by Fiona Capp
I groaned inwardly and closed my eyes. I should have known it would come to this. That deep down, Kate had wanted to get caught and to have it out with him.
‘How enlightened of her,’ David said, his eyes still fixed on Kate. ‘Tell me then, Kate, why do you need to do it? What burning urge forces you to go out into the night with a spray can?’
‘Because it makes me feel alive!’ Kate bellowed, tears streaming down her blotched cheeks. ‘Why should it matter to you? You’re never around. You haven’t been around for years!’
Surely he must have seen it coming? But no, it was as if she had stepped forward and slapped his face. He looked stricken. Dumbfounded. Then, all those years in politics kicked in. His expression hardened, as if an invisible shutter had come down.
‘I know you don’t mean that, Kate.’
‘I hate you both!’ Kate screamed and ran from the room, slamming the door behind her. We could hear her sobs and wails through the wall. The wails came in high-pitched bursts, unleashed from somewhere deep inside her, splitting the air like a curse. As her voice grew hoarse, the sobs mellowed into childlike gulps.
I stood looking at David, willing him to understand. I didn’t want to have to explain. It was too hard. It would come out wrong. If only there was some way of getting the whole picture, the view from Canberra and the view from home, a kind of God’s-eye view, instead of each of us backed into our own corners. Perhaps this was why people invented God. An independent arbiter, a third party who knew and understood all. The possibility of a higher truth. But failing God, there was wine.
‘How about a drink?’
For the first time since I’d got back from the police station, he glanced wearily in my direction. ‘So, Est, what happened to trust?’
I took a bottle from the fridge, poured two glasses and sat next to him on the couch. Trust. When you thought about it, nothing mattered more. You couldn’t take the smallest step without it. At first, your children trusted you completely. It was the greatest weight and the greatest joy you could know. As they got older, things got messy when they realised how fallible you were. Sometimes you failed their trust. And then you had to learn to trust them, and that was a hard thing to do, to hand over that trust. To trust that they could look after themselves. The trust in marriage ought to be simpler: two grown-ups making a pact. Hadn’t we established the ground rules right from the start? But sex wasn’t the only pitfall. When to speak up, when to stay silent. How could I explain – without making it sound like an accusation – that while he could pronounce on rights and wrongs from afar, I had to live with Kate, to watch her struggle, to strike the deals that only made sense when you were there.
‘I could ask you the same thing.’
‘But I have trusted you. Absolutely. I know what a great mother you are. But this! How could you not realise where it might lead, the trouble it could cause? It’s not the graffiti, it’s the fact of it being illegal. And perhaps I am out of touch about the dangers. But we’re within cooee of winning the election and if the media get hold of this, they’ll go to town. It’s easy for us to think street art is cool; we live in the inner city, in a bubble. The most radical electorate in the country, for God’s sake! Out there in the suburbs, people see these ugly scrawls all over their trains or their shops and they don’t like it. And neither do the police. As far as they’re concerned, people like Kate are vandals.’
David sank back into the cushions and rolled himself another cigarette, took a few puffs and his mood mellowed, became reflective. ‘Once, not so long ago, I would have said legalise it. But how can you? It would mean open slather. Anyone could take a spray can to anyone else’s property.’
The word ‘property’ lingered in the air between us. I didn’t dare look at him for fear he would read my mind. I could hear his voice over the megaphone, a distant echo from the past, telling a crowd of students that private property was a crime. The root of everything rotten in the capitalist system. And I could still hear their cheers.
The irony that he didn’t want to acknowledge was that Kate was her father’s daughter. Doesn’t she remind you of someone? I wanted to ask him. Someone you used to be? I remembered something Kate had told me recently. How she was glad graffiti was illegal. How she wouldn’t want it any other way.
I looked down at my empty glass. I’d drunk the whole thing without even noticing but instead of calming me down, it had stirred me up.
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ I heard myself say in a voice I didn’t recognise. Who was this woman with the nasty, self-righteous tone, this woman about to let fly? I didn’t want to be her. ‘I couldn’t have stopped Kate if I’d tried. She was set on doing it. It made her happy and she hadn’t been happy for a long time. And for that, we’re both to blame.’
Funny how you could think you were on top of things, until it all came spewing out. ‘You reckon I’ve betrayed your trust. But what about that freedom you promised me? All those years ago. I mean the freedom to live how I want to live. Because when I think about what lies ahead, I don’t feel free at all. I feel trapped, like fucking Rapunzel! Everything’s out of my hands – I don’t have any say.’ I was sobbing now, some invisible hand squeezing my throat.
For the second time that evening, David was floored. ‘Trapped? Oh Esther, Esther. It’s only because everything’s happened so fast. It’s the shock on top of the grief. After the election, sure, things will be strange for a while. Life will change. But then you’ll realise what an extraordinary adventure, what an incredible honour it is to have this chance to make a difference. And we’ll do it together, like we always have. It won’t change us.’
I stared at his pleading face. How could I object to this ‘adventure’ he spoke of? It often happened during our arguments. His way with words, his ability to conjure up something bigger than our puny, individual lives always seemed to leave me floundering and uncertain of my feelings and whether they mattered at all.
