Drawings and Prints
Clara, 30
New York City and Perth, 2040
Clara sat at her window, alone, looking down at the bench in Central Park. She and her mother used to make up stories about the people who sat there. But she was gone.
She existed only in the books she had read and left behind. In the photos and the memories. In the conversations that Clara had with Sam. It was just the two of them now, with the friends she had picked up along the way and the odd relationship here and there. Sam was always in a serious long-term relationship. He was so much better with people than she was.
There was one man whom Clara had been serious about a few years before, but he’d turned out to be a pathological liar. Her mother had suspected as much.
‘I’m so sorry, Clara. I should have warned you, but I didn’t want it to look like I didn’t approve,’ she had said. ‘But, really, you dodged a bullet with him. You’re very smart, getting out when you did before it became too serious. You’re very, very smart.’
But it also meant she was very, very lonely.
‘You would have been lonelier if you had stayed with him,’ her mother had said many times. Clara knew that was true. There would be others. She hadn’t given up.
Sometimes she dreamed of returning to Perth. Clara’s grandparents were still there, and her uncles and cousins. They stayed in touch on social media and email. But her mother had taken her out of Perth long ago. It was probably not the right place for them, having lived all their lives in New York. It’s really more for sport and beach people, her mother used to say. They were art and book people. They were New Yorkers. If they didn’t leave during the pandemic they would never leave. And so it was her forever home. New York had everything except, according to her grandmother, the right yoghurt and her family.
Many years ago, Yiayia Koula had worked out how to send Kairos Yoghurt to New York City. Every month, whether she willed it to or not, a tub arrived at her mother’s apartment, now Clara’s apartment, packed in a special frozen gel with customs clearance. Clara traced her fingers over the label. She loved the letters, the Greek alphabet. It reminded her of her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother. Clara had one memory of her great-grandmother Yiayia Sia, but it was so long ago she wasn’t sure if it was a memory or a dream, or a combination of the two. There were roses, big blushing roses. ‘You will find my treasure, Clara-mou,’ Yiayia Sia said, stroking Clara’s hair. ‘The treasure is for you.’
And so it was Clara, just Clara, in the apartment, looking down on the bench. Some of her friends had children, either with their partners or alone. There were always those places you could go to be impregnated. Or you could just go out and get impregnated.
But there were the environmental implications of having children, and Clara spent a lot of time doing everything she could possibly do to reduce her carbon footprint. Sometimes she wondered how different things would have been if she had got pregnant by accident in one of her brief relationships. If she had a child maybe life would feel different now. Maybe. But she still had time for children. Loads of time. She was only thirty.
‘Hello, Clara speaking.’
‘Clara? It’s Yiayia Koula,’ said a raspy Australian voice.
‘Yiayia Koula! I was just thinking about you. How are you and the family?’
‘I’m old. I think you should visit. I’m turning ninety-four. We are having a party, like we do every year. You and your brother should come. If you don’t have the money, I will pay for you to come. I cannot travel anymore and I want to see you.’
‘Oh, I would love to but I just—’ Clara started to say, but there were no excuses left, really. Why didn’t she want to go? Carbon emissions? Was it really just about the carbon emissions?
When her mother died, her grandparents insisted on a full Greek Orthodox funeral and organised it all from Perth. Clara and Sam were too grief-stricken to fight, so they went along with it. Her grandparents couldn’t travel and they watched it via live-stream. Clara, Sam and their friends sat in dark wooden pews of the church, as the priest chanted and blessed and spoke in Greek. The eyes of the gold painted icons stared at them and the candles flickered as they cried for their mother.
Athena was not meant to go first. When Clara had seen her grandmother’s face on the screen and the sharp pain on it, Clara had realised that she couldn’t understand the extent of their suffering. That Athena had been their youngest child and only daughter and she had died before them. It wasn’t the right order.
Clara conceded that it was time to visit her grandparents. Maybe there was still something of her mother left in Perth. Maybe she would see it for herself.
‘Oh, yes, actually, maybe I will come and visit,’ Clara found herself saying. ‘It’s time. I want to see you too.’
‘What about your brother?’ Yiayia Koula asked. ‘He never answers my calls.’
‘I’ll ask him,’ she said.
_____
Later that day she met up with Sam at one of their places on 94th and Lex where they used to go with their parents.
‘Sam, I’m going to visit our grandparents,’ she said to him. ‘Do you want to come? I think it’s time. They’re in their nineties and probably aren’t going to be around much longer.’
Sam sipped his coffee and spread his bagel thickly with vegan cream cheese and then a thin smear of strawberry jam on top.
