by Heather Rose
Phillip opened the door and said she would be ready in five minutes. ‘Make yourself at home,’ he said. ‘Sorry,’ he corrected. ‘It is your home, of course.’
‘Was,’ I said, and smiled. ‘A very long time ago now.’
I hadn’t been able to get away fast enough after year twelve. I got three jobs once I knew I had a place at NYU and six months to save up. I worked a checkout at the supermarket through the week, pulled beers at a pub in town Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, and all day Saturday I worked at Salamanca market selling second-hand books for a friend of Dad’s.
The furniture in the house was exactly the same. The same sofas, the same paintings on the walls. The liquidambar now shaded the entire deck. Granny’s flat was still there, closed up now. The tyre swing was gone, as was the bald patch we’d rubbed into the earth beneath it. Now it was all smooth clipped lawn and nothing to indicate children had ever lived here. The pink tiles in the bathroom were still the same, and my old room was as it had been the last time I was here. Homogenised white linen, cream walls and a wicker chair with a cushion bearing an image of the Eiffel Tower. No hint of the girl I had been, which was a relief. I didn’t need her back.
Everything smelled as if it had been polished with lemon verbena. Perhaps it had. There were silver-framed photos of us all on the hall sideboard, but we were ghosts, somehow, in that house. JC’s bad moods, Max and her bushwalking friends laying out their wet tents to dry on the back lawn, me with my world map on the wall and pins in all the places I was going to go. Gone too were all the nights when Mother and Dad argued, Mother working her way up into a fever pitch of rage at whatever she felt was unfair right then. So many dinners where she said not a word. And all the while, through our teenage years, this feeling that she wasn’t really there. Her secret life of lovers and drinking and spending money—all of which I only pieced together later, but it made sense of it all. I remember Max ringing me on my twentieth birthday and saying, ‘Well, now Mother is the only teenager left in the family.’ Some women aren’t meant to get married. Or be mothers. I don’t know why we place that expectation on them, our daughters. It’s a huge job and we all know that it takes everything to do it well. Not everyone has everything to give. And we expect them to keep doing it all their lives. I think my mother only ever wanted her freedom. Born in the wrong generation. I didn’t make things easy for her. And then I left.
Mother was looking more like a ghost every day. She’d exhausted all her options. She’d had two rounds of chemo and it had shrunk the tumours, but then new ones appeared in her lungs. An experimental treatment had worked for a few months, but not anymore. Her last chance was this next round of whatever it was that came in a drip over the course of an hour once a week for six more weeks, a new drug, expensive, with tough side effects. It was unlikely she’d ever taste food again.
On the drive to the hospital she told me that it was very nice to be taken for treatment by her daughter because so many other daughters took their mothers. I mentioned that other people’s daughters were not the leader of the Opposition, but she assured me that other daughters, even very important ones like Maxine, found time to take days off to be with their mothers.
‘Verity has come with me a few times,’ she said. I had discovered that Mother slightly despised her friend Verity because Verity could use the internet. Usually it was Phillip, my boy, who took her.
A nurse welcomed her and settled her into a reclining chair. There were at least a dozen patients all being set up, each with the gaunt, slightly flushed look of the deeply unwell.
‘The staff seem very nice,’ I said.
‘They know who I am,’ said Mother. ‘One day they left me waiting in reception. I was not impressed. I rang Max and told her it wasn’t good enough. It hasn’t been a problem since. When you’re waiting to die, any other sort of waiting becomes intolerable.’
I wondered about the book I’d brought in my bag. At what point would I be able to bury myself in it? We waited for the drip to be fitted and treatment to begin.
Mother looked at all the other patients in their blue vinyl recliners, their drips and trays, several of them hairless. One woman was in a blue cap.
‘Oh, she’s got the freezer bag on,’ said Mother, a little too loudly.
The other woman looked up from her magazine.
‘It’s designed to stop your hair falling out,’ Mother said to me. ‘They tried it on me. Hideously painful. The most excruciating headache. And fine lot of good it did.’
