by Jessie Cole
Billie leaned forward. ‘You have to be quieter here, Jess,’ she whispered. ‘Just be careful—it’s polite here to be considerate of the people around you.’
I pulled my arms in, chastened, wondering how I had come to take up so much space. At home I was small, but in Tokyo I was some kind of blundering giant. On the walk back from the restaurant, I saw how skilfully my oldest sister moved through the throng. Billie towered above everyone in her expensive shoes, her confidence moving her forward in life at a pace that left me straggling behind. I followed her through the crowd, still the child I had always been, trailing after my magnificent sisters, except now there was only one.
≈
The next morning Billie sat across from me at her kitchen table, buttering toast and taking neat sips from a glass of orange juice, a newspaper spread out beneath her plate. I thought about the only time I had seen her cry—after Zoe died—in the back seat of the car. There had been no sign of that kind of emotion since. I slowly chewed my toast, watching her read the paper, unsure what to say. The phone rang, cutting into the morning quiet. Billie rose to answer it, carrying her half-eaten slice of toast. She pressed the phone against her ear. ‘Moshi moshi.’
Listening, Billie whimpered like a frightened child. The triangle of toast fell slowly from her fingers. I stood up in alarm, bumping aside a chair as I moved towards her.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’
A low-pitched, guttural moan, ‘No, no, no, no …’ Billie shook her head.
‘What is it?’ I hissed. ‘Tell me it’s not Jake.’ Having lost one sibling, this was my biggest fear.
My sister’s body began to convulse. She sagged towards the floor in a staggered kind of collapse. Curled up on the ground she sobbed, the phone bouncing in the air on the twisted cord.
‘Billie?’ I choked out.
She shook her head at me, pointing at the phone. ‘Dad. It’s Dad.’
I picked up the receiver. ‘Mum?’
‘Jess?’
‘What happened?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘He did it, didn’t he?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How?’
‘In the car, gassing himself in the car.’
‘Who found him?’
‘Me. I knew something was wrong when he wouldn’t answer the phone, so I went round. But I knew before I got there. Jake knew too. I wouldn’t let him come with me, but when I got back he was waiting at the gate, and he said just like you did, He did it, didn’t he?’ My mother’s voice spilled down the phone, soft with distress.
‘Is Jake all right?’
‘He’s here. He’s okay. Quiet, you know?’
‘Mum, what should I do?’
‘Come home, can you come home sooner?’
I looked at my sister, shuddering on the floor. ‘I’ll talk to Billie. We’ll work out what to do.’
‘Okay, Jess.’
‘Mum?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You’ll be all right, till I get home?’
‘We’ll be okay, Jess.’
‘Who’ll pick me up?’
‘I don’t know, we’ll think of something.’
I imagined trying to get home to my soundless, breathless father. Dead. Gassed in the car. Exhaust fumes. Carbon monoxide. My mother’s silent tears.
‘Okay, Mum, we’ll call you back soon.’
‘Jess?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Just … try not to be too angry.’
Numb and tingling, I was frozen in space. My sister lay unmoving below me, her fist bunched up against her swollen lips.
A rising storm was sweeping upwards through my body. I had skipped denial and gone straight to rage.
‘How could he leave us when he knows what it’s like to be left?’ I felt myself whisper. ‘He knows how this will be.’
Billie stood up, still shaky, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. Putting the kettle on, she slowly began to clear the kitchen bench.
Standing in the middle of her tiny apartment, I was unable to decide on the smallest movement. Motionless, not a single thought penetrated the hollow nothingness inside my mind. Billie made tea, pouring out the boiling water with an efficient flick of her wrist. I was stranded beside the phone. My sister led me over to the couch, handing me a hot cup and gesturing for me to sit down.
‘You know, I’m not angry with him, Jess.’ Billie was suddenly calm, sitting on her end of the couch. ‘I mean, he was such a good dad.’
I tried to focus on her words.
