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Amid the animated conversation and the cigarette smoke, the laughter and flirtation and the jugs of beer slopping on the tabletops, Deborah was enjoying herself thoroughly until the people seated closest to her started talking about Amnesty International and prisoners of conscience. Suddenly, unwillingly, her mind shifted to the bizarre things the others had said today about her mother.
A desperate bid for freedom. Rescue her own life.
Could that – could there be any truth in that? No! Surely not!

But then, as if she were watching a movie, she saw her mother
in the house they’d lived in, saw her doing all those normal mother things: moving from room to room, making beds and picking up clothes, shoes, books, toys. Writing shopping lists. Saw her struggling in from the car with big bags of groceries, yelling for the kids to come and give her a hand. Saw herself, Deborah, kneeling on the floor stacking cans of baked beans and tomato soup in the cupboard and her mother above her saying with such passion,
‘I hate shopping!’.
Heard herself asking genuinely, ‘Why? I thought you like getting out of the house?’ and looking up to see her mother’s expression of helpless exasperation… and in that moment she knew it was true.

She didn’t feel like being in the pub any longer. She picked up her jacket and leather shoulder-bag from the back of her chair and left. Luckily the rain had stopped, but it was cold and dismal and she felt… friendless. While she waited for a bus she thought,
I miss my family
. It was actually the first time she’d had that thought all year: she was living in a flat with a couple of other students now, and what with uni and part-time work she was far too busy to get home much, or even call them.
I’ll go over there this weekend
, she thought. James; she missed James.
Maybe I’ll take him to a movie.

She got home at the same time as one of her flatmates. They chatted for a while, smoked a little joint, then Deborah got ready for bed. From the drawer of her bedside table she took out a thick pad of lined paper, about two-thirds of which was already full. She folded the pages back to the next blank sheet, propped it on her raised knees and began to write.

Dear Mum
,
Something happened today that has kind of changed everything. Everything i.e. about my understanding of you, and if my understanding of you has changed, then that means everything I understand has changed.

She went on to describe what the women in the CR group had said, and the memories she herself had experienced while sitting in the pub.

What does this mean
, she wrote
, about why you abandoned us? Why you deserted us? Why you left me to deal with Robert and James and Meredith? Because you must’ve known Dad was never going to understand all those things about…

She stopped writing and sat there propped up in bed, staring fixedly ahead. For a long time she didn’t move an inch, but a change gradually came over her face: her eyes narrowed, her lips compressed. A cold, angry look returned to her beautifully proportioned, high cheek-boned face, and suddenly she started writing furiously again in large forceful letters:
You got the chance to rescue your own life but what about us? YOU DIDN’T GIVE A FUCK, DID YOU?

Striding along the street towards home, Deborah rehearsed the Alison Ramsbottom story. She could almost hear the words spilling rapidly from her mouth as she told Angus, almost taste the first glass of white wine from the bottle he’d have waiting, already chilled. But the house was still and quiet. Not even the dogs to greet her. Eventually Deborah had to walk down to the bottle shop and buy some wine herself, since there was no sign of Angus and his phone was going straight to message. Where the hell was he? Olivia had come back with the dogs but now she was out in the shed with Flopsy Mopsy and bloody Cottontail. Deborah poured herself another glass of wine.
Why does everyone always piss off on me? Bugger them!

She went into her study and wrote for a little while, quick and intent, in longhand on a pad of thick lined paper. When her glass was empty she stopped, tore out the pages. By the linen cupboard in the hallway she knelt down to retrieve a box way at the back. She had to pull out the vacuum cleaner and the old heavy pressure cooker to get at the box she wanted, and then just as she was putting into it the pages she’d written, loosely folded, Olivia materialised beside her.

‘Shit!’ Deb exclaimed. ‘You scared the living daylights out of me!’

‘Sorry, Mum. Dad home yet?’

‘No, he’s not. Why?’ Deborah was shoving things back into the cupboard all anyhow.

‘I want him to look at my English essay.’

‘Well,
I
could look at it, you know!’

