‘Who was on the phone?’ Ellie asks as I hold her tightly.
‘Your grandmother. She wants to visit.’
‘When, Mummy?’
‘Soon. Next week.’
‘What does she look like?’
Abdhul frowns at me, shocked. ‘She doesn’t know her grandmother? It is not good for them.’
‘She lives in Sydney …’ I shake my head to steer him away from saying any more on the subject.
‘But she can come here,’ Abdhul says. ‘I don’t understand. It’s her grandmother!’
Ellie tilts her face up towards me, a sunflower seeking illumination.
‘Well, they’re about to meet. Isn’t that good,’ I say, trying to end this. ‘It’s very exciting.’ I smile at Ellie but she’s looking overhead, towards a whooping sound: a black jay flying towards the thick vegetation on the other side of the rivulet. From a branch over the water, it cries out twice, its signature twin call, and another comes to join it, then another. Within minutes, the trees above the rivulet brim with sleek black birds, their calls drowning out every other sound.
We sit at the kitchen table for a meal of lamb chops with garden salad. Abdhul suggested Nina’s practice of using a few pieces of fresh mountain pepper leaf as garnish. My grandmother also used the dry leaves and pepperberries in cooking. Before we start, Abdhul looks down and quietly mutters a small prayer. If someone were to look in through the window, they would think we were a family. I apologise for the simplicity of the meal, and Abdhul looks at me as if I have lost my mind.
‘It is a very good meal,’ he tells me, starting on the salad.
He is, again, right.
‘I’m pleased you could join us.’
Abdhul’s phone beeps with a new message, which he reads and then shows to me. It is a message from RACS – the Refugee Advice and Casework Service. They have called him in for an interview with a lawyer.
‘Is it your immigration interview?’ I ask, and he dips his head.
‘Can you come with me?’
I look at the date in the message and check the calendar on my phone. Ellie is looking at me for my answer, although she has no idea what we are talking about. I wonder about the implications of being present at this interview, and whether I will be of any use. I will need to get time off work, but cannot say no to him. In recent years, Nina used to ask me to phone plumbers or electricians on her behalf because, she said, her accent and diminishing English resulted in second-class treatment.
‘Yes, of course I’ll come with you.’
Abdhul nods his thanks, but has gone quiet.
‘Are you working this weekend?’ I ask.
‘Just on Friday night. Not Saturday.’ He is cutting his lamb chop, and a small amount of blood leaks onto the white plate.
‘Would you like to come away with us for a couple of days?’ I ask the question before thinking it through. Abdhul is a married man with children. I am now single. How would his wife feel about this? How would I feel in her shoes? But with Ellie here, surely my intentions are clear. ‘A friend from my work has offered me her beach house for the weekend.’
He looks up from the meal, his knife and fork still in his hands. As yet, he hasn’t eaten any of the lamb, and he says something in his own tongue again, appearing distracted.
‘Is everything okay?’ I ask him.
He takes a mouthful and smiles at me. ‘Yes, okay. Thank you. I would like to come.’
I’d forgotten just how orange the lichen-covered boulders are along the east coast of Tasmania until Ellie asks me if the rocks have been painted. I explain to her about lichen being a cross between algae and fungi, where both need the other to survive.
‘Stop, Mummy,’ Ellie says firmly. ‘I want to have a look.’
I park the hire car and Ellie runs across the sand to the water, making a scramble for a large red-orange rock, which becomes an island as the waves come in. Abdhul rushes after her, leaping up onto the rock and taking her hand, the pair of them stranded for a time. He is talking to Ellie, and trying to coax her off the rock, although there is no danger.
‘She’s fine,’ I call, getting out of the car.
‘She can swim?’
‘Yes. Like a fish!’
Abdhul laughs and tells Ellie, ‘You will have to teach me!’ He looks across to Mohammad, who was a surprise addition to the weekend’s plans. The boy is now also out of the car, standing beside me.
I watch Abdhul looking at the surf and cannot begin to imagine how terrifying his ordeal in the smuggler’s boat must have been. I reach out my hand and Mohammad takes it.
