Friday Brown

by Vikki Wakefield

  I thought about loneliness. How it’s not something you catch and mostly we choose it. How a trouble shared is a trouble halved but things like love and joy are multiplied when you have someone to share them with. I looked out of the window. On the street below there were hundreds of people—thousands, maybe—going about their business without touching, speaking, or acknowledging each other’s existence.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a towel, and picked up the bedside phone.

  The girl answered.

  I asked her what number I should call for directories and she replied in an bored, automatic tone. When I thanked her and told her to have a good day, the line went silent for a few seconds.

  The girl sounded surprised. ‘Sure. I hope you have everything you need.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  I called the number and got put through.

  ‘Can I speak to Alison Dunne, please?’

  I waited. The on-hold music was interrupted by a woman saying the call was being diverted. Please hold. I held.

  Then she answered. I told her who I was.

  Alison Dunne, intern, asked what she could do for me.

  And I said, ‘I want to tell you a story.’

  Now, the box. Part of me wanted to throw it off a bridge and see it sink below the surface so that any reminder of Arden would be gone forever. I wanted it to fill up with water and mud and drift to the bottom. That would have been a fitting end. I’d been carrying the damned thing around for two days and it was heavy.

  After I finished speaking with Alison Dunne, I closed the curtains and sank into the mattress and just lay there, staring at the neon numbers on the clock, thinking I’d never sleep.

  I woke up swearing. Morning had come and gone. The blinds were closed and when I whipped them open the sun was high and blazing.

  I dressed and took the stairs. I came out in the lobby and the girl behind the desk looked up with a smile. It faltered when she saw my face.

  ‘Are you okay? Did something happen to you?’

  ‘I’m fine. Thanks for asking,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back later.’ I felt stupid for saying that—it’s not like I had a curfew.

  ‘Yes, well, you’ve paid for the week. I figured you would,’ she said. ‘Are you on holiday? I could give you some brochures.’ She grabbed a handful from the display behind her and shuffled them into order.

  ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll be here for a funeral.’

  ‘You think…? Oh.’ She tucked the stack away and clasped her hands in front of her.

  ‘Actually, it’s more a celebration of a life.’

  ‘That’s a nice way of looking at it.’

  ‘I’m Friday,’ I said with my hand on the door.

  ‘Rebecca. Bec,’ she answered and pointed to her name badge. ‘I’m here if you need anything.’

  I thanked her again and stepped out into the sunshine.

  It was that easy to get to know a stranger.

  The patch of green in the middle of the city was yellowing. The sun had burned the crisp edges of the grass; walkways were littered with bottles and cans. The rearing statue was unchanged except for a few new tagged initials on its rump. I touched a hoof and thought about how we leave our mark on the world—that one man could inspire a monument in the middle of a city but others could only leave their initials behind.

  ‘Bree,’ I called when I got close.

  She was sitting with her back to a tree, headphones in, her eyes closed.

  ‘I’m back,’ I said.

  She opened her eyes. ‘I didn’t think you’d come.’

  ‘Here I am.’

  ‘Is it…over? Did they find…?’ She didn’t finish.

  ‘I’m still waiting to hear. Have you seen the others?’

  She wound her headphones around a finger. ‘Yeah, they’re around. Joe’s got his old job back at the markets. AiAi’s with Carrie and Darce most of the time. They’re looking after him.’ She groaned and put her hands over her face. ‘It seems wrong, doesn’t it? To keep on living?’

  That was how I’d felt the night I left Grandfather’s house, after Vivienne died. But now I disagreed. ‘Here,’ I said and thrust Arden’s box into her hands.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Open it.’

  Bree jiggled the catch. She ran her fingertip over the padlock’s torn edge.

  ‘I’ve gotta go,’ I said and stood up. ‘Things to do.’

  ‘Like what?’ She cocked one eyebrow. ‘Stay.’

  I shrugged. ‘Get busy living.’

  ‘Wait…’ She opened the box. ‘What’s all this?’ She let out a low whistle. ‘That’s a lot of money. How…’

  ‘Think about it. She had to be putting a thousand bucks a week in that tin.’

  Bree fished around inside and pulled out her mobile phone. She held up a fistful of wet notes. ‘What am I going to do with all this?’

  ‘Share it with the others. You’ll find a use for it.’

  ‘Here. Take some,’ she said. ‘You could start over.’

  I shook my head. ‘It belongs to you guys. Anyway, new beginnings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.’

  ‘Where will you go? Will you be okay by yourself?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah.’ I stuck my chest out. ‘I am descended from kings,’ I joked.

  ‘Really?’ she said.

  ‘No. Not really.’

  Bree closed the box. She shoved it towards me. ‘When they bring him back…I mean…here. You know what to do with it.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ I took the box.

  ‘I’m sure,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll come back soon,’ I promised.

  ‘I’ll be gone for a while, but give me your number. I’ll call you.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Cooktown,’ she said. ‘To stay with my auntie. They live the old way.’ She looked away, embarrassed. ‘Everything was so big out there, Friday. You know?’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  The following day, I walked barefoot through familiar streets, a newspaper jammed under my arm. I cut through an underground car park and came up in a quiet lane where seedpods burst under my feet. I worked my way through winding streets and alleys to the rows of old terraced houses, strung along like a paper-chain. And where the chain was broken by a patch of blackened earth, I stopped.

