Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  ‘You reckon?’ said Leonie.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Cathy. ‘I know he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Leonie. ‘Well, I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it.’

  29

  I didn’t sleep. How could I with that letter from Mum clamouring away on the desk under my notebook?

  Early in the morning I heard Hessel step through the kitchen and out across the yard. It wasn’t even first light.

  I slipped out of bed and padded quietly in my socked feet across the linoleum, into the kitchen. I heard the car start up outside. I got to the window in time to see the beginnings of the dawn and Hessel driving away, back to the vet’s, I presumed. I listened for a moment. Bette’s quiet snores drifted through the thin walls. And then there was a sudden ‘snap’ – the mouse trap under the fridge going off. I jumped. I stood still, with my eyes closed, breathing, and listened for any more movement – please no more movement, please let it have been a clean kill – but to my relief there was silence. I wouldn’t look. Not right now. Not this minute. I just couldn’t.

  Back in the little room I picked up Mum’s letter from my desk and retrieved my phone and took a picture of it. I returned it to its envelope then used my phone as a torch as I crept with it down the dim hallway. Outside my grandparents’ bedroom door, I paused to listen to the regularity of Bette’s breath before switching off the light from my phone and moving soundlessly into the room. I went by feel and by whatever glow still filtered in from the setting moon and the early dawn until I reached her bedside table. I held my breath as I slid the drawer open and returned the letter.

  Back in my room I sat up in bed, fan heater on my feet, trying to think.

  Everything was different. Was everything different?

  I didn’t understand the past, that much was clear. I didn’t have the facts. Here I was, sitting on this bed, in the present, unanchored – that was what I was feeling. I was adrift. But that wasn’t what had changed. I had been aiming for unanchored – that had been my whole intention in coming here, to shake off the weights of my life that were keeping me moored, holding me back. But in allowing myself to drift here I had assumed something like a safe and clear lake. But Mum’s letter . . .

  At breakfast, Bette said nothing about the night before. She seemed completely back to her Bette self, bustling about, presenting tea and toast, washing dishes. I retrieved the behind-the-stove mouse trap with its adult casualty, and as I emptied it into the bin and began to clear the table, I watched Bette, trying to understand, trying to imagine the context in which she would have received that letter from Mum – all that blame, that reproach, that anger. All that threat – stay away from my daughter.

  How was I to receive that threat? When Mum wrote it, was she drunk? Was she just angry? Was she being petulant? Or did she have reasons that weren’t written down? Her letter had a face, but face value was something I simply could not count on.

  Watching Bette, trying to imagine what she might know that could make sense of the letter, trying to understand the actual implications, if any, for me, I found myself noticing something else about her instead.

  I noticed that although she bustled about, a blur of movement and busyness, she didn’t actually make any noise. Her bustle was almost entirely silent. It was odd. And that realisation suddenly made sense of something else too. In the last few days, more than once, I had jumped to find Bette standing in the room with me, or much closer to me than she had been the minute before. As I watched her move around the kitchen, picking things up carefully, putting them down carefully, I understood why. Even the floor didn’t respond to Bette’s movement in the same way as it did to me and to Hessel, I realised – creaking and groaning on every step. It wasn’t just that she was light. I saw now it was because Bette seemed to know where all the creaks and groans were, and she was actively avoiding them.

  I had seen this way of moving before, I realised. Mum did it. When she wasn’t drunk. When she was sober she moved slowly, carefully – gingerly, like a cat. She moved like she was stalking something, creeping up on it, not wanting to be heard until the moment she pounced – on the dishwasher, the kettle, the buttons on the microwave.

  The sense of oddness grew until, watching her, this silent bustling of Bette’s felt all wrong. It was completely and utterly strange. It seemed . . . sinister. She was a woman on mute.

  I had assumed a safe and clear lake but here, now, the water seemed deeper and murkier than I could have imagined. To be unanchored, here . . . what did that mean? I didn’t know. I just didn’t know.

