Ways to Come Home

by Kate Mathieson

  We stop for a moment to watch a clutch of chickens and a rooster strut by as though they own the town. Hunter is so close his body leans into mine, like he can’t hold his own weight anymore.

  At the school we wave goodbye. Without saying a word, Hunter leans in and hugs me. His arms encircle my waist and mine his shoulders. He is warm and small, smaller than I first thought.

  We wave to each other as our group walks back to camp. Just before we turn the corner he yells out, ‘Tomorrow?’

  I cup my hands and shout back, ‘Yes.’

  I watch him safely go into the hut he calls home. And for a moment I get a glimpse into the joy it may be to have a son.

  I DO not come from my parents.

  Another woman carried me into this world. Her. My birth mother. Although there is nothing about her to suggest that she has earned the title of mother.

  When I was born in the middle of a cold Sydney winter, I spent the first thirty days of my life inside a hospital. I often wondered little things. Did I see the sun during those days? Did anyone ever pick me up as though I was theirs and press me to their chest? Did I hear a heartbeat? What damage was done that can’t be reversed?

  At an early age (four or five), I seemed to become preoccupied with things other children were not. I began to watch them. My family. How they moved the same way. How they shrugged and pursed their lips when thinking. How they mirrored each other in ways I could not mimic.

  I did not share my dad’s hushed tones or soft, gentle touch. I did not share my mother’s tight-lipped resilience, my sister’s intellectual stance on most things. I tried many times, but it felt foreign to laugh as they did, to smile and shrug, to keep calm, to be poised and pragmatic.

  They loved me, yes, but to me, there wasn’t a core that linked us together. We did not walk the same, laugh the same, look the same. We did not sing the same soul songs to the night, and I did not feel the bond that comes from the sharing of flesh and blood.

  I had always convinced myself I would grow to look like them. My dark hair would turn blonde, my hazel eyes would become a startling blue like arctic water under the sun. But I did not. I grew taller and wider and thicker, and my hair deepened to a dark espresso. It had kinks and curls while theirs hung thin and straight. They were quiet and calm and peaceful, and measured. And I was busy putting on plays, dancing around my bedroom, and being shushed.

  I was six when I first tried to leave home. I decided I didn’t want to live in a place where I didn’t belong, so I would go somewhere else. I packed my bag – one pair of shoes, a jumper, my glow worm torch, a book – and I slipped out into the evening. I left the front door ajar because I wanted them to know I was gone. I walked up the driveway thinking, Now what?

  I walked one, two houses down. There I stood, unsure. One foot on the pathway, the other on the lip of the road. I sat for a while near Mrs Louis’ driveway, my backpack still on. I was waiting, like some of us do, for someone to chase me, run me down, gather me up, cover me with kisses and love. I counted the minutes it took my parents to find me, using Mississippis to mark the seconds.

  Forty Mississippis until they found me.

  But they didn’t run towards me with the ferocity and love I desperately desired. Instead they simply said to each other, ‘Oh, thank goodness we found her.’ And then to me, ‘Come inside Kate, it’s dark.’

  Walking back into the house I remember thinking distinctly, I do not fit here. I am not sure if I meant my home, my life, or this earth, but I did not FIT. My parents loved me greatly, but it came from a place of calmness and quiet; a place that always felt out of reach. And for me, that was never enough.

  I felt I was bound by nothing more than a name to my family; and how loose it is to be bound by only a word.

  GROWING UP, these are the things I knew about my birth mother. She was born in New Zealand, she was 5’1”, pregnant with me at 27, and liked singing, knitting and reading. She was described as mature and intelligent.

  Who decided this, herself? The nurse who knew her for a few hours? Do mature and intelligent people get pregnant and give their child away?

  There is an insistence on her sanity, her level-headedness. Apparently a love of history and horses. But we all know what happened. Between the woollen scarves she made or the medieval stories she read, when she birthed me, she turned away. She simply said, I can’t. Or even worse, no, and left me to make my own way through this world.

