Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.
The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.
Georgia Blain has written a number of novels for adults including the bestselling Closed for Winter, which was made into a feature film. Her memoir Births Deaths Marriages: True Tales was shortlisted for the 2009 Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers.
In 1998 she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists and has been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the SA Premier’s Awards and the Barbara Jefferis Award. She lives in Sydney with her partner and daughter.
HOUSE of BOOKS
GEORGIA BLAIN
Names for Nothingness
This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by Pan Macmillan, Sydney, in 2004
Copyright © Georgia Blain 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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ISBN 978 1 74331 436 4 (pbk)
ISBN 978 1 74343 090 3 (ebook)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Acknowledgments
IT MUST HAVE BEEN LAST WEEK that the petals started to fall. They lie damp and crushed on the bricks below, the brilliant pink already faded and grimy. Every year this happens, seemingly overnight, a loss that is both sudden and inevitable, and Sharn looks out over the bare branches, wondering at how it has managed to creep up on her yet again.
She has her two cigarettes laid out on the step below her, and she lights the first one, the smoke acrid in her mouth, as she sits on the concrete landing at the back of the flat.
The few remaining blossoms are scraggly in the evening light. They cling with no conviction to the twigs, just one moment away from floating to the ground, and she leans forward, almost precarious in her balance, to see whether she can send them on their way. One sharp breath of air and they teeter on the brink of falling, another and they would be gone.
From behind her she can hear the front door open and she knows that Liam is home. She is going to go in and tell him to be quiet, Essie has just gone to sleep, but that would mean putting out her cigarette and so she stays, head resting against the railing, as he comes out onto the back steps.
‘Got a drink for me?’ he asks, and she just points through the door towards the fridge.
He sits behind her and takes the second of her cigarettes, the match flaring sulphurous as he lights it, and as he leans forward to kiss her, she moves back.
‘There was a story on the news tonight,’ and she looks up towards the darkening sky. ‘A woman who came home to find her husband dead.’
Liam is silent and she turns to face him.
‘As good as dead.’
He picks up his glass.
‘They took him to hospital and put him on life support.’ She stops, wondering whether the cry she just heard was Essie’s or another child’s, somewhere out in the surrounding flats. It is quiet again, and she waits for a few seconds before continuing. ‘The doctors say there’s no chance of recovery. They want to turn the machines off. But she won’t let them.’
She reaches for Liam’s cigarette and inhales deeply. She will still have a second, and she stands, slightly dizzy from the nicotine, and squeezes past him to where she has left the packet on the table. She wipes at the ring of moisture from the beer bottle and picks up the cap, irritated with the way he leaves his rubbish lying there – so much so that she flicks it towards him (just missing his shoulder) as she makes her way back outside.
‘She’s sent his photo to a group of faith healers and they have told her they can make him well but it will take them six weeks. She wants the hospital to wait.’
The night has settled in now and it is cold as she sits back down on the cement step. Liam is waiting for her to finish, and she can’t even be bothered to tell him that that’s it, that’s the story.
‘What happened?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know.’ It is obvious to her that he has missed the point, it has been obvious since she began telling him, and she looks across at him.
He sighs with the effort of trying to remain pleasant in the face of her hostility. ‘It’s going to happen more and more,’ he eventually says.
‘What?’ She can hear the irritation in her own voice.
‘Situations like this. There’re so few hospital beds. They can’t keep people on life support forever.’
She watches the tip of her cigarette glow and then fade as she stares out across the yard, the tree now barely visible in the darkness.
‘That wasn’t the point,’ she tells Liam, but he doesn’t hear.
She stubs the cigarette out, grey ash on the railing, and leans forward once more as she expels a great breath of air into the night, unable to tell whether she has delivered the final death blow to the few remaining flowers.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Bringing on the winter.’
And as she bends down to pick up their cigarette butts, he tells her that it’s going to come anyway, ‘no matter what you do’, his voice soft in the stillness, so soft as to be inaudible even if she had stayed out there with him, but she has gone back inside, his final words heard by no one but himself.
Later, in the darkness, Liam wakes. It is just before dawn. He does not know how he is aware of this, but he is. The sky has not yet paled, the birds have not yet begun to sing, but he will lie still until the night turns to day, and then he will eventually slump back into sleep only moments before he has to get up, tired beyond belief, to go to his studio.
Next to him, Sharn is curled up, her thick, dark hair spread across the pillow, and he gently cradles himself into the curve of her back, fearful of disturbing her but wanting her warmth.