‘I have thought about it from time to time,’ he said. ‘But it’s just so far.’
‘Yes, but Yiayia Koula and Pappou Evan have come over here so many times. And when Mom died, they were too old to travel.’
‘That was a terrible time.’
‘Yes,’ said Clara. ‘It was.’
They both stared into their coffee cups as they remembered.
‘I just have no interest in going,’ Sam said, breaking the silence. ‘Honestly, I can pretend I want to see them, but I don’t think they actually like me all that much. And whenever I meet Australians I just feel like they’re nothing like me. Even though Mom was Australian. Well, Greek-Australian.’
‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel Australian or American or Greek-Australian-American or whatever the hell we are. She was calling me to come, as if we wouldn’t see her again,’ she said.
‘Are you going to see our father?’ said Sam. ‘Is he still around?’
‘Absolutely not. I’m not going to see him, just our grandparents. And maybe Mom’s friend Sally. She still sends us a card for our birthday,’ Clara said.
Sam shook his head. ‘I just don’t want to go.’
‘Okay,’ said Clara, exhaling. ‘I’ll go alone.’
_____
The flights were long. So long. She slept, she ate, she drank some wine and slept again. She changed planes, and the same again. It was such a long way. No wonder her mother never made it back again. Although she had assured Clara it was less to do with the distance and more to do with the fact she might be prosecuted for taking her children out of Australia when they were young without her husband’s actual consent. Her mother was convinced she was on a watch list. But her biological father hadn’t made a fuss about them. He had let them go.
Clara had a newfound respect for her elderly grandparents. They had done this trip so many times to see her mother and her brother and Clara. Clara should have visited years ago, really. She had taken them for granted.
Perth airport was the same as all the others. But outside the airport she was immediately hit with the force of the heat, the dryness, the plastic-blue sky and white-hot sun. It was like arriving on a different planet.
The taxi driver with both arms of sleeved tattoos wound through an industrial zone, past the city towers, a sparkling blue river and magnificent trees. She recognised her mother’s alma mater from photos, perched on the edge of the river with its giant clock face staring out. The car wove around to a suburb with huge modern-style homes, a little Hamptons-esque, to the address on the card.
And, like a palace, her grandparents’ house with white columns and manicured gardens. There was a collection of electric cars parked outside
She paid the driver and stepped out of the taxi. The garden was full of thick, blushing roses. There was the mildest hint of a breeze.
She rang the doorbell and looked down to a white pot at the front door. There was a spiky red-flowered plant. A cactus?
A man opened the door.
‘Hello, I’m Clara,’ she said. ‘From New York. I’m Koula and Evan’s granddaughter.’
‘Oh yes, they’re expecting you,’ he said with a smile. ‘Come in. I’m Luke.’
‘Are you my cousin?’ she asked. ‘Sorry, I don’t remember everyone’s names.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I work for your grandparents and uncles at Kairos Yoghurt.’
‘Oh, right,’ she said.
‘They invited me over today. They’re more like family really. They wanted me to meet you.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Clara, smiling. He was quite good-looking, and they weren’t related.
‘Koula’s mother actually saved my life when my mum was pregnant with me,’ he said. ‘She died, unfortunately but Koula stayed in touch with my aunt who raised me.’
‘Oh,’ said Clara. ‘Oh, I see. I’m so sorry.’
‘But let me take you to them. They are so excited to see you.’
She followed Luke along a hallway with photos of herself and Sam framed all over the walls and flowers in vases. Roses, everywhere.
At the back of the house her grandparents sat in throne-like chairs, side by side, like the fairytale King and Queen of this strange land. Clara’s cousins bounded back and forth with drinks and food. Her grandmother beckoned to her and Clara walked over and embraced her, squeezed as tight as she could. ‘I feel like I have been waiting my whole life for you to come home,’ Yiayia Koula said.
‘I made it here.’
‘Finally,’ Yiayia Koula said.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come before, but my mother—’
‘Oh, your mother,’ she said as her eyes clouded with tears. ‘Athena.’
_____
In the morning, Clara sat at the table with her grandparents. They were remarkably functional for their age – making Greek coffee, ladling honey into bowls of yoghurt, muttering to each other in what might have been Greek but perhaps was Australian English, or a combination, which Clara struggled to understand. Maybe when you’ve been with someone for so long you speak a mutual language, your own dialect.
‘How long have you two been married for now?’ Clara asked.
‘Seventy-two years,’ they said in unison.
Back at home, Clara asked Sam to text her every second day, and if she didn’t pick up to come to the apartment. She didn’t want to be one of those people who died and nobody knew about it for months. That was one of the biggest downsides of being single. This kind of relationship, this level of intimacy, the fabric of your life woven with another person so completely.
