This Picture of You

by Sarah Hopkins

  As he reached the end of the central walkway, he stopped, looked up at the windows of the office buildings—his own office, his own window—and wondered if anyone was looking down, tracking his movements. Is anybody watching?

  He was skating on the edge, granted. But in his mind the ground was firm. As long as he pushed himself back into the fray, as long as he wanted it, he was still in the game.

  Whatever side, he told himself, the choice was his.

  Chapter 26

  This is what happened.

  He is lying down, and she is kneeling beside him.

  As she buttons her shirt her hair falls over her face, and when she pulls it back he takes over with the buttons and tells her to come home with him; they can take a bath and sleep there until she has to go.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Neither of us is going to be feeling any good. Best part ways here.’ She smiles, holds his hand and, like she is reciting a poem he doesn’t know: ‘Here in the first pale light.’

  ‘You are beautiful,’ he tells her, without meaning to say it—maybe in gratitude for a clean break, he thinks, but from the sudden gnawing emptiness he knows it isn’t that.

  ‘There is something I want to say,’ she says, and he is relieved to hear it, hopes she has a way to say it.

  ‘Yeah, sure, me too. It was an amazing night. If you weren’t leaving . . .’

  ‘No, it’s not that. It’s not what you think.’ She looks away and, seeing the garden around her as the sun peeks over the tenements, shakes her head. ‘God, look at this place.’ Then her eyes come back to him. ‘And you. How did I get here?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Yes, I remember.’

  There is a flash of confusion in his eyes, and some trepidation in going forward: ‘So?’

  ‘So. I want to tell you something else, something I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘Okay, shoot.’

  ‘It is something about when we were young,’ she says. ‘I didn’t tell you but I want to tell you now.’

  ‘So tell me,’ he says, not knowing whether to make light of it. Her face is not light. But it is worth a go. ‘Does it have a happy end?’

  She leans down so that her hair falls forward again, this time touching the side of his face, and she whispers, ‘It does: the end is now. Aren’t you happy?’

  Why the girl is spinning him around before she says goodbye, he doesn’t know, but figures that in the end it doesn’t matter. ‘Sure I am. I mean, I’m happy.’ She sits up again and he takes her hand. ‘I’m sad too.’ But again he senses he is missing the tone—the way she looks at him, like he is something edible and she is hungry . . . A curtain has come down on the night, but this is no parting game. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You said before that you remembered me, you remembered seeing me at your place when I was a little girl.’

  ‘Sure, I remember.’

  ‘Okay, so I used to sit there at the back door for hours when Lil did the dinners for your mum. I got bored. I helped a little, but I couldn’t do much. I was only eleven. I wasn’t allowed to get in the way.’ She lowers her voice, holds his gaze. ‘So I started looking out for you, waiting to see if you’d show up again.

  ‘You did, one night. I saw you in the garden smoking a cigarette; there was a wooden bench under a magnolia tree—you lay down on it looking up at the sky. I saw the smoke rising up . . . You were there for so long I wondered if you’d fallen asleep. But then I heard the creak of the gate and you weren’t there anymore.

  ‘Another night I heard you fighting with your mother on the veranda and you threw a stone at the car. Do you remember that?’

  A wave of adolescent memories is flooding over his creeping hangover. Though he has a question of his own—why is she telling me this now?—he doesn’t ask it. ‘I do, yeah, I remember that,’ he says. ‘It just seems a little strange that you do too.’

  She isn’t put off. She inches closer. ‘You want to hear strange?’

  He doesn’t, but he will.

  ‘I told you before about the photo on our fridge, the one of you and your mother.’ He nods. It was an odd note even then, the mention of the photo. ‘Well, your mother wasn’t in the photo; it was just you. And it was never on our fridge. I took it from your kitchen. There were a bunch of copies, and I took one.’

  She waits for him to ask the question ‘Why?’, then when he does she hesitates, and looks him straight in the eye.

  ‘The truth? The truth is you were the best-looking seventeen-year-old boy I’d ever seen.’

