by Anna Romer
What happened that day, Ruby? Why can’t you remember?
Jamie was Mum’s firstborn, her favourite. Three years older than me, Jamie had inherited our mother’s fine features and slim frame. She’d also been outgoing and bubbly, the way Mum was. My sister and I were both dark-haired, but that was where the resemblance ended. I’d always been weighty, even as a child. I was shy and wore glasses. Books saved me, but neither my sister nor my mother ever really understood my addiction to reading. They didn’t exactly disapprove, but the word ‘bookworm’ always seemed to be spoken in a way that made me squirm.
After Jamie died, amid my pain and confusion and guilt, I’d entertained the hope that Mum’s favour would transfer to me. I waited through the tearful years; waited for Mum’s grief to wear thin, for her smile to return, for her trilling laugh to once again ring through our house. Eventually it did, and there even came a time when she could look at me without crying. But I’d given up waiting for Mum’s favour. Jamie had died, but she had never been forgotten.
‘Ruby!’ Mum waved. She excused herself from the bald man and hurried over. ‘Darling, how lovely to see you!’ She pecked my cheek and gave me a swift hug, then stood back to appraise me. Her smile slipped. ‘I see you’ve let your hair grow. A pity, it looked so nice short.’
‘Hi, Mum.’ I attempted a smile, but there followed an awkward moment in which I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Mum turned her attention to the man beside me. ‘Hello there, you must be Rob?’
Rob beamed, engulfing my mother’s slender hand in his large one, pulling her imperceptibly closer. ‘Delighted to meet you, Mrs Cardel. Ruby has told me so much about you.’
‘Please, call me Margaret.’ She smiled, then seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain. ‘You look familiar, Rob. Have we met?’
Rob gave a sexy chuckle. ‘If we had, I’d certainly have remembered. You’ve probably seen my ugly mug in a bookshop window somewhere. My third book’s just come out, Emotional Rescue. Maybe you’ve noticed it around?’
‘Not yet, but I insist on hearing all about it. You’ve obviously taken time out of your busy schedule to travel up here to see my show. I must say I’m flattered.’
‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Margaret. Ruby speaks so glowingly about your paintings that I had to see them for myself. Very impressive they are, too. Good thing I brought my chequebook,’ he added, patting his pocket.
Mum linked her arm through his. ‘Then I must show you my favourite piece before someone else snaffles it up. It’s a still life, the subject is a wonderful old Singer sewing machine I inherited from my grandmother. It dates to before the first world war. Are you interested in family history, Rob?’
His smile smouldered. ‘It’s one of my passions. In all honesty, I can’t think of a more fascinating topic.’
I softened at his words; Rob loved history, all right – other people’s history. He never spoke much about his own family. He’d tried once and got all choked up.
In the first chapter of Let Go and Live Rob described his childhood. A mother too smacked-out to care if he went hungry. A string of violent ‘fathers’. Stints in remand homes. And then, life on the Sydney streets. Drugs, car theft, destitution. One stormy night, huddled under a bridge in a sea of mud and shattered glass and syringes, sixteen-year-old Rob had felt himself crushed by hopelessness. The pain of his existence threatened to swallow him. He picked up a broken bottle and pressed it against his wrist, thinking death would bring relief . . . but then a voice had spoken softly to him through the haze of his despair.
Let go, Rob. Let go of the pain and find a way to live.
He felt a spark of hope – he later wrote – as if a light had winked on in his heart. He dropped the bottle, got to his feet, and walked through the long night, letting the rain wash away the mud and blood and loneliness. After that, he turned his life around. He’d gone to uni and majored in psychology, but then branched off with his own radical ideas. Contrary to popular opinion, Rob believed that dredging up old wounds was counterproductive. His resulting book, Let Go and Live, was an overnight hit.
The trick is not to resist your fear, he’d written. You have to smell it, taste it, embrace it, allow it to overwhelm you. And then simply let it go.
Rob’s sexy laugh lifted above the babble of voices, followed by my mother’s musical trill. I sighed and turned away from the crowd. Mum’s cool reception of me hadn’t been a surprise; she was always aloof when we met, which I supposed was how she protected herself from my nagging curiosity about the past. But sweeping Rob away and leaving me standing around like a wallflower – well, that hurt.