‘It won’t work,’ Mother said to the other woman. ‘You may as well save yourself the pain.’
From the look the other woman gave her, she thought Mother was referring to the cancer, not the hair loss.
‘Look at us. A bunch of drug addicts!’ Mother announced loudly to the other patients, who all looked a little startled to be addressed in this way. I could see most of them knew exactly who she was—mother of both the premier and the leader of the Opposition. One younger woman smiled as if a show was about to begin. The room was set up to allow a collegial feeling among the patients, the chairs all facing inwards, as if this was a meeting of sorts.
‘Did you see that young girl in the paper the other day?’ Mother said to me. ‘The one that held up that corner store—for a tin of baby formula! What’s the world coming to?’
I’d read about it. The ever-reliable Mercury newspaper—a mix of bad puns, skewed facts and small-town stories.
‘I thought she had a pretty good reason,’ I said. ‘Not for armed robbery as such. But she was clearly desperate.’
‘But the tattoos. No wonder she can’t get a job.’
‘I don’t think she was wanting a job, Mum,’ I said. ‘She’s a new mother. That is a job.’
‘I know that, Astrid. I’ve got cancer, not stupidity. I mean that she wouldn’t need to point a gun at some unsuspecting boy, even if he was a Muslim, if she had a job.’
‘I don’t think him being a Muslim was the point.’
‘It’s not like they’re not pulling guns on us these days.’
‘Well, not here in Tasmania,’ I said quietly, glancing at the nearby patients. ‘Not that particular young man or his family.’
‘Oh, you can’t be sure about his family. They just fly off and become radicals. Then they come home on their Australian passports and the next thing you know you have another mass shooting. Or more stabbings of perfectly innocent bystanders. It’s no different to the communists in the fifties. They infiltrate, these people, and before you know it, they’re in parliament, making changes to the rules. And then it’s too late. And we’re all having to get down on our knees and pray to Allah.’
‘So you think the girl was probably right to use a gun, seeing he was a Muslim?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m not saying she was right, Astrid. I’m just saying that if you were needing to steal from a store run by a Muslim, I can understand that young girl taking a gun, just in case.’
‘Like the Australian who took a gun and killed all those New Zealanders in a mosque?’
‘Oh, you still have to make every conversation an argument, don’t you?’
I said nothing. Sometimes it was the only way. After a few moments, my mother said, ‘I mean, what’s going on when mothers can’t afford milk for their babies?’
I thought we would leave it at that, until my mother said, ‘Mind you, that sort of girl, they don’t like to breastfeed. Probably a smoker too.’
‘But you didn’t breastfeed, Mum, did you?’ Sometimes going over old wounds is strangely cathartic. Like scratching a mosquito bite long after it has scabbed.
‘When Maxine was born, they completely understood that I didn’t want to breastfeed. Gave me tablets and my milk dried up in a few days. But that was Sydney. Down here … goodness, you’d think they were in charge of my body. As soon as I got home, I put you both on the bottle. I mean you didn’t want to feed at the same time, or sleep at the same time.’
‘Until Dad discove
red we’d sleep if we were put to bed together,’ I said.
‘Oh, I think it was his mother who sorted that out.’
This was a blatant lie. It was one of Dad’s stories. How on a bad night, when we were only a few weeks old, he’d wrapped me and JC up together as if we were back in the womb, and it had worked. We didn’t sleep apart until we were five. Squashed into the same cot, then the same bed. Apparently, JC wouldn’t fall asleep until he had my hand in his.
‘Your grandmother,’ said Mother. ‘She was a help with you all.’
This was an extraordinary compliment coming from my mother. You are mellowing, I thought. Death is working on you.
‘I loved Granny,’ I said. ‘I missed her so much after she died.’
‘I can’t imagine you’ll miss me. I doubt you’ll even come home for my funeral.’
‘Don’t say that, Mum. Anyway, I’m here now.’
‘Yes, but I’m not dead. I know you, Astrid. You only do something if it suits you.’
Maybe not mellowing after all.
