The Truth & Addy Loest

by Kim Kelly

  He smiled now, though, and touched the side of Addy’s face with the back of those knuckles. ‘You shouldn’t be sorry,’ he said, a gentle growl. ‘You look very beautiful, that’s all I wanted to say. You look just like your mother.’ He cocked his head again, back at the kitchen: ‘You like this boy, hm?’

  ‘I think so.’ She swallowed her own emotions under a shrug, scrunching her nose as if she were happily noncommittal: ‘We’ve only just met.’

  Her father grunted: ‘Is that so?’ As if he didn’t believe her.

  ‘It’s true.’ She laughed as her father’s compliment began to sink into her centre, warming her from the inside out: he’d never called her beautiful before; he’d never said it so plainly, out and out and in the absence of wine: You look just like your mother. She said to him now: ‘I didn’t know Dan existed a week ago.’

  The front door opened and closed. ‘There’s Nicky,’ her father said, already gone.

  She smiled at Dan, standing by the picture window, hands in his pockets; she smiled at her dad, watching as he grabbed Nick by the chin in the lounge, inspecting the damage to his cheek. She saw the glance Nick threw at Dan and the glance Dan threw back at him.

  ‘Dad, lay off.’ Nick grabbed their father’s arm by the wrist. And then she saw her brother’s knuckles: red, grazed, as though he’d freshly decked someone.

  Her brother met her gaze now, too, and she could see it in the post-fight glaze of his eyes: You have, haven’t you.

  Of course, Addy would never learn just what Nick had done to Alan Hadley that Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t as though she and that filthy bastard were ever going to mix in any of the same circles in future for her to hear the faintest word.

  No, she’d never find out that her brother had taken that cab straight to the Hadley’s place, to their big, fuck-off house in the highest heights of the Wollongong suburb of Figtree, knowing that the whole holy-rolling family would be gathered there post-church for their own lunch.

  ‘Hey, Nick!’ It was Alan who had opened the door to him. ‘Long time, no see. Come in, mate, come in. We heard about your win on Friday night. Have a beer.’

  ‘Nah.’ Nick shook his head, as Alan’s father appeared behind him at the door.

  ‘Nick, great to see you,’ his father had said. ‘Come in and join us, please, pull up a pew.’

  ‘Nah.’ Nick shook his head again. ‘Don’t have time, Mr Hadley. But thanks.’ Alan’s father was quite a nice bloke, and Mrs Hadley was quite nice, too, except that they’d managed to turn both their sons into spoilt pricks – takes one to know one, as Nick well knew, but he drew the line at anyone hurting his sister.

  He said to Alan now: ‘You raped Addy, I just found out.’

  ‘What?’ Both Alan and his father took a step back.

  ‘You heard me,’ Nick said, right at the same moment Alan’s brother, Scott, the police constable, stepped in.

  ‘Watch your mouth,’ Scott said, muscling up like he’d just learned how to do it at cop school. ‘What’s this about, then?’

  ‘Your brother raped my sister,’ Nick repeated the reason for his visit, and explained: ‘At her school formal, he took her into the bushes and raped her. As a fair thing, I’m going to hit Alan once for it now, just the once, and we won’t say another word about it – right?’

  ‘Shit – Al?’ Scott turned to his brother, and the looks all round said the charge was true: Alan Hadley was guilty as sin, and suitably mute with terror as Nick grabbed him by the front of his shirt. Nick dropped that dirty fucker there and then on the patio, one very hard crack that smashed his jaw off its hinge, leaving him whimpering, with his mother racing out from the kitchen: ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Hadley,’ Nick said, with some genuine remorse. He looked over at Mr Hadley: ‘I reckon that’s the end of the matter. Unless you want to get legal over it, but I don’t reckon anyone would come out of that looking too clean. My word is as good as yours.’ It was, and as well, Dave’s father happened to be a criminal barrister – not that anyone needed to know that right now. Nick bent over Alan, who was moaning and clutching at his broken face, and he whispered in his ear: ‘If I hear you’ve done the wrong thing with that dick of yours again, I’ll come back and rip it off, and then I will make you eat it.’

