This Picture of You

by Sarah Hopkins

  She never made a note, not of a church service or a game venue or a bus route; she kept it all in her head. It wasn’t just that her door was never shut or that she stocked her cupboards not knowing who she’d be feeding. It wasn’t just that she was anchor and safety net to her urban clan. Iris was more than that. She was its memory.

  ‘You remember all this, all these appointments you have to keep?’ Maggie once asked.

  Iris smiled, tapped the side of her head. ‘If it’s important, I remember it.’

  The third and final sitting. It was a still, sunny day so they sat on the porch.

  To the blotted ink and fine lines on the page, today Maggie added brushstrokes in muted tones of blue and brown.

  ‘You almost done?’ Iris asked.

  ‘There’s some more I need to do at home, but I don’t need you to sit anymore. I have enough sketches.’

  Iris came forward in her chair. ‘What haven’t you done yet?’

  ‘The eyes. I leave them until last.’

  And further forward still. ‘Why do you do that?’

  ‘Because once I finish the eyes,’ Maggie said, ‘the picture comes to life and you fly away.’

  Iris smiled, nodded. ‘I think I’m gonna like your picture.’

  As Maggie put her brushes away, Iris leant across to touch her hand.

  ‘You just missed him the last time you were here,’ she said with a smile in her eyes. ‘Tyson, I mean. I told him about you, and about your painting. You’ll get to meet him now, Maggie. He’s coming back to stay.’

  Maggie gasped. ‘Iris, that is wonderful.’

  ‘Ain’t it.’ A broad smile spread across the width of her face. ‘So I asked why he hadn’t been visiting his nan much these days—you’ll like this. You know what he said to me?’ She paused, waited. Maggie shook her head. ‘He said it was because the dog wasn’t here anymore; he didn’t have to worry about looking after that bloody dog. Would you believe that? So I’ve been thinking, and I reckon your idea about getting him another dog isn’t so bad—not from you, love, from me. I’m gonna go to the pound, get one ready for him when he comes back.’

  The talk had moved to when Tyson and Kayla were coming and why—‘the tip she’s been living in is being bulldozed’—when Iris pointed to a house across the street and down the block. ‘She’s going to go back to her place, that one there, but Tyson can stay here with me.’

  The house she pointed at was the one Maggie had parked in front of the first day she came to the street, the one with the blue couch in the garden. Of all the houses it was the most neglected; perhaps in her mind she had made that observation, but it was only now that she really looked at it for the first time.

  ‘That’s Kayla’s house?’

  She felt a trickling unease before she had any sense of its cause.

  Iris mistook the way she stared, embarrassed at the state of the place. ‘She ain’t lived there a while. I’m gonna get it cleaned up before they get back.’

  The front gate lay broken at the foot of a tree and a gutter hung loose from the roof; from the garden a branch stretched to the door as though poised to knock on it.

  ‘I didn’t know she lived here,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Ever since they were together, she and Rodney. God knows how she’s kept it all these years.’ But when she saw the way Maggie still stared down the street, her own eyes narrowed. ‘What you looking at anyway, Maggie? What is it, love?’

  Maggie turned away from the house to regard Iris, every line in the old woman’s face now so familiar. ‘Nothing,’ Maggie said, giving voice to the word, but only voice.

  After Iris went inside, Maggie walked down the street to her car, and then crossed over to the house where Kayla had lived. Standing on the footpath, she could see through the front window a curtain tied in a knot. The front door was painted yellow, and on the door a broken pane of glass had been nailed over with timber boards. When she stepped into the garden she saw that the lowest board had been prised loose, and wondered whether, if she walked up the steps and stood at the yellow door, she would be able to see inside. If she were to look through the gap, what would she see?

  Driving home she took a wrong turn. An unknown street led her to roadworks, a standstill.

  What would she see?

