What the Light Reveals

by Mick McCoy

  ‘We’re going home. In two weeks.’ There was excitement and relief in her smile, which he couldn’t begrudge her after what he’d put her through. It was so much better than the loss and grief that had clouded her eyes those last two months.

  ‘Before I pass out, there’s something I want to say.’ He coughed a little.

  ‘Let’s get you into bed first.’

  ‘No, no.’ He held up his hands. ‘I don’t want to lose my will.’

  ‘Okay.’ She leant towards him, elbows on the table.

  His shoulders were strung high and tight. ‘I’ve lied to you about something very important.’

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  His spidery legs jiggled under the table. ‘When we were in Australia, after I was sacked from the SEC and I got jobs then lost them, or missed out despite being the best candidate …’

  ‘This can wait,’ she said, reaching out to him.

  He grabbed her hand. ‘I lied to you. I wanted so badly to come here that I lied to you.’

  ‘What about?’ she said, not the slightest pause, or indication of surprise.

  ‘That job in Hobart with the British firm. The manager down there was determined to fight for me. He told me about the telegram from ASIO recommending that I should be sacked. “Fuck ’em,” he said to me. “I don’t take orders from the likes of them.” Conrad didn’t smile, even though he put on his former employer’s thick Scottish accent. ‘But after a month away and with the parent company’s board leaning on him, the future there was too uncertain to go through with selling the house and arranging for you and the boys to come down, so I resigned. I missed you and I wanted to come home. Peter was just a baby.’ He dropped his head. ‘I didn’t get sacked – I lied about the manager giving in to his board. I wanted to come home. And even then, I wanted to come here.’

  ‘But he’d have eventually given in and sacked you anyway.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, but he shook his head. ‘And the Swinburne Tech job – they offered it to me but I didn’t take it. Then the patents office job, I quit. I wasn’t sacked – I quit, because my God was it boring.’

  ‘You said you failed the security check.’

  ‘For the Melbourne Uni job I did. And the one at Fisherman’s Bend, but not Swinburne Tech. I turned it down.’

  ‘Oh Connie, I don’t care about any of that,’ she said. ‘I agreed we should leave. The night those goons were in the laneway …’ Her eyes were wide at the memory of it. ‘People hated us. They didn’t know us but they hated us anyway. I couldn’t walk to the shops without whispers and rudeness. My brother wanted to teach us a lesson. My own brother. And no matter what you say about those jobs, the ones you left or didn’t take, they’d have sacked you sooner or later. It made no difference. We didn’t belong. They didn’t want us to belong.’

  He’d expected her to be unsettled or disappointed, probably angry. ‘It’s the same, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Here or there, it’s the same. Melbourne or Moscow, it doesn’t matter. They watch us and take our jobs from us.’ Out the window, low grey clouds hung off the shoulders of the apartment block across the street, stifling the light. ‘The reasons we should stay. All this time I’ve carried them around as confidently as if they were true.’ His ran his bony fingers through his hair. ‘And that ridiculous badge they gave me.’

  He was tired. The discharge from hospital, the drive home and being hauled up the stairs, the whisky. The confession. ‘I lied to myself,’ he said. ‘I was selfish and proud. But I was just stupid about my lungs. Stupid. I honestly didn’t know how sick I was. At my check-up, the one already booked for the morning after I passed out, I thought they’d give me some medicine and I’d be fine.’

  ‘It’s not the same, though, in Moscow and Melbourne,’ she said.

  He watched his wife across the table. The forgiveness. She was stronger than him, and truer. He loved her still. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s not the same. We’ll be so much better off in Melbourne.’

  He pressed his palms against the tabletop. ‘I’m going to walk to the bedroom without help, and I’m going to sleep.’ He tried to stand, but had the leg strength of someone who’d spent the last two months in bed. ‘Could you?’ he asked.

  She pulled out his chair with him still in it, squatted in front of him, her hands behind his bony hips. ‘Arms around my neck,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got a new target,’ he said. ‘Climb the stairs to the aeroplane in two weeks. Can you help me with that?’

  ‘Nothing would make me happier.’

  As his head hit the pillow he thought about how much he’d missed being there. Not in the bed, or the room, or even the flat, but the place he shared with his family, what was left of it. It didn’t matter where they were. Moscow didn’t matter.

  As he lay in his bed, he was surprised by the beginnings of an erection. How long had it been? He marvelled at the futile but welcome persistence of human instincts. It wasn’t a youthful erection by any means, but it was still an erection. He was proud of himself.

  ALEX

  Alex sat across the foot of Sinead’s bed with his back against the wall, reading My Brother Jack. Peter’s notes were scribbled in its borders. Sinead was at her tiny desk.

  ‘I don’t know what he expects me to do,’ she said. ‘I can’t suddenly change now, just because it doesn’t suit him.’

  Her Russian supervisor had decided yesterday, three months into her two-year exchange, that he could no longer accept her thesis topic, the representation of the Soviet Union in Western journalism, because her work was likely to be critical of more than just Western journalism.

  ‘What about your supervisor in England? Can’t he sort it out?’

