Kerry sits at the kitchen table scrolling through the photographs that Andrew has sent to her phone, photographs her mother had sent to Brooke. She has looked at them several times a day since she and Andrew spoke on Sunday evening. Now it’s Thursday and she’s still drawn back to them, still trying to see more deeply into the pictures, to work out what she actually knows about her mother.
‘Do you think you ever saw Mum and Dad as other people see them?’ she’d asked him on the phone a couple of days ago. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever even considered who they were outside those roles and all the assumptions that go with them.’
‘I’ve tried,’ he’d said, ‘a few times, but more now, now that Dad’s gone. I feel I knew him more clearly than Mum, because he was always a person of extremes, always telling you what he thought, what mattered, how we ought to see things. I think of Mum and what I get is reassurance and love, and I suppose safety, and I feel guilty because I think my relationship with her has been just that, always wanting but never really taking the trouble to get to know who she is, other than just Mum.’
‘That’s what I’m feeling too,’ Kerry had said. ‘But I’m wondering about Dad too. I was always so desperate for his attention . . .’
‘Looking for his approval?’
‘Yes . . . and never feeling I got it. Unlike you.’
Andrew laughed. ‘If I did have it I never knew. He always had me on the end of a piece of string – he’d tug it to get me to do something or behave in a particular way, and I’d do it but I never felt it got me anywhere with him or won me any approval.’
‘But he adored you,’ Kerry said. ‘You could do no wrong. “My number one son”, he called you. He was incredibly proud of you.’
‘Well, he only had one son, and if he was proud of me he never really let me know. He never thought I was tough enough, or smart enough, or capable of making difficult decisions.’
Kerry was silent.
‘Are you still there, Ker?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m thinking. It looked so different to me. I was very jealous.’
‘And I was jealous of you. He called you his “little princess”, he was always stroking your hair and telling you how lovely you were, and letting you sit on his knee. I wanted him to hug me and he hardly ever did.’
‘Why haven’t we talked like this before?’ she’d said eventually.
‘You never think of it, do you? I suppose I took everything for granted, and then Dad got ill . . . and everything else seemed to go downhill too.’
‘I want to talk to you properly – face to face, spend time together. Will you come over in the holidays – you and Brooke? She and I used to be real chums but I’ve lost touch with her. I feel I hardly know her.’
‘We’ll come,’ he said. ‘Give Mum time to get back and over the jetlag. We’ll come then. But why do you think Mum told Brooke about Flora and not us?’
‘Maybe because it was easier for her,’ Kerry says. ‘She probably hoped Brooke would tell us, and thought that by the time she got home we’d have sorted out how we felt about it. Not that there was any real sorting out to do.’
‘I wonder too if she felt bad about never having told us – I mean, all those years, she must have known it wouldn’t have mattered to us. So I guess she was just being loyal to Dad.’
‘And I wonder how Flora feels about that!’ Kerry had said. ‘Messy, isn’t it?’
Staring now at the picture of Connie taken in Brighton with Flora, Kerry sees someone complete and separate, not simply a daughter’s projection tinted and tainted by time. And she feels – yes – she actually feels something. It’s a longing to reach out to Connie, and have her reach out in return. It’s like a bullet entering her chest in slow motion and emerging from the other side, then gone. But it is – was – a feeling, the first she has had since the fierce burst of anger she’d felt when she stopped the car and got out the day they were driving home after the funeral. A real feeling, a tiny crack in the wall.
‘What are you looking at, Kerry?’ Samira asks, peering over her shoulder.
Farah has gone out to see a patient who needs to be checked every four hours, and Kerry is alone in the house with the twins.
‘Some pictures of my mum,’ she says, turning the phone so that Samira can see.
‘I like your mum,’ Samira says. ‘She’s always nice to me.’
Kerry nods. ‘She’s nice to me too.’
‘Do you miss her?’
She hesitates. ‘I do, I miss her a lot. I’ve missed her for about ten years.’
‘That’s silly. You can’t miss someone when they’re here.’
‘Actually, I think you can,’ Kerry says. ‘You can be at a distance from them even if you’re close by.’
Samira shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says with great authority. ‘Like, I miss my dad more than anyone because he’s dead and he’s not coming back.’
Kerry smiles at her. ‘I know what you mean. I miss my dad too, but I really think I miss my mum even more than him. I know that sounds funny.’
