Thursday

Laura heard the phone ring in her sleep, through a dream more real than daylight. It was a swimming dream and hard to wake from. At an unknown beach, where she kicked and stroked towards a headland that kept receding, towards a crowd on the sand, a colourful knot of them, who didn’t hear her shouts. Even as she called to them, though, asking where she was, she realised she had no voice, she could not make a sound, not even a rasp; even her heavy breath was silent.

She opened her eyes and the dream snapped off. Her body in the narrow bed felt heavy after the weightlessness of the dream swim, and she was shocked by the light, which was the exact yellow of the beach. Her eyes felt gritty, as if particles of sand had lodged there. But there was no ringing sound now, nothing; all noise had stopped.

She rubbed her face. The feel of the beach was still with her – was it Brighton, or elsewhere? She looked up: outside the window the sun was already boring its way across the Australian sky. She knew she had slept for a very long time. Nevertheless, she was tempted to roll away from the window and close her eyes again, even to risk a repeat of the mute dream, the anonymous beach. It would be worth it just to return to that weightlessness, in which she was barely conscious of her body, only the lift and dip of her arms as she swam, the effortless kick.

But her skin was damp beneath the cotton sheet and her mouth and throat were dry. She knew she should get up. Still, it took some moments before her limbs responded, moving slowly as if they were underwater. She stood and looked outside again: leaves and foliage slumped pale and heavy in the humid air. Yes, underwater, she thought, remembering summers when moving through air was like moving through warm water.

But the memory contained a question. She let it hang there in the fugginess where jetlag and dreams and foreboding had met. As she began to sort through her clothes she addressed it: Who was the person who knew these things? Was it the young girl she was in this house? From the evening before, she remembered an obscure fear of going to sleep here and waking up in that girl’s skin. Just before sleep, a sudden horror of following her own footsteps through the house, of being caught in the groove of old movements and breaths.

That vulnerable, teary girl. She threw clothes onto the day bed. T-shirts and skirts, socks, pants, they all fanned out, crumpled, musty from the suitcase. Could the geography of childhood be so firmly stencilled on your soul that you returned, not just to a place you once moved in, but to the habits and attitudes and emotions that once made you? Could the grown, self-made woman revert to the young, skittish child in the house where that child had lived?

The whole notion seemed hallucinatory to her. But possible. She tied a sarong around her hips and wondered if she was actually fully awake or in some odd time delay, her brain caught somewhere in the thin air of long-distance flight. She was five minutes out of bed but already her skin felt clammy. Sweat beaded her top lip. She sat down suddenly on the bed and knew that what she wanted most was to go straight back to sleep.

No. She said the word aloud. Something in the cotton-wool of her head reminded her this was a bad idea, that she needed to wait to sleep again until night. She breathed deeply, visualising the hours stretching out through the day, the long minutes of consciousness. It seemed unendurable. But would be endured. She knew this in the part of her that had met impossible deadlines, done hard things. She picked up her mobile: one missed call. Fergus. She took a breath and pressed in the number, waited for his voice.

Later, still strangely tired, she would think back to the light-water dream and the heavy-water air of the morning, and to the sound of his voice. Stories, she’d heard him say, that I want to tell you. I’ll buy you dinner. Or thought she’d heard. What? she’d said or shouted at the phone, and he’d apologised for the noise of water, of the surf, and carefully pronounced the name of a beachside bar. Seven o’clock, he yelled.

The first time Kieran saw Abby, she was wearing a shapeless summer dress printed with big red and orange hibiscus flowers that made him think of islands. It was the way she walked too, as if she was moving without a purpose, without any need, a holiday kind of walk.

It was a weekday morning, and he was at the park. He liked to go there after nine o’clock, when everyone was at work or at school, and everything he touched had the delicious feel of something borrowed, something he really shouldn’t have. That morning Abby was drifting, or maybe being blown by the wind, and although he was standing still, behind the monkey bars, he felt that he was being drawn towards her, instead of the reverse. He turned to the side, trying to be invisible, or very still, or both.

So it jolted him when she sat down on the swing and began to talk. She pushed off into the air, the flowery dress billowing softly, her straggly fringe flicking back from her eyes. Gentle Jesus meek and mild, look upon a little child. Gentle Jesus, meek and – d’ you know the rest of the words to that? Her voice tangling with her long hair, so he saw strands of words, blonde.

Kieran looked quickly behind him. Was someone else there? He hadn’t seen anyone on the path. Gentle Jesus ... The swing slowed and she tried to propel it with her legs. Skinny legs, long. Hey, give us a push? Please?

She turned her head then, and looked directly at him for about three seconds. There was no surprise in her face. She looked at him as if they already knew each other. Then the wind whipped her fringe across her eyes again and she leaned far back, so the curtain of hair hung straight down, the ends in the dirt beneath the swing. He moved out from behind the monkey bars. She lay back on the seat of the swing, her face upside down, grinning at him. C’mon then, she said, swinging away and back again. Push! He smiled, and pushed.

