by Mick McCoy
‘Ha! Why would I?’
‘It would be good to meet her,’ Conrad said, his voice even. ‘She must mean a lot to you.’
‘Tell us about her,’ Ruby said. ‘Please.’
‘It’s too late. Way too late.’ He stood. ‘She’s something good in my life and she has nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with this family.’ As he walked away from the table he said, ‘Valentin, you should get a refund on my ticket.’ He closed the bedroom door.
Ruby sat with her head in her hands. The three airline tickets rested on the table, one creased and torn. Alex didn’t understand how much work was involved. Didn’t appreciate it was for him, as much as anybody. She’d been to the Australian embassy and arranged their entry visas. They’d treated her as if they still thought she and Conrad were spies, made her wait, ignored her. But it had been easy to stay calm because she’d known she would win. They could make her wait, send her away – she’d come back the next morning. And the next, and the next, each time greeting them with a smile outside their office before they even started work and, eventually, they were persuaded by her polite but dogged persistence, if only to get rid of her. Who was that for, if not for him? And the packing those last few days. Thirteen years of their lives crammed into chests and suitcases. His clothes among it, his books, his tapes and records. Not once did he tell her not to do it. All carried down to the foyer and loaded into a taxi and lugged piece by piece into the customs office in the centre of town for inspection and sealing with steel bands so it wouldn’t need to be done on the day they flew out. Then back into a taxi, back up the stairs. Five flights of stairs while he was out with that girl. She didn’t expect his help but he hadn’t stopped her. He hadn’t said, Don’t pack my things because I’m not coming. All of it a waste now if he really wouldn’t come.
* * *
In the days that followed he set up a darkroom in the bathroom, swapping the normal light bulb for a red one, bringing an enlarger home from the university and leaving it on the floor under the towel rail when he wasn’t using it. A thick plywood board for his trays of chemicals rested over the small bath. Nothing could be moved for fear of a spill. Hooks were screwed into the walls and lines strung across the room from corner to corner, from which he pegged his prints. Bottles of chemicals were stacked by the toilet; tongs and scissors and measuring jugs just lay about. It stank in that tiny airless room from those horrible chemicals. And all the towels he’d stained in just a few days. She couldn’t use the toilet for half the night, and when she was allowed in it was a cluttered, impossible mess. She couldn’t see herself in the mirror with that stupid red light. All to remind her he wasn’t going.
‘The darkroom equipment must be very expensive,’ she said. ‘How will you pay for it once we’re gone? On top of your living expenses?’
‘All this stuff is free,’ he said. ‘On loan or paid for by uni. And I have more work at Mosfilm, starting from term break.’ He was infuriatingly unruffled, just like Conrad.
‘But Alex, you don’t know how much paperwork is involved just to live here. Your foreign ID, your Moscow residency permit, your Red Cross pass. And this exit visa Valentin arranged is only valid for a month.’
‘I don’t need the exit visa and Valentin will help with everything else, just like he has for you.’
‘But you have no birth certificate since you burnt it. You don’t know how hard it will be to renew everything.’
He smiled. ‘Valentin will help.’
‘What about this girlfriend? Is she going home for summer? Is she coming back next year?’
‘You don’t know anything about her.’
‘But what will you do here all alone? Australia is your home.’
‘There’s nothing for me in Australia. I was four years old when I left. I’m Russian.’
‘What about us? Conrad and me? We’re your family.’
‘It’s too late.’
Snatched conversations that went nowhere. Luggage was unsealed, unbanded, unpacked. Alex would come home from uni or the girlfriend’s, pick at the contents of the crates and bags little by little, day by day, as the need arose for something he couldn’t find, and then he’d leave again.
Through it all Ruby continued the percussion on Conrad’s chest and back. From that single ten-minute bout after he’d come home, they’d both developed the endurance for two forty-minute sessions each day. His lungs were much clearer, but she was still worried about how he’d get through such a long flight. It would be almost two days from the time they took off before they arrived in Melbourne.
