by Nicole Hayes
‘Asked around, I guess. Made some of it up. Who knows?’
‘But not the truth,’ I say flatly, wary of that word, given how flimsy it is. ‘Who you are.’
He squints at me. ‘Why? Who am I?’
I blush furiously. ‘I mean, about Mum.’
He twists the bottle between us, turning it round and round. ‘They’ve found a better angle, haven’t they?’
Why let truth get in the way of a good story.
‘They just say what they want.’ He slowly shakes his head, disbelief in his eyes.
‘You get used to it,’ I say, then laugh shortly. ‘Actually, that’s a lie. It sucks.’
‘Your mum does all right.’
I half-smile, half-grimace. ‘She’s good at dealing with the media, but she really doesn’t like it either.’
‘That’s her problem.’
The cold edge of his voice is breathtaking. It hurts to hear it. Is this how he treated Mum? I glance out at the street, determined not to ruin this. It feels so fragile. I focus on a woman power-walking past, pushing a pram at lightning speed. Tears sting my eyes. I look down at the table, blinking them back. ‘She was sixteen,’ I say finally.
Colin doesn’t answer. He takes a long drink of his beer, then places it on the table between us.
‘Have you always known?’ I ask.
‘That I was given up or that Premier Rowena Mulvaney was my mother?’
‘Both.’
‘Being stuck in an orphanage is usually a good sign your mother doesn’t want you,’ he says bluntly. ‘I was six before anyone claimed me again. They didn’t stick, either.’ He takes a handful of chips. ‘I’ve known about a year.’
‘They didn’t tell you sooner?’
He laughs. ‘They didn’t tell me at all – closed adoption, records sealed. Then they shut the whole place down and burnt the files. People’s lives went up in smoke.’
A tradie walks past us and hesitates at the next table. Colin seems to hold his breath until the man disappears inside, out of earshot.
‘It didn’t matter for a while,’ he continues, his voice lower now. ‘I didn’t want to know who she was – who I was – even if they would tell me.’
‘Then how …?’
‘I guess the right people asked the right questions. Word got around. I got curious.’
I extract a couple of chips from the packet, chew slowly while I consider my words. ‘So, what happened outside the restaurant? Why were you fighting with her?’
Colin picks at the label of his beer. ‘She feels guilty and wants to play mummy now.’ He pushes the bottle away and leans back against the seat, knocking my foot to the side as he shifts. I flinch and tuck myself in tighter. He’s so angry. ‘Little late for that, Mummy Dearest,’ he says to the sky, raising his beer in a mock toast.
‘Why did you come to Melbourne if you didn’t want to see her?’ Even as I try to maintain a neutral voice, the kind Harry would say a good journalist would use, I hear the judgement and frustration in my tone.
‘I didn’t come for her.’ He twitches a little as he says this. His fingers tear at the label on the now-empty beer bottle and his feet scuff the cement.
‘Then why?’ I ask.
He stands up. ‘Do you want another Coke?’
‘I’ll pay,’ I say quickly, mentally calculating how much money I have in my wallet. Twenty dollars, max. How many beers will that buy? How much of this man’s time?
‘Whatever.’
I stand up, then realise the bartender won’t serve me. I extract a ten-dollar note and hold it out to him, smiling apologetically. ‘You’ll have to buy it.’
He nods. ‘Right. You’re sixteen.’
I sit back down while I wait for him to return, sorting through the contents of my wallet to make sure there isn’t a missed twenty-dollar note in there that I’d forgotten about. I pull everything out. Five dollars plus whatever change he gives me.
I start slotting the receipts and other bits and pieces back into my wallet just as Colin returns. He looks at the pile in front of me, the printout of my precious Pearl Jam tickets peeking out from the mess.
‘What’s this?’ he asks, retrieving one of the tickets from the pile. ‘Pearl Jam? They’re all right. Good seats?’
I smile, even though I know he won’t return it. ‘Really good.’
‘You taking your boyfriend?’