At first they just met in the park. Sometimes Abby would get there before him, and he would see her soaring on the swing from way up on the hill path. Her head would be flung back and her hair trailing, like the first time.

On these days he learned to sit quietly nearby and wait for the swing to slow. It was no use trying to talk. Abby was somewhere else, her thoughts pushed up and propelled away beyond the solid ground where Kieran sat, pulling at grass, glancing up occasionally at the shape her body made, arcing through air.

He knew enough not to question her, even when she’d stopped. She simply wouldn’t answer. But once when she felt dizzy after she finally slumped down next to him, he asked her if, when the swing was really high, she kept her eyes open.

Always, she said. He waited for more. It’s the stillness. I like to look at the stillness. I like being the only thing that moves.

He’d nodded, needing no more. Needing just those few words. He felt happiness beating in him, beneath his ribs, in the soft pads of his fingertips. As if she had put the words there in his hands. That’s when he began to think about love. About the way he loved other people. If he might be in love with her. Or just in love with her sentences.

Kieran was thinking about this today as he sat at work. Now, these months later, he didn’t worry so much about missing her during the day, knew it was not so catastrophic. There were other ways he could keep up with her, make sure she was okay. He was humming – a fragment of Beethoven? he wasn’t sure – as the bell sounded and he swung his bag over his shoulder, heading for the canteen. After lunch the end of his shift was just a few hours away. If he walked fast, he could be at the top of her street half an hour later, just before her father got home.

Cress went from room to room with her basket, gathering up washing. Mainly it was Kieran’s. She had stopped questioning how her grandson, so fastidious in other ways, could be completely forgetful about his clothes. They were left where they dropped, piles and trails of jeans, T-shirts, socks. Beside his bed, near the television and – despite the proximity of the laundry basket – on the bathroom tiles right next to it. For a long time she tried to reform him. She’d nagged, pleaded, offered rewards. Now, after ten years or more, during which the style and the shades of Kieran’s wardrobe had barely changed, Cress had all but abandoned her efforts. Nothing seemed to penetrate. Each complaint was still met with the same bemused look, the same shrug as he scooped up the clothes in question and deposited them in the laundry.

Often, when he reappeared, he would be wearing one of the contentious items, crumpled jeans or dirty socks or a sweat-stained singlet. This was done, she knew, completely without malice, almost completely without thought. Having picked it up again, he’d just feel like putting the thing on.

But today she was unperturbed by the forgotten clothes or by anything much at all. She sorted washing into piles and whistled a soft tune, the way Ed always had. As she bent to pluck one good-sized load from the floor, and dropped it item by item into the machine, her old body recognised the emotion. It was a feeling of repleteness, of some vacuum filled; she’d felt it grow in her chest at St Barnabas the moment she opened the tea-chest, and it was still with her. But there was something else too, an edge of excitement, that belonged to a much younger version of herself.

When she and Ed had first met, the war wasn’t yet over. She was sixteen and too young, her father considered, to be consorting with a nineteen-year-old about to go off to fight. He’d forbidden her to see him. But after Ed had gone into camp, he’d sent her a letter through a friend. They’d spoken once on a hospital phone, too, even though any contact was forbidden, but a letter was visible contraband, thrilling and dangerous.

At work in the wards she could keep it safely in her purse, or slip it into her bra, but at home she felt no such daring. Nowhere was safe. At first she’d kept it tucked into her pants, where its corners dug into her hips, sharp and reassuring, but she was terrified it would slip and fall. In the end she’d wedged it behind the Jesus picture on her bedroom wall where, even though it was just two thin airmail pages, it seemed to Cress to expand, to puff out as if it was breathing. That’s how she felt now about the dress.

As she moved around the house, tidying, thinking about dinner, her eyes kept flicking towards the bedroom, as if the dress had a smell or a sound that might leak out. But this time it was Cress who seemed to expand. She felt swelled by its presence, and ordinary things seemed smaller: the regular twinges from her rheumatic hip didn’t irritate her today, and nor did the thought of the vegetables waiting in the kitchen to be chopped.

So now that the house was tidy and the washing on, and she felt she’d avoided it long enough, Cress went into her bedroom, tip-toeing as if someone might hear. The air outside was still, save for the crows, and she barely noticed them. Even so, she pulled down the sash on her window, adjusted the curtains to make the room dim. Although it was midday and broad daylight, it felt safe to bring out the parcel. But her stomach tilted with pleasure at the risk.

She knelt in the shaft of sunlight the curtains would not absorb. Reached beneath the bed and drew the parcel towards her as a communicant draws the cup. Unwrapped the sheet. Then leaned back on her haunches just to look at the dress for a while. Minutes passed while her eyes took in nothing but pearls, the curve of neckline heartbreaking to her in the shape it still held, its fragile threads.

