As though immersed in a bizarre movie, Mia watched Eric step towards Lucinda’s upturned face, take her chin in his fingers and kiss her in a way he had never kissed Mia in all the time she had known him. He slipped an arm around her slim shoulders and they both sauntered towards the departure lounge.
‘Are you okay?’ the young woman with the braids enquired, appearing from nowhere, her brow crinkled in concern.
‘Oh, yes. Yes. I’m fine,’ Mia said, sniffing back her tears and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She watched the young woman’s braids swing as she turned and strode to the counter, immediately returning with a purse pack of tissues and a sympathetic smile.
‘I have no money on me,’ Mia said refusing the tissues, desperate to claw back a semblance of pride.
‘That’s okay. Keep them,’ the braided young woman said, her sympathetic smile now oozing pity.
Mia nodded her thanks, snatched the tissues and scampered from the store, planning to leave the airport as quickly as humanly possible.
‘Calling Lucinda Brayshaw-Mahoney and Eric Sandhurst. Your flight to Brisbane is about to depart. Please make your way to Gate 18 immediately.’
Mia stopped and turned her head towards the invisible PA system, certain she had misheard its message. She had not checked the destination of QF388, only the gate number. Eric had told her he was travelling to Sydney. Yet the PA system had said Brisbane. Torn between the need to be clear about where Eric and Lucinda were actually heading, and her desperate desire to step out of this surreal fantasy into which she had been trapped as a reluctant player, Mia made her way to Gate 18, by now impervious to the possibility of being seen.
Eric and Lucinda ran ahead, their feet clicking along the polished tiles, their laughter causing others to turn and watch. Memories flooded back as she watched the protective way in which Eric grasped Lucinda’s hand. She tried to recall when she and he had stopped holding hands.
Once Gate 18 was in view, Mia ceased running behind them, immediately apologising to a suited man who cluckingly swerved to avoid her, slamming her leg with his briefcase and choosing not to apologise in the process. Rubbing the pain in her leg she watched the radiant smile of the man who was her life as he handed the flight attendant their boarding passes and disappeared into the boarding tunnel with the woman he so obviously adored.
With every thread of strength she could muster, Mia walked towards the terminal exit, stopping to check the departure board once more. ‘Departed’ flashed alongside ‘QF388 Brisbane’. He had lied to her yet again.
She spent less than 30 minutes at the gym, unable to be around people who were coping so capably with life.
At 4.00pm she called his number and burst into tears the moment he answered.
CHAPTER NINE
Tim folded and hung the tea towel after helping Annie with the washing up, feeling rankled by several futile attempts to drag her into a productive conversation about Lauren Quayle’s visit and what Annie honestly intended to do about the social worker’s veiled threats. ‘If you don’t get Rachel seen by a doctor they could put her in foster care,’ Tim pleaded.
‘I’ll phone Dr Shepherd when I have time,’ had been her most salient comment. She dried her hands and reached up to the medicine cupboard, removing a blister pack from which she squeezed two pills.
‘Do you have a migraine?’ Tim asked frowning. Despite not appearing to be fit, his mother was rarely sick.
‘Yes, love, but if I take these and turn in for an early night, it’ll be gone by morning.’
She kissed Tim goodnight and shuffled towards her bedroom, leaving him to stare at the pile of unfolded washing in the laundry, which pricked his conscience due to his mother’s uncharacteristic debilitation.
Glancing without feeling or thought at the sight, through the kitchen window, of his father working at the bench in the shed, Tim grabbed up the basket of fresh washing, pulled a cold stubby from the fridge and pointed the remote at the television. The in-depth banter of his favourite footy panel show was sufficiently entertaining to deflect from the mind-numbing repetitiveness of folding — although he was supremely grateful that the task was confined to linen and towels and excluded parental underwear.
Later, with an armful of folded towels balanced precariously under his chin, Tim toed opened the door of the old oak wardrobe they used as a laundry cupboard, only to find it was ridiculously untidy and nothing was in its proper place. He stretched up and began pushing the towels into the only available space, which happened to be on the top shelf between an ancient shoebox and an eclectic collection of balled wool, the multiple colours of which were dulled by the cloudy plastic bag shrouding them.