‘Okay,’ said Olivia, sounding surprised.
Now why does she have to sound like that, for heaven’s sake?
‘Would you like to?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ her mother replied, standing up and closing the door of the linen cupboard firmly.

‘Now?’

‘Well… in a little while. After dinner.’

‘Okay.’ Olivia melted away into her room.

The bottle of wine was almost empty by the time Angus’s car pulled up in the driveway.

‘Hi, darling,’ he said, breezing in and going to kiss her.

‘Where have you
been
?’ Deborah asked, fending him off. ‘I’ve been home for bloody
hours
. And your mobile’s turned off!’

‘Is it?’ said Angus mildly, fishing it out of the pocket of the jacket he’d dumped on a chair. ‘Oops!’

‘I couldn’t reach you!’

‘Sorry, Deb. Was there a problem?’

‘
Yes
, I – oh, never mind. I just wanted to
talk
to you, for god’s sake. Where were you?’ She gave him a hard look. ‘Have you been out drinking?’

‘Well, not as much as you, apparently,’ he said, lifting the almost empty bottle from the wine cooler on the bench. ‘So I had a meeting after work, and a couple of drinks. So shoot me now, Deb!’

He sounded tetchy, and Deborah’s own hostility flared at his tone.

‘Can’t I rely on
anyone
?’ she snarled. ‘Not even you? God knows you don’t have anything
like
the pressure I have, puddling along in your cosy little office doing the same thing you’ve been doing for twenty years.’

Angus had his back to her, getting another wine glass out of the
cupboard, and he kept his back to her for quite a long time. Deborah waited for him to turn around, and some of the punch went out of her while she waited, looking at his back in its blue shirt, the sleeves rolled up nearly to his elbow. At the lines on the back of his neck. She liked that neck. When he turned to her again his face was unnaturally still.

‘Is there something bothering you?’ he asked politely. ‘Something happen at work?’ He picked up a bottle of red wine from the floor beside his jacket. She hadn’t noticed it before. They didn’t usually drink red.

She told him about the call from Alison Ramsbottom, and even about the upsetting memories it had aroused of her mother’s desertion. It all sounded a bit lame now. Like she was… playing for sympathy.

‘Doesn’t sound very pleasant,’ Angus said, but his voice had none of the plangency of real concern.

‘You don’t
care
!’ flared Deborah accusingly, and in her husband’s indifferent expression, in the moment’s hesitation before he protested that yes, he did care, sure – she saw that it was so. Angus, who always cared, whom she had always depended on to care, did not. She didn’t accuse him again, realising with a little internal thud that one had that luxury only when it wasn’t true.

The argument petered out. They ate dinner with Olivia, everyone seeming a bit flat or preoccupied, and after Angus had read and commented on Olivia’s essay they watched some TV, read a little and went to bed. They didn’t say much, and didn’t touch.

Deborah woke again at 4.14, that’s what the numbers on the digital clock said. She lay there worrying helplessly about her father, about the looming scandal she hadn’t talked to the minister about before she left work. About that look she’d seen on Angus’s face. Alison Ramsbottom’s phone call seemed as irrelevant as a week-old mosquito bite now. She lay on her back staring at the curtain rod on the wall opposite, barely discernible in the dimness. When her eyes
started to water she wiped them and noticed the bunched-up tension in her cheeks. Her whole face, she realised, was contorted with tension. She made herself relax the muscles there, and in her throat as well. And her shoulders.
Oh god, I feel like I could just implode. I’m like this all the bloody time.

She rolled onto her side, toward the middle of the bed and the wall-like protective shape of Angus’s back, the steady sound of his breathing as he slept the night away, undisturbed by noises or worries or his wife’s nocturnal wakefulness, her restless comings and goings. He had always slept like this, deeply, peacefully. Oh, why did she get so irritable with him, so snappy and terse? Did it matter, after all, that he was absent-minded sometimes, and lacked ambition?

