She begins to awaken, and realises whose voices they are—her father and Paul. She sobs herself awake—gulping, soft sobs that choke her.
‘Mum, Mum, why are you crying?’
Peering through swollen eyes, she looks at Amber standing beside the bed. Shoving herself up on one elbow, she brings herself into focus to reassure her daughter.
‘Is it Dad?’
She sinks back for a moment then pulls herself up again.
‘Yes, sweetheart, but it’s okay, remember? It’s all right to cry, Dad won’t mind. Come on, hop in here.’ She reaches out and grabs her, dragging her in.
Amber snuggles under her mother’s chin and wraps herself around her.
For the first two months after Paul died, she’d woken up each morning to find Amber curled up behind her. She had needed Amber to sleep in her own bed, so that her own anguish could be smothered in the pillows that still smelt of him. Later, during the autumn months, she’d allowed Amber to sleep all night in the bed. But this past month Amber had returned to her own bed and Kerry had finally stopped crying herself to sleep. But the dream had brought her to tears. She could still hear her father’s voice. And Paul’s.
She caressed Amber’s soft hair. Aimee was right. She was going through stages. The first few months she was so angry—at the world, at Paul for leaving her, at other women with husbands, at herself—that she couldn’t think straight. Except when she talked to Aimee, then it seemed to make more sense.
At first she hadn’t wanted any visitors including Aimee, but like her, everyone kept coming around. Friends from her school days with offers of help, mates of Paul’s from work or bike riding who insisted on cleaning up around the place, the mothers of Amber’s school friends who she hardly knew but kept bringing food and offering to take Amber places. And her mother, her poor mother, who had sat most of those early days and watched her, her eyes haunted with worry.
It had taken Aimee, and a book she’d recommended on grief and loss, for her to find a way out of the resentful fury she’d felt, a fury that would have repelled most people. She’d cried after reading it but the book had comforted her, given her hope that she could cope with the pain, in her own way.
And Lori.
‘Yoohoo, it’s just me, Kerry, thought you could use these, I’ve too many on my grapevine. Amber might like them. Can I come in? Sorry, hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.’ She’d barely stopped for breath as Kerry reluctantly ushered her in. By the time she did draw breath, they were drinking tea and eating grapes.
Kerry smiled at the memory. Lori now dropped in once a week or so, for a cup of tea, after work, and they just chatted, not about much, but she looked forward to it. She would always be grateful. Lori, whom she’d always avoided because she knew, knew Amber was adopted, and so she never felt she could pretend around her. She didn’t know why, she just couldn’t.
Same as with Mrs King, she couldn’t pretend around her either. Every time she came into the library, Mrs King could see right through her, or into her, or something. And last week, while cataloguing new arrivals with Suzanne Rasmussen, the librarian, Mrs King had come over and asked her if they were getting a new book in, Life After Death or something, and she’d remembered—remembered the last thing Mrs King had told her in a reading, the only one she’d ever had, before Amber came into their lives: a life will be given to you and a life taken. And so it was, she realised, so it was, the deal was done. She hadn’t outrun the words—they’d caught her.
She had stood staring at Mrs King, tears welling, until Mrs King reached out and touched her hand. A soft, tingling warmth ran through her and she felt, for a moment, as if someone was cradling her.
‘It’s all right, dear, he’s never far away.’
She’d looked into those kind eyes and knew, she just knew, Mrs King was right. Later, Suzanne had found her sobbing in the toilets and hugged her. She surprised herself by not resisting and Suzanne dropped her cool, efficient demeanour and cried with her until they both caught a glimpse of their mascara-smeared faces in the mirror and laughed. She’d wiped Kerry’s eyes with such tenderness that her heart lurched.
Grief. It felt like a rollercoaster, up and down, up and down, and she wasn’t sure when it would stop.
She breathed in the familiar woody scent of her daughter’s hair and held her closer.
‘Mum, you’re squashing me.’
