by Liz Byrski
‘You’ve bought a bike!’ Barbara said, feigning amazement. ‘And what a beast it is. Well done, you.’ How satisfying it was to know someone well enough to predict their behaviour, and to love them enough to find their idiosyncrasies endearing. How lucky she was to have this precious friendship at a time in her life when she had least expected it.
‘Yes, it is rather good,’ George said, looking proudly at the bike. ‘I had a secret little run on it yesterday evening. Seems I still know how to ride.’ He reached in the pocket of his shorts and handed her a ten-dollar note. ‘Terry asked me to give you this. He said you’d know what it’s for.’
‘I do indeed,’ Barbara said, slipping Terry’s betting loss into her pocket. ‘Well, this is excellent, George, we can get into training for China.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ he replied. ‘Not such a bad idea after all, and rather more fun than the language course.’
‘I liked the language course, though,’ Barbara said as they pedalled away. ‘It was terribly tiring, so much to take in, but I enjoyed it. It’s a good thing to have done. When we come back, I’m going to help out with the asylum seeker classes. Even if we weren’t going to China, it would have been worth doing that course.’
‘Yes, well, we are going to China,’ George said. ‘I made the bookings yesterday when I went into Maitland to pick up the bike. First of March we’re on our way. And yesterday evening I got an email from Robert with the contact details for a bloke in Beijing to email about classes – very interested, apparently.’
‘Really?’ Barbara said, swerving slightly to look at him. She’d always thought that the chance of either of them getting any work was remote. ‘Classes for you?’
‘For both of us. Come back home with me afterwards and we’ll compose an email together. Do we get to go for coffee at the end of the ride?’
‘Naturally,’ Barbara said. ‘My shout, as this is your maiden voyage.’
The whole China plan had been a godsend for Barbara. It distracted her attention away from the feeling that everyone she loved was in a mess; that their lives were either stalled or fracturing. Worry had destroyed her concentration, bringing her writing to a halt and interrupting her reading. She thought it was the sort of anxiety that parents must feel observing the lives of their adult children, knowing that intrusion or interference was the best they had to offer. But China, and all its possibilities, allowed her to surf the Internet reading short, easy-to-digest pieces on its history, culture, politics, tourism and much more without too much concentration.
Barbara had stopped believing that once the police made an arrest everything would be back to normal. What she now knew was that while the shooting in itself was terrible, it was the peripheral damage that could prove fatal. Probably all families had their secrets, the old hurts and simmering discontents that ran so deep you could blunder into something without even realising it. When she had asked Adam about pawning his cello, it simply hadn’t occurred to her that she might be treading on such sensitive ground.
‘I can’t really talk about it,’ he’d said at first, his gaze fixed firmly on Daisy and Toby, who were stalking something down by the water’s edge. ‘I’d be breaking a confidence. Letting someone down.’
‘But, Adam, it’s forty years ago. It can’t matter now.’
‘It does matter. To me it does,’ he’d said, and he picked up his bike helmet, pulled his wallet from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Let’s get going. Can you take this and pay, and I’ll round up the kids.’
That evening, exhausted by cycling, shed clearing and all the noise and activity that went with having two children in the house, Barbara was sitting quietly reading the paper with the TV sound turned down when Adam, who had been supervising Toby and Daisy’s bedtime, came down the stairs.
‘I thought of making some tea,’ Barbara said. ‘D’you want some?’ She folded the paper and glanced up to see Adam framed in the doorway. His face was a deathly white, the hand resting on the doorjamb shaking. ‘Good heavens, Adam, whatever’s the matter? Are you sick?’ she asked, dropping the paper and getting up to take his arm. ‘Come and sit down. Can I get you something?’ He shook his head and allowed her to lead him to the sofa, and sat ghostlike beside her, his hands clenched between his knees, tears running down his cheeks in fast and silent streams.
Barbara reached for the box of tissues and pulled out a handful. She wanted to dry his tears as she had so often done when he was a small boy, but she suspected it was demeaning to dry the eyes of a grown man, so she pressed the tissues into his hands. Adam wiped his eyes, holding the wad of tissues over his face now as his body rocked with silent sobs.
