‘You? I don’t understand what you are saying.’ He looks again at me before returning his worried gaze to my mother.
‘The last night I came to visit you … I was almost back at my front door, back home. Do you remember? You had walked me to the corner?’
‘Yes, yes. You seemed so happy. It’s why I could never underst –’
‘He assaulted me, Uli. Before I could get inside. I was wearing Nina’s coat so I think he thought I was her.’ She looks my father in the eye. ‘He raped me.’
My mother is crying, and Uli has a hand on both of her shoulders.
‘No, Helena. My darling, don’t tell me this …’
Again, I feel I am intruding, more so this time. They are focusing so intently on each another that I wonder if they would notice if I quietly left. Uli draws my mother to him and clasps his arms around her back.
‘No, no.’ He holds her to him, shaking his head.
‘I fell pregnant and didn’t know if the baby – if Sara – was yours or that horrible man’s ... Sara’s done a gene test.’
‘Oh, my darling.’ He looks at her again and wipes the tears from his face. With one hand still on my mother, he reaches out a hand to my knee. ‘I would have loved Sara even if she wasn’t mine.’
26
I show Dale the abstract I’ve written summarising the paper I’d like to give at the Munich conference. He looks at me, seeming surprised and amused.
‘You have no data, Sara.’
‘I am proposing a pilot study, there is time for –’
‘You have no funding.’
‘No.’
‘Do you know how expensive just the chemicals are for the laboratory work we do here? And you have work to do already. That I pay you for.’
‘Yes. Sean has offered to help.’
‘Has he now?’ Dale smirks. He leans back into his seat, and picks up my proposal again, reading it.
I look at the old photograph he has on his desk of Claire and Sally, when she was just three or so. Both are tilting their heads with sweet passivity, yet when Claire phones Dale in the lab, the ringtone he has set for her is of a barking dog. Dale thinks the joke is hilarious but the rest of us shrink every time she calls. I don’t want to add to Claire’s stress, but each time I see her at school, I feel I should tell her both about the ringtone, for surely she doesn’t know her husband is making fun of her behind her back, and what Sue has told me about Anna. But the classroom is not the right place, and I haven’t instigated any more catch ups over coffee. I don’t want to sit opposite her and be caught between revealing what I know and being dishonest by withholding secrets.
‘Here’s the thing,’ Dale says, finally. ‘What you have written is interesting.’ He taps the pages with the back of his fingers. ‘And your methodology is sound. You say you have access to a large group of subjects?’ He pauses, looking again at the abstract and apparently considering it.
‘Yes, I do.’ He likes what I’ve written.
‘And it is all your own idea. Your own …’
‘Yes, of course.’ I am incensed.
‘Sean didn’t –’
‘No! It is my work. I’m not sure why you’re asking.’
‘Don’t get all uppity, Sara. Listen, I’m willing to support this, on the condition that you seek out the appropriate ethics approvals. They’ll need to be fast-tracked …’
‘Thanks –’
‘And on the condition that you still get the other work done.’
‘I appreciate it. Thanks again.’ I stand and reach out to shake his hand, although he is not extending it. Eventually he does. His handshake is weak and the type that makes the skin creep on the back of my neck. I just want to be out of his presence.
In the tearoom, I rinse out my stained coffee cup.
‘How’d you go?’ Sue asks. I hadn’t even heard her coming.
‘Good, I think. But that man has an unnatural talent for pissing me off.’
She laughs. ‘Not just you.’
‘He seemed surprised I’d come up with the idea on my own.’
‘That’d be Dale …’
‘Because of my gender or what? We’re similar ages.’
‘But I bet your ex didn’t keep house like Claire does for Dale, freeing him up for his important work.’
‘No.’ I feel a wave of irritation at the likes of Claire for making it possible for men to rise to seniority in their careers when their female coworkers have to be superwomen to get ahead. In the same breath I kick myself for such an unfair and ungenerous thought, for punishing other women for what their husbands do or don’t do. Women should have a choice, period. I am sure Helena would argue that that’s the point of feminism.
