He ended the call and turned on his laptop. He went to the coroner’s website and found the decision straight away. What he wanted were definite answers. He wanted a fixed point that he could look at and distance himself from. What he wanted most of all was to be told that what had happened was somehow inevitable, that Kirsten had always been this way and he couldn’t have done anything, all those years before, to have prevented it. But the word that was used was inconclusive, an uncertain word that hovered between two places.
The coroner said that Kirsten had most likely died by asphyxiation caused by drowning, although her body was never found. She appeared to have taken an indeterminate amount of Xanax, which may have contributed to her death. The coroner couldn’t rule out misadventure. Misadventure—it sounded like an ordinary and harmless word.
Andrew scanned the document again. What he read was expressed in words that were conditional, they brushed across the surface of what had happened that day at Lake George and closed over no holes. The coroner didn’t delve into why a person might have died so silently; that question was left for the people who knew her and remained.
He moved to his window and below him the street looked closer than he expected it to, a small leap to the ground. There was one thing left he could do now to find out about Kirsten. He could drive to Canberra and speak to Kirsten’s sister. Kirsten had driven up and down her sister’s street in Ainslie that day, pacing like a person trying to gather the right words to say.
He would visit Kirsten’s sister. There was more to what had happened than was contained in the coroner’s report and, since her mother had said so little, maybe her sister could tell him what he needed to know. He hired a car that day.
•
Andrew had forgotten that drive out of Sydney, how the suburbs continued on and became at first older and then newer and finally more spread out the further he drove from the centre of Sydney. The houses might have been spun in a centrifuge and dispersed that way. When he was cruising out along the highway, he remembered why he liked driving, aware of the movement, of seeing the world slide silently by, the feeling of being sealed off from it and all that mattered was his destination.
The further south he drove, the land seemed to change from green into a paler colour, the landscape yellow and parched. Closer to Canberra, in a creek that ran beside the highway, willow trees grew from the water, deposited there by banks that had collapsed under their own weight. In the water their leaves billowed out around them.
He started to see on the sides of the road dead creatures bundled up like sacks. At first he didn’t understand what they were until he saw a creature that must have died that day, the long pink smear of it along the surface of the road. He swerved to avoid it and the car beside him honked loudly. There seemed to be too many of them, little brown bundles on the shoulder of the road where the bitumen was soft.
•
When he reached Canberra, he had an immediate sense of the city’s spaciousness. The streets were long and wide, with gentle curves, as though to accommodate a procession. There was nobody out on the streets, though, and it felt like a town that had been built but abandoned. Everything that happened in Canberra seemed to take place behind closed doors, in meeting rooms or malls. It was a city in which the streets had been planned before the buildings and houses, a giant thoroughfare designed for ease of movement from one place to the next. A place in which nobody actually stopped.
On his way to Ainslie, he stopped beside Lake Burley Griffin. The water was as dull and unmoving as a flat piece of rusted tin. It had been such a long time since he had been there and he wanted to get a sense of the city, this small, quiet place from which his country was governed; a place he had seen most often as a thin and static background on the news. He parked beside a tree with leaves that were red. In the lake, the water was a milky-brown colour, thick and silty like the water in a dam. A fountain dispersed a stream of water that was pushed sideways in the wind.
Across the lake stood Parliament House, its windows darkly tinted like those of a limousine. The Australian flag snapped on its mast in the wind. His gaze moved to the National Gallery, where Kirsten had told her mother she was going on the day she came to Canberra, and he understood why she might have decided not to go inside after all. He had felt the suffocating effect of looking at art when he was producing none of his own.
•
He drove to Ainslie along a straight road that led to the War Memorial, a monolithic arch of concrete built to honour the dead. He turned left towards Mount Ainslie, where the houses seemed to press up against the hill making the suburb feel enclosed.
When he reached Campbell Street, the street that Kirsten had driven up and down that day, a sudden shiver moved through his body. He was driving the same route she had, following the path of a woman who was now dead, the trail left behind by a ghost. It seemed to him that what she had been doing that day, driving around Canberra, was looking for a reason to live—and she hadn’t found it there. She hadn’t found it anywhere.
He braked and the car behind him, large in the rear-view mirror, sounded its horn. The sudden noise unsettled him. On the letterbox beside the car, he saw the number he had parked beside was forty-eight; the house he was looking for was number fifty-two. The handbrake was stiff, resisting as he pulled it into place and he waited in the car, knowing that as soon as he stepped outside, he would have to make an investment in what he had come to do. He extracted the keys from the ignition, stepped out of the car and breathed in air that was cool. Gum trees lined both sides of the street and they had outgrown it, set to a different scale than the houses in the suburb.
Number fifty-two was a single-storey, cream-brick home, as neat and compact as a model. There was a clean, white car parked outside the double garage. It was the sort of house that gave away nothing about the people who lived inside it and offered him no sense of what to expect.
As he crossed the lawn, dried gum leaves crunched under his shoes like snail shells. He rang the doorbell, and waited, but couldn’t hear any movement from inside the house. He had a sudden need to leave. What could this woman really tell him about Kirsten that he didn’t already know? But before he could leave, the door opened.