When her feet began to numb Cress carefully stood, using the end of the bed for balance. Then she stooped and pulled the dress from its folds. Was surprised by its weight as it fell from narrow shoulders into the beam of light. Turning, she pressed it to her own body, gripping it to her waist, glancing up – as women do – to find the mirror. The action was pure instinct, and she was startled by what she saw. Holding it there, she did not see the reflection of an old woman and a wedding dress. Nor was there an image of its young owner, years ago. Staring, transfixed in the half-light, she thought not of brides but of angels. Shapes, presences, things that remained when bodies were gone. Her hand trembled lightly over the pearls. She looked up and around, but the room was untouched, the bed, the window, the drumming heat very much of this world.

The mirror, though: it was more than one-dimensional. She saw this as the figure in the reflection calmly returned her gaze. It was at once substantial and weightless, this figure, and Cress bent her head – a fraction, infinitesimal – towards it. She looked and looked. Neither seeing nor not seeing. Above her, on the wall, the Virgin Mary wore a similar expression. Cress put a hand to her heart. As she did the dress slipped and moved sideways. Suddenly everything was normal again, the image in the mirror just an old woman holding a dress, looking ludicrous. Cress pursed her lips, impatient. Stupid old thing. She re-wrapped it, quickly, carelessly, and pushed it beneath the bed with the toe of her shoe. There were real things, she told herself, to think about now.

Kieran knew that Abby’s house was old, but it was not old like his own, or like Angela’s. There was no garden, to start with. Just bare patches of grass burned by summer, a couple of shrubs, and at the top of the stairs, outside the front door, a pot sprouting dead stalks, marigolds perhaps. Half-hearted weeds collapsed against the chain-wire fence.

It was, he’d decided, a house that kept secrets. Above the clipped yellow grass its walls and windows colluded in their blankness: nothing could be gauged from them, nothing told. The cream of the weatherboards was dull but not chipped, the sliding aluminium windows clean but bare. Without awnings they made him think of a woman without eyebrows, without lashes. The front door, which was always closed, had a panel of opaque glass and a bell. He wondered if it had ever been rung.

Apart from the weeds the yard was neat: wheelie bins tucked together near the side path, a hose looped over a tap. Further back, a shed with a tilt-a-door and a clothes hoist with a peg basket. Sometimes there was a washing trolley parked beneath flapping clothes, and on these days he craned to see the items pinned to the lines as if they were messages left there, clues. But the flowery dresses and blue drill work shirts told him no more than he already knew.

From the end of the street he watched for her father’s white sedan. He came home at precisely the same time every day, turning into the driveway at half past five. If he was going out again he would leave the car out, parked inside the gate and beside the house; otherwise he climbed out to open the garage door, drove the car in, and walked back to the front gate to close it before he went upstairs. He was a medium-sized man, well-built. He carried a small blue esky with a white lid. When he had locked the car or closed the gate he went straight upstairs; he didn’t stop at the letterbox, he didn’t pause in the yard. His face, which was tanned a deep brown, was unknowable, but his body, even from a distance, looked constrained in the blue work clothes, as if they were a costume that hid his real skin. As if it was capable of much, much more. If he was close enough, Kieran could hear his heavy boots on the stair treads as he climbed, the click of the back door as it closed behind him.

On the days the car was left outside, Kieran felt physical relief shudder through him. He didn’t have to worry about her when her father was going out. That still felt odd to him: that a girl alone in a house at night was safer than when she wasn’t. But in Abby’s case he knew that it was true. Just the week before he’d heard shouts even through the closed windows, even from across the darkened street. The sound made him feel sick but he’d crept close to the house anyway, flattening himself against her neighbour’s high fence. He listened with his whole body, as if the vibrations of sounds and meanings might come up through the soles of his feet, or through his palms. When the shouting had stopped, all he could hear was a soft sound like a whimper; very quiet, quieter even than a kitten. Then silence. He’d waited for a long time, to make sure. Then he’d slipped away.

Now, standing behind the bus shelter on the opposite side of the road, he wished hard, crossing his fingers behind his back, that tonight her father would come home and go straight out again. He closed his eyes, whispered please to no one in particular, though he would have liked a falling star. In his mind he visualised the car – white, always clean – nosing into the front yard and stopping. The gate left open, the car just inside, ready to go again. That’s all that was needed.

And that was exactly what happened. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing: the car turned into the yard and stopped. He heard the engine rumble and die, watched the driver’s door open, the figure emerge and then lean back into the car for the esky. The door clicked closed, the gate stayed open. He was going out again. The wish had worked.

