2

As Professor John Young sat back behind his desk, he whispered the words again. ‘The only redemption we have is when we understand the way we have affected other people’s lives.’ His nerves pulled within him.

When his daughter Lucy had died seven long years ago, John had felt as though everything was swimming in a different direction to him. His grief had spun around him and against this swirling tide he had failed to be an anchoring strength for either his wife, Louise, or his elder daughter, Jessica. Lucy had been eleven. The senselessness of her death swallowed him; his grief was an abyss.

After Lucy’s death he had, by chance, met Charmaine and left Louise to be with her. Since then he’d been estranged from his only other child. Jessica was stubborn and unyielding. She never forgave his abandonment of her after Lucy’s death and she nurtured a bitter resentment that he was now too frightened to face. He never blamed Jessica for taking her mother’s side. And now, in dark moments, he admitted to himself that her unrelenting hatred of him was justified.

He recalled Simone’s comment: ‘Failing to understand the effects of our actions on the people around us is not against the law but in the moral sense, it is a crime.’ And Jessica kept coming to mind.

When he met Charmaine she’d seemed the only way he could save himself. He was selfish, possessed with such consuming grief, but Charmaine had been renewing, bringing freshness and hope back into his life. They planned a future together, a new beginning. He’d wanted more children desperately - another Lucy - and had thought when he married Charmaine that she did too. That’s what she had said to him and he had believed her. She would lie curled up in his arms and he would tell her how beautiful she’d look when she became pregnant. She would tell him the names she liked - Jasmine, Tara and Chanel if it was a girl; James, Jackson or Jason if it was a boy. She would look at the Barbie dolls and children’s clothes when they went shopping. ‘So adorable,’ she would squeal.

But so many things turned out to be illusions that, once exposed, left only the dust of disappointment. Her promises of giving him a child now seemed like a hollow lure. The sanctuary he’d felt in his marriage throughout its first four years had vanished in the last two. She seemed as disinterested in him as he was with her and, with no children, their large creaky house felt cold and empty.

The spark of rescue that Charmaine brought to his life was now gone. He could no longer bring to the surface the inspiration to write poetry, his once beloved release. The words that slipped onto the pages from his hand now were merely the groans of an older, bitter man. He would crumple the thick white paper, feeling vacant, as though icy hands had dipped inside him to crush everything warm and breathing.

Shafts of late afternoon sunlight were coming through the window of John’s office, the warmth momentarily comforting him. If he closed his eyes he was back under the clear Italian summer sun, having just turned eighteen, falling in love. In those summer months he had felt immortal, fearlessly jumping from tall blonde cliffs into an endless turquoise sea. But as he reopened his eyes he felt as though he had always been acidly cynical, older than he really was in years, and the sun, no matter how hot it might get, did not seem enough to properly warm him.

In Simone he’d seen that enthusiasm so lost in himself, especially in the way she glowed when they talked about literature. He’d loved Lolita too, the lyrical way that Nabokov used language: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

He had forgotten until Simone had reminded him. She was animated, her face alive. Seeing that light in Simone made him want to reach out to her. ‘Don’t lose this,’ he wanted to say to her. ‘It’s far too precious. Once it’s gone, you might as well be dead.’

He had first glimpsed that shimmer when he read a paper Simone had submitted for his class. Her writing had been optimistic, original. When she made an appointment to see him, he matched the name on the paper to the face of the young woman who wore so many bangles to class that she jingled when she walked. She had stood out, with her long dark hair and dark features. He had assumed she was Spanish or Italian and was surprised to find that she was an Australian Aboriginal - the first he had ever met. He had felt flattered when she had sought him out, had wanted him to work with her. He felt paternal pleasure as he saw her develop her strong, sharp mind. He smiled as he thought of the way she would twirl strands of her hair around her finger when she was deep in thought.

John looked at the photograph of his wife framed in embossed silver. Her long dark hair and exquisite tulip-petal lips. Even though his love for her felt crushed, he could not deny her beauty was breathtaking. He turned the frame over, placing it face down on the desk. Exhaustion seeped into his muscles. He had not been sleeping well, lucky to catch more than a few hours a night, which left his days stained with fatigue. Once he had been frantic, untamed ideas spurting into his head. He scrambled to capture each shard of thought, prolifically writing his observations and opinions about law, power imbalance, injustice. He had been heralded as a genius by the age of twenty-five with the publication of two critiques of the legal system that had secured for him a meteoric rise within the elitist realms of his chosen profession. At the same time he had found a space - a creativity - away from the law in which he could compose his poetry. Now that man seemed forever lost. A ghost.

John looked through the papers in his in-tray - an invitation to a round-table discussion on Fellini and fascism, requests for talks, comments, references, advice. ‘Please read this’, ‘please give your comments on that’ - he left them all. Collecting his coat and scarf, he started the half-hour walk home.

It was getting dark earlier and the air had a suspended bite to it. He felt the light wind sweep across his face as he walked through the university yard, past the large brick chapel that was crowned with white columns and arches. For so many years it had seemed unchanged, he thought. John had gone through the ornate doors into the otherwise austere building on his first day as a student almost thirty years ago and it was as strong and solid now as then. He was the one who had aged from the athletic, understatedly handsome man he once was. His face still retained its boyishness but it was now carved with lines around his mouth, forehead and eyes; and the grey was seeping through his hair.

‘Thirty seasons have come and gone since I first came here,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Almost thirty times I have seen these trees watch their leaves burn and fall to the ground, stand naked in the snow, scratching the sky, until budding with life again in the spring. A pity we don’t spring to life again, renewed. A shame we only get one cycle and that we decay in the process.’

When John finally stepped through his front door, the large house was still. He took off his coat and scarf, hung them by the door and trudged to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and looked at the wrapped scraps of food. He did not know where his wife was but, if he was honest, he didn’t care if she never came home. He grimly closed the refrigerator door, no longer hungry.