David put his arm around my shoulders. ‘But, if it’s all too unbearable, Est, of course I can pull out.’
And what if I called his bluff? What if I turned to him and said, ‘Will you?’ But he knew I wouldn’t.
‘I didn’t say I –’
‘I know, I know. Gerald’s gone but he’s given us this …’ He fell silent, thinking. ‘This gift. This incredible opportunity, and if we squander it, we’ll never forgive ourselves.’
16
GOTLAND
September 2010
The wind rattling the shutters woke me in the early hours of the morning. I drifted in and out of sleep knowing that it would soon be dawn and that Sven wanted an early start. There was a small island to the north called Fårö that had some unusual rock formations he was keen to show me. The following evening I would leave for London and much as I was looking forward to seeing Ros and was missing Kate, I knew I wasn’t ready to go.
Not long before sunrise, I opened the shutters and leaned on the window sill, staring out over the sleeping town. In the moonlight, it looked more like something out of a fairytale than ever: the wooden turrets of the cathedral that might have been plucked from a middle-European castle; the wall with its gates, portcullises and ramparts; the little tarred houses and cobbled streets.
As a girl I’d loved fairytales more than any other kind of story and something about them still had a hold on me. It wasn’t the magic or the happy endings that appealed any more but the disturbing truths they told about our lives. In spite of the whizz-bang technology of the twenty-first century and all our freedoms, these stories of young girls stalked by wolves, of maidens locked away in towers, of wife-murdering husbands, still rang true. They were psychodramas. The atmosphere of horror and dread only added to the allure of the fairytale realm because it was so cathartic. I used to think of these far-off lands as a kind of long-lost home, a forgotten part of myself that had broken off eons ago and floated away. And who ever grows out of the longing to revisit, if only briefly, that faraway home?
It took less than five minutes for the car ferry to cross Fårösund. You could see immediately that it was a much wilder place than the main island, as if the wind blew stronger here and the rain fell harder. We drove past stunted, bent-over trees and shaggy fields dotted with black and brown sheep and the occasional lonesome farmhouse until the silvery sea glimmered in the distance between towering limestone stacks. Everything was barren and bleached and yet strangely beautiful in a scorched-earth kind of way. We might have been at the end of the earth – or at the beginning.
Sven said nothing as we stood on the pale stone beach among the great trunks of limestone. As I walked around them, I started to see why they’d been compared to Easter Island statues. The slender necks, the bulbous noses, the pointed chins, the stiff upper lips, the closed eyes, the elaborate headdresses. The tufts of grass and lichen which gave the impression of stubble or a moustache. Except that these weren’t man-made. They had been created by the wind and the waves and the rain blindly working at the cracks and fissures for thousands, maybe millions of years. I knew all about cracks and fissures but had always thought of them as weaknesses. In these rocks, though, flaws made transformation possible; allowed nature to whittle new shapes.
I knew that Sven had his reasons for bringing me here – as he had with all the other places we’d visited – and that it was up to me to figure them out. This was the way he worked. Unlike David, who overlaid everything with words, Sven let things unfold. He was the kind of person who spoke to you through the places that mattered to him, trusting the eloquence of the physical world, opening your eyes to things you might not otherwise see.
He stopped in front of one of the stacks and looked up at it, smiling. ‘I drive up here sometimes just to be with them. They make me envious. I could spend my whole life and never match what nature does without trying.’
I noticed that one of the stacks was more basic than the others, more like a pedestal than a person. Did he think it would be all right to climb it? He said he couldn’t see why not. Once I had a foothold, Sven put his hands on my hips and pushed me up, then hauled himself over the ledge. When I reached out to help him to his feet, his grip was crushing. Seeing me wince, he took my hand – like a child’s in his giant palm – and gently examined it.
‘No bones broken.’
We looked down at my hand in his. There was the slightest delay before he let it go. His eyes lingered on my face as if searching for traces of whatever it was we’d both felt my first night on the island; the connection I thought had been broken when Ros left. Over the past few days, we had conducted ourselves with exaggerated care. Without meaning to we had entered a kind of medieval dance in which each partner mirrored the other’s movements while never touching, always keeping a proper distance. There had been times when I could almost hear the static crackling between us, even as we turned the other way.
As I studied the curve of the beach and the stark outline of the rock formations against the deep blue of the sea and the watercolour wash of the sky, I could still feel his grip on my hand. The view was not beautiful or beguiling but there was a kind of bare-bones honesty about it, like Sven himself. It suddenly struck me what he’d been doing these past few days: peeling back the layers of the island and offering them up to me, as if presenting parts of himself. Laying himself bare through the landscape. This is what I am. The kind of honesty that demanded the same in return.
We climbed down and walked further around the beach and reached a spot protected from the wind where the water was smooth and inviting. A flock of seagulls swirled chaotically by. The way they were crying and swooping gave me the urge to do something reckless, to break the rules of the dance, and before I could change my mind, I announced that I was going in.
Sven raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you sure?’