  At that, Nick had walked back across the yard and out to the waiting cab, with the sounds of Alan’s girlfriend screaming, ‘Oh my God!’ ringing all the way up to the lilly-pilly hedge. No one came after him, though; even Scott knew the ultimate score, at least in this town: while the Hadleys might have been upstanding members of the community, none of them were up for Commonwealth Games selection. This was Wollongong: sport came first. Alan Hadley had just lost a contest, that was all. Boohoo. Nick was more concerned by then for how late he was for his own lunch; although he’d been less than five minutes at this business, it would take him another ten or fifteen yet to get home to Port.

  And when he got there, the look of revulsion on Addy’s face was enough to keep his mouth shut, the way she’d seemed to guess. She hated violence; he’d never let her know any had been committed in her name – he wouldn’t even tell her when he’d hear the good goss a few weeks later that Alan and his girlfriend had split up while he was still sucking jelly through a straw; he’d never let their dad know he’d just put his entire future in jeopardy, either. He knew this Dan bloke felt the same way, too: protective. He was all right, Dan Ackerman, calling him like that last night, looking up his number in Addy’s telephone book: ‘You don’t know me, I’m a friend of your sister’s …’ Nick had always found that sister of his a bit hard to read, but things got a lot simpler between them from that point on.

  ‘How is Dave?’ their father asked, bringing out the chicken and rice, and Nick replied, ‘Yeah, good,’ but Addy saw the light return to his eyes at that second, the instant spark of love, before he sidestepped further chat, getting up from the table to go back out to the kitchen himself: ‘Gunna put some pasta on. I’m hungry.’

  ‘You? Hungry?’ Addy teased him, even as her heart stung for her brother’s most tender and dangerous secret; it made her think that it was none of her business who he might have just flattened or why, that he’d have had his reasons, and they were probably decent ones. She wondered if it was best to leave some things unsaid, to let some revelations unfold in their own time, when everyone was ready – especially their father. It wasn’t as though either she or Nick weren’t always thinking of him in their own ways, and trying to work out how they might best be able to bring him joy. Nick would do everything humanly possible to impress the Amateur Boxing Association board of selectors to get onto the Games team; he’d do everything he could to pass his final exams this year as well, despite his lack of interest in economics – or indeed in any academic thing. And Addy, she had now firmly decided, would go on to do Honours in English and everything humanly and metaphysically possible to be awarded First Class; and she would write a novel one day: she would place the printed pages in her father’s hands, her name emblazoned on the cover: their name. To be mispronounced by millions for all time, she smiled to herself around a plump, piping-hot apricot.

  ‘You were at the bout?’ her father asked Dan Ackerman, and all the talk over the next half-hour was of boxing, the match, blow by blow, only a fleeting moment of unease when Dan confessed he’d never played rugby league. Addy couldn’t remember ever feeling so contented, looking at these three men, feeling something was complete now that Dan was here, some good and right thing. Such wilt thou be to me … Donne joined them now too:

  Thy firmness makes my circle just,

  And makes me end where I begun.

  Or, at least, nearly.

  She rose to put the kettle on for coffee, and to slide the cheesecake onto a plate. As she did so, looking into its plainness, she thought the cake needed a candle. She’d say they should celebrate Dan’s forthcoming birthday, but really, she just wanted to mark this day as special, first day of the rest of h
er real, true, magical life, or something like that. She had a stash of candles somewhere, and she rummaged through her mind for them, through kitchen drawers and linen cupboard shelves, sensing all the while that they were somewhere more obscure. Then, yes, she remembered: they were in a white paper bag in her old school case, where she kept all sorts of odds and ends, under her bed. Memory can be funny like that, can’t it? Capable of extraordinary detail when we need it to be. Or when we’re ready for it to be.

  Her old bedspread said hello as she opened the door of her room: soft chenille stripes of purple and green, immediately comforting. What a haven this little room had been over her growing years, a refuge, whether from a school bully, the steelworks’ stink or that forgettable jerk Hadley, she’d shut the world out here, and hadn’t realised until now how much she’d missed it, sitting at her little desk, staring out to sea. She retrieved the school case from under the bed, a dear battered thing of brown cardboard, bestickered with hearts and butterflies all creased and peeling around the brooding cartoon face of David Bowie; she wondered what David Bowie might think of his image stuck forever in such an unglamorous place, and supposed he’d like it – she’d put it there with such adoration in the summer at the end of Sixth Class.