I swiftly scan the street to see if Kessie and Jake are around. Did he see them? Is that what he means? ‘No. I’m going to go with … the drummer from my band.’ This feels natural, for the moment. Two strangers who have something in common. I’m grateful for that. We could be like anyone else. Minus the whole separated-at-birth thing, that is. ‘Luke wants to go. Actually, he’s begging to go.’ I set down my Coke. ‘But he’s too young. One day I’ll take him.’
Colin nods, studying the table. Does he know I mean his brother, Luke? I feel a twinge of regret at having mentioned him. It feels like every word I speak has the potential to explode in my face. ‘But my friend – the drummer – she’s a huge fan, like me.’
‘You’re a musician?’ He’s looking at me frankly now. The distant, hooded stare seems to have disappeared.
‘Yes,’ I say firmly. ‘I play guitar. I mean, I’m still learning.’
‘Cool.’
He places the tickets on the table between us. I’m careful not to snatch them up, pausing before I collect them and slot them neatly back into my wallet.
I take another sip of my Coke, but the ice has melted now and it’s watery and flat. ‘So, why did you come to Melbourne? You didn’t really answer me before.’
He holds the beer bottle up to the light, then sets it down. ‘Free ticket. Warm weather.’ He sweeps a wide arc around us, the cool air and evidence of past rain not even warm by Irish standards.
‘Free ticket?’
A harsh laugh. ‘You don’t know any more about this shit than me, do you?’
What’s the right answer? That I know nothing, that I’m here to find out and am therefore useless to him? Or do I admit to him that Mum’s been lying to us? To everyone. He hates her already. Nothing I can say now will fix this. I rest my head in my hands, exhausted by all the second-guessing and double meanings. ‘I don’t know what I know.’
‘What the feck does that mean?’ He laughs so honestly and freely that I laugh too. Because, yeah. What the feck does that mean? Tension seems to leach from us both.
Finally, he cocks his head, the same way Mum does, the same quizzical expression in his eyes. It takes my breath away and I have to look down at the table to gather my wits.
‘There’s an organisation – a charity – in Ireland trying to connect kids with their families, to make up for the years of secrecy and neglect.’ His mouth twists into a wry smile. ‘There are a lot of us,’ he adds. ‘I got into some trouble. I guess they felt guilty. Whatever. They paid for my ticket.’
I wonder if Mum knew he was coming.
He takes a drink, then sets the beer carefully in the middle of the table. Sweat beads dribble along its length. ‘Why aren’t you at school?’
‘Holidays.’
‘So you’re free today?’
‘I have to pick up my brother at five …’ I stop, embarrassed. Should I have said ‘my other brother’?
He doesn’t seem to notice. ‘Want to kill a few hours with a complete stranger who shares some of your DNA?’
‘Sure.’
He finishes his beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Let’s go.’
CHAPTER 34
OUT OF SESSION
‘Seriously?’
‘It’s Australia. What else do you people do?’
The bay water is like ice and the sand is damp and cool underfoot. With the grey-blue sky in the background and the tension gone from his face, Colin looks like a teenager. More like in the photo. I don’t know if it’s the cold water or the idea of a beach that’s suddenly made him seem closer to my age,
but it ends at the chiselled cheeks and the smooth skin of his jaw. The rest of him belongs to someone who has lived – a lot. His chest is muscled and taut, and those elaborate tattoos cover his back and shoulders. They’re the kind bikies have – all snakes and skulls and daggers dripping blood. Some homemade ones too. I squint as he tests the water, feel my breath catch when I realise that on the bare patches of skin, free of tattoos, are other markings. Scars. There’s a string of them, a pattern along his forearm that looks like a trail of tiny full moons. The shape of cigarette tips.
I look away. I roll up my jeans and wade into the shallows beside him. A small, foamy wave crashes against my legs. I leap at the cold and watch helplessly as the water soaks my jeans. ‘Too cold!’ I yelp, heading back.
‘Pathetic!’ he calls out, a crooked smile taking the edge off his tone.
I sit beside his towel, unrolling my pants in the hope they’ll dry. It feels good to have sun on my skin, weak as it is.