‘Have you been swimming at the beach before?’ I ask the boy. I make a swimming motion with my free arm.
‘No.’ He looks intrigued by the people surfing further along the beach.
‘We’ll organise some lessons if you like,’ I tell him, hoping he understands.
I switch my thinking to the practicality of where we will all sleep tonight. The unit Sue has offered is small, with just two rooms, but I remember her saying there is a couch.
Mohammad and I walk down the beach towards Ellie and Abdhul and, as the waves retreat, Ellie jumps from the rock, expertly clearing the retreating waves. Abdhul claps and Ellie grins at him. She kneels where the sand is just wet enough to work, begins building a castle, and calls for Mohammad to join her, which he does, shyly at first, but growing bolder with each handful of sand.
‘Good,’ Ellie tells him.
‘Good,’ he says back to her when she carves little windows into the castle and a moat around the outside. Water rushes in, and they both jump back and run squealing up the beach.
Abdhul and I sit on a driftwood log and he tells me how, when he came by boat, a fish with wings flew into their small vessel.
‘It was incredible,’ he says. ‘I did not know fish could fly.’
‘A flying fish. There are such things.’ We laugh at the idea, at its ridiculousness.
I know better than to think Abdhul ignorant. Or if he is, so am I. When he first told me he’d spent his early years on his family’s goat farm before fleeing to Pakistan because of threats from the Taliban, I asked him why they hadn’t just gone to the police. He looked at me as if I were a fool. ‘The Taliban are everywhere,’ he said. ‘They are animals.’ I hate to think how many naive comments I’ve made in his company, and cannot imagine what it was like to not be able to go to the authorities for help.
It would have been the same for Nina in Russia when her father was taken by the forces of his own government, and, later, when the German army invaded. She never told me what happened that day.
Abdhul tells me he went to school in Pakistan and learned English. He studied his craft of carpet weaving and became a teacher. I pull up a world map on my phone and ask what route he took to get to Australia. He traces a path with his finger from Pakistan to Malaysia.
‘By plane,’ he says, then talks of a series of buses and boats and motorbike rides. ‘In Indonesia, I was in jail. We dug ourselves out with spoons.’ He demonstrates by holding out his shirt and putting sand in it, then dumping it on the other side of him. ‘We had four or five tries in boats but were sent back. In the boat, there was no food or water. It was terrible. Really terrible. My friend on another boat, he died. Then Australia. Christmas Island. Then Pontville, here in Tasmania. The people were kind, but we could not leave.’
He runs sand from one hand into the other.
‘But now, I am growing tired and I …’ He touches his head, suggesting headaches. ‘I have trouble sleeping. I miss my family.’ He turns on his mobile phone and again shows me pictures of them.
‘Your children look lovely,’ I say. ‘And your wife is very beautiful. Like an actress.’ I feel so plain in my jeans and t-shirt.
‘Yes. She is my beautiful wife,’ he says and I marvel once more at his bravery and loyalty, despite the years of separation. Ian and I were such amateurs at marriage, I think.
Abdhul continues, ‘But my chil
dren don’t know me.’ He looks out to sea, and I try to think of something to say.
‘They are how old now?’
‘Four.’ He seems disappointed in me for not knowing this.
‘Both? They are twins?’ He shows me their individual photographs again and I realise the photos were taken years apart. How had I misunderstood something so important?
‘Sorry. I didn’t understand when you explained that. I feel stupid.’
Two young women walk past in revealing bikinis pulled halfway up their backsides. I think I hear Adbhul tisk his tongue. He mutters something in his own language to Mohammad before returning to our conversation.
‘In my culture, it is bad luck to say that you have twins,’ he explains. ‘We worry one will be taken.’
‘Oh, I see.’ I look into the faces of his children. Neither is smiling. ‘So, four years old …’ I am not game to ask the obvious question.
‘Yes. My wife was pregnant when I left. I have not met my children.’
The massive grey rock that is the centrepiece of Bicheno looms ahead of us and we turn left into town, and continue along the bay. Small white weatherboard houses wrap themselves around a semicircle of blue-green water that is alive with anchored lobster boats painted in bright red, turquoise and white. I follow Sue’s directions up several side streets, and pull into the driveway of her beach house.