‘Jeezus,’ he muttered, his teeth clenched with the effort of squeezing the towels into the disproportionate space, finally surrendering and setting about rearranging the shelf’s contents.
The square shoebox, its unbendable cardboard the same colour as faded concrete, did not initially leave the cupboard willingly, its surprisingly leaden weight at odds with its dimensions. Tim eventually coaxed it down and placed it on top of the washing machine. His anxious attempts to untie the string, wrapped around several times, were frustrated by his short nails and his burning curiosity which had quickly morphed into impatience. Eventually, with a single snip from sharp scissors, the string instantly lost traction and the lid slipped off to reveal old snapshots of assorted sizes, some coloured, others black and white, with even the occasional sepia-toned snap the size of a postage stamp.
Steeped in a sensation of wrongdoing, because of the secrecy that permeated his father’s family history, Tim nevertheless knew he had made a significant — if prohibited — find in this box. With a sudden sense of urgency he threw the few photographs he had examined, along with the cut string, into the box and made his way to Rachel’s room where he knew she would still be doing her homework at her desk under the window.
‘What do you want?’ Rachel said turning to see Tim’s head peeking around after he had knocked softly on her door.
He stepped in, his exhilaration and the old box he held in his hands immediately grabbing Rachel’s attention.
‘Look at these,’ he whispered setting the box down on her desk and pulling the curtain aside slightly to make absolutely certain the old man was still engrossed in whatever he was doing in the shed. ‘Heaps of old photos. And I’d bet my left one they’re the old man’s family.’
‘Are you serious?’ Rachel said immediately forgetting her homework and reaching for the box.
Tim immediately whisked the box from Rachel’s desk and strode over to her bed, upending the box to release the snapshots — at least a hundred of them — plus countless brittle insect carcasses and small collections of fluff of indeterminable origin.
‘Tim,’ Rachel whined, ‘look what you’ve done.’ Together they quickly gathered the debris that he had tipped onto her pink doona and shook it into the box before turning back to the photographs.
Tim shuffled and slid through the pile excitedly, searching for one of the photos he had found when he had first untied the box in the laundry. ‘Look,’ he said finally locating it, ‘don’t you reckon this little guy looks like Ben?’ Tim handed the faded photograph to her of a dark-haired boy aged about seven, his pout the same as that which sometimes appeared on Ben’s face. His dark eyes resembled Ben’s as well, but in place of Ben’s lively darting sparkle, this boy’s glare had a shallow coldness about it.
Rachel grabbed the photo and stared at it. ‘That’s really creepy,’ she said grimacing and eventually shoving it back at Tim.
‘And what about these?’ Tim hurriedly picked two photographs, which he placed down side by side on the pink silken surface of the doona.
‘This is the earlier one,’ he said pointing to a shot of a tall, thin man with brown hair. A little girl aged about two, with a mop of dark curls, was nestled on his hip and a small dark woman in a floral dress smiled at his side. A dark-haired boy about six years old stoo
d in front of the man whose free hand rested protectively on his shoulder, while a girl of about four with long fair braids hugged the floral dress of the woman. In the background, a neat cottage and rose garden conveyed an air of family happiness and contentment. ‘The boy in this snap isn’t the same kid as the one who looks like Ben,’ Tim said. ‘I reckon that’s because he wasn’t born when this was taken … Now, look at this one,’ he pointed to the next photograph, which featured four children and two adults in front of a rundown hayshed, their bleak expressions in direct contrast to the earlier snap. Tim wordlessly pointed to the face of the woman and glanced towards Rachel.
