Chapter 9

Beth

By the time Saturday lunch came around again, I had drawn and redrawn the distribution lines of the lotto win several times over. I had settled on what I would give my family: $10,000 each for Jarrah and Elijah and $15,000 for my parents, and I had rehearsed the speech I planned to deliver. I considered holding off my announcement until the money had landed in my account so I could present them with a cheque as well as the news. But I figured it was probably good to give them a few days to digest the information before handing over the money.

Gran was a different kettle of fish. Of course, I wanted to share my good fortune with her, but I suspected she would refuse cash; she had the means to buy whatever she wanted or needed. Instead, I planned to offer to upgrade her camera or pay for a trip. Or maybe I could track down a taxidermied unicorn head to go with her new jackalope? I decided it was best to ask her what she’d like.

I pulled up at Gran’s house to collect her for lunch, climbed out of the car and made my way to the front door. Since I had decided to purchase a new car, I had become increasingly irritated by the need to climb over the passenger seat. I had put up with this exit method for years without feeling inconvenienced. In fact, I became defensive when people ridiculed my car’s quirks. But I looked forward to having a vehicle that I could get into without performing an acrobatic manoeuvre and that had ‘reliable’ as one of its key features. When I test-drove the hybrid car, I had decided to buy the model with a leather interior and tinted windows. They were modest luxuries, I told myself, and ones that would aid resale. But since then, the fabric seats that often gave me a static zap and lack of sun visors in my current car had suddenly become unbearable.

‘Gran,’ I called out, opening the front door. ‘It’s just me.’

‘Darling,’ she cooed, appearing from the kitchen. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m good,’ I answered, bending down to hug her as she arrived in front of me and then recoiling when I saw a large, multicoloured bruise on her arm.

‘Jesus, Gran! What have you done to yourself?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she replied dismissively. ‘I’m on a new blood pressure medication that can cause me to bruise easily. It doesn’t hurt, it just looks bloody awful.’

‘How did you do it?’

‘It was silly, really. I knocked my arm at the herbarium when I was putting away a new specimen.’

When she wasn’t traipsing around the bush checking on orchids, Gran volunteered in the state herbarium to catalogue new species records. She and a team of volunteers gathered in a lab to attach newly collected specimens to special parchment, using dental floss – a hardy and trusted material. They applied barcodes, details of when and where it was found, and a label with whatever name it had been given. Then they put it in a special plastic container, inside a climate-controlled, fireproof vault alongside records that were collected on early European expeditions by the likes of Bruni D’Entrecasteaux, Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders.

As we got into the car and drove towards my parents’ house, Gran told me that the specimen she’d been working on was a new species of mistletoe. A softly spoken botanist whom I’d met on a field trip a few years back found the plant while he was surveying for wattles. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of plants in the north-west and figured that if he didn’t recognise it, it was probably new to science. He was right.

‘You should have seen his face when he saw the specimen carrying his name,’ Gran recounted. ‘He was absolutely chuffed. And so he should be; it’s a great honour.’

‘I’ve always thought botanists are lucky they get plants named after them,’ I mused. ‘I feel for the entomologists, who have their life’s work honoured by the naming rights of a newly discovered cockroach or dung beetle, or the parasitologists who work with parasites.’

She chuckled.

With only a few minutes’ drive left until we arrived at my parents’ place, I sought to steer our conversation away from whether the naming of a North American slime-mould beetle Agathidium bushi – after George W Bush – had been intended as an honour or insult, and instead towards my recent financial windfall.

‘Gran,’ I began, seizing a brief moment of pause. ‘Do you want for anything? I mean, is there anywhere you wish you’d gone? Anything you wish you’d bought? Anything you wish you’d done? Or anything you’d like to have another go at?’

‘Goodness me, darling. That’s a deep question for a Saturday morning. What’s brought this on?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ I lied. ‘I’m just curious if there’s anything you regretted not doing. Or seeing. Or buying.’

‘No. Not really,’ she said, her head tilted slightly in thought. ‘I have all I could possibly need. I’m happy and healthy and comfortable. And I’m surrounded by a loving family and good friends. I’ve enjoyed a rich, full life …’

Her inflection went up, and the sentence hung as if incomplete.

