by Lucy Clarke
“Then what is it, Saul? Why didn’t you want me to come tonight? When I asked you this morning about going for a drink, you already knew you’d be here, didn’t you?”
He tries to offer a casual no, but the word comes out sounding insolent, defensive.
She shakes her head, eyes narrowing. “Jackson warned me that you were a liar.”
The sting of the words cracks in the air like a whip. “What?”
She lifts her chin. He remembers the gesture from the first day he met her when she’d just arrived on Wattleboon. He’d seen a fire in her then, and despite everything she’s been through, it still flickers now.
“I know about your fight, Saul. Why the two of you fell out.”
He stares at Eva, his heart rate accelerated. “And?”
“So I know about what happened on his birthday four years ago. I know how you turned up at the barbecue, made a deliberate play for his girlfriend. Took her home with you.”
A mosquito buzzes close to his ear. He doesn’t move to bat it away.
“How could you do that to your own brother?”
When Saul speaks, his voice sounds hollow. “I didn’t. She was my girlfriend, Eva.”
EVA STARES AT SAUL as he says, “Jackson was the one who took her.”
She shakes her head, amazed by the audacity of the lie. “Bullshit.”
His eyes stay locked on her face. “It’s the truth. She was my girlfriend, Eva.”
She remembers how Saul had lied on the phone to Dirk; lied about working late tonight; lied to Jackson. “Truth?” She moves past him and strides along the roadside.
She is about fifty feet away when she hears Saul call after her, “Jackson’s birthday is on the fifteenth of July.”
So? she thinks as she continues.
“That’s the middle of winter here. You said he’d had a barbecue for his birthday—but why would anyone have a barbecue on the beach in the middle of winter?”
Eva stops.
“The barbecue was for my birthday,” he calls. “It’s on the seventh of March. Our summer.”
She turns now.
“She was my girlfriend.”
Her teeth press against her bottom lip as she hears Jackson telling her, You can’t trust him. He’s a liar. Yet she has begun to. She thought they’d become friends.
Saul walks along the roadside, stopping in front of her. “I’m telling you the truth, Eva.”
She shakes her head. She won’t believe it.
“That’s why I left Tas—went to South America for a few months. I needed to get away. I couldn’t stand seeing him with her.”
She balks. “South America?”
He nods.
“Jackson went there. Not you!”
“Jackson?” His brow furrows. “Until he went to England, Jackson hadn’t been outside of Australia.”
She breathes out hard, shocked by the madness of what he’s saying. She has no idea why Saul is doing this. She opens her mouth to confront him when something Dirk said pushes into her thoughts: Jackson was the Tassie boy, Saul the traveler. Dirk had been drinking at the time and she’d assumed he’d gotten his sons’ names muddled. But what if he hadn’t?
She touches her hairline, thinking, thinking.
“Eva,” Saul says carefully and levelly, drawing her gaze to his. “Everything I’m telling you is the truth.”
That word again, truth. It is Jackson she trusts. Her husband. The man she loved and planned to spend her life with. The man she’s lost. “Why are you doing this, Saul? Jackson told me all about South America—Chile, the Atacama Desert, Peru, Brazil—I know about his trip.”
“He never went to those places.”
“And you did?”
“Yes.”
A group of drinkers tumbles out into the pub parking lot. She hears an engine being started up, bass booming from the vehicle before the door is slammed. “I flew to Chile first and spent two months traveling up the coast, surfing. Then I drove right through the Atacama Desert and up into Peru. I picked up some work in a nature reserve building trail paths for a few months.”
Eva’s fingers are clenched at her sides as she listens. The description is an echo of Jackson’s travels. She has no idea why Saul is using Jackson’s words to try to tear at her memory of her husband.
Saul continues. “In Peru, I headed first for Chincha. I wanted to hike Machu Picchu—that’s why I’d gone there in the first place.”
No, she thinks. That’s why Jackson went there!
