Friday

At first, Cress did not recognise the woman standing next to the tall sideboard at the front of the shop. But there was something about her that made Cress pause and squint, something about the way she stood. The woman’s face was turned away, but even from there Cress could tell she was mesmerised, or lost in thought, her whole body still. Except her fingers, which felt their way along the polished silky oak sideboard as if she was blind.

Cress went back to her shelf, to the endless ordering of discarded china. Who would ever want all these ugly cups? All these plates that seemed immune to breakage. She pushed them into rough order and looked up at what was left on the shelf. A shadow loomed on her right: the woman was standing halfway up the aisle. Their eyes locked; a wave of anxiety rolled around her belly. Before she could turn away, pretending, ignoring, the woman moved towards her. Laura, she heard the woman say, or perhaps that was her own voice, unsummoned. Laura.

*

Kieran was making a sandwich. Two pieces of brown bread, buttered right to the edges. Right up to the crusts, he hated it if they were dry. He took a lot of care, the butter knife was a paintbrush in his hand, precise. The same with the peanut butter. It was more fun, really, because of its texture. He swirled it on, flourished the knife, concentrating. It had to be right. He pressed one slice on top of the other. Used the butter knife to cut the sandwich into four. Nursery squares, his mother called them. She laughed when he made them, nudging him in the ribs. But she always wanted hers done the same way.

He put the sandwich on a plate and dropped the knife in the sink, vaguely acknowledging it was one of Cress’s special ones. That lodged in his thoughts, and instead of returning to ‘Whiz Kids’, he wandered with his plate into the hallway, his eyes casual, searching out all the other special things. He chewed and nodded at them, one by one, ordinary and innocent on the hall shelf: a silver spoon, an old chipped cup, a doily. On a table at the end of the hall, a little tin soldier, scratched. He was there to guard the door to Cress’s room, but today the door was open, so Kieran kept wandering, eating his sandwich. There was the glass dish on Cress’s dresser, the Virgin Mary on the wall.

Mary didn’t seem to mind him, so he stood there with his plate, looking at her. The blazing heart. And was struck – he felt a physical jolt – by understanding. The blazing heart. That’s how his own chest felt, sometimes, when he looked at Abby. Full, bursting, ablaze. He lifted his gaze to her eyes. Did her heart hurt her? Her eyes were hurt. Yes, he thought, and felt the plate, empty now, slip from his hand to the floor. Unsurprised, he watched as it splintered into bright shards like Mary’s tears.

Kieran saved me, Cress said. They were sitting in a café Laura didn’t recognise, in a street that might have been familiar, beneath its new façade of glass and decking and steel, if she wanted it to be. But familiarity was something she was still not sure she needed, even as this old woman with eggshell eyes pulled her back to the past.

They had been there for fifteen minutes and Laura had barely said a word. She was already tired and restless when she’d walked into St Barnabas; the relentless heat and interrupted sleep had sucked out her optimism. She’d stopped briefly to look at some furniture at the shop door, then wandered down an aisle of cheap crockery and glass, thinking of her mother’s plates and cups. Turning into the second aisle she looked up to see, just metres away, an elderly woman with neat silver-grey hair pinned back behind her ears. She was wearing a straight linen dress belted at the waist, a gold bracelet. Lipstick. Her hands were busy with a shelf of cups; Laura’s overall impression was of tidiness, order. Laura stopped without knowing why. The woman turned from the shelf she was sorting. Her eyes flashed surprise first, or confusion; she pursed her lips briefly over possible sounds. Impossibly, Laura thought she heard her own name. She moved towards the old woman and was unsure, then, where her own voice came from. Hello, she heard herself say. I’m Laura. I’m looking for your grandson.

Cress was quiet, her lips still pressed together, even as they walked to the café, as they settled opposite each other at a square wooden table. When Laura began to explain the bequest, Cress had frowned. Then she finally spoke. For Kieran, she said slowly, inclining her neat grey head. She spoke very clearly, precisely. Into this tangled space walked a waitress with a black apron slung low on her hips. Coffee? the girl asked. Tea?

Orange pekoe, said Cress. And began to talk about being saved. I really do think he kept me alive. The waitress still hovered. Laura asked for espresso, watched the waitress tuck her order pad into a pocket in the front of her apron and walk away. Arriving when he did, just after Ed died.

She looked up. My husband, Cress said. Laura nodded. He was fifty-five. Simply stopped breathing in mid-sentence. That’s what they said, the people at the mill. They said he looked like he was thinking hard, trying to find words. Then he fell. As if he’d been tipped from his chair.

The old woman’s eyes were steady, but in her voice there was still surprise. Laura followed Cress’s gaze and watched a figure topple through air, the unfinished sentence suspended over a desk, over a chair.