Kieran breathed deeply and smiled to himself; when the coast was clear he stepped away from the bus shelter. He hadn’t seen Abby, not even a shadow behind the window at the front, but today that didn’t matter. Today he had done something better. As he rounded the corner towards town his legs felt like steel and his arms were powerful, swinging by his side. Strong. Maybe more than strong. He walked tall, not thinking of a destination, feeling like a wizard, someone special. Someone who could keep Abby safe.

Laura spent the morning making a checklist of work that was needed and made calls to the funeral parlour and the celebrant. Through it all the tiredness stayed and after lunch she gave in to it, lay down and fell instantly asleep. When she woke she felt renewed, optimistic. She took the old school case and sat in Angela’s armchair in the parlour.

The case had been carefully preserved: the only signs of wear were the original grazes from being dropped at bus stops and hauled on and off school port racks. It wasn’t even dusty. Now that it was here, propped on her knees, she stared at its geometric patterns and let them take her, just momentarily, back to her seven-year-old self. The little girl who loved the structure and routine of school, the smell of desks and ink wells and chalk and the elementary readers with their pictures of Dick and Dora; the girl who thrived on the approval of teachers and the A-grade report cards they wrote her. Who, even then, pretended it was Angela who parted her hair in the mornings and tied up her pig tails, Angela who made her Vegemite sandwiches and wrapped them in greaseproof paper, who chilled the cordial in the plastic drink bottle packed, along with her copy book, inside this red and white school case every morning.

She breathed in, blinking away the skinny, needy schoolgirl, and unlatched the lid of the case. It was full of papers. Documents. Envelopes, foolscap sheets. She lifted the first layers to see more of the same beneath, along with some documents or booklets, it was hard to tell, stowed inside a plastic bag. Near the bottom there was an old velvet box she recognised as Angela’s. Laura held the papers in place and fished it out.

Inside, three pieces of jewellery. Two plain wedding bands identical apart from their size, and a gold chain. She recognised the smaller ring: it was the only jewellery Angela had ever worn, round-edged, rose-gold. She held it up between forefinger and thumb. From this angle she could read the inscription: August to Angela 25-6-1952. The other, bigger ring was inscribed too: Angela to August. Laura stared at the words, stung by their intimacy, by everything they implied. There, in the palm of her hand, her father acquired a shape, became more than a shadow; he was a young man with eyes, fingers, emotions. More than a missing father – a lover, a missing husband. August to Angela.

She leaned back in the chair and closed one hand around the rings; with the other she felt around on the floor for her teacup. The tin roof cracked like a whip under the sun. Laura looked from the window to the bookshelves to the empty fireplace, tried to place the shape of her father between them, among them. The shape of her parents as a young couple. But the room was already too crowded with images and emotions she’d filled it with long ago. The handsome, loving, dead father; the preoccupied, angry mother.

She returned the rings to the box, lifted the gold chain, and saw the locket for the first time. It was not a conventional heart shape but a rectangle in the same rose gold as the rings. It had a tiny crimson jewel at its centre and a catch, which gave easily when she pressed it. Inside were two black-and-white miniatures, a woman and a man. Laura brought the pictures close. She’d never seen them before. From the high collars and the stern faces above them, the woman’s upswept hair and the man’s beard, she guessed they were her grandparents. But maternal or paternal? Were they Angela’s features, or August’s?

There had been just one photograph of her father in the house when she was a child. Thinking of it made her look up from the locket towards the bookshelves where the photo had always been. Perhaps it was the light: the photo didn’t seem to be there. She squinted, running her eye along the books, seeing it in her mind’s eye: a young man, tall and fair, hands in the pockets of his baggy trousers, laughing towards the camera, or the person holding it. His eyes were creased up, kind. As a child she had often stared at this photo, holding it up close to her eyes as if that would reveal something, perhaps the back of his head, the exact colour of his eyes, the smell of him. As if, up very close, the photo might speak; he might whisper something to her, the answer to one of the endless questions she’d gathered in her head. What made the train crash that night/Why isn’t Mum like other mothers/Do you think I’m pretty?

But the photo wasn’t there. She turned back to the school case and the mound of papers it held. Took a deep breath, and began.

The first thing was a birthday card. Happy Birthday, Mum, among throngs of yellow roses, her own handwriting at perhaps ten, fifteen years old. Below it another, then another. She opened them and placed them on the floor beside her. Next a bunch of receipts, paper-clipped, that she’d need her glasses to read. Certificates: First Prize, Ballina Art Show, 1990; First Prize, Ballina Art Show, 1991. An exhibition catalogue dated 1996. A scattering of business cards: galleries, government departments. Two caught her eye: the card from Michael Peters Gallery, Noosa, looked new and had a handwritten mobile number. And Belshannon & Martin, Lawyers, with the same address, an outdated local phone number and a sky-blue background. She put them to one side.