“Afterward, I flew to Brazil, where I met up with a friend of mine.” He tells her about a hostel he worked at in Brazil, but she already knows the story—knows all of the stories—and she can hear Jackson telling her how he’d bought a beat-up old motorbike from the hostel owner and rode it along jungle paths where the foliage was thick and the air dense with moisture.
She wants to tell Saul to stop—stop talking!—but he goes on, her husband’s memories spilling from his mouth. His lilting accent is so much like Jackson’s that it feels as if his voice is ripping her open.
She lifts her hands to her ears to cover them, but she can still hear him. Suddenly she is drawing her right arm back, then launching it forward at speed. Her palm connects with Saul’s face and she hears the slap of her fingers against his cheek.
Finally, there is silence.
14
The palm of Eva’s hand smarts as it hangs limply at her side.
Saul doesn’t move. His eyes are on her, wide with shock.
“I . . . I . . .” She cannot finish the sentence. Her legs are trembling as she turns, crosses the road, and then begins to jog. Her feet move heavily at first, sandals clacking against the tarmac, but then as her legs find a rhythm, her speed builds.
She runs beside a row of weatherboard houses, the smell of a barbecue swirling in the air. Beads of sweat bloom across her forehead and blood rushes to the surface of her skin. She keeps on going, flying along the roadside in the fading light.
A car passes and she senses the turn of a passenger’s head as he or she stares after Eva, but she concentrates only on the motion of moving forward, distance judged in landmarks: an old barn where two mares stand with their heads together; a tractor without wheels in a gateway; a field planted with neat rows of strawberries.
Then she veers from the road onto the gravel track that leads to the bay—and it’s only then that she slows to a walk. She places her hands on her hips and blows out hard, her pulse still sprinting.
Gum trees frame the track, their warm smell thickening the still air. She walks through their shadows, her body shaking from the exertion.
Why had Saul said those things? Why wouldn’t he stop? She pictures the earnestness of his expression as he explained about the feud. He looked genuinely shocked when Eva contradicted him. She tries to contemplate the possibility that what he was saying is true—but she can’t, not when she can hear the smile in Jackson’s voice as he told her how he’d had to fix the motorbike he’d bought in Brazil with only the tools on his penknife, or when she can recall his wistful description of the sun rising through a shroud of mist from the top of Machu Picchu.
Something sharp pushes through her memories, like a shard of broken glass: there is a photo on the wall of Saul’s living room of the towering peaks of Machu Picchu. When she’d first glanced at it, she’d assumed it was Jackson standing in the foreground with his backpack on—only that couldn’t be right because if the brothers weren’t close, why would Saul have a picture of Jackson?
She runs a knuckle over her lips as she tries to picture the photo again. She can see the rich green peaks, the tops of them veiled with mist, but the image of the figure beneath them is indistinct in her mind.
When the track curves off to the right to lead her toward the shack, Eva doesn’t take it. She keeps moving forward. Straight to Saul’s house.
SAUL’S TRUCK HASN’T PASSED her, so she knows the house will be empty. No one locks their houses on Wattleboon, so she’s
not surprised when she finds the side door into the kitchen open.
Her heart beats harder as she steps inside. The smell of wood and something peppery tinges the room. It is almost dark now, but she doesn’t reach for a light. She lets her eyes adjust to the dimness, making out the shapes of kitchen units, a mug tree on the windowsill, the toaster tucked in a corner.
As she passes the sink, she sees the small round shape of a tea bag that has been tossed there.
The hairs on the back of her neck stand on end as if someone has blown icy breath beneath her collar. She gazes at the tea bag unblinking, losing all sense of her surroundings. It’s as if she’s back in her apartment in London looking at the rust-colored stain in their sink from where Jackson had left his tea bag. She can almost smell the earthy musk of Jackson in the air, hear the sounds of traffic and sirens from the street below their apartment.
She wants to be back there so much that images of Jackson and Saul, London and Wattleboon, twist and knot together so they are no longer separate, but rather one continuous tangle of thought.