As you can imagine, Cress went on, looking at Laura levelly, it was a very bad time. And the church was no comfort. Well, apart from the singing. She smiled. We had the whole choir at the funeral. The Requiem Canticles, beautiful – everyone said. I felt like I’d left my body myself.

Through the low background murmurs of the café Laura heard the old woman speak and thought, momentarily and madly, that Cress too might be singing. The tone, the pauses, the rhythm. The beautiful enunciation. Yes, Laura said, yes, but felt hollow, thinking of the short service she had planned for Angela, the absence of ceremony.

Their tea and coffee arrived in a clatter of pots and cups and spoons. Cress watched the girl as she retreated. Waited until she was almost out of sight before turning her head to say: And I think I’d like some scones. The girl stopped, glanced around, but Cress had turned back to the table and was organising her tea.

Laura looked up at the girl blankly, and shrugged. Two serves, she said.

The rest of it, the church – Cress shrugged too, playing with sugar. Nothing. Gone. But then – she withdrew her hands, they disappeared into her lap – I thought it was something temporary. People go in and out of faith, I’ve watched them. I think I just felt a bit negligent, a bit stupid really, as if I’d misplaced something valuable. Put it down somewhere and then couldn’t find it again.

One hand reappeared. She poured tea. I still went through all the motions. I’d walk outside at night and look at the sky. I’d ask why. He was too young, I’d say. It’s too early. Stirred, tapped the spoon softly on the side of the cup. She half smiled, tasted it, then held the cup with the fingers of both hands. Too early! She looked into Laura’s eyes. As if there was a grander plan. As if it was anything more than bad luck.

Laura drained her cup. The coffee wasn’t strong enough or hot enough. She felt her chance, pushed away the cup and opened her mouth to speak. As she did the waitress materialised with a tray and filled the table with scones, butter and jam. Ah, Cress breathed, lowering her cup. She reached for the plate. I miss scones. The only cake Kieran will eat is date loaf.

Kieran stood for a moment, his empty hands tingling, surveying the scattered pieces of china. He was thinking of waves slapping against rocks, the explosion of water; there were elbows and stars and triangles of china all around the room. He hurried to get the dustpan, dragged the brush in wide arcs across the wooden floor. Some of the pieces it retrieved were tiny, chips and slivers that would reveal him if Cress found them with her feet. He redoubled his efforts, pushing the brush beneath her chair, around the dresser, under the bed. Where his insistent sweep dislodged something solid, pulling it partly out with the brush. He peered more closely beneath the drapes of the bed covers.

Between the movements of tea pouring and drinking, Cress watched Laura’s face. Her belly had been bubbling with nervousness since they sat down; she felt she was perched on the edge of something and might fall. Her fingers, she realised, were twisted around the handle of the teapot too firmly, there was a dull ache in her joints. She took a breath, collected herself. What will be will be, she found herself thinking. So she listened, or pretended to. She could often learn more from a person’s face, she had found, than from anything they had to tell her.

So in the silences, she kept watching. She was searching for the things that had survived, whatever was there, innate, from when Laura was a child. Her memory had its own snapshot of the girl: in this she had the luminous but unforgiving demeanour of youth. She’d been a couple of years above Shelley at the local school, Cress recalled. This was before the town exploded, a time when faces might still be known. This face, anyway: Cress had always known this face. What Cress remembered was tallness, an angular body still finding its shape. And bright, restless eyes too often soured with resentment, eyes that regarded the world around her and found it wanting: her school, her town, her own slow and dreary movement towards adulthood, and freedom.

Now she watched Laura toy with her espresso – espresso – and tried to see that girl. Perhaps it was something about her mouth. The creases at its corners. They might have been dimples when she was young – now they creased even when she grimaced. She was a serious woman, Cress thought, serious even about herself. She remembered the teenager passing her on the street, the furious eyes. Well, lots of teenagers looked like that. It passed. With Laura, the fury had dissolved to a wry watchfulness, as if she too was anticipating a blow. Was ready for it.

But then, Cress reminded herself, Laura had just lost her mother. Had become, at whatever age she was – fifty-two, fifty-three? – an orphan. Did it matter to her? She remembered the death of her own parents, the unexpected shock of the abyss that opened suddenly between her and her own death, now that they were gone. Mortality stared straight at her, with no one left in between.

Now the younger woman was looking at her intently. Cress, she said, and Cress found herself surprised by gentleness, tell me about Kieran. Why do you think he saved you? Laura held a butter knife in her right hand. Cress noticed the small bulge of muscle beneath the short sleeves of her T-shirt.

