This Picture of You

by Sarah Hopkins

  ‘Hannah Lee.’

  She thought a moment before answering him, no longer surprised at the frontal leap into the past. ‘Actually, I did.’

  ‘But you didn’t like them.’

  Them meant Dave and Linda. ‘Come on, Martin, I liked them fine.’

  As he began to recount some part of their conversation in the bar, Maggie shook her head in disbelief. ‘God, how are you remembering all this? Do you know what I remember of that night? I remember it was hard to breathe for all the smoke. I remember Linda climbing on top of Dave and you squirming in your seat. And I remember my first and last amphetamine hit. That’s it, nothing more.’

  He listened attentively, as though waiting to see if she would offer up a piece of the puzzle he was putting together in his mind. ‘And the party?’

  She laughed. ‘I may as well not have been there at all.’

  He feigned a wounded look. ‘The kiss.’

  She shrugged. ‘I know, you’ve said it before, but it’s a blur up until the garden. I remember the garden.’

  He reached across then to take her hand, and when he did, when their palms pressed together, his grip suddenly tightened. ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said. The look that flashed across his face was a breathless child begging to play, but what settled when their eyes remained locked, when he pulled her hand down to him, was an urgency of the adult kind. ‘Second thoughts, let’s not move. Let’s stay right here, why don’t we . . .’

  Though they did their best of it up against the kitchen bench, they moved to the sofa, and ended in bed, where afterwards they slept. When they woke, they woke at the same time.

  ‘This isn’t what we’d expected, is it?’ he said, the words gentle, free of fury or frustration.

  She shook her head, held her smile, wanting to keep him in this place where he remembered what was happening to him. Sometimes he would leave it and return so quickly she doubted herself for thinking he had left at all, hoped there was reason to doubt, clinging to it as she clung now to his hand.

  ‘It never is,’ she answered, but they would make do. They would get up out of bed and she would tell him it was a good day to fix the gate and she would ask what he needed so that she could get it from the store. Of course, then he might say: ‘I can fucking well get it myself,’ or, ‘That stupid little quack telling me I can’t drive.’ Or, depending on how the wires connected this morning, he might thank her and tell her he’d have a look in the toolbox in the morning. What she was learning was that whatever she said or did in response did not matter; there was no benefit in her being firm and consistent. He was not a child who could be taught—that would not work. This was not a process of learning, but of unlearning, the shedding of what it was that he had known, what he had been taught, what he was told yesterday. A strange scattering, as though a thief had been in their home, and they were still looking around for what had been taken, some insignificant items that they told themselves they could do without, then the things of value they tried to shrug off. And of course the thief returned again and again, night after night.

  Maggie took each day as it came—as was her way—until one day, a Tuesday, when the nurse came to visit.

  After the last consultation the doctor had recommended a home visit ‘to arrange things around the house’. Annie had offered to be there—‘I’ll remember to ask all the right questions.’ When Jack was sick and they were making the arrangements for his palliative care, Maggie had done the same for her. And Annie meant well, she always did—holding Maggie’s face in her hands as she arrived and telling her she was going to book her in for a facial: ‘I’ve never seen anyone more in need of it.’ It was another way of telling her she had aged ten years, Maggie thought, saved from dwelling on it by another bang on the door. This time it was a stout woman who reminded her immediately of the nurse from the hospital—a cloudy tinge of pity in her eyes as though she were privy to something they were not. And, like in the hospital, it didn’t take long for her to discover what it was. Together Maggie, Martin, Annie and the nurse moved from the fridge to the cupboard to the bathroom cabinet, writing labels for all the plastic containers and boxes and bottles as they chatted about the glycaemic index and the price of limes, and when they were done and Martin had left to take a shower, the nurse sighed and smiled and, putting her markers back into their plastic case, said softly: ‘The earlier you label things, the more chance he’ll have of finding them later . . . while the words still mean something.’