Sean’s offsite in Launceston and not due back until tonight. As soon as I’m out the door, I text him with the news. His reply is instant: ‘Fantastic! Lab slave at your disposal. x’
At 8.15 pm, there’s a knock at the door. I didn’t suggest Sean come over, but still my heart jumps like a lovesick schoolgirl’s when I see him through the stained-glass panelling. I open the door and form a ‘shhh’ across my lips with my index finger before kissing him. It’s the first time he has been inside the cottage. I see Michael Forster’s face at the glass across the road. Sean catches me looking and turns towards the Forsters’ house just as the curtains close.
‘Poor man,’ I say. ‘What sort of life does he have that he needs to notice everything that happens on the street?’ I take Sean’s hand. ‘Come in quietly. Ellie’s just gone to sleep.’ I nod to the room along the hall and Sean peeks inside, smiling.
‘She looks very sweet.’
He glances across the hallway to Nina’s old room and the single, unmade bed where I have been sleeping.
I shut Ellie’s door. ‘Come into the kitchen. I’m afraid this place isn’t very spacious.’
‘Well bloody done on the proposal,’ he tells me. ‘Getting it past Dale is the hard bit. I’m sure it will be accepted for the conference.’ He kisses me again. ‘I’m jealous of the idea, to be honest.’
‘Thanks, I think. Dale was weird about it though. He asked if it was all my own idea.’
‘He’s obliged to. The university’s cracking down on plagiarism.’
‘No, he thought you might have helped me out with it. Have you talked to him about it at all?’
‘Of course not. But he knows I’m interested in epigenetics. Forget him. Water off a duck’s back.’
‘I still have to get ethics approval.’
‘Don’t worry about that. Go in tomorrow and let them know what you need. I used to sit on the panel. I’ve got some contacts there still, if you want.’
‘Maybe, yes, given the timeframe.’
He peruses the room. Ellie’s art is all over Nina’s once-tidy fridge.
‘I have no idea what I’ll do about Ellie if the paper is accepted. The conference is for a week, right?’ I glance towards Ellie’s room. ‘Right before Christmas. Very family friendly.’
‘Can’t her dad have her? From what I gather he owes you a bit of time.’
‘True fact.’ I think of the number of occasions I’ve covered for Ian’s trips away. The ones when he no doubt started shagging Sylvia.
‘I can’t imagine not being with her on Christmas day. Although, I don’t think I’m ready to do the joint lunch thing.’ I roll my eyes. ‘And I had her for the last one.’
‘It’ll be nice for them. He must miss her heaps.’ Sean runs his hand down my spine and I shiver. He laughs quietly.
‘How was Launceston?’
‘Fine.’ He looks towards Nina’s room with its single bed. ‘Is that our only option?’
‘Afraid so.’ I chuckle in reply. ‘There’s a lock at least. But we’ll need to be quiet.’
‘I can be quiet.’ He slips his hand up the front of my shirt.
‘Really, Sean. I don’t want Ellie meeting you for the first time like this. Okay?’
‘Do you want me to leave?’
‘I just hope your grandma’s ghost isn’t watching.’
I think of Nina sitting at her bedroom mirror, unfastening her hair, preparing for her nocturnal sojourns to visit … who? Was there someone? Or was she just taking a walk as she claimed? I think, too, of Helena, in the room where Ellie is sleeping now, sneaking out to visit Uli, my father.
Sean and I lie on the bed and he kisses my neck.
‘Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts,’ I whisper, suppressing another laugh as he tickles my ribs with his fingertips.
‘They’re theoretically possible.’
I pull my head back, surprised. ‘How so?’ I slip my hand under his shirt and caress his chest, then lift the shirt over his head. His well-toned body is smooth and warm.
‘People still argue about whether the universe is flat or curved, believe it or not. It’s one of the great, unresolved cosmological questions. I’ve got a bit of an obsession with that kind of math. Sort of a hobby.’
