Tuesday

Kieran watched Cress carefully after the funeral. Everything seemed to be fine, but she was very quiet, he noticed, as if she was waiting, as if there was something in the air she didn’t want to miss. What? He found himself paying close attention to things too. The movements of animals, the moon. He listened carefully: to the waves for instance, the air at midday, the weather report on the radio. Cress always turned the news on at seven, morning and night. He began to listen in as well, especially to the weather, surreptitiously watching it – and Cress – for signs.

On Tuesday, satisfied the day held a temperature range of 19-30 degrees and no other mischief or message, he followed Cress from the kitchen after she’d switched off the radio. She was headed for the back door, and as she stopped to pick up gardening gloves and hat, he asked, mildly, what kind of painting she liked. Oils, watercolours?

They’d never had much in the way of paintings in the house. He’d noticed that ages ago. Mainly there were photos, baby photos of him, a wedding photo of his parents and another of his mother at school, the sepia face of his grandfather in a slouch hat and uniform – the face looked sort of startled, Kieran always thought, and very young. That photo was particularly interesting to him; it was different from the others, as if it was a different grandfather. As if there’d been two of him – the one Cress talked about, and this other, much younger, soldier grandfather.

It puzzled him, but he loved the photo anyway, and loved all the others too; the faces beaming out, optimistic, hoping for the best from all this. He thought they were smiling out at some invisible pair of eyes, some future face, his. Even as the camera clicked they were looking out at him from lives they’d already lived. For some reason he found this comforting, as if each person was multiplied into many. He would let himself think, sometimes, that they were with him in the room. He would imagine voices for them, things they might say.

So he hadn’t noticed the lack of paintings until he met Angela. The photos began to look different then. He would stand in front of them and try to imagine the faces constructed in layers of paint. He would follow the crevices and clouds of shadow, thinking about brush strokes. And because it was Angela’s hand he saw with the brush, he imagined the photos as they might be if she’d painted them. Wondered if the colours would be the same, the eyes. He imagined her painting his dead grandfather, the browns of the uniform, that look on his face – a kind of bewilderment. Is that how she would have seen him? Right now, standing there at the back door, he wished more than anything that he could ask her that. Would his grandfather look bewildered through layers of oil paint? Would he have looked different if Angela had painted him, yet another version of himself?

Cress was talking. Yes, I like some oil painting, she was saying, wriggling her fingers into her gloves. And charcoals. Your mother was quite good with charcoal at school. She was looking at him, waiting, and playing with the brim of her hat.

Angela liked everything. He looked at Cress’s forearms above the gloves, the bones, the speckled skin. Again he thought of brush strokes, the way Angela might paint them. There was a word she used – stipple. Yes. Cress’s pale forearms would be stippled with a colour like tan, or – he thought of the rows of paint tubes – like bark. She was very good at watercolour, he said.

Cress nodded. Those flowers, she said, clamping the hat on, pushing hair back behind her ears. If you could paint like that you wouldn’t need a garden. She opened the door and they both walked out into the sun.

You would, Cress, Kieran said as they both surveyed the beds and trellises, all rampant growth. It was November, the magnolia by the back door was in flower, and beyond the garden gate a poinciana was pushing its first orange blooms through its skirts of leaves. The air seemed full of nectar. You’re very good at gardens. Cress looked across and smiled at him, then picked up a bucket and her old red cushion. He followed her as she strode down the path.

Halfway along she paused and leaned over to examine a tomato plant. Look, she said. The tiny yellow flowers had been thieved since the day before, snipped clean off. She looked around for culprits. Birds, probably. He could see her thinking, her eyes flicking around the garden. She was a bit bird-like herself. Without looking at him she said: Did you like Angela’s paintings? as if she was talking to the garden bed. Kieran stood near her, hands in pockets. The tops of the nearest parsley, he noticed, were missing too.

He thought about the question while Cress moved around, nudging leaves with one finger, peering beneath them. Occasionally she stopped, still as a statue, staring. Only her hand would move, slow at first and then with a sudden strike, closing around a small grasshopper. A grim smile, and she would brush it from her glove, muttering softly. Kieran felt a pang for the tiny creatures. She used good colours, he said.

Cress nodded, crouched to pull weeds from the edging. He thought they were pretty, these weeds. The little mauve flowers seemed to be grinning. Cress must have agreed. Cheeky blasted things, she said, tugging at their fleshy roots, tossing them into the bucket. Kieran looked at them. Most things had a kind of beauty, Angela had told him, depending on how you looked at them.

She didn’t talk much when she was using oil paints, he said. He watched Cress as she began to move down the garden edge, kneeling occasionally on her cushion, plucking at weeds and grass. She was concentrating, digging for roots. Then: She was quiet, she said.

