This is My Song Page 14

  Rose, rose, rose red,

  Will I ever see thee wed?

  The girl’s voice was stunning, rich and caramelised. Joe couldn’t help but quieten himself and listen. Nor was there any missing or sliding; she hit and held each note as precisely as the original creations come from that clear-sky time when creatures first opened their throats and music began.

  ‘Again,’ called Ms Wicks, her joy tumbling forth.

  Joe obeyed but against Soraya’s voice his own, always an easy silken flow, seemed a harping abrasion, a crow to a koel.

  I will marry at thy will, sir,

  When I am dead ...

  ‘Lovely,’ cried Ms Wicks.

  Yes, he thought, yes, Soraya’s song was lovely, the loveliest thing he’d ever heard. Against his own, thin and pale, tin-coated … Another thought flitted in. His voice had been beaten dry by hers – when cast against perfection, how could anything else properly exist? Logical extension: when an ideal trumps your only available effort and there is no chance of equalising, why persist? Why bother?

  ‘“O Holy Night”,’ said Ms Wicks. She pressed piano keys, counted them in. Joe was late to the song, thinking instead how cruel it was to glimpse another’s inspiration yet know without question that it is beyond reach.

  Nash served lunch on the rear deck that had once overlooked a patch of bushland but now offered views of a multi-storey construction site, scaffolding and porta-loos. The cottage was Rebecca’s, inherited from her aunt, and now Nash lived there too; studio and spare bedroom downstairs, living spaces upstairs, walk-in robe converted into a nursery for Essie.

  A large bowl of oily-looking tuna salad. In a former life, his father had been a chips-and-burger fanatic.

  ‘Health kick,’ said Nash, his grin attempting to mask his embarrassment. ‘Hey, have some bread. It’s wholegrain rye. Bec made it.’

  Joe ate suspiciously. Beyond the balustrade the day was undecided, a blazing sun giving over to machine-gun bursts of rain before reasserting itself.

  Nash brought him a tall glass of iced lemonade, stacked the plates and said, ‘So.’

  Prelude to a lecture. Joe tensed.

  ‘How long’s it been?’ asked Nash. ‘A bit over two years? Twoand-a-half, maybe?’

  Thereabouts.

  ‘The dust settles,’ Nash continued, sounding like a politician. ‘We adjust. Life goes on.’ He cleared his throat and said, ‘Look, I know it hasn’t been easy, but believe me, it would’ve been a lot worse if I hadn’t – done what I did. Your mother and I –’

  He pushed again at his glasses. Nash had always worn large lenses in bold frames but these new ones were smaller. Dainty, thought Joe. Even feminine.

  ‘Anyway. I know how it is –’

  Doubt that.

  ‘I know you miss –’

  The certainties.

  ‘The old place –’

  The farm, yes, where Mum painted her surprisingly good watercolours (not any more) and you did your photos (still do, nothing-repeat-nothing stops that) and I wrote dodgy rhymes (not any more) or walked through the dust with messed-up, big-eyed ol’ Socrates (definitely not any more). The farm where we did good things. Helped the world! Like that time when we looked after next-door’s pigs, Laurel and Hardy, and the other looking-after times: the cockatoo that Mum nursed, the possums, babies some of them, barely furred, broken lorikeets brought to our door like chunks of fallen rainbow, a lost wallaby that drove Nash nuts because it chewed the one thing that he cherished beyond his career, a patch of spongy, verdant lawn –

  ‘But it’s gone, Joe.’

  We looked after those animals and in doing so, looked after ourselves. Or so I thought.

  ‘Once we’d separated –’

  Once you’d left –

  ‘The upkeep would have been impossible. Look, there’s no point in dwelling on the past. What I wanted to say was, my future is here with Bec and Ess, and I want you to be part of that.’

  Joe did not answer. Nash gazed at his son’s face as if it were newly purchased and he was checking it for defects. He sipped his own drink, a gin and tonic, and said casually, ‘I’ve repainted the spare room. Why don’t you give your mother some space to deal with things, and move in for a while?’