She picked up the flat half of her scone. Not nearly as interesting as the top, all crisp and uneven. She sighed. He did what God couldn’t, she said, then looked up. Born a week after Ed died. Imagine those two days on the calendar, year after year. She scooped up butter, lots of it, then jam. Red. Kieran has some kind of syndrome, something obscure. She spread the jam to the edges of the scone, leaving no gaps. But we didn’t know that until later. For a while there was just a sense that he was different somehow, that he wasn’t quite with us. He took ages to respond to things, voices, light. She bit into the scone and chewed slowly, looking over Laura’s shoulder.

But despite the butter, the sweetness of jam, the scone was dry in Cress’s mouth. She struggled to swallow. Too many thoughts, there were always too many thoughts. She swigged tea to wash it all away. After all the tests I had this dead feeling, she said. It was as if I was expecting it, as if I was waiting for the next blow to fall. I don’t know why. For a while it felt like punishment, another cross to bear. It took me a while to realise it wasn’t that at all. That he was a gift. To me, almost more than to his parents.

Kieran sat on the floor with the parcel of white cotton, the gathered shards of china beside him forgotten. His hands were on the oblong shape, his fingers flared, divining its contents. Already, of course, there were things he knew it wasn’t: hard things, like books or plates or glass. It wasn’t a box. Not unless it was a miniature, hidden beneath the layers of fabric he was sure he could feel through the sheet. Within seconds he had convinced himself it was treasure, folded over and over in disguise, just waiting for his hands. A secret treasure. And this was the other thing he knew: that it was contraband. One more piece for Cress’s hoard, for sure.

He didn’t wait to open it. But he was careful, noting the way the sheet was tucked, memorising the creases. Finally, when the dress was revealed and he held it at arm’s length before him, he was disappointed. A dress. An old one. He shook it, making sure it was just a dress, that it hid nothing else, no secret pockets or compartments. It didn’t look like treasure at all.

Laura looked at Cress across the scattering of crumbs on the table, the smears of jam in a dish. The old woman looked directly back at her. She appeared to be waiting for something, expecting some response. Her eyes glittered briefly; then she shrugged. Laura said: And he lives with you? Not with his parents.

He loves it here, Cress said evenly. It suits us both. And Shelley comes down a lot.

Suddenly the old woman leaned forward in her chair. Laura was startled, thought of a hungry bird, its beak jutting sharply. Laura, Cress said, narrowing her eyes again. Laura. Have you come here to talk about Angela?

The words dropped to the table between them, echoed back at Laura from the empty cups, the tea leaves in the strainer. About Angela, yes. And Kieran. She’s left him a painting – she stopped. She had never, she realised, got further in her own thoughts than this. I left this place a long time ago, Cress. Angela and I didn’t really know each other well. She stopped again, tilting on the edge of saying more, of saying too much. Now I’m trying to find out as much as I can. To find someone who might have known her better than me.

He knelt and slowly re-folded the dress, his hands deliberate, trying not to fumble. This happened once, in a momentary panic about fingerprints, and the dress slumped and fell over his knees. He leaned down close to the fabric, and then away, making sure, remembering he had washed his hands before making his sandwich. Then, as he rearranged the folds of the bodice, his fingers drifted over the beads, the tiny pearls.

He let them linger there, his fingertips reading the texture, now smooth, now hard, now oddly pliant. In the soft light through Cress’s window, the tiny shapes seemed alive, like oysters. Oysters and pearls, he thought, blinking at them. The jewels of the sea. This gladdened him. Perhaps it could be treasure after all.

I’d never heard your grandson’s name before the lawyer told me. Laura was playing with her empty cup, twisting it around, interrogating its sides as if it might tell her what she wanted to know. I don’t know anything about him. Where he lives, how old he is. But he’s the only person she’s left a painting to. In the Will. So – she looked up and shrugged.

Cress was staring at her now. Laura wondered if she had said too much. She wanted suddenly to be away from this woman’s gaze, away from her strange silences and mad eyes and inexplicably guilty hands.

Kieran and Angela were friends, Cress said at last, slowly. Unusual friends. Several seconds ticked over. Cress seemed to cast her net for the right reply. Finally, Unusual in their connection, she said. She was over seventy, to start with. He’s forty years younger. She stopped, frowned. But they seemed to meet as equals. That’s how it was for Kieran anyway, that’s how he talked about her.

Laura watched Cress hesitate. You have to know, Cress went on, that Angela chose Kieran. Not the other way round. She encouraged the friendship. Then stopped, questioning the truth of it. Well, that’s what I thought. But truly, I don’t suppose I know. How do we ever know these things? I’m still looking for ways to explain it.

After he’d replaced the parcel, removed the broken china, wrapped and buried it at the bottom of the wheelie bin, Kieran remembered the episode of ‘Whiz Kids’, still on pause on the video machine. He sat down and pushed the play button, but the relentless excitement of the host – which he could usually tolerate – grated against the quiet he’d carried with him out of Cress’s room. He gave it one more minute, long enough to hear someone spell hygiene with the ‘i’ and the ‘e’ round the wrong way, and ejected the tape.