The woman standing before him wore a white shirt, the top button undone to reveal a silver pendant. She had her mother’s awkwardness and her lips were pursed, as though in response to an insult delivered many years before. Her arms were lean and toned—she was someone who worked to look thin. She frowned at his appearance at her door.
‘Yes?’
‘Hello, my name is Andrew Spruce. Are you Lydia Thomas?’
The woman folded her arms, nodded, and scepticism moved across her face, a quiver of movement like someone suddenly aware of the cold. He wondered if she thought he was there to sell her something. And perhaps in a way he was seeking something from her, some reassurance that he was not to blame for her sister’s death. That what had happened to Kirsten was not in any way attributable to him. He wanted someone who knew Kirsten better than he had to touch him on the arm and tell him that he was not responsible. He thought of Kirsten’s death and the first feeling to surface in him was guilt.
‘I know this might sound strange to you, but I met your mother last week,’ he said, thinking the woman would soften at the mention of Renee. But instead he saw something else—a stung look; the look of someone unexpectedly hit with bad news. But she recovered herself quickly and he had the impression that she had grown used to controlling her own emotions.
‘Did my mother tell you to come here?’ she asked, and he had another glimpse of Renee in her daughter, the way her face was so carefully held. It looked as though she had tried but never quite succeeded in leaving her mother behind. Every day she would see Renee staring out from her own reflection.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that. I just wanted to talk to you about your sister.’
She didn’t respond immediately, but finally she said, ‘Kirsten.’
‘Yes,
’ he said and worried for a moment that she might be about to shut the door on him, to turn him away. ‘I used to know her. I was Kirsten’s boyfriend. We lived together when we were at university.’ He felt he was pushing his words up a very steep hill.
Lydia looked to her left, aware of someone else in the house, although it seemed silent to him, clean and undisturbed.
‘You had better come in,’ she said. The understanding of who he was and how he was connected to Kirsten seemed to tug at her. Her shoulders slumped; a sudden new awareness of gravity seemed to weigh her down. She stepped back and let him in. He followed her into the lounge room and sat on a sofa of soft, beige leather that gave way underneath him too easily. He fell backwards into it.
Lydia disappeared into the other room and he heard the murmur of voices. A few moments later, a man walked down the hall and out the front door. He heard a car start and drive away. Lydia returned and sat on the chair opposite him. ‘My husband,’ she said and waved her hand in the direction of the door.
‘I don’t think I saw you at the coronial inquiry,’ he said.
‘No, I didn’t go to Sydney for it,’ she said. She held her hands out on either side of her body, touching the lounge with the tips of her fingers, as though to assist her with balance.
‘Your mother didn’t mention me to you? I went over to her house.’
‘My mother and I don’t talk regularly anymore,’ she said, and there was a directness to her words, a finality, that made it clear the subject was closed. He wondered what it would be like, to shut a parent out of your life. He imagined that it was a door that wouldn’t close easily.
‘Did you have much contact with Kirsten?’ he asked.
‘Off and on. She lived with us for six months last year. She was looking for work down here. After she—when she stopped working for the barrister.’ The barrister. There was something about the way Lydia said those words, holding them up between them like soiled clothes.
She looked at him, regarding his clothes and shoes, appraising him. ‘But we hadn’t spoken in months.’ Her eyes were sharp and her mouth was narrow, giving him the impression that it was taking a great deal of effort to keep her feelings at bay.
‘Well, I can’t imagine what it must have been like. I don’t have any siblings myself.’ His words made him sound like the coward he was. He looked down after he spoke and the carpet under him was the colour of crushed eggshells. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I know we never met, but Kirsten often spoke about you. I know you were important to her.’ His skin went tight and he realised how cold it was inside the house. It must have been the air conditioning. It was colder indoors than it had been outside. ‘We fell out of touch in the last few years,’ he said, when she didn’t respond. He worried that his words sounded too thin and superficial, that they had been said too often before by other people. It was hard for him to swallow, his throat felt dry.
‘Yes, well, it’s nice to know that Kirsten still had—’ she hesitated, as if not quite sure how to describe him ‘—people who cared about her.’
He felt a tear in his eye, large and hot and threatening to fall. Emotions were welling in his chest and expanding as though inflated with warm air. He didn’t dare to move or speak, for fear his feelings might engulf him.
‘Could you tell me about what she was like in the last few years?’ he managed to ask, barely recognising his own voice. It quavered and leapt between words.
Her sigh before she spoke was long and draughty. ‘When she was well, she was fun to be with. Maybe I remember that most because I knew how dramatically things could change. You can give so much of yourself to another person; I didn’t know that.’ She looked up at the ceiling as she spoke and he had the impression she’d forgotten he was there when she continued. ‘Sometimes, especially in those months she was living with us, I started to worry that if I kept giving she would take everything I had. To be honest, the day I came home from work and found she was gone, I actually felt relieved. Having her here almost destroyed my marriage.’ As she sat opposite him, she looked guarded and composed and not very much like a generous person.
