Staying

by Jessie Cole

  ‘Come on, mate—give us a look at your finger. See if you need a bandaid.’

  Luca turned his face from my shoulder, holding his pierced finger wrapped like a treasure in his other hand.

  The fisherman gently pried away Luca’s small fingers. ‘Not too bad, but it’s bandaid material. I’ve got a first-aid kit in my car. You want to come up and I’ll fix it for you?’

  Luca’s bottom lip began to tremble, his eyes brimming again with fresh tears.

  ‘Luca?’

  Tilting his head back in abandon, my son pushed his lips together like a tiny sad bird, but he nodded. Watching his delicate face, I couldn’t keep from crying, and as we walked up the beach to the fisherman’s car, I hid my tears in Luca’s hair.

  The car was a banged-up old ute, and the fisherman motioned for me to sit down in the passenger seat. Edging myself in against the torn upholstery, I held Luca on my lap as Milla huddled in worriedly against my knees. The fisherman walked to the back of his ute, returning with a towel for each of my boys and a large metal first-aid chest.

  ‘Come here, mate, and I’ll wrap you up,’ the man said to Milla, and my son stepped away from me into the towel. The fisherman handed me the other towel and I draped it over Luca’s shoulders.

  ‘Thanks,’ I whispered, sniffing softly, trying to rein myself in.

  Putting the metal chest on the bonnet of the ute, the fisherman opened the lid. Both the boys watched in awed silence. They had never seen a first-aid kit. The fisherman washed Luca’s injured finger with disinfectant, then dabbed it lightly with white cream. Luca made his purse-lipped-sad-bird face, but he kept very still. With great solemnity the fisherman produced a narrow white bandage and then wrapped Luca’s finger with slow, careful movements, winding the end of the bandage around Luca’s palm and finally tying it in a neat, tight knot.

  Like the boys, I had been in thrall to the seriousness of this bandage procedure, but once it was done the situation seemed slightly farcical and I found myself smiling at the man’s grave face. He bent forward to check his handiwork, then glanced up and grinned at me with gleaming black eyes. My breath sucked up inside me at his smile. Startled, I wondered if my own dark eyes looked anything like his. It struck me that this man was very beautiful, with his kind face and gentle hands, and I tried to guess how old he was.

  ‘Well, boys, that’s some fancy bandaid,’ I said. ‘Thanks, thanks a lot. That was awful, wasn’t it?’ My voice was wet but unduly cheery.

  ‘Yeah. Shit, you know?’

  Holding Luca tight, I clambered out of the fisherman’s ute. Caught in this sudden intimacy with a stranger, I wasn’t sure what to do.

  ‘Come on, boys—let’s go, hey? Let’s go home.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ the fisherman said. ‘Sit down a sec on the grass, get your bearings.’

  A pulse still beat in the back of my head, tears prickled behind my eyes. Perhaps I should wait and not jump straight into the car? Torn, I looked down at the grass.

  ‘Okay.’ I stood Luca on the ground at my feet and wrapped him snugly in the towel, then sat down and pulled him onto my lap. Milla stood beside me, the towel flapping off his shoulders, his gaze on the water.

  ‘Mum, can I go back in?’

  ‘Hmmm, but I’m all the way up here.’

  ‘Just in a little bit?’

  ‘Only if you stay right at the edge. No swimming, just paddling.’

  ‘Up to my knees?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Milla ran down to the shore. He jumped the shallow waves, the water splashing up against his belly. I could see him restraining himself from going in any deeper, and he turned back to check I was watching. Wriggling on my lap, Luca loosened the towel. He watched Milla, as though an imagined game between them continued unabated in his mind. The fisherman sat down beside me on the grass and the three of us were silent, watching Milla play. After a moment Luca stood and shook off his towel. He lingered a little at my crossed knees, then turned to face me with large, sombre eyes.

  ‘Mummy, my finger doesn’t hurt anymore,’ he said, as though I might not believe it. ‘Can I go down and play with Milla?’

  ‘Yeah, baby—just try and keep the bandage dry.’

  Luca wandered down to the water. He called out to Milla in his high singsong voice, then he too jumped over the small waves and laughed as the water sprayed up against his body.