  While her conscious mind had sidelined the question, its back rooms permitted it entry now with open arms, and there, sitting in an unmoving car and cursing the wrong turn, it began to fester and to agitate memories of a certain and like kind. When finally the traffic began its slow creep, she failed to indicate at her first turn and swore back at a cyclist who spat at her tyre, so that by the time she pulled up in the drive beneath the blackened clouds, the business was done: everything was out of place, not just the streets behind her, but the garbage bins and the front doormat and the tin for the teabags, and her husband, pottering on hands and knees with his Blu-Tack and his photographs, was more than a day further away.

  Your judge was my son’s first decent lawyer. That was what Iris had said on that first visit.

  So he was here to see you?

  No, she had said. He hit the dog, that’s all, so this was the place he stopped.

  Already the question had taken root: was it there that he had stopped, or was it at a different house, the one across the street and a block away?

  In the studio she sat at her desk and stared at the painting like it was a blank page. When she looked out the cobwebbed window she saw Martin there now, kneeling down at the edge of the garden bed. She watched him as he dug holes in the dirt and filled the holes with snow pea seedlings, framed by the window as though she had painted the image herself.

  When he was finished with the seedlings, he went inside, and Maggie got up from her desk to follow him. She found him back in his study, sitting on the floor with a single photograph in front of him. Still looking at the photograph, he pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it, and with the exhalation of smoke he closed his eyes, just as he used to . . . He had got the packet yesterday while she was buying the seedlings, and looked only mildly surprised when she told him it was the first packet of cigarettes he had bought in twenty years.

  Maggie knelt down and picked up the photograph from the floor. On the border was the faded date: August 1979. It was a picture of a naked woman sitting on the edge of a bath in the middle of a kitchen. She was bent forward from the waist, her head dropping between her open legs. It was Linda in the loft. The light came in from the window and fell on the small of her back.

  Martin’s eyes followed the photograph in Maggie’s hand. ‘She was a beauty, wasn’t she?’ he said. ‘I think it’s the best one I’ve ever taken. Do you think?’

  It was just months ago, Maggie thought, remembering that Sunday lunch, that she had allowed herself to believe the passage of time provided protection—that day by day there was a growing distance from whatever came before. Now, somehow, the reverse held true. With each day, they seemed to be moving backwards, she and Martin, in a creeping tide of time and space, ever closer to a past that was not the stuff of nostalgia or reminiscence but of potholes that had been sidestepped and never repaired.

  And as it turned out, the road was not straight: at the end it formed a loop, forcing us all to turn back.

  Chapter 20

  Ethan checked Laini was asleep before he sat down in the dark at his computer and opened her blog.

  Over these last weeks it had become his habit, to scroll through the About Me section and the photos of Laini and the labradoodle, and to continue past the day’s post to the Comments link.

  Since the ‘meditate or masturbate’ conundrum had opened the floodgates, her readers’ comments and Laini’s responses to them had taken on the tone of a confessional. Here it was again, in response to yesterday’s post, a frenzied flourish of virtual unburdening:

  ‘I couldn’t tell my therapist this but . . .’

  ‘I am married to a woman who doesn’t make me feel anything.’

&nbs
p; ‘I am a serial home wrecker.’ (That one from VeryYummy Mummy.)

  And most startlingly of all: ‘I would rather put my face in the fire than give my husband a head job.’

  Laini did not suffer fools; she was quick to tell readers who stepped across the line to crawl back into the hole from whence they came. But the rest of her replies were all shades of the same wondrous colour: I am no one’s moral compass. Nothing is unsayable. This is your space.

  It reminded him of the old, life-giving Laini, and it reminded him (not without a tinge of resentment towards this sea of grasping strangers) what it felt like to share in her bounty. Then, just yesterday, he started to get a taste of it again. She was worried about him, his moods. (He’d slammed a door; the glass had cracked.) His mother had noticed it too. They had talked. Even when he was a boy, Maggie had said, there were problems when Martin came back from New York; it all escalated this one time when she and Martin were having some troubles and Martin had moved out.

  ‘She said it sent you into a rage, baby. And it got me thinking about what’s happening to Martin now, and I wonder if maybe that’s what the anger is about.’

