by Kylie Ladd
She’d started at that, taken aback. She’d never told him she was with Ben.
‘I called your mother,’ he said, noticing her reaction. ‘Just after you dumped me. I was trying to speak to you, but I got her instead. She told me what had happened—that you’d met someone at the school. I remembered you mentioning Ben and guessed that it was him.’ When Skye didn’t respond he went on, ‘I was a bit of a mess at the time. I think Nell was trying to put me out of my misery.’
‘Ben and I broke up,’ Skye said. ‘I finished the grant, but the school didn’t offer me anything else.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Hamish said, and he sounded as if he meant it. Then he’d leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Look after yourself.’
Skye stared after him as he walked away, while the intermediate girls waited impatiently for their class to begin.
Three days later he had rung her on her mobile. Jess missed her, he said. Did she want to meet them for a walk? Skye had hesitated, but then agreed. It wasn’t as if she was doing anything else, and she missed Jess too. They went to a park and threw the ball for Jess, just as she was doing right now. Hamish had talked about the job he’d taken as soon as his results came in, how all the years of study were finally paying off. Skye had listened quietly and then told him about Ben. Just the barest facts, those she could choke out. That ridiculously, shockingly, he was her biological brother. That she’d loved him, that she still wanted to talk to him, but he’d vanished. Then she’d started to cry and Hamish had put his arms around her, and she’d realised with surprise that even in the midst of all her pain, all her anguish, it felt good to be held.
Nothing else felt good, so she’d seen him again. And again and again, until holding turned to kissing, and kissing turned to sex. Skye thought of Ben then, when Hamish was on top of her. She didn’t mean to, but she couldn’t help it. She still longed for him, still loved and wanted and missed him terribly. But Ben had gone, and for some brief stretches of time Hamish helped her forget that. He distracted her from her anguish; he stopped her going mad.
By July she was pregnant. It was her fault, of course. She’d been on the pill, but sorrow had left her scatterbrained, sleep-deprived, unable to concentrate on anything more than simply getting through each day, and she’d regularly forgotten to take them. Once it was confirmed, the options were limited. She didn’t think she could go through an abortion, and she certainly wasn’t going to give the baby up, not after what had happened with Ben. Instead, to her surprise and even relief, Hamish proposed, and they were married that November. She was twenty weeks gone, already showing in her dress.
Skye shook her head at Jess, who kept nudging the ball towards her. She was too tired to keep throwing. She needed a rest. Pregnancy, she’d discovered, felt a lot like grief. There was the weight and the heft of it, the way it fatigued you; there was the inability to think clearly or do very much at all. A house opposite the park still had its Christmas decorations up, she noticed, though it was almost the end of January. Skye knew how its owners must feel. She was out of sync too: married and pregnant to one man, but thinking of another. Everything jarred; nothing was the way it was supposed to be.
19
Ben positioned himself on a bench just to the left of the museum’s main entrance. He’d made sure he was there a good half hour earlier than they’d organised, but still he was nervous. Just say he missed her? How terrible if she came through the doors looking for him, and didn’t see him, particularly after all he’d put her through—disappearing like that, with no explanation. Another fear gripped him: maybe she hated him. She’d arranged this meeting, sure, but maybe that was only so she could tell him how much she despised him, to spit the words in his face, then walk out of his life forever. Ben felt sweat prickle beneath his armpits, in his groin. He deserved it, after all.
‘Ben! BEN!’
He looked up in the direction of the cry but for a moment didn’t recognise her. She had grown so tall, and her hair was longer. Then she flung her arms around him and he knew her immediately—the rangy limbs, her earthy scent. Those things hadn’t changed.
‘Kirra,’ he said, hugging her tightly, a lump in his throat. The foyer echoed and surged around them, full of school groups and tourists. How strange to remember that she wasn’t actually his sister. She still felt as if she was.
Kirra was the first to pull back, disentangling herself from his grasp. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ve only got an hour, then I’m due back with my class.’
‘Where do you want to go?’ Ben asked. ‘Are you hungry? We could have something to eat at the cafeteria.’