  ‘They play well, your boys.’

  I was alert to this man beside me, with his tattered rolled-up jeans and his strong, bristled forearms, but I was still startled by his statement, the beginning of a conversation I wasn’t quite expecting.

  ‘Yes, they’ve always been like that. It’s as though they just fit each other’s little nooks and crannies. It’s lucky, I suppose.’

  ‘My kids fought like demons when they were little.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  I looked across at the man’s face, slipping a family into the picture of him that was forming in my mind. He was perhaps thirty-five, I thought, with a wife and three kids. The man smiled, his lips turning up on one side, but his eyes slid away from mine. He was subdued now, after all the drama of the embedded hook, and I was enlivened.

  ‘Thanks for looking after Luca like that,’ I said. ‘They were very impressed by your first-aid kit. Does every fisherman carry one of those in the back of his ute?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. I’m sorry about the hook.’

  His words seemed to edge quietly towards me in the wind.

  ‘I’m always like that,’ I said. ‘When it’s them, my boys, I just can’t hold it together. You’re supposed to have a rush of adrenaline or something that makes you … capable of reacting, but I just … fall apart at the seams. It’s bad—’ I paused. ‘I mean, it must upset them, it must make them more frightened.’

  ‘It was nasty, that hook in his finger.’ His voice was soft. ‘It was all the way through.’ He looked off towards the boys still bounding about the shore. ‘It made me feel sick, and he’s not even my kid.’

  I pulled out a blade of grass and broke it into pieces, arranging them in a green flower on my bare knee, knowing I should say something more. I’d been out of the world for some time, and these first steps back were Wobbly, unpractised. If I’d ever had any grace in company, I had lost it. I felt like a broken bird after a long convalescence, trying clumsily to relearn how to fly.

  The fisherman shifted there beside me, as though he too felt a restless unease.

  ‘Sometimes I feel like the only person left on earth, besides the boys,’ I blurted out. ‘When I think of myself from the outside, I know I must cut the loneliest figure.’ The words kept tumbling from my mouth. ‘It feels like the edge of the world just here, don’t you think?’

  I blushed, looking away. I hoped he wasn’t watching me. I felt the sudden heavy presence of my own body. Conscious of myself sitting there beside him, I stood up, crossing my arms over my breasts, wondering if I could just walk away.

  ‘What about your bloke? Where’s he?’

  I stared at my bare feet in the green grass, not knowing how to explain.

  He crossed the ocean a while back.

  ‘He’s gone now.’ I felt myself sigh, teetering there on the brink of appropriate conversation. ‘I was with him so long, and when I had the babies he just sort of slipped away. I mean … slowly, and after a while it was like there wasn’t anyone left.’ I had plunged right over, but continued on, doggedly. ‘He seemed almost empty, and I used to prod him, you know, to see if I could find him again. After a while I made him leave—it was lonelier with him there.’

  I’d been silent so long, but suddenly I was spilling words. Dread was rising inside me. I feared I would be struck down for the folly of sharing such secrets. I waited for this man to get up and leave. To say, Well, this started out okay, but enough is enough.

  He was quiet. Thinking. Finally he said, ‘Sometimes I think I’m like that. Like there’s nothing left inside me.’

 
I glanced up at his eyes. They were sad and unf linching. He didn’t break my gaze. I began to tremble and couldn’t stop. I hugged my arms about myself, fighting the urge to flee.

  ‘Do you come here much?’ I asked, not wanting to be rude, wishing to be friends.

  ‘Yeah, I live not far off. I haven’t seen you here before.’

  ‘I’ve never been to this beach. It’s nice. Peaceful.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I felt myself step back, edging away from the man before me, starting to panic. ‘Look, I’m just going to check on my boys.’

  Turning and walking down the grassy slope to the sand, I stiffened against the man’s gaze on my back. I couldn’t help bracing against the idea of his eyes upon me and felt juvenile and ashamed. When I reached the boys they were fine. Luca’s bandage hung limp and forlorn from his hand.

  ‘I accidentally got it wet, Mummy.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter—we’ll fix it up when we get home.’