Amber started to wriggle, pushing her head out from under Kerry’s chin. Kerry tickled her under the armpits. Squealing, Amber tried to escape and retaliated, pinching Kerry’s arm. Kerry let go abruptly and Amber leapt out of bed, laughing.
‘Ouch, you big bully, don’t hurt your poor mum.’
‘Don’t tickle me, it makes me cough,’ she countered, coughing loudly for emphasis.
‘Okay, no more tickling.’
‘Promise?’
‘No.’ She grinned at her.
‘Mum!’
She laughed at her indignant daughter standing with her hands on her hips trying to keep a straight face. She seemed to have shot up this past few months, making her look suddenly older. She’d be thirteen in a few months. A teenager. Paul would have … she let the poignancy wash over her and breathed slowly, not fearing it, not fighting it. It had taken her months to get to this place, the place Aimee had helped her to find. And Amber, it was a joy to see her smiling. ‘Hey, you, do you want scrambled eggs for breakfast?’
‘Yum! Yes, please. And then can I go over to Melanie’s place? Her mum said I can stay for lunch and we’re going to Hammond Park to feed the ducks. Is there enough bread? I only need one piece under my eggs.’
‘Yes, you can go to Melanie’s.’
She thought of Melanie’s mother, Pam, one of the school mums who’d so generously supported her and made her one of their group that met once a week at Pam’s house. At first she hadn’t felt as if she had a choice whether or not she went. Pam was on her doorstep almost every day with some excuse for being there and never once seemed put off by her abruptness, or her initial lack of enthusiasm for the morning teas. But Pam’s seeming obliviousness to her moods carried her along and before she knew it, she was looking forward to the weekly catch-up with the women.
‘And there’s heaps of bread. You can have more than one piece for your breakfast,’ she called out after Amber, who had run off into the kitchen.
She still hadn’t got used to buying for two and regularly threw out half-loaves of bread or mouldy vegetables. Her own leftovers competed for space in the freezer with the frozen casseroles she’d been given by friends and neighbours. She smiled at the thought as she climbed out of bed and pulled on Paul’s dressing gown, a faint waft of him teasing her nostrils. She sucked it in and felt his absence grinding in her stomach.
The pipes groaned as Amber filled the kettle. Amber did so much more now, making a pot of tea every morning the way Paul used to, or making her own bed—and she’d stopped regularly asking Kerry if she was okay. It was Aimee who’d noticed Amber’s anxious checking, after the incident in the bush, and so they’d talked about it. Kerry ended up telling Aimee about her own anxiety, after her father had died, and her need to count and rhyme. She never thought she’d tell anyone about that but over the days and weeks that followed Paul’s death, she’d told Aimee many things—she felt safe with her, trusted her. And together they were planning for Kerry to tell Amber she was adopted, before her birthday in September.
‘Mum, your tea’s out.’
Kerry pulled the dressing gown closer and walked down the hall. That gave her three months. Her mind raced but she took several slow, deliberate, deep breaths and was in the kitchen before she realised she hadn’t counted her steps.
Aimee pulled up outside Kerry’s house, her mouth dry. She wound down the window for some fresh air and took a long swig from the bottle of cooldrink she’d picked up on the way over. She peered across the wide street and over the tin roofs towards the distant slime dumps and yawned. She’d shared two bottles of
red at Gerry’s for lunch yesterday and then she’d opened another one at home after the phone call with her parents. Then she’d fallen asleep in front of the television and woken up freezing in the early hours of the morning, the kerosene heater out and the lounge room stinking of fumes. Her head had throbbed from the wine, or the smell, maybe both. The Panadol packet in the bathroom was empty and she’d tossed and turned in bed till the alarm went off at seven. If it weren’t for her appointment with Kerry this morning she might have rung in sick.
‘Hello, Miss McCartney.’
She turned sharply. Her head pinged in protest. She focused her eyes and smiled wanly at the ball of energy in front of her.
‘Hello, Amber,’ she said slowly. ‘What are you doing home?’
‘It’s holidays.’ Amber looked at her as if she was strange not to know.
‘Lucky you.’