  Maggie did not smile back. Annie and the nurse chattered on even after Annie had ticked off the last question on her list. Maggie could hear them walking out the front gate as she closed the door behind them and turned back to face the empty hallway. While the words still mean something. A minute passed as she formed a plan of what would constitute her next steps. When she moved again it was to find the newspaper, to open it to the page of the Sudoku puzzle and hand it to Martin with a pen, then to walk out the bedroom door, through the garden and into her studio. There, in the middle of the room, cast by a few careless words into a bleak and unknowable future, she fell to her knees and she wept. She wept first for Martin and for the loss of their life together, and then—as a woman who saved her tears for rare occasions such as this one—she sat on the floor and wept for other things that she had lost: most of all—still, most of all—the touch of her own mother’s hand.

  ‘You will manage fine,’ the nurse had said today on leaving.

  This was true, as she always had, and though the words had brought her little comfort as they were spoken, they now recalled to Maggie what it was her mother had said when people asked how she coped with the death of her husband. ‘I manage his death,’ she would say, and her friends would nod, translate her clumsy English: she copes with it; she is able to manage. But though it was not uncommon for Lili Varga to fumble a word, Maggie knew that the use of the active verb was deliberate; there was nothing passive in the way her mother wrestled with death. She managed it as she managed life. When she woke at dawn she prepared meals for the day and wiped the bench clean before leaving for her job in the hospital kitchen. When she came home she spoke to her husband’s framed photo on the mantel and nodded at his stony silence, then checked Maggie’s homework and lay down beside her on the couch that was her daughter’s bed and listened to her read. And when Lili went to her own bed exhausted by the day, she thrashed beneath the sheets on the other side of the thin wall and used her pillow to smother the guttural roar of her grief. When she was done with that she got up and went to the basin, where she washed her face and applied her cold cream, then looked in the mirror and affirmed it was the end of another day.

  A relentless ghost, since her death there was not a day that Lili did not enter her daughter’s thoughts, as she did now, as Maggie wiped her face with her sleeve and propped herself up against the bookshelf, above which hung the first portrait she had ever painted of her mother—in the bottom left-hand corner, a botanical dissection of her beloved kiwifruit: ‘the first thing I truly loved about Australia’.

  Maggie could almost hear her speak now: ‘For pity’s sake, pick yourself up, Magda. The nurse is a blithering idiot. Idióta! Does she know what will happen tomorrow? Not a clue . . . These people do more harm than good.’ And on she went, until Maggie had indeed picked herself up and got to her feet.

  In the kitchen now, Martin was making tea, the newspaper and pen on the table, both the Sudoku and the crossword complete.

  And Lili, of course, was right. The nurse did not know what would happen tomorrow.

  For tomorrow, just as the leaden mass of unspent time began to press down—a cruel joke after all his years of work—there it was, like a gift. Maggie cursed herself for not thinking of it sooner.

  All morning Martin had been talking about the photographs on the wall of the New York loft, recalling the images and the time and place they had been taken. In the afternoon when she returned, she found him sitting on the bed surrounded by all his equipment—two camera
s, a tripod, boxes of ancient, unused and unusable film.

  ‘Look what I found!’ he said, beaming.

  Just the Christmas before she had brought him an SLR, digital and very expensive, but when she suggested he use that instead of the old one his face screwed up with the bitter taste of new technology.

  ‘Oh dear, no,’ he said. ‘It is never quite the same.’ He held the camera up and looked at her through the lens, then brought it down again and smiled with the revelation: ‘This is it, Maggie. This is what I do.’

  And he said no more.

  All this talk of New York, Maggie now wondered, had it been for this, to bring the camera back into his hand? There was good reason not to dwell on that day—the pain of what came after. Maggie had tolerated Martin dissecting it into chapters and telling it form and verse because it seemed to have become a beacon of clarity in his otherwise muddled mind. Perhaps now, she thought, it had another purpose, this dredging of the past; perhaps he had found buried there a way to navigate the present.

  She went to help with the film, but he put his hand ever so gently on hers. ‘I don’t need any help, but thank you.’

  He took to thanking her more and more, for the least little thing, but always and most fervently for taking his film and returning with his prints, which he would lay out in rows on the floor of his study and tag with yellow post-it notes.