  I looked up towards the man, and he waved. Standing, he walked down to the sand and back to his discarded fishing gear. I watched him a moment, then forced myself to walk across to him—to be polite, to say goodbye.

  ‘I’m going to go in a minute.’ I tried to be normal, whatever that was. ‘Thanks for everything. Thanks for the towels. I’ll put them in the back of your ute when I go.’

  Nodding, the man was somehow defensive. This stranger, with the kind face and the first-aid kit. I knew that by sharing I had invited him to speak, then promptly run from his honesty. I stood, awkward and sorry, swiping the sand with my toes.

  ‘Maybe I’ll see you again one day,’ I said. ‘It was good to talk to you.’

  ‘Yeah. What’s your name?’

  ‘Jessie.’

  The fisherman grinned then and pointed to the sand at my feet. I’d drawn a large circle about myself.

  ‘Are you defining your boundaries?’

  I laughed, an unexpected springing giggle.

  ‘Well, don’t worry, Jess—I won’t step inside your circle.’

  He was teasing, and I smiled, unsure what to say. After a long, waiting moment the fisherman rebaited his hook and flung his line out into the water, and I turned and walked back to my frolicking, leaping boys.

  ≈

  That night, I lay in bed, scribbling in my notebook. After I discovered writing, I didn’t feel the acute loneliness that had dogged me before. The things I couldn’t say anywhere else felt said once I’d written them down. I wasn’t writing journal entries but telling stories. If I recorded what had happened in narrative form, it existed somewhere outside of me.

  For me, writing was all about secrets. Things unspoken, things unspeakable. I came to writing from a place of great isolation, and I wrote to tell secrets to myself. When my father took his life, colour leaked out of my world. Any aspirations I’d held for the future disappeared. My life felt full of holes. I lacked the opportunity to communicate what had gone wrong, and the space between me and everyone else seemed to swell, getting wider with every passing day. That is not to say that life didn’t resume, because it did, but a concealed world opened up inside me, which, regardless of my external circumstances, remained hidden. I felt fractured, deeply. So when I started writing, it was not an act of sharing with others, but a kind of joining of my outside self with my hidden inside. An attempt at wholeness. A place where that lively self I had been in childhood could finally re-emerge. There was no reader. There was only me and me. I was whispering secrets in my own ear.

  When you are invisible in your own world, you have zero standing. A shadow-walker, an outcast. You have reached a kind of bottom rung—you have nowhere to fall. There is a strange freedom in that nowhere space. When I wrote, I felt free from the shackles of judgment or shame or any sense of what I ‘should’ say, because I was already shunned. I wrote as though the world beyond the borders of my body wasn’t even there. I wrote into the deepest silence. The power I felt in breaking that taboo—ploughing what had been an emotional wasteland—was monumental.

  What I found most unexpected was what I uncovered. I’d been quiet so long, stored away so much, that I was like a cluttered cellar—all sorts of things were hidden in my depths. The thoughts–beliefs–images–people–emotions that I’d pushed away or denied were still swirling somewhere inside me, creating meanings and explanations that were often far beyond my conscious understanding. All sorts of mysterious things arose. I was writing about my life, yes. Things I believed wholeheartedly to be true. But I knew my stories were also a type of fiction, built on the fallibility of memories, and those mixed-up tales we tell.

  ‘I’d like to read them,’ Varda said, more than once.

  It was hard to imagine sharing my words with another, but when I plucked up enough courage, I left her a story to read after one of our sessions.

  Once I was home, she rang me. ‘I wouldn’t normally do this,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Ring you without prior arrangement.’

  I wondered what was wrong.

  ‘It’s just … I read the story and … I think … I think it’s something.’

  I was dumbfounded, standing on the other end of the line.

  ‘I’m not an expert,’ she pushed on, ‘but I believe your writing is of a publishable standard.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Jessie, I think you’re a writer.’