‘Listen, Clara, there is something I have to tell you,’ Yiayia said. ‘My mother, your Yiayia Sia, hid some treasure in Aeaea, before she left. She told you about it when you were very young. But you probably don’t remember.’
‘Ah, the treasure. Here we go,’ said her grandfather.
‘Skáse, Evan,’ her grandmother said.
‘I kind of remember her saying something like that. But, how would I find it?’ Clara asked.
‘It’s on the mountainside near her village. The view is a gap between the cliffs; you can look to the sky and the ocean. She buried it there. She said it was a very special spot for her. She wanted you to go back and find the treasure. We still have the family over there.’
‘Why didn’t you go when you could?’
‘By the time we could take a holiday from the yoghurt factory, it was too difficult for us to go away for too long,’ she said. ‘We saw Athena in London. And then you were in New York, so we went there. And then there was the pandemic and there has always been something going on. The treasure is for you, anyway. I don’t know what it is. It might be something good. It might be nothing. I used to think she was a bit crazy. But I had a dream and I think that the message is for you.’
Clara nodded. ‘I remember Yiayia Sia telling me about the treasure. Maybe it’s a memory or maybe a dream. You were there too. And my mom. There were lots of roses everywhere.’
‘So Clara, which flavour is your favourite?’ asked Pappou Evan.
‘Which flavour?’
‘Of the yoghurt? We have all the flavours.’
‘Oh, the Greek vanilla and honey. It’s delicious,’ Clara said.
Her grandfather removed the pot of yoghurt out of the fridge and put it on the table in front of Clara.
‘Help yourself,’ he said.
‘Thank you, Pappou,’ Clara said. She had tried to be vegan. She had tried to be gluten-free. She had tried to be everything. But she had always loved the sweet creaminess of the yoghurt. She couldn’t imagine her life without it.
‘Where is your brother?’ Yiayia Koula asked. ‘Why didn’t he want to come?’
‘Oh, he’s very sorry he couldn’t come. He had something pop up for work.’
‘Hmmm,’ her grandmother replied. ‘But, honestly, I don’t understand how neither of you are married yet or have any children. You better get on to it. You are thirty now. It’s definitely time for you.’
‘Okay,’ Clara said, smiling.
‘So, what do you think of Luke?’ Yiayia Koula asked. ‘He’s a very nice guy. He is single at the moment.’
‘Luke? Oh, I don’t know,’ said Clara, blushing. ‘He seems nice. I talked to him a bit. But Yiayia, I live in New York and—’
‘Well, you can keep talking to him,’ said Yiayia Koula. ‘He will come to the party too.’
Clara bit her lip.
‘I wish that you lived closer than New York. And now Athena is gone. Gone before me. But that’s life, I guess. Sometimes things happen in the wrong order. Sometimes things don’t happen the way you want them to. Sometimes I think that Athena is still in New York and she will ring me and tell me all the news about you and Sam and what you’re doing at school. And then I remember that Athena is dead. And every time I remember, it feels worse. My heart breaks all over again.’
So does mine, thought Clara.
_____
Clara had a list of everywhere and everyone she had always wanted to visit in Perth. The university that she had passed on the way to her grandparents’ house and the river in front of it. The beach. Her grandparents. And her mother’s friend Sally, who had visited them a few times over the years.
Sally lived in a small house near a freeway. It was blindingly bright as Clara stepped out of the taxi and onto the whiteness of the concrete. Every ray of sun seemed to attack and scald her skin as she walked the short distance up the path to Sally’s door.
‘Oh, Clara!’ Sally said, reaching out with her thin arms. ‘It’s so lovely to see you.’
‘Thank you, you too,’ said Clara. ‘It’s been so long.’
‘You remind me so much of Athena, but I guess everyone says that to you,’ Sally said as they sat down on her blue fabric couch.
‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘Yes please,’ said Clara. ‘I’m so jet-lagged. The flights were so long and—’
Clara paused to look at the photos in frames in the living room, including one of Sally and her mother when they were young. The air conditioner hummed.
‘Would you like to sit outside? It’s cool in the shade, I promise,’ Sally said, as if she could read Clara’s mind.
Clara followed Sally to the back screen door, and outside was the most unusual, mystical garden. Plants and trees with huge solid flowers on them, things Clara didn’t know the names of and couldn’t pronounce when Sally said them. Little birds dipped in and out. And it smelled like – what was that smell? Eucalyptus? Wattle?
Sally brought the coffee out to a little metal table and they sat in the garden.