  When the law allowed it, her name was delivered to me in a crisp slim envelope from the registry. The font was faded and slightly ajar, but you would only notice this if you stared at it for too long.

  Her name was Lillith. And she had named me too. Sarah.

  I wondered, Had she looked at me and thought me a Sarah?

  In Hebrew, where it originates, Sarah means princess or noblewoman. Sarai appeared in the Old Testament; she was the wife of Abraham and spelt her name with an i at the end until God later changed it to an h. Later she committed the spectacular feat of giving birth at the age of ninety to Isaac.

  Kate, or as I was christened, Katherine, is decidedly more unknown in its derivations. (The irony here is not lost on me.) From the Greek Aikaterine, the etymology is debated: it could derive from the earlier Greek name Hekaterine, which came from hekateros, meaning each of the two; or it could be derived from the name of the goddess Hecate, variously associated with crossroads and entrance-ways, she was often depicted holding two torches, or two keys in her hand.

  It could be related to Greek aikia (torture); or it could be from a Coptic name meaning ‘my consecration of your name’. In the early Christian era it became associated with katharos, to mean ‘pure’, and the Latin spelling was changed from Katerina to Katharina to reflect this.

  The name was first borne by a fourth-century saint and martyr from Alexandria called Katharina, who was tortured on a spiked wheel.

  Yes, I think. That’s how I feel. Tortured. Like I’m on a spiked wheel.

  After receiving the envelope I slept uneasily for a week. I woke at night from heavy dreams.

  I was troubled. Should I search for her? What would I find? Up ahead Hecate, the sorceress, held aloft two keys. Behind her, two pathways ran in opposing directions. Left or right. Yes or no. Light or dark. But what if you couldn’t tell which way is which?

  I began to ask for guidance and advice from the world around me. I shall search for Lillith if the traffic light goes green in less than five seconds. If there is rain today. If I see two white birds in our camellia tree. Each time I made it more obscure, and each time I found those items that I was looking for. It seemed the entire universe was saying Yes.

  As I knew it would eventually, saying Yes found me on weekends pouring through phone books and white pages and current election records. Lillith Samson, I thought, repeating the name like a mantra. Where are you?

  To say there were millions of Samsons would be an understatement. I could have joined all the lines of Samsons together and, like a ribbon, wrapped it around the world a few times over.

  Finally I ended up at the New South Wales State Library. A large creamy building made of marble and pillars and sandstone, tall and structured, carved into a corner on Macquarie Street. I requested electoral rolls dating back to 1978 – so old it was stored on microfilm.

  ‘Both New Zealand and Australia,’ I asked. The librarian with kind brown eyes set me up at the old clunking machine that needed a dust. It was so large that I had to stand to go through each line – highlighted in yellow faded paper, scrawled notes in formal cursive writing.

  For hours I travelled through ten years and there was nothing. No death, no marriage, no name on the electoral roll. She remained a mystery.

  I burst into tears and when concerned faces gathered around me, I had to pretend it was something else. The only thing I could find to say to the kindly librarian was, ‘I stepped on a pin.’

  That was what it was like, the tip of the needle; small enough that no-one could see, even m
e. But my God, when it pierced, it hurt like hell.

  When I left the State Library it was grey, almost night. The winds were shaking the trees, seeing if they could pull any of them loose. I took out my wallet and found the nearest liquor store. Inside I tossed up between whiskey and wine. One you could drink faster, but the other had more effect.

  I caught the train home and looked away from a mother and daughter laughing over a crossword. I avoided staring at the teenage couple kissing on the station, not pausing for breath. An elderly couple held thin, papery hands as they helped each other off the train like a love affair that never ended. It was clear the most beautiful thing in the world was to be wanted.

  I looked out from the train window onto the world – everyone seemed to be in pairs.

