And now, they’ve been passing each other for weeks, ever since William, each one entering a room as the other leaves it. He can smell her where she’s been but can’t see or feel her, even when he’s close, a hand span away. The baby was an anchor and now they’re unmoored. They float apart in the middle of a lake, with fire on every shore.
The water, the fire.
It’s his first-ever memory: the orange light that flooded the sky, and his mother, her breath on him, her sweater scratching his neck and the smell of her and not-her, of smoke that was a smell but also a heat in his body, his heart on fire.
His first-ever memory like broken glass, pieces that don’t make sense except as photos his mind took, a confused jumble of images.
A car door slams shut, rocks his body.
‘No no no no,’ his mother says, and his seatbelt clicks open, and she picks him up and runs with him, though he must be too heavy, surely he could run beside her. Her flashlight dances through the trunks, branches flick against his face, leaves or branches, and they rush into the open, where the smooth lake stretches out to all sides.
The boat wobbles in the cool water.
The lakeshore pulls away.
The lakeshore burns.
There are no stars.
His eyes and mouth sting with smoke, and he lies down in the boat to breathe. An invisible space between the black of the water and the black of the air, everything unknown but the fish-like gasp of his lungs in his small boy body. And his mother’s arms around him, in the boat in the centre of the lake, as though they are the only two people in the world.
His first memory.
Somewhere now and nearby, a garage door clatters open, a phone, a distant siren, and Dan hears them all at once and tenses.
The fires will get bigger, he’s read, with climate change—warmer springs and summers will extend the fire season and give flammable plants longer to grow.
He is grown-up again, alone. He needs Elise.
But when he calls her, the phone rings and rings and she does not answer. Selfish bitch, he thinks, and the thought, once he’s had it, feels archaeological—as part of his body as bone. How long has it been in there? How long it has been in there, he corrects himself. It takes him so long to see these things, too long to let the fiction go, let reality creep in to where it probably always was to begin with. It’s not fair, any of it. How she gets to make the rules for both of them, take the grief for herself, how no one understands why he can’t get his shit together, not Elise or fucking editors like Joan fucking Wilson, or anyone who’s offered condolences in person or over email or Facebook or in shitty soft-focus floral greeting cards.
Across the street the baby cries again, the sound faint through so many walls and so much street space, thick as time, and when he starts to think down these lines it worries him. There’s only one life, and look at it. He’s wasting his days on a rich old man, transcribing a world both real and imagined, and maybe in the process reversing their trajectories. The artist becomes younger, and Dan, already beginning to age, does so at a greater rate.
He has so many questions for his uncle—straightforward and impolite questions that beg the kind of answers you ought to be able to put into a memoir, if it’s a good one.
He dials Hannah Wallace, but hangs up before she answers.
He should have asked his mother these things, before he took her work and debunked it, before he took her life and fictionalised it.
Before he took
her life.
In the late afternoon, three coffees in, Dan snags the flow and has a good two-hour session on Berlin Warne’s first portraits—Orwellian Frankensteinian images of the American Midwest, with figures hunched in dingy taverns or detasseling corn or pushing pigs up the ramp to slaughter. In each, it is impossible to tell where the human ends and the beer or crop or meat begins. They simply become each other.
Like a cartoon Dan saw once of a gingerbread man in a gingerbread house.
Is the house made of flesh? the cartoon asks.
Or is the man made of house?
He is immersed in his version of his uncle’s story when he hears a heavy pounding at the front door and a shout, his name, and instantly he thinks:
Elise,
and he feels the moment of William all over again, the shock, the panic,
but why doesn’t she use her key?
He climbs off the spare bed and looks through the curtain. There, a woman, upset and familiar, but the top of the front stairs is dark and he can’t make out who it is, and the moment is odd, unlikely, that he should be called on like this, to help, to be there, but he pulls on a sweater and jogs out to answer, flicks on the light. It’s one of the mothers from across the street, the smaller of the two, thick dark hair, face scrunchflushed with tears, eye whites gleaming.