  There is no response from him beyond an awkward smile, but as she knew they would—as she had intended—the words sing to his vanity and settle him in for the rest of the story.

  She took it home, and she stuck it on butcher’s paper on the inside of the cupboard door in her bedroom. And she started doing drawings from it, lots of drawings, each with a different view of him, a different angle—as though she were writing a secret journal, inventing a coded language. When the paper was full she tore it down and threw it in the garbage before Lili could see it.

  When he turns away she waits for him to look back at her. ‘Then imagine today when you handed me the charcoal and sat down on your stool . . . You wondered why I laughed. I mean, I couldn’t say—not then. I couldn’t tell you I’d drawn you all those times before. But now I think, what the hell, I’m not going to see you for, like, forever, so why not spill it? The truth, I guess, is that you were pretty much my first love.’

  Her eyes are glazed, shining. But the pupils are minuscule now . . . hardwired.

  For a minute there is silence but for the sounds of the waking street. Finally he finds the words. ‘That is one hell of a story.’

  He tries to remember back to the little girl at the house. He can remember the mother, the dinner parties, but the girl is just a shadow at the door . . . He can’t remember her at all.

  ‘And you think I’m crazy.’

  ‘No, well, a little bit, sure I do.’ The words come back: stalker girl. ‘I mean, not mentioning it earlier—letting the whole day go by, the night . . .’

  She puts two fingers to his lips, presses down then slides them away as she kisses him, soft and long, and final. ‘I gotta go now, Martin,’ she says. ‘I don’t regret a bit of it. If I could have dreamt it, this is how it would have happened. And already it feels like it never did . . . That’s always the way with the best things.’

  She ties her shirt and smiles, and it dawns on him if this is a hit-and-run then he is the guy left lying on the side of the road. It is happening again; he is a character in someone else’s story. Behind what happened here, there was an intention, and with that intention, an inevitability . . . She leans down, more a brush of the lips than a kiss, and then she is on her feet, standing over him. All that is left now is the slow fade of her smile as she turns away.

  When she is gone, in her place there is a chiding sadness—an old man sitting among scattered photographs, shaking his head and telling him it is a mistake to let her go and it is a mistake to follow her home; it is a mistake to think that he can match her, because he never could, he never can.

  Out a window, it is daylight, and like the line between the cliffs and the sky, the time to speak was clear.

  In the study again, there she was, smiling at the door, bag on shoulder, keys in hand.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

  ‘To see Iris,’ she said.

  But he shook his head. He knew her; she was never one for blinkers. ‘You are foraging.’

  Her smile faded. She looked surprised, but not unpleasantly so.

  ‘Perhaps you could just ask,’ he said.

  ‘Ask what?’

  ‘Why I went there.’

  ‘I did. You didn’t remember.’

  His next words came without forethought in a voice that knew more than he did: ‘Then for heaven’s sake, Maggie, ask someone else.’

  Chapter 27

  Coming through
Iris’s gate with the finished painting, Maggie remembered walking up the same steps to the same open door four months ago. She remembered how afraid she had been, how she had looked inside, down the hallway to the scribbled walls.

  Come, Maggie, she had said to herself. What is the worst it could be?

  Just four months, the same door, and now all she felt as she knocked was a reluctance to wait—an impatience to see Iris, to see the look on her face when she saw the finished portrait.

  Without waiting for an answer, she entered.

  Walking down the hall, she stopped at the stairs to call for Iris then continued to the kitchen to find it empty. Dispirited, she stood at the bench and wondered whether to wait. She put it down, the large plastic sleeve tied with blue string, and after a couple of minutes untied it herself and removed the top sheet to look at it again. Though each stroke on the page was her own, already she was outside it. That was the way she could always judge a painting: if it was poor or incomplete, the faults and omissions were hers, but once worked to a point where there was nothing more she could do, the painting stood alone. It didn’t always follow, not by any means, that it was a great piece, just that she was no longer its caretaker.

  She checked her watch; Iris could be hours. Ready as she was to hand it over, Maggie returned the top sheet and turned back down the hall.