Did Rob even care? Clutching my bag against me, I thought about the tangle of black lace crammed beneath my usual layers of dross. Tonight, I silently promised, I would confront him and learn the truth.
I headed for the outskirts of the room.
Bright halogens illuminated Mum’s paintings, making them focal points in the otherwise dimly lit gallery. A quick scan told me they were all interiors, but it wasn’t until I’d approached the first one – a large room furnished only with a bay-fronted 1940s desk – that my breath caught. The huge canvases were eerily beautiful, their jewel colours seeming to breathe under the intense illumination, as though they’d been rendered from living light rather than mere paint. There was a stillness about the rooms they depicted, a sense of quietude and desolation that drew me in.
I wandered from image to image, spellbound. The gallery around me faded. The chatter grew muffled, the clink of glasses ceased. I might have been alone, moving through those familiar rooms in silence.
There was the kitchen where Jamie and Mum and I had eaten breakfast. And there was our old lounge room. Years ago, it had been cluttered with tables and a piano and a wrought-iron day bed upholstered in brown linen. In the painting, it seemed almost bare; the clutter had been cleared away, the only furniture was a lonely pair of ornate chairs.
Further along was a smaller canvas showing the bedroom I’d once shared with Jamie, with its cabinet of spooky antique dolls and light-filled window shedding sunbeams onto a pair of neat single beds.
Ghostly fragments of memory wafted back to me, formless and elusive. Two little girls running through the long grass. Sunshine warming bare arms and legs. The sweet, spicy scent of stringybark blossoms. My sister’s voice, whispering with heartbreaking clarity in the back of my mind.
Hey Ruby, you wanna collect wildflowers? I found some rock orchids near the river; we could press them and make a card for Mum. Bring your togs, we’ll go for a dip while we’re there . . .
Best friends. Doting sisters. Thick as thieves, Mum had called us.
I dug under my hair, rubbing the sudden knot of tension. Jamie had died a long time ago, I reminded myself. Eighteen years. I should have put her behind me by now, made peace with her death, and moved on – but she haunted me even now, and probably always would.
The next painting was Mum’s old sewing machine, the one she’d been so eager to show Rob. It was smaller than the other canvases, more intensely colourful. The antique Singer sat on its cabinet in a narrow room, the window above it aglow with afternoon sun. The black curves of the machine’s body were chipped and scarred by age, its flywheel worn shiny by the touch of countless fingers. The decorative scrollwork was picked out in gold leaf, which glimmered softly under the lights.
I went closer, drinking in the gummy faintness of oil paint, the sharp tang of turpentine. Closer still, until the sewing room was no longer merely a painted image, but breathtakingly real.
Mum had used that old Singer to make our clothes. Floral tank tops and hippy pants, dresses in crazy patterns. Pink for Jamie, green for me. We’d teamed everything with boots and thick socks, even the dresses. It was an unusual fashion combo, but Mum had always insisted we dress sensibly in case of snakes.
You girls tread carefully in the long grass, she routinely warned. But Jamie and I always raced off, never listening. Do
wn to the river, picking flowers and weaving hats from lomandra leaves. Ignoring Mum’s calls that dinner was on the table going cold. We’d hide beneath the gnarly casuarina that grew on the bank, bluebells and purple-pea trampled beneath our feet, giggling madly with our heads together concocting wild stories, or belting out outlandish made-up songs.
The tension at the back of my head returned, and I rubbed it absently. According to the doctors, my amnesia was the result of the head injury I’d sustained the day of Jamie’s accident. The injury had earned me eleven stitches and three weeks in hospital, and a god-awful headache that lasted months. Afterwards, my brain had gone into lock-down, burying my recall of that year in an unyielding vault.
But now, as I drifted through the landscape of memories my mother had created, I felt the contents of that vault begin to stir.
The next painting was eerie, as beautiful as a dream. It was a garden panorama observed through the open kitchen window. Curtains billowed in the breeze, framing a perfectly manicured landscape. The garden had never been that well tended in my day; its beds were always choked with weeds and drifts of gum leaves and fallen banksia pods.
