‘Um . . . well . . .’
‘Sorry. You don’t know me. You don’t have to tell me,’ Leonie said. ‘But she knows you’re here, right?’
‘Of course,’ I said, without missing a beat. She looked at me a bit too long then, but I made myself busy with some offcuts of tape, and after a moment she let it go.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s go again: so, I’d shake your hand, but . . .’ The woman wiggled blue latex fingers and said, ‘Hi, I’m Leonie. I’m an old family friend.’
‘Hi Leonie,’ I said, wiggling my fingers back. ‘I’m Anna.’
‘Hi Anna.’
‘You’ve cleaned up around here,’ Leonie said, looking around. ‘I assume that was you. The place looks great.’
‘Come on,’ I said, checking Bette was properly asleep, and lowering my voice anyway. ‘The place looks one step above unsanitary. Which, yes, is one step above when I arrived.’
Leonie chuckled openly then, a deep, throaty, burbling laugh. I liked it. It was a great sound. She leaned back over her work on Bette’s arm again.
‘I’m not sure how long I’m staying.’ I don’t know why I said it. I don’t know why I wanted it out there in the air around us. But Leonie just nodded and I leaned forward as she peeled back the dressing more; it didn’t stick this time. The whole pale underside of Bette’s forearm was a weeping mess, red and raw and gelatinous. It was impressive. I breathed out.
‘Can’t really blame her for knocking herself out like that,’ I said, as Bette gave another snore. ‘It must hurt like hell.’ I peered closer at the ragged edges. ‘That’s really quite bad, isn’t it?’ Leonie nodded. I went on, a bit shocked that Bette had been nursing this the whole time I was here, as she was cooking breakfast, delivering tea, doing dishes. ‘I had no idea. I really had no idea.’
‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least,’ Leonie said.
‘Sorry, what do you mean?’
‘Well . . .’ Leonie seemed to toss something up in her mind. ‘It’s just that I’ve known your family for a long time, I guess. All your women are bloody weird and secretive and always thinking they need to shut up and go it alone.’
A strange tingling sensation flushed through me. ‘Is that what you meant about me and Bette being family?’
‘Yeah, sorry about that. I know your family, but I don’t know you. It was a dumb thing to say.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
As Leonie cleaned and re-dressed Bette’s wound she told me about everything she was doing and why she was doing it. ‘This is a dressing which keeps moisture in; it’s important to keep a wound like this moist.’
‘Why? What happens if you don’t?’
‘It’ll never heal. Usually we’d leave the dressing for longer, but she’s had some infection –’
‘I don’t bloody wonder.’
Leonie looked around the kitchen and laughed again. ‘Yeah, exactly. So, as well as antibiotics we’re changing the dressing more regularly than we usually would.’ A slightly rotten metallic smell had wafted up with the removal of the dressing and it lingered in the air of the kitchen, even after Leonie had covered the wound again. I waved my hand in front of my face and leaned in closer to see how she was finishing it off. ‘Well, you’ve got a strong stomach,’ said Leonie. ‘That’s a good start.’
As she was winding the last bit of gauze around the clean fresh dressing, Hessel appeared in the doorway. He stopped still when he saw Leonie, but Leonie didn’t even look up, winding away at the gauze around Bette’s limp arm as she said, ‘Hello, Hessel. Yes, as you can see, I’m here again.’
‘Where’s the other one?’
‘I swapped her out. You know I like to look in on Bette.’
‘I told you. And I told them.’
‘It’s not your call.’
Hessel stood in the doorway of the kitchen. Leonie kept her eyes down. Hessel was full of something to say, I couldn’t guess what, but then he looked at me and quickly turned and walked away from the house, his footsteps fading out across the gravel.
A weird silence settled across the kitchen.
‘I thought you said you were a family friend,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well. Bette thinks I’m alright. Don’t you, Bette?’ Bette grunted and Leonie spread surgical tape between her fingers and deftly cut two lengths. ‘Hessel, however, is no great fan of yours truly.’