  Once upon a time there was a cow and its name was – Svetlana. Which is a Russian name and most people, being as they are, would assume Svetlana to be a spy or at the very least a femme fatale, because that’s the accepted role of a Svetlana and we all have accepted roles, don’t we? Particularly with names; like Clarissa is a snooty girl and Ed is a cool guy (maybe a bit too cool, wears suit jackets over his jeans) and Baz is loud and swinging arms and crude jokes and Joe is – Joe is something else. Whatever.

  So. Those roles are created by social expectations created by the media, which actually stereotype those roles on the basis of what they consider those social expectations to be, thus making the whole process utterly circular and self-thingummy and therefore pointless, the real point being that a creature going by the name of Svetlana is expected to be a Russian spy but she is actually a cow. (Or Svetlana could be a bull that just happens to have a female name, or even transgender? Why not have a transgender bovine? Why should happiness surgery be restricted to humans?) Anyway, the media-social self-thingummy cycle means that Svetlana will be forced into not behaving like a transgender bovine and start behaving like a fatalistically female Russian spy, thus creating his-her-its role and robbing the poor creature of anything remotely like individuality –

  ‘Psycho! Answer the freakin’ question!’

  The classroom rushed back in like a coastal breeze: Bridgman leaning against the whiteboard, Turton playing desktop tennis with his pen top, blank faces, staring-down faces, staring-at-Joe faces. The triple M of schooling, he thought – misery, monotony, menace.

  The lunchtime bell crashed and echoed.

  ‘Psycho!’

  ‘One more time,’ intoned Mr Bridgman. ‘When is it necessary to break the rules?’

  They waited. Joe straightened his idea, breathed, raised his hand.

  ‘When the rules are wrong, sir.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Explain wrong.’

  ‘Immoral.’

  ‘I see. According to whose version of morality?’

  The class groaned. Mr Bridgman glared. Joe laced his damp fingers and said, ‘Society’s, sir. The version of morality that most people would accept and believe.’

  ‘Ah, the greater good. Mr Hawker is a utilitarian.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ said Turton as the pen top tumbled. ‘Can we go, sir?’

  ‘In a moment. Joe, an example please. When is it necessary to break the rules?’

  A split in time, mercurial and blue, before it came from him in a torrent.

  ‘A boy,’ he said, ‘is taken to a walled city. The boy has been told that he is lucky. It is a privilege to be in this city. There are only two rules. One, he must work hard and two, he can never leave – but that’s okay. He’s doing this for the benefit of himself and everyone in the city, so why not work hard and never leave?’

  ‘Socialism, Joe –’

  ‘But once the boy is inside the walled city he finds other rules that he wasn’t told about, rules like – no matter how hard you work we will starve you, torture you and, if we feel like it, murder you.’

  Now the anticipation held them firm, like a hospital bedsheet. Joe said, ‘Most people would see those new rules as morally wrong. They would agree that the boy should break the original two rules by stopping work and escaping from the camp.’

  He sat back, suddenly tired.

  ‘Even if it means?’ asked Mr Bridgman softly.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Joe. ‘Even if it means.’

  ‘One more question. Does the boy escape?’

  Driftwood like a thin, abandoned bone, faded blue numbers.

  ‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘He does.’

  ‘Then so do we all.’ Mr Bridgman turned away before saying as an afterthought, ‘Class dis
missed.’

  He thought about death on the way home, not the process but the result. The after. How once you have begun to live and understand how much energy lies within and around you, it’s weird to discover that one day you won’t live but others will, and that energy will be theirs, accessed without you. Also weird to think that there’ll still be a world, even though you’re not there. He wondered, does the earth’s air change if one person cannot breathe it and thus add to the chemistry? Does the absence of that person shift the balance of the entire planet, giving it a kind of orbital shiver? Do our dead selves become void – or perhaps antimatter? The latter seemed preferable, but where might all that antimatter go? It must be stored … perhaps there’s another universe, Joe thought, an anti-universe filled with the antimatter of the departed. It’s white, not black; it’s starless, sunless, infinite. And wise.