And Conrad didn’t once try to make Alex change his mind. ‘There’s no point in me doing that,’ he said, when she pleaded with him again, mid-treatment, to help convince Alex to come home. ‘We’ve already been through this. I would be no more successful than you.’
‘He hates me, though,’ she said, cupped hands pock-pock-pocking against his back.
‘Every time you tell him he can’t do something, you strengthen his resolve to show you he can. Every time you say how naive and inexperienced he is, he hears you saying he’s stupid. You push him into a corner. How do you expect him to respond?’
‘What do we do?’
‘Let him stay. Either he can look after himself and all is well, or he finds out he can’t and then we work on getting him home.’
‘We can’t just leave him here on his own.’
‘Ruby, in four months he’ll be nineteen. He’s been through a lot. Maybe he’s ready. Maybe it will be good for him.’
She tapped at his shoulder to indicate they were done. ‘But it won’t be good for me,’ she said. ‘I’ll miss him terribly.’
He rolled himself to the edge of the bed. ‘Tell him that before we leave, because I know he doesn’t hate you, but I also know he’s worried sick that you hate him.’
‘Has he said that to you?’
‘Yes, he has.’
* * *
Ruby didn’t need the alarm to wake her. She was up and dressed well before she flicked on Conrad’s bedside light and gently nudged his shoulder. She left him to get ready and retreated to the couch, watching Alex’s bedroom door, willing it to open. But there was no movement to be heard behind it.
She scanned the flat. It all seemed suddenly foreign. The wear marks on the linoleum from the table and chairs, the dirty tea towel hanging from the handle on the stove door, an upended pot draining next to the sink, cheese and kefir chilling on the windowsill. None of it felt familiar. And so much was missing. No books lined shelves or lay open on the table. No pictures or posters hung from the walls. No vases held flowers. No photographs of her and Conrad and her boys with their faces smiling back at the camera.
Instead, where pictures had once hung, their borders were remembered by grimy smudges on the walls. Belongings taken from shelves had left behind their shadows in the dust, newspapers and magazines stuck out of rubbish bins, empty corners revealed dead flies or balls of hair like weeds in an untended, unloved garden. There was nothing to show that the Murphy family had ever lived there, called this place home. She was leaving Alex with nothing. With less than nothing. With the ghost of his departed family. And she was leaving without Peter.
A knock on the door made her jump. ‘You’re early,’ she said to Valentin as he stepped inside.
‘Are you ready?’
‘No.’
‘Yes,’ Conrad said, appearing from the bedroom. ‘We’re ready.’
‘I haven’t said goodbye to Alex.’ She turned to Conrad. ‘Have you?’
He hadn’t answered before Alex opened his door.
‘I’ll start taking things down to the car,’ Valentin said.
Conrad hugged Alex.
‘You’re getting stronger,’ Alex said. ‘You might survive the flight.’
‘I’ve survived your mother’s daily beatings. The flight will be nothing compared with those.’ They lingered. ‘I’ll miss you, but you’ll be fine, I know.’
‘I’ll miss y
ou too, Dad. Here,’ Alex said to Ruby, holding out an envelope. ‘It’s my first letter home.’
She took it without speaking. She felt like a young girl leaving home, surprised by a parting gift from her father.
‘You can read it on the aeroplane,’ he said, stepping forward and hanging his head on her shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘So am I.’
‘I love you.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I love you too.’
Conrad put an arm lightly around them both. ‘I’m going to start making my way down.’
‘Do you want some help?’ Alex said.
No,’ he said, heading for the door. ‘I practised yesterday. Down and back. You stay here and give your mother a kiss.’
Alex pressed his lips to Ruby’s forehead.
Valentin returned, picked up the two remaining suitcases and headed for the door. ‘I’m coming back here for breakfast, Alex,’ he said, already out in the hall. ‘See you in a couple of hours.’
Ruby stood in front of Alex. ‘Can I open the letter in the car?’
