Staying

by Jessie Cole

‘I talked to Jake. About when Dad died.’

  Startled, she turned to me in the doorway.

  ‘What did he say?’ She laid down a handful of long skirts on the bed.

  ‘He told me about the day before Dad died. About how he told Dad that no one cared.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said that Dad was being intense and he told Dad that no one cared.’

  She gazed past me, out through the door.

  ‘I don’t remember that,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t remember that at all.’

  ‘Jake said you knew he was really upset about it. You knew and rang Dad to make sure he was okay.’

  I watched her face, wary of causing her grief.

  ‘All I remember is that at some stage during that day I’d said to your father, “I’m ready to move on with my life.” I know I said it at some point, just in passing. And when he wouldn’t answer the phone the next day, I knew that he had done it, and I knew it was because of my words. That’s all I remember about the day before he died.’

  ‘Your words?’

  ‘Yes …’ She nodded. ‘I mean, he was so close to the edge all the time, you remember?’

  ‘What about Jake’s words?’

  My mother tucked her long hair behind her ear, and the familiar crease appeared on her brow.

  ‘I don’t know, Jess. I called your father most nights, to see if he was okay, or he called me. But all I remember is what I said. My words.’

  We all have our own sentence, I thought. Our own guilty words.

  I stood there, half inside the door, suspended at the edge of my mother’s room.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘How do we get rid of those words? How did you?’

  She slowly shook her head. ‘I don’t think we can. It’s just, after a while the words don’t feel quite so heavy.’

  ‘You learn to live with it?’

  ‘They don’t hold so much weight.’

  ‘You can’t float them out to sea?’

  ‘Mmm…’ Smiling at the thought, my mother turned from me and began to hang her skirts back on the rack. I thought of the photos I’d taken of my father’s letter. How I’d wanted to let it go, but couldn’t quite do it.

  ‘Jess?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You okay?’

  I glanced at the slates that covered the floor of my mother’s bedroom, at the nozzle of the vacuum poking from beneath her bed.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  ‘You sound a little sad.’

  ‘No, I’m okay.’

  I turned to look at the rack of my mother’s clothes hung up against the wall and thought of the comfort of her long, flowing skirts. When I was small, my mother’s gaze was a constant presence. I had talked and played and laughed beneath her sun-gaze, but sometimes—overwhelmed by the surveillance—I had searched around for shade. Curling myself against my mother’s welcoming frame, I had hidden my face beneath her skirts, nuzzling in the shadowed darkness against her warm skin. Now, in her bedroom, I reached out a hand and traced the edge of the silk scarf that hung down beside the door.

  ‘Mum?’ I turned back towards her.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’m going to get up early and take the boys to the beach, to see the sunrise.’

  My mother nodded, watching my face.

  The chirping of crickets was loud in my ears. That tree, that birdsong, that rock, the feel of the slate beneath my feet, the very same bed where I had first felt my father’s heartbeat banging beneath my tiny ear. I thought of my mother’s strength, of her resilience. How it wasn’t set like stone inside her, but something she chose anew each day. I stood a moment in her gaze, taking it all in—this place, the site of my wounding but also my refuge—then I turned and walked out the door.

  ≈

  Staying in the one place, my memories had become overlaid, one on top of the other, as though every new day had imprinted its shape on me and I could no longer see what was underneath. Instead, I remembered the textures of the past. The feel of the bricks beneath my feet, the clacking sound of my rollerskates, the smell of the rain in summer, the soft swish of my mother’s skirts.

  The forest itself was thick. It wasn’t ornamental, like most gardens, but vigorous and self-maintaining. The birdsong was various and ever-present. Staghorns and elkhorns and mosses and lichen grew on the tree trunks, the bromeliads endlessly reproduced. It had its own microclimate. My parents had planted it, but it felt timeless—eternal. I knew they’d had a vision when they began, but I don’t think they could have imagined just how big or beautiful or self-sufficient each tree they lovingly patted soil around could grow. Planting trees is a commitment to a far-off future. There’s something deeply hopeful about it. When I was a kid, growing in this growing forest, the future seemed endlessly bright. Everything was wildly fertile, all around me teeming with life.