  The cardboard box had finally been opened, the clothes inside washed, folded and taken to the Red Cross store. Annie had decided to keep her father’s tie collection, only three in total, one black and skinny, one striped, one blue with a Harrods monogram.

  ‘I bought that in London,’ she said, ‘and sent it home as a gift. Not sure if he ever wore it, but you could.’

  ‘Me?’ said Joe.

  ‘As a memento,’ his mother said, her face reddening. ‘Just an idea.’

  So the box was gone but the brown case had remained, its buckles and straps still firm. Dinner was done when Joe returned from the bathroom and found Annie staring intently at the case.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘I’m scared. Can you believe it?’

  He went to her. His mother, normally so regulated, was trembling.

  ‘That case,’ she continued, ‘was always off-limits. I had no idea, I still have no idea – look at the condition! It must be forty years old, probably more, and yet it’s so, so –’

  Loved? The soft brown sheen could only have been crafted by welcoming hands. Joe thought of the flank of a cow, the caress of the owner before milking.

  His mother said, ‘Joe, will you open it? I can’t.’

  He nodded, reached down and raised the case onto the kitchen table. The buckles rattled. When he lifted the front flap the smell reminded Joe of rooms in an old house, peeled paint and stained dust covers.

  He pointed inside the case and said, ‘You should –’

  ‘I know.’ Her smile was a thin line. ‘It still makes me sad, how poorly I knew him,’ she said. ‘I think, from now on, it will always make me sad.’

  The smell thickened as she reached in and fossicked, eventually extracting a maroon notebook with a patterned cover and a magnetic lock-clip. The book appeared to be quite new.

  ‘Must be his memoirs,’ said Annie. ‘The nurses told me how in the last few months he’d taken to sitting near the window with a notebook. Doing his memoirs, he said. This must be them.’

  She held the book tightly, as if it might fly from her grasp and seek liberty, then placed it on the table and opened it.

  On the first page, a title scribbled at the top in awkward block letters.

  LOVE AND SORROW.

  The rest of the page was blank. Annie turned it over. The next page was also blank. The next, the next. She looked at Joe, puzzled, continued to leaf through pages, unbroken rectangles that seemed to mock. About halfway through she gave up … title on the first page, nothing more.

  ‘Joe,’ she asked, ‘when you visited, did you see him writing?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Neither did I. I mean, I assumed, because they said … perhaps it was a mistake. They misunderstood – he meant to do it but couldn’t. I don’t know.’

  Obviously disappointed, Annie returned to the case and found a small thin box that had been secured with a rubber band. Inside were pens, paper clips, a stainless steel watch that had stopped and an empty envelope. There was no inscription on the watch.

  ‘Underwhelming.’ She rubbed her eyes, sat down heavily. Joe, peering into the case, saw a second compartment at the rear. Within this compartment were a larger envelope and a square of what looked like cardboard. He extracted the envelope, obviously fragile, and looked inside.

  ‘Photos,’ he said, tipping them carefully onto the table.

  There were two. In the first, bigger image, a group of people stood to attention in a room. The photograph had obviously been taken from a high point, the camera angled to capture upturned faces. There were grinning children, neutral adults, blurred faces towards the rear.

  ‘Oh.’ Annie pointed at a face on the front edge of the assembly. ‘That’s me.’

  He saw it straightaway, a fresher, pressed-in version of his mother with the same tilt of the head and not-quite-satisfied eyes.

  She pointed again. ‘And that’s Nancy. Remember, I was telling you –’

  The girl was snow-skin and asphalt-hair, pushing herself to the fore. Joe sensed the type, brash me-ness masking the turmoil of not knowing if she would ever be properly cherished.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Jefferson,’ said Annie, running her finger across the photo. ‘Keira, Brenda. Silly little George. Oh, and Mum. Poor Mum.’

  Familiar face but the smile was uncertain, he could tell that much.

  ‘Two damaged people,’ said Annie wistfully. ‘Perhaps that was the reason –’

  For their togetherness?

  Their love?

  She sighed aloud and said, ‘This must have been the spring party. They always took a photo. Mr Jefferson must have given this to Dad.’

