Hold

by Kirsten Tranter

  DEDICATION

  To my mother, Lyn

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Kirsten Tranter

  Praise

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Picture a Sydney beach: not the broad oversized sweep of Bondi or Cronulla, or the long white-sanded strip of Manly, or the picturesque pockets of water around the harbour, netted in against the sharks. Imagine the intimate curve of Bronte, the strip of green beyond the sand reaching back into a dark tangle of trees and ferns and grass in the gully beyond the children’s playground.

  A few parents and toddlers stand and bend and splash in the shallows protected by a crescent of rocks. Lap swimmers take their exercise in the concrete pool while waves smash against the walls, slopping over the sides and sending flecks of spray into the lanes. A handful of young people and grown-ups, tourists and students and dedicated locals shriek and stand and swim in the two or three metres of safely swimmable water, the limited space before the short shelf slopes down quickly into deeper water. Waves knock them down with sudden, insulting force and they stagger back to their feet. Further out, the surfers sit on their boards. The tide is high; the spray hitting the pool grows more intense, the smack of the waves harder.

  Sharks are not a problem here, but the rip can be deadly. Signs warn against the currents, stealthy hidden things that can tow you out in a matter of quick minutes, like magic, and leave you to swim as hard as you can while you remain in place, held there like one of those terrible dreams where you run and run without getting any closer to where you need to go, or any further from the horror that pursues you. It is the first week of March, still hot as the heart of summer, but school started weeks ago and workers are back at work, so on this weekday morning the beach is not crowded. The strip of cafes is half busy with people, laptops out next to their coffees and fruit salads and slices of thickly cut toast. A small gang of aging men and women sit in folding chairs on the concrete walkway near the water, their skin leathery and deeply wrinkled by the sun.

  The water shows its range of blues and flickering, glassy greens, its temperamental variety, and goes dull and steely as the sky clouds over. One of the surfers is in trouble, further out than the rest. It takes a while for the others to notice, and then the ripple of knowledge moves faster between them, and they signal to the lifeguard on the sand. Some of them paddle out, some of them paddle in. The water is rough. The troubled surfer’s board is there, but he is lost by now beneath the surface, struggling for breath that will not come. One by one the people in the water make their way onto the sand; the lap swimmers finish their laps and look up, and watch the lifeguards in blue set out in their jet ski. Before too long the ambulance will arrive.

  I didn’t see it. But I knew the beach well. My cafe was the one that used to be a newsagent before it shut down and reopened as a place selling overpriced juices and a breakfast of bacon and eggs I loved so much I didn’t mind overpaying. After I swam my laps in the pool, every once in a while I bought a lime Splice from the canteen at the edge of the beach, measuring out the coins into a hot column in my palm which gave off the smell of metal and salt, and I would stand on the walkway overlooking the pool to eat it, calmed by the methodical up and down of the swimmers, feeling the drying salt prickle my skin, savouring the sweet slice of ice cream, the tangy frozen sugar of the lime. My favourite place on the sand was well back from the water on the southern end of the beach, not far from the shallows where the babies played.

  I knew every step of the path down the street from Conrad’s flat, an art deco apartment he shared with an architecture student, just blocks from the beach, across the grass and down to the water or ahead to the cafe or up to the bus stop. I spent every weekend there, and one or two nights during the week. For three years it had been my treasured escape from my home in the inner west, my breath of sea air at the edge of the city. We had talked tentatively about my moving over there, but I liked being a visitor, I liked the way the place belonged to me as a sort of intimate tourist.

  I started to know the tides, when they were coming in or out, and liked to think I could recognise the point where the balance shifted, like a long breath in and out. I knew the way the water revealed its darkest blue around the submerged rocks where the waves broke so dangerously. I wasn’t a strong swimmer; I didn’t like the current and could never learn to spot it confidently, the way Conrad tried to teach me, by seeing the point where two waves would cross each other from conflicting angles. I could never be sure.

  I didn’t see it; I wasn’t there that morning. I was on the bus after staying the night at Conrad’s, driving away and up the winding hills and through the city into work. We had been fighting that morning, our first real argument since agreeing to stay together after a week where we had talked about splitting up. I have forgotten what the argument was about: one of the aspects of that day which my mind has closed over. We were both rushing to get ready, impatient, falling over each other in the flat’s cramped kitchen and bathroom. I had left before him, slamming the door, taking the path by myself in a cranky rush. I rode the bus wishing that I had waited for him after all, feeling a trembling sense of fear that the fight would seal things, that it would be over, and I realised that I didn’t want that to happen. The early sun glared through the windows and the bus lurched up the hill in low gear, every mundane turn and strain familiar to me by now and suddenly precious, invested with a sense that all of these patterns were part of our relationship, that all of it could be over. I didn’t want to lose him. Maybe it was time to move, I thought to myself, time to take the next step. I ignored all the difficulty of the morning, the squeezed space, the tiny flat. When I lived there we would work out a smoother routine.