‘Do you know if she was getting treatment?’
Lydia shook her head sadly. ‘It never really helped. For as long as I can remember, Kirsten had problems with anxiety. This was before the term was as popular as it is now. Even as a teenager, she just used to worry unnecessarily. Most of the time she was fine, but when it came it was debilitating.’ She touched her fingers to her lips. ‘It never did become manageable for her.’
He wondered how it was possible for him to have lived with Kirsten and not to have known that she suffered from this condition. Maybe he’d been too preoccupied with understanding himself to have ever really known anyone else. Maybe it had taken him this long in his life to begin to look outwards, to begin to understand others.
‘And it was something she was very good at hiding. Mum always used to tell her she didn’t have a problem, that everyone felt the way she did sometimes.’
‘Did you know Kirsten came here?’ Andrew asked. ‘That on the day it happened, she drove past your house several times?’
She stiffened. ‘My mother told me. Kirsten was always welcome here.’ She looked past him. There was a pause and the house was so quiet, it might have been located amid empty fields.
‘Do you know what it was like in the end?’ The way she held her mouth, the flatness with which she spoke her words, made him think she was saying something she’d been waiting a long time to say.
‘Talking to her, talking to Kirsten, was like waiting for glass to break. You know that moment when you drop something and you wait to see whether or not it shatters?’ She looked at him, to see if he’d understood what she had said. ‘That’s what it was like with Kirsten. You never knew if she would be upset by even the smallest thing. It was the same way with Mum, too, when we were growing up. We were always walking around the house on tenterhooks.’ There were tears in the corners of her eyes, tears of anger more than of sadness. ‘For a long time, I used to forgive Kirsten for being that way because I thought she didn’t know the effect she had on other people.’ She stood up and moved to the window. It was overcast outside.
On the coffee table was a Vogue Good Living and the house on the cover was open and airy; through the window the sky and the sea were the same effortless blue.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘To have upset you.’ He felt he had come here into her house only to reopen old wounds, injuries she thought had healed.
She smiled at him, a smile that looked sore. She unfolded her arms. ‘No, I’m sorry . . . I wish I only had nice things to tell you about her.’
He rose to leave. When he was on the other side of the flyscreen door, she said, ‘She had a difficult relationship, you know.’ She cleared her throat. ‘With our stepfather.’
He looked at her through the gauze of the flyscreen, wanting to know more, but she bore the expression of someone who knows something but doesn’t know what to do with that information.
He walked back across the freshly mowed lawn to the hire car. The interior smelt of new plastic. He fitted the key into the ignition, but found himself unable to start the car. He wondered why Kirsten had come here that day but not gone in. He wondered whether there was something in Kirsten’s life that she had come down here to share, but couldn’t bring herself to speak of and so instead remained silent in her car.
He drove back to the city centre with a hard feeling in his chest, a knot of emotion that sat under his sternum. Was it possible for anyone to live without letting this hardness into their heart? Or was it something that set in with age, inevitable somehow? The streets, wide and gentle, ushering him through the city and out the other side, heading back towards Sydney.
•
Half an hour out of Canberra, past flat, open paddocks where bales of hay were rolled into balls like oversized skeins of wool, he stopped at Lake George. The water had receded, exposing the dry grass, a dirty yellow that had fo
rmed the bottom of the lake when it was full. In the distance, the brackish silver water seemed still, a body of water that did not lap at its shores.
The water in the air sharpened the definition of the hills and the trees in the distance, but left a haze over the land. Behind the lake, wind turbines twirled in large, slow circles. The movement was mesmerising, the blades swishing through the air like pinwheels under a constant breath. The air glistened with water, evaporating and condensing, forming clouds, biding its time and waiting to rain.
Beneath the lake was a reservoir of water that the lake drained into, water settled onto the grass and eventually vanished below. He thought of it under the landscape, surging, moving through channels of old rock, a dark underground sea roaring away beneath him.
‘It’s a bit eerie, isn’t it?’ A voice behind him spoke and he turned, startled. A man sat with the door open, leaning from his car, eating an orange. He hadn’t noticed him there. The man had a white head of hair and a beard that covered only his chin.
‘God, you gave me a fright,’ Andrew said. ‘It’s been a while since I last came here. I don’t think I’ve been here since I was a kid.’
‘You should have seen it a year ago. Completely empty, it was just a field. There was cattle grazing out where the water is now.’ The man nodded towards the lake then bit into the orange, dripping juice onto the gravel at his feet.
Andrew moved closer to a wooden post to which flowers had been taped. The petals had hardened and turned brittle and brown, like flowers used to make potpourri. The curled red ribbon that held the bouquet in place was the only colour that remained.
The man in the car closed the door. Andrew turned and watched as he reversed the car then drove away. It would have been a day like this when Kirsten had been there; a day when there were very few other people around. How long had she sat in her car? What had she thought about but been unable to say?
He looked out into the haze of refracted water. What sort of numbness would it have taken to have walked out there? There was a silence about this lake, as though the water had blunted every sound.
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