by Kylie Ladd
Tightening the rope attached to his harness, Zia took another deep breath and bent his knees. Maybe if he pushed up, hard, as if he was jumping, he could find a handhold, something to grab onto. An image of his father’s face flashed into his mind, dubious and alarmed. Baba hadn’t wanted him to attend the camp, had asked that he reconsider. Zia had ignored him, but now he understood. There wasn’t much point in escaping Iran only to perish here instead.
‘Zia! What are you doing down there? Having lunch?’
Ben’s voice floated down to him, though it was Sally who was belaying. Zia ignored him. Easy for Ben to mock. He was safe at the top. He’d probably never even tried it.
‘Get a move on!’ Ben yelled. ‘I’ve got a phone call for you.’
Zia glanced up. He could just make out Ben, far above him, peering over the edge and waving his mobile. Zia’s heart lurched. Was it his mother? She hadn’t wanted him or Farid to go on camp either, hated the thought of them being so far away. You could hardly blame her, really . . . His mind on his mother’s anxiety, Zia began to climb, his fingers miraculously finding purchase where moments before they had encountered only smooth stone.
When he reached the top, Ben was talking into the phone, smiling and saying something about how lucky it was that there was reception out there. For a second Zia wondered if it had all been a ruse to get him moving, but then Ben silently handed it to him. At the same time Sally reached for Zia’s harness, began to undo the rope, but Ben motioned to her to stop.
‘Hello?’ said Zia. The line crackled.
‘Zia? Zia? Can you hear me?’ It was his father, his accent somehow heavier down the line than it seemed in person, his voice thickened and choked.
‘Yes, Baba,’ Zia said. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘Zia, we have just heard the news. Habib’s visa has been approved. He will be with us before the end of the month.’
Zia sat down hard next to Sally, glad that he was still tethered to her. He felt dizzy, weightless. ‘Habib? Are you sure?’
‘It is true,’ replied his father formally. He was crying, Zia realised. That was why he sounded so different. Zia had never heard his father weep before. ‘Arran called us. He said he has known for a few days, but wanted to make sure it was true. He will book a flight for Habib.’
‘Is he OK?’ Zia asked. ‘Habib, I mean.’
‘He is fine. He is looking forward to coming to Australia. He says he will start his life again.’
Zia looked over at Ben, who was watching him. Ben grinned and raised one thumb.
‘Does Madar know?’ He wished he was there with his parents; he wished he could embrace his mother and feel her hold him back.
‘Yes. I called her. I will go and see her after work. She was very happy. Can you put Farid to the phone?’
‘He’s in a different group, but I’ll tell him later, at dinner.’ Zia swallowed. His legs were shaking again, though from joy this time rather than terror. His legs were trembling. It had been a day for it. Noticing his tremor, Sally put her arm around him and squeezed his shoulder. It felt good. ‘Dad, I have to go,’ he said. ‘I’m still tied on, and someone else needs to use the rope. If you speak to Habib can you tell him I love him? It’s wonderful news.’
‘Yes,’ said his father simply, the word quivering with emotion. Zia hung up and shakily passed the phone back to Ben. For the first time since he’d reached the top he looked around, at the view. From up here you could see the whole of the Grampians and the surrounding country—mountains, trees, lakes, sky. You could probably even see to Melbourne, Zia thought. To Melbourne, across Australia, and all the way to Syria.
‘Do you want to go tell Farid?’ Ben asked. ‘His group’s down at the lake. I can drive you.’
Zia looked up from unfastening his harness. ‘Yes,’ he said quickly. He was dying to tell Farid, to rejoice in the news, make it real by sharing it. ‘Don’t you have to be here, though?’
‘Nah,’ said Ben. ‘Sally’s got it under control. I just get in her way.’ She smiled, but didn’t look at him. It seemed to Zia that Sally didn’t like Ben as much as on the first camp they’d all been at last summer, though he had no idea why. He liked Ben. He thought he was great. ‘I should probably get back to camp anyway. Start dinner,’ Ben continued. He checked his watch. ‘Sal, if I send Brian up with the bus in about two hours does that give you enough time to get everyone through?’