  ≈

  Living at the site of my trauma, I’d grown a thick skin. The garage where my father breathed his last breaths still stood, and I passed it daily on the way to my car. It seems inconceivable, but I rarely thought of him when I glanced inside. The garage had taken on a new purpose. We no longer parked there. My mother used it to store the fabrics she needed to make the cushions she sold at the markets. The space didn’t haunt me, the way you might expect. Sometimes old friends of my father visited and I could see them brace themselves as they walked through the door, so overcome by the presence of the past that they could barely conceal their discomfort. His drawings still hung on the walls, and everything was much as he had left it.

  ‘I don’t know how you stand it,’ Billie once said. But staying was two incongruous experiences at the same time: comforting yet sometimes also distressing. Home can be a complicated notion, the word itself conjuring all sorts of laden imagery. Put it beside ‘family’ and you’ve got a potent mix. From what I’d witnessed, most people ran as far from the site of their early trauma as they could, tripping over the debris in their haste. But I was like a fish swimming against the current, knocking again and again on the door of my childhood, wanting—somehow—to get back inside.

  ≈

  Sometimes the house threw up a surprise that would take me unawares. Folding the washing, I got distracted by a book on the bookshelf and pulled it out. When I saw the single nail-hole through the top I sucked in a breath, the memory of my father’s shrine splashing over me unexpectedly. Scattered through the many bookshelves, these novels were camouflaged, their spines unmarked. Plucking out a book, I never knew when I might find one. I stood there, holding the book in my palms as though within it might be some kind of answer. Smoothing my fingers along the cover and over the indented nail-hole, I randomly opened the pages. Like artefacts, these books were imbued with meaning: dense and historical. It was hard to know what to do with the feelings they aroused. The intensity of the memory had no place in my day-to-day life. Slipping the book carefully back between the others, I picked up the pile of clean clothes and took it into the bedroom.

  Washing sorted, I was restless. The boys’ voices were unceasing, and I retreated out to the trampoline to stretch out on my back and watch the sliding clouds. It was hot, and I could hear the buzz of nearby insects and the loud call and reply of the whipbirds. I peered up at the sky and then turned my face and watched the soft, springing movement of the palm fronds that curved into the skyscape.

  Milla and Luca wandered outside sucking on ice-blocks my mother had made for them the night before. They were quiet except fo
r the smacking of their lips against the orange ice. Standing close by, they kicked at the grass with their toes and then climbed up beside me on the trampoline.

  ‘Don’t drip those up here—it will be so sticky.’ My words were a habit, offered routinely at the sight of a dripping ice-block, and the boys continued sucking without remark. Milla perched himself comfortably on the edge of the trampoline. I closed my eyes, and Luca leaned his back against the upright triangle of my knees.

  ‘Mum, can we go somewhere today?’ Milla asked, and though I didn’t open my eyes, I knew how carefully he was watching me.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’

  ‘To the beach maybe. The hook beach. We could get fish and chips after.’

  Nudging Luca aside, I turned over onto my belly.

  ‘Maybe a bit later when it’s not so hot,’ I replied. The boys finished their ice-blocks and jumped down, throwing the plastic sticks into the garden.

  ‘You better pick them up and put them in the sink, otherwise they’ll get lost.’

  Plucking the sticks from among the bromeliads, Milla and Luca ran back inside the house, and I could hear the oscillating tones of their game. The singsong to-and-fro of their words. Listening to my sons’ voices, I pressed my face into the black weave of the trampoline mat. Through tiny squares of light I could see the patchy grass beneath. I watched the brown ant-mounds for signs of life.

  In a moment the boys came running back, armed with scrapbooks and textas.

  ‘Nonny got them down for us. She said we could draw out here with you on the trampoline.’ Milla’s eyes were bright as he climbed up beside me. I sprang up and down as the trampoline mat adjusted to his weight.

  ‘Okay, but no bouncing.’

  Luca pulled himself up, opening his pencil case so that the coloured textas flowed out over the surface of the black mat and rolled towards me. If I jostled around to create some space for myself, the boys would just nudge in closer, filling it up. As he drew, Milla’s tongue poked from his lips. He was careful, precise. In contrast, Luca drew endless smiling faces, just two dots and a curved-line mouth flung out from the end of his texta at high speed. In a few minutes he was bored and began to colour the metal springs of the trampoline. Milla drew on in silence, and Luca crawled off the edge and wandered back inside.