‘I know. Mum’s in the shower. I’m going to Melanie’s. We’re going for a picnic to Hammond Park and on Tuesday we’re going mushrooming out the bush with her dad and on Wednesday I’m sleeping at her house ’cause it’s her birthday and on Thursday Mum’s taking us to town to spend our pocket money ’cause Mum’s not working that day and on Friday Melanie is sleeping at my house and …’
She blinked at Amber’s brilliance. Amber jumped from one foot to the other, reckoning up her week, her pigtails flapping about, half a loaf of bread under her arm. A child in the moment. She grinned. ‘You’re going to have fun, eh. Wish I was going to a birthday,’ she joked.
‘You can, you can come to mine,’ Amber replied earnestly, leaning her elbows on the car door, staring in at her.
The spontaneous generosity of children. It was rare in adults; Lee had it. It’s how they’d ended up sharing a house. ‘My lease is up,’ Aimee had complained at a party. ‘You can live at my place,’ Lee had offered, ‘Tim’s moving out.’
Uncomplicated. Like Lee. Only it wasn’t.
Her head began to throb. She was tired of complications. But she missed Lee. The last time they’d spoken was a birthday phone call back in January, around the time they’d found Kerry. She frowned as she realised Lee’s birthday was coming up. Would it hurt to call? Conflicting emotions fought for control. Aware Amber was waiting for a reply, she rearranged her face.
‘Thank you, Amber, but we’d better wait and see what Mum has planned.’
‘No, Mum said I can have whoever I want and I want you to come.’
She smiled at the determination in Amber’s voice.
‘Okay, then, I’ll come.’
‘That makes your wish come true!’ Amber exclaimed, sprinkling breadcrumbs over Aimee’s lap as she jumped away from the car and ran off, waving.
She watched Amber run down the street, turn around several times to wave then disappear around the corner. She brushed off the crumbs and thought of the healing immediacy of life for children, their capacity for being in the moment and, if nurtured and loved, their ability to overcome anything. Amber would need all of that resilience in the months ahead when she learnt she was adopted.
She looked back across the roofs and tried not to feel the pushing in her chest. Supporting Kerry over the past few months had called on every skill she’d been taught in social work. She now knew she could sit comfortably with someone’s grief, just sit, and be present, not recoil from the intensity of a woman wailing for the man she had lost, nor flinch when she screamed in anger at you, the world, herself. She’d witnessed the transformative power of telling your story over and over again till you were ready to imagine a different future, one without him in it.
And she’d realised that her own grief work was unfinished.
Physician heal thyself.
She thought she had. With Rena, the social worker at the uni, she’d imagined a new life for herself, and moved on; not allowing herself to think about the past anymore was how she’d survived. She’d attended counselling, found ways to stay calm, control her anxieties. But coming to Kalgoorlie hadn’t allowed her to leave it all behind, in fact it seemed to be rising up more often. She dropped her head in her hands. Ignoring her anger at her father was becoming harder. She was afraid she’d erupt, afraid of the consequences. Lately, life crowded in on her, the past and present shoving for room, as she supported Kerry to tell Amber that she was adopted. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on her.
A siren warned in the distance making her jump. She needed to talk to someone. Drinking to stop thinking wasn’t working. But who? Not anyone in Kalgoorlie, everybody knew each other. Last night, when she’d rung for her mother’s birthday, she’d reluctantly given in to her pleas to come down for her father’s sixtieth birthday in October.
Maybe I could take some leave, she thought. She was well overdue; she could arrange a session with Rena or the women’s counselling service in the city. Yes, after all this is over, that’s what I’ll do, she decided. There’ll be plenty of people there and I can avoid him. Her brother Jon, a school teacher working in London, also hoped to make it. It will be good to catch up with him, she thought. She felt better. Even her headache was receding. She took another swig of her drink, leant back in her seat and glanced over at Kerry’s house. She’d give her another ten minutes to get ready. The newly painted tin roof gleamed silver and the verandah posts, mission brown. Rotary had organised a busy bee and all Paul’s mates had turned up. Lori’s dad and brothers-in-law came too. Good men. Decent men. Decent. She squirmed in her seat and looked at the mines in the distance. Aimee thought of the conversation with her father last night.