‘I suppose so,’ he said, but his face said otherwise.
‘I’ll wait.’
‘That would be better.’
She kissed his lips and left.
WHAT THE
LIGHT REVEALS
ALEX
18-1-71
Dear Mum,
I’m writing this because there are so many thoughts trying to hijack each other that speaking the words out loud is beyond me. And because I’m a coward.
I killed Peter.
I was driving the car when it hit the pole. I tried to tell you on the night, but you were too keen to leave me. Dad took the blame to protect me and I let him. At the police station, at home, I let him cover up for me. But it wasn’t my idea to tell the lie, it was Dad’s. He didn’t ask my permission. He didn’t think that maybe I wanted to tell the truth, or that I’d be better off if I did. And at the time I didn’t know how hard it would be, to let him lie for me. I thought that not taking the blame would be better, easier. But I was wrong. The secret has been making me crazy.
I was driving. I lost control of the car in the wet and we hit a pole. Peter died. Maybe if Dad was driving it wouldn’t have happened, but Dad was drunk. He was so sick it was dangerous for him to drive, he asked me to do it, so I did.
If I’d hit that pole the same way and bent the car the same way, but Peter was sitting in the back seat, instead of lying down and asleep, he could have prepared for the impact and might not have been hurt at all. And because you hated that car, you might’ve thought breaking it was a good thing. You might have been happy it was broken, happy with me.
I’m not saying it was Peter’s fault for being asleep. I’m saying it was an accident that had a terrible outcome, both being caused by lots of things – Dad was drunk and too sick to drive, Peter was lying asleep in the back, it was 1 a.m. and everyone was tired, the weather was really bad, the roads were slippery, potholed and dangerous and the streetlights were useless, it was a shit car and I was an inexperienced and pretty bad driver.
There should have been nothing to hide. I should have been able to tell everyone I was the driver, but Dad wanted to protect me from the police and from you and anyone else who might have dished out some punishment. It was a dumb decision because no one was going to get into trouble with the cops. The car wasn’t crashed into the pole to kill Peter. Any trouble was going to come from our family. From you. That must be what Dad thought or he wouldn’t have lied for me. Not to you, anyway. And because he was going to lie to you, he had to lie to everyone.
But I still knew I did it. I still had all the guilt. I still have. The truth shouldn’t have hurt anyone. But hiding it, lying about it, did hurt someone – me.
The longer you thought Dad was the one driving, the harder it got to tell the truth. I tried when you came home with Dad after I’d burnt the birth certificates – do you understand why I did that now? – but he collapsed in the bathroom. I thought he was going to die on the floor and it seemed like my problems weren’t important. And then you told me Peter was your favourite and you’d rather I was dead instead of him. After that, I just couldn’t tell you.
I’m angry with you, not Dad, because your secrets and lies about the adoption were to protect you. Dad’s secrets and lies about the accident were to protect me. From you. And then if the person you’ve lied to finds out the truth, whether or not the truth itself hurts them, keeping the truth a secret, telling a lie day after day after day by not telling the truth, is sure to hurt. I’m angry, really angry, and I want to be angry. But in writing this letter I’m doing for you something you couldn’t or wouldn’t do for me.
And I miss Peter so badly. I killed my brother and I miss him every day.
That’s why I’m staying in Moscow. Not because of Sinead. And anyway, why would I share the one good thing in my life with the person who’s the source of all the bad things? I can finish my course, get Peter’s ashes back and spread them at the pier in Odessa. I want to do it for him. And even for you. And Dad. And me. Maybe then I can stop being angry and think about coming back to Australia, I don’t know.
Alex
PS: I haven’t told Dad how I feel about the accident because he was going to be dead and then he wasn’t. Give him this letter. Please.