‘Yep, fine,’ she said, then stood up and leaned over the edge of the rock face. ‘Rasheeda! Are you ready?’
A nervous yes drifted up from the base of the climb. Zia was glad he wasn’t Rasheeda. Smiling, he hurried away from the cliff and back down the mountain after Ben.
It took almost an hour to reach the main campsite at the lake. Zia stared unseeingly out of the window as they drove, rehearsing and anticipating breaking the news—how thrilled Farid would be, how they would celebrate together. Maybe they could go out to the airport to meet Habib. Their family didn’t have a car, but surely Arran would take them, or Ben? He and Farid could make a sign to hold up, but in Farsi because Habib wouldn’t know English yet . . .
‘You’re quiet,’ Ben said. ‘Happy?’
Zia nodded. The news sat in his stomach like a big bowl of his mother’s khoresht, warming and filling him.
‘It is fabulous, isn’t it?’ Ben continued. ‘I was so pleased for you all when your father told me. That visa took a while, I guess because Habib’s not a dependant anymore. How long has it been since you last saw him?’
Zia had to work it out. He counted back on his fingers, then looked over at Ben, surprised. ‘Seven. Seven years.’
‘It hasn’t felt that long?’
‘No.’ Zia paused. ‘It hasn’t. But it’s felt a lot longer at times too.’ His thoughts raced. In his mind he had always pictured Iman and Habib as they’d been when he last saw them in Shiraz. Teenagers, young men, Habib still at school. Yet he’d be grown now, he’d have a beard. The idea unnerved Zia somehow, made his brother a stranger. And he would be, really, wouldn’t he, after seven years apart, after living in a refugee camp?
‘Shari will be pleased to see you back early, anyway,’ said Ben, changing the subject. ‘She’s down at the lake too.’
Zia blushed. Shari was Daniel’s younger sister and had just turned fourteen. He’d noticed her when she came to pick Daniel up from drop-in; he’d seen her noticing him. She had sat next to him at dinner on the first night of camp and they’d spoken for a bit. She was kind; she listened. She didn’t frighten him like girls his own age. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said, careful to keep a straight face.
Ben laughed. ‘Oh Zia, how you’ve come on. You barely said boo when I first met you.’
‘I was too scared to open my mouth,’ Zia admitted. ‘Especially in the classroom, with everyone around. I thought they’d laugh at me.’ That daily fear; the knot in his stomach that had lasted five years. ‘Miss Holt didn’t, though,’ he went on. ‘She kept me behind after art one day. I thought I was in trouble, but she just wanted to ask about Iran. The mosque. One day I’ll go back there. She was nice, wasn’t she?’ he said to Ben.
‘Yes,’ said Ben. His smile had gone. ‘Yes, she was.’
Farid was standing on the pontoon near the centre of the lake, surrounded by a group of boys all pushing and yelling. Water sparkled on his skin; his wet hair shone like spilled ink. As Zia ran from the car down to the shore a chant began: ‘One, two, three . . .’ Farid jumped high into the air, bending one leg and extending the other, landing with a splash that drenched his mates, who cheered.
Zia waited for him to surface then called out above the din, ‘Farid, come here! I’ve got something to tell you!’
‘Good luck getting him off that,’ said Brian, one of the leaders, who was lying back on the sand keeping an eye on the group. ‘They’re having a blast.’
‘FARID! COME HERE!’ Zia shouted again, ignoring Brian. Reluctantly, his brother began to swim towards the
bank. Zia waited until he was almost there, then couldn’t contain himself any longer. ‘Habib is coming! Baba just called!’ he exclaimed.
Farid stood up and shook the water from his ears. ‘Coming here?’ he asked.
‘No, to Australia. His visa is through. Arran told Baba. He’ll arrive in a few weeks!’
‘That’s good,’ Farid said. ‘Madar will be pleased. What about Iman?’
Zia scowled. ‘No news. Don’t you think I would have told you if there was?’
Farid shrugged. ‘OK, keep your shirt on. I just asked.’ He turned and dived back into the lake, striking out for the pontoon again. Zia stared after him, fuming.