Kieran didn’t know if it was a question or not. He was looking at the plump leaves of a basil plant but he was seeing Angela, her face closed up in concentration, her lips slightly open but nothing coming from them, no words, not for hours. Or so it seemed.

He remembered the relief when she finally put the brush down and suggested a cup of tea. He heard himself say to Cress’s back: Sometimes.

But he’d loved the quietness then. Into it had swum all the night sounds he was happy in, a sea of them. He would sit quite still and pretend he was at the bottom of the ocean, listening; the sounds were waves around and through him. The wind became the movement of the tide, the call of night birds was the song of whales and dolphins. Crickets and geckos clacked softly: the conversations of fish, of rays, of anemones. At these times Angela’s music would be played very low, and that too had its underwater rhythms, an orchestral soundtrack to the waltz of fish, the sway of seagrass.

You would have been good company for her, Cress was saying. Kieran looked from the basil to the low clumps of marjoram and parsley, all coral-like, and then to his grandmother. She was pressing weeds into the bucket, strands of runner grass. He felt an odd sensation, as if he really had been submerged and had finally surfaced. He tilted his head, as if he was clearing his ears. Then meaning struck. The things Cress had said. About Angela, and him. All the things she knew.

In the rose garden Laura cut and pruned and dug. Some of the plants looked beyond her help: thick and woody, with long hard thorns hooked like the nails on an old woman’s toes. Almost grudgingly, she had decided to prune the roses for Angela, who had loved them. All through Laura’s childhood, though, they were merely a menace; painful to collide with, unsuitable for hide-and-seek. An errant ball could scatter petals and provoke punishment. Another reason to flee to the yard next door: her own was rose-encrusted. She hated them.

But now they were a memorial to Angela, or would be one. She would need all of her skills to bring them back. Some still sprouted gaunt blooms, gallant against the neglect and the heat of a dry, early summer. She snipped them off, the morning sun hard on her back, feeling deftness and sureness return to her hands. Realising the week’s events had robbed her of just that: confidence, certainty.

From behind her, from the other side of the house, came the sharp sounds of wood being cut and planed and nailed. When Fergus had arrived she’d offered to help him, but he’d glanced around the rooms and waved her away. You’ve got enough on your hands, he said.

For the first hour or more it felt odd: she felt like she barely knew him, and here he was, working away on her back verandah as if they were old friends. But the feeling faded as her hands moved around the roses. It was a familiar pattern, after all; the distant sounds of someone working as she crouched among plants or dug saplings into soil. She thought of Alvaro and the Fiorentina, of the work she’d left, all the other trees they fought to keep alive.

Who cares about these trees? Francesca had asked once, at the beginning. The orchard was just a small rag of land then, and the ancient house untouched. If they’ve nearly died out, there’s a reason. Wouldn’t you think?

But Laura had just come back from the old Gastone estate, where she’d found a reference in a farm catalogue to the Fico Rondinino San Sepolcro, a fig she’d been hunting for years. Her skin was alive with the possibility of finding one. You care about your grandmother, don’t you? she’d replied, filling a bucket with water for the new seedlings. Same thing.

Alvaro had winked at her as he cleaned his knives. Francesca is a modern woman, Laura. In his provincial accent it sounded like ‘Lara’. She cares only about her hairdo and her shoes.

Now Laura pulled up an image of the old Fiorentina brooding over the remote hillside and the potato field. She thought of the food it had provided, the shade, the firewood from its dropped branches. For how many generations? She had guessed its age at about one hundred but it could easily be more. It might be a great-great-grandmother, still storing her memories of seasons and children, of wars and weddings, of all the families that had left for the cities and later, for new lands. Leaving the trees and taking their memories, their knowledge and their recipes with them.

She stood and wiped sweat from her face with the sleeve of her shirt. The water bottle beside her was empty, so she went back to the house to refill it, still thinking about the pear, and about the graft Alvaro was tending now in the orchard. She had resisted the temptation to ring and ask about it, not wanting to insult him. Trust me, he’d said to her when they’d first planted together, and she had. Did.

At the sink she looked up through the open window at Fergus bent to some task at the other end of the deck. She filled a tall glass with water and took it to him, but he was planing a piece of wood and didn’t hear her approach. She stood there, holding the glass; his shoulders and arms looked glazed in the heat. His skin was deep brown – as if it had been painted, she thought, one coat after another. She looked away and put the glass down. Skin like that didn’t burn, not really, it just gained another coat, another layer. She felt her own skin stinging from too much sun and turned to leave, but he realised she was beside him and stopped. He thanked her for the water and as he drank she said, Why would you do this, Fergus? Waving her hand around. All this?

He handed back the empty glass. Shrugged. Bohemian lawyer taking pity, he said.

