Profound thought: Living with your sins is not worse than dying for them.
Our mother Hyacinth died three months after the bridge disappeared. It left more of a hole than I thought it would. I was glad for all the times I’d gone and sat with her, and all the G&Ts we’d drunk after the drugs stopped working in the final weeks. If she hadn’t been the mother I’d wanted, what did it matter? We all disappoint someone. Another profound thought: Your heart is with you your whole life.
Before she slipped into her final sleep, she said, ‘You’re a good daughter, Astrid.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ I said. ‘If you knew all the things I’d done, you might not think that.’
‘Oh, I know a few of them,’ she said. ‘Don’t go waiting until you’re in my position to forgive yourself. Or other people, for that matter. No-one is going to do it for you. Leave it behind, dear. Otherwise it just weighs you down.’
Then she said, ‘I did my best to love you all. I don’t think I was very good at it.’
‘That’s okay, Mum,’ I said. ‘We love you. We’re all fine. You’re not so fine, but has it been okay?’
‘Life?’ she asked. ‘It’s been a little disappointing, to be honest. Now, is there any champagne?’
Those were her last words.
JC was devastated by her loss. It was then that he begged Stephanie to come home from New York and she agreed, but only if he promised never to enter politics again. He invested in a gin and whisky company. It’s called Truth Serum and the irony is not lost on anyone. He’s dropped a lot of weight.
‘I guess we’re the grown-ups now,’ I said to Max, after our mother’s funeral.
‘That didn’t occur to you before?’ Max asked.
‘Strangely not,’ I said.
It was a crazy time but, nearing sixty, life is allowed to be kind of crazy.
I bought a campervan after Mum died, and Dan and I headed off, finding out-of-the-way places to camp and fish all up the east coast of Australia. Once the worst of the winter was over, we went home to Bruny, and when we closed the curtains, lit the fire and turned on the music, we could forget what had nearly come to pass.
The light is beautiful in the mornings and, often on our walks, ours are still the only footprints on the beach. The shearwaters still nest in the dunes and take flight on the last warm wind of summer. The dolphins still leap in the channel. The sea eagles still nest in the great gums along the coastline. Wallabies graze in the paddocks, and rabbits too. The breeze still blows cold from the west and warm from the north. The fish farms continue.
I often wake surprised to find I am still in Tasmania. Being here and smelling the air, seeing the landscape and the light change through the seasons, I wonder why I tried so hard to stay away. This life now wasn’t what I’d planned. Nor was falling in love with Dan. I’d thought that when I finally did start another relationship, I’d be wary. Jumpy. But Dan made it easy. Looking back on it, he treated me like a stray with wounds. He was kind and steady.
Tavvy met a Tasmanian in New York, and they are considering moving back to Australia. Tasmania is going to be the first place in the world to be totally mapped for a virtual reality game, and my son Paul is one of the team working on that. Years ahead, if chaos does come, if the forests are finally felled and the oceans turn toxic, my great-grandchildren might have that other reality where they can see the Tasmania that was mine, that was ours, when the world was simpler.
I think often of my dad. I remember him telling me that you become more of who you are the older you get. And it seems that in this, like a lot of things, he was right.
Amy O’Dwyer, the first Green premier in Australia, and her husband Charles Lee were both at the Boxing Day lunch Stephanie and JC held the next Christmas. She has been doing an admirable job of running a multi-party government.
‘So much easier this way, infiltrating Australia,’ Charles said to me as he poured champagne. ‘Marry an Australian.’ We clinked glasses and laughed.
Max was there too, with Sandra. Tavvy and Paul had come from New York for Christmas with their partners. And Dan was there, of course. So was Edward Lowe, with a man called Tarif, a chef from Oman with a quiet sadness. They were an intensely good-looking pair, those two, and I wondered what Tarif knew. Did he have any idea? Was he one of us? I saw them out on the balcony surveying the view. There was something so world-weary about both of them, and I thought how that same thing was in me, even if I couldn’t see it.
Henry Liu, May Chen and her father, Gao Enzhu, were also there. May and Henry were expecting a baby in June. They’d asked me and Dan to be godparents. I liked May’s father very much. He was teaching me Mandarin.
One Saturday, Dan and I drove to the RSPCA and bought a dog and a cat. Wheeler and Riley. If you were to look in the window you might see us by the fire, curled up with our books, our wine or whisky. We don’t watch TV. We don’t even own a TV. I check the New York Times every few days and we read the papers on Saturday, but it’s enough. The world is here, and we only have so many years. Some nights you might see us chatting out on the deck or heading down to the beach for a moonlit swim in the channel. Or you might see us in Hobart going to a movie or for dinner.