‘That’s totally weird,’ Samira says. ‘Who’s that other lady?’
‘It’s my Auntie Flora,’ Kerry says, studying Flora’s face, trying to see more than just the family likeness, seeking memories here too.
‘Is she nice?’
‘I think she is, but I haven’t seen her since I was younger than you are now, so I can hardly remember.’
‘Did you miss her?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kerry says. ‘I haven’t really thought about it until now.’ And Samira shrugs and races off to the lounge where Lala is calling her to see something on the television.
The trouble with a photograph, Kerry thinks, is that it captures a mere second, a look, an expression, and freezes it in time. A look that may not even be characteristic. What sort of person is this long distance aunt? What does she care about? What makes her laugh or cry? She thinks of Flora, isolated from her family and her best friend all those years, for simply being who she was. She remembers the beach, the chill of a shadow blocking out the sun, her eyes flying open, how she snatched her hand away from Jennifer’s, her father’s eyes dark with anger, and the steely control in his voice.
‘Come along, you two, time for a swim or a walk. I’ll come with you.’
And she’d scrambled to her feet, her face blazing with fear and shame, heart pounding, knowing he must have seen their linked fingers. In the ten days since Jennifer had arrived to stay, a current of electric sensuality had developed between them. They dared not speak of it even to each other though no words were needed. But that afternoon she was terrified. Once on her feet she thought her legs would crumple under her and she shivered despite the warmth of the sun.
After that they were never alone. Her father was on holiday and they went everywhere as a family. Only Andrew was exempt, and Kerry knew that as soon as they were out of the door he would be off on his bike to meet his girlfriend at Battery Point. The tension was paralysing, but somehow they got through the final few days until it was time to deliver Jen back to her parents.
‘I’d like to talk to you in my study, Kerry,’ her father had said when they got back. ‘Right away, please.’
And she had followed him upstairs, fear churning her gut, and perched awkwardly on the edge of the chair facing him across his desk.
‘I will not have that girl in this house again,’ he’d said, ‘and I want your promise that you will have nothing more to do with her. Nothing at all.’
‘But, Dad . . .’ she’d begun.
‘I don’t want to discuss this, Kerry. And if I were in your position I wouldn’t be butting in or asking questions. This is not negotiable. If you can’t promise me that then I shall have to talk to her parents, tell them what you were doing.’
‘But we weren’t . . .’
The icy chill of his look silenced her. ‘I want you to tell me that it will never happen again. I want the best for you, Kerry, in every possible way – a good career, a fine husband and a happy marriage with beautiful children. Your behaviour has put all that at risk. And you will say nothing of this to your mother. She would be deeply hurt if she knew about this.’
It’s many years since Kerry has given this exchange even a passing thought and now, as she digs into this little pocket of memory, she is torn between feeling it cruel and ignorant, or simply laughable.
Humiliated and shamed she had walked out of his study and down the stairs. Her cheeks burned with her usual embarrassing blush, tears pricked her eyes, and she wanted to roll up in a corner and die. As she reached the foot of the stairs Connie walked in from the garden towards the kitchen and caught sight of her.
‘Oh, Kerry darling, you’re upset.’
‘I’m fine,’ she’d said, gritting her teeth.
‘I can see you’re upset. You and Jennifer were having such a lovely time, but she can come other times, you know, whenever you like, and anyway school starts again soon so you’ll see each other every day.’
She’d opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t, and ran instead into Connie’s arms.
‘Poor darling, come on, let’s make some tea and take it out into the sunshine. I’ve got your favourite cookies . . .’
And life was normal again, except for that terrible secret she now shared with her father. She maintained a sort of friendship with Jennifer but they never visited each other’s homes again. There was a tension between them, his tension, which could never be released.
‘We were just girls being girls,’ she’d told Andrew on the phone the other night. ‘Usually it’s a passing thing, part of teenage discovery, but Dad obviously didn’t see it that way.’