Here in the painting it resembled a picture postcard: roses frothed around the base of a nodding purple butterfly bush, and nearby a clump of spider dahlias bristled in the heat. On an elevated bank overlooking the vegetable garden grew a walnut tree, its bare branches festooned with last season’s pods. At the foot of the trunk was a small mound of earth, like a new grave.
It was a lyrical painting, magical – a summer song rendered in pigment and light – but the wintry tree with its blackened pods and grave-like mound infused it with a sinister element.
‘She’s certainly got talent, hasn’t she?’
An elderly woman had sidled up beside me. She was tiny, possibly in her nineties, and wore a red dress embroidered with white daisies, complemented by a knitted bag and gorgeous black patent shoes. Her snowy hair was braided into bunches behind her ears, and pinned to the neckline of her dress was a tiny bouquet of native daisies – yellow-buttons, we’d called them as kids. As she moved closer to the painting, the overhead lights gleamed off the antique silver locket she wore at her throat.
She bent forward and squinted at the printed legend attached to the wall at the base of the canvas.
‘It’s called Inheritance. An intriguing name for a garden vista.’ She beamed, and her features shifted into a landscape of wonderful wrinkles. ‘I suppose the mystery is what makes it so enjoyable to ponder.’
It was probably nostalgia brought on by seeing Mum’s paintings, but this woman seemed ever so vaguely familiar. I wanted to ask her name, but I held back. The gaps in my memory made chatting about the old days awkward; from the age of twelve I’d habitually avoided talking about the past, and old habits were hard to break.
‘I’m not a big fan of mysteries,’ I admitted. ‘I’m the type who lies awake all night worrying over them. I’m much more comfortable knowing the facts.’
The woman looked at me, openly curious. ‘Then I feel for you, my dear. The way I see it, life is one big mystery. A person thinks they have it all figured out, that there’s nothing left to learn, and that’s usually the point when the next big question lands on their head like a bomb. You must spend many a sleepless night? I know I do,’ she added with a laugh.
I couldn’t help smiling. ‘You’ve got me pegged. I’m a chronic insomniac.’
We both chuckled, and a warm feeling came over me. I felt as if I’d known this woman for years. Her gaze seemed so open and friendly, so filled with approval. And her voice made me think of cosy things: buttered scones, bookshelves crammed with well-thumbed volumes, hot chocolate and laughter. The moment was so sweet that I lost my qualms and had to ask.
‘The artist is my mum. Are you a friend of hers?’
The woman looked pleased. ‘Yes, dear. At least I was, many years ago. We were neighbours.’
‘I thought you looked familiar! You’re . . .’ There was an embarrassing silence as I groped around for the name I’d obviously forgotten.
She smiled kindly. ‘You might remember me as Mrs Hillard. But please, call me Esther. I bought Lyrebird Hill from your mother, after . . . well, after you both moved back to town. It’s been a long time, Ruby. How old were you then – eleven, twelve?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘How’s life been treating you?’
‘Great!’ I said too hastily, then floundered. Now wasn’t the time to go into detail about how off-the-rails I’d been before I’d met Rob; how grief had driven a wedge between my mother and me; and how I still had the occasional nightmare about Jamie.
‘I’ve got a cottage over on the coast in Sawtell,’ I told her. ‘And I’ve—’ Met a really nice man, I’d been about to say, but again my words stalled. I recalled the bra at the bottom of my handbag, and decided the topic of work was the safer option. ‘I have a little bookshop twenty minutes’ from home in Coffs Harbour, the Busy Bookworm. Despite everyone going digital, it’s been doing really well. I sell rare and second-hand books, as well as all the latest releases.’
Esther beamed. ‘I simply adore books. I’d love to see your shop – but I’m afraid my days of travelling to the coast are over. That sea air is a bit too humid for my old lungs.’ She patted her chest, and her bouquet released a sweet peppery scent.