Beyond the open door, a bird calls and she turns. Outside there are no streetlights, no roads, just trees and only a glimmer of the bay. She is in Wattleboon, in Saul’s kitchen. It is his tea bag discarded in the sink. Not Jackson’s.
A shared habit, that is all.
She forces herself to take several deep breaths, swallowing down the irrational panic.
Then she leaves the kitchen and heads for the living room, not letting her eyes roam beyond her purpose now. She passes the sofa and edges toward the far wall of the living room, where three framed photos are hung.
It is the middle one she stands before, her gaze leveled.
She sees the tall peaks of the mountains and terraces, and the silhouette of a man in the foreground, wearing a backpack. She leans closer to see his face.
She wills it to be Jackson so deeply that his and Saul’s features blur in her mind so she no longer can tell who is who. Her thoughts spin with uncertainty and she takes two steps to the left, hitting the light switch with the heel of her hand.
The room glares into life and she stands rigid before the picture, blinking in the clear image: Saul at the summit of Machu Picchu.
Just like he said.
She tells herself that the photo doesn’t mean anything. Both brothers could have traveled there, or Saul could’ve doctored the image somehow.
Behind her she hears movement and Eva becomes aware that someone else is in the house.
Slowly, she turns.
Saul is standing in the doorway. “What are you doing?”
She glances toward the photo on the wall. “It’s you. Backpacking. In Machu Picchu.”
“Yes.”
“Jackson could have gone there, too.”
Saul looks at her levelly. “He could have, but he didn’t. Jackson never went to South America. I’m sorry, Eva.”
Her thoughts spin with confusion. Why is Saul saying all this? “Jackson’s degree,” she says, remembering her conversation with Saul when he was collecting oysters. “You said Jackson never studied marine biology.”
“He didn’t go to college. He lived in Melbourne for a while, but he was working as a cocktail flairer.”
Bile rises in her throat. She pictures Jackson behind the bar at the wedding, tossing bottles high into the air and swinging the liquid into glasses. She had laughed at his showmanship and asked where he’d learned to do it. He’d said, I had a lot of time on my hands when I was a student.
Eva has the sensation that she’s standing very high up on a ledge. One wrong move and she could fall. She needs to be still, to find balance. Yet she senses that there is more to come—she can feel it twisting around her ankles like a strengthening wind.
She stacks each of the facts like bricks, trying to make something solid from them.
Jackson didn’t do a marine biology degree. Saul did.
Jackson didn’t have his girlfriend taken from him. Saul did.
Jackson didn’t travel around South America. Saul did.
She swallows, pushing down the slick of bile. “Then the things he was telling me . . . they belonged to you.” Nothing makes sense. “What else?” she hears herself saying. “What else are you saying were lies?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“After college, what did you do?” she asks, her voice stretched thin.
“Eva—”
“Please!” she begs. “Just tell me!”
He looks at her steadily. “I took a dive job on the Great Barrier Reef for a season, working with tourists on coral restoration projects. Then I came back to Tassie for a while. Worked for this outdoor experience company that put on activity camps for kids. I was teaching them how to dive—”
“The camp was on the east coast. You lived in a wood cabin for three months.”
A vein in Saul’s temple flickers and pulses. “That’s right.”
“Jackson told me he worked there for a season. Did he?” she says, hearing the desperate edge to her voice. “Did he ever work at a camp like that?”
His head moves from side to side. “No.”
Eva grips the neckline of her top, pulling it away from her flaming skin. Panic sparks through her body. How could it all be lies? “So what was Jackson doing during that time?”
Saul opens his hands in front of him. “He worked in a boatyard for a few years. Before that he was working in a pub down in Sandy Bay. He put on events for a while—small music festivals, dance nights, that sort of thing.”
In London, Jackson had a job with a drinks company. He was knowledgeable and had a good understanding of the trade, and was great with clients. He’d never used his marine biology degree, and Eva had never questioned it. Why would she? They lived in the city, not by the coast.