She looked at him, the calm green eyes. He might have been talking about the house, or about the will, about her family or his. The world. He waited, watching her, but she had no more questions. Only nodded, her lips forming a half-smile. Then he turned from her and went back to his work.

She took the empty glass to the kitchen and went to the front steps to survey her work. The roses were bare wood now, bony urchins, pared back and stark. The cutting would seem harsh to someone who didn’t know them, or didn’t understand what was required. Still, she had to admit now to a sneaking feeling of triumph, a juvenile pleasure in getting her own back. It’s for your own good, she said aloud to the plants. And turned inside again.

Cress sat at the bench in the kitchen, tying up sprigs of herbs for the monthly produce stall at the church. Rosemary, sage, bay leaf, thyme. Veronica had a knack for choosing the right moment to ask, usually after she’d helped Cress with a job at St Barnabas, or as she pressed one of her husband’s old shirts into her hands for Kieran. At any rate, Cress had never refused to bring something, tomatoes straight from the vine, a couple of plump eggplants, pumpkins. But later she would chastise herself. It wasn’t the time or the gift but the obligatory two visits to the church, one to deliver and one to help at the stall. She would try, every third Wednesday of the month, to make both trips short, nipping in to do her bit and leaving before any more was required.

Today, though, she was enjoying the job of snipping the herbs and inhaling the homeliness of them. The memory of soups with bouquet garni, her mother’s sage stuffing. But it was the smell of rosemary, clean and spiky between her fingers, that took her back, quite suddenly, to the moment it all came home to her, the moment she finally realised where Kieran was going at night, what the music meant. That the person he was visiting was Angela.

A winter evening, and a leg of lamb in the oven. She’d rubbed it with salt and garlic and left it to roast. It was dusk: the first crickets chimed, and from the kitchen she could hear the insistent sound of television advertisements: Kieran was waiting for the ‘Quiz’. The lamb was in the oven because it was Monday. Monday roasts – something to look forward to after the weekend, she’d reasoned when Ed was alive and Shelley was young. It was a tradition that died with Ed, but she’d renewed it when Kieran came to stay. It had been his favourite meal for a while, roast lamb and potatoes. Or perhaps he’d just said it was; within months it had been replaced by sausages. It was as if, she thought now, he’d been easing her into living with him, humouring her, not the other way round.

Still, she went on cooking lamb on Mondays. That night – two, three years ago? – she’d wandered out of the kitchen and slumped down beside Kieran, weary from the garden. It had been a winter of no rain and empty dams; she’d spent hours on her feet, hand-watering, coaxing things to stay alive. It was some minutes into the show; the host had introduced the contestants and announced the topic – art history and practice – when Cress remembered the rosemary. Kieran had barely blinked as she levered herself out of her armchair and scuttled from the room. When she returned, the sharp aroma of rosemary was still on her fingers – later she’d found a broken sprig on her woollen sleeve – and Kieran was glued to the screen. He was, she thought, oblivious to her presence or absence.

It had all seemed normal at first. There was nothing out of the ordinary in Kieran’s absorption, in his dogged entry of words in his notebook, his contained pleasure in knowing things, in beating a contestant to an answer. Then she realised he was answering all the questions. Quietly, without fanfare. Recording each answer on the page in front of him, not to remind himself, as he usually did, of the new knowledge, or because he’d got it wrong. That night he was recording the answers like trophies, because he’d got them right.

Cress had switched her attention then to the television screen. The questions ranged across centuries of art. The answers were words like tympanum, surrealism, gouache, Pissarro, plein air, Streeton, Ochre. She sat watching and listening until the end of the show. Kieran knew that ‘a picture or decoration produced by inlaying small pieces of coloured glass, stone or tile’ was a mosaic. That ‘a mixture of water-colour pigment and water’ was a wash. Chinese White, he murmured to a question about a pigment made from zinc oxide. The contestants looked flummoxed – then relieved. It was the last question. As the credits came up Kieran had put down his pen. For once it wasn’t the show he wanted to talk about. He took an exaggerated breath through his nose. Lamb roast, he’d said, and smiled.

Now, bent there over bouquet garni, rubbing rosemary between her fingers, her head kept repeating the refrain: rosemary for remembrance, rosemary for remembrance. She wished it away. Wished, as she frequently did, that she had talked to Kieran there and then, that night, about Angela. About his night-time walks, the hours he spent with her, what they talked about. What Angela did. What Angela said. And more than anything: why?

But at the time there had been no possibility of such a conversation. Her first reaction – apart from mild shock – had been a kind of grief, a sense of loss. Kieran was hers. Hers in ways that transcended her role as grandmother and his as grandson. She had always felt a sense of guardianship, she realised that day, from the moment she guided his body from his mother’s, wiped the blood and vernix from his head, and finally, almost reluctantly, snipped the cord.