  I ducked under the sagging tape fence and stepped around the debris. The section of interior wall was still intact, lying flat, but the newspaper clippings were bleached by sun and rain. In the backyard, where the pond used to be, there was a dry well and a snake-shaped skeleton, its bones picked clean.

  I opened the newspaper and slid out the pages. I spread the sheets out over the old clippings and pinned down each corner with pieces of wood.

  There was a montage of pictures of Silence and me. If you clipped them into squares and flipped them front to back, they would have played like a miniature movie scene.

  The pram rolled away.

  Silence ran to the edge of the platform.

  He jumped onto the tracks.

  I dashed after him, I peered over the edge.

  The pram came back up as if plucked by the hand of God.

  While we fussed over the baby, Silence’s figure blurred like an apparition and disappeared between the stationary train and the far wall.

  The headline said simply: THE BOY NOBODY SAW. The last frame was in colour, zoomed-in and blown up. You could see the blue of his eyes, his silver fringe that hung above them, his teeth that didn’t quite fit. The caption underneath read: Lucas Emerson (Silence), our tragic hero.

  In the photo, he was waving.

  Two days after the newspaper story, four days before his funeral, Alison Dunne called to tell me that my friend had come home.

  Silence’s body went unclaimed by his family. His sister Amy never showed.

  I thought of his spirit, trapped in that train station forever, and it nearly broke me. I wanted him to have his memo
rial, something solid and glorious to say he’d been here, but when I turned up at the crematorium carrying a box full of money that stank like riverweed, I was too late.

  A city of strangers had already claimed him.

  On my last night in the city, a still, clear night just before dark, I went to the cemetery. Crickets went quiet where I stepped and started up again when I’d passed. A layer of mist hovered above the ground. Trees huddled and whispered.

  I found Silence’s grave by heading towards the glow of scattered candles and the scent of citronella and hot wax. I’d missed the service—I didn’t think I could stand to hear the detached, pre-packaged spiel I’d sat through for Vivienne—and waited until well after, when everybody would be gone.

  But they weren’t.

  I sat alone, far away from the crowd on a grassy mound. Hidden by darkness, I watched.

  Every funeral should be like his. Nobody was quiet or reverent—instead, the sound of laughter and tears mingled together. People kept coming in a steady stream to place flowers on Silence’s grave. When it was covered, they put them on other graves. There were messages from children written in crayon, clippings from the newspaper, notes on pastel paper.

  Silence’s funeral and headstone were paid for by donations from people who never knew him but who wished they had. He wasn’t forgotten. He would have loved that.

  I saw Bree and her family sitting in a circle, I heard them singing a low, joyful song.

  AiAi had new sneakers that glowed white in the dark.

  Joe was playing He-Loves-Me-Not, sprinkling petals over Carrie’s head.

  Darcy wore a hoodie and most of her face was in shadow. Carrie whipped the hood away and tousled her head—shaven to the bone—and they started a slap-fight that ended in a hug.

  And Wish. He was watching, like me. Standing apart. He was so like her he made my chest ache and I had to turn away.

  I took the note I’d written for Silence and, instead of sticking it to his headstone with the others, I let the breeze carry it where it would.

  The piece of paper flew. It soared—up, beyond the trees and into the clouds—and took with it the last few lines of Vivienne’s poem, perfectly remembered:

  There in the silence of the hills,

  I shall find peace that soothes and stills

  the throbbing of the weary brain,

  for I am going home again.

  I love you.

  Friday.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Grandfather’s cat was waiting by the front gates. It stalked me along the driveway, tail twitching, moving between a regal saunter and a mad dash to catch up. Every few steps it stopped to shake dew from its paws. I reached the end of the driveway and the cat disappeared through a gap in a hedge.

  There was something different about the house, or maybe I just missed it before. It wasn’t the imposing mansion I remembered; it was sad and empty and old.

  I crept around to the back of the house. The hexagonal verandah of Vivienne’s fable popped and creaked. Beyond it, a rectangle of weed-choked grass the exact shape of a swimming pool.

  The windows were dark, apart from the dining room and the dying room—Vivienne’s lamp was on to guide me home. I dropped my bag onto the porch and raised a fist to knock on the back door—but something made me stop.

  Music. Tinny and distant, like an old gramophone playing. I heard the chink of crystal, the sound of pieces smashing to the floor, scattering into corners.

  I moved to the window, pressed my face against the glass and peered into the dining room.

  Grandfather selected a whisky glass from the tray next to him. He rolled it in his palm. I remembered there being six; now there were two. He swigged from the glass in his other hand until it was empty, then wound back both arms. Both glasses hit the chandelier and exploded into pieces.

  I gasped and took a step back.

  He sat there, showered in fragments of glass and crystal. This was his grief now, uncivilised and raw. He looked up and saw me through the window. He stared as if what I did next would give him some measure of me.