‘So, how are you, Sally?’
‘Oh, pretty good. The garden keeps me busy since I retired,’ she said.
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It’s funny, I often think that Athena is still here, like I could pick up the phone and call her in London or New York and she would answer. I guess it’s like that when you have someone close to you living far away. The physical distance is always there, so it doesn’t feel that different.’
‘I think she died of a broken heart when David died,’ said Clara. ‘We were all devastated, but she was just never the same. And then—’
Clara began to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ Clara said. ‘I just still really miss her. And I was the one who found her that day. I should have gone to her apartment. She was getting ready to meet me.’
‘Oh sweetie, it’s okay,’ said Sally. She stood up, leaned over and hugged her. This was new for Clara, crying to someone she hardly knew, who wasn’t even her therapist.
‘Sorry,’ said Clara, wiping her eyes.
‘Oh, Clara, you know it’s not your fault. I know that Athena loved you and your brother. She always wanted the best for you. And she had a hard time when she was married to your other father. I remember telling her that she was entitled to happiness. Although Koula thought otherwise,’ she said. ‘How is she anyway? The Queen of the Yoghurt Empire?’
‘Oh, Yiayia Koula is the same,’ said Clara with a smile, wiping away a tear. ‘She’s trying to set me up with someone.’
‘Someone Greek?’
‘No.’
‘There’s a change.’
‘Oh, Yiayia Koula knows who she is. Although—’
‘Although?’
‘My mother once told me that—’ Clara started.
‘What?’ asked Sally.
‘That her grandmother, Yiayia Sia, told her that Koula was really the baby of her sister, who died in childbirth. They had just arrived in Australia. Yiayia Sia promised her sister that she would look after the baby. Yiayia Koula doesn’t know,’ said Clara.
‘Oh, Clara,’ said Sally, putting down her mug. ‘Please promise me that you won’t tell your grandmother that. I don’t get on with Koula, but that would literally kill her.’
_____
‘So, Clara,’ Yiayia Koula said to Clara the following morning. ‘You are not too old to learn how to cook properly. I will teach you.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I have my friend Chrissie coming over here, and her daughters, Eleni and Pana. They are going to help make food for the party,’ she said. ‘They are coming today.’
‘You’re going to cook your own food for the party? You don’t get caterers?’
‘I do not outsource food preparation. We cook every year for my birthday. I am going to teach you,’ she said. ‘It’s not too late. You can still learn.’
Clara watched, entranced, as her ninety-three year-old yiayia and friend Chrissie and Chrissie’s daughters spent the day cooking – tirópites, spanokópita, loukoumádes. They buttered sheets of filo pastry, whipped eggs, sprinkled sugar. They talked and talked.
Mid-morning, Yiayia Koula stopped and stared at the kitchen counter, dusted with flour.
‘Are you thinking of my mother?’ asked Clara, putting her hand on Yiayia Koula’s arm.
‘Athena could not cook. I tried to show her these dishes, but she didn’t have that kind of brain.’
Clara didn’t know what to say.
‘I always looked up to your mum, Clara,’ said Chrissie’s daughter, Eleni, buttering away. ‘She was always so brave going on all those adventures overseas. I was so happy when she asked me to be her koumbára.’
‘Her what?’
‘Oh, her maid of honour. I’m sorry, I forgot you don’t know the words. I was so sad when her marriage to your father didn’t work out. I always thought that I was partly responsible, you know. I think she wanted to have one of her non-Greek friends. Sally, I think her name was? I kind of felt bad about it.’
‘I’m sure you did a great job,’ said Clara, taking a pastry brush and buttering a sheet of thin filo.
‘Keep the damp tea towel over the filo so it doesn’t dry out,’ said Yiayia Koula. ‘It’s very important.’
‘Okay,’ said Clara, with a smile. She copied them as they made platters full of food. Savoury and sweet. The scent of hot pastry, melted butter, cinnamon and cloves. Their laughter and constant banter. Just being in the presence of these old Greek-Australian ladies was so comforting to her, although she couldn’t put into words exactly why. But Clara felt like she had been in this kitchen on the other side of the world all along.
_____
In the late afternoon after many hours of cooking, Clara took a taxi to Cottesloe Beach. It was a slightly choppy day and the waves were large and fierce, curling onto the sand with an intensity that Clara had thought was reserved only for storms. It was a raw coastline, not as pretty and still as in the photos online.
There were a variety of people scattered on the sand. Possibly tourists with leathery skin and smallish strips of material that could hardly be classified as swimsuits. Older white-haired couples in good shape flaunting their wrinkles of time, with goggles plastered to their heads. They all seemed to know each other. Younger families with parents and toddlers with sun-bleached hair, running up and down and around.