He was a whole month early. Ed’s funeral barely over, the flowers still alive and the sympathy cards propped on the sideboard. Vince, Shelley’s husband, had gone back to Brisbane. She and Shelley, heavily pregnant, were still locked in that cocoon of emotional safety that keeps bereaved people together in a house, unwilling to leave. She and her brothers had felt that way after her father died; they’d sat drinking tea and cocoa and talking on the verandah of the old house for a whole week before someone, Joe perhaps, said he had to go back to Sydney, he had to go back to work. It had been the same after Ed. In odd moments – boiling the kettle, bringing in the wash – she recognised it, this cocoon of false contentment. But it meant that she could stay calm when, just days after Vince left, Shelley’s upset stomach turned gradually into hard contractions and then into a terrifyingly rapid delivery on Cress’s bedroom floor. She had never seen a baby born so fast.

But he’d breathed straight away and whimpered and turned pink so she’d wrapped him in a soft towel and handed him to Shelley. It’s all right darling, she’d whispered, as if what had happened was against the rules, and secret. He’s fine. And they’d both sat there on the floor and wept and laughed and stroked him, and Cress had found herself remembering every tiny detail to tell Ed.

That had been thirty years ago. She’d never been able to discern the point at which she and Kieran had formed this particular reliance on each other, the symbiosis that allowed them to be absolutely themselves when they were together, without the constraints or expectations of being a grandmother or a grandson. They were able to just be. And that was the loss she feared most when she’d realised, that night, who was sharing him. This true sense of the person she was. That’s what he had given her.

She arranged the herbs into little netting bags, tied the tops with ribbon. Now, she thought, there were no ready ways of sorting it out, of labelling that fear, pinning it down. She remembered standing there in the kitchen on the night of Iris’s call, her hand still on the phone as if to prevent it from telling her more. But what else was there to know? She was too old, too old. What’s past is past, she thought. Angela is dead. And Kieran – her grandson’s face, open, inscrutable, flashed before her – no longer needed to walk the hills at night.

Laura tried to concentrate on the shoe boxes. The first layer of papers reminded her that she did, after all, know something of her mother’s habits. Angela didn’t hoard so much as keep good records and good stocks, as small insurances against penury perhaps, against disaster. There were bottles of buttons, even though she didn’t sew, pages of scribbled recipes, though she didn’t cook much. If Laura had needed new school shoes or a blouse or a book, Angela would pull out the jar of coins she had slowly accumulated for just such a purpose. Other bills were paid from the same source. Bit by bit, taking everything into account: this was how Angela had done things. She’d kept receipts and old bus timetables, the label from an azalea plant, catalogues from an art supply shop in Brisbane. A Christmas card from a craft shop up the coast. A library card. The miscellany of an ordinary life.

Laura felt her throat constrict. She pursed her lips, blinked. They were small, small things but they were the world, as big as art, as substantial as the paintings propped in the shed, encrypted with meaning. She rubbed her fingers over a receipt for a woollen cardigan, size 12, $29.99. Softly – as if the bones of Angela’s shoulders were there beneath the words, woollen cardigan, her ribs, her elbows and wrists.

Towards the bottom of the box, two receipts, both handwritten; one for two canvases, three feet by two, and one for firewood. Neatly folded twice. And another piece of paper. It was different in size and texture, thin and old, like the airmail paper she’d used years ago to write letters home. She unfolded it carefully. Angela’s handwriting: it had barely changed in fifty years. Faded now, but still legible, still able to reach across the air and the years and squeeze her heart. It might be a sponge, her heart, mopping up, heavy. In her hands now was a page of song lyrics, several stanzas. Laura read them, biting her lip as recognition dawned. Some say love, it is a hunger ... The words to a Bette Midler song. The Rose.

Sometimes, Kieran felt that everything he was and everything he had were not quite enough and never would be. It was a feeling he didn’t understand, but he knew it was only around when Abby was. Before Abby, he hadn’t known about longing. How it coated everything, layered everything with the possibility of sadness, of disappointment. He’d never really coveted anything. Never wanted anything so much that it made him feel like this.

He sat on top of the monkey bars, trying not to look around, to look for her, and thought about the word covet, and how it made him feel he was doing something secret. He’d looked it up as soon as he heard it on ‘Whiz Kids’: desire eagerly, the dictionary said, usually what belongs to another. That had confused him; he didn’t think Abby belonged to anyone. But he did know that since Angela had gone, the word had come back to him and he realised she was, in fact, a kind of secret, and it was his secret. So, he thought now, hooking his legs over a bar and letting his torso drop and swing, in that way Abby did, really, belong to him.

