It was cooler and the light had changed. I could hear low voices and the clink of glasses and the thud-thud-thud of chopping from the kitchen. I pulled the sheet up over me and Mum poked her head around the corner.
‘You’ve been asleep again.’
I grunted.
‘Chen’s cooking. Dinner’ll be ready shortly.’ She stepped into the room, holding a glass of wine. ‘What are you watching?’
‘Nothing.’ I found the remote and flicked it off. ‘Hasn’t he got his own family?’
‘He’s been a good friend to me,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘I don’t have anyone else, Jarrah. Let me have one friend.’
I fiddled with the sheet and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
‘Do you want to invite someone for dinner? Maybe Tom? Laura?’
‘Nope.’
We sat in silence for a while.
‘Go and talk to your friend,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll come in a bit.’
She smoothed her hands over her dress, nodded. ‘Jarrah, it’s best you don’t say anything more about your accident, OK?’
‘Why? Is it embarrassing you?’ I knew I sounded nasty, but she flinched when I said that.
‘We don’t want anyone to take you away,’ she whispered.
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I could see she was upset. I felt sorry then. Tried a smile. ‘It’s OK, Mum.’
‘Is it?’ She looked relieved. ‘We need to be OK, Jarr. We really do.’
I nodded and she went out. I looked at my phone to see if there really was a message or if I’d dreamed it. Even though I didn’t want to think about Tom I checked my messages. He’d come around the night it happened, hadn’t he? I still didn’t know what for. I hoped he was coming to say it was OK, what I’d done, and we could forget about it. Tom was a nice guy. It was the sort of thing he’d do.
There was no message on my phone. There’d been nothing from Tom since that night. Trying to kill myself had pushed things too far. Two really big stupid mistakes in one day that left no doubt what kind of person I was. Too much for him. Couldn’t blame him, really.
From the kitchen I smelled garlic frying. I hadn’t smelled cooking for … it felt like forever. We’d eaten so many casseroles and so much takeaway. When Dad cooked, he always used lots of garlic. He knew he was a crap cook. He told Mum garlic was a substitute ingredient for talent. They used to laugh about it.
I got out of bed and up onto my crutches. I didn’t like that guy.
BRIDGET
He throws together a meal from what’s cluttering up the fridge and old stuff in the pantry: pasta with tomatoes and a few herbs he yanks from the garden, some forgotten cheese, capers, bacon, stock cubes. It tastes like something from a restaurant, at least compared to Finn’s cooking.
Jarrah stumps into the kitchen and slouches down, sullen and unfriendly, but even he softens a little as you eat, as if Chen’s kindness overflows, washing over you all like the good food and the wine. It makes you warm. It lets you forget for as much as a few minutes at a time.
Jarrah’s eyelids droop again at the end of dinner. You’re worried at how tired he is; you hope it’s still the surgery aftermath. You send him back to bed, and when he’s settled in the lounge room you press a kiss to his forehead and switch off the light.
Back in the kitchen Chen is quietly stacking the dishwasher. You wipe down the benches and, without asking, empty the rest of the wine into your glasses.
‘Let’s go outside,’ you whisper.
Without words you agree that the couch on the verandah is too close to where Jarrah has just bedded down. Chen leads the way down the steps onto the lawn, crosses to the patch of light furthest from the house. Sits.
‘We’ll get eaten by mozzies,’ you whisper.
He shrugs and you sit. Not too close. Not too far off either. You can’t be sure if you’re out of sight of the lounge room, though you think it probable. Hopefully Jarrah has fallen asleep fast, the way he usually does.
‘How’s the survey going?’ you ask.
‘I’ve got a graduate helping now. We’ll finish the fieldwork this week. It’ll take a couple of months to analyse and write it up. But … you know how it goes with these projects.’
‘How?’
His smile is sad. ‘I’ve never seen a report stop a highway from going where it wants. Bureaucrats don’t understand the subtlety of genetically distinct populations. Koalas are being culled in parts of Victoria because there are too many of them, so why worry about the ones here dying out? How many koalas do you need, after all?’
