I wake from a dream in which I am trying to wrap an infant version of myself in banana leaves. I pull at the palm fronds, desperately trying to get the two ends to meet around the baby’s tiny shoulders, but the baby feels cold—far too cold for something living. There are no other leaves available, and in a panic I run in small circles with the child in my arms. The baby touches my face with one hand, and with the other points towards a banana palm in the distance. I wake up while sprinting towards the plantation.
I raise the back of my hand to my own cheek, which is warm and dry. Without getting out of bed, I lean across and open the curtains to let the light seep in. It’s a grey day and the nearby shed creaks with the effort of staying upright in the mild wind.
My mother will be buried today.
I send a message to everyone back home—Thinking of you—before lying back down and rubbing my eyes. It’s not enough, I know that, but I don’t feel as if I can say anything else. Perhaps it would have been better to send no message at all.
I can hear Jack unstacking the dishwasher in the kitchen, while listening to the morning news on the radio.
‘Jack!’ I yell towards the door until the sounds stop. ‘Is the coffee on?’
I hear him ignite the stovetop and run the tap. ‘Yes!’
I get dressed—noting that Simon has read the message I sent but not yet replied—and enter the kitchen just as Jack’s shaking a frying pan full of bacon over the heat.
I sit down gingerly at the table and he turns the heat down on the stove before bringing a cup of coffee over and placing it in front of me.
‘Voila!’ He does a jerky two-step near the kitchen fern. ‘Coffee for the queen.’
I bow regally as he picks up a tea towel from the table and flings it over his shoulder.
‘Do you want the bacon now or later?’ he asks.
‘Now, please.’
He opens the cupboard and rummages for a plate. I wait for the lull between us to become generous in nature. I want a fat pause to lead me into talking about last night. I could explain to him why it is so painful to sit like this right now. Jack has always been the most liberal of all my parents, the one who talked to me openly about adult things; in hindsight, it was perhaps because he knew us less. At some point we grew as tall as adults and that was enough for him to start talking to us as if we were. I don’t need to protect Jack from the truth of things like I do for Vincent. Jack is generally a little more resilient.
There’s a nice long break of nothing in the air, so I draw a deep breath in to fuel my opening sentence.
‘I went to a kink party last night.’
He stands up abruptly and inclines his head to the side, his mouth turned downwards.
‘Oh.’ A short gap this time. ‘With that friend?’
‘Yeah, I met him on the internet and we went to a party in an industrial lot and it was full on. Lots of whipping.’
I sip my coffee. If I can’t be candid with my distant father, who can I be candid with? I feel like grief has stripped me bare and I can really be raw and honest here. She’s going in the ground today. Today. Who has time for lies and subterfuge anymore? I look out at the water as a wave of gulls lift up into the air and collectively flap away from the riverbank.
‘Well …’ he says, looking fundamentally panicked, a strip of bacon dangling from the tongs.
‘I think I’m going to join a club. You learn things about the body, like pain, pleasure, limits …’
‘You know about the body, honey.’ He puts the bacon on the plate, then turns to the sink and rests the tongs on top of the scourer. Then he picks them up again and shakes them into the open bin. He runs them under water. I wait until his focus on the tongs lessens a bit.
‘If you need something to do, I’ll give your details to Shell. She owns Clear Skies, the funeral parlour in town. I think it would be a good idea to talk to her.’
He picks up the dishwashing liquid and covers the length of the tongs in a long squirt before rubbing at them vigorously with the sponge.
‘You don’t want to get caught up in all this … this kind of thing,’ he says while hunched over the sink scrubbing.
‘Why?’ I say. ‘Getting whipped was the closest I’ve felt to being nothing. I think I need the pain. Maybe we all do?’ I sip my coffee while he dries his hands. ‘But I’m also curious to know what it would be like to do the whipping—you know, like, where does that take you mentally?’
He picks up the plate of bacon and brings it to the table. ‘My honey muffin, you need time to heal. Stop pouring acid on an open wound.’
He places the plate in front of me and I pick up my fork, skewering a piece of bacon.
‘Well, I’m going to meet the owner of the club anyway. I just want to see what it’s like.’
He raises his shoulders up to his ears and looks out the window. ‘I’m not going to stop you, but I really want you to meet with Shell as well.’
‘I’m not against the idea,’ I say. ‘But only when I feel up to it.’
He nods, and walks back to the sink to continue scrubbing at the tongs. It’s too intimate, eating bacon and listening to him clean, so I start talking again.
‘I had a bad dream about wrapping myself up as a baby in banana leaves. I don’t know what it means.’
I roll another piece of bacon up, and chomp down on it in the same way I’ve seen guinea pigs eat carrots.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘there are some shrubs down by the river. You could go sit under one of them and ask the land for wisdom. You know how healing that place is. It might be good for you to reacquaint yourself with it.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Great idea.’
