Friday Brown (30 page)
Silence’s funeral and headstone were paid for by donations from people who never knew him but who wished they had. He wasn’t forgotten. He would have loved that.
I saw Bree and her family sitting in a circle, I heard them singing a low, joyful song.
AiAi had new sneakers that glowed white in the dark.
Joe was playing He-Loves-Me-Not, sprinkling petals over Carrie’s head.
Darcy wore a hoodie and most of her face was in shadow. Carrie whipped the hood away and tousled her head—shaven to the bone—and they started a slap-fight that ended in a hug.
And Wish. He was watching, like me. Standing apart. He was so like her he made my chest ache and I had to turn away.
I took the note I’d written for Silence and, instead of sticking it to his headstone with the others, I let the breeze carry it where it would.
The piece of paper flew. It soared—up, beyond the trees and into the clouds—and took with it the last few lines of Vivienne’s poem, perfectly remembered:
There in the silence of the hills,
I shall find peace that soothes and stills
the throbbing of the weary brain,
for I am going home again.
I love you.
Friday.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Grandfather’s cat was waiting by the front gates. It stalked me along the driveway, tail twitching, moving between a regal saunter and a mad dash to catch up. Every few steps it stopped to shake dew from its paws. I reached the end of the driveway and the cat disappeared through a gap in a hedge.
There was something different about the house, or maybe I just missed it before. It wasn’t the imposing mansion I remembered; it was sad and empty and old.
I crept around to the back of the house. The hexagonal verandah of Vivienne’s fable popped and creaked. Beyond it, a rectangle of weed-choked grass the exact shape of a swimming pool.
The windows were dark, apart from the dining room and the dying room—Vivienne’s lamp was on to guide
me home. I dropped my bag onto the porch and raised a fist to knock on the back door—but something made me stop.
Music. Tinny and distant, like an old gramophone playing. I heard the chink of crystal, the sound of pieces smashing to the floor, scattering into corners.
I moved to the window, pressed my face against the glass and peered into the dining room.
Grandfather selected a whisky glass from the tray next to him. He rolled it in his palm. I remembered there being six; now there were two. He swigged from the glass in his other hand until it was empty, then wound back both arms. Both glasses hit the chandelier and exploded into pieces.
I gasped and took a step back.
He sat there, showered in fragments of glass and crystal. This was his grief now, uncivilised and raw. He looked up and saw me through the window. He stared as if what I did next would give him some measure of me.
I felt closer to him. I’d lived it. Grief leaves a space that has to be filled. I wanted him to know that I knew. An emotion too big to contain swelled in my chest.
I prised a hefty rock from the dry wall surrounding the garden bed. It was as smooth and chilled as an ice sculpture and I needed both hands to lift it. I paced back seven steps, raised the rock above my head, and heaved it at the glass between us.
It exploded. The noise was louder than I expected, less than I’d hoped. Startled pigeons fluttered out of a
tree. Shards hovered, then plummeted like falling stalactites onto the sill.
When the tinkling stopped, the music played on, a woman with a whiny voice singing about regret.
Grandfather was still, his palms pressed flat against the table.
The curtains billowed like beckoning hands.
Grandfather’s lips twitched. He laughed and smacked his hand down like a gavel. ‘We’ve made a mess of things, haven’t we?’ he said.
I nodded.
He levered himself out of his chair and came around to open the door.
I followed him into the entrance hall. I waited exactly one minute before I asked the question.
‘Tell me why she left.’
Grandfather picked up my bag, slung it onto the bottom step of the stairs and went into Vivienne’s sitting room. He switched on a light, turned off the lamp and unplugged it.
‘No need for this anymore.’ He sat on the edge of Vivienne’s hospital bed. The side dipped under his weight. He touched the pillow lightly, like he was scared to erase her.
‘Her bed’s still here,’ I said.
He sighed. ‘Sometimes we keep the physical objects until memory is enough.’ He covered his face with his big hands. ‘I have some of her things to give you. She said I should wait until you were ready.’
‘Things?’
Was I ready?
‘Things that belonged to her, that she left behind. The rest she said you must find for yourself.’
I glanced around the room. The white noise inside my head was finally quiet. I saw the signs, now that I was looking.
There was a low bookcase next to the bed, loaded with thick-spined, dust-coated classics I’d never read. I saw by the marks on the carpet that Grandfather had pulled it close, so that Vivienne could reach. I saw fingerprints in the dust, a book of stories by Henry Lawson. And I saw a patch of unlikely symmetry: a wide red spine nestled between six blue ones.