He can smell her skin, and he would like to whisper that he still loves her, that it is hard to still love her, to sustain himself on memories of what their life once was, but he is trying, and he is, if nothing else, dogged in his persistence. But he says nothing. He fears the emptiness of the words should he utter them out loud, and he turns onto his back again and stares up at the ceiling, hating his continued failure to effect any change.
It has been just over four months since Sharn travelled north to bring Caitlin home, and in the time since her return, they have both been paralysed, locked in a stillness that does not shift.
He should have left the job he was doing and gone with Sharn when she went up there, but instead he had let her go on her own. She returned less than a week later. He remembers opening the door to find her, not with Caitlin as he had expected, but with this child in her arms, Caitlin’s child. Seventeen weeks ago, and still Caitlin has not followed; there has been no call, no letter, no knock on the door, no attempt from Caitlin to reclaim her daughter. They no longer discuss this, neither of them mentioning the vigil they are keeping, the waiting that hangs over them both. But then, this is not surprising; there seems to be so little that they discuss these days.
He stretches out, trying to bring sleep to each limb, and remembers how, at first, he believed it would only be a week or so until Caitlin turned up or, at the very least, contacted them. ‘We need to ring her,’ he would say to Sharn as each day passed, never quite able to believe that something as simple as making a telephone call was seemingly impossible.
After two weeks he had tentatively suggested that perhaps he should take Essie back to Caitlin. ‘What’s the point?’ Sharn had asked. As soon as Caitlin was ready to have her she would come and get her. Surely Caitlin’s lack of contact told him enough.
He eventually agreed to wait another week, but when the time came he once again did nothing, his inaction continuing with each new deadline he set. He knows what he should do, and the weight of that knowledge is no longer bearable.
He looks at Sharn in the darkness and then closes his eyes, trying to find peace by recalling the moments that he keeps, like old postcards, to be brought out, thumbed over, gazed at fondly. His sustenance.
First he goes back to Sassafrass, because this is where he always starts, returning to the moment he met Sharn, there in the garden, sixteen years ago. He was waiting for Simeon to come and show them their room when he saw her walking towards them. He didn’t notice Caitlin at first. She was a three-year-old child then, small enough to hide within the folds of Sharn’s sarong, silent, unnoticeable.
‘Simeon said to let you know that you’re in that one,’ and Sharn had pointed to a small lilac-coloured shack at the edge of the garden. ‘He’ll be back soon.’
She had a frangipanni tucked into the shoulder strap of her singlet. He remembers the milky sweetness of the perfume mixed with the tang of her sweat. She had looked at him, ignoring Jen, and told him that her name was Sharn and that she was the hired help.
He thanked her for letting them know where their room was.
She grinned. ‘Only doing what Simeon says’ and she looked at him once again, taking him in with a directness that he later admitted was confronting as well as flattering.
(‘I was full on,’ she would sometimes say when they used to recall their first meeting.
‘You still are’ he would tell her now if they ever discussed their past, which they no longer do.)
And then she had turned and left them, aware that Liam’s eyes were still on her, watching her as she made her way down to the river track, Caitlin silent by her side.
It is no good. He sighs as he tries to recall another moment, anything that will take him away from the anxiety that does not seem to be dissipating. He will stay with Sharn. He will stay at Sassafrass. This time it is an afternoon that he returns to. They are in the vegetable garden as the storm rolls in, the first hint of cool after the heavy heat of the day. He is meant to be at one of Simeon’s workshops, but instead he has come to help Sharn pick lettuces for the evening meal.
Everyone else is in the main hall. They are letting out primal screams and their voices ring out loud and harsh in the stillness, but he barely hears them. He is engrossed in her. The strength of her arms, the sheen of sweat across her clavicle, the curve of her thigh beneath the thin dress.
The thunder claps and a streak of lightning darts, terrifyingly close, across the purple sky as the rain falls, heavy and warm.
She looks at him and smiles, her teeth white against the darkness of her tan, her eyes alive with joy, and they link hands, drinking in each other’s breath.
That was when he kissed her.
He remembers and he leans in closer to where she lies there in the bed next to him. He breathes in the scent of her hair, wanting only to keep remembering.
He is still at Sassafrass, and she is lying by the river, the sunlight warm on her skin, the grass dancing, golden, around her. She is dressed in blue, and her singlet matches the softness of the sky.