Back in the kitchen, he took an apple from the fruit bowl, rubbed it thoughtfully against his trouser leg. Then walked outside, where the sun – bright, surprising – obscured and obliterated it all: the noises and surprises, even the glint of treasure. It coated him in happiness. He set off down the hill towards town, feeling loose in his skin. Don’t sit under the apple tree, he sang, kicking stones, with anyone else but me, anyone else but me, anyone else but me.

Cress sat toying with the uneaten part of her scone. It had all turned out to be much more complicated than she intended. She looked carefully at Laura’s face, watching for accusation. But Laura’s eyes were unbetrayed. Cress took a deep breath. She would have to tell her baldly, then, about Kieran. But she would have preferred questions. Questions that would lead her. She felt the weight of all the wrong ways there were to tell this story.

She wondered how to start. Beginnings were important, she knew, they had to be right. She watched a dry leaf flip across the brick floor of the café. Remembered Kieran’s face on the mornings after Angela’s. The weary elation. The sureness. Her own shock and wariness when she realised where he was going, who he was visiting.

Then she let the words tumble out. Partly in frustration at her inadequacy, partly because, in the struggle to explain, she was surprised by a new thought, one she didn’t want to speak. Angela, she saw suddenly, hadn’t just chosen Kieran, she had annexed him. His thoughts, his dreams. The word went around and around her head silently, while she spoke others out loud to Laura, explaining the night-time friendship, the smells Kieran brought home – oil paint and coffee, turpentine – and the music. He’d even seemed to look different, sometimes for days, his range of expressions altered. He seemed to expand, she heard herself say.

But the notion of annexation was still there, and she ran her hand over her head as if to pat the idea down, to keep it there. She wanted to think about it, the way it implied that Kieran was a territory, a possession, and Angela some superior power. Annexation, appropriation. Then it hit her.

Adoption.

Kieran walked down towards the fruit shop. Today there were pumpkins, big yellow halves mooning at him from the sidewalk bins. The sight cheered him. Cress had a pumpkin patch, an unruly thicket of vines and leaves that splayed out beyond the garden. Bold, she called it. Kieran loved it when she did, imagining the vine as a naughty child as it escaped the fence and made for the scrub beyond the clothes line. Sometimes, in the garden, he watched the plate-shaped leaves wilt in the midday sun, and monitored the tiny marbles bulging into fruit. Now he stood across the road from the shop, staring absently. Beside the pumpkins there were oranges in mounds. Open boxes of carrots. Today is a yellow day, he thought.

This was the corner where Abby always left him. Where she drew the line, assuming he wouldn’t follow, that what he knew about her stopped there. Some afternoons they’d wander down here to the shops, and he’d convince her to walk the whole block before she left. They’d walk up past the drapery, the offices, the snack bar and back again. Just to extend the moment. To push time out. She knew he did this, though, and he knew she knew. As soon as they’d done the loop she’d pull away, proving her separateness. He didn’t mind. They were separate. They were like an egg, he thought now, the yellow and the white. The thought pleased him. He liked eggs.

He was thinking egg-shaped thoughts when he caught sight of her, sitting on the ground at the edge of the park. She was brushing her fingers over the grass, staring intently. He sauntered up, crouched down beside her without saying a thing. Now he could see she occasionally plucked a stalk and examined it before casting it aside. His gaze moved between her face and her fingers. Finally she said: We’re looking for four-leafed clover.

He understood immediately and joyfully that ‘we’ was both of them, Abby and Kieran. Dropped to his knees and stared at the ground. Had to think for a moment, remembering. Four-leafed clover. Him and his mother looking, years ago. It’s good luck, his mother had said. But to Kieran’s eyes they all had four leaves. He knew he had to look very hard.

They worked silently together. It didn’t seem like a long time. Surely it was only two minutes later when Abby said, I’m bored, come on, and wandered off in the direction of the shops. He scrambled up, brushing grass from his jeans. Lucky lucky lucky, he said, following her.

They walked halfway up the block, stopping to look into shop windows. The newsagent’s was full of exercise books and pencil cases and there were school uniforms on little mannequins outside the draper’s. Abby paused at the big glass window. There were ladies’ dresses on display, ordinary dresses like Cress wore, some blouses. Abby stood pulling at her over-size T-shirt, twisting her hands in the excess fabric. It’s expensive here, she said. There’s better stuff at the op-shop. Cheaper.

Then her eyes fell on a choker of cheap glass beads on a shelf inside the window. There were bracelets and earrings too, silver with blue stones, others with green and yellow, necklaces of translucent, liquid chips. They look like rain drops, Kieran said, his hands on the plate glass. Or treasure, she breathed next to him. When I’m rich I’m going to have boxes and boxes of beads. I’ll wear a different colour every day.