‘No kidding,’ I said. And there it was again, Leonie’s throaty laugh. So I went on. ‘My mum can be a bit the same. It must run in the family. She was a bit down on me seeing my boyfriend, who is Lebanese.’
‘Really? That doesn’t sound like Cathy.’
‘Yeah. I guess some people can get a bit funny about people from elsewhere. Especially older people, like Hessel, like, with you, you know – it’s harder for them to adapt. They can get funny about anyone with immigrant heritage, African or Lebanese or whatever. Nassim gets it all the time.’
Leonie was sitting back, giving me her full face. The look she was giving me was sheer disbelief, and then a sharp twitch began at the corner of her mouth.
‘Oh honey,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Is that what you call it? Getting funny?’
I blinked. ‘Um. No. Of course not. No. Sorry, I –’
‘And are you saying I’m from somewhere else and Hessel isn’t?’
‘No, but well, you know what I mean.’
Leonie looked absolutely astonished. The mouth twitch had completely disappeared. ‘Are you serious?’ Leonie actually seemed a bit pissed off now.
I felt my face go red. ‘My boyfriend –’ I started. ‘I’m sorry.’
Leonie’s demeanour changed again quickly; the twitch was back and she gave me a softer look. ‘Ah, kiddo,’ she said, and sighed. ‘You’re just a young fish. Maybe too young to know better, I don’t know. Maybe not. But you should probably start thinking about whether it’s a good idea for a young white girl to start explaining racism to a Djaara woman old enough to be her mother.’
I nodded and blinked hard. Oh god, not here, not now. I didn’t want to cry.
And then Leonie started laughing. ‘“People from elsewhere”,’ she said, pronouncing ‘elsewhere’ with a grand English ‘h’. ‘“People from else-hwhere”,’ she said again, and laughed a lot, and then when it began to die down again she chuckled to herself and said, ‘You should be showing me your visa,’ and then she laughed so hard she had to wipe the tears out of her eyes with the back of her wrist so she could see well enough to smooth the last bits of surgical tape around Bette’s dressing.
I tried to laugh too, at myself, but it came out a bit hard-edged.
Leonie trimmed the tails of the tape and tucked away the ends of the bandage with a deft hand. She took off her gloves and reached over and quickly patted my hand. ‘You’ll be right,’ she said. ‘Try not to take it personally. I get it. Sometimes you gubbas don’t know your own racism until it reaches up and smacks you in the face.’ And then she stood up and began packing things away in her kit.
When everything was neatly away she held out her ungloved hand for me to shake. ‘Well, it was nice to finally meet you, Anna,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, taking her hand. I felt like my head was spinning. ‘It was nice to “finally” meet you too, Leonie.’ And then I added, ‘Even though I’ve never heard of you.’
She laughed and nodded. Then she dropped my hand and looked down at me. ‘Actually, Anna. Do you want to do me a favour? You drive, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what you could do? I’ve made a doctor’s appointment for Bette on Thursday and Hessel’s got a long history of not taking her. Do you reckon you could make sure she gets there?’
‘Well, I’m not sure –’ But then I nodded, suddenly eager to please Leonie, or at least eager to get her to leave. ‘Okay, sure, I could maybe do that.’
‘Good girl,’ she said. ‘Medical centre, main street, next to the post office. Eleven-thirty.’
Leonie picked up her
kit. She gestured to where Bette was still sitting, head back, snoring, and said, ‘Anyway, I’ll be back tomorrow to check on her again. I could maybe teach you a couple more things if you like.’ And then halfway to the door she turned back towards me, smiling, and she lowered her voice. ‘And maybe I’ll bring my son. He’d love to meet you.’
I listened as Leonie’s footsteps crunched away across the gravel, but after only a moment they crunched back and her face was in the doorway again.
‘Hey Anna, honey?’ she said.
I looked up. ‘Yeah?’
‘Look out for yourself while you’re here, okay? Promise me?’
‘Um, okay?’
Leonie looked at me for a moment longer, and then she turned and was gone.