I kiss his shoulder, then his mouth, then the dip in the bridge of his nose, and he pretends not to be distracted. He takes a tissue from the box on the bedside table and folds it so that two distant points on the tissue, of ‘space’, now converge.
‘The thing is that we wouldn’t really notice if it was curved, so, theoretically, it could be. And if it curves so much that parts of it touch, then time travel has a basis in science.’
‘You trying to wow me with your sparking intellect?’
‘Is it working?’
I look back into Nina’s mirror and shiver at the thought that she could be watching us, as unbelievable as that sounds. I take hold of the edge of the sheet and pull it up over our heads so we are again in a tent, then lean down so our foreheads are touching.
‘Yes,’ I answer. ‘It is.’
SUMMER
27
‘Take this rope, Liebchen,’ Uli says. Ellie smiles widely and pulls, her grandfather’s hands in between hers as they haul the sheet in and the sail unfurls. The wind picks up and the yacht heels over gently.
‘You’re a natural,’ he tells her, and looks back towards us but gets distracted. ‘Look, a fairy penguin.’ He points it out. ‘See, there! Floating on the water. No, there are two. Helena, can you bring up the binoculars so she can get a better look?’
My mother comes up the companionway from the cabin and strings the binoculars around Ellie’s neck.
‘At night you will hear them calling,’ Uli says, his hand on Ellie’s back. ‘If you are camped on the beach, you can sometimes see them waddling up to their burrows, a sweet little parade.’ He chuckles.
I am not sure I have ever been so happy. It is as if I have woken in a parallel universe, the one that might have resulted had my mother and Uli been allowed to marry over forty years ago. If it weren’t for the rape, my parents might have eloped.
‘Thank you, my dear,’ Uli says to Helena as she passes him a shop-bought biscuit.
‘Where’s your wife today?’ I ask.
‘At an artists’ group. They meet on Sunday afternoons.’
‘She doesn’t mind us coming out with you?’
‘No.’ He laughs. ‘She’s a big girl. No problem.’
We approach an area where floating salmon ponds have been erected for aquaculture and a seal raises its head, doglike. Ellie squeals. The seal dives again and comes up with a good-sized salmon in its mouth.
‘Quick, put out the line,’ Uli says.
I’d heard of this, seals breaking into the salmon nets and releasing hundreds of fish. Uli opens a hatch and pulls out a galvanised bucket and a fishing rod. He threads some salami on the end of a hook and casts it in. Within minutes, he is hauling in a large salmon, and Ellie is holding out the bucket, excited and afraid all at once. The fish flaps loudly, and Uli reaches forwards and skewers its skull before I can distract Ellie’s attention away.
I see her face drop. ‘It’s hard to watch, I know,’ I tell her. ‘It was quick. Your grandfather knows how to do it humanely.’
‘I don’t want to catch any more.’
‘You will when you’ve tasted it,’ Uli says. ‘Sushi for lunch, and I’ll smoke some later at home.’
It is as if we have been together our whole lives.
‘So, we’re in for a bit of a shake up with our new prime minister,’ Uli says.
‘The day was going so well!’ I laugh. ‘Why did you have to mention him?’
‘You’re not a fan?’
‘God no.’
‘He’s right about the boats though.’
I knew it was too good to be true. Or have I misunderstood?
‘There need to be some controls. It can’t be just whoever comes. People who came here from overseas after the war worked hard for the chance. They also had to line up. To assimilate. To leave our differences behind us.’ He rebaits the hook. ‘And do you think that if everyone who arrived was allowed to stay, more wouldn’t come? More wouldn’t drown at sea?’ He points at the water. ‘Or be stuck in those godforsaken camps while they wait to be “processed”?’
I have been secretly fearful that his last points might be true, but don’t admit it. Surely my father, whose own parents fled, isn’t a believer in queues. Surely he knows people who risk everything don’t have a choice.
I look at the tiny shapes of fairy penguins bobbing in the water.
‘Abdhul came on a boat,’ Ellie says.
My father looks up from the knot he is tying on the end of the fishing line. ‘Abdhul?’