  When Zoe died my father had erected that giant log in the garden in memory of her, planning to carve her name into it like a tombstone, but—overcome by grief—he never did. Once a rich, woody brown, the log was now shrunken and grey. Furrows ran down it in vertical lines—the rain had made its mark. It looked, quite simply, like a dead tree, where once it had all the majesty of a monument. When my father first erected the log, it was large and imposing, but the trees had grown around it, dwarfing it in size. My sister, her life cut so short. She stopped being, while the forest lived on. When my father thought to memorialise Zoe with this grand, half-finished gesture, he couldn’t know how apt a symbol it would one day become. My sister’s log. The dead still here among the living.

  People often proclaim that what’s needed is a fresh start, and I understood the allure. The temptation to begin again, to wipe the slate clean. But sometimes you had to stick around to see things come to fruition. Some trees live hundreds of years. The magnitude of those lifespans are hard for the human mind to comprehend. How can we know, when we plant those seeds, just how extraordinary the trees might become?

  My home in the forest contained so many layers of memory it was difficult to experience them with any clarity. The hope and the loss and the joy and the sorrow, like seams of soil, building and building. There was a density to it, this layering of memory, a richness. I looked out my bedroom windows at the gentle sway of the moonlit leaves, the trees so solid, so enduring. I was planted here, I thought. What will I become?

  ≈

  I suspect many of us have a shadow-walker, a damaged self too maimed to bring into the light. Each one of us is wounded in some way, carrying secret scars. Why is it that we are called upon to hide them? My father’s grief was too large for the forest to hold, but what if there had been a space for him—out in the world—to inhabit that sorrow? A space without stigma or the threat of exclusion. And my sister too. What if Zoe hadn’t been forced to live all those parallel lives? To pretend everything was fine when it obviously wasn’t? Being in pain isn’t a form of failure; it just means you’re alive. It’s time we stopped casting out those among us who are hurt or frightened. Those among us who have been harmed. A wound isn’t contagious, but it’s slow to heal if it receives no tending. We need to bring them back from the other side of the river, all those shadow-walkers. It is dark there, and they are dying in great numbers. Setting themselves on fire. One by one.

  ≈

  Driving to the beach, my gaze darted between the road and my sleepy children snuggled up on the back seat. Awake but slouching, Milla stared out the window at the silhouetted trees. Luca’s cheek sagged against his seatbelt, eyes closed in sleep, lips rosebud pink. A dull ache lingered behind my brow and I lifted my hand to push against my forehead, trying to press the pain away. Gradually lightening, the sky was opening before us, and Milla sat up, spine straight, to peer out the window.

  As we pulled up at the headland, the horizon was tinged an impossible red. Milla and I clambered from the car.

  ‘Mum, what’s that?’ Milla’s eyes were disbelieving as he watch
ed the sky.

  ‘It’s the sunrise, baby. The sun coming up, the night turning into day.’

  ‘We better wake Luca up.’ Milla’s voice was low, serious. ‘He won’t want to miss this.’

  I leaned back against the bonnet of the car. Milla trotted to Luca’s window and pulled the door open. He unclicked his brother’s seatbelt and tugged at Luca’s limp hand.

  ‘Luca, wake up and look at the sky.’

  Tumbling from his seat, sleepy-eyed and clumsy, Luca lurched towards me. Squinting sideways at the slow rise of red from the horizon, he nudged against my side and I wrapped my arm around his small shoulder.

  ‘It’s a sunrise,’ Milla stated, presenting the facts. ‘When the sun comes over the horizon. Beginning of the morning.’

  Face soft, eyes wide, Luca stared out at the ocean and the luminous colour. The red was melting into orange and pink, and moving upwards across the sky. The tip of the sun burned brightly at the edge of the skyline.

  ‘Could I swim out there?’ Milla asked, pointing out towards the sun.

  ‘No, the horizon is just an illusion. You can’t get to it, just like you can’t reach up and touch the sky.’ I lifted my free arm high above my head and wiggled my fingers.