‘Can’t,’ she said, pulling him past the blue whale skeleton and towards the escalators. ‘This is group study time, remember? I’ve got to watch a film, then fill in a worksheet. Couldn’t tell my teacher I was meeting my long-lost brother instead.’ She flashed him a smile, blue-eyed and delighted, then impulsively reached for his hand as they rode to the second floor. ‘I’m so happy to see you.’
‘I know. Me too,’ said Ben. ‘Listen, Kirra, I’m sorry for what happened. I wasn’t thinking about you when I left Tatong that night. It’s just that—’
‘Shhh,’ she said, pulling him into the Science and Life Gallery. ‘Don’t talk. Don’t talk about that, anyway. Help me get these questions answered, and then we can just sit with each other for a bit.’ She grinned at him again, cheeky in her excitement. ‘All my class will be wondering who the mysterious older man is.’
She was growing up, Ben thought, following her into a darkened theatrette at the rear of the gallery and settling himself in a seat while she fiddled with a notebook and pencils. Heck, she had grown up. When did that happen? He sneaked another look at her through the gloom. Kirra must be half a foot taller than when he’d seen her last, fourteen months ago. She was due to grow up, he supposed, but it was still a surprise. She’d had her ears pierced, and was wearing a short skirt and a strappy top rather than her customary shorts and t-shirt. How was his mother dealing with this, her baby erupting into womanhood?
The film came on, and Ben stared at the screen, concentrating fiercely. He didn’t want to think about his mother. What was done was done, and they all had to live with it now. Just this hour alone with Kirra had taken four months to organise, and he wasn’t going to waste it feeling angry. He shouldn’t have even tried to talk to Kirra about the situation, he thought, remembering the moment on the escalator. She understood. Even if she didn’t, she had sought him out, which was all that mattered. Ben remembered the first letter she’d sent to him, forwarded from his old address just a few weeks after that night at the farm. The shock of seeing her handwriting on the envelope, the way his heart had thudded as he slit it open. His mother had written too, countless times, but he’d thrown those straight in the bin unopened. He knew she was sorry, but sorry wasn’t enough. She should never have lied to him for so long. She’d stolen his identity from him, didn’t she realise that? She’d betrayed him completely.
He took a deep breath. Beside him, Kirra whispered, ‘It only goes for a few more minutes, I think,’ then went back to scribbling notes. Ben read the heading on her worksheet: Mitosis and meiosis. Biology, he thought, remembering his own school years, the abandoned science degree. The film was showing cells dividing. Chromosomes replicated obediently, then split down the middle and moved smartly to their designated poles. It was all so clean, so straightforward. Ben’s split had been messier. In the week after confronting his mother he’d moved flats so she didn’t know where he was, and got a new mobile phone number to avoid her calls. Leaving his job had been wholly to escape memories of Skye, the slap in the face of passing her mosaics every day in the playground, but it had pleased him that he was also dead-ending another avenue through which his mother might try to contact him.
He’d written back to Kirra, though. She said she missed him and she just wanted to know how he was. Cunningly, she’d suggested he reply to her care of her best friend’s address, knowing, a
s he did, that their mother would otherwise intercept his letter. I wish you could work this out with Mum and Dad, she had written, but if you can’t it’s not fair to leave me too. She was only thirteen at the time, and the words made Ben’s chest tighten with guilt. He hadn’t thought it through. Of course he hadn’t. He knew once he confronted his mother that he never wanted to speak to her again, but he hadn’t factored in the collateral damage to Kirra.
Thankfully, he hadn’t lost her. She emailed him from school when she could; he sent her his new mobile number, and every so often she would cycle down to the phone outside the pub and ring him from there. Ben loved those calls. He could picture her, red-cheeked, as she chatted about her friends and the village; he could close his eyes and imagine Tatong stretching out in front of her—the cattle clustered beneath a tree for shade, the dew stringing the fence posts in the early morning. Once he asked her why she didn’t call from home, wait until Mary was out and ring him then.
