4

LETTER

Next day at 11 am, Sarah is at my door. We walk to her car and we drive off. Just like that. I’m kidnapped, out of the blue, out of my morning. It’s coolish and drizzling. I clear my brain of any thoughts and just check the trees out of the window. Sarah drives with precision and gusto. She follows the road rules, but the ride has an exciting edge. We swerve around the bends and pound down the freeway.

‘Have you had breakfast?’ she asks, and hands me a decaf coffee in a takeaway cup, waving away my thanks.

She’s even remembered I don’t drink real coffee. Her eyes are firmly stuck on the road and silence fills the car as I cradle the warmth. The freeway leaves the suburbs in piles behind it. The sky leans in, swallowing a great gulp of void to make room for the planes. I cling to the cup and try not to wonder what I’m doing in this car. Sarah chuckles.

‘What can we call you? A buffer, a chaperone, a decoy perhaps?’

I don’t go so far as to believe she reads my thoughts; she’s just got this strange brand of common sense.

I don’t know how I get myself into these situations. Was it the thunderstorm? It’s as if something slips and I slip with it. Sarah comes to a halt at Tullamarine and we sit in the lane for quick pick-ups. An airport official is about to move us on, when Mary appears. It’s easy to recognise her. She’s a blue torch among all the relaxed travellers. Sarah beeps her horn. As I jump out to help Mary with her case, I catch the glimpse of a presence through the grilled blue lattice and smile towards it.

‘Hello, Mary.’

She nods and gets in the car. Sarah grabs her arm and leans in towards her with her whole body. There is something desperate in her sudden intensity. Her reaching expression can clutch at nothing. The burqa reminds me of Bluebeard and his forbidden room, except that for Sarah, it’s her own daughter incarcerated in that blue room, a room to which she no longer has access.

Her usually deep voice nearly breaks into a falsetto.

‘How was the trip?’

‘Fine, Mum.’

Mary’s voice is young, Australian, certain. It has a healthy, no-nonsense tone. As I help her with her case, her hand, damp with perspiration, slips on the handle. I wonder if it’s due to the burqa or to nervousness. Soon a damp sheet of silence is also hanging in the car. Throwing myself on mute cliffs, I’m a gull, flapping around to find something to say. I cough and comment on the rain. They don’t answer. Sarah concentrates on her driving as if she were hugging a cliff road instead of a freeway. Wading still further into triteness, I ask Mary whether she prefers Melbourne or Adelaide.

‘I don’t know yet. I couldn’t say. I’ve been back in Adelaide for seven years now. But I’ve good memories of Melbourne.’

Sarah’s two palms grip the wheel enthusiastically.

‘That’s good news.’

Mary turns her blue head to her mother.

‘It wasn’t all bad.’

I can’t fathom if this is a joke or just a hard fact. I decide to relax and think of my grandmother. I let her sit beside me in the car, feel her slim body bounce on the road, her hands quietly folded in her lap. Death has brought her wisdom, humour and peace. I let my gull fly out to sea. An old man whispered to me in Sarah’s bar that they don’t know where gulls sleep. It’s a deep mystery. Even scientists don’t know, he assured me. I like this information so much that I don’t want to check on the Net to see if it’s true. I wonder if I am going to be brought home or if Sarah is planning to keep me hostage through a silent lunch.

As if on cue, Sarah’s voice rings out unnaturally.

‘Have you eaten?’

Mary’s naked hand emerges from the blue cloth.

‘I’m fine.’

Sarah clears her throat.

‘Surely you must be hungry.’

Inexplicably, her daughter turns to me.

‘There was stuff on the plane.’

The motor seems to have acquired a warlike roar. At last, we’re approaching Melville Road – Brunswick bound. Sarah takes a ragged breath.

‘Shall we all have a bite in the café down the road?’

I find myself murmuring assent. Mary says nothing. Now we are parked. The car shudders into silence, and spits us out.

Soon, we are sitting in a café on Barkly St. We choose sandwiches and coffees. The waitress’s enormous breasts and buttocks are soft moving hills around the tables. She tosses a glance and a joke over her shoulder. She reminds me of someone from my childhood, or from a film, some nice memory just on the verge of oblivion, surging back into reality in the flesh. There’s a bicycle hanging on a wall and, here and there, terrariums. These big glass jars containing plants remind me of some wacky, self-sustaining, domed city – decided, planned and sprouting before any human beings can come to live in it. I peer at the plants – maybe tiny people are hiding under the leaves. The music is loud, thank God.

Soon we’re all stirring our spoons, in sync, in our coffee cups, even though none of us take sugar. Sarah jerks her head up.

‘So it’s over, hey?’

Mary’s head doesn’t budge, but her spoon stops turning round and round. I suddenly wish I had a burqa. It must be comfortable in there, ‘heard but not seen,’ a vengeance on childhood’s ‘seen but not heard.’ I wait for her answer like an idiot. What has this got to do with me? Yet I can’t help but feel Sarah’s anxiety churn in my own stomach. Mary lays the tips of her ten fingers on the edge of the table:

‘Yes.’

The word just hangs there between us.

Sarah doesn’t really deserve this; she uses none of a mother’s cheap tricks. The ten fingers disappear again. Mary sighs.

