. The skulls were double-printed in two colours, rust-red and teal, just off centre from each other to give the impression of something slightly out of focus, as though if you put on a pair of 3D glasses the skulls might suddenly jump out at you, unified in their grinning three-dimensional horror.

  I hugged it to my chest, as if to protect both it and myself from the chaos around us, and then I leaned it against a ragged bunch of newspapers and sat back on the bed.

  I began to shiver. The bus driver had been right. It was freezing. And there was no heater that I could see. I couldn’t bear to undress so I kicked off my shoes, pulled on the thick men’s tube socks Grandma had given me over my own thin socks, turned off the main light, and got in under the covers on the squeaky bed. For a while I tried rubbing my arms with my hands and wiggling my feet against each other, but eventually I just gave in to the cold and lay there staring at the ceiling by the dim blue light from my phone.

  I had s
et myself adrift on a sea of unfamiliarity. I had sailed through a flowing darkness of rain and stars away from all that was light and known. And now I was here.

  And I couldn’t stay here. No matter what my plan had been. I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t stay here, but I couldn’t go back either.

  And outside, the darkness flowed and flowed.

  I hunkered down further under the doona. The blue crocheted bedspread that had been Mum’s provided absolutely no warmth, so I bunched it up around my face instead, clutching it, weaving my fingers through the crocheted web and holding on tight. I pointed my phone light onto my memento mori so I could see it in the dark.

  They were complicated objects, the both of them – Mum’s old bedspread and my memento mori. They were symbols of everything I had left behind.

  But I held on to them anyway. I held on to them because right now they felt like the only anchors I had.

  My Cathy,

  Won’t you please come home? Even just for a visit?

  You know your room is always here, waiting for you. We all would like to see you so much – all of us. Especially now.

  We don’t understand why you left. How could you have left us like that?

  Why won’t you answer any of my letters?

  If you come home we could all be a family again. We could all have dinner together. It would be like old times.

  And you could bring my baby granddaughter. I’m old, Cathy. I don’t have forever to wait. Why won’t you come and visit? I’d like to meet my granddaughter before I die. Don’t I deserve that at least?

  Your loving mother, Bette

  Please don’t tell that I wrote.

  6

  I wasn’t going to sleep. I was going to lie there trying to keep warm, and then I was going to get up before dawn, get my things together, sneak out and get on the first bus back to Melbourne. I wasn’t even going to say anything to my grandmother – Grandma Bette had never been part of my life before and we could easily go back to that. The bus would whisk me away as if I’d never arrived, and I could find somewhere else to stay in Melbourne, a nice clean warm anonymous hostel perhaps, while I got myself sorted out and came up with a new plan.

  It had to be done. Because the absolute wrongness of everything here couldn’t be clearer. I had read Grandma’s letter and imagined a lovely old farmhouse with a cute little room for me, perhaps with a wooden floor and a rocking chair, a window with a rolling pastoral view – the perfect retreat for an industrious student undergoing a period of recuperation. But this here? This place? I didn’t even know what the view outside this house looked like. Where the hell was I, anyway? And as for the inside . . .

  The socks my grandmother had given me were painfully tight around my leg – the ribbing felt like it was bruising me – and the foot part was too big, leaving a pocket of cold air around my toes. How could men wear socks like this? They made me think of my dad, of just how far away he was. All the way away in Germany, looking after Opa who was really sick. He had been there for over a month. Usually I went with him to visit Opa, at least once a year. Sometimes Mum came, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she was too ‘unwell’. Code for too damn drunk.

  I missed Opa nearly all the time. Opa was the best. The best in the world. Oma had died before I was born so Opa had been the only grandparent I had. Until now.

  I should have gone with Dad. What if this had been my last chance to see Opa? I should have gone at least for these holidays. Oh my god, I should have gone.

  Impossible.

  Impossible. Everything was impossible. It was all such a mess.

  I unplugged my phone, turned up the brightness, and held it on the pillow next to my head. Tried to slow my breathing.

  I didn’t mean to sleep. I didn’t mean to, but the next thing I knew, I was made of woven grass and I was unravelling and being carried off by the wind, piece by piece. It was so important that I reweave myself, but I couldn’t do it as quickly as the wind was unweaving me . . .

  Until something woke me – a loud thud, a light scratching. I opened my eyes to the first touches of grey beginning to creep through the room. I was curled up tight against the cold; my body was a stiff and sore apostrophe.

  ‘Shit,’ I cried, and sat up. I checked the time on my phone. ‘Shit!’ The first bus would be arriving any minute. I threw back the covers and the cold hit me like a wall. I ran in my tube-socks to the back door, threw it open, and launched myself outside into the whipping air.