Kerry stares again at the photographs of Flora, remembering that on the few occasions she has thought of her it has been with fierce disapproval. She flushes with shame as she recalls her self-righteous and hostile remarks to Connie about her. All these years they had believed Flora guilty of some terrible sin or crime when all she was guilty of was being herself in a way that harmed no one else. It shocks her now that they had been encouraged to forget about Flora, and they had shown no curiosity about that. She’d always known that Connie kept in touch with her, but why has she not asked her mother about it? And how could Connie go along with it for so long and never talk to her or Andrew about it? None of it seems to make sense, until she thinks again of that day on the beach and, later, facing her father in the study. And she remembers his words, his orders, the expression on his face and the way it paralysed her. He had always had an extraordinary power to silence them when it suited him, to remove what he didn’t want to see or hear, and she remembers the thing he always used to say: ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ And the thing about not asking questions, said in a way that made her feel completely powerless, always followed it: ‘If I was in your position I wouldn’t be asking questions.’ She’d heard him say that to her mother, and it was only when she’d been at university in the late eighties that she learned that this was the means some men used to silence women – the power of concealed threat – and once again it takes Kerry’s breath away.
*
Early on Saturday morning Andrew wheels the bikes out of the shed and leans them against the wall, thinking that cycling was just one of the many things that had fallen by the wayside in the slow disintegration of his marriage. This ride means a new start. Although a real new start would mean a new job too – the present one feels like a ball and chain that he drags behind him with little enthusiasm and dwindling energy. It was his father who had steered him towards the public service and it has served him well for years but it has never really been what he wanted. At university he had wanted to study art history or literature or both, but Gerald had dismissed this with a grunt and a wave of his hand.
‘And what sort of job will that get you?’ he’d demanded. ‘Do you want to end up mouldering away in some university? What sort of career is that, where’s your ambition?’
Andrew had rather liked the prospect of mouldering in a university, he saw himself in an office full of books, preparing lectures, becoming an expert in some obscure corner of the history of art, or early colonial writing. Anything, really, that would allow him to live a quiet life with books. Alternatively he would have enjoyed something physical and had floated the idea of agricultural college. But Gerald had decided that economics was the way of the future and he managed to make it sound interesting.
‘You can go anywhere with an economics degree,’ he’d said.
Andrew knows now that his father was right – it could take him places, had already done so. It’s just that they are not the places he wants to go. It’s time, he thinks, to take a risk in order to find the sort of life he wants for himself, not the one that Gerald had wanted him to have. He doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life living out his father’s vision.
‘Are the bikes okay?’ Brooke asks, appearing beside him in her cycling gear.
‘They’re fine. I just need my helmet and then we’ll get going. Remember when we last did this?’
‘Yonks ago,’ Brooke says. ‘We went with Mum to that café she likes. When she comes back we could see if she wants to do it again. I bet Zachary doesn’t ride a bike.’
The thought of Zachary on a bike strikes them both as hilarious and they double up with laughter. Andrew runs inside, collects his helmet, phone and wallet, and they set off slowly down the shallow slope, getting used to the feel of the bikes again.
‘That house really is embarrassingly awful,’ Andrew says as they cruise to the end of the road. ‘Is that where Donna’s boyfriend lives?’
Brooke nods. ‘Yep. Gross, isn’t it?’
Andrew slows down and comes to a stop. ‘That looks like Zachary’s car. It can’t be, surely?’
Brooke looks away and then back at him and he sees her face is flushed.
‘Why are you looking like that? Is it his car?’
‘Yep. That’s his. Donna says he goes there sometimes.’
Andrew slips back into the saddle again and starts to move on. ‘How odd. Do you know why?’
Brooke ignores his question. ‘Let’s get going,’ she says, ‘I want my breakfast,’ and she pulls away, cycling faster so she can put more distance between herself and the house.
Andrew follows her with a distinct feeling that something is wrong. She’s been strange, subdued, since the day he came home to find her sitting on the floor in the darkened kitchen. The row with Donna had really upset her but he’s convinced he hasn’t quite got the whole story yet.
‘Is there anything you haven’t told me about all that business with Donna?’ he calls, pulling alongside her.
‘Dad! We’re cycling. Don’t spoil it by talking.’