  To this, Ethan’s was a phased reaction. First, reflexively, he flinched. Laini wanted to trawl through all that paternal-rejection stuff and it wasn’t easy to shut down. But with that, the shift in her focus, he was lifted (albeit briefly) by a sense of relief: the blog had sucked up the self-loathing and given her some headspace, which meant there was more Laini energy coming his way: briefly, because that in itself led to a reality check. It had worked okay in the early days, all her questions—‘I want to know you. I want to know all of you.’ He could answer and deflect; it was easy enough, but harder now, he realised, as over the years he’d accumulated more and more pieces he wasn’t able to share.

  And finally, maybe a little out of left field—as his thoughts meandered around the blog and looped back to Laini’s digging—there formed in his mind a Venn diagram of marital knowledge, at its centre that portion which ought to be shared. What the blog offered in this picture was a fresh line of communication, a new and improved method of discovery. Forget for a minute what Laini wanted to know . . . After weeks of reading her answers and replies, Ethan had begun to form a question of his own, and though initially he had no intention of ever asking it, as time wore on, as he fell into the habit of sitting glued to a screen at night indulging in the mind-fuck that was his wife and then leaving for the office in the morning wondering what blouse Sally would be wearing when he arrived, the necessary adjunct was whether or not what he was doing would mean the end of his marriage. The fact that the question remained unanswered was beginning to threaten his ability to look his wife in the eye and hence function as any kind of husband, which led Ethan now to the view that one way or another, he needed to know.

  What the blog offered was the gift of anonymity. And so it was that tonight, in the dark of his study, he clicked on what was for him a new box: Add Comment. (Mentally relabelled: Test the Waters.)

  As FaithlessJohn, he wrote: ‘I love my wife and I love having sex with other women. One feeds the other. Honestly, I am a better husband for it. Thoughts?’

  Ethan reread what he had written three times, nodded to himself, and pressed Post.

  Chapter 21

  It was the sight of the bats in the distance that had confused him.

  Twilight, he had thought. Dinner. ‘What time will dinner be?’

  She looked frightened by the question and told him it was morning, and they were above him then, cockatoos not bats; he could see the yellow tails. It was morning, of course. The sun was rising and not falling. And with that knowledge, out of his shallowing breath, a cloud of dread descended again—not because of the fact that he was wrong, but the fact of a beginning.

  Scrambling or still, always now the same answer, the same taunt: it had begun, and every day it began again.

  Last night over dinner, barely a word: a man and a woman in a room, the connection between them one of circumstance. He thought to ask her what had made her go so quiet, but better to keep it vague.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

  And that was all.

  Chapter 22

  Maggie waited until Martin went to bed to return to her studio. It was after midnight.

  She opened the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet, and at the back of the drawer, from an unlabelled file, she pulled out an envelope.

  She switched on her lamp and turned off the main light, then sat at her desk with the envelope in hand before putting it down in front of her. There it was, the faded handwriting: Martin’s name and his work address. When she picked it up to hold it again, she could feel the power drain from her hands as it had done all those years ago when she had first found it tucked between the covers of a book. The book, she remembered still, was called the The Book of Torts.

  It was 1982.

  Martin had started in new chambers when she saw the book lying next to the box on the floor. The move had been hurried as he was trying to get set up before leaving on a trip to New York. Dave was in rapid decline. At first they were told it was pneumonia, then cancer, some form of leukaemia. It was a virus that was attacking his immune system. They couldn’t find a treatment. This was to be Martin’s second trip that year to see him. When she saw that the letter was from Linda she assumed it would have the latest news on his condition, or that is what she told herself as she opened it, as she pulled the letter from the envelope.