Softly she placed her left hand palm-down on his back, just below his shoulder blades, feeling that solid familiar flesh. Well, a little less of it these days: the steady exercise regime he’d taken up was really starting to pay off, he’d lost almost all of that middle-aged heaviness that had started to thicken his frame.
He’s a little bit vain after all
, she thought fondly, and wondered again if he really hadn’t minded that she hadn’t organised a big party for his fiftieth birthday mid-year.
I should have done that. Maybe he thought I didn’t… care about him. Love him
. She still felt bad about it, as though she had slipped up. But she just hadn’t been up to it. And he’d assured her that a small dinner party was much more what he preferred. Good old Angus.

And there was that school reunion thing. He really wanted me to go with him and I just
…
sneered
. Her face twisted in the darkness in a grimace of self-recrimination.
Oh, I should’ve gone.

She stroked his back, and inched a little closer so that she could smell him, feel the warmth of his body. Gently she kissed the back of his dear, lined neck. Tears prickled her eyes.
I love him so much
. She stroked his hip, where the old soft T-shirt flopped and fell away. He didn’t stir.
He hasn’t really stopped caring
, she thought.
He can’t have. I’ll never snap at him again. And we’ll do things together, nice things
. Finally she drifted off to sleep again.

But in the morning she woke up with gritty red eyes, feeling unrested and like she might be on the edge of a migraine. She complained sharply to Angus when she had to get up and make her own coffee, and he went off to do the shopping at Victoria Market alone. Shortly after he drove off Deborah pulled on her track pants and trainers, yelling to Olivia that she was going for a run. Off she loped and settled quickly into her stride, hoping that in the steady pacing she would find the right way to handle this stupid crisis the minister was freaking out about. Solutions arose like that sometimes, when she was running.

As soon as her mother left the house, Olivia went to the linen cupboard in the hallway, quickly removing the things at floor level till she found what her mother had been so jumpy about the night before. There it was: a large rectangular box from some extinct department store. Lifting its faded lid Olivia found it crammed with paper, some in bundles held together with perishing rubber bands, some just in layers: a thick sediment of paper, all handwritten. Most seemed to be in her mother’s writing, but some wasn’t. No, wait, this was her mother’s handwriting too, but different. From ages ago, when she was still a kid. Most of it was on lined paper, the cheap stuff you bought in thick notepads, some was on plain white sheets, and some on that nice thin crinkled stuff, airmail paper, made specially for writing letters on. In the days when people used to write actual letters. Snail mail. Yes, these were all letters, heaps of them. Maybe hundreds. But none of them had ever been mailed: there were no envelopes, and no replies. And it looked like on every letter the greeting was the same:
Dear Mum
, that’s how each one began.
Dear Mum
.

CHAPTER 13

Angus had turned fifty the year of his primary school’s one-hundredth anniversary. That was part of the reason he’d gone to the centenary reunion: he just liked the arithmetic, the neat doubling. Generally speaking he was not all that interested in birthdays, reunions, anniversaries, or in meeting up with old friends from school or university just for the sake of it. After his parents retired to Queensland, he’d hardly even been back to the coastal town where he grew up.

He hadn’t even particularly wanted a fiftieth birthday party, although he knew Deborah wouldn’t allow it to pass without organising something. Organising, that was Deb’s strong suit: chart the course, instruct the crew, steer the ship. Angus basically just kept rowing, that was all he needed to do.

So he was turning fifty. It wasn’t that big a deal. Just a number, really. So he was getting a bit podgy round the middle: he’d get around to putting in some hours at the gym. Hair a little thinner, not much he could do about that. Work was ticking over; daughter as self-propelled as ever, though everyone was warning him the teenage years would bring a few bumps. Yes, his wife was a bit too busy, a bit
tense – but that wouldn’t go on forever, surely. Things would settle down whether he got himself into a lather or not, so why bother?

The Lake Booradalla Primary School Centenary Reunion had been held in late March, Angus’s favourite time of year. He’d tried to persuade Deborah and Olivia to come with him, make it a family trip, camp out maybe like they used to when Ollie was a little tacker and they hardly had any money.

‘It’ll be so
beautiful
at the coast,’ he promised them in a stagily honeyed tone, making a game of it. ‘Daytime it’ll be clear and sunny. The ocean’ll still be warm enough for swimming. And the nights’ll be crisp and we can look at the stars…And there won’t be any tourists, because it’s still school term.’