I stood at the still-open kitchen window and watched Leonie’s car tear out of the driveway and speed off down the road. Bette still snored behind me. I pulled my hood up on my head, picked up my phone and stepped into the cold wind of outside. I could make a new plan. Of course I could. No doubt it would be disconcerting: any change would introduce new uncertainties, which was never a good thing as far as I was concerned, but my original plan simply hadn’t factored in a place like this. My original plan had been perfect, and now, because of this place, it wasn’t. There would be a clinic in Melbourne I could book into. I’d need to research hostels. It would be expensive, but maybe that couldn’t be helped. And, of course, when I found reception to do those things I would communicate with Nassim too. I wouldn’t just leave it like that. I wasn’t that sort of person. I couldn’t just vanish on him. That would be cruel.
I should have written a note. I should have ended it properly yesterday, before I left.
The gravel sounded like pulses of static under my feet as I walked across it. I held my phone out in front of me. Nothing. No bars. Through the fence the ground turned squishy and uneven, pockmarked by a thousand sheep’s hooves. I waved my phone about above my head. For a moment one tiny bar flickered, and then disappeared, not to be lured out of hiding again.
No reception. Nothing but me and here.
And I just really didn’t know whether that was a reprieve or a sentence.
10
Yesterday. Only yesterday. Only one day between here and then.
Only yesterday, in the early dark, that I had physically untangled myself from Nassim’s sleeping body and crept downstairs to where my case and backpack were already packed and stowed away in the hall cupboard, my clothes for the day of travel folded on top of them.
Only yesterday that I had lain next to him before getting up, basking in the warm, near bulk of him, listening to his restful breathing – a rhythm I rode like something elemental, like the pulsing of waves on a beach.
Only the night before that, with both my parents away, that I had agreed to him staying over, perhaps wondering if in fact I might tell him everything.
Only yesterday that I had failed to wake him up and tell him anything at all.
One of Nassim’s arms was underneath me, the other curled over the top. He had snored, despite promising not to. I was lying awake in the dark, looking at my memento mori where it was hanging above my desk, gleaming in the light from the streetlamp, Nassim’s handwriting just visible in the bottom right corner, a quote from our favourite song. Let’s love now before the flesh leaves our bones.
We had first done just that, on my birthday, when he had given me the picture. We’d gone to a hotel. Nassim spread a rug on the floor and laid out a feast. And in the sanctity of that room, we had our perfect moment: embracing life, embracing flesh, embracing now. Objectively there was nothing perfect about it – it was fumbling at best – but even then it was a sublime new thing, sex with Nassim. And after that I wanted it again and again, as often as I could get it. It was such a good thing – purely good, sexy and honest. It banished thought – for the first time I felt free of my thinky-thinky mind. Love was in my body. In his body. It relaxed me. It enlivened me. And we were so careful. We had been so, so careful. We were responsible. We weren’t going to be like those others, the stupid ones. We weren’t going to let it take us over, even though, even though yes, we were completely unable to keep away from each other. But we used condoms, even in the heat of it all, even when we didn’t want to, and then we made appointments and we both had our sexual health screens and I went on the pill. We were smart about it even while we lost our heads.
And now this.
I was still undecided. I might tell Nassim. I might.
Nassim had changed everything for me. For the better. Since he’d arrived in my life I wasn’t so worried all the time. I’d been sleeping better, I was beautifully distracted from the up-and-down shit-show that was life at home, I was generally happier. And I’d been convinced that this was a good enough trade-off for all the time I wasn’t studying, all the time I was spending with him that wasn’t actively moving me towards my goal of being a doctor.
But it was as if Dr Honeycott had shaken me awake. He had broken the happy trance I had been in. I had thought I could just fix this blip and continue on my merry way. But he was right. The blip wasn’t a blip at all. It was a message from the universe. Of course I didn’t deserve good things. Of course I didn’t deserve Nassim. Of course I couldn’t have him as well as the future I hoped for myself, needed for myself. That kind of happiness was for people other than me. Better people. People who didn’t fuck up. People who didn’t make themselves ridiculous at the first hint of attraction to a guy, people who didn’t get themselves pregnant like some stupid horny rutting animal and then try to convince themselves that there was no shame in it. My life had run off the tracks. And it was my own stupid weakness that had done it. Weak. I was weak. Weak. Like my mother.