  At the end of the day he would guide her through them, each row containing a story, each image a reminder of where he had been—and proof that he was still there.

  For Maggie—with Martin’s time taken up more and more with his photographs—it enabled her to go back to a project of her own. Though she had set it aside, it was one that had been in her mind every day since he had left the hospital. For Maggie, Martin’s new focus meant a return to plan. It meant that she would drive up the hill to find the street in La Perouse, and she would knock on its doors until she found the house and the boy who had lost his dog.

  Chapter 13

  Martin recognised it for what it was: a tag team.

  Maggie left for her shift at the youth centre, and minutes later Laini appeared at the door, ‘dropping in to pick up Finny’s skipping rope’. The boy had taken up skipping recently after tiring of tae kwon do, and no, Laini had assured him, skipping was not ‘more of a girl’s thing’ and no, he wasn’t just ‘taking a stab at it’; it was now a recognised school sport and Finny was aiming to make the team. As for the ‘dropping in’, Martin well knew that Laini had no need to pick up the rope (there were another five at home), and that she had come instead to check up on him. These days, it seemed, there was a limit to how long he could be left alone.

  When she suggested she make them a cup of something, he told her he’d had enough tea and it was too late for coffee. ‘I am going to plant my basil,’ he said. ‘Spring will be over before I can blink.’ And with that he left her in the kitchen. When he came back inside she was still there, now pouring oil over a tray of potatoes and red onions. ‘Are you staying?’ he asked. No, she was not staying; she was just making a start on dinner for Maggie.

  ‘Still,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘I’d better get you a glass of wine.’

  Laini finished her progress report on Finn and let Martin pour them both a second glass, then she leant forward on her elbows, chin resting on clasped hands, and said: ‘I bet the last thing you want is for everyone to tiptoe around this.’

  He smiled back; the wine had taken the edge off the fact that he was being minded. ‘Well, I don’t suppose that is your plan: to tiptoe.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s not in my DNA.’

  What then began was the first conversation of any length outside of the hospital in which Martin was asked to describe what was happening to him when his mind left a room and wandered back into the past. Laini asked questions that Maggie and Ethan were scared to ask, not just for fear of the answers, but because they shared a belief, as did he (it ran in the family), that putting problems into words gave them life and set them on a trajectory of their own, the speck of control one had over them to start with forfeited forever. Laini, needless to say, was not of that mind. To verbalise was to release. Like Finn and his burps: better out than in. And today, as Martin sat with her at the kitchen table drinking their bottle of wine (still waiting as he was for one of these damn doctors to come out with a prognosis on the rest of his days), he could see that there was something sturdy and no-nonsense about her approach, something in the nature, indeed, of a raft to a drowning man.

  ‘One minute I have turned on the tap to water the garden,’ he said, ‘the next I am standing in a pool of water and the seedlings are floating around my ankles. I am better in New York, somehow. I have a timeline there.’

  Then she wanted to talk about that, like Ethan did. ‘I love that you are telling the story, Martin. It is about time this family started saying it like it is. I mean, go ahead: “This is us!” You and Maggie are an amazing couple; if it all came from a wild one-night stand, so be it, that is your love story . . . I can’t bear all this fucking pretending.’

  There was a precedent for the frustration now in her voice: Martin remembered it as she spoke—the conversation at the dining table just after Finn was born. They had finished lunch and Laini was trying to settle the baby’s reflux.

  ‘God, was Ethan this bad?’ She tried to get Finn on the breast but he spat out the nipple and screamed until his face started turning blue. Maggie took him, held him over her shoulder and patted his back as she walked up and down the hall. It worked.

  Laini looked defeated. ‘She has the touch.’

  ‘Sometimes all it needs is another pair of arms,’ Ethan said.

  ‘Yep, anyone’s but mine. I know he’s just this tiny thing, but it feels deeply fucking personal.’

  Martin shifted awkwardly in his chair, with the sense it was not a conversation to which he should be privy. Laini caught on to that and started with stories of how Finn lit up at the end of the day whenever Ethan walked through the door and other cheery parenting moments until she stopped to ask Martin if any of it was sounding familiar. ‘What was Ethan like as a baby?’