He walks towards her, his step quiet against the crumbling richness of the river dirt, but still loud enough to wake her, and she leans on one elbow as she looks up at him. She smiles and he knows, with an electric shock of certainty, that she does love him, and that she will leave with him, before she even holds out her hand, before she even speaks the answer he has been waiting weeks to hear.
And then she dissolves, the next memory sliding into focus, taking him to a different place, to the city, about a year later, and he is back in the first house they shared. Sharn is at work and he and Caitlin are alone. She sits as she always sits, passive, doing as he suggests but no more. He draws her a picture of a cat, a black cat, tiptoeing gingerly along the top of a fence, and he asks her what she thinks.
‘Not a very good likeness, I know,’ and he is putting the paper away, not expecting a response, because there never is one, when he is startled by a touch on his knee.
‘I like it,’ she tells him.
She is four and they are the first words she has ever spoken, not just to him, but to anyone, and as he resists the urge to lift her up and squeeze her tight, to whoop with joy at the extraordinariness of this event, she asks him to draw another.
‘Just like that one,’ and she points to a ginger tom, a stray, crouching low beneath the peach tree, tail flicking as it watches the birds pecking at the blossom.
And then there is Sharn again, one last time as he drifts into sleep. Arms and legs tangled in his, hair knotted around his limbs, sweet wet smell of sex; in his dreams he longs for her, and it is a longing that doesn’t fade, that cannot be pinpointed to a single time or moment. It runs through everything, a strand that re-emerges as one frame melts into the next, a yearning for what has gone that creeps stealthily into his subconscious.
She is kissing him and it is her eyes that he sees, closed, in close-up, the waxy skin, the darkness of her lashes, fluttering slightly and then still as he finally stops seeing, as he is enveloped in a darkness that is no longer awareness …
And then Essie wakes him. He had not slipped deep enough into sleep to let her single cry slide over him unnoticed and he gets up, uncertain as to whether morning has finally come, or whether it is still night.
She is asleep, thumb in her mouth, her skin pale in the darkness, and as he tucks her in, he kisses her gently.
SHARN WAKES, immediately aware that Liam is not in bed beside her. It is morning, and she calls out to him, panicked at his absence.
She finds him, moments later, asleep on the floor in Essie’s room, a blanket lying across his otherwise naked body. She looks at him, stretched out, peaceful, and as she bends down to cover him, she reaches hesitantly to stroke the softness of his hair back from his face, but he wakes at her touch, and she pulls her hand back, mouthing for him to be quiet, Essie is still asleep, come back to bed.
Alone in their room, she waits for him. It is only six-thirty, neither of them has to be up yet, but he does not follow her, and she is surprised to hear the sound of the shower, the water drumming against the bath. It is cold, and she pulls the blanket closer to her body, wanting these last few moments of sleep before she has to get ready for work.
Twenty minutes later, he is dressing by the side of the bed, searching through the pile of clothes on the floor for a clean T-shirt.
‘What’s the occasion?’ He has rarely got up before her, and although her words are light, the uncertainty that has nagged at her since she first woke is still there.
‘Can’t sleep,’ he says, and it is all he says as he goes to get Essie, who is calling out from her room.
He is taking her to his mother’s this morning, an arrangement Sharn knows was not wanted.
‘She thinks that what we are doing is wrong’ Liam had told her earlier, and he had not looked at her, his refusal to meet her gaze confirming what she knew; that he agreed with Margot, despite the fact that he used the word ‘we’ rather than ‘you’.
Sharn had told him that that was by the by, irrelevant, and none of Margot’s business. ‘Will she or won’t she? It’s as simple as that,’ and she had tightened her fist in frustration, her nails digging into her skin, because she needed to go back to work and they had no other choice.
She would. Liam had called Margot again, and she had said that she would do all that she could to help. ‘Because that’s the way she is,’ and he had not looked at Sharn, not directly, as he told her that this couldn’t go on. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
Standing in the bathroom, trying to comb the knots out of her hair, she listens to Liam explain the arrangements to Essie. She is about to tell him that she doubts a child who is not yet one needs such details, but she stops as she sees her face in the mirror. There is a sharpness in her expression that makes her look away.
I am not a likeable person. She hardly dares whisper the words out loud.
(‘Have you always been like this?’ Liam would ask on the rare occasions when he had simply had enough, and she would wonder when it had begun, because no, she does not want to think that this is the way it has always been.)
