Coda

I watched the news day and night, a twenty-four-hour cycle from the banal to the catastrophic. My favourite newsreader always sat in front of a projection of the Harbour Bridge holding the city together like a bracket. I’ve seen photographs of it being constructed, two arcs that reached towards each other in mid-air, a giant yawn of sky between them. If the bridge came apart, could other things be undone? I could go backwards in time. I imagined it all coming apart, splitting in two – six million rivets of Newcastle steel raining down into the harbour.

I wanted to break the bridge apart like a wishbone to see if my brother would come back: to walk through the carpark at Narrabeen and not see Zed. The reverse butterfly effect. I could keep unpicking till I got to a particular time: until there was the possibility of a redo.

That summer rain broke the banks of the Brisbane River. The city flooded; muddy water rose into houses and shops and forced residents to leave. On the news, neighbours floated down streets in a tinnie rowed on brown water with tree-branch oars, and tried to save furniture, photo albums, dogs.

In the week after Elijah’s funeral I stayed in the family home, mostly curled up on the couch. I spent days in my pajamas and watched live coverage. It felt therapeutic to do that, to feel connected to a greater tragedy. To share in grief on a larger scale.

New South Wales sent emergency services teams north: police officers, firefighters, paramedics. After the floodwater receded the buildings were left with earthy watermarks. A whole lot of volunteers drove interstate to clean the dirt from other people’s belongings.

I remembered all those years earlier, during Black Christmas, when I lay on the veranda, my head near Elijah’s, while fires burnt around us making the sky red as desert dust. Then this. When Elijah was missing each day had felt like an aeon and now all those years ago felt like they had just happened. Strange how years did that: sped up and slowed down. During that period between fire and flood, time and water moved out of equilibrium: always too much or not enough.

~

I walked past a street sweeper, I walked past an officer on a chestnut horse whose coat shone in the sun, I walked past a man ranting with such force his saliva hit the ground, I walked over chip packets and smashed beer bottles.

My phoned pinged and I retrieved it to find a message from Hyun. It was a picture of the shop counter covered with books, and on top was the cat, sitting up sphynx-like, the black and ginger sails of his ears pricked with an opened book between his paws; as if he were reading and interrupted.

Pyewacket misses you, the text read.

I hadn’t been into the store since Elijah’s body was found. I didn’t know how to reconcile the specifics of what had happened with the haven of the bookstore and Hyun, or want all the problems of my real life spilling into Terrace Books, which had become a sealed-off pleasure.

Sorry, I wrote back, not sure what to say. I didn’t want to lie about what was going on, but I didn’t feel strong enough to tell him the whole story, with all the details. I wasn’t even sure how to start it, or where the beginning was. Something’s happened. I added: I can’t really talk about it now.

No pressure. Come in when you can. Hope you’re okay.

The sky was clear that day and a light sea breeze blew through Darlinghurst. When we were younger Dad took our whole family back to County Armagh in Northern Ireland, where his family was from. The clouds hung so low there it was as if I could reach out and touch them. For those four weeks their uninterrupted greyness made me homesick. There was a certain shade of blue that only a Sydney sky could make; if I hadn’t seen it for a while my eyes ached and I could feel a lacking near my heart.

There was an envelope addressed to me in the letterbox the week before. When I opened it I recognised her looping cursive straight away:

I’m so sorry to hear about what happened to your brother. I’ve been thinking a lot about you. I bought this at that weird newsagent across the road from the institute – you know, the one we thought might be a cover for a money-laundering operation. Anyway, I wanted to buy you a card with an inspiring quote in it about love and grief, but this was the only one they had.

Love Serey xx

PS When you’re ready, you should come back: you’re too good at research not to.

When I flipped back to the front of the card there was a white collared shirt and a blue and gold striped tie. Above the picture was the text Happy Father’s Day to the Best Dad in the World.

I wondered if there was a specific word in English, or any other language, for a friend who could elicit laughter at the epicentre of loss: a highwire act of mercy. If there wasn’t a word, there should be.

As I walked through the park, the facade of the Macquarie Institute came into view. Inside the science marched on, not quickly, but with intent.

I saw the logo of the person as they ran to the left, flying their DNA behind them like a kite. Momentarily the image inverted like an optical illusion. In that instant I wasn’t sure if I had misinterpreted the icon all along. It appeared now with great certainty as a body facing away from the ground, being struck down from the right by the vortex of DNA as if by lightning.

