Hayley freezes, gets to her feet and, from the look on her face, I think she’s going to cry. She sidles up to me, takes my arm. She whispers. ‘What’s wrong with him, Mom?’
‘He thinks you’re Devin, honey.’
Her fingers release their pressure and there’s a moment where her eyes shift to the side, computing what has transpired. She lets me go. She drops my arm and goes to him. She sits on his lap and puts her arms around his neck. ‘Hey, Grandpa,’ she says. ‘It’s me, it’s Hayley, remember? Remember you lived with us? I’m your Monkey’s girl. I’m not Devin. Devin’s dead. It’s all going to be okay, Grandpa.’
He drops his eyes. He drops his head. It falls upon my daughter’s shoulder and stays there for one second, then two, then three. When he lifts it again and looks up, his eyes are glimmering like two tiny seas.
Hayley and I leave the building and her hand feels soft and small in mine. We reach the car and she goes to the front passenger door, she lifts the handle and waits for me to unlock it. ‘Uh-uh,’ I tell her. ‘I want you in the back seat.’
‘Aw Mom!’ and her face sinks into a scowl.
‘If we lived in Turkey, you wouldn’t get to sit in the front seat until you were twelve.’ My easy retention of obscure facts suddenly comes to the fore. She will understand my will and my reasoning even less into the future, but for now she listens and climbs into the long seat behind me.
‘Put your seat belt on,’ I say.
‘But I’m in the back!’
‘Put your seat belt on.’
‘O-kay!’ And then she does.
The day has turned. Just half an hour before the sunshine warmed us where we sat in the room with my father; now the clouds have gathered and the wind chills my skin. I put my own seat belt on and start the car.
‘I want to go to the beach,’ Hayley says.
She has a way, my daughter. She has a way of speaking to me where just the tone of her voice defies any logic in my own words, and justifies all the presumed logic and sense in her own. It is difficult to argue with her when she decides there is something worth putting her weight behind.
I drive slowly and I watch Hayley in the rear-view mirror. She’s resting backwards against the seat, her face turned outwards and illuminated by the stark grey light of the sky. She looks so young to me. Her skin so clear, her eyes defined. There’s a purity of thought behind them, not yet too badly affected by the distortions of the world. I wonder if she’s thinking about my father, trying to work it out. There are times that I don’t like her, mistrust her potential to become someone argumentative and stubborn, spoiled even, but beneath it all, I know that she is the one thing that matters to me most in the whole of the world.
We reach the beach. I park the car and she lifts her head and unbuckles her belt. We both get out, though I haven’t brought jerseys or coats warm enough for how the weather is now. The small kiosk where we bought the hamburgers is already closed, a corrugated hatch battened down and shining a blank refusal to any potential customers.
‘So now what? Do you want to go for a walk?’
She goes to the low rough wall and climbs over it, but rather than moving on she sits and her eyes are on the sea. Her arms are marked with hundreds of raised pimples like chicken skin: she is freezing cold.
‘We can’t even get a hot chocolate.’
‘Stop talking so much, Mom,’ she says.
My eyes smart at her acute tongue, always able to find the core of me. But I swallow any further words, the trivial comments that are ner vously waiting at the top of my throat eager to fill any gaps and prevent exposure of the truths of our afternoon. I climb over the wall, sit beside her and put my arm around her, but she moves out from under it and away. She doesn’t want me to protect her. She’s come here for something else, and I know what it is.
‘I wonder where that dog is,’ she says.
‘She’s probably in a warm nest somewhere, looking after her pups.’
‘Maybe she’ll see me and come out to say hello.’
‘Maybe. I doubt it though. It looks like it’s going to storm later. She’ll probably stay right where she is.’
‘What if she’s hungry, Mom?’
‘She’ll be okay. Stray dogs can take care of themselves. After a while that’s what they prefer. Being stray.’