‘Dan,’ she says, ‘can you help me? Please? Kylie’s in the car and I’ve locked it and my phone and everything is in the boot and I don’t know what to do, I have to get back to her, she’s upset, and now I’m gone, and Lara’s away and it’s so dark and I don’t know what to do! Please, will you help?’
Before Dan can even answer, the woman runs back down the stairs and across to her drive, where she peers in the window of the black VW sedan there.
‘It’s okay, sweetie,’ she says into the window glass, ‘Mummy’s here. I know, I know, it won’t be long now.’
When he crosses the street, already on his phone, already helping, he can hear the screams up close as if inside his skull, the baby trapped in her car seat in the darkness. The child’s cries pull every hair on his body at once, with the sadness of her boxedupness,
so much like William’s.
He shines his phone light through the window at her, but quickly pulls it away again. He doesn’t want to see her in there, red-faced and panting.
‘Ten minutes,’ he says to the mother. He can’t remember her name. ‘They’re coming.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, and turns back to the car. ‘I can’t tell her anything, that it’s going to be okay, that I’m here and I’m sorry. Fuck. I’m so stupid. She’ll hate me.’
This last strikes him as inappropriately funny, and he swallows a laugh. ‘She’s fine in there: safe,’ he says. ‘And if we needed to, we could break a window and pull her out. Besides, she won’t remember this, I promise. She’s not going to hate you for this. You’ll have to wait a few years. When she’s thirteen, for sure.’ He smiles.
‘She won’t ever get into the car again.’ But she smiles.
‘It could be worse,’ he says. ‘She could be trapped in there with a giant stuffed clown.’
She laughs, a nasal cough. ‘That would give me nightmares.’
‘Think of this as sleep training.’
‘We tried that, you know, let her cry, because after six months of no sleep you’ll try anything, right? It was awful, whatever the books say. Lara had to restrain me. Hey,’ she says suddenly, looks aslant at him. ‘I am so sorry. I’m such an arsehole, I shouldn’t be telling you my sob stories when you’ve …’ She trails off, crinkles her nose.
‘It’s okay.’
‘I can’t even imagine,’ she says quietly, ‘except to know it can’t be okay.’ She looks in at her daughter, taps the window with her fingertips. ‘We wanted to say something but it just felt so awkward, you know? But we should have. Brought over some wine or something.’ She crinkles her nose again. ‘I’m not good at stuff like this. I’m sorry.’
‘No one is, trust me.’
Both are silent for a moment, and evening street sounds envelop them over the muffled cries of the child. The soulful coo-coora of the currawongs, the rude dusk crawk of the corellas. The occasional slow chatter of a house gecko. Every call sounds foreign to him, surreal.
‘I loved your novel,’ says the mother. ‘It was amazing. I cried. I’ve been wanting to tell you that, too. Not that I cried, but … you know what I mean.’
She turns back to the car to tap on the
glass, then, ‘It must be so hard, writing. Not just the words, but working on your own. You should come over for a coffee sometime, I’m almost always around. Or that’s what it feels like, anyway. Some days I lose it, like my brain is coming out my ears. I’d love someone to have a real conversation with, not just about, you know, baby stuff.’ She pauses. ‘Though we could talk about that, too, if you want. Or politics.’
Dan laughs, can’t help it, this woman is so bright and absurd. It occurs to him that he likes her, and might actually, inconceivably, take her up on the offer. ‘I have a confession,’ he says sheepishly. ‘I’ve forgotten your name.’
She turns from the window and laughs, extends her hand. ‘Sofia Maria Giorgia Rossi,’ she says, and the words are lyric and exotic when she says them. Her hand is warm and firm. ‘But you can call me Sofe.’