Andrew smiles and speeds up, thinking how much she has grown in so many ways since they last rode together. Back then it was always him saying ‘don’t talk, pay attention to the road, don’t talk’. And they ride on side by side in silence and then speed up as they get on to the river path. It’s a glorious morning, the air is blistering cold on his face but the sun cuts through the trees casting jagged patterns on the concrete. More of this, he thinks, more of this is what I need, a more natural, active life, and as they ride on through the sunlight his heart suddenly soars with a sense of possibility – the possibility of being different, being true to himself after so many years of doing what is expected of him. His breath comes faster and he feels the pull of his calf and thigh muscles, the tightening in his chest that warns him how unfit he is, but it’s glorious here, the wide road on one side, the long stretch of grass down to the water on the other, his lungs bursting in the clear cold winter air. He pedals faster, cycling as hard as he can, passing Brooke, needing to push himself to the limit.
‘Slow down, Dad,’ Brooke yells, ‘look where you’re going!’
And her voice is the last thing he hears before his front wheel cracks into the concrete bollard and the bike rears up, spinning away from under him as he is thrown sideways, off the cycleway onto the road, and into the path of the oncoming traffic.
*
‘I can’t tell you how good this feels,’ Chris says, grasping Kerry’s hand as they edge their way through the Saturday crowds in the Salamanca markets. ‘I thought . . . well, I thought lots of things but the worst was that it was all my fault and that you were going to leave me.’
‘Typical man,’ Kerry says, nudging him. ‘It had to be all about you! It was never your fault.’ She laughs, leaning closer to him, wanting to feel the solid warmth of his body that she has missed so much. She had called him the previous morning and suggested that he and Erin drive the children down after school and stay until Sunday evening. ‘I want to come home,’ she’d said, ‘but it might be fun for us all to have a weekend in Hobart together.’
Last night, when everyone else had gone to bed, she’d tried to explain to him how it had changed.
‘I haven’t been able to feel anything for weeks – well, months really,’ she’d said. ‘I could see things happening around me and I knew I should feel happy or sad or hurt or touched, I knew what the feelings ought to be but I just couldn’t actually feel them. It was like being behind a wall with everyone else on the other side. But on Monday I was looking at photos of Mum and Flora and I felt something, really felt it. Like something moved through me and I felt it in my chest, something had changed.’ She’d paused, wondering whether he understood, and saw that he was confused but hopeful. ‘You see I’d had a feeling, I actually felt something again.’
‘Okay,’ Chris had said cautiously, ‘and then what?’
‘Well, a couple of nights later I was thinking about something that happened ages ago when I was about thirteen and this girl, Jennifer, came to stay.’ And she’d told him about Gerald’s reaction.
‘Seems a bit over the top,’ Chris had said.
‘Exactly. And I kept thinking about it and I felt myself go quite cold with shock at the awfulness of it. And eventually – this sounds weird, I know – but I just started to laugh. Not just pretended to laugh, I actually laughed with my whole body, but most of all with my mind, Chris.’
‘Well,’ he’d said, obviously still trying to understand, ‘that sounds good, but why?’
‘I laughed because it was so horrible and cruel that it suddenly seemed ridiculous. I laughed about Dad and what he did to Auntie Flora. I laughed about all the years she’s been a sort of pariah – a symbol of darkness. An example of what might happen if one of us overstepped the line in any way. And there was this thing he always said to shut us up. It brings me up in goosebumps remembering it. He did an awful thing to Flora, Chris . . .’
‘Well, by our standards he did, but your dad wasn’t a bad person . . .’
‘I know. But he was a bully and he did a cruel and awful thing, so awful that it suddenly seemed funny and I started laughing at . . . at the crassness and stupidity of it all, the waste, the terrible hurt. I laughed and I couldn’t stop. In the end I had to lie down on the floor and wait for the laughing to end. And I realised that I was feeling things again, that wall had come down.’
She could tell that it didn’t make much sense to him but she could also see the enormous relief in his face, and feel the intensity of his feelings in the way he held her and kissed her. And she decided not to tell him about the really dark moments, the dreams, that fragile silhouette, crazed with cracks, shattering into shards of dark glass.
Later, when she’d leaned over to kiss him, she felt the salt of his tears on her lips.
‘It feels just like us again,’ Chris says now. ‘It’s been difficult for a long time and you’ve been different . . .’
She nods. ‘I’m sorry, it must’ve been really hard for you. All of it, especially these last three months, but I think I’m getting back to normal now.’
‘Normal?’ he grins. ‘You were never normal! You were always outstandingly crazy and infuriating and perfectly wonderful, which is why I married you. It’s really good to have you back. Let’s just take things one day at a time.’ He puts his hand to her face. ‘Good lord, you’re freezing, and your ear is so cold it’ll drop off.’