She bites at her bottom lip, a nervous habit she has had for as long as she can remember, and turns back to the task of combing her hair. She cannot untangle one of the knots, and as she holds up the offending strand she searches for the scissors in the bathroom cabinet, suddenly aware of how quiet it is. ‘Liam,’ she calls out, but there is no answer.
The flat is empty. Essie’s breakfast plate is still there on the table, Liam’s half-drunk cup of coffee is next to it.
They have gone – and he has never left without saying goodbye.
I am causing trouble.
She knows it. Pushing it over the line, nudge by nudge. They had gone to bed barely speaking, and he has left with no attempt at reparation. Until recently she has always taken it for granted that Liam would be there to stop her when she reached the edge, one arm held up as he tells her he still loves her, no matter how irascible she is.
‘As much as the day I first saw you,’ he has always said.
The relief of the affirmation would always let her breathe again.
‘You don’t love,’ she would smile, ‘not on first meeting.’
But she knows that is not entirely true. It may not be love as such, but there is something. She can still see him as she saw him then, sitting with Jen and waiting for Simeon. She had been so lonely. Just her and Caitlin, living alone by the river. She had come on to anyone at that time; the guests, Simeon (whenever he could get away from Mirabelle), men in the nearby town. It was the way she was. And then she met Liam, and she thought how different life could be.
As she searches through a bowl of loose change for her keys, she wants to tell him that she is sorry; she knows she should not be so sharp with him. She wants to tell him how much she needs his love. But they are words that never seem to get said.
She glances at the clock and realises she has to get going. The weather has turned overnight and she cannot put on the sandals she has worn for the last three months. She searches for an old pair of Liam’s boots (‘I can’t believe you have the same size feet,’ and he would look at her and grin, her impossibly large feet anchoring a slight frame). His clothes are still spread across the bedroom floor. They smell of him, but any softness she feels towards him evaporates as she upturns his jeans and his keys fall out of the pocket. He must have taken hers. She is meant to open up the office. She will have to call him, catch him at Margot’s and get him to meet her outside the legal centre on his way in to work. She dials the number, apprehensive at the thought of speaking to Margot, who will try, in a way that will be all the more irritating for its lack of assertiveness, to make her disapproval felt.
The phone rings twice.
‘Liam?’ Margot’s voice quavers (as always).
‘No, it’s Sharn,’ she tells her. ‘He hasn’t got to you yet?’
‘No-o.’ She draws out the word, not wanting to get Liam into trouble, following it quickly with a suggestion that the traffic may be bad. ‘Shall I get him to call you?’ she asks.
Sharn tells her that it’s all right, that she doesn’t really have time to wait, and she wants to hang up, to get off the phone before Margot has a chance to ask her if she has heard from Caitlin, if they have come to any decision yet, but she is not quick enough.
‘No,’ Sharn says. ‘And I’m sorry about this, I’m really sorry that we’ve had to ask you to do this, and I appreciate it.’ She can hear the edge in her own voice.
‘It’s just that …’ Margot hesitates, ‘a child needs to be with its mother –’
Sharn cuts her off. ‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, Margot, but I’m really very late.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ll see you by four,’ Sharn promises, and as she hangs up she starts dialling, trying to find someone to come and let her into the office, muttering his name, Liam, Liam, Liam, over and over, as she waits for Lou to pick up the phone.
IT IS ONLY A TEN-MINUTE DRIVE to Margot’s, and there is no hurry.
Liam does not, as Sharn believes, have any pressing work on at the moment. No jobs have come in for a couple of months. The money that he has been depositing into their account has been borrowed from his mother.
‘It is just temporary,’ he had promised. ‘Until we take Essie back. Until Sharn can go back to work.’
But he is tired of lying. He is tired of coming home at night after pretending to work, and he is tired of then pretending to communicate. All morning the need for change has kept pulling at him, stronger than ever, and as he sits in the car, he does not know how long he will be able to remain still in the face of its force.
He glances into the rear-vision mirror and Essie grins, her two top teeth tiny and milk white. He reaches back and feels her fingers curl around his own, the gentle pad of her soles soft against his arm as she kicks at him. She has grown since Sharn brought her back. ‘Remember how hungry she was?’ Sharn would say to him each time he had put forward the possibility of returning her to Caitlin. She wants him to agree that Essie was malnourished, but he has less and less conviction in the memory she holds up as truth.
‘Da da.’
She has only just started trying to form words, her gurgles being shaped into sounds that he is beginning to recognise.
‘I am not your dada,’ he tells her and then, as he catches her quizzical glance in the rear-vision mirror, he wishes he hadn’t.