‘Hey,’ said Ben behind him. ‘Farid probably doesn’t even remember Habib all that well. He would have been, what—five, six?—when you left.’ Zia nodded and swiped at his eyes with his hand. ‘It’s not the same for him,’ Ben went on. ‘He’s practically grown up here. Why don’t you come and help me with dinner? You can tell me about Habib while I peel the potatoes.’
It was a kind gesture and Zia appreciated it, but he shook his head without turning around. ‘I need to have a shower after rock climbing,’ he said. ‘I’ll come over later.’
‘OK. I’ll be at the barbecue if you want to talk to me.’
But Zia didn’t want to talk to Ben, or to anyone else. He just wanted to be alone for a while, to absorb the events of the day. The shower was as good a place as any for him to think. Bloody Farid, he thought, ducking into his tent to grab his towel, more interested in doing bombs than hearing about his older brother.
Something was beeping. Zia looked around, confused, before he remembered. His mobile, the one Arran had given him, which he’d stashed beneath his pillow to keep safe. There must be a message. He pulled it out and checked the screen. Two missed calls. The first was from his father, who had hung up without saying anything and must have then rung Ben’s phone instead; the second, twenty minutes after that, was from a number he didn’t recognise. He entered the voicemail code to hear the message. ‘Zia,’ his mother said. ‘Your father says Habib come Australia soon. I am so joy. Call me please.’ Zia put down the mobile, then picked it up and listened again. To his knowledge, his mother hadn’t used a phone since they’d left Iran, constrained first by her English and then her ever-deepening silence. He clicked back to the display and memorised the digits on the screen. Then, smiling, he began to dial.
35
Apply glue. Press down tile. Straighten or adjust as necessary. Repeat. Skye smiled to herself. This was the easy part—tiling the base of her sculpture—and she was getting into a rhythm. With a bit of luck she’d be finished in a few hours. She might even make it to the supermarket before Molly was due to be picked up from daycare. That would be nice—the simple luxury of pushing a trolley without her daughter inside it trying to snatch things off the shelves. She’d earned a break, she thought, starting a new line of the small cobalt squares. She had relished the challenge of the last few months, of creating her first three-dimensional piece, learning to work with the topography of the sculpture rather than the flat surfaces she was used to, but it was a relief to return for a while to something straightforward. Life had been complicated enough lately.
When she had finished the row, Skye stretched out on the floor to give her back a break. The commissioned statue loomed above her—three figures initially rising as a single column, then separating, but remaining joined by the circle of their hands. At just over six foot it was by far the largest thing she’d ever done, and, she thought, the best. Nell had asked around among her artist friends and found someone to guide Skye through casting it in concrete and steel, but the rest of the work was hers alone. Thousands of tiny tesserae, flowing in swoops and whorls; all those individual pieces somehow creating something so whole.
It had been the right decision to make the largest figure a man. Her original sketches had featured a mother and daughter—herself and Molly, perhaps—but as she tried to develop them they’d failed to come alive. After a while she understood why. Mothers were always being shown with children. It had been done too many times before; it was the subject, after all, of her own favourite sculpture, Michelangelo’s Pietà, and what was the point in trying to re-create that? For a week she had toyed with plans for a brand-new design, but then one evening she had chanced upon Hamish and Molly playing their door game on his return from work. Her idea wasn’t wrong, she’d realised, just the way she was envisaging it. She had gone straight to her studio and made a new set of sketches: a father greeting his children, a girl and a boy.
As she’d looked over them the next day she knew that they worked. They were truer, somehow. Using three forms gave the piece added structural stability, but the statue, which she called Reunion, felt right on a more important level. Men, after all, were the ones most likely to be apart from their families, through their jobs or divorce. Skye sighed and stood up. Ironic, really, to have thought all that through, to have started work on the commission, and then to have moved out, just before it was finished. Ironic that her own daughter was no longer living with her father. But Molly was alright, she told herself. It hadn’t been a huge shift for her, surely? She’d only ever seen Hamish for half an hour or so every weekday, after he got in from work and before she went to bed, and she was still spending most of each weekend with him. They’d agreed on that, that he’d pick her up from Nell’s after lunch on Saturday, return her there before dinner on Sunday night, and so far there’d been no problems. Really, Molly seemed completely unperturbed by the arrangements.