‘I’ve done a terrible thing, Barb,’ he’d said when he was finally able to speak. ‘A really terrible thing, and I’ve let everyone down.’
The memory of Adam’s grief that night brought a lump to Barbara’s throat. Ahead of her she saw George turn into the main street, heading for the same café. She followed him slowly, dismounted and wheeled her bike to the rack.
‘I suppose one gets used to the bum ache,’ George said, holding out his hand to take hers. ‘My muscles are feeling a bit elderly; not bad, though, starting again at seventy-five.’
‘I’ll treat you to a chocolate muffin,’ Barbara said, taking his hand. ‘That’ll take your mind off it. By the time we get to China you’ll be riding like a teenager again.’
‘Whatever are you doing here?’ Jill asked when she saw Heather getting out of a cab in the hotel car park. ‘Oh my god, there’s been an accident. Is it Adam? The children?’
Heather took her arm, ‘Everyone’s absolutely fine, Jill, honestly. Sorry, I should’ve phoned. Really, there’s nothing to worry about.’
Jill sighed with relief. ‘Thank goodness, so why –’
‘Look, this is an awful cheek. I’m taking advantage of your good nature, abusing our overdue friendship, and imposing on your privacy,’ Heather said, ‘but I . . . well, I need to talk and . . .’
‘And you came all this way?’
‘I should’ve rung, but parliament rose early and I’m not flying back to Newcastle till tomorrow. I’ve wanted to talk all week, ever since Byron Bay, so I just walked out, got a train and then a cab and here I am.’
‘Just in time for a shower and some dinner,’ Jill said. ‘And I’m really pleased to see you. I thought of ringing you. I’ve been dying to know about your weekend.’
Heather rolled her eyes. ‘That’s what I need to talk about,’ she said. ‘Debrief. Can you bear it?’
‘I’d love it,’ Jill said, taking her arm. ‘Are you staying the night? My room is vast and has two double beds. Good thing you didn’t get here earlier. I only just got back from the Rhododendron Festival.’
The rhododendrons had been magnificent and Jill had even felt a tremor of warmth for Marcia, without whom she might never have known about them. More than halfway through her precious time in the mountains, the things that had oppressed her at home now seemed infinitely more manageable and she was convinced she’d be a nicer person by the time she got back there. She pictured Adam surrounded by the usual chaos and at the beck and call of the children, and she felt ever so slightly guilty, but only ever so slightly. It would show him what she coped with all the time, it was the trip-up on reality he needed. When she got back she would talk to him about the burden of being responsible, and how desperately she needed him to share it.
‘So, tell me all about it,’ Jill said as they waited for their meal. ‘Did you have a wonderful romantic weekend? Is the house gorgeous?’
‘The house is truly gorgeous,’ Heather said, looking calmer now, less fraught than when they had met in the car park. ‘I took some photos – they’re in my camera. I’ll show you when we go back to the room. And Byron Bay is really lovely. I can see why people rave about it and . . .’ Her voice trailed away.
‘And?’
She sighed. ‘And I had a very difficult weekend which, of course, is why I’m here
. Oh, Jill, I do love Ellis so much, and I desperately want this to work, but sometimes it’s so hard, and I seem to be so bad at it, I wonder if it’s just too late to start all over again.’
‘Of course it’s not too late,’ Jill said. ‘And bad at what, exactly?’
‘At being in a relationship. Perhaps I’ve been single too long.’
‘It’s bound to be difficult at first, Heather,’ Jill said. ‘Relationships always are, all that sizzling sex and bliss and then you hit the reality check. And I’m sure it must be harder as one gets older. We all get stuck in our ways, and it gets harder to change, to adapt to someone else.’
‘I know, but I keep getting it wrong. I keep stuffing up.’ Heather paused, looking around the half-empty restaurant and lowering her voice. ‘And I keep thinking Ellis just wants me to be nineteen again.’