Caitlin had always called him Liam. She had opted for Sharn’s name as well, never using the words ‘mum’ or ‘mummy’.
Right from the start, she would seek him out, creeping up to sit by his side as he took part in Simeon’s creativity sessions. The whole workshop process was not for him, he had come along because this was something Jen had wanted to do. He only had to glance around the room to see that he did not find the sessions as amazing as the others did. So he was relieved when Caitlin came to be with him, when she provided a distraction from something that he had never really had any enthusiasm for, an experience that he had agreed to take part in because there had seemed no reason not to.
Sometimes he would slip out from the back of the room, taking Caitlin with him. In the heat of the garden, he would show her how to build miniature huts from bamboo, or tiny images from petals spread out across the grass. Other times, he drove her into town, the windows wide open, the fields of cane waving phosphorescent green under the shimmering heat of the sky. He would talk to her, pointing out everything they passed, describing it as if she were blind, wanting to give her words, thousands of words that she could store up for later use, because he always believed that the time would come when she would speak.
(‘It’s just the way she is,’ Sharn had said to him. ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ and she turned away from him. ‘The doctors say there’s nothing wrong with her physically. And I can’t afford a specialist.’ She looked around her room and then back up at him. ‘I mean, what do I have?’)
In those early days, he was particularly wary about voicing his opinion when it came to Caitlin. Sharn was her parent, he wasn’t, but as he fell in love with Sharn, his friendship with Caitlin also grew. He liked her, and it was not just because he knew that being with Sharn also meant being with her daughter.
He smiles now as he remembers those trips into town with Caitlin. There was no stopping him on those drives, his words would tumble out in a rush, his chatter broken only by bursts of song, old rhymes that he remembered from his childhood, sung to her loudly and tunelessly.
Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John, went to bed with his trousers on.
At first he had wanted her to laugh, to squeal in delight, to utter some sound in response to the joy he found himself expressing in her presence.
One shoe off and one shoe on.
He would sing to her over and over again, altering his tone, his voice, his facial expressions, while her smile deepened, her eyes danced, and her hands clapped in merriment – and her voice remained silent.
It was a lesson for him. He came to enjoy entertaining her as a pure act within itself. He stopped seeking a response that he was never going to receive, and he told himself that he had no right to urge her to be anything other than what she was.
But perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps his constant failure to act has always been, as Sharn tells him, not just a matter of him being relaxed (his description of himself). Perhaps it just isn’t enough.
On the days when he is meant to be working, when he has told Sharn that he is cutting a corporate video, that he will be back late, he sits by himself in the room that he has hired as an office, and goes through his old Super 8 films. He knows he should be ringing around for work, calling people he has done jobs for in the past, chatting about this and that before he tries, casually, to slide in the question: ‘So, you guys been busy?’
And they will tell him, always, that they’ve been frantic, run off their feet, because no one in this business ever dares to admit anything other than success.
‘That’s great,’ and he hates the sound of his own voice as he says that he, too, has a whole lot of work in the pipeline, but in the meantime, if there’s ever any call for an editor, you know, whatever, even just a small job, his words trailing off as he waits for the standard response, the sure thing, we’ll be in touch, to round off a conversation that he has come to realise will never be anything other than this: a shameful display of his own vulnerability.
He needs them, but he is not part of their world. He doesn’t know how to go out drinking after work. He can’t pretend that an ad or corporate excites him. And so he has stopped trying. Not suddenly, just slowly, from a few calls a day to a couple a week and, now, none.
When he loops the Super 8 onto the projector, the film a smooth plastic ribbon that runs taut from spool to spool, he braces himself for the images of what he was before he met Sharn, what he became with Sharn and what he is now.
The dust dances in the thin beam of light and the spools whirr, the end of the film clicking against the body of the Elmo as he runs it back to the start, threading the beginning through. He reaches across to turn off the desk light, and with the curtains drawn the room is dark, broken only by the white square on the wall, and then the first splash of colour, the first frames of his life, captured, flickering like moth wings before his eyes.
There he is. Trekking in the Himalayas. He is seventeen, handsome and completely carefree, grinning into the camera, doing as his then girlfriend, Lise, had directed him, pointing to the snow behind him, holding it in his hand, while the camera zooms in and then out again to capture him rubbing it into his face with glee.
