But the place was deserted. There was no sound except the buzz of the insects and, in the distance, the rush of the river, swollen from all the rains. The central house was still standing and so were the mud huts, but the plants had almost taken over, pulling at the walls, covering the doors and windows, choking the rooves – and the grass was almost waist high, impossible to penetrate. But she managed to find the vegetable garden, or what was left of it. Pumpkin vines, huge, thick, trailing across the dirt, marrows that Simeon would have been proud of left to rot on the ground.
The path down to her shack had all but disappeared. She took a stick to beat back the grass and to scare off snakes, and she fought her way through the growth, past the hayshed and down to the river.
The roar was overwhelming. The banks had burst and the water had risen right to the edge of what used to be her door. The windows were smashed and she could see inside. The one room that she used to share with Caitlin. The floor had rotted and collapsed. Sticky weeds grew up the walls. The shelves Liam had put up were still there, even the table and chairs, and the mattress, the stuffing bursting out of the seams, tangled into the lantana.
Around the back, the old tin bucket that she used to wash Caitlin in was lying up-ended in the grass. She picked it up to scoop out some water from the river. She was hot and thirsty, and she thought she would cool herself down and then get going again. The bottom had rusted through and it fell out as she held it in her hands, slicing through her palm and hitting the ground with a thud. There had been a snake lying underneath and she hadn’t even seen it. It darted out, flicking through the grass and disappearing from view.
She had lived there for almost four years. Looking at that place, what it was and what it had become, she was surprised at how insignificant it seemed. Because that time at Sassafrass was the hardest time in her life. The hardest and also the best. It was the place where she fell apart and the place where she fell in love. It was the place where those two extremes had met.
PART 4
IT HAS BEEN FOUR MONTHS since Sharn went north, and Liam is now on the same road she was once on. He and Essie, following in her footsteps.
After three hours of driving, Liam knows he has to stop.
He pulls over at a motel, uncertain as to whether he will actually have enough money to cover a room for the night, but aware that he cannot keep going; he is tired and Essie needs to be fed.
The only other car is a rusty panel van in a corner of the car park. There are two men and a woman in the front seat, sharing a joint, the music loud. He can hear their laughter in between the brief revs to the engine. The laughter stops as the woman (who could not be more than nineteen) suddenly gets out, slamming the door shut behind her.
‘Fuck off,’ she shouts, and Liam watches as she raises a finger in the direction of the car.
‘Slag’ one of the men shouts back at her, and he guns the accelerator one more time as she walks away.
Liam smiles to himself. He has, for a moment, a flash of what Sharn would have been like before he met her, before she became pregnant with Caitlin and found her way to Sassafrass. He remembers her stories. He likes to imagine her striding through trouble, one finger raised in defiance as she turns her back on the jeers.
‘I was shocking,’ she would tell him, and she would grin at the memory. ‘Sometimes I reckon it’s a pity I smartened myself up,’ and although she would still be smiling, he could never be certain whether she meant it or not.
He misses her already, even though he is aware that he is missing something that vanished a long time ago. He takes the key out of the ignition, knowing that he cannot dwell upon the potential consequences of his decision to leave like this with Essie. It is a rupture that may not be reparable.
The motel is on the outskirts of a coastal town, amongst a sprawl of brick-veneer houses and empty takeaway food shops with broken neon signs. It is early in the evening and everything appears to be deserted. This is the autumn season, when there are few tourists and businesses struggle to stay open until the summer. He knows he will have no trouble getting a room, although the sign seems to be stuck on ‘No Vacancy’, and he turns around to tell Essie that this is where they are going to sleep, just for the night.
The car doesn’t lock, so he has to bring everything in with him.
‘Can you walk?’ he asks Essie, and he holds his hand out to her.
She has only just started attempting to stand on her own and is not capable of taking too many steps without falling over. They make it halfway to the door before it becomes patently obvious that she is not going to cover the entire distance. She wants to crawl, and he tries to scoop her up with one arm, dropping the bags in the process.
‘Okay,’ he says, and he holds her carefully as he bends down to retrieve their luggage. She giggles, thinking this is some new game he has invented especially to delight her, a kind of strange dipping dance, and she claps her hands as they both come back up to a fully vertical position.
He smiles. He has been allowing himself to get closer to her, even in the last few hours alone, and he knows how hard he has been trying to avoid any attachment.
(‘Don’t say anything,’ Sharn had said when he had opened the door to her and this unknown child. ‘Please, just don’t say anything,’ and the air in his lungs had tightened into a sharp point as he waited for an explanation.)
The reception area is empty and he puts Essie down on the carpet. She holds on to his leg, her apprehension at the strangeness of this environment evident in the way she tries to hide behind his jeans. He rings the bell twice, and then one more time, before a middle-aged woman comes out, baby tucked under her arm, and tells him that there is, as he had expected, a room.
‘And food? Is there anywhere I can get some food?’
She looks doubtfully at Essie, who immediately ducks her head back behind Liam’s leg, and then suggests the pizza place next door.
As he counts out the little money he has left in his wallet, he realises he will have to ring Margot and ask her for more. But after he rings Sharn. That, he knows, must come first.