I walk along the river, matching my pace to the bubbling rapids. The sun has warmed the rocks on the bank, and there is the herbaceous smell of leaf humus drying. Jack had told me it flooded a few weeks ago in a lightning storm that split a tree a kilometre away. I curl my toes in my boots as I step on granules of quartz that have erupted from the river bed onto the path. Ancient sediment. Dinosaur bits. Slivers of granite and obsidian. Fossils and space ships in rubble beneath me.
Years ago, when Simon and I were teenagers here on holiday, it had rained for a full week. We were bored, so Jack led us down to this spot to pull clumps of clay from the bank, collecting big chunks of it into metal buckets that we then carried back to the deck. He showed us how to make cups with the clay by holding a lump in your hand and sticking a thumb inside it, then winding it around until a vessel opened in your hand like a flower. They were the colour of mustard streaked with grey sediment. These are spectacular, Jack said, when I placed my cups along the balcony rail to dry. They crumbled during a thunderstorm the following week, dissolving under heavy drops of rain, but even after the clay was washed away there were evenly spaced starbursts along the plank of wood where they had stood.
I sit down in the shade with my back to the trunk of a tree and ants immediately begin crawling in frenzied zigzags over my shoes and legs. Still guilty about the moth, I brush them off gently into the nearby grass. My wounds from Leo still feel sore and I lean further back to be more comfortable. I pick up some dried leaves and sprinkle them over my lap just like in the dream; I want the river to heal me. Here I am, ready and waiting for the epiphanies to occur. I look around. The view is not bad.
I hear some sticks cracking along the path and look up to see Jack wandering along the embankment, sliding down every so often due to the lack of purchase in his rubber thongs.
‘Oh Lia, honey, hi,’ he says as he falls sideways slowly. ‘I didn’t want to intrude, but I wasn’t sure if you still knew the track.’ He pauses and puts both hands on his hips to catch his breath. ‘I didn’t want you getting lost.’
‘I’m not lost, just waiting for some kind of healing to take place.’
He begins to sob. ‘She haunts me, honey. It’s like I can hear her voice in my head asking me to check on you. Has she eaten? Is she happy? Is she washing? Is she depressed?’ He wipes his nose on his sleeve. ‘Mothers never leave, you know.’
He sits on the trunk of a fallen tree. ‘When she was pregnant with you, we did those bloody classes at the hospital, the ones where they tell the women that they’re going to be torn apart, and also kind of let the blokes know too, so they can be prepared for it.’ He watches the river. ‘And I mean, you do need forewarning, because no one has ever really seen someone split to their arse under fluorescent lighting before. It’s quite new and you can forgive first-time fathers for feeling a little …’ He waves his hand around as if searching for the right word.
‘Stressed?’ I offer.
‘Fucking terrified,’ he says.
I shuffle across the grass and pat the spot next to me, but he remains sitting on the trunk.
‘But fuck, Lia’—tears are streaming down his face now—‘they told us that the mother’s heart changes when she has a baby inside her. It gets bigger and kind of collapses to one side, and there’s this tube that runs from her heart to the baby’s and they share blood. A woman is changed after that, isn’t she? How could she not be?’
He looks at me, hands open to the sky.
‘I mean a woman stays connected to her children forever. Death can’t negate that. She’s in you and you’re in her.’
‘And you came here to tell me that?’ I say.
‘No, I came here to make sure you’re safe, and to tell you to ask if you need anything—like money, for example—and also to take a shit. I always shit outside. It’s part of giving back to the earth.’
‘Every day?’
‘Most days. You are totally one with the land then—you should try it.’ He walks away from the riverbank and into the scrubby bush.
‘Just go and enjoy your shit,’ I say, standing and brushing any remaining ants and twigs from my body before heading back to the house.
‘Can I borrow the car?’ I yell into the trees, and wait for his reply.
‘Of course!’ I hear some more sticks breaking, and some rustling. ‘The keys are on the hook near the door. Just ignore the petrol light—it’s broken.’
As I begin to walk back down the path I hear him call, ‘And drive defensively, honey. There are some absolute idiots on the roads at the moment. Seriously, assume that no one else knows what they are doing.’
I think about my mother’s heart once being a conduit to my own and whether that means we are still connected. I think about Daniel’s heart lying at the bottom of the ravine and whether his mother would have felt it there. Her own heart might have dropped the same moment as his did, and she would have known right then that he had torn the cord between them. There’s too much responsibility with being tethered to someone else. They are at the mercy of your own decisions. Anyway, my mother is gone now, so I don’t need to think about her, or me, or anyone else, like Daniel and his mother. I don’t need to be safe or responsible. I can hit the bottom of the ravine and she won’t feel a thing. No one will feel a thing.