‘She never goes out,’ Kirra had said simply. ‘Dad does the shopping these days. He gets stuff wrong and she scolds him, but it doesn’t make her do it herself.’
After that Ben had never referred to his parents again during their conversations. He sensed Kirra’s frustration at times, her anger at them all, but there was nothing to be done. Occasionally, on the phone, she’d get teary and he’d distract her by talking about the future, when she was at uni, and how she’d come to live in the city and share his flat. ‘You’ll be married by then!’ she’d wailed once, and he’d laughed. He knew that was never going to happen.
She’d never asked about Skye, instinctively sidestepping the topic. Then, one night last week she’d rung him excitedly to announce that she was coming to Melbourne for the day with her science class. They were going to the museum. Could he meet her there? Ben asked about the teacher—wouldn’t she be keeping an eye on her students at all times? But Kirra said it would be fine. ‘We have to do some group work,’ she’d told him, ‘but Anna, Gab and Sim know all about you. They’ll cover for me as long as I complete my section of the worksheet.’
‘Finished!’ she exclaimed now, slapping her notebook shut. The film was still running, seedlings unfurling from the ground in time-lapse photography.
‘Do you want to go somewhere else before the rest of your class get here?’ Ben asked.
Kirra glanced around. The theatrette was still empty save for a mother and a toddler sitting in the front row, the child slurping noisily on a juice box.
‘Nah,’ she said, picking up his hand again. ‘Let’s stay here. It’s cosy. I can have you all to myself.’ Then she added quietly, her eyes wet, ‘I miss you, Ben.’
He sighed. ‘I know you do, and I miss you too. But I had already moved out.’
‘I know, but it’s still different. I could talk about you then. I didn’t have to act as if you didn’t exist in case I made Mum cry again.’
Ben dropped her hand, hurt. She was breaking the rules.
‘OK, OK,’ Kirra said. ‘Forget it. Tell me about your new job. Youth work, huh?’
She was trying, so he made an effort too, hoping they could regain some of the closeness he’d felt when they sat side by side in silence. ‘Youth work makes it sound more glorified than it is. I run a drop-in centre for disadvantaged kids, over near the commission flats. It’s only three afternoons a week. I break it up with some relief teaching. It keeps things interesting.’
‘What do you do with them? The kids at your youth group.’
‘Play pool or ping-pong—we’ve got some old tables. Talk, hang out. If the weather’s OK we go to the park and kick the footy.’ He smiled. ‘They’re trying to teach me soccer.’
‘World game.’ Kirra shrugged, as if everyone knew that. He was charmed by her all over again, this child-woman with her miniskirt and her tears and three fingernails coloured in with texta. ‘Have you met anyone?’ she went on.
‘Hey, enough questions. My turn,’ he protested. Seeing her pout, he said, ‘No, I haven’t. I promise you’ll be the first to hear if I do.’
She smiled. Her braces had come off, Ben realised. That was good. His father must have struggled to pay for all those orthodontic appointments.
‘What about you?’ he asked slyly. ‘Any year eight romance going down?’
Kirra blushed. ‘Maybe. Not really. I mean, there’s this boy in my maths class—’
‘Mumma, baby, baby!’ shrieked the toddler in the front row. Ben and Kirra’s faces swivelled towards the sound. On the screen, a baby was being born, the camera alternating between close-ups of the mother’s labouring face and the infant being squeezed like toothpaste from between her legs. There was blood, Ben noticed, blood and amniotic fluid and mucus. This had to be footage of an actual birth. It was a bit full-on, but he supposed the realism was instructive.
‘Again, again!’ the toddler cried as the woman in the film lay back, exhausted.
‘God,’ said Kirra, squirming in her seat. ‘That looked awful. Who would ever want to have kids?’
After they’d said goodbye, and he was walking across the museum forecourt towards the housing commission flats, Ben thought about her question. He did, he realised. He wanted to have kids. Maybe that was easy to say, being a man and not having to go through what he’d seen on the screen, but he was sure of it regardless. He liked kids—he was a teacher, so of course he did, but he eventually wanted some of his own too.