  She popped the locks with her thumbs, an action which always made her feel like a gunslinging cowgirl for some reason absolutely vanished to the mists; she imagined the first exquisite tinkling piano bars of superfreak Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’, felt a pang for glitter eyeshadow and a long-lost desire to learn the cello, just to be near him. How precious this little case was: it’s where she kept the photographs of her mother, the three of them.

  Elke and Peter dressed for dinner, smiling for the restaurant camera, and – yes! There was an appliqued rose on her bodice, unnoticed before in the black and white, but there it was indeed, a flower, a flower her mother had doubtless made, peeping out from where she pressed her heart to her husband’s coat sleeve.

  And there was Elke by the caravan they’d lived in before they built this house, snowy-haired Nick on her hip. She looked tired and happy, her reassuringly boring hair a mess, slipping from its pins. Nick just looked fat.

  And there was Elke with Addy: they are laughing into each other’s eyes as mother places a frangipani flower behind baby’s left ear: forever. Addy could smell that frangipani even now; she could see the surf-bleached midnight-indigo of her mother’s swimming costume.

  There were other bits and pieces in the little case: her mother’s fox-fur ear muffs; a fine china cup with rabbits dancing around the rim; an empty perfume bottle, clear-cut and heavy in her hand – Joy by Jean Patou, still faintly trailing its floral bouquet. How Addy came to have these treasures, she never knew; they simply were: undiscussed and hers. They lived in this case with all her birthday cards from her father, old academic reports and awards, the small yet dignified laurel-wreath trophy for that German prize, half-filled notebooks of sketched vignettes and poems, a short story published in the high school magazine. Two tins as well: a large round biscuit tin with parrots on the lid and her crochet things in it, hooks and scraps of wool; and another lunchbox-sized one containing a home set of important utilities she liked to keep handy, including scissors, nail clippers, compass and protractor set, needle and thread, thimble, two pencil sharpeners, a roll of sticky-tape – and, under all that, the packet of cake candles inside their white paper bag. There were four different colours – blue, red, yellow and green – all candy-striped with white spirals, and she’d only used one, a yellow one, for her father’s birthday last year.

  Candles in hand, she was just about to close the case and return to the kitchen, when another photograph caught her eye, on its side at the back, as if it had been dislodged from behind her stack of notebooks – she glimpsed some sort of parkland scene, big trees and a wide lawn, and it wasn’t a photo she’d recalled ever having seen before. At first, she thought it must have been a picture she’d cut out of a magazine for some long-ago school project; when she picked it up to take a closer look, though, she saw it was sepia-toned and printed on thick card. It was a photograph: a very old one. Beneath the trees, and in front of a formal, flower-filled garden bed, it showed a picture of two girls, one taller than the other, both in light summery dresses, white socks and black buckle shoes. They were beaming for a bright, happy day, and between them was a donk—

  No. Between them was a zebra.

  She stared and blinked and stared and blinked again, yet the picture remained.

  She turned it over, to see if there might be an inscription of some kind – such as, Ha-ha! Got you a beauty this time. But the faded-pencil words here only said:

  Anna und Elfie. Zoologischer Garten Frankfurt am 11 August 1919.

  Perhaps it was the psychic overload delivered by the long week’s shocks and slings, but Addy took this one calmly.

  She sat back on her heels, with the photograph in her hands, taking in the face of her grandmother, the taller of the two, searching for a resemblance; her face, though, both their faces, were too small to see much more than their sunshiny smiles. They were smiling at her, at Addy, from their eternal holiday, framed on her lap by the full-colour European blooms of her garden dress, giant around them here, now. Had she seen this photograph before? She looked over her shoulder, out the door into the empty hall, as if someone might tell her. She wanted to run out to her father: Dad! Dad! Where did this photo come from? Could he have slipped it into her school case? Why would he have done that? How could he have done that when there were no photographs of anyone from that generation in the house? She’d snooped more than a few times, and she’d asked – years ago. ‘No, Adrianna, there is nothing,’ she was told, and she knew not to ask a second time. Maybe he’d lied, just because he didn’t want to talk about it – couldn’t talk about it.