  ‘Our man is a hero unto the last . . .’ it read. ‘They want to bulldoze the garden on Eldridge Street and replace it with housing blocks, but he has managed to get ten thousand signatures on a petition so they’ve called a halt . . . Pyrrhic, maybe—saved to be bulldozed another day—but safe to say he will not be alive to see it happen. That is my news, darling Marty. Dave is going to die. And before he does he wants to give us his blessing for everything we have done and everything we are going to do—for our fucked-up love, as he calls it. Is it so fucked up? (A little mucked up, sure, but fucked up?)’

  There was no past tense.

  It had been four years since Martin had returned to live with them in Sydney. Ethan was now eight, almost nine.

  What Maggie remembered now, sitting at her desk, was the feeling as she turned the letter over in her hand that deep down she had seen it all along, the same feeling she had today standing outside the house with the yellow door. Linda was not the end of it; there had been another side all along. Martin hadn’t driven into Iris’s street because he was lost, but because he had been there before.

  I tried to end it, he had said when he came through the door and she showed him the letter; he had tried on his last visit.

  Maggie put up her hand to stop him. ‘But before that . . . every time you went back.’ It was a statement, not requiring confirmation.

  And then, from Martin: ‘If it helps, even when we were living there together, I was never enough for her. There were always other men. We spent more time hating each other than anything else.’

  If it helps . . .

  Maggie did not understand then, nor did she now, how the information could in fact have helped. Did he expect it to arouse sympathy? Was the idea that he had been punished enough? Entrenched in his suggestion was a self-regard to which she had never found a way to respond.

  She told him to leave and he stayed in a flat in Randwick for a month, and every night when she closed her eyes, it sucked the breath out of her: Linda in her white catsuit, her golden flesh and her acid tongue, and whatever it meant, however it played out: their fucked-up love—first the reunions in New York, and afterwards, with the distance between them, all the ways Linda had lived in his mind. She didn’t need him to tell her that. More than anyone Maggie knew what distance did.

  There was just the light from the desk lamp, the corners of the studio in darkness. On the desk was the painting of Iris, the eyes still blank. How to fill them, the eyes of the woman who as a girl had run from trucks for fear
of being taken from her family, the mother who had cared for eleven children but was separated from her own.

  And behind the light of the lamp, in between a statue of Ganesh and the framed ink drawing by Mrs Bess—a rocky outcrop, the Lost Cat—was the photograph of Lili and Frederick, and her grandfather Levi.

  ‘He looks like you,’ she had said to Martin as he sat with his son for the first time.

  ‘He doesn’t have my eyes.’

  ‘No, you’re right. He doesn’t. They are my father’s eyes.’

  Maggie did not look their way, to the faces in the photo, but in the recesses of her mind they lingered—the fact that they had lived, the lives that they had led. Their eyes stared out, speaking of the horrors and miracles to come. That day it was a farewell they each knew in their hearts to be final. Three years later it was another: Frederick and Lili and their little daughter Maggie waving farewell to the families of strangers on board the Fairsea, bound for Sydney. They embraced one last time as they were ushered down onto separate decks, one for the men, one for women and children—big empty holds with triple-tiered bunks, each with a mattress and a blanket and a leaflet on the pillow. On the cover of the leaflet was a map of Australia, and in letters curved around its northern coastline, the promise: ‘The Land of Tomorrow’. The Fairsea travelled towards it, across the Mediterranean to Egypt, through the Suez Canal to Yemen and out into the Red Sea, to Colombo and across the Indian ocean to Fremantle and to Sydney, and every evening of the month-long journey—dubbed their ‘pleasure cruise’ by Frederick—they would meet at the children’s dining table on the mess deck, taking it in turns to trick their ashen-faced daughter into taking a mouthful, and to think of all the reasons under the sky to be grateful: the curls in Maggie’s hair from the saltwater showers; the power of disinfectant to mask the stench of sickness in the corridors; the communal space on the top deck that allowed ample room for children’s games and a good walk (contrary to stories they had heard of ships so crowded the passengers could only stand and sway like trees). And the real jewels: the lifting of the wondrous fog that had settled around the Lighthouse of Port Said, and the whale and her calf breaching off the Sri Lankan coast before slipping in unison beneath the water’s surface.