Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  I kicked off the ground again and rode along the shoulder of the road. At the corner I glanced back, but the angle on the window had changed so now it was just a thin pane of reflected moonlight.

  Bette and Hessel’s little house was nearly completely dark; only a soft lamplight came from one of the back rooms. I turned the bike onto the gravel driveway, but as I neared the house I stopped short. I could hear something, a sound like whale-song – sustained, pitiful, and yet somehow melodic, virtuosic. It was coming from inside.

  I wheeled the bike to the yard fence and left it there, stepping from the crunching gravel to the quiet grass, and then through the back door and into the dark kitchen. And then I heard it clearly. It was Bette’s voice, in a tremulous wail, rising and falling. I followed it down the hallway to a door, slightly ajar, with lamplight casting a meagre shard across the carpet. I pushed the door open a little and it made a swooshing noise on the carpet as it went, and the keening stopped.

  My grandmother was sitting up alone in a rumpled bed, looking like a frail bird in a dishevelled nest. Clothes and books were piled everywhere around, scattered with mouse droppings. A little walkway showed worn carpet to Bette’s side of the bed, and another snaking around to the other side, which lay empty. The old woman’s breathing was shallow, and her chest heaved as though she were having a panic attack.

  ‘Grandma? You okay?’

  Bette looked startled.

  ‘Is it your arm? Does it hurt? Are you feeling hot?’

  Bette stared at me, wide-eyed. She seemed unable to answer, so I stepped into the room, holding my breath against the mousey smell until I could sit down on the bed in front of her. I reached out to put a palm against her forehead, but Bette intercepted – she grabbed my hand and held it hard against her cheek as though she would never let go. For a moment I felt shocked – the desire to pull back was really strong. But I resisted the urge and gently took her hand in both of mine and returned them to the bed while I put my palm against her forehead. She felt warm but I didn’t think she was alarmingly hot.

  ‘Where’s Hessel, Grandma?’ I asked.

  Bette coughed, a choking sound, and I stood decisively. ‘Let’s get you up and into some fresher air,’ I said. ‘We’ll take your temperature and I’ll make you some tea, get some fluids into you, okay?’

  As I helped Bette out of bed, lifting the bare gnarled feet down to the floor and offering her an elbow to help her stand up, Bette, still sitting, reached out a shaking hand and moved an envelope from the bedside table into the drawer underneath it. She looked up at me, a strange, forlorn, lost kind of look, and then took my elbow and wobbled to her feet.

  It was still early. I set her up in the armchair and smoothed the fluffy silvery hair to one side. She had calmed down a bit and now she felt almost cool to the touch, but still I got her to direct me to a thermometer in the crowded pantry and a moment later it confirmed a normal temperature.

  ‘Have you eaten anything?’ I asked. She shook her head. I switched on the television and delivered her some painkillers with a glass of water.

  ‘Hopefully those will help. That seemed like a lot of pain.’ Bette popped the pills eagerly into her mouth and swallowed a gulp of water. ‘So, where is Hessel, Grandma?’ I asked, as she handed me back the glass.

  ‘At the vet with Polly.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. That couldn’t be good, not this late in the evening. I took her hand and squeezed it. ‘Poor Polly, and poor you,’ I said.

  ‘She is very bad. In a lot of pain. He is very afraid he might lose her.’

  That poor beautiful horse. It was terrible to think of that poor horse being sick and pregnant and in pain. But it was also quite terrible to think of Bette here, all alone, in pain, unable to even feed herself . . .

  I made her some tea, which she seemed to tolerate fine, so I set about in the kitchen putting together macaroni cheese while Bette sat in the alcove and watched television.

  The package was under my bed. I was aware of it as I pottered around the kitchen, but I left it where it was. I delivered a steaming bowl of macaroni cheese to Bette and she wolfed it down, and then eventually, after she had watched one full episode of Midsomer Murders and half of a talk show, I looked over to see that she had fallen asleep.