The sea is grey and choppy. She doesn’t speak for a bit and then she says, ‘No, you’re wrong, Mom. Everybody wants to belong somewhere.’
‘But she’s not everybody. She’s a dog.’
‘Even a dog is something. Even a wild one.’
I am freezing. I need my daughter’s warmth, but she doesn’t want me touching her. She wants to sit there exposed and independent, and I want to go home. I’m thinking of warm soup and Auster and perhaps making a fire.
‘I want that dog to come to me, Mom.’
‘She’s not going to, Hayley. Let’s just go home.’
‘Look!’ Her arm shoots out, her finger points at the big wide sea. I look across the water, straining to see what she does. There are gannets flocking much further out, but she’s never had an interest in birds.
‘What, Hayley?’
‘There! It’s a whale!’
And then I see it. Not the creature itself, but a fine spray of mist that spurts out against the leaden sky.
We wait for the whale to re-emerge, but it does not. It holds its breath and rests beneath the surface. Waits for the moment it needs to rise and breathe again.
I look down at my daughter. Strands of her hair have come loose from her ponytail and fly with the insidious wind. My hand aches to reach out and smooth them down, but I fear her physical rejection of my natural instinct.
‘What’s wrong with him, Mom?’
A wave comes like a slow tide through me, into the silence and cold, a wave of sorrow and of wanting, and it reaches up to my eyes and threatens to spill over. ‘He’s just old, Dev,’ I say.
‘You called me Dev, Mom.’
The realisation slices through me, sharper than the cold. My guilt gushes out into the small space between us, but I keep my hands to myself. I do not say it, but I know it now, more than I’ve ever felt it before. I wish Devin were here.
Suddenly Hayley stands up and puts her arms around my neck. I breathe and there’s the smell of hair and soft skin, the scent of youth and childhood still untainted, still sweet with hope and forgiveness. And then she draws back, takes my hand, gives me a soft, unblemished smile. For once she really looks at me and lets me have her eyes to bury myself inside. ‘I don’t think the dog is coming,’ she says. ‘Come, Mom, let’s go home.’
I rise from the wall and look out to the place where I once held my sister, and then I walk arm in arm with Hayley to the car.
Twenty-Eight
I met Auster on an aeroplane. I was on my way home from Japan, exhausted from my efforts to expose the underbelly of human nature through documentary film-making. I had been drawn to Japan by eye-witness accounts of the rampant slaughter of marine mammals. I thought that my all-seeing lens would uncover the facts in a way that would make the world sit up and pay attention. Naively, I believed that I could make a difference, that something I did could have some impact on what the world was, change it even. I didn’t yet know that everything I could have changed or made a difference to was already behind me.
The whole project was premature. I wasn’t well enough connected to expose what I thought I knew. I didn’t understand how information worked, particularly the kind that was covert and protective of the potential to make massive amounts of money. That first trip to Japan proved futile. We couldn’t gain access to any of the places where we’d heard that at times the sea turned red. We had to abort and retreat home.
The camera crew had gone on ahead on an earlier flight while I volunteered to sit and wait in the brightly lit airport for the red-eye departure on another aeroplane that still had empty seats.
I boarded and packed my simple black bag into the stowaway
hatch and collapsed into the seat beside the window above the wing. Ten minutes before departure, Auster appeared beside me. He smiled. I looked into his tawny eyes and something inside me shifted and settled into place. His hair was thick and full, and I knew instantly how soft it would feel when I would put my fingers through it. We were strangers to each other, but I knew him. I’d known him all my life, and when I smiled at him, he smiled, grinned almost, as though he too knew something, that this was only the beginning.
‘I’m Auster,’ he said, and sat down in the seat beside me. He held out his hand. His elbow was already touching mine. I shook his hand and it felt warm, like a place I instinctively knew. He had a small scar on the outer edge of his lip and his mouth was generous and full.
‘Catherine.’ Already I regretted the sleeping tablet I’d washed down with a sip of bathroom water from the tap in the airport just before boarding.