Inside the plastic sleeve was an assortment of papers that looked more official: some seemed to be clippings from newspapers or magazines; others were clumsily typed. She unfolded the first. It was a newspaper clipping without a date. The headline read: Mothers will give evidence, and below it: Women who relinquished babies for adoption in New South Wales over the past sixty years have been invited to tell their stories.

She rifled through the next few documents. More clippings, some longer than others, all reports from that first State Inquiry into Adoption Practices. But in amongst them, some stories and even some single paragraphs and sentences carefully cut from a magazine, pasted down, and some pages of typing that looked like quotes. She plucked a couple out randomly and read:

How many children do you have? One. No, two.

There is no language for absence. The words themselves are missing.

My grief creates someone else’s joy.

They told me I was lucky. That I should think myself fortunate. That I could pick up my life, start again.

And a list, written in Angela’s hand:

Department of Child Services (Families?)

non-identifying information

CentreCare

Jigsaw – Linda/Jemma/Jenny?

Brisbane.

Laura replaced the collection of clippings in the school case along with the jewellery. Closed the lid. She looked up, and felt she was seeing the day for the first time: the sun hot through the windows and the sky bleached to an ice blue. My grief created someone else’s joy. She finished her tea and went to the window. There was something about those words and all the others that irritated her. They were all so sentimental, she felt them curdling at the base of her throat. Where was Angela’s sentiment when she, Laura, was a child? You won’t survive in this world, young lady, Angela had told Laura over and over, if you’re going to be a sook. Laura grimaced at the memory. Bloody absence, all right, she said aloud.

Outside the sun was wilting leaves and drawing the scent of eucalyptus from them. It was too hot, but she wanted to get out, to move, to shake off the prickling under her skin. She took a towel and her togs and decided to drive to the sea.

Cress thought about a beef casserole for dinner, with beans, and perhaps a date loaf. She’d have preferred a sponge pudding herself, or a crumble, but knew most of it would go uneaten. Kieran would watch as it came out of the oven, admire it, smile, and then ignore it. Date loaf was the only cake he would eat. She’d tried him with cream-filled butterfly cakes, rich chocolate, plain scones – useless. Your mother loves my scones, she would scold, they’re her favourite. But Kieran would just nod seriously, the way he did watching the ‘Quiz’, and make himself a peanut butter sandwich.

Making the date loaf was, she knew, a way of avoiding other things, like thinking about Angela’s funeral. For some reason it made her feel nervous. She measured butter and syrup into a bowl, added bicarb. A shame it had to wait for the daughter to arrive: these things should be organised quickly, and done. For everyone’s sake. She stirred the mixture with a wooden spoon and greased two tins. And then there was something to wear. It would have to be the brown pleated skirt and beige blouse; there wasn’t time to find anything new.

She tipped the dates from the packet and began to chop. An image of Ed’s funeral reared up suddenly in front of her: the full church, Shelley’s face. Empty, she’d thought at the time, as if she’d used up everything in the days before, all emotion, and there was nothing left, not for anyone. She’d realised, watching her daughter, that it was their first experience of loss, both of them. Even then, they’d had no sense of what it really meant.

She looked down. When had she finished the dates and started on the beans? She had no idea, but now, beneath her hands, there was a pile big enough to feed a family of nine. She grimaced. Kieran wasn’t fond of beans. Well, they would have to be used somehow. She picked up her Day-to-Day Cookery to look for sauces but there was Ed again, at her shoulder, shaking his head. Calvinist, she heard him say. And then turning to Shelley: There is a part of your mother that never grew out of the Depression.

Kieran walked past St Barnabas, taking the back way home. It was nearly closing time; he went in through the front door anyway, to see who was there. Everything was quiet, but as he walked past the counter Iris popped up from where she’d been kneeling, making him jump. Kieran! she cried, Just the man! She came scuttling out, straightening her skirt and complaining about dust. There’s a heavy box up the back, damned if I can move it. He looked sharply at her as she took his arm. Pardon my French, she said, and led him off.

In the back room where the deliveries usually came were several boxes and cartons, along with some bentwood chairs and a broken rocking horse. It’s this one, Iris said, indicating a cardboard packing box with St B – china & glass scrawled across one side. Kieran sized it up, but before he could slip his hands beneath it Iris was talking again. He paused. And this one too. She was standing beside a tea-chest that had already been opened; some of its contents unwrapped and left on the floor. Cups, some plastic: the usual. I thought Cress had done this one, Iris said, frowning, bending to retrieve some of the discarded newspaper. She looked over at him, her head cocked to one side. He was waiting until she’d finished. Just down the front, if you would, she said, and laughed as he grunted at the weight. He staggered down aisle two and settled the box on the exact spot on the floor where Iris was pointing.