It was she and Nell who were struggling. Skye picked up the glue and bent once more to her task, the familiar ache in her back kicking in immediately. Of course Nell had said yes when Skye asked to move home. What else could she have done? Her mother wasn’t the type to turn her away, but did she regret it now? The last eight weeks had been difficult. Nell loved Skye and Molly, Skye knew that, and she’d sworn that she would welcome their company, but her modest house felt overcrowded with the three of them in it, and it wasn’t set up for a toddler. Molly was always pulling things out of cupboards or trying to open the bottle of bleach in the bathroom, even after Skye had asked Nell to store it somewhere higher. Once Molly had put her favourite doll to bed in the oven, which didn’t have a safety catch. Nell had turned it on that evening without checking inside, and Skye had spent the rest of the night alternately placating a hysterical Molly and trying to scrape molten pink plastic and charred acrylic hair off the element. Then there were Molly’s TV shows, which Nell disapproved of, and that time she’d once got into Nell’s studio, because Nell wasn’t in the habit of locking the door, and painted all over a half-completed canvas . . .
Skye had sympathised with Nell over that one. Your studio was a sacred space, the place where you were most yourself. She was lucky that she’d kept hers, at least for now. The statue was so heavy it wasn’t as if she could move it somewhere else, and she didn’t want to be working on it at Nell’s anyway, didn’t want to introduce anything else for them to argue about. Lucky, too, that when she’d screwed up the courage to call and ask him if she could have access to the studio two days a week while Molly was at creche and he was in the office, just until the commission was finished, he’d said yes. Of course, he’d told her wearily, it’s not like I’m using it. Then he’d hung up. She’d flinched and sat there staring at the receiver. It was the only contact they’d had since the terrible argument on the day she’d left two months ago; since she’d gutlessly begged Nell to ring him up and establish his schedule with Molly. Now she hid in her bedroom when he came to collect her. It was pathetic, yes, but she couldn’t bear to see the pain on his face, the way he looked at her. Twice! he’d yelled as she’d strapped Molly into the car seat on the day she moved out. What sort of bitch breaks someone’s heart twice?
Jess stood up from her blanket in the corner and padded over to the door, waiting to be let out. She should take the dog for a walk, Skye thought guiltily. It couldn�
�t be much fun for Jess, spending almost all her days alone now, but she wanted to get as much done as she could before it was time to leave. The deadline for the statue was looming, and once that was met she could make some plans. She wasn’t being fair on anyone, she knew that—on Jess, whom she’d barely had time to pat; on Nell; on Hamish. For all their sakes she needed to make a new start—get her own studio, maybe find a flat for rent. The trouble was that it all cost money, and that was something she didn’t have. Nell only asked for her share of the bills, Hamish paid for the creche, yet still she was struggling. The final payment on the commission would help, but for how long? She’d have to look for a job. Skye daubed on some more glue and pushed the tiles down, hurrying now. Maybe something in a school again—the hours were good, which would be easier on Molly. When she got home tonight she’d have to check that grants website where she’d come across her artist-in-residence position . . .
The studio door opened, and she jumped. It was Hamish, clutching his briefcase and looking pale. ‘Skye,’ he said. ‘I left work early—I’ve got a migraine. I saw your car outside and thought I’d better tell you I was here, so you didn’t get worried if you heard someone moving around the house.’
‘Thanks,’ said Skye, her heart still racing. ‘I appreciate it. Can I get you anything?’
‘No. There’s some Panadeine Forte in the bathroom from when I did my shoulder. I’m just going to take that and go to bed.’ Hamish turned to leave, but then he noticed the sculpture. ‘Is this the one for the park?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Skye. ‘It’s nearly done. I’m just completing the base.’ She watched him study it. No one else had seen it yet, not even Nell or the committee that she’d had to submit her drawings to. For six months she’d worked on it alone. It was like being pregnant—the excitement, the worry, gradually growing something that you could imagine, but never definitively see. Now it was almost finished, and her pride made her want to talk about it. ‘It’s going to be installed in a fortnight, and on the Saturday after that there’s some sort of ceremony. The council are sending a truck to collect it, and a forklift. I just hope the driver knows what he’s doing. It’s really—’