Kieran looked from the window to Abby and back to the jewellery again. Beads and treasure. Come on, she said, tugging at his sleeve. But Kieran was slow, hoarding time. Thinking.

Do you want to come to my place tomorrow? he asked as she walked away.

The teapot was drained. So was the old woman’s energy, Laura thought, listening as Cress’s voice dropped, trailed away to monosyllables. She watched Cress twist her empty cup round and round with the tips of her fingers. So that’s what I’ve got, she thought. A dotty old girl with a Calvinist bent and an odd boy who walks at night. Still, the odd boy had known her mother. And in an apparently second-hand, unspoken kind of way, so had Cress.

Did you ever speak to Kieran about Angela? She was speaking to the top of Cress’s head, still bent over the china cup. The fine strands of hair, the silver hair clip. Laura felt a sudden bolt of tenderness for her, and for the old, old woman Angela would never be. There are so many things I’d like to find out. Things I’d liked to have asked her – But just then the waitress arrived with the bill. Laura felt the bubble of air around them deflate.

Out on the footpath they both hesitated. As the sea breeze flicked at their skirts, and lifted Laura’s hair and dropped it, she said: I’ve just discovered my mother had another child, before I was born. A boy. He was adopted out. She paused again and glanced at Cress. It was all kept secret, buried.

She looked out towards the ocean, and didn’t see Cress’s face, the movement of her eyes, the way her mouth opened and then closed again, words dying on her tongue. I don’t know why he was adopted or how and I don’t know why she didn’t tell me. Why she couldn’t. There was only the two of us.

She turned back; Cress’s face was wooden. She looked straight ahead and said, Well, we have to get on with our lives, Laura. Put things behind us. Your mother knew that, she must have.

The sea was pale in the heat, shimmering; small waves slumped to shore. They stood silently. Cars rolled past, and people; Laura brushed strands of dark hair from her face. She thought, how do you put a child’s whole existence behind you? But said instead, I’d like to meet your grandson, and fished paper and pen from her bag and scribbled out the number of her mobile. As she offered it, Cress took Laura’s hand in both of her own. The old woman’s palms felt velvety, like flower petals.

Laura drove slowly along the esplanade, watching clouds gather over the darkening sea. She wanted to think about Kieran, about the story Cress had told her, but it was the old woman’s face she kept seeing, on the windscreen, on the bitumen in front of her. The way she looked as she talked about ‘putting it all behind us’. As she shrugged off a lifetime of religion, spoke of life as just a series of coincidental events, good and bad. As if, these days, she believed nothing had meaning. Just as Angela had.

There was the citrus smell of approaching rain. Laura parked the car in a back street so that she could walk in the cooling air. Down past the town gardens, the library with its low verandah, the bowls club and then up the hill to the pink and green sandstone of St Mary’s Catholic Church. She stopped and leaned over the fence, admiring the stained glass and the little grotto with its blue-robed Mary. As a small girl she’d wanted badly to climb inside that grotto, to sit with Mary, to wear the white dress and veil of confirmation.

But Angela had been cynical about all religions, about denominations of every kind. Even Sunday School. Laura was jealous of the children who went – jealous even that they were never allowed to play on Sundays, when they seemed to turn into different people, people with brushed hair and patent leather shoes and hats and family lunches to go to. Had she actually seen them then, or just imagined seeing them? Shuffling into St Barnabas near the esplanade, or into St Mary’s, or the modest Methodist church just behind Broken Beach. They’d be all dressed up, and some of them – not the Catholics apparently – also went to Sunday School where there was singing, and stories. And at Christmas, a picnic, with sweets and three-legged races and a present for everyone. Even with the dressing up it sounded exotic to her, a club she was barred from and therefore wanted badly to join.

But Angela had tossed off her pleas with one word: hypocrites. Laura hadn’t even known what the word meant, not for the years she was placed with the tiny group called Others during religious instruction at school, all the years she wondered what a ‘confirmation’ was, the years she struggled to learn the words to the Christmas carols they sang at school in December, words everyone else already had by heart. Of course, Laura had loved the carols, had coveted the rituals and the robes and the belonging. Standing here now, her hands on the sandstone fence, she could smile. Angela never knew how lovingly her agnostic daughter had coloured in the nativity scenes in end-of-year art classes, or how often she and her friends played ‘communion’ with red cordial and arrowroot biscuits, or what it cost her to pretend that she and Angela, like all the other families she knew, didn’t ever eat meat on Fridays and always ate hard-boiled eggs on Easter Sundays. She turned from the church and wandered back down the hill to her car.