You once cared about the koalas too, but in truth you now wonder the same thing. What will it matter if this small local population, hanging on by a thread, doesn’t survive? Perhaps it’s better to let them go rather than building koala crossings, overpasses and underpasses, trying to protect tiny patches of habitat, creating little oases that become traps surrounded by human development.
It’s better to dwell on these questions than to look at the shape of Chen’s shoulders. That’s one thing you mustn’t do. Dwell on the way his slender bones lean slightly towards you, the way his leg folds up under his arm with a flexibility Finn could never manage.
He slaps away a mosquito. ‘Are you going to tell me about Jarrah?’
You point at the gum tree towering overhead. ‘The branch broke when he was climbing.’
‘Bridget, it’s me.’
You take a deep breath. ‘He says he changed his mind about hanging himself and was trying to get down from the tree.’ Recounting it to someone else, your voice begins to break. ‘But he already had something around his neck, and the branch broke and fell on him and I nearly lost him.’
‘Oh, Bridget.’
You gulp a cold mouthful, wipe your mouth on the back of your hand. Repeat the mantra that gets you through the days: he’s alive. You have one son still alive.
Chen is looking at you with soft eyes. ‘I wish you’d let me help.’
‘You’ve done so much already.’ You choose a stock phrase to keep him at a distance.
‘I wish I could take the pain away.’
A bat lands in the tree with a leathery flap of wings, shaking the leaves and squealing, and you’re grateful for the cover because you nearly say, ‘There is.’ It would take the pain away, you know it. Perhaps only for the duration, perhaps only for a matter of minutes, but those minutes would be something.
You could take him to your bed. Make sure Jarrah is asleep, make sure no one will find out. You could take Chen to the studio, rather than risk doing such a thing in the house. Hell, you’ll be leaving the house soon enough. It may even be that Finn never comes back here – not if he goes to jail.
Chen’s skin is so smooth you want to run your hands down his hairless arms. You imagine feeling his small firm biceps, cupping the back of his neck and pulling him towards you. Your breath comes faster. You stare at the grass, because if you look at him, meet his gaze, you’ll fall.
The crickets start up in a sudden chorus and a frog croaks invisibly nearby and bats overhead call out and the first prickle of stars begins. You can feel the wine thrumming but you can’t blame it. The desire would be there without the wine, you know it. The desire for just one thing that isn’t laden with grief or fear or fury.
You don’t know how long you sit there, neither of you moving, but it’s dark by the time you lift your hand from the grass. You feel the glass tumble gently to one side, the rest of the wine soaking into the lawn. You raise your hand and extend it towards him. Your fingertips find the cloth of his T-shirt and slowly, slowly, you press your hand until your palm is where you’ve longed to place it, over the centre of his chest. His heart thuds against the spread of your fingers.
FINN
Finn’s breath came hard in his chest, rasping in and out. Sweat dripped down his forehead. He sucked in another lungful, paused momentarily, braced himself. Looked up.
Mount Wellington’s summit was ahead, not far, he knew. T
he clouds had sunk down to hang from the mountain’s shoulders. Sandra was up ahead too, out of sight, and he wondered how he’d become so unfit since moving north. It was too damned hot to exercise there. In Hobart he could walk out the back door and hike the lower levels of Mount Wellington’s slopes and be back in a few hours. Any North Coast walk was a hot, sweaty exercise, peppered with ticks, mosquitoes and leeches.
He shifted his pack, gulped water, set off again. It was shameful for her to beat him to the top by too much. Shameful to arrive sweaty and red-faced and gasping too.
Around the bend she was sitting on a rock, waiting.
‘Nearly there, buster,’ she said, pushing up to her feet in a fluid movement. ‘Race you.’
‘It’s only gentlemanly,’ Finn panted, ‘to let you win.’