When the RACQ guy comes to jimmy open the car, Dan says goodbye and heads home, strangely buoyed by the conversation, though it didn’t seem to have any substance, though the circumstances were strange, uncomfortable. A quarter-hour of muted screaming should have scoured his nerves, but it didn’t. He did something good, and useful, and maybe that’s enough for now.
Later, Dan stretches out along the couch and flicks on the TV and it’s that movie with Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey he’s seen a hundred times and always wished he could replicate. Have his memories of his mother erased, let her be the same dark hole his unknown father occupies.
But this time, for the first time, he thinks of Elise.
Would he erase her if he could?
William?
He remembers their first night together, he and Elise curled into his king single in the studio apartment in Westside LA, curled like twins, like Gemini, secrets heating the air between them. Secrets he told her or would not yet tell her, tried to guess between her words. Already bound rope to rib to this real, practical, solid woman.
How long had he been on his own? It was eight years then since Tess had died, and what had he done? He’d lived in his jeep for six long months, every desert in the west, trying to forget what he’d lost. A pointless degree in art history. He would have liked to punish his mother with medicine, become a doctor, an oncologist, shove that in her face if he could stomach it.
But he couldn’t.
He couldn’t even afford college without her.
No, Sibyl Warne had killed his first, best love with green juices and coffee enemas, hope and words, and still he took her money.
In the end, he used words to punish her. The Alternative had done well, some financial freedom, but it wasn’t enough.
And there was Elise, so real. A zoologist, brushing thirty, nearly a PhD. It felt good to be pulled into the immediacy of four beige walls, white ceiling, brown pile carpet, and her. He felt lightened with the tethering, balloon-like. With her hand on the rope, he brushed the sky.
The End had just been released, and here they were, beginning.
The phone rang brash through the whisper dim.
The voice said, ‘Daniel? Is this Daniel Warne?’
‘Yes.’
The voice said, ‘I’m afraid I have bad news.’
Dan waited, listened.
He could not hear the voice breathing. It continued in a muddle of words,
body, cliff.
Decomposition.
And Dan’s first, terrible thought was
Good.
For him, her, for both of them. But for all the hating he had done, he had loved her for so long. Loved the idea and ideal of her. She was his mother, after all.
And now he was an orphan.
Maybe he deserved to be.
And so, putting down the phone, he nearly ruined everything. He felt Elise watching him, but he couldn’t look at her. Instead, he let his gaze take in the whole room at once, books piled on the pine dresser, on the deep green chair in the corner. He saw everything and nothing simultaneously.
‘You’d better go,’ he said.
But when she didn’t move, he made himself look at her and tried to conjure the words he needed. ‘I have to. Something’s happened. I don’t. I’m sorry. I’ll call you.’ He’d erupted in a cold sweat, was shivering with shock and guilt, sadness, relief.
But Elise looked back at him with sharp eyes and firm flushed nipples and cut straight through whatever bullshit he was fumbling to build, and said, ‘No.’ And put her arms around his clammy torso and pulled him to her warm smooth body and told him she was with him, not leaving, and let him wet her with unexpected tears.
‘I’m not like her,’ he said. ‘But maybe I am.’
And Elise held him in the tangle of sheets and skin and let it come out, the words not beautiful like on the page, but the real, fragmented truth of it, broken down and reassembled. It was absurd, saying so much, naked like that. He wished he had more than a flimsy sheet to cover him. It smelled of their bodies, the fluids they produced.
There had been something comforting about knowing his mother was there, even if he didn’t call her or write her, even if he only saw her name on the internet sometimes, when he searched for it. Even if he planned to spend the rest of his life not-seeing her.
He hated her for what she’d done. Loathed her. Yet,
part of him didn’t.
It was a part he didn’t like to think about. He was his mother’s son in too many ways: the prospect of fame and recognition and his own money, so appealing. He’d used her story as a boost, and Tess’s story, too. He’d pressed their lives into ink onto pages. Made all of it real.