‘Where did you get that information from, Aimee?’ he’d asked angrily.
She’d challenged him again about Cundeelee and this time she told him she’d heard there was another reason for moving the people to Coonana—uranium.
When she’d avoided answering, he’d begun talking in his politician voice, assuring her there was nothing untoward, that he had inquired of his colleagues and the move was due to water shortage, considerable research had been undertaken and negotiations with the local people had resulted in additional resources at the new site.
‘So what about the uranium, Dad? I thought mining uranium was against Labor policy!’
‘It’s legal to grant an explorer’s licence for uranium, Aimee.’
Now it was his lawyer’s voice, all certain and unemotional. Which always made her argumentative.
‘Well that’s splitting hairs! Why would anyone explore if they didn’t plan to mine it?’ She heard him sigh in exasperation.
Slowly, he replied. ‘Look, Aimee, sometimes in government you inherit things.’
‘What do you mean things?’
‘Arrangements, binding agreements, you can’t run roughshod over previous legitimate business dealings when you come into government. That’s all I’m going to say. And, please Aimee, be a little circumspect about this, rumours can be harmful.’
‘And moving a whole community, who don’t want to move, because they need a better water supply, rather than putting in the infrastructure that would rectify that, isn’t harmful?’ she’d countered.
‘Look Aimee, I understand your concern, I really do but it’s not that simple. Nothing is, in government, there’s a lot going on at the moment. Look your mother wants to talk to you. I’ll hand you over. Bye.’
She’d been left frustrated, with questions she still wanted to ask, an anger she didn’t know what to do with and a disquieting sense of something not right. She also knew the anger wasn’t only about the move.
A second siren wailed in the distance announcing a blasting. Soon a low tremble would shake the earth. She wondered again about decisions that are made so far from the people they affect. Gold mining had once been about men and their diggings, then came the businessmen from cities as far away as London and New York who bought into the mines. She’d studied capitalism in sociology. Does being so far removed from the consequences of your decisions make it easier to make them? she wondered. It seemed to her it did. Decisions that turn pe
ople into something less human. The workers’ choices were limited and it suited everybody to turn a blind eye, to collude in the process. Put up with the future likelihood that you would get lung disease, possibly die from it, in order to have work and if you didn’t do the job, then there were ten behind you who would.
‘Are you coming in, or are you staying out there all day?’
She looked up to see Kerry standing on the verandah, a grin on her face, holding open the flywire door.
And there stands one of the consequences.
She forced a laugh and called back. ‘No, I’m coming, it’s freezing out here.’ She wound up the car window and gathered the papers from the seat beside her, copied pages from a new book in the office library on telling children they were adopted. Mostly, they were about assuring children they were loved and helping them feel safe.
With the papers under her arm, she pushed open the iron front gate. It didn’t squeal as she opened it, someone had oiled it.
‘Yeah, well luckily it doesn’t last long. In a month or two it’ll warm up. It’s always nice in August for the Kalgoorlie Cup. Paul and I …’
She watched Kerry take a deep breath and start again.
‘We always go to the Cup; I usually get a new dress for it. But last year I bought a pair of knickerbockers with a matching jacket. That was a mistake. They’re out of fashion already. I’ll blame Amber for that one, they were her idea. Still I’ll get some wear out of the jacket, perhaps I could—’
They were interrupted by a loud bang that rattled the verandah boards and made them both jump. An aftershock rumbled under their feet.
‘God, that felt close.’
‘Yeah, I never get used to it. They reckon the tunnels are like a rabbit warren below us. If there’s ever an earthquake we’ll all probably fall in. Some places have, you know. One lady’s driveway disappeared down a big hole, another bloke’s outdoor dunny fell in. Good job he wasn’t on it at the time.’ Kerry threw back her head and laughed.
The Secrets We Keep Page 14