Clara looked out to the sea and saw something on the horizon. She hadn’t thought there was anything beyond this part of the Indian Ocean. On the maps she had never seen an island, but it was there. There was possibly a lighthouse? She would have to ask someone about it.
Clara followed the steps down to the sand, slipped off her sandals and then walked towards the water. It felt cool and bubbled underneath her feet. She let her feet sink into the wet sand, squelching it between her toes, watched the waves and felt the breeze.
Could she be a beach person? Maybe she had been a beach person all along. What if her mother was wrong? What if they were meant to have stayed?
Clara knew that her mother and biological father had come to the beach when they were younger. They would come early in the morning and swim to cleanse themselves of hangovers, before drinking flat whites and eating poached eggs and avocado slices on buttered sourdough toast. That memory was one of the only ones that her mother had shared of the time that she and Richard had been in love, had been happy. Before they got married and moved to London, before they had children.
Clara looked up and down the beach from her spot on the sinking sand. There were young couples with firm bodies, holding hands. Was that how her mother and her biological father had started out?
‘I got everything I wanted in the end,’ her mother said to Clara once. ‘Everything. Sometimes I feel like I’m waiting for someone to snatch it all away.’
And then came the days. When David died after a battle with cancer. When her mother didn’t show up to meet her at the Met. Oh, that day when Clara found her mother, fully dressed, ready to leave the apartment, lying on the floor in the entrance. Her heart had stopped. Just like that. She would never breathe another breath. It was over.
Clara wiped a tear from her eye and thought of her mother’s final moments, imagined her trying to open the door, to reach the phone, to call for help. She should have gone to her apartment. Clara thought of alternate versions of that day. But perhaps it had already been decided.
Everyone told her there was nothing she could have done. There was nothing, but sometimes nothing became everything. Clara could have kept her mother alive a little longer, perhaps. Maybe she could have seen the new exhibition. She could have had one more slice of Sachertorte at Café Sabarsky. She could have bought one more novel from The Corner Bookstore. And Clara could have had one final soft hug from her beautiful mother.
Standing here, on Cottesloe Beach, Clara felt a whisper in her ear. Had her mother taken her here as a child? Did she sit on the sand and watch Clara and Sam play in the waves and build sandcastles like the nearby toddlers?
The sun was pounding down on her now and she began to sweat, but the waves were keeping her from taking on the ocean. She was a visitor, after all. This was not her home.
Clara walked up to the shady pine trees and found a spot on the grass, away from circling seagulls.
She watched a young mother with her hair in a ponytail hand out muffins and fruit to three children. She was trying to sip her coffee in a reusable cup while her kids sat like baby birds in a circle, waiting to be fed, fighting over scraps.
‘Mummy, Mummy,’ the children wailed, as the mother looked to the ocean, as if she were trying to block out the whining and the feuding. Her eyes were somewhere else, with someone else. Clara tried to catch her eye and smile at her, but the woman didn’t look in Clara’s direction and soon starting herding her children towards the car park.
The seagulls began to cry out, looking for the last lunch scraps. She saw people with wrapped-up paper parcels. Fish and chips!
Clara ordered the smallest portion they had and waited. When it was her turn – number fifty-seven on a printed paper ticket – she took the parcel to the grassed terrace and unwrapped it.
With her fingers, soon greasy, she ate the salt-and-vinegar flavoured chips and the heavily battered piece of fish. She had never had fish and chips before, not like this. She watched the waves, licked the salt off her fingers and felt her mother’s presence somehow. Maybe she was here, watching her, beside her, right now. Or dancing on the waves, weaving in and out, finding it amusing that Clara had finally journeyed all the way over here. Clara hoped that her mother still thought of her, wherever she was, or if she didn’t exist anymore, as Clara feared, that she had enjoyed their life together and not regretted anything. Regret, Clara knew, was the worst.
And that’s why, when all that was left on the paper was a few greasy splotches and she had rolled it into a ball, Clara decided that she would have no regrets. She would find someone or something else to love. She couldn’t put it all on Sam. She had to let him live his own life.
Clara knew that now was the time to be passionate. To give her life everything she had. Maybe that’s what her mother had thought when she seized the opportunity to follow her heart and go to New York. Her great-grandmother Sia, leaving Greece in the ruins of war and venturing far, far away to Australia.
The sun blazed into a magnificent orb of fire and then began to sink into the water as the sky melted into gold and orange. A glint of light caught the two mátia on her bracelet. Clara stayed until there was nothing left but an empty sky waiting for the next day.