* * *
Exams started the week after his parents left, although he only had three across two weeks. He slept a lot, did only enough study to pass, worked at Mosfilm and saw Sinead whenever she’d have him, which was nowhere near enough. Most of his spare time was spent taking photos and developing film. Initially a symbol of defiance against his mother, the bathroom proved to be a workable darkroom with all the kit he’d brought in from the university. It was the room in the flat where he spent most of his waking time. Everywhere else there were reminders of Peter.
In the kitchen he found a wooden pestle and mortar under the bench. It was one of Peter’s early woodwork assignments, but he couldn’t look at it without seeing that room at the crematorium and thinking about what they were used for there. He threw them out. He also found a chopping board Peter had made, in a narrow gap beside the stove. After cleaning it he kept it on the kitchen bench, a reminder to persist with the medics or trainee monks or whatever the hell they were at the Donskoy crematorium. To not sit back and wait for their letter. His mother had cleared out Peter’s clothes and taken every photo of him back to Melbourne, but his hockey stick and skates, a few schoolbooks and the old chess set were left where Peter had last finished with them. Alex stood the hockey stick by the front door and left the chess set on the living room table.
He began inviting back people from his course. Acquaintances who, now he had the flat to himself, seemed a lot more interested in him. His mother had shopped for him once she accepted he was staying: milk, cheese, sausage, kefir, oats, tea, rye bread, a dozen eggs, tins of beans and tuna, even some sugar. As long as his guests brought the vodka, there was plenty of food, plenty of space and no one to tell him not to play his Rolling Stones cassettes at whatever volume he chose. But it was Sinead whose company he most wanted and she hadn’t come.
Back on that first morning, Valentin had returned from dropping his parents at the airport, expecting to be fed breakfast. Alex made porridge. It was terrible but Valentin didn’t complain. That very day he started his role of uncle by proxy, something he took with great seriousness, even if he’d been put up to it by Conrad and Ruby, as Alex suspected. He made a deal that every Sunday afternoon he’d give Alex a driving lesson in his own car, in exchange for a meal afterwards. But then he always brought the food, often some vodka and usually his girlfriend, Galina, a nurse he said his father had introduced him to. He told Alex she’d saved his father’s life.
Around the end of February, with Valentin and Galina badgering him about Sinead, Alex succeeded in convincing her to join them for Sunday dinner and, best of all, to stay the night. Since telling her
he wasn’t going back home with his parents, she hadn’t let him spend a single night in her room. The ‘good thing’ he’d lied to his mother about might have been over, or not so good, by the time he said it. But fling or not, just friends or not, even if she came that Sunday only because she was a student likely to eat her best meal for the week, he could happily live with that, especially if it also delivered her to his bed. Ten weeks after losing his virginity, he wasn’t keen on celibacy. And to him, she was so much more than a fling.
Up until then he’d been sleeping in his own bed, same as always, which was fine while he was on his own. His plans for the coming Sunday, though, raised the prospect of using his parents’ room. He packed away their double sheets and blankets because the thought of sleeping between them made his skin crawl.
He took the single set from his own bed, leaving it undressed, because the idea of using Peter’s was even creepier. ‘Where are the double sheets and blankets?’ Sinead said, that first Sunday night. She stood beside the bed, holding the corner of the single sheet at arm’s length, staring at it like it was sweat stained and evil-smelling.
‘My mother took them. She probably didn’t think I’d need them.’
It was late, Valentin had plied them both with vodka and Sinead’s only option was a long, cold wait in the dark for a bus on Leninski Prospekt to take her back to her dorm room, yet still she wanted to leave.
‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ he said. ‘We can stay close.’
They did stay close, but not as close as he’d hoped, and in the morning they hardly spoke. They walked the quarter-mile to the Metro station, grey clouds frayed by the wind, misty rain slanting in. He bought her one of the pirozhki buns that had become his breakfast staple and caught the bus with her to MSU before they parted, no kiss, no hug. Alex caught the next bus straight back to the Metro line, to chase some shots for his first-year portfolio on Moscow’s street dogs. He’d come up with the idea after Gregory – the one-legged, one-eyed vet – had lost his dog, Joseph.