In the aeroplane, he had no awareness of movement. With the window shades down and the lights dimmed, the plane felt still, as though suspended from a cord in mid-air, like a mobile over a child’s bed. Time was distorted around him. He slept deeply most of the way to Sydney and woke before they landed to find his breakfast laid out on the tray in front of him, sealed in plastic and foil.
He had used his frequent flyer points to buy the flight, which meant a four-hour stopover in Bangkok between connecting flights, during which he’d managed a snatched conversation with Dom. He’d told her the reason for his trip and that he’d be back in Berlin the day after her. She had wanted to know why it was so important for him to find out about this woman. But he wasn’t sure he could explain it yet, even to himself.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘Ich dich auch,’ she replied.
•
When the plane landed in Sydney, he shuffled along behind the other passengers. He moved awkwardly through the customs hall, teetering forward as he took the escalator down to the baggage carousels. After so long on board the plane, sleeping and flying against time, it took him a while to become aware of his own edges again.
After being out of the country for so long, hearing the Australian accent again made him bristle, the way the voices floated, uninvited, into his head. Two women behind him were discussing whether or not to go back and buy another bottle of duty-free vodka and the man beside him was asking the customs officer whether he should declare the chocolate he’d brought back with him from Switzerland. People became an amplified version of themselves when they travelled, their good and bad qualities turned up a few notches.
He queued for a taxi. When he got into the car, talk-back radio blared from the front, the honeyed tones of a voice that seemed to be coaxing the world into outrage.
‘Leichhardt, please,’ he said as the car bumped over the speed hump and turned a corner to drive out of the airport.
Along the expressway, the nature strips divided the lanes of traffic in two. Gymea lilies, their flowers already black, sat like ravaged nests on stilts and the kangaroo paws had turned a dirty orange from exhaust fumes. Houses backed directly onto the road and through breaks in fences he caught glimpses of yards and swimming pools, small and private views of other people’s lives.
As they drove towards the city in the late summer light, everything around him looked unreal. The light was brighter than it was in Europe, sharper and somehow crueller. He hadn’t prepared himself for it.
•
Along his mother’s fence purple hydrangeas bloomed, their round heads like old women’s swimming caps. The first sound he heard after he knocked on the door was the squelch of her rubber-soled shoes on the wooden floor. As long as he could remember, his mother had worn flat shoes, like most nurses.
‘Andy,’ she said as she opened the door, and she walked straight into him, wrapping her arms around him. She was the only person who continued to call him by that name. He wasn’t sure, exactly, when people had stopped calling him that and started, instead, to call him Andrew. It had happened gradually, the further away he travelled from childhood, as though the innocence that went with the nickname had thinned and faded and was now finally lost. He rested a cheek on her head. She still used the same shampoo.
After a moment she let go, took a step back and held his shoulders. He saw that a patch of hair near her temple had turned completely white, although the rest of her hair had remained dark, like his.
‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Why are you home all of a sudden?’
His mother went through her life assuming the worst. And he knew why. She worried that he would die young, as his father had; her greatest fear was outliving him.
He’d only had time to send her a quick email before he left Berlin. Don’t worry about collecting me from the airport, he’d written, though he knew she wouldn’t. She hardly drove anywhere, anymore. She hadn’t been into the city in years, though it was barely six kilometres away. Sometimes he wondered why she stayed in Leichhardt. If she wanted to live quietly, why she didn’t move to some small coastal town, or to the mountains where her sister lived? But part of him knew exactly why she stayed. Living in the same house for so many years had always been about holding on to the memories of his father.
•
Andrew was eleven when his father died. That day, he came home from school to a silent and empty house for the first time he could remember. All he could hear as he opened the door and walked carefully down the hall were echoes of his own movements. Even before he learnt of his father’s death, he knew from the silence that something had been irreversibly lost.
His mother had never told him how his father died; the knowledge remained inside her sunk deep like a stone in a well. As a child he kept thinking that one day, when she stopped feeling sad, she would sit him down and explain everything. But a year had passed and then another year. And he hadn’t been told a thing about it. Nor had he dared to ask. From overheard telephone conversations, he had gleaned two facts: ‘collapsed’ and ‘the garden’. Those words were all he ever knew about his father’s death.
His mind, though, had filled in the blanks. The absences in his knowledge were transformed into pictures, a sequence of images that ran together in his head. He replayed those scenes so often they had become as real to him as if he’d actually witnessed them. His father stood in their backyard, surveying his vegetable garden. Then, abruptly, he toppled, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
•
His mother made him a pot of tea in the same striped teapot she’d always used, though the pattern grew more faded each time he sat down to drink from it. He’d once brought her back a new teapot from Delft, hand-painted blue and white, the porcelain so fine it felt soft in his hands. His mother used the things she owned until they had served their purpose. This was what losing someone you loved did to a person: it made it difficult to let go of other things. She would be serving tea from that teapot until the day it broke apart in her hands.
‘How’s Dom?’ she said, sliding onto the stool beside his. His mother’s movements had become smaller and more horizontal as she’d aged.
‘She’s fine, Mum,’ he said, not quite meeting her gaze. ‘I had to see to a few things back here before my exhibition next month. It has nothing to do with Dom and me.’
‘So everything’s okay then?’ Her tone was tentative, as if she was aware she was asking for too much. His mother had never met Dom and he tried to keep their relationship to himself. He wanted to hold on to this new privacy he’d acquired from living abroad. His mother had lost her husband at a young age and seemed determined, since then, to know everything she could about Andrew, as though knowing the details might prevent another loss. He couldn’t bring himself to speak to her about Kirsten straight away. He’d always felt he could not mention death to his mother without reminding her of the death they both lived by.
‘When’s your opening?’
‘Mid-March. I have to send the galleries all the images by the end of the month.’
‘That soon?’
He nodded and they both looked at the calendar on the wall. It was the third of February; he’d lost a day in transit.
She sighed heavily. ‘How long are you staying?’
‘I’m flying back next Saturday. Is that okay with you?’
‘That soon? Of course,’ she said.
They spoke easily about other things: his mother’s sister, the walk-in wardrobes she’d recently had installed. He told her that the tenants in his apartment in Darlinghurst were moving out in two weeks and the agent would be advertising for new ones. Though he couldn’t always be open with his mother, he felt at least that around her, he never had to pretend; he didn’t have to project the air of confidence that the rest of the world expected of him. He felt the same way around Dom.