  ‘We spent months before I came, agreeing to everything. If I have to change it the way he wants, it won’t be worth doing at all. It’ll be nothing more than propaganda.’

  It sounded like she wanted to pack up and go home. She must have a boyfriend back there.

  ‘Besides,’ she continued, ‘they don’t like each other. I hardly think either of them is going to put a lot of effort into resolving this.’

  They’d only been together six weeks, but when Alex imagined the coming summer – still four months away – he saw her there. Even though his mother was talking about going home to Australia, even though Sinead had already planned to go back to Watford for two months over the summer break and now her arsehole supervisor might make it permanent – even with all that, he saw them together on a train to Odessa, lying side-by-side on the beach under cloudless blue skies, waking up late in a hotel room with nowhere else to be, eating in cafes, making love.

  He was nowhere near done with that dream when she changed the subject. ‘Do you ever talk to them?’ she said out of the silence.

  ‘Who?’

  She’d opened a folder of his photographs, from the most recent rolls he’d developed: homeless men on the street, in building foyers, at Metro entrances, anywhere they could get out of the weather, drink in peace and sleep. ‘These men. Are they okay with you taking their picture? Do you ask them about it first?’

  ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘What about your supervisor?’ Had she already made up her mind to leave?

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  He didn’t believe her but felt too insecure to push it. He needed her more than she needed him, they both knew that. He wriggled across the bed and sat next to her. ‘Most of them I ask first, whenever I can ask,’ he said. ‘But not all.’ He shuffled through the photos to find the one-legged veteran standing in front of a propaganda poster. ‘See this guy.’

  Across the city in the last month a new propaganda poster had appeared, showing the outline of a woman’s face. She was fine-featured, the young and strong and beautiful image of Mother Russia the government promoted to its own people. Against
her cheek she held a soldier’s cap and two cornflowers, her eyes focusing on the faraway, captioned with the words Nobody is forgotten, nothing is forgotten. Black charcoal on white, no colour except for the red star on the military cap and the deep indigo of the blooms.

  ‘I talk to him a lot,’ he said.

  ‘Is he missing an eye too?’

  Alex found a close-up. ‘Here.’ There was history in his face. Hardship, disappointment, acknowledgement and acceptance of the futility of his life. ‘That one eye tells the lie of the slogan on the poster. He is forgotten. Everything done to him and by him is forgotten.’

  ‘It’s too sad,’ Sinead said. ‘How does he stay warm? That coat is threadbare. And he only has an old moccasin on his foot!’

  ‘He has a dog, Joseph, named after Stalin. He calls it Slovoch, Bastard, like that’s its real name. But he loves his dog, treats it better than himself. He lies on the pavement while Joseph is curled up on his cushion.’

  ‘Do you know his name, or just the dog’s?’ The way she frowned at Alex, it was as if he’d insulted her.

  ‘Yeah, I know his name. Gregory.’

  ‘Have you ever bought him anything?’ she said. ‘Given him a cigarette?’

  ‘Often I get him something from a street cart. A cup of kvass. Have you had that?’ Alex pushed himself back across the mattress, leaned his back against the wall and picked up his book. ‘But I’m not answering any more questions. You’re not my mother.’

  He wasn’t reading but kept his eyes on the book as she stared at him. ‘You’re such a child,’ she said, and left the room.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re angry at me,’ he said as she thudded down the hall. He cast aside the book again.

  She came back after a minute with a large soup pot and two cleaning sponges she’d had on the boil to clean them. ‘The woman who works in the kitchen thought these smelled like sausages,’ she said, her voice free of irritation. ‘I had to show her it was just dirty sponges in the pot.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Sorry about before,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling bad about why I’m here and I was trying to make you feel bad too.’ She sat heavily in the desk chair, the pot on her lap. ‘But that’s not even logical, is it? Or fair,’ she said. ‘I had no right to criticise you. I’m a blow-in, I don’t know this place, but you do – you’re a local.’

  Alex stared at his feet. ‘Not if my mother has her way.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She wants us all to go back to Australia now that Dad’s out of hospital.’

  ‘How long have you known about this?’ Sinead’s face was hidden. She pushed aside his photographs with too little care as she rested the pot on the desk.

  ‘A week.’ He lifted himself away from the wall, scanning his pictures for scratches or water-damage. ‘Dad’s due home from hospital today. He might already be home, but he’s still so sick I don’t think they’d let him fly.’

  ‘Well, that’s great news, isn’t it?’ She threw the sponges into the pot, water splashing over the lip. ‘When do you go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m not going, I don’t think.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m not ready.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Live in the flat,’ he said. ‘You could come and stay.’ It sounded like a proposal and his face reddened.

  ‘You can’t live here,’ she said, her accent more English than usual, like a schoolteacher’s.

  ‘I know that.’ It wasn’t necessary for her to say that. ‘I’m not asking to.’

  ‘Can you live by yourself in the flat?’

  ‘The rent’s fixed by the state. For life.’

  She sat beside him on the bed. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘Can you live in this country by yourself? With all the bad things that have happened?’

  ‘All the bad things involve my parents. That’s why if they leave, I want to stay.’ He hesitated. ‘Plus there are good things here.’