  Bette’s fingers had been broken. Who had broken them? There didn’t seem to be that many options.

  ‘Grandma?’ I said.

  ‘Mhmm?’ She didn’t look up from the sink. I didn’t know how to start that conversation. I couldn’t start it.

  ‘What was my mother like as a kid?’ I asked instead – a whole other complicated subject, in light of the letter. ‘What was she like at my age?’

  I watched as Bette took a suds-covered wooden spoon out of the sink, laid it carefully and silently on the rack, and stepped, in a considered way, to the bench where some dirty plates lay on the chopping board. She lifted the board and stepped smoothly back in front of the sink. And then she lifted each dish carefully into the water, without any clatter or splash.

  My grandmother didn’t turn around. ‘Stubborn,’ she said. ‘Ungrateful.’

  I escaped as quickly as I could across to Bromley Cairn and sat on the old mattress on the floor, staring at the photo of Mum’s letter on my phone. I couldn’t make it make sense. I couldn’t make it give up its meaning. Nothing here made sense. Nothing in me made sense. All the lines had gone, and I needed them. I needed those lines to know what to do, to know what was right, who was right. It all felt exhausting, and overwhelming. I hadn’t slept all night, so now I lay down and rested my head on my arm and stared dumbly at the wall and watched as the winter sunlight moved through the room, the shape of the window, stencilled in white gold, travelling slowly across the floor.

  And then the same noise came from upstairs, the creak, the lower creak, and then, differently to before, another one and another one. It sounded like footsteps. I did a mental roll call – Bette, house; Hessel, vet’s; Basil . . . And then from the floor above, a bump, and then a scrape.

  Right. That was it. Ghost or possum or trickstering Basil . . . I had to check this out.

  I put one foot on the staircase, and then the other, and actually, despite appearances it seemed solid. The steps creaked and groaned, but they didn’t move or shudder or shake, so I kept going and when I reached the top I looked around.

  There was open space on one side, a large and empty room, dust-ridden with a half-removed internal wall and boarded-up windows. On the other side was a closed wall with a door – the glass-windowed room I had seen from outside, the one with the added-on room at the back of it. I opened the door and looked inside, but while I could see the window with glass that faced back to the house, at the back of the room, where the extra room should be, there was just a boarded-up window. I walked tentatively over to it, put my fingers under the sash and heaved.

  It was firmly stuck. There was no budging it. It was almost as if it was locked from the other side.

  I put my hands above my eyes to peer through the cracks in the boards. There was darkness behind, but still glass in the window and the weak light from the room behind me bounced back into my eyes. I tried different cracks in the boards, but it was always the same; the room beyond gave away nothing of itself.

  I stepped back and dusted my hands, then crossed back to the glassed window and looked out. It was all spread before me, the small domestic view of the few places I had been here – the house, the stable, the cairn, with the curved belt of trees in the distance and the backdrop of the wider expanse behind it. I imagined seeing myself walking around down there, my figure truncated by the view from above, moving between the house and Bromley and the c
airn. I imagined seeing myself and Basil climbing all over the cairn together, small and childlike from this distance. I looked and saw at an angle my own lean-to bedroom window, itself gleaming in the daylight as I had seen this window gleaming.

  The alarm clock on my phone blared out and I jumped, goosebumps spreading immediately all over my body. It was a study-break alarm. I swiped the alarm dead, turned the volume on my phone right down, and was suddenly as uncannily aware of myself as if someone had been watching me. I turned and gave the boarded window a hard stare.

  Downstairs I sat down on the mattress again and nestled my face into my arm, into Nassim’s sleeve, pretending he was holding me, trying to recapture the warm glow this room had first given me, trying to remember that this was the house of my ancestors, trying to feel like there was more to the house than just bluestone and mortar. Like there was a beating heart in it somewhere: something or someone who cared . . .

  I woke to the loud sound of a car pulling up roughly. There was the skid of tyres on gravel. I opened my eyes to see the light in the room quite changed – both brighter and colder, a strong midday light diffusing everything, but the yellow spotlight glow of morning gone.