  I turned off the television and pointed her to bed, and as she shuffled off down the hallway she turned and, like nothing had happened, said, ‘Don’t stay up too late, Cathy dear.’

  I didn’t correct her. But I did stay up too late, thinking. The philosopher had made me feel strange. Strange about lines. I had been drawing them left, right and centre. Between myself and home, between me and Mum, between me and Nassim and this situation. Too quick to draw a line underneath it. I hadn’t changed my plans, but it wouldn’t hurt to think about it all a bit more, to try to get my head around it while I was still in the bodily experience of it. Once I took the pill, it would be over, and maybe there was something to think about, or to feel, or to learn or experience while I was still in it. I didn’t want the same thing as last night, the attempt to swallow, the ugly spitting. The distress that caused.

  I turned off the kitchen light and sat on the bed, again not retrieving the package. It could wait a day. I climbed, exhausted, under the covers, and as I did, something slipped from the side table and onto the floor with a small metallic tingle. I leaned out and picked it up. A tiny crank handle. The handle to the music box. I dropped it back onto the floor next to the bed and then rolled over and fell asleep.

  When I woke again, suddenly, after what seemed like only moments, I was thirstier than I could ever remember being. The water from the kitchen tap drummed loudly on the metal sink before I got a glass under it. I needed water, so much water. I gulped until I was gasping for air, and when I had quietened down, underneath the thin racing tick of the plastic clock, I heard my grandmother snoring. I stepped through the dark hallway to where her bedroom door stood ajar, wan lamplight spilling out across the worn and gritty carpet. And there was Bette, lying on top of her covers still in her clothes, on her back, an ungainly open-mouthed snore emanating from the back of her throat on every in-breath, and a box of opened painkillers on the bedside table beside her.

  I was filled with pity for the old woman in her cluttered, filthy room. Her bandaged arm was caught awkwardly beneath her body, so I stepped into the room and started trying to manoeuvre it out, gently at first, but then, when Bette showed no signs of being disturbed, with more force, wiggling Bette from side to side to inch the poor arm out. Eventually it came free and I laid it gently on the bed beside her, and then picked up the box of painkillers from the bedside table. No way of telling if Bette had taken any on top of the two I already gave her. Or how many. Should I panic?

  I looked at the woman in the bed, this mystery behind skin, and wondered at the fact that the egg that had become half of me had first grown inside this old body that lay there, injured and depleted on the bed in front of me. The egg that had become me had blinked into existence inside the developing body of my mother, inside the body of my grandmother. Like a photograph of a photograph of a photograph, going back in time. It was hard to think about. Just like the egg inside me now, the one riding the wave of life with some of Nassim’s sperm, that egg had grown inside me inside the body of my mother. Where to draw the lines . . .

  Bette’s breathing seemed fine, so I slid open the bedside drawer to put the tablets in there, thinking of some kind of out of sight, out of mind preventative action, and there in the drawer was the letter that I had picked up for Bette from the post office. When the man had handed it to me the typewritten front hadn’t revealed anything about what might be inside the envelope. But now, I caught my breath. A folded note was peeking out of the torn envelope, written in handwriting that I instantly recognised.

  Without hesitating, I took it from the drawer, pushed the drawer shut, switched off Bette’s lamp and left the room, taking the letter with me.

  The letter held the promise o
f something, maybe some answers. Because it was in Mum’s handwriting.

  My mother had responded to Bette after all.

  28

  Paper is a strange thing. Recently it was alive – growing, using the air, the sun, the water running through the soil. You hold a piece of tree between your fingertips, pressed flat, and read what some primate has inked there.

  I wasn’t used to it, all this writing on paper. The screen was my medium, the words floating and then duplicating to their recipient – instantly in two places at once, both more and less permanent than words on a page; real and unreal at the same time.