  ‘Don’t stay because of me.’ Her voice was free of emotion, her gaze direct.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I’m only here until summer, if that long. I don’t know if I’ll be granted another year, or if I want it. I’m from one side of the world and you’re from the other. I’m twenty-two and you’re seventeen.’

  ‘I’m eighteen,’ he said, ‘but so what?’

  ‘You belong with your family, not with me, particularly after everything that’s happened. They’d miss you. They must need you.’

  His hands were trembling. ‘I used to hate it here,’ he said, rising from the bed. He wanted some space between them, but the room was so small. He slumped into the desk chair but felt awkward there, exposed and inadequate. He sat against the opposite wall among her shoes and underwear. ‘It was this place. Moscow. That’s what I always thought, and I’d have done anything to leave. But finding out I was adopted explained all the differences in how my parents treated Peter and me. Mum, mostly.’

  What was he trying to say? What did this have to do with Sinead rejecting him?

  ‘And then Peter died and Dad got sick and Mum got angry. And it split us apart even further.’

  She wasn’t interested. He could see it. She was shitting herself that what she thought was a fling meant way too much to him.

  ‘Not belonging with them is a stronger feeling than not belonging here. So I’m going to stay. I’m going to finish my course and I have my new job.’ He hesitated. ‘And I’ll spend as much time as I can with you, if you’ll let me.’

  ‘But I’ll be gone, Alex. Four months, maybe less, and I’ll be gone. And it might be for good.’ Her voice was pleading. ‘Don’t choose me over your family.’

  He collected his photographs.

  ‘Alex, don’t leave like this,’ she said, but she didn’t do anything to stop him.

  He took the stairs two and three at a time down all twelve floors, ran through the entrance foyer and straight out the front doors. Snow was everywhere, falling from the grey sky, hanging off the trees, ankle deep on the ground. A hundred yards into the winter’s day he stopped and stared back at the MSU building, its wedding cake architecture now dusted white. A few weeks earlier he’d run from the hospital like this when he’d found his father’s room empty, but back then he had a refuge. Sinead’s dorm room. Sinead.

  He stuffed the folder of photographs into his satchel and walked on.

  CONRAD

  ‘Welcome home, Dad.’

  Conrad rubbed at his eyes. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘After six,’ Ruby said, standing at Alex’s shoulder. ‘You slept the whole afternoon.’

  ‘How do you feel?’ Alex said.

  ‘Magnificent. I had an erection before.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Ruby laughed.

  ‘Dad, I don’t want to know,’ Alex said, his face all cartoonish disgust.

  Conrad dug his elbows into the mattress to begin the slow process of rising from the bed. He was overjoyed to have surprised and embarrassed them. Ruby stepped forward to help. ‘Let me try,’ he said. He coughed and gurgled, but he got there.

  ‘Starting tomorrow,’ Ruby said, ‘I’m going to get to work on those lungs.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Percussion,’ she said. ‘Drum on your chest with my hands. Rattle that muck out of you.’

  ‘This is why I don’t come home much,’ Alex said, smiling. ‘I’d rather hear about Dad’s hard-on. Anyway, I have an announcement to make.’

  Conrad wondered about the girlfriend he’d never met. ‘Tell us, then.’

  ‘I’ve got a job. As a film loader, at Mosfilm.’

  ‘That’s wonderful news, Alex,’ Conrad said. ‘When do you start?’

  ‘Last week, actually. The day after Christmas. Three afternoons a week. It fits perfectly with my college timetable. The pay isn’t great, but …’

  His proud grin was transparent and genuine. Ruby’s brow
pinched.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ he said.

  ‘We’re leaving for Australia in two weeks,’ she said, before walking from the room.

  ‘Two weeks!’ Alex said, staring through the door at his departing mother. He turned to Conrad. ‘Did you know about this?’

  He pushed himself to his feet. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What do you mean sort of?’

  ‘The date I found out about today, but you knew we were going.’ He shuffled sideways so he could steady himself against the wardrobe door. ‘You still want to go, don’t you?’

  Alex’s face was stony. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. Not now.’

  ‘Why not? What’s changed? The new job, but what else?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘Can you sit with me? On the bed?’ Conrad lowered himself to the mattress. ‘Please.’

  Alex glanced at the photo on the chest of drawers, of Peter in a nappy playing on the kitchen table back home.

  Watching him, Conrad said, ‘Tell me about your girlfriend. When am I going to meet her?’

  Alex sat. ‘Dad, it’s all wrong now.’ His head hung low. ‘I’m sorry but it’s all wrong.’

  ‘We’ll make it right.’

  Alex leant forward, elbows on his knees and hands hanging down like wilted leaves. ‘I’m not ready for that.’

  ‘Can I help?’ He touched his son’s shoulder. ‘Let me help.’ He squeezed gently, but Alex didn’t move.

  ‘You’re stronger, anyway,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘I want us all to go home. I truly want it.’

  ‘I believe that, Dad. And I never thought I’d say this, but I want to stay. I have a job now, I like my course, I have Sinead.’

  ‘You’ll get a job in Melbourne. Enrol in a new course.’