By the time she got back to the house Laura knew a storm was brewing. She took a glass of wine onto the front verandah, the word brewing in her head, teasing her. A storm brewing, she thought, suggested mischievous hands, at work for dark purposes. She remembered Cress blushing slightly, mocking herself and her own words: As if there was a grander plan. As if it was more than just bad luck.

Clouds were purpling the eastern sky, and wind gusted up the valley, snatching at leaves and hair. Laura leaned into it, breathing brine and eucalypt. She rubbed her arms, anticipating. Looked down from the verandah over the roof of the shed and the grass and the jumble of rocks and ferns. Tried to remember the name of the spiky green fronds that splayed against the dull tin of the shed. It occurred to her that Kieran, Angela’s odd friend, might know the name, might know this place better than she did.

A few fat drops of rain slapped onto the railing and onto the deck behind her. The light dimmed, and Laura tensed with excitement, as if the storm was a piece of theatre for which she’d paid admission. She looked around the sky. It was marbled in purple and grey, lit from behind by occasional lightning. To the east the sea and sky had washed together, obliterating the horizon. The world was a confusion of senses, upside down: the sky without stars, without sun or moon, and overhead thunder booming like the sea.

Laura hurried inside to close windows, the impulse automatic. Once again she felt some atavistic pull, her feet following old footsteps, her hands moving in old patterns, pulling down the sashes, locking them shut. It occurred to her that in London – in her part of London – the windows were always closed. She switched on lights and pushed back curtains, and settled down to enjoy the storm.

Cress washed her hands at the tap and slipped off her gardening shoes, paused to look at the sky as distant thunder thumped and rolled. She breathed in the scent of storm air, then turned inside. A piece of silverside was slow-cooking on the stovetop; she cleaned off the carrots she’d picked and added them to the pot. The words Kieran and Angela were unusual friends bubbled away with them. She stood with her hands in her apron pockets, her lips pursed, as if she could re-live the morning and stop herself saying things. The Requiem Canticles, I thought I’d left my body myself. She winced. Stupid, stupid.

She went into the lounge room and looked around for her book. It wasn’t on the arm of the chair where she’d left it. Hadn’t she? A tremor of irritation rippled through her. So much time was wasted in forgetfulness – minutes, hours she would never get back. These days she knew it was best, when something was lost, to stand still, to be calm, to let her mind and her eyes settle. Deep breath. She let her vision wander without urgency over the sofa, the floor, the top of the television. The coffee table. Kieran’s notebook was open there, words from a recent quiz scrawled across a page: remedy, daffodils, symphonic, repent.

From the notebook she bent slightly to look on the other side of the armchair. She half grimaced, half smiled. The corner of a hardback book was visible, lying where it had fallen from the armrest onto the floor, its bookmark beside it. She picked up Martin Chuzzlewit and sat down and began to hunt for her place.

Several minutes – was it? – went by. Cress put the book down and listened. The rain had begun, uneven at first, then drumming an even, reassuring beat on the tin roof. She pushed herself up from the chair, restless, thinking, What’s done is done, and all for the best. So, she thought, moving around the lounge room, straightening doilies, why do I feel like this? That I need, somehow, to account?

The room was in shadow now. She stood in front of the bookshelf, absently running her fingers along spines, shuffling and tidying. Noting the shape each book carved in the dust. Was prompted to clean the shelves there and then, but a crack of lightning intervened, stopping her hand, and it suddenly occurred to her: He still isn’t home. She limped into the kitchen, her legs stiff, to check the dinner and the time. The smell of meat cooking made her cheerful again, replaced any concerns about Kieran. He’d be along. He would, she told herself, come in the back door whistling, hungry, most probably wet from the downfall. Would, of course, want to eat before the ‘Quiz’. As this came to her, this image of her grandson, as she lifted the saucepan lid and leaned away from the steam, and as she caught the breath of meat and onions, in the same moment she knew what she had to do.

She walked into the lounge room where she’d left her handbag. Pulled out the creamy-coloured paper and peered at the writing. The mobile phone number and the 7 with a cross through it, the way it was written in Europe. Later, that 7-would seem stamped on her irises, she would see it everywhere, on her dinner plate, on the carpet, in the sky. Then she picked up the telephone and carefully pressed in Laura’s number.

The voice at the other end made her hesitate. This was a conversation she’d long imagined but never rehearsed. She searched for words and phrases in a momentary panic; stared at the paper that was still in her left hand, as if it was a cue. Outside thunder boomed and rolled and the phone line crackled with static.

Laura was saying: Hello, hello? I can barely hear a word.

Laura? It’s Cress. A pause. I need to speak with you. Cress could hear two lots of thunder, one at each end of the line, and rain smacking against tin. Static spat and fizzed and occasionally shrieked. She pursed her lips and swapped the phone to her other ear. Somehow the storm had made her brave, all that might and energy. It’s about your mother. I need to tell you something. Something from the past.