Kerry nods. ‘It’s bitter, isn’t it, despite the sun? There’s a stall up here where they sell hand-knitted beanies. I’m going to get one, and the kids probably need them too.’
Salamanca Place is packed as usual on a Saturday morning, and they squeeze on through the crowd, steering Erin, Farah and all the children to the beanie stall. Kerry watches as Chris insists on buying everyone a beanie and soon they are trying on different colours and patterns while he takes pictures on his phone.
Since he and Erin arrived with the children yesterday afternoon Samira and Lala have taken charge of Mia, making a space for her in their bedroom, letting her rummage through their clothes. They are acting like big sisters and Mia is making the most of it, lapping up the attention, and walking between the twins holding both their hands. Chris snaps them discussing whether she should have a pink or purple beanie. Kerry laughs as he photographs her encouraging Ryan to get a dark green one with red stripes, and then Erin and Farah giggling together like little girls – as though they are all one big family.
Sorting out the beanies takes a while and when Chris has paid for eight of them and they are all kitted out they make their way through the crowds to a café and order several different pizzas. It’s just as the pizzas arrive that Kerry’s phone starts to ring.
‘Ignore it,’ Chris says. ‘This is all so good, just ignore it.’
She ignores it for the first few rings and then pulls it out of her pocket just as it stops.
‘Brooke,’ she says, staring at the phone. ‘I don’t think she’s ever called me before. Do you think something’s wrong? Maybe I should . . .’
Chris shrugs. ‘Okay, but best go outside, you won’t be able to hear anything in here. Don’t be too long or I’ll eat your share of the one with anchovies.’
Kerry weaves her way between the tables, finds a spot that is sheltered from the wind, presses ‘call back’ and waits, stamping her feet against the cold and turning up the collar of her jacket.
Brooke answers, speaking so fast that Kerry can barely understand her. ‘Slow down, Brooke,’ she says, ‘slow down, take some deep breaths and then tell me what’s happened.’
Brooke slows down and Kerry listens as she tells her about the bike ride, about Andrew being thrown off the bike and onto the bonnet of a passing car. Brooke gasps for breath and goes on: the ambulance, the emergency ward, the cut on Andrew’s head and his arm, and his neck, the brace on his neck . . .
‘Whoa, hang on, Brooke,’ Kerry says. ‘What was that you said about his neck?’
Brooke repeats it and Kerry’s shiver has nothing to do with the cold. ‘Is he conscious, Brooke? Can I speak to him? Can you hold the phone for him?’
There is some fumbling and faint voices in the background, and then she hears Andrew’s voice, the apologies, the explanation, the embarrassment and, most of all, the fear.
‘I’ll be on the first flight I can get,’ she says. ‘And I’ll call Brooke back to let her know when that’ll be. Try not to worry, Andrew . . .’ she hesitates, ‘love you.’ Her heart is racing and she can feel fear surging through her and has to pause and feel that, really feel it for its own sake, before she does anything else. Months with nothing and now the intensity of her fear for her brother propels her over the crumbling remains of that paralysing wall. Opening the restaurant door she steps inside and waves to Chris, beckoning him to join her.
‘He sounds okay,’ she says when she has explained what’s happened. ‘And he says he’s okay, the cuts on his head and arm hurt, and his bum – his mobile was in his back pocket so when he landed on his bum bits of it got embedded in one buttock, but it’s his neck, Chris. The doctors think he could have broken his neck. They won’t know until they’ve done an MRI, and Brooke’s really rattled. They can’t get hold of Linda, who’s in Singapore, and Andrew’s worried about Brooke having to cope alone. I’ve told him I’ll get the first flight I can.’
Chris puts his arms around her. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll see if Erin and the kids can stay here with Farah for a couple of days, until we know what’s happened. There’s no way I’m letting you go alone, not after all you’ve been through. Come on, we’ll tell the others and go straight home, get online and find a flight.’
Kerry nods, ignoring the tears that are running down her cheeks. She puts her hands up to his face. ‘You’re the best,’ she says, ‘I love you to bits. You do know, don’t you, that none of what’s happened was ever about you?’
And they hurry back through the restaurant, gather up the others and the remains of the pizzas, and head out through the crowded marketplace to the car and back to Connie’s house.