  Martin could remember the bungled silence in the moment that followed, the distant background of Maggie in the hallway humming ‘Old Macdonald’. Laini, naturally enough, looked to Martin for an answer. In time, perhaps it was only a few seconds, Martin smiled, cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t have a lot to do with Ethan when he was a baby.’

  ‘Well, that must have been more the norm back then. Still, you would’ve copped an earful at arsenic hour, I’m sure. You can’t tell me he was the perfect baby.’

  ‘Oh no, I couldn’t tell you that. He had reflux too, from what I understand.’

  At this point, Maggie appeared in the doorway with the sleeping baby in her arms, a look on her face of bemused concern. It wasn’t until Ethan saw the way his mother was looking at him that he seemed to realise the fault was his, that there was an obligation on him to inform his wife of their family’s history, and that in that obligation he had failed.

  Laini, exasperated: ‘It sounds like you never laid eyes on him!’

  Martin smiled as he folded his arms. ‘Well, that’s not quite true. I saw a photo.’ He turned to his son. ‘Perhaps it is time to fill Laini in on some of this.’

  She glared at him. ‘Martin isn’t your father!’

  Martin shook his head. ‘Oh, no, it’s nothing as dramatic as that. Certainly not . . .’ He rose from his chair, put his arm around Maggie’s shoulders and they exited the room, leaving Laini and Ethan alone at the table.

  And now: This is us! she says.

  This is us, indeed. As he poured the last of the wine a number of different responses to what Laini had just said formed in his mind, none of which he gave voice to. Instead came Laini’s question: ‘Tell me something lovely, Martin. Tell me about the first kiss.’

  ‘Hah! Well, I can tell you she has forgotten it.’

  ‘But y
ou haven’t.’

  ‘Lord, no.’

  ‘So then . . . set me the scene.’

  Martin smiled. ‘That’s just where I’m up to . . .’ And without explaining what he meant, he launched into it, the party in the Spring Street loft . . .

  From the bar to the park to the party: a massive space on the fifth floor. It was already past midnight as they wove a path through the crowd, girls in sequined leotards and leopard-skin underwear, a pair of twins with identical bare breasts and matching chiffon skirts, and men in pinstriped suits and ties and silk turbans and red berets.

  ‘Maggie had never seen anything like it in her life.’

  Of course Linda fitted right in; beneath her coat was a white sleeveless catsuit, her magnificent flesh bursting out of it for all to ogle, and there was Maggie, still in the clothes she’d worn all day, the clogs and the miniskirt. All she could do was tie her blouse in a knot at the front. Linda took hold of her then and shimmied her into the dance, pulled her in tight before launching into some kind of matador act with an invisible cape and Maggie as her bull.

  ‘I lost her,’ Martin said to Laini. ‘I went to the bar to get us drinks and the crowd swallowed her up. Just as I thought I might never find her, there was this God-awful piercing shout in my ear: “Hey, you!” It was Sylvia, the hostess—a mad redhead who liked to wear an Indian headdress—shouting across the room: “Get the fuck off my painting!” Everyone spun around to look and there she was, Maggie, standing up on some kind of platform. As I pushed my way closer I saw that the surface of the thing was made of rubber and it was mottled, multi-coloured, and Maggie was standing smack-bang in the middle of it, looking around in a panic trying to figure out what the terrible shouting was all about, and mad old Sylvia launching forwards and shouting: “Get your fucking clogs out of my vomit!”

  ‘Maggie looked down at her feet; the piece of shit Sylvia called art was an image of spewed-up food chunks and swirls of yellow bile. Thankfully, Maggie got it; she was standing in art, and this was a performance. Looking out again to the crowd she took a breath, and sprung off and onto the floor in one gracious leap. A couple of people clapped, and Sylvia bowed to stronger applause, graciously extending her arm to Maggie as cohort. Magnificent, I thought, how she’d managed to come out of it unscathed. It was my idea of hell and there she was curtseying to the crowd. I wanted to kiss her right there and then.’