She answers almost immediately, saying his name as she picks up the phone, and as he sits down on the sagging bed, trying to extract the lamp cord from Essie’s fingers, he tells her where they are.
‘Why didn’t you speak to me first?’ Her voice is flat, tired, and so unlike her that he does not know what to say.
‘I’ve tried to,’ and he lifts Essie into his arms, wanting to feel her warmth, but she struggles out of his hold and back down to the floor, clutching the chenille bedspread between her fingers.
Sharn says nothing.
‘Essie’s fine,’ he tells her.
Still she does not reply.
‘She needs to be with Caitlin.’
‘Does she?’ And the sharpness in Sharn’s voice is almost metallic in its coldness.
Outside, a truck pulls in to the car park, the low rumble of the engine reverberating throughout the room, the headlights slicing through the nylon net curtains. Essie looks up and points. He does not smile at her, nor does he nod in response. She crawls across the room towards the desk, and he watches as she pulls herself up, dragging down the padded vinyl folder that contains a list of local businesses. She sits on the floor again and pulls out the cards, one by one, spreading them across the worn brown carpet.
‘You can’t decide for her,’ he tells Sharn. ‘You don’t even want a child in your life,’ and as he says these last words, he hears the low sounds of Sharn’s breathing, so close she could be in the room with him. They are words he should not have spoken, but he has said them now, and he waits for her response.
‘This is not about me wanting or not wanting to be a mother.’
They are crossing a line and it is dangerous. Liam knows it. ‘I know.’ He sighs. ‘But I don’t have it in me, not a second time, not now.’ He speaks slowly, softly, fearing that his words will be heard by Essie because, even if she doesn’t understand their exact
meaning, they amount to a betrayal.
‘I was as good a mother as I knew how to be.’ There is a slight crack in Sharn’s voice, and Liam winds the telephone cord tightly around his finger, watching the blood drain out of the flesh. ‘I may not have been the parent you were, but then, you chose to be a parent. I had no choice.’
His eyes are stinging from the drive. He lets the cord unravel and rubs his hand across the roughness of the stubble on his cheek.
In the silence that follows, he does not know if she is crying, but when she speaks again, her voice is controlled. ‘I took her because I was worried about her. Caitlin was worried about her. I know I didn’t want her. But I saw how they were living. I saw how malnourished she was. I saw. You didn’t.’
Liam knows this is true. She has told him this before, and he cannot argue with her. He was not with her when she drove up to see Caitlin. He had a job. It was one of the few times he had had a job in the last year, and he looks over to where Essie is chewing on one of the business cards, the paper soggy in her mouth. She slaps her hand down on the pile in front of her and watches them scatter. She is hungry and he will have to go and feed her soon.
‘Maybe it’s just that I have to see it for myself.’ He is standing now, and he reaches over to switch on the main light, bathing the room in a dirty orange glow. He catches a glimpse of his face in the bathroom mirror and he looks old.
‘Maybe you could trust me,’ she tells him, and her words are bitter. ‘Maybe you could recognise that I do the best I can. Maybe you could see that sometimes doing nothing is not good enough.’
He does not want this conversation to continue. He switches the light off again, and the room seems suddenly dark. Essie turns to look at him, and because she seems about to cry, he flicks the switch, on, off, on, off, over and over again, in an attempt to amuse her.
‘This isn’t about us,’ he says, and Sharn is silent for a moment, pulling back the anger that has taken longer to surface than he had anticipated.
‘It is and it isn’t,’ she tells him. ‘You can travel so far on nothing, and then …’ Her words trail off. ‘We don’t act together anymore. We don’t even talk.’
She is right, although he feels that he is the one who has been forced to live on nothing.
‘I have to go,’ he says. ‘I have to get some food for Essie. I have to put her to bed.’
She does not try to stop him, but as she is about to hang up, she asks him to promise her one thing, and he can hear how much she hates having to ask anything of him.
‘What?’
‘Don’t do anything to spite me.’
He does not answer.
‘You know. To make a point.’
He tells her that of course he wouldn’t.
‘Look with your own eyes. Judge fairly.’
And, as he puts the room key in his pocket and bends down to pick up Essie, he promises her he will do as she has asked.
IT IS COLD IN THE FLAT. The heater broke at the end of last winter, the switch on the timer snapping off in Sharn’s hands. It was, she was sure, a simple job, but one that neither she nor Liam were capable of doing, and at that stage they had not got around to having it repaired. So they had just left it, gathering dust in the corner of the room, and now that autumn has come again, she wishes she had had it fixed.
There is an old radiator in the bedroom that Margot lent them. She remembers it moments after she hangs up from speaking to Liam and she brings it out to the lounge. It has not been used for months, and the dust sizzles when she switches it on, the smell of singeing hair pungent in the tiny room. It will burn off, she tells herself, and she sits in front of it, holding her hands up to the warmth.
She had not had time to do the dishes that morning and she looks at them piled high in the sink. She never used to care about things like that. She remembers her mother always cleaning, occasionally berating her for her failure to help, and she wonders when she, herself, changed.