‘Here we are,’ I tell Ellie, but she doesn’t answer. I turn around and see that she’s asleep, as is Mohammad. They are draped across each other, like an advertisement for Harmony Day. Abdhul chuckles.
‘Maybe they will marry one day,’ he says, and I laugh.
Abdhul and I unload the groceries, bedding and bags of clothes, and I am relieved to see that the couch pulls out into a sofa bed. I make a pot of tea and set out four cups. On several occasions now, Ellie and I have gone together to Abdhul’s home where Ellie has been delighted to be offered tea and lollies. She is standing at the door now, her face creased from sleep. Seeing the tea, she goes to my shopping bag, gets out the boiled sweets, pops one in her cheek, and offers the others around. She goes to wake Mohammad to give him his.
I suggest we take a walk along the beach, but Abdhul asks for a sleep first and says he must pray. He goes to the bathroom and returns a short while later with damp hair. He asks Mohammad to also wash, and they retreat to the side room for their prayers. When they are finished, Abdhul arranges himself on the couch and pulls a blanket over his head, with only his hands protruding, his turquoise and silver ring brilliant on his smallest finger. Ellie stares at him lying there, quickly asleep. He is the only man who has slept in our company since Ian left.
‘Why don’t you two go and play outside?’ I tell Ellie and Mohammad, pointing to a totem tennis game in the corner of the room. ‘I’ll help you set that up.’
In the back garden I push the sharp pole into the soil and twist it in. Mohammad and Ellie grab hold of it lower down and take their feet off the ground in turn to add more weight. As soon as it is firmly in place, they fire the ball around and swipe at it with their racquets, their laughter bright like the day.
Back inside, I look at Abdhul and again feel guilty that it is me watching him sleeping and not his wife. I picture her curled up beside him, spooning. Are there different ways of being intimate in Afghanistan? Do husbands and wives sleep naked together? Spooning was something I never managed to do all night with Ian, nor sleep completely naked. After making love I would again don a t-shirt for warmth.
Abdhul twitches under the blanket and I wonder what he is dreaming of. What binds him and his wife so strongly that he risked his life to come here in the hope of making a safe future for her and their children? Would Australian fathers and husbands go to the same lengths in the same circumstances? Would they remain loyal for three or four years? Longer? I hope the answer is yes. I think of Nina living in Hobart for Helena’s schooling while my grandfather worked, and died, up at the Hydro camp trying to make a future for his family. And then there is the other extreme: my mother falling pregnant to my mystery father who, if he knew I existed, did not fight for me when Helena moved to another part of the country, leaving us both.
Abdhul wakes suddenly and catches me looking at him. I turn my attention to a magazine on the bookshelf and flick through the glossy pages that feature toothy celebrities and their babies. Abdhul fills the silence by checking his phone and then coming to show me a stored photo of himself as a young boy on his mother’s lap. He must have photographed the original image with his phone camera. In the picture, his mother is wearing a long dress and headscarf, and her husband is standing proudly behind them, dressed in white. He scrolls to a photograph of his own son.
‘My son looks like me doesn’t he?’ he says, and I agree. ‘Does Ellie look like you did?’
Some time ago, my mother surprised me by texting a picture of myself as a baby, round faced and serious looking. My mother, too, must have taken a picture with her phone of an old colour photograph. I had seen very few images of myself as a baby, and assumed few were taken. I take my phone and locate the photograph, opening it for only the second time. I show Abdhul. My mother is holding me and appears pale and drained. She is not smiling and, if anything, looks shocked to have me on her knee.
‘She doesn’t look very happy,’ I say.
He thinks for a moment, then points to a detail I hadn’t noticed. My mother is holding my hand.
18
Monday, and my mother is due to arrive at any moment. It has been a long day in the lab and all I want is a cup of tea or, better still, a gin and tonic, and a quiet sit down with Ellie. Instead, I have had two strong coffees to jolt myself into readiness for the knock at the door, and now feel wired and faintly nauseous, like I am about to sit an exam. I forgot to phone Helena on her birthday over two months ago, and didn’t even mention it during our last phone call, but I doubt she will be thinking of that.