The idea that Jackson had been lying is unfathomable. She feels dizzy, as if the ground is swaying beneath her. She crosses the room to the window and grips the window frame to hold herself steady. In the fading light outside, she notices the sea kayak tucked against the bench where she’d seen Saul gutting fish. “Is that your kayak in the garden?” she asks, keeping her back to him.
“Yes.”
“Did Jackson ever own one?”
“A kayak? No. Not that I know of.”
So his beautiful tales of paddling in glassy bays, watching white bait flicker silver in shoals below, were fiction? Is that what she is expected to believe?
“Photos,” she says, suddenly turning. “You must have photos from college, from your travels.”
“Yes, I’ve got pictures,” he tells her.
“I need to see them.”
SAUL GOES INTO HIS room and pulls out the drawer beneath his bed. Inside is a slim file of letters, a bag of photos, and a wooden box with rusted hinges. It’s the box that he finds his hands hovering above.
He removes the lid and leans in close, breathing in the smell of salt and the chalkiness of pebbles. Inside are items he’d saved from their family shack: a thick glass bottle they’d found washed up in the bay, which he and Jackson filled with tiny shells; an oily green feather from the plume of a swift parrot; an abalone shell, the outside aged and brittle, the inside still gleaming with the memory of a former beauty; a pack of cards, the seams bound with aging tape.
He picks up a well-thumbed Wolverine comic belonging to Jackson, the edges curled and stained with mildew. He’d found it behind the bunk bed when he threw out the mattresses. Jackson had loved reading comics, losing himself in the fantasy of all those wild adventures and the mythical powers of the superheroes.
Growing up, the real superhero in Saul’s life was his brother. Jackson was the guy who could dive down and come up with an abalone in each hand, or do a tailspin on a skateboard before anyone else was even into skating. He was popular, brave, and he made everyone laugh. So it amazes Saul that Jackson wiped out his own history and replaced it with his brother’s.
He puts the comic aside, then turns his attention to the
photos Eva’s asked to see. He empties the bag of pictures onto the bed and begins riffling through them, looking for any of him as a student or when he was traveling. He picks up one of Jackson that was taken when he was living in Melbourne. He’s wearing a dark polo shirt, the name of a bar printed in gold on the front. He is grinning as he spins a cocktail shaker; his hands are blurred, too fast for the shutter to catch.
Of course Saul had always known Jackson was capable of lying. He remembers the wildly exaggerated stories he used to tell as a boy, which would make his father laugh and their mother frown a little. But this? It doesn’t make any sense to him. He’s only just coming to realize how deeply Jackson had deceived Eva, and the knowledge of it makes Saul uncomfortable—complicit by default.
As he flips though more photos, he comes across a picture of Jackson taken almost three years ago that Dirk had given him. Saul looks closely at the image of his brother, wondering whether he should tell Eva everything he knows. His hesitation isn’t out of loyalty to Jackson: he’s dead, so what does it matter? Nor is it out of loyalty to Dirk, who has asked him to keep quiet.
As he tucks the photo at the back of the drawer and gathers the rest of the pile, he realizes that he’s hesitated this long because he cannot bear to see what the truth will do to Eva.
EVA SITS ON THE sofa, her knees hugged to her chest. Her thoughts skitter and slide, as if moving across ice. It seems utterly incredible to her that Jackson could have been lying this whole time. They had loved each other, made marriage vows, spent hours talking about their pasts, their futures.
But a doubt skates forward: she had only known Jackson for two years. She’d fallen in love so swiftly and unexpectedly, had she really paused to take stock? Within a few months he’d already been welcomed into the fold of her friends and was treated by her mother as part of the family. It had given Eva a great feeling of intimacy and security.
Yet she’d not met anyone from Jackson’s past, not even his family. She’d been introduced to colleagues and friends he’d made since moving to London, but none of them had known Jackson any longer than she had. With mounting dread she realizes that Jackson could have created any past he’d wanted and nobody would have known.