So in the early dark of my bedroom I crept out from underneath Nassim’s arm. He had shifted unconsciously to let me up. ‘Bring back coffee,’ he’d mumbled and then disappeared back into sleep.
In some part of my brain I knew it was disgusting that Dr Honeycott had made me feel the way he had. And in some part of my person I knew he was wrong. That Nassim and I had only responded to something that was so wrapped up in every atom of us, every touch, every look; eons of evolution and instinct had made it so. Nothing, nothing about it had felt wrong, because nothing about it was wrong. But as I’d left Dr Honeycott’s clinic that small part of me, the part that contained all my righteous anger, all my defensive bravado, all sense of my own goodness, melted away. I felt exactly the way he thought I should feel – shit and ashamed and dirty and unworthy.
Barefoot on the cold tiles of the laundry I changed out of my pyjamas and into my clothes for the trip. I wrote the note for Mum and left it on her pillow. I felt guilty about leaving her too. But I decided not to feel that. She didn’t deserve it. Not at all. Mum could read that note, after what she’d done, after who she’d been, after the way she’d treated Nassim and me, and she could weep and cry and drink and call me all sorts of things and try to manipulate me back home, and I could decide to not even care. I would decide that. But Nassim . . .
I’d planned to leave a note for Nassim too. Something beautiful. Something to make him feel loved, because he was. He was loved. I’d never told him. So the note would say something that did all that, but which was also final, which left no room for questions or negotiations.
I held the pen, but it froze in my hand. It stopped uselessly there. The nib was resting on the blank page but the right words stayed resolutely in the ink tube inside. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t write whatever it was that was the right thing to write. It didn’t feel like anything was the right thing to write.
I dropped the pen and wheeled my case to the door and was about to heft my backpack on my back and walk right out, but I just had to risk it one more time. Maybe I would do it. Maybe I would wake him.
I went back upstairs and looked at him there, lying in my bed. Just looked at him. At the baby-softness of his brow; at the warm hard shape of his shoulder.
It hurt. A
lready it hurt. It hurt so bad and so hard that for a moment I thought I was going to do it, to shake his shoulder, to start to talk.
But I couldn’t do it.
I was ashamed of myself. And ashamed to admit it. Stalemate.
And then, I didn’t know what I was doing, but it seemed the only way to force something to happen, to force myself out of that door: I carefully and quietly lifted my memento mori off the wall and took it with me. And then I was out on the street with it, walking awkwardly, lugging both it and my backpack and dragging my suitcase, already late for the only bus that would get me to the train and the coach that would ferry me to my fresh start. To my new life. Away from these clouds to a wide open sky.
11
Standing there, in the middle of the paddock, considering the fact that I had no reception – no way to book in anywhere else, clinic or hostel, and also no way to contact Nassim at the very least to let him know I hadn’t vanished so he didn’t go off and file some sort of missing person’s report on me or something – I heard Hessel calling my name.
I looked around and saw him leading the most gorgeous bay horse out from the little wooden shed. He called again, ‘Anna, come and meet my other beautiful girl.’
The horse’s abdomen swung back and forth with her gait as Hessel slowly and gently led her across the paddock towards me. Her coat shone a rich rust colour, and her mane and tail and ankles were points of black. I realised with a thrill that the horse was pregnant – the large and swinging abdomen, the slow walk. When Hessel and the horse reached me, the intimate sound of her breathing, and the close twitching of her flesh, the noisy worrying of the bridle in her large mouth, filled me with a sense of wonder.
‘Wow,’ I breathed, and lifted a hand to touch the mare’s neck.
‘This is Europa Pearl,’ said Hessel. ‘But this is her race name, her breeding name. To us she is Polly. She’s my beautiful broodmare, aren’t you, Pol?’
The horse coughed her breath out of her nose and leaned her face into Hessel’s body in such a mute articulation of love and trust that I was moved by the sight of it, by the relationship between this horse and this man.
Where We Begin Page 6