You’re a sweetie, she said, patting his shoulder. She went back behind the counter and began to pack up. Kieran headed for the door. As he reached it Iris’s voice stopped him again. Is your grandmother all right? she called, and when he turned he saw her stretching her lips in front of a hand mirror, a lipstick in her other hand. She seems a bit edgy. She applied the lipstick and snapped the mirror shut. Looked at his blank face. Maybe it’s the heat, she said, turning away. You get along now, it’ll be getting dark.

Kieran didn’t bother to wave. He closed the big arched door behind him and wandered off, brushing dust from the box off his shirt, and whistling.

Laura swam from one end of Convent Beach to the foot of the headlands, then back. After she dried off she stood near the rocks, looking out. The sea was a dark blue cloth flung out by invisible hands, billowing silvery in its creases and folds. Flung out again and again, never perfect. This was what she’d thought as a child, watching the sea as her feet mined the shallows. Pippis in a bucket beside her. Somewhere to the left or right – she looked both ways even now, as if her mother might appear – Angela would be crouched with her sketchbook. Dune flowers bloomed and faded on the sand.

She listened: there was the sound she woke with. It was something beyond the slamming and crisping of the waves, a sound she knew was the belly of the sea, grinding, rolling, turning in on itself in the great spaces between continents. The deep. Always it had reminded her of her own place here: she was one grain of sand.

Back at the house she glanced at the contents of the case, scattered on the parlour floor, and felt a wave of irritation again. She turned from them to the kitchen, where she seized cleaning cloths and an empty box and began to clear and clean the old kitchen cupboards. She worked without thinking, conscious only of the need to move, to change, to obliterate. Old cans of peas, rusting at the edges, cans of apricots and peaches, soup – pea and ham, chicken and corn. Worn-down candles, Sunlight soap, an almost-empty bottle of Worcestershire sauce. An ageing colander, aluminium saucepans, plastic containers yellow with use. Thick-lipped cups and unbreakable plates. She pulled them all out, consigning them quickly to the sink or the box. She was barely aware that her blood was pumping more furiously, her hands tipping and shoving and scrubbing.

When the phone rang she pressed it to her ear with her shoulder and didn’t stop.

Kate made small talk and Laura answered as she seized bottles and cans from shelves. What are you doing? What’s the noise? Kate asked.

Cleaning, Laura said.

Well, you’re going to break something. Stop banging.

Laura looked down at the box full of cans and ugly crockery and paused. Dropped her cloth and leaned against the kitchen bench, feeling, suddenly, all the weight of the last few days in her arms and neck.

Mum?

Why didn’t she tell me? she said. Why didn’t I know?

Neither Kate nor the miles of ocean between them had an answer.

It makes me feel like I didn’t count.

Of course you counted. Laura could visualise her daughter unwrapping her scarf as she came in the door after work, throwing it on a nearby couch: she imagined the gesture over and over; ordinary, comforting. She bent and plucked a teacup from the box, held its fine handle in her fingers. Remnants of gilt edging were just visible around the rim.

That’s how it always was. That’s how I always felt, she said. She put the cup down. It’s hard for you to see. You’ve never had to plead with me to love you.

No, Kate said. I haven’t. And I don’t know what it’s like to lose a baby. Down the phone line Laura could hear faint music playing. She tried to recognise it, and in the pause Kate said: Maybe she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. Who knows. But whatever happened, surely it would have broken her heart.

Laura gave up on the music and retrieved her cleaning cloth. She ran it idly over the bench where she stood. You’re assuming she had a heart. She smiled grimly.

Kate hesitated. Then: I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt, she said.

That night Cress told Kieran about the funeral. I didn’t know Angela well, she said as they finished dinner, but I’m going. I thought you might like to come with me. It’s on Monday. She put her knife and fork together on her empty plate, picked up her water glass. Kieran had never been to a funeral. He knew what it was though. The definition was there in his notebook: the ceremonial disposal of bodies. He’d written it down years before, when it was just an interesting word, not something he had to put together with a person. Just a word, not real.

Sitting across from Cress, the remains of beef casserole on his plate, he tried to get his head to link them up – funeral and Angela. He stared at the leftover chunks of carrot, the smears of gravy. It was just carrot and gravy. It didn’t help. Cress seemed to be searching the plates for answers too. No, he said finally. No. I don’t think I’ll come.

They sat at a table that looked over Broken Beach, over a sea that heaved and glittered in the silver light. They made small talk for a while and Laura decided she liked the way Fergus Martin looked, clear greenish eyes and wild hair combed back from his face. She ordered wine and when the waiter left she said, You know, I’d imagined you were some crusty old bohemian lawyer with egg yolk on his tie. Who took pity on painters and writers. She picked up her knife and fork and switched them around.

You got it half right. He nodded towards the cutlery. You’re left-handed. They were watching each other.

