This Picture of You

by Sarah Hopkins

  For a moment full recovery flashed before his eyes. I can come back from here. What the situation required was a measured response: with time, with distance . . . Five fingernail marks did not mean his downfall. He felt the rusted points and played it through. He would agree he’d need a tetanus shot; he would stop his game on Laini’s blog. And once it was all done, he’d talk to her again, lay his cleaner soul bare the way he used to . . . Ethan took a deep breath (poor Sal, she had seen the worst of it), then let the rake fall back down to the ground. Following his father up the stairs, he heard that he was still muttering.

  ‘I’m not sure you call that living at all.’ And at the top step: ‘The light is still on. Would you?’

  Ethan went back down and flicked the switch, and there, in accordance with his father’s wishes, he sat in the dark of the basement waiting to see what would bring him to his feet again.

  Chapter 32

  He is lying on a blanket on the lawn next to the garden bed. This is where he comes now when he wakes in the night. The smell is grass and mulch and salt—salt because he lives by the sea.

  God’s country.

  The witness holds up his hand and swears by Almighty God.

  This is where he comes when he wakes and he waits for her to come.

  Finally, tonight, he hears her steps.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ The voice isn’t angry like it was before.

  Before was the study when she told him to go to bed. At first he couldn’t remember what he had done wrong. He waited, but when she spoke it was into the air.

  ‘There isn’t any point,’ she said, then she talked about putting something into a drawer and shutting it, nice and tight. She shouted too. ‘Can’t you even look at me?’

  He couldn’t, because he was looking through the box of photographs of New York he and Ethan had brought up from the basement. The time capsule. She shouted about that too. ‘If I hear you dredge up that day one more time . . .’ No, ‘fucking day’, that was what she said, or ‘fucking time’.

  Then she was crying and telling him she didn’t mean to shout and that she loved him but sometimes she couldn’t bear the sight of him. He didn’t respond because the room was suddenly small and airless.

  Only when the house was quiet again did he remember that she was angry because of what happened in La Perouse between him and the girl. She was angry because he was a liar, because he came home from New York a liar and because once a liar he stayed a liar because that was what he was.

  She repeats: ‘What are you doing out here?’

  ‘It was your idea to come to the garden,’ he said. ‘That’s why we came.’

  ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘No, it’s not, we’re fine. This is the best part. You remember?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Please, Martin, enough . . .’

  He holds his hand up in the air, extending it towards her. ‘The only reason I am telling it is that you will listen,’ he says. ‘I had to start from the beginning, don’t you see?’

  For a time she is silent, but somewhere her eyes soften with sadness. She takes a step closer and looks down at him. ‘Alright, you tell me: what is the best part?’

  ‘You have to lie down. You remember?’

  Lie down.

  And she does, she lies down next to him, and staring up at different stars, she asks—finally, she asks. ‘Where are we up to now?’

  He tells her that they’ve woken up and she has told him the story about drawing on the cupboard door. ‘Like you did on my wall.’

  ‘Yes, the wall of the loft.’

  ‘A graffiti artist.’

  They smile together. There is a reason to dredge up the day.

  ‘So tell me then, what happens next?’

  ‘You had another story. You remember?’

  She nods. She remembers. ‘Does it have a happy end?’

  The sun peeks over the tenements. ‘Of course it does,’ he says. ‘The end is now. Aren’t you happy?’

  ‘Oh, Martin . . .’ Each time as she repeats his name the sound is a different one, each a different kind of pain. The first is fresh, the second is old, the third is quiet. Then she smiles and closes her eyes. ‘You were pretty much my first love.’

  There it is, the best part.

  Now he knows, but he didn’t then. From that day he had made a mistake, a mistake he carried forward. From that day he had thought he could never match her, and all those years he had never tried.

  ‘I was wrong, Maggie.’ That is all he says, and what he means. In the end—since that night with the girl in La Perouse—he had matched her. In the end, since then, with as much certainty as she had loved, so he loved too.