‘Cup of tea, Mum?’ I asked, getting up.
‘That would be nice. Ask a nurse.’
‘I’ll sort it,’ I said.
Outside in the corridor, I rested my forehead against the wall. Then I texted Max. With mother in chemo. Where can I find the fentanyl? Need to hook myself up.
Max sent back the crying with laughter emoji and the halo face emoji.
I had wondered, as children of unhappy marriages do, why my parents stayed together. I’d asked my father on one of his trips to New York when my children were small and I was beginning to realise how hard marriage was.
‘I loved her,’ he said. ‘As soon as I saw her, I thought, I have to take care of you.’
I’d asked Mother too. It was after yet another fight where Mother had said something needlessly insulting and Dad had left the dinner table. She’d had the decency, on that night, to appear a little remorseful.
‘Why does Dad stay with you, Mum?’ I’d asked. I was eighteen. Granny was dead. I had my scholarship in the US. I was almost out of there.
‘Oh, Astrid, can’t you see? The poor man loves me.’
I had tried to become only my father’s daughter. But my mother taught me everything I know about manipulation.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was late Friday afternoon. The past week had blown all the records for heat across Australia. In Tasmania, bushfires had been burning in the World Heritage area down south and the Tarkine up north. The wind had picked up and now smoke had obliterated the far hills, giving the world an eerie amber glow. All day I’d had meetings with people who had been ill at ease, worried for the week ahead when the temperatures were predicted to rise, and no rain in sight. A hot northerly had been blowing all day and the air smelled of smoke.
I’d taken a swim and, as I walked home, I found Dan cleaning flathead under a gum tree. When we were children, it would take half an hour in the morning to pull up enough to feed us all for breakfast. I’d heard again and again from people that those days were long gone. Now you were lucky to get a feed in three or four hours. Recreational fishing had taken its toll on the channel.
‘They look good,’ I said, sitting down on a log beside him. He was working at an old communal table, weathered and whitened by sun and salt.
I watched his hands as he ran a knife up the body of the fish, shedding scales and washing the board down when that bit was done.
‘How was your day?’ he asked.
‘Actually, I spent the afternoon with the Recreational Fishing Club.’
‘Ah, what do they have to say about things?’
‘They mostly talked about the fish farms,’ I said.
‘It’s the biggest employer in the state,’ he said. ‘After tourism and the Catholic education system.’ He was now slicing up the fish and pulling out the innards under the gills. ‘They’ll be the biggest primary industry in the state soon. The broken nets and rope, and all the stuff that washes up on the shore, that’s nothing compared to the havoc they wreak underneath the water.’
‘So I’ve heard,’ I said.
‘When we were kids,’ he said, ‘I learned to dive in the Huon Estuary, and the bottom was amazing. We used to see crayfish and abalone and sharks—all sorts of stuff. I remember watching documentaries about the Great Barrier Reef and the Mediterranean, but the Huon Estuary was way more vibrant because of the mix of warm and cold temperatures. A lot of algal life, a lot of vegetation, and a lot of fish life as well.’
‘But it’s not anymore …’ I said.
‘Everyone used to have nets. We’d net heavily. It was just part of the culture. It’s what we did.’
‘So it’s not the fish farms?’
‘It’s industry too. I mean, we like to think it’s somebody else, but it’s all of us. There was a crazy scheme in the sixties that dredged the scallop beds. People want to think everything recovers eventually, but it doesn’t. You can get a few if you dive for them now, but this channel, it was scallop heaven.’
I watched him wash down the weathered table with another bucket of salt water, scrub away the last of the fish remnants, leave it shipshape for the next person.
‘I’ve got to get these home,’ he said. ‘Mind if we walk and talk?’
We headed back across the road and up the flight of stairs. At the top of the narrow path, we came to our road and walked side by side.