‘Go on,’ I encouraged, braking at a set of red traffic lights and taking the opportunity to study her face for clues.

‘Oh no,’ she said with a little shake of her head. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Please, Gran. What were you going to say?’

She fiddled with the dangly beaded earring that hung from her right lobe.

‘Well … since you’ve asked. I’ve always wondered what happened to my first love.’

I snapped my head around to look at her. I had expected her to say ‘I’ve always wanted to see the Amazon’ or ‘I’d rather fancy a grand piano’, which I would have satisfied with an all-expenses-paid trip, or a surprise delivery of a Yamaha. Tracking down a long-lost lover was not what I had anticipated. I doubt I would have been any more shocked than if she’d told me she wanted to try heroin.

‘Your first love? Who was that?’

It had never occurred to me to ask if she had been with anyone before Grandpa, and she’d never volunteered it. I wondered if Mum knew anything about this mystery relationship.

‘Gerry Burnsby,’ she replied, her voice slightly breathy.

‘You’ve never mentioned him before,’ I said, doing my best to keep my eyes on the road now the traffic had started moving again.

‘Of course not, darling. It’s ancient history. We studied botany together at university and lived in the same college. Gerry was from the UK but was studying on a government-sponsored exchange in Australia. We were so in love.’

‘So what happened between you?’

She sighed deeply. She was stroking her thumb on the back of her opposite hand, which she routinely did when she was reading or when her mind wandered elsewhere.

‘Gerry went back to London. We promised we’d write to each other, and even made plans for me to visit when I finished my degree. But I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and never received a reply.’

‘My goodness, Gran. I’m so sorry. Did you ever find out what happened?’

‘Our relationship was … complicated,’ she replied tentatively.

‘Complicated? How?’

‘It was a different time back then, darling. You couldn’t just “hook up” with whomever you wanted.’

She used her fingers to create air quotes around ‘hook up’ to indicate it was a concept that was not familiar to her generation.

‘Gerry’s family was noble, and there were certain …’ she paused to search for the right word, ‘obligations that came with being born into a world of such extreme wealth and privilege. They would not have approved of our relationship at all.’

‘What did your family think?’ I asked. ‘Surely they would have been keen to welcome an aristocrat into the family.’

‘No one ever knew we were together,’ she said wistfully. ‘It was just the two of us, in our own little bubble. Just Gerry and me. It was lovely, actually. But it meant that no one understood how utterly devastated I was when it ended.

‘Anyway,’ she chirped after a moment, with a little shudder of her head, as if shaking off the memories. ‘About six months after Gerry left, I met your grandpa. Then we got married and lived happily ever after.’

She smiled at me, but I could tell she wasn’t telling me the whole story.

‘Did Grandpa ever know about Gerry?’

‘No. Well … no, not really.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, it’s all ancient history now. I probably shouldn’t have even brought it up. I don’t know what made me think of it.’

As I put my indicator on to turn into Mum and Dad’s street, I wondered if I could use my winnings to help resolve the mystery around Gerry. I could hire a private detective to find him and arrange a reunion. Or perhaps I could enlist the help of a historian to work out whether there was an explanation for why he never wrote.

‘You’ve been to the UK lots of times since you were at uni,’ I said. ‘Did you ever try to get in touch?’

‘No. I never did. I thought about it a lot and spent many nights planning what I would say if we ever saw each other again. But it wouldn’t have been fair to your grandpa while he was alive, and I haven’t been to the UK since he died.’

We pulled up outside my parents’ house and made the journey up the front path. As we reached the front door, Gran turned to look at me.

‘I know you don’t believe in fate, Beth,’ she said earnestly. ‘But if things had worked out with Gerry and me, none of you would exist. And I wouldn’t change that for anything.’

I exaggeratedly squinted my eyes at her, partly in gest, and partly because I hadn’t heard Gran – a trusted voice – speak of fate like that before. It was unnerving.

The front door opened, revealing my dad standing in the doorway wearing one of Mum’s old kimono dressing gowns, white socks and thongs.

‘Konichiwa,’ he said, with his hands in a prayer position, bowing his head. ‘Anyone for sushi?’