He dives into the water and disappears. The water is brown and cloudy from the swirling of sand every time the wind picks up. I shiver with cold just watching him. When he breaks the surface, Colin lets out a short, sharp laugh and his arms briefly flap about like a kid’s. But when I smile, he seems to rein himself in, gathering his gestures into something smaller and more contained. He crouches in the water and turns his back to me so that only his head and shoulders are exposed. Despite this, I can see him shivering. We sit there for some time, only a few metres apart, me on the shore, him in the shallows.
He stands up finally and wades to shore, the lapping waves nipping at his feet.
Some kids are playing footy with one of those Nerf balls that float when they land in the water. I watch them as Colin towels off, thinking about how different my life would have been if I’d been born first, when Mum was sixteen. If she’d given me up instead. I see those scars, the trail of moons like a smile on his muscled arm. I suppress a shudder, then realise that Colin’s watching me.
‘What was it like?’ I ask.
He wipes his chest, dries his legs, shakes his towel free of sand and spreads it next to me. He plonks down in the middle of the towel and rests his arms on his knees. It’s so natural and unselfconscious that we could be anyone.
‘I don’t know any different,’ he says finally.
‘Do you have other family?’
He shakes his head.
Neither of us speaks for some minutes. I feel like I should go, leave him alone. He’s not even looking at me now, and any of that lightness from moments ago has vanished. The hard ball of tension is back. The cold eyes. The wall of silence.
I begin to stand when his voice stops me. ‘What’s she like?’
I pick up a stick, damp and stringy, then put it down again. ‘I’m pretty mad with her right now, but she’s all right usually.’
Across the bay, the white caps bob and dip, the murky depths reflecting how my head feels. He’s still waiting, expecting more.
‘She drives me crazy,’ I add, offering a lopsided grin. ‘But I love her. We all do.’
His expression is unreadable. I feel a powerful urge to apologise to him – for my mum, for Gran, for all those years he was on his own, for the marks all over his body, the moon-shaped smile. For everything.
‘Tell me about her,’ he says so quietly I have to strain to hear.
My heart sinks. The brittle thread between us feels just that tiniest bit stronger, but telling him my life has been pretty great can’t end well.
I reach for the stick again, mark out a square, place a dot in the middle of it. ‘She’s smart,’ I say. ‘Really smart.’ I steal a glance at him, but he’s looking dead ahead. His shoulders hunched and taut, arms wrapped around his knees as though to ward off attack. ‘Funny, too. I guess you’d know that if you’ve seen any clips of Question Time on YouTube.’
I let a slow smile touch my lips because there’s been so much to be ashamed of, so much out there about her life, my life, things that should be private, that I forget how much of the good stuff is there too. The things that show her best side. The moments that have made me proud.
Colin tilts his head as though he’s not prepared to admit to it. ‘As a mum.’
I carve a hashtag into the circle, next to the square, straining for the right words. ‘She’s good,’ I say. ‘She’s a good mum.’ I look at him, and he finally meets my gaze. ‘She’s a really good mum.’
He looks down at the sand again.
‘She’s hurting pretty bad too, if that helps,’ I add. ‘I know she tried to find you.’
He laughs bitterly then. It’s a sharp, guttural sound. ‘What the feck difference does that make?’
‘I don’t know. I just thought –’
‘You thought what? That I’d forgive her?’
I bow my head.
He looks away, studies the footy group for a long minute, then turns back, eyes blazing. ‘I don’t know why I bothered,’ he says, his hands clenched by his sides. ‘You all deserve each other. All of you,’ he finishes, casting a wide sweeping arm to take us – the whole world it seems – into his words. Then he grabs his towel and stalks up the beach.
I watch the shape of him disappearing. He reminds me so much of Mum then – the stubbornness, the unflinching determination – that I decide there’s only one thing I can do.
I stand up unsteadily, brush the sand off my damp, clingy jeans, and head towards the street.