Right-handed. I eat left-handed. Which bit? The ‘bohemian’ or the ‘pity’? She smiled and sat back and crossed her arms, looking from his face to his shirt, a green and brown batik. He smiled but didn’t reply; picked up his empty wine glass, twisting its stem. So she turned the conversation to her mother’s small bequests, letting him talk about beneficiaries. Then he said, How are you going with it all? The house, the paperwork.

The afternoon and all its uneasiness lodged in her head. Confused, she said, shrugging. All this stuff she’s left. Jewellery, documents. She frowned, imagining the typewritten words piled hastily in the school port. It could be anyone’s. There’s nothing there that makes me think: my mother.

Fergus smiled an infuriating smile. Maybe that’s because she was someone else, as well being as your mother, he said.

Laura fought off impatience. Yes, she said. But I’m looking for the person I knew – mother, whatever.

Which documents are you talking about? Fergus leaned back in his chair and rubbed a spot on the back of his neck.

There’s some clippings. Bits of stories from papers and magazines. Phrases, paragraphs, things like, ‘My grief created someone else’s joy’. Someone said that, at an inquiry or in an interview. Laura looked up from the table directly into Fergus’s eyes. I can tell you right now, she said, it wouldn’t have been Angela.

He gave a low whistle. That’s a tough call, he said.

She would never have used those words. Not the word ‘grief’. Not in my hearing, Laura said. Thinking: She would never have said it and would deny that she felt it, even as she painted it on canvas and played it on her record player. She called me a sook if I cried when I fell over or wasn’t asked to a girl’s birthday party. She’d say, ‘Don’t whinge, it won’t help. Toughen up.’ And after a while, I did. She played with the edge of her napkin. So it makes me a bit cynical, she said. Why did she leave me this stuff? Why didn’t she just tell me before?

There was a pause as the wine arrived and they ordered plates of fish. Then:

Do you know anything about adoption? he said.

Laura filled their glasses. A tea-light candle struck chinks of light through the wine. Fergus tapped his glass against hers and didn’t wait for a reply. My mother’s sister got pregnant at seventeen to the local copper’s son. In 1949. His raised his eyebrows. You can imagine the reaction.

Laura swallowed a bigger mouthful of wine than she’d intended. It was cold, very cold. She put a hand to her chest where the liquid burned momentarily. Fergus said: When I was a kid she was just this dotty aunt. Nerves, they called it then. She hardly spoke. She’d come and stay and just stare at the TV, or chain-smoke, sitting on the back stairs. I didn’t take much notice. Then just after I finished law school she jumped off a cliff in the national park behind Angourie.

He took a swig of wine. Mum asked me to look after the legal stuff, to tidy up her affairs. There wasn’t a lot – she’d never married, but she’d left her jewellery and some cash to the child she’d given up. He grimaced. It was in an old suitcase at my grandmother’s house, tucked under Sylvie’s bed. The jewellery, the money, and some letters she’d written that had been returned. In amongst it there was this small moth-eaten teddy bear. Later, when I’d looked into the whole adoption thing, I wondered if she’d made it for him. Maybe even before he was born, imagining she might keep him.

Laura looked up as the bistro filled and voices and laughter rocked like a tide around the room. What was that whole adoption thing? She was watching a young couple lean towards each other across a table, their faces open, undefended.

An industry! He placed his palms flat on the table. Based on shame, on bad girls who had illegitimate babies. Girls who were told they’d be redeemed if they gave their babies up.

Their food arrived and they fell quiet. Laura regarded her barramundi. She said: But for Angela? She chewed, thinking. My father stayed, after all.

Fergus skewered a piece of snapper and began to eat. Then he stopped and said, She wasn’t married when the baby was born. He looked at her. There was a conversation I had with Angela. The day she brought the case for you. She wanted to clear up some legal things, and I asked her if she’d ever tried to contact the boy, if she’d ever lodged an application.

Laura had been intent on her plate but now she laid down her fork.

She said no. She said, that was part of the deal.

The deal?

The moral equation. That’s what she meant. What she said. The trade. You lose the baby, but the baby gets a good life. Fergus shifted around in his seat, pushed his sleeves up. The candlelight caught the auburn hairs on his forearms, turning them gold. She said, ‘He’ll be better off.’ But that’s what they told them, then. That’s what they told Sylvie. You’re young, you’ve got nothing. There are married couples with homes and jobs who can give your baby everything.

Then he leaned towards her. She thought she could smell lemons, or limes, or both. These girls didn’t want to give up their babies, Laura. They were bribed. Told it would all be for the best.

Laura blinked. Considered. Then said: But why didn’t she try to find the boy aferwards?

I think she had to believe the bargain worked, at least for him, he said, and shrugged. It seemed to be the only way for her to survive. In her mind he went to a rich and happy family, and had a good life, a wonderful life. She imagined him happy, surrounded by things, well educated. She didn’t want to intrude on that, she said. And – he paused again, then: I can’t remember the exact words – but she stood up, I thought she was ready to leave – and she said something like, ‘He wouldn’t have wanted to see me. I was the one who gave him up.’ That’s what my aunt believed too. That she’d given away her goodness along with the baby. That she was no longer worthy of anything.