‘No matter how crazy he got, I always think of all the ways he supported us. The way he flew Zoe and me up to Burringbar every holidays when we were girls, the way he paid my rent through uni. He was always there for me, and I can’t be angry with him now. I just don’t feel it.’
I peered at Billie over my teacup. The anger that swelled inside me—pressing hard against my ribs—lessened just a little.
‘We’ll have to organise you a flight home, Jess. That’s what you want, isn’t it? I can’t come straightaway.’
‘Yes, I just want to go home.’
≈
The Tokyo subway was empty as we made our way to the platform. My wheeled suitcase clattered loudly against the cracks in the pavement as my sister and I walked together in silence. Words trailed out of arm’s reach, dwindling at the edges of earshot. We were isolated in the hush of our grief, and the train station was deserted as though in response.
‘I’ve never seen it this way.’ Billie glanced about as she spoke. ‘I mean, it’s Golden Week, that’s why.’
I couldn’t answer, dragging my bag and listening to the clack-clacking of its wheels. The train to the airport was empty and I stood a moment in the open door, grasping at Billie’s sad goodbye across the gap. The doors closed between us, and the train pulled away. I watched my sister recede. Identical buildings flickered past, the thwacking void of the tunnels barely registering.
On the plane, a capsule of silence moving through the night, I lay across a row of empty seats in the dark, eyes wide open but unseeing. I thought, a tearing pain within, of my father’s gone-ness, of the sudden hole where he had been. My mind skipped backwards, skimming over the past years of madness and despair, landing instead in other places. The warmth and safety of my father’s touch. Swimming out past the crashing waves. Clinging together while we dived under them. Knowing he would never let me go. In the blackness of that first night without him—cocooned alone in a machine in the sky—I was unable to block out the simple and undeniable question. How could he choose to die?
The thought somersaulted inside my mind, turning and turning, a looping refrain. And then suddenly, like the bursting of a dam wall, I remembered his voice on the phone before I left—his swallowed words, his floating breath—and I knew with the greatest certainty what it was he was calling for. He’d been trying to say goodbye.
‘Are you ringing for some reason? ’Cause I’m busy now.’
‘Dad, I have to go, okay? Unless you want to tell me something?’
‘Yeah, okay. Bye.’
And I was flooded, silent spilling tears. I bit down on my knuckles until they stopped. Nine stretching hours suspended in the sky.
≈
It’s easy to imagine that if we were to lose those we love, it would be beyond bearing. Perhaps our hearts would stop in simple protest—we could just lie down and die. But it isn’t like that. Our hearts go on beating, still pumping blood through our veins. We keep taking breaths, in and out. Life as we have known it is forever ruptured, but our animal bodies are stubbornly resilient. Cells die and are replaced, vibrating matter still hums all around us, but the endless stretch of grief time begins. Minutes feel like hours, days like weeks. Around us there is action, the world flashing past, but in grief time everything is played out in slow motion.
My plane landed in Sydney, where I waited for perhaps an hour. A transit lounge. I stood and sat, and stood and sat, numbed and silent. A
lone man reached for his acoustic guitar, and every song he chose slammed against me, bruising me with its surreal punch.
I thought, and not for the last time, that things are not always as you expect them to be. The strangeness of the world bustled about me, people going from one place to another, happy and unknowing. Even those who did not look happy seemed everyday and average. Yet the air had turned to oil. Movement was hindered, speech was thickened. The natural forces that held the universe together were altered, gravity had gone askew. I was spinning on a different axis, woozy and out of sync. I wanted to ask the man with the guitar to stop singing. I wanted the world around me to be still. I wanted time to stop. I wanted it to go backwards. I wanted to rewind to that place just before I’d said to my father, ‘Yeah, okay. Bye.’ I wanted to start again from there with a new set of questions.
‘Dad, are you okay?’
‘Dad, you know I love you, right?’
‘Dad, is there anything I can do?’