  RAFFA HAS tracked and traced and whittled. He has taken care to include everything I had asked for. The entire jewellery box is covered. But he has done this using my drawings not as inspiration as I intended, but as an identical copy. The star is wonky, exactly as I have drawn it. The ocean waves are wobbly, just like my original. He is indeed the finest copycat. And his carpentry is intricate, delicate, amazing. It’s just that my designs look like a child has been doodling on the box.

  ‘What do you think, Kate?’ he asks me tentatively, watching me look at each end of the box, turning it upside down and glancing carefully over each side.

  ‘I love it.’

  I take the box down to the beach. There is a perfect catch at the edge of each lid, a place where the box can be shut and locked, and you don’t need to worry about it spilling open. This is a relief.

  I feel glad. But then I don’t. I become desperately aware there is another thought making itself known. The under thought. Beneath the layers, under the leaf litter of my mind, in the soil. The one that knows this is a box.

  A box.

  It is not lost on me that I have come to Africa to empty something locked inside of me, something I’ve held inside for years. And yet the only thing I have purchased, that has been created just for me, is a locked box.

  I sit with it for a while. The ebony painted wood. Raffa has sealed it with a waxy oil. It has been left to dry in the African sun and instead of cracking, it has become voluminous, shiny like seal skin.

  Carefully, I open the box, and it does so with a wooded pop! It creaks slightly – the hinges, the wood still young. With the lid fully opened, I am not dismayed to find it empty.

  The lake finds me. Then retreats. Finds my toes. Retreats.

  I watch an empty shell rock back and forth in the shallow tide. Something used to live in its smooth moon-coloured hallways. I lean over and without thinking, rinse it and place it in my pocket. Then, without a thought, I take it out of my pocket and put it in the box. It squeals when I open it, and creaks as it shuts.

  I walk along the water’s edge. The box tucked, like a child, on my hip.

  Down the bend of the bay, past a small patch of grass planting itself in some dunes, I find the nub of a stick. No longer than my pointer finger, waterlogged once, the tide has smoothed the splinters, worn them back better than a sander. It is gnarled and knotted and seems to have given birth to, I count them, five more branches before it ended up in the lake. A gust of wind? A storm? It too finds a place in the box.

  At the far end of the campsite, hundreds of metres past the point I am meant to stop, where the tide has gone out, I find an old rock. Pressed and round, it curls with coolness into the palm of my hand, perfect for skimming.

  Shell. Twig. Rock.

  I go on after that, walking across the landscape, collecting items. Filling my jewellery box with parts of the world.

  Giving lost things a place to call home.

  I stop. Isn’t this why I had started this journey, to address how to fill things up? Or how to let things go?

  I carry the box back to my room where it throbs at the bottom of my bed. As if it holds a heart, beating.

  LILLITH PREFERRED to be called Lila. Perhaps it made her sound more exotic. That was her second statement to me when she called.

  Her first: I’m your mother.

  I couldn’t breathe. My knees wobbled. I sat on the kitchen floor, the phone cord extending, and held the receiver to my ear. It was as if the world had emptied of all things and all people and it was only her, and me.

  I was wondering if she was going to say it. Those little words. ‘Sorry. I just couldn’t. I wanted to, but—’

  She didn’t. I’m not sure if that meant something or not.

  ‘Really glad you found me!’ she exclaimed, breathing heavily into the phone.

  ‘Yes.’

  She had a New Zealand accent. A peculiar lilt. I listened carefully to the way she clipped her vowels. It should have been strange, hearing her voice for the first time, but instead hearing it was soothing. A voice from the past. As if I remembered it.

  ‘Well, the private investigator did. He caught me between France and Italy. Good job I had phone reception, otherwise. Well, not to worry about that. Glad it all worked out.’

  ‘Yes.’ I couldn’t find words.

  She said with interest, ‘You sound so Australian.’

  ‘What else would I sound like?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, finally finding silence. ‘Like me?’

  She took my pause as a sign to continue talking, and she nattered away as if I were a long-lost friend, an old aunt, the neighbour from up the street. Was I grateful for that, the chitchat? I wasn’t sure.