  He doesn’t stop her leaving. Her smile fades and the girl is gone and he is alone in the garden that lives and breathes with the sense he has lost something before he ever really had it.

  On the walk home he stops at the shopfront of Mrs Bess, sits on the sidewalk facing the building. The closed door is covered in graffiti—words and pictures, the tag of the running man, straight up and sideways and upside down. The eyes are the windows, burnt-out holes. The words are overlaid in colour and the letters end in arrows.

  Against the door a pair of stone-eyed pigeons huddle, waiting for it to open. They remain immobile, as though he were not there at all. His head is aching, but it is someone else’s head.

  The memory is there again. The old man is younger, in a place he doesn’t belong, a dark street. The mistake is fresh, still bleeding . . .

  The man is not a memory, nor the mistake.

  It is raining. He is on the street, in the passenger seat of a car driving up a hill to a house with a yellow door. That is where the day must end.

  And if the day ends?

  She sleeps.

  As he watches he thinks not of the girl in the loft but the woman who crosses into the reserve every morning and walks down the rock ledge, cap and goggles in hand. A swimmer’s shoulders.

  When he stands up, it feels for a moment as though he has woken from a nightmare to find the abyss is not real. This is real: a box against the steps full of his grandson’s toys and, hanging on the clothesline, the frayed rug they hauled back from Istanbul and were forced to leave in customs. For four weeks Ethan stayed with his Nanna while they toured Greece and Turkey, and when they finally put the rug on the floor just a few weeks after they’d got back, Nanna had a heart attack and died. Ethan was ten and he ransacked his toy cupboard, furious at her betrayal, throwing all the bears she had given him into the hallway.

  Nanna was Lili. They’d had a lovely trip, but Maggie never could speak of it without tears.

  Next there is a seeping light and the birds begin their call.

  Martin follows the sound down the side path and out the gate, across the road and onto the reserve. The grass beneath his feet is long and wet and wavy. Swishy swashy, swishy swashy . . . But it is just a detail, along with the splitting trunk of a banksia tree, the white paint peeling from the timber railing, the spotted rock and the tanned cliff, like paints on a palette beneath a grand canvas. Martin looked out at it—the edge of pale yellow light unveiling the day. As he reached the cliff there was a memory, fingers fumbling with lure and bait, numb from the cold. He cast, and just as the flight of the cast passed vertical and the motion stopped, he released the line and marvelled at its distance, at the pink ripples in the surface of the water.

  Across the water, the call of the cockatoo: dots forming in the distance, then nearing, they seem to cease flight mid-air, to descend like rain into the single tree near the cliff’s edge, suddenly silent, unseen.

  And if the day ends?

  This is the answer. I play it backwards.

  Like so, the sky his screen:

  The freckle on her shoulder, the scar on her hip.

  A big blue hat and a little skirt.

  The drink spills.

  She smiles, he follows.

  So what are you going to do, Maggie Varga?

>   And finally, to begin again, she stands across his doorway.

  A last wave of blood rushes into his chest.

  Without fear of falling he is suspended in the liquid air, and in the branch of the single tree, sidestepping towards him with the watery eyes of a lonely boy, is a black cockatoo. It is for his grandson Martin reaches now. If he could scribble a message on the bark of the tree, if he could finish the conversation they had started . . . And then it ebbs, this need to make right. As he extends his hand, his fingers touch the branch to form a bridge, permitting the bird to continue its way until it is near enough, and when it is, it dips its head down to Martin’s ear and whispers, chortles.

  All he can make out from the limerick is the sound of its taunting rhyme, and all that is left on this last of gentle days is for Martin to laugh along.

  About the author

  Sarah Hopkins is the author of two previous novels, The Crimes of Billy Fish, which was highly commended in the inaugural ABC Fiction Awards and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and Speak to Me. Sarah is a criminal lawyer and lives in Sydney.