He swung back and forward twice, then folded his body up and over and climbed back down. Dared to look around: the park was still empty. He mooched over to the tap for a drink. Sometimes, the most familiar things made him unbearably jealous. The other people he saw in her street, anything connected to her. He hated this feeling; he wanted to be rid of it, to empty himself out. He would wander around the town or his own garden wishing he had the still, unmoving life of a picket fence, the calmness of a lemon tree. But then he would be taken by surprise, as he was now, as he leaned over the tap and let it run, by the blazing beauty of something, like this pool of water beneath the tap, all the sky’s limitless knowledge reflected there, the potential of it. He stared into the pool and loved that word. Felt it pulsing from the edges of the water trapped there in the dip. It was all muddy brownness and shapes, but they were the shapes of colours, blue, red. It was everything he wanted to see there.

He looked up, blinking through new eyes. Walked out of the park towards the esplanade, stopping to examine the rough sandstone blocks in an old wall, the faded green like an old man’s eyes, the lilac. He’d walked past this wall a thousand times but it was, he saw now, beautiful. He stared at fabrics on men’s shirts, the paisleys and checks, finding them intricate and clever, and the astounding curve of a woman’s upper arm as she reached to touch something, a leaf perhaps. He ran his hand over and around the railing on the post office stairs, its metal shiny with age and use. It was all, without doubt, beautiful. He wanted to say this to Abby. He wanted to turn and find her there, at his shoulder, to say, Look. To see it all, all that he felt, reflected in her eyes.

When he got to the beach, he sat leaning against a warm rock, feeling the morning and early afternoon stored and recorded there. That is what the rock knows, he thought: the sun, where it was, its precise strength, and its weaknesses, at each hour of the day. Everything has a memory, Angela had said to him one night when they were drinking tea in the shed. It was one of the rare occasions when she stopped painting to sit for a moment. It had seemed novel to him, sitting down with her. Out of the ordinary. All their movements felt new, made up. He always saw her standing. When he thought about her, that’s what his mind’s eye saw: her back, or her profile, as she stood at her easel, as she bent over a drawing.

That night, though, she seemed to almost subside into a chair. Bring your chair, she’d said, motioning to him. Let’s stop a minute. He’d tried to smile, to appear relaxed with his cup on his knees and his back rounded for balance. In his other hand, a cleaning cloth. Angela nodded, and then sighed.

This place feels different now, Kieran, better, she said, looking around and then back at him. It’s because you’ve been here. It’s because of you.

He’d been looking at the floor as he drank his tea and now he kept looking, unsettled, hoping meaning would show itself there. But she was quiet so he glanced up, trying for the right words. They didn’t come. Angela waved her cup around and said, All kinds of things are precious. He kept looking at her, but her eyes were somewhere else. Around them the night was waiting. Kieran realised he was still holding the cloth and that Angela was staring at it. His fists were clenching and unclenching so that the cloth had become a damp, untidy ball.

And everything has a memory. Stones and earth have a memory, Kieran. Like muscles. Like cells. This place, these walls, they’re porous, they’ll remember you. Your hands, the words you’ve said.

Now he wondered if that was true. Would the walls of Angela’s shed remember him? Would this rock, this sand, the grass in the park, the swings? He jumped up, his mood lighter and his limbs springy and loose. He hoped it was true. His feet were slow in the sand as he made his way towards the road and he kicked a piece of driftwood to see how far it would go. Stuck his hands in his pockets and thought of the colours he’d seen in the water, in the sandstone, which was the same colour as Abby’s hair. The first day he’d seen her he’d touched that hair as it hung below her on the swing. Maybe, he thought, and began to whistle as he reached the path, maybe, if what Angela said was true, Abby’s hair would remember him.

Laura stood with the piece of paper in her hands. So light. But confirmation that there was another Angela all along, a shadow mother she had never known, someone so affected by the words of a popular song that she would write them down, tuck them away. Laura shook her head. The Angela she knew would never have done that. She carried the page out into the sun to Fergus.

Look. She put it in front of him, right under his eyes. He frowned, wiped his hand across his mouth. It was in a box. He read and then looked up at her, eyebrows raised.

I thought the only music she liked was opera, or classical, Laura said.

He shrugged, and squeezed her shoulders briefly – the same way he had, she thought, at the funeral. She frowned and said, She really was two people. Laura tucked the paper into her pocket and went back inside.

By the time Cress had finished, the afternoon was nearly gone. She gathered the fragrant little bags, settled them in a cardboard box and took them outside. Shafts of late sunlight striped the back garden; she decided to drive down, there and then, and deposit the box in the church store-room, when there would likely be no one else there. If she was fast enough, there would be time to get home and have the sausages cooked before ‘Gardening Australia’. She looked down quickly – the skirt and blouse would do, even if she did run into someone – and climbed behind the wheel.