  Whatever the story was, it had sent her this: a silent gift of permission that she should, beyond all doubt, continue with her own. She held her own future in this sweet whisper of the past: she could hear their laughter, she could smell the sun-warmed dust in the zebra’s soft tufted mane. The light before the dark, the right before the wrong, the peace before the war, all the way backwards and forwards again. This was her story to tell, however it came.

  The kettle whistled in the kitchen; it was time for cake.

  They stayed late, walking, just the two of them, Addy and Dan. They went down to the rocks of Fisherman’s Beach at the end of Gallipoli Street, then up over the Hill 60 Lookout, past the old concrete bunkers of World War Two, past the public swimming pool, to Port’s best treasure: a crescent shore of sparkling sands six and a half kilometres long, glowing softly gold in the lowering sun.

  They talked and talked, of all kinds of things, where they’d been, where they wanted to go, what they’d known, and what they wanted to know. They exchanged thoughts on the strangeness that so many Australian streets and other suburban features were named after battlefields: Gallipoli, Hill 60, Tobruk, Suvla, Marne, Somme. There were flowers among them, of course, native and not, a sprinkling of Aboriginal words, too, and memorials to long-forgotten explorers, but war was the prevailing trend. They decided that peace was expensive, and that no one could ever know if it was worth the price.

  They weren’t travelling at the speed of light, and yet perhaps those strings that drew them tight together made wings so that all time had seemed to cease, even as the sun sank towards the dusk, and they walked on and on, bootless, toes delighting in the cool, silken sand.

  She asked him, looking out at the deep blue horizon: ‘If the universe is unimaginably enormous and everything is happening all at once, all the time, everything in its separate slice-moment of being, could it really be possible to speak to someone from the past?’ As much as the inexplicable glitch of Frieda and The Curiosity Shop had seemed gifted, even tantalisingly romantic, the illogicalities snagged like beached seaweed. Could I really have spoken to Frieda? Could she really have told me what happened to my dad, to my grandparents
? Or did I make it all up, after all? If I did make it up, though, how on earth did I buy that copy of The Fire Flight from the second-hand furniture place when that shop most likely doesn’t even sell books? Or did I buy it somewhere else? Or did I not buy it at all and I’ll find a completely different book sitting on my bedside when I get back? Was Dan just humouring me about quantum whatevers? I don’t want to be anyone’s crazy girlfriend. I want to be me – but usefully me, brain-more-or-less-intact me. Please. I want some kind of explanation I can understand.

  ‘Well, I don’t know …’ Dan stopped walking, and squinted out at the sea: ‘We’re all fundamentally connected to each other, aren’t we? Like water, sort of.’

  ‘Hm?’ No idea what you’re talking about. She scrunched her toes into the sand, feeling its realness, whatever real might mean; she watched the gentle breeze lift a lock of his hair from his forehead: yep, real enough for me.

  ‘Hm.’ He was still squinting at the water, thinking about her question; he said: ‘The sea can seem like one whole, big thing, can’t it? It’s not, though – obviously. It’s made up of molecules – hydrogen and oxygen bonded together, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She knew that much from Year Ten chemistry. H2O: two hydrogen atoms, Hs, linked to their oxygen O with lines that looked like outstretched arms.

  ‘Yeah.’ Dan went on: ‘Well, the molecules themselves aren’t bonded to each other, are they. They’re attracted, they want to be together, but they’re not stuck to one another. When they need to, they break apart – like when it rains, or when the surf washes up on the shore, or when water drips from wet hair. It’s still all water – every bit of it – it’s all one, and it’s not one, either. It’s just a heap of fancy electricity, going on inside every atom, all the time, and this water, all of this water, every molecule of it across the whole world, in one way or another has been here for all time – forever in all directions. So, every water molecule you can see has, conceivably, been everywhere in the world at some time – in the sea, in a cloud, in a tear – and is everywhere in the world right now. They’re all constantly in existence. You see what I mean?’