She smiled and set out ahead of him. He didn’t mind. Sandra looked pretty good from behind, much better than he did. It was definitely his preference for their walking order. The sight of her bare calves gave him something to focus on. Something other than remembering the last time he climbed the mountain, with Toby in his backpack, when Toby was still small enough to be toted around.
His chest was really hurting by the time they made it to the top. They emerged into the car park, strode across the tarmac, scrambled up a shortcut. Avoiding the main tourist lookout, they headed in silent assent to the spot where locals waited to see if the clouds would part for them.
No sign of it today. The clouds swirled damply across the view, and Finn felt his sweat begin to chill. Sandra pulled a couple of nut bars from her pack and tossed him one.
‘Let’s give it a while,’ she said. ‘You never know.’
She was cheerful and he liked that. No one else dared be cheerful around him.
Something had happened in the ten days since he’d come south. The dream of coming home had fallen apart, but it wasn’t just that. It was being apart from Bridget and Jarrah, being alone.
Seeing Sandra, that first time, had crystallised it. He’d wanted to snatch her up, crush her to him, bury himself in her. A feeling so much stronger than their previous flirtation, savage in its intensity. He wanted them to go, that moment, run together into some new world, leave their spouses, their children, all of it. Wanted to throw himself into the heat of it, cauterise his wounds with desire’s burn.
She’d responded in kind. Held him hard, let him sob raggedly, kissed his head and said his name. In that moment he could have done it.
But a squall had blown in across the water and they’d escaped its stinging rain in a nearby pub, and the warmth and the smell of beer and the act of ordering food had killed the moment so thoroughly that Finn doubted he’d really felt it, or seen it in her, and the pain claimed him again, snatched him back from any hope of reprieve, and soon they were eating hot chips across the table from each other and the moment was gone.
And by the time they’d ordered their second drinks she’d dispelled any lingering doubt. ‘It won’t ever happen with us, Finn. It was a flirtation that went too far. But I never would have done it.’
It was so ridiculous that Finn had found himself laughing. ‘Right. Well, thanks for breaking it gently. Maybe you could have told Bridget that.’
‘Of course I told her, but it was too late. We crossed her boundary of betrayal. It was different with Hans. He knows what happened. I had to tell him why we couldn’t come to the funeral. He’s OK.’
‘OK?’ Finn asked, incredulous.
‘Well, not thrilled obviously. But he understood. We moved on.’
‘Just like that?’
Finn had been chewing over that ever since. For him, the attraction had set off a domino cascade of disaster. Sandra and Hans had simply moved on. It was hard to comprehend.
The clouds swirled and lightened around him, and Finn glimpsed for a second the harbour far below before they closed in again. Sandra finished her nut bar and tucked the wrapper in her pocket.
‘Do you think she’ll ever forgive me?’
Finn sighed. ‘I don’t think forgiveness is her strong suit.’
‘Does she blame you for Toby?’
Finn didn’t know where to start. The question of blame, the question of paying for it, the question of guilt, the question of the gate, the question of forgiveness, all so tangled together.
‘It was my fault. You’ve read the papers.’
‘It was an accident.’
‘Not according to the law.’
‘It’s almost like you want to go to jail.’
‘I almost think I do.’
‘Finn!’ She pushed herself up off the rock. ‘That is fucking crazy!’ She came over, put both hands on his shoulders. ‘You’re not still carrying some stupid guilt about you and me, are you?’
He shook his head.
‘Then what? What makes Bridget such a saint and you so evil?’
Finn stared back at her, feeling the heat come to his cheeks under her gaze. He wavered. So alone in this choice. So many secrets. He could tell Sandra. It might help.
‘If it was Bridget’s fault, could you forgive her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then give her the chance to forgive you.’
Finn shrugged, confused. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
She looked around. ‘I don’t think the clouds are going to clear and it’s getting on. Should we head down?’
Finn exhaled. The moment was gone. He wouldn’t tell.
‘Could you give me a few minutes on my own?’
She stepped back, shouldered her pack and strode off. The mist swallowed her in moments as if she’d never been there.