‘Sara has a refugee friend. From Afghanistan,’ Helena says. ‘He seems like a very nice young man.’
Uli touches my cheek with the back of his hand. ‘Well, I am sure he is. And you have your mother’s heart, but there needs to be an orderly system. One that’s fair, Sara. That is what this fine country is famous for.’ He casts his line and we all watch it fly and land.
‘And for those who are already here? Like my friend?’
‘Well, once they are here … it is more difficult. If he is a refugee, as you say, he cannot just be sent back with no care. He must be treated well. Given safety. I don’t like the detention camps. How could I? The years they spend there without hope. It is why stopping the boats is necessary.’
‘We can’t turn the boats around though, Uli.’ My mother is arcing up. ‘Imagine if that was Nina on the ship she came over on. She was pregnant. She would have had her child, me, at sea.’
I think of Nina, her coat blowing open. Fear in her eyes. ‘If there were safe places to apply for asylum it would be different, but Abdhul says the Taliban are everywhere.’
Ellie is looking back and forth between us.
‘I’m not saying it’s easy,’ Uli says, feeling the line with his finger for tugs. ‘And it’s not black and white, left and right, right and wrong. Those intolerances for holding anything other than one or other point of view, that’s where the poison lies. That’s why your grandmother left Russia. It’s why my grandparents were killed.’ He keeps his voice low, perhaps for Ellie’s sake, but I can see he is growing frustrated, even angry. He reels in the line. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, I am not anti-refugee. I was one! Yet if I express an opinion that is remotely critical of completely open borders, that’s what I am labelled. Humanity is more complex than that.’ He casts the line again and hands it to Ellie, then turns to Helena. ‘Do you disagree?’
‘You’re right. It’s complex, Uli. But that doesn’t mean we should be complicit in how the government is treating the refugees who are here. We need more places. Faster processing times. Ideally, we’d help make it safe for them to stay in their own countries. Provide good aid. Diplomatic solutions. No one wants to leave their home. Their families. No one gives up their children without a very heavy heart.’
Ellie squeals again and Uli, smiling, helps her reel the fish in.
‘It’s a big one.’ He is beaming and all of us are on our feet, looking thro
ugh our reflections into the sea.
The next afternoon is Ellie’s seventh birthday and we have four little girls, two boys, and most of their parents over to the house. Mohammad came with both his mother and Abdhul. I also invited my mother, Uli and his wife, who I met today for the first time and who I think is still warming to the idea that I exist. It is a houseful, and I am pleased I eventually took Helena up on her offer of making the birthday cake.
One day it will be Sylvia making the cake, and I will have to allow that as well. For Ellie’s sake I will have to open my heart, rather than close it.
I introduce the other mothers to my parents, to Abdhul, and to Mohammad’s mother, relying on Abdhul to pronounce her name correctly. To me it sounds like ‘Shitty’, and I am not game to say that aloud. We spill out onto the lawn where the children make paper boats and cast them down the stream. I look around the group, at Claire trying unsuccessfully to make conversation with ‘Shitty’, and at Ellie trying to include a shy boy she said had been bullied at school and who she insisted on inviting. The boy is not easily convinced and Ellie, I can tell, is regretting her decision. Dale dropped Claire and Sally at the cottage but, to my relief, didn’t come in. He just pointed to his watch through the car window, presumably telling Claire the time he wanted her to be ready to be picked up without causing him the inconvenience of having to knock on the door. I mentioned the party to Sean, and he said he didn’t expect an invitation. ‘Ellie and I haven’t met yet,’ he said. ‘It’s for her friends and family. I’ll come next year.’
‘Uli, let me introduce you to Abdhul,’ I say, steering my father across the lawn, past Helena and Bronwyn, who are having a conversation about Helena’s career.
‘And you never married?’ Uli’s wife asks, popping a piece of fairy bread into her mouth.
‘No, I’m married to my work I’m afraid. I wouldn’t say no to a wife though,’ Helena says and Bronwyn laughs.
My father stretches out his hand and Abdhul takes it.
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