At the church, she hurried around to the back with her key, and was almost up the stone step to the door when she realised it was open. She pursed her lips, swallowed a mild curse, and went in. The room was unlit and gloomy; Iris was bent over a tray of seedlings, marigolds and pinks, her back to the door. She looked up at Cress’s greeting, then down again. For some reason, she said, these remind me of Angela. The colours, perhaps. Or maybe it’s the time of day.

Cress said Hmmm, and busied herself finding a place for the box of herbs. She always said, Iris went on, that she preferred the nights. Something about colours.

Iris’s words stirred memory. Cress pushed aside what seemed to be bottles of apricot preserve, she wasn’t sure, to make some room. But felt irritated, anyway. Perhaps if you put the light on, she said, turning towards the switch.

Iris leaned back against the counter. Do you remember, she said, when she came down with the painting, the one she donated? A Save The Children raffle, I think. I remember because she said night was her territory. Someone asked her about her work routine. She said she liked nights because they were uncomplicated. She liked their texture, I think she said.

Cress threw a clean tea towel over the open herb box and turned to Iris. Yes, she said, texture. Now can you make sure these are out of the sun tomorrow, she said. It was more an instruction than a question. I may not be here when you’re setting up. Iris nodded. Cress walked to the door. Have to get back for Kieran, she said, and lifted her hand as she left.

On the drive back up the hill she tried to think about dinner but the clear image of Angela at the auction kept playing, over and over, across the windscreen. It must have been twenty years before, just as Angela’s paintings were gaining recognition. Cress had taken Kieran to the auction, unaware Angela would be there. She’d found herself standing with Kieran – how old had he been? Twelve, thirteen? – on the edges of a loose group that had gathered to look at the donated painting, or perhaps at the reclusive painter.

Cress hadn’t heard the words texture or uncomplicated, but she had her own memory of what Angela said that day and it had never entirely left her. Mainly because of Kieran. He’d become fascinated as soon as Angela began talking about night, the way the air thickened in moonlight, she said. Daylight thins things out, bleaches colours, flattens surfaces. Beside her Kieran was nodding, his eyes fixed on a spot beyond the group. Cress had thought he was dreaming, but later, as they walked up the hill, he would repeat back to her everything Angela had said.

Now she climbed out of the car, and watched as the last of the sun blazed pink and peach beyond the clothes line. She wandered over and turned the line, checking Kieran’s T-shirts. Someone at the auction that day had fawned, But your canvases are full of colour and light, or something like that, and another voice had chimed in, Those wildflowers – it’s like there’s a soft lamp on behind them. A glow.

Cress remembered Angela’s smile. It was for all of them, Kieran too. But night allows colour to bloom in your head, she’d said. Don’t you think? Daylight makes everything too obvious. Like mini skirts.

They’d all laughed then, putting it behind them. Cress, on the fringe of the group, nonetheless saw that Angela was dismissing them, and ushered Kieran away. Of course, she thought now, fingering a sleeve, the waistband of jeans, they were all a bit younger then. All of them must have assumed they understood pain and disappointment. That they’d felt the grip of grief and let it go. Processed it, dismissed it. How else could Angela be so brazen about what day gives, and night appropriates? How else could she herself keep the mantle of her faith, her head bent to her own certainties in St Barnabas twice a week?

She frowned at the dew-damp clothing. Grief never entirely disappeared, she knew that now. It was a chameleon, ducking and weaving among other emotions, disguising itself. So clever that, years after the catastrophe, you might be mistaken for someone who had never felt pain. For someone who was good at it. Now that she was older, she knew that was the assumption: you are old, you have lived, you are versed in pain. And she might have thought it herself, once. But the chameleon had changed its skin again in the past week. Pain – or grief – had reappeared, a reminder that age did not bring immunity.

Inside she flicked on the television and in the kitchen chopped tomato and onion for gravy, lined up sausages in the pan. Then looked at the time and ran water into the sink to wash the vegetables. From the other room came the voice of a newsreader: it must already be after seven. Cress dried her hands on a tea-towel and walked through the house, flicking on lights, listening to television voices speaking of drainage problems, a bushfire in Queensland, some political fracas she had no interest in. She had no desire to hear any of it at all. She went to her bedroom for a clean towel, determined that tonight she would not even worry about Kieran and Angela. She would get dinner in the oven, watch her gardening show, and have a long hot shower.

In the late afternoon, after Fergus had left, Laura stood with the fridge door open and stared at the piece of fish she’d planned to cook for dinner. Suddenly it was all unbearable, the house, the idea of eating, the humid air trapped in the room. She walked from the kitchen and pulled on her boots and headed off through the rose garden and up the dirt track, turning onto the road towards the national park. She would walk and walk, would let her body take over, let it tell her what to do. At this time of day, the collision of air – forest and sea, sap and salt – was almost tangible, she could feel it, taste it on her tongue. She breathed deeply.