  I sat up. Around me on the floor was a semi-circle of grass and little white flowers. Small sprigs of flowering wattle were placed among the display. I sat up further and looked at the decorations. It was pretty and pathetic, like the offering of a small child. ‘What the fuck?’ I said. All I could think was that it was a prank from Basil. Was he here? Had he been upstairs? Was that Leonie driving in to pick him up?

  I went to the window and looked outside to see Hessel’s car with the empty horse float attached to the back. He had brought the float back without Polly. I could think of only one reason he wouldn’t have just left it there until the foal was safely born, or until Polly was well enough to come home in it.

  My heart sank.

  I picked my phone out from among the strewn botanicals, staring at them for a moment again. If it wasn’t Leonie driving in, then . . .

  On my phone there were bars of reception, a battery of messages that hadn’t woken me with the volume so low. They were all voice messages, from missed calls that had happened much earlier in the day. There was one from Basil and, surprisingly, several from my mother.

  I put it on speaker. Anna. It’s Basil. I really shouldn’t have let you go without telling you something yesterday. I’m trying to catch a lift over there.

  A chill crept across the back of my neck. I looked at the ceiling above my head, at the flowers on the floor around me. And then the messages from Mum began to play.

  ‘Anna, Leonie’s just called me.’ It was my mother’s voice but strange, changed almost beyond recognition. ‘Why are you there? Why?! Why would you –’ A strange breathlessness and then her message cut out.

  And then there was another one from her.

  ‘Anna. You listen to me.’ Mum’s voice was scaring me. ‘Anna. You have to get out. Are you listening to me, Anna?!’

  What the hell was going on? My skin was prickling all over. A sharp pain suddenly skewered through my abdomen.

  There was one last message from Mum. ‘It’s . . . 7.15. I’m coming now. I’m getting on a plane. I’m only a few hours away. I’m coming to get you.’

  There were still bars on the phone. I dialled Mum’s number but it went straight through to her voicemail. She must be in the air. I tried to think. I couldn’t think. But in the end it didn’t matter what I could or couldn’t think, because there, outside the window was Hessel, standing on the back porch of the small house, roaring across the gravel patch.

  ‘Anna!’ he roared. ‘Anna! Where are you?’

  I froze, a strange and sudden instinct keeping me still and silent. I watched through the window as he stood on the porch waiting, listening for my response. And then he roared again.

  ‘Where are you, you little bitch?’

  17 January 1996

  That day

  Cathy sat with Becky at the edge of the res on towels spread out on the rock-hard claypan. The sun bounced off the water and hurt Cathy’s eyes. She dropped her large-framed Jackie O sunglasses down off her forehead over her eyes, then reached across and pressed play on her CD player. She’d filled it with the requisite eight D batteries so they could stay here as long as they liked, her and Becky. Jen and the others would arrive at some point, she supposed – you didn’t have to arrange a meet-up with friends around here, they would turn up eventually; there was nowhere else to go. She hoped they would get here soon – Cathy had her new bathers on.

  She squinted out at the pontoon. It was the only way to actually have a decent swim here; the water from the beach was so shallow for so long, and the mud underfoot was a beige brown that turned the water to caramel milk the moment you stood on it. Every step bubbled with the gas trapped by rotting leaves and grass under the thin layer of clay mud that stuck to the sole of your foot like a thong. It was hardly glamorous. But once on the pontoon the water around was deep enough and far enough away from the scungy bottom to be clear and actually appealing. So all summer a little crowd, mostly guys, some girls lounging in bikini tops, collected there. But you had to get out there first. And that water would ruin her bathers, would stain brown the white lines in the red tartan. She should have opted for plain black.

  At the start of the summer some enterprising boys had taken a CD player out there, floated it across on a tractor tyre’s inner-tube, wrapped it in a plastic bag and tied it to the pontoon so that all you had to do was put your batteries and CDs in a lunch box and swim out with them. Which was fine, but it meant you had to fight for your music, and really, out there, Madonna or Kylie were never going to win against The Offspring, or Green Day, or Silverchair.