  Strange, she later thought, how one day life can be so gentle in allaying our fears, and the next so brutal in obliterating expectations. Months ago she had stood at the door, consoling herself by asking what the worst could be, and what had she found? A little girl in purple underpants with a texta lid stuck in her nostril, and Iris, the old woman who refused to take payment for her shell-covered box. Then today, with the painting under her arm, she found only an empty house, and now, as she was leaving, something more: an occupant returning—and finally an answer to her question as to what the worst could be.

  There in the doorway was a woman, the same woman who had rushed past her and out the door on her first visit. It was, she now knew, Kayla: mother to Tyson, daughter-in-law to Iris. Maggie stopped halfway down the hall.

  Unable to see her face, Maggie recognised her only from the same green tracksuit and streaked, matted hair. To hold herself up, the woman was gripping either side of the doorframe with her large brown hands. Like a dead weight, her head lolled forwards, though at the sound of Maggie’s steps it raised up, a slow reveal of her face: first the mouth, the tongue lying flaccid on her lower lip, then the half-open eyes rolling from side to side before settling on Maggie, and when they did, when they found their focus, the tongue retracted to form the question: ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  Fear rising in her throat, she could feel the woman’s eyes burrowing into her own. ‘I am Maggie,’ she said. ‘A friend of Iris’s.’

  In response, the woman’s head lunged forwards again, as though in an effort to nod she had miscalculated its weight.

  ‘You must be Kayla,’ Maggie went on. ‘Iris told me you were moving back.’

  Looking up again, the woman separated her words as though she was being forced to repeat them to a simpleton, ending in a crescendo. ‘I—am—not—moving—back—to—this—SHIT—HOLE!’

  Maggie took a small step forwards, edging towards the door, the door that was blocked—‘If Iris isn’t in, I’ll . . .’—but Kayla paid no attention, her words now slurred together: ‘. . . This fuckin’ zoo up here, everyone watching like you’re a monkey in a cage.’ Her eyes flickered. ‘Like you . . . like you, watching me . . .’ And again: ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  With that, her eyes closed, and as they closed, she leant against the doorframe and slid slowly down to the floor.

  Maggie stared down at the woman, her thoughts blocked by a creeping paralysis. Here it was, the ghoul she had feared when five months ago she had stood in that same doorway and remembered the warning: it wasn’t a street where you went around knocking on doors. Here it was, previously imagined so that now it felt to Maggie like something remembered, something known to her, and as for her judgment—her condemnation—for that she could look even further back, to a day long ago when just down the hill and a stone’s throw from the snake man she had been dragged from the jetty and had gone home to scrub herself clean. This woman, damaged and drug-addled, laying blame everywhere but at her own feet . . . The rising stench of stale sweat and tobacco was as abhorrent to Maggie as everything she had done: her abuse of herself, her neglect as a mother . . . So it flowed, all the reasons why the line between them was a wall—I am not her, this is not me—all the reasons why her instinct told her to get out of here, and to get away.

  How then to step around the woman without stirring her back to life?

  As she considered the question, Maggie noticed a new drawing on the scribbled wall: a road that went all the way to the doorframe, and on the edge of the road a house and above the house a yellow sky and in the corner of the sky a black moon. The road was green and the house was red—a world of its own, Maggie thought, no matter what played out around it. Like the picture on the wall of the migrant centre: The Land of Tomorrow . . .

  She stepped closer to the door, and the moment she did, the eyes opened. When she went to take a second step, Kayla made a yelping sound as though she’d been kicked. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she shouted, and as she shouted her head began to shake violently, like she was in the middle of a convulsion. It lasted only a few seconds. By the time Maggie grabbed her phone to call an ambulance, the woman had clamped her head in her hands to make it still, looking at Maggie now with pleading eyes and simple, quiet words: ‘I can’t be here.’

  ‘Is there someone I can call?’