Owain Glyndwr, The Story of the Last Prince of Wales.
I slid out the book. There was an envelope pressed between its pages.
Grandfather stayed my hand before I opened it. ‘I was hiding them for her as she wrote them. She said you would have questions and there was still so much she wanted to tell you. There are more, take your time.’
‘Tell me why she left.’
‘It’s complicated…’ he started.
‘That’s what she said.’
‘I forced her to make a choice. Between you or me.’
‘But I wasn’t even…’
‘She was pregnant.’ He smoothed the creases on the envelope. ‘The last thing she said before she left was she couldn’t make a good choice, so she…’
‘…made one she could live with,’ I finished.
We were alike in ways that couldn’t be accounted for by eye colour, features, or a gesture, a word. Some kinds of crazy you make for yourself, others you inherit.
I went up to my room. There were still traces of me, undisturbed: my long hair on the pillow, the pile of stuff I left beside the bed, the cracked bar of soap in the bathroom.
I unpacked my clothes and placed the rolls of money on the bedside table. I’d see them when I woke and they would remind me that there was more I had to do. Silence deserved a monument more lasting than memory—a statue of him on a bench in the train station maybe, or a bronze figure of a hooded boy leaning to kiss the fish—because memories change depending on who’s doing the remembering. And you had to honour your dead.
The mobile phone rang. Wish sounded far away.
‘You left,’ he said. ‘I saw you. We’re still at the cemetery. There was a reporter here, asking for you. You should see all the stuff people left—pieces of paper, notes everywhere. Candles. A woman sang “Amazing Grace”.’
I picked up Vivienne’s pearls and let them pour through my fingers.
‘Are you there?’
‘How did you get this number?’ I asked.
‘Bree.’
I heard Grandfather’s heavy tread on the stairs. His footsteps stopped at my door and then moved on. I swung my legs onto the bed and curled up there, fully clothed in the dark in a room that felt like clouds.
‘They still haven’t found her. Or Malik.’ Wish said it too casually, like he was trying to spare me his pain.
Arden. Someday I hoped she’d find peace. Power, like love, is given. It isn’t something you can take.
‘I will kiss you again,’ Wish said.
I pressed the phone hard against my ear until it started to burn.
‘I need to know you’re okay. Say something.’
Moonlight spilled into the room and the pearls were warming against my skin. I felt for Vivienne’s T-shirt under my pillow. The fabric was soft and I could smell her now that the memory of her dying had faded.
One day, I thought, if I let time pass in one place, only the good things—the things I wanted to remember—would be left. There would be this day, then the next, then the one after that. I could do one day at a time. And if home wasn’t a place, maybe it was a connection. Something woven from loose ends and mismatched threads that took time to knit together, like fractured bone.
Maybe family were the people who came looking for you when you were lost.
‘I don’t need saving,’ I said.
He laughed. It was short, humourless. ‘I know.’
The lump in my throat eased. It shifted, it shrank.
‘You will kiss me again,’ I promised.
Just before morning I woke shaking, haunted by the ghost of a dream.
It wasn’t a bad dream. I knew the script. The faceless mannequins had mouths and they were smiling. I grasped the empty hand and felt bulldust puff between my toes. I took the knife, cut through the vines and, at the far end of the corridor, the door swung open.
There was nothing on the other side, but I wasn’t scared.
I sat on the window-seat with my chin in my hands, stared out at the rectangle of lawn, and waited for first light.
The sun was a pink stain on the horizon when I slipped downstairs. My furry escort met me at the back door and led the way along a path to a garden shed. Inside, I found a shovel leaning up against a wall.
It takes time to believe again.
I broke ground where the middle of the pool would have been.
About half a metre down, beneath black earth, the shovel grated and stopped.
My thanks to the team at Text who make everything seamless; to my editor, Penny Hueston, for her faith, energy and for seeing the things I didn’t; to Steph Stepan for being fabulous.
Thanks to my agent, Sheila Drummond, for being in my corner.
To my literary ladies, Allayne Webster and Rebecca Burton, thank you for reading the bare bones of this book and for saying all the right things. I’ll porch-sit and prattle with you guys any time.
Thanks to my fellow authors—anyone who ever smiled at me in a crowd, took me under their wing and made me feel a little less lost.
And last but never least, thanks to My People. You know who you are.
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