There was silence for a moment. Then Laura’s voice saying Cress? I don’t think I heard you properly. The crackling rose and fell on the line. This bloody phone.

But Cress was undeterred. I know about the adoption, she said, calm but loud. About the baby, the little boy.

Again, silence. Just the crashing noises of the storm running electrically between them. Cress stood with the weight of words in her hands and arms. She stared at the floor, where the number 7-appeared and disappeared over the carpet, and understood that she needed to keep speaking, while she had the strength. Already every part of her was saying: Stop. Hang up now. So she spoke loudly, and plain. She said: I was there, in the hospital, when the baby was born. I nursed there. I helped to arrange the adoption.

In the moments that followed she imagined the other woman’s reaction. She imagined Laura’s face, cradling the phone, the way her eyes might widen as meaning dawned. But she only heard: You were there? before static intervened again and clarity became impossible. So she gathered her energy and raised her voice and said firmly St Barnabas, come tomorrow down the line, not knowing if Laura heard her, or if the line was still alive. Then she lowered the telephone and placed it in its cradle.

In her bedroom she sat down on the bed and folded her hands on her lap. The room was dim with rain shadows but even so she could easily make out the face of the Virgin. The tears, the sorrowful eyes. For a long time Cress sat and looked at Mary’s face. She felt calm. Mary’s eyes helped, and so did the presence of the dress tucked away on the floor beneath her. She couldn’t see it or feel it, but it comforted her anyway, a cushion against the sharp bones of memory. She allowed herself to feel that for a little while. Then she stood, slowly, and straightened her skirt, and went out to switch on lights in the darkened house. As the kitchen blazed into life she saw the sprigs of parsley on the counter, and decided it wasn’t too late to make a white sauce.

At the highest point of the main road through the hills, behind a splash of emerald green grass, was the entrance to the national park and its walking tracks. Kieran seldom ventured here – at least not on the tracks. Whenever he did, the rainforest crowded in on him and he felt watched, jostled; the dimness and the animal patterns of the trees were vaguely threatening. He preferred to make his own way around, marking his own paths through. But he liked the big grassy picnic area, with its gentle slope and scattered tables and paddymelon droppings. He would choose a shady place at the edge near the flowering ginger plants and watch people come and go.

Today there were two small groups, a family spread out on a blanket with plates and bottles and cups, and a couple on their backs on the grass, their socks and walking boots discarded beside them. One was using a small pack for a pillow, and they both were still, possibly asleep. The family wasn’t very lively either. A woman lay on her belly flicking the pages of a magazine. There was a baby in a floppy hat beside her, and a man with his arms on his knees.

Being here made him feel close to Angela – she’d told him once she liked it here too. She would sit and watch all the families and couples, searching, she said, for what they had and she didn’t. Contentment. After they’d left she’d walk around on the grass, looking for signs, looking at anything they left, the imprint of a blanket, a plastic cup. Anything might be a clue.

Kieran glanced around the perimeter of the park, to where the forest shuffled its feet on the gravel of the car park. Everyone always said there was no noise up here. They spoke about the quiet. But to Kieran, these days there was music everywhere. Even here, crouched low, he was close enough to the trees to hear the prickling of birds’ feet in the mulch, and behind this, the steady slide of lizards, maybe snakes.

And then there were the shushing, secretive sounds of the breeze through thousands of leaves; sometimes he felt that leaf-sound collected itself as it skipped up the hills, moving up through endless trees until it reached him. Birds joined in, and the rattle of palm fronds, and it was as if his head was inside a song. Today it could be a lullaby, Brahms, he tried to remember when Angela played it. He looked over at the woman with her baby, and knew it was something to do with them, but didn’t know exactly what. For a while he was lost in the rhythms of the song, soothed as a small child. A blue-tongue appeared at the edge of the undergrowth, hesitated, cautious, then stalked into the sun. They both, man and lizard, cocked their heads at the other, agreeing to share the cloudy sunlight, the absence of movement.

Abby’s beads. Kieran thought about the drapery window, Abby’s words like beads themselves: When I’m rich, I’ll wear a different colour every day. A tremor of fear ran through him. He peered down between his feet, at the patch of ground that was its own world, soil, ants, grass. The enormity of what he had done seemed to stare back at him. He had invited Abby home, to come to his own house. He had never done anything like that before, had never invited anybody.

He looked up and breathed deeply, unsure how much time had passed. Now the air smelled of rain, and above the treetops the hazy clouds had turned blue-black and were advancing, it occurred to Kieran, like an army in dark tunics. A fretful wind scurried before them. Beneath the clouds the world had shrunk, compressed between trees and sky. Kieran shivered. He was still unsure about storms. Most people he knew enjoyed them, or said they did – Abby had told him once they were thrilling and he had taken that word away and examined it, turning it over and over, looking for a glint of truth.