He’d made the right decision. He’d made the right decision. It was a mantra he’d devised in that first wrenching month after leaving Skye. He repeated it once more as he waited at the lights on Nicholson Street. He wanted children; Skye would have too. If they’d stayed together, that wouldn’t have been possible—if they’d stayed together it would have been wrong. It would have been illegal; it would have been incest. Then why why why did he still miss her more than a year on? Ben had always subscribed to the rule of halves—that it took about half as long as you’d been going out with someone to get over them. By that measure, he should have stopped thinking about Skye in a matter of weeks; two months, tops. Instead, he had to fight the battle again every single day, had to invoke his mantra and remind himself that losing her was wrong and he was moving on.
He’d get there, he told himself as he approached the drop-in centre, a former storage area at the base of the flats. Skye probably had another boyfriend by now, anyway. What was done was done, with her just as with his parents. Better to look ahead, to think about the kids he’d see that afternoon, the trip he’d planned for them to Lygon Street tonight for pizza.
His mobile rang. ‘Ben,’ said Avril, one of the on-call managers at the centre. ‘Are you on your way in? I’ve got a caseworker here who has a boy with him. He wanted to know if he could join your group. I told him that you’re pretty full, but he said it’s urgent.’
‘Thanks,’ said Ben. ‘I’m just here now. I’ll talk to him.’
Ben stepped into the office and came face to face with Zia. Behind him was Arran.
20
‘What man ’tis not so much ’tis not so much ’tis since the nup . . . the nupt . . . the nuppy . . .’
‘Nuptials,’ Mrs Leon corrected with a sigh. ‘It means marriage. “The nuptials of Lucentio” is Lucentio’s wedding. And slow down, Troy. You’re running all the lines into each other.’
The boy standing at the front of the classroom resumed reading, skipping past the difficult word to the next sentence. Zia, sitting at his desk, scanned his own copy of the text, trying to work out where they were up to. What was the word? Nup-tials. But how was it spelled? N, then an A maybe . . . The unfamiliar couplets danced in front of his eyes, taunting him. What did it all mean, anyway? Zia had heard of Shakespeare, but this was like learning another language, the prose as impenetrable to him as Italian.
He closed his eyes and put his head down on his desk, willing the lesson to end. Only two weeks in, and high school was defeating him. He still didn’t know where he had to be each time the bell ra
ng; he didn’t understand why they couldn’t just stay in the one classroom all day, like they had at Fitzroy Primary. He’d struggled there too, but now he missed it. There he’d known everyone; here the corridors were awash with strangers, people who bumped into him and didn’t even say sorry. The first time he had gone to use the toilets he had lingered too long in the doorway, waiting for a spot at the urinal, until someone had called out, Hurry up, faggot, and he’d fled, ashamed. He didn’t know ‘nuptials’, but ‘faggot’ he understood.
And the work . . . the work was too hard. Zia had been so proud to have made it through his last years of primary school without having to repeat; so grateful to his grade six teacher, Ms Walters, who had tutored him after school and on weekends to get him to the level of the rest of the class, but now he almost wondered why she’d bothered. Another month, and he’d be hopelessly behind again. He missed Ms Walters. She was a good teacher, kind and caring, but it was more than that. He missed her interest and belief in him; missed that she knew about his mother and how things were at home. Nobody here knew, or if they knew they didn’t care. Zia wriggled his face around on the desk, trying to find a cool spot for his cheek. At least, he thought, he had the drop-in centre. He hadn’t really wanted to go to begin with, but now he was glad he’d let Arran drag him along. He liked the centre. It was different from school. He felt normal there among the other boys, where everyone had an accent, not just him; where nobody made jokes about his father when he came to collect him at the end of the night. It was good to see Mr Cunningham too, who’d told Zia to call him Ben. They hadn’t had much chance to talk yet—Ben was so busy trying to keep the group under control—but he looked out for Zia, and on the one afternoon Zia hadn’t shown up Ben had phoned him at home to check on him. Maybe Ben could explain this Shakespeare to him, Zia wondered. He was a teacher after all.