  ‘An illusion? Like a unicorn or a dragon?’ Milla glanced up at my fingers, then back at my face.

  ‘No, baby. Illusions are when what you see isn’t exactly how things are. It looks like the sea meets the sky just out there, that the sun is coming up across a straight line—but really the earth is round like a ball, and there are no edges to reach, no straight lines. It’s a trick of the eye. An illusion.’

  ‘What are dragons and unicorns, then?’

  ‘Stories that people tell. Myths.’

  The waves rolled softly towards the shore, glimmering with fresh sunlight. Milla pulled his shirt over his head.

  ‘What are you doing, gorgeous?’ I asked.

  ‘Going for a swim …’

  ‘Not yet—wait until it’s properly light. Let’s go down and sit on the sand.’

  The feathery grass of the sand dune rustled in the breeze. Wandering downwards, I watched as Milla and Luca jumped from smudgy footprint to smudgy footprint, treading an ancient path to the shore. Crossing the beach, a crab flicked from hole to hole and I bent and touched the rolled spheres of sand that littered the tiny burrows. Milla stopped and poked his finger inside a round opening.

  ‘Do you think I can catch one, Mum?’

  ‘You’ll have to be fast.’

  The sun was a half-circle on the horizon, the sky suddenly bright, colour seeping up into the blue. Milla and Luca ran to the edge of the water, but I drifted above the waterline to the place where I’d made the fisherman’s silhouette. Shells and rocks were strewn about, evidence of a weathered construction, but the print of the man was gone. I thought of Sam and felt my heartbeat quicken. Excitement or fear, it was hard to tell. I wondered if I could uncross my wires. I knew I would try, my willingness a new brightness opening up inside me. One step at a time.

  Looking along the dunes, there were dry-tossed branches tangled in bunches of dune grass, and I moved forward to pull them free. Selecting two pieces of grey driftwood, I poked the branches in the sand next to the mess of shells. I drew a circle around the upright wood, and watched my creation as it was slowly lit up by the sun.

  The children’s voices carried across the sand, and I turned to see them jumping the sliding veil of the shallow waves, pale bodies shining with stray drops of water, the sun a yellow ball against the sky. At the shore, the hard sand around my feet was patterned in furrowed, stretching arms. The children’s pyjamas lay sprawled on the dry sand above, abandoned. I watched as a spiralling wave collapsed inwards and glided towards the shore, rushing in a final surge across my toes. The water was cool and I looked down at the clear, bubbling wave.

  Breaking the silence in my family felt monumental. We had shielded each other from our pain, but the price of that had been loneliness. I didn’t want to be quiet anymore and I didn’t want to be alone. Not trusting anyone, not trusting myself. All those years I’d been afraid, as though inside me a wildness prowled that might one day burst the banks. But I had been steady. The storms I had weathered and still kept my feet. That life force my father had given me—his intensity, his passion, his impulsivity, his fearlessness, his creativity, his drive—I wanted it all back. That wild bright light and all its potential.

  Stepping back from the water, I pulled off my clothes.

  ‘Mum, what are you doing?’ Milla stopped jumping and looked at me, head cocked to the side.

  ‘I’m coming in, boys. I’m coming in.’

  A narrative is a powerful thing, laying down a road that can be walked, a path that can be seen behind you. You can look back and witness how far you’ve come. Writing—that simple act of arranging words in a line—allowed me to bring order to parts of my life that had seemed deeply chaotic. Before I found a way to sense-make through words, I felt tossed about like a leaf caught in rough surf, unable to get to shore.

  Through writing, I discovered a language that made telling my story possible. I believed once I’d finished that would be it. I’d have gotten the whole lot off my chest, and there’d be no more left to say. But as I moved from my twenties into my thirties, I faced a whole new set of experiences, as everyone does. New relationships, new heartbreaks. To my surprise, I kept on writing. Invented stories, told in another person’s voice, based around incidents and encounters that had never occurred. I began to write fiction in an attempt to understand the new complexities of my world. In the years that followed I wrote two novels, back to back, and in an improbable series of events they were published.