When they first got back from Sassafrass, they had still had good times. They would leave Caitlin with Margot and go out all night. He would cook her breakfast the next morning and bring it to her in bed. He was gentle with her, he was kind. She smiles to herself and then, aware of the emptiness of the flat, says his name out loud. ‘Liam.’ Her voice soft in the quiet.
She searches in the cutlery drawer for her pack of cigarettes, but there are none there, and she vaguely remembers finishing them last night as they sat out on the back steps. She had told Liam her story about the woman whose husband had died, who had believed, with complete and utter conviction, that he was not, contrary to all evidence, actually dead. To that woman, there in that room, talking to those reporters, each word she spoke was the truth. Nothing anyone could say would convince her otherwise. He was alive, and as long as she believed in his life it would exist. It was just a matter of faith.
Caitlin’s faith in her choice was, without doubt, absolute. Sharn had seen it.
Liam’s faith in their life, the three of them together, had, for such a long time, been a strength that had given her room to falter. He had made his decision, choosing to bind his existence up with theirs, and no matter how bad things had become he had stayed resolute in that faith. But that has changed, and she knows it is too simple and neat to select her return with Essie as the date of that change, or even to choose Caitlin’s departure as the defining moment. These things are gradual, sliding downhill until there is no going back.
She starts pulling old knives, corks, dead matches and string out of the drawer in the hope of finding a loose cigarette floating around forgotten. A broken corkscrew, a bread knife that snapped in two years ago, coasters they have never used, there is so much junk, and not a cigarette among it all.
She gathers everything in a plastic bag and takes it out to the front door. She will dump it in the bin. Liam never likes to throw anything away. She, on the other hand, would like to chuck it all out, and she opens the next drawer, pulling out old tea towels, scraps of aluminium foil, paper serviettes that have yellowed with age; everything rubbish.
Keep it, Liam would tell her if he were here now. There’s nothing wrong with it.
She looks at the rag in her hands, the edges burnt on the stove, the centre riddled with holes and stains, and she throws it in another bag, but her enthusiasm for the task is waning. She wants a cigarette. She wants to smoke and drink until she feels ill.
She takes the garbage out to the bins and walks up to the local shop, wishing she had thought to put on a coat before she left. But it is not far, and she counts out the change in her pocket. Just enough for a pack.
Sharn has come to this shop for years, but she has never really exchanged more than a few words with either of the owners. She asks for what she wants, pays for it and then leaves. She remembers the owner’s wife, Sofia, once attempting to start a conversation with her, and how quickly she had cut her off. She had been fighting with Liam and she had been late for work, and although she knew she had been abrupt, almost rude in her response, she had simply had no time. Sofia has never forgiven her, and she hands over the cigarettes now and takes Sharn’s money with no more than a cursory nod of recognition.
Liam, on the other hand, always talks with them. He knows the intimate details of their lives. Their daughter’s wedding and subsequent divorce, their son’s attempts to start his own business, their trip home and their disappointment at all that had changed. Caitlin, too, would tell them about school (more than she ever told Sharn), and she would listen to their stories with what always appeared to be a genuine interest.
Having grown up in a small town, Sharn knows what it is for everyone to know everyone else’s business and she has never had any desire to try to replicate the experience here. Every time she had entered a shop she was watched, the newsagent never taking his eyes off her as she flicked through the magazines, the woman in the milk bar asking her to empty out her pockets as she ordered a hamburger, her friends keeping watch when she snuck behind t
he counter of the drive-in bottle shop to nick flagons: she was trouble and everyone knew about it. Now, here she is, fast approaching middle age, and with so little fight left in her.
At home, the kitchen floor is still littered with half the contents of the drawers, and she stuffs it all back in, aware that she no longer has the energy to do the clean-out she had envisaged. The drawer handle comes off as she attempts to close it, and she throws that in too. What’s the point? They will never get round to fixing it.
Liam had loved this place when they first moved here.
‘Look at it,’ he said, with an enthusiasm she had found difficult to believe. ‘All we need to do is paint and it’ll be perfect.’
And they had painted. Her, Caitlin and Liam, and it had looked better, light, fresh and empty. She had been surprised.
But that was years ago, and the paint had been a cheap undercoat, a white that was now grubby, an undercoat they had never got round to covering.
‘It’s fine,’ Liam would tell her whenever she suggested that they do it again. ‘What’s the point, anyway? It’s not like we own the place.’
She sits on the couch, turns on the television and lights the first of her cigarettes, the tobacco sizzling against the bar of the radiator. Essie has gone and there is no reason for her to go outside and smoke in the cold. It was always Liam’s rule anyway, and she had simply abided, not wanting to create any friction around Essie, not wanting to give him the chance to tell her that these were his conditions, if she wanted him to help her, these were his conditions. She had needed him, and he knew it.
He has gone and he has taken Essie with him.
She finds it hard to believe.
She stands slowly, and walks to the row of framed photos on the wall. In the picture of the three of them together, he looks at her with love. She touches the image of her own face, the smooth line of her cheek, the darkness of her eyes and the curl of her hair, and then pulls back, wincing slightly.
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