I walked past the hospital and the empty bus shelter. I walked past the stain on the bus shelter seat where the man used to sit. I thought of my brother, and of Jonathan, who would be sitting at his desk. I remembered what Rebekah used to say about history, how it was only told by the survivors. I reflected on all the clever things she told me before she became fallible. I didn’t want to not have a voice, to not be written. I didn’t want to be a smudge.

When we were small, if anyone had to guess about us as siblings, they would have thought it would be me who wouldn’t survive. I wondered when things started to go wrong for Elijah, if there was a singular moment. Or was it another mechanism, some gene passed down from generation to generation, hidden? Something that was packed and unpacked, passed along only to him, under his skin.

Elijah and his bones that would never be made old.

I felt sorry for people, like Hyun, who would never get to meet him.

I entered the revolving doors at the front of the Macquarie Institute. I wasn’t sure what I was walking into or why I was the one left, but I was glad that I was. Perhaps after I finished my PhD I would apply to do a postdoc after all. Maybe I could even use my skills to research what happened in conditions like psychosis – how breaks in reality could be mended at a cellular or molecular level.

As I climbed the indoor staircase I felt them all there with me: Dad, Rebekah, Elijah, Nonna, Cate, even Mrs Taigh. I wondered how long it took, with grief, to see the parts of it that were not sad.

At the top of the stairs I nearly bumped into Professor Olsen.

‘Dr Donohue!’ he said. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’ When he said my name like that it sounded different from when Jonathan said it. It wasn’t part of a game or a trick, but more a term of respect. He touched me lightly on the shoulder in a way that didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. ‘I was so sorry to hear about your brother. I remember when he came to see you speak at the symposium. He clearly had a great admiration for you.’

I still couldn’t talk easily about Elijah. It was hard enough just being out in the world. ‘Thanks,’ I said, even though he’d got it the wrong way around. ‘I thought it would be good for me to come back to work, on my PhD. I think I was supposed to email you. Anyway I know, I mean, I saw you’ve published what I was working on before, but presumably there are more functional experiments to go on with.’

Professor Olsen looked visibly shaken: his eyes widened and his faced flushed as he looked at the floor. ‘Jonathan told me with great certainty that you weren’t coming back. I thought you two were friends.’ He looked down again. ‘I’m sorry. I should have phoned you.’

There was a pause that was momentarily awkward before Professor Olsen regathered. ‘But yes, you should come back. Of course, there is always more work. More opportunities. We have our lab meeting now, as you know, and you should come along.’

In the conference room, members of the laboratory team were seated around a long boardroom table. Serey gave me a small, excited wave when she saw me. Jonathan stood at the end in front of a projector screen, presenting PowerPoint slides. When he lifted his left arm to indicate a table, his fingers were tinted blue by the slide background. For the presentation he wore navy slacks, a collared shirt and tie with no jacket. The shirt was candy-striped with bright colours. He looked professional but with a twenty-four-hour stubble that I remembered against my skin. Once again he’d nailed the brief: professional with a rebellious edge.

Hold on, wasn’t that the slide template I always used?

He presented for forty minutes on Bough1. After the in vitro work had been published he moved on to mammalian models, first mice and then macaques. In every experiment where the gene was mutated the animals suffered the same fate: litter after litter, life after life the brains were altered, the neurons could not develop properly. The animals could not learn to move or feed independently; their little existences were cut short. In grown mammals when the gene was altered the animals developed a kind of dementia: they could not learn via reinforcement or reward, they got lost in mazes.

I thought again of my high-school biology teacher Mrs Taigh then, of all the things she’d taught me and everything I’d learnt since. I wanted her to know I was here, still studying the nature of things. I wanted her to know that since Elijah had died I’d walked with a limp too, except mine was the kind of limp that didn’t affect my leg. It was one that not many people could see.

When Jonathan presented, he made eye contact with every person in the room sequentially, moving around in an anticlockwise direction; making each one feel seen. His eyebrows shifted upwards a fraction when he noticed me there; his speech became faster and he dropped a few uncharacteristic ‘ums’.

Wait a minute, had I rattled him?

As Jonathan spoke, too quickly now, my right hand toyed with what was in my pocket, turning them over, hoping they would spark like flint. I waited patiently while Jonathan finished presenting the work that had rolled on from my own unacknowledged hours, as he basked in the glow of fluorescent lighting and the admiration of our colleagues. When the questions petered out, Jonathan looked up and over the room.