  Being published required my participation in realms outside the forest of my childhood. Stepping into the world after such a long period of seclusion was stepping into the unknown. In my home in the forest we had no mobile phone reception, limited fuzzy television and only dial-up internet, which I had never really used. I didn’t know about online communities or blogging. I’d never been to a writers’ festival. These things were beyond the periphery of my small world. All that time I’d been wondering about my tribe—whether or not it even existed—and there you all were.

  For me, emerging from grief hasn’t been about leaving home, moving on, or even letting go. It hasn’t been about hiking a mountain trail or travelling the world or starting life again in a more exotic place. It’s been about sharing words—slowly, tentatively—sharing words with you.

  In truth, I wish that my dead ones were here to tell their own stories. That I wasn’t left—the unofficial archivist—sorting through the clues. The search for truth is rife with complexity, littered with unknowable possibilities. Maybe all we can ever do is acknowledge and bear witness to one another’s stories.

  ≈

  At its heart, grief entails learning to live with the consequences of love. Without love, there is no grief, for nothing has been lost. Connection, intimacy, affection, attachment. For me, these things have come to seem delicate, fragile even. Knowing this, I try to treat them tenderly. But living in the forest almost all of my life, cohabiting with my adolescent trauma, I’ve come to see the inevitability of uncertainty. Even in the forest I can’t keep it at bay.

  These days, I’m not so wary, not so stiff and sore. The line between destruction and perfection no longer feels quite so fine. Sometimes I’ll still cry when I hear the word ‘trust’. Certain things, once broken, are hard to mend, and often the least visible scars last the longest. But deep down, I know that I’ve been lucky, that not everyone is born into a sea of green, or could possibly live in the place of their wounding and find it healing or transforming. Home has been my balm, my consolation.

  Stillness—a kind of moving. Staying—a kind of grace.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the support of the Australia Council of the Arts in the creation of this work. Big thanks also to Varuna, The Writers’ H
ouse, where I spent two separate fellowships working on this project, many years apart.

  To the early readers of this memoir—Varda Shepherd, Sarah Armstrong, Neil Buhrich, Lhasa Morgan, Peter Bishop, Donica Bettanin, James Murray, Anna Sabadini—I still remember all your words of encouragement. Thank you for being so gentle with me.

  Special recognition for my agent, Jenny Darling, who fought tooth and nail to get the text up to scratch. I could not have done it without you. Also to Mary Rennie, who championed this work so fiercely from the outset.

  Thanks always to those beautiful shiny-shiny girls—Louise Nicholls, Danika Cottrell, Rose Anderson, Ruby Rozental and Rachel Scarrabelotti. I’ll never forget your kindness. And to Niki Huang, Laura Rosen, Jane Osborne, Jahnavi Vinden-Clark, Olivia Ross-Wilson, Gemma Holston, Gabriel Finardi, Bradley McCann, Matt Hagan, Crissy Tomarelli, Michael Elliot, Marlene Farry, Emma Kearney, Romy Ash, Sean Anderson, Anna Krien, Tracy Farr, Eliza Henry Jones, Hayley Katzen, Jane Rawson, Penny Nelson, Joseph Bell, Josephine Browne, Lilli Waters, Amanda Patterson, Siboney, Lisa Walker, Jane Camens, Helen Burns and Michelle Taylor for friendship, inspiration and support. Thanks also to my beau, who—tentatively—has showed me a new kind of care.

  Many thanks to Elizabeth Cowell and the whole team at Text, who have demonstrated such enormous sensitivity and commitment throughout the process of bringing this work to publication.

  To my remaining siblings, Billie and Jacob, my mother, Jan Smith, and my sons, Milla and Luca—a special thanks. Without each of you—and your monumental love and generosity—there would be no Staying.

  Finally, to my dead ones—Zoe Matilda Cole and Ian Gordon Cole. The brightest of falling stars. I still miss you.

  JESSIE COLE grew up in an isolated valley in northern New South Wales, where she still lives today in her childhood home. Her first novel, Darkness on the Edge of Town, was shortlisted for the 2013 ALS Gold Medal and longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award. Her second novel, Deeper Water, was released in 2014 to critical acclaim.