‘Are you going to come in?’
Anders let out a long breath and nodded.
I looked away. It was his funeral. I just hoped they’d leave me out of it.
The hospital lift stopped on every floor, taking an age to get us up to Mum’s floor.
‘I’ll wait till you’re through,’ he said. ‘And talk to your mum then.’
‘What if I want to stay with her all day?’
‘Then I’ll wait all day,’ he said. The lift doors opened and he walked out, leaving me standing there.
I rushed to catch him up. ‘What if she doesn’t want to talk to you?’
He was walking fast, so I had to run every few steps to keep up. ‘She has to talk to me, Henry. At least this once. After today, it will be up to her.’
That stopped me in my tracks. ‘What about me?’
His eyes were puffy and bruised from lack of sleep. ‘That’s what Lydia and I need to talk about,’ he said.
He’d brought a bag with his sketchbook and pencils, and settled into a chair in the corridor down from Mum’s ward.
He was too far away to hear what went on between me and Mum. For that, at least, I was grateful.
‘He didn’t want us, Henry. He didn’t want you, and he didn’t want me–’
‘Then why did he keep trying to find us? Why did you keep running away?’
She bit her lip. This was the bit that I didn’t understand.
‘You were such a beautiful baby.’ She was trying not to cry; I could hear it in her voice. I kept my eyes on my thongs, on the hangnail on my grubby big toe.
‘I couldn’t believe anything could be so perfect. I couldn’t believe that I could loveanyone the way that I loved you–’
She grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. ‘I had never spent a night away from you.’ The fierceness in her voice forced me to look up. ‘When that first letter arrived, I was so angry ... I sent it back unopened: Not known at this address. Then just to be safe, I moved house.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I was afraid.’
‘Of Anders?’
She hesitated and something broke inside her. ‘Of him wanting you. Of him wanting to take you away from me.’
The tears were flowing now. ‘You were all that I had, honey-bun. You’d started school and I was terrified he’d want you for half the holidays ... that there would be weeks on end when I wouldn’t be able to see you–’
So she had run. And kept on running.
‘You don’t know that,’ I said finally. ‘You don’t know what he wanted, because you didn’t take his calls and you didn’t open his letters.’
I gently extracted my hand, stood up and walked out of the room. From the end of the corridor, Anders saw me coming. He closed his sketchbook, stood up and waited for me.
He’d been waiting a long time.
‘You need to talk to Mum,’ I said and kept on walking.
I walked out of the hospital, across the road, past the golf course and down to Centenary Pool. The lady on reception let me raid Lost Property.
I don’t know how many laps I did or how long I stayed there, but when I came back, Anders was gone.
Mum was sitting quietly in a seat near the window, a large notebook clasped to her chest. I pulled a chair up next to her and waited.
‘I thought he didn’t care,’ she said finally, her eyes tracking the ceaseless flow of cars and buses down below. ‘But I was wrong.’
She seemed calm, as though the storm had finally passed. She tore her eyes away from the window and fixed them on me.
‘So ... do you like him?’
The question kind of threw me. I shrugged, then nodded.
‘Would you like to keep seeing him?’
I nodded again. ‘If that’s all right with you.’ I hesitated. ‘Does that mean we can stay where we are for a while?’
She thought about that. ‘Yes, I think so. That’s probably a good idea.’
I leaned back in my chair and let out a long rattling breath. She reached across and slipped something large and flat onto my lap.
‘Andy – sorry, Anders – left these for you.’
A small flat booklet in a plastic cover lay on top of an artist’s sketchpad. A brand new one with the name ‘Anders Neilson’ scratched out and ‘Henry Hoey Hobson’ written above it.
I opened the cover of the sketchbook and turned the thick creamy page.
It was a head-on portrait of a butterflier in mid-stroke. Anders had captured the powerful lines, the surge of strength through the shoulders of the swimmer as he reared up out of the water–
I looked closer. It was me. My lips were open, gulping air ... and glittering at the corners of my mouth were two sharp canines...
I burst out laughing.
Anders had drawn me with vampire teeth.
A bit of Mum’s dazzle crept back into her smile. ‘He did that while he was waiting. He thought you might like to have it.’
I closed the sketchbook and the little flat book slid onto the floor.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, reaching down.
‘It’s a bank book,’ she said. ‘I don’t think they make them anymore. It’s like a savings account without the keycard.’
I opened it up. Inside were columns and dates and amounts. The first entry, dated more than twelve years ago. A deposit. Five dollars. The same as the next one and the one after that. A whole page of five-dollar deposits at more or less regular intervals.
On the next page it jumped up to ten. A page or so later, to twenty. As I leafed through, the amounts grew steadily larger, the intervals, a little longer. The final entry made my eyes pop, a whopping thousand dollars, dated a month ago. The balance, recorded in the far right column, was mind-boggling.
‘I don’t get it–’ I frowned up at Mum. ‘Why did Anders leave me this? What’s he been saving up for?’
‘Read the name on the account.’
I looked down to where she pointed. I’d been so caught up in the columns of figures I hadn’t noticed the name typed neatly across the top of the book.
Henry Hoey Hobson.
For more than twelve years, he’d been saving up for me.