≈
Before my father’s death I hadn’t been back to the house in Burringbar for over a year. Turning into that shadowy driveway on the day before his wake was like travelling along the back roads of memories so ingrained they were almost mythic. Every lazy tree folding against the car, every white pebble squashed deep within the dirt—even the grey wonga pigeons that wobbled, unhurried, along the roadside—continued untouched by the Dad-sized hole in the universe.
Walking about the garden, I slid my fingers against the prickly wooden walls of the house, caressing the palm fronds and bird’s nest ferns that poked onto the walkway. The stillness was comforting, as though a peace that had been missing through the dark years had settled about the place, snuggling its arms against the buildings in a warm embrace. We had come early to clean up the house before the wake, and when we arrived we shielded our puffy eyes against the blinding light of the sun.
‘It’s so bright,’ I muttered.
‘Yeah,’ my brother replied.
‘It was him, then,’ I whispered. ‘It was him all along.’
‘What?’
‘He was the darkness.’
My father, who had fought the gigantean garden for years—who had battled the enormous trees and my mother’s heart—trying to bring in the light, had been fighting a darkness that came from within. This darkness had gripped him, blackening the whole house, leaving it smudgy and cold and filled with shadows. We had battled it too, never really believing that he was its source, never really trusting that a man’s heart could colour our whole world. Now he was dead, the brightness was so overwhelming it seemed definitive proof. Quiet fell upon us, and we wandered about, aimless and unsure. Where to begin in a dead man’s home?
Our home.
My throat knotted with the emptiness of it, the word ‘dead’ sitting like droplets of mercury on my tongue.
At the wake I was dry-eyed but skittish with emotion. Cleaned and freshened, the house filled with people and they spilled from the sliding doors into the gardens. Almost everyone I had ever known was there. Billie, flown in from Japan just for the ceremony. Extended family I barely recognised. Gabe, Lou and the shiny-shiny girls, teachers from the school I no longer attended, all my father’s colleagues and cronies and lovers and friends. The sudden presence of so many faces from the past only emphasised my father’s palpable absence. And theirs. The lonely isolation that had surrounded us since Zoe’s death. It was all I could do to stop myself standing on a chair and yelling, Where have you all been?
In his last years my father had been terrifying. Looking around at the crowds of people, it angered me that they had left us to deal with him alone. I tried not to think about all the times—after we had fled the house—that my mother had rung his friends and asked them to visit him. Frightened of him, but frightened for him too. She’d ring back the next day to see if they’d gone around, but they never had. Why was it left to us—the people he had most terrorised—to look out for him? His oldest friends had known enough to ring and tell my mother, ‘Get rid of the axes. Get rid of anything weapon-like,’ but they had not been willing to spend time with him, to make sure he was all right. And now here they all were at his wake, mournful and sorry.
The familiarity of every face stung, and I felt myself curl inwards, away from the sidelong glances. Wandering about, I caught glimpses of the faces of my mother, brother and sister across the way—lightning flashes of sadness—but we didn’t seem to connect. Forcing myself to move through the crowd, I weaved in between the scattered groups of mourners and felt the conversation ebb to nothing as I passed.
Hours before, at my father’s funeral, Zoe’s long-ago boyfriend had sat in the front row and sobbed and sobbed through the service. I hadn’t seen him since I was small and didn’t recognise him now, grown manly and square. I couldn’t understand who he was, this shattered man, his head cradled in his open palms. I was afraid, looking at him, this heartbroken stranger soaked with tears—the only person in the crowded crematorium I could not place in my father’s history.
Later, at the wake, one of my father’s friends introduced him: ‘Romeo, here. He’s turned into a man. You remember him, Jess?’
Zoe’s boy smiled hesitantly.
‘I didn’t know who you were.’ My voice came out muted.
‘It’s me.’
‘You look different.’
‘Well, you’re grown up. You were a little girl the last time I was here.’
Silence stretched around us.
‘I think about her all the time,’ he murmured. ‘She was just gone.’