When I woke, my head was pressed into the soft cotton of his shoulder. I had no idea how long I had been sleeping that way, and I hoped I hadn’t drooled in my sleep. He took his headphones off with his free arm and paused the movie he was watching. ‘You’re exhausted,’ he said. ‘Sleep more, if you like.’
Panicked, I straightened myself and tried to brush my hair into place. I cleared the sleep from my throat. ‘Why were you in Japan?’ I asked.
‘Just forging some new business pathways, for cheaper technology,’ he responded. ‘I’m in computers.’
‘Were you successful?’
‘In a sense. We had an anthropologist come out, help us understand how business is done. It helps a huge amount to try to understand the culture you’re dealing with.’
‘Maybe that’s what I need to do if I ever try to make a film there again,’ I said. He had a Styrofoam cup of water on his small fold-down table, and he offered it to me. I took the liquid and drank until it was finished. ‘Though I’m not sure even that would help. What these guys do with dolphins? There must be some kind of mafia situation going on to protect them.’
‘What people do, who they are, it’s influenced by a million other things, all through time. How can we really understand anything?’
‘Or anyone,’ I said.
He looked down at me. Even seated he was much taller than me and I tilted my head upwards. Our eyes met in silence and we both smiled again.
As we walked together through the passenger arrivals gate at the airport, each of us pulling a suitcase on wheels, Devin’s face glowed in a way that pulled her out from the crowd. She was holding a silly cardboard sign on which she’d etched my name in bright colours, in a gothic hand-drawn font.
I kissed her on the cheek and she hugged me tight, excited, but I showed less enthusiasm and I wondered if she felt it. Auster stood behind me, holding his case on a short leash like a small obedient dog. I released my sister and stepped aside. ‘This is Auster,’ I said. ‘And this is my sister Devin.’
Something in my chest went flat, like a stone repeatedly ground down by the crushing sea. Expecting nothing any more, or expecting to witness again the subtle changes that go on in humans when suddenly in the presence of an indefinable beauty, I turned to him. His face was flushed. At the sight of her, I imagined. ‘This is where we part, then,’ I said. Far away a storm threatened to break.
‘Wait,’ Devin said. Her eyes were dancing across his face. ‘How are you getting into the city? Do you want a lift? I’ve brought Catherine’s car.’
‘That would be great,’ Auster answered, too quickly. ‘I usually get a taxi, but if you’re headed that way anyway—’
I didn’t want to see their faces and watch their eyes connect. My own face burned with rage at the foolish hopes that had encouraged such a strong flame inside me. Fresh from our time apart, I saw again what Devin had that held and captivated all who came near her. Inevitably it usurped me, dampened any fire that might have been.
I sat on the back seat of the car and listened to Auster and Devin reveal their public selves to each other, all the way into the city. Devin’s laughter was too silvery, she tried too hard, and Auster repeated his own story in much the same way as he’d done with me on the plane. The township shacks became factories and electricity towers, and then the buildings rose higher and we drove into the edges of family suburbs where young people were starting their lives in apartments.
Auster’s flat wasn’t too far away from mine. Devin pulled up to the curb and Auster invited us in for a coffee. ‘Sure,’ and ‘No,’ Devin and I said simultaneously. Auster shrugged, taking my answer to be the valid one, and I assumed that the invitation was simply politeness. Devin wore a lot of jingly bracelets, and I wondered if between them he’d noticed her scars.
‘Can I get your number then?’ he stood outside and leaned down, looking into the car. I’d moved forward to the front passenger seat and I was sure he was talking to Devin.
‘Sure!’ Devin rummaged in her bag and scrawled my number on a piece of paper. She was staying with me while she studied, sleeping on my couch, eating the food I paid for with the proceeds of a late-night waitressing job as I worked at getting my career off the ground. She had a rare brain, she was gifted at science and maths, she could go anywhere with her writing, but still, and even then, she was beginning to see no point to anything.