Her goodness. Laura turned to look at the sea. Images of her own daughter rolled in and out of her vision as the water heaved and fell. Kate’s tiny, perfect face in the moments after birth. The way she looked in sleep. And her own triumph and pride in having done this thing, growing, birthing this perfect being. Her goodness.

She turned back to Fergus. I just can’t buy all that, she said flatly. You’re assuming it was the same for everyone, that Angela was just like Sylvie. But there’s no teddy bear in my school case, Fergus. I can only go on my own experience, the mother I grew up with. If she had nerves, they were made of steel.

Cress watched her grandson’s face, set, unknowable, as he cleared the dinner table. He slid the dinner plates together, gathered the cutlery and hesitated over the pepper grinder and the salt. I’ll bring them, she said, pushing back her chair. You go off now, I’ll wash up tonight. He grinned widely at her and put everything down again. Go on, she said as he kissed her cheek.

He stepped away and then stopped. But it’s ‘The Bill’, he said, it’s Thursday.

Cress was already on her way to the kitchen. She waved over her shoulder. Not tonight, she said. Before long she could hear Emmy Lou singing something that sounded like a lament: We lift up our prayer against the odds/And fear the silence is the voice of God. She listened to the song as she ran water into the sink and pushed a cloth over benches and stovetop. How many times had she heard this song, this album? Somehow it had embedded itself in her memory, and she found herself anticipating the next lyric, and the next. We are ageing soldiers in an ancient war...

She ran a brush around the dishes, her thoughts lost in its circular motion and the fluorescent shine of the suds. Was it the song that filled her eyes – ridiculously, unexpectedly – with hot, unfamiliar tears? She blinked them away, her hand continuing its circle around the edge of the plates. It had never made her cry before. The thought prompted action: she flicked her fingers free of suds and picked up a tea towel to dry them. But she found herself inside the same circle of sadness as she dried the plates, around and around and around.

Half an hour later, polishing the kettle and toaster and shuffling the canisters into a tidy line, she heard the music stop, and then the sound of the shower. The song, she knew, only added to a feeling that descended as soon as Kieran decided he wouldn’t go with her to the funeral. Right up until then she’d felt a kind of calm about the day, had seen herself, composed, dignified, approaching the grave with her grandson at her side. She folded the polishing cloths and returned them to the cupboard, filled the kettle for tea.

By the time the tea had drawn and she was pouring two cups and stirring sugar into one, she knew that Kieran had buffered her from this all along. That, for longer than she had ever admitted, Kieran had protected her.

They walked to the car park, looking up at stars shuffling around the southern sky. Fergus asked her about her work, and the orchard, and she suddenly wished only to be there, in those brown Umbrian hills, the night air thick with light over the trees. She wanted the life she had before this new knowledge, without it. Despite the constant financial fight to keep the orchard alive, the pleas to governments and councils, that life seemed incredibly simple now, innocent.

It’s in Umbria, she said. That’s where I live for most of the year. Trying to salvage old trees, old varieties of fruit. Apples, pears.

Like an outdoor museum.

Exactly like that.

So you’re an archaeologist. A botanical one.

They reached her car. She reached into her backpack for keys and said, Did you know that pear trees can live for a hundred and fifty years? More.

He dug his hands into his pockets and looked at her, serious. No, he said, I didn’t.

Laura drove home with weariness seeping beneath her skin. She was thinking that she would call Alvaro over the next couple of days, not to check on him but to feel for a moment or two the shrinking of distance that telephones provided, to feel, even to pretend, that she could walk out the door and into the loamy field among all her trees, bend to their leaves and their individual odours, dip her hands in that soil.

Back at Angela’s house she leaned against the car in the darkness, trying to see beyond it to the shapes of the trees next door, where it all began. Where, as a child, she’d retreated from the painful roses, from the house, from the shed with its windows and silences too easily broken, to big-limbed trees that offered, she saw now, a rough and masculine kind of comfort. Clambering around the reaching branches of mango and mulberry, she’d felt her own imagination arch and weave, felt for the first time the limitless spread of the possible. The glossy beauty of her own potential.

That, she thought as she climbed the front stairs, desperate for bed, was what she would like to have said to Fergus. It was nothing about archaeology, really, it was about being a beneficiary. Those old trees, she would have told him, make us more human. We owe them. She began to undress as she felt her way through the dark, hands blindly on tabletops, railings, doorways, peeling off shoes, jeans, shirt so that when her hands found sheets and mattress she simply folded herself into them. As she fell into sleep she had an image of the original Fiorentina, limbs extended over the valley and the shoulders of all the generations she had sheltered.