‘I know.’
Our words hung there in the air. My sister had been dead six years, which in grief time is nothing. A snap of the fingers, a single beat.
‘It was an atomic bomb, what she did,’ he said, his eyes suddenly liquid. ‘Blew us all apart.’
Wine slipped from his glass onto the bricks and I felt myself nod. The ramifications of Zoe’s suicide were still playing out all around us, ripples that never seemed to end. I touched my fingers to my brow—an odd compulsive gesture—and remembered Zoe’s sudden sighing sprawl.
‘Did you see his eyebrows, Jess?’
I wanted to flee, far away, with my hot cheeks and all my quiet despair. I pulled my hand from my face, and veered away from him in a single awkward movement, unable to say goodbye.
As the night wore on and the alcohol kicked in, people began to approach me and secrets bubbled up to the surface.
‘He swallowed nails, once. He told me.’
‘And shattered glass.’
So many whispered horrors.
‘I know your mother was scared of him. Really scared.’
‘He asked me for a threesome. Him and some woman.’
‘I was so worried for Janny, for you.’
‘I dreamed of him the night he died.’
‘I should have visited. I knew he was in trouble.’
One of my father’s cronies insisted on taking me into the garden.
‘It all looks so familiar, Jess. Like I’ve never been away.’
The night was black, and I cringed with trepidation at the secrets he might try to tell me now that he was drunk, and he had me alone.
‘Your father. Fuck. He wrote me so many crazy letters.’
My father’s friends all wanted to confess what they had known, getting things off their chest. For me, this litany of secrets was too much to bear. Too many revelations all at once. Weren’t they supposed to shield me from the worst of it? Hadn’t I seen enough? I hung back, waiting, dreading the new information this man would want to impart. He pulled me along, and I stumbled a little on the uneven ground.
‘Come on, Jess. I want to show you something.’
I followed him, unwillingly, until finally he stopped.
‘Look out there. What do you see?’
I peered into the darkness. He pointed towards a densely bushed embankment in the expanse of the night and I saw what he wanted me to. There, in the distance, wer
e two faintly luminescent spots.
‘Mmm … some type of glowing mushroom?’ I said. Perplexed by his urgency, I held myself stiffly against the onslaught of more furtive uttering. Another confession. I was wary, but the man was silent, staring at the two spots. He tugged again on my arm.
‘No, look. It’s him.’
‘What?’
‘It’s his eyes—he’s here. He’s watching us.’
I looked away from the luminescent spots, gazing instead at the lights of the house, thinking of my bed in the yellow cottage by the sea. Turning, I walked back in, leaving the man swaying uncertainly in the dark.
≈
When someone you love takes their own life, they leave you with no right of reply. They have had the final say, and it is final. All the arguments you might have put forward must be swallowed. There is no one left to make them to. In suiciding, my father became both the victim and the perpetrator. The ‘killed’ but also the ‘killer’. The kind of rage I might have felt at the murderer of my loved one—a pure, unbridled loathing—wasn’t possible. I had lost him, but he had taken himself from me. And on top of that, I felt I was grieving two people—the father I had known before Zoe’s suicide and the father who came after. I was a mixed-up mess of sensations—sorrow, hate, confusion, love, fear—and all these feelings had no place for resolution.
My brother and I buried my father’s ashes in the garden, overlooking the orchard and the black bamboo. We tramped through the trees, our faces like masks. The ground was damp and the red soil stained the hem of my blue silk dress. Kneeling, I felt the fine fabric give way at the shoulders, the dress falling apart at the seams. Fraying and muddy, I banged the heavy dirt into the hole we had dug, covering the fine grey ash with an angry vehemence.
≈
In the days after my father’s wake, my mother took long walks on the beach alone and shed weight like she was disappearing. She barely spoke. I watched her go, fretting after her fragile form. It had always been her way, to keep things to herself, but it frightened me to see the sudden definition of her bones beneath her skin.