  I had no time to take in the landscape as I sprinted out to the road just in time to see the back of the bus disappearing down the highway towards the city. I stood leaning over, hands on my knees and panting as I watched it go and wondered what on earth I would have done anyway – leap on board in my socks and leave all my things behind?

  I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on breathing out and in. New plan. New plan. The next bus wasn’t until late morning, but I could still pack up now and leave. I could walk away down the road. If I was quick, I could be gone before my grandma and grandpa were even up, and I could try to catch the next bus from further along. That’s what I would do. I stood up straight and opened my eyes.

  And the landscape opened up in front of me.

  It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.

  Over the road the plain spread away, flatter than I imagined land could be, but somehow it seemed I was also high up because not far above the soggy green expanse, a dark grey layer of cloud slid over the earth, perfectly parallel, not touching at any point. The plain stretched away, east, south, west, every way I turned, the same in every direction, finishing in the distance with a line of blueish-brown hills on every horizon. In each paddock there was a curious mound of boulders, all different sizes, but generally twice the height of a person and about thirty steps around: a mini-mountain for every meadow. And around them, in the thin slices of living space between earth and low-hanging sky, sheep milled about, chewing the new shoots in the sodden grass, spreading themselves evenly across the fabric of the land, like dots on a dress.

  I breathed in deeply. The cold air filled my lungs with a fresh green smell of earth and grass. The wind tugged at my hair and clothes but moved nothing of the treeless landscape in front of me.

  I peered down the road. Who knew how far the next stop was?

  It still seemed like my best option. I could wave a bus down if I had to. I could stand in the road – make it stop for me. I turned quickly to head back to the house and collect my things. And I gasped.

  There, on the other side of a blasted gravel driveway from the little house, looming large and stark in the middle of all this flat landscape, stood a towering bluestone box; the shell of a once-grand Victorian farmhouse mansion.

  It was a shock, turning and finding it there, looming behind the little house. It seemed incongruous that something so large had been just standing there, completely unnoticed by me. I almost felt like it had snuck up on me. Like it had been quietly watching me.

  In all of that landscape, everywhere the same as everywhere else, the hulking form of the ruined mansion seemed like it had landed from outer space. It had a shallow triangle roof with no eaves at all, just two-storey walls standing as blank shields to the wind. And despite feeling like it had been secretly watching me, when I properly looked at its cliff-faced expanse, I saw that most of its windows were boarded, and it actually seemed like it was trying not to look around. Only two glass windows remained in their sockets, one at the bottom south end and one at the top north, and when the sun came out for a moment they glinted and gave the facade a cockeyed appearance.

  I walked down the gravel driveway to have a closer look. The bareness of the old house was odd; it made it look more like a prison building than a house. At first I didn’t understand it, but then I saw telltale marks on the walls and realised a verandah must have once run around it. I imagined the skirt of it there, like a decorative frill, softening the house, shading it, like a little girl all dressed up
; suddenly it made sense, and the place looked like it might have once actually been someone’s home.

  The sun came out behind me and my shadow was cast so long it nearly touched the foot of the bluestone house, and then it disappeared again and the wind turned even colder. I shivered and drew Nassim’s hoodie closer around me.

  ‘Anna? Is it really?’ came a man’s voice from behind me, thick with a Dutch accent. ‘Is it little Anna?’

  I turned to see a short silver-haired man standing at the back door of the small house wearing a dressing gown embroidered enough to be a king’s robe, at odds with the tattered grey slippers on his bony feet. This must be my grandfather, Hessel. I saw Bette hovering behind him, beaming at the scene, like she had invented me herself, drawn me out of the air – her miracle!

  Hessel stepped down from the doorway and came towards me, his arms outstretched.

  ‘Oh, our girl, look at you – you are from the old country, you certainly are!’ He embraced me and I smelled the old-world European perfume of his hair-crème, and it reminded me instantly of Opa. Hessel looked at me again and kissed me once on one cheek, and then on the other, and then again on the first.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘My dear! It is my absolute pleasure to meet you.’

  ‘And it is a pleasure to meet you, too,’ I said.

  ‘Such manners too.’ He smiled at me and then at Bette. And then he announced to the world at large, ‘My granddaughter. Of course she is a beauty! Ah, but it is easy to be beautiful when you are young. But look to my Elizabeth.’ He pronounced my grandmother’s name with a hard ‘t’ at the end; neither ‘Bette’ or ‘Elizabeth’ but a Hessel-specific combination of the two, and we both turned back to look at her where she stood, still hovering outside the back door, watching on like a proud gift-giver. ‘You are hoping you will have her genes, huh?’

  I smiled. His obvious affection for his elderly wife was adorable. Then he caught me looking at the old house, the grand old bluestone ruin. ‘And what do you think of your inheritance, eh?’ he asked. ‘Elizabeth’s family home. Your family home. She is grand, isn’t she? We are restoring her, do you know? She is going to be grand again.’