  Kayla seemed to consider the prospect before dismissing it. ‘Ty-son!’ The first syllable of the name was lost under her breath; what was heard was only the shrill and desperate cry for her ‘son’. Maggie turned back to the door, hoping that the boy would appear, but no one did. When she looked again at the woman on the floor, she was staring back at her now, teeth bared in a smile.

  ‘You the judge’s wife,’ Kayla said.

  Maggie nodded.

  ‘How is he, the judge?’ she snarled, and began to laugh, a horrid, high-pitched laugh. Then she covered her face with her hands and shook her head, lost in a memory, all the while laughing. Only when Maggie stepped closer to the door did Kayla speak again. When she did it was more a hiss: ‘So what you people trading now?’

  Maggie stood silent and stunned in the face of the woman’s contempt. Just as she was forming the words to ask what she meant, the boy appeared at the door, and behind him a brown dog.

  He flashed a look at Maggie then knelt down and took his mother’s face in his hands to look into her eyes. ‘You alright, Ma?’

  ‘Tyson, my baby,’ she said, and to the dog: ‘Fuckin’ mutt.’ She kicked out at it but missed and hit the wall.

  ‘Come on, let’s get you up.’

  And as he went to pull her arm over his shoulder, he looked at Maggie nervously. ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘She’s been doing okay, I promise.’

  Realising she had been mistaken for someone who needed to be convinced, someone with power over their lives, Maggie told him he needn’t worry about her. ‘You don’t need to explain. I’m just . . .’

  But her sentence trailed away. The boy was the same height as his mother, and they were both stick thin, but there was more colour in his face, and next to her sunken eyes his shone large and luminous against the chestnut brown of his skin. His front teeth were slightly crooked but no bar to the fact he was a strikingly beautiful-looking boy.

  ‘I’m just here to help,’ Maggie finished. ‘I’m a friend of Iris’s, that’s all.’

  He hauled his mother up from the floor, and Maggie followed them back into the kitchen, where he propped Kayla into a chair.

  ‘We’ll be right,’ he said.

  Kayla formed a last smile on her lips before falling asleep in the chair, a sliver of dribble sparkling at the corner of her
open mouth. The boy took her wrist and felt her pulse, nodded. ‘She’ll just sleep a while,’ he said with the despairing confidence of a physician treating a terminally ill patient. ‘That’s all she needs.’

  As though the animal had waited for the all-clear, the dog now made its entry, and immediately lifted its leg against the leg of the chair in which Kayla slept.

  ‘Aw, hell!’ Too late, Tyson scooped up the dog and ran it out to the back courtyard. When he came back in, Maggie was kneeling on the floor, wiping the chair leg with a paper towel.

  ‘I’m Maggie,’ she said.

  The boy nodded.

  ‘I did a painting of your nan.’

  ‘Yeah, she told me.’

  ‘And I wanted to talk to you. That’s why I came here in the first place.’

  ‘Yeah, she told me that too. But she already got me the dog.’

  ‘He is a lovely dog.’

  ‘Except she’s pissing all over the place. I can’t let her inside. I gotta train her somehow.’

  ‘I am sorry about the other one, the other dog.’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, I heard.’

  ‘I am very sorry about that, about what happened that day.’ After all this time the words sounded abstract and hollow, but on hearing them Tyson looked at her more closely, curious.

  ‘What did you hear about it?’ he asked.

  ‘I spoke to the ambulance officer.’

  He nodded, looked away. ‘So you know. He told you what happened.’

  Not sure what he meant, Maggie cast her mind back to the conversation, and remembered how it ended. ‘You mean about kicking the car?’

  Still looking down at his feet: ‘I knew that was why you came.’

  Maggie shook her head, told him it wasn’t the reason, but the boy wasn’t listening. She reached out and took his arm. ‘That isn’t why, Tyson. I don’t care about the car . . . Do you hear me? I don’t care about the car one bit.’

  He looked down at the hand on his arm, then back at Maggie. ‘I just wanted someone to help, that was all. I didn’t mean to kick it. I didn’t mean nothing.’ He looked at her then, as though trying to gauge whether she believed him, as though it mattered. ‘No one would help,’ he said. ‘No one helped.’