‘She’s a bit older, but she looks so sad in this one,’ Rachel said peering at the photograph. ‘And there’s the little kid who looks like Ben.’ She pointed to a one year old staring at the camera from his mother’s thin hip. Rachel’s eyes silently scanned the photograph, drinking in every detail. ‘Do you reckon he’s Dad?’ she said her voice barely a whisper. She peered closer. ‘Their father is different in this one.’ She pointed to the surly nuggety man at the woman’s side. ‘Do you reckon that’s her next husband — like, it’s Dad’s father?’ Rachel’s face contorted and with a shiver of her shoulders, she dropped the photograph back onto the pile. ‘That would make him our grandfather. That’s hideous, Tim. He gives me the creeps just looking at him.’
‘And the woman is our grandmother,’ Tim added, retrieving the photo and peering closely at the woman he now knew had once been happy, but whose joy had curdled later in life to misery.
Silently sliding the photographs around on the pink doona Tim selected another snap and handed it to Rachel. ‘Look at her,’ he said, pointing to the smaller of two girls who were posing woodenly for the camera in bathers.
‘Oh my god. She has my nose. And my eyes. She looks like me,’ Rachel said peering closer.
‘That’s the little two year old who was being held by her dad in the happy family photo. She’s about 10 years old in this one, and she’s looking pretty pissed off,’ Tim said.
Rachel peered closely at the photograph of the two girls — her father’s half-sisters, both in shapeless two-piece bathers — the younger one with dark hair, and the older one of about 13 years old with fair hair. ‘Yeah. They both look fed up. Like they’re hating having their photo taken in bathers.’ She pulled a face and immediately shoved the photo back at Tim.
Tim stared down at the image of the two unsmiling girls. ‘You can’t blame them,’ he joked. ‘They look bloody ridiculous. Bikinis were more like Nanna’s undies in those days,’ he joked. ‘I just don’t get why no one talks about them,’ he added, suddenly serious as he packed the photographs back into their box.
‘Who cares? I’m more interested in getting my math homework done,’ Rachel said, returning to her desk.
Tim retied the string, wondering why Rachel was suddenly so dismissive. He had made one hell of an exciting find and he knew this would not be the last time he would examine the photographs that seemed, at last, to be giving up buried secrets. He closed her bedroom door quietly as he crept out with the box, which he replaced in the old laundry cupboard before heading out the back towards the light that spilled from the open door of the garage.
Peter filed a spark plug at his workbench, a half-bottle of whiskey at his side, the old grey four-wheel drive straddling the service pit like a silently stranded whale.
‘Howdy, Dad,’ Tim said, stepping in and making his way towards the workbench, the smell of whiskey already evident.
Peter turned towards him with an uncharacteristic air of joie de vivre. ‘What’s up, Tim?’
‘Just want to chat,’ he replied.
Peter snorted. ‘About what?’
‘Just wondering why we never talk about your family.’
Peter stopped filing and glanced at Tim. ‘There’s nothing to talk about, lad,’ he said his gnarled fingers readjusting their grip on the small file.
‘Were they cattle farmers too?’ Tim asked, recalling the backgrounds on most of the photographs.
‘Sheep and cereals,’ he said.
‘Did you have any brothers and sisters?’
‘Mm?’ Peter held the spark plug up to the dim light and tossed it with an angry clang into the metal drum on the opposite wall. ‘That spark plug’s shit,’ he said. ‘Probably made in China.’
‘Well, Dad? Did you have siblings, or not?’ Tim said suddenly aware of the peaceful quietness that night brings, which was only heightened by the crickets’ chirruping and the occasional lowing in the distance of their cattle.
‘Why all the questions?’ Peter said, eventually turning his gaunt, grey-stubbled face to Tim for more than a second.
‘Just interested in knowing a bit about my heritage. What about your mother? You’ve never talked about her,’ Tim said, remembering the photographs, the obvious changes she went through.
Peter’s tone held venom, but his face showed nothing. ‘My mother was a cold, hard bitch. I was glad when she died.’
‘That’s pretty harsh, Dad. She must have done something really bad to deserve such hatred,’ Tim said, bracing for some sort of backlash from his father over such impertinence.
‘Hatred came to her like a magnet. Easy as falling off a log … anyway, lad, it was long before your time. No need to concern yourself.’