There is one thing about old age. It takes a long time. It started creeping up on me around fifty-three and it hasn’t let go. Keeps having a word with me here and there and, no doubt, one day it will be the only conversation I’m having. But it’s a long way away, that moment. And I think Dan is my lucky charm. He keeps me young. There’s not a day goes by that he doesn’t make me laugh.
I thought of Angus and how he would have been so proud of us all. And I imagined our mother surveying this scene. Max being gay, me hooking up with Dan, JC abandoning politics. The whole multicultural assortment at the dinner table. Worst for her would have been the Greens running the state. She would think the world really had come to an end. But it kind of does, here, in Tasmania. Or maybe it’s the beginning. I wondered what Shakespeare quote our father might have summoned up for it all. Perhaps: We know what we are, but know not what we may be. Ophelia. Hamlet.
I had moved into Dan’s place while mine was rebuilt, but now we live between the two homes. I still like my own space. My house is mostly an art studio now. Wheeler and Riley live with him. I like the way Dan walks across the lawn and up onto the deck at the end of the day, as if we’re still just neighbours. In the mornings, I make him spirulina smoothies and he calls them hippie juice, but he drinks them. He looks well. He’s bought a Harley which vibrates like a wild thing. In our black leathers, with the wind in our faces, I feel like I’m seventeen again. Until I get off the bike, and I’m almost too stiff to walk.
Once upon a time, people like my ancestors and Dan’s came to Tasmania having no choice. Convicted for stealing a loaf of bread, a silk handkerchief, or for cutting someone’s throat. Transported to the other side of the world and nothing familiar in it. But when they had the chance to leave, after they’d served their sentences, they didn’t go back to where they’d come from. They decided to stay and make a life here. They built homes, grew food, raised kids and imagined a future. And they did their best to forget the people who had been here before, who must have loved it too. The people who had died so they could live this way.
We’re still doing the same thing a couple of hundred years later. It feels like half the world is trying to do the same thing. Find somewhere peaceful to live and forget the past.
I took leave from the UN after the bridge, and then I resigned. In truth, when you’ve done what I’ve done, it doesn’t feel quite right to go around trying to encourage people to get along. I’ll remain on the books for my other role. Our cell is still active. I don’t spend time wondering what will come next.
I think Henry Liu is the only person who suspects. He said to me one night, at Cloudy Bay, with its two-hundred-and-eighty-degree view over sea, beach and hills, and the most brilliant aurora lighting up the sky, ‘We have bought our peace at a high price, Astrid.’
‘We have,’ I agreed.
‘There are certain truths that never escape us.’
I nodded.
‘But we are safe here, among friends,’ he said. ‘And I maintain excellent surveillance. I have our family to consider. Our extended family. You, more than anyone, understand family, Astrid. Like you, I would never let anything happen.’
I realised that, in his way, he was thanking me.
I started writing a memoir, thinking to exorcise all I’d seen out there in the world, but dredging up those images was all too hard. So I enrolled at art school. I started to work in metal. Turns out, with a little tuition, I’m kind of handy with a welder. So there are sculptures in the front yard and a pretty elaborate fence going up around my house. Dan cooks most nights. We’re okay. We’re better than okay. When I see him walk in the door, I think: That’s him. That’s who I want. I sleep really well. And the sex is fantastic.
Coming back wasn’t what I’d planned. Nor was falling in love with Dan. Nor was blowing up a bridge. We never speak about it. We’ve put it aside. Just like we did the death of the Chinese worker. Sometimes I am still quietly thrilled at myself. And sometimes that shame of not being ashamed registers in me, playing its song. I like to think my father might have understood. Not the act itself. Never that. But the strategy.
‘Who did you help today, Astrid?’
‘Well, Dad … I did a very bad thing. But I did it for all of us. So this place could be what it is a little longer.’
I could hear my father say, ‘I never did repent for doing good, nor shall I now.’ Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice.
Out there, beyond Tasmania, the world is getting crazier, more destabilised, more vulnerable. Climate change has gone from greenhouse to hothouse and there’s no winding it back. The Middle East is getting drier; southern Europe, northern Europe, North America too. India will have a bigger population than China before long. Soon enough clean water, good soil, regular rainfall, it will all be worth more than oil. So we’re sitting on a goldmine here. But it’s possible to forget, if you don’t read the news, if you don’t pick up your phone. It won’t last, this Tasmania. The crazy will come. But for now it’s all clouds and sea, wind and stars, solitude, peace and the beautiful illusion it will go on forever.