Jill smiled. ‘He probably does. Wouldn’t most men like us to be like we were? Younger, slimmer, sexier and more willing to do their bidding? But the men who live with us go through the process of change with us, they get used to it. Ellis probably came back with the dream of how you were, and now he has to get to know you as you are. Didn’t you expect him to be the same as all those years ago?’
Heather propped her chin on her hand and thought about it. ‘Well, not really, but then I was just presented with him as he is, totally out of the blue. It was different for him. He says he’d been thinking about it, dreaming it, for a very long time, so yes, I suppose all that would have been about how I was, not how I am.’
‘There you are, then,’ Jill said. ‘The dreams were based on the old Heather. Now he’s coping with the new one and it must –’
‘Be a shock to his system,’ Heather cut in. ‘I see what you mean.’
‘But he loves you, and you obviously love him.’
‘Yes,’ Heather said hesitantly. ‘And there are times when I feel he knows me and understands me completely, when he makes me absolutely melt with love and desire. But there are others when I could happily strangle him.’
Jill laughed. ‘Sounds pretty normal to me.’
‘But is it?’ Heather asked insistently. ‘Is it really? I mean, the dramatic reverses, the plunge from love to . . . not hate, but exasperation and a sort of fury. Is that really normal?’
‘I’m sure it is for lots of people,’ Jill said, ‘probably for most of us at times.’
‘You and Adam?’
‘Oh well, I do know how lucky I am, Adam is such a wonderful person. But, as I told you the other day, sometimes he drives me right up the wall. Why do you think I’m here now?’
Heather nodded. ‘He more or less told me that himself when I called. Perhaps I’m overreacting, but Ellis, he has a very short fuse and he seems to be so easily rattled. If I disagree with him it’s always very personal, as though he’s affronted that I have a view that’s different from his. Emotionally he’s high maintenance.’
Jill shrugged. ‘It’s still early days. You haven’t been able to spend much time together yet. Perhaps he just wants a bit more of your attention.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Heather said, leaning back in her chair. ‘The time thing is part of the problem. He’s got heaps and I’ve got very little.’
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Jill suggested when they had finished their meal. The sun was close to setting but it was still light and she loved the dusk here in the mountains. ‘Just a stroll before the light goes?’ There was a path that had become her favourite; it meandered through tall trees up a steep slope towards a small clearing with a bench made from roughly hewn tree trunks, and a stunning view of the distant peaks.
‘There’s something else I need to tell you, Jill,’ Heather said as they walked. ‘About what you asked me earlier, about me and Adam. Before I went to Byron Bay I called to talk to you. Adam gave me your number, and we talked. Well, he didn’t say much, of course –’ she rolled her eyes – ‘when does he ever? But when he told me you were away I got the feeling that . . . that part of the trouble between you was about what happened with Ellis all those years ago.’
Jill nodded, holding her breath in anticipation.
‘It’s pretty simple, really,’ Heather said, ‘but the longer you keep a secret, the deeper you lock it inside you, the harder it seems to talk about it. Your head tells you that it’s not that awful or extraordinary, that it’s something that happens to a lot of people, but you can’t really convince yourself that the world won’t fall apart if you start to talk about it. Anyway, that’s what Adam and I did when Ellis left. I . . . well, I . . .’
‘You were pregnant, and Adam helped you to terminate it and pawned his cello to pay for it,’ Jill said.
Heather stopped walking and turned to face her. ‘You know? How do you know?’
‘I worked it out for myself,’ Jill replied. ‘It wasn’t that difficult. What happened when Ellis left was obviously something that both of you wanted to keep hidden. Then Barb mentioned that when she and your mother got back from their cruise, Adam had pawned his cello because he needed a large sum of money. As soon as Barbara told me that, and added that he’d asked her not to tell your mother, and not to ask any questions, it was pretty obvious. Who or what mattered enough to Adam to make him pawn his cello? Only you, his mother and Barbara, and it wasn’t about either of them. It didn’t need a genius to work it out.’
They were in the clearing now and Heather brushed some leaves off the bench and sat down. ‘So you know. Why didn’t you tell Adam?’