Thunder, a tentative grumble, rolled around the eastern sky. At the far end of the green the family was packing up, the man chasing an errant hat across the grass. Kieran stood, but the lizard took fright – or perhaps it smelled the rain too – and scurried off into the bush. The woman scooped the baby onto her hip and hurried off towards the car park.

Kieran moved slowly, skirted wide around the picnic ground. The grass glowed in the storm light. As he walked down the hill his shoes scuffed loudly in the scree that edged the road, kicked thoughtlessly at split and bloated mangoes, turpentines, that had dropped from a late-blooming tree. By the time he got to Angela’s turnoff – hesitating, then walking on, resisting the lure of the house and the woman with the eyes – rain was falling, and he was back inside the lullaby and the story that went with it.

It was a conversation he remembered by its fragrance: the air had been thick with mango and frangipani, overripe mulberries. Later, whenever he smelled the hot curdled sweetness of fallen fruit, he would see a shrunken doll on a tiled floor, a perfect lifeless thing. That was how Angela had described her miscarried child: like a tiny doll, she’d said. Another boy.

That night, after her story, he’d walked home through dropped frangipani, with summer’s early sun smearing lemon and grey on a black sky, unable to get the images and Angela’s words out of his mind. They’d been talking about the paddymelons in the hills, the wary eyes, their tiny babies tucked in pouches like pieces of warm dough. They lose them, you know, she said, and within seconds, it seemed to him, meaning shifted, she was saying something else. For a while he struggled to follow: who was this person with a baby tucked inside her? He pictured a thumb of warm doughy flesh.

I was only half-way along when the pains came, she said. Or not quite. I knew then it must be a boy. I knew.

He’d wanted to ask why but she was going too fast. The pencil in her hand moved with her voice, arcing and circling across the paper. Brahms – it must have been – soared around the ceiling. I tried to pretend I wasn’t feeling it. I told August it was muscle strain. Well, it was in a way. I lay on the couch, talking to the baby – I wasn’t even sure how much of a baby it was by then, how developed ... I spoke softly, trying to calm the pain, to whisper it away. Please stop. I must have been half crazy, talking to this unknown baby, this unknown face. I was saying, please stop. I love you. I already love you. Stop.

Kieren’s own words had fled from him, all his hungry questions. He was still, had frozen with the teacups in his hands, the sugar bag under his arm. He was just watching Angela’s face, her eyes intent on her drawing. Was she crying? He didn’t know, but her voice cracked then. I had to go to the bathroom, she said, and that’s when it happened. I had to crouch down with the pain. I was calling out, and then – it was so sudden, it didn’t seem like a birth. I’d tried to pull a towel down for him but he was there before I could, on the cold floor. And you know, he was perfect. Toes, arms, fingers. Smaller than my hand but perfect. A tiny, tiny doll. She drew a long breath. I don’t know how long I sat there. Ages. When I looked up August was kneeling in front of me. He was quiet but his face was all broken. She looked up briefly. A boy. A boy, she said, her face unknowable, her breath shredded, who never breathed.

Kieran had waited, but there was no more. Angela wiped her left hand roughly across her face, her right hand paused over the drawing. The white sheet of paper bloomed with buds at various stages of opening, tiny tight fists, or petals just unfurling. Kieran didn’t register the flowers at all, though his eyes fixed themselves on the cup-like shapes and didn’t move. Then his own hands resumed their tasks, spooning tea into the teapot, boiling the jug. The sounds clicked and clattered into Angela’s silence. When the tea had drawn, he filled Angela’s cup and took it to her. He touched her arm and left it there by her side. His own tasted only of disappointment, and sadness, so he left it, still half-full, and walked away towards the door. Hesitated there, waiting for something, an instruction, anything. Then left, closing the door softly behind him.

Now, suddenly – it seemed sudden – he was home, at his own back door, as if that other walk home had been relived. Except that this time he was drenched, his clothes were heavy and cold and his face was running with rain. He stood beneath the overhang with the smells of the storm he’d barely noticed and the drenched garden, the rich, plum-pudding smell of wet fertile earth. Brahms was no longer with him, and he was glad. He didn’t want to think about Angela’s baby now. He wanted the sounds of the storm in his ears, the sounds of life.

The air was liquid grey, but through the dullness there was a beam of yellow light. He realised Cress was in the kitchen, that it was dinner time, and he was probably late. The ordinariness revived him, of the kitchen light and of his wet shirt stuck fast to his back and the cool wind on his arms. He forgot about the lifeless doll and sat down on the back step, the reassuring wood beneath him, and took off his boots. He whistled as he opened the door to the warmth and the fuggy aroma of corned beef.