‘But I am concerned, Dad. Your life is part of my history. You don’t get it,’ Tim said, undeterred. ‘What about your father? Was he still alive when your mother died? How did he cope with four kids?’
Peter instantly turned to him, with the look of someone who had been slapped. Tim knew he had given away too much of his unearthed information. His mind scrambled for an explanation as to why he suddenly knew so much.
But after a while, Peter turned back to searching through a metal box on the workbench. ‘We all just got on with it,’ he said.
‘How old were you when she died?’
A beat of silence. Followed by, ‘Dunno. Early teens, maybe.’
‘Why did you hate her so much?’ Tim said, his excitement mounting as the prospect increased of finally solving some baffling family mysteries through this conversation.
‘She used to beat the living crap out of me.’
That explains a lot, Tim thought, as he bravely uttered the question that burned in his gut for release, but prepared, at the same time, for his father’s absolute and fierce wrath. ‘How did she die, Dad?’
Peter said nothing.
‘Dad? I said, how did she die?’
‘Drop it, lad.’ Peter slowly raised his body from the old tractor seat at the workbench, stretched his back, and climbed down the steps into the work pit to finally disappear under the four-wheel drive.
But Peter’s contemptuousness reaped neither surprise nor upset from Tim who, whistling the theme song of the footy panel show he’d watched earlier that evening, wandered back to the house, content in the knowledge that an old shoebox had just taught him more about his family history in an hour, than he had learned in an entire lifetime from his parents.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Declan, I don’t know what to do,’ Mia howled into the phone, her tears made even more uninhibited by the sound of his voice. ‘I really need to see you,’ she sniffed. Mia was aware that in all the years she had known Declan she had never broken down like this, had never been so needy of his attention. But the shame that stabbed at her now, was nowhere near as strong as her desperate need for his comforting.
‘Mia … Mia … oh my gawd,’ Declan spluttered. ‘You poor soul. Look, in two hours I will have finished my list. A couple of patients are in a really bad way. I can’t cancel. Will you be okay till then?’
Mia noted the anguish in his voice and closed her eyes, swallowed hard and wiped her nose with her tracksuit sleeve.
‘Yes, I can manage. Can we meet somewhere once you’ve finished your appointments? I need to get away from home for a couple of hours.’
‘Uh-huh. What about Honeyeaters …
say, six o’clock?’
Mia sighed. Turned to stare out at her garden. ‘Okay. I’ll see you then,’ she said wiping fresh tears from her face.
‘Are you sure you will be alright till then?’ Declan rasped, then added, in his psychiatrist’s voice, ‘What will you do in the meantime?’
She sniffed. ‘I’ll run a hot bath and have a soak,’ she said, her tone deliberately lighter.
‘Good. That’s a good plan,’ he said. ‘Now, do you want me to pick you up?’
‘No. I’ll see you at the restaurant at six.’
Mia found solace in the sounds of water spluttering and gurgling into the en suite bath. Naked, she stood before her bedroom mirror, absently watching the reflection as steam rose from the bathtub to hang like a band of cloud from the en suite ceiling. She turned her attention slowly, almost hesitantly, to her naked body’s reflection and forced herself to look, despite the self-loathing the act of examining her body invariably caused her these days. She wondered if things could have been different had she exercised her thighs more diligently. She lamented the inevitable consequences of age — the slackening jawline and belly, the dimpled flesh. She had always taken for granted that she and Eric would grow old together. That they would go on making love forever. That the disintegration of their flesh would happen in unison and would prove to be inconsequential because of … well, she didn’t really know … perhaps because of something more spiritual.
She slipped into the hot bath, allowing clouds of suds to caress her as they crackled almost inaudibly beneath her chin. Watched the way the soft-scented sud mounds shrouded her body, moving when she moved. Studied the hundreds of tiny rainbow-bubbles within the billowing foam. Relished the silence broken only by distant sounds of traffic and the water’s gentle movement. Laying her head onto a rolled towel she had placed along the bath’s edge she peered up at the ceiling.
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