  I thought over that morning later, trying to remember if there was any sign that he was having difficulties. I probably heard the wheeze of the Ventolin inhaler when he finished getting dressed, like I did every morning we were together, but I didn’t notice it by then.

  Surfing didn’t seem like an especially stupid thing to do for a person who had asthma, at least compared with smoking cigarettes, which he did when he was drunk, and smoking weed, which he did every weekend. I wasn’t the kind of girlfriend to try to talk him out of those things. He let his older brother do that — I’d seen tense exchanges between them, where Nick tried to reason with him and Conrad would just stare at him and light another cigarette and wander away. The smell of smoke rarely seemed to stick to him, but I was used to it, to the occasional sourness of it in his mouth, the way he held a cigarette loosely and a drink in the other hand and blew the smoke in a stream away from me, his eyes on mine, starting to smile.

  I knew the inhaler would be there on the sand with his towel, the only things he took with him to the beach apart from his board and a couple of two-dollar coins for a coffee on the way home.

  I heard about it later that day. I was home in Rozelle, miles away in a different part of the city, by the time the news reached me. But I knew Bronte well enough, right through to the place on the sand in the middle of the beach where they would drag his body and try to put breath back into it. I could picture it. And I did.

  That is the story of an ending, obviously, not a beginning, but the beginnings and endings of this story won’t seem to arrange themselves in proper order. They double over confusingly. Where to begin, and where to end?

  There was that day in March in the first week of the month, a Thursday. But this story begins later. It
exists somewhere in the long, stretched-out shadow of that day. Close to three years later, when I had constructed a different city for myself, a place without sand or surf, never straying close to the water’s edge.

  One

  I was putting the dry-cleaning away when I found the door. There was something I liked about the slippery transparent covers protecting the clothes, despite the guilty sense of wasting so much plastic. I liked the way it felt to pull the clothes out of the bags when it was time to put them on, the way they tore through the filmy plastic almost as though they were being born, as though they were new again.

  We had only been living in the house for a few months and already the closet was crowded with cheap flimsy hangers from the cleaners, thanks to David’s mania for perfectly pressed shirts. I slid them aside to make space and noticed the door there at the back of the closet for the first time.

  The built-in closet in the master bedroom had been one of the attractions of the house to begin with. I had lived with an old oak wardrobe for years, found in a thrift shop back when I was an undergraduate first living out of home. It had a certain charm — a pretty grain to the wood, an age-spotted mirror on the inside of the left door, and traces of winding blue flowers and vines on the side panels, a transfer that had peeled away over the years. Anything left in it for too long developed a stale odour that was hard to shift. I was attached to the wardrobe simply because it had been with me for so long, but in some ways I wasn’t sorry to let it go when it was time to move to the new house with David.

  The movers put it out on the street when they’d finished packing my boxes and scant pieces of furniture into the van. I’d given my bed to Ruby, my housemate, who was tired of her ancient futon. There wasn’t much else to take. I felt sad leaving the wardrobe there, with its feet slowly sinking into the grass and earth of the nature strip. But then David showed up in the car to take me to the new house, and as we were driving away I looked back and saw a young woman stop on the pavement to inspect the wardrobe. She opened one of the doors and watched it swing closed.

  ‘It’ll find a new home,’ David said, watching the traffic at the intersection, knowing what I was thinking. I had a quick moment of envy for her: she was me for a moment, the me I was leaving behind, the person who picked up stray pieces of furniture on the street and brought them home to a shared house. I was moving to a different sort of life. The car turned the corner and I left the feeling behind: it was right to be moving, and I leaned back into the comfortable speed of the car as it shifted gears.

  The built-in closet was large enough for all of our clothes, with a strong brass rail and shelves, and drawers fitted at one end. It spoke to me of maturity and ownership and permanence. The room had been altered to create the closet at some point in the past. My things smelled faintly of paint, but that was because of the whole house being freshly painted.

  The bedroom was wainscoted in thin panels of wood that reached up the walls to waist height, and when I noticed the door I thought at first that it was the same thing, extended into the closet. It was wood, and painted the same eggshell white as everything else. But when I looked more closely it wasn’t the same at all. There were four narrow panels set into the door, a similar style to the rest of the doors in the house, which were mostly original, with heavy, faceted-crystal knobs. There was no handle but there was a mark on the door where there would have been one, and a space bored through the wood where the bolt would have gone, and a keyhole beneath.

  I pushed the clothes aside and bent down to look through it, but there was only darkness. I thought about those magical childhood stories, the ones where children discover a gateway to an enchanted world full of peril and unusual creatures. But I wasn’t pushing my way through shadows and fur coats, surrounded by antique cedar, hiding from a stern uncle and siblings. It was morning, and I had just collected the dry-cleaning, and the room was warm and sunny. It was a Wednesday in late January, the middle of an unrelenting Sydney summer, a summer that seemed to last forever like the summers of childhood; every month since September had set new records, and the bushfires had been blazing for so long it seemed incredible there was anything left to burn, always a smudged line of ashy smoke against the southwest horizon. David had left for work and I was alone in the house. The cappuccino I had bought on the way home from the dry-cleaners was waiting on the dresser for me to drink. The noise of the street below drifted in through the open balcony doors — car horns blaring, a man shouting. Tyres screeched and the traffic returned to its usual hum, still slow in the dragged-out lull that followed the New Year.