Every shade of green was there. Every measure, every pattern of leaf and bark too, tear-drop, grey daub, tree ferns with finger spans and fists. Everything living and dying. Lives and deaths, embraced in willing soil. She had to tread carefully: the great trees and vines and roots pawed at the paths, the forest was dank and fecund and insatiable. She walked on down the track, and the words to Angela’s song rose and fell around her, echoed back from whipbirds as they snapped their calls in the forest, in the screech of small robins, and in the rhythm of her legs and feet. It is a flower, she heard, and it was in her fingers and on her lips and swelling in her lungs, it is a river. An endless, aching need.

The front room had a couch, like a sitting room, there were bookshelves and a fireplace, he remembered that. He remembered the mound of ash, untouched since winter, the way he had to sweep the hearth over and over. The books and magazines scattered, lying on every possible surface. It had taken ages to get them into tidy piles. He wondered if the woman had scattered them around again, or made a mess of her own. There was probably quite a bit of dust from all the sawing and planing, it had probably settled on the furniture and shelves once more.

If the woman was in the room in the daytime, and he was very careful not to jerk his head or twitch, he could watch her for as long as he liked. The shadows here were a good camouflage. He knew this because a few days before, she suddenly stopped washing one of the windows, it was taking her forever, and stared through the glass straight at him. The cloth in her hand froze in its circular movements halfway up the pane. He was strangely calm, waiting for her scream, or a volley of abuse, and then – how many seconds or minutes later? – she looked away and began the rhythmic washing motion again, around and around.

He’d stared back. She hadn’t seen him. Couldn’t have. She was probably just thinking – about what? That’s when he felt a bit sick. Wanted to run back up the hill, through the overgrowth, along the road to his own home, his own room. But knew he couldn’t, not while she was at the window. He suddenly felt it was all arse-up, that he was the object under the microscope, trapped by someone’s gaze. Cow, he’d thought, sinking slowly to his haunches among the leaf litter of a hundred gum trees. And suddenly grinned. Silly cow. It must have been the third time this week. And still she hadn’t seen him.

But it was night now. He hovered at the edge of the darkened yard, under an overhang of mulberry leaves, keeping his eye on the front windows of the house. He didn’t want to go any closer. He wasn’t nervous, exactly, though his belly flipped around as if he was. It was more the feeling that, in darkness, the whole place belonged more to him than to her. The shed in particular. But there she was in the front room again. From here he could only see her head and upper body and it was hard to make out exactly what she was doing without moving, without getting way too close. Just as he thought that, she moved again and was gone, probably to the kitchen, he assumed. Of course she was; it was dinner time. That’s why his belly was flipping: he hadn’t eaten for ages. And there was this other thing: tonight, he really wished he could talk to Angela. It made the flipping worse.

He thought about the tall trees on the other side of the house, and the rocks near the shed, their line of sight to the back deck. He’d watched her cooking dinner from those trees before. Watching her cook, it occurred to him, was like watching Angela paint. That helped. He kept very still, just in case she reappeared, and thought: Maybe if I zig-zag around and get up high. He sidestepped from beneath the leaves and branches, dropped to the ground and stayed low. A minute later he was just another shadow merged with the darkness between the house and the shed.

But she wasn’t in the kitchen. All he could see through the windows was the bulk of the fridge, the walls. He bunched his fists, confused. Why had he assumed she was? Maybe she’d just gone to the toilet and was back in the front room now. That was possible. Or gone to bed early. Very early. If she was in the shower he’d be able to hear it from here. He was certain of that. But how would he–

Hello.

His heart leapt to his mouth where it stopped any words, any sound. His head jerked around and his fists tightened and he took a step back without realising he had. The woman was only a few metres away, standing as straight and still as he had been. Her mouth was half smiling. He froze with one leg behind the other, ready to run. The rest of him was saying just that – Run! – but his legs didn’t seem to be listening. He looked down at them briefly, confused, and then up at the woman again. The smile, he saw, wasn’t a mean one, and his heart at last returned to his chest. He put his hand on it. But kept watching her, just in case.

I’ve got something for you, she said.

Laura leaned back against the low bench and folded her arms. Kieran was silent in front of the painting. He’d been silent a long time. Just nodded at first, when she said Kieran? and said nothing as he followed her to the shed, and nothing when she indicated the big canvas propped against the wall. He just stood there, looking from the canvas to her and back again, so she’d lifted it onto an easel and retreated to the bench and said, It’s yours. From Angela. Watched as he took several steps towards it, extended his hand, ran a finger over the scrawled title, I Go Looking for Signs of Contentment #2.