‘Of course,’ Jonathan said, a scalding redness spreading up from his neck and onto his cheeks, ‘we may need to rejig the workplan, now that it appears Dr Donohue has decided to come back.’

I stood up from my seat then, as if my legs were spring-loaded. ‘I never said I wasn’t coming back,’ I stated, a little too loudly.

The entire group looked confused.

Leaving the meeting room and walking back into the laboratory, I reached into my pocket to retrieve what I had brought. I put Jonathan’s cufflinks down on his desk, wishing they were bigger or made a louder noise. You left these at my place, I wrote on a nearby yellow post-it note. I went back to my own desk then to reclaim my space; the silver pieces seemed too lovely, too delicate and shiny for the ways he’d made me feel.

~

Six months after Elijah’s funeral my parents decided to sell the house. Surrounded by constant references to their firstborn, it had become too painful for either of them to live in. I found out around this time that the man I had seen in bed with my mother was the father of one of her music students, and that she’d moved in with him.

Dad hired a real-estate agent named Lydia to sell the property. She was small with peroxide-blonde hair pulled into a tight bun, and wore make-up so thick I couldn’t tell if she had real skin underneath. Lydia was disappointed with the condition of the house. She directed us to empty it, paint the walls, pull up the carpet and have the floors sanded and varnished. To have it sold as a blank slate rather than a page full of words.

Nothing prepared me for leaving our family home for the last time. The thought of it open it for inspection felt like something internal being made public and put on display. A violation. The house was a part of our family that we were leaving behind. I ran my hand over the windowsills in my old bedroom for the last time, walked through the hallways and pressed my palms to the windowpanes. The house my parents bought after they were married, the house where my mother was pregnant and where, in turn, Elijah and I were brought home and began our lives.

If you lost a place, did you lose all the memories that were made there? Would we somehow lose more of Elijah as well? Shapes of Elijah and me clung to the walls and the floor, from the ceiling, amber and translucent as cicada shells. Where we learnt to see and to talk, where we skinned our knees and lost our teeth – we pulled them out of the gum, the crunchiness of sinew breaking, and put them in glasses by our beds. Where we had our first dreams and nightmares.

Who we were.

I belonged to this house and now it was going to belong to other people, our floors becoming a palimpsest. People always talked about living in a house, or a city, but no one ever warned me that the reverse was also true: how this house, this place would come to inhabit us all.

When I went back the furniture was gone and the threadbare blue-grey carpets ripped up. It felt both smaller and bigger, and sound echoed through it like a tunnel. Dad arrived at the same time and we collected the last cardboard boxes of belongings. We found the painters staring at the newly varnished boards.

‘Oi! There’s more in here, boss,’ one of the women called out. I thought there must be termites in the wood, and wondered if the house was just going to fall into itself.

I looked over her shoulder and saw what she meant: clusters of indentations in the floorboards. To those who worked on our house the patterned imperfections were puzzling and made no sense, but as soon as I saw them I knew what they were. A code only those who loved Elijah understood. Wooden dimples on the floor under the window in Elijah’s bedroom where he played the cello for hours with no protective mat. Identical hollows on the back veranda where he sat with his cello, shirtless on summer days, overlooking the bay. Under the archway to the dining room the divots marked where he wore a tuxedo and performed for guests at my parents’ birthday celebrations. Cavities in the loungeroom were opposite the couch where my mother sat with a metronome and critiqued him before exams. The sanding machine must not have been set deep enough to erase all the markings Elijah had made with his endpin, and when the lacquer was poured on, the dents had been filled in, preserving all the places he played as caramel depressions.

Dad and I stood in the markings made with Elijah’s cello. I saw my brother with fixed gaze, left arm raised, his hand on the neck, his right arm bowing aggressively like a farmer scything hay. Elijah stood with one knee pointing outwards and the foot of that leg pressed against the inside knee of his other; Elijah as he ate an apple outside and watched a storm roll in; Elijah when he cannonballed into the harbour in board shorts, his lean body enclosed in the summer of his olive skin. We stood on the balcony, unable to speak, surrounded by the song of his youth: Elijah’s laughter, the brown-black curls of hair that brushed his neck as he threw his head back. We saw the mole on his right cheek and all the lightness of his tourmaline eyes before whatever it was fell behind them, making them dim.

I was still here, but had large parts of myself missing, shifting voids the wind could blow through. They were wounds I would have to grow around if I was to remain upright, like a scarred tree.