‘Thanks,’ Auster said, folding the scrap. He slammed the door and to this day, he swears that the last person he looked at was me.
We drove for a bit and Devin was quiet. ‘So how was Japan?’ she asked eventually.
‘I feel a bit defeated, actually,’ I told her. ‘Nothing worked out the way I’d planned.’
She turned into my road and slowed the car beside the apartment block. ‘Auster’s nice,’ was all she said, as though she hadn’t heard me.
He called the following weekend. I was alone in the flat, cleaning out the fridge. ‘That coffee,’ he said. ‘Do you want to have it now?’
I wanted to tell him that Devin wasn’t there, that he should phone back or leave his number and I’d get her to call him. ‘Okay,’ I said instead. ‘Do you want to come round here?’
He arrived in khaki shorts, trendy sneakers and a white T-shirt that looked great against his rich skin. I struggled to meet his eyes. I’d taken the rubber gloves off, but my hair was still dirty and tied in a band, and I wore my oldest sweatpants with a loose cotton shirt.
We didn’t talk at all as I boiled the kettle and poured out two cups of instant coffee and ladled in the sugar. He looked into the cup I handed him as though he might change his mind, but then he took a sip.
‘Coffee okay?’
‘It’s fine. I’m a bit of a coffee snob, that’s all. Haven’t had an instant in quite a while.’
‘Sorry.’
His eyebrows lifted and he breathed in. ‘No! It’s fine. I wasn’t complaining.’
Morning sun lay on the table between us. Silence filled the room, as though I was muffled in a down duvet. I looked at my nails and I bit the corner off one. ‘I don’t have any biscuits,’ I said.
‘Where’s your sister?’
It had to come. I took a sip of my own coffee and it scalded my tongue. ‘I don’t know. She likes to go out on Saturdays; it gives me a bit of space too. She has a thing for vintage clothing. She trawls the markets and charity shops.’ I wished he’d leave then, so I could get back to the fridge.
‘She seems nice.’
‘Yup. She is, mostly.’
‘Nothing like you though.’
He looked at me, but his words emerged too earnestly, as if he felt obliged to say them. His fingers played with the rim of his cup. He says now that he was nervous, but if he was, it didn’t show.
‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she? I’m sure she’ll be back soon.’
‘We should go out sometime.’
‘That would be fun.’ I imagined the three of us around a pool table, Devin and Auster wrapped in impenetrable sexual chemistry and me wondering what the hell I was thinking even being there. Not bloody likel
y, I thought.
I smiled at him. ‘Try calling in the week.’
He nodded, pressing his lips together, but said nothing, and the silence grew.
He asked about my films and I talked about what I loved most, and as he leaned forward and listened, the silence grew smaller. I began to relax and almost forget my imperfections. His body shifted forward as he sipped on the liquid I later learnt that he could barely stomach and he seemed really interested in what I had to say. ‘It’s great to see someone talking with such love about what they do for a living,’ he said.
I looked at him sideways, hardly believing he was serious.
Later the door swung wide and she stood before us, her jeans fitting her perfect form, a clean white vest loose on top. Her eyes grew, shifted to me and then locked onto Auster. Her face flushed; it was seldom that my sister seemed taken by surprise. He stood and his smile was genuine, warm. ‘How was the market?’ he asked.
She offered us more coffee but he declined. Without sitting again, he looked at his watch. ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a call.’
‘That would be great,’ Devin gushed. She followed him to the door to see him out, as though I hadn’t spent the last half-hour entertaining him, as though I was merely the parlour maid. She leaned against the door and smiled, and something dropped into my stomach. He moved forward awkwardly and pecked at her cheek, and then looked over her head at me. ‘We speak soon?’
I gathered the coffee cups and my smile felt weak, defeated. ‘Great.’
Devin closed the door and he was gone, but he left confusion behind him.