  ‘Is Grandpa there?’

  Annie scanned. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He used to come along – had to, I suppose, Mr Jefferson was his employer – but he hated all the small talk and posturing. He probably left the room when the camera came out. Surprising that he kept something like this.’

  She reached for the second photograph and said, ‘I’ve never seen this before.’

  The image was sepia. A handsome man, stiff-backed and proud in a dark suit, was standing behind a woman. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress with buttons and lace, and perching awkwardly on the edge of a chair. There were two children in the photograph, a small blonde boy seated on the woman’s lap and an older girl standing beside her. The boy looked frightened. He was gripping a stuffed toy, a bear with flat ears, in front of his striped tunic. The girl was much calmer. She had very curly hair brushed into a part, the curious judgmental eyes of an animal looking out from its lair and either the beginning or end of a smile in a mouth that seemed to want to say, ‘Just wait! Just wait till I grow older, just wait till you see what I can do, just you wait!’

  She draws the eye, thought Joe, she’s firelight in a forest. He watched his mother pick up the photograph very gently, as if concerned that it might crumble through her fingers as dust.

  ‘Who are they?’ he asked.

  ‘I can only guess,’ she said, ‘that the boy is Dad as a child.’

  Meaning –

  ‘Making these two his parents and the girl, his sister.’

  Sister … great-aunt. Where might she be?

  Annie turned the photo, narrowed her eyes and read, ‘Praha 1934. That’s Prague, isn’t it? As in, the Czech Republic.’

  ‘There’s more,’ said Joe. He reached into the case. The cardboard square was furred and slightly torn at the edges. He pulled it out and saw that it was the base for a glued photo of a bird with insolent eyes, a magnificent bird perched alone in a tree.

  Annie stared. ‘Oh, Joe,’ she said, ‘Joe, it’s the goshawk.’

  He loved her restoration, hearing the lilt in his mother’s voice as she described the bird diving between her upraised arms, recalled the grace that flowed between child and animal.

  ‘Where we lived,’ she said, ‘was just air and land. It was quiet and predictable and I was happy with that – until the goshawk turned up and suddenly I wanted more.’

  Joe considered that – the promise found in the soaring, singing bird, a creature rarely tied to place
or circumstance. His mother propped the photograph on a bench and made them both cocoa. She said, ‘I can’t believe he kept this either. I remember, it was from the first roll of film I ever had. All the other shots were duds. This was the last one and somehow it ended up perfect. Beginner’s luck, I suppose.’

  Joe gazed at the goshawk’s ghostly lines. He could sense the bird’s power and speed, its fearless, tenacious strength.

  ‘Did it have a name?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Just the goshawk. It wasn’t right to name him. That would have made him less wild, less free.’

  Which made Joe think of the farm, the menagerie of wounded beasts that they had maintained. He’d loved tottering out to the cages and enclosures, helping his mother feed and nurse. This was a time when the Hawker family had been defined by their place in the community; there’d been phone calls at all hours, people dropping by with animals rescued from the side of the road or removed from the dangers of a land clear, playground or backyard.

  He remembered the energy of their togetherness, the excitement and steady purpose. But as the menagerie had grown, Joe had seen his father back off.

  ‘Someone’s got to pay the bills.’

  Annie, working part-time, had already cut back her hours. The animals demanded a lot of time and money but that was fair enough. Couldn’t just let them fester and die.

  ‘You can’t save everything,’ Nash had suggested irritably.

  ‘Be wrong not to try,’ she’d answered.

  Some days – no, most – Joe had returned from school to find her ragged with weariness and sorrow. The cages were too small, a baby possum had died, a fox was raiding at night. Nash was nowhere to be seen.

  Now the farm was gone, replaced by a cul-de-sac of duplexes and vigilante cats. At the time, it had been easy to cast his father as uncaring, but now Joe wondered, could it work the other way? Was it possible to have too much compassion? That’d be a good question for Mr Bridgman. ‘Sir, can people care too much?’

  ‘Explain, Joe.’

  ‘As in, it’s obviously noble to give of yourself –’