  A Buddhist, she didn’t believe in the accumulation of things. She had two suitcases and a few old coats. The rest of her belongings were sold, borrowed or rented, splayed across the world hanging in new houses.

  ‘You don’t need a house or a mortgage,’ she told me, ‘when the world is waiting for you to visit.’

  Her favourite countries were China, Egypt and South Africa. She could speak five languages. I listened intently, but said little. I tried to fill twenty-one years in that conversation, stuffing information into the gaps of my life. Gaps that opened like the hungry mouths of baby birds, empty and wanting. Hoping her words would carry me forward. For it wasn’t a sense of her that I was searching for; it was a sense of me.

  She explained to me that she was made to travel. She wanted to learn Arabic and German and Mandarin.

  Me too, I thought, me too.

  She said, ‘Let’s meet,’ as though she were planning a party.

  She would be in Sydney in six months. Staying in Chinatown.

  After a rare pause, she asked with a tight voice, ‘What do you look like?’

  We matched on every count – deep brown hair, cocoa eyes, full lips, arched noses, deep olive skin. She said with an easy laugh, ‘You sound like me.’

  And after all these years of not fitting in, it seemed with ease, that finally I did.

  I ARRIVED in the city too early. I watched people come and go from the hotel foyer, and each time I sat a little straighter. Is that her?

  The people behind the desk were dressed in red blazers. They answered ringing phones with muted tones of importance and rhythm. ‘Thank you, madam.’ ‘Of course, sir.’ ‘Yes, a 6 am wake-up call for Room 378.’

  There was an older lady at the desk and I was sure she wasn’t Lillith. She had a walking cane and I didn’t think a tour guide could afford to be slow when squeezing through San Marco Piazza with a tour group. Although a cane would come in handy to swat away thieves, perverts and excessively attractive women.

  I walked outside. The October sun was fading, and the world was hot and dark. My watch was on time, which meant she was late. Ten minutes. An older couple stepped from the chill of the hotel and headed towards the city for dinner, her arm on him, her high heels echoing until they turned the corner.

  I sat and stared at my phone, then my watch. I counted like my mum used to when I was in trouble. One, one and a half, two, two and a half ... I wonder what number I am counting to, and whether you can ever really get to the end if it’s a
place you’re not sure you want to go. I went into the foyer again, and when the cold made my arms freeze, I went back outside.

  Someone called my name. ‘Kate.’

  I looked up, and it was her.

  She called my name again then rushed towards me. I thought we were going to shake hands. That’s what strangers do, don’t they? Instead her chubby arms engulfed my waist. Her head didn’t even reach my chin. Her hair was short on top and long at the bottom, dark brown and much curlier than mine.

  She had my chocolate eyes, or I had hers. Her lips were slightly thinner, her mouth circled in finely spun wrinkles like strands of fairy floss. The lines of a smoker. Her nose was more of a nub and less prominent on her face, which was shaped the same as mine. A heart. Her voice was deeper, raspier, her skin brown and tanned – just like mine.

  I hesitated. After a lifetime apart, what do you say?

  ‘Well let’s go inside,’ she said grabbing my arm and leading me into the hotel bar.

  The bar, if we could call it that, was a small room with chipped ebony tables pushed together and worn pink seats like I was visiting an old lady’s house. The plushness of the rouge carpet and moss-green upholstery had indeed been rich in the day it was decorated, circa 1970. Now the rouge red carpets had become tattered, absent in places, scuffed. The occasional circular stamp of a cigarette burn. White wallpaper had been breathing smoke for years, staining it the colour of hay. The once-golden brocade on the edge of the cushions had turned a faded mustard.

  On these nights, hot and dark, people like to lounge outside with cold drinks and good views. They like to see and be seen, their legs holding the first colour of the summer sun under white skirts and tight dresses. Because of this, there were very few people in the tattered, cold bar. An old man sitting at a stool nursed the same beer he’d had since I’d arrived. A couple of middle-aged men stared over their rums at the city skyline, lost in thought.