  But there was something about the solidity of paper, the material itself: it was matter, it had weight and substance. When I had first imagined writing to Bette, I’d thought it would be a little bit like being in a novel, existing in a fiction. But now, holding Mum’s letter, it seemed like the opposite was true. Paper gave things weight. Words on paper were realer than real.

  No, Bette. No. You don’t deserve that.

  Please stop contacting me. I am not ‘yours’ nor have I been for a long time. You know perfectly well why I left. Mother and daughter in history only. Your doing, not mine.

  And I know exactly what you’re doing with your ‘we’ this and that – Leonie has my number, you know, and while she doesn’t suspect it I know this has you and Dad all over it. I think it’s despicable. And for you to think that you could use it as a lure to bring me back . . .

  And stay away from my daughter. Do NOT try to contact her, or I really don’t know what I’ll do.

  But don’t worry. I won’t report you to my father. I am even less inclined to have anything to do with him than I am with you.

  It was acid. It was ice. It chilled me to the bone.

  No wonder Bette had wailed.

  The little insides of the music box still sat on the windowsill in front of me. The comb teeth sat waiting, the crank handle slot still empty. I stood slowly, numbly, like I was moving underwater. I picked up the tiny crank handle from the floor by the bed and, with my other hand, lifted the music box mechanism from the windowsill and fitted the handle into its slot. You can’t tell from looking, I thought, what song a music box will play. It needs a human touch to make it sing.

  It was a beautiful thing, the inside of the music box. It wasn’t designed to be beautiful, it was designed to be hidden. But with its tiny gear at the side, its crank shaft handle at the ready, the nobbled roller, it was beautiful, like a delicate player-piano in miniature. Like the inner workings of a human, the beauty of a physical system, all ready to go, but simply waiting for an injection of energy, of life. Waiting for something or someone to make it go.

  The two letters sat side by side on the desk, the first letter from Bette and Mum’s response. The piece of paper that had brought me here, and this new piece of paper to be reckoned with.

  I picked up the music box and placed it on the letter from my mother. It was a paperweight full of tuneful promise, but I was reluctant to turn the handle.

  I didn’t have it in me. That’s what I was feeling. I didn’t have it in me to reckon with this. I reached for understanding, but all I found was silence and still water and a boat that didn’t want to be rocked.

  The house was quiet. Mum’s letter was loud. I reached out again and picked up the cool metal thing. With thumb and forefinger I turned the tiny handle and, like a singing insect, the mechanical beast began to perform.

  At first I couldn’t make out the tune from the tinny jingling, and then slowly it formed in my mind, first into mere recognition, and then into words.

  Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques

  Dormez vous? Dormez vous?

  ‘You’re up late.’ Hessel was at the door behind me and I dropped the music box back onto the desk – onto the letters. I slapped my hands down over the top of them all, but the music box sang on.

  Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines

  ‘Yes, just studying,’ I managed to say. How had I not heard the car?

  I watched my grandfather’s eyes move from the jingling music box to the letters underneath. If there was any recognition I couldn’t see it, but my heart beat faster anyway. ‘Is everything alright with Polly?’ I said.

  Hessel watched the letters for a moment longer, as if they might move, before he spoke. ‘She is bad. Pretty bad. She is staying at the vet,’ he said. ‘I have left the float. I will go back first thing and fetch her home.’

  I quickly pulled a notebook across the desk and opened it out over the letters.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry she’s so bad. Do you need something – can I do something?’

  Hessel blinked. And then he looked at me while the music box tinkled on and on. ‘You should be asleep,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Hessel. I’m going to bed right now.’

  Hessel looked at me a moment longer. His eyes narrowed. And then he turned and left.