I wasn’t sure at all but didn’t want to back out. I wanted to follow that impulse. Nodding defiantly, I turned away, pulling my jumper over my head and trying not to think about what I was doing. Behind me, I could hear him undressing too. I slipped off my skirt, horrified by the sight of my pale legs with their dimpled flesh and unshaved hairs. As I reached around to unclip my bra, I found myself thinking of that night all those years ago, when I stripped for David in my bedroom and how different my slender young body had been from the one I inhabited now. What was I doing?
My clothes off, I tried to make a dash for the water. But running barefoot over the pebbles was out of the question. All I could do was walk gingerly towards the water’s edge. The icy touch of the Baltic was enough to make me curse myself all over again. It was too shallow to dive straight in, which meant wading in excruciating slow motion as the freezing water inched up my calves and thighs.
Sven came crunching across the shingles behind me with steady, untroubled steps, as though he did this kind of thing all the time. His body would be firm and sculpted. I hated to think of the sight I made. The bulges and curves, even though I was still trim.
As soon as it was deep enough, I threw myself into the water, the cold burning straight through me in a searing, head-splitting rush. Then came the tingling, the over-alertness of shock. I opened my eyes and through the filmy blue-grey could just make out the pebbles on the bottom. When my head broke the surface, everything looked hyper-real, more sharply etched than before – the limestone stacks, the shoreline, the sweep of the beach. And Sven, stroking calmly towards me. He stopped a few metres away, observing that proper distance. His normally unruly hair was plastered smoothly around his face. On shore he had a slightly shaggy, weather-beaten air, but here in the sea he looked sleek and streamlined and perfectly at ease. In a tale from Ovid, he would have turned into a seal. I couldn’t stop staring at him, taking in his new form with shameless pleasure. His shoulders and upper body were, as I’d suspected, compact and honed. And he wore his nakedness with natural dignity. It wasn’t something you could fake. It came from neither needing to hide nor show off; from being comfortable with who you were.
I watched him floating on his back, his lower body submerged, his hands clasped behind his head as he stared up at the icy blue sky, seemingly unconcerned by the cold. I liked the way he was happy to let the moment be. The way he wasn’t afraid of silence. The way he didn’t feel compelled to be playful or try to impose himself.
Reluctantly, I shook myself out of my trance. ‘Brrr!’ I shivered. ‘Whose mad idea was this? I don’t suppose there are sharks in the Baltic?’
He let out an explosive laugh. ‘Sharks! You ought to be used to sharks.’
‘Nothing dangerous then?’
Sven grinned, as if about to dream up some Nordic equivalent of the Loch Ness monster, then shook his head. There were currents, he said, looking at me intently. As for the other dangers, they were up to us to navigate.
Without thinking, I stood up, then realised that my breasts were exposed. Only minutes ago I would have ducked under, but we had gone beyond that now. Sven’s eyes flickered over my body. He smiled appreciatively. Then his gaze returned to my face, as if to say the next move was mine.
I could feel the current pulling me to him. All I had to do was lift my feet and let it do its work. I glided forward and then stood up again, right in front of him. There was no point speaking. It was enough to tilt my head and feel his lips. The kiss was soft and tasted of the sea, and I felt it humming through every cell in my body. I told myself it was a thankyou kiss, a kiss of gratitude for his kindness, for showing me the island and stripping it back, layer by layer. When he put his hands on my hips, I stifled a gasp and with deep reluctance, pulled away and swam mechanically back to the shore. We’d had our moment and that would have to be it.
On the beach, I wrapped myself in an old blanket Sven kept in the back of his ute and tried to remember the last time I went skinny-dipping. It must have been when I was a teenager, long before I knew David existed. Before I knew anything much, except what it meant to be young and impulsive and full of vague yearnings for things out of reach.
&
nbsp; I watched Sven emerging from the water and was conscious again of that desire to stare, to drink him in. I was about to turn away when he nonchalantly raised his arm and broke into an easy smile. What must it be like, I thought, to be so at ease in your skin?
Mine was red and fiery from the cold and it was hard dragging my clothes over my half-dry body, but I felt so alive and so surprised by joy I didn’t care.
When I Skyped Ros that evening she wasn’t wearing her wig. She had shaved the fuzz from her scalp and looked more like a Buddhist nun than ever. I asked why she’d done it and she said it felt better that way. She’d spent too much of her life hiding behind her hair, letting it define her. She liked the freedom of having none. Although this shedding of her old self made me uneasy, it also gave me hope that she might be ready to leave London and come home for good. But then she started talking about chambers. Everything was black and sooty but it would only take a week to clean up and do some repairs and in the meantime she could work from home. She was clearly eager for things to go on as before. I could see that persuading her to consider other options was not going to be easy. But there was no point trying to push things now. There would be time when I was back in London with her, when the drudgery of cleaning up and getting back to work was starting to sink in.
Ros was keen to know how things were going. I told her about all the places Sven had taken me and how kind he had been. I didn’t tell her about the kiss. I was really looking forward to London, I said. I wasn’t lying but I knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth, either. And so we talked about other things, and it was only later that I discovered how unwell she’d been since leaving Gotland. We talked, as we always had, not telling each other what was on our minds, and I began to wonder whether Gotland was the only place on earth where we could speak truly.
17
CANBERRA
August 2010