‘Since I was a teenager,’ he said, ‘most of the Huon Estuary has, at some stage, had fish pens hovering over it. The bottom is suffocated with waste. They’ve killed the harbour over at Strahan. That won’t come back for years now, if ever. Now they’ve moved into the channel, it’s suffering the same fate. The east coast estuaries will be next. Because of pressure from conservationists, they’re pushing out into the open ocean, which is where I’d prefer them to be. But it’s more dangerous. Know a bloke who lost a thumb out there a few weeks ago.
‘Now that you’ve got me started,’ he said with his trademark grin, ‘did you know they feed mackerel to the salmon? They use a lower-value fish to make a higher-value fish, which seems nuts to me. I mean it’s questionable, when you’re eating your bit of salmon, whether you’re eating anything healthy at all. They’re putting that colour in the feed, too—anthocyline, or something like that—to make it look pink. So there’s people lining up in the Sydney markets to eat this Tasmanian salmon, and it’s a filthy industry. But that’s not a fight for us to worry about. I’m not going to give a rat’s arse about anything anymore.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Is that going to be your new year’s resolution?’
‘You just become such a grumpy bastard as you get older, if you’re not careful.’
‘Is your dad a grumpy bastard?’
‘Probably. He died a few years back. Reckon he’s still complaining somewhere.’
We had arrived at his gate.
‘I think you’ll just get happier as you get older,’ I said.
‘Do you now?’ he said.
Sometimes it feels like my job is to help my clients find the parts where they don’t know themselves, and the parts where they do, and get them to talk to one another. Sometimes it’s like the divide between justice and mercy. Usually, people are harder on themselves than anyone. My gift is that people talk to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve learned to ask questions. But mostly it’s because I’ve learned to shut up. It’s amazing what people will say if you give them the space to say it. But when a person is attractive, that can be deceiving. Some of the most ruthless men I’ve known have been handsome. It’s almost a sociopathic marker. Dan was good-looking but not typically handsome. He was big and rough around the edges, and he wasn’t needy. He didn’t seem to be making up for any great hole inside him.
We both turned then and looked out at the smoky evening sky.
‘Not looking good for the next few days,’ he said. ‘Badly need rain.’
The northerly was dropping and the channel was a milky
pale blue.
‘Another day in a life,’ I said. ‘When you add them up, there aren’t that many of them.’
‘Maybe there’s enough,’ he said.
‘Do you think?’
‘If you make the most of them,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’
We could hear the bridgeworks going on, muted at this distance. Generators, drills, the rumble of the barges that traversed the channel from the manufacturing plant at North-West Bay. Voices on the air.
He said, ‘I’ve gotta get these into the fridge. They’re for my mum. Seeing her in the morning.’
‘I could make dinner one night,’ I said. ‘If you want.’ I suddenly felt nervous.
He looked at me and his eyes twinkled. ‘I’m not turning you down,’ he said. ‘But I’ll cook for us. Not tonight. Another night. Soon.’
‘You don’t trust my cooking?’ I said.
‘Not sure I want to see you all domesticated. Wouldn’t be right, somehow.’
‘So have you got a hot date?’ I asked.
‘You really love to ask the questions, don’t you?’
‘That’s why they pay me the big bucks.’
He laughed and walked through his gate and was gone into the dusk.
It was the lovely thing about the island while ever there was only access by water. If it was past 7.30 pm, you knew no-one was leaving. Short of your own runabout, or a kayak, you were all here for the night because the ferries had stopped running.
I walked across my paddock and up onto the deck. I went inside, made a salad and opened a beer. I saw Dan drive away in his ute. Then I sat down with my laptop and began another report on the day’s activities. When it was done, a software program encrypted it and it winged its way to America, where it would be opened by an analyst who worked in a remote corner of a famous building. Hidden from presidential faithfuls, some of us were watching the axis move from democracy to tyranny in the United States and, oh, so many other countries. That’s why I had come. JC had asked, but so had they. I had been sent back to my home town to see just what it was that had the Chinese government so very interested in Tasmania. Since I’d arrived, I’d amassed a few theories, but that was all they were. I needed to get closer to May Chen. I suspected she knew exactly what was going on. I also needed to work on my brother.