My mother arrives in a taxi. I see it through the glass panels flanking the entrance, and I ask Ellie to open the front door, which she excitedly agrees to do. I feel a rush of nerves again, fearing that, in letting Helena into Ellie’s life, I might also be opening the door to bottomless hurt for my daughter. But, as Abdhul said, not introducing them is not healthy either.
I watch my mother ascend the steps and see Ellie taking her in. Helena is wearing a pair of slacks and a fawn-coloured cardigan with a colourful beaded necklace. Her hair – twisted and kept in place by combs at the sides – has grown since I last saw her on the television news. There are a few mostly grey strands loose around her face, and the reading glasses have gone, as has the blazer and business skirt. I let my daughter and mother meet, my feet planted firmly at the far end of the hall as Helena crouches to Ellie’s height with a warmth I’ve only ever imagined in my mother’s eyes.
‘Mummy says you’re my grandmother.’
‘Yes, sweetie.’ Helena gives Ellie a long hug before looking up at me with wet eyes. ‘Hello, Sara.’
‘Hi.’ I have tears in my eyes, too, but manage not to cry. I wonder what changes she sees in me.
My mother pushes herself up by using her hands on her knees for leverage. It’s difficult to reconcile this middle-aged woman with the ever-present image I carry in my mind of a self-centred young medical student who disowned me at birth. She extends her hand and I take it. Can she feel my fingers shaking? I notice her slightly enlarged knuckle joints, reminiscent of Nina’s hands, and marvel that she can still perform life-saving surgery. We kiss each other on the cheek. There is a brief hug.
Ellie leads her grandmother down the hallway and into her bedroom where I watch from the doorway, surprised to see tears on my mother’s face as Ellie reintroduces the toys to their original owner. Ellie stops, noticing my mother is crying.
‘Don’t mind me, Ellie sweetheart. I’m just so happy to see you. That’s all,’ Helena says.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her cry, although she looked close to it at my wedding. I study
her while she’s not looking. Out of the suits she wears for the newspapers, my mother looks smaller. I notice that the hem at the back of her trouser leg is coming down.
‘I brought you this,’ Helena says, reaching into her handbag and passing Ellie a small doll made of cloth and stuffed with something fragrant, which I soon recognise to be lavender.
Ellie squeals with delight. ‘Did you make it?’
Helena laughs. ‘No, sweetheart. I gave up on sewing years ago. I bought it at the markets. Another clever lady made it, someone much cleverer than me.’
I listen for the next part, for the promise she will ask Ellie to make, but she says nothing more. My mother looks overwhelmed and in need of space.
‘You have a little play with your new doll in here, Elliekins,’ I say. ‘I just have to have a chat with Helena. Okay, sweetie?’
Ellie nods without taking her eyes from the doll.
In the lounge room, Helena scans the bookshelf instead of looking at me. She asks if I received the photograph she texted.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’
‘Sorry not to have more photos of you as a baby. It’s a real shame. There are lots of things I’d do differently if I had my time again.’ She takes from the shelf a volume of poetry and opens it.
‘You didn’t look very happy in the picture,’ I say.
‘No. I wasn’t.’ She shuts the book. ‘I wasn’t very happy back then.’ She goes to the nearest lounge chair and drops herself into it heavily, as if she was distracted by her emotions and misjudged the distance, or didn’t have enough strength in her legs to make the move more gracefully.
An idea comes to me, and I can’t believe it hasn’t occurred to me before. It would explain so much.
‘Did you have postnatal depression, do you think?’ I ask it gently, realising that I have been so busy feeling sorry for myself that I’ve failed to adequately imagine myself in my mother’s shoes. My mother doesn’t answer straight away and I feel a deep and unexpected sadness for her.
Helena runs her hand across the frayed embroidered armrest, then takes a loose thread between her fingers and twists it. She is uneasy and I’m caught between the old desire to push my mother away and a new urge to hold her close, to comfort that girl whose mother was raped in this very house.
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