  Ding dang dong, ding dang dong

  13 January 1996

  The weekend before that day

  Cathy had hoped that on the day her father took her little brother to the city for his fourteenth birthday, he might find something to like about Danny. All that evening she tried to imagine what they might be doing: watching a film, eating some dinner, drinking a beer . . . But then Hessel came home early. And as he pulled up outside the kitchen window it was obvious to Bette and Cathy that he had come home alone. Bette said nothing as Hessel stumped in through the kitchen, and as he went through the double doors into his Dutch Room, slamming them behind him, she quickly busied herself at the sink. So it was up to Cathy to open the double doors and approach Hessel where he sat reading alone among his old dead artists.

  ‘Dad, where’s Danny?’ she said.

  ‘The boy’s an idiot,’ said Hessel. ‘He doesn’t understand film culture. He doesn’t understand anything.’

  ‘Dad? Where is he?’

  ‘I do not know where Daniël is. You should not care where he is.’

  ‘Is he in Melbourne?’

  ‘You are an idiot like your brother.’ And Hessel grabbed her arm and pushed her roughly into the kitchen, then shut the double doors against her.

  Bette was standing right outside the doors, but she sprang back as Cathy was ejected.

  ‘Mum!’ Cathy said. ‘Why don’t you do something?’

  Bette stood hesitantly for a moment and then she said, brightly, ‘Perhaps we should all just leave it until the morning, talk about it in the light of day, when we’ve all had a sleep and cooled down a bit,’ and then she went without another word to the back of the house, to the bedroom she shared with Hessel, and closed the door.

  Cathy walked out of the house. She did a circuit of the outside in case Danny was hiding out there in the dark. ‘Danny,’ she whispered. But there was no answer. She’d try calling Leonie, but the phone was in the Dutch Room with Hessel. Across at the old house she opened the door in the dark and shone a torch up the stairs. Cathy hadn’t been over there since they were kids. She had an idea to look in the secret room up the stairs where Cathy and Danny had always played hiding games. It was also where Danny went when he was hurt or sad or scared.

  The room wasn’t really a secret room – or at least, it wasn’t ever meant to be. It had just been built onto the back of the top floor as a way for the early Bromleys to extend the building when poverty-stricken family from England turned up – Bette had told Cathy this in one of her many Bromley lectures. They hadn’t even given it a door, just left the original window there as the only way to get in and out.

  ‘It’s just me, Danny,’ she said into the silence when she reached the top of the stairs. She dusted the grit from the handrail off her hands and shone the torch around.

  In that original top-floor room the floor tilted away at an angle towards the back. The air was close and stale, the heat of the day still trapped under the roof. The window at the back of the room, the entrance to the secret room, had dense boards fitted into the fram
e so that it was impossible to look in without opening it. The dust on the sloping floor was undisturbed.

  ‘Danny?’ Cathy said, and she slid the window up in its sash and shone the torch around the small square space. Empty.

  When Cathy returned to the house the light was off in the Dutch Room and the house was dark. She crept through the double doors and picked up the phone.

  ‘Is Danny with you?’ Cathy whispered to Leonie the minute she picked up.

  ‘Yes,’ said Leonie. ‘He’s here.’

  ‘Oh thank god.’

  ‘He can’t talk though, he’s just having a shower right now because he’s a bit of a mess. Your dad kicked him out of the car up on the highway. Literally kicked him out as it was still moving.’

  ‘Oh shit! Is he okay?’

  ‘The car was just going slowly, you know, but fast enough to take some skin off his shoulder. Arch happened to drive past later and saw him sitting there covered in blood and picked him up.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah. And, also –’ Leonie paused.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘So your dad told him that if he stayed friends with me, he’d kill me.’

  ‘Oh fuck.’

  ‘Yeah. So I’m a bit freaked.’

  ‘Man, he’s such a jerk!’ Cathy said. But she felt so crazy with relief that Danny was okay that she said, ‘But I wouldn’t worry about it, seriously, Leonie. Dad’s all bluster and talk. Really, he’s gutless.’ She felt more and more sure of herself as she talked. She was totally convinced. ‘He’s totally a prick, doesn’t know his own strength sometimes, but he’d never actually really hurt anyone.’