  The closet was set against an adjoining wall we shared with the house next door. Our house was one of a row of Victorian terraces, and I wondered whether the door in the closet was a relic from a time when the two houses had been joined. The door might once have opened onto a room that was now part of the other house. Still, it seemed strange to have left it there and not simply bricked it over.

  I looked through the keyhole again. The darkness seemed to have changed. I pressed my hand to the door as I straightened up and felt it give; it stuck for a second, in that way doors do when the weather has been wet and the wood swells against the frame. A prickle of adrenaline and sweat flushed my skin. With another harder push the door opened.

  It was a small empty room, the proportions made strange by the fact that the ceiling was of a height slightly greater than the length of the room. It was the same tall ceiling as in all the rooms of the house, but made to seem taller by the size of the floor space. It made me think of an Escher print that had hung over the bed of an ex-boyfriend long ago, stairs leading up and down to impossible spaces in an optical illusion. I wondered for a moment whether I was in fact in the neighbour’s house, then I noticed that the room had no other door.

  There was a fireplace on the facing wall, surrounded by dark green glossy tiles, and bookshelves built into the walls on either side. I crossed to the window to my left and my footsteps made a small, flat-sounding echo in the empty space. The window wouldn’t open, and my fingers came away covered in dust when I tried to shift the latch. The glass on the lower pane was frosted, and textured on the upper half, showing a mottled blue sky.

  The floorboards were stained a dark brown, almost black, and the walls had been covered in pinkish-red damask wallpaper. It was in many ways the opposite of our newly renovated home, with its pale oak floors, white walls and modern Danish fittings. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, strung with ropes of crystal beads. I pulled a cord near the door, not really expecting it to work, and two out of the eight little candle-shaped bulbs came alight.

  It should have been claustrophobic, with the stuck-shut windows and coloured walls. But something in me relaxed when I walked in, as though the odd proportions of the room were somehow a perfect fit with my body. It was like a strange mix of crossing into a space that was unfamiliar and yet also known in some deep, forgotten way. It wasn’t as though the room had been waiting for me in particular, although it did project a sense of something close to consciousness, as spaces sometimes do when they have been used and lived in for a long time. It felt something like waking up a person from a long sleep, but then it occurred to me that the room didn’t feel sleepy at all — more as though its attention had been elsewhere for a time, and was now focused on me.

  There was space for a bed or a desk or possibly both. Who had lived here? When was the last time it had been used, slept in, inhabited? I tried the window again with no luck and switched off the light. The sun caught one of the chandelier’s crystals and reflected a little patch of shimmering rainbow on the floor. When I looked down at it I noticed a piece of glass near it, a teardrop-shaped bead that had fallen off. I picked it up, filled with a desire to take it with me, but it seemed wrong to remove it. I placed it on the mantelpiece instead, thinking that I could come back with a ladder and fix it.

  On this side, the door had a round, dented brass knob, smooth to the touch. I stepped back through to the closet and pu
lled the door closed behind me as well as I could. The smell of new paint and new carpet met me, and I went to the dresser to collect my coffee. I had only been in the room for a minute or two, or so I’d thought, but the cappuccino was cold. Clouds had started to build up outside, although the day was growing hotter by the minute. I thought about the ray of light that had thrown the bright patch of colour onto the floor, and wondered whether I had imagined the whole thing. It had the effect of a precious dream, one of those vivid, poignant ones that sometimes come in the few minutes of dozing after the alarm has already sounded.

  I went out to the balcony. Sometimes it held a pocket of coolness for a little while early in the day, but this morning the boards were warm under my feet, the iron rail only just cool to the touch.

  When David and I had first started seeing each other we used to sit in the evenings on the cramped balcony of his flat in Glebe. After he and his wife separated he had rented a small apartment in a red-brick sixties building with a view over the bay. The previous tenant had left a jasmine plant on the balcony in a fragile-looking plastic pot and it had stayed alive improbably in the face of David’s neglect, tendrils struggling to find a hold against the bricks. The tenant had also left a couple of milk crates, blue plastic cubes that made sharp impressions on my backside when I sat on them. I laughed when I first saw them on the balcony. The crates were a throwback to student living; I had owned many of them over the years, used as bookshelves and coffee tables and seats. Not owned, exactly. They always felt like borrowed things, destined to be passed on or returned to the laneway or the milk truck one day.

  ‘I’ll get rid of them,’ he said when I laughed at the crates. ‘I never come out here.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I told him, and sat on one. ‘You should get some more of them, somewhere to put all your books. Do you have any cushions?’ There were no cushions. David seemed almost too big for the small area of the balcony, which wasn’t much wider than the milk crates, and stood there uneasily, with that look he had in those first weeks and months, as though he expected me to get up and go at any moment and was trying to be cool about it.