‘Because he needs to be able to tell me himself,’ Jill said, sitting beside her. ‘Not just about what happened, but why it was so significant to him that he wasn’t only silenced by your promise, but by something within himself.’
Heather shivered slightly in the evening air, pushed her arms into the sweater that had been draped over her shoulders and pulled it on over her shirt. ‘It was his religion, of course. He was still doing battle with all Dad’s stuff. He’d had sin, hellfire and damnation hammered into him. I escaped most of it because I was a girl and younger, but it took Adam a long time and a great deal of heart searching to break free of it. The termination was devastating – illegal, of course, and shonkily done. There were some doctors doing abortions in those days, but Adam wasn’t able to find one, so it was a backyard job.
‘Mum and Barb were away for ages, thank goodness. We’d never have been able to keep it from them. So I was a mess, and Adam was too, because he’d had to organise it and find the money, all under relentless pressure from me, and then look after me. I was pretty sick. I got an infection and we had to get a doctor, and lie to him. I’m sure the doctor knew but he treated me anyway. It was really only much later that I understood how the religious conflict affected Adam. When you’re young, you don’t realise that everything you do has consequences, not just for you but for other people, and that even if you get away with it at the time, some day you’ll have to pay.’
‘Are you saying you wish you hadn’t had the abortion?’ Jill asked.
Heather shook her head. ‘No, but I’m saying I wish I hadn’t been stupid enough to get pregnant. And I wish it had been safe and legal for me to have a termination. Because as well as making the decision and actually going through with it, which was bad enough, there was this backyard business that left me feeling like a criminal. It takes a long time to recover from that, to get back some self-esteem, and there were physical consequences for me too.’
‘What sort of consequences?’
‘Years later I was having some gynaecological problems, and my doctor did some tests and found that the abortion and the infection had caused the sort of damage that meant I’d never be able to have children.’
‘Oh, Heather, I’m so sorry,’ Jill said.
Heather shrugged. ‘In the end, of course, it didn’t make that much difference because I never got into a relationship where I might have wanted to have children. There was a time in my late thirties, though, when I went through a lot of grief about it. But there
were other things happening in my life, and I made myself focus on those and eventually the grief passed.’
They sat silently side by side for a few moments listening to the sound of the breeze in the tree tops, watching the last vestiges of dusk fade into darkness.
‘Did you ever consider talking about your own experience?’ Jill asked. ‘Talking publicly, I mean?’
‘Of course,’ Heather said, ‘many times. But how could I? Adam and I had promised each other that we’d never tell anyone, and when I got to the stage where I felt I could talk about it, he was still stuck in it. I couldn’t do that to him, not after everything he’d gone through for me.’ She stopped and turned to Jill. ‘That’s the bond, Jill, the connection you sense between us as more than the brother–sister thing. You go through something awful with someone and it ties you together. When I got shot, Shaun was there and he took care of me, and because of that I feel a real bond with him. We shared that dreadful experience and it’ll always be there, something only we can fully understand. It’s much deeper with Adam of course, not just because we’re brother and sister, but because of all the guilt, and the illegality of it. It never goes away but you learn to live with it. I’ve come to terms with it but Adam never did. He’s been stuck in it all these years and who knows what it’ll take to shake him out of it?’
Smoke from bushfires drifted south towards the city as Jill drove home a few days later. It hung in a yellow-tinged grey blanket, blocking the sun, and it reminded her of how she’d felt as she set out on this journey – as though she were in danger of being smothered. She remembered that the French had a word for this act of taking time out: dépaysement was the purposeful self-removal that brought clarity and improved sensitivity to one’s own surroundings. As she pulled into the drive and switched off the engine, Jill felt that clarity and freshness. Home looked remarkably good. Adam had cut the grass, and there were a couple of new citrus trees in big pots near the front door, something she’d been planning to do for ages. Whatever chaos lurked within she’d sort it out over the next few days before she went back to work. The front door opened as she got out of the car and Adam came towards her. He was barefoot, wearing long shorts and an old t-shirt and he looked different, looser, more upright; the way he moved seemed both more relaxed and more assertive.