No, his mother couldn’t have believed what she told all those people, all those thousands—millions—of people. She must have known what she was doing. In the books, the conventions, the interviews,
the trail.
She’d run that trail a hundred times.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Elise, lips at his ear in his hair on his cheek. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She blotted his grief with her own, and her body, and they were so strong, stronger than anything because of it.
Would he give up those moments, now?
chapter 9
In the dream, she walks between the rooms of her house, hers and Dan’s. Outside, it rains and the cars whoosh as they pass, the sound soft, gentle. She walks. The floorboards creak with her weight and she pauses; she is too loud and will wake them. Him. She needs to find the bedroom, but she’s forgotten where it is. None of the rooms are where they should be.
But there: Dan. Their bed is in the spare room, William’s room, and Dan is asleep on it, long arms and legs spidered to the corners. He is naked. He breathes deeply. Another whoosh outside.
She creeps onto the bed so she will not wake him, and sits astride him one leg to each side and leans forward and kiss-counts the freckles on his cheek. On his nose. His chin, unshaven, tickles her own. He exhales warm air through his damp gap mouth and he will never know it, how she runs her hand across his clavicle, sternum, ribs as he sleeps; how she traces the lines of his wrist and hip where the flesh is thinnest, where she might so easily push in.
Then, she does it. She pushes in below his sternum, where his ribs curl up and towards his centre. Forms a hole. Makes another. She might speckle him this way, pock him with her forefinger, but instead she draws a line across the skin and muscle of his belly with the edge of her nail and opens him. There is no mess, no blood, no tumbling of innards, just a hole. She digs at it.
More cars drive by in the rain, more and more of them and closer, the whoosh of them like a pulse, like the red and blue pulse on an ultrasound, like a heartbeat, like William. She gasps. He is there, she sees him now, inside Dan—William is there and he is alive and she pulls him free and into her arms and he clings to her.
But it is not William. This is a girl child, and she looks up at Elise with wide, startled, unborn eyes. Deep green eyes, flecked with brown. Faulkes eyes, like her father’s.
At five in the morning, when she can’t wait any longer, she starts walking out towards the highway, using her iPho
ne intermittently as a torch. Most of the time, she can see the strip of sandy track as a lightness against the heavy trees, or feel it under her boots, and lets these senses guide her. The birds begin to squawk and chiree, and by the time she meets the road an hour later, the sky has taken on a luminous pre-dawn blueness. She stands at the side of the road and watches both ways, unsure what to do when someone stops. Should she ask them to drive back with her? Should she go into town and organise a tow?
But the first vehicle to swing around the bend, pull to the side, is a green-brown LandCruiser. A parks ranger steps out, Hollywood hero, sandy hair and reef-blue eyes and he hasn’t shaved, she thinks, because he’s been camping. Though he’s not in flannel and doesn’t smell like fire but wears the uniform, long-sleeved tan shirt, grey-blue pants, the badge of the National Parks with a fetus on it.
Fetus?
She looks again, and it’s not a fetus but a tree kangaroo, tail looped down, curled into itself, dangling from an unseen perch.
‘Hi,’ he says, and his smile is crooked, not unfriendly. Familiar. ‘Everything okay?’
‘I work at the uni,’ she says, as if that explains everything. She hears her words from outside herself. ‘I’m an academic.’
She clears her throat, as if to start again.
‘I mean, I’m trapping. Antechinuses. My truck is jammed on a tree root back there.’ She turns and points the way she came. ‘Would you have a saw or something?’
The man smiles. ‘Hop in,’ he says and nods his head towards the passenger door. He leans into the truck to move things off her seat, the seat that will become her seat—a phone and map and fluoro clipboard jammed with papers. When she slides in beside him, he puts out his hand. ‘I’m William,’ he says. ‘But you can call me Will.’
Cold slides down her throat and through her chest. But his hand is warm, and he goes on, unaware. ‘How far along are you?’
‘What?’ Unconsciously, she smooths the front of her fleece jacket.
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