  I felt closer to him. I’d lived it. Grief leaves a space that has to be filled. I wanted him to know that I knew. An emotion too big to contain swelled in my chest.

  I prised a hefty rock from the dry wall surrounding the garden bed. It was as smooth and chilled as an ice sculpture and I needed both hands to lift it. I paced back seven steps, raised the rock above my head, and heaved it at the glass between us.

  It exploded. The noise was louder than I expected, less than I’d hoped. Startled pigeons fluttered out of a tree. Shards hovered, then plummeted like falling stalactites onto the sill.

  When the tinkling stopped, the music played on, a woman with a whiny voice singing about regret.

  Grandfather was still, his palms pressed flat against the table.

  The curtains billowed like beckoning hands.

  Grandfather’s lips twitched. He laughed and smacked his hand down like a gavel. ‘We’ve made a mess of things, haven’t we?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  He levered himself out of his chair and came around to open the door.

  I followed him into the entrance hall. I waited exactly one minute before I asked the question.

  ‘Tell me why she left.’

  Grandfather picked up my bag, slung it onto the bottom step of the stairs and went into Vivienne’s sitting room. He switched on a light, turned off the lamp and unplugged it.

  ‘No need for this anymore.’ He sat on the edge of Vivienne’s hospital bed. The side dipped under his weight. He touched the pillow lightly, like he was scared to erase her.

  ‘Her bed’s still here,’ I said.

  He sighed. ‘Sometimes we keep the physical objects until memory is enough.’ He covered his face with his big hands. ‘I have some of her things to give you. She said I should wait until you were ready.’

  ‘Things?’ Was I ready?

  ‘Things that belonged to her, that she left behind. The rest she said you must find for yourself.’

  I glanced around the room. The white noise inside my head was finally quiet. I saw the signs, now that I was looking.

  There was a low bookcase next to the bed, loaded with thick-spined, dust-coated classics I’d never read. I saw by the marks on the carpet that Grandfather had pulled it close, so that Vivienne could reach. I saw fingerprints in the dust, a book of stories by Henry Lawson. And I saw a patch of unlikely symmetry: a wide red spine nestled between six blue ones.

  Owain Glyndwr, The Story of the Last Prince of Wales.

  I slid out the book. There was an envelope pressed between its pages.

  Grandfather stayed my hand before I opened it. ‘I was hiding them for her as she wrote them. She said you would have questions and there was still so much she wanted to tell you. There are more, take your time.’

  ‘Tell me why she left.’

  ‘It’s complicated…’ he started.

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘I forced her to make a choice. Between you or me.’

  ‘But I wasn’t even…’

  ‘She was pregnant.’ He smoothed the creases on the envelope. ‘The last thing she said before she left was she couldn’t make a good choice, so she…’

  ‘…made one she could live with,’ I finished.

  We were alike in ways that couldn’t be accounted for by eye colour, features, or a gesture, a word. Some kinds of crazy you make for yourself, others you inherit.

  I went up to my room. There were still traces of me, undisturbed: my long hair on the pillow, the pile of stuff I left beside the bed, the cracked bar of soap in the bathroom.

  I unpacked my clothes and placed the rolls of money on the bedside table. I’d see them when I woke and they would remind me that there was more I had to do. Silence deserved a monument more lasting than memory—a statue of him on a bench in the train station maybe, or a bronze figure of a hooded boy leaning to kiss the fish—because mem
ories change depending on who’s doing the remembering. And you had to honour your dead.

  The mobile phone rang. Wish sounded far away.

  ‘You left,’ he said. ‘I saw you. We’re still at the cemetery. There was a reporter here, asking for you. You should see all the stuff people left—pieces of paper, notes everywhere. Candles. A woman sang “Amazing Grace”.’

  I picked up Vivienne’s pearls and let them pour through my fingers.

  ‘Are you there?’

  ‘How did you get this number?’ I asked.

  ‘Bree.’

  I heard Grandfather’s heavy tread on the stairs. His footsteps stopped at my door and then moved on. I swung my legs onto the bed and curled up there, fully clothed in the dark in a room that felt like clouds.

  ‘They still haven’t found her. Or Malik.’ Wish said it too casually, like he was trying to spare me his pain.

  Arden. Someday I hoped she’d find peace. Power, like love, is given. It isn’t something you can take.

  ‘I will kiss you again,’ Wish said.

  I pressed the phone hard against my ear until it started to burn.

  ‘I need to know you’re okay. Say something.’

  Moonlight spilled into the room and the pearls were warming against my skin. I felt for Vivienne’s T-shirt under my pillow. The fabric was soft and I could smell her now that the memory of her dying had faded.

  One day, I thought, if I let time pass in one place, only the good things—the things I wanted to remember—would be left. There would be this day, then the next, then the one after that. I could do one day at a time. And if home wasn’t a place, maybe it was a connection. Something woven from loose ends and mismatched threads that took time to knit together, like fractured bone.

  Maybe family were the people who came looking for you when you were lost.

  ‘I don’t need saving,’ I said.

  He laughed. It was short, humourless. ‘I know.’

  The lump in my throat eased. It shifted, it shrank.