In the silence time became fluid, became elastic between them. For the first time since she’d been back, Laura felt some hint of Angela’s presence. She was utterly calm – as Angela must have been, she realised, here with Kieran and the quiet. As she watched him she thought the silence might be a current of time, moving around and between them, the three of them: she was now Angela in the shed, now Laura in the orchard, both of them sharing the pool of calmness that Kieran brought. Any moment one of them might speak and break the current, but this quality in the air would remain.

This was where Angela had found her contentment.

Kieran turned to look at her. His face was blank, as if he was waiting for something, a bus, or an answer. Laura unfolded her arms and tilted her head, looked back at him. Can you tell me, she asked, about Angela? Realising as she said it that she didn’t expect any answer.

And there wasn’t one for perhaps a whole long minute. He stood there with that same air of expectation, then shrugged. She was sad, he said.

Kieran walked home through the humming dark, thinking about the woman. Laura. That was the name she told him as he left. Laura. He said it aloud as the road sloped down and his legs swung. It was a good name, he decided. He liked the way it went up at the end, the a like the end of Angela. It made a good sound.

He felt much better than he had when she said hello. He hadn’t been frightened but he’d been unsure about her, unsure if he wanted to be there, in the same space, then in the same room. He felt stupid and angry that she’d found him. And he didn’t want to go into the shed. Not at first, not with her. And there was this other thing: she might want him to talk to her, and he didn’t want to talk.

But something had happened in there. He’d stood looking at Angela’s painting with the woman nearby and felt that even though Angela wasn’t coming back, it was all right. He would be all right. There were all these pieces of her, parts of her, in the world. Eventually he’d lifted the painting off the easel and felt its weight and said, I don’t think I can carry it home.

And she had laughed, the woman Laura, with her eyes – more of Angela, the blue eyes – and told him she would arrange it. She knew his grandmother, she said – just, he thought, like Angela had. He’d said goodnight and walked up the path. It was good not to have to scramble up through the bush. When he reached the backstreets of town he felt like he’d stepped back in time. He knew the word: déjà vu.

Sometimes, after summer nights at Angela’s, he would lie on the damp beach and close his eyes and imagine what was happening inside the sounds around him. The slap of waves and the hiss of their retreat over a universe of sand. He wondered if the same sounds existed at the bottom of waterfalls, beneath the pools and streams they fed. He thought about those sounds again now. He was already late for dinner, but was tempted to go down to the beach anyway, and rest his cheek on the damp sand. The sand at least held no surprises, was as predictable as his pillow. But that very thought, and the image it produced of his bed, its welcome, made him forget the beach and turn towards home. He was suddenly tired; wanted to lie down with something good on the stereo, something he loved. The thought drew him on through the scented streets.

The house was quiet when he opened the door. The smell of sausages, recently cooked, was so rich he could almost see it; everything had a glow. It was his favourite dinner. He went in through the lounge room, his spirits lifting. There was the hiss of the shower; the lamps were on. In his bedroom he plucked Lucinda Williams from his CD stand; as her voice drifted up and out around the room he threw himself onto his bed, landing on his back. He tucked his hands behind his head. Within seconds the balls of his feet, the bare toes spread wide, were tapping air.

Three words. She was sad. Laura poured the last of the wine and sat down in the armchair in the parlour, where papers from the shoe boxes and the school case still lay fanned out on the floor. From the moment she’d seen Kieran in the shadows outside the house, she’d sensed the walls of an invisible triangle closing. She was sad. The words, simple, devastating, brought them together, Angela, Kieran, Laura. In that moment she saw past the anger, past the distance Angela had put between them and that she, Laura, had then made physical by leaving this town, leaving the country. Laura had seen one Angela: angry and tough and controlling. Kieran had probably seen the inner one.

She put the glass on the floor beside the drifts of papers and documents. She stared down at them. They were, she saw now, bookends of her family’s life. Here was her own birth certificate: Laura Elisabeth Lindquist. Born to Angela Mary and August Arne, September 10, 1953, at 8.14 pm at Ballina, New South Wales. Seven pounds fourteen ounces. Here were the early records of her growth from the local Maternal and Child Welfare Centre: baby Lindquist took her first solid food – mashed banana – at three months, cut her first tooth and sat up at eight months, crawled at seven months, was weaned at eight months, walked at one year. And there, put to one side, her father’s funeral notice, Angela’s tickets and receipts, The Rose.

She sat and regarded the papers. They would not, she knew, tell her about her childhood loneliness, her rebellion at school, her own anger. But there was something else. Something she hadn’t been consciously looking for: proof that she had been born into love, that she had been wanted, cared for. It had been recorded, that love, written down: mashed banana at three months. When she finally fell into bed, leaving the evidence scattered over the parlour floor, it was this phrase that came back to her. She hugged it to herself, and slept.