An End and a Beginning

The chap and quat of basketballs forms a steady backbeat to my thoughts. I sit at the dining-room table in front of the window and watch a high-school teacher showing some students how to throw a javelin. The teacher wears a wide-brimmed straw hat, a khaki shirt and shorts. He steps back on one foot in a strained, balletic pose, half-sport, half-sculpture, then moves his arm forward in a wide, slow-motion arc, so that the group of watching students—and me through my window—see a blessed golden spear shoot forward and fly. After an age of growing up has passed, the spear falls into the well-washed turf.

Kids go on shooting for goals on the high-school court way after it gets dark. If practice can make them Michael Jordans, then each one will be for sure. I see them as Peter in a few years time, but the picture no longer carries with it the anxiety it once did.

Peter’s over at Derek’s while I’m finishing this—my account of events, mine as opposed to Gail Trembath’s, or anybody else’s. I gave Gail an exclusive on how we set a trap and caught Guy Harmer, and made her the happiest reporter in the southern hemisphere, for a while at least.

I’m in the Lyneham house, and Derek’s doing what he said he always wanted—building from his own design, from the dirt up, on a block out along the Murrumbidgee. Meanwhile he’s renting a flat in Braddon, where Peter has his own bedroom, but can’t take Fred.

The story of the end of my marriage to Derek both is and isn’t part of this account. I feel a bit guilty for not saying more about it, and Derek, when he reads this, will hate it and say I’ve misjudged him.

Derek looked at me when he got off the plane, looked at me over the top of Peter’s head, and we both knew it was over. Derek’s face was blank with the need to tell me what he’d put off for so long. He’d met someone in America. She was flying out within a month to join him. He wanted a divorce.

Derek and I had more in common that morning at the airport than we’d had in years. Peter makes no bones about wanting us back together, but he likes Valerie and seems happy spending time with her and Derek. Valerie was there when I phoned Derek and Peter after the accident. Peter never said a word about her. I asked him why and he said, ‘Mum. You were stressed out enough.’

I asked Peter whether he’d ever said anything to his father about Ivan and me, and he shook his head, his mouth set in that stoic line that warned me not to push him.

I like to take Fred for a walk when it’s beginning to get dark. We cross the road to the school oval, listening to the steadiness and urgency of the traffic on the highways behind and to the side of us. I stare at the poplars that grab and hold the last light as it disappears behind O’Connor Ridge.

We move towards the belt of trees where the high-school students eat their lunch, Fred scavenging, me with my head up. Fred always hopes for the bonanza of a whole discarded sandwich, or a piece of cake. He misses his master; sometimes, when I’m turning for home, he disappears and won’t come when I call.

The lights over the path and along the street bring memories with them; full-throated memories that take not only human form, but the forms of clever machines as well.

Who haven’t I accounted for? Bambi’s doing dressmaking at home. Between seams, she’s reading the job ads and hoping to strike it lucky for an interview, like me.

I visited her one afternoon and we drank Red Zinger tea and chatted. I wondered how I could ever have believed Bambi capable of framing Rae Evans and stuffing up my car, realising I shared with her the impulse to carry colour around, to be captured by bright petals and the hungry opacity of leaves.

There was a postcard from Rae in the letterbox waiting for me when I got home from Bambi’s.

At first I didn’t even notice the picture on the front. ‘Hello Sandra,’ Rae wrote, in her small, backsloping hand. ‘I don’t think about many of my ex-colleagues, but I do about you. So let me know how you’re keeping.’

I flicked the card over and studied the photograph of a North Queensland rainforest, imagining the light of the tropics glancing off Rae’s indoor skin, as I propped the card against the sugar bowl. A feeling of escape rose from it like perfumed oil.

I thought of Rae as she’d been when I first met her. And then by the lake in the dark that evening. Of Rae’s omissions and half-truths. Of how I’d liked her, and of how she’d made me angry. Of what might have happened if she hadn’t left Canberra the day the charges against her were dropped.

Somehow I didn’t think Rae would ever willingly come back here to live. I stared at her address in tiny letters at the bottom of the card, as though she’d added it as an afterthought. She’d already said thank you and congratulated me on our report, which was on the AGPS bookshelves at last between maroon and pale-blue covers.

I doubt whether DIR will have Rae back, if DIR still exists after the elections. They’ve been so long in coming. Now they’re only a few days away, I feel strangely calm about the outcome.

I got a surprise phone call the day after Rae’s postcard. A security guy at DEET had walked into a problem with a hacker, and wondered if I’d consider a little low-key investigating.

‘Why me?’ I asked, trying to hide the fact that I was tickled pink.

Well, he said, he’d heard about me. His ‘problem’—the way he said the word made me feel as though he was asking me to walk across a roomful of eggs without breaking them—required an indirect approach.

I didn’t say yes right off. I waited twenty-four hours, then said it. Computer Security Consultant. Does that sound grand? I must say I find it appealing. With a bit of luck and good connections, with one thing leading to another, who knows, even I might find a way to get along in cyberspace.

. . .

Ivan gave Brook the completed horse as a coming-home present. Brook is learning to program. He has to go in for chemo once a week, and he’s bald again. Apart from that, he’s becoming as much of a tech-head as Ivan was, or is.

I was there when Brook tried it out for the first time.

He pirouetted slowly, his face and head invisible beneath the helmet. Because I couldn’t see his eyes, I didn’t know how he felt, how he was reacting, but his movements reminded me of ballet steps, slow, untutored, with an uncommon grace. He held the joystick at arm’s length for balance, moving it slowly forward, then back in towards his body with a calm precision.

He stopped his slow circling, and for a few more moments swayed from side to side. Ivan went to him and grasped him by the shoulders, and took the helmet off as gently as if he was removing a bonnet from a newborn baby.

Brook’s face was washed clean of any expression, and his bald head shone with dancing.

Curious, I climbed up on the platform. There was nothing to frighten me now in the dull soft hiss of illicit spears against a horse’s wooden sides.

I thought it would be the old VR, with perhaps the battle added on. I expected to move inside a burning city, wooden buildings collapsing inwards, the sounds of screaming, heavy timber falling.

Instead there was blackness, slowly taking shape. A black horse, both mythical and life-like, extraordinarily beautiful, made for destruction yet somehow surviving.

I was inside it, as before. But this time I felt its heart beat next to mine; its life, its vital organs warm between my breasts. Then I was riding it, this creature of humility and grace, over a dry land, eucalypt forests, a river, towards a crystal coastline and the sea. A creature made for flight, instead of a shell of dead wood being dragged by its belly towards death.

I wept when it was over, somehow too spent to lift the helmet off. My tears wet the blue padded leather, and I balanced unsteadily, one hand on either side of the corral.

— END —