‘He didn’t beat me, or anything like that. It’s just over. Lasted seven years, not a bad run really. We were actually just thinking of having kids and then …’

We’re both staring at her blue folds. The waitress, bearing our sandwiches, weaves her hills and valleys around us. We bend our heads as if we’ve just received Holy Communion. That grandmother of mine was a Catholic and a church fiend, with a hard-edged virtuous streak, yet that’s not the voice I hear. I hear a strong, warm heart, dispensing with the chaff, a wide-eyed awareness. If only I could access some if it now. Sarah fiddles with her coffee spoon, before taking a casual sip of coffee.

‘What were you saying, Mary?’

The blue head turns swiftly.

‘No kids. There were no kids. I can’t have kids, Mum.’

Suddenly her voice is clogged with tears. Sarah and I stare at each other again because we have no other eyes to look into. We could be in a ring, three boxers not throwing any punches. Why do these women want children so much?

The mother’s eyes are two dark slits. The daughter coughs and suddenly she is filling in the empty space with words.

‘Thanks for putting me up at the last minute. Billie can’t have me because she’s staying with her parents. I didn’t even check if she was still in her flat. I just presumed she was. Turns out she’s had a cancer scare. Just told me about it. But she’s okay now, hopefully. Do you remember her stepmother, Mitali?’

I jump.

‘Mitali? Is she Indian? Does she work in gardening? Is her partner called Ian?’

Mary stems my staccato questioning.

‘Yes, that’s it. Melbourne’s a small place, isn’t it?’

I explain that I work with Mitali. The blue head turns swiftly my way again.

‘Billie says that she’s been a better mother to her than her own mother.’

By her instant check, you can see that Mary wished she hadn’t said that. But it’s too late now. Sarah takes a quiet sip of her coffee. I would like to put some sugar in both their cups.

Silence snakes in on us again. I notice Sarah putting her hand out in a futile, ineffectual gesture, as if she were trying to stop a forest fire or hold on to someone already too far away. Then her hand falls.

‘Mary, I’m sorry. Sorry.’

It reminds me of how she expressed her sorrow for Jill Meagher’s family. She’s embarrassed with pain; she can’t bear her own overwhelming compassion. She has to keep succinct. I can feel something in the blue material – the daughter could be smiling at her mother, who knows?

‘It’s not your fault. It’s just a fact. I’ve done all the tests. We could have adopted but that wasn’t on the agenda for him. He wanted a …’

Sarah supplies the last word:

‘… a son?’

What does it mean? There certainly seem to be no Islamic leitmotivs floating around in Mary’s talk. One wonders why Mary is still in a burqa, if it’s not for her man. Catholics, Scouts, businessmen, rock stars, politicians, doctors’ wives – most people have a credo that slips into the slightest of their utterances. But Mary’s clean Australian voice rests on itself, without the support of any ideology. Is her blue outfit some kind of disguise? I guess one doesn’t question someone’s vegetarianism, gluten-free diet, football team – or burqa.

Suddenly it’s all finished. We have eaten our sandwiches and drunk our coffees. The waitress comes with the bill. Sarah pays and refuses any contribution. We could have been sitting there for hours. It’s not real time we have spent there. It reminds me of fairytale time, when you follow a staircase under a forest and live down there for a hundred years. But you eventually return to the surface and the clocks say you’ve only been away for five minutes. We get up so awkwardly the legs of our chairs make a terrible noise on the cement floor. We could be gangsters springing up with our hands on our holsters – but we’re just walking to the door.

As they leave me on my doorstep, Mary clambers out.

‘Hey, nice meeting you,’ she says, lifting her hand.

I reach out vaguely and touch her blue sleeve, like a Catholic touching the Pope’s robes to collect an extra blessing for the road. I watch them drive away with a vague feeling of anticlimax. Maybe some crude Pavlovian response in me expected bombings, terrorist attacks or hostage-takings – instead of just despair. Then, realising the time, I fumble for the key and rush inside to jump into my gardening gear. When I step out again, I am suddenly uncomfortable in my heavy jumper, jeans and gumboots. Maybe they too are a disguise. Things have acquired the habit of becoming strange – not only clothes, but also the house, the street – everything except for the cat.

On the way out I try not to check the letterbox. Avoiding disappointment can be made into an art form. That’s when I see the letter poking out in its white envelope. I haven’t received one for nearly two weeks. I grab it and push it into my jeans pocket. The wind has picked up and the sky is clear of rain. Kim expects me at the first garden we’re working in, near where I live. I’m conscious of the letter all the way there. I can’t read it running down the street. I should have left it in the box, but I‘m too scared – an evil wind could blow it away, or rain could wash away the ink.

Every time these letters come I keep them with me. I wear them. For an hour or two I can’t bear to open them. The idea of breaking the newness of them would tip them over into the past that devours everything. The fact that the letter stays in my pocket preserves its status – keeps it free, full of unopened promise. I run down the road and feel its faint rustle against my hip. I have the feeling that a complete season, quite apart from the one surrounding me, has inserted itself in my day: his season. The cold isn’t so cold, the trees are nearer, the footpath isn’t so hard, the recent rain smells good. Everything is stranger, sharper; even the air has a different taste. Maybe mountain climbers reaching a certain altitude at last feel like this. They may trip, blunder, fall, but with one glimpse of the summit, they feel at home – as I do with my letter.

When I get there, Kim is busy and has no time for sidelines.

‘Just dig a hole in this bed,’ she says.

I push my spade into the mud. The Australian earth welcomes me. I could die here, I know, and never be in fear of becoming a roaming spirit, a dybbuk, a djinn, in search of home. My home is the thrill of paper, the rustle against my thigh, of Australian words written by an Australian hand.