Or, another reel. Jen asleep in a car. Her face resting against the window, her long pale hair hiding her expression from the lens. They were driving to Sassafrass. She had inherited money, and when she heard about Simeon she decided that he was the one who could help her. She wanted to be a writer. Why not? She had paid for both of them, but when he had stayed on (not because of the workshops; it was Sharn that had kept him there), he had called Margot to cover six more months of courses.
And then there is Sharn herself. Beautiful and young. Grinning at him cheekily, smiling shyly; there are boxes and boxes of footage. Sharn and Caitlin, him and Sharn, Sharn on her own; he knows what each reel is from the label, and he is surprised at how closely the images reflect his own memories of the past, at his own ability to edit out the bad, grey days that never made it onto film and have failed, until recently, to leave an indelible stain on his own heart.
‘You have an unwavering ability to ignore the negative,’ Sharn would tell him, and when she was happy she would say it with delight, leaning forward to kiss him as she spoke.
But when the hard times came, her words were impatient, his inability to face up to reality became the mark of a fool, and he would flinch under the sharpness of her tongue.
He knows where it is, the third box on the fourth shelf, the label: Sharn, Sharn, Sharn, the first footage he ever shot of her, sixteen years ago. He had brought his camera with him, hiding it in the bottom of his bag when they arrived (suddenly aware that he did not want to put his own creativity under Simeon’s gaze), bringing it out only when he met with her, away from the others. She is sitting outside her shack with Caitlin, washing her daughter in a tub of water, scrubbing the river mud off her, her long, curly black hair damp with sweat. She glances up as he approaches but the directness of her gaze does not last for long. She was changeable with him at that time. Forthright one minute, gently confiding the next, and then distant, as though she had no interest in him whatsoever.
It is Caitlin who registers delight. Jumping out of the tub, she runs towards the camera, her arms wide, her naked body wet and still smeared with mud. He remembers how he dropped the camera (the last few seconds of footage show a blur of grass, yellow green rearing up towards the lens) and ran, only to let himself be caught by her moments later.
This is the reel that he has marked out as a possible first. The beginning of his labour of love, an editing together of their life in an attempt to immerse himself in what he would like to see as reality. This is what he has been doing on all the days he has been pretending to work, and it is a task that has, until recently, absorbed him. But he knows that it cannot go on forever, the money he borrowed from Margot has almost gone, and he flinches at the thought of confessing to Sharn that he is once again without work.
More pressing still is the question of Essie.
She meets his glance in the rear-vision mirror as he finally starts the car. He has been sitting without moving for some time now, he has no idea for how long. This is what he does. Time seems to just drift through his fingertips.
‘Ba,’ she tells him, slipping her thumb out of her mouth to utter the syllable, and he agrees with her, yes, it is a bus, rounding the corner up in front of them.
He does not even know what her name is, the name that Caitlin used (if any) when she held her, a tiny baby in her arms, because he hadn’t been there when Sharn had gone to bring Caitlin home. Essie is just a name they made up after Sharn admitted to not knowing what she was really called (‘she didn’t tell me, she wasn’t speaking, no one was, she only told me to take her’), and because of this he does not use it often.
She is looking out the window, an old T-shirt of Caitlin’s clutched in her hands, and he croons to her, softly, under his breath. The nursery rhymes that he used to sing – still there, lodged in his heart.
SHARN HAD ONLY BEEN AT SASSAFRASS for two months when she went into labour. It came on so fast; she was down on all fours and vomiting, and there was no time to get over to the house for help. It was Simeon who heard the screams, and he halted the workshop, momentarily, to get Mirabelle.
‘Go to her,’ ‘he said, quick.’
And she did.
When Sharn remembers that afternoon, it is the screams that she hears. First her own and then Caitlin’s, a piercing newborn howl.
The heat was unbearable, and the blood and the stench, and she could neither move nor call out, don’t leave me, as Mirabelle stepped out into the milky haze of the day.
‘I’ll fetch water,’ she said, ‘from the river,’ but Sharn knew she just wanted to get away, and as she watched Mirabelle disappear she held that baby in her arms, her tiny head rolling back on her shoulders, and she knew that if she had the strength, she, too, would have done the same. Walked. As far and as fast as she could go. ‘See,’ she muttered to herself, ‘there I go.’ Through the long grass by the side of the river, up the path to the main house and then along the track to the main road, and in her mind she is standing there, one arm held out, hitching her way out of there, flagging down the first ride to come her way. Gone.
‘She is a beautiful girl,’ Liam would sometimes tell her in those first few months after his arrival, when they would talk, just the two of them, by the river.