It made me think of grassy slopes, and river water gurgling over stones, and the sound of children laughing. An image flashed into my mind: a room full of cluttered bookshelves, in which a grandmotherly woman sat in a patch of sunlight, reading from the volume in her lap. I saw two children perched at her feet, listening intently. I strained to bring their faces into focus; it was just a tiny glimpse of memory, but all of a sudden it seemed important. Yet even as I grasped for it, the scene slipped away like smoke.
Esther gestured at Mum’s canvas. ‘Margaret’s done a splendid job, hasn’t she? It’s been fascinating to see how the old farmhouse must have looked when the three of you lived there.’
‘It was more cluttered,’ I admitted. ‘Mum was quite a collector back then. She had stuff crammed into every corner.’ Despite my reluctance to talk about the past, the memory of our unruly living spaces touched me like a smile. My shoulders relaxed and I found myself rushing on. ‘Jamie and I were chronic hoarders, too. We filled the place with all the treasures we brought back from the bush – birds’ nests, lumps of driftwood from the river, that sort of thing. Mum’s paintings don’t do justice to the chaos we created. She’s made it all seem very empty.’
‘I suppose that’s how she remembers it,’ Esther said gently.
A length of silence followed. I feigned absorption in the painting, trying to think of a question to ask my companion that would divert our conversation in a new direction. There were plenty of topics that didn’t involve the past: Where had she bought her fabulous dress? Great shoes, too. And what was the story behind the lovely locket she wore? But standing there surrounded by my mother’s enormous canvases depicting a place so closely associated with my childhood, the past seemed inescapable.
Besides, I’d been quiet for too long.
Esther looked at me carefully. ‘You and your mother had a sad old time, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ I muttered, unable to stop the sinking feeling. ‘We did.’
‘I’ve thought of you both so often over the years. Poor Jamie, too. She was such a bright girl. It must have been awful never knowing what really happened to her. All those years, wondering and worrying. I don’t know how Margaret coped.’
My face tightened in shock. ‘What do you mean?’
Esther frowned and moved nearer. ‘They never did find who was responsible, did they?’
‘Responsible?’ The nameless fear that had lain dormant in me for years stirred. I drew a steadying breath and centred myself. ‘Esther, you must be mistaken. Jamie fell. She hit her head. No one was responsible. It was an accident.’
Esther searched my face, seeming
to take in every pore and freckle and line, frowning as if my features were a puzzle she was unable to work out. ‘Is that what your mother told you?’
I stared at her, trying to stem the panic. I had no memory of Jamie’s death; I couldn’t remember finding her on the rocks that day, or the aftermath of questions; nor could I remember her funeral, or the months that followed. Mum had sat me down one day and outlined a simplified version of events, no doubt hoping to unlock my memory. But when the vault refused to open, she’d given up trying.
‘Mum said there was a lot of rain that day,’ I explained, my words coming in a rush, leaving me breathless. ‘The rocks were slippery, Jamie must have misjudged the incline and lost her footing. It was definitely an accident, Esther. Maybe you’re thinking about someone else?’
Esther pressed her fingers to her earlobes. ‘Oh, Ruby, I do beg your pardon. My memory isn’t as good as it used to be. I’m sorry I’ve upset you.’
My lungs deflated, and I slumped. My limbs were suddenly shaky, my brain wired. A vague feeling of nausea swam around inside me.
‘That’s okay,’ I said in a mouse voice. ‘No harm done.’
Esther’s keen eyes – so intently trained on me until that moment – darted away. I followed her gaze across the gallery. People were milling in smaller groups now, or had detached from the central cluster to wander around the walls admiring the artwork. I saw Mum standing in the midst of a small gathering at the nibblies table.
Fingers curled around my wrist. Esther’s skin felt as smooth as ancient satin, but her grip was firm.
‘Will you promise me something, Ruby?’
I frowned at her, still shaken by our exchange. Any request for a promise made me wary, let alone one put forth by someone I’d only just met.
Esther released my wrist, but her eyes pleaded with me until I nodded.
‘Will you visit me at Lyrebird Hill?’ she asked. ‘Please say you will, my dear. We can continue our conversation in private. I have fond memories of you and Jamie as children. Perhaps they’ll help you remember? Besides, I’ve got something for you. A book,’ she added quietly.