The truth was, Finn had no idea how Toby got into the pool. He hardly knew what he was doing any more, except that he had to stick to the path he was on, take everything that came with it. Pay the price, carry out the penance, and hope that somehow, at the end of it, Bridget might still be there.
Was that what Sandra meant? That in taking the blame for Bridget, he’d given her the harder task – of having to forgive him?
It was too much of a head-fuck; he couldn’t make sense of it. He had to trust his first impulse, the deep knowing that he had to carry this for her, and it was better for her never to forgive him than never to forgive herself. He had to remember that one thing and stick to it, stand up and plead guilt, knowing it was the best chance of saving them. Or at least of saving her.
The solicitor had sent down a pile of paperwork and he’d signed various parts of it. In the normal course of events his wife would have taken the power of attorney, but Malcolm had warned him against it and advised appointing Conor instead. He’d had some strong words to say about the house sale, suggesting that the money went into a trust in case anything happened while he was inside. ‘Anything’ presumably meaning Bridget leaving Finn, something Malcolm clearly considered a strong possibility.
Finn looked around to make sure he was alone, then eased his backpack to the front and opened it. Unzipped an inner pocket and drew out a small wooden box. Something he’d carved years ago from a single piece of Tasmanian Huon pine and assembled without nail or glue, using only dovetail joints and fine timber pegs.
It might have been, he knew, his greatest betrayal yet, but he couldn’t come back to Tasmania without bringing something of Toby with him. It could have been a toy or piece of clothing, those were the things he’d thought of, but when the moment came, the only thing that would do was a handful of ashes from the box under the bed. Some tiny part of his son to put to rest, there at home. Was it some kind of sacrilege, separating the ashes of Toby?
He took out his penknife, kneeled, scraped a shallow hole in the soil beside the rock. He eased the lid off the box and looked down.
He was crossing some line, taking some irrevocable step. He tilted the box, saw the ashes shift and begin to slide. Had a sudden image of Jarrah’s face and the way his older son had looked at Toby sometimes.
Stopped himself. Righted the box. Snatched up the lid and pressed it back on.
He wouldn’t do it, not alone and in secret like this. Not without Jarrah and Bridget. He wouldn’t split his grief from theirs.
The things no one knew. He’d told no one about almost losing Jarrah too, and remembering that night flooded his body with adrenaline. It had been bad enough saying goodbye in hospital. He’d known Jarrah was being discharged the following day, that everything was set up at home, that Bridget would be there. Known he had to go to Tasmania and see his father. But leaving Jarrah had been torment. In the end he’d done it the coward’s way, kissing the boy’s forehead while he slept and writing him a note. Every cell in his body screaming its protest as he walked away, down that long squeaky corridor stinking of antiseptic and death.
He couldn’t go home to Murwillumbah before the case. He only had it in him to leave Jarrah once.
He slid the box into his shirt pocket, feeling it bump against his skin as he put his pack back on. He’d keep it with him, hold Toby close.
JARRAH
Mum had to go out for shopping and stuff and I guess she thought I was better, because she left me alone, promising to be back soon. As soon as the car pulled out, I crutched outside, opened the gate, let myself into the pool area.
It was still pretty bad. I could kind of see the new plants in there, some with their leaves sticking out, some down low. Every now and then there was a little movement on the surface and ripples spread out. Those poor fish, I reckoned, trying to swim through the slime. But Mum promised it would be better in a few days.
I lowered myself onto one of the pool chairs and laid down the crutches beside me. It smelled mouldy but I ignored it. Sat in the pool area for the first time. I’d walked through here a few times when I had to, but never just sat and looked at where Toby had died.
The last time we’d swum together was the day before Toby drowned. Dad had come out of the studio kind of happy, saying the sculpture was going well and he could have a break. Mum and me were playing with Toby, helping him swim a few strokes between us. He could dog-paddle the short distance from one of us to the other. I guess I thought that meant he could swim.
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