While I live

CHAPTER 22

During the war no-one held us to account for the stuff we’d done. That figured. Back then there wasn’t anyone around asking us to fill in forms. Now I found that things had changed a lot. The three of us were at the house for hours, answering questions in between turning down multiple offers of counselling. Finally I chucked a bit of a tantrum and told them we were tired and had done enough for one day and they suddenly reversed direction. Next thing we were on our way home in a police car.

It took a long time to get Gavin to bed. He reminded me of the cow who’d been on Ecstasy. I just hoped he survived it as well as she had. She was in great shape. But Gavin was like a puppy on Ecstasy, jumping around, running around, zigzagging through the house. He broke a cup and a pot-plant holder. It was only when he fell against the window beside the front door and cracked it that he calmed down a bit, and that was only because I got so mad at him. I didn’t want my parents’ house trashed as soon as I took it over. I felt every break, every bit of damage as a failure on my part.

Poor kid, he couldn’t help himself. I made him take a bath instead of a shower and I did Milo for two, and toast with Vegemite, then said, yes, he could sleep in my bed if he didn’t take up all the room.

By the time I got to bed he was asleep big-time, like, unconscious. I stood looking at him. He seemed so relaxed, half on his back, his right arm flung out, breathing long and slow. I was glad he could find a peaceful place in sleep at least.

I was in my pj’s and had one knee on the bed when I realised, almost calmly, that I was about to fall apart. I also realised I couldn’t do this in my bed when Gavin was there. I went back out towards the sitting room but only got halfway when I started trembling and sobbing and hugging myself. I leaned against the wall then slid down until I was on the floor. It seemed like something outside me had taken control. It shook through me like I was a washing machine. I knew what it was of course. The image of Shannon, lying there naked and tied up, her blood, the death that I saw in her eyes: where was I supposed to put that? What was I supposed to do with it? In what part of my body was I supposed to store it? Please tell me. Because whichever part it was, I knew that part was full. It had been full for some time. Since the death of my parents in fact. I had my arms around my knees and I was shaking so hard that it hurt my teeth, as I tried to find a place for all this horror.

Gradually Shannon’s blood gave way to my parents’ blood, her damaged body made room for my parents’ terrible wounds. The enormity of what had happened hit me at last. Sitting there on the corridor floor in the house where my mother died, I howled for my mother and father, howled like a dog, gasping for air between the howls. At the same time crazy torn-up pictures of our lives seemed to blow down the corridor towards me, as though someone had literally pulled out thousands of photos from the family albums and confettied them, so that all I saw were my mother’s gloves tied to her stocks when we were waiting to go skiing, my father’s moustache when he grew one for a few months, the scar on my mother’s wrist that she wouldn’t talk about — and now I would never know its origin and I would never see it again — her amused expression when my Stratton grandmother commented on the new curtains: ‘Do you think this style will last?’ The little black dress my mother wore to the opening of the grandstand at the racecourse, my father’s pencil stub writing down the golf scores, his laugh, her fine fingers, his grunts when he was absorbed in a job and I was asking questions, her big brown nipples that she didn’t like but I loved, his long soft penis and its curious head, her pubic hair so dark and mysterious, his pubic hair so thick and curly, him planting a kiss on the new tractor while I, at the age of eight, took a photo, her laughing and saying, ‘So you’d like me better if I had four wheels and a power take-off?’, him saying, ‘I’ll show you a power take-off,’ and grabbing her and them kissing kissing kissing, passionately, as I ran around them laughing and squealing and grabbing at them, the two of them kissing, hugging, and the love between them, the love the love, always the love, the wild beautiful love that somehow survived the fights and the stresses and strains and worst of all the monotony of everyday life and I understood then what it means for a human life to end prematurely and arbitrarily, how each human being is an accumulation of wonderful and unique details, and in destroying a human being you destroy ‘all the thousand million memories’ as well as the bent little finger on his left hand and the stubble on her legs and the smile and the grimace and the frown and the way they use a spatula and the way they chop an onion at arm’s length or place the jumper leads on the car battery or hold a baby at the school fete while the mother has a go at the ‘Putt for Prizes’. ‘Does anyone really appreciate life while they have it?’ For a few moments there I think I became one of the philosophers and poets and infants and even Monets, a member of the exclusive club of those who do.

It seemed so unfair and lonely and cold as I lay there on the floor and realised after a while that no-one was going to come and get me, no-one was available to help me, no-one would put me to bed. The house was cooling fast — we couldn’t afford to have a heater on all night — and it always lost its temperature quickly.

So I put myself to bed, after a while, a long while, and I lay there feeling Gavin’s warmth and listening to his breathing. At the end of each breath I waited for the next one, scared that it might not come. ‘Please keep breathing, Gavin,’ I begged him, ‘please don’t stop. Keep reaching for that next breath, little one.’

I was thinking about my parents’ love. Where was it now? What happened to it? It had to be somewhere. A force as powerful as that doesn’t just disappear. Didn’t they teach us in science that matter can’t be destroyed? It only changes form. If that were true for an orange or a rock or a Falcon ute, surely it had to be true for the bond that my father and mother had. Maybe that’s what bound this house together, kept the farm going, caused Gavin and me to be lying here together tonight. As I drifted into sleep I imagined I could feel it whispering down the corridor, slipping in and out of the rooms, circling the bed and finally holding us both safe in its arms.