  Danny and Leonie were out on the pontoon, doing backflips off the side, Leonie in board shorts and a black T-shirt so she didn’t have to care about the mud.

  ‘She’s got such a great figure,’ said Becky, watching her. ‘I’d be showing it off if I was her.’

  ‘Yeah, you would,’ said Cathy.

  ‘She looks like Naomi Campbell. I’d kill for that skin.’

  ‘No. You wouldn’t.’ Cathy was remembering last year, when Danny smuggled Leonie into their house, looking for the first-aid kit, Leonie bleeding profusely from a split above her eye where some yob had launched a beer bottle at her from a car as she was walking with Danny along the road.

  ‘I would.’ Becky retrieved her bottle of coconut oil from her bag and lathered her fair legs, then presented them to the sun.

  ‘You’ll just get freckles,’ said Cathy.

  Becky sighed. ‘I know. But maybe between the freckles I’ll go darker.’

  Cathy skipped the CD forward to ‘Sanctuary’, her favourite song on Bedtime Stories, and she and Becky lay back on their towels with T-shirts over their faces and their straps off their shoulders to avoid tan lines. As the sun soaked into her, Cathy folded one leg up and stretched the other out and imagined she was on the deck of some high-class yacht somewhere, cruising into a little cove in the Mediterranean.

  ‘I don’t know why you guys bother coming here if you’re not even going to swim.’

  Danny was standing above them, dripping water on them. Leonie stood behind him, politely dripping onto the clay.

  ‘Bugger off, Danny.’

  Danny shook himself like a dog, sprinkling water everywhere, turning the clay to mud.

  ‘Fuck off, Danny.’ Cathy sat up as he shook water from his hair onto her baking belly.

  ‘You don’t want to hang with me, Kitty Cat?’ He sat and slung a cold wet arm around her shoulder.

  ‘Ah, Jesus! No.’

  ‘Come on, Cathy,’ said Becky. ‘Let them.’

  Cathy sighed elaborately. ‘Okay. But only because you’re here with Leonie, and Leonie’s cool. Hey, Leonie.’

  ‘Hey.’

  Danny reached over to the CD player. ‘So can we please change it over from the ubiquitous Madonna? Whe
re’s the Cranberries I got you?’

  ‘I like Madonna.’

  ‘Oh god, I know.’

  ‘What do you like, Leonie?’ said Becky.

  ‘Lots of things –’

  ‘She likes what I like –’

  ‘Some of it, Danny. But I like other stuff too. PJ Harvey. TLC. Tiddas. I have eclectic tastes.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Becky, looking around uselessly. ‘Well, we don’t have any of those.’

  ‘That’s alright,’ said Leonie. ‘I like Madonna too.’

  ‘What?’ Danny slapped his hand to his forehead. ‘No!’

  ‘Yes, I do. She is unapologetic. And direct. I like that. And anyway, I’m going to swim out again, so don’t take me into account. See ya.’ Leonie ran and waded into the water until it was thigh height and then began a strong stroke out to the pontoon. Danny watched her go. Cathy smiled and leaned over slightly and nudged him with her elbow. He looked up, startled, and then ducked his head and laughed.

  ‘I wish I’d never said anything to you,’ he said.

  ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference,’ she said. ‘You can’t hide anything from your big sister.’

  ‘Except good taste,’ he said, then ran into the water after Leonie and began a thrashing Australian Crawl so typical of the guys around there.

  ‘Why do they all swim like that?’ Cathy said.

  But Becky was still watching after Danny. ‘Cathy,’ she said, ‘that graze on Danny’s shoulder looks bad. Really bad.’

  ‘I know,’ said Cathy, turning onto her front to give her back a go at the sunshine. ‘Some birthday present, huh.’ She lay down with her head on her hands. Becky went still beside her, and Cathy heard her take a big breath in.

  ‘You gotta do something,’ Becky said.