CHAPTER 35
GENERATIONAL CHANGE
‘Where are we going?’ Luke asks, shuffling awkwardly beside me in his crocs and baggy tracky dacks. His hair’s on end, wet and tangled as usual, and he has that puffy, pink look he gets after he’s spent too long in the water, made worse by his bruised eye. I reach for the towel he’s dragging along the puddled pool deck and roll it into a ball, then shove it against his chest to hold. Nathan’s dad, Mr Alessandro, brought them both to training after they’d hung out for the day. I thank Mr Alessandro and get the obligatory half-apologetic, half-sympathetic nod. ‘No worries, Frankie,’ he says as we head to the pool doors.
‘Hurry up,’ I say to Luke, as much to distract me from Mr Alessandro’s expression than anything else.
‘Got any new pics I can see, Paedo Junior?’ a voice from behind taunts. ‘My phone’s not getting any reception.’
I hesitate, tempted to tell Travis just where he can shove his phone, but then I remember his iPad. I still have to fix it, but so far he hasn’t dobbed me in. Surprisingly. I’m so sick of having to fight. I sigh. ‘Let it go, Travis.’
There’s a brief flicker of something behind his gaze. I try to remember the last time I called him by his first name and realise I can’t. It’s been ages, but I used to.
He high-fives Luke, who smiles. As a lifeguard, in Luke’s mind, Travis Matthews is right up there in hero status with Captain America. Maybe even Ian Thorpe. ‘Good swim?’ Travis asks.
Luke nods shyly. ‘All right. Did a new PB.’
‘Nice.’
I watch Travis Meathead Matthews turn into a normal human being before me, and wonder what the hell I’m supposed to have done to earn his endless bullshit. He doesn’t even look at me but speaks directly to Luke.
‘See you at the States?’
Luke grins, eyes bright with pride. ‘Yep.’
Travis winks at my brother and turns on his heel, throwing a rough, ‘See you, Junior!’ over his shoulder. I guess I should be grateful he dropped the ‘Paedo’.
I grab Luke by the hand and tell him to hurry, but he yanks away and stops dead. ‘I SAID, WHERE ARE WE GOING?’ he yells.
‘Luke!’ I stop and scope the pool centre. The shrill screams and endless splashing could drown out a small football crowd. No one’s looking. That’s something. ‘What’s your problem?’
‘I asked you a question.’ He crosses his arms, refusing to move.
I bend down to his level. ‘You want this fixed, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘T
hen shut up and come with me.’
Gran’s family room is small and smells of lavender and crème de menthe.
Luke has showered and is wolfing down a toasted cheese and avocado sandwich while Gran sips her grasshopper and I impatiently stir the cup of dull-grey instant coffee she’s forcing me to drink. I sit beside her, mostly ignoring the buzzing of my phone, except to check who’s messaging – Jake, over and over; Kessie, over and over; Tyler, once, saying simply: Hope we r ok. Finally I send Jake and Kessie a message saying that everything’s fine – that I’ll call them later – but my finger hovers over Tyler’s number. What do I say? I mean, we are okay, but my fingers refuse to type the right words. When in doubt, emoji it out. I settle on a smiley face with a couple of treble bass symbols.
I let the mindless babble of the Masterchef contestants lull me, though, by the end of the episode, I’m genuinely worried that Carrie’s spinach and feta soufflé might not be fully aerated and that Brett’s grain-fed spatchcock is overcooked. There’s a newsbreak, featuring Mum opening a refurbished train station, Sarah in the background nodding gravely, Harry twitching beside her. I wonder if he knew what it would be like to be the Premier’s media secretary. It’s definitely different to the gig he signed on for all those years ago, back when he was straight out of university and looking for a career. As long as I’ve known Sarah, she was serious and dedicated. But Harry was young and new, just a few years older than I am now. He was nothing like he is today. I wonder if it’s what he wanted. I wonder if he’s happy.
Gran stands heavily, that thick body heaving with an unusual lethargy, and she leads me out into the kitchen with a jerky wave.
We barely shut the door before I speak. ‘I met him.’
Gran blinks. ‘I assume you mean Colin.’
‘Yes, I mean Colin.’
‘You know where he is?’
I nod.
‘How?’
‘Is that important?’
‘You won’t tell me?’
‘We hung out. He took me to his hotel to change.’
‘To change …?’